A woman—he tried to remember whether they’d asked the neighbors about a woman. On Saturday, he was sure, they’d all referred to the killer as “he.” Had that influenced what people had told them?
Coming into town from the north, he was only a few blocks from the Borowski house. On sudden impulse, he turned onto Posey Avenue and again at Grove Street. He found a parking place a block beyond the little house. The once immaculate lawn, now badly trampled, would soon need mowing. The plants hanging over the porch were already drooping for lack of water.
He didn’t expect to find as many people home at midday on a Monday as there had been on Saturday, but odds were with the old ladies next door. He twisted their old-fashioned mechanical doorbell and heard its metallic brring.
Miss Luca, the plump one, came to the door. Oh, my, yes, she’d be glad to help in any way she could. It was such an awful thing. She and Miss Hobbs had hardly slept a wink since last Saturday. You never knew when he’d come back, did you?
No, Miss Hobbs wasn’t home. She’d gone over to the Senior Citizens’ Center for the afternoon, hadn’t left but five minutes ago. She was a great bridge player, but Miss Luca had never cared for it, herself. It seemed to change people’s whole personalities. Why, he’d never believe what Miss Hobbs had said to her the last time she’d agreed to play. They’d made their bid—a person would think that would be enough. Well, of course, she always bid on the conservative side, just in case. And she was right. If she’d bid the grand slam Miss Hobbs said was in their hands that day and then forgotten to count trump as she had, it would have been simply terrible.
Well, yes, Saturday had been terrible, too, though in a different way, of course. No, she didn’t remember seeing anyone near dear Wanda’s house before they went in for “Masterpiece Theatre,” she’d told him that before, hadn’t she? But she was keeping her eyes peeled now for any suspicious-looking man, he could be sure.
A woman? Oh, no, surely not. She couldn’t bear to think it. Women didn’t do such terrible things. They were too sensitive and gentle. Why, just last year, when their sweet kitty had died and the mice had begun running through the kitchen just as bold as you please, she herself had scarcely been able to see to bait the trap, and when it had snapped, she’d thrown away mouse, trap, and all, because she was too softhearted to touch that furry little body.
Well, yes, she supposed there might have been a woman around when they went in, but for gracious sake, she and Miss Hobbs were there, too, and they were women.
No, she didn’t remember seeing other mothers and children, but of course that didn’t mean there hadn’t been any. She kept a good watch on the street, he could be sure, but hardly for women and children. Well, dear Wanda was an exception. Such a considerate neighbor and such dear little children. It was so very unfortunate that that man had come at the one time in the week when she and Miss Hobbs were too busy to see what was happening.
22
Miss Hobbs was busy again. Standing behind her, Fred could see no point in announcing himself until she finished finessing the queen of hearts. She was on her way to another slam, and very much in control of this one. Would she feel the need to play it out? Apparently not.
“I think the rest are ours,” she said quietly, fanning her cards expertly. If he hadn’t seen it, Fred wouldn’t have believed her gnarled, arthritic hands capable of such dexterity.
“Well, I never,” marveled her partner, whose slender fingers were covered with rings.
“Bertha, I wish I knew how you did it,” said the man to her right.
Miss Hobbs lowered her eyes. Fred spoke before modesty could yield to the desire for a postmortem.
“Miss Hobbs, I wonder if you’d spare me a few minutes.”
She turned slowly and leaned on the table to look up at him, her spine and bent neck rigid.
“Yes, of course, Lieutenant,” she said. “Muriel, will you excuse me, please? I won’t be offended if you want to find another fourth.”
The woman with the rings shook her head emphatically. “Not on your life,” she said. “Partners like you don’t grow on trees, you know. You’ll wait, won’t you?” she asked the others. They murmured assent and, with what Fred thought remarkable delicacy, took the cards to another table and started a game of gin rummy.
“They know how much trouble it would be to get me up and moved,” Miss Hobbs said matter-of-factly, as if she’d read his mind. “Have you found out who killed my neighbor?”
