Murder on the Astral Plane (A Kate Jasper Mystery) (4 page)

- Four -

“Whaddaya mean, psychic soiree?” boomed a small, gaunt man with an intelligent face. His voice was bigger than he was as he walked into Justine’s living room. And rougher.

“Psychics, Chief Wenger, sir,” the taller, younger man answered, his voice quivering with excitement as he tailed the older man through the doorway. “As in telepathy,” he expanded. “That’s what the woman said on the phone, that it happened at a psychic soiree, some kind of experiment. Sir, the very possibilities—”

“Is this more Marin, New Age hoo-hah?” the man who had to be Chief Wenger demanded. “Kettering, you know I hate that crap.”

“It’s not crap, sir,” Kettering replied eagerly. “Actually, studies show that many Americans believe—”

“I don’t give a rat’s behind what many Americans believe,” Wenger cut in, surveying the room. “Fer Pete’s sake, someone was killed. Right, Yuki, O’Dwyer?”

The two uniformed officers nodded almost imperceptibly. Kettering’s reply, however, was not imperceptible.

“Right, sir,” he continued, still smiling, his eyes glinting under his dark eyebrows. He was well over six feet tall with an eager-beaver face and a jutting chin that Kirk Douglas would have coveted. Kettering was so excited, I had a feeling he would have rubbed his hands together, except that he couldn’t because he was carrying a huge stack of books,
The Enneagram Made Easy
by Wagele & Baron on the top. “Can’t you see the opportunity? I’ll be able to facilitate all of my studies now. This is cosmic, sir. A real murder, and a group of people attuned to the very—

“Oh, please, Kettering,” Wenger moaned heavily. “You should have stuck to fingerprints. Remember when you were excited by the little whorls?”

“But people, sir, I like them better. They’re even more complicated.” Kettering bounced on his heels. “And the pathology. We’re on the leading edge here—”

“Well, I’m certainly on edge, Kettering,” Wenger interrupted again. The chief looked like he should have been heading a university department somewhere. The heavy-lidded, intelligent eyes and high forehead were classic. And the sour, just-sucked-a-pickle expression.

“Sir, perhaps if you would be a little more open-minded, we could target our energies more effectively here.”

Wenger shot Kettering a long-suffering look, sighed, and pointed to the group of us, all still seated conveniently on the rug.

Kettering smiled back at Wenger, then turned to the rest of us.

“Well, hello,” he said, with all the enthusiasm of the guy who announces the movie times on the telephone. “I’m Lieutenant Kettering, and this is my boss, Chief Wenger of the Paloma Police Department. It looks like we may have a crime on our hands.” He glanced over at Silk’s dead body and paled a little. I was pretty sure it was the first time he’d actually looked at her. He made a quick comeback, though. “But we don’t just have a crime.” He surveyed us, his face as earnest as a door-to-door solicitor’s. “We have an opportunity. An opportunity to use our skills, telepathic and otherwise. An opportunity to share a profound adventure, an opportunity—”

“Can it,” Chief Wenger ordered, turning to his uniformed officers again.

“Yuki, O’Dwyer!” he shouted. “She dead?”

“Yes, sir,” the two officers answered simultaneously. Simultaneously and expressionlessly.

“Get the crime-scene technicians,” Wenger told them.

“Yes, sir,” they answered again, and O’Dwyer stepped away from his post at Silk’s body, leaving Yuki on detail as he used a cell phone.

“Can I interrogate them?” Kettering whispered to Wenger, loud enough for any one of us to hear him. Maybe he was deaf as well as enthusiastic.

“Fine,” Wenger answered, and Kettering turned our way, all but wagging his tail.

“See those books he’s carrying?” Barbara whispered in my ear, her whisper far lower than Kettering’s. “Thin books, short words?”

“Big type?” I whispered back, trying to keep my lips from moving.

Kettering didn’t seem to notice. Though Wenger glared our way. He definitely wasn’t deaf.

Justine stood up then. A brave woman.

“This is my house, Chief, Lieutenant,” she told the two policemen. “I’m Justine Howe. I called in this, this…incident.”

