The Bohemian Connection (23 page)

“So you killed him?”

She flashed that smile again, like a paper floating over a fire. “It was easy. He didn’t expect it. I hit him with a pipe, just like Michelle. You don’t have to hit them as hard as you’d think. You don’t have to kill them that way. You just have to stun them and drop the body into the slime. The slime does the rest. It was so easy. So nice. So appropriate. It was so good, so right to see Ross dead. Even Daddy would have agreed.”

She continued to smile, more concretely now, as if the recitation of facts was pulling her back toward reality. “There was dirt piled right beside the cesspool hole, just waiting. I didn’t shovel much in over him. Just enough to cover him. Then I drove to the hospital. If Ross had taken me to the hospital, I wouldn’t have had to drive alone. I wouldn’t have killed him, you see. But he wasn’t going to.”

“What happened to his Bohemian Connection records? Did you just leave them in the house?”

“Yes. There was no need to do anything else with them.”

“And then you became the Bohemian Connection?”

Jenny laughed. “Ross would have been so angry. He was going to have an auction for the job. That’s why he came home. He was going to call some of his suppliers and have them come over and bid for the job. But he didn’t get the chance. I killed him first.” She laughed again. “Sometimes I wish he hadn’t died, so he could see me. He would be so furious. He thought he was keeping everything so secret, like he was this big important man with his clandestine job. But I always knew where he kept things. When I was in the house, watching that crazy woman, I’d take out his boxes and go through his records.”

“And the people he dealt with, did they think he had passed the job on to you?”

“They didn’t care. They knew me. They trusted me as much as they trusted Ross, maybe more. By that time I knew more about the area than he did. They’d seen me with him. The local people knew we didn’t get along, but the out-of-towners didn’t. They just knew I was his sister. If they called the Bohemian Connection’s number, I answered.”

The whole operation was becoming clear. She was right; it was so simple. “So the men who needed to contact you came up to you on the sidewalk and had their pictures sketched, right?” How many times had I seen an unlikely subject in Jenny’s chair? How often had I noticed a man handing her
a
bill, a bill for an eight-dollar sketch, and getting no change?

“It wasn’t just for the money.” Jenny stared at me, a pleading look in her eyes. “I did like taking Ross’s job. I did need the money. Ward never could keep his mind on the little matters of business that make the money to live on. With him it was always Sunset Villas, or high-rises, or pie-in-the-sky things. We could never have lived on his commission from selling houses. But that wasn’t the real reason. Those men I met, they were important. Sooner or later one of them would be an artist, or a gallery owner, or a critic, and he would see my work, and he would appreciate it like no one in this little town does, and then he would arrange for me to show it in a city, where an artist should be. You see that, don’t you?”

“You did all this for your art.”

She smiled. She looked down at the gun, then at my face again. Her finger arched on the trigger. She lowered the barrel toward my heart.

“Jenny,” I said, trying to keep my voice even, “you promised to sketch me, remember?”

“No, you just wanted to nose around.” She straightened her arm, moving the gun closer to me.

“But I wanted your drawing, too. Don’t you remember I told you I’d looked at artists doing drawings of people when I was a kid. But I was too young then. I didn’t have the money for a drawing—not a good drawing—not one by an artist with talent.”

Her eyes narrowed. I tried to tell from her expression how much touch with reality she still had. Would my reasoning make any difference? Or had the thrill of death become too strong?

“It’ll only take a few minutes,” I said.

She glanced from my face to the sketch pad.

“You’ve got your sketch pad. Your charcoal is here. Mine is the only face you’ll have to sketch as long as you stay here.”

Jenny laughed. “I can draw you day after day. I’ve never done a dead person. I’ve never drawn a corpse as it decays, as the skin droops in around the bones. You have good bones.”

I swallowed hard. “Corpses smell, Jenny.”

“I’m an artist. A real artist suffers for her art.” Her eyes looked at once blurry and piercing, as if they had honed in on some private truth, leaving reality behind. She was as crazy as her mother.

“And there are holes in the cemetery,” she said. “When they dig a hole the earth is soft. I can add another corpse. I like holes.”

