Rogues Gallery (19 page)

“Mac, I'm getting an idea,” I said.

“I already have one.” He pulled out his smartphone and punched a number out of his “Favorites” list.

“Hello, Oscar. Jefferson and I are at Happy Homes Realty. If you will join us at your earliest opportunity, I think we have something interesting to tell you. Why, the identity of Olivia Wanamaker's murderer, of course.”

XII

By the time Oscar arrived, we had moved into a conference room. At Mac's invitation, Cecily and Piper had joined us. We all stood around a conference table, somewhat awkwardly.

“So what's this all about?” Oscar demanded.
I was wondering that myself, Chief.

“Motive,” Mac said. “The key to solving this murder is that the culprit had two of them - a motive for killing Olivia Wanamaker and a motive for framing Ralph.”

Oscar patted his pockets until he realized that he was out of cigarettes. He always is. “You're going to drag this out, aren't you?”

“Yes. Everyone seemed to hate or at least dislike Mrs. Wanamaker, with the possible exception of the voters who elected her to City Council. By all accounts she was quite unpopular with her colleagues both at City Hall and here at Happy Homes. The singular exception was Piper.” He nodded to the home stager, who seemed puzzled as to why she was in the room. So was I.

“Piper provided us with a huge clue - the information that Olivia's paramour was much older and that he had an assignation with her on the day she died. No one else knew this, although the calendar in her cell phone showed an appointment at ten-thirty with ‘R.P.'”

“Ralph Pendergast!” Oscar exclaimed.
No flies on you!
“I knew it! You dragged me over here just to tell me - ”

“However,” Mac forged on, “an analysis by a computer expert of my acquaintance has determined that the appointment was typed into Mrs. Wanamaker's calendar
after
ten-thirty.” This totally had my head spinning around like that girl in
The Exorcist
. Mac had said nothing to me about having somebody look at Olivia's smartphone. Was that what he'd been up to this afternoon while I was slaving away in my office? Well, not exactly slaving away. Mostly I was giving Popcorn a blow-by-blow account, including an excellent (if I do say so myself) imitation of Tony Lampwicke's put-on accent. But still -

“What do you mean?” Oscar demanded. I take it back. He wasn't so quick on the uptake today after all.

“I mean that someone else entered Ralph's initials in the calendar after the murder to implicate him,” Mac said.

“Cecily!” I blurted.
Finally, my moment has arrived!
Only it hadn't. I don't know who looked more put out, Cecily or Mac.

The former merely looked at me with a “say what?” expression on her café-au-lait mug.

“By no means, old boy,” the latter said in a tone that made me want to hit him with a door repeatedly. “Whatever gave you that idea? If Cecily had invented an assignation for Olivia and Ralph and put it Olivia's calendar, she certainly would have called that appointment to our attention.”

“Then who - ”

“Sometimes people talk about premeditated murder and
crime passionnel
as if the two categories were mutually exclusive. They are not. This was a premeditated crime of passion. I should have seen that right away. Bludgeoning is not the weapon for a murder of gain, even though in this case the murder was pre-planned.”

“You mean this was some kind of love triangle?” Margaret Cole asked.

“Nothing as simple as that,” Mac said.
Oh, good. I was really afraid this was going to be a simple solution.
“The
affaire de coeur
that led to this crime was not a mere triangle but a quadrangle. The killer was not the husband, Sam Wanamaker, or the boyfriend, Tony Lampwicke, but the boyfriend's girlfriend.”

That's when it clicked for me. The woman who had worked with Tony for years until she got let go by Ralph Pendergast - giving her a major axe to grind against the provost - was also the woman who had filled us in about the older boyfriend and Olivia's plan to meet him on the morning she died.

“Piper,” I said, staring at her. There was no note of triumph in my voice this time as shock registered on her face. Actually, I felt damned sad. Strangely, I also experienced a twinge of disappointment that Piper didn't have better taste in men. She'd been dating that insufferable Tony Lampwicke and Olivia had poached on her territory. There was no much-older boyfriend. Piper had made that up as part of her frame of Ralph. It all fit. I was three steps behind Mac, but I was catching up now. Apparently I was the only one, though.

“Are you planning on accusing everybody in the room, one by one, Cody?” Gordon Cole demanded. I guess he was feeling a little touchy because Cecily and Piper were both Happy Homes employees.

It's always hard to tell what's going on behind Mac's beard, but I didn't think he was enjoying this any more than I was. “This time Jefferson is right.”