“We’re working on it.” He took the chair vacated by the lone male bridge player. “We think we’ve narrowed it down a little, and I’d appreciate your help.”
“I only wish I could help. It makes me so angry.”
He knew just how she felt. But he went on.
“Maybe you can. Think back to Saturday morning. Try to see the street in your mind, as you saw it just before you went into the house. Was anybody, anybody at all, out there besides you and Mrs. Borowski?”
“The children, of course, and Miss Luca.” She wasn’t being flip, but seemed to be taking his question literally. Good.
“Yes. Anybody else?”
“The paper boy was already gone, no one delivers milk anymore, and the mail didn’t come until after …”
“After the police arrived?”
“Yes.”
“You’re doing fine.”
She shut her eyes, and for a moment he thought she’d fallen asleep, as his grandmother used to do, bolt upright. Little movements under the closed lids suggested, though, that she was scanning the street in her mind’s eye.
“Down at the end of the block,” she said, opening her eyes again, “there were some other children coming towards the park. Bigger children—maybe ten or twelve years old.”
“Would you know them again if you saw them?”
“No, they were too far away. I’m not even sure if they were boys or girls. I remember they were pretty rambunctious, and one of them was bouncing a basketball.”
No bouncy children had disturbed the perfect order of the Borowski living room. Scratch the children.
“How about women?” he asked.
“I don’t remember. Usually I don’t notice people all that much, but the children reminded me of myself when I could still get around. Would you believe I played basketball? Out by the barn with my brothers, and I loved every minute of it. Something in me snaps to attention when a basketball goes by. There’s nothing like that sound on a sidewalk.” Her voice sounded dreamy. He didn’t want to lose her.
“So you noticed the kids.”
“Yes, and I’m afraid that’s all I noticed. I don’t remember any men or women, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t there. Now if you asked me about cars, it would be different.”
“Cars?”
“It’s a little game I play. I’m a car watcher, the way some people are birdwatchers. Miss Luca, with whom I live, was ecstatic one day last week when she saw two hummingbirds and a rufus-sided towhee in the same morning. I wouldn’t hurt her feelings for the world, but I think a Porsche, an MG, and an Edsel top that any day, and I saw all three last Friday.”
“Were you watching cars Saturday, too?”
“Not intentionally. It’s an automatic thing, you know. Of course I know all the regulars in the neighborhood and I don’t even notice them, but let a stranger drive by, and my antennae are out.”
“And?”
“It was a disappointing morning. All domestic.”
A wild thought occurred to Fred.
“You don’t keep a tally, do you?”
“On paper? No, but I think you’ll find my memory is excellent.”
“Yes, ma’am, I’m sure it is.” And he was. “Suppose you tell me all the vehicles you remember seeing on the street when you left Mrs. Borowski on her porch.”
“A Buick Skylark, red, this year’s model, with a CB antenna. Then a red Ford pickup. I’m not sure of the model year, but it was rusted out all around the fenders.”
“Th
at’s it?” His pencil paused over the little notebook.
“It was quiet then. It picked up later.”
“There was quite a crowd, yes.”
“No, I mean while we were still watching television. Not even “Masterpiece Theatre” can make me miss a Corvette. It was vintage 1959, in wonderful condition. Then a light blue Seville not more than a year old. After a while an elderly green Rabbit with a bad cough and a pink Pinto I hadn’t seen for months. It used to go by all the time. That’s all.”
“Did anybody stop and park?”
“No, but they couldn’t very well. There’s no parking in our block.”
“What about drivers, or passengers?” It was too much to ask, he was sure.
“I couldn’t see them from inside the house. Besides, I told you, I watch cars, not people. My friends think I’m a little batty. Maybe they’re right.” From her impish grin, he could tell that her friends’ opinions didn’t worry her.
“Today I’d give a lot to be a people watcher instead—but it wouldn’t bring her back, would it?” Now she was sober.
