Murder in a Nice Neighborhood (13 page)

“Let me help you.” I found the armhole that had eluded her. “You should have waited until I got back.”

“I’m not in the habit of waiting around for help,” she grumbled. “I can look after myself.”

“That makes two of us,” I agreed.

She thrust herself up from the bed, tottering on one foot. “Don’t start drawing a lot of silly parallels between my situation and yours,” she snapped. “I want out of this bed. I want to go downstairs and look at my notes. I want a cup of coffee.”

“Yes’m. Right away.”

That pulled a reluctant smile from her. “Sorry to be in such a bad mood,” she muttered. “I’m a rotten patient. It really bugs me to need help.”

“Me, too.”

She shot me a look from which the grogginess had dissipated. “I warned you, Liz. There’s no comparison between having a bum ankle and being stalked by murderers.” She shook her head impatiently. “God, my head feels like someone performed liposuction on the gray matter. Did
I
hear you tell Biddy that another man had been killed?”

“That’s right.” Her cane had fallen out of reach; I handed it to her. “If this doesn’t work, try leaning on me. Yes, there was another murder. They asked me to identify the body, lacking anyone else to do it.”

“Oh, Liz.” She lost a little of her belligerent air. “Do they suspect you?”

“It seems not.” We moved out into the hall, she leaning on the cane, me ready to assist. Our procession stopped at the head of the stairs. Claudia looked at them for a stony minute, and then lowered herself until she was sitting on the topmost one.

“I used to enjoy this as a child,” she remarked. “We called it bumping.”

“Claudia—”

“Works when you’re hiking a steep trail, too,” She scooted down to the half-landing and made the turn.

Paul Drake stood at the foot of the steps. His face was carefully expressionless.

Claudia gave me an accusing stare over her shoulder. “You didn’t tell me he was here.”

“I didn’t get a chance.” I waited, wondering if Claudia would annihilate Drake with a few well-chosen words before throwing him out, or just boot him without stopping to talk.

She did neither. “Well, Detective Drake,” she said graciously, bumping her way down the rest of the stairs, “you can give me a hand up. After all, that’s supposed to be the police function, right?”

“Right you are, Mrs. Kaplan.” He offered her his hand, and managed not to wince when she put her full weight on it
pulling herself up.

“He wants to join us for dinner, if that’s all right with you, Claudia.”

She scowled for a moment, then shrugged. “Why, certainly, Liz. It’s our duty to offer aid and comfort to the minions of the law.” She turned to
Drake. “I guess you miss Signe’s cooking.”

“I missed Signe, for a while.” Paul Drake glanced from her to me. “She moved several months ago, and I’m still alive.” His smile was tight. “Mrs. Kaplan seems to have heard the same gossip you have—that I’m ruled by my stomach. Well, no point in denying it. Can I help you fix the vegetables?”

He was handy in the kitchen, I’ll say that for him. I enjoyed it myself, having had just the bus’s tiny galley or the closest picnic table as a kitchen for the past few years. We worked together while Claudia watched from a seat at the table, sipping the coffee she’d demanded and making sarcastic comments on Drake’s domesticity. I wondered about this Signe person—the name had a familiar sound, and after a while my subconscious connected her as a friend of Bridget’s who used to come to the local writers’ meetings.

“Get the man an apron, Liz,” Claudia commanded. Drake was rather splashily scrubbing beets. “He’s getting water everywhere. Is that why Signe left, Detective Drake?”

“She got a different job,” he said, keeping his eyes fixed on the beets.

“That’s right.
Los Angeles Times,
wasn’t it?” Claudia turned to me. “Signe Harrison used to write for the
Redwood Crier.
I understand her new job is much more lucrative. Do you correspond?” This was jabbed at Drake, who managed to roll with it.

“She sends me scenic postcards,” he replied, cutting the tops off the beets much too closely. “Like she does the other friends she left behind.”

I gathered up the beet greens to stem and wash. “We’re not going to eat those repulsive things, are we?” Claudia dropped the subject of Drake’s former love, which was fine with me.

“They’re delicious, and good for you, too.” I shoved the beet greens into a pot and added a little water. Drake didn’t look too enthusiastic, either.

“Where’s the meat in this meal?” Claudia transferred her glare to me. “I’m no vegetarian, Liz. I need red meat to keep up my strength.”

