Death hits the fan (28 page)

"Simple too," I added helpfully.

He looked at me suspiciously for a moment, then rolled his boiled-egg eyes tragically. At least that's the effect I thought he was going for.

"But where has my little dove flown?" he asked, his after-shaved face close to mine now.

"I thought she was with you/' I told him honestly.

"But no," he declared, stepping back and waving a hand dramatically. "Family business took me to other places, other lands. I returned today, ready to offer Ingrid shelter. Shelter for her gentle soul as well as her ... her .. . her gentle body. And now she is gone." He put his face into his hands.

"Where were you, anyway?" I asked.

"Wisconsin," he muttered. Then he got back in character. "But how will I find her? My little lost love. How will I find her in this big uncaring world?"

"She have your phone number?" I asked.

He nodded thoughtfully.

"She'll call," I assured him. If he was unlucky. But then maybe Raoul could handle Ingrid. Anyone could handle her better than I had. And Raoul. With his roving eye, and his hand-seeking lips. I bet he had a lawyer just loaded with prenuptial agreements. I didn't think mine and Ingrid's had been the only hearts he'd toyed with.

"Do you really think she'll call?" he asked plaintively.

"Your love will show her the way," I assured him. Actually, it was kind of fun to talk like Raoul. Maybe this was how it felt to be in a roving troupe of players. Without leaving home. And the romantic words did the job.

"Ah yes, my dear Ms. Jasper." Raoul gushed. "You are wise as well as kind."

He grabbed my hand and kissed it before I could grab it back. But then he was gone. I'd disinfect the hand later. I had gag-gifts to design.

I rushed back to my desk, sketching the little tai chi slipper earrings. They would be perfect. I could even picture them dangling from my own, usually unadorned, ears.

That is, if the doorbell would stop ringing. My pencil

ground to a stop when I heard the chime, the fourth in the hour. I hadn't even breathed deeply, as far as I could remember. Maybe I'd just have to stop breathing at all, at least until I was through with the tai chi gift project.

This time I didn't approach the door cautiously. I approached it angrily, flinging it open.

A short, balding man in aviator glasses stood framed in the doorway.

"Ms. Jasper?" he inquired.

"Yeah," I snarled back. What was it this round? Save the rocks? Save the moss? Save a solicitor's job?

"Skunks," he said.

"What?"

"Buy low, smell high," he added.

I just stared.

"A little skunk humor," he explained. "I'm the skunk broker."

"Oh, the skunk broker," I murmured. In fact I could smell the faint odor of eau-de-skunk emanating from his short body. This man was here to save us. I stopped snarling. Maybe I should throw myself at his feet. But the smell kept me at a distance.

"I've got the traps," he told me. "Just need to get under the house, rustle up the little fellows, and guide them away. And get my check, of course." He smiled and added, "Heh-heh." But all chuckles aside, I had a feeling the check was the real priority.

I showed him the way under the house through a hinged piece of plywood I'd used to cover the entrance in the early stages of the skunk wars.

"Will it smell?" I asked.

"Probably not," he reassured me. "The little guys are pretty sleepy during the day. I'll get them out of here before they know what's happening. I put a tarp over the cage and they don't even know where they're going."

Nor did I, really. To a game reserve or to the next neighborhood. As long as they were at least a block away, I wouldn't worry. I stuffed a metaphorical cork in my bottle of ethical objections and watched him disappear into the recesses underneath the house. Then I ran back up the stairs, waiting for the aromatic explosion. But it never came.

Fifteen minutes later, he was back. And his skunk scent hadn't increased any as far as my aroma-meter could tell. I could barely smell it over the tang of the meal Wayne was still working on.

"Four skunks, two hundred dollars," he informed me. I got my checkbook. As I filled out the check, I wondered what he would have charged for Ingrid.

Just as I closed the door on the skunk broker, Wayne wandered out of the kitchen. Had he timed it that way?

"Think I saved the meal," he announced with all the gravity of an emergency-room surgeon.

Before I could even say "yum," the telephone rang. At least it was a change of pace from the doorbell. Yvette was on the other end of the line.

"Lunchtime, tomorrow," was her greeting.

"No more meetings," was my reply.

