15
A
s Louise sat in the recreation room and took the last sip of her fourth cup of coffee, she realized she should have stopped at three. She already was so restless that she felt like jumping out of her skin. She had to get out of the house today, even if it meant sneaking out the recreation room door and through the woods to avoid running into nosy press people. Bill had already had sharp words with one TV newsman who had sneaked onto the property last night and demanded an interview. The last thing she wanted to do was tangle with someone else.
She took George Morton's warning seriously not to try and solve the crime on her own, but surely he couldn't object if she merely visited her neighbor Nora. She was the kind of friend who might shed some meaning on this horrible nightmare. For Louise was in a kind of nightmare, an existence dominated by a grisly murder, pushy reporters and suspicious police. Once she'd taken her cup to the kitchen, she returned and carefully opened the recreation room door, peeking both ways to be sure no one was lurking about.
As she stepped out, the August heat folded over her face like a blanket. On this side of the house was the Oriental gardenâa handsome assortment of bamboo, deciduous azaleas, grassy tufts of chartreuse carex, and blue-flowered plumbago. Her gaze was drawn immediately to the tire marks in the ground. With a little shudder, she realized the killer had done this damage, driving the cartita straight through the plants, flattening a few low grasses and plants, and even bending a couple of tough, five-foot-tall bamboo stalks. But why? It was as if the killer had a grudge against her.
She knelt down and with dexterous hands pulled the carex and plumbago back into position, smoothing the earth around them. She would come back with the loppers to cut down the broken bamboo shoots.
As she worked on neatening the garden, a smile crossed her face. John Bachelder, her ambitious cohost on
Gardening with Nature
, was the only person she could think of who might bear her a grudge. John wasn't happy that Marty Corbin kept writing him out of scripts. But ambitious or not, she knew he was not a murderer, just a man anxious about keeping his job.
She decided to exit the woods by way of her neighbors' yard, the Kendricks. Wearing tan shorts, an olive drab T-shirt and old tennis shoes, she blended in perfectly with the sweet gum, dogwood, oak, wild cherry, and sassafras trees that populated the yard. No news hawk would observe her here.
She opened the gate in the fence between the two properties and headed for the street, realizing that this was the first time she'd shown her face in public since the body had been discovered Thursday night. No one paid any attention to her, not the evidence technicians still poking through the front yard nor the patrolmen out at the curb. Their job was to dissuade nosy people including the press from prowling inside the yellow police tape that surrounded the Eldridge yard. Although she could see several strange cars parked at the entrance to the cul-de-sac, she was a little disappointed to see that Charlie Hurd's red Porsche was not among them.
And here Charlie said he wanted to help solve this murder
, she thought. It made sense, though, that he'd be more help looking for clues beyond this cul-de-sac.
Lying before her was the round, sunny asphalt space of Dogwood Court. Emanating from the cul-de-sac were six big pie-shaped yards, the homes themselves shrouded in tall forest and therefore only partially seen from the road. Gardeners like Louise, Nora Radebaugh and Sam Rosen took advantage of this rim of sunshine to plant little front-yard gardens. As she slipped closer to the Radebaugh house, she inspected Nora's tall orange tiger lilies and drifts of small white daisy-flowered
Tanacetum niveum
, accented with fountain-shaped clumps of
Miscanthus sinensis
. She passed the garden and within a few steps had walked from sun into deep shade, where tall pines thriving among the sweet gum and oak attested to the more acidic soil on this side of the cul-de-sac.
She took the shortcut up the slight rise to the house, threading her way through the trees and ending at the big front windows. She peeked in and was not surprised to see Nora. She was sitting on a couch, her bare feet tucked under her, wearing white flowing slacks and a white gauze top. She appeared to be writing in a notebook. The poet at work. No matter what happened in the world, no matter what downswings her personal life with her husband, Ron, took, Nora never stopped writing poetry and had the bylines to prove it in various poetry magazines.
Louise knocked on the window, then realized this was not a good idea after a crime in the neighborhood. But Nora was not fazed. She merely looked up, smiled in recognition and signaled with a cock of the head for Louise to go to the front door.
When she entered the cool house, she heard the low sounds of the stereo playing Brahms and smelled the faintest aroma of furniture oil in this cleanest of houses. Nora enclosed her in a long embrace. “Louise, my dear” was all she said, and it was sufficient. They went to the kitchen, where Nora prepared green tea in a pot that was so streamlined that Louise thought it must have come from an art museum store. They settled in the living room on a big sofa.
Carefully balancing her teacup so as not to spill, Louise relaxed into the softness of the sofa pillows. “Nice teapot. Museum of Modern Art?”
Nora smiled. “Tar-jay.”
“Wow, Target?” said Louise, incredulously. She'd missed a large beat in discount store merchandising. “Nora, I came over here because I need your help.”
Her friend's gray eyes were all sympathy, but her mouth curved in a smile. “I know the police suspect you of the killing. Do you know I've already been importuned to help by your lovely Martha?”
Louise pursed her lips. “You mean Martha's been here already?” Why did she have the faint feeling that Number One daughter was taking over her and Bill's life?
“Yes,” said Nora, and reached a hand over and grasped Louise's. “Martha needs to talk, just like you do. And she's always confided in me, you know . . . and even more so in Mary.”
How well Louise knew this, that both Martha and Janie, when facing big decisions, ran across the street to her side-by-side friends Nora and Mary. Of course, she usually discovered this well after the big decisions were made.
Should I take this internship in Guatemala, or would it be better to spend the summer working with the poor in a Chicago ghetto?
Martha would ask.
