Murder in a Nice Neighborhood (18 page)

“It’s not as if Liz is suddenly rich,” he pointed out. “That old place needs lots of deferred maintenance. The only way you can afford it is to
sell it, but you wouldn’t get enough out of it to
buy a house around here.” He leaned forward again. “Of course,” he murmured, “you could go somewhere else, where things are cheaper—Oregon, or Colorado—”

“No!” I clutched the warm cup. “How can this happen? How can a loving gesture turn me into an even hotter suspect?”

Claudia looked at me, worried. “It’s a shock. But don’t collapse, Liz. Use your head. We’re going to get at the truth here, if you can help us.” She challenged Drake. “Who else knew that Liz was the beneficiary?”

He smiled. “Vivien used a standard will form from the stationer’s, so there was no attorney involved. Her son died, you told me, in Korea, so she had no relatives to consider. According to Liz, she wasn’t told. So it seems, no one knew about it. At least, no one’s come forward.”

“Delores Mitchell,” I said suddenly.

“Who?” Claudia wrote the name down on her pad.

"That woman we saw today—you know, old Stewart Mitchell’s daughter. I know Vivien took one of her workshops. Maybe Delores knows something about her will.” I remembered something else. “Yes, and I won’t get the house anyway,” I said triumphantly. “Vivien had taken a reverse mortgage. Those people will get the house.”

"They’ll put it up for sale,” Drake said after a thoughtful silence. “But I think the way that works is they get their advance plus interest out of it, and the rest of the proceeds go to the residual legatee.” He wrote Delores’s name down too. “I’ll check it out.”

“So both you and Vivien knew this Mitchell woman.”

Claudia gnawed on her pen. “Who else did you both know?”

“Hard to say.” I was finding it difficult to focus. The hot tea helped. I closed my eyes. “That developer. Ted Ramsey.”

“Ramsey’s a friend of yours?” Drake looked up from his notes. “I didn’t know that.”

“He’s not my friend.” I struggled to be coherent. “He swims at the same time I do. I met him a couple of times, once when I was taking Vivien to class. He was after her house. Promised to find her a nice studio in one of the ritzy retirement homes around. She was too nice when she turned him down—he kept thinking she just needed a little more persuasion.”

“So he wanted her place—why? He doesn’t do single-family stuff.” Drake made a few notes.

“He had options on a couple of other houses next to hers. The one around the corner belonged to Eunice, the other woman in my writing group that just died. She had a big lot with a small house and her backyard intersected with Vivien’s,” I remembered yesterday’s awkward moment. “One of the other neighbors, Carlotta Houseman, is really gung-ho to move into a retirement place. She was feuding with Vivien because she thought Vivien was going to queer the whole deal.” I surprised myself by yawning.

Claudia caught it. “You’re tired,” she said, putting down her pen. “Why don’t you take that nap now?”

“We’re not finished.” Drake directed an intimidating stare at Claudia. She didn’t back down.

“Liz is.” She was right. I felt exhausted, in spite of the long sleep the night before. My head throbbed, my eyes felt sandy. I wanted to crawl into my bus and hide in my sleeping bag while crying a couple of gallons of tears for everything that had gone wrong in the universe over the past two billion years.

“I’ll come back for dinner,” Drake announced, knowing, I guess, that if he waited to be invited he would have a good, long wait. “I’ll bring a pizza or something. You ladies are not thinking of going out, are you?”

“We women,” Claudia told him, heaving herself to her feet to accompany me, “are going to nap and recruit our subconscious brains to do the hard work of figuring out what has been going on here. If the pizza smells good enough, we might let you in.”

“Lock the door after me,” he ordered, taking another doughnut out of the box and following us out of the kitchen. “Don’t let anyone else in. If you remember anything pertinent, don’t call up potential blackmailers and tell them about it. Let me know. Let me know if anything worries or bothers you or anyone wants to talk to you. I don’t want any accidents happening here, understand?”

“You come in loud and clear, Detective Drake.” Claudia stopped in the doorway of the room she’d assigned to me. “We’ll see you later.”

I barely remember falling onto the bed. Sleep was deep and welcoming, like a thick blanket between me and the rest of the world. I didn’t want to dream, but of course I did.

