Murder in a Nice Neighborhood (22 page)

“I don’t—” I had difficulty getting the words past the dryness in my throat. “I don’t want to die, Delores.”

“You have to,” she said matter-of-factly. “When you’re dead, everything will be settled.”

“No, it won’t.” I didn’t know if trying to be logical with someone whose sanity was slipping away would work. “Another death will just raise more questions. Your dad would have known that. He wouldn’t want you to keep killing people.”

She wasn’t really listening. “I saved all his things. This was his gun.” Her voice hardened. “And he wouldn’t have cared at all about someone like you. He wanted me to be happy.”

“You don’t need to shoot me. If you need something typed to be happy, I’ll do it for you.” Delores, in her bulky costume, filled the side door space; I couldn’t get past her. It would be difficult to race around the table and through the passenger door before she potted me, if she meant to. I was effectively trapped. “Just tell me what you want.” I pulled the typewriter toward me. The light had grown too dim; I couldn’t see the words on the paper in the machine.

“Your confession, of course.” Delores’s gloved fingers rubbed the gun in an absent caress. I couldn’t take my eyes off the gun; it looked similar to the one I had shot Tony with. At the time, I’d thought I’d rather die than shoot someone again. Now I wasn’t so sure.

“Put it in your own words,” Delores ordered. “On a fresh sheet of paper—how sorry you are for all the murders.”

I gripped the smooth metal sides of the typewriter to keep my hands from shaking. “I didn’t do the murders, Delores.”

“You had opportunity, and you’re obviously not . . ." She hesitated, and I thought wildly that she didn’t want to hurt my feelings—"you’re not a responsible person. You don’t have a house or anything but this junk heap.” She flicked a disparaging glance at the interior of the bus, and I saw it for a moment through her eyes—the duct tape that mended the bench seat’s upholstery, the broken window, the faded curtains.

“Maybe,” I said, keeping a firm grip on both temper and sanity. “But I still didn’t kill anyone.”

“How can they let you go free after all the evidence against you? Those yew seeds should have convinced them.”

“Yew seeds?” I must have looked too interested. She waved the gun in my face. I jerked back on the bench, and then tried to look relaxed when every muscle in my body ached with fear. “You put them in my cooler?”

“I should have taken you out then,” she said, scowling at me as if we were discussing nothing more important than me stealing her lane at the swimming pool. “Actually, I thought you might be dead, and that wouldn’t have suited me too well, because it might have gotten you off the hook. But this plan,” she concluded with satisfaction, “is bound to work. Write the note.”

“Now?” I needed time. Somewhere back in my mind was the knowledge that Drake was coming, if I could only buy enough time. Her face was just a pale circle above the blackness of her costume. The evening was still in the deep blue stage, before absolute night.

“You can turn on the light. That way I can be sure what you’re doing.”

“I don’t need the light.” I felt in the cupboard below the table where I keep copy paper. I put it in the machine, moving by touch, and then stopped helplessly.

“Just write that you murdered all of them, you’re sorry, and you’re taking this way out.” Delores rattled it off with the self-possession of the truly poised. “I tried to do it but I kept making mistakes, and everybody knows about your boring perfect typing. Typewriters are so primitive.” I could hear the disdain in her voice. “But the police could tell if the note wasn’t written on this typewriter, so I had to do it this way.”

I hit the return lever a couple of times, stalling. “Why the gorilla outfit, anyway?”

“It’s Halloween,” Delores said reasonably. “With the head on, nobody can tell if I’m a man or a woman—and no one I know would ever believe it’s me in this outfit.” She laughed her girlish laugh. It gave me the horrors. “When I’m through here I’ll just go back to my car and take it off. I have my real costume underneath—a very nice Tahitian sarong. I am going to a party later, as a matter of fact. With Ted," she added.

“That’s nice.” My fingers were icy. They didn’t feel strong enough to pound the keys.

“Glad you think so.” Her voice roughened. “He’s said a couple of times lately that he couldn’t believe you would have anything to do with the deaths. That just made me so mad."

“It’s the truth.” I forced my hands to unclench, and tried to steady them.

“Not after tonight.” Delores was openly gloating. “Ted’ll have to admit he was wrong. Maybe then he’ll be a little more forthcoming. Maybe when I give him the development rights to my new properties, he’ll see what a good partnership we could have.”

