The Merchant of Menace (3 page)

“I can drive today, can't I?" Katie said, bounding into the kitchen. "Oh, my gosh! What happened to the kitchen? It's clean!"

“Mrs. Nowack cleaned it for me last night as a surprise. A very nice surprise," Jane admitted.

“Wish I had friends like that," Katie said. "Wonder if I could persuade Jenny to clean my room."

“I wouldn't count on it. You remember I took care of Mrs. Nowack's dog for a whole week while they were out of town. Jenny might stick you with an even bigger payback. Todd! Hold it," she added as he came into the kitchen and headed for the refrigerator. "If you spill so much as a drop or crumb in here, you'll be grounded until you're of voting age.”

He looked around in wonder. "Hey, it's clean in here!"

“You don't need to sound
that
amazed," Jane groused. She wondered if she ought to put a drop cloth under the table.

When she returned from getting Katie to school, Todd's car pool had picked him up and Jane was pleased to discover that he'd heeded her warning. The kitchen was still spotless except for a cardboard milk carton on the table. She gave Shelley a call, thanking her effusively for cleaning up for her.

“Oh, Jane, quit being so mushy. You know that my deepest, darkest secret is that I love to clean. Just don't let anybody else know. Need any more help?"

“No, I think I've got a handle on it. I've got lists of things to do all over the house."

“You and your lists!" Shelley laughed. Jane was a compulsive list-maker, often breaking a single job down into components so she had more items to check off to bolster her sense of accomplishment. Sometimes, when she did something that wasn't on the list, she added it for the sole purpose of striking through it.

“If I don't have my lists, I just sit in a stupor, wondering what I'm supposed to be doing," Jane said. "But now I've got to start marking things off. Talk to you later.”

The caroling party was to be the next evening, so she had two days to prepare. Cleaning the house and getting out the holiday decorations were the first orders of business, but there was shopping and cooking to be done, as well as bill-paying, carpooling and all the other normal, time-consuming chores. She was looking for where the toilet brush had deliberately hidden itself when the doorbell rang.

Julie Newton stood on the front porch, staring at the Johnsons' house. She was so stricken by the sight that she didn't even notice when Jane opened the door.

“Decorative, isn't it?" Jane said.

Startled, Julie gasped, "I've — I've never seen anything quite like it."

“Come in before you freeze," Jane said.

Julie did as she was told, following Jane to the kitchen. "I have the most exciting thing to tell you," she said, shedding her coat and stocking cap, her fingers making dainty darting motions at her hair to fluff it. Julie Newton, Jane thought, would be cute all her life. She was the perky kind of woman who never seemed to age. Her eyes crinkled at the corners when she smiled, which was most of the time, and she was always in motion. Fluffing her hair, gesturing enthusiastically äs she spoke, swinging a leg when she was seated, and almost bouncing when she walked. A regular bundle of energy.

Jane offered her coffee or tea. Julie chose tea and squealed with delight at the sight of the plate of cookies Jane set on the table. "How darling! Jane, you're so clever!”

That's how she gets people to do things they don't want to,
Jane thought.
With flattery.

“
Uh — what are these green ones supposed to be?" Julie asked.

“Elves. Don't ask. What's your news?”

Julie jiggled around in her chair with delight. "Oh, Jane. It's so neat! You know who Lance King is?"

“Lance K— oh, yes, that 'action reporter' on television. What's so exciting? Did somebody bump him off?"

“Bump him off? Oh, Jane, you're joking, right? You're so funny!"

“What about Lance King?"

“Well, you know he does all those reports on unfair stuff. Crooked businesspeople and sham charity organizations and all? But he sometimes hosts the regular nightly news from special events."

“Yes, I know.”

Julie was quivering with excitement and looked like she was about to explode with the thrill of it all. "Well, Jane.
We
are going to be his special event tomorrow night!" Her voice was almost a shriek of joy.

“What?" Jane asked, appalled.

“Yes, it's true. He's going to anchor the news from your house! From your very own house!”

“Oh, dear God…" Jane whimpered.