Vivien was standing at the counter in her kitchen, which by the alchemy of dreams I knew was actually my kitchen now. But there she was, fixing me a snack, smiling over her shoulder like she used to do. When she turned around, I saw that instead of the usual plate of sliced cake, she was holding a bowl of cereal, its black blobs of raisins floating in milk. Behind her on the counter was the little sample box. A feeling of horror grew slowly while I stared at the bowl held in her gnarled hands. Reluctantly I shifted my gaze, and there was Alonso, clutching the bag to his chest, glaring at me accusingly. Vivien, too, had lost her smile; she looked as if she disapproved of something. Her hands began to tremble, and I reached for the bowl before the milk could slosh onto the floor, but it receded as I reached, until I wasn’t in the kitchen anymore and Vivien, blown before me like a wispy kite, was rapidly borne out of sight. Alonso began to mutate, his face dripping and changing in a grotesque kind of acid flashback. I knew what he would turn into, and told myself to wake up, but not before Pigpen’s dead face confronted me, his expression somehow sly, the open eyes filmed over.

I did wake up then. The dream’s lingering horror settled over me thickly. I had that groggy, befuddled feeling that comes from sleeping in the daytime. More than anything, I wanted a swim. It was just past one; the pool would still be open for laps.

It didn’t take long to strip and put on my suit. Claudia was sleeping; I could hear from the foot of the stairs her deep breathing and occasional delicate snores. All this was a strain on her, and she wasn’t in the best of shape to begin with. Obviously she needed her nap more than I’d needed mine.

I pulled sweats over my suit, rolled up a towel, and looked at the back door lock for a minute. The key was in it. Drake would definitely say it was dumb to go for a swim. I wanted to pretend that didn’t matter. But to let the antagonism between us color my self-preservation—that would be dumb.

The phone was in the kitchen. I closed the door so I wouldn’t wake up Claudia. Drake answered himself, impatiently, as if he’d been interrupted in devising a solution to the national debt.

“Drake. I’m going to Rinconada Pool. I’m riding Claudia’s bike—it’s less than a mile. I’ll be finished in an hour or so, and bike back.”

“You’re out of your gourd, lady.” His breath hissed through the receiver, diving down my ear. “You don’t go anywhere or do anything.”

“I’m letting you know,” I pointed out, realizing how much easier it was to talk to him without his well-honed, inquisitive presence. “I could have just left, and no one the wiser.”

“Where’s your keeper?” He sounded seriously annoyed. “I thought the formidable Mrs. Kaplan was going to guard you like a Rottweiler.”

I couldn’t help the smile. At least he wouldn’t see it. “She’s getting some rest. I’m not going to bother her, and neither are you.”

“So it’s not clear who takes the Rottweiler role, is it?” The sounds of paper being shuffled, or perhaps shoveled, filled the receiver. Then he spoke again. “I haven’t taken a lunch break yet. I’ll pick you up in a few minutes. Don’t wait outside, and lock the door when you come out. I’ll take you to Rinconada and bring you back.”

“I’m touched.” A flat voice, reciting orders—I had lived too many years with that already. “Such concern for my well-being. Next time, I won’t tell you first.”

“There might not be a next time.” The frankness was brutal. “Your possible futures include a couple of scenarios that would severely limit your movements.”

“You mean jail.” I leaned against the wall. “So I’m pretty much under house arrest right now, is that it? I’m surprised you don’t have someone posted here.”

There was a brief silence, time enough to deduce the bull’s-eye. “I’m not talking about jail,” he said finally, as if exasperated. “I’m talking about death. Wait inside until you see my car. It’s a—”

“I remember your car.” My mouth wanted to say something else, but my hand hung up before I could betray myself. I scribbled a note for Claudia and left it in the middle of the kitchen table. Then I unlocked the back door and relocked it after me, pocketing the key. Drake might be concerned for my safety, but he also regarded me as chief suspect. There was sure to
be a policeman lurking somewhere. I was in no danger, and there was something I had to do.

My bus was out of sight behind the garage. I ran my hand along the side, feeling the ridges on the metal from my inexpert attempt at painting it last summer. The curtains were pulled back, as I’d left them after tidying up after the assault. The cardboard window still showed its hole from the previous night’s break-in; I hadn’t yet gotten around to fixing it. I unlocked the door and checked that the cooler door was propped open to air and that everything was in its place. The boxes of files stashed on the floor under the pull-up table gave me a pang. It was as if the life I’d shaped for the past few years was over already, with only a big question mark to take its place. I had found my little rut so comforting, so secure. Now I knew that comfort and security had been delusion and illusion. There was no going back. There might be no going on.

