The Drowning Spool (A Needlecraft Mystery) (7 page)

S
ERGEANT
Malloy was brought into the august presence of Ms. Felicia Colt, administrator of Watered Silk. The office, on the first floor and overlooking an attractive walled garden with a tall fountain in its middle, was large enough to accommodate a mahogany conference table with six chairs and a big antique wooden desk.

Ms. Colt, on the other hand, was almost a little person. Probably not quite five feet tall, she had dark hair in a Dutch bob, a white silk blouse with a big collar, and a black suit that fit her tiny frame exquisitely. She came out from behind her desk to put a tiny hand into Malloy’s big one. Her grip was warm and surprisingly firm. Her voice, when she spoke, was equally firm, with a hint of warmth—a good voice for a person in charge.

“I hope I can be of use to you in your investigation,” she said, taking him in approvingly with her fine dark eyes. “Please, take a seat.” She went back behind her desk and managed to climb up into her executive chair in a single graceful movement. Its seat was high enough that she did not appear dwarfed by the size of her desk.

Mike chose one of the comfortable leather chairs facing her desk. “Thank you for agreeing to see me with such little notice,” he began.

“This is a terrible thing that has happened to us,” she replied. “We need to get to a solution quickly so we can move on.”

“We would like to solve this quickly,” he said. “But I personally am not in favor of making an arrest just so we can declare it solved.”

“You don’t think, then, that Ethan Smart had anything to do with Ms. Wahlberger’s death?” she asked him.

“No, ma’m, I don’t. It is not possible that he let someone into the pool. For one thing, he didn’t have a key to the pool room door. For another, a quick review of the tapes from the camera that night do not show anyone coming in the main entrance carrying a body or pushing a laundry cart or dragging a trunk big enough to contain a body.”

“So whoever brought that woman’s body into the building must have come through one of the other entrances,” said Ms. Colt.

“Well, we are reviewing the other tapes from cameras trained on the other doors, but so far we haven’t seen anyone coming in with a body-size bundle or container. Is there an entrance not guarded by a camera?”

She shook her dark head. “No.”

“Something on the roof, perhaps?”

“No. There used to be a big entrance down in the machine room, back when this place was a silk factory, but it’s been boarded up for decades—since long before we came here.”

Malloy nodded. He had seen that pair of heavy double doors blocking the entrance from the alley, high and broad enough for a truck to drive through. The beams holding them closed were huge, fastened with iron bands, dirt and dust ground into their grain. They had obviously not been used in many years. It would take a week of work to get them to open or—if someone was in a hurry, with a body to get rid of—a dozen sticks of dynamite.

“So how do you think they got the body of Ms. Wahlberger into the pool?” Ms. Colt asked.

“I think if we could find that out, we’d know who to arrest.”

“Is there anything I can do to help?”

“Whoever brought the body here must have known about the pool. In fact they were so familiar with the place, they knew a way in that even you don’t know about. That means somebody here is connected to the murder. Somebody here, an employee or a resident, is either the murderer or knows who the murderer is. What I’d like you to do is get out your list of employees and your list of residents and run your eyes slowly down them. See if a name doesn’t jump out at you, even a little bit.”

“All right, I will do that, and I’ll contact you if a name does leap to my attention.”

“Thank you.” Malloy stood. “Meanwhile,” he said, daringly, because it was really none of his business, “you might reconsider the firing of Ethan Smart.”

“I will take your recommendation under advisement,” she said, in a chilly voice. Clearly she was offended at his putting his oar in where it did not belong. But maybe it would have an effect.

• • •

O
N
Wednesday Betsy came a few minutes early to her water aerobics class, this time to have a quick talk with the instructor, Pam, standing short and slim in her Speedo swimsuit at the deep end of the pool.

“What are you doing right after class?” Betsy asked.

“Working out some routines for special-needs clients. Why?”

“Could I talk with you for just a little while? Maybe fifteen minutes or so?”

“What about?”

“Finding the body of Teddi Wahlberger.”

Pam literally took a step back, and her eyebrows lifted. “What makes you think I’d answer any questions about that?”

“I’ve been asked by a member of Ethan Smart’s family to look into the circumstances of her being brought to the pool.”

Pam looked slantwise at Betsy and said accusingly, “You’re not a police officer.”

“No, I do this as a private citizen.”

“A PI? I thought you owned a shop that sells embroidery stuff.”

“That’s right, I do. This is a sideline. It’s something I’ve been doing for several years. I have a list of satisfied clients.”

Pam hesitated so long that Betsy was sure she’d refuse. But finally she threw up her hands and said, “Oh, what the heck. Sure. See me in my office, off the exercise room, as soon as you get dressed.”

“Thank you.”

Wilma was on time for the class, appearing bright, interested, and energetic. But she looked at Betsy without any sign of recognition, so Betsy didn’t tell her she’d found the cross-stitch pattern she’d asked for. There’d be time for that later.

Pam was in an imaginative mood today. She called for different sets of exercises, such as touching the right foot with the left hand, and then touching the left foot with the right hand, repeating that movement four times before changing it to lifting alternating feet behind and reaching for them with opposite fingers four times. Repeat. Repeat. She had them do jumping jack arms while making cross-country ski movements with their legs. She even had them skipping across the pool, a movement Betsy hadn’t done since childhood and found surprisingly difficult to do in the water.

