Aurora 03 - Three Bedrooms, One Corpse (5 page)

Patty’s underling, Debbie Lincoln, was a rather dim and cowed girl right out of high school.

She was a full-figured black with hair expensively corn-rowed and decorated with beads. Debbie was quiet, punctual, and could type very well.

Other than that, I knew little about her. At the moment she was sitting quietly by Patty with her eyes on her hands, not chatting back and forth like the others.

Eileen finally got settled, and we all looked at Mother expectantly. Just as she opened her mouth, the conference room door opened and in came Mackie Knight.

His dark round face looked strained and upset, and he responded to our various exclamations with a wave of his hand. He collapsed into a chair by Eileen with obvious relief, automatically adjusting his tie and running a hand over his very short hair.

“Mackie, I thought I was going to have to send a lawyer down to the station to get you out!”

“Thanks, Mrs. Queensland. You were going to be my one phone call,” he said. “But they seem to believe, at least for the moment, that I didn’t do it.”

“What did happen yesterday?” Eileen asked.

We all leaned forward to listen.

“Well,” Mackie began wearily, telling a story he’d obviously told several times already, “the phone rang here five minutes after Patty went home for the day, and I was standing out in the reception room talking to Roe, so I answered it.”

Patty looked chagrined that she hadn’t worked late the day before.

“It was Mrs. Greenhouse, and she said she had an appointment to meet a client to show him the Anderton house. She had forgotten to come by earlier to get the key—if anyone happened to be leaving our office soon, could they bring it by? She was worried she’d miss her client if she left to come to our office.”

“She didn’t name the client?” Mother asked.

“No name,” Mackie said firmly. “She did say ‘he,’ I’m almost positive.”

Idella Yates, beside me, shuddered and clutched her arms as if she were feeling a chill. I think we all did; Tonia Lee, making arrangements to meet her own death.

“Anyway, this is the part the police have the most trouble with,” Mackie continued. “What I did, instead of driving up and leaving the key and going on home ... I went home first, put on my jogging clothes, and went out for my run. I stuck the key in the pocket of my shorts and stopped on my run to hand it to Mrs. Greenhouse. That only made maybe seven to ten minutes’

difference in the time I actually got there, and it suited me better. To tell you the honest truth, I wasn’t so excited about doing her work for her. No one here would be that sloppy. When I got there, she was at the house by herself. If anyone else was there, I didn’t see him. Hers was the only car. It was parked in the back, outside the kitchen, so that was the door I went to.”

“Why does that seem funny to the police?” Mother asked. “It doesn’t seem odd to me.”

“They seem to think that I ran instead of driving my car so no one would identify my car as being in the driveway, later. They said a woman living across the street from the Anderton house, she was waiting for her daughter to get home from spending a week out of town. So she was sitting in her front room, looking out the window, and reading a book, for the best part of two hours . .. the daughter had had a flat on the interstate, turns out. This woman might have missed a person on foot, but not a car.”

“What about the back door?” Eileen asked.

“The people who live behind the Andertons were watching TV in their den with the curtains open, since they knew no one was in the Anderton house. They told the police that they saw Tonia Lee’s car pull up when it was still daylight, but fading fast. One woman got out. They sat watching TV and eating in their den while they watched, and no other car ever pulled up. They figured someone else had come to the front door. They did see Tonia Lee’s car pull out after dark, way after dark, but of course they couldn’t see who was in it. They were pretty interested, someone being in the house for that long; they thought someone might really be thinking of buying.”

We all mulled that over for a minute.

“I wonder why the police told you so much?” Patty asked.

Mackie shook his head. “I guess they thought they would pressure me into confessing or something. If I’d been guilty, it might have worked.”

“You run every night, you’ve always told us that, and I’ve often seen you. That’s not suspicious at all,” my mother said staunchly. We all murmured agreement, even Patty Cloud, who was none too fond of having to do work for a black man, I’d observed. Though having Debbie working for
her
didn’t seem to be a problem.

