The Dark and Deadly Pool (14 page)

“Sleepy,” I said.

“Goodness,” Mom said, “you’re wasting the best part of the day.”

“Morning people always say irritating things like that,” I told her, and giggled, because I sounded like Tina and her pop psychology.

Mom giggled too. “I’ll let you get back to sleep,” she said, “if you tell me one thing. How are you? Is everything
all right? The dishwasher isn’t acting up again, is it? Do you need anything?”

“That’s more than one thing, and everything’s fine,” I said.

Mom sighed. “You’re a young woman now, Liz. I shouldn’t worry about you. Your father says to me over and over, ‘Nothing’s going to happen to Liz. She’s fine.’ ”

“I’m fine,” I said.

“Are you eating properly?”

“Mom!” I was more awake now. “You promised you wouldn’t ask me that.”

“Well, I just don’t want you living on junk food. I bought all those nice vegetables and that big bag of Golden Delicious apples. You love apples, I know. You are enjoying the apples, aren’t you?”

“Constantly,” I said. “I slice them on my pizza.”

“Mary Elizabeth,” Mom said, “I love you, and I miss you, Take good care of yourself.”

“I will until you get home, Mom, and then I’ll give up and let you do it,” I said.

She laughed. “Your father sends his love too.”

“I love you both,” I said. “Good-bye, Mom.”

“Good-bye, sweetheart,” she said, and we hung up together.

For a moment I snuggled back into the blanket, feeling cosy and warm from both the blanket and from Mom’s voice. But I was awake enough now to remember, and the remembrance of last night was like a cold bucket of water dumped on my head.

I couldn’t stay in bed another moment. I washed my hair, rubbed some mousse into it, and set it on hot rollers. Then I put some green stuff on my nose and chin. It looked kind of sickening, but I’d bought it after reading
that it banished zits forever. I pulled on my old jeans and my favorite T-shirt printed with
NOBODY’S PERFECT
and went into the kitchen to make breakfast.

The open refrigerator was yawning at me when the doorbell rang. I knew who that would be. Mrs. Zellendorf. I had got in awfully late last night, and I bet she knew all about it. How can you be independent and at the same time have a next-door neighbor checking on you?

In my bare feet I padded down the hall to the front door and threw it wide open. There stood Fran. He was holding a sack of doughnuts.

He blinked, then smiled. “You’re a walking advertisement for your T-shirt,” he said.

“I thought you were Mrs. Zellendorf.”

“Do we look alike?”

“No. But—”

“If I were Mrs. Zellendorf, would you invite me in?”

“Well, sure, but—”

“Hi,” he said. “I’m Mrs. Zellendorf.”

I had to giggle. “Come in, Fran. Go straight back to the kitchen. Just excuse me for a moment.”

“Don’t change on my account,” he said. “You look good to me even with that sickening guck on your face.”

I washed my face, put on a little bit of blusher and blue eye shadow, and combed out my hair. “Why?” I asked my reflection, peering nose to nose in the mirror. “Why do you care? It’s just Fran.”

The mirror didn’t say a word, so I joined Fran in the kitchen. He had already poured two glasses of milk and put the sack of doughnuts on the table.

“Where do you keep the paper napkins?” he asked.

I got the napkins and plates, sat across from him, and fished out a jelly doughnut.

“I had to get out of the house,” Fran said, his mouth
full of doughnut. “My uncle’s six feet five, and he intimidates me.”

“I can’t imagine anyone intimidating you.” I took a big bite, and the tart raspberry jelly exploded into my mouth.

“Uncle Ralph does, but he proves my theory. I asked him how he did in school, and he said okay. Just okay. I asked if he worried about being only okay, and he said it didn’t bother him at all, because he spent most of his time playing first string on the football team. See what I mean? No stress, no worries, and he gets to be six feet five.”

“Then why don’t you just stop worrying about school?” I asked.

“It may be too late,” he said glumly. He licked his fingers and added, “Either your nose is bleeding, or you missed with the jelly in your doughnut.”

I wiped off my nose and pulled a second doughnut from the bag. Fran did too.

He took another bite and said, “I thought about you last night. I hoped you wouldn’t be afraid, and I wished I could be with you. I missed you. So—how did it go?”

I dropped my doughnut and burst into tears.

In an instant Fran was beside me, his arms around me. He kept murmuring little snuggly things into my neck. “You missed me too, huh? It’s okay. I’m here now. Don’t cry.”

