Hanging by a Thread

by Monica Ferris

  “The strap of my sandal was twisted so I was leaning against the wall of the kiosk trying to straighten it with a finger when all of a sudden he was there. I could see his teeth gleaming in the streetlight—he was always smiling, did I tell you that?” She blinked a little owlishly and Betsy wondered if the drink in her hand wasn’t her third or even fourth.

  “Yes, you did.”

  “ ‘Need a hand?’ ” he asked, all nice. ‘Nope,’ says I, ‘I’m just fine.’ And he kind of grabs me around the waist, only lower, and I slither away and say something like, ‘How dare you?’ only I put it stronger, and all of a sudden he’s on me like paint on a fence, and I have this thing I do, where I stomp on an instep and it will make just about anyone alive yip like a dog and back off. Only all he says is, ‘Hey, quit that,’ and keeps on coming, so I send my elbow hard into his midriff, and he had to let go then, because he couldn’t breathe anymore.” She widened her eyes and shaped her mouth like a fish out of water, gulped a few times in imitation of a man with the wind knocked out of him, then chuckled maliciously. ”That was the only time I ever saw him without that damn grin.” She lifted her glass and drained the liquid, tonguing the ice to shake loose the last of it.

  “Good for you,” said Betsy as Gretchen put the glass down with a victorious thump. “Nice to be able to take care of yourself like that.”

  “Well,” said Gretchen, tossing her head to make her hair shift and fall back, “when you start moving in the upper class, you either learn or go under.” She snickered.

  “When you heard about Angela, did you think right away that Foster Johns murdered her?”

  “Of course not. I was sure Paul did it.” She stared out the window, those amazing eyes filled with tears. “He pretended to be a nice person, but he didn’t have many friends, though lots of people are saying now how much they liked him. I went to high school with Paul, and even back then I thought there was something wrong with him. It was like a glass wall between him and you. He was always smiling and doing favors, but you couldn’t get close to him. And it didn’t change after he married Angela. He was nice to me, but all he’d talk about was sports or fishing or hunting—never about anything deep or important. I sometimes wondered if he didn’t have any deep thoughts. There was just this weirdly happy guy, with a smile a yard wide—and an inch deep.”

  “How long had you known Angela?”

  “Since middle school. She was like the opposite of Paul. She was really shy, but when you got to know her, she was deep. I remember when she was twelve, she had worked out what it must be like after you died. She said time was a river and we rode down the river all our lives, seeing the shoreline in sequence; and then when we died, we were like flying over the river and could see where it started and all the places it went and where it ended. And everything that ever happened or was going to happen was all happening on the river, so that’s why God knew what we were going to do before we did it. I mean, she was twelve, and she had this all worked out. I was the only person she told. She was good with books and tests, but her grades suffered because she almost never talked in class. There were some boys she liked in high school, but she never went out with them because she was too shy to let them know she liked them. I was the wild and crazy one, dances and parties and midnight movies, and people used to ask me why I liked Awkward Angie, and I’d say, ‘But she’s so deep!” Gretchen laughed self-deprecatingly.

  “So why did she marry Paul?” asked Betsy.

  “I asked her that once and she said, ‘Because he asked me.’ I think she had a real self-esteem problem, she could have done so much better if she knew what a great person she was.”

  Their waitperson brought the big menus at this point and there was a pause while choices were made. Gretchen ordered another Manhattan, Betsy a sparkling water; Gretchen ordered a big salad, no dressing; Betsy a salmon steak that came with fresh fruit and a frozen yogurt dessert for fewer than a thousand calories.

  “What did Angela tell you about Paul?” asked Betsy when the menus were taken away.

  “That he was wonderful, outgoing, and always cheerful, with lots of friends. That was at first. Then she said less and less and finally didn’t say anything. Then it got hard to get hold of her, and she finally said Paul didn’t like her to spend so much time out with her friends, he wanted her at home with him. Well, I was working on wrecking my first marriage about then, so what the hey, we didn’t move in the same circles anymore and it was easy to let things slide.” Gretchen shrugged, but her mouth was weighted down by regret. She rattled the ice in her empty glass, looked around and brightened. “Here come our drinks, about time.”

