Martha had walked around the wooden divider separating the front of the courtroom from the observers’ seats to greet Betsy and Winnie and a mob of well-wishers, including Bunny Kildare.
“Mrs. Fletcher?”
I turned to see Jane standing at the side of the table.
“Would you please tell Martha congratulations for me?” she said.
Daria stood at the back of the room with her arms crossed and an irritated expression on her face.
“You can tell her yourself,” I said. “She’s just over there.”
“I don’t think she wants to talk to me right now.”
“That’s where you’re wrong. She would much rather hear congratulations from you in person. She’s very fond of you, even though you testified against her.”
“I never got that message about lunch from Martha. I swear it. I wouldn’t have stood her up.”
“What do you think happened to the message?”
Jane looked back at her mother. Daria scowled, pulled open the courtroom door, and disappeared into the hall.
The young woman turned and gazed uncertainly at the group surrounding Martha. She took a deep breath and let it out. “Thank you,” she said to me, and walked toward them. She waited until Martha noticed her. Martha opened her arms to Jane, and the younger woman walked gratefully into them.
“So all’s well that ends well,” Tony McKay said over my shoulder. “Congratulations, Jessica Fletcher. Fine work.”
“Thank you,” I said, gathering my papers on the defense table.
“Perhaps we can have that dinner now that your schedule looks as if it will be a bit freer.”
“I don’t think so, Tony.”
“Why not?”
“I have other obligations.”
“Do I detect a little antagonism here?”
“Perhaps. I’m not happy that you lied to me.”
“About Henry?”
“Yes. I think you knew he was on the early plane. He would have told his sister, Pearl, and it would have been evident from the boarding card you said she checked in his travel records.”
“You really are a good sleuth, aren’t you? Sorry about that. I had no idea Henry was the killer; please believe me. I was merely protecting my business interests. Trying to keep the police from probing where they didn’t belong.”
“It seems you share that goal with Chappy Ciappino. He didn’t want anyone looking into his business arrangements either. But after the police finish charging him with attempted bribery, I don’t imagine there will be much they don’t know.”
“Dreadful fellow. Can’t say I’ll be sorry to see him go away for a while, but it’s going to be hell running the show all alone now.”
“You’ve been in business many years now. You’ll manage, I’m sure.”
“I always had strong partners to share the load. Victor was the brain behind the business, and Henry, the little bugger, was a masterful manager.” Tony eyed Martha as she hugged Betsy good-bye. “Maybe I can convince the lovely widow to become a businesswoman. Do you think she has any skills in that direction?”
“You’ll have to ask her,” I said.
“I think I shall,” he said as he walked away.
I hoped fervently that Martha would choose to hire a business consultant rather than trust Tony to manage her half of their joint affairs.
“Oh, Jessica, I’m thrilled and giddy and so grateful to you for everything you’ve done,” said Martha several minutes later when the crowd in the courtroom had thinned and she returned to what had been the defense table. “I can’t wait to sleep in my own bed, and take you around town and treat you—and me—to some of the shows, and a good restaurant, and Betsy is already planning to pull me into a casino. And you know, I think I’m going to buy a little house in Cabot Cove so I can come visit anytime I want.” She laughed. “It feels so strange to be making plans. I haven’t thought beyond the minute ever since I was arrested.”
“You have all the time in the world now to make plans,” I said. “And you can do anything that takes your fancy. You’re a wealthy woman now.”
“Oh, my sweet, generous Victor,” she said. “If only he could be here with me to enjoy this moment. I miss him so much.”
“I know.”
“You do know, of course you do.”
A guard was waiting to escort her back to the jail, this time without handcuffs and manacles. I gave Martha another hug, promised to pick her up shortly, and watched as she walked away, a soon-to-be-free woman.
I never dreamed two years ago at Martha and Victor’s beautiful wedding that I would be back in Las Vegas helping to defend her against a murder charge. It had been an unforgettable experience. But it was time to go home to Cabot Cove.
As for Martha, after months in jail, she was eager to sample life again, to explore the pleasures and entertainment the city had to offer. I could understand its appeal. Las Vegas, with all its glitter and glamour and flashing lights, was a twenty-four-hour party, a perpetual celebration. Martha was still relatively young, certainly beautiful, and now a very rich woman. I hoped she could make a life for herself and find happiness beyond amusement, beyond material possessions. I hoped she could gather friends and family around her for years to come, and share the most important part of life—love.
Chapter Twenty-two
“I’m Rikid Klieman.”
“And I’m Eddie Hayes. You know, Rikki. Court TV has covered hundreds of trials over the years, and you and I have personally been involved in plenty of them as attorneys. But I don’t think I’ve ever seen one end as dramatically as the murder trial of Martha Kildare. Perry Mason couldn’t have done better.”
“It looked for a while that the system might have failed and that an innocent woman could have been convicted. Mrs. Kildare has a lot of people to thank, including Jessica Fletcher, who stepped out of her familiar role as a famous mystery writer and dug up the evidence that freed her.”
“Maybe Mrs. Fletcher should consider becoming a lawyer.”
