My First Murder

by Susan P. Baker

  Willard Thompson. He would have killed her if he’d had the chance. Did he indeed have the chance and was now covering up? Why would he have come forward like that? Why did he want to meet that night? How would he have known where she was?

  Robert Reynolds should probably be at the head of the list. Many people would kill for money, and he would be the proud recipient of $250 thousand soon. Would he kill the mother of his children? He seemed to truly care for her. Did he do it out of love for Madge?

  Who knew where Elizabeth was? And who would she have let into her apartment?

  I couldn’t help but get the feeling that something funny was going on in the district attorney’s office. Doyle Proctor had answered very few of my questions. He never did admit that Elizabeth had set up some of her clients. He was a cold one. I didn’t think that it was a necessary requirement that the chief assistant be that cold to someone who was trying to solve a crime. Maybe he hated private investigators. I certainly hadn’t given him any reason to be as rude as he had been that morning.

  My head went ’round and ’round, and finally I drifted off. When I awoke, it was to the ringing of the phone again. That was getting old.

  I answered. It was Robert Reynolds. Would I come to dinner? They had some things they’d decided I ought to know.

  My mind was whirling again. I got up, pulled on my shorts and shirt, and drove a couple of blocks to the laundromat. While my small supply of clothes was washing and drying, I got out my spiral notepad and reviewed the notes I had made from day one. Something was there, but I was missing what it was.

  I moved through my notes rapidly. Couldn’t grasp it. I felt like it was on the tip of my tongue or the edge of my consciousness. I wanted to open my brain and peer inside. If it was swimming around, I could reach in and grab it. I needed someone I could bounce ideas off. Even Margaret would do.

  I assigned a page to each person I suspected, outlined what I knew about them and where they were when Elizabeth Reynolds was killed, and then it came to me. Just a little more investigation, and I could confirm who did it.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  When my laundry was done, I drove back to my room, careful to enter only after I’d made sure no one was there. Then I bathed, dressed, and arrived at the Reynolds’ house sharply at 7:30 P.M.

  “Hi,” Catherine said glumly when she answered the door. She was dressed in white pants and layers of brightly colored blouses. Her face was solemn as she led me to the den where I saw that Anne and Mr. Reynolds were waiting for me literally on the edge of their chairs.

  Mr. Reynolds jumped up. “Can I offer you a drink? I can fix almost anything,” he said with a friendly smile. He was wearing one of those blazers with the college professor patches on the elbows.

  “A Bloody Mary would be nice,” I said as I perched on the edge of a bar stool at the portable bar in the back of the room. Funny, I’d never noticed it before. I glanced over my shoulder and saw Anne and Catherine huddled on the sofa together watching us.

  The atmosphere in the room was stilted and awkward, much different from the previous visits. I wondered what was going on.

  “You ever smoke dope, Mr. Reynolds?” I asked, and watched him while the vodka actually sloshed out of control when he reacted to my question. The girls were tittering behind me, but I ignored them and waited for Mr. Reynolds to recover himself so he could answer. Behind his glasses, his eyes had a stern, reprimanding look, and he cleared his throat.

  “You really ought to call me Robert, Mavis. Especially if you’re going to ask me intimate questions.” He grinned suddenly. His face was rather nice like that.

  “I thought it’d make a good ice breaker. Something’s going on here, Robert. I can feel the tension in the air.” I set my purse on the other black Naugahyde bar stool, sat back, and crossed my legs. I was hoping to give the impression that I wasn’t leaving until I got some answers.

  Slapping a napkin to the side of the glass, he handed me my drink and went on to mix himself a bourbon and Seven. “I’m a liquor man myself,” he said as he poured. “Not that I didn’t try marijuana once or twice when I was young; I did. We all did in the Sixties. But I didn’t care for it. It seemed like it would be too easy to want to do it all the time, and I had a lot I wanted to do with my life.” He stirred his drink and took a taste of it. “You girls want a Coke?” he called to the front of the room.

  The girls came forward, as if on signal. “Yes, please,” Anne said. She moved my purse up onto the bar and bounced up onto the stool beside me, looking at me closely and smiling. Catherine stood at my right. I was surrounded.

  “Mavis was just inquiring as to whether I ever smoked dope, and I was telling her that I had experimented with it a couple of times when I was young. What do you girls have to say? Ever known me to do dope?”

  “Nope,” Anne said loudly, seeming to intentionally try to make it rhyme. “But you do drink alcohol too much, Daddy,” she said and made a frowny face at him.

  “Anne!” Catherine said.

  “Well, he does. I wish you wouldn’t drink at all, Daddy.”

  Robert handed them their soft drinks and didn’t reply.

