Death on the Family Tree (23 page)

“Dutch?” she called softly, knocking again.

He still didn’t answer.

She checked a small wooden stoplight hanging beside his door. At night, the staff went around and pulled levers to turn all the lights red. Each morning, residents pulled levers to turn the lights green, to indicate they were up and about. If a light was still red by nine o’clock, somebody from the staff investigated.

Dutch’s light was green, of course. He was always up by nine. So where was he? Probably playing poker with his cronies. He hadn’t left yet, unless he had crossed the lobby while she was in the ladies’ room. And surely even the phlegmatic Leona would have remembered to inform him Katharine was there.

She tried his door, but it was locked. She padded to the far end of the hall, to a sunny solarium where groups worked puzzles or played cards. It was empty.

If she had known who Dutch’s friends were, she could have knocked on doors, but she didn’t like to disturb strangers. With a huff of disgust, she headed back to the elevator.

“I’m too wobbly for all this walking,” she muttered.

At the desk, Leona popped her gum and rang his apartment again, but nobody answered.

“Has he had any guests today?” Katharine asked, scanning down the visitor register she had already signed.

“Just the laundry branging shirts.” Leona slung the gum from one side of her mouth to the other and pointed a sharp red nail at an illegible scrawl. The laundry man had signed in at 10:35 and out at 10:50.

Katharine sighed. “You don’t know who he plays cards with, do you? We were supposed to have lunch together, and he may have forgotten.”

Leona made a face. “Forgettin’ is a fav’rite pastime around here.” She chewed thoughtfully. “I don’t know ’bout poker, but he eats with Jack Johnson. I could ring Jack.”

Jack said, “I haven’t seen Dutch all day. He called this morning and said he wasn’t coming to our little game, he was going out to lunch and wanted to get a haircut first.”

Katharine asked Leona to call the barber, who worked in the basement. He said Dutch got a haircut at nine-thirty and he hadn’t seen him since.

Maybe it was what had happened at her house, but Katharine was beginning to feel anxious. She told herself it was silly to worry. But still—“Could you all open his door for me, just to be sure he’s all right?” she asked.

“I cain’t leave the desk,” Leona reminded her, “so I cain’t do a thang to help you myself. Mr. Billingslea is out at a meetin’ in town, so he cain’t help you, neither. But why don’t I call Norman? He’s fixin’ a clogged toilet right now, but he’ll get up there as soon as he kin. You wanna wait down here?”

“No, I’ll wait in the hall up there.” Katharine didn’t want Leona lifting the weight of her mascara high enough to notice how red her eyes still were.

While the elevator crept back up to the third floor, she wished she had asked Jack who Dutch’s other friends were. She was going to feel real silly if he came back from visiting somebody—or out of the bathroom—and found her and Norman, who doubled as handyman and daytime security, breaking into his apartment.

One nice feature of Autumn Village was a couple of comfortable chairs halfway down each hall. They were there for residents who found the long halls too much of a walk at one stretch, but Katharine availed herself of one and kept an eye on Dutch’s door. Ten minutes passed before a lanky man in a brown uniform came upstairs jingling a big ring of keys.

“Hey, Norman,” she greeted him. Norman and she had had a few run-ins in the past over the speed with which he didn’t repair leaking toilets and faulty phones, but he seemed to hold no grudges.

“Hey, Miz Murray. What’s the problem?” He played a tune on a fat ring of keys.

She stood. “I am supposed to be having lunch with Mr. Landrum but I can’t find him. He’s probably visiting somebody else, but since we had a date for lunch—”

“Probably just forgot,” Norman said cheerfully. “Leona said you want me to let you in.” When Katharine nodded, he pulled a wrinkled form from his pocket. “You’ll have to sign here.”

After she had made it official that she had requested permission to enter Mr. Landrum’s unit uninvited, Norman found the right key and opened the door. “We can’t let just anybody in, you know,” he told her as he stood back to let her precede him. “We don’t want our residents complaining.” He raised his voice a pitch. “Mr. Landrum? You got company.”

Dutch didn’t answer. He sprawled facedown on the couch. And as soon as Katharine touched his hand, she knew he would never eat fried chicken again.

