Big Foot Stole My Wife Page 12

  “And no one knows where he is now?”

  “No one cares where he is now, Mizz Malloy, including me. Last I heard he was in Arizona or some place like that, living in a trailer with a bimbo. Probably beating her like he did my sister. You want to have locks installed, do it.”

  He replaced the receiver with an unnecessary vigor. I put mine down more gently and regretfully allowed my brilliant idea to deflate like a cooling soufflé. Mr. Fleechum’s brother-in-law had been gone for three or four years. It seemed unlikely that he had made an extra key, kept it all that time, and then waited until my apartment was empty for a few days so that he could invite a college girl over to murder her.

  I was still tiptoeing, but I couldn’t seem to shake a sense of someone or something hovering in the apartment, possessing it in the tradition of a proper British ghost in the tower. I went so far as to stand in the dining room doorway, trying to pick up some psychic insight into an earlier scene when two people had entered the room and one had departed.

  I tried to envision them as burglars. They’d have been seriously disappointed burglars when they saw the decrepit stereo system and small television set. But why choose my apartment to begin with? The duplex fit in well with the neighborhood ambiance of run-down rental property and transient tenants. There were people downstairs, single boys who were likely to come and go at unpredictable hours and have a stream of visitors.

  Okay, Wendy and her companion weren’t burglars and they hadn’t come in hopes of filching the Hope Diamond and other fancy stuff. The girl had come to see me, and her murderer had followed her, bringing his knife with him. She hadn’t known I was out of town—and why would she, since she didn’t know me from Mary Magdalen?

  A knock on the door interrupted my admittedly pointless mental exercise. It also knotted my stomach and threatened my knees, and my voice was shaky as I said, “Who is it?”

  “Jorgeson and Corporal Katz, Mrs. Malloy. Katz is going to put up the chain so you’ll feel safe tonight.”

  I let them in. Katz immediately busied himself with screwdrivers and such, while Jorgeson watched with the impassiveness of a road-crew supervisor. I subtly sidled over and said, “Have you turned up anything more about the victim?”

  “The lieutenant said not to discuss it with you, ma’am,” Jorgeson said, his bulldog face turning pink. “He said that you’re not supposed to meddle in an official police investigation—this time.”

  “Oh, Jorgeson,” I said with a charmingly wry chuckle, “we both know the lieutenant didn’t mean that I wasn’t supposed to know anything whatsoever about the victim. I might be able to remember something if I knew more about her. What if she’d been a contestant in that ghastly beauty pageant I helped direct, or been a waitress at the beer garden across from the Book Depot? You know how awkward it is to run into someone you’ve seen a thousand times, but you can’t place him because he’s out of context. When I saw this Wendy Billingsberg, she was decidedly out of context.”

  Jorgeson’s jaw crept out further and his ears gradually matched the hue of his face. “The lieutenant said you’d try something like that, ma’am. As far as we know, the victim didn’t have any connections with any of the locals. She attended classes sporadically and pretty much hung out with the more unsavory elements of the campus community.”

  “Ah,” I said wisely, “drugs.” When Jorgeson twitched, I bit back a smile and continued. “Peter’s right; none of the druggies buy books at the store or hold down jobs along Thurber Street. Was she dealing?”

  “I’m not supposed to discuss it, ma’am. Hurry up, Katz. I told those boys downstairs to wait for me.”

  Katz hurried up, and within a few minutes, Jorgeson wished me a nice day (and hadn’t it been dandy thus far?) and led his cohort out of my apartment. I waited until I heard them reach the ground floor, then eased open my door and crept as close to the middle landing as I dared.

  Jorgeson, bless his heart, had opted to conduct his interview from the foyer. “Wendy Billingsberg,” he said in a low voice. “You both sure that doesn’t ring a bell? She was a business major. Either of you have any classes in the department?” There was a pause during which I assumed they’d made suitable nonverbal responses. “She lived in the Bellaire Apartments. You been there?” Another pause. “And she used to be seen on the street with a coke dealer nicknamed Hambone. Tall guy, dirty blond ponytail, brown beard, disappeared at the end of the last semester, probably when he caught wind of a pending warrant. Ever heard of this Hambone?”