"But I think the murderer will be there—"

And once again the doorbell rang.

"Gotta go," I told Yvette cheerfully, hung up the phone, and ran to the door.

Winona Eads was standing on my doorstep when I opened up. I surveyed her tall, gawky body and beautiful face and decided it could have been worse. It could have been Felix. But hopefully Felix was being grilled by his own peers at this very moment. I shook the thought of manacles and red-hot pincers from my mind reluctantly. Winona was here, not Felix.

"Is it cool for you to talk now?" she asked me, her voice

barely a whisper. I balanced the smells floating in from the kitchen with the need in her widely spaced eyes.

Her eyes won. Barely.

"Come on in," I told her, trying to keep the sigh out of my voice. Of all my visitors, only a murder suspect had made it into my living room. I wasn't sure what that said about my social abilities.

"I've been ... well. .. thinking," she told me once she was sitting on the denim couch.

I nodded encouragingly and lowered myself into one of the hanging chairs.

Winona wriggled uncomfortably, and pushed a hank of her long red hair back from her oval face. Was she uncomfortable on the couch or in her own body? My guess was her body.

"See, I gotta know who did it," she declared, thrusting her head forward suddenly. "Like I said before, S.X. Greenfree meant something to me. She was important. She wrote beautiful stuff. No way she shoulda been killed like that. No way."

Wayne walked in and lowered himself down next to me in the hanging chair. It wobbled for a moment with his added weight, then stabilized.

"Hello, Winona," he said politely, no clue on his face that he'd just saved our lunch and wanted to eat it while it was still in remission.

"Hi," Winona replied and then jerked her head away.

Was her sudden wariness because Wayne was male? I knew at least one male in Winona's life had treated her badly. Maybe all men were suspect for her.

"So you've been thinking," I prompted her as patiently as I could.

"Yeah," she answered, turning her head back slowly. "See, it had to be someone who really knew her. At least I

think so. 'Cause no one else would go to that much trouble to kill her. It wasn't enough to just read her books, you see."

I nodded. She had just taken herself out of the running as a suspect. Very convenient. Convenient for Wayne and me as well, I realized. All right, convenient and logical.

"So, I've been thinking, like, who really knew her?"

"The other two authors," I offered. But my mind asked if indeed they'd really known her, either. No one at the science fiction writers' meeting had seemed that close to Shay la Greenfree. Why should Ted or Yvette be any different?

"Yeah." Winona bobbed her head up and down eagerly. God, she was vulnerable. I wanted to hug her. I wanted to adopt her and her son. I wanted—

"Dean Frazier," Wayne put in, bringing my mind back to the real question. The question of murder. And he was right. Dean had probably known Shayla better than anyone else who'd been there that night.

Winona bobbed her head up and down again, but this time she blushed. Was she embarrassed by the relationship between Dean and Shayla's husband? Even though she was over twenty, there was something about Winona that still seemed teenaged. She was probably embarrassed by the mention of anything with sexual implications.

"You know about Dean Frazier and Scott Green?" Wayne asked quietly.

I gave him a sharp look. Was he trying to embarrass her even more? Then I realized. He wanted to know how she knew what she knew.

"Neil told me," she whispered. Then her voice got a little louder. "Neil Nakagawa, you know. He's really cool. He told me a lot of stuff. About that crazy woman who worked for his father. The one who died. And how the acupuncturist lady knew S.X. Greenfree before. And about how the Zoe lady was friends with her. And that old guy was nuts over

Death Hits the Fan 247

her. See, all those guys knew her. They had ... well... motives. Or something."

"Possible motives?" I tried.

"Yeah," she agreed, repeating my words carefully. " 'Possible motives.' That's it."

"Or at least relationships with S.X. Greenfree," Wayne put in. His voice was thoughtful now. "Whether relationship translates into motive is another question. For instance, how would a long-ago school friendship qualify as a murder motive?"

Winona's milky freckled skin flushed again.

"Maybe she was mean to her," she answered diffidently.

Mean. Shayla was mean to a lot of people by some accounts. It was a simple word, but—

"Neil's been really helping me out," Winona went on. "He even got me a job in his father's store." She lowered her voice again. "After the other lady died."

