The PMS Outlaws: An Elizabeth MacPherson Novel (9 page)

“Have you ever thought about teaching kindergarten instead?” the old man was saying.

Elizabeth narrowed her eyes. “I like my work,” she said. “I’m only here because my husband died.”

The man in the bathrobe shrugged. “I hope you buried him.”

Warburton felt the discussion slipping from her grasp. Before Elizabeth could frame a blistering reply, she said, “I’m sure we’ll learn more about Elizabeth in the days to come. Now before we get down to business, why don’t the rest of you make her feel part of the group by telling her who you are.”

With varying degrees of reluctance, the adults-turned-kindergartners mumbled their set pieces.

One of Elizabeth’s lunch table partners went first. “Rose Hanelon, journalist and alcoholic.” The middle-aged woman smiled. “The two are not always synonymous. In my case they are.”

Seraphin, the waiflike beauty, gave Elizabeth a tentative wave. “Sarah Findlay. Depression, I guess.”

“And liar,” put in one of the men. “She doesn’t eat enough to choke a cat.” A warning look from Warburton silenced him.

Emma O. held up her white-scarred wrists. “E. O. Kudan. Technogeek. Escape artist.”

“Matt Pennington. Architect—um … currently unemployed. I suffer from depression.”

“Or, an acute perception of reality,” said the scarred man in the bathrobe.

“Wait your turn, Mr. Randolph,” said Warburton, putting an edge in her voice.

“It is my turn, O Elephant Bride. Hillman Randolph. What am I here for? Perhaps because I annoy the oafs in the outside world. Or because my countenance mars their pretty little world.”

Deciding to let that one pass, the discussion leader turned to a faded older woman who had been staring at the floor. “Mrs. McNeil?” she said. At once she corrected herself: first names only in group. “Beulah?”

A colorless woman in a worn sack of a dress looked up shyly as she spoke. “I’m Beulah. My son and daughter-in-law insisted I come here for a while. I’ve been active in church all my life, you see, but just lately I’ve been called to go and preach the word of God to strangers.…”

“At the top of her lungs. On street corners,” Matt whispered to Elizabeth, who nodded in sudden comprehension.

“It just embarrasses me so much to make a spectacle of myself like that, but they tell me I must. They keep at me until I do it. The voices, I mean.” Her own voice trailed off into an anguished whisper. “The voices.”

“We’ll get back to the voices later, Beulah,” said Warburton. “Clifford, you’re next, please.”

The scowling young man rubbed his stubble of beard and flashed an unpleasant smile. “Cops put me here,” he said. “Evaluation-before-trial kind of crap. Street cops risk getting their heads shot off for twenty grand a year, and they’re trying to tell me that I’m crazy.” He leaned back in his chair and shot a triumphant glance at Hillman Randolph, who pointedly ignored him. “ ’Course if it keeps me out of prison, I’ll give ’em all the crazy they want.”

Warburton simply stared at him and waited. Finally the young man mumbled, “Clifford Allen. Alleged burglar. That’s all I’m going to say.”

“All right.” Warburton nodded to the portly man with the beaming smile on his round face. “Steve?”

The portly man upped the wattage of his grin, and said, “Steve Monroe. Attorney at law.”

“I’m pretty sure that’s curable,” said Emma O.

Warburton glowered, as only a plain fat woman can. The badinage stopped.

Elizabeth felt an odd sense of detachment from this assembly of strangers, as if she had wandered into an audience participation play whose plot she could not fathom, but she was prepared to be entertained. She drifted away into contemplation of her own situation and missed the rest of the introductions. Perhaps the medication was working. She was still aware of her grief, and the fact that it ought to cause her pain, but there, too, the detachment made her feel as if she were observing someone else’s troubles or remembering the emotions generated by a favorite book or film. Her bereavement was still there in the forefront of her mind, but it wasn’t personal just now. She knew it, rather than felt it.

Elizabeth wondered if a dulling of the emotions helped one to get over a death or merely postponed the grieving. Sooner or later she would have to stop taking sedatives … wouldn’t she? And when she did, would the sorrow flow back undiminished from the first pang of loss, or would the passage of time have distanced her beyond its reach? She decided that worrying about future emotions was borrowing trouble. Just get
through today, she told herself. Eat, and sleep, and take your pills.

