Murder Unrenovated Page 8

  “You want some coffee?”

  “Oh, Julia, I have to run. I’d better not. But I wanted to ask about it. Jack will absolutely freak!”

  “Even I was surprised. I mean, some landlords try arson, or let the top-floor pipes break and ruin everything. But Artie has hopes of getting his money out of the building now that the young folks are buying these places. So I thought we’d already run through all the bad things that could happen in this house.”

  “Well, even freaking Artie wouldn’t do that! Would he? It’s terrible advertising. God! Our African room! Aren’t you glad you’re way down here?”

  “I sure am. And glad the locks are there.”

  “Could Artie have left things unlocked on purpose?”

  “Maybe. But I’m not dumb, Ann. I’ve checked. And it’s generally locked.”

  “Julia! Remember that dumbwaiter we found? Could someone come down that, if they got into the attic?”

  Ann didn’t know Julia had made herself a private elevator. Julia shook her head. “No, it’s too tight a squeeze with all that machinery in the attic. Besides, the car is very sturdy, and it’s screwed in place down here. It would be easier to saw through the floor than that hardwood cabinet.”

  “True. But doesn’t it give you bad vibes? A dead body!”

  Julia shrugged and said sanctimoniously, “Time, like an ever-rolling stream, bears all its sons away.”

  Ann laughed. “Well, I’d rather be borne away in my sleep than strangled. But speaking of time, I’ve got to split.”

  “I’ll walk you to the corner. I’m off to church.”

  They strolled together through the warmth that had finally, grudgingly, arrived. Julia asked, “Ann, did the sketch in the paper look familiar to you?”

  “No. Not at all. Why? Did you recognize him?”

  “No. But there’s something—Did you two keep keys?”

  “Jack did. He had some idea of going back to get even with Lund but I told him he’d be crazy if he did.”

  “Good. The police will be around to talk to you, you know.”

  “They will? Oh, God, of course they will! What should we say?”

  “Just answer their questions. Tell the truth. Who knows, you may have the missing clue. But you might want to throw away those keys. And I wouldn’t bring up the KKK episode. Though it wouldn’t be natural to say he was anything but a rat if it does come up.”

  “Yeah. Well, we’ll tell the truth—we’re glad he’s out of our life and hope he stays out. But God, Julia, how can you be so calm?”

  “I never noticed that shrieking and jumping about was very good for solving problems.”

  Ann laughed warmly. “Always the schoolteacher! Hey, it’s good to see you, Teach. Take care of yourself, hear?”

  “Same to you, Ann.” They parted at the corner.

  The World Hunger meeting got off to a slow start because everyone wanted to discuss the murder and Julia’s exciting predicament. “The neighborhood just isn’t safe anymore,” declared Pauline McGuire, adjusting her glasses.

  “Nobody’s ever totally safe,” said Ellie Voorhees. “I think there was more trouble around here four or five years ago than now. But we’ll never get rid of all the crazies in the world.”

  “True.” Pauline nodded energetically. “But I wish we could keep them out of our homes! Any idea how they got in, Teach?”

  “No one’s found any signs of forcing,” said Julia. “So the crazy who did this had to have a key. Or a friend with a key.”

  Ellie Voorhees puckered her forehead and said, “All those real-estate people and plumbers. Could be anyone. And they haven’t found the weapon?”

  “No, though I could—well, you don’t tell police what to do.”

  Pauline frowned at her, alarm in her dark eyes. “Maybe the plumbers have an organized-crime connection!”

  “Or maybe Artie does,” said Julia. “Yes, I’ve thought of that. It’s a convenient empty house. Warmer than the docks.”

  “Okay,” said Ellie Voorhees, who was chairing the meeting. “But now we ought to get to work. One out of maybe five thousand of us gets murdered every year, and he was the one. But in India one out of eight babies dies. We’ll save a lot more lives if we talk about our mission there.”

  “I’m not a baby,” grumbled Pauline, but they got to work.

  After the meeting, Pauline cornered Julia by the exit. “Hey, Teach, I’m going to Utah, so we can’t have dinner Tuesday. But I bought some nice fresh scrod today. Want to help me eat it?”

