Crazy for You (18 page)

“How does that work?”

He grinned. “A GoMo is like a vampire. With a Verizon phone you can only get service from a Verizon cell tower, same thing with a T-Mobile or AT and T. But a GoMo sucks the power out of whichever cell tower is closest. So you actually get service in a wider range of areas. Of course, you get a sound like the PA system at the Greyhound station, but you can always text instead.”

I bought two three-month-service cards, scratched off their PIN codes, and waited while the clerk programmed everything in to the phones.

“Christmas gifts?” he asked, handing me my purchase in a plastic bag.

I nodded. “Christmas is going to be a little early this year.”

Vince Trumbull hadn’t returned my bugged phone, claiming he needed to keep it for “evidence.” But I wanted a phone so I could contact Labeck. Possibly Labeck’s own cellphone was bugged, and I didn’t want to take a chance on calling him at that number. Ever since he’d told me about gadgets that could pick up sounds twenty feet away, I’d been paranoid. Hence the new, clean phones. I’d give him the GoMo next time I saw him.
If
I saw him.

I knew I should return to work because I’d left Juju shorthanded, but time was running out for Labeck and I needed to track down more leads. The Brookwood police weren’t going to do it; as far as Trumbull was concerned, Bonaparte Labeck was the strangler and he didn’t need to look any farther.

That left the sleuthing up to Mazie Maguire, teddy-wearing crime buster.

After I left Walgreens, I drove over to Rhonda’s neighborhood. I was trying to be inconspicuous, but Pig wasn’t exactly the stealth bomber. Pig sputtered and farted and oinked along, grumbling about how it was going to need a new muffler soon. The crime scene tape was still strung around the perimeter of Rhonda’s house. Patchy snow covered the lawn, disguising the burned-over area. A snowman stood in the yard next door, a first-snow-of-season snowman, more twigs and dry leaves than snow. I drove around the block, parked in front of the Schnabble house, hurried up the unshoveled sidewalk, and rang the bell.

Fran opened the door. “Look who’s here! Hey, Mazie, how are you?”

“Sorry to just drop in like this.” I’d never seen Fran dressed up or wearing makeup before. She wore a black sweater, gray pants, dressy black pumps, and a string of
pearls. “Did I come at a bad time—are you on your way to work?”

“No, it’s a good time.” Smiling, she held the door open for me. “Come in. I just got back from Rhonda Cromwell’s funeral. I’m such a hypocrite! I ought to be wearing red spangles.”

I followed her through her living room, out to her kitchen. Her dinette table was in front of patio doors that looked out onto her lawn. There were empty spaces on the patio where Fran’s lawn furniture had once sat. Presumably, the police had removed the furniture to a crime lab.

“Jayden forgot his lunch,” Fran said, flapping a hand toward the sandwiches and thermos mug sitting on the table. “He’ll have to take the school hot lunch. Which means I’m the one who ends up eating this stuff. Join me?”

“No, really, I couldn’t,” I said, protesting for form’s sake, because I was starving.

“Oh, come on. Get some bowls and plates down out of that cupboard.”

Feeling guilty—I was accepting the hospitality of a women I suspected of being a murderer, after all—I got out the bowls and plates. “How was the funeral?” I asked, wondering why I hadn’t thought of attending it. In mystery stories, detectives were always picking up important clues at funerals. “Did anyone confess to the murder or throw themselves into the grave?”

“No grave. Rhonda was cremated. They just had a short service at the funeral home.”

“Big crowd?”

“A few family members and some nosy nellies—like me, for instance. Oh, and the ex-husband.” Fran set silverware and napkins on the table. “The guy was drunk. He cried through the whole service. Honest to God, I don’t know why that man hasn’t been arrested. It’s so obvious he killed Rhonda. I mean, those big, phony crocodile tears—puhleeze!”

“The detective in charge thinks Ben Labeck did it.”

“Oh, that cute young guy they’re chasing all over the place? Better him than me. The police hauled me in for questioning after they found Rhonda’s body. I was at the station for hours. They wouldn’t even let me use the bathroom.”

She shot me an apologetic look. “I completely caved, Mazie. I’m such a—what do
you call it in prison—a stool pigeon? I told the police how you helped me clean my lawn furniture.”

“Don’t worry about it. It backed up my own story.”

