Where Nobody Dies

by Carolyn Wheat

  “Please wait outside, Ms. Jameson,” Button said blandly, ignoring my fury. There was a hint of steel in his voice that had me moving, however reluctantly, out of my chair. The fact that I was contemplating murder apparently bothered Button not at all.

  By the time I hit the outer office, with its clacking typewriters and smiling posters, I was mad as hell. I should have known better, I thought sourly, pacing around the cluttered office in my rage, than to trust a cop!

  No wonder, I told myself with angry hindsight, that Button had been so agreeable to my coming along. He’d known instinctively that the minute things got interesting, Lucenti would have me evicted. I looked wistfully at the closed door. What was going on in there? I wondered. Was Art stonewalling, was he baring his soul, was he turning on his formidable charm? But that particular commodity, I thought wryly, had been singularly lacking when I’d left the room.

  My reflexive pacing was interrupted by the woman who’d inspected Button’s ID when we’d first come in. “Would you like some coffee while you’re waiting?” she asked.

  The woman looked to be around thirty, though her unfocused face and fluffy hairstyle made her seem younger. A fuzzy pink sweater and heart-shaped locket added to the effect, which was less dewy youth than gauche adolescence.

  I responded to the question as I always did, with an enthusiastic acceptance and a silent hope that the coffee would be drinkable. It wasn’t.

  “Good coffee,” I lied, swallowing it with a grimace I turned into a smile. Maybe politics is catching.

  The woman smiled back, and I was struck by the oddness of her mouth. She had a full, sensuous lower lip, but her upper lip was a taut line that suggested a dessicated New England spinster. Her lips looked as though they belonged to two different people—people who wouldn’t like each other very much.

  “I’m Donna Healy,” she said, sitting down next to me on a straight-backed chair. “I’ve been with the congressman since his first campaign. It’s hard not to worry when …” Her eyes strayed to the closed door, behind which her boss was facing Detective Button’s no-doubt thorough cross-examination.

  Donna Healy. I was sure I’d heard the name from Linda. Then I recalled bitchy remarks about one of Art’s aides who’d been in love with him since the year one, but whom he treated with casual disdain. Linda, I remembered with distaste, considered the whole idea irresistibly funny.

  “Detective Button’s hoping the congressman can help him find whoever murdered Linda Ritchie,” I explained.

  “But didn’t her husband—”

  “That’s what the police thought at first,” I answered coolly, “but that was before they found out she was blackmailing everyone she knew—including the congressman.”

  Whatever I’d expected from Donna Healy—outraged denials, tearful sympathy—it wasn’t what I got. “I knew it!” she cried excitedly. There was a flush of triumph on her unformed face, a light of vindication in her pale blue eyes. “That explains everything,” she went on happily.

  I caught up with her. Linda had played her little game with Donna as she had with Brad, convincing the lovesick girl that Art was giving her the special attention Donna had hungered for for years. It was, I realized with a suddenness that stopped my breath, a stunning motive for murder. And Donna had just as much access to the phones as her boss did. But would Linda have arranged to meet her co-worker at her own apartment?

  “That’s why he was taking her to Washington, wasn’t it?” Donna asked shyly. “Linda tried to hint it was because he couldn’t stand not to be with her, but I didn’t believe it.” Yet something in her tiny voice told me she had believed it, and it had hurt her very much.

  “I always dreamed of working in Washington with Art someday,” she went on. “I always knew he’d get there, even when he was only a district leader. But then we won and instead of me he picked Pete Lo Presto as his legislative aide. He said I’d be more effective in the neighborhood office, but …” Her voice trailed off.

  “And his taking Linda was the last straw,” I prodded sympathetically.

  She nodded and swallowed hard. “But I should have known not to believe Linda about the other stuff,” she said. “Art would never be unfaithful to his wife.” The assertion was tempered by a good measure of regret. “He never looks at other women.”

  “That’s not what Linda wanted people to believe.” I fueled the flame of Donna’s anger. “You weren’t the only person she gave the wrong impression to.”