Katharine started to turn him over, but Norman held her back. “I’m sorry, Miz Murray, but you’ll need to wait in the hall. I believe Mr. Landrum has expired.”

Katharine didn’t know whether to burst into hysterical laughter or throw back her head and scream at Norman’s asinine stupidity. Obviously Dutch had “expired.” Nobody but a small infant can successfully mimic the stillness of death. Besides, when she bent over him, she could see that his face was purple and his tongue lolled out of his mouth. Had he had some kind of fit?

Poor dear, he must have been putting on his tie. It lay in a heap on the arm of the couch. She picked it up, rolled it idly, and stuffed it in her pocket as she left the room with tears streaming down her cheeks.

She slumped into the nearest chair in the hall, moving through a thick fog of grief. The morning’s earlier events receded in importance before this blow. Losing Dutch was like losing her parents all over again. Dutch was the last remaining adult who had held her on his knee, attended her graduations and her wedding, and knew her family’s private stories and jokes. When they buried Dutch, they would bury her entire childhood except what she carried with her.

In the next hour, she sat in a sodden lump while Autumn Village dealt with violent death in its own discreet way. She considered calling Posey or Tom, but what could they do? She watched without seeing as a procession of people came and went. Mr. Billingslea himself appeared and stood guard, waving away curious residents with the bland, professional assurance, “Everything is under control.”

Under control? In spite of a cup of strong, sweet tea brought to her by a woman with an equally strong, sweet face, Katharine wanted to laugh hysterically at the hackneyed phrase. Nothing in her life was under control at the moment, and Dutch had gone beyond control.

At some point Mr. Billingslea came to her chair and said, “Wait here, please, Mrs. Murray. They want to interview you in a little while.” So she sat, threading Dutch’s tie through her fingers, waiting. Once the initial tide of grief receded, she felt a curious sense of detachment. It was hard to believe she wasn’t waiting to take Dutch to lunch. Or Aunt Lucy. Or her mother. She wished she had taken Dutch out more often—that he hadn’t died so inconveniently
before
they’d had dinner.

She had cried out all her tears by the time they carried the heavy stretcher toward the freight elevator at the back.

When a policeman bent over her and asked, “You were the one to find him, ma’am?” she looked up at his uniform in surprise. She hadn’t noticed who had been going in and out of the room. She had expected a doctor.

Before she could say more than, “Yes,” she realized the interviewing officer wasn’t listening. He was looking at what she was doing with her hands. “What is that, ma’am?”

She held it up. “Dutch’s tie. He must have been putting it on when he had his fit. It was lying on the arm of his couch.”

“Hey, Steve, come here!” he called to an officer down the hall. When Steve arrived, the first officer pointed. “I think we’ve found your weapon.”

Katharine dropped it in shock. “Dutch was killed?”

“Yes, ma’am. Can’t choke yourself without a noose and something to stand on.”

The man named Steve bent to retrieve the tie. “You been holding it?” he demanded.

“Running her hands all over it,” the other officer answered for her.

“There went any fingerprints.” Steve dropped it in a plastic bag. “Ma’am, haven’t you watched enough television to know not to touch anything at a crime scene?”

“I didn’t know it was a crime scene.” She swayed and would have fainted if he hadn’t caught her. Her ears roared.

Somebody pressed her head gently to her knees. “Stay like that for a minute, ma’am. Hey! Can I get a cup of something hot and sweet down here?”

In another minute, somebody thrust another cup of tea into her hands and held her shoulder while she drank it. As she obediently swallowed, Katharine decided to call Tom after all. She didn’t care if he was in a meeting with the president. She needed him.

As soon as the world stopped spinning, she reached for her phone and called Tom’s cell. After four rings it picked up automatically, and Tom’s pleasant business voice came on the line. “This is Thomas Murray. I’m sorry I can’t take your call right now, but if you leave a message, I’ll get right back to you as soon as I possibly can.”

“Tom? Katharine. Call me as soon as you get this, please? I have to talk to you at once.”

Fiercely, she punched in his office number. “Louise, I need to talk to Tom as soon as possible. I’ve got an emergency down here. Two, in fact. I urgently need to speak to him.”

