Murder is a Girl's Best Friend (5 page)

“You told this to the police?”

“Of course I did! I told them a lot more, too. They just chose not to listen.”

“Who did you speak to?” I nervously inquired. “Who was the detective in charge?” Since my homicide detective boyfriend’s precinct didn’t encompass West 26th, I was certain it wasn’t Dan Street, but I held my breath and mentally crossed my fingers anyway.

“Sweeny,” Terry said. “Detective Sergeant Hugo Sweeny. ”

Whew!
My relief was palpable. I was eager to help Terry if I could, and I was raring to pursue the story of his sister’s murder, but if Dan had been working on the case, I would have had to decline. I would have had to bow out completely—or at least
pretend
to. Even with Dan
not
directly involved, I’d have a lot of pretending to do . . .

“What makes you so sure Detective Sweeny is wrong?” I asked, snatching my cigarettes out of my purse and lighting one up. “Maybe the burglar shot Judy the minute she saw him, before she could put up a struggle, or react in any way to what was happening.” I offered Terry a smoke, but he didn’t seem to notice.

“I could believe that if the shooting had been sloppy,” he said, becoming more agitated, “if at least one of the bullets had missed the heart and hit her shoulder, say, or her leg. But both slugs hit dead center, and they were fired at close range. Judy wasn’t killed by a burglar,” Terry insisted. “Whoever shot her stole her purse and watch just to make it
look
like a burglary!” His face wasn’t as white as his hair anymore. Now it was chili-pepper red.

“Was her apartment ransacked?” I asked, keeping my tone as calm and professional as possible.

“The place was a mess,” he said. “At least that’s what the police told me. They said everything was turned upside down. And I believe them, since the apartment was a wreck when I got here. The police were responsible for some of the disorder themselves, of course—they had rummaged through everything looking for clues—but they weren’t the cause of the major destruction.
That
was the murderer’s handiwork.”

“Was anything else taken?” I asked, still exploring the burglary angle.

“I don’t know for sure, but I doubt it. Judy never owned anything worth stealing. She was a salesgirl in the lingerie department at Macy’s, and she didn’t make much money at all. I don’t even know how she could afford to rent her own apartment. She used to room with two other girls down on 19th Street, but she moved out and took her own place a few months ago.” Terry pulled a paper napkin out of the table dispenser and dabbed it over his perspiring forehead.

“Anyway,” he went on, “it doesn’t matter if anything else was stolen or not, because if it was, it was taken just for show. This was no burglary, I’m telling you! Judy was intentionally
murdered!
And her apartment was trashed because the murderer was looking for something specific—something he never was able to find.”

Terry was so adamantly convinced of his theory, I found it hard to argue with him. “What do you mean by
something specific?
” I asked, crushing my half-smoked cigarette in the glass ashtray. “Do you know what the murderer was looking for? And how do you know he never found it?”

“Because I found it myself!” Terry declared. He locked his eyes onto mine and pierced me with his pure blue stare.

“Go on,” I coaxed. “Tell me everything.”

“I’ve been living in Judy’s apartment for the past three weeks,” he began, speaking very slowly and intently now. “I had to come into town to identify her body . . . then I stayed on to make her burial arrangements . . . sell off her furniture and stuff . . . pack up her clothes for Goodwill . . . clean all her blood off the carpet . . .” His chin started trembling again. “I had to dispose of the food and pack up the dishes—clear everything out of the apartment for the landlord. That’s when I discovered it, when I was sorting through the stuff in the kitchen cabinets.”

“Discovered what?” I urged, acting as solemn as Madame Curie, but feeling as sleazy as Hedda Hopper. I probably shouldn’t admit this to you (or anybody else, for that matter), but rather than shrinking from the horror of the things Terry was telling me, I was yearning to know all the dirty details. The truth is always lurking in the details. “What was it you found?” I asked again.

Terry sat up straight, lifted his chin, and squared his wide, muscular shoulders. “The buried treasure,” he announced in a deep, resounding, pirate-like voice. “I found the buried treasure.”

I thought my ears weren’t working right. “What did you say?”

“I found it yesterday afternoon,” he went on, “wrapped in tissue paper and buried in a box of Quaker oatmeal.”

