Rogues Gallery (16 page)

“Somebody must have cloned Ralph to get your CEO,” I said.

And so forth.

By the time our food arrived (the Marilyn Monroe sandwich for Lynda, the slightly less toxic Route 66 for me), we were on to the subject of our own personal budget.

“I still think the price Ralph and his wife are asking for the house isn't bad,” I said. “But given the current circumstances, we may be able to get it even cheaper if we play it cool.”

“But do we want it? I'm not sure we really talked about that.”

Oh, yeah. The body kind of took our attention off of that.
We hadn't talked about the murder, and I hadn't warned her that the other purpose of our meeting with Cecily was to ask her about Olivia Wanamaker. What was this lately with me hiding things from the women in my life?

“You know I like it,” I said. “It's my kind of house. But what do you think? What's your honest opinion?” You probably think I was adding silently,
as long as it agrees with mine.
But that wasn't the case. I was hoping to make one move and stay put, so it had to be a house where both of us could be happy for a long time.

“I like it better than all of the other houses we looked at, and we looked at an exhausting number. If I had to pick one, that would be the one. But I think I'd like to look at it one more time just to be sure.” She reached her hand across the table and took mine. “I want to picture our children in it,
tesoro mio
.”

We finished lunch with time to spare and walked over to Happy Homes Realty, not far away on Market Street. The office is mostly divided up into cubicles, with an agent in each one. Cecily Almond, on the phone when we arrived, waved and smiled from hers. After a few minutes she signed off and gave us her full attention.

“Hi, guys. Good to see you. Nice day, isn't it? So, are you ready to make a bid?”

“Not quite,” Lynda said. We'd agreed that she would do most of the talking. “We'd like to see the house again.”

“Oh, sure. No problem. Um. Well, actually, there
might
be a problem. I'm not sure the police have cleared away the crime scene tape yet. But after that, no problem!”

Could I ever have a better opening for negotiating a lower price? But before I had a chance to open my mouth, I heard, “Lynda! Jefferson!”

Mac was trying to look surprised as he walked our way, but he isn't as good an actor as he thinks he is - at least, not off stage.

“What are you doing here?” Was that a note suspicion I detected in my beloved's voice?

Mac held up a Multiple Listing Service catalog with photographs of homes for sale in Sussex and nearby counties. “I stopped by to pick up a house-hunting aid for a prospective new professor in the English department.”

That may have even been true, though not the complete truth. Mac seldom lies, but often misleads.

“This is our real estate agent, Cecily Almond,” I said, as if he didn't know. “Cecily - ”

“You're Sebastian McCabe. I've read all of your books.”

“Not yet,” he assured her. “I have many more to write.”

“Then I'll read many more. I just love them.”

I know you're in the sales business, networking and all that, but do you have to actually gush?

“Thank you, Cecily. That is very kind of you to say so. Lately I feel almost guilty about engaging in murder for fun and profit in my fiction. I have learned that real-life homicide can be sad, tragic, horrifying, and many other things, but never fun.”

Cecily shivered slightly - the real thing, nothing theatric. “No, it's certainly not. I hope I never find another body as long as I live.”

I keep hoping that myself!

Mac was all sympathy. “That must have been a horrible experience, especially given that Mrs. Wanamaker was your friend and colleague.”

“Friend would be pushing it. In fact, colleague would be an exaggeration.”

Mac raised an eyebrow.

Cecily looked around Cubeville and lowered her voice. “Olivia was very hard-charging and not a team player. That didn't win her many friends in this office. In fact, she wanted to start her own team and she asked me to join her. Month after month I'm usually the second ranked sales agent, right behind Olivia. I said no thanks.”

“You mean she was planning a new company?” Lynda asked.

Cecily nodded. “She even showed me the logo - Olivia Wanamaker Realty. I thought this was a risky time to be going out on her own, but self-doubt was not one of her handicaps. She thought her name on the door would bring in clients.” Cecily shrugged her slim shoulders. “She sold a lot of houses, so maybe she was right. We'll never know.”

