Grime and Punishment jj-1

by Jill Churchill

  They're so damned resilient, Jane thought. It must come from having no sense of their own mortality yet.

  Shelley came to dinner, and in front of the kids neither she nor Jane discussed the afternoon's events. Todd turned up, filled to the brim with a double cheese Whopper and fries and content to listen to Mike and Katie's account without taking much interest. Eventually they all wandered off to their separate pursuits, and Jane and Shelley were left to sit over the remnants of the makeshift dinner.

  “You'll stay here tonight?" Jane said. It was halfway between an invitation and an order.

  “Thanks, I'm planning to. Mary Ellen Revere invited me to stay at her house and I lied and said I'd already agreed to stay here. I know I've got to get it over with, sleeping in that house, but not until Paul gets back tomorrow. He tried to get a flight tonight and couldn't. I called my sister and told her that, if this isn't solved by the time they're ready to come back, I want her to keep the kids a little longer. Jane, why do you suppose this happened?"

  “I have no idea. I guess it could have been someone that woman knew."

  “But why? And how would the killer have known she was at my house? As I understand it, she didn't even know where she'd be until she reported in to work early this morning. The Happy Helper man called a while ago. He said she's a 'floater,' a worker with no regular assignment but to fill in. Like a substitute teacher."

  “Well, there's always the wandering maniac theory. That's what Thelma thinks — somebody whose lack of moral fiber pushed them over the brink."

  “The next stage after growing hair on the palms of your hands? Murdering cleaning ladies? Forget wandering maniacs. You know as well as I do this is a neighborhood of devoted snoops. You can't even go for a walk without somebody alerting the police. If you aren't decked out like a full-fledged jogger, you're assumed to be a criminal. How would this maniachave cruised around the neighborhood without being noticed?"

  “You know what you're saying, don't you? That it had to be someone familiar. Someone from the neighborhood.”

  Shelley's eyes widened. "Not necessarily, Jane. It could have been someone who looked like they had business around here. A TV repair truck or a Sears van or a gas meter reader in a uniform."

  “Shelley, what would be the point? There would be no reason to go to all the trouble of disguising himself just to kill her in your house instead of her own."

  “There is that, of course. Well, then we have to consider that he didn't want to kill her. Suppose it was someone who came to rob the house."

  “Was anything stolen?"

  “No, nothing was touched, apparently. I haven't searched everything, of course, but it doesn't look like anything's been torn apart or dumped out, as if someone had been rummaging for valuables.”

  Jane had to take her word on this. If you moved so much as an ashtray in Shelley's house, she noticed immediately.

  “So why kill her and not take anything?”

  “Maybe she caught him coming in?"

  “While she was vacuuming the guest room?"

  “Jane, you're just picking apart everything I suggest as a possibility," Shelley said with a hint of anger. "What do you think could have happened?"

  “I'm sorry. I don't know. But, by damn, I'm going to find out. We're all in danger until we know who it was and why. If someone could come in your house, murder someone, and leave right under our noses, it could happen again."

  “But why would it happen again? Why did it happen this time? I just keep asking myself the same questions over and over."

  “All right. Let's get organized about this. I read a lot of mystery books and I know all about motives. I'll make a list and then we'll cross them off one by one. Whichever one's left has to be the right answer."

  “Somehow, I don't think it's quite that easy," Shelley disagreed. You make it sound like a computer course."

  “You'll see," Jane assured her, getting out the notepad and a stub of pencil. "Since it didn't look like robbery, let's assume for the moment that somebody meant to kill her. Now, what are the reasons for murder. Greed. That's usual."

  “I doubt that a cleaning lady had a vast fortune for someone to inherit, otherwise she'd own the company. And she didn't seem to be wearing a strand of emeralds or anything that I noticed."

  “True, but it might have been greed for something in your house."

  “But I told you, nothing was taken."

  “Still, it might have been that the murderer meant to take something and just didn't get it. Suppose he'd gone in and determined to kill anybody who was there and then rob the place, and just as he killed her, he heard you coming in?”