“Relax.” I pulled a bloody London Broil out of the refrigerator. “I picked this up especially for you this morning, when I got Vivien’s groceries.”

Claudia’s eyes lit with pleasure. “I’d better cook it. You vegetable-lovers don’t know what to do with a good steak.”

“I’m an economic vegetarian,” I said mildly. “Meat is hard to grow in a garden, so I only eat it for special occasions.”

“I’ll cook it,” Drake offered.

Claudia enjoyed bossing him around—"That heavy cast-iron skillet, Detective Drake, since we don’t have time to grill it. Lots of salt, mind. No, get it really hot!” Drake stood it pretty good-humoredly, and maybe he really preferred having Claudia hector him to eating a solitary dinner in his trailer. I don’t mind solitude, but it was pleasant to share the kitchen with other people, to join a conversation whenever I felt like it,
to set a table with china and glassware, instead of eating out of the pot that fits my one-burner stove.

The steak filled the kitchen with its aroma, and I was ravenously hungry all of a sudden. I had the veggies steaming gently, the beet greens cooked and chopped. I wanted to add a little good vinegar to them, but Claudia didn’t have any.

“Bridget gave me some—it’s in the bus.” I took a bottle of wine out of the cupboard where Claudia had told me to find it, and set it on the counter. “Open that, Drake, while I go get it.”

“Open that, Drake,” he mimicked, looking through the silverware drawer for a corkscrew. “I can see this dinner was a mistake. You’re losing all respect for my authority.”

“I never had any to lose.” I felt quite witty, going out the back door while they laughed inside. Night lay over the garden like the spangled velvet I had once fingered at the fabric store downtown. The scents of roses and jasmine were shamelessly cohabiting. The air was cold and, despite the flower scents, definitely on the cusp of a seasonal change. I picked my way through bars of moonlight, around the corner of the garage.

The side door on my bus was open. The dome light was off.

I didn’t even think that Tony might be in there with a knife, or that the murderer was waiting for me. A surge of territorial adrenaline took over my thought process. My home, my few precious things, were under attack.

I launched myself through the gaping door. After the brightness of the moonlight, it was as dark as a cave in there. Crouched on the floor beside the cooler, I had time to realize what a stupid move I was making. The correct thing to do would have been to yell for the police, since one of them was right in the kitchen.

Before I could rectify my mistake, something moved in the back of the bus. It came toward the door, a dark, indistinct shape. Reflexively I grabbed at it as it rushed by, and found myself with a handful of what felt like sweatpants. The intruder fell heavily in the doorway of the bus, and I lost my grip.

The intruder straightened. An arm came up, silhouetted in the open doorway. I couldn’t tell exactly what it was holding, but some intuitive part of my brain suggested that it would be heavy and would hurt a lot when it encountered my head. As the arm came down, I managed to roll sideways. Even glancing off my head, the blow had an impact like collision with an asteroid belt.

I didn’t really lose consciousness. It was there, somewhere, just out of my grasp. In the dark bus there was a considering silence, and I knew as well as if it were spoken that my assailant was still there, wondering how badly I was hurt, whether to finish me off.

Then the back porch light came on, making a nimbus over the garage roof, and Drake’s voice called, “Where’s that vinegar?”

The looming shape at the door of the bus vanished. Footsteps raced down the driveway, crunching in the gravel. More footsteps came pounding toward the bus.

I lay there, letting the blackness of the ceiling slowly dissolve as my eyes got used to the dark. I couldn’t seem to move or make a sound, although I could hear acutely Drake’s muffled curse when he tripped over a loose paving stone in the path.

“Liz! Are you back here?” His footsteps stopped when he saw the open door of the bus. For a few moments there was silence, and then he was leaning over me.

I wanted very much to see his expression, but it was too dark, His fingers touched my neck, feeling for a pulse, then he moved my head gently. At last I could summon my voice. “I’m okay.”

“I’ll get an ambulance.”

“No!” This threat brought me fully alert. “I’m fine, really.”’ I sat up, unable to keep from wincing. “Nothing an ice pack won’t cure.”

Drake turned on the dome light. Even its dim radiance hurt my eyes. He felt around my head, his other hand warm and wonderfully steadying on my shoulder. “You’ve got one hell of a goose egg here, lady. What were you hit with?”

“Something heavy.” I felt the lump myself. It was big, as he’d said, just behind my right ear. He squeezed past me where I huddled between the front seats and the pull-down table. I missed the warmth of his hand. “Round and limp-looking, it was. But it didn’t feel limp.”