“Isn't it fabulous? I knew you'd be so excited."

“Julie, I don't think that's—" Jane started to bleat.

“No, don't thank me. It was a pleasure to do it. I just took myself in hand and said, 'Julie Newton, there's nothing to stop you. The worst that can happen is that he'll say no,' and so I just called the television station and they actually put me through to him. I told him about the neighborhood caroling party and even suggested it would be a nice change, to do a 'revealing' piece about something that went right instead of wrong. I told him all about the neighbors, what nice, interesting people they all are—"

“You told him all about us?" Jane asked.

The thought made her stomach hurt. She, and many others, thought Lance King was far and away the most obnoxious individual who ever got in front of a television camera. He was the expert at the surprise attack, taking a camera crew to some unsuspecting individual's home or place of business, shoving his way in, and asking 'Do you still beat your wife' questions and berating the victim, barely skirting FCC regulations on obscene language issues. If he'd really only taken on genuine crooks and rip-off artists, it might not have been so offensive. But as often as not, he was simply dead wrong in his accusations. He'd be back on a week later, making a patronizing apology that always managed to be every bit as insulting as the original interview.

According to newspaper accounts, the local station was always being hit with enormous libel suits, most of which they lost. Or more correctly, their insurance carrier lost. There had been an article only a month ago about the insurance carrier trying to drop the station's coverage, but the station had filed suit against the carrier, claiming it was the carrier's incompetent lawyers who were to blame. When it got to court, a judge had ruled in the station's favor. The newspaper reporter, mincing among the libel laws himself like a trained soldier in a minefield, managed to suggest, without saying so, that the judge was afraid of what Lance King might to do him if he didn't rule in the station's favor. The general manager of the television sta- tion had been quoted as saying that Lance King was the brightest star in their galaxy of fine reporters and they considered his reports an honorable and necessary public service. . blab, blah, blab. In other words, he was a point grabber and, Jane suspected, would have been out on his ear if the insurance had been canceled.

And now darling, cute, bubbly, idiotic Julie Newton had blabbed to him about their block caroling party, no doubt told him interesting tidbits about the neighbors and, worst of all, invited the jerk to Jane's house.

“Julie," Jane said, sitting down across from her and fixing her with a bleak stare, "you have to uninvite him. I won't have the man in my house.”

Julie quit bouncing in place for a minute. Then said, "Oh, Jane, another joke!" She wiggled like a happy puppy.

“I'm not joking, Julie," Jane said firmly. "You're going to have to call him back, explain that you failed to check with the hostess of the party in advance and she has now told you her house can't accommodate any more people — like him and his crew."

“Jane, I can't do that."

“You must do it. Otherwise I'm going to tell everyone the party after the caroling is canceled. Or you can have it at your house."

“No, I can't. I don't have a kitchen. I made some changes and Bruce couldn't finish it all." Julie sat very still for a moment. "He knows your name and address. Lance King does. I'm sorry, Jane, but he asked where the party was so he could come by early in the day and setup cameras. If I tell him you won't let him in, it'll make him mad at both of us."

“I don't care if he's mad at me," Jane said. "Are you sure?" Julie asked.

“What can I do?" Jane asked Shelley half an hour later. Shelley had responded instantly to Jane's frantic call for advice and sprinted across their driveways to chew the situation over. "Even if it hadn't been somebody obnoxious, Julie had no business inviting an outsider to my house."

“No, she didn't, but the problem now is to get rid of him," Shelley said.

“If I refuse to let him come, he'll be insulted and angry and he's the last person in the world I want to make enemies with," Jane said. "On the other hand, it makes my stomach hurt to think about having him in my house. People will think I'm expressing some sort of approval of his appalling behavior."

“You could come down with a sudden, violent, and highly contagious disease," Shelley suggested.

Jane shook her head. "No, nobody'd believe it. And I'd just end up sticking someone else in the neighborhood with the same problem. And I wouldn't even be able to help them out because of my smallpox or cholera or whatever.”