“I’m sure she’d make a good one. We’ll be back for more discussion about the Kildare murder trial with today’s guest legal experts after this commercial break. And don’t forget that tomorrow we’ll begin coverage of the sensational murder trial in Florida of a man charged with murdering his wife and his mistress.”
“Stay tuned.”
Here’s a preview of
Majoring in Murder
A Murder, She Wrote mystery,
available from Signet
I’d never seen a green sky before. The color was not the green you picture when you think of grass and trees. It wasn’t mint green or hospital green or even olive green. It was more like the color of the ocean when it pushes into the bay and up the river, when the bottom is murky and an oar dipped in the water roils up the particles of silt into a muddy cloud. It was that color green.
I climbed the steps of the Hart Building, debating whether to return to my apartment or go inside and wait out the approaching storm. The quad, usually alive with students, was eerily empty. Only the soft rumble of thunder, and the rustle of dry oak leaves tumbling over themselves across the square, broke the silence.
“I don’t like the looks of this, Mrs. Fletcher.” Professor Wesley Newmark, chairman of the English department stood on the top step and studied the darkening sky. The wind elevated the few strands of sandy hair he’d carefully combed over his bald pate.
I followed his gaze. “What do you see?” I asked.
He squinted at me as a gust of wind spit droplets on the lenses of his glasses. He pulled a handkerchief from the pocket of his gray tweed jacket with leather elbow patches. “You’d better get inside. If the alarm goes off, take shelter in the basement,” he said, wiping his glasses and replacing them on his nose. “I’ve got to get to my appointment. I’m late already.” He started down the steps, hugging his bulging, battered leather briefcase with both arms to keep the wind from catching it.
“Where are you
going?” I called out, but the wind must have carried my voice in another direction. He didn’t answer, or if he did, I didn’t hear him. He hurried down the stairs, ran across the quadrangle in the direction of Kammerer House, where the English department had its offices.
I opened the door to the Hart Building. It was Saturday morning and most classes had finished for the week. Outside my classroom, I glanced at a television monitor mounted on the wall. A message flashed on the screen: “Tornado Watch Till 4 P.M. This Afternoon.” Oh my.
I’d come to Schoolman College to teach a course on writing murder mysteries. Harriet Schoolman Bennett, dean of students and the granddaughter of the founder, was an old friend. We’d served together on the mayor’s committee to combat illiteracy when I’d taught at Manhattan University in New York City and she’d been earning her Ph.D. at Columbia. That was before Schoolman suffered the financial consequences of declining enrollment, and Harriet had come home to rescue what she’d wryly called “the family business.”
Schoolman was a small liberal arts college in a state that boasted large universities. Situated midway between Purdue and Notre Dame, it struggled in the shadow of its larger and more sophisticated rivals. Recently, however, its fortunes had begun turning around, thanks to its writing curriculum. Harriet had instituted the program five years ago to gain much-needed publicity and shore up the student base. Contacting her connections in the academic world and buttonholing old friends to help out, she’d attracted a series of bestselling authors to come to Indiana to teach. My course was entitled “The Mystery Genre in Publishing Today,” and Harriet had promised that I’d find the bucolic college campus a stimulating environment, both for teaching and for working on my own manuscript.
However, a tornado was not the kind of stimulation I’d had in mind when I’d agreed to come for the fall term.
My classroom offered a quiet sanctuary in which to work on the curriculum; at least it would have if my thoughts hadn’t kept drifting to the impending storm. Outside my window, the rain had stopped, but a charcoal gray sky promised more to come. I packed up my papers, mentally calculating how long it would take to reach my apartment, hurried down the empty hall, pushed open the doors, and stepped outside.
A pinging noise and the sharp feel of hail hitting my scalp made me shrink back under the narrow overhang and raise my briefcase over my head. I watched fascinated as hailstones the size of golf balls bounced down the stairs and rolled onto the path. Across the quad, between two buildings, was a small parking lot, and I heard the hail striking the hoods of the cars. The unmusical percussion jarred me from my reverie.
The door opened behind me, and Frank, a maintenance man at the college, grabbed my elbow.
“Professor Fletcher, you can’t stay out here,” he said, tugging me back into the building. “Everyone’s already in the shelter. Come quickly. There’s not a lot of time. I’ll take you to the—”
A series of short horn blasts interrupted his instructions. Spurred by the alarm, I ran after him down the deserted hall to the emergency staircase. The thunder was louder now. Or was it the wind? I was having trouble distinguishing the source of the sound. The loud roar was deafening, punctuated by the clatter of breaking glass and crashing debris. I felt the building shake, and the hairs rose on the back of my neck.
We raced down the flight of stairs to the ground level and through an open door into a concrete bunker illuminated by bare light bulbs screwed into wall fixtures. At least a dozen people were huddled on benches or sitting on the floor.
“Oh good, you found her,” someone called out. “What about Professor Newmark?”
“Couldn’t locate him,” Frank called back, as he and another man hauled the iron door closed and shot three dead-bolts just as something massive slammed into the metal from the other side.
I felt a hand on my arm and turned.
“Come. There’s some room on this bench.” A woman slid over to make a space for me to sit.
