by Judith Ivie
“Of course, it didn’t hurt a bit to have your gorgeous Latino hubby standin’ at your side last night,” observed Margo.
“Uh huh,” Strutter agreed. “That man just gets better looking with every passing year.”
“You’re right. Armando was a real confidence booster. I was reluctant to have him come along at first, preferring to confront my memories on my own, but as things turned out …” I let my words trail off. “At least this time I didn’t have to come home and tell him I’d found a body.” Oddly enough, that had happened before. More than once, in fact. My friends were well aware of the circumstances on those occasions, having become embroiled in the subsequent investigations.
Now they nodded philosophically. This time, poor Armando had been right there with me.
“What happens next?” Margo wanted to know.
“You’re asking me? You’re the one who’s married to a homicide detective,” I reminded her. Lieutenant John Harkness was the mainstay of the Wethersfield Police Department’s major crimes division and had succumbed to Margo’s charms a few years previously. The two die-hard singles had married and settled down blissfully together to everyone’s amazement, possibly even theirs.
A sappy smile spread across her face as it always did at the mention of her husband. “Don’t I know it?” she said smugly. “But it’s different from town to town dependin’ on the size of the police department and so on. I don’t know how it works in Brewster, and John isn’t around to make his usual discreet inquiries,” she pointed out. The husband in question had flown out this very morning to an intensive six-day training session in Quantico, Virginia.
“So you’re saying that size does matter, is that it?” Strutter sassed. Margo tossed her napkin at her.
“Well, I don’t know either,” I said, leaning down to retrieve the napkin from the floor. “Brewster seems to be one town in which we haven’t yet been involved in a major criminal investigation. Oh, boy, a whole new group of emergency personnel to get to know.”
To no one’s surprise, Mindy had been pronounced dead on arrival at Backus Hospital shortly after her arrival the previous night, and her death had been labeled suspicious. Agnes Spivak had been kind enough to telephone that information to me earlier this morning as she and Mitch hustled to make their flight back to St. Louis. “Naturally, that meant they wanted a complete statement from us before we left town. We didn’t make it out of the building as quickly as you did, so we were stuck. I don’t think either one of us got ten minutes’ sleep last night,” she said wearily. “Do you know how long it takes to handwrite a statement? You would think they could at least have let us use a computer, but no.” She yawned audibly. “Sorry. They actually separated us, put us in different rooms like we were suspects or something.”
“What did they want to know?” I asked her.
“Who we talked to last night, if anything seemed out of the ordinary, what we knew about anyone else there who might have had it in for Mindy.”
I swallowed my dismay. “What did you say about me?”
“They already knew about you and Mitch and Mindy, probably from Joanie and Ariel,” Agnes summed up, “so Mitch had no choice but to go over that old business. He put the blame on himself, Kate, honestly. Said you behaved like a perfect lady and never once did anything vindictive. He’s pretty sure they believed him, so good luck with your statement. I’m sure they’ll be calling you for one. Let us know how it goes.” She rattled off their home phone number before breaking the connection.
I reported the gist of this conversation to Strutter and Margo.
“Well, that’s just crazy,” Strutter stated flatly. “If you hated somebody’s guts for more than thirty years and decided to remove them from this world, why on earth would you do it in the presence of a couple of hundred potential witnesses? That’s dumb.”
Margo frowned at a nick in one perfectly manicured fingernail and began digging through her Coach bag for an emery board. “Dumb like a fox, as my daddy used to say. What better place to do somebody in than at a public function attended by a whole bunch of likely suspects? From what Kate’s told us, there were at least a dozen people at that reunion who won’t exactly be cryin’ their eyes out over Mindy’s demise.”
I hadn’t thought about that, having been focused on my own situation, but Margo was right.
“It’s the perfect crime,” she went on, filing away the offending flaw.
“You mean one that never gets solved because there are too many suspects, and nobody gives a fig about the victim anyway?” Strutter’s eyebrows climbed her forehead.