  “Hambone?” Jonathon echoed. “The description doesn’t sound like anyone I know, but we’re not exactly in that social circle. What’s his real name?”

  “We’re still working on that,” Jorgeson said. “What about you? You ever heard of someone named Hambone?”

  “Nope,” Sean said firmly. “Look, Officer, I was up all night studying. I’ve already told you that I didn’t see anyone and I didn’t hear anything.”

  “Neither did I,” Jonathon said with equal conviction. “I went out for a hamburger and a brew at the beer garden, then came back and watched some old war movie. Fell asleep on the couch.”

  “What time did you leave and subsequently return?” Jorgeson asked, still speaking softly but with an edge of intensity.

  “Jesus, I don’t know. I went out at maybe ten and got back at maybe midnight. You can ask the chubby blond waitress; she’s seen me enough times to remember me.”

  “The medical examiner’s initial estimate is that the girl was killed around midnight, with an hour margin of error on either side. It looks like the girl and her friend managed to sneak upstairs while you were out and your roommate was studying in his bedroom. You didn’t notice anyone on the sidewalk when you came back?”

  After a pause, Jonathon said, “Well, there was a couple, but they were heading away from the duplex and having a heated discussion about him forgetting her birthday or something. I didn’t pay much attention, and it was too dark to get a good look at them. Other than them, I don’t think I saw anyone during the last couple of blocks. There was a guy going around the corner the other way, but all I saw was the back of his head.”

  “Did he have a ponytail?” Jorgeson said quickly.

  “I just caught a glimpse of him. Sorry.”

  I heard the sound of Jorgeson’s pencil scratching a brief note. “And you didn’t hear anything?” he added, now speaking to the other boy.

  “No,” Sean said, “I’ve already told you that. Nothing.”

  “That’s enough for the moment,” Jorgeson said. “Both of you need to come to the station tomorrow morning so we can take formal statements. In the meantime, if you think of anything at all that might help, call Lieutenant Rosen or myself.”

  The front door closed. The downstairs door closed. Shortly thereafter, two car doors closed. I closed my door and tested the chain Katz had installed. It allowed the door to open two or three inches and seemed solid enough until I could get the lock rekeyed, which was pretty darn close to the top of my priorities list. Breathing, number one. Deadbolt rekeyed, number two.

  I went into the kitchen, made sure the bolt on the back door was still in place, and started to make myself a cup of tea while I assimilated the latest information so graciously shared with me.

  Wendy was known to have consorted with a dealer. He’d vanished, and no doubt preferred to remain thus. She’d run into him, recognized him, and threatened to expose him. She found a way into my apartment and ended up on the living room floor. I again checked the bolt, then turned off the burner beneath the tea kettle and made myself a nice, stiff drink. I went back into the living room, checked that the chain was in place and the deadbolt secured, and sat down on the sofa, wondering if the emergent compulsion to maintain security would be with me for weeks, months, or decades.

  I put down my drink, checked that the chain and deadbolt had not slipped loose, and went into the kitchen to call a locksmith and pay for an after-hours emergency visit. And after a moment
of revelation, found myself calling someone else.

  Half an hour later I went downstairs and knocked on the boys’ door. Jonathon opened the door. His expression tightened as he saw me, as though he expected another bizarre outburst from the crazy lady who cohabited with bats in the upstairs belfry.

  “Hi,” I said in a thoroughly civilized voice. “I realize it’s been an awful day for all of us, but I’m not going to be able to relax, much less sleep, if I don’t have the locksmith in to rekey the deadbolt. He said he’d be here in an hour. I just thought I’d warn you and Sean so you wouldn’t come storming out the door.”

  “Sean’s sacked out under the air conditioner, so he couldn’t hear a freight train drive across the porch. I’ll see if I can get through to him, though. We’re both pretty rattled by all this. Thanks for telling me, but I think I’ll wander down to the beer garden and soothe myself with a pitcher. Two pitchers. Whatever it takes.”

