Bowled Over (20 page)

“Really? I would have thought she would have wanted to forget those days.” Ella had been the new girl and, as such, ostracized in the tight small-town community of Wolverhampton High. It had made her prickly and difficult, if Jaymie remembered right.

“We talk about everything! She changed once she left this town. I have only ever known her as the sweet and wonderful woman she is now, the one who helped me heal from losing my dear first wife. The little boy, Connor, is the
one I felt sorry for in the middle of that sad spectacle here in the store, made the center of Kathy Cooper’s paranoid fantasies.” He stopped and shook his head. “I’m really sorry that she was murdered; that shouldn’t happen to anyone. But you have to wonder: How many people did she make angry? How many other folks did she attack like that?”

“Good point, Bob,” Valetta said, handing him a slip of paper with the doctor’s name and number.

Once he left, Jaymie thought over what he’d said while she reorganized her melamine picnic display. She took out the book that had the advance bookings for the picnic baskets and noted that Craig had picked one up for the July Fourth picnic, the Lover’s Lane basket, but hadn’t returned it yet. That was to be expected; how could he think about something like that while grieving for his wife? It worked to her advantage, since it would give her a good excuse to follow up with him. She could say she was dropping by to pick it up from him to save him the trouble. And just maybe she could get the answers to some of her questions.

Craig Cooper seemed to have known weeks ago that he had no intention of moving to Toledo, and yet Kathy had still thought they were, going by her conversation with Matt Laskan. She was
counting
on it. But then later that day she told Kylie she knew she wouldn’t be getting custody of Connor. Were the two statements somehow tied together? Or had something else been going on?

They got busy, and the afternoon flew by. It was getting late, the brilliant, super-heated sun blazing down on Queensville from a slanted angle and overlaying everything with a rich golden glow. Jaymie began to haul the stuff on the porch back into the store in preparation for closing. First the big box of beach balls and the other box of Water Weenies. Then the assorted cartons of flags and kites, badminton sets,
gardening paraphernalia. She was hauling the last box inside when she heard a siren not far away.

“What’s that?” Valetta called from the back, where she was shutting down her pharmacy and catalog counters.

“I don’t know.” Jaymie stepped back out onto the porch and listened. More sirens. “Something big,” she said to Valetta, who had come to the door.

“You follow the sound while I lock up,” Valetta said, giving Jaymie a shove.

Jaymie dashed back in, grabbed her purse from the hook behind the counter and headed to the door. “Tell Jewel I’ll be back for Hoppy in a few minutes,” she called out over her shoulder, already skipping down the steps. It sounded like the sirens were heading down to the river. “I hope it’s not a drowning!” Jaymie muttered as she trotted toward the wailing sirens. But the riverside was calm. The siren sound was from past the riverside, beyond the docks. She picked up her pace and headed toward Johnny Stanko’s neighborhood.

A crowd was gathering, even as the police were trying to push them back. They had Stanko’s house surrounded, and a sergeant used a bullhorn, saying, “Come on out, Stanko. We know you’re in there, and we know you have a gun. Come on out, and no one will get hurt!”

The tension ratcheted up as neighbors gathered in worried knots, whispering to each other. A cop began to push them back, and one couple hustled their young child away. Jaymie tried to find out from a cluster of neighbors what was going on, but no one seemed to know anything. They had all just heard sirens and gathered to watch.

One shot rang out, and police descended on the house, breaking a window and tossing a tear gas container in. They waited just seconds before three of them fastened gas masks
over their faces and broke down the front door with a battering ram.

Valetta, gasping for air, hobbled up to Jaymie and stood on one foot, pulling her shoe off and emptying a pebble out of it before putting it back on. “What’s going on?” she cried, hopping around.

“I don’t know, but it doesn’t look good,” Jaymie replied. She wasn’t going to tell Valetta about the gunshot.

Twelve

V
ALETTA CLUTCHED
J
AYMIE’S
arm, trembling with worry. Moments later an officer wearing a tear gas mask led a handcuffed Johnny Stanko out of the house. He was doubled over and retching, barefoot and wearing only jean cutoffs, his dirty blond hair falling over his eyes.

“Johnny!” Valetta cried.

He stumbled, and the officer righted him. Valetta started toward him, but a police officer stepped in front of her and grabbed her arm, not hard, but enough to stop her. “I’m sorry, ma’am, but I can’t let you do that.”

She wrenched her arm from his grip, stiffened her spine and said, “I’m only going to talk to him.” She shouldered her way past a couple of people standing around gawking. Jaymie followed in her wake. “Johnny,” Valetta called out. His head snapped up. “Johnny, don’t say anything to the police, okay? I’ll get you a lawyer. Don’t say
anything
. You don’t have to talk to them!”

He nodded, and was led away. She watched them go, eyeing the police with a stern gaze.

Jaymie, who had followed her, said, “Valetta, if you think he’s innocent, why don’t you want him talking to the police?” That was quite a change from the day before when she wanted him to go to the police and tell them his side of the story.

Her expression set in stubborn rebellion, she said, “Because I don’t want them bullying him into confessing. He’s such an easy target. This is different than if he’d gone in voluntarily. Idiot!” She stamped her foot. “Why didn’t he listen to me?”

They started together back to the Emporium to make sure Valetta hadn’t missed locking up anything in her haste to find out what the sirens were about, and so that Jaymie could get Hoppy. “Do you think they’ll do that, try to pin it on him? They only want to find out who did it.”

“But if they figure that’s Johnny, their lives suddenly got easier.”

