Authors: Lorena McCourtney
That same evening, Officer DeLora unexpectedly showed up. Mac had gone to the store to pick up some half-and-half for morning oatmeal, so I was sitting alone, in a lawn chair under the maple tree, reading my “Our Daily Bread” devotional. She was in uniform but driving an older Toyota Corolla rather than a police car. This late in the day, her stiff bun drooped and several red strands straggled out of it, but her expression was still stern enough to wilt weeds.
Chapter Seven
I didn’t expect Officer DeLora to accept my offer of iced tea, but she did. When I came out of the motorhome with ice clinking in plastic glasses, she was sitting in the other lawn chair. She dropped a hand to where Koop was circling the chair. He sniffed her fingers delicately and she started to stroke his head, but he backed away with a warning twitch of stubby tail.
“That isn’t fair,” Officer DeLora objected as if she’d just received the social snub of the year. Her stern expression wilted as limp as her hair. “I really have almost quit smoking. I had only one cigarette today.
Actually only
half
a cigarette.”
“It isn’t like an official reprimand for dereliction of duty,” I said kindly.
She didn’t comment, just jiggled her shoulders as if trying to shake off Koop’s disapproval.
“Is this an official visit?”
I asked. “We found a few things in the yard that we thought we should show you.”
I led her to the discarded sofa, where Mac had piled the photo of Elvis, the mannequin head, and the wine bottle. She examined and thanked us for conscientiously saving them, but dismissed them as meaningless to the case. My opinion also, although I’d been hoping she’d want to take them to a police lab. Now they were something more I’d have to dispose of myself. We went back to the chairs and our tea.
“I came because I have some information I thought might interest you,” Officer DeLora said when she sat down again. “Some of it is official and some isn’t.”
“Okay.”
“I finally remembered why the Braxton name sounded familiar. Our Deputy Chief of Police got married a while back. To a woman whose last name was Braxton. Sylvia Braxton. So her name isn’t Braxton now, of course. It’s Haldebrand.”
For a moment, the Haldebrand name bounced around in my head as if looking for a place to land. It sounded vaguely familiar. Had I heard it somewhere in connection with the Braxtons back at the trial?
Then the more important part of what Officer DeLora said hit me like a blast of that smelly stuff in the refrigerator. The Braxtons had slyly placed a family member right there in the home of a top officer of the police force, in his
bedroom,
a setting notoriously favored by
femme fatales
for extracting secrets. Now, through her, the Braxtons would have access to all kinds of information, with databases available only to law enforcement. They’d have a nationwide network of police departments at their disposal. New and improved ways to run me down.
I couldn’t escape their tentacles anywhere!
Then I took a deep breath and put the brakes on my runaway panic. Surely not even a Braxton would go so far as to
marry
someone as a way of hunting me down.
That was surely inflating my importance in the Braxton world. They must have bigger and better grudges and conspiracies to occupy their time. Besides, the Braxtons thought they’d already disposed of Ivy Malone. Although. . .
“How long ago were they married?”
“Last fall, I think. It was before I joined the force. I know about it only because the woman who had my desk at the station before me did a lousy job of cleaning out the desk, and the clipping about the wedding was in there. Along with some old coupons from Suzanne’s Donut Shop.” She rolled her eyes at the cliché of cops and donuts.
So the wedding would have been before the Braxtons killed the woman they thought was me, and back then they
were
still looking for me.
“How old is this Sylvia Braxton/Haldebrand?” I finally asked.
“I have no idea. I’m just telling you what I saw in the clipping.” Officer DeLora impatiently shoved a wayward strand of red hair back in the bun and stabbed a pin in it. “What difference does it make how old she is?”
“If she’s young, she’s probably a Braxton by birth. Taking me down is practically in her genes. If she’s older, maybe she was a Braxton by previous marriage.” In which case I could hope she’d signed off on the Braxton conspiracy, and her marriage link with a high-up member of the local police force was pure love. A comforting thought, though not one I could grab onto with much assurance. The Braxtons had a no-holds-barred mentality and a pit-bull tenacity that might even include a spy planted in a bedroom. “Do you know anything about her background?”