  I went back upstairs, secured the chain and the deadbolt, and sat down to wait. Ten minutes later I heard the front door downstairs close and footsteps on the porch. So far, so good. I turned on the television to give a sense of security to my visitor as he came creeping up the squeaky stairs, the key to my door in what surely was a very sweaty hand.

  To my chagrin, it was all for naught, because he walked up the stairs like he owned them (or rented them, anyway) and knocked on my door.

  “Who is it?” I said with the breathlessness of a gothic heroine.

  “It’s Sean, Mrs. Malloy. I wanted to talk to you for a minute. There’s something that occurred to me, and I don’t know if it’s important enough to call the police now.”

  “Sorry,” I said through the door, “but I’m too terrified to open the door to anyone except the locksmith. Go ahead and call Lieutenant Rosen; I’m sure he’ll want to hear whatever you have.”

  I listened with increasing disappointment as he went downstairs and into his apartment. A window unit began to hum somewhere below.

  “Phooey,” I said as I switched off the television and did a quick round to ascertain all my locks were locked. I was brooding on the sofa several minutes later when I heard a telltale series of squeaks. A key rustled into the keyhole. As I stared, fascinated and rather pleased with myself, the knob of the lock clicked to one side, the doorknob twisted silently, and the door edged open. I went so far as to assume the standard gothic heroine stance: hands clasped beside my chest, eyelids frozen in mid-flutter, lips pursed.

  Then the chain reached its limit, of course, and the door came to a halt. A male voice let out a muted grunt of frustration, but became much louder as the police came thundering upstairs. Once the arguing and protesting abated, I removed the chain and opened the door.

  Jonathon had been handcuffed and was in the process of being escorted downstairs by Jorgeson and Katz, among others. Peter gave me a pained look and said, “I was about to remove the evidence from your lock when you did that, Claire. Why don’t you wait inside like a good little girl?”

  “Because I’m not,” I said, now opting for the role of gothic dowager dealing with inferiors. “I happen to be the one who figured out the key problem, you know.”

  “You happen to be the one who swore there was only one key for the deadbolt. That’s what threw me off in the first place.”

  “Don’t pull that nonsense. You heard me say that I used the same key downstairs as upstairs. It was perfectly obvious that my door, the boys’ door, and the front door are all keyed the same. Fleechum, the prince of penury, saved himself big bucks. Once I told the boys that a locksmith was coming, both of them realized they’d have to have their deadbolt rekeyed, too. Sean was puzzled, but I’m afraid Jonathon was panicked enough to try something unpleasant.”

  “It would have come to me at two in the morning,” Peter said. “I would have sat up in bed, slapped my forehead, and called Jorgeson to rush over here and test the theory.”

  “Then I’m delighted that your sleep will be uninterrupted.”

  “When I get some, which won’t be anytime soon. Now we’ve got to see if anyone at the beer garden noticed Wendy recognize her old boyfriend and follow him back to his apartment. Sean wouldn’t have heard any discussion, but he might have had problems with a corpse in his living room the next morning. Did you tell the boys you’d be in Atlanta until Thursday?”

  “I asked them to collect my mail.”

  “So Jonathon, a.k.a. Hambone, figured he had a couple of days to do something with the body. Unfortunately, you returned.”

  “Unfortunately, my fanny! If I hadn’t come home early, he might have had a chance to take Wendy’s body out in the woods where she wouldn’t have been discovered for weeks. Months. Decades. And don’t you find it a bit ironic that you sent me downstairs—to the murderer’s apartment—when I discovered the body?” I was warming up for another onslaught of righteous indignation when Peter put his arms around me.

  “And why did you come home early?” he murmured.

  “Because every now and then I like being told that I’m a meddlesome busybody who interferes in official police investigations,” I retorted, now warming up for entirely different reasons. “No one in Atlanta had anything but nice things to say about me.”

  “Are you saying you missed me?”

  “Jorgeson, you fool,” I said. “I missed Jorgeson.”