The cemetery was full. But I didn’t want to keep Jenny concentrating on methods of my disposal. I needed her diverted, not thinking of me. I said, “Did you like putting Michelle in the sewer hole?

“I had to. There was no place else. It was Ward’s fault. Like everything.” With her free hand she extricated a piece of charcoal from the pack, keeping her eyes and her gun on me. “He invited those people, those Underwoods, for the weekend. He didn’t ask me if it was convenient. My busiest week, and he invites strangers, and then expects me to entertain them, to be there listening to their bourgeois talk, to cook for them. I had to make dinner. I had to sit and watch their bland faces as they talked, and listen to Ward go on and on about floor plans and unit sizes and access and variances. I thought I couldn’t stand another word. But then they went to bed. They were old. They didn’t stay up late. I left. I had to get out of the house.” She glanced from me to the backpack on the table. “Take the pack off the table. Hold it arm’s-length in front of you… Okay, now put it on the floor. Take the sketch paper out. There’s a portable easel in there. Take it out. You can set it up. That’s it, just snap the support in place. Now put it on the table. Okay. Back up, back to the wall.”

I moved against the wall, pushing the backpack to one side. “So you went outside,” I prompted.

“Michelle was at the bottom of the stairs. She’d been drinking. I could tell. You could always tell with her. Drink makes some people happy like Daddy, but not Michelle. It made her a bitch. She was real angry. Her face was pointed, like a weasel or a fox. It was all sharp edges of flesh, not bones. She said, ‘That house should have been mine, mine and Ross’s. If you, all of you, hadn’t bugged him, he wouldn’t have left here. You think you can have it your way, Jenny,’ that’s what she said, ‘you think you can have it your way; well, you can’t. That cesspool, you think you can go on letting that leak into my garage, don’t you? Well, you can’t.’ She said she was going to talk to the congressman. She told me he had a lot of power, that he would make them dig up the cesspool. She told me the man who came out to check the mosquito larvae told her that.”

Jenny moved the easel closer and glanced quickly from me to it and back to me. “I said I didn’t believe her. But she told me the man from Environmental Health came out and told her exactly what to do.”

“So you decided to kill her?”

“I had to, you see.” She drew a circular line on the pad.

“You hit her on the head, right? Then you dropped her body in the sewer hole. You couldn’t put her body in the car where it would be visible to anyone who walked by. You couldn’t drive it an hour into the woods when you had company who would wonder where you’d been.”

Jenny looked angrily at me. “I couldn’t even put the car in the garage because the damn sewer hole blocked the driveway.” She smiled. “It was fitting, don’t you think: I couldn’t use the garage because Michelle fussed about the sewer construction, so I used the sewer for her body.”

I caught my toe on the edge of the backpack. “So you planned to take Michelle’s body out of the sewer hole in the middle of the night Sunday and put it in Craig’s nursery truck when you drove to the flower market in San Francisco?”

She added another line to the sketch.

I edged the pack closer.

“I could have left the body anywhere. I planned to drop it in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. They have plenty of bodies there. Then I could have gone on to the flower market. If I left here half an hour early I wouldn’t even have been late. I still could have gotten the alstroemerias Craig wanted.” She glanced back at the sketch pad.

I inched the pack closer. It was almost within reaching distance. “What will you do now?” I asked.

“I know people, people in the hills. I have connections. Hey, hold still. Push that backpack this way, slowly.”

I leaned forward slowly. I grabbed the pack and flung it at her. The gun fired. I rolled under the table. The easel crashed down. The gun fired again. I could feel the breeze of the bullet passing my ear. I leapt forward, grabbed Jenny’s foot, and yanked her to the floor. She smashed the gun into my shoulder. My hand went numb. I grabbed her arm with my other hand. The gun fired wide. I swung my arm at her neck. It was enough to stun her.

T
HE REST OF
S
UNDAY
was consumed with the aftermath of Jenny’s arrest: the statement for the Sheriff’s Department (given to a deputy while Wescott questioned Jenny) and the avoidance of the reporters who were thronged outside. I was afraid my house might be surrounded by reporters, too, but it was clear of them. After I saw the news coverage, I understood why. I had gotten off unscathed with regard to publicity. Congressman Tisson hadn’t mentioned my role in encouraging him to push Michelle’s complaint, and the Sheriff’s Department wasn’t going out of its way to say a civilian was involved in the killer’s arrest. For me, that was just fine; the fewer people who knew, the better, particularly if one of the ignorant was Mr. Bobbs. (I didn’t want him connecting my uncharacteristic visit to the office on Saturday with the murder investigation.)