  She was immediately sorry she'd suggested it.

  Shelley hugged herself. "Could I have actually been in the house with the killer? No, Jane. That doesn't work. If he didn't mind killing her, he wouldn't have minded killing me. And how would he have gotten away? If he'd jumped from a second-story window, he'd have been bound to hurt himself, and the police checked all around the house for signs of things like that. If he didn't go out the window, he'd had to have come downstairs, and I could see the stairway from the time I came in the kitchen. I wasn't looking at it, but I would have certainly noticed anyone coming down."

  “Okay, cross off greed. It was just a suggestion. Reasons for murder. Greed, fear—"

  “Fear of what?That woman? Would you be afraid of her?"

  “Not physically. But what if she knew something the killer was afraid she'd tell?"

  “Jane, you met that woman. She didn't strike me as knowing how to tell time, much less dangerous secrets. Besides, the question I asked earlier applies — why kill her at my house? Why not at her own, or on the street?"

  “I don't know about the where-to-kill-her part, but think some more about the why. Just suppose that she'd been cleaning some office, though. You said she was a substitute and went all sorts of places. Suppose she learned something about a company take-over, or—"

  “Happy Helpers doesn't do businesses. Only domestic jobs. I tried to get them for Paul's office."

  “Some people do their business at home. Mary Ellen Revere, for instance."

  “With a broken arm she can't even use? She strangles her?"

  “Of course not. I didn't mean her. I was just making an example of somebody around here who has a business at home." Jane sighed. "Now who's shooting down ideas? All right.Cross off fear. What else is a motive for murder? Well, there's mercy killing, but this obviously wasn't a method of putting a loved one out of her misery. What about revenge?”

  The phone rang and Jane answered somewhat impatiently. It was Laura Stapler, inviting Shelley and her and the kids to spend the night at their house. Jane had a momentary vision of being cooped up in the Staplers' house like survivors of a nuclear attack. "'That's sweet of you, Laura, but Shelley's staying here and I think we'll be fine."

  “You do have the house locked up tightly, don't you? And be sure to draw the blinds. My husband could put a rush order through and have an alarm system installed for you tomorrow if you'd like. Normally it takes a week or so, but under the circumstances—"

  “That's very thoughtful, but I really can't afford it."

  “We could arrange for financing, thirty six months at fifteen percent."

  “Laura, no, thank you!" Jane said firmly.

  Sensing she'd gone too far or in the wrong direction, Laura tried to reemphasize her concern for Jane's safety without selling anything. Jane hung up after listening long enough to convince Laura that she wasn't offended. "What ghouls! Where were we? Oh, yes, revenge.""For what?"

  “Who knows? Maybe Mrs. Thurgood did some awful thing to somebody and they got back at her by strangling her.”

  Shelley tapped her immaculately manicured fingernails on the table, considering. "It's certainly possible. Without knowing anything about her, there's no reason to mark it off the motive list, but my instincts tell me otherwise."

  “I know what you mean. Somehow she seemed t
oo — too bland to have ever done something awful.”

  The phone rang and Jane answered, afraid that Laura had thought of another safety device to peddle. A can of Mace or something. But it was Detective VanDyne. She handed the phone to Shelley and cleaned up the dinner table while Shelley talked — or rather, listened. Except for the occasional "uh-huh" or "I see," it would have seemed she was on hold.

  Finally, she hung up and came back to the table. Jane poured them each coffee from a fresh pot. It was after eight, so she'd switched over to decaf.

  “He wants to leave a man in the house overnight.”

  "Well, he didn't say so in so many words, but the gist of it was that he has absolutely no motives or suspects yet."

  “Greed, fear, mercy, revenge?Nothing?" She wondered why, with so many motives available, he hadn't found one he liked.

  “No, he told me he'd spent the evening interviewing her coworkers. It seems she's a childless widow who's only lived in the area for two months and has been on welfare most of that time. Some private agency for indigent widows. Before she came here, she drove a paper route in a little farm community in Montana and taught Sunday school."