  I wondered if his soft laugh meant he didn’t believe me.

  The Last to Know

  “Bambi’s father was murdered last night,” Caron announced as she sailed through the door of the Book Depot, tossed her bulky backpack on the counter, and continued toward my office, no doubt in hopes I had squirreled away a diet soda for what passed for high tea these days, in that scones were out of the question, and clotted cream merely a fantasy.

  “Wait a minute,” I said to her back. Although her birth certificate claimed we had an irrevocable biological tie, I’d wondered on more than one occasion if the gypsies hadn’t pulled a fast one in the nursery. We both had red hair, freckles, green eyes, and a certain determination—in my case, mild and thoughtful; in hers, more like that of a bronco displeased with the unfamiliar and unwelcome weight of a cowboy with spurs.

  She stopped and looked back, her nostrils flaring. “I am about to Die of Thirst, Mother. We have a substitute in gym class, and she’s nothing but a petty tyrant, totally oblivious to pains and suffering. We had to play volleyball all period without so much as—”

  “What did you say about Bambi’s father? Was it some sort of obscure Disneyesque reference? Thumper developed rabies? Flower found an assault weapon amidst the buttercups?”

  “I am drenched in sweat.”

  I told her where I’d hidden the soda, then sat on the stool behind the counter and gloomily gazed at the paperwork necessary to return several boxes of unsold books. The sales departments of publishing houses are more adept than the IRS at concocting a miasmatic labyrinth of figures, columns, and sly demands that can delay the process for months, if not years.

  Caron returned with my soda and the insufferable smugness of a fifteen-year-old who knows she can seize center stage, if only for a few minutes. The reality that the center stage was in a dusty old bookstore patronized only by the few quasi-literates in Farberville did not deter her. “Not Bambi the geek deer,” she said with a pitying smile for her witless mother. “Bambi McQueen, the senior who’s editor of the school newspaper. Don’t you remember her from when you substituted in the journalism department?”

  It was not the moment to admit all high school students had a remarkably uninteresting sameness, from their clothes to their sulky expressions. “I think so,” I said mendaciously. “What happened to her father?”

  “It’s so melodramatic.” Caron paused to pop the top of the can, still relishing her ephemeral power. “It seems he was having an affair with Bambi’s mother’s best friend. The friend showed up at their house, tanked to the gills and screaming at him for dumping her, then said she was going to go home and k
ill herself.” She paused again to slurp the soda and assess how much longer she could drag out the story. “Pretty dumb, if you ask me. I met him when Bambi had a Christmas party for the staff, and I was not impressed. He’s okay-looking, but he’s got—had—this prissy little mouth, and he was forever peering at us over the top of his glasses like we were nothing but a bunch of botched lobotomies swilling his expensive eggnog.”

  “What happened after the friend said she was going to kill herself?” I persisted.

  “This is where it gets Utterly Gruesome. Mr. McQueen was really alarmed and followed her outside. She got in her car, but instead of leaving, she ran over him in the driveway and smashed him into the family station wagon like a bug on the windshield. She claimed her foot slipped, but the police aren’t so sure.” Caron dropped the empty can on the counter and made a grab for her backpack.

  I caught her wrist. “That’s a tragic story. Where’d you learn the details?”

  “It’s all over school. Bambi wasn’t there today, naturally, but she called Emily at midnight, and Emily told practically everybody in the entire school. Emily’s mouth should be in the Smithsonian—in a display case of its own.” She removed my hand. “I have tons of homework, Mother. Unless you want me to like flunk out and do menial housework for the rest of my life, you’d better let me go to the library and look up stuff about boring dead presidents.”

  “I find it difficult to imagine your success as a cleaning woman, considering the sorry state of your closet and the collection of dirty dishes under your bed. By all means, run along to the library and do your homework. Afterwards, you may explore this new career option by cleaning up your room.” Her snort was predictable, but I realized there was something that was not. “Where’s Inez? Is she sick today?”

  “I really couldn’t say,” Caron said coldly as she headed for the door. “I don’t keep track of treacherous bitches.”