  “I’ve never known Father to do any type of narcotics, Mavis,” Catherine said with a frown at her sister. “And I think I would have been able to tell. We had an assembly at school once where the police came and told us all about drugs and how to tell if someone was doing them. You know, bloodshot eyes and funny behavior. And Father really only has a few drinks every night. It’s not that much.”

  “I wasn’t trying to start a family feud,” I said as I looked from Catherine to Anne. “I’m just trying to put this thing together. Sometimes tactless questions are the only way I know of to go about it. What about Elizabeth, Robert? Did she ever use drugs?”

  “Lord, no. She hated them. That’s one of the things she was fighting over there in her old neighborhood. If it was up to her, she’d lock the drug dealers up and throw away the key,” he said.

  “Mother used to question me about the kids at school, Mavis,” Catherine said. “She was always afraid that I’d get in with the wrong crowd. She wanted to know if I knew if drugs were available on campus, who was doing them, and stuff like that.”

  “Mom drank too much, too,” Anne said.

  My head was bobbing from side to side as I watched and listened to each of them. My head involuntarily jerked over toward Anne now as she surprised me with that statement.

  “How can you say that, Anne?” Robert glared at his daughter.

  Anne crossed her arms defensively in front of her. “Well, she did. Sometimes when she’d come home after I’d gone to bed, she’d come into my room to kiss me goodnight and I’d smell it on her breath.” She ducked her head and watched her father with brooding eyes.

  Robert sighed and came from behind the bar to where his youngest daughter was sitting. He put his arms around her and pulled her head against his chest. He stroked her hair. “I don’t want that to be how you remember your mother though, Anne. She didn’t do that a lot, and it wasn’t until the last year that she did it at all.” He looked over at me, his eyes sad. “She did start drinking more in the months not long before she left, Mavis. She’d do it before she came home. I don’t know whether it was at the office or if she’d go out somewhere, but when she’d come home it was often quite evident that she’d had a little too much.”

  “Did you ever ask her for an explanation?” I asked.

  “Not at first. I thought she must be going to happy hour with friends or something, but later, when it got to be more frequent, I did. She was real close-mouthed about it, saying that work was just getting to her.”

  “But she never used drugs as far as you know?”

  “Absolutely not. Why do you keep harping on that?” he asked harshly. “I told you how she felt about them.” He released Anne and stood staring at me, his arm dangling across the back of her bar stool.

  I sipped my drink, pondering whether he had a need
to know about the cache of drugs Thompson talked about. What the heck, all he could do would be give me an honest reaction. “A former client of hers told me that she stole his dope while he was in jail.”

  “That’s absurd! Elizabeth would never do that. I’m surprised that she’d even represent the man.”

  “Mother really didn’t like dopers, Mavis,” Catherine said. “She hated them.”

  I looked at Catherine leaning up against the side of the bar reaching for the Coke can to refill her glass. She’d been straight with me so far. I didn’t think she’d lie now.

  “Believe me, I’m just trying to make sense out of everything I’ve been told. The man insists that he told her where he’d hidden some drugs, and that he’d asked her to get it out of hiding and sell it and get him out of jail, but she disappeared after that and so did his dope.”

  “You’re kidding!” Robert said. “That’s just not Elizabeth!”

  “Okay, then tell me, would Spencer?”

  “No.” Robert’s eyes lowered. A troubled expression came over his face. He walked back around the bar and picked up his drink, taking a long swallow. He set it down and looked me in the eye. “To tell you the truth, Mavis, I don’t know if he would or not.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “I mean it seems awfully curious to me that he seems to be doing so well.”

  “I know.”

  “Have you seen his office?”

  “Yes.” He swirled the ice around in his highball glass and took another swig of his drink. “I went over there a couple of times to pick up checks from him. It’s nice.”

  “It’s more than that, Robert,” I said. “It’s plush.”

  “He could have gotten some real good personal injury suits though, Mavis.”

  “He would have had to settle them for an awful lot of money in the last year.”

  He shook his head. “I’d hate to think Vern would do that.”

  I swallowed the dregs of my Bloody Mary and put the glass down. “Well, it seems someone is setting up people to be busted and possibly selling the drugs somewhere in the process. Or maybe the other way around.

  “I just don’t know,” Robert said.

  “Let’s go in to dinner,” Catherine said softly. I glanced at her. She seemed downcast. My guess was that she had her own ideas about people and was disappointed at what I suspected.

  I slipped off the edge of my stool and picked up my purse. Catherine and Robert led the way out of the room. Anne and I followed.

  Anne pulled on my hand as we walked. “Mavis?”

  “Yes?” I looked down at her.

  “I always liked Vernon. He was nice to me.” Her eyes were clouded over, and her face was drawn up in a frown.

  I slipped my arm around her shoulders. “I know.”

  “He used to play with me when I was little. Sometimes, when school was out, Mama would take me to the courthouse with her, and Vernon would be there. He’d hug me and tease me, and people would look at us funny, but I didn’t care. I knew it was because he was black—but I didn’t care.” Her eyes were searching my face.