“Oatmeal?” I asked, suddenly wondering if, along with his courage, Terry had lost his marbles in Korea, too.

“I took everything, including the oatmeal, straight to the police first thing this morning,” Terry rattled on, “but they still don’t believe me. They said this doesn’t prove anything. They’re so damn sure Judy was killed during a random robbery, nothing’s ever going to change their minds!” His face was turning purple now.

“What—exactly—did—you—find?” I pronounced the words calmly and carefully, as though speaking to a hysterical child.

“Here! I’ll show you!” he cried, in a voice so clamorous the fat gray-haired woman sitting to our right looked up from her macaroni and cheese and gaped openly at us, her heavily rouged cheeks sagging in surprise. She continued to stare as Terry shoved his hat and gloves aside and slid the Thom McAn shoebox into the center of our small table. He untied the twine, lifted the lid, and pulled out a cylindrical cardboard Quaker oatmeal container.

“Go ahead, open it!” Terry said, pushing the round, red-white-and-blue cereal box toward me. “See for yourself what’s inside.”

I was so curious I wanted to seize the carton, yank off the top, and dump the contents out on the table. But I didn’t want to make a mess. Or a scene. And I didn’t want the nosy old girl sitting next to us to see what was in the box. I mean, what if it was something really gruesome—a mutilated ear, or a severed toe, or something horrible like that? (I had just written a story about a recent murder case in which a plucked eyeball had provided the major clue, so I
wasn’t
being overly imaginative.)

Carefully pulling the container in close to my chest, I propped my elbows on either side and hunched my shoulders over the top, creating a darker, more private space. Then I sank my head low over the carton and slowly, gingerly, removed the saucer-shaped lid.

The dusty smell of oatmeal was distinct. And there, sitting on top of at least three inches of grain, was a crumpled mass of white tissue paper which, I discovered as soon as I touched it, contained something hard and beady and prickly, something that moved when I poked it with my forefinger. Overcome with curiosity, I stuck all of my fingers into the cardboard cylinder and pried a wide opening in the tissue paper, exposing the contents of the crumpled package.

I was bedazzled. Even in the confined space and murky shadows of my lowered head and hunched shoulders, the mound of diamonds sparkled, sending a thousand tiny but brilliant shafts of light into my astonished, disbelieving eyes.

“Are these real?” I gasped. “Or are they rhinestones?”

“They’re real,” Terry said. “I had them appraised before I showed them to the police. There’s a necklace, a pin, a pair of earrings, and two bracelets. Altogether, they’re worth about thirty thousand dollars.”

“Wow.” I wanted to take the diamonds out of the oatmeal carton and examine them more closely, but I didn’t dare. I thought the snoopy old lady sitting next to us might see them and swoon, her heavily rouged face landing smack in the middle of her mac and cheese casserole.

“There’s no way on earth Judy could have bought that jewelry herself,” Terry said, in a calmer, more serious tone. “So it was either given to her by somebody who’s very rich, or it was stolen.”

“Could she have stolen it herself?”

“No! Absolutely not. Judy would never steal anything. She was a bit on the wild side, but she was no thief. She
could,
however, have been talked into hiding stolen goods for somebody else—if that somebody was a man, and if she fancied herself to be in love with him. Judy would do anything for the man she loved, even if she’d only just met him, and loved him for just a few hours. That’s just the way she was. Every time she fell for a guy—which was way too often, if you ask me—she gave herself to him completely.”

“Was she in love at the time of the murder?”

“Not according to Mrs. Londergan, the older woman—a widow—who lives across the hall. She told us—me and Detective Sweeny—that she and Judy had developed a very close relationship, a mother/daughter kind of thing. She said my sister often confided in her, and she claimed Judy definitely wasn’t involved with anybody at the time of her death. She was, as Mrs. Londergan put it, “between boyfriends.”

“That implies a new boyfriend was on the horizon.”

“With my sister, a new boyfriend was
always
on the horizon.”

“Did Judy ever have any
rich
boyfriends?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did Mrs. Londergan know?”