“We don’t even know that’s why they picked him up.”

“Even you know better than that, Jaymie. What I want to know is, who tipped them off that he was in his house?”

Valetta was so worried that Jaymie just didn’t want to let her handle it all alone. She put her arm over her friend’s shoulders as Hoppy bounced around them, yapping. “Come on over to my place. You can call the lawyer from there, and we’ll talk about it. I have so many jumbled ideas, and I need someone to bounce them off.”

Valetta agreed. They returned to the Leighton house, and Jaymie made dinner while her friend tracked down a lawyer who agreed to go to the police station and intervene for Johnny Stanko. Valetta guaranteed the lawyer’s fees. Jaymie didn’t say anything, but knowing how much lawyers cost,
she thought that Valetta must really believe in Stanko’s innocence if she was willing to do that for him. A public defender would have been the sensible alternative, but Valetta claimed that she knew the public defender in Wolverhampton, and she wouldn’t let him defend a gerbil accused of attacking a giraffe.

After dinner and after Valetta was allowed to briefly speak with Johnny on the phone, they sat in the backyard with tea and the animals. Surly Denver sat on Valetta’s lap and endured being stroked and petted for an hour as they talked about the murder and its aftermath. “What I can’t figure out is, who turned him in? Johnny said he hadn’t been out of the house at all, and I sure didn’t tell anyone he was there.” She glanced over at Jaymie.

“Neither did I, Valetta. Really.”

Her friend nodded. “I know you wouldn’t have, but—”

“But you wondered. It’s okay. If you believe Johnny is innocent, let’s think of who else could have done it. I’ve been trying to create a timeline for everybody who was there, but it’s difficult.” Jaymie ran back inside, got some paper and a clipboard and plopped back down in the old wood Adirondack chair. “These are the folks I’ve thought of who might have had reason to kill Kathy Cooper, but there are a lot of things I don’t know yet.” As she wrote each name, she said it out loud: “Kylie, Andy Walker, Craig, Matt Laskan, Ella and Bob Douglas.”

“Ella and Bob?” Valetta said, adjusting her glasses and leaning toward Jaymie to gaze at the list. “Why them?”

“Well, Kathy had that run-in with Ella at the Emporium, and Bob said he was really angry about it.”

“Okay. Weak, but just barely possible.”

A house finch twittered happily at the neighbor’s feeder until Dipsy barked at it and sent it fluttering away. “Let’s
start with Kylie: motive, means and opportunity.” She jotted those words down with a dash after each one. “Motive is easy; Kathy had been trying to get custody of Connor, and if she’d been trying to do that, she must have been trying to make a case that Kylie is an unfit mother.”

“That’s just sad. A year ago, maybe even a few months ago, I might have agreed, but Kylie has really been making an effort,” Valetta said. “Andy Walker has been helpful, too. I think they’re good for each other, because both miss Drew, and both want what’s best for Connor.”

“Good for each other,” Jaymie mused. “Interesting. Anyway, Kylie has to have been very angry at Kathy over the whole custody thing. And Kylie and Andy were in the park;
that
we know.” She paused. “How did Connor get away from them? I wonder. They were looking for him that night. Where were
they
?” She looked off at the setting sun, red gold and hanging low in the sky, disappearing behind the line of poplars. “If they were in on the murder together, they could have parked Connor somewhere, done the deed, and when they came back, Connor was gone.”

Valetta grimaced. “Isn’t it too much of a coincidence that you then find Connor near Kathy? How did
that
happen?”

“I know. It’s weird. They have to stay on the possibility list, either separately or together. They could have picked up the bowl, I suppose. By the way, what do you make of Johnny insisting that he put the bowl back down on our table?”

Valetta shook her head. “The problem with Johnny is, he’s so used to getting in trouble, he seems to lie by instinct.”

Jaymie privately thought,
That is exactly what a murderer would do
, but she wasn’t going to say that to Valetta. Johnny Stanko was very much on her list of suspects. “On to Matt Laskan,” she said. She related to her friend what she
had overheard between Matt and Kathy at the picnic, how she seemed to be threatening him with some secret, and what Jaymie had learned about his high-profile girlfriend. “I don’t know where he was; I can’t even be sure he was in the park when Kathy died. Until I know, he has to stay on the list of suspects.”

Valetta looked thoughtful. “I may know friends of his. Let me see if they know what he was doing on July Fourth after he left the picnic.”

“And
I’m
going to try to find out what secret he’s hiding. Not sure how I’m going to do it, but I will.” She sighed. “We really don’t know a lot, do we?” But maybe they did know more than she thought. Dani Brougham had said that Kathy told her she was going to get revenge on all her enemies; who were her enemies? Besides Jaymie. She definitely needed to talk to Dani again.

“And we can’t forget about the standard reason to kill someone,” Valetta said, suddenly. “Who did she leave money to? Who benefited? Was there an insurance policy on her?”

Jaymie’s stomach dropped. How could she have forgotten to think of that motive? Wasn’t money at the bottom of most murders? “How do we find out?”

“Leave that up to me,” Valetta said.

“I’m going to follow up with Kathy’s friend Dani, Craig and with Mrs. Hofstadter. Mom and Grandma both said they felt sorry for Kathy and her mom. I didn’t realize their dad was so hard on Kathy especially.”

Valetta stuck her long legs out in front of her. “I still can’t figure out who would have told Kathy about what you supposedly said back in high school. Why? Why would anyone want to hurt you both like that?”