I'd Kill For That

by Marcia Talley

  About the time Robards was drifting off, a smile was crawling across Aaron’s face, this one very real.

  Though young, Aaron understood that most academics weren’t in the AmEx Gold and Polo set. He’d occasionally wondered how his sociologist brother-in-law maintained the Gryphon Gate lifestyle.

  Now he knew.

  * * *

  The tips of her Coco Beach Coral–lacquered acrylics dug four small crescents into Vanessa Drysdale’s right palm. The newly arrived fax trembled in her left. Three readings, and still the words made no sense.

  Vanessa glanced up, watched merlot ooze down the Bombay beige wall of her study. A mulberry mushroom was spreading on the carpet below the wall stain, darkening the shards of crystal glistening in the nap.

  Vanessa was calmer now, beginning to regret the Waterford goblet the outburst had cost her.

  But what did the message mean?

  Again she read the quote. Again she felt anger rise like a hot, white flame in her chest.

  “A talebearer revealeth secrets.…”

  —Proverbs 11:13.

  Church tomorrow. Showtime!

  Vanessa crumpled the fax and tossed it into the wastebasket. Taking a deep breath, she slowly, calmly, carefully picked up the basket, crossed the room, and began adding fragments of shattered crystal to the basket’s contents.

  * * *

  Jerry Lynch spent a miserable night at the club on Friday, keeping up a facade of civility while inwardly fixated on his impending financial collapse. The moment Renée left for the stable on Saturday, he closeted himself in his office and began poring over the DOW and NASDAQ, the NYSE and AMEX, desperately seeking a path to salvation.

  Jerry was still searching when Renée called to say that her horse had sustained an injury and that she would remain at the stable until very late. Jerry scarcely listened to his wife’s directions concerning leftovers. His eyes never left the tiny figures scrolling across his computer screen.

  Hours later Jerry barely noticed Anka’s knock, paid no attention to the dinner tray she left on his credenza. He agreed to a request without hearing the maid’s question.

  The windows dimmed, grew dark. The monitor’s glow became the only source of light in the study. At one point Jerry heard his fax connect, then print out a message. He ignored it.

  Decades, millennia, eons later, Jerry slumped back into his state-of-the-ergonomic-art Relax Your Back executive chair and ran a hand across his balding crown. If anything, he felt more anxious than when he’d begun. Had the transactions made sense? Had he dug himself into a deeper hole?

  Bloody hell. At least he’d taken action.

  Jerry got up, scowled at Anka’s tray, and headed for the kitchen. Passing the fax machine, he noticed the previously ignored communication. Ever hopeful of a business opportunity, he snatched up the paper.

  “A talebearer revealeth secrets.…”

  —Proverbs 11:13.

  Church tomorrow. Showtime!

  Jerry’s face went cranberry.

  “Bloody hell!”

  He looked for a return number or for some indication of the sender.

  Zilch.

  “Bloody hell,” Jerry repeated, though this time less emphatically.

  * * *

  Feeling slightly confused after her unexpected meeting with the senator, Toni Sinclair spent all of Saturday with her daughter, feeding the deer, shopping, swimming, then dining at the marina restaurant. Miranda loved fried shrimp and picked the marina whenever given a choice.

  Was that it? Toni had wondered, sliding into a booth opposite her daughter. Or was Mommy on some wild Freudian roller-coaster ride with her id?

  After tucking Miranda into bed, Toni watched a series of sitcoms on The Comedy Channel. Gilligan and the captain were building a time machine. Lucy and Ethel were selling door-to-door. Barney and Gomer were bagging a skunk. Things went badly for all of them.

  That’s me, Toni thought, clicking off the TV. I’m living a joke where nothing works out.

  Passing the open door to her office, Toni spotted a single fax lying on her machine. Her stomach knotted.

  For a full ten seconds Toni simply stared at the thing, then her mouth contracted into a thin line of determination.

  As she read, the line went slack, and the room receded around her.

  “A talebearer revealeth secrets.…”

  —Proverbs 11:13.