  “Nobody would want or need to kill somebody like that," Jane said.

  “But somebody did," Shelley reminded her.

  SIX

  Jane hardly slept all night. Dreams of vacuum cleaners run amok and red MGs coming out of dishwashers haunted her. At one point, a vacuum cleaner cord turned into a boa constrictor and wound itself around her. An army of identical women in blue uniforms marched in the house and changed everything and it wasn't her house anymore. When she woke before the alarm, sweating and exhausted, she could smell coffee. Shelley was already in the kitchen, puttering around silently. She had on faded jeans and a baggy pink cotton shirt that was wrinkled just enough to be trendy without looking sloppy. But for the first time Jane could remember, her friend looked tired and worried.

  “Paul called from the airport," she said as she poured Jane a cup of coffee.

  “I didn't hear the phone." Apparently she'd slept more soundly than she realized.

  “I got it on the first ring. He got some sort of middle-of-the-night milk flight and is on his way now, after about sixteen stopovers."

  “You don't have to go to the airport, do you?”

  “No, he left a company car there.”

  Jane took a cautious sip. Shelley's coffee had a reputation for burning the bottom out of cups. Steve used to say you had to use a blowtorch to cool it. But this time it wasn't bad. Jane dragged out a package of grocery-store donuts and offered Shelley one. They sat together in companionable silence for a few minutes, and finally Shelley sighed and brushed the donut crumbs into a neat pile in the center of her paper napkin. "So, what are you doing today?"

  “Whatever you need me to do."

  “I don't think I need anything, but that's sweet of you. It's all over now, or at least I hope to God it is. Don't you drive your blind children this morning?”

  One of Jane's volunteer activities was to take a group of blind children from the high school to a weekly session in special techniques in daily living. "Not until Friday."

  “This is Friday."

  “No! It is! I was supposed to have Edith to clean for the first time today. Oh, Lord! I haven't even straightened up enough for her to work on the actual dirt. Do you think they'll send her, after what happened?"

  “I can't imagine why not.”

  Jane was already scurrying around the kitchen, throwing things in the dishwasher and wastebasket with random abandon. Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed a car coming down the street. Shelley was instantly on the move.

  “There's Paul," she said, slipping on her immaculate tennis shoes.

  “Get along, then. I'll check with you later and see if there's anything you need.”

  Jane went through the house like a demented whirlwind. Steve used to have a fit about Jane's feeling that she had to tidy up for the cleaning lady's arrival. "That's what you're paying her to do," he'd say as she snatched the newspaper away from him to dispose of it the moment he was through.

  “Men just don't understand. I'm paying her to do the real cleaning, the stuff I hate," she'd explained repeatedly. "The icky corners of the bathroom, the windowsill dusting, the serious clear-to-the-corner vacuuming, scrubbing the stains out of the sink. But a cleaning lady can't get to that unless everything is picked up.”

  As she passed the door to her bedroom, she heard her alarm buzzing and realized she'd forgotten the time in her frantic haste to prepare for Edith. She roused the boys without much sympathy for their sleepy pleas for another five minutes. Katie was already up, doing her hair. "Put away all those bottles and tubes and cans, Katie. I'm having a new cleaning lady today and I don't want—"

  “Mother! You're having a cleaning lady? What if she gets killed too?"

  “Katie, don't be ridiculous!”

  Jane said it with a conviction she didn't feel. Lightning doesn't strike twice in the same place, she'd been telling herself, but that didn't necessarily apply to murder. At least, she supposed it didn't. Still, she went back and gave Katie a hug that both pleased and embarrassed her. "Don't worry, kiddo.”

  As she headed out later with her first car pool, she noticed the red MG back in front of the Nowacks'. Now that Paul was back, VanDyne was probably questioning him. Did Paul Nowack have enemies who might have had something to do with the murder? Jane wondered. Who could guess? For, as much as she and Shelley saw of each other, Jane never felt she knew Paul at all. He traveled a great deal, and Jane had few opportunities to make her own assessment of him. As a neighbor, he was nice in a quiet way. But it wasn't any sort of shyness — more a sense of a powerful personality that was at rest. It had to be. How else would a Polish steelworker's boy turn into the man who owned a nationwide chain of Greek fast-food restaurants? That sort of thing didn't happen to wimpy men.

