ILL-TIMED ENTANGLEMENTS (The Kate Huntington mystery series #2) (10 page)

She handed him a list of several names. “These are the folks who most tended to find Frieda… abrasive.”

“I’ll walk you out, Detective,” Kate said and followed him to the door. She slipped outside and pulled the door partway closed behind her, without touching the outer knob. “So does this eliminate Betty Franklin as a suspect? She had no reason to want to harm her friend.” She decided not to push the idea just yet that the attempted break-in put Betty more in the category of potential victim than suspect.

“Not completely. All three of these ladies were in the writers’ group. We’ll be looking into what other connections there might be between them.” In response to Kate’s glare, he added, “I told you before, I look at my cases from
all
angles.”

“You can’t seriously still suspect her. And what about the attack on myself and Mr. Canfield? Betty would have no reason to go after us. We’re trying to help her.”

“It’s conceivable the pot got knocked off accidently.”

Kate put her hands on her hips. She caught herself before she said Rob’s name. Not a good idea to turn Lindstrom against him. Instead, she said, “I have been told that all too many police officers these days don’t care about getting the true culprit. They just try to make a case against the most likely suspect.”

Lindstrom sighed. “Mrs. Huntington, I assure you that I am not one of those officers. But my captain… he’s a by-the-book kind of guy. This second murder does confuse the issue, as do the attacks against all of you. But I know what Captain Davis will say. Maybe that’s what the murderer wants, to throw us off.”

“That sweet little old lady killed a good friend of hers just to throw you off her trail? Oh come on, Detective!”

“She didn’t seem all that sweet today. Kept biting my head off.”

“Maybe that’s because you were spouting one ageist stereotype after another,” Kate snapped at him.

To her surprise, his expression turned sheepish. “Yeah, I need to stop making assumptions about this crowd, just because they’re old.”

In a much more sympathetic voice, Kate said, “It’s easy to do. I keep catching myself falling into the stereotype trap, too. But elderly people find it insulting when you lump them all together.”

“It’s not just insulting. It’s dangerous. I could miss something vital,” Lindstrom said, his voice sharp with self-criticism. Then, with a small grin, he added, “But I have a feeling you and Mrs. Franklin are going to keep reminding me to keep an open mind.”

“Just doing our civic duty, sir.” Kate gave him a mock salute as she returned his grin.

Lindstrom’s face grew serious. He scrubbed his hand over it, then ran fingers through his hair. “Look, it’s early on in the investigation and some much better suspects may very well be discovered soon, but for lack of anybody better right now, Mrs. Franklin’s at the top of the suspect list in the Blackwell murder. She has the most compelling motive by far and physical evidence places her at the scene…”

“At some point in the past,” Kate interrupted. “Not necessarily the night Doris was killed.”

Lindstrom nodded slightly. “She’s got no alibi, so from the captain’s perspective, we have motive, means and opportunity.” He echoed Rob’s words from Sunday.

Kate studied his face for a few seconds. “But your gut’s saying she didn’t do it, isn’t it?”

Lindstrom hesitated. Deciding not to respond to that, he said instead, “I think it would be a good idea to convince Mrs. Franklin to go to a motel for now. Just to be on the safe side.”

“Then why aren’t you taking this attempted break-in more seriously? And by the way, I was the one who locked the door earlier,” Kate said. “You should at least take fingerprints off the doorknob.”

Lindstrom pointed to the door. “Do you realize how many prints will be on there. It would take hours to take everyone’s fingerprints, just in this building, in order to compare them. And then what would we have proved? That someone grabbed her doorknob at some point in the past.”

The detective scrubbed his face with his hand again. “My resources are stretched a bit thin at the moment. Had another major case land on my desk this morning, as well as this new murder. I think it’s more important to have my people chasing down real leads rather than fooling with fingerprinting a doorknob.”

“But you do believe that someone tried to break in to get to me or Betty?”

Lindstrom looked at her for a moment, his cop face back in place. “I’m keeping my mind open to all possibilities.” He did not point out that one of them was the possibility that Betty Franklin had opened the door herself, before screaming.

He had talked to his cousin, who was an author, and had found out that it was likely the woman’s publisher
would
have dropped her if the plagiarism accusation had any validity, and maybe even if it didn’t.

