New Year's Eve Murder (10 page)

“You never saw me and I never gave this to you.” He handed me a small square of pink paper with writing on it. “I don't understand,” I said, feeling confused.

“That's all I'm saying.” He turned and walked up the street to the Town and Country Properties office and went inside.

I looked at the note. It said
Teddy Toledo
, and had an address and a phone number. The address was in a town I had driven through to get to Silverton and Bladesville.

I started back to the real estate office and then stopped. The man who had given me the note was the Larry who had gone to lunch while I was talking to George Gleason. He must have heard our conversation. This Teddy Toledo had to be the link I was looking for.

I sat in my car eating my sandwich and drinking skim milk from my thermos, hoping there was nothing lewd about my actions. According to the piece of paper on the seat beside me, Teddy Toledo lived in Stormkill. I recognized the “kill” part of the name as a Dutch word that many old towns, like Peekskill, had, a relic of the early settlers of the Hudson River valley.

The question was, should I knock on Teddy Toledo's door by myself? I really had no desire to go to the Bladesville sheriff and tell him I had a possible lead in the murder of D.D. Doe. But I didn't know if Teddy Toledo was a dangerous person.

Just to be on the safe side, I found a pay phone and left a message for Jack, who was away from his desk, that I was going to Toledo's house. A nearby gas station gave me directions to the road in Stormkill where Toledo lived.

It was a big, old house with an apartment over the garage, and I wondered whether Mr. Toledo might be the tenant up there. I started by ringing the doorbell at the main house, and a gray-haired woman answered. She had a bright smile and wore wool pants and a sweater.

“Oh, you're looking for Teddy,” she said, when I explained my mission. “He lives up there.” She stepped out of the house and pointed to the garage.

“Do you know if he's home?”

“Oh, I think so. His car's there. I don't think he takes his walk till later on. Just go up the stairs and knock on his door.”

I felt better about visiting this man if someone nearby knew I was there. The stairs to the apartment door were brushed clean of snow, as had been the walkway from the house. I wondered if that was part of his job as tenant. There was a small landing at the top of the stairs, and I held my breath a minute before knocking.

“Coming,” came the brisk reply and the door was whipped open. “Oh. Sorry. I was expecting Mrs. Anderson.”

“She told me to knock on your door. Mr. Toledo?”

“Yeah.”

“I'm Chris Bennett. I'd like to—”

“Come inside. It's freezing out there.”

“Thank you.”

The apartment was one large room with a tiny kitchen to the right of the door, a wall of closets, and an open door to a small bathroom, an efficient use of the space of a two-car garage. But only a small part of that space was used for living. Teddy Toledo, a thirtyish man in jeans and a sweatshirt with a blond beard and a bit of a stomach, was indeed an artist, one of Melanie's suggestions. Easels and drop cloths and canvases and paints took up about three-quarters of the large room.

“You're an artist,” I said.

“If you're from the IRS, I'm aspiring. If you're here to buy, yes, I'm an artist, and everything's for sale.”

“I'm neither,” I said, but I rather liked him. “I want to ask you about Susan Stark.”

“Who?” He pulled a chair away from a small kitchen table and offered it to me.

“Susan Stark.”

“Never heard of her. She a fan of my work?”

“I thought she was a friend.” I took my coat off and he took it from me, hanging it in one of the most crowded closets I had ever seen. “I thought you were the one who told her about the Donaldson farmhouse.”

“Who are you?”

“Susan is missing,” I said. “I'm looking for her. Her parents are frantic, her boyfriend is beside himself. I just want to know where she is.” I had been going to say “if she's dead or alive” but I thought better of it.

“I've never heard the name, and I don't know what farmhouse you're talking about.”

I took the picture of Susan out of my bag and handed it to him. He looked at it quite intently and I half expected him to comment on her bone structure, but he handed it back. “Sorry.”

“Mr. Toledo, Susan rented that farmhouse in Bladesville five months ago from Fred Donaldson. She said you had told her it was vacant.” It was a lie and I hate to lie, but I couldn't mention the realtor who had given me Toledo's name and address.