  “Utah!” exclaimed Julia. “You’re off to see Audrey?”

  “The kids sent me airfare.” Pauline was beaming.

  “Lucky you!”

  They walked down the avenue toward Pauline’s building. One of the new young people on the block was painting her iron gate and gave them a smile. Julia smiled back, but with mixed feelings about this wave of too-industrious youth rolling into her neighborhood. Pauline said, “Yes. But they didn’t give me much notice for a two-week trip. That makes a hole in your life.”

  “I know what you mean. It’s great when your children want to be nice to you. Except they also want to run your life.”

  “Especially those two! They give me pamphlets all the time. Trying to save me before I ship out among the unchosen.” A feeble, uncharacteristically vulnerable smile flitted across her face. “Maybe they’re right. Maybe I’m a goner.”

  “Oh, shut up, Pauline,’’ said Julia forcefully. “We’re all sinners. Don’t let those green kids shake you up. You know a lot more about life than they do.”

  “Yes. But I still have to read their pamphlets. To be polite.”

  Julia thought of the Reverend Goon’s program, always a surefire way to turn away Artie’s buyers. Until the unruffled Ms. Ryan appeared. She said, “I sympathize.”

  Pauline’s apartment was pleasant, thought not as spacious as her Carroll Street floor-through had been. Her furniture and plants looked a bit cramped here. Well, Julia had felt a bit cramped too after Vic had his stroke and she’d had to move him and his wheelchair to a ground-floor apartment. A cheap ground-floor apartment, since his so-called benefits had been eaten up by the medical expenses. But she’d come to love her place, where a touch of the glamour of its days as the Sweeney dining room still hung in the air. Pauline, too, was grateful for her son-in-law’s subsidy that enabled her to stay in a safe, familiar area. Without rent control, she needed that subsidy.

  Pauline was still glum as she hung their coats in the closet. “But don’t you think sometimes we’re just in the way? I’ve got bad teeth and varicose veins. Even the mighty Teach is visited by arthritis in the knees. In the old days we would have died years ago.”

  “What do you mean, in the way?” objected Julia stoutly. “It’s other people who are in our way. We’ve got a few thousand babies in India to save, and a few thousand American kids to tell about Fred-Law Olmsted’s vision, and so forth.”

  “Maybe. But I still don’t know how you can stay in that apartment. Even here around the corner, I get the shakes about it.”

  “That place is already full of ghosts for me,” explained Julia. “Benevolent ghosts. They won’t let this upstart bother me.” Though, in fact, that bloated young face kept seeping into her dreams. She changed the subject, picking up a snapshot from Pauline’s coffee table. “Hey, look how those grandchildren of yours are growing! You’re right to keep in touch. They’ll grow up fast. Time like an ever-rolling stream.”

  “I know.” Pauline, taking the wrapped fish from her refrigerator, smiled at the photo. “I dote on those kids. I’d do anything for them.”

  “Grandchildren are one of the great inventions, all right,” Julia agreed. “And look at your begonias! They’ve grown about two feet!”

  Pauline joined her at the window. “Yes,” she admitted with pride, “they’re going to be great this summer.”

  Julia touched a graceful young leaf. “Aren’t you worried about leaving them for two weeks? Even
a plastic bag is not enough when they’re growing so fast. Want me to take care of them?”

  “They do need watering every day,” Pauline admitted. “But I don’t want to bother you—”

  “Don’t be silly. I’ll make you return the favor when I visit Jean.”

  After they had eaten the scrod and cleaned up the tiny kitchen, Julia shouldered her bag and picked up the two pots of begonias to walk the half-block home. As she approached the door, a man emerged from a Buick parked across the street and hurried across. Julia sighed, exasperated.

  “Mother! We were so worried!” Vic Jr. was tall, with his father’s strong nose and gentle eyes. Behind him, a miniskirted blond woman and a teenage boy were getting out of the Buick.

  “For heaven’s sake, Vic. What are you doing here?”

  “I told you I was coming.” He took the plants from her.

  “You didn’t tell me when. Have you been sitting in that Buick an hour and a half?”