Piper pushed stray strands of chestnut hair back off of her face. “That's ridiculous. You guys are just trying to save Pendergast's hide because he's your boss.”
That wouldn't be my preference, actually.
“You can't prove a thing.”

“I beg to differ, Ms. Lawrence. Oscar, did you find any unidentified prints in the Pendergast house?”

“Well, yeah, a few, but - ”

He was probably going to say that's what you'd find in any house. Everybody who's not a hermit has scores of visitors to his or her home over the years, and it's not like most people's fingerprints are in the FBI database. I've never been fingerprinted. Have you? Okay, maybe you have, but not everybody has, not by a long shot.

“I think you will find that some of those prints belong to Piper Lawrence, who had no good reason for being in that house since she didn't stage it and she was hardly a friend of the Pendergasts.” Mac waved a hand dismissively. “Oh, no doubt she attempted to wipe away all traces of her presence, but I am confident you will discover that she was unsuccessful.”

It was one of Sebastian McCabe's boldest bluffs in a career that had included some doozies.

Piper sat down hard in the nearest chair. She looked like a deflated balloon. “I was out of work for seven months. Do you know what that's like? I'll never forgive Pendergast for that. I was good at my job at WIJC and he took that away from me. I wasn't going to let that bitch take Tony away, too. Liv and I really were friends, or so I thought. But she didn't know about Tony and me. We'd kept that on the down low because he used to be my boss. When she told me how she seduced him, bragged about it, really, I knew I had to get her out of the way so that Tony and I could be happy. That's all I wanted, just to be happy.” She looked around the room at the rest of us. “Is that so wrong of me?”

“If there is any means by which one could ascertain when an appointment was entered in a smartphone calendar, I am unaware of it.” Mac looked understandably quite pleased with himself. “I made that part up.”

“Good thing Piper doesn't happen to be an expert on smartphone technology in her spare time,” Lynda said.

We were relaxing in Mac's study, and she had a Knob Creek Manhattan in her hand.

“So how did you figure it out?” my sister asked - as if Mac wouldn't have held forth without prompting.

Mac set down his beer mug. “I started with the risky premise that Ralph was innocent and someone had framed him. That is why the murder was done in that house, and that is why the highly unconventional weapon of a frozen salmon - to make the murder appear unpremeditated, as if the body had been put in the freezer with the expectation of coming back. That would point to the owner of the house.

“The murderer, then, had animus against both Olivia and Ralph. He or she also knew that Ralph owned the house and that it would be available for meeting Olivia. That directed my attention to Happy Homes. Who was it who told us that Olivia had an appointment, and said that it was with an older man, throwing suspicion on Ralph? Piper Lawrence, who was still upset about being laid off by Ralph. What motive could she have for killing Olivia Wanamaker?”

“Romance rears its ugly head,” Lynda said.

“Indeed. When Tony Lampwicke told us that he had been involved with another woman that he would not name, it required but little imagination to speculate who that woman might be and to connect the dots. Tony formerly worked with Piper Lawrence. Piper currently worked with Mrs. Wanamaker and was said to be her only friend at Happy Homes - therefore the one person to whom she might confide her current dalliance, and a person she presumably would have no hesitation in meeting at the house on Campion Lane.”

“Too bad,” I said. “I always liked Piper. But I'm glad it wasn't Cecily Almond.”

“So am I,” Lynda said. “I forgot to tell you that she's taking us through the house again tomorrow.”

XIII

My visits to Mac's office in Herbert Hall are not exactly rare occasions, so I wouldn't call it surprising that Ralph found us both there the following morning. The expression behind his rimless glasses was that of a man forced to carry out an unpleasant task.

“I'm here to thank you for what you did on my behalf,” he said. “My wife told me after the fact. Although I don't approve of her appeal to you, and would have stopped her if I'd known, that by no means lessens my gratitude. Incredibly, Chief Hummel seemed quite serious about considering me a suspect.”

“He was dead serious,” I assured him.

“Er, yes, well.” Ralph licked his lips nervously. “If there's anything I can do to repay you, please let me know.”

It suddenly occurred to me that he really meant it. The last thing in the world he wanted was to be under a debt to Mac and, by extension, to me.

“I assure you, Ralph, ‘the work is its own reward,' as the Master once said.”

That was fine for Mac, but I wasn't going to let Ralph off the hook that easily. “There is something you could do for me.”

