Murder in the Marketplace (22 page)

“And all’s certainly not right with the world.” Though that was hard to believe, enclosed in that bright space, with roses providing their perfume free of charge and bees making their monotonous music.

“What’s the matter?” Claudia pushed her glasses up and settled her shady hat more firmly on iron-gray curls. “Is surrogate parenthood getting you down? Or is it this other stuff? Biddy mentioned after you left Thursday night that you were having some kind of trouble with the census.”

"Trouble, yes.” I snipped off a couple more faded flowers, and bent to pull up a mat of scraggly forget-me-nots that were sticking their seed pods onto my socks. “Nothing but trouble, lately.”

Claudia stopped snipping and stared at me. “The Browning Society might have your poetic license revoked for inappropriate quoting, but otherwise your life seems as chaste and pure as that of any novice nun.”

I shook my head. “Not so. Death is dogging me.”

“It dogs us all.”

“Not quite so near at hand. People are dying right in my face lately. It’s—unnerving to have bodies turn up so regularly.” My bucket was full of flower parts. I carried it to the big trash can to dump it.

Claudia holstered her Felco shears in one pocket of the faded overalls that had, years ago, belonged to her husband. “I want to hear all about it,” she said, plunking herself down on the garden bench.

I didn’t want to sit. I kept snipping while I told her the story. It took so long I nearly finished weeding her vegetable plot, too. She followed me around with a chair, firing questions while I talked. Claudia’s queries were easier to answer than Drake’s interrogation the previous day. She didn’t judge every word I spoke. She just wanted the facts, and she wanted them in the right order. Biography writing had made her as nosy as all get-out about other people’s lives—not everyone, just those she was interested in.

“So how does your niece feel about finding herself in the middle of this?”

“She’s resilient. It's like a murder mystery to her. She doesn’t know any of these people.” I shivered, despite the warm sunshine. “She doesn’t realize I went through something similar last fall.” The rows of corn and melons were neat and weed-free, freshly hilled up. The dark earth had its own fragrance, and I enjoyed it while I could; the next step was to hoe in a little fish meal.

Claudia frowned. “Why haven’t you told her?”

“It’s not that I’m sheltering her or anything. It’s just that she and her mother go at it hammer and tongs to the point where ordinary conversation is impossible.” I got up, stretched the kinks out of my back and headed for the greenhouse at the rear of Claudia’s big yard.

She followed me. “Nevertheless, Liz, it’s a mistake to assume teenagers aren’t tuned in to what’s going on.”

“If I tell her, I have to tell her mom, and I can’t face it.” I filled Claudia in on the invasion of Renee. “Last night she and Amy fought and fought. I can’t even go in my room and close the door, because the bathroom opens from my bedroom and they were storming back and forth from there. I didn’t realize before that the bathroom was so heavily used by middle-class women and their offspring.”

“Bathroom and kitchen, women’s traditional territory.” Claudia spoke absently, watching as I rooted through the coffee cans and paper bags stored under the potting shelf in the greenhouse. Last week we had started flats of lettuce; the seedlings were just peeking above the soil. That was one bright spot in my dull and ever more endangered existence.

“And parlor—don’t forget the parlor.” I found the coffee can of fish meal.

“And the kitchen garden, of course.” Claudia wrinkled her nose at the sight of the fish meal. “Think I’ll get some iced tea. You want a glass, Liz?”

“Sure.” I wished I could escape the fish meal, but someone had to fertilize the corn and melons. It didn’t take long. I raked in the meal, spread some compost on top to keep the neighborhood cats out, and joined Claudia in the kitchen.

“I called Bridget,” Claudia said. “For once she was home on a Saturday morning. She’s coming over.”

I took the glass of tea she handed me. "That's nice. Why?”

“Because you have to be proactive, Liz. People take advantage of women who don’t stand up for themselves. That meathead Drake could very well decide to make you the scapegoat, like he tried to last time.”

“Boy, don’t you hate when that happens?”

“Stop it.” Claudia looked at me over her bifocals. “Clowning around won't make this go away. This last poisoning could be pinned on you—you had opportunity. We have to plan your strategy.”

I opened the refrigerator so I could stick my hot face in its cool interior. “Have you got any lemons?”

“Liz. Why can’t you see that somebody at that company may want you to take the blame?”