  “No.” The boy approached them, yawning and stretching his arms coltishly. “We grabbed a hamburger. Hey, did it happen in your pad, Grandma?”

  “No. All the way up on the top floor. See the oriel window?”

  “What’s oriel?”

  “That little window that sticks out. You probably don’t have them in the suburbs.”

  “Oh, yeah. I thought that was a bay.” A very cool, sophisticated thirteen.

  “It is. If it has its own bracket you can call it an oriel too.”

  “Did you see the stiff?” The boy reverted to the real topic of interest.

  “Greg, hush!” Diane, scandalized, joined them.

  Julia ignored her and answered Greg. “Of course I saw him. You couldn’t keep me away from something like that.”

  “What did he look like? Yucky?”

  “Greg, that’s enough!” said Diane.

  “He looked pretty awful, Greg. He’d been strangled, so his face was puffy and sort of dark.”

  “Yuck!” Greg was delighted, forgetting to be cool. “Was there a lot of gore?”

  “Vic, make him stop!” pleaded Diane.

  “It’s no use. Mother’s egging him on,” said Vic tiredly.

  Julia put her arm around Greg’s shoulder. “No. Not much gore. But his tongue stuck out a little from being strangled.”

  “Yuck!”

  “I was scared.”

  “You were?” Greg’s quick glance held a furtive question. She’d been right, then. What really preyed on a thirteen-year-old mind was not so much that evil things happened; that fact was boringly obvious. The worry was how people should react to the evil things.

  Julia said, “Every one of us was scared. There were four of us who saw him before the police came. And we all felt pretty sick. I think one of the men really was sick when he saw it. I heard the toilet flushing as I was going up to look.”

  “Did you want to run away, Grandma?”

  “Sure. We all wanted to. But there were things to be done, so of course we stayed.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m not ashamed. People should feel awful about someone dying. It’s a very serious thing. But it would be shameful to run off and not report it, or not help the police as much as you can.”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s brave to feel sick about it and still do what has to be done.”

  “Yeah. I’d do that,” Greg decided, full of resolve. “I’d get it together. Call the police and stuff. Even if I felt sick.”

  “Yes. I know you would, Greg.” Julia turned to Vic and Diane with a twinkle. “Well, if I’ve answered everybody’s questions, let’s go in and have some coffee.”

  Diane didn’t smile, but Vic grinned sheepishly and followed her in. Julia fixed the coffee and sat in the chair near the sofa. “Greg, there’s a new Central Park book on the fourth shelf,” she said.

  “It’s okay. Beat the Clock is on,” he said, switching on the television set and folding himself into a gangly heap two feet away from it. Julia, with an uneasy thought about the future of books in Greg’s TV generation, turned her attention back to Vic and Diane.

  “Vic, I’m not going to move, so let’s talk about something else,” she said. “Did you recognize the picture in the paper?”

  “God, of course not! Or—was it someone we know?”

  “No, I just thought he might be someone from Jersey.”

  “Mother, I just don’t understand. Your friends are moving away.”

  “Not many of them. And not of their own free will.”

  “Lund has made you a very generous cash offer to move.”

  “Pah! How much cash would it take to get you to move from that place in Jersey you’re so proud of?”

  “That’s different, Mother. We own that place.”

  Julia sighed. Even at forty, Vic had not learned that places could own people, could wrap them in intangible, unbreakable filaments of friendship and familiarity, of memory and expectation. He would have to learn it for himself; explaining would be futile. She said wearily, “I’m not moving.”

  “But, Mother, it was murder!”

  “If anyone wanted to murder me they could have done so long since. Just don’t worry about it.”

  Diane said, “It’s just that we care about you.”

  “Yes. It’s hard on us too,” agreed Vic. “Don’t you understand? Won’t you do it for us?”

  Julia’s voice softened. “Vic, I know you care about me. But at this time of my life I can’t do things for you anymore, I have to do them for me. I don’t really need anyone to take care of me. And I want to stay here. This was your father’s and my home.”

  “Damn.”

  “It’ll be all right.”

  “Please think about it, Mother.”