“I didn’t do an in-depth investigation, no.” Full exasperation now, as if Officer DeLora wished she’d kept memory of where she’d heard the Braxton name to herself
. She crunched down on a chunk of ice as if trying to reduce it to molecular level. “I think you’re making way too much of this. I can’t believe our Deputy Chief of Police would marry into a mini-Mafia of
crooks, as you called them. He’s been with the Department a long time. Impeccable reputation.”
Yeah, maybe I was going overboard. But the faux-Ivy was
dead,
and I doubt she’d think I was making too much of anything. “So if you don’t think the Braxtons are involved, who
do
you think killed the woman in the tub?”
“It looks as if she was trying to hide out here, so it was probably someone she knew and was afraid of. Someone who had it in for her because of some past grudge or conflict. “
Which meant that at this point the Braxtons weren’t even a blip on the radar of law enforcement investigation of this case. But that didn’t mean I could escape the
Braxtons’
radar.
Okay, Mac was right. Time to pick up and make tracks out of town before the mini-Mafia figured out that even though it was bothersome to have to kill me twice, I was readily available for the second time around. Could they already know I was here? I wavered over that one but finally decided, probably not. The case of an older woman dead in a bathtub probably wasn’t enough to warrant the immediate attention of a Deputy Chief of Police, especially with the much bigger news of convenience store killings. I should have a few days of anonymity before the spy in his bedroom, and then the entire Braxton clan, found out that a surplus Ivy Malone had turned up here.
Maybe someday it would be safe to come home to Madison Street, but today wasn’t the day. Okay, time to hit the road.
But that logical decision again snagged on guilt and responsibility. Could I just drive off and forget about a woman who had died because of a connection with me?
“That was the unofficial item I was going to tell you,” Officer DeLora continued. “The other information is official. The dead woman definitely isn’t Ivy Malone.”
Good to hear. There are mornings when I tend to give myself a good poke to make sure I’m still alive and kicking. But just to be sure, I asked, “How do you know?
“In some conditions, an undisturbed body may dry out and mummify, making fingerprints fairly easy to get, but this one didn’t.” She wrinkled her nose as if remembering the scent that still loomed way too large in my own scent-memory. “So it was difficult getting fingerprints off the body, but we finally got a partial. Using that, along with all the other fingerprints in the house, the body has been identified as Lillian Hunnicutt, age 64. At least that was the name under which she was fingerprinted. She’s been arrested various times, mostly for minor shoplifting. Toothpaste and soap and socks. And Ritz crackers. Apparently she had a real taste for Ritz crackers because that came up several times.”
Which reminded me I’d found an unopened carton of Ritz crackers in the cupboard. Somehow that struck me as sad. The woman had gone to the trouble of acquiring the crackers, likely by sleight of hand, but she’d never even had a chance to open them.
“She’s been married at least twice,” Officer DeLora added. “Which meant name changes, and she’s also used various aliases. We do know she’s been incarcerated a couple of times, and she spent an occasional night at a local homeless shelter. She was also institutionalized briefly with a mental problem.”
I reflected on the details of the woman’s sad life and death. Homeless. Incarcerated. Institutionalized. Murdered. But in spite of a life that sounded rough and lonely and full of mistakes, Lillian had a certain amount of smarts. She’d figured out how to hijack a place to live and then solved the problem of utilities too. She’d managed to keep the bills paid and buy, or shoplift, the occasional parsnip and Ritz cracker. Maybe, in my house, she’d even been trying to start over. Eat radishes she raised herself, and work her way up to caviar canapés. Except that she’d made the fatal mistake of passing herself off as me.
“Has her family been notified?”
“So far, we haven’t located any family yet.”
Sadder still. No family. All alone in the world. Dead in a bathtub. Carried off in a body bag. The Braxton killers walking free. Maybe they’d held a gleeful We-Got-Ivy celebration, with beer and barbecue and balloons for the kids.
“Will you keep looking for a next of kin?” I asked.