I pulled back, grabbed my napkin, which was gritty with granulated sugar, wiped my eyes, and blew my nose. “I’m not crying about you, Fran,” I said. “Sit down, and I’ll tell you what happened.”

As I recounted the story, Fran leaned forward with interest. “There goes your theory about Mr. Kamara being the one who orchestrated all the crimes.”

“Not necessarily,” I said. “Maybe that’s why he was killed.”

“By whom?”

“I’m not sure.”

“And why?”

“There are a few things about this case I don’t know yet,” I said.

“Like everything,” Fran said.

“Don’t rub it in.”

“Why don’t you just forget all about the problem and let your detective friend take care of it?”

I thought a moment. “Maybe it’s because of my job. I’m supposed to be responsible for the well-being of the guests of the health club. Maybe I feel guilty because I didn’t investigate that noise I heard last night. Maybe it’s because I’m scared, and I want the police to catch the murderer as soon as they can.” I rubbed my nose with the back of one hand. The sugar felt scratchy.

“I have a good idea,” Fran said. “Let’s go to the zoo, and eat hot dogs, and ride on the Hermann Park train, and forget all about the Ridley Hotel until it’s time to go to work.”

My immediate reaction was to say no. But getting away from the problem for a little while made sense. I pushed my chair back from the table. “Okay. Let’s go.”

“Wash your face first,” Fran said. “If you go out like that, you’ll attract bees.”

I did, and pulled a clean health-club T-shirt and shorts from the drier, stuffing them into a paper bag.

“We can take my car and go from the zoo to the hotel, and I’ll take you home when our shifts are over,” Fran said. So I got my plastic purse from where I had left it on the hall table. I took the small box from it and laid it on
the table, following Fran out the front door and to his car.

Fran’s car made Old Junk Bucket look good. As he put his key in the ignition, he patted what was left of the dashboard and said, “Come on, Yellow Belly. Don’t let me down.”

With a wheeze and rattle the car started. Nervously, we headed for the Hermann Park Zoo.

Fran had been right. Going to the zoo was a good idea. We had a wonderful time and made it back to the Ridley not only on time, but a little early. My watch said two-forty
P.M.

As I entered the club from the hotel, Mrs. Bandini and Mrs. Larabee sat bolt upright. They were seated where they could watch the door and catch me when I came in. They both waved and motioned to me, but I pretended that I didn’t understand what they wanted. I just smiled and waved back and hurried into the office.

Deeley Johnson was behind the desk. Deeley was trim, compact, and perky, with a big smile for everyone who came into the club. Her hair was no longer than an inch anywhere on her head, and on her it looked great. “Hey, girl!” she said. “Did you think I was never coming back?”

“I’m sorry you were sick,” I said.

“No big deal. I’m just sorry I missed all the excitement.”

Mr. Kamara’s staring black eyes suddenly popped into my mind, and I shuddered. “It wasn’t exciting, Deeley. It was horrible.”

“Yeah,” she said. “I guess it was.”

“I’m glad you’re back,” I told her.

“So’s Art Mart. He told me he was going to sleep till noon today. Too bad he didn’t get the chance.”

“Why didn’t he?”

Her eyes widened. “That’s right. You didn’t hear about the break-in.”

“Where? What break-in?”

“Let me tell you. Two of them, in fact. When the police went up to Mr. Kamara’s suite, after you went home last night, they found it had been gone over. Stuff was all over the floor and thrown out of the closet. I mean, it was a real mess.”

“Somebody must have been looking for something.”

“Down here too. Whoever it was did a job on the health club. All the drawers in the desk were open—they broke the lock on the bottom drawer—and nothing was left on the closet shelves.”

“What did they take?”

“Nobody knows,” she said. “Art Mart couldn’t find anything missing.”

I gasped as it occurred to me. “If they came back after I had locked up, how did they get in?”

“Good question,” she said. “The door between the hotel and the club was locked up tight.”

“Deeley!” I said. “The wall!”

She looked puzzled, and I realized that she wouldn’t know, so I told her about the gap in the wall.

“Did Lamar or Art tell Detective Jarvis about the wall?” I asked.

“Probably,” she said.

“Where is Art?”

“Gone home for a while. He’s in a real grouchy mood.”

“I suppose he didn’t like having to put back everything in the closet.”

