Murder Most Mellow (A Kate Jasper Mystery) (33 page)

- Twenty-Four -

I glanced at my watch anxiously and accelerated my pace toward home. It was twelve thirty. That meant Vivian would be cleaning for the unhappy parents of the bride-to-be that she had mentioned yesterday. I could probably catch her there. But what was their name? I stopped for a minute to remember, but my brain refused to cooperate. My brain could tell me the name of the woman who played Beaver Cleaver’s mother in another decade, but it had forgotten a name uttered less than twenty-four hours ago. I cursed to myself and stomped the rest of the way home in disgust.

I was climbing the front stairs when the name surfaced. Kornberg, that was it! I hurried into the house and grabbed my phone book. There was only one listing for Kornberg in Marin. Barring the chance of unlisted Kornbergs, these had to be the ones. I briefly wondered whether I should intrude on Vivian while she was working, but only briefly. My need to know had overwhelmed my sense of courtesy. I put on my glasses, got in the car, and drove in search of the Kornberg residence.

The address from the phone book was in the upscale end of Marin. I drove through miles of sparsely populated rolling hills until I reached the black wrought-iron gates that guarded the Kornberg residence. My heart did an anticipatory leap when I saw Vivian’s Datsun in the driveway. Information Central was in. The iron gates were open a few feet. I climbed out of my car, pushed them open further, and drove up the long driveway to park behind Vivian’s car.

As I rang the doorbell of the impressive three-story glass-and-redwood structure, I realized I was going to feel pretty foolish if anyone but Vivian answered. I figured I could always pretend I was collecting for charity. But it was indeed Vivian who greeted me at the door, holding a bottle of Windex in one hand and the working end of a vacuum cleaner in the other. I breathed a sigh of relief. My relief was short-lived.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Vivian snarled.

I decided to skip the pleasantries and get straight to the point. I pushed my way past her into the house. She turned to glare at me.

“Vivian, I talked to Jerry’s wife,” I said carefully, watching her face. “She told me what he called about.”

Vivian’s tan skin paled to a sickly yellow. Her pupils contracted. I was still watching her face, fascinated, when she jerked the Windex bottle up to my eye level and squeezed the trigger.

I saw the blur of spray and smelled the ammonia in the same instant. A millisecond later the cold spray hit my face. But it didn’t reach my eyes. I had my new glasses on.

I could taste ammonia, though. I spit it out and wiped my face with the back of my hand frantically. Then I yanked my wet glasses off, clearing my vision just in time to see Vivian drop the Windex bottle and grasp the long neck of the vacuum cleaner with both hands.

I turned and stepped to the side without thinking. The beater brush crashed down in front of me.

“Vivian, I’ve written it all down—” I began.

She wasn’t listening. She lunged at me, muscled arms outstretched. I backstepped quickly. She tripped over the vacuum cleaner cord and hurtled to the ground. A sound of startled pain and rage erupted from her lips.

“—in a letter,” I finished. “They’ll know what happened. They know I was coming here. It’s no good,” I told her.

“You and your goddamn tai chi!” she screamed. Her eyes looked strange again as she looked up at me, wide and unfocused like they’d been at Nick’s house. But now I recognized the expression. It was pure hatred.

“Vivian…” I said gently, then faltered. What words could help her now?

“Why didn’t you just keep your nose out of it!” she screeched. “I left you three messages.”

“It’ll be all right,” I lied softly.

“SHIT!” she roared.

“Oh, Vivian, I still can’t believe it was you,” I burst out. “I really do like you, for God’s sake!”

It might have been the sincerity of my last words, or maybe just the knowledge that her mistakes were irrevocable. Vivian bent her head and exploded into loud and wrenching sobs. I sat down next to her on the carpeted floor. My own eyes were watering profusely. I told myself it was just the ammonia fumes. The skin on my face was beginning to burn too. I pulled an old wadded-up Kleenex out of my pocket to wipe my face. Vivian wordlessly handed me a damp cloth to better do the job.

We sat on the floor, side by side, for some time. I wiped my face and she massaged her hurt knees. I could smell her acrid sweat over the tang of ammonia.