She shuffled her feet on the dry grass and looked mildly uncomfortable. “I’m using ‘we’ in the . . . departmental sense. I didn’t personally identify her from fingerprints. And I’m not personally trying to find her next of kin. But I’m sure someone will keep at it because it might help find her killer.”
“Or killers?”
“I don’t think it’s been determined yet if more than one person might be involved.”
“The Braxtons are big on teamwork.” Though apparently they hadn’t yet gone in for matching Team Braxton T-shirts.
Officer DeLora chose to ignore my teamwork comment, which I did not find encouraging. Law enforcement was totally ignoring the Braxton connection. Why? Easy answer: because no one believed an LOL’s wild story of a Braxton conspiracy to kill her and killing Lillian Hunnicutt by mistake.
“Although not finding family may be because Lillian Hunnicutt isn’t her real name, of course,” Officer DeLora continued. “Her identity hasn’t been released to the media yet, because family hasn’t been notified, but I’m telling you because I thought the name might mean something to you. Perhaps a relative or acquaintance?”
Lillian Hunnicutt. I thought hard about the name, but I couldn’t dredge up anything. I found a certain sadness even in her name. Lillian. It gave me an image of a grandmotherly type woman, sweet and old-fashioned, generous with hugs and cookies. And yet she’d wound up alone and dead in a body bag. I finally shook my head. “Doesn’t ring any bells.”
“Well, let us know if you happen to think of anything.” She stood up to leave.
“Is your hand okay now?”
“There’s nothing wrong with my hand!” She hastily shoved the hand behind her back.
“Oh. When you were here before, you kept looking at it. I thought maybe you’d injured it.”
She gave an odd bark of laughter and brought the hand out to study it. Short, no-nonsense fingernails, unpolished.
No wrinkles or veins marring the smooth skin. Did I once have hands like that? I stuck both my LOL hands around behind my back.
“No, I didn’t hurt it. Actually—” She broke off as if she’d started to say something but was reluctant to go on.
“Actually?” I prodded.
She opened and closed the hand. “Have you ever heard of Miranda rights and the Miranda warning?”
“You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say or do can and will be used against you in a court of law,” I quoted. “You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you.”
Officer DeLora blinked at me in amazement. “You know the whole thing?”
“There are a couple more lines, about whether the person understands the rights and if he or she is still willing to talk to you. But an officer can ask questions without giving that warning, if the person hasn’t been arrested, just like Mac and I and everyone else was questioned.”
“How come you know this stuff?” She gave me an even closer peer as if comparing my face with wanted posters. “You’ve been arrested?”
No. Although I’ve come close a few times. But back when I was hiding out at a friend’s apartment waiting to testify at Bo Zollinger’s trial, I’d filled the days learning about computers and the internet. I was afraid a Braxton lawyer might somehow manage to have me arrested, so I looked up and memorized the Miranda warning. So if authorities came after me, I’d know if they
were doing it according to the letter of the law. I’d also run across the words to that silly old Mairzy Doats song, and sometimes they still invade my head at odd times.
Mairzy doats and dozey doats
—
I
kicked them out now before they grabbed hold of vulnerable brain cells.
Instead of answering Officer DeLora’s question now, however, I had one of my own. “What’s the Miranda warning got to do with your hand?”
She opened the hand and looked at her palm once more. I could see some black marks on it.
“A few weeks ago, I had to question a guy we had under arrest. I needed to do the Miranda rights warning, but I got nervous and told this guy he was entitled to an—” She broke off and groaned. Her shoulders sagged. “To an alligator. And if he couldn’t afford an alligator, one would be provided for him.”
“An
alligator
?”
She nodded. “I couldn’t sleep the night before. I’d been watching some TV show about swamps and alligators and . . . I don’t know . . . it just came out.”
The guy must have wondered what kind of justice system they were running, although I didn’t say that.
“Anyway, after I messed up that time, I wanted to make certain it didn’t happen again.” She shoved her hand over where I could see it. There, written with one of those permanent markers that didn’t wash off, was a single word, the word that should have been in her recitation about Miranda rights.
Attorney.