Shelley took a sip of her coffee. "Much as I like to be the neighborhood wise woman, always ready with a solution, I'm coming up empty on this one," she admitted. "How did you leave it with Julie?"

“You mean after I beat the stuffing out of her?

I've never been so tempted to smack somebody upside the head. I told her I wanted an hour to think about it.”

The doorbell rang and Jane found Bruce Pargeter standing on the front steps, looking very upset.

He introduced himself and Jane said, "I know you, Bruce. Remember, you put in new pantry shelves. Come in out of the cold."

“I remember. I wasn't sure you did.”

Bruce was a chunky, florid-faced young man, probably about thirty years old, Jane would have guessed, who lived with his widowed mother at the other end of the block. He was a wizard at fixing, repairing, or renovating almost anything. Almost everyone in the neighborhood had benefitted from his skills at one time or another. One of the advantages to having him around was that he was unfailingly cheerful and polite and had excellent taste. He could suggest to homeowners that their own ideas were dreadful without being the tiniest bit rude about it.

But today he didn't look the least bit cheerful. In fact, he looked extremely upset.

“Hi, Bruce," Shelley said when they entered the living room. "I've been meaning to tell you how happy I am with that flooring in the family room. I'm so glad you convinced me to get the planking rather than the squares."

“Too bad you don't have a tape recorder running, Bruce," Jane said with a laugh. "Not very many people have ever heard Shelley admit that someone else was right and she was wrong.”

But Bruce Pargeter only gave her a thin smile. "Jane, I want to warn you about something andask a favor. I'm doing Julie Newton's kitchen and I couldn't help but hear her on the phone this morning. Do you know she's invited Lance King to the neighborhood caroling party?"

“I'm afraid I do know. Shelley and I were just trying to figure out what to do about it.”

Bruce gave her a grim look. "Jane, if you value the quality of your life, you won't let that — that person in your house. Believe me, you'll regret it the rest of your life. He's the most evil person in the world.”

It turned out that Bruce's
experience
with Lance King went way back to years ago in Kentucky, where they both lived at the time.

“Ever heard of karst topography?" he asked.

“Something to do with caves, isn't it?" Jane said.

Shelley looked surprised. "I never cease to marvel at the weird snippets of things you know about, Jane."

“College geology," Jane said. "I liked geology.”

Bruce took up the explanation. "In the simplest terms, karst topography is where you have limestone bedrock below the soil. When there's a lot of groundwater, it erodes the limestone over time and that forms caves. If it erodes far enough, sometimes the top of the cave falls in and you get a sinkhole. Most of the middle part of the country is limestone bedrock, but only some areas get sinkholes. Kentucky is one of them."

“This has something to do with Lance King?" Shelley asked.

“Quite a lot," Bruce said. "My dad was a contractor outside Louisville. He built a little subdivision, eight or ten houses, and just as the last one was being completed, the first one fell into a sinkhole. The added weight of the house itself collapsed the ceiling of the cave and the entire house just collapsed into the hole."

“Oh, my gosh!" Jane exclaimed. "Shouldn't somebody have known there was a big hole under the house?”

Bruce nodded. "Oh, yes. Nobody in their right mind would build in that part of the country without having a thorough geologic survey done. My dad hired the people, who assured him that it was solid bedrock."

“I sense Lance King coming into the story real soon," Shelley said.

“Yep," Bruce said. "But it was much worse than just losing the building." His expression grew even more bleak. "It happened early in the morning while a woman and her two-month-old baby were in the house asleep. They were both killed. Crushed as the house collapsed.”

Jane and Shelley tried, unsuccessfully, to stifle their gasps of horror.

Bruce sighed. "I think my dad would rather it had been him. He nearly had a breakdown when he heard. It was only the old Puritan ethic of facing things down that kept him going. And, of course, that's where Lance King comes in. He was on his first job out of college, heard about the tragedy, and took out after my dad like a rabid wolverine. He did pieces on him almost every night for a week. Went around to other people Dad had built houses for, scaring them
to
death, working them all up to say Dad was a murderer — God, it was awful."