The Merchant of Menace (20 page)

“Strange in what way? Big, little? Pigeon-toed?"

“Big. And more rectangular than most shoes."

“Something foreign? Ethnic boots of some sort? Aren't traditional Japanese shoes sort of rectangular? Is there a sole pattern?"

“Not much. This is such a light, dry snow that it just packs into the pattern after a step or two. One of my men thinks he can see a row of diamond shapes in one of the prints, but I think he has too good an imagination."

“But you think these weird shoe prints belong to her attacker?"

“They could. Or somebody could have just been prowling around earlier.”

Bruce Pargeter came up from the basement with an assortment of tools bulging out of a large, beat-up toolbox. "You're all done, Mrs. Jeffry. Try running the water in the guest bathroom. Let it run for a while.”

Mel excused himself from plumbing matters and left. Jane noticed that he took her printouts of Lance's computer disk with him. No matter, she could print them out again. Mel hadn't thought to ask her to turn over her copy.

“Bruce, give me a bill right away and let's sit down and talk about redoing that bathroom," Jane said, back in fully domestic mode.

After Bruce had outlined his ideas for redoing the bathroom, which all sounded good, especially considering that Jane had no ideas of her own in the matter, he left. She'd considered trying to keep him there and chat about the murder and the attack on Ginger, but had an eerie feeling that she shouldn't. It was as if she'd had her quota of good luck in finding things out and if she pushed it any harder, she might get in trouble of some sort. She didn't want to know more about it — she wanted the police to solve it and let her occupy her mind with celebrating the holidays.

She checked the computer for return E-mail from her father, but there was nothing but a spam ad from somebody called "HotChick" saying if the recipient of the note would send $29.95 to a post office box address, a complete guide to curing impotence would be forthcoming.

Jane hit the delete button. She used to send irate responses to junk like this, but it was fruitless.

She wrapped the last of the presents, prepared a new grocery list, and hit the mall. By the time she got home, she was nearly asleep on her feet. She checked E-mail again, found none, and decided she really needed a good nap. Not a few minutes of sleep on the sofa, but a real turnoff-the-phone, get-in-bed nap. She set sandwich makings on the kitchen counter and told the kids she wasn't to be disturbed for any reason for at least two hours.

This unusual request must have alarmed the kids, she realized three hours later. While she slept, they had cleaned the house, even their own rooms. Katie had consulted some cookbooks and was preparing chicken soup. Mike had shoveled the entire driveway and put out the trash and recycle bins for tomorrow morning's pickup. Todd had washed, dried, and brushed Willard, who was now so staticky that he looked like a big yellow tumbleweed.

“Good heavens!" she exclaimed. "All this because I took a nap?"

“We thought you were sick and wanted everything nice for you," Katie said.

“That's very sweet of you all," Jane said. "But I was just tired. Now I feel great.”

And she did. Amazing what a little sleep could do.

“You don't want chicken soup?" Katie asked.

“Why don't we all have it with dinner?”

This settled and the kids reassured that she wasn't ill, Jane checked her E-mail again. This time there was a note from her father saying the Jeffry family's Christmas packages had arrived in good order and that her peculiar note wasn't a foreign language.
Change each consonant to the one that comes before it,
his note said.
Same with the vowels. Who is Julianne Newton and why does anybody care if she was a stripper in college and might have been a prostitute? You aren't involved in another murder, are you? Your mother worries. Love, Dad.

E ven the
knowledge of the code didn't help · much. Jane phoned Mel with her father's information, then went over to Shelley's.

“My dad broke the code. Where are the printouts?" she said.

Shelley shoved a pair of cake pans, half full of a pink batter, into the oven and ran to get her paperwork. They ended up having to write the alphabet down to keep the letters straight, but quickly had the files deciphered.

Jane looked over the results. "For all the trouble this has been, there's not much of a payoff, is there?"

“I certainly expected something juicier," Shelley agreed.