  When their entrees arrived, Betsy said, “If Paul was such a nasty piece of work, he must have had enemies. Any idea who they might be?”

  “Not a clue. Angela never said anything about him having trouble with anyone, and I don’t remember anyone else saying they hated his guts. You really believe Foster Johns didn’t whack him, don’t you?”

  “I don’t know anything for sure right now. I do believe the only way to prove whether or not he did it is to find out who had a motive to kill both of them.”

  “Well, don’t look at me. After that encounter at the docks, I could have cheerfully shot him, but there’s no way on earth I would have killed Angela.” Her voice broke. “Oh, Angie, my sweet angel!” She snatched up her napkin and held it to her nose and mouth. “I hope you find out who it was, with proof and everything. I want to hire the worst lawyer on earth to defend him.”

  Back in the shop, Godwin said, “I hear you’re moving up in the world, lunching at Maynard’s with Gretchen Goldberg-Tallman?” He walked in a circle, nose in the air, arm lifted and bent at the wrist. “How do you do?”

  “The FBI and CIA should come and study the grape-vine in this town,” declared Betsy. “They could throw away their wiretaps and bitty cameras and position-locating satellites. The frozen yogurt hasn’t even melted in my stomach, and you have a full report. Is Gretchen all that high in society?”

  “Ooooh, first-name basis and everything!” said Godwin.

  “Goddy...”

  The young man knew that tone, and sobered. “Yes, she moves in the upper circles, dinner with the Day-tons, weekends with the Humphreys and the Well-stones. Len Tallman’s name turns up on the lists of Minnesota’s most wealthy—plus his father’s grandmother was Teddy Roosevelt’s granddaughter. Gretchen’s a trophy wife, his third; he’s her second husband.”

  “Carol didn’t strike me as someone who moves in those kinds of circles.”

  “She doesn’t. Len says Carol makes him uncomfortable, so Gretchen doesn’t see much of her sister.”

  “Len dislikes Carol because she’s a lesbian?”

  “No, because she’s in a wheelchair. He has a ‘thing’ about handicapped people. He’ll give a million to charity or a research hospital, but he can’t bring himself to touch a person with any kind of handicap.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “Well, rich people need lawyers, and who is my beloved John but one of the best? John is also something of a gossip.”

  “Has John ever said anything about Foster?”

  “Only that he must be pretty slick to get away with murder. Foster’s not a client; John gossips mostly about his clients.”

  Betsy’s eyes narrowed. “I wonder what would happen if Len Tallman were ever injured so severely he’d need special aids to get along.”

  “Can’t happen,” said Godwin. “He’s got living wills on file around the world, saying let him go if it’s worse than a bad chest cold. I heard he’s even got DNR tattooed on his chest. Oh, by the way, the Bay Times called. Number’s on your desk.”

  The Excelsior Bay Times was a weekly newspaper given away free but widely read. Expecting to be connected with somebody trying to persuade her to buy a bigger ad, Betsy dialed the number and found herself talking to a reporter.

  Someone had told him about Betsy’s “Winter Window,” and he thou
ght it would make a nice little article. He proposed to stop by with a photographer at Betsy’s convenience. About an hour later, she was posed beside her window, smiling broadly, and the reporter took at face value her comment that she liked diversity and hoped her window would bring a diverse collection of customers to her business.

  That evening, Betsy had Foster Johns to dinner. It was supposed to be Morrie’s dinner, but by the time she’d gotten hold of Foster, it was too late to have him come back to the shop. So she’d called Morrie to explain that she needed to talk to Foster, and Morrie had been fine with that.

  Foster arrived at her apartment looking tired. He seemed to have lost ten pounds—and also that controlled air she had noted about him. “How are you doing?” she asked, taking his jacket. He was wearing Dockers and an old gray sweatshirt.