Would it be a good thing if I dated other boys besides Chris, since he's in college, and I still have another year of high school?
Janie had asked this of Mary Mougey, and Mary had passed it along. The whole situation left Louise feeling that she'd failed as an authority figure. The girls treated her more as a sister than a mother. And she had no clue as to how she could gain more clout with her daughters.
Nora was talking now about their putting their ideas together. “Maybe if we all work together, we can find the person who did this rotten thing.” She stared out the front window. “In fact, on the premise that three heads are better than two, let me ring up Mary. She's just pulled into her driveway. I know she fled the house for a while.”
“What for?” said Louise.
“My dear,” said Nora, shoving her short, dark hair away from her face, “to get a little peace. You mustn't underestimate the impact of this crime on the neighbors. We've all been interrogated by the police, of course, and now the newspaper and TV and radio people are out there like a pack of sharks that smell blood. I personally got rid of them by telling them I had a virus that they wouldn't want to catch.”
Louise colored. She thought back on recent years and started to count. What was it, three or four times when murders had encroached on the peace of greater Sylvan Valley? And each time, unfortunately, Louise had been right at the center of the trouble.
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“What do we think of Phyllis as a prospect?” said Louise.
Mary Mougey, who had joined them in the living room, crossed her legs, and Louise noted that she wore red Prada sandals. Louise had seen them in a catalog and would have bought a pair herself had they not been so pricey. They went well with Mary's navy-trimmed white pantsuit, a notch down from the elegant clothes she wore for her high-profile Washington job.
“Wait a moment before you start,” said Nora, unfolding herself from the sofa and going to a sideboard. She held up a stenographer's pad as she rejoined them. “Martha and I each made notes when we talked earlier this morning.”
Mary smiled. “Dear Martha. How is she handling this?”
Nora said, “Very well.” She hastened to add, “ But of course Louise can tell you better than me.”
Louise shrugged. “As Nora says, very well. She has everything including Bill and me under control. Even the wedding plans.”
Mary clasped her hands in delight, for she hadn't yet heard the news. Louise had to fill her in on the impending nuptials.
After a few moments, Nora eyed her two companions and said, “Now, let's get to this little list that Martha and I made.” She flipped open the notebook. “Your daughter insisted it be alphabetized; she's very well organized. I myself would have just written it in shoddy quatrains.”
“Who's on the list?”
“Mike Cunningham, Lee Downing, Phyllis Hoffman and ... Mort Swanson.”
“Mort Swanson?” said Louise. “Don't tell me.” Wasn't being faced with his own mortality enough without also being thought of as a possible murder suspect? “I'm not sure I see his motive.”
“Louise, this list is just academic,” said her friend. “The killer could well be someone we don't even know, but we have to look at the local people, and that includes Mort. I can't believe either that he would do such a horrible thing. But he was Peter's lawyer for a great share of his business affairs. We can't ignore him.”
“And how did you and Martha come up with Lee Downing?”
Nora gave Louise a careful look. “Martha said Bill mentioned it to her this morning. Downing just finished buying Hoffman Arms two days before Peter disappeared.”
“Oh.” Louise hadn't known that her daughter knew as much as she did herself.
“Mike Cunningham's name is here because he defended Peter and seemed to have a close relationship with him as his attorney. Who knows what went on between them over the past few years?”
Mary leaned forward toward Nora and gestured with a graceful hand at the pad. “Why don't you put a name at the top of that list: âA' for Archer, Greg Archer.”
Louise said, “Greg Archer? Did Greg even know Peter Hoffman?”
“I have no knowledge of that, Louise,” said Mary. “But what I'm telling you is that darling-looking blond man is terribly aloof when I try to talk to him, possibly because I have a bird's-eye view of him snooping.”
“Snooping?” said Louise.
“Yes, and in your yard. He pokes around there when you're away, even rides that little cart around through both yards, though rather awkwardly.” Her eyes widened. “I bet he's told police things that might even have helped implicate you, my dear. Just jot the name down, Nora. We'll try later to find a tie between him and the deceased Peter Hoffman.”
Nora turned thoughtful eyes toward the woods beyond the living room. In a quiet voice, she said, “I'll put my money on Phyllis right now. If I were Phyllis, I would have killed him long ago.”
Silence greeted this statement. Louise looked at her friend and saw it was not meant as a joke, for Nora's face was unsmiling. Louise chuckled as if it were a joke, but the levity sounded a little phony. “It might have been a hard thing to do, since he's been living in a mental hospital. What would you have done, slipped him poison cookies?”
Nora relaxed back in the sofa and said, “I'd like to think I don't mean that. But with his alley-cat ways, Peter demeaned women in public more fiercely than any man I've ever seen. He crassly killed, decapitated andâ”
Louise bent her head. “Oh, stop. I agree with you, but don't say any more.”
Nora said, “I regret bringing that up, Louise. Forgive me. Let me just say that Phyllis does have a personal motive. Not only did Peter cheat on her time and again, but as soon as he was hospitalized, he put Mike Cunningham in charge of his financial affairs. It changed Phyllis's lifestyle overnight. Mike immediately sold their big house and informed her that she needed to get a job to help support herself. She's had to handle almost everything, including rent on her house, on a sales clerk's salary.”
Mary smiled knowingly. “Maybe she thinks she's suffered enough and was anxious to be a rich widow.”
“And now she is, I guess,” said Louise, “or is she? We don't really know where Peter's money is going, do we?”
“No,” said Mary, “but I dearly hope the police find out, or perhaps Phyllis will tell me. She phones me frequently at work, which is quite inconvenient at times. The woman must have no close friends. I am really no more than an acquaintance.”