“Maybe, or maybe because the wrong person gets set up and convicted. In a situation this confusin’, either one is a possibility.”
I warmed to Margo’s theme. “It might also be a classic case of misdirection. I’m sure Mindy Marchelewski didn’t graduate from high school and morph into a sterling human being. It’s a pretty good bet she made a few more enemies in the years since we all saw her last, and one of them could have decided to do away with her right in the middle of a crowd of fellow sufferers. Maybe the DJ had it in for her and overdosed her while the lights were lowered for the last dance.”
“In the ladies room?” Strutter demurred. “Unlikely, don’t you think?”
“It wouldn’t be the first time a man put on a wig and a skirt to commit a crime,” I pouted. Margo grinned at me consolingly.
“There, there, Sugar. Don’t take it so hard. Maybe he didn’t do the actual deed, but he could have been a dealer who supplied the deadly dose to the murderer.”
I brightened up at her farfetched scenario. “Yeah! I wonder what the drug in the syringe was. All Agnes said was that it wasn’t anything you’d expect to find a junkie mainlining in a public restroom, which I took to mean not heroin.”
Margo considered. “I asked John about that when we spoke this mornin’. He was kind of distracted, but he did speculate that since Mindy was so boozed up, it wouldn’t have taken much to finish her off, whatever was in that syringe.” She frowned. “Then he clammed up in that irritatin’ way he does just when the conversation about an investigation gets good.”
Strutter looked thoughtful. “The syringe, yes. Now why do you suppose that was left on the floor next to Mindy? Why not tuck it away in a purse or a pocket?”
“Could be that someone else came in, and the killer got rattled and dropped it,” I offered.
Margo considered that possibility and shook her head. “You said that particular restroom is very small, only two stalls,” she reminded me. “If you walked in and saw two sets of feet under one stall door, what would you do?”
“Assume that something was going on I’d rather not know about and make a hasty exit,” I said promptly.
“Exactly, which is what anyone with any common sense would do under those circumstances,” Strutter agreed. “So the killer had plenty of time to collect that syringe, even if she did drop it, which brings me back to wondering why it was just sitting there on the floor, waiting for Joanie and Ariel to find it when they went looking for Mindy.
We all looked at each other. “It was meant to be found?” I ventured. “Maybe it was a message to make it clear that Mindy had been murdered.”
Margo blinked at me. “But who was the message for, Sugar, Joanie and Ariel?”
“Possibly. Probably, in fact, since everyone at the reunion knew the three of them hung out together. It was a good bet that Joanie or Ariel would go looking for Mindy after a while, and sure enough, Ariel did, and Joanie followed very soon after that.” I remembered Joanie’s distraught face when she’d come crashing out of the women’s room. Despite myself, my heart twisted in sympathy. It must have been quite a shock to find Mindy, her fearless and formidable BFF, crumpled on the floor like that.
“So what was the message the killer was trying to send to Joanie and Ariel?” Strutter wanted to know.
I thought I knew the answer to that one. “Those three women were thick as thieves in high sc
hool, and they still seemed friendly thirty-five years later, even though Mindy didn’t live around here anymore. All for one, and one for all, partners in making life miserable for a goodly number of their classmates. Don’t you get it?”
My friends looked blank, so I spoke slowly and clearly. “One down, two to go. The killer was telling them, if I can take out Mindy Marchelewski, I can surely punish you, too.”
“Creepy,” Strutter shuddered.
“You really think?” Margo wondered aloud. “I don’t know, hon. Thirty-five years is a heck of a long time to hold enough of a grudge to murder one woman, let alone three. What would be the point after all this time?”
“You’re looking for logic in an illogical situation,” I pointed out. “Grudges don’t have time limits on them, and psychological wounds don’t always heal, we know that. Sometimes they fester. In fact, it’s often the oldest hurts that cause the most trouble emotionally. Just ask any psychiatrist,” I laughed, and Margo joined in.
