Poisoned Pins (24 page)

He chuckled, but I sensed his heart wasn't in it. “I wouldn't know about that, although they sure do have rules for everything else. ‘Any fool can make a rule, and every fool will mind it.' Bear in mind Mr. Thoreau had never dealt with the likes of the Kappa Theta Etas. When Ms. Vanderson officially awarded me the contract, I had to plow through dozens of pages of small print about workman's comp, bonding, liability insurance, penalties, and assessments. You'd have thought I was adding a wing to the Pentagon rather than painting one shabby house.”

“And now you're trying to convince me that you went to the house after dark to shake the scaffold? I wasn't born yesterday, Ed. I was born . . . earlier than that, and I've learned to recognize taurian excrement when I hear it. You and Winkie have something going, don't you?” I said all this with the confidence of a teenage entrepreneur. In that it was sheer speculation, I felt I'd presented it well, and I waited expectantly for him to collapse on the table top and blubber out an admission of guilt.

“I went by there tonight to drop off some paint chips. She's supposed to show ‘em to Ms. Vanderson tomorrow and get back to me.”

I barely stopped short of shaking a finger at him. “This is not the time for fairy tales, Ed. I've been sitting
here for hours, working on a very good theory to explain Winkie's problem with the screens and all these sporadic manifestations of an unidentified prowler. In the interim, my foot has gone to sleep and I've donated several pints of blood to an endless stream of mosquitoes. You didn't park in front of the house; you chose to come through the alley and hide your motorcycle behind a fence. The last thing I need is this nonsense about paint chips!”

“They want white, but they can't seem to decide if they want bone white, antique white, shell white—”

“I'll find proof,” I interrupted with an edge of petulance caused, no doubt, by anemia. I started to stand up, but sank back down as an idea struck. Had Jean Hall found proof? She had already been blackmailing one person, and with her light summer course load, surely she'd had enough free time for additional victims. I frowned at the fence, trying to imagine her in an avaricious confrontation with Winkie. Jean Hall, seated and gloating as Dean Vanderson leaves. The gate creaks open, and in comes Winkie. Money is tendered, then Winkie tells Jean to wait for a few minutes while she trots back to the house and positions herself in Debbie Anne's car. Several problematic issues came to mind, the most obvious being why conduct business in the patio rather than the suite. Winkie was hardly wealthy. Debbie Anne might object to handing over her keys and taking the rap by default. There were more holes in this than in the fence, I concluded.

I opted to disarm him with a new topic. “So, Ed, why was your best friend Arnie in the bushes the night Jean was killed?”

“Arnie in the bushes? What are you talking about?” He came over to my end of the table, braced himself with his knuckles, and loomed over me like a leather monument. “What was he doing?”

“That's what I asked you,” I said, resolving not to shrink. “I was walking home, contemplating nothing more complex than dinner, when Arnie hissed at me. He emerged from the bushes, begged me not to tell
anyone, flashed his camera in my face, and drove away before I could demand an explanation.”

Ed turned away and sat down on the steps that led to the back door, muttering unpleasantly under his breath. What little I could hear consisted of such phrases as “low-down sumbitch” and “filthy little rodent” and other less decorous descriptions of good ol' Arnie Riggles. I could offer no rebuttal, since I was in full agreement.

When Ed finally calmed down, I said, “If he suspected that you and Winkie were . . . behaving indiscreetly, he could have been trying to get evidence to blackmail her. Something like that would be enough to ruin her career with the Kappa Theta Eta organization, and she's within one year of retirement and the pension fund. Is there any way he might know?”

“He made a snide remark regarding her size, and I felt the need to discourage any further ones,” Ed said reluctantly. “A couple of times I saw a green truck in the alley near the Kappa house, and asked him about it. The first time, he cackled and said he'd been at a female mud-wrestling match out in the country somewhere. The other, he just said it wasn't his truck. I decided to forget about it rather than try to figure out what he'd be doing in the alley so late.”

“So you do admit that you and Winkie are having a relationship?”

