The Best of Sisters in Crime (17 page)

What was going
on here?

Sis Dunaway had
seemed hell-bent on avenging Marge’s death, but where was she? Had she gone to
the cops? I kept one eye on the clock and one eye on Justine. Whatever Sis was
up to, she had better do it quick. Finally, mere minutes before the flight was
due to be called, I left the newsstand, crossed the gate area, and took a seat
beside Justine. “Hi,” I said. “Nice permanent. Looks good.”

She glanced at
me and then did a classic double take. “What are you doing here?”

“Keeping an eye
on you.”

“What for?”

“I thought
someone should see you off. I suspect your Aunt Sis is en route, so I decided
to keep you company until she gets here.”

“Aunt
Sis?’
she said, incredulously.

“I gotta warn
you, she’s not convinced your mother had a heart attack.”

“What are you
talking about? Aunt Sis is dead.”

I could feel
myself smirk. “Yeah, sure. Since when?”

“Five years ago.”

“Bullshit.”

“It’s not
bullshit. An aneurysm burst and she dropped in her tracks.”

“Come on,” I
scoffed.

“It’s the truth,”
she said emphatically. By that time, she’d recovered her composure and she went
on the offensive. “Where’s my money? You said you’d write a check for six
hundred bucks.”

“Completely dead?”
I asked.

The loudspeaker
came on. “May I have your attention, please. United Flight 3440 for Los Angeles
is now ready for boarding at Gate Five. Please have your boarding pass
available and prepare for security check.”

Justine began to
gather up her belongings. I’d been wondering how she was going to get all that
cash through the security checkpoint, but one look at her lumpy waistline and
it was obvious she’d strapped on a money belt. She picked up her carry-on, her
shoulder bag, her jacket, and her paperback and clopped, in spike heels, over
to the line of waiting passengers.

I followed,
befuddled, reviewing the entire sequence of events. It had all happened today.
Within hours. It wasn’t like I was suffering brain damage or memory loss. And I
hadn’t seen a ghost. Sis had come to my office and laid out the whole tale
about Marge and Justine. She’d told me all about their relationship, Justine’s
history as a con, the way the two women tried to outdo each other, the
insurance, Marge’s death. How could a murder have gotten past Dr. Yee? Unless
the woman wasn’t murdered, I thought suddenly. Oh.

Once I saw it in
that
light, it was obvious.

Justine got in
line between a young man with a duffel bag and a woman toting a cranky baby.
There was some delay up ahead while the ticket agent got set. The line started
to move and Justine advanced a step with me right beside her.

“I understand
you and your mother had quite a competitive relationship.”

“What’s it to
you.” she said. She kept her eyes averted, facing dead ahead, willing the line
to move so she could get away from me.

“I understand
you were always trying to get the better of each other.”

“What’s your
point?” she said, annoyed.

I shrugged. “I
figure you read the article about the unidentified dead woman in the welfare
hotel. You went out to the morgue and claimed the body as your mom’s. The two
of you agreed to split the insurance money, but your mother got worried about a
double cross, which is exactly what this is.”

“You don’t know
what you’re talking about.”

The line moved
up again and I stayed right next to her. “She hired me to keep an eye on you,
so when I realized you were leaving town, I called her and told her what was
going on. She really hit the roof and I thought she’d charge right out, but so
far there’s been no sign of her. . . .”

Justine showed
her ticket to the agent and he motioned her on. She moved through the metal
detector without setting it off.

I gave the agent
a smile. “Saying good-bye to a friend,” I said, and passed through the wooden
arch right after she did. She was picking up the pace, anxious to reach the
plane.

I was still
talking, nearly jogging to keep up with her. “I couldn’t figure out why she
wasn’t trying to stop you and then I realized what she must have done—”

“Get away from
me. I don’t want to talk to you.”

“She took the
money, Justine. There’s probably nothing in the belt but old papers. She had
plenty of time to make the switch while you were getting your hair done.”

“Ha, ha,” she
said sarcastically. “Tell me another one.”

I stopped in my
tracks. “All right. That’s all I’m gonna say. I just didn’t want you to reach
Mexico City and find yourself flat broke.”

“Blow it out
your buns,” she hissed. She showed her boarding pass to the woman at the gate
and passed on through. I could hear her spike heels tip-tapping out of ear
range.

I reversed
myself, walked back through the gate area and out to the walled exterior
courtyard, where I could see the planes through a windbreak of protective
glass. Justine crossed the tarmac to the waiting plane, her shoulders set. I
didn’t think she’d heard me, but then I saw her hand stray to her waist. She
walked a few more steps and then halted, dumping her belongings in a pile at
her feet. She pulled her shirt up and checked the money belt. At that distance,
I saw her mouth open, but it took a second for the shrieks of outrage to reach
me.

Ah, well, I
thought. Sometimes a mother’s love is like a poison that leaves no trace. You
bop along through life, thinking you’ve got it made, and next thing you know,
you’re dead.

Back to table of
contents

Elizabeth George’s
A Great Deliverance,
winner of an Anthony and an Agatha,
and nominated for an Edgar and a Macavity, introduced Detective-Inspector
Thomas Lynley and Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers. The sleuths return in
eight more bestselling novels, including
Deception on His Mind,
to solve cases in which love,
betrayal, and the often unrecognized burdens of the past are key elements. Internationally
acclaimed (she won the German Mimi and the Grand Prize for Literature in
France), the Lynley and Havers novels abound with British sites and sounds,
providing palpable settings for Elizabeth’s astute observations of human
nature.