 “Claudia, it’s just possible that Jenifer’s death was  suicide—the most the police will say is that the evidence is ambiguous, and maybe someone fed her a bunch of pills when she was groggy from a doctored drink. Why? Why would anyone want to kill a nice young girl like her? What could she have that anyone would want to kill her for?”

“Was she raped? Hurt?” Claudia leaned against the kitchen counter. From the open kitchen door came the deep, thundering roar that is Bridget’s elderly Suburban coasting to a stop.

“No.” I watched the door. “Nothing like that. Just dead. Very neatly, peacefully dead." I thought about Jenifer lying there in front of the sofa. “She was wearing a bathrobe— looked like she’d had a shower, gotten her nightie on ready for bed. The same way she looked that noon.”

Bridget came up the steps. Her arms were empty—no baby, no little boy clinging to her hand. “Now, what’s this, Liz? Why didn’t you tell me things were getting worse?”

"They’re not—not for me. Nobody’s trying to kill me.” I took another sip of iced tea while Claudia poured Bridget a glass. “But Claudia thinks I need saving anyway.”

“Your party the other night.” Claudia ignored my chaffing. “Ed Garfield was there, Liz says. Who else from his company?”

Bridget thought. “I don’t really know any of them but Ed and Suzanne—we meet them sometimes at industry whizbangs. Let’s see, Suzanne was at the party, wasn’t she? Yes, I spoke to her. She spent most of the time standing in the corner with a beer.”

Claudia set a bag of pretzels and half a box of Girl Scout cookies on the table. “Who did she talk to?”

“All I noticed was that she watched Ed.” Bridget took a pretzel out of the bag. “They lived together for years and years. I remember one night a few years ago we saw them in St. Michael’s Alley. It was soon after we’d seen Steve Jobs there, and Emery pointed out Ed and Suzanne and said they were starting a new company, and maybe one of them was the next Steve Jobs.”

“A great honor, I’m sure.” Claudia selected a pretzel after much careful scrutiny. “Who, pray tell, is Steve Jobs?”

Bridget rolled her eyes. “Never mind. Anyway, I thought that was interesting, because she’s the programming brains of the two. Emery said Ed is better at the marketing stuff.”

Claudia looked up from her pad. With paper and pencil, she’s at her most formidable. “Just a minute. I thought this dead girl was Garfield’s girlfriend.”

"That was what I heard at the office, that he was romancing her and she was up for it.” The iced tea glass was cold and as wet as Barker’s nose in my hand. “But before that, he was supposed to have been Clarice’s boyfriend. Jenifer’s roommate.”

“Probably he was,” Bridget said, nodding. “Emery said there was a lot of gossip about SoftWrite when they broke up—about whether they’d split the company like Solomon’s baby or keep on. And Ed started playing the field like a maniac—he had a lot of status dates. Rumor had it that Suzanne was pretty depressed about it all.”

“So there.” Claudia looked at me triumphantly. “We’ve only been at it for less than an hour, and we’ve already got a great suspect to take your place, Liz—this Suzanne. She had motive, opportunity, and she’s a smart woman, which means nothing is beyond her. You’re safe.”

“Yeah, but I don’t think Suzanne would do things like this.” I shoved my glass away. “She’s not matey, exactly, but she wouldn’t kill someone out of jealousy. I don’t think so. And she wouldn’t poison Ed, would she? Not if she killed Jenifer to get him back?”

“Ed was poisoned?” Bridget put down her glass and stared at me. “I didn’t know about this.”

"Yesterday afternoon. He survived. But another guy died—the HR manager.”

Before Bridget could answer, Claudia cocked her head toward the front of the house, and then we all heard it—the faint sound of the front door knocker.

“Salesman, probably.” Claudia looked at me. “Liz, do you mind? Your legs are younger.”

I didn’t mind, especially when I opened the front door and found Amy there. “Amy! How did you know Claudia’s address?”

“I looked it up in your Mr. Drake’s phone book.” Amy was all but wringing her hands. “Aunt Liz, while I was watering the flowers you told me to, he came out, and asked me all these questions about what we did last Thursday. I said my mom would be out pretty soon, and he told me to come to his house, so I did, even though I thought it might be the wrong thing, but he made me write down what we did—you know, when we went to the grocery store and then to your friend’s, and when we came home, and what times and everything!”

I led Amy back through the hall as she spoke. When we got to the kitchen, mercifully, she’d reached the end of her story. “Hello, Mrs. Montrose,” she said dutifully to Bridget. “Hello, Mrs. Kaplan. Sorry to barge in on you.”