  “Could be better, could be worse. I lost a client in Chanhassen today; apparently some idiot here in Excelsior phoned him. If I find out who did that, I’ll sue his ass. Maybe some of the gossips in this town lose their house for slandering me, they’ll think twice before they spread lies. But on the other hand, two women in the Excello Bakery smiled at me yesterday. One of them was Alice Skoglund, but I don’t know who the other one was.”

  “Alice is definitely on your side, she’s hoping I’ll find proof of your innocence,” said Betsy. “Wine?” He nodded, and she filled his glass. “She’s been feeling guilty because she wanted you to threaten Paul Schmitt with a poke in the nose if he wasn’t nicer to his wife, and instead you ended up falling in love with her and then suspected of her murder. Here, come and sit down; the chicken will take a few minutes more to bake.”

  Once he was comfortable, she asked, “Why did you agree to meet Paul the night he was murdered?” she asked.

  “Because I wanted to know who really murdered Angela,” Foster replied.

  “You believed he had the evidence?”

  “I didn’t know what he had. He said he had something , and he said the police might not believe it if it came from him.”

  “Weren’t you afraid to meet him alone?”

  “Hell, yes! But this was three days after Angela’s murder, and the police hadn’t arrested anyone. I was going crazy. I was sure as I could be that Paul did it, but when he called, he sounded so sincere, it kind of threw me. But I’m no fool, I also figured maybe he was thinking to round things off by killing me, too. But I thought, well, what if he really has something? So I told him to come to my office. I set up the recorder in the top drawer of my desk, and I left the drawer open about an inch. I walked around the office saying ‘Testing, testing,’ and adjusting the volume so it would pick up his voice no matter where he was. And a lot of good it did me. I’m sure I bored some unfortunate cop out of his mind when he had to sit and write down everything he heard on that recorder, which was me saying ‘Testing, testing’ about twenty times, then fragments of me wadding up paper, scratching lines and figures on paper, swearing, and whistling through my teeth. But because it only came on when it heard a noise, it didn’t help much with the alibi because it didn’t record the long periods of silence.”

  “And you didn’t phone someone to tell him you were meeting Paul, in case they found your body the next day?”

  “No. It was supposed to be a secret, him turning the evidence over to me. If he really had something, then I was more than willing to be his cat’s paw in getting it to the police.”

  “Do you remember who your cleaning lady was back then, the one who helped give you an alibi?”

  He smiled. “Sure. She’s the same one I have right now. Her name’s Mrs. Nelson. Treeny Nelson. You want to talk to her?”

  “Well, yes, I think I do.”

  He said, “Call me tomorrow and I’ll give you her phone number. Or come by at five and wait for her.”

  10

  The next day Betsy was busy unpacking and putting out items from Dale of Norway’s Trunk Show. The boxes came from Needlework Unlimited in Edina. Betsy was pleased to see that not only was everything there, it had been carefully packed. Dale of Norway sold beautiful sweaters at Hoigaard’s and The Nordic Shop and at upscale stores at the Mall of America. But they also sold patterns and wool. Betsy mooned over the authentic Norwegian sweaters that served as models—she put one pattern aside for herself, a typical snowflake-on-sky blue one—but there were also some lively and beautiful non-traditional patterns. She was particularly taken by a dark gray scarf with pockets at either end, whose orange edging was finished with little picots. It was worked with two strands of wool, making it thick and heavy, but also quick to work. Perhaps Jill would like it for Christmas, if it were worked in shades of blue. (Betsy sometimes thought Jill became a police officer because she could wear blue to work every day with nobody thinking anything of it.) She put one of those patterns aside as well.

  She removed the small paper sign announcing the show from her glass-fronted door and replaced it with a much bigger one, which also offered fifteen percent off all knitting materials. The trunk show would be here for a week and then move on to Duluth.

