Not Exactly a Brahmin (26 page)

“About my case,” I said to distract him, “what do you want to know?”

He perked up. “The footprints under Lois Palmerston’s window. Who made them? I’ve been trying to figure that out all day.”

“Want to guess?”

“Jeffrey Munson? You said he wore running shoes. He seemed like a skulker.”

I laughed. “No. Actually, there was no need for any of the five suspects to peek in Lois’s window. It would have been dangerous for them to park in front of the house and creep around in the bushes. If they’d wanted to find out about Lois, they would have called, or rung the bell. They hadn’t been watching her house all night. They didn’t know there had been no lights on. If any of them had come by, they would have assumed she’d gone to bed early. The only person who was watching the house, and who was being driven crazy by the lights being off, was my friend Billy Kershon.”

“The kid across the street?”

“Right. I saw him that day in his shorts and running shoes. Even then he was keeping an eye on the house. He spotted me right away. He charged over and asked me about the case. And I”—I sighed—“told him that I could use all the help I could get.”

Howard laughed. “Your own personal deputy, huh?”

“When I take him on his tour of the station, I’ll have to remind him that private investigators shouldn’t go around breaking the law, even to help the police.”

Howard shifted the half-horse’s tail and stretched his long legs, resting his feet on a white styrofoam orb the size of a medicine ball. (I remembered a woman had come to the party as a snowman. Apparently, she had left without her middle snowball.) “But, Jill, how did you know the killer was Nina Munson? When you got out of the car, I was still figuring it to be Sam Nguyen.”

“Well, the killer had to be Sam Nguyen, but it couldn’t have been Sam Nguyen. So the only possibility was someone who looked like Sam. It was your fake Howards that gave me the idea. Even knowing that I was at a costume party, when I saw the first one I thought it was you.”

“You did?” Howard looked insulted.

“Well, it was your house; I expected to see you here. I was talking to Pereira, not thinking about you. And the fake Howard looked enough like you from the back to pass. There was no reason to assume it wasn’t you.”

“Nina Munson and Sam Nguyen, do they look that much alike?”

“From the back. They’re both short. They have very dark, blunt-cut hair. At Trent Cadillac, Nina wore white overalls and a white jacket. And when Ralph Palmerston, Cap Danziger, and Jake Trent saw her back as she was leaving the shop, there was no reason for them to assume they’d seen anyone but Sam Nguyen. They saw someone who looked like Sam, in a place where Sam should be. Without giving it a thought, they assumed it was Sam.”

“But what about the time. You said by that time of day Sam was always at lunch.”

“True. Sam knew that and the Vietnamese restaurant knew it. But no one at Trent Cadillac held Sam accountable for his time. He came and went as he pleased. If he chose to have lunch late one day no one thought anything of it. And besides, with Ralph Palmerston throwing a tantrum, Jake Trent and Cap Danziger were so busy trying to placate him, they weren’t worrying about the time.”

“So Nina planned it all alone?”

“So she says. And I believe her. She said she’d had enough of hassling with collaborators. She was used to making her own decisions and facing the consequences. She’d taken chances before. She was the one who was expelled from college for taking on the dean. When the five Shareholders concocted the scheme, it was just party talk. Nina was the one who decided to make it reality. She called Lois: she got her out here. And the others were swept along into the operation.”

Howard nodded. “But cutting the brake lines: it’s such a masculine kind of crime.”

“That’s what appealed to Nina. She had helped Jeffrey enough with cars to know where the brake lines were, and she had a firm hand from sewing to make the punctures with.”

“But Jill, she still had to get to the car.”

I brushed the potato chip rubble from the arm of the couch. “That was the hard part. Fortunately for her, Palmerston’s car was parked near the back door of the shop. Getting to the car wasn’t really dangerous. She hadn’t committed any crime yet. She was just a person dressed in white overalls. If someone had spotted her then, she could have turned around and walked out.

“The chanciest moment was at the car itself, getting in position to make the perforations. But once she was doing the work, she was just another pair of white-overalled legs sticking out. No one would look twice at that. That’s what you see in the repair shop. And when she finished, all she had to do was keep her back to the area where the customers wait. That’s when Danziger spotted her and he, Trent, and Palmerston assumed she was Sam Nguyen.”

“But what about Cap Danziger? Didn’t he recognize Nina?”

“He denies it. At the time he assumed she was Sam Nguyen. If he did see through the disguise—which he also denies—it wasn’t till much later.”

“But he knew that Sam Nguyen would be at lunch when he saw Nina in the repair shop. When he heard that the brake lines had been cut, didn’t that make him suspicious?”