“Lots of people run or ride bikes in the evening,” Idella said suddenly. “Donnie Greenhouse does .. . Franklin Farrell does.”

Franklin Farrell was another local realtor.

“I bet it was Donnie,” Eileen said bluntly. “He just couldn’t stand Tonia Lee screwing around anymore.”

“Eileen,” Mother said warningly.

“It’s true, and we all know it,” Eileen said.

“I’m sure she just made an appointment with someone who used a false name, and the man killed her,” Idella said in so low a voice we had to strain to hear her. “It could happen to any of us.”

We were all silent for a moment, staring at her.

“Except Mackie, of course,” Eileen said briskly, and we all broke into laughter.

“Naw, I just get framed for it,” Mackie said after the last chuckle had died away. And we were all sober again.

Patty Cloud said suddenly, “I think it was the House Hunter.”

“Oh,” my mother said doubtingly. “Come on, Patty.”

“The House Hunter,” said Eileen consideringly. “It’s possible.”

“Who’s that?” I asked. I was apparently the only one not in the know.

“The House Hunter,” Idella said softly, “is what all the realtors in town call Jimmy Hunter, the owner of the hardware store. On Main, you know?”

“Susu’s husband?” I asked. There were several women named Sally in Lawrenceton, so most of them went by distinguishing nicknames. “I was in their wedding,” I said, as if that made it impossible for Jimmy Hunter to be peculiar.

“We all know him,” Mother said dryly. “And we christened him the House Hunter because he just loves to look at houses. Without Sally with him. He’s always going to buy her a house for her birthday, or some such thing. And he’s got the money to actually do it, that’s the only reason we put up with him.”

“He’s not really in the market?”

“Oh, hell no,” Eileen boomed. “They’re going to stay in that old house they inherited from Susu’s folks till hell freezes over. He’s just some mild kind of pervert. He just likes to look at houses.”

“With women,” Idella added.

“Yes, when we sent him out with Mackie, he didn’t call us back for months,” Mother said.

“He won’t make appointments with Franklin, either,” Idella added. “Just that Terry Sternholtz that works with him.” Eileen laughed at that, and we all looked at her curiously.

“Maybe he called Greenhouse Realty instead,” Mackie said quietly.

“And since the Greenhouses are hard up, Donnie sent Tonia Lee out with him, just on the off chance he might really buy something.” This was Eileen’s contribution.

“Let me get this straight. He doesn’t make passes?” I asked.

“No.” Mother shook her head emphatically. “If he did, none of us would show him a doghouse. He just likes to look through other people’s homes, and he likes to have a woman who isn’t his wife with him. Who knows what’s going through his head?”

“How long has Jimmy been doing this?” I was fascinated with this bizarre behavior on the part of my friend’s husband. “Does Susu know?”

“I don’t have any idea. How would any of us tell her? On the other hand, it does seem strange that gossip hasn’t informed her that her husband is house-hunting. But as far as I know, she’s never said anything. You were close to Susu in high school, weren’t you, Roe?”

I nodded. “But we don’t see each other much nowadays.” I forbore from adding that that was because Susu was always ferrying her children somewhere or involved in some PTA activity. I was having trouble picturing thick-featured Jimmy Hunter, still broad-shouldered and husky as he’d been in his football days but now definitely on the heavyweight side, wandering dreamily through houses he didn’t want to buy.

“If it’s not the House Hunter,” Patty suggested, “maybe Tonia Lee’s murder has something to do with the thefts.”

This caused an even greater reaction than Patty’s first suggestion. But this reaction was different. Dead silence. Everyone looked upset. Beside me, Idella rubbed her hands together, and her pale blue eyes brimmed with tears.

“Okay,” I said finally, “fill me in on
this.
The real estate business in this town just seems to be full of secrets, these days.”

Mother sighed. “It’s a serious problem, not something like the House Hunter, whom we more or less treat as a joke.” She paused, considering how to proceed.

“Things have been stolen from the houses for sale for the past two years,” Eileen said bluntly.

