3 Revenge of the Crafty Corpse (16 page)

I stood but didn’t move from behind the desk. “That’s not what I came to discuss.”

“Then what? I have a very busy schedule today, and I really wish you’d make an appointment ahead of time when you need to speak with me.”

“Next time I will. For now, though, do the police know that Lyndella Wegner was your grandmother?”

fifteen

Shirley froze; all the
color drained from her face and neck. Without saying a word, her body language confirmed my hypothesis. She stared at me for several seconds before regaining a semblance of composure, Then she closed the door behind her, but held fast to the doorknob. “I don’t know how you found out,” she said, “but if you’re inferring I had something to do with her death, you’re wrong.”

“Why the secrecy?” I asked.

She released the knob and slowly walked across the room to her desk. When I stepped aside, she sat down, clutching her Birkin to her chest as if the pricey bag were a talisman that could ward off evil. I took the seat opposite her.

“Not that it’s any of your business, but I suppose if I don’t tell you, you’ll go to the police.”

“Which wouldn’t look very good for you, considering you told me that when murders occur in assisted living facilities and nursing homes, a staff member is usually charged and convicted. Even if you’re innocent, the negative publicity would most likely ruin your career.”

Shirley emitted a sigh of resignation. “How did you find out?”

“Lyndella wrote about you.”

“Wrote about me?” The thought seemed inconceivable to her. “Where?”

“In her journals.”

I wouldn’t have thought it possible, but Shirley grew even whiter, and she began to tremble. Her voice came across as panicky. “Wh … what journals?”

“She kept binders of her various crafts projects.”

“I know about those. I told Reggie to toss them with the rest of her crap.” She paused and eyed me for a moment. “She didn’t, did she?”

“No, she gave them to me, along with all of Lyndella’s crafts. The ones you destroyed. Is that why you fired her and told the police you thought she killed Lyndella?”

“I fired Reggie for incompetence and disobedience. She never should have been hired in the first place, but my hands were tied.”

“I heard.”

Shirley raised an eyebrow. “For someone who’s only been here a few days, you seem to know an awful lot about what goes on at Sunnyside.”

“People talk.”

“Don’t believe everything you hear.”

“Like the fact that you deliberately steered the police toward Reggie? You know she didn’t kill Lyndella. That kid is scared of her own shadow.”

“I know no such thing. Reggie fit the profile, an incompetent malcontent with self-esteem issues. The police agreed with me. That’s why they picked her up for questioning. My call to them only sped things up a bit.”

“Is she under arrest?”

“No, they let her go for lack of evidence, but that’s beside the point. You haven’t told me what those binders have to do with these journals you mentioned.”

“They’re one and the same. Lyndella wrote about what was going on in her life during the time she crafted each piece. Little notes scrawled in the margins of each page of directions. I read through them, hoping to find a clue to the identity of her killer.”

“And did you?”

“You tell me.”

“I already did. I didn’t kill her. I tried to help her. If I’d wanted to kill her, why would I wait twenty years?”

“Maybe you finally snapped? She certainly took pleasure in yanking your chain.”

Shirley’s panicked expression grew more panicked. “She wrote that? What did she say?”

“She called you a tight-assed old prude.” Actually, Lyndella had called Shirley far worse, but tears were beginning to well up in the eyes of the woman sitting across from me, and I saw no point in twisting the dagger I’d already plunged into her gut.

“What else?”

“She suspected you of destroying her business.”

Shirley sniffed. “Is that what she called it? Her
business
? I was trying to protect her.”

“She didn’t see it that way.”

“No.” She took a shaky breath. “So what are you going to do with this newfound information, Mrs. Pollack? Go to the police? Blackmail me?”

“Blackmail?”

“I know you need the money. Why wouldn’t you stoop to blackmail?”

“Because I’m not that kind of person. As for going to the police, they didn’t bother taking the journals as evidence when they had the chance. I suppose they didn’t look closely enough at them when they searched Lyndella’s room. I have the big picture, but why don’t you fill in the details for me? Then I’ll decide what to do.”

