Aurora 03 - Three Bedrooms, One Corpse (16 page)

“Sure,” he said sleepily. He wound a strand of my hair around his finger. “Do you ever wear it up?” he asked.

“Oh, sometimes.” I rolled over so it hung around his face like a curtain.

“Could you wear it up Saturday night?”

“I guess so,” I said warily.

“I love your ears,” he said, and demonstrated that he did.

“In
that
case,” I said, “I will.”

A thud on the foot of the bed made Martin jump.

“It’s Madeleine,” I said hastily.

I could feel him relax all over. “I have to get used to the cat?”

“Yes, I’m afraid so. She’s old,” I said consolingly. “Well, actually, middle-aged.”

“Like me, huh?”

“Oh, yes, you practically have one foot in the grave,” I said.

“Ooo—do that again.”

So I did.

* * *

He had stowed some extra clothes and shaving gear in his car, so he was ready for work.

“Where to?” I tried not to feel dismayed. This relationship was so new and perilous and fragile, and I was so constantly afraid Martin did not feel what I felt, so often aware of the differences in our ages, experiences, goals.

“Back to Chicago, to report on the plant reorganization to the higher-ups. I’ve been cutting out a lot of deadwood, finding out the weak points in the plant management. That’s what I was brought in to do.”

“Not a popular job.”

“No. I’ve made some people mad,” he said matter-of-factly. “But it’s going to make the plant more efficient in the long run.”

“How long will you be gone?”

“Just Wednesday and Thursday. I’ll fly back in Friday morning. But why don’t we have lunch today? Meet me out at the Athletic Club at twelve-thirty, and we’ll go from there, if that suits your plans.”

“Okay. But please let me take you to lunch this time, my treat.”

The look on his face had to be seen to be believed. I burst into giggles.

“You know, that’s the first time a woman ever offered to take me out,” he said finally. “Other men have told me it’s happened to them. But never to me. A first.” He tried very hard not to glance around at my apartment, so much humbler than any place he’d be used to living in since he’d climbed the business ladder.

“We don’t have to go to McDonald’s,” I said gently.

“Sweetheart, you don’t have a job—”

“Martin, I’m rich.” Gosh, that word still gave me a thrill.

“Maybe not what you would think of as rich, but still I have plenty of money.”

“Inherited?” he asked.

“Uh-huh. From a little old lady who just wanted me to have it.”

“No relation?”

“None.”

“You’re just a lucky woman,” Martin said, and proceeded to demonstrate just how lucky I was.

“You’ll mess up your suit,” I said after a moment.

“Damn the suit.”

“You told me you have an appointment at eight-thirty.”

He released me reluctantly.

“See you later,” he said.

I gave him a light kiss on the cheek. “Twelve-thirty,” I said.

I had an unpleasant task to face that morning. I had decided I should go see Susu. All the people who wrote in to “Ann Landers” and “Dear Abby” complained that they felt neglected when someone in the family had serious legal problems or went to jail, that people tried to act as if it hadn’t happened or stayed away entirely. While Jimmy hadn’t exactly been arrested, I didn’t want to be a fair-weather friend to Susu, though time and circumstance had certainly created a gulf between us. So I pulled on a bright sweater and black pants, and red boots to go with the sweater. Cheerful, casual—as if it were an everyday catastrophe that had befallen the Hunter family.

It took me a second to recognize Susu when she came to the door. Her veneer was stripped away, and so much of Susu depended on that veneer. Her shoulders sagged, her eyes were red-rimmed, her clothes were—it seemed—deliberately shabby and old. She looked as if she’d reached back in her closet for the things she was saving to pull on when she painted the carport.

There were dirty dishes piled up in the sink. Susu was not only genuinely a woman in the midst of a crisis, she was also acting out the part.

“Where are the kids?” I asked cautiously.

“I sent them to my sister in Atlanta.” As if she’d put them in a box and taken them down to the post office.

“You’re here all by yourself?”

“Not a soul has come by except our minister.”

“What’s the story on Jimmy?”