I
n the kitchen of the newly purchased mansion/office of MacPherson & Hill, the previous owner, the notorious Jack Dolan, was nodding happily over a cellophane-wrapped chocolate brownie. A steaming mug of sugared tea sat on the table within arm’s reach. Edith had made it for him, when on thirty seconds’ acquaintance he told her plaintively that he hadn’t had any breakfast. He was counting on her not noticing the paper wrappings from his fast-food breakfast biscuit in the trash can. He liked this new visitor. When he said he was hungry, he thought he saw tears in her eyes. With a horrified squawk and a reproachful look at poor old Bill, the lady had searched the refrigerator, and, while the selection was meager, she’d managed to rustle him up a snack, promising to bring proper groceries the next time she came. Yep, she was a keeper all right. He hoped she could cook.

Now fortified with his makeshift meal, Mr. Jack had returned to his nap. He hoped these people would be gone by four, when the pizza delivery boy was due to arrive with his dinner. While he dozed, his visitors discussed him in anxious whispers.

Edith hissed, “What do you mean, the old man came with the place?”

Bill motioned her into the dining room, letting the swinging door to the kitchen close silently behind them. “Keep your voice down!” he said. “I don’t want to upset him.”

“You’re upsetting me,” said Edith. “Is he starving?”

“No. I am. I notice you didn’t offer me any tea.”

“It’s not in my job description,” said Edith, waving aside
his hunger as a minor point. “You bought a house with an old man in it … like a … like a garden gnome?”

“All right, I admit that it’s a bit unusual as real estate transactions go, but I did save us a lot of money. And I thought it might be the best thing for him, really.” He explained about Mr. Dolan’s children who lost the house in a land deal, and how the old man had refused to be moved from his home. “He has no place to go,” said Bill. “And I felt so sorry for him. Poor, helpless old man, well past ninety. He doesn’t want to go into a nursing home, and who can blame him? How could I turn him out of the house he built?”

Edith sighed. He couldn’t. Of course, he couldn’t. He was Bill, the ultimate soft touch. She and Powell Hill would probably have to send him to the beach before they called in the termite exterminators. “So instead of a guard dog, you have an elderly tenant in your Tarafied law office. How do you see this working?” she asked.

“Well, I don’t know. Mr. Jack seems pretty happy on the sunporch, and the offices will be in the front parlor, so he won’t be in the way.” Bill was giving her that he-followed-me-home-can-I-keep-him look. “There are extra rooms upstairs, and I wouldn’t mind giving him one of those, but I don’t want to take a chance on his falling down the stairs and getting hurt. He’s pretty feeble. I don’t think he can handle stairs anymore.”

“I just hope he’s housebroken.” Edith sighed again. She supposed that her law-firm duties had just been enlarged to include nurse/caretaker for an elderly man. Still, the place was magnificent, she thought, looking around at the golden oak paneling and the high ceilings of the elegant dining room. It would cost millions to build such a house from scratch today.

Another thought occurred to her. “You’ve checked this out, haven’t you? Structurally, I mean. Somebody has made sure this house isn’t built on a landfill or an earthquake fault? Quicksand? Anything like that?”

“All clear,” said Bill. “Outside inspector. Seller’s guarantee.”

Edith shrugged. Miracles do happen, she thought. Perhaps Bill had made a sensible buy, after all. She hoped that A. P. Hill would see it that way.

“Mr. Jack has had a really interesting life,” Bill was saying. “The Realtor told me that back in the forties he got into trouble with the law. He may even have been in prison.”

“Oh, fine,” said Edith. “Dream houses always have some kind of a catch to them. The problem with this one is it comes with a little old convict. We’ll all be murdered in our beds.”

“No,” said Bill. “I got the impression that Mr. Dolan was a white-collar criminal. Not violent. Anyhow, I doubt if he could even lift an ax any more.…”

Edith was unimpressed. “Let’s hope you don’t have to be his lawyer as well as his landlord.” She sniffed.

A
. P. Hill sat at the desk in her hotel room, going over the papers for the case that had brought her to Richmond, but she was unable to concentrate on the details because her thoughts kept straying to memories of her conversation with P. J. Purdue. Should she report the call to the police? She sighed. Why bother? Purdue had given her no idea of her whereabouts, and the call would not be traceable. Was there anything she could have said that would have convinced Purdue to give herself up? Again, no. At the time of the call, Powell had not even known
that her old classmate was a fugitive from justice. There isn’t much you can do when you don’t know what’s going on.