Shirley picked up her phone. “April, hold all my calls until further notice.” After she hung up, she closed her eyes, and took several deep breaths, exhaling slowly between each before she finally spoke.

“I was adopted as an infant,” she said, her eyes still closed. “My adoptive parents were wonderful people, but I was always curious about my birth parents. As I grew into adulthood and established my career, I became more and more obsessed with the blank spaces in my life. Gaps that could only be filled by learning more about who I really was, where I came from.”

She opened her eyes and her voice grew strident as she said, “Working in healthcare, I came to realize that everyone should have the right to know about his or her background for medical reasons if nothing else.”

“So you tracked your mother down?”

“No. I tried. Through various channels available to me, but I failed to find anything. The adoption was private, handled by a doctor and lawyer. Both had died, and my parents—my adoptive parents—never knew anything about my birth mother other than she was an unwed mother. They didn’t even have a name.”

Shirley let go of the death grip she’d maintained on her Birkin and placed it on her desk. She stood and began pacing back and forth across the small office as she continued speaking. “A little more than twenty years ago I had a health scare. Knowing my medical history would have helped tremendously at the time. After the crisis passed, I hired a private investigator. I didn’t care how much it cost me; I needed to find my mother.”

“Did you?”

She shook her head. “She died shortly after giving me up for adoption. Drug overdose, according to what the P.I. uncovered. But he did find an address for my maternal grandmother. For Lyndella.”

“I can imagine that came as a bit of a shock.”

Shirley laughed. “Did it ever! The investigator told me she ran a
dating service
in Savannah, Georgia.”

“Which you took literally, not realizing he’d employed a euphemism?”

She nodded. “I was a lot younger and much more naïve back then.
I decided to fly to Georgia to meet her.” Shirley laughed an ironic laugh. “When I rang her doorbell, she thought I was applying for a job. She sized me up in a glance and dismissed me as lacking what she called the
je ne sais quoi
demanded by her upscale clientele. Can you believe that? The gall of the woman, telling me I wasn’t good enough to be one of her hookers!”

That sounded like the Lyndella I’d come to know from our short acquaintance, her journals, and the other residents’ stories about her. The woman never minced words, always spoke her mind, and didn’t give a flying fig whom she hurt in the process.

“When I told her I was her granddaughter, she didn’t believe me at first, but she finally came around and invited me in.”

“Was this at The Savannah Club for Discerning Gentlemen?”

“You even know the name of the place?”

I nodded.

“No. She lived separate from her bordello. You have to understand, at that point I didn’t know she ran a bordello. I still thought
she operated a dating service. I was thinking in terms of a modern-
day Dolly Levi.”

“Who?”

You know, like in
Hello, Dolly
?”

“Right.”

“I had read some people still relied on matchmakers to find them the perfect marriage partner.”

Living in New Jersey with its large Indian population, I knew about matchmakers and arranged marriages. However, I had no idea whether the custom extended to other immigrant groups, let alone non-immigrants.

“Anyway, once Lyndella accepted me as her granddaughter, we established a relationship. Every six to eight weeks I’d fly down to Georgia for a weekend. She told me about my mother, how she’d run off as a teenager, got mixed up with the wrong crowd, and gotten herself pregnant. According to Lyndella, my mother didn’t even know who the father was. Lyndella convinced her to give me up for adoption.”

“Because Lyndella knew how hard it was to raise a child as a single parent?”

Shirley shook her head. “She never mentioned that, but I came to suspect it because she never spoke about my mother’s father. I don’t even know if they ever married.”

“I don’t think so. Her journals suggest she became pregnant when she was only fifteen. She made plans for a wedding, but I came across no indication that a ceremony ever took place.”

“I’m not surprised. Anyway, a few weeks after my mother gave me up for adoption, she OD’d. I guess I was lucky.”

“How so?”

“I might otherwise have been raised by Lyndella.”

A valid point. It couldn’t have been easy for Shirley’s mother, growing up in a whorehouse. Maybe Lyndella bore a good deal of the blame for her daughter running off and turning to drugs.

“Eventually, I learned the truth about Lyndella’s business.”

“You didn’t suspect anything by the type of artwork in her home?”