"What does Neil think about Marcia Armeson's death?" Wayne asked.

"He thought she wasn't really . .. well... very cool, you see," Winona answered hesitantly. "But he couldn't see why anyone would want to kill her. He thinks she just fell into those books."

"Do you think that's likely?" Wayne asked, his voice a prosecuting attorney's now.

"No." Winona sighed. "It doesn't make sense. Not so soon after the other murder. Not that I really understand it all."

"And you like Neil," I prompted.

"Yeah," she admitted. This time her skin turned bright red. "He thinks I could really be a writer, you see. He read some of my stuff and he, like, thinks maybe I could get a scholarship or a grant or something to go to a real college instead of dental hygiene school. Neil's so smart. I keep

telling him 'no way,' but he just keeps telling me to think positive. He really believes in me. I don't know why."

For all of Winona's twenty or so years, she had such an innocence. A real innocence, an innocence that— An innocence that sucked me in like a vacuum cleaner. Suddenly, something in me chilled. Could all that innocence be an act?

"Neil's real worried right now," she added, frowning. "About his father, you see."

Damn, Neil's father. Our friend, Ivan Nakagawa. I still didn't know the details. Why had Ivan been in a mental hospital? I'd worked in mental hospitals and I knew there were all kinds of reasons to leave reality that didn't lead to murder. But still. . .

"Like his father's real distracted now."

She looked up at us, her wide eyes seeming to seek guidance.

"Are you worried that Neil's father is the killer?" Wayne asked gently.

Bingo. Winona's body jerked on the sofa.

"No, no way," she objected, but her head was turned away from us. "Neil's father is really nice, you see. And he's Neil's father. No way—"

The phone rang just as she was objecting. I ran to the answering machine.

I heard Wayne prompt Winona gently from behind me.

"But?" he said.

I picked up the phone just before the canned message began.

"Kate," a voice said. "I'm feeling very uneasy." It took me a moment to identify the voice as Ivan's, a.k.a. Neil's father. "I need to talk to you and Wayne. Can you come by tomorrow?"

I wanted to say no. I wanted to hang up. But this was Ivan, Wayne's friend. Wayne's friend who had spent time in a mental hospital for unknown reasons.

"Why?" I asked.

"I can't concentrate," he told me. There was a faint note of hysteria in his usually calm voice that I hadn't heard before. Maybe I just hadn't been listening. "I can't seem to find the serenity . . . I just can't—"

He stopped mid-sentence.

"Harmony will be restored when we find out the reason for the deaths," he finally finished.

"The murders," I reminded him.

"The murders," he agreed solemnly. "Will you talk with me once more? Please."

"Of course," I told him. Why had I said "of course" to Ivan and "no" to Yvette?

But Ivan thanked me and hung up before I could answer my own question. Or change my mind.

I marched back into the living room, feeling suckered all around. Kate Jasper, the all-day sucker. The all-life sucker.

"But why didn't Neil's dad fire that Marcia lady?" Winona was asking. "I keep thinking about it. Why didn't he just fire her if she was that awful?"

The question stopped me with one foot still in the air.

7 let my foot drop back to the carpet and then just stood there, staring at Winona. The ever-so-innocent Winona Eads who had come up with a nasty question that I hadn't even bothered to seriously consider before. Ivan's failure to fire Marcia was suspicious. And unfortunately, I could think of at least one answer to the question of why Ivan hadn't fired Marcia Armeson. Blackmail.

The word tunneled into my mind like a dentist's drill, vibrating with the threat of worse things to come. But my mind rejected the word. I shook my head. Shook it hard. In spite of all my doubts about the man, I couldn't believe that Ivan Nakagawa would allow himself to be blackmailed. Any more than Wayne would. But would Ivan commit murder? That was a different question. One I was starting to worry about.

"Maybe Mr. Nakagawa was too softhearted to fire Ms. Armeson," Wayne proposed.

Winona wriggled on the couch, thinking it over. My mind

wriggled with her. How softhearted did an employer have to be to put up with all the grief that Marcia had handed out? Not to mention the thieving.

"Don't have to worry about Mr. Nakagawa," Wayne went on gruffly. "He's a good man."