Terry shook his head and shrugged. “I never asked her. Before I found the jewelry I had no reason to ask her, and after I found it I had no time to ask her. I didn’t discover the diamonds until late yesterday afternoon, remember, and after that I was so busy getting them appraised, and taking them to the police, and trying to convince Detective Sweeny they proved that Judy was murdered—and then, when he didn’t believe me, trying to contact
you
—that I never had a chance to speak to Mrs. Londergan again.”

“I’m surprised Sweeny didn’t confiscate the diamonds.”

“He did.”

“What?!!!”

“He said he was going to catalog them and keep them as possible evidence, but I knew by the way he was acting he’d just stick them away in a locker somewhere, never use them to try to solve the case. So when he left his office to get the proper forms to fill out, I grabbed the oatmeal container off his desk, stuffed it back in the shoebox, snuck down the hall, and scrammed.”

“Pretty nervy,” I said, smiling. “I thought you said you were a coward.”

Terry smiled back. “Only when I’m being shot at.”

I found his motive noble and his conduct commendable, but I knew the police wouldn’t see it that way. “Does Sweeny know where you live?” I asked him.

“Of course. He questioned me extensively the first time we met.”

“Then he’ll come after you, you know. He probably won’t sleep a wink till he gets the diamonds back. He may even arrest you—for theft, or tampering with evidence, or some such charge.”

“I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.”

I peered down into the oatmeal box and took a long, lingering look at the tangled heap of glittering gems. Then I scrunched the surrounding tissue paper back together, put the top back on the cereal box, tapped it down tight, and slid the closed container across the table to Terry.

“Better put these someplace safe,” I said. “Someplace safer than a shoebox.”

“No!” he cried, pushing the oatmeal carton back in my direction. “I brought them for you. I want you to keep them.”

“Are you nuts?!!!” I gulped, beginning to believe that he really was. “I can’t possibly do that! Those diamonds don’t belong to you. They’re not yours to give away.”

“I don’t mean that you should keep them forever,” Terry quickly interjected. “I just want you to keep them till the case is solved. They’re the only real clue we have. You’ll need them to catch Judy’s murderer.”

I’d been afraid he was going to say something like that—something about me chasing down Judy’s killer. And I guess I’d known from the moment he told me about the murder that
that
was what he wanted me to do. But I also knew that I was a writer—
not
a detective—and even though I had, by some incredible, unimaginable fluke, managed to flush out the psycho who had murdered Babs Comstock (and who then almost murdered
me!
), that didn’t mean I’d ever in a hundred million years be able to uncover (much less
catch!
) the monster who killed Terry’s sister. And even if I
did
catch him, what was I supposed to do with him? Pronounce him guilty and lock him up for life in my broom closet?

“Hold it right there!” I said, sticking my hand up like a stop sign. “
You’re
the one named Catcher, not me! And maybe you haven’t noticed, Mr. Catcher, but I’m a journalist, not a cop. I don’t
solve
crimes, I just write stories about them.”

“Yes, but you do it so well. And you do it here in Manhattan, so you know how the city’s criminal justice system works. And Bob said you’re a
very
tenacious investigator. The word he used was ‘relentless.’ He said that once you start searching for something—a lost key, a lost soul, even a hopelessly lost cause—you never give up. You stick to the bitter end. And that’s what I need—someone who believes that my sister was deliberately murdered and who will stop at nothing to prove it.”

“Yikes!” I cried, suddenly catching a glimpse of the big chrome-rimmed clock on the wall. “It’s two-fifteen! I’ve got to get back to the office immediately.” I shoved my arms into my coat sleeves, grabbed my purse and gloves, and bounced to my feet like a startled kangaroo. “I’m not kidding, Terry. I have to go right now. I could lose my job for staying out so long.”

 

Terry looked at his watch. “Good God! I didn’t realize it was so late! I’ve got to go, too, or I’ll miss my bus.” He shoved the oatmeal container back into the shoebox and slapped his hat on his head. Then he jumped up from his chair, picked up his gloves and the shoebox, and followed close behind me as I lurched away from the table and hurried through the still-crowded restaurant to the exit.

 

“But what about my sister?” he begged, bounding ahead to open the door for me. “Will you at least
try
to dig up some new evidence—something that will convince the police to get back to work on the case?”