Betty Franklin might not have a motive in this last murder, but she definitely had a very strong reason to kill Doris Blackwell.

•   •   •

Back inside the apartment, Kate filled the others in on her conversation with the detective. Skip turned to Rose, handing her the keys to his truck. “Fingerprint kit’s in the back compartment. This is a good opportunity to teach you how to lift prints.”

“But how do we compare them to the residents’ fingerprints?” Kate said.

Skip shook his head. “We won’t be able to. Actually we’ll be lucky if we get anything clear. But if we do, we can at least run them through the system to see if the owners of the prints have police records.”

After Rose’s print-lifting lesson resulted in nothing but smears, everyone grabbed a sandwich from the plate Betty had placed on the breakfast bar, then gathered in the living room area to regroup. Betty brought her posterboard lists out and propped them up on the settee. Mac and Skip grabbed chairs from the small dining alcove. Rose just sank to the floor, legs crossed in front of her.

Betty was putting two asterisks next to the names she had given to Detective Lindstrom, when Kate’s cell phone rang. It was Rob, checking in during the court’s lunch recess. As succinctly as possible, Kate filled him in on their harrowing morning. She forgot to mention the potted plant that someone had tried to drop on her head the previous evening. The subsequent events had pushed that right out of her mind.

“Damn!” he said, when she got to the attempted break-in at Betty’s apartment. “This is not good. Can you convince her to move out temporarily?”

“Already been tried,” Kate said. “Skip’s going to camp out on the living room rug tonight. We’ll be okay.”

“Hopefully this case will be over today or tomorrow. I’ll be on the road the minute after the judge’s gavel comes down.”

After Kate had disconnected, Betty said, “These are the folks that Frieda
really
rubbed the wrong way, but lots of other people found her a bit irritating. I love…” Betty stopped and closed her eyes, fighting for control. “I loved Frieda dearly,” she continued, “but she did tend to carry telling it like it is to the extreme.”

“Were any of those who found her particularly irritating among the guys with whom Doris flirted?” Kate asked.

Betty pointed to three names: James Berkeley, Fred Murphy and Henry Morris. “But Henry finds everybody irritating and his wife’s been gone for months now.”

“He’s in the writers’ group, and we haven’t been successful at getting him to talk to us yet,” Skip pointed out.

“I don’t know why he stayed in the group after Sally died,” Betty said. “She was the writer. He just dabbled some. Says he’s writing his memoirs, but he almost never has anything ready to share with us, and when he does, it’s pretty awful. A couple times I’ve wanted to ask him point-blank if he really thought anybody would be interested in the life of a maintenance supervisor for Lancaster’s public schools. I always thought he came with Sally just to know what she was doing. The man seemed to be a bit on the jealous side.”

As Kate started making two lists of interviewees, Skip said, “Back to the drawing board. We need to re-interview everybody who knew both women. If we can find a common motive, then we’d be cooking.”

“Yeah, we should try to find out if Frieda gossiped about them,” Kate said, as she handed the first list to Mac who was sitting next to her. “Skip and I’ll check out the flirtation/jealousy angle with the rest of the married couples, and see how they react to Frieda’s death. And we’ll try again to get Morris to talk to us.”

Skip nodded his agreement. “But we better wait until after Lindstrom’s people have talked to these folks. He’ll have our heads if we get in the way of his investigation.”

“Good point,” Kate said as she watched Mac stand up, then lean down to offer a hand to Rose. She grabbed his forearm in a gesture reminiscent of soldiers or athletes giving each other a hand up. As Mac hauled Rose to her feet, Kate hid a grin. These two sometimes acted more like military comrades-in-arms than a romantic couple.

But apparently his respect for Rose as a comrade-in-arms had overcome Mac’s sexist tendencies–tendencies that, along with his gruff personality, had led to two divorces. Maybe, just maybe, her childhood friend had finally found true love. Kate hoped so.

As the other two headed out the door, Kate turned to Skip. “Do you think it’s safe to leave Betty here by herself?”

Before he could answer, Betty firmly announced that she would be just fine. “I’ll stay out here in the living room and keep an eye on the door. The chain held before so it should again. Somebody tries to get in, I’ll scream bloody murder.”