“Glad to meet you,” Lieutenant Kettering assured her, stepping forward and shaking her hand heartily. “I just want to tell you how interested I am in the field of psychic phenomena. I’m sure we can each learn from one another—”

“Ma’am,” Chief Wenger cut in, his rough voice softer with Justine than it had been with his lieutenant. “Is there another room where we can get comfortable?”

Justine nodded and led us all into her kitchen with a minimum of fuss, dragging Isabelle’s and Elsa’s chairs in with her. The choice of the kitchen as a “comfortable” place must have involved an element of positive thinking. The kitchen had the same knotty-wood paneling and grass cloth motif as the living room, along with white-tiled counters, and an old electric stove and refrigerator, but it wasn’t anywhere near as big as the living room.

“Isabelle, Elsa,” Justine said quietly, gesturing toward the chairs she’d brought with her.

Our two elders sat down obediently. And quickly. There weren’t enough chairs for everyone to be seated. There was barely enough room for everyone to squeeze into the kitchen at all. Wenger grabbed one of the four kitchen chairs. Kettering grabbed another and laid his stack of books down on the table. Linda Underwood propped Artemisia in the third chair. Artemisia definitely needed it. She had chewed off all of her lipstick and her eyes were glazed under her smeared mascara.

“It’s okay, sweetie pie,” Linda cooed in Artemisia’s ear. Did she really believe it was okay?

It did feel better in here, away from Silk’s body, with the smells of fried onions past, and sugar and spices flavoring the warm air. I sniffed, trying to guess what meal had been cooked last in here, while Gil Nesbit took a quick look around and plopped into the last seat as if he were playing musical chairs. That left the rest of us to stand around or find creative ways to sit.

Barbara and I ended up scrunched into the small amount of space on the floor by the kitchen cabinets. Tory perched on a tiled counter. Justine, Zarathustra, Linda, Denise, and Rich all stood. So much for getting comfortable. The kitchen floor was uncarpeted, cold, and hard.

“Well, sonny, getting all excited about this murder, are you?” Elsa asked, turning toward Lieutenant Kettering, her thin voice rasping in a friendly way. At least, I thought it was friendly. It was hard to tell with Elsa. She turned back. Was that a wink behind her bifocals?

“Yes, ma’am,” he replied. Then his face grew serious. “Of course, I realize a tragedy has occurred, a significant one—”

“Who was killed?” Chief Wenger asked.

“Silk Sokoloff,” Justine answered. Her dark eyes teared up for the first time. Was it just hitting her now? “She was a friend, and a colleague. She was a wonderful character.”

“A kick,” Linda added. “More like a dog than a cat. Romping around all the time. Pushing her nose into people’s faces.” Her voice was almost inaudible when she finished, “We’re gonna miss her.”

Zarathustra turned his head to the wall. Was he mourning Silk’s passing or remembering old grievances? Everyone else looked frozen.

“Who killed her?” Wenger asked, all business now.

“We don’t know,” Justine answered, hesitating for a moment. “I told the woman at the police station. None of us knows. Most of us were masked, and the rest were outside the room.”

“Doing a psychic experiment?” Kettering demanded eagerly.

Justine nodded.

“Most of you were actually wearing
masks
when she was killed?” Wenger demanded, his voice not so gentle anymore. “Masks without eye holes?”

We nodded as a group.

“Fer Pete’s sake!” Wenger boomed. “You expect me to believe that?”

Then Wenger got down to the real interrogation. Times, places, reasons for being there, relationships to the deceased,
etc.
He even inspected one of the sleep masks. Kettering took out a notebook and drew diagrams and made lists while his chief grumbled at the answers he was getting. My mouth felt drier, the floor felt colder and harder, and the air warmer and stickier as Wenger pressed on. Finally, he ran to a stop. As far as I could tell, he had covered every fact possible. Would he let us go now? A picture of Wayne flashed into my mind. Damn. I shouldn’t have left Wayne alone so long. I hoped he was all right. I opened my mouth to ask if I could call him, but Kettering was already talking.

“Shall I take it from here, sir?” he asked.

Wenger nodded with a loud, weary sigh. I wondered how long it had taken him to perfect that sigh.