“I guess you’ve got a point there, but I’m afraid I can’t relate. We southern gals love our mothers and daddies to pieces, right along with our girlfriends and heartthrobs and aunties and crazy-as-bedbugs distant relatives. Of course, things are different in our lovely Georgia climate. I believe this snow and ice and absolutely bone chillin’ wind for half the year makes you Yankees brittle,” she sniffed.
“More so with every passing year,” I agreed but returned to my point. “I was happy to see that most of my former classmates, even the ones who suffered at the hands of Mindy, Ariel and Joanie, seem so happy and well adjusted; but I saw more than one flicker of fear cross a face last night when the mean girls showed up. Some of those bad feelings may have been buried under carefully cultivated layers of civilized restraint, but I’d bet any money they aren’t forgotten or forgiven. Judging from the way the situation played out, I’m thinking someone in the gym had an old grievance that had been pushed down for years, but instead of lying dormant, it fed on itself and finally broke free when the victim was faced with those tormentors one more time.”
“Someone who just happened to have a loaded hypodermic handy?” Margo lifted one exquisite eyebrow.
“I know, I know. It’s farfetched, but emotionally it makes sense to me. You’re saying it must have been planned, if whatever was in that needle killed Mindy, but I don’t think it was. I believe the combination of being in that setting again with those women resurrected all the hurt and the anger more powerfully than ever before and turned a usually nice, normal human being into a murderer.”
Margo looked thoughtful. “Lord knows we’ve seen it happen before. I just hope to God you don’t get stuck openin’ this particular can of worms.”
Three
“You’d think having a high school arch-enemy finally get what she deserved would be more satisfyin’,” Margo observed. We sat in the living room of the little Wheeler Road Cape where she was conducting an open house. When we left the diner, Strutter had hustled off to release her sixteen-year-old son Charlie from babysitting his pre-school-age sister Olivia. Armando had decided to put in a few hours of paperwork time at the TeleCom offices, so I’d opted to keep Margo company during what promised to be a slow afternoon.
As expected during the week between Christmas and New Year’s, lookers were almost nonexistent, but the anxious sellers had insisted.
“Oddly enough, it’s not all that much fun, especially when I’m one of the suspects in her murder,” I agreed. “They really seemed to want to talk to poor Mitch, too, but I don’t imagine he had much to tell them. I can’t even recall him or Agnes speaking to Mindy last night.”
“Well, it all seems silly,” Margo dismissed my fears while idly picking a long, white cat hair from her otherwise immaculate trousers. A fat Persian cat, the source of the offending hair, purred from a wing chair near the fireplace where a Duraflame log burned cozily behind the screen. Too bad no prospects were here to enjoy the effect.
“Not if you know my history with Mindy, it isn’t,” I pointed out. “Unfortunately, three-quarters of the people at that reunion do know it and were all too happy to share it with Officer McCarthy last night.” I stared out the front windows at the For Sale sign staked in the tidy lawn. A red balloon was tied to it and bobbed forlornly in the cold breeze.
“Ancient history. My goodness, we’re talkin’ about 1978. Who can even remember that far back?” Margo scoffed. She recrossed her elegant legs and tucked a stray lock back into her blonde chignon.
“I can, just as clearly as if it all happened yesterday,” I mourned. “I’d have a lot of trouble coming up with specifics about something that happened ten or fifteen years ago, when I was up to my ears in kids and housework and a full-time job, but high school and my first real boyfriend are right here.” I tapped my forehead. “I can remember who said what to whom, why they said it, when, and what I was wearing at the time. When you’re seventeen, there’s nothing quite like being publicly dumped by your boyfriend of two years in favor of the biggest tramp in town to create a lasting memory.”
“Hormones trump true love every time at that age,” Margo agreed. “Still do, come to think of it. It has been my experience—and as you know, I’ve had plenty—that men of almost any age will follow their little captains wherever they lead ‘em. Tell me all about it, Sugar.”