Deeley stood and stretched. Then she laughed. “Are you kidding? Do you really think that Art Mart would do all that work with me here?”

We grinned at each other.

“This has been a bad morning,” she said. “The pool company came and drained the pool, and scrubbed it down, and now they’re practically through filling it up again. Nobody’s supposed to go in today, because it’s going to take till tomorrow to get the water heated properly.”

“But I saw a number of people here in the club.”

“Some of them only want to sunbathe or use the exercise equipment. Oh. And it’s okay if they want to use the Jacuzzi.” She glanced out the window at Mrs. Bandini and Mrs. Larabee and lowered her voice. “Some of them just want to talk. Watch out for those two.”

The card file was near her elbow. Now was a good time to bring it up. I told her about some of the cards missing, then returning to the file. “Have you ever noticed that?” I asked.

She thought a moment, then shrugged. “I never paid that much attention. An awful lot of people come and go through the hotel. Anyhow, why would some of the cards be missing? What would it mean?”

“I don’t know yet,” I said.

“Probably every now and then a card gets accidentally misplaced.”

“Maybe.”

Deeley pointedly glanced at the clock. “I’ll keep the desk till you get changed,” she said.

Two minutes to three. I hurried into the women’s dressing room. I locked my purse inside my locker, since the desk lock was broken, and soon returned to the office dressed in the health-club uniform.

“Hope your day’s better than yesterday,” Deeley said. “See you tomorrow.” She quickly left the club.

Plopping into the desk chair, I suddenly remembered
Mr. Smith’s card. I opened the bottom drawer and picked up the few papers that were lying scrambled on the bottom, thumbing through them. The card was gone.

I methodically went through every drawer in the desk. There weren’t that many papers in it. A few notes about things that probably should have been thrown away a long time ago, out-of-date fliers about health runs, and things like that, but no sign of Mr. Smith’s card. Obviously someone had taken it.

Maybe Art or Deeley or whoever had cleaned the desk had tossed it. I went through the wastepaper basket. Obviously it hadn’t been emptied since the nightly cleanup crew had been here, because it was full of Deeley’s candy and gum wrappers and Art Mart’s diet drink cans. The card wasn’t in the basket either.

Why would someone want that card? Is that what the ransacker had been looking for? Surely not. It could have been taken out of the file at any time. Then where was the card?

I glanced through the window to the pool to see Mrs. Bandini and Mrs. Larabee pointedly staring at me, so I strolled over to join them.

“Sit down, sit down,” Mrs. Bandini said as she patted a chair that had been deliberately arranged between the two women.

I did.

“Tell us what happened last night,” Mrs. Larabee said.

First, I repeated what Detective Jarvis had said about their description of the two men in business suits. They were so pleased with themselves that their cheeks turned pink.

“Next time your son-in-law tells you you’re nosy, you can tell him it’s a talent that can come in handy,” Mrs. Larabee said to Mrs. Bandini.

“His word was
curious,
not
nosy,
” Mrs. Bandini said.

“A matter of semantics,” Mrs. Larabee said. She turned to me. “Tell us everything that happened, Mary Elizabeth. We heard you were once more a heroine.”

“Heroine? No.” Unshed tears swelled painfully behind my eyes. I didn’t want to cry again, so as quickly as I could I told the women everything I could remember about what had happened the night before.

As I ended the story, my appreciative audience burst into a duet of clucks and sighs and hum-humming.

“Was it murder or not?” Mrs. Bandini asked.

“I guess no one will know until the medical examiner gives his report.”

Mrs. Larabee laid a plump hand on my arm. “When you find out, tell us.”

I shifted in the chair. My legs were getting cramped. This was a good time to end the conversation, so I stood and stretched. “I will,” I said.

“I beg your pardon. Can you help me?”

The voice was behind us. The three of us turned in one motion, as though we were on a string. A blond woman, who was probably in her early forties, looked at me inquisitively.

“I saw your T-shirt,” she said. “No one else was in the office. Could you help me?”

“Of course,” I said, and tripped over the chair leg in my rush to assist her.

She held out a hand to steady me. She wasn’t a beautiful woman, but she was attractive. Her hair was tightly pulled back into a knot at her neck. She had on a little too much makeup, but I recognized her cream silk jacket and skirt from one of the fashion magazines. Expensive. So was her gold jewelry. Her pale leather handbag hung on
her arm, the clasp ajar, her sunglasses hooked over the side.