Wilma, whooping with glee, did the exercises with no apparent trouble and a lot of splashing. Since it was easier to splash in the shallower end of the pool, she stayed there—which was just as well, since the others mostly stayed in the deeper water.

At the end of class, as they climbed up the ramp to the apron, Wilma winked at Betsy and said, “See you on Thursday!” So she
had
recognized her. Or maybe she just had a lucid moment. Whatever the case, she stayed in the pool to splash some more.

Betsy showered and dressed hastily, then went through the exercise room and between the two treadmills to Pam’s little office. It was brand new—like the rest of this end of the facility—and ferociously neat. It was also stiflingly hot.

“They’re working on the heat problem,” Pam said. She was dressed in a sleeveless knit top with white and blue stripes and white shorts. She stood to shake Betsy’s hand across her small desk.

“Too bad you don’t have an outdoor window you could crack,” said Betsy. The temperature outside was seventeen degrees, which would have cooled things down in a hurry. Three of the office walls were solid, painted cream, bordered by a couple of file cabinets and a credenza topped by a computer. The computer screen displayed the logo of Watered Silk (a red streaming banner with a single watered silk mark like a stylized kiss in the center, which Betsy thought amazingly risqué for a retirement center). The logo drifted across the screen, bumping diagonally off its borders.

The wall with the door into Pam’s office also featured a large window overlooking the exercise room, the kind of double-paned window that does not open.

“What can I do for you?” asked Pam, sitting down again, and resting her clasped fingers on a single file folder in the center of her small gray desk.

Betsy sat in the wooden-armed upholstered chair. “Tell me how people can get into the pool area without going through the door.”

Pam looked past Betsy at the door to the pool she could see through her window. “They can’t,” she said.

“I did,” Betsy pointed out. “I came to it from the locker room.”

Pam shrugged that off. “But you came into the pool area first through that door.” She nodded at it. “Then into the locker room, and then out again. There’s no back entrance.”

“What about the men’s locker room?” asked Betsy. “Is there another way into the men’s locker room than from the pool area?”

Pam hesitated, then shook her head. “No, I’m sure there isn’t.”

“Ethan told me that the door to the pool has a key lock, not an electronic one.”

“That’s right.”

“Who has a key?”

“I do, as does my fellow physical therapist, the administrator, and the head of maintenance.” Pam’s fellow physical therapist had come into the pool room near the end of that morning’s class, and remained there with Wilma.

“That’s all?”

“Yes.”

“So even if someone managed to get into the building without being seen, she couldn’t get into the pool area.”

“Not without a key,” Pam said, a trifle smugly.

“But someone did, obviously.”

That wiped the smug look away. “Yes.” Pam put a slender hand sideways over her mouth for a few moments, her eyes wide and blank. “It was the most awful thing that’s ever happened to me.”

Betsy did not reply, and after another pause, Pam continued, “I can’t think how she got in there, if the night guard didn’t let her in. I mean, there’s just no way.”

“But Ethan didn’t have a key, so he couldn’t have let her in, or the person bringing her into the pool,” said Betsy. “I’d like to know why he was fired.”

“Maybe he wasn’t fired, maybe he quit. I mean, it doesn’t seem fair to fire him, does it? So maybe they didn’t. They haven’t told me anything about it.”

“Have you ever loaned your key to someone?”

“No . . .” Pam frowned and bit her top lip. “Well, actually that’s not true. The last time I went on vacation, I gave my key to my substitute. She left it in the desk drawer, I found it when I got back.” Pam gestured at her desk.

“When was this?” asked Betsy.

Pam thought, then turned to her computer and brought up a calendar. “Five months ago. I was gone for twelve days.”

“Was your office locked? The desk drawer?”

Pam drew up her shoulders a little. “No.”

“So how long was the key to the pool in the drawer?”

“Just overnight. I called my substitute about it, and she said it never left her key ring until she left it in the desk drawer on her last day.”

“May I have her name?” Betsy had been rummaging in her purse for the reporter’s notebook she carried when sleuthing. She brought it out, along with the beautiful wood-cased ballpoint pen Connor had given her.

“Heidi Langstrom. She’s now at Courage Center.”

Betsy nodded. Heidi was one of her water aerobics instructors over there, and a licensed physical therapist. She would call her later today.

“Now, Teddi Wahlberger was found naked in the pool, right?”

Pam frowned and her lips thinned as if in pain. Clearly she was distressed that Betsy knew this. But then she nodded. “Yes, that’s right.”

Betsy continued, “We know she was brought to the pool already dead, possibly in an attempt to make people think she came here to swim and drowned in the pool. But to make that ruse work, her clothing should have been here, too. Was there clothing belonging to her in the locker room?”

“No, it was piled up near the ramp. I didn’t look through it, of course, but I remember there was a beautiful fur jacket on top. It might’ve been fake fur, but it looked real. And a pair of high-heeled leather boots. Both black.”

“Was there a purse?”

“I didn’t see one, but it could have been under the coat.”

“Anything else?”

“I think I remember seeing one end of a bra sticking out at the bottom. It was black or dark brown.” She was frowning in an earnest attempt to be thorough. “That’s all I remember. But it was a pile of clothing, obviously more things were under the coat.”