In “The Evidence Exposed,”
hidden motivations are brought to light after a member of class in British
architecture dies on an excursion.

Adele Manners gave her room one last look.
 
The bed was made. The clothes were picked up. Nothing betrayed her.

She shut the door
and descended the stairs to join her fellow students for breakfast. The dining
hall rang with the clatter of their dishes and silverware, with the clamor of
their talk. As always, one voice managed to soar above the rest, shrill and
determined to fix attention upon the speaker. Hearing it, Adele winced.

“Hypoglycemia.
Hy-po-gly-
ce
-mia. You know what that is, don’t you?”

Adele wondered
that anyone could avoid knowing since, in their two weeks at St. Stephen’s
College, Noreen Tucker hadn’t missed an opportunity to expatiate upon
hypoglycemia or anything else. Seeing that she was doing so once again, Adele
decided to take her plate of scrambled eggs and sausage to another location,
but as she turned, Howard Breen came to her side, smiled, said, “Coming?” and carried
his own plate to where Noreen Tucker reigned, outfitted by Laura Ashley in an
ensemble more suited to a teenager than a romance writer at the distant end of
her fifth decade.

Adele felt
trapped. She liked Howard Breen. From the first moment they had bumped into
each other and discovered they were neighbors on the second floor of L
staircase, he had been very kind to her, preternaturally capable of reading
past her facade of calm yet at the same time willing to allow her to keep
personal miseries to herself. That was a rare quality in a friend. Adele valued
it. She valued Howard Breen. So she followed him.

“I’m just a
martyr to hypoglycemia,” Noreen was asserting vigorously. “It renders me
useless. If I’m not care
ful. . .”

Adele blocked
out the woman’s babbling by scanning the room and engaging in a mental
recitation of the details she had learned in her two weeks as a student in the
Great Houses of Britain class.
Gilded capitals on the
pilasters
, she thought,
a segmented pediment above them.
She smiled
wryly at the fact that she’d become a virtual encyclopedia of architectural
trivia while at Cambridge. Cram the mind full of facts that one would never use
and perhaps they might crowd out the big fact that one could never face.

No,
she thought.
No, I won’t. Not now.
But the thought of him came to her anyway. Even though it was
finished between them, even though it had been her choice, not Bob’s, she
couldn’t be rid of him. Nor could she bury him as he deserved to be buried. She
had made the decision to end their affair, putting a period to five years of
anguish by coming to this summer session at St. Stephen’s College in the hope
that an exposure to fine minds would somehow allow her to forget the
humiliation of having lived her life for half a decade in the fruitless
expectation that a married man would leave his wife for her. Yet nothing was
working to eradicate Bob from memory, and Noreen Tucker was certainly not the
incarnation of razor intellect that Adele had hoped to find at Cambridge.

She gritted her
teeth as Noreen went on. “I don’t know what would have happened to me if Ralph
here hadn’t insisted that I go to the doctor. Always weak at the knees.

Always feeling
faint. Blacking out on the freeway that time. On the freeway! If Ralph here
hadn’t grabbed the wheel . . .” When Noreen shuddered, the ribbon on her straw
hat quivered in sympathy. “So I keep my nuts and chews with me all the time.
Well, Ralph here keeps them for me. Ten, three, and eight P.M. If I don’t eat
them right on the dot, I go positively limp. Don’t I, Ralph?”

It was no
surprise to Adele when Ralph Tucker said nothing. She couldn’t remember a time
when he had managed to make a satisfactory response to some remark of his wife’s.
At the moment his head was lowered; his eyes were fixed on his bowl of
cornflakes.

“You
do
have my trail mix, don’t you, Ralph?” Noreen
Tucker asked. “We’ve got the trip to Abinger Manor this morning, and from what
I could tell from looking at that brochure, it’s going to be lots of walking. I’ll
need my nuts and chews. You haven’t forgotten?”

Ralph shook his
head.

“Because you did
forget last week, sweetie, and the bus driver wasn’t very pleased with us, was
he, when we had to stop to get me a bit of something at three o’clock?”

Ralph shook his
head.

“So you
will
remember this time?”

“It’s up in the
room, hon. But I won’t forget it.”

“That’s good.
Because . . .”

It was hard to
believe that Noreen actually intended to go on, harder to believe that she
could not see how tiresome she was. But she nattered happily for several more
minutes until the arrival of Dolly Ragusa created a diversion.

Silently, Adele
blessed the girl for having mercy upon them. She wouldn’t have blamed Dolly for
taking a place at another table. More than anyone, Dolly had a right to avoid
the Tuckers, for she lived across the hall from them on the first floor of M
staircase, so there could be no doubt that Dolly was well versed in the
vicissitudes of Noreen Tucker’s health. The words
my poor blood
were still ringing in the air when
Dolly joined them, a black fedora pulled over her long blond hair. She wrinkled
her nose, rolled her eyes, then grinned.

Adele smiled. It
was impossible not to find Dolly a pleasure. She was the youngest student in
the Great Houses class—a twenty-three-year-old art history graduate from the
University of Chicago—but she moved among the older students as an equal, with
an easy confidence that Adele admired, a spirit she envied. Dolly’s youth was
fresh, unblemished by regret. This was not a girl who would be so stupid as to
give her love to a man who would never return it. This was not a weak girl.
Adele had seen that from the first.

Dolly reached
for the pitcher of orange juice. “The Cleareys had a real knockdown drag-out
this morning,” she said.

“About
six-thirty. I thought Frances was going to put Sam through the window. Did you
guys hear them?”