“I see. I'm afraid the price of the house - ”

“No, no, it's not that. We want the house and I'm sure we can work out a fair price.”
Two pals like us, why not?
“I had something else in mind.”

“I just had a chat with Ralph,” I told Popcorn as I breezed in to my office a few minutes later.

“Then why do you look so happy?”

“Are you aware that he's cutting budgets again?”

Her face darkened. “I've heard rumors.”

“Well, it's true. You are no longer my administrative assistant.”

When I saw the “I've-been-punched-in-the-gut” look on her face, I immediately regretted trying to play cute.

“Your title is now assistant director of the office,” I hastened to add, “with a higher salary to match. Ralph is going to cut some other budget instead of ours, probably Mac's.” I was sure that Ralph would find a way to win in the end. But I had this round by a knockout.

Popcorn sat down. “Wow, thanks, Boss. Something tells me there's a story behind this.”

“Yep.” I picked up that morning's edition of
The Erin Observer & News-Ledger
with a Johanna Rawls's account of Piper's arrest blazoned across page one. “It's the story behind
this
story.”

Dogs Don't Make Mistakes

I

“Nine-one-one. What is your emergency?”

“I think someone's in my house. My dog's barking like crazy.”

“What is your address?”

“928 Senter Street, with an ‘S.' Hurry!”

“We'll send a car right away.”

(Loud bang.)

“Was that a gunshot, ma'am?”

(Long pause.)

“Ma'am?”

“Yeah, it was a gun.”

“Are you all right?”

“I'm not the one hit. It's a man and I think he's - oh, my God - it's my husband!”

The 911 call played over and over again on the Cincinnati television stations in the week after the shooting of Tim Crutcher. When I first heard it on our kitchen TV, I was fixing myself a yogurt salad for dinner and bemoaning my lonely - albeit temporary - bachelor existence. Lynda was out of town on a business trip for a few days, visiting the Grier Ohio NewsGroup's chain of newspapers upstate in the suburban Cleveland area. I had the TV on to keep me company. Our house seemed so big without her. After more than a year and a half of marriage, I'd gotten used to not being alone. My former solitary ways seemed like an old suit that didn't fit anymore.

Concentrating on building a healthful meal, I wasn't paying much attention to TV4 Action News until I heard my friend Ashley Crutcher's name. It came near the end of a lead-in from the male co-anchor, Brian Rose. I looked up with a jerk at Ashley's name. I saw reporter Mandy Peters, as she now called herself, standing in front of a two-story frame house in a middle-class neighborhood. She was bundled up in a heavy TV4 jacket as insulation against the November cold.

“Well, Brian,” she was saying, “neighbors in this quiet, small-town community tell us tonight that they were shocked to learn of the shooting that rocked their street in the early hours of the morning.”

Cincinnati hardly ever thinks of Erin, about forty miles upriver from the home of the Reds and Procter & Gamble, except at times of crime, grief, and tragedy. On one such occasion more than two years earlier I'd met Mandy Petrowski, then working as an intern at the same station.
[****]
She'd just recently rejoined TV4 under her new name, which I happened to know she made up. Her auburn hair was now curly and I think she'd had some work done on her teeth, making them even more perfect. She still had a generous mouth, a cute nose, and a penchant for dramatic pauses.

After the mandatory clips of shocked neighbors (“I couldn't believe it!”), Mandy returned in a live shot to actually start telling the story. “It all began at about two-fifteen this morning with this nine-one-one call.”

The audio of the call was accompanied by captions so we didn't miss any of the words.

Back to Mandy on camera:

“Dead tonight is twenty-nine-year-old Tim Crutcher, who until recently lived here with his wife, Ashley. Neighbors say the couple was estranged. I'm told the victim had been out of work for some time and may have had a drinking problem.”
I hope you never ask my neighbors about me, Mandy.
“Ironically” - she tried to look ironic - “his wife is a paralegal for a prominent criminal attorney here in Erin named Erica Slade. Now, we tried to reach out to Ms. Crutcher to get her side of the story, but she told us to talk to Ms. Slade. The attorney was unavailable for comment. No charges have been filed. Live from Erin, Mandy Peters, TV4 Action News. Back to you, Brian.”

Brian, who'd been glued to the 6 P.M. anchor chair at TV4 since before I'd come to live in southern Ohio, looked serious. I could feel a question coming on. Anchors always have a question. Sometimes they manage to make it look spontaneous.

“What are law enforcement officials saying about the likelihood that an arrest will be made soon?”

