“You’re really messing up,” Andrew said.
Joan repressed a snarl.
“Andrew, can you say ‘rubber baby buggy bumpers’?”
“Rubber baby buggy bumpers. Why?”
“Now say it ten times, fast.”
“Come on, Mom.”
“Go ahead, try.”
He survived three before degenerating into “bubby bunkers” and retreating into the kitchen, where she could hear him slamming doors and muttering to himself. Half an hour later, she was willing to call a truce with the overture. She wiped the excess rosin off the strings and laid the viola in its case. Andrew appeared in the doorway.
“Which omelet do you want, Mom, the one with onion or the plain cheese?”
It wasn’t a joke. He had managed two perfectly browned omelets, light and moist in the middle. The coffee was hot, the toast crisp, and the salad fresh.
“Who taught you to make an omelet?” Joan asked, after the first forkful of the cheese. “This is wonderful.”
“It is, isn’t it?” he said between bites. “I think I have a natural gift. I should cook more often.”
“That could be arranged. What else can you do?”
“Depends on what’s in the refrigerator. Ham, turkey, mushrooms—combinations. Almost did a turkey-cheese-onion tonight, but we were out of turkey.”
“All omelets?”
“You don’t like omelets?” His face was innocence itself.
“Love ’em,” she said firmly. “I’ll probably die young, full of cholesterol, but with a smile on my face.”
She was telling Margaret Duffy about it while they pitched in to fold mimeographed newsletters after the Senior Citizens’ Center board meeting on Monday morning.
“He keeps surprising me. I’m enjoying him and I don’t think I’m cramping his style too much.”
“You probably give him the kind of freedom your folks gave you. I’ll tell you, the Zimmermans set this town on its ear with their notions about bringing up children.”
“Notions? My parents?”
“I’ll never forget the night they took on the PTA over the issue of corporal punishment. There was some disagreement about what teachers should be allowed to do to other people’s children, but your parents went out on a limb all by themselves when they said in public that they didn’t spank their own.”
“They never mentioned it at home,” Joan said.
“Probably not, but the teachers’ lounge buzzed for a week about how you’d turn out.”
“And then we left town before they could find out. I wonder what they’d think if they knew I was a Zimmerman.”
“Well, it did come up when you applied for this job.”
“It didn’t!” She stopped folding in surprise. “And they hired me.”
“Alvin Hannauer didn’t hurt. He was tickled to have your father on the dig that year. Experienced anthropologists didn’t drop in every day, you know, especially not with a grant in hand to study Rattlesnake Mound. Mostly he had to manage with students who wanted him to pay them while he tried to teach them not to destroy all the evidence every time they discovered an artifact.”
Joan chuckled. “He sounds just like Dad.”
“They had a lot in common,” Margaret said. “Anyway, when the board was dragging its feet about you—you didn’t have the qualifications on paper, and even worse, you were a stranger—Alvin said he’d heard about you in letters for years and we’d be lucky to get you.”
Touched to know that her usually uncommunicative father had written anything about her at all, much less letters with such an effect, Joan was grateful to the man who had spoken up for her.
“I’ll have to thank him. I didn’t think anybody but you would know about me.”
“Well, of course, I didn’t, not really,” Margaret said. “Not the way I know the people I watched grow up around here. I taught two generations of quite a few families—three of some.”
Of course. Margaret would know Oliver inside out.
“You probably taught a lot of the people in the orchestra, didn’t you?” Joan asked, reaching for a stack of mailing labels.
“Well, yes, over the years. Most of them left town. It’s amazing how little the ones who stayed have changed, though. Nancy Krebs never listened in class and she’s still too wound up in her own affairs to hear what anyone else has to say. Makes for boring conversation.”
Trust Margaret Duffy to put her finger on it.
“Nancy says Evelyn Wade was in our class, too, but I don’t remember her.”