  She had no more than hung the new poster up when three women marched into the shop, one an adolescent twelve, the next old enough to be her mother, and the third old enough to be her grandmother. Betsy didn’t recognize any of them as regular customers. The girl had dark brown eyes and the dark auburn hair that sometimes accompanies them. She said, “I need a kippah for my bat mitzvah, and they”—she tossed her head in the direction of the other two women—“didn’t like any of the ones for sale at Brochin’s.” Which was a store in St. Louis Park.

  In a heavy Russian accent the grandmother said, “What did she say? What’s a kippah? We are here for a yarmulke. I want to stitch a yarmulke for my granddaughter. Bad enough they do this bat mitzvah for girls, but if they do, I want something nice in blue and white. You have such a thing?” She looked around doubtfully.

  The girl said, “Kippah is the correct term for it, I learned that in Talmud-Torah school.”

  The mother said, “It doesn’t matter.” And to Betsy, “My mother-in-law said she would sew one if you had a yarmulke pattern or even just a circular pattern we liked in the right size.” She made a round shape about six inches across with her thumbs and fingers. Her English came from Brooklyn with just a trace of Russia in it.

  The daughter said firmly, “I want something pretty, with horses on it. Or soccer.”

  The grandmother said something in angry Russian, the mother replied in kind, and the daughter shouted, “Speak English!”

  “You hush!” said her mother. “Your grandmother wants to make you a gift, and so what if she calls it a yarmulke and you call it a kippah? It comes to the same thing, so why do you always want to make trouble?” She turned to Betsy, and, her voice suddenly sweet, she asked, “So, what do you have?”

  Betsy had spent some years in New York City, and this was so much a taste of there, she could not stop smiling.

  “I have some needlepoint yarmulkes, but only a few. Let me show them to you.” She pulled four canvases from a drawer in the white dresser near the front door, and the child immediately picked a pink one with black silhouettes of dancing children around its edge.

  But the grandmother wanted the blue one with white Stars of David. The child refused to even consider putting such a lame article on her head, which scandalized her grandmother no end. “What are they teaching you at shul, how to be rude?” she demanded.

  Another shouting match began, into which Godwin walked, his arms full of boxes picked up from the post office. He was so startled at the racket that he dropped them, which in turn startled them into silence.

  “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “A little disagreement over what pattern of yarmulke the young woman is going to wear for her bat mitzvah,” said Betsy.

  The fight started in again and faintly, in the background, Betsy heard the phone ringing. At this point she’d had enough of New York and withdrew gratefully to answer it, taking the cordless
phone into the back of the shop.

  It was Alice. “Is today the start of the trunk show?” she asked in her deep voice. On being assured that it was, she asked Betsy to not sell the last of any mitten patterns until she had a chance to come by “probably tomorrow” and take a look at them.

  Betsy promised and then said, “You seem to have disliked Paul Schmitt for a long time. Surely you weren’t the only person who didn’t like him. Alice, I’m trying to find someone who hated him, perhaps someone he hurt badly. Can you think of anyone like that?”

  Betsy had to wait while Alice sank into her noisy coma for a minute, thinking. The sound cut off. “Alex Miller, maybe,” she said.

  “Jory’s brother?”

  “That’s him.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Alex and Jory were supposed to go into partnership with their father in that auto repair shop Vern founded. Then there was a family fight that kept getting worse and now Alex isn’t speaking to either his father or his brother, nor they to him. His mother told me that Alex blames Paul, but even now, with Paul dead all these years, the quarrel hasn’t been made up. Alex’s wife, Danielle, talked to Alex’s mother about it, but she can’t get them to make peace. Alex is the one most hurt, he was really close to his brother and wanted to go into business with him so his father could retire, but that’s not possible anymore. Jory can’t do it all alone, so Vern has to keep working. Vern’s wife is worried about him. She and I work on several committees together and we talk.”

  Betsy recalled the angry way Vern Miller and his son Jory had talked about Alex. “What does Alex do?”

  “He works at the Ford plant in St. Paul.”

  “Do you know where he lives?”

  “No, you’ll have to ask Mrs. Miller. Vern won’t speak to Alex, but I’m pretty sure Jin stays in touch, for the sake of the grandchildren.”