“You’re going into partnership with him?” I moved my fingers onto the home row and felt the comforting cold smoothness of the keys. There was a little chip on the
f
key—my left index fingertip found it automatically.

“He should have offered it months ago; I told him I was interested.” She laughed scornfully. “He thought I was just interested in him, and of course I am, but I wanted to work with him. There’s real money in development if you do it right. Especially if the land costs next to nothing.” She waved the gun again, and its shiny metal caught what little light there was. Again it commanded my gaze. It was an effort to look away. "Type," Delores ordered.

I typed: “Paul. Delores Mitchell is holding me at gunpoint.” As a sentence, it lacked credibility. If he ever saw it, he wouldn’t believe it. I kept trying to find an escape somewhere, but my brain wouldn’t work at it. All it would do was embrace the cold breath of the breeze and the sharp scent of Claudia’s compost pile, along with the sophisticated perfume smell that was coming from Delores and the way the crows flew around the black treetops like upward-blowing leaves, cawing out their evening roost song. These would be my last sights, sounds, smells. Like Pigpen, like Vivien, I would be dead, and the world would continue on without me.

“Why?” I turned to look at the dark shape of her. “Why did I kill them?”

“Well—because.” She hesitated. “You’re mentally unbalanced. You hated Pigpen because he was a bum, and you hated poor Vivien because she had a house and you didn’t.”

“Not very good reasons.” I noticed that she’d called Pigpen by his nickname. In the news reports he’d been Gordon Murphy. “Why did you kill them?”

She didn’t answer for a moment. “Do you have a tape recorder on?” Leaning through the side door, she reached up and switched on the dome light. “Of course you don’t— you don’t have anything. I can tell you, I guess, since you’re so curious. That’s funny,” she remarked. “I wouldn’t think a person on the verge of death would be curious.”

“It doesn’t seem fair to die without knowing why.” I didn’t voice the thought that the others had died that way. In the dim light, Delores’s face looked much the same—self-absorbed, self-important.

“It was Eunice’s fault, really,” Delores said, shifting the blame. “She asked me about reverse mortgages, if our institution had them. And we didn’t. But I thought I could help her out, put some of my capital into her place, just like a reverse mortgage but private, you see.” She sighed. “She had that oversized lot—the possibilities were endless. So after I saw her with those sample cereals on her counter, I got the idea, and I just couldn’t wait any longer. Vivien had already approached me about a reverse for her house, and I knew with those two big parcels I could do quite a deal.”

“So you killed Eunice. To get your hands on her property. Did she make you her heir?”

“Of course not.” Delores sounded shocked. “That would have been improper, and besides, it might have made me look suspicious. I have a lien on her house, and I’ll just sell it to myself to pay off the costs.”

“Convenient.” I felt choked by the lump in my throat—of tears, of rage, of fear.

“It was fair,” Delores protested. “She got the money, after all.”

“But not time to spend it.” I didn’t mean to say the words. They just slipped out. A wave of crimson washed over Delores’s face.

“She was a sick old woman whose life was a burden to her,” she spat. “Now type.”

I added another sentence. “She killed Eunice and Vivien—those reverse mortgages are phony.” Now that the light was on, I could see that I’d misspelled “holding”—it read “hilding.” But since Drake would likely never see it, the spelling didn’t matter.

I had to
buy more time. Swallowing my fear, I forced a casual tone. “Sounds like you planned their killings pretty well,” I said. “What was it—yew seeds in the granola sample?”

“I wanted it to look like a normal death,” she explained. “Or an accident or something. The seeds were hardly noticeable mixed into the cereal—and those old people don’t see so well, after all. The yews grow wild on the vacant lot next to our house; I saw some program on TV about how poisonous the seeds were, so I picked the berries last summer before Daddy died.” She sounded proud of her enterprise. “I mashed them through a strainer and got lots of seeds and made some tea with some of them. Daddy likes his tea with honey; he never even noticed.”

“So you saved the rest of the seeds?” I needed a reality check. It was hardly believable that goody-goody Delores would say such things.