  This time the strange lips twisted in unmistakable bitterness. “From the day Linda first came in here, she was trouble. Little sly insinuations about how much she knew, or how she and Art did this, or Art told her that. She made such a big deal about it every time she spoke to him.”

  I took a shot in the dark. “Did they ever go into corners together and talk? Or meet secretly?”

  Donna rolled her eyes. “She used to break in on him when he was in the middle of something and go into her helpless act. He’d ask her to wait till he was finished, but somehow she always got him to leave what he was doing and go with her.”

  I began to wonder about Donna’s alibi for the night Linda was killed. It was far out, but Button’s betrayal still rankled, and I had a quick fantasy of finding the real killer while he fooled around with the congressional red herring. But it was all too obvious that Donna’s dream of a relationship with Art would in no way have been advanced by the death of Linda Ritchie. Not with the beautiful Aida around. Still, it was worth a question.

  “The night Linda died,” I asked innocently, “you weren’t here, by any chance?”

  Donna Healy’s mouth tightened, and her eyes narrowed. “How did—” Then she broke off, her pale eyes widening as she remembered something.

  “I was here,” she explained. Looking toward a closed door at the rear of the office, she added, “But Her Highness sent me away.”

  It took me a minute. “Mrs. Lucenti,” I murmured, nodding sympathetically. “Did she say why she wanted you to go?”

  This time the sneer wasn’t merely the product of Donna’s incongruous lips; she meant it. “She said she wanted to be alone with Art so they could work on his new committee assignments. As if that dumb PR knew anything about congressional legislation,” she finished with a snort.

  “Then why …”

  Donna leaned forward, a conspirator’s smile on her face. “She wanted me out of the way,” she said triumphantly.

  Even allowing for Donna Healy’s obvious bias, there was something here that needed following up. “Was there anything about a phone call that night?” I asked tentatively.

  “Was there ever!” Donna replied, still in a teenage secret-sharing mood. “I heard them talking about it the next day. Art left the headquarters early because Pete Lo Presto called, only Pete said he never called at all.”

  “So the congressman was out somewhere alone the night Linda died.” I was thinking aloud, but my thoughts were taking the wrong direction for Donna Healy.

  “You mean,” she corrected sharply, “that Aida got Art out of the way. If anybody from here killed Linda, it was her.”

  “Why didn’t you tell this to the cops?” I asked. “You certainly aren’t covering up for Mrs. Lucenti.”

  “I wouldn’t lift a finger for that lazy bitch,” Donna agreed. “But Art asked me not to saying anything, so …” She shrugged.

  “Maybe he’s telling the truth now,” I said, glancing at the door to Art’s office.

  “I hope so,” Donna said, flashing a look of hatred at the door behind which Aida Lucenti sat. “She deserves anything she gets.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Not only is she as lazy and dumb as all her kind, she hasn’t even got any feeling for her own family.” One look at Donna Healy’s desk, covered with graduation pictures, first Communion photos, baby pictures, showed what a cardinal sin ignoring family was in her book.

  “They go to Puerto Rico once a year to see her relatives,” Donna went o
n. “But Art makes her go. She said last year it made her sad to see how poor they were, but he said it would look bad if she neglected them, so they went. She won’t even stay in their house,” Donna confided, a superior smile on her lips. “She has to have a fancy hotel with a swimming pool.”

  I pretended to think about Donna’s accusation. “And she turned down that job, too,” I recalled.

  “That just shows you how lazy she is,” Donna commented. “She nagged Art over and over for something she could do to help his campaign. Of course, the best thing she could do would be to give him a divorce, but …”

  I gave the remark the perfunctory laugh she expected, and Donna went on, “So he told her about this job on the mayor’s commission and she got real excited about it. She couldn’t wait to start, only then the bad publicity happened. Then when that was over and he’d fought like a tiger to get her accepted, she up and says she’s not interested anymore.”

  “Perhaps all the publicity made her nervous,” I pointed out.

  “That’s what she said,” Donna countered, “but what she really wanted was plenty of time to go to the beauty parlor or the health spa without having to work. Art tried to convince her, to show her how bad it looked, her backing out after he fought so hard to get her the job—which was her idea in the first place!”

