Chill Factor (6 page)

“Marty’s like family, Dixie. He was on his way to the airport, and he’s coming straight over here for a late lunch, as soon as the cops stop rubber-hosing him.”

“Amy, get a grip.” Gently, Dixie took the egg her sister was about to break into a bowl and set it back in the carton. “It was Edna’s car, Edna’s mole scar. It was Edna.”
With two bullet holes in her chest and a piece of her cheek missing.

Dixie swallowed back a sudden surge of bile as she envisioned Aunt Edna lying in a pool of blood beside her Subaru.
Wasn’t there
anything
you could’ve done, Ms. Butt-kicking Instructor?

Dixie blinked away the image. Though thinner and younger-looking than she’d been a year ago at Bill Pine’s funeral, the dead woman had definitely been Edna Pine. Grasping Amy’s arm, Dixie guided her toward the den.

But Amy jerked away and lifted the receiver on the kitchen phone. “Edna is no bank robber. I’ve left messages for her to call us as soon as she gets home. She’s probably at a movie—you remember how much Edna likes movies.”

With the phone to her ear, Amy tucked Dixie’s unkempt
hair back, plucked lint off her shirt, smoothed her collar. Fussy, even for Amy. Dixie found herself praying that Edna would miraculously pick up the phone.

“Hello! Aunt Edna, this is Amy Royal. You won’t believe the awful thing that’s happened here—”

For one dizzying instant Dixie thought Amy was right: The whole episode
had
been a weird mistake. Then she realized Amy was talking to Edna’s answering machine.

When her sister banged the phone down in frustration, Dixie wrapped an arm around Amy’s waist and once again tugged her toward the den—less forcefully this time. Amy’s warm, cushiony body smelled of vanilla. Her blond hair, cut neckline-short for the rapidly approaching summer, already showed sun-bleached streaks from working in the yard. Fiddling with a silver pendant, she relaxed into Dixie’s embrace as they walked.

“Remember the weekend Aunt Edna took us all to Astroworld?” Amy asked. “You, me … Marty. She wouldn’t get on the roller coaster, but Marty teased her until she agreed to try it, trembling like a wet Chihuahua—”

“Then we couldn’t get her off the thing. I believe she had more fun than we did.”

“
You
didn’t have much fun. The rides made you sick.”

“Edna gave a lot of her time to us kids,” Dixie recalled.

“She’s been lonely since Bill died. Edna needs people around. Shame on us for not going to see her more often. Carl!” Her husband’s balding head barely showed above his leather recliner. “We’re going out to visit Edna tonight, as soon as she calls back.”

“Amy—” Dixie wished her sister would stop speaking about the woman in the present tense. Amy’s ability to dismiss anything she didn’t want to believe could be mind-boggling at times.

“Keep it down back there,” Carl groused, turning up the TV volume. “I want to hear the news.”

“
In a police shoot-out today a second Granny Bandit…”

Amy tried to pull away and head back to her kitchen.

“No, sit!” Dixie tugged her onto the sofa. Brutal truth might be the best medicine.

On the screen, patrol cars clustered around Edna’s Subaru. Reporters, uniformed officers, and plainclothes investigators obscured the camera’s view of the body on the asphalt as paramedics wheeled a gurney to a waiting ambulance.
The wounded officer
, Dixie figured. They’d whisked him away just as she arrived on the scene.

But police were either keeping the details of the robbery under wraps or were as dumbfounded as the media claimed.

“A suspect in the Texas Citizens Bank robbery that occurred in Richmond this morning engaged police from four jurisdictions in a twenty-two-mile pursuit that ended in Houston. The suspect was pronounced dead after police returned gunfire. The stolen money has not been recovered.”

“Branch that size wouldn’t have but sixty, seventy thousand on hand,” Carl commented. He fancied himself another Rukeyser when it came to money. “Not enough cash to go to jail for, let alone get yourself killed. Common crook, maybe, needing his heroin ix, might risk it. A woman
might
, I suppose, if she’d let the taxes run up on her property and expected to be put on the street. What I’m saying, a
desperate
woman. You were there, Dixie. Did Edna look desperate? And what happened to the dough?”

Having been on the scene, Dixie was naturally expected to know such things.

“I saw her carry the bags out. I guess she got rid of them somewhere.”

“When?” Carl pointed to the television. “Said they caught sight of her a mile from the bank, stayed behind her all the way into Houston. Richmond’s not a big town. If she stopped off, someone would’ve noticed.”

“Would they? People drive around locked in air-conditioned vehicles behind tinted windows.”

“Amy, didn’t the woman live right in the neighborhood all those years? I’m saying people
knew
her, knew her car. In small towns, people still howdy their neighbors.”

A phantom of guilt edged into Dixie’s thoughts as she recalled the night Barney and Kathleen brought her home from a halfway house. Edna, Bill, and Marty had immediately bustled over to meet Dixie. Fresh from a sexually abusive environment,
Dixie’d found love and healing among the Flannigans and the Pines. Now that she’d moved back into the Flannigan farmhouse, Dixie once again lived next door to Edna, yet she’d howdied her neighbor no more than a half-dozen times in the past two years.
A woman you loved like an aunt… and that’s all you could manage?

“Carl, these days most Richmond residents are busy driving to and from Houston,” she muttered. Besides, what did he know? Semiretired, her brother-in-law spent most of his time on the golf course or at home playing the stock market on his personal computer.