Mac put the house book under his arm and unwrapped a cigar, not that he could smoke inside Happy Homes. I think he just likes the prop. “As a mystery writer of some experience who has had several unfortunate encounters with untimely death in real life, I cannot help but wonder who might want Mrs. Wanamaker dead.”

Cecily chuckled mirthlessly. “If this was one of your Damon Devlin novels, there'd be no lack of suspects. I've already hinted that she wasn't Miss Congeniality here at the office. Besides that, a lot of folks in the local real estate industry weren't happy with her crusade against student landlords. We sell a lot of properties that are rented to students. And I don't imagine that Margaret and Gordon were very happy about her plans to leave Happy Homes, if they heard about it.”

Margaret and Gordon Cole, a couple in their sixties, had founded Happy Homes back in the '80s, riding high in boom times and hanging on through several slumps. The last few years might have been the worst they'd seen. I could imagine that losing their highest-producing agent would be a hard blow.

“Surely not everyone hated her,” Mac said, waving his cigar. “She leaves behind a husband. Unless her marriage was...” He delicately left the thought uncompleted.

“I don't like to repeat gossip.”
So listen carefully the first time.
Cecily didn't say that, but that was the idea. “From what I hear, Sam Wanamaker wasn't the dumb blonde she took him for. Apparently things had been strained at their house lately after he smelled pipe smoke in the bedroom. He doesn't smoke.”

“Is that what you talk about at lunch around here?”

Lynda asked. “That's pretty personal. I'm surprised you'd know a thing like that if she wasn't that friendly with her co-workers.”

I couldn't tell from her tone whether Lynda was offended at the gossip or wanted Ben Silverstein to hire Cecily as a reporter. It could have been either. My wife is an old-fashioned girl in a lot of ways, but she's also a newshound through and through.

Cecily lowered her voice. “Piper Lawrence heard it from Sam. They went to grade school together. A man won't tell a thing like that to another man because he doesn't want to look like a fool, but sometimes he'll tell a woman that he's friends with.”

Welcome to small town America, where everybody knows everybody - and sometimes too well.

“I haven't seen Piper since she got laid off at WIJC-FM,” I said. She'd been assistant producer at the campus radio station until Ralph had decided in an earlier wave of cutbacks last year that Tony Lampwicke and the other on-air personalities could pour their own coffee. That's not all Piper did, of course, any more than that's all Popcorn does. But when Ralph Pendergast gets a notion in his head it can't be dislodged with a jackhammer.

“Piper works here. There she is over there.” Cecily pointed. I could barely see the top of her head above a cubicle on the other side of the room.

“She must have gotten her real estate license after St. Benignus gave her the old heave-ho,” I said. “I'm glad she landed on her feet.”

“Oh, Piper isn't an agent. She's a stager.”

I made a mental note to say hi to her on my way out. She might see me, and I wouldn't want her to think I was avoiding her because of survivor's guilt.

“If you were writing a detective story,” Mac said to Cecily, “who would be your favorite suspect?”

She gave that a good ten seconds' consideration. “Me.”

Mac almost lost his grip on the unlit cigar in his mouth. Whatever he'd been expecting, it wasn't that. “Why you?”

Cecily smiled. “Because I'm the least likely person. Olivia was a pain in the butt, but I don't have a reason in the world to be glad that she'd dead.”

“But with her gone, you'd be the top ranked agent here,” I pointed out. “Wouldn't you like that?”

“She was planning to leave Happy Homes and start her own outfit anyway, remember? She tried hiring me.”

“Oh, right.” I wondered whether Olivia Wanamaker had acquired a real estate broker's license - a step up from an agent's license - which she would need to start her own company. That would indicate how serious she was.

After a few more attempts, Mac finally gave up trying to get Cecily to speculate on who might have done in her personally unpopular but politically successful colleague. I'm sure that Mac found her reticence frustrating, but I thought it was admirable.