“I seem to have admitted it. We met in line at a movie theater during spring break, had coffee, started talking about this and that, decided to catch another movie later in the week. We're both misfits in our own ways”—he held up a hand to repudiate any arguments I might proffer—”and we have a lot in common. Then one of the girls who lives in town told Winkie she'd seen us, and made some snippy remarks concerning my personal habits and mode of transportation. Winkie freaked and decided we couldn't be seen together in public anymore. We met a couple of times at motels, but then she became paranoid about that and suggested we confine ourselves to late-night trysts in her suite.
Randolph was right when he said, ‘Stolen sweets are always sweeter: stolen kisses much completer.' “

“Were you climbing out Winkie's kitchen window when Debbie Anne came up the path alongside the house?”

Abashed, he cleared his throat before saying, “I was so preoccupied with what had just happened that I didn't even see her until we collided. She has a good set of lungs, doesn't she?”

“She certainly does,” I said absently, trying to keep straight the sequence of events in the sorority yard. “But you couldn't have knocked down Eleanor Vanderson the following night. It was no later than nine o'clock, and therefore much too early for an illicit liaison. Could that have been Arnie?”

“It might have been, but I don't think he's blackmailing Winkie. Someone else may be, though. A month ago I spotted one of those idiotic pink paper cats in the wastebasket and fished it out. Whoever sent it had taken a felt pen and drawn semicircles over the eyes so it looked as if it were asleep. The written message was a reminder that she had only a year until her retirement. I asked her about it, but she said it was a little joke and clammed up. She's been skitterish ever since then, drinking too much, taking by the handful what she says are mild tranquilizers, and continually fretting that the curtains aren't drawn tightly.”

I had known her for no more than a week, but I had noticed how nervous she was when she prattled on about the sorority's reputation. Unlike Dean Vanderson, she was not taking blackmail with composure and a vague aura of contempt. “Arnie can't be behind it,” I said, mostly to myself. “He's only been around recently, and he has no access to the paper cats. And he's the last person I'd accuse of being aware of the sorority's rules—and being devious enough to take advantage of them.”

“Or sober enough, anyway,” Ed said wryly. “But you caught him snooping in the bushes with a camera, so he must be up to something. I'd like to wrap my
hands around his scrawny neck and choke it out of him.”

“What a great idea, Ed. Why don't you do it, and call me afterward?”

“He never came back to his apartment after the gambling raid, so I called the jail. The desk sergeant said he'd been released on bail. I don't care if he drowned in a creek, but I've got to go down to the unemployment office tomorrow and hire another assistant.” He rose and put on his helmet. “I hope you don't feel obligated to speak to Ms. Vanderson about all this. Winkie's under so much pressure now that she's liable to flip out if she loses her job.”

“I see no reason to tell anyone,” I said, adding yet another tidbit to my growing list of things I ought to pass along to the authorities. “But wait! You have Arnie's camera. Why don't you have the film developed? Then we'll know if Arnie's into blackmail, or was merely astray on his way to the nearest bar.”

He agreed to do so, wheeled his motorcycle out to the alley, and rocketed away in an explosion of gravel. I walked back toward my apartment, having some difficulty imagining Winkie and Ed in passionate abandonment, the dragon and mermaid on his back rippling convulsively. National would surely frown on an alliance between a housemother and a biker, no matter whom he quoted.

What a busy girl Jean had been, what with pledge-class picnics, lectures at the law school, pimping for her sisters, and blackmailing the dean, her housemother, and quite possibly other people. Of the two remaining Kappa Theta Etas, Rebecca was the logical successor to that particularly heinous throne. She'd even needled Pippa about motel rooms, as if challenging me to decipher her innuendo. Little did she know she was dealing with a woman renowned for both her deductive prowess and her dedication to meddling to the bitter end.

When I arrived home, I gazed at the telephone for a long while, debating whether I should call Lieutenant
Peter Rosen and tell him what I'd learned. Scowling, I finally continued into the kitchen and put on the tea kettle. It was much too late; the bleary-eyed patrons at the drive-in theater were well into the third movie by now. None of my revelations were particularly urgent. Dean Vanderson had a motive to kill Jean, as did Winkie . . . and Ed. Rebecca might have decided to take control of a lucrative business. Pippa was a less plausible suspect, but possible. And I couldn't completely rule out Debbie Anne Wray, owner and presumed operator of the lethal vehicle.