“You and Evelyn didn’t see much of each other. She was a bossy little thing—spoiled rotten, I thought. But that sounds like a whiny child and she never whined. Still, when she set out after something, she was accustomed to getting it and she always made it show. She was big on show—used to draw little circles over all the i’s in her schoolwork but couldn’t be bothered about spelling. You were just the opposite. Pigtails and shoelaces always coming undone. I expect she would have looked down on you, if you’d noticed her. But you went around with your nose in a book and missed half the snubs that came your way.”
“I remember enough.” Joan resisted the temptation to check her back hair. “Did you teach Wanda Borowski or George Petris?”
“I taught Daniel and Emily Petris. The parents came from somewhere on the West Coast. Emily followed her mother back there when that marriage broke up. Daniel floated around Oliver like a lost soul for a year or two, but he seems to have pulled himself together recently.”
“Probably because of Mr. Isaac.” Joan described her visit to the violin studio and Isaac’s obvious pride in the beautiful cello back Daniel was carving. She caught herself before mentioning anything about knives, even to Margaret, although it seemed a laughable precaution. Instead, she asked about Wanda.
“Yes, I remember Wanda,” Margaret said. “She came to me fresh from St. Paul’s. I often wondered whether she’d become a nun herself.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I suppose it was because she was so meticulous in everything she did. She was quiet, never boisterous, seemed almost afraid of boys. Five years in all-girl classes might account for that, but it didn’t have that effect on most of the girls. But I was wrong.”
“Maybe you weren’t that far off. Her house felt like a convent to me. Old-fashioned, painfully clean. I remember wondering if the children were ever allowed to mess things up. And she planned ahead. At eleven in the morning, she had supper going in a slow cooker, and I think she must have sprinkled those shirts the night before or at the crack of dawn, they were so evenly damp. It felt like the old nursery rhyme: ‘This is the day we iron our shirts.’ ”
“Old habits die hard, Joan. There was a time I thought the world would come to an end if I washed on Saturday instead of Monday, but what else could a schoolteacher do? Of course, back then it took all day—you couldn’t just toss a few things into the automatic when you wanted them. But I still organize my life that way. Only now it’s Saturday that feels like the only right day, even as long as I’ve been retired.”
Joan was sitting very still, her fingers idle.
“Joan, are you all right?”
She came to life slowly.
“I’m sorry, Margaret, did you say something? I wasn’t tuned in. I think … I think I’ve just figured something out.”
19
A cup of Monday morning coffee at his elbow, Fred hunched over his desk in the windowless squadroom sifting through a fat stack of reports on the Borowski murder and his own skimpy notes on the Petris case.
The poisoned cup, he was convinced, had been burned with the rest of the trash. The only angle he could see on George Petris was the possibility that the killer considered Wanda Borowski a threat, and he knew he was swimming upstream on that. He hadn’t been pulled off the case, but he could feel the stifled snickers when his back was turned.
I’m paranoid, he told himself, and turned to the reports. Still no weapon. All
the Borowski kitchen knives were clean as the proverbial whistle. Whoever coined that expression had spent precious little time with wind instruments, he thought. They all smelled of spit sooner or later. Clean or not, though, George’s oboe hadn’t been turned up by an exhaustive search of the Borowskis’ neighborhood.
Isaac had sworn that none of his knives had left the violin studio, which was locked on Saturday. It mattered very little, after all. Daniel might have made a knife of his own—he’d shown his talent in that direction. Or, like anyone else arriving at Wanda’s house when she had the oboe waiting for him, he might have used his father’s missing reed knife. Fred picked up the phone to check with the pathologist about the knife Sam had lent him Sunday.
“Just saw it,” Dr. Henshaw answered, much too cheerfully for a Monday morning. “Sure, it would make a clean cut like that. Too bad the end of the blade is rounded off, though. Give me a nice wedge-shaped end, now, and I might be able to match it to a mark that would pin it down.”
“You found a mark?” This was news.
“No, but if I had.”
If we had some ham, we could have ham and eggs, Fred thought gloomily, if we had some eggs.
