But then I noticed that the clay-red mud was fresh and wet, and that it clung to the car’s grille as well as the tires. I reached out to touch the hood.
It was warm.
Well, well. I clenched my teeth. Catering was safer than this, and sometimes you couldn’t be sure about catering. I needed to be quiet, I knew that. In fact, I needed to skedaddle.
But my feet stayed cemented to the cold garage floor. I had come here. I was going to go into Laura’s house, and in two days I was going to go through Laura’s locker. Kathleen had left me at the top of the driveway; if there was someone in the house, that someone probably would be unaware of my arrival. I was going in. And if I saw somebody I would scream bloody murder and apologize later. I could even arm myself, the way they did on TV Unfortunately there was no .22 slung across my chest, and I was at least fifteen steps from the kitchen and the nearest meat cleaver.
I looked around the garage. There was a large workbench. Maybe the woman who claimed to be a leader had bought herself a nice heavy hammer or wrench or even a drill. My feet made gritty echoes as I tiptoed over.
The bench was large and long and had two shelves above it and one below. Paint thinner, caulking, and a tool box rested on the first shelf. The tool box yielded a small wrench. I was about to enter the house with it when I saw the edge of something else on the top shelf. I reached up.
It was a BB gun. I recognized this type of firearm from the time I had volunteered as a counselor at Arch’s Cub Scout day camp. Many local people used them to shoot bothersome blue jays or rabid squirrels. I ducked down to check the shelf underneath, but there was only a large cardboard box marked BB’s.
I was not going to load the gun. For one thing I couldn’t exactly remember how to do it. It looked menacing enough, a lot like a rifle really, and I would just have to do a good impersonation of Annie Oakley if the need arose.
I crept through the unlocked door to the kitchen but stopped short before heading through to the living room. In that room, someone was rustling papers.
My body went numb. The unloaded BB gun felt cold and inadequate. I backed up noiselessly, grabbed a long knife off a wall mount above the counter, and turned back toward the garage.
The blue Volvo was still there. I locked its doors, jammed the knife into the edge of the window and pushed down with all one hundred twenty pounds.
The alarm split the air. I jerked the knife out and ran back around to the front of the house.
The door between the kitchen and the garage banged open. After a moment the alarm stopped. Whoever was down there had the keys to the car, and wanted the alarm off so as not to attract attention.
From the top of the driveway came an unexpected female voice, followed by a robe and a head of hair neatly rolled in cylinders.
“Hoohoo! Kathleen, is that you, dear?”
The Volvo engine started and revved. From where I was crouched behind a thicket of chokecherry bushes I could not see who was driving. Worse, the driver appeared to be wearing a ski mask.
“Hey!” yelled the robed woman to the car.
The driver ignored her and gunned the Volvo back up the driveway. I wanted to stand to get a better look, but I didn’t want the driver to see that I was the one who had set off the alarm.
“Kathleen!” the woman in the driveway was calling again, now that the Volvo had gone. “Are you in there?”
“Excuse me,” I said in a loud voice over the chokecherry bushes. “Hello!”
When I had pushed my way through the underbrush and up to her, I learned the caller was Laura’s neighbor, Betsy Goldsmith. She had come out because of the noise, but did not know who could be driving Laura’s car, or why. Her husband was a pilot, she added, and since they had no children they traveled frequently and didn’t really know too much about what was going on in the neighborhood. She did know, however, that her neighbor had died, although she had missed the funeral.
“Do you know who was in that car?” she asked me. “It looked like Laura’s. Why would someone be over here with it now?”
“I really don’t know,” I said, then added, “and I sure do wish I did.”
“Well, it certainly is strange—” she said, then gave me a quizzical look.
“I’m here to see the house,” I told her, before introducing myself.
“The caterer!” she said. An embarrassed smile flooded her face, as if she had met a famous person at the Laundromat. “Well, I certainly hope you buy that house. Most people would be spooked, you know. Don’t want to live in a house where there’s been a death.”