“She gave him my name?”

“Yes.”

“And she said her name was Susan Something?”

“I'm not sure what name she gave him.”

“I don't know what you're talking about, OK? And I don't have a lot of time to kill. So if you don't mind—”

And then it hit me: Fred Donaldson's uncertainty that the picture of Susan was the same person who had rented the house. “Did D.D. rent the farmhouse?”

“Yeah, D.D. rented it,” he said, after a pause during which he must have decided to tell me the truth. “Let me see that picture again.”

I gave it to him.

“There's a resemblance, but this isn't D.D. The hair color's the same, something about the face is similar.”

“Mrs. Donaldson thought this was the person they rented the house to.”

“Maybe if you saw D.D. once and then you saw this picture a couple of months later, you could make that mistake.”

“Do you know what happened to D.D.?”

“What do you mean? Is she gone? I haven't seen her since last week.”

How do you know when a person is telling the truth? I had just told a little white lie and there was a good chance Toledo had not recognized it as such. If he didn't know D.D. was dead, he probably had had nothing to do with Susan's disappearance. But if he were D.D.'s killer…“She's dead,” I said. “I'm sorry to be the one to tell you.”

He looked at me with a face full of shock. “What happened to her?”

“She appears to have been murdered.”

“Someone killed D.D.?”

“That's right.”

He lifted his shoulders and turned his hands out. “Why?” he asked as though it were the last thing in the world he could imagine happening.

“I was hoping you could help me find that out.”

“Look, I'm not saying another thing till you tell me who you are and what your interest is in all this.”

“My name is Christine Bennett,” I said. “I know Susan Stark's parents.”

“Who the hell is Susan Stark?” he shouted.

“She's a young woman who disappeared the day before New Year's Eve. I have reason to believe that she went to the farmhouse owned by Fred Donaldson. I thought until a moment ago that she had rented that
house, although I can't tell you why she would do that. I can't even tell you what her connection is to D.D. But she borrowed a car last Thursday in Brooklyn and told the owner she was going to make approximately a hundred-mile round-trip, which would be just about to Bladesville and back. She seems to have known about the Donaldson farmhouse, although if she didn't rent the house, I don't know how or why. I'm not making a lot of sense, am I?”

“Very little. If there's a Susan Stark in D.D.'s life, she didn't tell me about her.”

“May I ask how you know D.D.?”

“We met in New York, a year and a half, maybe two years ago. We were friends. I wanted to get out of the city and I heard about this place, talked to Mrs. Anderson, and I got it. I've been here over a year. I kept in touch with D.D. and when she said she'd like to quit the city herself, I let her know about the farmhouse.”

I noticed he didn't mention anything about how he had found his apartment or heard about the Donaldson farmhouse, and I assumed he had made both finds through his friend at the real estate office.

“Did D.D. have a car?” I asked.

“Nah. You can't have a car in New York. You spend your whole life moving it from one side of the street to the other.” He was referring to the alternate-side parking restrictions because of street cleaning.

“Then you drove her up here?”

“I think she rented a station wagon when she came up.”

“How did she get out to buy groceries? She was pretty far from the center of town.”

“I'd pick her up, usually. We got together every once in a while. I was going to drop over tomorrow.”

“Did she have a phone?”

“She could hardly afford to keep herself fed. She
didn't have a phone. She didn't even have electricity. My God, I can't believe she's dead.”

“Mr. Toledo—”

“Call me Teddy, OK?”

“Teddy, what is D.D.'s full name?”

“Let's see. It's Delilah D. Butler. Her mother had great aspirations for her. Donna, I think, is her middle name. D.D. couldn't stand the Delilah. I think it hurt her every time she had to write it.”

“Do you have an address for her? Before she moved up here?”

“Yeah, but she's been gone since the summer. Wait a minute. I'll get the street number for you.” He went to the closet and pulled something off a shelf. “Here. It's over on the Lower East Side, not the kind of place you could stay in for long. Lots of animal life.”

