Acts of Violets (9 page)

Trina handed me the coffee mug, put a plastic container of vanilla Coffe-mate on the table, then took a seat across from me and repositioned the sniffler on her lap. “Marco said to tell you about Dennis Ryson, but what exactly do you need to know?”

I reached for my purse on the floor beside the chair to pull out my notepad and pen, and found a kid digging through it. “Hey, that’s not child proof.” I grabbed the strap and found myself engaged in a tug-of-war with a tot.

“Chad, stop that,” Trina said firmly. Chad ignored her.

“Then I guess it’s corner time for you.”

He dropped the strap and scooted backward, his eyes opened wide, as if a voice in his curly little head were screaming, “
Oh, no!
Anything
but the corner.”

I put the purse in my lap, just in case Chad changed his mind.

Trina shrugged. “Sorry. It’s getting close to their nap time.”

“Then I’ll try to make this brief. Basically I want to know more about Ryson—if he ever had visitors, how he got along with the neighbors, how he harassed you . . .”

Trina held up an index finger, signaling me to wait; then she took the sniffler into another room and came back empty-handed. She poured herself a cup of coffee and sat down again. “Ryson was a weirdo. A number one creep who couldn’t get it through his thick skull that I didn’t want anything to do with him.”

She paused for a sip of coffee. “He kept asking me to go out with him. After I’d said no about, oh, fourteen times, he tried to win me over by bringing flowers that he’d obviously swiped from someone’s garden. I made the stupid mistake of taking them the first time, but after that I wouldn’t even answer the door. Then I’d find the flowers ripped to shreds on my back porch the next morning.”

“That’s creepy.”

“It got worse. Once he brought over a shopping bag with a leather bra and thong inside and said he’d bought them because he knew I’d look hot in them, and they would be a change from the pink satin set I wore to bed.”

“He peeked in your bedroom window?”
She wore pink satin underwear to bed?

“I told him to get lost and slammed the door in his face; then he started leaving nasty messages on my answering machine and peering in windows, scaring the kids. I had one mother pull her child out of day care because of something Ryson said to her. I called the police several times and they finally had me file a restraining order, but that only made him sneaky about what he did.”

When she paused for another sip of coffee, I moved her on to the next topic. I’d heard enough creepiness to get the picture. “How did he treat his other neighbors?”

“Everyone around here hated him, especially Ed Mazella. Ed and Eudora live on the left side as you face Ryson’s house. Every night Ryson would play heavy metal rock music from a boom box in his garage while he tinkered with old motorcycles, revving their engines for hours. It drove Ed crazy. Ryson’s driveway runs on the side of the house near Ed’s bedroom. They’ve gotten into some wicked shouting matches over it.”

I was scribbling fast, and when she paused again, I grabbed a quick gulp of coffee. “Other than you and the Mazellas, has anyone else on the block had a beef with Ryson?”

Trina thought for a moment. “An elderly lady lives on Ryson’s other side, and she’s very hard of hearing, so the noise probably didn’t bother her. My next-door neighbors have griped about him, but I think that’s as far as it went.”

“Did you ever see anyone stop by his house?”

“There was a girl who used to drop by, but she stopped coming around.”

“Can you describe her?”

“I didn’t really pay attention.”

“Do you remember what kind of car she drove?”

“I think it was white, kind of rusty . . . I’m not really into cars.”

“How long have you lived here?”

“About a year and a half. It was a wonderful neighborhood until two months ago. That was when Ryson moved in.”

“What did you ask Marco to do about Ryson, specifically?”

“Tell him to stay the hell away from me. Lean on him, if necessary. Marco is good at that kind of thing.”

How did she know what Marco was good at? And why did her face glow when she spoke his name? “So you know Marco through his sister?”

“Gina Salvare and I were best friends growing up. My family lived a few doors down from the Salvares.” Trina sighed dreamily. “I had a major crush on Marco. All the girls on the block had a crush on him, but he never seemed to notice.”

That explained the glow. This woman
still
had a crush on Marco, and I was back to checking her head for split ends. “Did you know the police have focused on Marco as a suspect in Ryson’s murder?”

Her eyes welled with tears as she nodded. “He called me this morning to tell me.”

This morning? Hmm. Before or after he’d called me?

“I feel terrible,” she said, her chin starting to tremble. “I wouldn’t have asked him if I’d thought this would happen—not that I’m sorry to see that creep gone.” She carefully wiped beneath her eyes with her fingertips. “I know Marco wouldn’t have intentionally killed him.”

“Intentionally? Do you mean you think he could have killed him accidentally?”

She put down her coffee mug and raised her chin defiantly. “If Marco says he didn’t, that’s all that matters to me.”

That was a quick sidestep. I decided to let it ride for the present, but I jotted down
intent or accident?
on my pad, to remind me to come back to it. “Were you still at home yesterday evening when Marco went across the street to talk to Ryson?”

“No. Marco told me to take little Mark to my mother’s house and stay there overnight, and that’s exactly what I did.”

“Little Mark is your son?”

“Yes.” She smiled, her eyes shining with a maternal love that made me envious—for about a second. Then the sniffler came wobbling in, his nose streaming with yellow goo, his light brown curls stiff along the temples from something that looked like dried pudding. He held up his arms, whining to be picked up. Envy gone.

Marco. Little Mark. Coincidence? Did I even want to go there? Was there any way I could stop myself? “Is this little Mark?” I nodded toward the child now sitting on her lap, the one who looked absolutely nothing like Marco.

“This is Timmy.
That’s
Mark.” She used her free hand to point through an arched doorway into the living room, where an olive-skinned boy about three years old, with curly dark hair, was stacking wooden blocks and knocking them down. Hearing his name, he paused to glance around at us. Trina wiggled her fingers at him and he gave her a mischievous grin, his mouth curving up at one corner—just like Marco’s did.