“He’s down at our lawyer’s office right now. They kept him all day yesterday. I think they may arrest him today.”

“Susu, you think he did it!”

“What else can I think?”

“Well,
I
don’t think he did it.”

“You don’t?” She sounded amazed.

“Susu! Of course not!”

“His fingerprints were in the Anderton house.”

“So? Hasn’t it occurred to you there are several ways they could have gotten there without him having been the one to kill Tonia Lee?”

“Like how, Roe? Just tell me how!”

“Maybe some other realtor showed him over the house. Maybe Tonia Lee did show him the house, and then he left and her date showed up and killed her!”

“Jimmy must have been having an affair with her, Roe. Then she threatened to tell me or the kids and he killed her. He must have just lost his temper.”

“I could kick you in the rear, Susu Hunter. You are making up things you can’t possibly know. You get yourself into that shower upstairs and get your nice clothes on and put on your makeup and go down to your lawyer’s office and you
ask him yourself.”

I was probably doing exactly the wrong thing. Susu would get down there and Jimmy would say, “Yeah, I did it. And I had been having an affair with her, too.”

Saint Aurora, I told myself sardonically.

But Susu was actually doing it. She went up the stairs at a pace a little brisker than her previous shamble. She was patting her hair absently, doing some damage-control evaluation.

I washed the dishes. I left them in the drainer to irritate Susu into putting them away.

She came down in thirty minutes, looking more like herself.

“When is he supposed to have done her in?” I asked.

“Well, Wednesday night.”

“But he took your son to karate practice, or something, that evening, didn’t he? And he was at work until then, right? After practice, he came right home to supper?”

“Yes.”

So much for it having been Jimmy’s car Donnie had seen.

“So when did he find time to go over to the Anderton house, screw Tonia Lee, and kill her?” I asked.

“That’s true,” she said slowly. “I guess I was just so quick to believe he did it because he’s been acting so funny lately.”

“He may be going through a hard time, Susu. He may even need therapy or something. But I really don’t think Jimmy ever killed anyone.”

“I’d better get down there. Thanks for coming by, Roe. I just kind of gave up.”

“Sure,” I said, not feeling noble at all.

“Of course, if he did do it, I’ll never want to see you again,” she said with a tiny smile.

“I know.”

She’d never been as dumb as she liked to seem.

I was getting back into my car when suddenly I realized that this was the morning of Tonia’s funeral.
Another
unpleasant task. I looked at my watch. I had thirty minutes. I raced back to the townhouse, dashed up the stairs, tore off my clothes and pulled on my winter black dress, loose and long with a drop waist. No time to bother with a slip; no time to pull on panty hose. I rummaged through the closet and got my black boots. The dress needed a necklace or scarf or something, but there simply wasn’t time, and my earrings would just have to do. I yanked on my coat and ran to the car.

The Flaming Sword of God Bible Church was a rectangular cement-block building painted white, with a parking lot of ruts and dust. A cold wind whistled straight through my clothes as I got out of my car. I pulled my coat tighter around me with one hand and held my hair out of my face with the other. I gusted into the little church along with the chilly wind. The parking area had been crowded, and the church was jammed to capacity. I’d seen a television news truck outside, parked in the rear along with the hearse, and the camera crew was in the church. I was willing to bet Donnie was responsible for that. There was no place to sit; every pew was jam-packed with solid Lawrencetonians in their winter coats. I hovered at the back, trying to spot a dark corner. My mother’s basilisk glare found me anyway. Of course, she’d arrived on time, and was seated decorously in the middle of the church, along with the other members of the staff of Select Realty. They were all there except Debbie Lincoln, who presumably was manning the phone at the office.

For a moment I looked for Idella, before I remembered.

The coffin was sitting at the front of the church. I was thankful it was closed. It was covered with a pall of red carnations, and the sharp scent of the flowers carried through the chilly air.