“Did you know Laura?” I asked.
“Oh, you know,” she said vaguely, “we waved to each other. In winter my husband would help her shovel out, sometimes give her a lift into town when that car of hers wasn’t working, which was a lot.” She paused. “Maybe that’s who it was, her new mechanic. I knew she had someone new working on the car, maybe that person was looking for her.”
By looking through her papers?
“Laura and I gave each other cookies at Christmas,” Betsy added bleakly.
“She was my son’s teacher,” I put in.
“Uh-huh, well,” she said, starting back up to her house, “nice meeting you.” She turned back almost as an afterthought. “You don’t know who the new mechanic was, do you?”
“No, sure don’t. Say,” I began as if it had just occurred to me, “you didn’t see Laura right before she died, did you? I’m, just, wondering how she was.”
“We were gone that Monday the teacher came over and found her,” she said plaintively. “That last time I saw her was—” she thought for a moment “—the Saturday before.”
“But that—” I stopped. If Betsy did not know that Saturday was when the deputy coroner had said Laura was supposed to have died, I was not going to remind her and chance getting her spooked.
“I remember,” Betsy went on, “because I was out planting bulbs that day, trying to get them in before the cold weather. Laura walked out of her garage.” She stopped to point. “She waved to me as she came up the driveway. ‘Car broken again?’ I called down to her, and she said, ‘You bet.’ And that was the last time I saw her.”
“Did you know where she was going?”
“No,” said Betsy. “Errands, probably, since she taught during the week. Then later I heard a car and I figured she’d walked to the new repair place and picked it up. But I guess not if someone’s trying to return it now.”
I shook my head.
Betsy said, “Oh, well. When I was out planting the bulbs was the last time I saw her. I don’t know who her friends were,” she added and turned away again.
I tried to think of how to put the next question before she was out of earshot.
“Kind of odd,” I said to her back. “You know. You’d think that the cops would have been interested in you hearing a car on Saturday, huh?”
Betsy turned her rollered head and robed body so she could give me a long look. “How come you’re so curious? You’re more interested than the cops were. Anyway,” she said with a final sigh, “I don’t think I told them about hearing her come back later in her car. It doesn’t matter now, does it? You don’t kill yourself because you have a car that’s always quitting.” And off she trudged to her house, a two-story affair with several decks and a wide expanse of glass.
I walked quickly into Laura’s house, through the kitchen and into the living room. There was an opened box sitting on the blue rug. Its flaps stuck out at angles, as if someone had tried to close it in haste.
That’ll teach you to break in when I’m trying to break in. Lucky for me, in a way, that the cops didn’t suspect that Laura’s case was a homicide. They could have secured the house. This way all the burglars in town could drop in at a moment’s notice.
The box contained bundles of letters and postcards to Laura. I tried to read through at least one in each bundle, skimming because I knew Kathleen would be back soon. Some were from vacationing teachers whose
names I recognized. Some were from Illinois, from people whose names were unfamiliar. I pulled out a pad from my purse and wrote down the names, Singleton and Carey and Ludmiller and Druckman. There was even a bundle from the aunt who had paid the funeral expenses. The first letter was full of news of nephews traveling and a house being redone. None of this was helping me with a possible link between Laura’s death and the attempted poisoning of Fritz Korman, so I piled all the letters back into the box and pushed it into a cupboard.
Above the cupboard was a shelf of books. Beside it was the wall of photographs that I had briefly noted during the funeral reception. Laura’s library reflected sociopolitical issues of the Sixties and Seventies: Susan Brownmiller’s book on rape, works of Tillie Olsen and Adrienne Rich, Pacifism in the Nuclear Age and, of course, Our Bodies, Ourselves. In addition there were some books on alcoholism, including One Day at a Time in Al-Anon. To my surprise there was also a copy of The Dungeon Masters Guide, which I removed and flipped through. No name on the flyleaf, but I made a mental note to ask Arch about it.