“That trash decorated her business, not her home. I never saw any pornographic artwork or crafts until I moved her to Sunnyside.”

“Then how did you find out about her business?”

“She wanted to groom me to take over for her when she retired.”

“I’ll bet that came as a shock.”

“That’s the understatement of the year. I was absolutely horrified when I found out.”

“What did you do?”

“The only thing I could do. After all, she was my grandmother. I had to save her.”

“Save her?”

“Her soul. She had to see the error of her ways and repent for her sins if there was any hope for her.”

“Did you call the vice squad?”

Shirley shook her head. “Lyndella bragged that the police commissioner was one of her best clients. Along with the mayor and several other big city officials.”

“I know.”

“How could you know that?”

“She was in business for decades. Along with her craft journals I discovered an accounts ledger. Her clients were referred to by numbers and first names in the ledger, but she’d often embed the full name of someone within the directions for a craft. Her clientele went way beyond mere city officials.”

“I suppose that shouldn’t surprise me,” said Shirley. “Not with all the political sex scandals of the last few years. Congressmen. Senators. Governors. It’s disgusting.”

“So what did you do?” I asked, steering the conversation back to Lyndella.

“I called an investigative reporter at the
Atlanta
Journal-Constitution
.”

“Why an Atlanta paper?”

“I couldn’t trust that a Savannah paper wouldn’t bury the story. Or refuse even to investigate. Anyway, after the exposé the reporter wrote, the cops had no choice but to shut Lyndella down for good.”

“And after that she chose to move to Sunnyside? I’m surprised she even spoke to you at that point.”

“She didn’t know at first that I was responsible for outing her. Besides, she had little choice. The D.A. froze her bank accounts and seized her assets. She was left with next to nothing.”

“But she didn’t go to jail.” I knew this for a fact from Lyndella’s journals. She cut a deal. In exchange for no jail time, she wouldn’t name names. Given that many of her former clients now held positions at the state and federal levels—including one U.S. senator, four current and nine former congressmen, one current and one former cabinet member, and quite a few federal judges, not to mention one Supreme Court justice—the D.A. was pressured into making the offer.

“Lyndella was free but broke,” I said, “so you offered her a place to live at Sunnyside.”

“Where she proceeded to make everyone’s life miserable for the next twenty years and probably would continue to do so for years to come had she not been murdered. I don’t think that woman was ever sick a day in her life.”

“Her way of getting back at you?”

“Yes, but I didn’t kill her.”

I believed her. Everything Shirley had said corresponded to the timeline of events I had pieced together from Lyndella’s numerous journals and her accounts ledger. Shirley had dropped her defenses and bared her soul. I doubted the confession came easily.

In addition, I felt sorry for her. Although she hadn’t said so, I imagine Shirley had hoped for a loving relationship with the grandmother she unexpectedly discovered two decades ago. Lyndella certainly hadn’t lived up to anyone’s idea of a grandmother.

And I thought my kids had it bad with Lucille. Lyndella Wegner made Lucille Pollack look like Cinderella’s fairy godmother.

Someone knocked on the door. “Not now,” yelled Shirley, her voice filled with annoyance.

The door opened and one of the nurse’s aides poked her head in. “Sorry to interrupt but you’re going to want to hear this, Ms. Hallstead.”

Shirley morphed into her no-nonsense business persona. “What is it?”

“Mabel Shapiro has died.”

“How?”

“Apparently, in her sleep, sometime last night.”

Shirley opened the top drawer of her desk and pulled out a large magnifying glass. Then she accompanied the aide to Mabel’s room. I followed.

Since Mabel lived in a single, no roommate could supply any details of the previous night. Mabel reposed peacefully on her side under a quilt, her head facing away from us. Shirley rounded the bed and felt for a pulse.

“I already did that,” said the aide. “Tried to wake her, too. She’s definitely dead.”

Shirley rolled Mabel over onto her back. “Bring that floor lamp closer,” she told the aide, “and turn it on.”

Mabel’s face flooded with bright blue-white light. Shirley raised one of Mabel’s eyelids, leaned over her, and stared into the magnifying glass.

“What are you looking for?” I asked.