“Erin Police Chief Oscar Hummel declined to speak with us on-camera, Brian, but off-camera he told me that an investigation is underway.”

“We'll be staying with this story,” Brian assured us. “Thank you, Mandy.”

“On a much lighter note...” his brunette co-anchor, Tammie Tucker, began bouncily. Deciding that quiet wasn't always such a bad thing, I turned the TV off and went to work on eating my yogurt. I'd barely begun, though, when my smartphone made that pinging noise.
Incoming!
It was a text from Lynda.

What do u know about ashley?

I assumed she meant the shooting, not in general.

Only what I saw on TV just now. I miss you.

She picked up on the second sentence first and we texted for a while in a vein that was highly personal, somewhat amusing, and none of your business. Eventually, we got back to Ashley. I didn't bother to ask how she'd heard about the shooting from up in northern Ohio. News is her business. And from her perch on the Grier Ohio NewsGroup corporate ladder, she's always trying to help
The Erin Observer and News-Ledger
get a leg up on the other media. So she asked me,
Well, what do u think happened?

How should I know? My friendship with Ashley was a limited one. I'd only met her husband once or twice. I knew her from our membership in the Poisoned Pens, a group of aspiring Erin mystery writers. We meet monthly at Pages Gone By, a used bookstore on High Street, although I'd been slack in attending of late. Other members include Noah Bartlett, Mo Russert, Roscoe Feldman, and Mary Lou Springfield. Noah owns the store. Mo Russert works there, is passionately devoted to mysteries, but has never actually submitted a story to the group for critique. Roscoe is a sixty-seven-year-old English teacher at Bernardin High School. He's been dating Mary Lou, the school librarian, for seventeen years. Sebastian McCabe drops by occasionally to offer words of encouragement.

What did I really know about Ashley Crutcher? She was younger than me, maybe late twenties. She was nice, smart, and not the worst writer in the group (that would be Roscoe). If I were listing acquaintances of mine most likely to shoot their husbands, she wouldn't make the top ten. It could have been a tragic mistake - her estranged husband returned to the house unexpectedly, and she shot him thinking he was a burglar. But Erica Slade would have been out front with that story practically before the cops arrived on the scene. I feared a darker truth. I texted Linda:
Probably a
sad story of spouse abuse
.

That shows you what I know. Ashley had a very different story to tell, one that never entered my head.

II

That was on Monday. The next day I was in my office working on preparations for St. Benignus Day festivities on Friday and Saturday when Oscar dropped into my office.

Not surprisingly, the Feast of St. Benignus of Armagh on November 9 is a big deal at St. Benignus College. This year we were honoring St. Patrick's favorite disciple with a two-day blowout. Friday night was to feature a concert with Irish dancers accompanied by Mac on his execrable bagpipes. Saturday, the actual feast day, the campus would host a Celtic Festival most of the day, then Mass in the late afternoon, followed by an alumni dinner with an address by an Irish-American cardinal who had been prominently spoken of as a
papabile
- potential candidate for pope - in the conclave earlier in the year.

The enthusiasm with which Sebastian McCabe entered into the St. Benignus Day festivities struck me as somewhat lacking in humility, given that November 9 also happened to be his forty-second birthday. But who ever accused Mac of being humble? I was just texting his wife, my sister Kate, to ask whether she could hide the bagpipes when Oscar appeared.

“Howdy, Jeff.”

For a moment I was speechless. Oscar's baldhead was covered with a tam-o'-shanter. On his big noggin it looked wildly out of place, like wool socks on a cheerleader. When I finally recovered, I said, “What brings you here?”

He sat down, uninvited but welcome. “Oh, you know, I was in the neighborhood and just thought I'd stop by.”

That smelled fishy. “You never stop by.”

“Oh, hi, Oscar.” Popcorn, who'd been down the hall on a potty break, stood in the doorway. She unconsciously straightened her dyed blond hair. Oscar's eyes lit up.
So that was it!
I knew Oscar hadn't come by just to pass the time of day; he was here to make time with my assistant.

“Hello, Aneliese.” He hauled his well-padded body out of the chair.

Aneliese!
This was even more serious than I thought.

“Do you want me to leave you two alone?” I didn't try to keep the acid out of my voice. “Maybe draw the shades on my way out?”

“Actually, I'm kind of here on business,” Oscar said sheepishly.

“Of course.” Popcorn shifted into business mode. “I'll make some fresh coffee.”