“He’s at a meeting right now, Mrs. Murray, but I’ll be sure and give him the message. Is there anything I can do?”

“Yes. Try to get to him and tell him to call me. Then make him a plane reservation for this afternoon and clear his calendar for the rest of the week. I need him down here, real bad.” She didn’t even mind that her voice trembled on the last sentence.

After she hung up, though, she regretted the call. She didn’t want Louise thinking she was a hysterical wimp. And what could Tom do that she couldn’t besides hold her while she cried? The rest she could cope with. She always had.

Mr. Billingslea finally unbent enough to wander down the hall in her direction. “I wonder, Mrs. Murray, if you would call Mr. Landrum’s son. You know the family so well.”

“Oh, yes. I’ve known them all my life.” She didn’t add that Chapman Landrum was a prig who never approved of his father and had chosen to live in Schenectady rather than Atlanta, or that she had regularly knocked him down each time the families got together for holidays or summers up at Cashiers, when they were children.

When she agreed to make the call, Mr. Billingslea gave a small smile of relief. “You’re practically part of our family here,” he told her, patting her shoulder. Apparently he meant it for a compliment.

Katharine got Chap in his office and told him what had happened to his father. She listened to his rants about suing Autumn Village for negligence and countered by pointing out that Dutch must have let in whoever killed him, because the dead bolt on his door was open, but the night latch was on. She didn’t know why she remembered that detail, but she did.

When Chap calmed down a bit, she gave him the name of the funeral home that had handled so many ser vices for her in recent years. She even agreed to draft an obituary for him to edit when he arrived in town, but she refused to plan the ser vice. “You can do that after you get here. Besides, there will have to be an autopsy, since it was a violent death.” When Chap started to splutter, she said, “Just get here as fast as you can. We’ll deal with the rest later.”

Including the important issue of what Dutch wanted on his tombstone.

“Do me one more favor, Kat. Pick out something nice for him to be buried in. I couldn’t stand to go into his closet.”

She was touched. That was the first sign Chap had ever given of caring for his dad—until he added, “But you’d better wear sunglasses, his clothes are so bright.”

Then she wanted to knock him down again. But she was sorry he wouldn’t give himself the gift of time in Dutch’s closet. Clothes carry a person’s scent long after the person is gone. Katharine still had her mother’s old bathrobe in tissue paper in the guest room closet. Sometimes she took it out and buried her face in its silken folds. The fact that Chap would not enter his father’s closet was more his tragedy than Dutch’s.

When she told Mr. Billingslea what Chap had asked her to do, he referred her to a policeman in the hall. “There will be time for that later,” he told her. “The body won’t be released for several days.”

“Besides,” Mr. Billingslea chimed in, “we don’t permit anything to leave the unit until family arrives.”

“I promised,” Katharine pointed out, “and like you said, I’m practically family here. I was practically part of Dutch’s family, too. I’ve known him all my life. And I’d like to choose the clothes before I leave, please. I don’t want to have to come back. My house was broken into today, and completely trashed. I’ll be dealing with that for days. All I want is one outfit. I will take it with me and give you a receipt.” When the policeman started to speak, she repeated, “I don’t want to have to come back here.”

His eyes flickered.

She realized she had used the same tone she used to use with Jon, when she would call, “Don’t make me come up there.” Her social instinct was to apologize. Instead, she stood and waited.

He sighed. “Come with me, ma’am. And don’t touch a thing. Just point to what you want.”

Katharine stood in Dutch’s closet for several seconds inhaling his scent and missing him. Then she began to look for clothes. He had far too many, and they were jammed together in a haphazard way that made her suspect his wife had organized his closet until she died. Several plastic bags of laundry and dry cleaning hadn’t even been opened, just hung among the rest.

She spied the jacket to his best gray suit—the one he’d worn to Lucy’s funeral such a short time ago—and pointed it out. She found the pants farther down the bar. She pointed to a red tie, certain Dutch would want a red tie, then she stopped, chagrined. How could she choose a shirt that would please both Dutch and Chap? Dutch had liked colorful clothes. For daily wear he preferred knit polo shirts from various golf matches where he had marshaled. With suits, he favored green, blue, yellow, violet, or pink dress shirts. Not exactly what the starched-white-shirt Chap would consider appropriate for a funeral.