“Why?” I asked finally.

“That bitch couldn’t even keep her fuckin’ house clean!” Vivian bawled. Her face tightened as she turned toward me.

I kept quiet and waited for more.

“Prosperity consciousness. Bullshit!” Vivian shouted. She turned her head away from me again. But I could still see the angry sneer that twisted her face as she stared across the room.

“All the time telling me to ‘just open up to the universe.’ Asking me why I was blocking my own success. And then, finally, she got disgusted with me because I
chose
to be poor.” Vivian pounded her fist on the thick carpet. “She turned her back on me, goddammit! No more pep talks. Just ‘Clean my house and shut up.’ I was the fuckin’ hired help again.”

Vivian turned her head toward me once more. Her eyes were glazed, her face distorted by rage.

“Prosperity consciousness, when I can barely afford to live in Marin!” she cried. “My whole apartment is smaller than Sarah’s living room.”

Then suddenly all the anger, all the spirit, seemed to drain from her. Her body slumped, deflated. She dropped her gaze to the floor.

“It was the same thing when I was in high school,” Vivian explained in a subdued voice. I wasn’t sure if she was explaining to me or to herself. “I went to Woodside with all the rich kids. Only I wasn’t rich. They all lived in nice houses, like this one.” She waved her hand. I noticed the well-appointed living room for the first time.

“There were only a few of us from across the tracks,” Vivian droned on. “I remember inviting one of the rich kids over to my parents’ apartment. She couldn’t believe our whole family lived in an apartment. Apartments were for when you moved out from home, for fun, not for families.”

As she continued, her speech grew more slow and monotonous, her eyes unfocused, rounded and shining. She was seeing something I wasn’t. I couldn’t control the shudder that came with the realization that I was no longer watching my friend Vivian, but a murderer.

“I could steal the clothes to keep up, but it still wasn’t the same,” she said quietly. “They still had the cars. And the dates.”

Her torso spasmed suddenly, as if someone had grabbed her shoulders and given her a quick shake. Anger came back into her voice. “And then Sarah with her new investment program,” she snarled. “Do you know how much money you can make off of something like that? And she was already rich. She didn’t deserve it.
I
deserved it. I know computers backwards and forwards. But nobody will hire me ‘cause I’m self-taught, a hacker. I have a right to just one break, don’t I? Just one good program?” She looked into my face, searching for something, maybe approval, then turned away again, disappointed.

“It should have been mine,” she insisted sullenly. “So I took it.” The spirit seemed to have left her voice again. It was flat as she continued her story. “Sarah noticed somehow. She asked me if I’d been at her computer. I told her I hadn’t, but she didn’t believe me. She just smiled that weird-ass smile of hers and told me to be careful what reality I created. Said she’d take legal steps if I tried to sell her program.”

“It’s worthless, you know,” Vivian sighed, turning to face me again. She looked tired, haggard even. But at least her eyes were seeing me. “Totally worthless without channels of distribution. That’s what my brother-in-law said when I took the program to him. He said it was too dependent on the intuition of the average investor.” She shook her head. “No software house would touch it. He said if someone had already established channels of distribution, it might make some money. But for me, nothing.

“Worthless, all worthless. I thought maybe Nick and me…” she trailed off, her face softening a little as she spoke of Nick. She stroked her own cheek with one hand absently. “But, no, not even Nick. All worthless.”

“So you programmed her robot to kill her?”

“Yeah, I did,” she answered, her eyes narrowing. “But I warned her first. I sent her a message. I taped it from an old Bette Davis movie.” Vivian laughed bitterly. “Sarah ignored the message. She never even mentioned it. So I decided to kill her with her own fuckin’ robot.”

Vivian’s eyes searched mine again. I couldn’t approve, but I was beginning to understand. It’s all too easy to insist that success is a matter of will when you’re successful. The concept must have felt like salt on an open wound to Vivian. She was the outsider looking in, gazing at the lush fruits of success from the vantage point of poverty. Relative poverty, I corrected myself. Vivian wasn’t poor except by Marin’s standards. I stroked her shoulder gently, wondering what had drawn her to a place where she would always be relatively poor.