Michelle’s funeral was held Tuesday. The entire town trekked to St. Agnes’ Roman Catholic Church, filling the little church, the parking lot, and trampling the beds in which Father Calloway had never been able to grow vegetables. For the local papers the story was the high point of the year. Reporters and photographers from San Francisco, Sacramento, and Los Angeles, still in town for Bohemian Week, zeroed in on the funeral. Crews from three television stations covered it. They described Michelle as a heroine, a martyr for morality, family, and decent living. They called her a crusader.

It was an embarrassment of riches for them, this unexpected story with its divergent ramifications. Some reporters emphasized the murders of “high school sweethearts” in prose worthy of gothic romance, others concentrated on Congressman Tisson’s insistence on opening the cesspool. Some focused on the issues of prostitution and power concentrated in the Russian River area that week. A befuddled Mrs. O’Leary of the anti-hookers’ group was interviewed three times. And none of the reporters could resist the illegal and immoral acts of the Bohemian Connection. It was a muckraker’s paradise.

“If only Michelle could have seen this,” more than a few people on my route said. “She would have been in seventh heaven.” Some voices trailed off awkwardly here. Others plowed on to give their own analyses of the events. With every homeowner anxious to discuss the situation with whomever appeared at his door, it took me two hours longer than usual to finish my route.

Wednesday, in reaction to the previous days’ overload, no one mentioned Michelle or her murder. Perhaps there was nothing more to say.

It wasn’t till that afternoon that I got back to the sheriff’s department to read over my statement. This time I was ushered into Sheriff Wescott’s cubicle. From behind his government blue desk, he motioned me to a blue chair. In back of him was his overloaded bookcase. A pile of paper-filled boxes I recalled from my visit here several months ago suggested that he was either a very busy or very inefficient man. His desk was nearly invisible under memos, reports, and notices. His expression, as he looked at me, had the same ambivalence as Jenny McElvey’s, if not the intensity.

To break the silence, I said, “I was surprised at how little people were hurt by the coverage of Michelle’s murder.”

Wescott leaned back in his chair. “The papers and television, you mean? They could have done a number on some of these folks. Look at Ward McElvey, for instance. You’d think the husband and the brother-in-law of two Bohemian Connections would be damned by the publicity. But every news report I’ve seen has pictured him as a decent, hardworking Joe, putting himself out to support his crazy in-laws. He’s come out of it looking like a prince.”

I nodded. “Even Jenny will get something of what she wants—someone to support her and time to paint.”

Wescott nodded, but he wasn’t smiling now. “And that nerd Sugarbaker, look at him. Is there any mention of him bar-hopping in the county car, on a weekend, yet? None. If you believe the papers, he’s a dedicated public servant investigating cesspools on his own time.”

In spite of Wescott’s glower, I couldn’t help laughing. The front page photo in Monday’s paper showed David Sugarbaker pointing to the cesspool while an obviously disgruntled Congressman Tisson looked on.

But Wescott didn’t share my amusement. He continued to glower.

“And you,” I said, “you didn’t come out of this too badly, either. You’ve been quoted all over the place. You got the killer the same day as the cesspool was opened. That’s not bad publicity for a sheriff, is it?” When he didn’t answer, I goaded, “Is it?”

He leaned forward, elbows on the desk. “Well, okay, it could have been worse. But that doesn’t excuse the fact of your crossing our cordons, or putting me in a position where I had to drag an innocent citizen out of a bar. If word of that had gotten out I could have been—”

“But it didn’t. And you—”

“It doesn’t excuse your breaking into a house with a felon hiding in the living room.”

“Look, you’ve already given me a ticket.”

His mouth wavered, then he laughed. “I guess another warning to stay out of trouble isn’t going to do much good. But, you know, Vejay, one of these days you’re going to break the law and not get off with just a slap on the wrist.”