There was no organ, but a pianist was playing something subdued and doleful, maybe “Nearer, My God, to Thee.” The minister entered from a door by the altar. He was a plain young acne-scarred man, with eyebrows and lashes so light they were almost invisible. He clutched a Bible, and he had on a cheap dark suit, white shirt, and black tie. There was a shifting on all the hard pews. I recognized Mrs. Purdy down at the front, wearing navy blue and pearls. Beside her, Donnie’s white face stood out over a suit of unrelieved black.

“Let us bow our heads in prayer,” the minister intoned. His voice was unexpectedly rich. I did so, uneasily aware that a member of the camera crew was eyeing me with speculation. I began to edge away as unobtrusively as possible. I was afraid I had been recognized. The cameras had caught me before, when the Real Murders deaths had taken place. Surely no one would approach me until the service was over. The cameraman had poked the reporter, a very young woman I recognized faintly from the very few times she’d been on the air. He was whispering in her ear, and she was staring in my direction. My name had not been in the newspaper accounts of Tonia Lee’s death, thank God, at least as far as I knew.

I had a hard time concentrating on the sermon, which from the snatches I caught seemed to be a combination of “She is at peace now, whatever her life and last moments were like” and “We must forgive the erring human who has strayed so far from God . .. Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.” The congregation seemed to meet this last idea with some resistance at first, but by the time the minister ended, heads were nodding in agreement. I hadn’t caught the man’s name, but this preacher seemed to be a man of some persuasion.

The whole thing seemed to go by quickly, what with one thing and another. The pallbearers assembled and began to carry out the coffin, with some head-nods and murmurs among them to coordinate the lifting. Everyone rose, and the piano began to mourn again. For the last time, Tonia Lee left a house of the living. The camera crew became busy filming this, and I managed to work my way down the line of pews until I was even with the one where the Select Realty crowd was situated. After allowing enough time for the coffin to be loaded into the hearse, which I’d heard pulling around to the front door, the minister gave a closing prayer, doleful and fervent, and the congregation began to file out to their cars. All I had to do was whisper to Mother that the cameraman had recognized me, and the Select Realty staff closed around me. I managed to get to Mother’s car thus camouflaged, and squeezed in with Mother, Eileen, Patty, and Mackie, who had stood out in the Flaming Sword of God Bible Church like a chocolate drop on a wedding cake.

I hadn’t planned on going to the cemetery, but it seemed as though I had to.

None of us talked much on the ride to Shady Rest. I was thinking of how soon we’d be doing this again, whenever Idella was buried. Eileen was still washed out and subdued from our experience Sunday. Mackie was always quiet in a social setting, at least in one involving whites.

For all I knew, he sang solo in the choir at the African Methodist Episcopal church.

Mother was grim about the news crew. Patty was upset by the funeral itself. “I’ve never been to one before,” she explained, and I wondered if she’d only come to this one because my mother had assumed she would.

I looked around the crowd at the gravesite. Under the green tent, in the front row of folding chairs, sat Mrs. Purdy and Donnie and a thin-lipped woman I recognized as Donnie’s older sister. Tonia Lee’s aunt and cousins sat behind them.

The chilly wind whipped among the mourners, making the tent awning flap and the red pall ripple. It brought tears to eyes that otherwise wouldn’t have shed any. Franklin Farrell, his gray hair for once ruffled, was standing at the back of the crowd, looking a little bored. Sally Allison was there in a neat dark gray suit, her tan eyes flickering over the assemblage. Lillian, my former co-worker, had ended up with her face to the wind and was blinking furiously and shivering.

Lynn Liggett Smith, muffled in a heavy brown coat, was scanning the crowd with sharp eyes.

At least the graveside service was short. It helped that Donnie had decided to play the dignified widower rather than opting for histrionics. He contented himself with throwing a single red rose on the coffin. Mrs. Purdy burst into sobs at this romantic gesture, and had to be consoled with patting and hugging during the remainder of the service. I thought perhaps she was the only person there who genuinely regretted the ending of Tonia Lee’s life.

On our subdued ride back to the church, where Mother dropped me off by my car, I found myself wondering how Susu and Jimmy were getting along.