Bereft, rootless, I turned away when I heard the car idling in front of the house, locking up the artifact of my past, going to meet the arbiter of my future.

Chapter 28

I didn’t realize Drake was going to swim, too. I had expected him to wait in the car until I was done, since this kind of embarrassing baby-sitting couldn’t be much more to his taste than it was to mine. I would have been flattered by the minuteness of his attention if I hadn’t figured that nine-tenths of it was because he didn’t want his chief suspect whisked out of reach by accidental drowning.

The other tenth of his interest might possibly be personal.

He was waiting for me outside the women’s dressing room when I came out. He stood in the bright, cold October breeze, his legs braced slightly apart, arms crossed over his chest. As I had surmised, his build was burly; he wore baggy, Jams-style trunks instead of the sleek, nut-hugging racing suits the real swim jocks wore. What really made him looked naked was that his glasses were gone. He squinted at me, doing as thorough a catalog as I was. At least he would see me through the soft blur of poor vision. I am not one of those petite women who hang out around Nordstrom, bemoaning the dearth of size twos. My body has been lived in long past any damage a security deposit might cover. And it was never fashionable—though I might have given Rubens or Renoir a little heartache. Hourglass figures don’t work in the digital age.

Drake seemed accustomed to the unwritten etiquette of the pool involving lane speed and entry. I like to swim slowly but steadily, so I usually choose a lane near the deep end where the older swimmers go. Drake headed for the middle lanes, faster territory. He pulled on goggles, too; I don’t bother with them. If you use goggles and swim caps and floats and special shampoo, swimming ceases to be a cheap form of exercise.

I plowed back and forth through the water, unable to capture the usual mindless content with which I swim. There was too much churning around in my head, too many images, too much sorrow and pain. Swimming should be like meditation—just you, your breath, the rhythmic motion of your arms and legs, the punctuation marks of turns. At least that’s how it seemed to me when I discovered lap swimming in college. I’ve done it ever since, wherever I can find a pool.

After five laps of crawl stroke I switched to breaststroke. With my head out of the water, I could scan the other lanes. Drake had worked his way over to the lane next to mine—I saw his red swim cap. He was doing sidestroke, watching me. It didn’t help my concentration any. I switched to sidestroke, too, turning my back to him.

By lap ten I like to do some backstroke. But an elderly man had gotten into the lane with me, and his scissors kick was a real lane hog. I went back to crawl, burying my face in the water, seeking at least the relaxation that comes with exercise, if I couldn’t find the serenity.

I finished a very slow fifteen laps and climbed out of the pool. Drake hauled himself out, too. He’d swum the whole time, and didn’t seem winded. I had put him down as soft and sweet-tooth impaired. But his stocky build was all well toned. The only softness came from lots of frizzy, graying chest hair.

“You must work out a lot,” I said on the way back to the dressing room. “Swimming can be tiring if you’re not used to it.”

“I swim,” he said curtly. I had never noticed him at the pool, but he probably came early before work. We stopped outside the women’s locker room. “I’m trusting you, Liz. Don’t leave by the other door."

“I won’t.” I wanted to say more, to express outrage that he doubted me, to demand that things come to
a head so I could know where I stood. But that was obvious—I stood, dripping wet, shivering in the cold breeze, watching goose bumps break out on the parts of Drake’s arms that weren’t hairy. For once I could see into his eyes with no barriers. And for some reason, I didn’t want to look. I turned away, into
the echoing dampness of the locker room.

The hard blast of the locker room shower didn’t feel nearly so good when it wasn’t the only shower in my world. I rinsed off perfunctorily, dried quickly, and pulled a comb through my hair. I keep it short by cutting it myself when it begins to get in my way. This time, on my way out of the locker room, I stopped in front of the mirror. Through the steam that obscured it,
I saw my image—short, pale, no makeup, hair ragged. For the past few years I had cultivated looking like nobody, not willing to arouse interest in anyone, especially a man. When I caught myself wondering if I’d overdone it, I marched quickly out, back to my baby-sitter.