“Okay if I send it back with the kitchen knives?” Henshaw asked.
“As long as it’s here Wednesday.”
“No problem.”
Fred turned back to the reports. Although he had kept the time of Wanda’s death out of the paper, there was little mystery about it. The old ladies had seen her alive and apparently well at ten-thirty, and Fred himself had recorded the call from Daniel Petris at eleven. It stretched credulity to picture Daniel first making that call and then murdering the lady. Besides, Henshaw had put the time of death at not later than eleven, and they had run the washing machine through its cycle. Working back from the time Joan heard it stop, Fred estimated that Wanda must have started that last load no earlier than ten minutes to eleven. Sometime in those ten minutes, then, someone had walked into her house unobserved, killed her without rousing the neighbors, and left without leaving so much as a footprint in the blood that splattered the bedroom floor and puddled around her body.
So it was going to come down to the tedium of ten-minute alibis. He gave a copy of the orchestra personnel list to Kyle Pruitt and explained what he wanted.
“Hate to do this to you, son.”
“You really think one of them in the orchestra cut her?” The young sergeant’s eagerness reminded him of his own at the same age. With a round face, red hair, and a toothy grin, Pruitt looked a little too much like a plump version of the “What, me worry?” kid to be taken seriously in plain clothes. A former high school linebacker, he now resembled a budding sumo wrestler more than a lean, hard cop, and he knew it.
“I don’t know, but it’s time to start weeding out the ones who couldn’t have.” Fred borrowed the paper back and made little checks by the names of Elmer Rush and Yoichi Nakamura. “I’ve already talked to these two.”
“You sure you want me to talk to Wade?” asked Kyle, always leery of the bureaucrats.
“Just check with his secretary. They were working Saturday.”
“And the ladies?” Kyle’s big forefinger indicated the members of the symphony guild.
“Mrs. Wallston and Mrs. Wade were at the rehearsal when Petris died. I think you can skip the others for now. And, Kyle …” He paused.
“Sir?”
“Anybody can’t tell you where he was, you just say thanks anyway and leave. The polite cop, that’s you. All I want this time out are the easy answers.”
“Take their word for it?”
“Get all the confirmation you can. Just don’t pick a fight to do it.”
Kyle blushed as only a redhead can. It hadn’t been an idle reminder. That eagerness had landed him in hot water more than once. He left, looking somewhat subdued. Fred hoped the mood would last.
He was a little curious to know how long it would take for the word to get around that the police were connecting Borowski and Petris. Not that Kyle Pruitt would be saying any such thing. He was to approach the members of the orchestra as people who knew the victim of a brutal murder and to ask whether they had seen her the morning she was killed. Routine questions about possible enemies or reasons someone might have had for killing her would lead up to a last-minute turn and a casual “By the way, where were you Saturday between ten and twelve?” If Kyle managed the approach skillfully enough, he might not have to ask the question at all. All things considered, however, Fred gave the Oliver grapevine an hour at most.
Forty minutes later, the desk sergeant buzzed him with the news that a young woman wanted to make a statement about the Borowski murder.
“Who is she?”
“Name of Lisa Wallston.”
“Send her in. No, I’ll come for her.”
Fred threaded his way through the maze of desks and corridors to the front. Daniel Petris had called her good-looking. He hadn’t said she was a knockout. Slender, blond, with summer’s tan still warm on her skin, Lisa filled her trim slacks and simple cotton blouse in all the right places. The longest, darkest lashes he’d ever seen on a face untouched by cosmetics fringed her surprising brown eyes. She turned them on him full force, with no trace of a smile.
“Detective Lundquist?”
“Miss Wallston.” They shook hands.
“I’ve come to tell you about Daniel.”
He led her back to an empty office, aware as she surely must be of the heads turning in their direction. She gave no sign of noticing. He supposed she must be used to it. Nevertheless, he pulled the door half shut. He swiveled his chair toward hers, leaned back, and hooked his toes under the desk drawer.