Claudia looked gracious at this scanty evidence of manners still existing in the young. “It’s quite all right,” she said, gesturing to the refreshments. “Have a cookie or a pretzel. Did you say Detective Drake was asking you about Liz’s movements?”

Amy sat down in my chair and reached for the pretzels. “Yes, he was! Why, Aunt Liz? Is this about that girl who died? I thought she died the day before.”

“The police are checking into another death they think might be related.”

Amy’s eyes grew round. “Do they think you killed the body? I mean—”

“No, they don’t.” I was speaking more to Claudia. “They talk to everyone who ever saw or spoke to the person. It doesn’t mean they suspect me.”

“You have to protect yourself.” Claudia sounded determined. “You should go back and tell him this Suzanne is at least as good a suspect as you.”

“Who’s Suzanne?” Amy crunched her pretzel. “Oh, I know. Suzanne Hamner from SoftWrite. They mentioned her in that
Barron's
article I told you about Thursday night. I went back to the library and looked it up again yesterday. It
was
SoftWrite—the Palo Alto firm that’s going public.”

“Suzanne was in
Barron's ?”

“No, mostly they talked about that guy who came to the house Thursday—the hunky one.” Amy glanced at me slyly. “I told Aunt Liz he liked her.
Barron's
said he was one of Silicon Valley’s brilliant young executives. Their initial offering is expected to go like hotcakes.”

I somehow couldn’t tell Amy that the brilliant young executive was recovering from strychnine poisoning. “The phones were sure busy yesterday. I thought it was because of their new release.”

“Yeah, that, too.” Amy took a Thin Mint and sniffed it suspiciously. “Is this one of those Girl Scout cookies? Oh.” She put it on the napkin in front of her and had another pretzel. “The article said they would really cash in big.”

“There! You see?” Claudia was triumphant. “Suzanne wants her cash that she’s been working for and putting up with all this humiliation for. But somehow Jenifer stands in the way, so she has to kill her.”

“Shaky.” I got to my feet. “Don’t worry, Claudia. I won’t let them bully me. Thanks for the help, Biddy. Amy, you can ride back with me if you want.”

Amy stood up, too, and politely thanked Claudia. Her manners when her mother wasn’t in the room were really very good. “I need to go downtown, Aunt Liz. I have to get some things for Monday.” Fidelity had come through with the internship, and Amy was already anticipating her tiny salary. “I can walk if you don’t want to drop me off.”

“I’ll take you. I’ve got to work on my census register.”

I had the paperwork and a clean T-shirt in the bus. But the register wasn’t the only reason I was going back to Jenifer’s neighborhood. There was someone there I wanted to talk to, someone who maybe could tell me what anyone had to gain from killing her.

Chapter 24

Curtis Hall opened his front door as far as the chain would allow. He was surprised to see me.

“It’s Ms.—Sullivan, isn’t it? You know, the police have been around here asking about you.”

I noticed he wasn’t taking the chain off the door. “Have they? That doesn’t surprise me. Didn’t they ask about everyone else, too?”

“Well, yes.” He looked a trifle friendlier. “They made me feel incredibly guilty, and I didn’t do anything.”

“It’s their way.” I glanced at the bench beside the door. “Can we sit out here and talk for a moment? I admit, I’m just here for the gossip. It’s so strange to know that people are dead, maybe murdered, and not have the details.”

He hesitated. “Actually, ghoulish as it seems, I’d like to talk it over, too.” The door closed briefly, then opened without the chain. “Come on in. I was just about to have a cup of coffee. Care to join me?”

“No thanks.” I followed him into the living room I remembered from last time, its white walls and bold artwork like an oasis in a sea of suburban mediocrity. “I will take a glass of water, though.”

“Pellegrino or Perrier?” Curtis was in the kitchen. I didn’t follow him; plainly he was a little spooked by me, and I didn’t want to make it worse.

“Wet is all I care about.” His laugh floated into the room, and then he came in, carrying a tinkling glass and a cup for himself.

“So.” He sat in the other chair and looked at me expectantly. “I’ll be glad to gossip for you—I know practically nothing anyway. But you’ll have to shake loose, too.”

“What did they tell you?” I sipped the water. It tasted like fizzy tap water, as far as my untutored palate could tell.

“The detective that came—the same guy who was here the night you found Jenifer—”