She tried pacing up and down in the hotel room to clear her head. Then she began her exercises. Twenty sit-ups later, she turned the television on for noise. The problem with exercising alone is that there’s nothing to do with your brain, and it goes on in third gear while the rest of your body struggles along in first. Purdue and Larkin would not be evicted from her brain.

She sighed and pulled out the case folder she had started on the PMS Outlaws. Might as well consider the case. She wasn’t going to get anything done otherwise. She read a summary of the escape and an account of the first robbery. The state had plenty of witnesses, that was certain. The guard who had been disarmed at the doctor’s office had been frightened and humiliated when two women handcuffed him to a doorknob and made their escape. No doubt he had endured a considerable amount of ridicule back at the department for letting a couple of “ladies” get the best of him. He would be only too eager to testify for the prosecution, and there could be no question of mistaken identity with that particular witness.

The second victim of Purdue and Larkin was one Randy Templeton, a factory worker. The pair had picked him up in a roadhouse with promises of kinky sex, and then they’d left him handcuffed to a pipe in the basement of the bar. He had been rescued around three
A.M
. when the cleaning crew shut off the jukebox and heard cries for help from beneath the floor. The police had to send for a plumber to cut the pipe in order to free the nude and shivering Randy Templeton from his awkward
position. Aside from bruises on his wrists from the handcuffs, Mr. Templeton was not injured, but his humiliation was painful indeed. A weapon had not been used in his abduction, but still he had been robbed of more than three hundred dollars. Or so he claimed. A. P. Hill doubted that Randy Templeton saw that much cash in a month, let alone one evening, but even if the charge were reduced from grand larceny to petty theft, it still meant serious trouble for the assailants.

Three days later, just over the Georgia line, the pair had struck again, this time luring a newly divorced car salesman out of a Laundromat. The owner of a local pig farm had found the salesman handcuffed to the steering wheel of a junked car body in the weeds just off a dirt road. The victim’s car and wallet had left with the two pretty women whose descriptions matched those of the suspects in the roadhouse robbery.

Where were they getting all the handcuffs, A. P. Hill thought to herself. Would it be possible to trace them through the purchase of new ones?

Next she considered the matter of jurisdiction. The first crime had been committed in Alabama, when P. J. Purdue had assisted in the escape of a convicted felon. Was that a state or federal offense? Now they were robbing people and crossing state lines. What about extradition between states? No one had been killed or held for ransom, though. State or federal? And if … when … the pair were caught, what kind of prison time would they be facing? She hoped the pair would be tried in a state court and sentenced to a state penitentiary, because federal sentences do not allow for parole. Twenty years is a long time to sit while the world goes on without you.

A. P. Hill had met scores of criminals. She had defended
murderers without a moment’s qualm, but this case was different. In her law practice, she met her clients only after they were already accused of crimes, but P. J. Purdue was someone from her student days. Not a case. A person. A. P. Hill could handle weird cases or personal cases, but not both. And who appointed you P. J. Purdue’s lawyer? she asked herself sardonically. In order to represent her, first she would have to find her.

E
lizabeth was watching the clock on the wall of the group therapy room. Forty-five minutes to go. She hadn’t felt this anxious to leave a room since high school algebra. The introductions were over now, and presumably a real discussion of problems would begin. Were any of these people ax murderers, and if so, would she feel any better for knowing who they were?

Nurse Warburton gave the group a grudging smile. “Now who would like to go first?” she said. She looked expectantly at Elizabeth, who shook her head and looked away. “Anyone?”

Seraphin’s hand wavered tentatively, as if she lacked the strength to fully extend her arm. “I ate some lunch today,” she said softly.

“And how did that make you feel?”

The girl closed her eyes. “I try not to think about it,” she murmured. “Food is so heavy. I’m afraid it will close up my throat and never go down.”

This statement was followed by a few moments of silence, as everyone except Seraphin considered the consequences of not swallowing food. Finally the elderly woman in a faded sack dress raised her hand. “I’ve been thinking about God,” she said with a tremulous smile.