He held up the catalogue of homes for sales. “Well, I must get back to the groves of academe and put this into the hands of our prospective new professor.”

“
Ciao
,” Lynda said.

“
Alla prossima.
”

I hate it when they yack at each other in Italian; it makes me feel like a fifth wheel.

“We're leaving, too,” I asserted.

So we all three left together, by way of Piper's cubicle. I called out her name as we got close.

She turned around, saw us, and opened her generous mouth in a broad smile. “Oh, hey Jeff, Professor McCabe. Been a while. And you're Lynda, right?”

At St. Benignus, I was used to seeing her in slacks. Today she was wearing a burgundy dress of some soft fabric with a wide, white belt. Her chestnut hair, previously cut rather short, hung down to her shoulders. When her head moved I saw that she wore silver earrings, the same material she had around her wrists and neck. I wondered whether she took her fashion cues from the Duchess of Cambridge, who is Lynda's age and a little younger than Piper.

“Cecily tells me you've become a home stager,” I said.

“Isn't that wild? I'm even certified. Half a year ago I didn't even know what a stager was.”

Apparently she could tell from the look on Mac's face that he didn't know either, because she hurried on to explain.

“Staging means that I prepare a home for sale to make it appeal to the largest number of potential buyers, which facilitates the quickest sale at the best price. Research has shown that homes can sell up to twice as fast and for ten to fifteen percent more money if they're properly staged.”

She had the pitch down cold.

“No offense,” Lynda said, “but the Pendergast house didn't exactly look staged. It looked empty.”

Piper exercised her smile muscles again. “I didn't work on that one. I guess the owner didn't want to spend the extra money.”

That sounds like Ralph.

“How's business?” I ask that all the time. As an investor in index mutual funds - which had done quite well lately, thank you - I'm always hoping for indications of a strengthening economy. And this time I got it.

“Better,” Piper said. “People can see that houses are starting to sell again, and that's encouraged people who've been waiting to sell. So listings are up. But it's still taking longer for homes to sell than it does in a strong economy, so a lot of sellers are seeing the value in getting help from a professional stager.”

It seemed that Piper had indeed landed fairly softly after being bounced out of St. Benignus. I was sure that Popcorn would do as well if she got the axe. The question was how I would do without her.

“I suppose a dead body in a freezer is about the worst staging possible,” Mac said.

Piper seemed to take that personally.

“Like I said, I wasn't involved in that particular sale.” She ran a hand through her hair. “I'm still shocked by what happened to Liv. She was very nice to me and helped me out a lot when I first joined Happy Homes.”

Finally! Someone with a kind word to say for the dead woman!
But then, why shouldn't Olivia Wanamaker be nice to Piper? The two women weren't in competition for sales or votes.

“It sounds like you were rather close to Mrs. Wanamaker, perhaps closer than most of her colleagues here,” Mac observed.

She shrugged. “I guess so.” She lowered her voice. “I think a lot of the other agents were jealous of her.”

“If you know anything that might help the police find her killer, you must tell Chief Hummel.”

Piper's green eyes widened. “I don't know anything.”

“Perhaps you don't know what you know.” The way Mac said that, his tone of voice, it sounded like the most reasonable thing in the world. “What seems innocuous to you might be significant to the police. And what you may think too personal to share may be critical to the hunt for the killer. For example, if Mrs. Wanamaker had a boyfriend and you knew his - ”

“I don't!”

“ - name, I am certain the Chief would like to talk to him.”

“But I don't!”

“Well, then, that is final.” Mac smiled. He's at his most dangerous when he smiles. “You do not know his name. What
do
you know about him?”

Well played, Mac.

Piper hesitated. Should she tell or not?
Oh, go on!
“I know that he was quite a bit older than Liv. That created, uh, physical challenges that she described in some detail.” Piper colored. “I'd rather not be more explicit.”

Uh-oh.
An unidentified much older boyfriend would play right into Oscar's lamebrain back-up theory that Olivia Wanamaker and Ralph weren't the enemies that they appeared to be in public.