  I stopped and looked her dead in the eye. “Listen, Anne, if Vernon Spencer did something wrong, it had nothing to do with you, and it had nothing to do with his being black. I want you to remember that, okay?”

  She nodded. “We don’t know for sure that he did do anything to my mother.”

  “No. We don’t. If I find out, I’ll let you know.”

  “Okay.”

  We started walking again, and I caught Catherine looking back at us. A melancholy smile tugged at the corners of her mouth.

  The dining room was rather small. It was off to the side of the kitchen. We sat in matching cushioned chairs at a long, dark wood table. The only other furniture in the room was a china cabinet. The walls were covered with beige-and-pink-striped wallpaper.

  Catherine brought out a roast that she boasted she’d made herself, and we had potatoes, gravy, Brussels sprouts, and carrots. We talked of other things while we ate. There were a lot of long silences when I supposed everyone was thinking about either what had been said or what was to come. I still didn’t know why I’d been asked to dinner.

  When we were through eating, Catherine brought out coffee. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I was a tea sipper so I loaded up my cup with milk and sugar and tried not to grimace too much with each swallow.

  “You’re a great cook, Catherine,” I said when she sat back down after clearing the plates away.

  She smiled brightly and said, “And I’ll make someone a good wife someday, right?”

  I laughed. “I wasn’t going to say that. I would never say something like that.”

  She grinned. “Good. Dad would.”

  Robert smiled at his eldest daughter. “Can I help it if I’m old-fashioned and want my daughter to have a good marriage?”

  “Don’t start.” Catherine warned her father with a smile.

  “Her mother was a good cook, too, Mavis. At least she was in the early days. She wasn’t home later to do it, but I always helped out anyway, so it worked out okay.”

  “Yeah,” Anne chimed in. “Daddy makes great spaghetti. Madge always gets onto him to make something besides spaghetti and hamburgers.”

  I watched their faces to get a reaction to my next words. “I understand that Madge spends quite a lot of time around here. Where is she tonight? I was hoping to see her.”

  “She wasn’t invited,” Catherine said coldly.

  “Oh?”

  “Catherine and Madge don’t always see eye-to-eye, Mavis,” Robert said.

  “She’s always butting into our business,” Anne said. “It’s okay most of the time, but sometimes she gets on Catherine’s nerves.”

  I laughed. “Who told you that?”

  “Catherine. She gets on mine, too, but I don’t let it get to me. You see, Mavis,” Anne said with a cocky look at her father, “Catherine and I figure that Madge likes Dad, but we’re not sure how we feel about that.”

  “Anne!” Robert said sharply.

  She glanced at me, then at Catherine, and back at her father. “Well, we’re not. You said you weren’t either. I heard you talking to her the other day.”

  “Were you eavesdropping on my conversation, young lady?”

  “Just a little bit. I wish I’d heard the whole thing,” she said to her father. She turned to me, “See, Mavis, I didn’t know this, but Catherine knew where Mom was and was writing to her. They didn’t tell me that until today. I made them tell me when I heard them talking. It explained what I’d heard before. Catherine had told Dad, but not me.” Her eyes cut over to Catherine and her father, and she was frowning at them.

  “Is that true, Robert?”

  He sighed. “Pour me some more coffee, Catherine,” he said and then looked at me. “Yes and no. Catherine was writing to her, but didn’t know where she was.”

  “She knows all that, Dad. I told her the other day,” Catherine said.

  I nearly fell out of my chair. The dynamics of the conversation, not to mention the whole situation, were getting interesting.

  “Mavis and I had a long talk after school,” she said as she poured the coffee.

  “You did? Why wasn’t I informed?”

  “I didn’t know—I wasn’t sure if I could trust you, Dad.” Catherine’s face was a study. Her expression was open and honest.

  “Thanks a lot,” he said dourly.

  “Well, I didn’t. You’ve been so upset and I thought Mavis needed to know some things”

  “But you didn’t tell me you’d told your father, Catherine,” I said.

  “You mean that I was writing to her in Dickinson?”

  “Yes.”

  “I wasn’t sure I wanted to do that, Mavis. I’m sorry. I was afraid that Father was somehow involved. I wanted to talk it out with him, which is exactly what we’ve done.”

  “So you knew all the time
that your wife was at least receiving letters in Dickinson, Mr. Reynolds?”

  “No, not all the time. Hey, don’t go formal on me, Mavis, please. I didn’t kill my wife.”

  “Sorry, slip of the tongue.”

  “Freud.”

  “Right. I guess everyone is a suspect.”

  “Catherine just told me a few weeks ago. She wanted me to try and find Elizabeth again and get her to come back. Madge wanted me to divorce Liz and marry her and Catherine was trying to stop it.”