I'd been trying to convince her for six months that she didn't have to make the coffee now that she'd been bumped up to assistant director of our two-person office, but she insisted that she'd never
had
to make the coffee - she wanted to do it. So she disappeared.

Well, actually, she just walked away. I watched Oscar watching her, almost five feet of feminine wiles and administrative competence. Poor guy. I had a feeling he was going to chase her until she caught him.

“What kind of business, Oscar?”

He dragged his eyes back to me.

“Oh, it's this Crutcher case.”

“There's a case?”

“Sure there is. The man was shot dead in his own house.”

“Actually, he didn't live there anymore.”

“Still, his name was on the mortgage.”

“But Ashley must have been making the payments if he wasn't working. TV4 said he'd been out of a job for months.”

Oscar waved that away. “Let's not get bogged down in details. I'm taking a more psychological approach here.” Good grief! Had he been watching
Columbo
again? “What were Mrs. Crutcher's mystery stories like, the ones she wrote for that writer's club you're in?”

“I wouldn't call the Poisoned Pens a club.” What would I call it? I'd never put a noun to it. “And how do you know about that?”

“Oh, you know, small town, word gets around.”

He didn't find out from one of the other members or they would have answered his question. I sure didn't want to be the one to tell him about “Die Like a Dog,” Ashley's short story about a wife's revenge on her husband's unkindness to their pet. That wouldn't help Ashley a bit. Somebody, especially Oscar, could get the wrong idea. Surely Ashley hadn't intended to kill her husband.
Had she?

“So what were her stories like?” Oscar pressed.

“They were mysteries.”

The chief snorted. “I know that. Oh, thanks, hon.”

Hon?
Popcorn had handed him his coffee first, in a mug with hearts on it. They smiled at each other like two lovers in a sugary TV commercial. I felt a stab of jealousy, not the romantic kind. Popcorn and I had been working together a long time, like Batman and Robin or the Lone Ranger and Tonto or Sherlock Holmes and ... Never mind. When she gave me my mug of decaffeinated java, I murmured a “thanks” without looking at her.

“What I mean is this, Jeff,” Oscar continued. “Were Mrs. Crutcher's stories the blood and guts kind or the light-hearted murder kind or what?”

I shrugged.
No big deal, Oscar.
“They were the forgettable kind, I guess, because I can't remember them. Why is it important?”

Popcorn sat down in the other chair. Oscar managed to keep his eyes on me.

“The kind of stories that she writes would say something about her mind-set, like whether she had violent thoughts or maybe even how she felt about soon-to-be-ex-husbands. It's important because Slade is hell-bent on nailing Ashley Crutcher for this.” That would be Marvin Slade, the Sussex County prosecutor and former spouse of Ashley's attorney.

Shocked is too mild a word for my reaction to this news. “Nailing her? For shooting Crutcher in self-defense? Or is it a battered wife deal?” That still hadn't been clarified in the morning's
Observer & News-Ledger
story. Reporter Johanna Rawls had been no more successful at reaching Erica Slade than TV4 had been.

Oscar shook his head. “Neither one, according to Ashley. She swears up and down that she didn't fire a shot and the gun didn't belong to her.”

“What!”

Oscar kicked back the coffee like it was a shot of bourbon. “Yeah. You probably heard the nine-one-one tape. She says was still upstairs in her bedroom, talking to the dispatcher, when the shot went off downstairs. The prosecutor doesn't believe her. Who would?”

“Me, for one,” I said. I stick by my friends.

“Why would she make up a wild story like that when all she had to do was claim it was an accident or self-defense?” Popcorn asked.

Oscar regarded her. “Who knows why a dame does what she does? Women are illogical.” No, he didn't say it, but he would have if Popcorn hadn't been there. I know Oscar. Instead, he fudged it with, “Obviously, she didn't think this through very well. Nobody's saying she's a master criminal.”

“Is it really a smart political move for Marvin Slade to go all hard-ass on this one?” I mused. “His party already has a problem with female voters. If he takes this to court, he'll be going head-to-head with his ex-wife. And Ashley will look very sympathetic in the witness box, whether jurors actually believe her story or not.”

But the politics didn't concern Oscar. “I just do my job, Jeff.” He looked at Popcorn again and repeated, “I just do my job!”

“Well, I think she's innocent,” Popcorn declared, staring daggers at Oscar.

“That's up to a jury to decide, Aneliese.”

Ignoring that, she appealed to me. “You're not going to let it get that far, are you, Jeff?”