Death hits the fan (25 page)

"Yes or no, Ingrid?" I persisted. "It's not that hard a question. Either you saw him or you didn't."

"I don't know if I should even talk to you two anymore," she answered, or didn't answer. She jogged in place as she spoke. "This house probably isn't even safe." She tossed a significant look behind her at our home. Our home.

"And that's why you're moving out," I told her, smoothing my voice, hoping to work hypnosis into its tone. "You have money. You're all packed. Why not go to a hotel tonight? Wouldn't it be nice to feel safe?"

"Well," she pondered. She crossed her bare arms and chewed on her lower lip for a moment, considering. "The guy is already gone, so I guess it's safe, anyway."

I wanted to tell her that it wasn't safe, that we were probably more dangerous to her than the intruder. At least I was. And then I wanted to demonstrate that danger. Bodily. But Wayne wasn't through with his questions.

"It was a man, then?" he asked.

"Yeah," she admitted. Cooperation, finally. Maybe I'd let

her spend one more night. As if I could stop her if she wanted to. She was probably a protected species by now.

"What did he look like?" Wayne prodded, ever so gently.

"Oh, just some guy," Ingrid told him. "Tall, I guess, with a hat and maybe a raincoat. It was really gross. See, I heard the door open and I thought it was you two, but then this guy came in, like, tiptoeing or something. So, I hid real quick behind the futon."

And covered her eyes, I would have bet.

"Anything else you can tell us about him?" Wayne tried.

"He was really, really scary, sneaking around," she answered, her eyes widening in memory. "He was looking at stuff and walking toward the hallway when you two came back. I heard him run out."

Apollo began to yip from behind Ingrid before she could say anything more. The shrill canine bursts perforated my brain like a dentist's drill.

"Oh, you poor little thing," Ingrid murmured, stooping to pat the terrier's head. "You were scared too, huh, Apolly?"

"Was he behind the futon with you?" I asked.

"Uh-huh," Ingrid announced proudly. "And he didn't even let out a sound."

"Great watch dog," I commented.

Ingrid eyed me suspiciously, then wrapped her arms around Apollo to reward him for his bravery.

Fair is fair. I wrapped my arms around Wayne, and then shepherded him into the house and down the hall to the bedroom to reward him for his bravery. And Wayne didn't yip once.

>Ay psychic friend, Barbara Chu, called me Friday morning, right after Wayne left for work. And Ingrid went back to packing. How long could it take to pack a few suitcases? Was she unpacking them when we weren't looking, like Penelope unraveling her weaving while waiting for Odysseus?

"Ingrid will finish packing when she's good and ready, kiddo," Barbara told me when I picked up the phone. "And it's up to you to make sure she is good and ready. But I think you're just about to do that."

I ignored the fact that Barbara had answered my unvoiced question. I hadn't ever figured out how she did it, but I refused to give her the satisfaction of expressing my annoyance aloud. Not that it mattered, since she probably knew when she drove me crazy without my saying so, anyway.

"About time you called," I put in before she could gloat. And then immediately regretted the words, remembering her cousin dying of cancer.

"He passed on," she told me.

"Oh, Barbara, I'm sorry," I blurted out. I clenched my pencil in my hand. I was sorry. Sorry for his passing, sorry for her pain, sorry for my uncharitable thoughts.

"No need to worry, kiddo," she answered, her voice muted. "He's in the light now." Then her voice took on more of its usual vitality. "So let's go for lunch."

"Lunch?" I thumbed through the stack of invoices I was checking off and listened to C.C. chasing a yipping Apollo around the living room.

"Yeah, I wanna hear more about your murder. Let's meet at that new place on Third and Quesco."

"The Cat's Meow?" Yipping and paperwork, or lunch with a friend? My grip weakened on my pencil.

"Yeah, that's the one," she told me. "But Felix and I call it the 'psychic cafe.'"

I opened my mouth to ask why, but she was way ahead of me, as usual.

"You'll find out why when you get there," she assured me. "See you at twelve."

Then she hung up.

It was a done deal. So my No. 1 pencil worked hard on paper, smudging my fingers with graphite, while my mind

worked hard on a plan to dislodge Ingrid, smudging my core ethics with evil thoughts. Zoe's words about how people treated her as a sufferer of Crohn's disease came back to me. But most likely, Ingrid wouldn't even know what Crohn's disease was. Still. . .