  Church tomorrow. Showtime!

  After receiving her fax Diane Robards felt wired enough to put a double coat on Shea Stadium. She emptied every wastebasket in her apartment, took the trash to the dumpster, watered her potted cactus, changed the towels, fed her cockatiel, and mini-vacuumed the seed from around his cage.

  Diane then showered, shaved her legs, and plucked her eyebrows. The bird watched without comment.

  At eleven she crawled under the covers, clicked on the TV, surfed, and chose Night of the Living Dead.

  No go. She was too distracted to concentrate.

  Diane killed the TV and clicked off the light.

  No go. She was too agitated to fall asleep.

  After two hours of fighting her adrenaline, Diane drifted off. She slept like igneous rock, motionless and dreamless. By five she was up again.

  By eight Sunday morning she was in her office at the precinct, peeling the lid from a plastic coffee cup. A donut oozed jelly onto a wax paper wrapper on her government-issue gray metal desk. Her booted heels rested crossed beside it.

  On her way upstairs Diane had passed two uniforms relieving an intake of his shoelaces. Couldn’t risk the village drunk hanging himself in a fit of remorse over his addiction to Thunderbird, she snorted to herself, reaching for the donut.

  Diane blew across her coffee, took a bite of the pastry, glanced at her watch: 8:07.

  Two minutes since she’d last checked. Three hours until church.

  Down the hall a door opened. Some kind of hip-hop drifted out, was truncated.

  Through her window Diane watched thick pewter clouds elbow for position in a pearl gray sky. Questions inside questions spun in her head.

  What the hell did the fax mean? What could possibly take place at a boring, plain vanilla, nondenominational service? These people reeked civility. They hardly sang above a whisper.

  Diane forced herself to sort through mail she’d been ignoring since Sigmond Vormeister’s murder.

  Eventually she heard a light tap.

  “Captain Robards?”

  Diane looked up.

  A face was craning around her doorjamb. It looked uncertain.

  Diane’s eyes flicked to her watch, this time out of surprise.

  “What are you doing in at eighty-twenty on a Sunday morning?”

  The face was attached to Greg, the junior member of Diane’s death investigation team.

  “I—there’s something I think I should show you.” The young man shifted his feet. “I’ve been thinking about it and, yes, I think you should see it.”

  Greg sounded as though he were rehashing a dialogue he’d had with himself. Diane waited.

  “It didn’t mean much at the time, but later, well—”

  The size-elevens shifted again, and the face went through a series of expressions, finally settling on determined.

  “Jordan didn’t think it was important, but I—”

  “What is it?” Diane cut him off and immediately felt sorry for doing so.

  “I didn’t sleep worrying over this.” Wounded. “Might be nothing, but at least I will know I did my job.”

  Greg stepped forward and placed a Ziploc baggie on Diane’s desk. Inside were two pellets and approximately three ounces of crumbly brown matrix.

  Diane looked at the bag.

  “That came out of Sigmond Vormeister’s right pants cuff. Jordan told me to toss it, but—” Greg shrugged. “I don’t know. I just didn’t. Bagged it, then tucked it in a cabinet and forgot about it.”

  Forgot about it! she fumed, saying nothing till he finished.<
br />
  Greg placed a second baggie on the desktop. This one contained a single fragment no larger than a sunflower seed.

  “I found that on the gurney we used to transport Lieutenant Colonel McClintock’s body.”

  Same rusty brown. Same coarse texture.

  “I think it’s the same stuff.”

  Diane’s heartbeat ratcheted up. She thought so too. What was Jordan thinking? She’d have his ass for throwing out forensic evidence.

  “Do you know what it is?”

  Greg nodded.

  “That’s why I thought it might be important.” A pink patch was spreading across each cheek. “When this animal rights thing blew up, with the protest, and the swans, and the deer, and Lieutenant Colonel McClintock and all, well, I thought—”

  “Just tell me what it is, Greg.” Diane forced her voice calm.

  “Deer chow.”

  “Deer chow?”