“Where can she be?” I demanded of the whistling tea kettle. “She doesn't know anyone outside the sorority. She has no other friends and she's not with her family. The two campus police officers searched the house thoroughly, and—” I stopped conversing with the kettle as I realized they hadn't, not by a long shot.

I turned off the burner, locked the front door, and went down the stairs to the front porch. Only one bed-room light was still on in the sorority house, and after a moment of calculation, I decided that Pippa was awake. Tapping on her window would result in yet an-other bout of screaming. The Kappas were rather edgy these days.

My knuckles were sore by the time Pippa opened the front door. “Mrs. Malloy?” she said as she gestured for me to come inside. Her hair was wrapped around sponge rollers hidden, for the most part, by a lacy pink cap; a phrenologist would have had a stroke at the possibilities. “Is something wrong? Did you see another prowler?”

“Get the key to the chapter room.”

She dimpled uneasily at me. “Winkie has the only one, and she's asleep. Besides, I'd be in really awful trouble if I let you go in there. Only Kappas are allowed to go into the chapter room. There's stuff that's incredibly secret.”

“Get the key, Pippa.”

Rebecca came into the foyer. She wore a pink nightshirt and her face was glistening with cream, but she
was by no means drowsy. “Get the key to what?” she asked.

Winkie emerged from her suite, dressed in the gaudy peignoir I'd seen before. “What's going on, girls? It's much too late to have—Claire?”

My hope that I could take a quick, discreet look around the chapter room was not to be realized. “I think it's possible that Debbie Anne may be hiding in the chapter room,” I said. “Everybody agrees she has no friends outside the sorority and no place else to go. The campus police searched the upstairs, but not down there.”

“She couldn't have a key,” Rebecca said with a trace of scorn. “There's only the one, and it's in Winkie's possession at all times. Unless you're accusing her of collusion with our errant pledge, you're wrong, Mrs. Malloy.”

I wasn't in the mood to deal with minor details like keys. “I'm not sure whom I'm accusing, or of what. Why don't we check the chapter room and whatever other rooms are in the basement, and then I'll go home and you can go back to bed?”

Rebecca shook her head. “No one except members and pledges is allowed in the chapter room. If you and Winkie want to wait here, Pippa and I can go downstairs and make sure Debbie Anne's not huddled behind the furnace. I'm the ranking house officer, and I must insist the rules not be violated.”

I crossed my arms and glowered at all three of them. Just once, I thought, it would be nice if my suspects behaved according to the traditions of crime fiction. They should have been so overwhelmed with my relentless logic that we already would be halfway down the stairs, a dog howling mournfully in the distance, the key clutched in someone's sweaty hand, the stairs creaking, our path illuminated by a flickering candle—or at least a single dim bulb swinging crazily from a frayed cord. I wanted melodrama, not obduracy.

“Do the rules also cover what goes on at the Hideaway Haven?” I said abruptly.

Pippa and Rebecca exchanged startled looks. Winkie, in contrast, gurgled and staggered backward until she hit the edge of the desk hard enough to topple the vase of plastic flowers.

“How did you . . . ?” she gasped.

Ignoring her, I said to Rebecca, “Either you get the key or I call Eleanor Vanderson right now. It would be a pity to disturb her.” I paused to slather on emphasis lest they miss the point. “Not to mention her husband.”

“So it would,” said Winkie, her voice tinny and her white fingers entwined in the collar of her peignoir. “My keys are in my handbag on the coffee table, Pippa. Please fetch them and allow Claire to satisfy herself and leave. I'm sure she won't mention what she sees in the chapter room, and National need never hear about it. It will be our little secret, won't it?”

“Go ahead,” Rebecca ordered Pippa. “You and Winkie can wait in her suite until we're finished with this idiotic mission.”

Shortly thereafter she and I went to the basement, although there was ample light and the stairs failed to produce any sounds whatsoever.