I copied it down. The Lower East Side is one of the oldest parts of Manhattan, the first to be settled. When civilization moved north, which is uptown, the old buildings were left to age and crumble.

“What did she work at?”

“Whatever pleased her at the moment is the impression I got. She took some great pictures of celebrities and sold them for enough money to live on for a while.”

“Then she didn't have what you'd call a regular job.”

“I didn't know her that long. In the time I knew her, she did a few things, and that was one of them. For a couple of months she was a messenger and rode a bike through New York, delivering stuff. Then she turned around and wrote an article about it for one of the magazines. She was a talented person but—”

“But what?”

“Something was bothering her.”

That's what Kevin had said about Susan. “You have any idea what?”

“Not really. We were friends, not lovers. She talked to me about a lot of things, but she held some back. It was just something I could tell, a strong feeling. You want a beer?”

“No thanks.”

He went to a small refrigerator and took out a bottle, opened it, and drank from the bottle. “There's a micro-brewery up here. I'm their best customer.”

“How old was she?” I asked.

“I'd guess thirty, give or take.”

“Was she working on some project up here?”

“She was planning something.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that's what she told me, and that's all she told me. She may also have been writing some stuff, but I'm not sure. In the summer she kept one of the upstairs rooms as a study and she had an old manual typewriter there that she used. But when it got cold, she had to move into the kitchen where there was a woodstove. It was the only room that had any heat. I think she may have put the typewriter in there, too, but I'm not sure. I've been there, but the room was so full of junk I couldn't tell you what she had.”

“She was planning something,” I said.

“That's what she told me.”

“What was your impression? Was it something that would make money? Was it an act of revenge? Would it make her famous?”

“I don't think D.D. gave a damn about money. She knew how to make enough to survive. If she had a taste for good clothes and expensive jewelry, it didn't show. So I don't think it was that. Maybe she had a thing for fame. She had a good time photographing those celebs. Maybe she decided to be one of them, but I couldn't tell you how she'd manage it.”

“And revenge? Was she angry at anyone? Did one of those people she worked for do something to hurt her? Or a man she knew?”

“You're asking me to speculate,” Teddy said, putting the bottle of beer on the table. “This is a person I didn't know very well until she came up here last summer. I liked her. We ate together sometimes in the city, and out here, too. But I never met a friend of hers, never heard her mention a sister or brother. You know what? I think she sold those pictures to
Cool magazine.
”

“That's something,” I said gratefully.

“Or maybe it was the article. I really don't remember.”

“You have a phone here?”

“Sure.” He pointed.

I walked over and copied down the number. Then I wrote my own down for him. “Did D.D. mention New Year's Eve to you as a time when this thing she was planning would come to fruition?”

He thought about it. “I don't think she ever said that, but she did tell me not to drop by over New Year's.”

“Was she expecting company?”

“She didn't say. But when I dropped her off last week—Wednesday, I think it was—she said not to drop in over the weekend. I do that sometimes, but I've been pretty busy myself or I'd've gone to see her already. It's over a week.”

Wednesday was the day Kevin had presumably dropped Susan off at the Starks'. Thursday was the day she had told Jill Brady she was going to use the car. Had D.D. Butler been expecting her?

I handed Teddy the paper with my name and phone number.

He looked at it. “Wait a minute,” he said. “I'm really not thinking clearly. D.D. carried a purse as big as a
steamer trunk. There must be ID in there and phone numbers for everyone she knew. Why are you asking me?”

“There was no purse, no ID, nothing at all in the house.”

“You mean the killer took it all?”

“It looks that way.”

“Why would anyone do that?”

“The sheriff thinks that since winter isn't the time for prospective buyers to look at farms, the body might not have been discovered for many months and by that time it might not be identifiable.”

“But I dropped by every week.”

“Then the killer didn't know that.” Unless Teddy was the killer. And after murdering D.D. and disposing of her effects, he just decided not to drop by. Ever again.