Damn, I hoped it was a coincidence. “So you weren’t here when Marco was inside Ryson’s house. What time did you leave for your mother’s?”

“Around seven thirty.”

“And when did you come back?”

“Why is that important?”

She was getting snippy. I had to choose my response carefully because I didn’t want her to realize that she was on my suspect list, not out of petty jealousy, but because she had one major qualification—a motive. What I didn’t know was whether she had the opportunity. “I never know what will be important until the investigation is over.”

The sniffler squirmed off her lap and headed toward the living room. Trina watched him go, then turned back to gaze at me with unblinking eyes. “I came back early Monday morning, after Marco phoned to tell me what had happened.”

I wrote it down and put a question mark after it. I’d have to pay a visit to her mother to check out her story. “Where does your mother live?”

“Why don’t you ask Marco?”

It was my turn to narrow my eyes at her—and when I did I noticed that she really did have split ends. I jotted on my notepad:
Split ends, yes!
“I’m sorry if you think I’m being intrusive, Trina. These are just routine questions. I’m somewhat new at this, and if I skip any of them it throws me off.”

She toyed with a long silky lock of hair, pulling it from the back to drape across her shoulder. “She lives in New Buffalo, Michigan. Marco knows the address.”

By the coy gleam in her eye I could see she’d enjoyed adding that last part.

“Let’s go back to yesterday afternoon. Did Ryson have any visitors that you saw—or maybe you heard a car or motorcycle engine rev, or a door slam?”

She used her small, perfect teeth to tug on her lower lip as she thought it over. “I didn’t hear anything and I didn’t see any cars or cycles parked out front, either. You can ask Ed Mazella. Maybe he or his wife noticed something. Eudora sees just about everything that goes on in this neighborhood.” Trina checked the clock on the wall behind her. “I wouldn’t bother going there now. Ed works for a towing service and doesn’t get home until after five o’clock. Eudora is home, but I doubt she’ll talk to you.”

“Why is that?”

“She’s weird, kind of a hermit. She keeps the curtains drawn all the time and won’t answer the phone. I think I’ve seen her outside maybe once in the last month, late in the evening, after dark. She had some kind of hood thingy covering her head.”

“She must be agoraphobic.”

“Agora-what?”

“Phobic. Afraid to leave her house.”

Trina shrugged, then twisted to check the gaggle of toddlers in the living room. “I guess so. Are we done? The kids are getting antsy.”

I took that to mean we were. There was a stack of orders waiting for me back at the shop anyway, so I hurriedly glanced over my notes and saw the little reminder I’d written earlier. “There’s one point I’d like you to clarify. Is there any question in your mind about Marco’s innocence?”

“No question at all. I absolutely believe he’s not guilty.”

Interesting choice of words. From what minuscule information my brain cells had been able to retain from my law classes, I did remember that there was a heck of a lot of difference between being not guilty and being innocent. Did Trina know that? Was she being coy again? “So you believe he’s innocent.”

“You have to ask me that? Look, Marco is the most decent guy I’ve ever met. If he says he didn’t kill Ryson, that’s all that matters to me. And just between us girls, I don’t care who killed Ryson. All I care is that the creep is gone.”

She wasn’t being coy; she was being difficult. “Okay, that’s all I have for now. Thanks for the information and the coffee.”

I finished my last swallow of coffee, put away my pad and pen, and followed her out of the kitchen, betting that she had no problem finding jeans that fit.

At the front door we were swarmed by small, whimpering bodies with oozing orifices and sticky fingers, making my ovaries shrink up in fear. I raised my purse above my head and plunged through the grasping hands out onto the stoop and into the refreshingly cool September air, where I took a steadying breath and tamped down the urge to make a headlong dash to the car. At the moment, I was very glad that Marco liked his bachelorhood.

W
hen I got back to Bloomers, Grace was in the parlor waiting on several clerks from the courthouse, and Lottie had gone to Rosie’s Diner to meet her husband for lunch. All was quiet for now, but that would soon change. At two o’clock, the members of the Monday Afternoon Ladies’ Poetry Society would flock in to take up residence in the parlor, where they would spend the next hour and a half sipping coffee and tea, munching on biscuits and scones, and reciting original poems to one another, while Grace fluttered among them refilling cups and Lottie and I hid in the workroom.

I liked the elderly poetesses, but their rhymes of drooping jowls and sagging breasts and stiff hairs sprouting from their chins didn’t do much for me other than to give me nightmares about growing old. And poor Lottie had recently begun to check her hand mirror twice a day, tweezers at the ready, in case one of those stiff little suckers should try to sprout from
her
chin.

I put my purse on my desk and pulled a ticket from the spindle for a birthday basket a group of secretaries had ordered for a coworker. They wanted something cute and playful with a fall theme. Super. I was all about cute and playful.

I started with a ceramic vase shaped to look like a green and yellow gourd, then placed in it bright orange epidendrum orchids, vivid yellow sandersonia, sweet little white button mums, and grass green foxtail fern. Then I dug through a box of tiny plastic toys that Lottie had collected over the years, found one in the shape of a typewriter, along with a pair of miniature granny glasses, glued them on tall, wooden picks, and stuck them among the flowers. I tied a bright yellow bow around the gourd, stuck a neon pink pencil through the bow, and wrapped it all in cellophane.

Grace breezed through the curtain with a cup and saucer in hand. “I took advantage of the lull to bring you some mint tea.” She placed it on the work table, folded her hands in front of her waist, and smiled. She was waiting for something. Usually that meant I owed her an apology, but I couldn’t think of anything I’d done.