“Rock in a sock,” he said, holding up his find. It was a black dress sock, bulging horribly at the toe end. “Not the kind of weapon that’s easy to trace.” His eyes traveled around the inside of the bus. I looked, too. I’d left my sleeping bag out to air the night before, and it was rumpled, as if someone had crouched back between the cupboards that flanked the bed.

This yours?” Drake was holding a little halogen flashlight, the kind with an anodized aluminum case that I had seen at Redwood Trading Post but never felt rich enough to buy.

“Nope.” I reached for it, and he held it back. I noticed then that he’d picked it up with a Kleenex. “Hey, just like the real Paul Drake, but he always had a nice white handkerchief.”

“I keep waiting for the generation that hasn’t read Erie Stanley Gardner,” he grumbled. “Did you notice if the guy wore gloves?”

I pictured again that raised arm, the strange-looking weapon, and shook my head. “Couldn’t say.”

He used the flashlight anyway, clicking it on with the tissue between his finger and the switch, and then shining it in my eyes.

“No sign of concussion.” He switched the flashlight off and put it, wrapped, in his pocket. “Can you walk? Mrs. Kaplan will be worried by now.”

“I can walk.” I felt shaky, but not from being bonked. It was disturbing to think that a hostile person had been in my bus, waiting for me. “How did he get in?”

Drake’s scowl was plainly visible in the moonlight. “Just cut a neat little hole in your cardboard, here, and reached in to unlock the door. Why didn’t you have that window replaced, Liz?”

The window that Pigpen had punched out. I shivered. “Just didn’t get around to it. My life has been rather full lately. I’ll see to it soon.”

“You won’t sleep in this thing another night until you do.” He was angry. I could tell. “Mrs. Kaplan’s offering you a real room in a real house. Why don’t you take her up on it?”

I wanted to be angry also. Anger is such a purifying emotion. But all I could think about was a cup of mint tea and a session with my sleeping bag. “This is real, too,” I mumbled, glancing around my bus. “People who live in houses, or trailers, or apartments, don’t have a lock on reality, you know.”

He didn’t say anything more.

I scooted forward, and remembered the vinegar as I passed my cooler, which is where I keep most food staples. The vinegar and soy sauce stand with other bottles in a little plastic tub that keeps them upright while I’m driving.

The tub had been moved.

“Forget the vinegar,” Drake said impatiently. “if you don’t want an ambulance, I’m taking you to the emergency room.”

“Someone’s been in here.” I stared into the cooler. “Why would anyone break into my van to give me food?”

Drake was interested. “Good question,” he said, squatting down to see for himself. “Not a real philanthropist, since he hit you on the head. What’s different?”

“Things are moved around.” I took out the bottle of balsamic vinegar and handed it to Drake, who tucked it absently into his hip pocket. "I can’t really tell—what’s this?”

Drake stared at the plastic bag I pulled out. “Looks like some kind of seed or grain,” he said, puzzled. “I can see planting crack or grass to incriminate someone, but I never heard of planting granola.”

Chapter 20

An ice pack kept the pain in my head from exploding outward like the fireworks that cartoonists draw around those who’ve been wounded. I ate a little of the steak and felt better. Claudia ate, too, and Drake polished off what was left, bit by bit, making frequent forays outside, where a couple of uniforms were spending a fun evening scrutinizing every inch of gravel in the driveway.

Claudia poured herself another glass of wine—Drake wouldn’t let me have any, and he’d stuck to mineral water. After his last trip outside, he’d cleared away the dishes. Now the middle of the table was given over to Exhibits A and B, the rock-in-the-sock and the plastic bag with its mysterious contents. I couldn’t figure out if those contents looked more like caraway seeds or wild rice.

Drake had carried the bag in, using Claudia’s tongs. When she marched out, he slapped her hand gently away. “Don’t touch,” he admonished.

“I just don’t get it. Knock Liz over the head and leave this stuff behind? Doesn’t make sense.”

“Sure doesn’t.” I felt the lump again—my fingers just couldn’t stay away from it. I’ve been beaten up worse. Once in prison I was even kayoed while trying to break up a fight between two strong, belligerent women. But it was kind of like that childbirth pain you hear women talking about—the intensity gets lost in memory, and you don’t realize how much it hurts to be hurt until you’re hurt again.