Most of the notes were extremely sketchy. About a stockbroker down the street, Lance only gave the name of the man's firm and a remark about possible inside trading. Jane's said,
Jeffry pharmacies? Work there? Ask customers about mistakes.
Shelley's said,
Paul Nowack. Polish, but Greek food. Check with random health inspectors.

“
This looks like nothing at all," Jane said.

“I'm going to call Julie and ask if she was a stripper," Shelley said. "Hers is one of the more specific and I'm curious to know if there's any truth whatsoever to it."

“You're sure you want to do that? If she was, she's ashamed of it. Her husband works for a bank. They're pretty stuffy, you know."

“Maybe twenty years ago something like that would have mattered. But nobody takes stuff like that seriously, unless it's a politician or public figure.”

Julie didn't seem to be offended. "I wasn't a stripper, I was a go-go dancer. Not many clothes, but some. Why on earth are you asking?”

Shelley didn't have an answer ready and just said, "I'll tell you later." She repeated what Julie had said to Jane. "If she was upset about being asked, she sure didn't show it," Shelley added.

They went back to the list.
Bruce Pargetersame as Pargeter in KY. Asked around for home repair recommendations. No complaints.

“
Poor old Lance, striking out everywhere," Jane said.

Sam Dwyer's file only said,
Florida. Child.

There wasn't a file for Sharon Wilhite. Presumably anything he knew about her was in his head and didn't require notes.

The rest were all people who didn't appear to have any involvement with his murder. Some had left the neighborhood long ago. Several were people who had been absolutely proven to be out of town at the time of the murder.

“I'm really disappointed," Jane said. "He didn't really know much of anything about anybody. It was all bluff and speculation.”

Shelley shook her head. "Maybe. But then he could have just kept some of these notes as reminders of what he did know. And there might be other disks someplace with more detail.”

Jane stood up. "I'm going home. I'm sick of this and starting to feel like I just don't care who killed the jerk and why. I'm going to quit thinking about it and enjoy the holidays."

“Lucky for us that we can just put it aside," Shelley said. "Poor Mel can't."

“I know. But we can't solve every case for him.”

Shelley laughed. "I'm going to tell him you said that!"

“Don't you dare!”

Jane was so firmly resolved to stop thinking about the murder that she almost succeeded. She fixed a nice family dinner to go with Katie's chicken soup. She read a couple chapters of a mystery that she thought was too easy to solve, but discovered that her solution had been wrong all along. She tried out a new rinse on her hair that turned out fairly well, but did some serious damage to one of her favorite towels. She found some Static Guard to spray on Willard as the kids had discovered that petting him in the dark generated sparks. She called and had a conversation with Uncle Jim about Christmas dinner, then girded herself to call her sister. Marty, fortunately, was just getting ready to go out to a party and Jane felt blessed indeed that they didn't have to talk very long. Still, Marty man- aged to make three irritating comments and two downright stupid remarks.

As she went upstairs to bed, she reminded Todd that he had to get up fairly early the next morning.

“Why?”

“Have you forgotten? Pet got those tickets to some Christmas movie that's opening at ten.”

Todd was torn. He wanted to see the movie, but didn't want to have to drag Pet along. Jane pointed out that the tickets were scarce and he hadn't managed to bag his own — Pet had, and it was
she
dragging
him
along.

Jane went to bed early, slept like a rock, and was wide awake by seven — with nothing to do. She could hardly remember a time when she didn't have at least the tail end of a "to do" list pending. She let the pets outside, let them back in and fed them. This always had to be done early on Tuesdays because the trash trucks came later in the morning, terrifying the cats and moving Willard to bark his fool head off. Jane went back to bed with a new mystery book that was already overdue at the library. But she couldn't quite get into it.

She was as twitchy today as Julie Newton always was. Maybe that was Julie's problem — she got too much sleep. She tried picturing Julie as a go-go dancer. It wasn't hard. Go-go dancing, as Jane recalled, was all twitching.

Had Julie told Shelley the truth? Even if Julie really had been a stripper and Lance had proof, could it be a reason to kill him? As deep, dark secrets went, it wasn't a very good one.