“Then somehow it was out of my mouth that you’d gone in Rhonda’s house. I didn’t mean to tell. I’m sorry, but this one detective was so mean—the one that looks like he’s wearing a dead cocker spaniel on his head. I think I would have confessed to killing JonBenet Ramsay.”

“Trumbull, you mean?”

“Yeah, that’s the one. He kept asking why I’d killed Rhonda. I mean how stupid would I have to be to dump her body on my lawn furniture?”

Fran opened her son’s thermos and poured soup into two bowls. Chicken bits, veggies, and noodles slithered out. “Rhonda Cromwell made my life hell while she was alive. Now she’s dead and she’s still causing trouble.”

“Who do
you
think killed her?” I asked.

“Her ex. Definitely. Unless it was some guy’s wife.” Fran set a turkey bologna sandwich on each plate. “Or maybe somebody’s mother. I’ve seen Rhonda with kids who didn’t look old enough to drive.”

We pulled up chairs and sat down. From this vantage point I could see the rear of the Cromwell house, which already had a forlorn, abandoned air.

“You didn’t hear or see anything the night Rhonda was killed?” I prodded.

Fran blew on her soup. “Not exactly. But … well, I didn’t mention it to that lieutenant because he made me so nervous I couldn’t think straight. I thought of it later. See, I got up around eleven on Monday night to go to the can. My bathroom window faces the patio. I turned on the bathroom light. So if the murderer was out there—”

I stared at her. “Did you hear something?”

“No, I was half-asleep. But now I’m thinking—if the strangler was out there planting Rhonda’s body on my furniture, he might have noticed the light going on or heard the toilet flush, so he got scared and took off before he could finish wrapping her body in that tarp.”

“That makes sense.”

“If that tarp hadn’t been blowing around, Rhonda’s body might have sat out there
all winter.” Fran made a face. “Can you picture it, Mazie? I go out there on the first nice spring day with my iced tea and a copy of
Cosmo
, all set to lay out and catch some rays, and I uncover the chaise and—there she is! Rhonda, staring up at me with rotting eyeballs, and thawing out with those, you know, those ice crystals stuff gets when it’s defrosting.”

The image was gruesome, yet hilarious. I spat out a mouthful of soup.

That made Fran chortle. Which made me laugh. Then we were both madly giggling. I wanted to stop because it was wrong to find amusement in the death of a fellow human being, but I couldn’t. My diaphragm started to ache and my eyes were squirting tears.

Finally we both sobered up, although I still felt in that precarious state where it would take just one slurped noodle from Fran to set me off again.

Fran spoke around a mouthful of bread and bologna. “I’ve been thinking about why you’d leave a body out on lawn furniture. I think it was, like,
symbolic
. Someone’s saying: Hey, Rhonda you enjoy showing off your skanky bod to every guy around? So sun yourself for all eternity, you attention-seeking slut!”

This sounded a lot like the
someone
was Fran herself. I really wanted Fran to not be the murderer, because I liked her, but what if she’d been drinking Monday night, brooding on how much she hated Rhonda? What if she’d staggered over to the Cromwell house in drunken-zombie mode, strangled Rhonda, then blocked out the fact that she’d done it?

“I suppose the police asked you for your alibi,” I said, hoping it sounded off-the-cuff, because the whole point of coming here had been to find out what Fran was doing Monday night.

“Oh yeah, they were all over that. You want some juice? Water? Milk?”

“Juice, please.”

“Look.” Fran opened the cupboard next to her fridge. “Empty. I tossed out all the liquor. I’m a new person.”

She poured cranberry juice into sunflower-print glasses and handed me one. “Where were we? Oh, yeah, my alibi. Monday night I was right here. I was on the phone with Jerry, my ex, who’s telling me that if I don’t lay off the booze, he’ll file for custody
of the kids. And I say to Jerry, okay, so I got a little blitzed and toasted a couple bags of leaves and almost blew up some cars and tried to burn down a house, okay?”

“Sure.” Who hasn’t?

“But
he
was screwing the whore next door! So who’s going to win parent of the year, huh? We yelled at each other for a while, then I finally hung up and poured out all the Smirnoff.”

“Wow.”

“So my good-for-nothing ex was good for something at last. If I was talking to him, I couldn’t have been strangling Rhonda.”

Hmm. Not much of an alibi, I thought, sipping cranberry juice and mulling over the fact that I knew almost nothing about Rhonda’s ex. Maybe finding out ought to be my next order of business.