“As you realize, there has probably been a murder here,” Kettering began with a big smile. “And a murderer is by definition pathological. And of a certain type. There are many systems of organizing personality types: astrology, enneagram, numerology, Myers-Briggs…”

I had a feeling I was supposed to be taking notes as he droned on. I might have been in college again, the college of pop psychology. And just like in any college class, some of the students were letting out little whimpers of desperation. Including Wenger.

I leaned back against a kitchen cabinet, avoiding the handle, and let Kettering’s words float over me as I tried to center myself.
Calm
, I told myself, I needed to be calm.

Because I was in the presence of murder, which implied a murderer. I resisted the impulse to scan the faces around me once more. And if the presence of murder wasn’t bad enough, someone, somewhere, was going to tell Wenger or Kettering that I was the Typhoid Mary of Murder. If that wasn’t a type, I didn’t know what was. I reminded myself I was trying to be calm and took a long cleansing breath in.

“Psst!” Barbara whispered in my ear.

The breath stuck for a moment.

“I think he’s winding down,” Barbara went on, her voice still low as I coughed and sputtered out my cleansing breath. “Look interested,” she ordered.

I breathed in through my nose and fixed my watering eyes on Lieutenant Kettering’s eager face.

“…so, we’re looking for a personality type. The personality type of a murderer.” He paused. “You all know your astrological signs and birth dates, don’t you?”

“Fer Pete’s sake, look at their driver’s licenses,” Wenger muttered.

“So, who would like to begin?” Kettering asked, oblivious to his chief’s words.

Elsa Oberg cleared her throat. “Well,” she rasped. “Age before beauty and all of that. I’d go first, but then, maybe you should take Isabelle. She doesn’t look so hot.”

I glanced at Isabelle Viseu. Elsa was right. Isabelle didn’t look good. Her skin was grayed in the bright kitchen light, an unhealthy contrast to her wide golden eyes. But she merely nodded when Elsa mentioned her name.

“Thank you, Ms. Oberg,” Kettering said. And he sounded like he really meant it. “And let me say that in your case you have both age and beauty.”

Elsa tilted her head and grinned. Kettering had her.

“Pretty good for an ole lady, eh?” she replied. “Okay, you cute thing. I’m a Gemini. But I’m not saying my birth date. That’d be telling.”

“Just the number of the day you were born?” he cajoled.

“The number?” She looked confused for a moment, her impish face showing its age. Then she grinned again. “Oh, I get it. June sixth.”

“Wow,” Kettering said, and began flipping through the books on the kitchen table, muttering to himself. “Gemini, numerological six, yeah.” He brought his head up abruptly. “Would you say you’re extroverted, confident, energetic?”

“Yes,” Justine and Linda answered as one.

Elsa just winked again from beneath her bifocals.

“I’ll bet you’re an enneagram three, the achiever type, and a Myers-Briggs ENFJ—”

“A what, soldier?” Wenger brought him up short.

“An ENFJ, extroverted, intuitive, feeling, and judging,” Kettering explained.

“Well, I’m glad someone’s having fun,” Wenger growled.

Kettering moved on to Isabelle, whom he tagged as an enneagram nine, the mediator, who might have difficulty confronting or making decisions, a Libra, a numerological seven, and an ISFP.”

This time, Wenger didn’t even ask. He just told Isabelle and Elsa they could leave.

“And check in with Officer Yuki on the way out,” he ordered. “She’ll take your fingerprints and have a look at your driver’s licenses.”

I was glad we weren’t just going to be judged on our personality types alone. Then I wondered if fingerprints showed anything about personality types.

Kettering pounced on Justine next. He waved a book in front of her face, a book by a famous psychic whose very name made Justine groan out loud. That, Kettering heard. And he looked hurt.

“Don’t all you psychics stick together?” he asked.

“Lieutenant Kettering,” Justine answered in her most soothing voice. “Do all of you policemen stick together? Do you all believe the same things? Do you—”

“Wow, I’ll bet you’re an enneagram eight,” he cut in. “That’s the boss, the asserter. Do you always say what’s on your mind?”