“You’d think it might. But, as he told me, he didn’t want to ponder unpleasant topics like murder. He isn’t a man who likes to get his hands dirty.” I leaned forward. “Cap is the one who told me Sam always went to lunch at one o’clock. If he’d been involved with Nina, or even realized how she’d killed Ralph Palmerston, he never would have given me such an incriminating piece of information. He didn’t want me to solve this murder any more than any of the other Shareholders did. To them the murder itself was peripheral. What they feared was that if I kept digging I’d discover the Shareholders scheme and find out what Ralph Palmerston knew about each of them and it would all become public knowledge. That’s why Cap kept tabs on me. That’s why he filed the complaint.”

Howard pulled a curly red wig from the space between the sofa cushions. Eyeing it with disgust he tossed it onto the pile of beer cans. “Still, Nina Munson was one cool cookie. I can see why the ‘Sam Nguyen’ Palmerston called to didn’t stop to talk.”

I laughed. “That must have been one truly awful moment for Nina.”

“It all sounds pretty cold-blooded. Did she kill Palmerston just for revenge?”

“It was a combination of things. Revenge—after all, she’d taken care of Lois for years, and like Jeffrey said, all that time Nina never admitted that Lois could do wrong. So when Lois dropped her and Nina finally realized how she’d been used all those years, it was a very big shock. But she also killed Palmerston to save Jeffrey from being exposed, and to save Jeffrey’s business. She got twenty-five percent of the profits. She couldn’t live without that money. So it was a mixture of revenge, protection, and self-preservation.”

“Very practical lady,” Howard said. Then he grinned in anticipation. “What about Sam Nguyen?”

“Can’t wait to get your hands on him, huh?”

“I don’t want to appear greedy—”

I laughed. That was exactly how he appeared.

“I don’t want to appear greedy,” Howard insisted, “but Cap Danziger had something on him, and when you find that out, I’m planning to squeeze Nguyen till he spits out every drop of information on every drug dealer in the city.”

“An unappetizing picture.”

Dusk was beginning to fall. In it, the room looked even more depressing. “Despite that picture, I’m ready for dinner. Giving you an excuse to get out of here is the least I can do.”

“The least?” Howard was sitting up straight. I knew that look of his. I’d seen it when he told me about his scheme to even things out with Leon Evans. I waited.

“Jill,” he said, slowly, “I know you really wanted my parking spot. A garage space would have been very useful to you.”

“Mmm.”

“Particularly on Monday mornings. You’re never on time Mondays.”

“Mmm?”

“I realize that figuring out my costume was a little too hard for you.”

“Howard!”

“Okay. But I could still let you have that garage on Monday mornings.”

“For what in return?”

He glanced around the room. “The kitchen’s already half done. Only the counters and the floor and the stuff caked on the icebox door are left. Oh, and the walls—you know what that aerosol hors d’oeuvre stuff can do.”

When I didn’t respond, he said, “I’m just asking for help, not for you to take on the whole job. I know this isn’t exactly your field of expertise.”

He looked truly desperate. I laughed. “Make it Mondays and Fridays and you’re on. But we don’t start till after dinner.”

Susan Dunlap (b. 1943) is the author of more than twenty mystery novels and a founding member of Sisters in Crime, an organization that promotes women in the field of crime writing.

Born in New York City, Dunlap entered Bucknell University as a math major, but quickly switched to English. After earning a master’s degree in education from the University of North Carolina, she taught junior high before becoming a social worker. Her jobs took her all over the country, from Baltimore to New York and finally to Northern California, where many of her novels take place.

One night, while reading an Agatha Christie novel, Dunlap told her husband that she thought she could write mysteries. When he asked her to prove it, she accepted the challenge. Dunlap wrote in her spare time, completing six manuscripts before selling her first book,
Karma
(1981), which began a ten-book series about brash Berkeley cop Jill Smith.

After selling her second novel, Dunlap quit her job to write fulltime. While penning the Jill Smith mysteries, she also wrote three novels about utility-meter-reading amateur sleuth Vejay Haskell. In 1989, she published
Pious Deception
, the first in a series starring former medical examiner Kiernan O’Shaughnessy. To research the O’Shaughnessy and Smith series, Dunlap rode along with police officers, attended autopsies, and spent ten weeks studying the daily operations of the Berkeley Police Department.

Dunlap concluded the Smith series with
Cop Out
(1997). In 2006 she published
A Single Eye
, her first mystery featuring Darcy Lott, a Zen Buddhist stuntwoman. Her most recent novel is
No Footprints
(2012), the fifth in the Darcy Lott series.

In addition to writing, Dunlap has taught yoga and worked for a private investigator on death penalty defense cases and as a paralegal. In 1986, she helped found Sisters in Crime, an organization that supports women in the field of mystery writing. She lives and writes near San Francisco.