The photos on the wall were of grinning family groups and Laura, white teeth, skin tanned to nut brown, and hair summer-sun bleached. She was either clad in hiking gear and leaning against a boulder, or posing with the families by a lake or cabin. Some photos were signed with the same names I had seen in the box. In the bottom-left corner of this display was one picture that gave me a jolt.
It was another youthful photograph of the girl whose picture had been in the Kormans’ desk. Now I remembered why that picture had looked familiar to me—I had seen it in this house the day of the funeral. I immediately removed it from the wall and slid the picture out of the frame. On the back was written “Love to a teacher who is smiley (ha-ha) no matter what! B. Hollenbeck.”
I put this in my purse and tried not to imagine what Investigator Tom Schulz would say about taking things from Laura’s house. I trotted into the bedroom to look around there, if only to figure out where someone could stash some rat poison until an opportune moment presented itself at a postfuneral party. The bedroom was small and neat, with dresses and skirts hung in the closet and a crocheted throw folded carefully at the bottom of the bed. The bathroom was next. Its rows of Jhirmack hair products and Vitabath shower gel and body cream indicated a person who wanted to look and smell good. The medicine cabinet yielded some soap and cream samples as well as a prescription bottle announcing itself as Ornade, a cold medicine I used myself in the winter months.
A car was coming down the driveway. I hurried back through the living room to the kitchen. A quick visual check of both those areas showed no evidence of my prying. The knife was missing from the wall mount. Of course, that was because I had dropped it behind the chokecherry bushes. No point in risking picking it up now and engendering questions from Kathleen.
My eye fell on the pile of old mail by the kitchen phone. I sifted through it quickly, but it was only more ads, a few bills, a postcard from the Singletons. Then I remembered my promise to Kathleen and reached into my purse for the mail I had brought in. Outside, I could hear her opening the car door. I glanced again at the three bills that had arrived that day.
The past due Public Service and dentist’s bills I ignored. The third was a bill from my ex-husband and Fritz’s office. This seemed very odd to me, given Arch’s view that Laura did not get along with the Kormans. Maybe she was John Richard’s patient. Swallowing hard, I opened the envelope. Inside was a bill for an office visit.
It was the date that gave me a start.
Laura Smiley had done errands and seen Fritz Korman on Saturday, October third.
Afterward, apparently, she had come home and killed herself.
CHAPTER 10
I need to talk to you,” I said into the phone to Tom Schulz. I was aware that I was gasping for breath, as if I had just finished running a few miles when all I had done was pick up Patty Sue and drive home.
“What about? You having a heart attack or something?”
“Did you talk to the deputy coroner?” I demanded. “Anything new?”
“Yeah, he said that corpse just jumped out of the grave and told him all kinds of new stuff.”
“Not funny.”
He sighed. “The only thing I found out that I didn’t know already was that there was a foreign substance in her stomach when she died. Looks as if she took some Valium before she did it, settle herself down a little bit.”
“Valium?” I said quickly. “There wasn’t any Valium in her medicine cabinet.”
“Oh boy.” He snorted. “Not in her medicine cabinet, she says. What else did you figure out going through her stuff? Ever occur to you that what you were doing was illegal? Her medicine cabinet. Maybe that’s not where she kept it. Think of that, Detective G?”
“Cool it,” I said angrily. “This is why I called you. I’ll tell you what I found in my search. Another intruder was there when I got there—what do you think of that? I had to scare off burglar number one before I could do my thing. So. Did your fellow check to see if she had a prescription?”
“Just a sec, back up. You just broke into Laura’s house and found someone else had broken in, too? You got a description of this person?”
“I didn’t break in,” I protested. “But the other person drove off in Laura’s blue Volvo. Wearing a ski mask.”