The only person on the files who appeared to really have something to fear from Lance was Bruce Pargeter. And he freely admitted that he despised the man. And he really didn't have a good alibi for the night Lance was killed. He and his mother were both at home, but she was upstairs and he was in the basement. Even if she had suspected that Bruce had left the house, she certainly wouldn't have let on. He was her son. And the man who was murdered had been largely responsible for her own husband's death.

Jane had the sense that something was stirring around furtively at the back of her brain. Did her subconscious know something it was refusing to let go of? Or was she just hyper because she'd gotten too much sleep?

At nine, she woke Todd and called Mel. "Anything new?" she asked.

“Not a thing except that the files on the disk were a bust, which I guess you know."

“Boring, aren't they." She told him about Shelley's phone conversation with Julie Newton.

“Yes, Julie called earlier. There was something in the paper this morning about the disk having been found and she put two and two together."

“How did the newspaper find out?"

“We told them. And emphasized that we felt there was nothing of use to the investigation on it. I didn't want anybody else bashed around in pursuit of the damned thing. And Ginger is doing well," he added. "She still can't remember what happened to her, but her health is much improved."

“That's good to hear."

“You sound preoccupied," Mel said.

“I am. There's something on the fringe of my mind I can't get a hold on. Something about the attack on Ginger."

“The method? The place? The time?" Mel tried to help her prod the memory.

“No. Never mind. It's probably something useless anyway. How's Addie?"

“Fine. Fine!" he said with exaggerated enthusiasm. "A little bored, of course. I'd hoped to be free more of the time while she was visiting.”

She hoped he wasn't hinting that Jane entertain her, but if so, it was a doomed hope. "Well, I better get along. I'm taking Todd and Pet to the premier of a movie. I hope it's something appropriate, but I'm not going to investigate it too thoroughly for fear it's not."

“I'm sure Sam Dwyer has checked it out," Mel said. "He's very protective of his daughter."

“True. You've relieved my mind. Call me later, okay?”

Mel lowered his voice. "Want to see if we can sneak away this afternoon?”

She knew what he had in mind and it sounded good to her, but it wasn't possible. "I have to go back into hostess mode this afternoon and fix a nice dinner. My in-laws are coming over."

“I'm not crazy about celibacy."

“Neither am I, but I've got kids all over my house, you've got your mother at yours and I'm sure every hotel in the city is full of visiting relatives. Talk to you later.”

Jane took the kids to the movie. It was nice being able to back out of a pristine driveway, but she wished Mike had set the trash farther to the left. She had no room to avoid falling inthe infamous pothole. "Mom!" Todd said, rubbing his head where he'd bumped it on the window. "You've got to get that fixed.”

When she got back from dropping them off, Katie was in the kitchen, rummaging in the fridge. "What are you looking for?" Jane asked.

“Eggs. I want scrambled eggs. With bacon."

“I'll fix it," Jane said.

“You will?"

“I've got a lot of extra energy to expend." Jane gestured at Katie to sit down at the table. Jane pulled out a carton of eggs and put them on the counter. Oops, that was the full carton. She thought that there was another with only two eggs left. She found the other carton hiding behind a bowl of cookie dough that had somehow been forgotten. Jane stood for a moment, staring at the egg cartons.

“Mom? What's wrong? Mom? Wake up." Jane turned to Katie. "Egg cartons," she said. "Egg cartons and milk cartons."

“What are you—"

“Don't talk for a second. Let me think," Jane said. She put the eggs down, mumbling to herself and nodding. "Yes, yes. It has to be. It's the only thing— Katie, I take back my offer to make breakfast.”

She ran upstairs, closed the bedroom door behind her and dialed Shelley. In broken phrases, she told Shelley what she'd figured out. "Does that make any sense at all?" she asked.

“It might not be right, but it all fits. But you better call Mel right away. The trash trucks are coming."

“Oh! Yes.”

She called Mel, horrified that he might not be at his desk, that the evidence was going to disappear any second. It was plain good luck that he picked up the phone. She ran through her theory again. "Oh, come on, Jane!" he said. "It's all speculation."