Her face had the chagrined look on it again. “I never realized before how much we sprinkle our sentences with words like
dead
and
murder
, not realizing…” Betty’s voice trailed off as tears pooled in her eyes.

Kate reached over and patted her arm. She caught herself as she was about to ask if Betty was okay. Of course she wasn’t okay. She’d just lost a good friend.

Instead Kate said, “You have my cell phone number. Call if you need us, for any reason.”

As she and Skip headed out of the building in search of the first couple on their list, Kate heaved a sigh.

“Are you okay?” Skip asked.

“Actually I’m not sure I
know
how I am,” Kate answered. “Everything’s happened so fast that I haven’t really had a chance to process it all. I’d only met Frieda a couple of times but I really liked her. She was quite a character.”

Kate was quiet for a moment as they walked along the sidewalk in the hot sun. “She told me something yesterday that I didn’t share with Betty. Frieda didn’t want her to know that some people had already jumped to the conclusion that she did kill Doris. The most emphatic of them was a woman named Carla Baxter. I gave Betty a vague reason for adding her name to our suspect list.”

She fell silent again, her face serious, sadness in her eyes. Skip was tempted to take her hand to comfort her, but decided against it. He wasn’t sure how she would interpret the gesture.

“I can’t help but think that Frieda’s gossiping is what got her killed,” Kate finally said. “She told the wrong thing to the wrong person. I should have warned her yesterday to be careful who she talked to…” Kate’s eyes stung. She blinked hard, looking off into the distance.

Skip put his hand on her shoulder as he stopped walking. He turned her toward him. “I feel funny saying this to a therapist, but isn’t that a pretty typical grief reaction? To think you could have done something to keep the person from dying.”

Kate looked up into his sympathetic eyes and almost broke down. She nodded mutely, then turned and started walking again. He fell into step with her.

“Thank you,” she said softly, when she could trust her voice.

“You’re welcome.” This time he did take her hand to give it a brief comforting squeeze.

B
y two-thirty, Kate and Skip had finally tracked down both members of the Forsythe couple. He had been getting a haircut in the barber shop on the second level of the recreation building.

Mr. Forsythe was a robust-looking gentleman with a thatch of thick white hair and broken veins on his large nose that indicated an affinity for alcohol. He had laughed when they’d asked him about Doris’s flirting. “That old hag… Oops, sorry, guess I shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, but really, she was kind of pathetic. Always sidling up to me and making comments that I guess were supposed to be clever innuendoes.”

“So you weren’t even a little bit interested?” Skip had asked.

Forsythe had laughed again. “Go see for yourself why I wouldn’t be. You said you wanted to talk to my wife. She’s in the gym downstairs, doing her daily workout.”

They had understood what he meant when they’d located Mrs. Forsythe on a treadmill in the gym. Slightly taller than average, she had excellent posture, elegantly styled ash blonde hair and her latex shorts and light blue tank top revealed a figure that many women much younger would envy. Betty had said she was in her late sixties, but she looked more like mid-fifties. And a well preserved mid-fifties at that.

They’d had to wait for the timer on her treadmill to ding before they could get her attention. She had given Skip an appreciative once-over as she used a towel to pat the sweat off her carefully made-up face and a neck that showed only a hint of the crepey texture common to older women’s skin.

Mrs. Forsythe had also expressed a mixture of amusement and pity regarding Doris’s flirting with her husband. “If the woman hadn’t been such an irritating person in general, I would have felt downright sorry for her.”

When asked about Frieda, Mrs. Forsythe had shuddered dramatically. “I heard she was killed. I was telling Bob over lunch that maybe we should go visit our daughter for awhile.

“But to answer your question. I didn’t really know Frieda McIntosh. I mean I knew who she was, but I tried to steer clear of her.” Leaning closer to Skip, she had whispered, “She was a bit of a gossip. I didn’t want to end up one of her so-called friends that she talked about behind their backs.” She batted eyelashes, heavy with mascara, at him.

“Frieda told me that she overheard a conversation Friday or Saturday night, while standing in line for dinner in the cafeteria. A group of folks from your building were talking about Doris’s murder and someone said, or implied at least, that they thought Betty had actually killed her. Do you happen to recall who made that comment?” Kate had watched the woman’s body language closely while Mrs. Forsythe had given that some thought.