The concrete walls muffled the blast of wind, but the iron door creaked and rattled on its hinges. A moment later, the lights went out. Only a red bulb above the door remained illuminated, casting a feeble light. The rest of the shelter was steeped in darkness.
“Talk about just in time,” yelled a voice I recognized as one of my students, Eli Hemminger. “Like to keep us in suspense, huh, Professor?”
“I prefer to save these kinds of hairbreadth escapes for my novels, Eli,” I said, shivering as I realized the danger I’d been in. “But this is more like a thriller than a mystery.”
It was raining lightly when we emerged from our shelter and stepped out onto the landing in front of the Hart Building. The wind had calmed and the thunder was rolling away in the distance. Off to the east, flashes of lightning could be seen against the sliver of horizon visible between structures still standing. I took a deep breath. The air was bitter with the tang of mud. The smell reminded me of wet dog.
The quadrangle was a vastly different sight than the one I’d seen earlier. The tall oaks that had been shedding their autumn leaves still stood in the square formed by Schoolman’s academic halls and administration houses, but were stripped bare of both leaves and small branches. What remained were skeleton trees, blackened as if they’d been victims of a fire, and draped with torn papers, shreds of fabric, and other fragments of rubble in a macabre decoration.
As we gazed out at the devastation the tornado had wrought, the square began slowly filling with students, faculty, and staff from other buildings.
Harriet Schoolman Bennett jogged over to where we stood and called up to the people still on the landing. “Everyone all right up there?” At the nods, she continued, “Some of the phone and electrical lines are down, but the cell tower was spared. If you’ve got a cell phone, please share it so people can notify relatives they’re okay. We’re setting up a triage station in the Sutherland Library. If you come across any walking wounded on your way to the Union, please bring them to the reading room.” Her cell phone rang and Harriet held it to her ear with one hand, extending her other to assist a woman coming down the steps.
“Harriet, is there anything I can do to help?” I asked.
“Sure, Jessica. Come with me. We can always use an extra pair of hands. Frank, I’d like to see you, too.”
Frank and I joined Harriet, walking rapidly to keep up with her pace as she turned back toward the building that housed the Student Union. She waited till we were out of earshot of the others.
“Frank, what happened to the alarm? I didn’t hear it till the storm was practically upon us.”
“I’m sorry, Dean Bennett. The wiring is just too old,” he said. “It’s been giving me fits for weeks now. I told President Needler, but he said there wasn’t any room in the budget for repairs, that I’d have to fix it myself. I’m a pretty good electrician, but this system is beyond what I can do. We need an electrical engineer to take a look at it, and that could cost big bucks.”
“Call in an expert as soon as you can,” Harriet told him. “I don’t care how long it takes or how much it costs. We can’t afford to lose lives because our system fails.”
“Have there been any fatalities?” I asked.
“Not that I know of,” Harriet replied. “I had a telephone team call in to all the buildings when the tornado watch was upgraded to a warning. Hopefully, everyone got the message and took shelter in time.”
“I rounded up everyone who was still in the Hart Building and got them down to the shelter.” Frank said. “But I nearly missed Professor Fletcher here.”
“But he found me, as you can see,” I said. “Professor Newmark had warned me that there might be a tornado on the way.”
“Was he with your group in the basement?” she asked.
“No,” I replied. “He was leaving for a meeting, but he recognized the signs of an impending storm and told me to take shelter.”
“We were lucky in one thing,” Harriet said, pulling open the door to the Student Union. “The
basketball team was playing Wabash today, and a large contingent of the student body and faculty went over there to cheer them on. Thank goodness the tornado never made it that far.”
An hour later, Harriet and I walked outside. The air was now crisp and the sky had cleared, the sun starting its downward arc.
I took a deep breath. “You’d never believe a storm came through here, looking at that sky,” I said.
“That’s what it’s like in Indiana,” Harriet replied. “The weather is so changeable.”
On the quad in front of us, some of the staff, dragging green plastic garbage bags, were already starting to clean up. We walked slowly in the direction where the storm had done its worst. Others had preceded us, and there were groups of students strolling down the walk and lingering in front of the blown-out buildings like visitors to a tourist attraction. Campus security, at the direction of the police, was stringing yellow tape around the perimeter of three properties and hanging KEEP our signs every fifteen feet.
Kammerer House, where the English department had its offices, was badly damaged, only the front wall left on the second floor, and a hole in the ceiling of the first floor where debris had fallen through. Milton Hall next door, which housed the Office of Campus Services, was worse, the back of the building entirely gone and only part of the facade standing. Beyond them, the Bursar’s Office was minus a roof, and the front porch had disappeared.
A security guard left his post and hurried up to Harriet. “Doctor Bennett, may I see you for a moment.”
“What is it?”
“I need to show you something.”
“Can it wait?”
“No, ma’am. I don’t think so.”
We ducked under the yellow tape and followed the guard around to the back of Kammerer House. He picked up pieces of siding and roofing and threw them aside, clearing a path so that we could get closer to the remains of the building.
“It’s there,” he said, pointing under a mound of rubble, visible through a missing window.
You Bet Your Life Page 23