By eleven-thirty, I had a plan. Maybe. If Ingrid would buy it.

I got up from my desk to leave for lunch.

"Oh, Ingrid," I said as nonchalantly as possible as I neared the front door.

"Yeah?" she muttered, her back to me.

"I'm going out for a while, but a group of people from the Fenestry Society are coming in a little while—"

"So?" she replied.

"Well, you know about fenestry, don't you?"

"No," she said, but she turned my way.

"Well, they're a really good cause. You know, fenestry is a little bit like leprosy—"

"Leprosy!"

"Only worse," I continued. "The poor guys, first it starts with this rash, this really, really icky rash. And boils. And then the body parts start falling off—"

"What!" she yelped. She began doing jumping jacks, her eyes still on my face. "They don't send out guys to your house with this disease, do they?"

I nodded somberly as she upped the pace of her exercises. Hot damn. She was buying it.

"It's important that you hand them something for me—"

"Uh-uh," she cut me off, touching her palms to the floor now, then stretching. "Are you crazy? Is it catching?"

"Well. . . sometimes," I said softly, shrugging my shoulders. "But it's important you don't act put off when you see them—"

"You are crazy!" she shrieked, raising her arms into the air in an exercise I couldn't identify. "I'm outa this place!"

I didn't laugh until I was in my car speeding toward the Cat's Meow, and giving my inner apologies to any real sufferers of leprosy or any other potentially disfiguring illnesses.

I found the Cat's Meow on the corner of Third and Quesco. A serious-looking young woman in a multicolored head wrap met me at the door. She stared at me for a moment.

"Party of two?" she asked.

I looked around me. Barbara wasn't here yet.

"Yes," I admitted hesitantly.

Barbara came in a few minutes later, after I was seated at a small but warm and sunny table with cartoon cats smiling up at me from the tablecloth.

"Hey, kiddo," Barbara greeted me, looking gorgeous as usual in a violet jumpsuit with matching crystal earrings that framed her elegant Asian face perfectly. I stood up and gave my friend a long hug. Damn, that felt good. I felt big chunks of the last week's anxiety and sadness and frustration seeping out of me, loosening my tense muscles as they went.

"Feels good to me, too," Barbara murmured after we finally dropped our arms. "I needed you, Kate."

"Me too," I told her, wondering what to ask her about her cousin's death.

But the serious young woman who'd shown me to our table was back again before I could even form a question.

"You'll be having the grilled polenta triangles with moz-zarella," she told Barbara.

"I guess I will," Barbara agreed.

"And you .. ." The woman turned my way, a little frown creasing her forehead for a moment. "The tofu brochette over soba noodles."

"But—" I began. The tofu brochette sounded good, though. In fact. . .

The waitress turned and walked away.

J

I looked at Barbara. She was wearing her smug little Buddha smile.

"The 'psychic cafe'?" I demanded.

She just nodded.

"You set that up, right?" I asked.

She shook her head and grinned.

I grinned back. The psychic cafe indeed. And then I began laughing again. And Barbara laughed with me. Then we both started giggling, and kept on giggling far longer than the joke warranted. And I felt the remaining chunks of anxiety and sadness and frustration burbling out as we did. Primal giggling, the poor woman's psychotherapy.

By the time I was slipping grilled, marinated tofu and vegetables off my skewer and onto my noodles, Barbara had told me about her cousin's death. In detail. But oddly, her description had calmed me, even cheered me. I hoped Shayla's final transition to wherever she was headed could be as beautiful as Barbara's imagination.

"Don't worry," Barbara answered. "It will be."

"Okay, smarty-pants," I challenged. "Who did it? Who killed Shayla Greenfree? Who killed Marcia Armeson?"

As Barbara's habitual smile left her face, I felt my hopes sink like a crystal into deep water. I should have realized. Barbara always knew everything but whodunit.

"Felix thinks Yvette killed them," she told me, shaking her head.

"Why?" I asked, leaning forward eagerly, tofu forgotten.

"Because he has no imagination, Kate. Jeez-Louise, he figures she's weird, so she did it."

I flinched. My logic, exactly. "So who, then?" I prodded.

"The sick woman certainly had motive to kill Shayla, and the man whose ideas Shayla stole . . ."

"Did Felix tell you about them?" I demanded.

She shook her head no. Then she grinned again. "I read his notebook."