  “Nuggets you set out for the deer to eat.” Greg pointed to one of the pellets in the first baggie. “I recognized the whole ones right off, used to buy them on-line from Deer.com.”

  A billion info-bytes raced toward each other in Diane’s mind, like particles of matter rushing together for the Big Bang. An idea struggled to take shape from the chaos.

  Before the thought could congeal, the phone shrilled.

  Diane picked it up.

  “Captain Robards.”

  “Well, I’ll be snookered. Caught you working on a Sunday. Doesn’t say much for your social life, gal.”

  The medical examiner. It was a morning of surprises. Diane mouthed “thank you” to Greg and the young man left.

  “I have no social life, you know that,” she said.

  “Tough on a lot of gals, now that George is dead and McCartney’s married.”

  “There’s always the mall. What can I do for you, Doc?”

  “Got some news.”

  “And you say I have no social life?”

  “After our talk my secretary waved a subpoena under my nose. Damn trial’s gonna jam me up all week, so I decided to go ahead and finish up your Gryphon Gate boys.”

  Diane heard a squeak, pictured the pathologist in his big leather chair, cigarette burns dotting his shirt and tie, nicotine-yellowed fingers gripping the receiver.

  “Found some mighty peculiar things.”

  “Oh?”

  “Liver ain’t right.”

  Diane understood dependent lividity, but knew the M.E. would explain it anyway. He did.

  “Once the heart stops pumpin’, the blood settles, due to gravity and dilation of the vessels. ’Cause of all that, the down side of a corpse turns purple.”

  “Vormeister died on his back,” Diane guessed.

  “Bingo.”

  “When we found him, he was sunny-side up, but his face and front were covered with sand. I suspected he’d been rolled.”

  “That’s my thinking.”

  Diane was still following her own train of thought.

  “So he died on his back, ended up in the sand trap facedown, then someone turned the body over.”

  The M.E. responded, but she didn’t hear.

  “So the body might have been placed in the sand trap after Vormeister was dead.”

  “Then rolled again,” the M.E. agreed. “But it gets curiouser and curiouser. Because clotting takes place slowly after death, postmortem clots generally show settling and separation of the red cells from the liquid phase of the blood. Portions of the blood clot are cleared of red cells and come to look kinda like chicken fat. The portions into which these cells have sedimented look like blobs of currant jelly, and those blobs conform more or less to the shape of the vessel in which they’re formed. You with me?”

  “Yes.” Diane pushed the remnants of her jelly donut aside.

  “Antemortem clots don’t show that sedimentation effect. The antemortem critters are more friable and granular, and they don’t have the rubbery consistency of the postmortem type. And clots formed in a living person may have no resemblance at all to the vessel in which they’re found. Most are discovered as emboli that took birth at some site distant from their final lodgment.”

  “And?”

  “I found one whopper of a clot high up in Vormeister’s left anterior descending artery.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying I found one whopper of a clot high up in Vormeister’s left anterior descending artery.”

  “Antemortem?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did it kill him?”

  “Didn’t see any indication of acute myocardial infarction or muscle damage, but his heart showed evidence of previous problems.”

  “And?”

  “There’s a good possibility the clot led to an arrhythmia and sudden death.”

  “Are you saying Vormeister died of natural causes?”

  “I’m saying it’s possible.”

  “What about the head wound?”

  “Afraid I can’t determine conclusively if the poor chap died from the clot or from the blow to his head. By the way, the injury on his forehead was no big deal. The one on the occiput was a humdinger. If that didn’t take him off, the thrombosis surely would have.”

  Diane’s heart rate was cranking up again.

  “Wounds don’t bleed after the heart stops pumping,” she said. “Vormeister’s did.”

  “Almost true, young lady, but not quite. The lethal blow, if it was lethal, was to the back of Vormeister’s head. The lividity pattern tells me he died faceup, so postmortem settling of blood into the area of the head trauma wouldn’t be unusual.”

  Diane heard an expulsion of air and knew the M.E. had fired up one of his Camels.