A groan. He said, “Great. The woman kills herself and nobody finds her for two days and once she’s buried her house is like a practice area for B and E.”
“You never answered my question about the coroner.”
“What are you getting at?” he said in a voice edged with irritation. “You have any suspects yet? No forced entry, no sign of a struggle, no evidence of second-party involvement at all, which is what the deputy coroner concluded, by the way. You think she was murdered maybe by someone driving her car? And not only that, but whoever did her in is interested in killing Korman too, is that your theory?”
“I don’t know why there was no forced entry. Gould be she invited the person in, I don’t know. Maybe it was someone she knew,” I said to Schulz’s silence. Then I asked, “Were her legs shaved? Did she have hair under her arms?”
“What?”
“The story is she killed herself with a razor blade. But she doesn’t have any razors. At least, I didn’t see any in her medicine cabinet,” I added apologetically. “And guess what else? She read some feminist literature. Lots of them, us, don’t believe in shaving.”
Schulz said, “Well, no wonder she didn’t have any boyfriends.” I tapped my foot while he laughed. “Sorry,” he said, “this job gives you a strange sense of humor. Look. You can slash your wrists with a credit card if you try. We had one guy down Cottonwood Creek do just that, had a grudge against American Express. She might have bought a razor just to kill herself. She might have kept the Valium in her purse.”
“Might have,” I said, “might have. She was happy, she was funny, she didn’t leave a note, you said so yourself.”
“Yeah, I’m beginning to wish I hadn’t,” he muttered.
“Suicide a big surprise to all,” I went on. “And then somebody, for reasons unknown, tries to poison somebody else in Laura’s house after Laura’s dead. Somebody?” I added with vehemence, “maybe the same person, goes waltzing into her house looking for something after Laura’s dead. And meanwhile my catering operation is down indefinitely.” I stopped. Schulz, after all, was not the enemy. I said, “Tell me this. What do you need to reopen an investigation?”
“What investigation are you talking about? The one into that woman’s suicide?”
“Of course.”
He said, “An investigation is never closed completely unless we get a conviction of some kind. Which of course you don’t with a suicide. But if you’re talking about exhuming the body—”
“Maybe I am,” I said defiantly. “Maybe that’s what we need to get this cleared up.”
“I wish I knew how I ever got you into this.”
“
By closing down my business. By taking me out to dinner. By telling me I could help you. Tell me what you need to exhume the body.”
“You need,” he went on wearily, “some evidence you didn’t have before—”
“A neighbor heard a car at Laura’s house the afternoon she’s supposed to have died. This was after the neighbor had seen Laura walking into town in the morning. She didn’t tell the police because she thought it was Laura coming back with her car. There’s more. Laura made an office visit to Fritz Korman the same day.” I didn’t add how I’d come upon that bit of information. Surely stealing mail was a federal offense.
Schulz took a deep breath as if to signal he needed to get off the phone. He said, “I can talk to the doctor and the neighbor, but it’s not enough. You’d have to produce something like death threats against Laura. In writing, mind you. Or come up with some new physical evidence, a diary entry, a weapon, new indications somebody forced their way in. You got any of that?”
I paused. “No.”
“Okay then. Let’s go back to what we’re supposed to be worried about, and that is who put the stuff in Korman’s coffee. I found out the name of that particular rat poison. Just One Bite—how about that? I guess just one sip doesn’t work. But get this, it takes more than a bite to kill a human. In fact, you could eat ten times your weight and not die. You’d need a liver transplant, but you’d live. Your slick killer of Laura is incredibly stupid when it comes to poison.”
“I didn’t say it was the same person,” I said.
“Something else,” said Schulz. “The folks down at the Poison Center say it takes thirty to sixty minutes before somebody drinking that stuff would have a real bad stomachache.”
“What does that mean?” I asked. “That it could have been anybody who was around that coffee machine? Which basically means anybody?”
Catering to Nobody (Goldy Schulz Series) Page 12