She heard my disbelief as praise for her forethought, and nodded. “I got Pigpen to
collect cereal samples—told him everyone on the block had donated their samples to the Food Closet downtown. That was clever, wasn’t it? He was too stupid to see through it, anyway.” She looked at me, and I tried to look sympathetic. I glanced at the gun again. She was holding it in
a looser grip; I wondered if I could snatch it away without horrible consequences.

“So you really fooled Pigpen.” I couldn’t think of anything more constructive to do than getting her to talk.

“At first.” She scowled. “After
Eunice died, Pigpen figured out that I was doing something illegal with the cereal samples. He tried to blackmail me!” Her voice was incredulous. “Of course I had to kill him. I gave him some tea made from the yew seeds, just like I did Daddy, just like I’m going to
give you. Then I said I would drive him to the liquor store. I was going to push him into the creek, but when I saw your van parked there I knew that was better. He’d told me how you treated him. I stopped right there, whacked him on the head with my sock filled with rocks, and pushed him out.
I had to get out and roll him with my foot.” She wrinkled her nose in disgust. “At first I thought the smell in my car was a dead giveaway—he was so foul! I vacuumed and vacuumed, but I could still smell him until after the Beamer’s weekly appointment at the Auto Laundry.”

I could figure out the rest of it myself Alonso had taken Pigpen’s place, but Delores had found a real keen way of removing anyone who might connect her with cereal samples. And then Vivien, who frugally collected the free samples, quite proud of her thrift. For a moment great sadness washed the fear out of me, and then anger flooded in.

“Aren’t you done yet?” Delores nudged me with the gun. “Let me see what you typed.”

I gave her the paper, and reached for the gorilla head that sat on the seat beside me. Delores glanced at the first words.

“You idiot! This isn’t what I asked for!” She crumpled the paper, but for a few moments it had distracted her attention.

“Neither is this.” I rammed the gorilla head on backward over her head and ducked, just before she shot at me. Fire seared through my left shoulder. Before she could aim again, I managed to grab her arm above the hand that held the gun and bang it against the door frame as hard as I could. She was strong, but those little bones are delicate. The gun dropped into the grass at her feet, accompanied by her anguished cry. Then I kicked her in the stomach.

The gorilla suit provided some protection, I guess. She lurched backward, but she wasn’t down. The sound of the shot should have had Claudia calling for reinforcements. I couldn’t feel anything in my left shoulder except a warm trickling that was somehow reassuring. I scooted out of the bus, to where Delores was doubled up, and twisted her injured wrist as hard as I could. She screamed, and I shoved her forward. “I’ve got the gun now,” I lied. “Just keep going straight ahead, or I’ll put a bullet in you.” My shoulder began to burn again; walking jarred it agonizingly. If she realized that I could barely stagger, I might yet be done for.

She cradled her wrist, whimpering. “You broke it,” she whined through the gorilla head. “I can’t see anything! I’m suffocating.”

“Good.” My anger at her was the only thing that kept me on my feet. I wanted to
tear out her hair, get into a prison-quality fight with her, knock her head against the garage wall, cause her the kind of pain she’d caused Eunice and Vivien and her other victims. I wanted her to die, for a few red-eyed seconds.

The porch light over the back door hadn’t gone on; I began to worry that Claudia might not have heard the shot. With her uninjured hand, Delores was trying to
pull off the gorilla head. I pushed her again, and she stumbled against the garage. “Stop shoving!” She sounded really peeved at my bad manners.

“Keep going!” I wanted her far enough in front of me to be no danger, and not so far that I couldn’t tackle her if need be. Not that I relished the idea of tackling. I brushed against the coil of clothesline that hung on the garage wall, and grabbed it. Delores staggered in front of me, still one-handedly pawing at her head. Closing the gap between us, I dropped the loop of clothesline over her head. It wouldn’t go past her shoulders, and she began whacking behind her with her good arm, succeeding in landing a punch on my injured shoulder.

We careened past the garage and into the backyard, Delores’s costume liberally festooned with blackberry vines that had seized her fur with their thorns. I was still trying to get the rope around her to pin her arms to her sides; she was still trying to pull off the gorilla head.

Finally I remembered that I was supposed to be armed. “If you don’t stand still,” I ordered, “I’ll just shoot you. In the other wrist.”

She stood still, and I pushed the coil of rope down on one shoulder. The costume had incredibly wide shoulders—it was like dealing with a football player’s uniform. And I was handicapped by the bullet wound.