“No, it wouldn’t.” And that was the hell of it, he thought. The best you could hope for was to lay blame at the right door and put the killer out of circulation. He had no idea whether this one would kill again, anyway. He was afraid he’d find out all too soon. His own puny warnings would be forgotten as soon as the fuss died down, as it surely would without news of an arrest.
A light touch on his shoulder jolted him out of his thoughts.
“Hello, Fred. Have you come to learn bridge from the expert?” Joan stood beside Miss Hobbs, her warm eyes smiling at him.
“Not me,” he said, feeling too low to think of a clever reply. “I only came to ask her another question or two.”
Joan looked puzzled.
“About our neighbor, Joan,” said Miss Hobbs. “She was killed on Saturday. Such a shame.”
“Oh,” said Joan, the light dawning. “You’re—” and he saw her get stuck.
“The old biddy next door, I imagine,” said Bertha Hobbs, the imp shining through her thick spectacles.
“Not quite that bad,” Joan said, laughing. “Don’t let me interrupt.”
“I’m afraid I’ve told him everything I know. It’s mighty little.”
“Thank you, Miss Hobbs. You never know what will make a difference.” Fred turned to go.
“Fred, can we talk a minute?” Joan asked.
“Oh, sure.” Hearing the lack of enthusiasm in his own voice, he wondered how she would interpret it.
She led him to her cubicle.
“You look a little tired.”
“I’ll survive. It’s not one of my better days.” He sank down onto the wooden chair, wishing that it leaned back.
“I take it you didn’t get my note,” Joan said.
“What note?”
“Just to call.” She twiddled a pencil on her desk. “I had an inspiration earlier. It’s probably silly, but for a while there, I was so sure.”
“A little inspiration wouldn’t hurt.”
“Fred, I don’t think we know when Wanda died, after all.”
“Oh?”
“All we know is when she was last seen and when somebody started the washer. I don’t know why I didn’t see it right away—listen to me, now I’m sure all over again—but that somebody wasn’t Wanda.”
He bit off the sarcastic remark before it reached his lips. “Go on.”
“Think about it for a minute. She had her house clean, her ironing sprinkled, her supper cooking, and her kids in the park by ten-thirty in the morning—on a Saturday. You can’t tell me that a woman that well organized would wash one towel and one bathrobe in that big machine and leave a laundry hamper full of dirty sheets and towels.” Her eyes sparkled as she warmed to her argument. “Even if she had wanted to wash those things separately, which doesn’t make sense, she’d never have left the water level at extra high.”
It had a certain logic.
“But if she didn’t, then—”
“Then maybe the murderer did,” Joan finished triumphantly. “To clean up the blood. It would come right out in cold water if it hadn’t had time to set, and since we know she was still alive twenty minutes before someone started the washer, it could hardly have set.”
“I don’t think the lab would even be able to identify human blood, much less type it, after that,” he agreed. “But why bother washing it at all?”
“To slow you down, maybe,” she suggested. “Especially if the killer knew Daniel was coming or was afraid the children were on their way home. Weren’t you looking for someone covered with blood? Isn’t that why you wanted to go with me to Yoichi’s, because you heard about his sweaters?”
Of course it was. Even Yoichi had spotted it.
“This does change things,” Fred said. “One of the reasons I couldn’t see Daniel as a serious possibility was that he was completely clean. He even rolled his sleeves down to let us look. Volunteered it himself. Not that they might not have been rolled up all along, of course. I did figure our man would have blood on him somewhere. I suppose those things were hanging in the bathroom—we can ask the husband.”
“Covering up with whatever was hanging in the bathroom doesn’t sound like planning ahead,” Joan said.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Fred said. He tilted the chair against the wall, finding something like his customary angle for thinking. “I suppose you could count on finding towels in any bathroom. The robe might have been a lucky break. But I think you’re right about the washer. A real planner would have dumped in some other stuff, too. Sure doesn’t sound much like a woman.”