Even Debbie Lincoln was roused by this. She slid her eyes sideways at Eileen.

“In houses just listed by a particular realtor? In houses that have just been shown by one realtor every time?” I asked impatiently.

“That’s just the trouble,” Mother said. “It’s not like—say, the refrigerator vanished every time Tonia Lee showed a house. That would make it clear and easy.”

“It’s small things,” Mackie said. “Valuable things. But not so small a client could slip them into a pocket while we were showing the home. And even though the property might be listed with one realtor, of course we let any other realtor show it—that’s the way you have to be in a town this size. We all have to cooperate. We all leave a card when we show a house, whether the owner’s home or not . . . you know the procedure. If only we’d gotten the multiple-listing system, we could use lockboxes. None of this would have happened.”

What he meant was, none of the police station routine would have happened to
him,
because he wouldn’t have had to take a key to the Anderton house. Tonia Lee would be just as dead, presumably. Mother was in favor of paying for one of the multiple-listing services most of the Atlanta area towns used, but the smaller realtors in town—particularly the Greenhouses—had balked.

“And it was never the same people, never, any more than coincidence could explain,” Mother was saying. “I don’t think the houses had been shown by the same person—or to the same person—before the items were missed, any time.”

“You all borrow keys back and forth,” I said.

The realtors nodded.

“So anyone could have them copied and use them at his or her leisure.”

Again, glum nods all around.

“So why haven’t I read about this in the paper?”

Distinctly guilty looks.

“We all got together,” Eileen said. “Us, Select Realty; Donnie and Tonia Lee, Greenhouse Realty; Franklin Farrell and Terry Sternholtz, Today’s Homes; even the agency that deals mostly in farms, Russell & Dietrich, because we had shown some of the farmhouses.”

“City people who want to say they own property in the country,” Mother told me, raising her eyebrows in derision.

“And what happened at the meeting?” I asked everyone at the table.

No one seemed in any big hurry to answer.

“Nothing was settled,” Idella murmured.

Eileen snorted. “That’s putting it mildly.”

“Lots of mutual accusations and a general clearinghouse of old grievances,” Mother said.

“But finally, to keep this out of the papers, we agreed to reimburse the homeowner for anything missing while the house was listed.”

“That’s pretty broad.”

“Well, there couldn’t be any signs of a break-in.”

“And there never were?”

“Oh, token ones, and the police came in at first. That Detective Smith,” said Mother distastefully. She was unshakable in her conviction that Arthur Smith had done me wrong and that Lynn Liggett had somehow stolen him from my arms, despite the fact that Arthur and I had broken up before he began dating Lynn. Maybe a week before, it’s true. And I’d only broken up with Arthur maybe twenty seconds before he was going to break up with me, so I could salvage some dignity. But what the hell... it was all over.

“And what did he find?”

“He found,” said Mother carefully, “that in his expert opinion, the break-ins were staged to cover up the fact that the thief had entered with a key. And later on, the thief didn’t even pretend to break in.”

“But there was no one to accuse—any of us could have been guilty or innocent,” Mackie said.

“As usual, they checked me out first.” He wasn’t disguising his bitterness.

“No one was showing any sudden affluence. No one was taking lots of trips to Atlanta to dispose of the stolen items, at least as far as he could tell. Of course, we all go to Atlanta often,”

Eileen said. “And I gather the Lawrenceton police force is not large enough to follow all the Lawrenceton realtors wherever they go.”

Would Arthur tell me any more? I wondered. Had he, for example, staked out a house that might be robbed? Had he had any suspicions that he couldn’t prove?

“As far as we know, the investigation is ongoing,” Mother said with apparent disbelief. “The whole thing is still up in the air and has been for a long time, too long. We’re all sick to death of watching our every move for fear it’ll be misinterpreted. At least the talk about this isn’t so widespread that people are afraid to list their houses, but it may come to that.”

“That would really hurt business,” Eileen said, and there was a reverent silence.

“So who,” I asked, moving on to the vital question, “put the key back on the board?”