  “How did she get along with Linda?”

  “Linda hated her,” Donna said simply. “She called her all kinds of names behind her back.”

  “What about to her face? What kind of relationship did they have?”

  Donna shrugged; now that the conversation had moved from Art to Aida, her interest was waning noticeably.

  “Were there any of those private conversations like she had with Art?”

  Donna’s forehead puckered with thought. “I did see a note once,” she finally confessed. “I always knew,” she added cattily, “that Aida was illiterate, but even a Puerto Rican ought to be able to spell Linda, don’t you think?”

  “So they wrote notes,” I said. “They didn’t talk to one another?”

  “Not like Linda and Art.”

  Which made sense, I thought. If Linda wanted the illusion of intimacy with Art, she’d engineer private little meetings that would have the extra advantage of driving Donna Healy up the wall. Her treatment of Aida, too, was reminiscent of her previous pattern of tormenting Duncan Pitt with phone calls to his wife. If ghetto-educated Aida Valentin Lucenti was uncomfortable with written English, then Linda would demand notes—and then probably show them to Donna to get a quick laugh. I was suddenly tired of Donna’s juvenile jealousy.

  “You said Mrs. Lucenti’s here?”

  Donna nodded. “She’s probably doing her nails,” she added waspishly, “while her husband covers up for her with the police.”

  23

  Aida Valentin Lucenti was not doing her nails, or much of anything else, when I walked into the little room. She sat at an empty desk, her eyes not quite focused on a pile of dust-covered campaign signs in the corner of the room, drumming expertly manicured fingers on the scarred desktop.

  “Well?” she asked sharply. “Have they arrested him yet?” Taken aback, I said the first words that occurred to me. “Should they?”

  “Look, don’t cop an attitude.” The worried frown that creased her forehead took the edge off the ghetto-blunt words. “Just tell me what’s going down, okay?”

  “I don’t know,” I answered, making for the only other chair in the room. “Honestly,” I added, lifting a haphazard pile of invitations to a long-ago fundraiser. Putting the pile on the desk, I said, “They threw me out as soon as things got interesting,” and sat down.

  Something in my face must have told Aida she’d come on a little strong. Stopping her rhythmic drumming, she waved a hand deprecatingly. “Don’t mind me,” she said with an attempted smile, “it’s just my nerves. I hate to think of Art having to go through all that on top of everything else.”

  “You mean on top of Todd Lessek’s arrest?”

  Aida’s face tightened. Her trademark dark glasses hid much of her face, but the rest closed up behind unmistakable security gates. “What happens to Mr. Lessek,” she pronounced coldly, “does not concern my husband in the least.” She opened a gold cigarette case and took out a cigarette with an air of indifference spoiled by the slight tremor of her hand.

  “Then why,” I asked ingenuously, “do you think the police will arrest your husband?”

  She gave me a distinctly unfriendly look. “You should know,” she replied with a disdainful shrug. “You’re the one who stirred up all the trouble.” She tapped the cigarette against the gold case, then lit it with a matching lighter.

  “What I want to know,” she continued, breathing smoke, “is why? Why are you trying to destroy my husband?” The businesslike tone, the hard face, were wholly at variance with her dusky skin, her sensuous figure. She was like a tropical princess, unaccountably attired in a pinstriped business suit.

  The accusation stunned me. I just sat and stared at this woman whose cool words were like ice on a volcano of deep emotions.

  I went on the attack. “Where were you,” I asked calmly, “the night Linda was killed?”

  At first I thought the volcano was about to explode. Then she smiled and said, “Here,” looking around at the empty room. She went on to explain, confirming what Donna had said. “We had work to do. Art’s got a lot of bills to study to get ready for his committee work in the House. We were going to get in a pizza and work late, like we used to do when he first went into politics.” There was a slight, reminiscent smile on her face, and I had a quick vision of a romantic young couple eating take-out food and working together on a common dream. It was hardly the picture as painted by jealous Donna Healy, but I could see it clearly enough that Aida’s words rang true.