"You what—"

"He's still mad at me because I sent Ann to talk to you instead of to him," she explained cheerfully. Maybe reading other people's notebooks came easier to people who spent their days reading other people's minds.

"Too true," Barbara offered without apology.

"Okay, how about Ivan?"

"The bookstore owner?"

I nodded, surprised she needed to identify the name. But then she had needed to read Felix's notebook.

"Ivan's a good man," she told me. I relaxed into my chair a little. "Still, goodness doesn't preclude violence."

"But—"

"Same for the husband's lover. And for that brave young woman—jeez, it must be no fun having a kid when you're that young. And Yvette's husband. See, even if they're genuinely good people, it doesn't mean you can discount them as murderers."

"How about Phyllis Oberman and Vince Quadrini?" I asked, just for the record.

Barbara shrugged, the smile gone from her face again.

"I just don't know, damn it," she told me. She hit the table with her hand. "And I don't know why I'm always blocked when it's important. It's so frustrating! Because it is important. Someone out there is really mad—"

"Mad angryV I interrupted. "Or mad crazyT

"Both," she murmured soberly. And neither of us was laughing anymore. Anxiety clunked back into place. I was sure frustration and sadness would follow soon enough.

We ate quietly. The waitress was right. The tofu over noodles was perfect. The restaurant was bright and colorful. Even the warm sunlight on my back felt right. But in spite of all of that, Barbara's look when she hugged me goodbye chilled whatever warmth I'd felt.

"Be careful, kiddo," she warned once we were outside.

"I will," I told her as I turned to walk to my car. I was used to that warning.

"And Kate," she added. I swiveled my head back around to look at her. Her tone demanded it. "Be ready," she finished.

Unfortunately, that warning was a new one. But she was in her Volkswagen bug and backing out of her parking space before I could ask her for specifics.

My muscles were tense again as I drove home. Be ready for what? Did Barbara know something she wasn't telling me? Something she wasn't even aware of herself? I combed her words in my memory. Had she told me something important? Suddenly, I was convinced she had. But what?

I opened my front door and all thoughts of Barbara disappeared. Because one peek into the living room told me it was empty. Really empty. No Ingrid. No suitcases. Only the futon on the floor, wrinkled sheets bunched up in its center. Our home was ours again! Ours!

At least, it was ours and the skunks'.

I checked out each and every room in the house for Ingrid, Apollo, or suitcases, and joyously found none of the above. How to celebrate? Paperwork, the sergeant inside of me ordered. Paperwork.

I didn't waste any time arguing. I just trudged back to my desk, looked under the stacks of paperwork for Ingrid just to be sure, and then began dutifully filling out Jest Gifts forms. After a few hours, I asked myself why I couldn't solve a murder as easily as I'd dislodged Ingrid. And then I reminded myself just how difficult it really had been to dislodge Ingrid. It had taken work. And planning. So how could I work on finding out who killed Shayla and Marcia?

I could make lists, that's how. Means, motive, and opportunity. The one sensible thing Yvette had said. I pushed aside a stack of ledgers, pulled out a new pad of paper, and allocated a page each for Phyllis Oberman, Vince Quadrini,

Dean Frazier, Winona Eads, Zoe Ingersoll, Ted Brown, Yvette Cassell, Lou Cassell, and Ivan Nakagawa. I almost made one for Marcia Armeson, then shuddered, remembering her crushed body. How could I have forgotten? But filling in each page was harder than merely putting headings on.

I had written in a motive for Dean, and one for Zoe, Ted, and Yvette, when the front door rattled and opened.

I jumped out of my chair, wondering if this was the something I was supposed to be ready for. A murderer with a lock pick? But Wayne was the man who walked in, his eyes worried, harried, and hurried.

"Gotta go soon if we want to make the sci-fi meeting," he told me, not moving from the front door.

I pointed at the living room, but he didn't even seem to see my finger. Or the emptiness of the room. So I threw a jacket over my turtleneck and Chi-Pants and climbed into his Jaguar to go to the meeting of science fiction writers that Yvette had invited us to. The news about Ingrid could wait, to be savored all the more later.

The meeting was in San Francisco, over the Golden Gate Bridge, and all the way downtown in a neon-lit bar and restaurant that looked smaller on the outside than the inside. The waitress at the front just pointed upstairs when Wayne asked her for details. There was a little table at the top of the stairs where we paid our twenty-four dollars as nonmembers and got little, stick-on nametags as our reward.