I thought back with some reluctance, not at all eager to relive a major hurt of my youth. “Mitch and I were seniors. It was spring, and Mitch was feeling his oats, the way boys do at that time of year especially. He’d been pressuring me to go further than I wanted to go, but I was one of those anachronistic hold-outs of the sexual revolution, a virgin at the age of seventeen.”
“Imagine that,” Margo tsk-ed in disbelief. “You two had been an item for quite a while by that time, am I right?”
“On and off, mostly on, since I was fourteen and still in junior high school. That’s what we called it then. I couldn’t even remember wanting to date anyone before Mitch, and after I met him, it never entered my mind. He was The One, capital T, capital O.”
“He didn’t feel the same way?” Margo prompted. “But he must have. Why else would he have stuck with you all through high school?”
I shrugged. “Oh, he was fond of me, I know that; but as you say, four years is a long dry spell for a hormone-addled teenage boy whose friends are all crowing about their conquests. Thinking back on it now, I can see Mitch must have been getting pretty desperate.”
“So he sampled Mindy’s wares, is that about it?” Margo got up to adjust the fire screen and paused to stroke the purring cat. He wrinkled his nose and sniffed suspiciously at her hand. “He smells Rhett and Sassy on me,” she surmised, alluding to her chocolate Labrador, a devoted companion of several years, and the new dog in her household, a young female of mixed breed.
“Mitch was ready, and Mindy was willing, as she apparently was with any young stud who showed an interest. Sorry,” I added. “Mindy wasn’t doing anything different than about ninety percent of the other girls of that era, but I can’t seem to stop being catty about her, even knowing she’s dead.”
Margo snorted, an unladylike reaction she often had when something struck her funny. “Sugar, if I’d caught some little gal comin’ on to my sweetie, a catty remark wouldn’t quite cover it. That girl would have teeth marks on her. Mine,” she added just in case I hadn’t gotten the picture. “Even all these years later, I’d have to work real hard at controllin’ myself, so you just have yourself a good hiss and spit.” She shrugged and grinned. “Trouble is, back in those days, it was mostly me givin’ the other gals’ men the eye.”
“How did your sweetie feel about that?” I inquired, and Margo hooted.
“My sweetie of the week or my next-in-line sweetie? Sugar, you know I like men better’n I like chocolate candy, but up until I met John Harkness, I could take or leave ‘em all.”
I knew my libidinous friend well enough to know what she said was true. I also knew that chapter in h
er life had ended the day she’d married John. The best-looking hunk in Connecticut couldn’t tempt Margo to be unfaithful to her husband of four years.
“So if you’d been my classmate at Brewster High, I would have had to worry about you instead of Mindy Marchelewski, is that what you’re telling me?”
“Don’t know about that, but you can bet if I’d been at Brewster, Mindy would have had to worry about me.”
I laughed along with her but sobered quickly as the events of the previous evening came back into focus. I had left Joanie and Ariel to the ministrations of concerned onlookers and rushed into the cramped women’s room to find Mindy slumped on the floor. I called her name repeatedly and attempted to locate a pulse beneath her jaw and in one limp wrist, but I didn’t find one, so I shoved my way back out the door and yelled at the gawkers to call 911. Officer McCarthy, who’d been moonlighting as the security officer required for such events in a public building, had quickly taken over, pushing back the crowd and summoning medical help before attempting CPR. My next clear memory was of Mindy’s still form being taken by stretcher to the waiting ambulance.
Margo read my expression and took a stab at lightening my gloom. “You’d think by now you’d be able to take a dead body or two in stride, Miss Marple,” she joked gently. Over the past few years my partners in Mack Realty and I had been drawn into an unusual number of local homicide inquiries. Apparently, the real estate business was fraught with opportunities, not to mention motivations, for collateral mayhem, even in the picturesque and historic area known as Old Wethersfield.
“It’s Mrs. Fletcher, according to Armando, and I have no desire to channel either one of those ladies,” I growled. “I knew Mindy Marchelewski personally.”