“Where does Jerry live?” I asked casually.

“Hales Corners,” she said, naming a southwestern suburb so far out of the city that half the residents were cows. Hales Corners was a good ninety-minute drive from Brookwood, and another ninety-minute drive back. Jerry would have had to do some mighty fast motoring to get in a strangling, then get back home again before the Hales Corners roosters woke everybody up.

Fran’s phone rang, an old-fashioned landline phone on the wall next to a bulletin board crammed with kids’ artwork. She answered, listened, rolled her eyes, said, “Okay, I’ll be right there,” and hung up.

“That was son number two’s teacher,” she said. “Gavin threw up. I’m going to go pick him up at school. No, no—you sit, finish your lunch. You can let yourself out, right? Just make sure the door locks when you leave. Until they catch the strangler I’m being super cautious.”

I assured Fran I would lock up, thanked her for the lunch, and watched from a window as she backed out of her garage and drove off. Fran was certainly a trusting person. Would a murderer be that trusting? I cleared up the lunch things, filled the sink with hot, sudsy water and started washing the dishes so Fran could come home to a clean kitchen. Fran had an unobstructed view of the Cromwell house from her kitchen window, I noticed as I stacked the last bowl in the dish drainer.

A flicker of motion caught my eye. A man came around the side of Rhonda’s garage and headed for her back steps. He was average height and build, wearing a dark-green hooded sweatshirt, motorcycle boots, and jeans. A canvas pouch crammed with tightly rolled newspapers was slung over his shoulder. I recognized the papers as
The Weekly Advertiser
, a small community paper devoted to automobile ads and notices of garage sales, the kind of nuisance paper that gets tossed onto the driveway of every householder in the city once a week. The man took a rubber-banded newspaper out of his pouch and tossed it on Rhonda’s steps. Then, instead of continuing his rounds, he looked around furtively.

The house blocked anyone from seeing him from the street, and hedges on both sides of the property partially blocked the neighbors’ view. He whipped around to stare toward Fran’s house and I ducked down. When I cautiously raised my head again, the man was springing up the back steps. He inserted a key in the lock and let himself into the house.

What was he up to? Burglars often watched for death notices in the newspapers, then cleaned out the deceased’s house while the family was at the funeral. But maybe the guy
was
family—he’d had a key, after all.

Unless it was a lock pick, not a key. Sandy “The Safecracker” Stankow, another of my state-pen pals, had once explained to me how an expert picksman could crack a lock in seven seconds flat.

All my instincts told me that Green Hoodie didn’t belong in that house, that he’d used the shopper papers as an excuse to get into Rhonda’s house. He was up to no good and I was going to find out exactly what that no good was. I let myself out of Fran’s house. A minute later I was ducking beneath the Crime Scene Do Not Cross police tape on the Cromwell property, wishing I was wearing something more skulk-worthy than a skirt and three-inch heels. The ground-floor windows were too high above eye level for me to peek in, so I scuttled around to the front and crept up the porch.

If I ever won the lottery, I thought, I was going to buy an old Victorian house like this with a wraparound porch wide enough for wicker swings, hopscotch games, and roller skating. Dropping to a crouch, I crawled along the porch, silently cursing the wooden boards that clunked hollowly beneath me, raising my head to peer through every
window. Finally, just as my thighs were about to reach their breaking point, I spotted the man. He was in a room at the rear of the house, the same room where I’d changed into my waiter uniform—Rhonda’s home office.

Green Hoodie was frantically yanking out cords and cables from the hard drive of Rhonda’s computer. Wearing rubber gloves, he worked quickly, obviously anxious to get the job done. Why a hard drive; why not cash or jewelry? As he wrestled the hard drive free from the niche beneath the computer table, his hood slipped back, revealing his face. I was certain I’d never seen him before.

The guy was a thief. My first thought was to phone the police. I snatched my new phone out of my coat pocket and turned it on, then hesitated. Phone the police and I’d be in trouble for illegally crossing a police line. Trumbull was sure to bust me for that.

Then I remembered the phone’s photo option. Crouching beneath the window, I raised the camera and pointed the lens at where I thought the guy’s head would be. The instant I snapped the picture I jerked my arm down. Had the guy noticed the flash? I tensed myself to run, but nothing happened. Maybe there’d been too much sunlight out here for him to have caught the flash.