Katharine finally spied a white shirt with blue stripes hanging in an unopened cleaner’s bag with three yellow ones. She pointed. “That will do.”

As the officer reached his gloved hands up to bring out the shirt, she noted that the laundry was the same one she and Tom used.

“You all okay?” Norm called from the hall door.

“Fine,” she called back. “We just have to get shoes, socks, and underwear.”

“He won’t need all those,” Norman objected. She suspected he might be the clothing beneficiary for most of the men who died. It was hard to picture Mr. Billingslea wearing a former resident’s suits to work. However, she refused to shortchange Dutch in order to increase Norman’s legacy. Chap had left it up to her, so Dutch was going to be buried in full dress.

She accepted the top pair of shorts, the first undershirt, and the first pair of black socks she saw in the drawers. Then she nodded toward his best black shoes. “That’s it,” she said.

At the door to the bedroom she took one last look around. She had not been in Dutch’s bedroom since she used to play hide-and-seek with Chap and their friends, but he still used the old mahogany suite he and his wife always shared and the pictures on the dresser were familiar. “Goodbye,” she whispered softly before she followed the officer toward the hall.

Leona was waiting for them, holding a large carrier from Macy’s. “Mr. Billingslea told me to brang you up somethin’ to put ’em in. You don’t want to carry them thangs loose through the buildin’.” Katharine interpreted that to mean that Mr. Billingslea didn’t want other residents reminded of their own mortality.

She folded each piece and put it in the carrier under Leona’s critical eye. “Don’t you thank he oughta be buried in a white shirt?” she demanded.

“He doesn’t have any white ones,” Katharine told her. “Besides, he liked this one.”

“What about them the laundry brung today? They was white. I know, ’cuz the man had to lay ’em on the counter while he signed in, and I noticed, seein’ as how I ain’t never seen Mr. Landrum in a white shirt before.”

“Maybe he was bringing them to somebody else.”

“No, he weren’t. He had to ask me for the room number. Said he’d just started with the company and hadn’t been here before. Didn’t even know to go around back and use the ser vice entrance—just parked his little white van right in front of the door.”

“What did he look like?” The dry cleaner was owned and run by a Vietnamese couple, and the only workers Katharine had ever seen there were members of their extended family.

“Sorta old, I thank, but he wore a Braves cap that covered all his hair but the sideburns. They were white. Had on dark glasses, too. Said he had a sinus infection that had spread to his eyes. Had a soft scratchy voice, not much more’n a whisper, and he was tallish and walked all stooped over and real slow, like this.” Leona hunched her shoulders and tottered down the hall. She had a gift for mimicry Katharine had never suspected.

Katharine’s breath caught in her throat. None of the Vietnamese she had ever seen at the laundry were old, and all were short, but she knew one man who had fooled a lot of people by impersonating an elderly street sweeper. The same man who got bad sinus infections from going underwater, and who knew she was visiting Dutch this morning.

“He brought Dutch white shirts?” she asked.

“Yes, ma’am, in a long plastic bag. Coupla white ones, at least. That’s all I saw. They must be in there somewhere.” Leona peered into the living room as if expecting to see it festooned with shirts.

Katharine called to the policeman, “Could we look in the closet once more, please? There were a couple of white shirts delivered this morning we seem to have missed.”

He reluctantly led her back to the closet and, at her request, checked all the plastic bags. They found no white shirts. “Maybe they are in with dry cleaning,” she suggested.

He checked four suit bags, as well. “None of them have shirts, ma’am. Besides, all of these were promised at least two months ago. He had a lot of clothes.”

She gave him a wan smile. “Yeah, he liked clothes. I wonder where those shirts are.”

She asked him to reexamine the laundry bag the striped shirt had been in. It held only pale yellow shirts. “Maybe Leona thought they were white,” she murmured.

The officer looked at the tag still attached at the top. “These were promised four weeks ago. You think they waited a month to deliver them?” He didn’t expect an answer. “Looks like that laundryman is somebody we’ll need to be talking to.”