  “I’ve thought, Vic. I’ll be careful, of course. But the murder has nothing to do with me, and I like this place. I’m not moving.”

  There was an awkward silence, punctuated by excited squeals from the Beat the Clock contestants. Then Vic swallowed the last of his coffee and looked at Diane.

  “Well, honey, our trip was in vain.”

  Diane sighed and stood up, tugging down her miniskirt. Silly style, Julia thought. In the twenties when they’d gone in for short skirts they’d kept the waists loose too, so dresses slid right back into place when you stood up. None of this twitching your skirt down whenever you moved. But Diane was in her mid-thirties, a fragile time for a woman. And she did have nice legs. Let her pretend to be young for a while. The ever-rolling stream would catch her soon enough. Diane said, “Let us know when you do want to move.”

  “You’ll be the first to know,” Julia assured her. “But don’t expect it soon.”

  “We won’t,” her son said grimly. “Hey, Greg, c’mon.”

  “Aw.” Greg made the expected complaining noises but stood up and moved slowly to the door, his eyes still fastened to the TV screen.

  “I’ll see you all Sunday in Central Park,” said Julia.

  “We’ll pick you up,” said Diane.

  Julia started to protest but decided to let them win this one. She nodded.

  “Will there really be a birthday cake?” asked Greg.

  “An enormous cake.”

  “Hope it doesn’t rain again,” said Vic Jr.

  “It won’t. Not on Fred-Law’s day,” promised Julia.

  She watched them from her window as they crossed the street. Greg turned to look back with frank fascination at the oriel window, and Julia smiled as each parent, separately and furtively, glanced up at it too before settling into the car.

  Beat the Clock was over. She switched off the television and went to her desk to write about Fred-Law and the poison sumac.

  “So there’s nothing fishy about it?” Nick asked the lawyer.

  “Not from the legal standpoint. Standard contract, reasonably fair to both parties, unless there’s some hidden problem with the house. You’re sure there’s only one tenant left?”

  “Yes.” Maggie, in blue je
ans, had been doing stretches, but now had lighted fleetingly on the lawyer’s brown carpet and was sprawling back against Nick’s shins. He sat quietly, feasting on the warm touch of her back against his legs, on the shine of her black curls. An astounding woman. After his first wife had died, he’d resigned himself to a solitary struggle in his brutally unpredictable profession. Nick the Lone Ranger. But this mischievous statistician had somehow entangled herself in his soul, luring him into more unlikely roles than his job did: Marriage. Spy games in Central Park. Even buying a house where a murder had occurred. Not what he would have predicted for himself at all. He hoped he would be ready for what she’d thrust upon him next.

  Maggie was saying, “All the furniture was gone, except for the one mattress with poor dead Blondy.”

  “I can’t say I understand your taste in brownstones. I’d think you could have found one without a corpse.” The lawyer, a pleasant hazel-eyed young woman named Ellen Winfield-Greer, was wearing jeans too, because the play they were going to attend that night was a long way off Broadway. “Do you think this Mister Whosis—Lund—will really take back the mortgage for you? Of course you can get out of the contract if he doesn’t.”

  Maggie, grounded too long, rolled away from Nick into a handstand and walked a few steps on her hands as she answered. “We don’t know for sure if he’ll loan it to us. But Len thought he’d agree because Nick’s giving him such a big down payment.”

  “True. It’s a big percentage. You two aren’t as penniless as I thought.”

  Nick said, “I saved it all up from my dishwashing jobs. That’s the secret to financial success for an actor, Ellen. Don’t act.”

  “I’ll tell Jim.” Ellen too was married to a frequently unemployed actor. “It’s true, I’ve never heard of an actor getting a mortgage from a bank.”

  “No. Not till he was worth more than the bank.”

  “Exactly. And our upside-down friend here may have letters after her name and fat paychecks, but she’s a woman of childbearing age and therefore, say the banks, liable to quit her posh job at any moment.”

  Maggie eased into a split on the carpet. “Well, I am liable to quit.”

  “What? Are you kidding?”

  “Not for a couple of months. But Dan and I are thinking about starting our own statistical consulting firm.”