“I wasn’t really sure the robot would kill her,” Vivian said softly. “It was kinda like flipping a coin. If it did, I thought maybe it would mean I deserved the program, deserved success.” She shrugged her shoulders, “if it didn’t, I thought maybe it’d be sorta a joke, you know.” She shook her head sadly. “But it worked. The one thing I do right in my life, and it’s wrong. God, when I found her body I was so sorry, but it was too late.”

She clapped one hand over her face and began to sob again, more quietly this time. I put my arm around her shoulders.

“What about Jerry?” I asked after her tears had subsided.

Vivian jerked her head up. “I heard his message on your tape,” she explained, her husky voice full of mucus. She stared out across the room, unseeing. “You never rewound it before you left. So I did it for you after I finished cleaning. I had to listen to the old messages to make sure I didn’t erase anything important.”

She sniffled loudly. I handed her my Kleenex. She paused to blow her nose, then went on in a near whisper.

“Once I heard Jerry, I knew he must have seen me working at Sarah’s computer while she was gone. I spent a lot of time at her computer, copying her stuff and programming the robot. I even copied her will. Nobody from the outside ever would have noticed me in there. But Jerry was working inside the hedges.

“I went to talk to him. I knew where to find him. He always did Bolinas Avenue on Mondays.” Her body tensed as she remembered. “He said no problem, he wouldn’t tell anyone about seeing me if… if I’d sleep with him. I don’t think he knew I killed Sarah. He just thought I stole from her. And he was an ugly toad!” Her hands clenched into fists, bunching up the muscles on her arms. “I climbed onto the bed of the truck and hit him with his own shovel. The fucker deserved it!”

Her eyes were wide and unfocused again. I was frightened. I took my arm away from her shoulders carefully.

“I’m going to call the police now,” I said as calmly as I could.

“Yeah, I guess you have to,” she responded lifelessly.

I called the Marin County Sheriff’s Department and told them I was sitting with the murderer of Sarah Quinn and Jerry Gold.

I could hear excited voices and sounds of scurrying in the background. As police cars were dispatched I was advised to leave the house and leave the house fast. The voice on the line assured me that they would take care of things from here on out. I thanked the voice politely for the advice, hung up, and went back to sit with Vivian.

“Did you set my woodpile on fire?” I asked as I sat back down a few yards away from her. I kept my tone easy, friendly.

“Yeah,” she answered sullenly. “I had to. You wouldn’t stop nosing around.”

“But I could have been burned alive!” I protested, my tone no longer easy.

“No,” Vivian said, shaking her head. Her eyes filled with hurt. “I knocked on your door and made sure you were awake before I left.” She extended a hand toward me, but I was sitting too far away for her to touch. She drew her hand back and sighed.

“You’re my friend,” she said softly. “I wouldn’t have killed you. I just wanted you to stop.”

I heard the truth in her sad voice. I scooted closer and reached out to her. She grasped my hand for a moment, then let it go.

“Did you try to kill me with a potted plant?” I asked. I had to know.

“What the hell are you talking about?” she demanded irritably. I was relieved by her tone. She sounded like her old self again. Then I heard the police sirens.

“Did you shred my macrame?” I pressed her.

“Jesus, ain’t it bad enough that I’ve killed two people?” Vivian drawled. “Now you wanna blame me for your macrame.” She even managed a wan smile.

Vivian and I stood up together. I put my arms around her and hugged her tight as the police cars sirened up the driveway. She was shaking in my arms. I heard the sound of running footsteps and released her gently. Vivian’s eyes looked like a child’s as they widened with fear and uncertainty. My insides knotted.

In no more than an instant, the Kornbergs’ house was filled with the noisy activity of police and Sheriff’s personnel. A couple of uniformed sheriffs separated me from Vivian and took me into the shining stainless steel, glass-and-ceramic kitchen. I could smell the herbs and garlic that were artistically festooned on one wall and the cleanser from the recently scrubbed sink. Poor Vivian.