  Questions started popping into her mind. Some pertinent, some idiotic. Why not Polishfast food, at least? Even if he were involved in something unsavory — which was highly unlikely — a disgruntled business enemy would hardly think killing his wife's cleaning lady would intimidate him.

  Besides everything else, very few people had any idea where he lived. Shelley had said many times that he felt business was business and home was home. They even had an unlisted phone number, because he didn't want his franchisees being able to call him at home. In fact, his office staff didn't know how to find him; only his private secretary knew their home number. "The franchisees will call him in the middle of the night to ask how the dishwasher worksotherwise," Shelley had said once when Jane asked about it.

  That in itself was odd, now that she was thinking about it, in the light of a recent murder in the Nowack home. Was that really the reason for the unlisted number? Or was there a more sinister reason for keeping their number and address secret from the outside world? That is ridiculous! Jane told herself. Suspecting Paul of dark secrets was as insane as suspecting Shelley.

  … suspecting Shelley?..

  “No!" she said out loud.

  “No what?" Mike asked.

  She'd forgotten Mike and Katie were in the car. "Nothing. Just a crazy thought I had."

  “You know what they say about people who talk to themselves," Katie said meaningfully.

  “No, and I don't want to know," she said.

  Jane dropped Katie off at the junior high and Mike and his group at the high school. Mike had the wisdom to refrain from asking to drive this morning, which she thought showed a nice sense of maturity. When she got back home, Todd was sitting on the front porch, playing with a neighborhood cat.

  “Todd, I told you to stay inside with the house locked until Mrs. Wallenberg got here," Jane said. She must not have worded it strongly enough in her efforts to keep from frightening him with the implications.

  “I know, but she called and said her car won't start and could you drive us today?"

  “Oh, dear
.All right. Hop in," Jane said, glancing at her watch. She'd wanted to be sure to be here when the cleaning lady arrived, but that was hardly reason to make the whole bunch of kids late for school.

  Dorothy Wallenberg was in her driveway, pacing around on sturdy legs and slashing at grass blades with a tennis racket when Jane arrived. Obviously, this car problem was going to interfere with more than her car pool plans. "I'm so sorry, Jane."

  “No problem, I was up and out anyway. Do you need help getting your car to the shop or anything?"

  “No, they're supposed to be sending someone with a tow truck pretty soon, and I haven't got anything going today that can't be canceled. Stop back by and tell me what Shelley's found out."

  “I can't, Dorothy. I've got Edith coming myself today. Maybe later on."

  “You're having Edith? Why?"

  “Well, I'm told she's terrific and I need somebody."

  “I keep hearing how wonderful she is, Jane, but I had her for a month once and it was a waste of money. The woman just slouched around, pretending to work. 'A-lick-and-a-dab' cleaning, as my mother used to say. I complained to the Happy Helper people and they sent me somebody else."

  “How odd. Robbie Jones says she's terrific, and so does Mary Ellen Revere. Even Joyce Greenway swears by her, and you know what a cleaning fanatic she is.”

  Dorothy laughed. "I went over once, and Joyce came to the door apologizing for taking so long. She'd been in the storeroom dusting the luggage, she told me. I thought she meant she was getting ready to go somewhere, so I said, 'Oh, why is that?' Do you know what she said? She said because it was Tuesday, of course.”

  Jane was still chuckling when she dropped Todd and his car pool off at the grade school. She detoured by way of the grocery store to make a quick foray for cleaning materials. She'd meant to take a careful inventory the day before, but had naturally forgotten about it in all the upset. Not knowing what she might be nearly out of, she dashed down the aisle, grabbing one of anything that might clean floors, tubs, sink stains, carpet spots, ovens, windows, even silver polish. The stuff cost a fortune. She consoled herself with the thought that it would all come in handy sooner or later.