  “Bottom line. Vormeister could have been alive when someone took a swing at him, or he could have been dead. If he was dead, it hadn’t been for long.”

  “How long?”

  “Minutes.”

  Diane tried wrapping her mind around that.

  “One last thing. I just finished my external on McClintock. Decided to call you before I made the Y.”

  The M.E. took a deep drag.

  “McClintock was whacked with a cylindrical object, approximately one inch in diameter. Smooth, no grooves, threads, nothing like that.”

  “A lot of objects conform to that description.”

  “Yes, ma’am. But the injury pattern suggests this one had a notch at one end. I’ll send over the pics.”

  “Thanks.”

  “One last observation.”

  Diane waited out another Camel intake.

  “Vormeister’s and McClintock’s head wounds show identical patterning.”

  * * *

  Leland Ford was tired to the marrow as he turned through the arch into Gryphon Gate. He’d worked Friday night and all day Saturday, having volunteered for a double shift. It had seemed like a good idea at the time, a move that would impress Diane Robards.

  But Ford wasn’t capable of running on adrenaline. Though young, he needed a solid eight hours. Always had. Ford’s exhaustion was showing. His normally pink face had taken on a grayish cast, and the flesh under his eyes looked dark and puffy.

  Like many in Gryphon Gate, Ford slept poorly Saturday night, dozing and waking, obsessed with the Vormeister and McClintock murders. Images haunted him, forming and reforming like colored crystals in a kaleidoscope.

  Sigmond Vormeister, lying in the sixth hole sand trap. Had he known his killer? Had he noticed the weapon that split his head? Was he surprised to see the thing raised in anger? Terrified? Had those been the last sensations he felt?

  Lance McClintock, sprawled on the clubhouse patio. Had the lieutenant colonel been attacked by the same man who killed Vormeister? Was it a man?

  Why had the sociologist and the old marine been murdered?

  Toni Sinclair disappearing below decks on the Sans Sin.

  Roman Gervase streaking through the night, moon sparking his hair like cornsilk.

  Diane Robards, dark cur
ls framing her face, ass tight in her uniform pants.

  Ford kept rehashing his partner’s comments. Were the two deaths the work of a serial killer? A grudge killer? Fluke accident combined with impersonal coincidence?

  Though nothing else added up, Ford was certain of one thing: Big, dumb John Carnegie was right. He and Carnegie knew the residents of their community better than anyone else on the planet. When it came to murder, no one was better positioned to fill in the motivational blanks.

  That’s why Ford was cruising Gryphon Gate at nine o’clock on a Sunday morning.

  Clouds were gathering overhead, turning the morning dark and sluggish. The breeze carried a promise of rain.

  As Ford cruised past the Sinclair home, he noticed Miranda sitting on the front steps, her attention focused on something in her hands. The little girl was wearing a green gingham dress with a white linen pinafore, lace-trimmed ankle socks, and black patent leather Mary Janes. Her hair was curled and bound into ponytails, each garnished with an enormous green bow.

  Ford slid the cruiser to the curb. Miranda looked up and waved. Ford got out and strolled up the walk.

  “You look beautiful today, Miss Miranda.”

  “Mama and I are going to church.”

  “That’s a very nice thing, going to Sunday service. Used to do that with my mama and daddy.”

  “I usually go with Bertha and Bill. Mama doesn’t like church too much.”

  “Something special happening today?”

  Miranda shrugged and the ruffles on her pinafore brushed her curls.

  “Well, you’re a lucky girl to have friends like Bertha and Bill.”

  “They take me lots of places.”

  “Do they. What’s your favorite?”

  “My very favorite of all is the water slide, but Bertha and Bill won’t go there.”

  “I guess they’re a little too old for that.”

  “I guess.” Miranda giggled.

  “What’s your favorite outing with Bertha and Bill?”

  Miranda raised her chin and sucked her lower lip in behind her front teeth. “I think Santa’s Village. You can buy lots of really cool ornaments and Christmas stuff. Even in the summer.”

  “Like elves?”

  “You can’t buy elves.”

  “I have one.”

  “That’s not possible.”