“So, tell me about Daniel. You do mean Daniel Petris?”
“The whole town knows I mean Daniel Petris. Where have you been?” Her accent was soft Hoosier, but her voice had a hard edge he wasn’t altogether sure he believed.
He waited. She glared at him.
“They say you’re asking where people were yesterday morning, when that woman was killed.”
“That’s right.”
“Daniel was with me. I don’t know what he said—he maybe didn’t want to drag me into this—but we spent the night in my apartment. I’m surprised the busybodies haven’t already told you.” She challenged him to make something of it.
“When did he leave?” Fred asked, not rising to the bait.
“Noon, maybe. I’m not exactly sure.” She tucked a long strand of straight blond hair back behind her right ear.
“You mean you’re not sure when she was killed.”
“No, that’s not what I mean at all.” She bristled.
“You haven’t talked to him.”
“Not since Saturday.” Now she was beginning to hedge.
“Miss Wallston, I might as well tell you. We know Daniel was at the Borowskis’ house by eleven Saturday morning.” He tilted his chair upright and leaned toward her. “Why did you come?”
All the starch had gone out of her. Suddenly she shrugged and smiled, dazzlingly.
“I guess I thought he was worth it. I couldn’t let him get messed up in something like this.” The smile faded. “Daniel didn’t kill that woman, I know he didn’t.”
“Maybe not, but you didn’t help him any—or yourself, for that matter.”
“So it was dumb. I’ve done worse things. He didn’t deserve them either. Only this time I was trying to help.”
“Why did you think Daniel might be involved? His name hasn’t been mentioned.”
“But I thought …” Lisa stopped in some confusion. The hair escaped from behind her ear. She pushed it back.
“You thought?” Fred prompted.
“I thought you thought the person who killed George killed this Mrs. Borowski, too.”
The grapevine wins again. “And you thought Daniel killed his father, is that it?”
“N-no.” She backpedaled rapidly. “I don’t know what I thought. I just know Daniel is twice the
man his father ever was. George talked a wonderful line, but he never lived up to an obligation in his life. He flunked fatherhood, made a mess out of his marriage, and wrecked my life. I’m not sorry he’s dead and I won’t pretend to be.”
“I understand your mother was serving refreshments at the rehearsal the night he died.”
“Was she?” She stopped short. “You don’t think for a minute my mother would kill a man! Why, she’s a nurse,” she said, as if that made all the difference.
“Do you know where she was Saturday morning?”
“She was working. I was home. That part was true.” She pushed the hair back again, her fingers following the curve of her ear. “Daniel didn’t spend the night. I haven’t seen him or his crummy father for months.”
“Any neighbors around? Anybody see you?”
“No.”
“Phone calls?”
“No.”
Fred added her to his list of unconfirmed alibis. True, she hadn’t been anywhere near Petris during the rehearsal, but her mother had. And although it would be easy to check whether her mother had been on duty Saturday, Lisa herself might have been anywhere. Together, they had opportunity—and undeniable motive, if the second murder was in some way to cover the first. From what he’d seen at Werner’s lab, access to the poison wouldn’t have been a problem for anyone who knew what to look for. For that matter, hadn’t the aquarium man said something about salamanders and Lisa? Hers had all died. Maybe her mother had helped them along.
All along, he’d been wondering why Glenda Wallston would be willing to be in the same room as the man who had ruined her daughter’s life. In his early rash of phone calls, one of Lisa’s busybodies had suggested that Glenda was struggling with her Christian duty to forgive and avoid judging George Petris. A little hard to forgive a man you haven’t judged, he thought, but he knew he was splitting hairs. Real forgiveness would be asking a good deal. And whether or not Glenda herself would have killed Wanda, who had done her no wrong, he had no trouble seeing Lisa impetuously rush in to protect her mother from suspicion. Glenda might not even have known about the second murder.
Murder in C Major Page 13