  “Then the phone rang,” she went on. “I knew it was trouble because Art took it in the other room.” She gestured toward Art’s private office. “Then he came back and said he had to go out for a while, but he’d be back.”

  “Do you know who called?” My heart was pounding, but I tried to keep my voice steady.

  Her mouth twisted into a wry smile. “I thought I did. He gave me the impression it was Pete Lo Presto, his new L.A. Legislative aide,” she explained with a slightly condescending smile. I didn’t mind; it probably wasn’t often that ghetto-educated Aida Lucenti got a chance to show off her knowledge.

  “Did Art tell you it was him?”

  “Not in so many words,” she admitted. “But he let me believe it. So I stayed and worked—”

  “Alone,” I pointed out.

  “Alone,” she agreed.

  “And the phone call—did Pete Lo Presto make it?”

  She shook her head, and looked at the ground. “No,” she said. “He wasn’t even home. I found out later he was at the club all night, planning a dinner to pay off Art’s campaign debts. And he told me Art hadn’t been anywhere near the club that night.”

  “You think your husband got a call from Linda Ritchie, went over there to confront her, and ended up killing her?”

  No answer. From a woman of her passionate loyalty, the failure to defend was a confession.

  Finally, words came, spoken flatly through a dry throat. “Why should he kill her?” Aida asked. “He was giving the little puta what she wanted.”

  “Maybe he got tired of paying Linda off,” I suggested. “Maybe he was afraid she’d never stop and he’d be bled dry.”

  Aida’s face was blandly indifferent; my arrow was wide of the mark.

  “Or maybe she wanted more than money,” I went on, thinking of Donna Healy’s reference to secret meetings. “Maybe she wanted Art himself.”

  Aida snorted her contempt. “She was a fool—a bitch and a fool,” Aida proclaimed. “Art had no desire to make love to a child-woman.” Sexual pride enveloped Aida like a musky perfume.

  “Maybe not,” I shot back, “but if the alternative were exposure—”


  “Then of course, he would have done it,” she shrugged. “Did you think,” she added, the taunting note dominant now, “that he would kill to protect his virtue?”

  “Would he kill to protect his wife?” I asked. “Would he kill to protect you?”

  Bull’s-eye. I had the dubious satisfaction of watching the complacency leave her face, to be replaced by a perfect mask. A hollow tree without a solitary bird to cheer its bleakness.

  She recovered quickly. “Why should he have to?” But the voice was a croak.

  “Because of this.” I pulled the last of the blackmail material out of my purse and put it on the desk. Gray-faced, Aida turned the pages with trembling fingers, then faced me and asked, “The police—do they know”—her scarlet forefinger tapped her criminal record—“about this?”

  I shook my head.

  “I understand,” she sighed, her tone weary. Her shoulders sagged; the body she so meticulously maintained with her regular sessions at the spa was suddenly limp, flabby. “Now,” she nodded with certainty, “now you are ready to name your price.”

  I decided to go with the moment. “I understand,” I began, carefully noncommittal, “that there are lots of opportunities for a lawyer in Washington. Not to mention,” I went on, noting the cynical gleam in my companion’s smile, “on the federal bench.” The thought of becoming a judge has never appealed to me, but I’d begun to wonder just how high a price she would pay—or convince Art to pay—in order to bury her past.

  “I’m sure something can be arranged,” she purred. She was in control again, the color back in her cheeks, the hollow look replaced by a sleek confidence. “Just so long as the police know nothing of this.”

  “They don’t,” I said crisply. “Button would kill me, but they don’t. And they aren’t going to and you don’t have to bribe me. I’m not a blackmailer.”

  The surprise on her face was accompanied by a flash of anger. “Then why are you playing games with me?”

  “I’m not,” I sighed. “I only want one thing, and that’s the person who killed Linda Ritchie. It’s clear that you and your husband had reason to want her dead. Look what you were willing to give me to keep your past quiet. Wouldn’t Art have gone after Linda if he’d known what she was doing to you?”