“Fred Lundquist, you should know better than that,” Joan said, exasperation in her voice.
“Than what?”
“All women aren’t like Wanda, and you know it. I’m too stingy to waste all that water, even if I’m not the perfect housewife, but I can think of lots of women who wouldn’t give it a thought. Evelyn, for instance.”
Evelyn Wade, of the powder blue carpets and Cadillac. Was it the light blue Seville Bertha Hobbs had spotted? He whipped out the notebook and wrote, “Chk Cad model.”
Joan looked horrified. “You’re not taking that down!”
“No,” he said, not altogether truthfully. “It made me think of something Miss Hobbs told me.” Evelyn Wade had been in all the right places at all the right times—serving drinks, picking up a babysitter at Werner’s lab, and even driving by Borowskis’ Saturday morning, if that was her car. A certain ruthlessness had always made him uncomfortable around Evelyn, but he balked at translating it into cold-blooded murder. The question, of course, was whether Evelyn would have balked.
“Why?” he asked. “Why would she want to kill those two?”
“I can’t imagine,” Joan answered, and he realized that he had spoken aloud. “I know she’s a little pushy, but that’s absurd.”
A little pushy was not how Fred would have put it. “Probably,” he said. “I’m willing to consider the absurd right now, though, and anything else that fits the facts.”
“Okay, then, try this on for size. If a woman killed Wanda, then that might have been the woman Daniel talked to. Maybe that’s why the oboe disappeared. When she answered the phone and heard him say he was coming, she knew she didn’t have time to do much of anything but get away. So she put the robe and towel in the washer to throw you off the track, tossed the knife in the oboe case, and took off fast.”
That would fit Lisa Wallston, he thought. The last person she’d want to see, even on the street, would be Daniel Petris. In that case, though, she’d have known her casual lie was doomed from the start. Surely she could have come up with something more convincing. Unless … He remembered how easily she had abandoned that story. Could she have lied so transparently on purpose, to draw attention to Daniel as a suspect, thus getting back at both Petris men and at the same time sounding so ignorant of the facts as to make herself an unlikely suspect?
; Joan knew the gossip about Lisa and Daniel’s father. Fred told her about the visit and his idea that Lisa and her mother might have committed the two murders independently.
She considered it for long moments. At last she said, “I met Lisa’s mother yesterday in the OB ward. She’s bitter, all right. I don’t know how you tell whether a person is angry enough to kill. I just don’t know.”
Neither does anyone else, Fred thought glumly. They sat in silence, she shaking her head ever so slightly and twirling the pencil, and he letting his chin rest on his collarbone.
Another bitter person came to mind. Unsure how Joan would react, Fred kept silent. Finally, he left.
* * *
Back at the station he found Sergeant Ketcham buried in the Borowski file.
“What do you think, Johnny?” Fred asked.
“Not much,” Ketcham answered, scarcely looking up. “Lot of loose ends. I don’t see anybody backing up the neighbors.” He peered over wire-rimmed reading glasses. “Any chance they’re lying?”
That was a new thought. It tasted wrong, though.
“I can’t think why. They sure as hell didn’t do it themselves. Miss Hobbs has all she can do to get around, and Miss Luca … well, you look for yourself. There’s no reason it couldn’t have been a woman, though. That reminds me, I’d like you to find out what you can about where the ex-Mrs. Petris spent last week.”
“You want me to keep checking the orchestra people?”
“Let’s wait until Wednesday night. It’ll be a lot easier when they’re all in one place.”
A nagging ache reminded him that he hadn’t eaten since breakfast. His watch said ten to three—it would have to wait. He was due in court at three to testify in a case involving a string of bicycle thefts. In this college town, ten-speed Peugeots and Fujis amounted to big business, legal or otherwise. On the way out the door he remembered his other note.
“Hey, Johnny,” he called. “Who in town drives a Seville?”
Murder in C Major Page 15