“The dough from that second robbery in Webster,” Carl persisted. “They haven’t found that, either. And that Ames woman
worked
at Texas Citizens. She and Edna must’ve been in cahoots.”

Dixie couldn’t disagree with his reasoning. If both women managed to dump the money bags before police caught up with them minutes later, it must’ve been part of the plan all along.

“I’d wager the cops are swarming all over Edna’s house right now,” Carl continued. “Searching for the loot.”

“They wouldn’t!” Amy looked horrified. “Tramp through her home?” She swept a frantic gaze around her own den, as if expecting to see storm troopers crashing through.

“If they’d found any money at the Ames house,” Dixie mused, “we’d have heard about the recovery. Which means there must be at least one other person in the—”

“Don’t say it!” Amy slapped Dixie’s thigh.

“Ow! Say what?”

“That awful name the newspeople are using.”

“Granny Bandit Gang.” Carl chuckled.

Amy batted his arm. “It’s not funny!”

“You thought it was funny yesterday, couple of aging female gunslingers making off with a bundle. What I’m saying, it’s like that
Apple Dumpling Gang
, only women.”

“No, it isn’t,” Amy insisted. “Women have better sense than men.”

Her husband cocked his head down to peer at her through
the tops of his trifocals. “The hell they do. What’re we talking about here if not
females
robbing
banks?”

“Well, then—they must have good reason!”

What
reason? Carl’s property-taxes scenario made as much sense as anything.

“Bill Pine had insurance, didn’t he, Carl? And I don’t recall Aunt Edna being a big spender. Why would she need to rob a bank?”

“Here’s what I’m saying, a bunch of senile old biddies without enough to do—”

“Edna wasn’t senile!”
Amy protested.

“—got fed up with Texas Citizens making mistakes in their accounts. A person can’t argue with those damn computers. Once they start messing with your money, watch out.”

Recalling her own account problems, Dixie wondered if Carl might be on to something. If not need or greed, why not frustration as a motive? Hadn’t she been frustrated enough herself that morning to shout at poor old Len Bacon?

“We use Texas Citizens, Carl!” Amy’s tone suggested they remedy that situation immediately. “And you said it was my checkbook that was out of balance.”

“It was. You wrote down the deposit wrong. I’m saying these women—”

“Are all muddleheads like me? That’s—”

“Hold it!” Dixie raised a palm to halt the squabble. “Anybody can write a number down wrong. And the women who pulled off these robberies were not muddleheaded. They’ve stolen probably a quarter million dollars, total.”

Carl chuckled again. “Sure do have the cops scratching their heads. You have to give it to ol’ Edna—”

“It wasn’t Edna!” But before Amy could swat him again, the doorbell rang. Forced to settle for a lingering glare, she stalked off to answer it.

The visitor was Marty Pine.

Impeccably urbane in a charcoal double-breasted blazer and gunmetal-gray slacks, Edna’s son swept past Amy, granting her a quick hug and kissing the air near her cheek. The artistic abstract design in the gray tie he wore matched his pale blue
eyes perfectly. Gracefully graying hair retained a fullness a lot of women would envy. Marty looked thinner, possibly, than at his father’s funeral, but then Dixie had seen him only briefly that day, before he shuttled Edna away to her sister’s house in Galveston and zipped back to his ritzy art gallery in one of the Dallas supermalls.

“Dixie, you can’t know how glad I am to find you here. Hello, Carl.” Marty’s Italian loafers whispered across the carpet. He shook Carl’s outstretched hand, then whirled on Dixie and embraced her. “Maybe you can make some sense out of all this. The police are no good. But you—well, there you are, living right next door. Dix, you had to know something was amiss.”

Amiss?
Dixie supposed buddying up with brilliant artists and wealthy collectors was bound to result in some affectations. She hoped his were only syllable-deep.

And speaking of syllables, she and Marty hadn’t exchanged more than a few dozen in over twenty years, yet here he was hugging her as if the time had melted away and they were still high school sweethearts. Had his mother’s death shocked him into the past? He still smelled of the citrus cologne she remembered.

Finally, Marty pulled back to study her. The anguish etched in the lines of his narrow face reminded Dixie of the day someone let his pet rabbits out of their cage. He’d found them inside the fenced yard, all dead. He’d been fourteen at the time and doing his best not to cry.

Dixie felt his hand tremble where he touched her.

“Oh, Marty. I wish I did know what was going on with your mother.”

Amy patted his arm. “Carl, pour Marty a glass of wine.”

“I’ll pour us all one,” Carl mumbled.

Beyond the expected stress, Marty looked wired, Dixie noticed, his eyes as bright as new marbles.

“The police were all over me.” He perched on the edge of Carl’s vacated recliner. “They won’t let me have her … body, you know.”

“They will,” Dixie assured him. “They’ll release her as soon
as they clear up some of the questions about … how Edna died.”

“How she died?” He sprang off the chair. “They know exactly
how she died.
They shot her down, they—” He paced around the chair, then sank back onto it. “They gunned her down like some rabid dog in the street.”

Carl brought a tray with four glasses of white wine, handed one to Marty and another to Dixie.

“I—I—I had to look at her.” Tears glittered in Marty’s eyes. “They said I needn’t make, you know, an identification—you’d already handled that, Dixie. But I had to see for myself that it—it was really her.”

He tossed back the wine in three gulps. A few drops fell on his pricey jacket, but he seemed as unaware of those as he was the tears now sliding down his face.

“Poor Marty.” Amy, her own cheeks damp, took a second glass from Carl’s tray and traded it for Marty’s empty one.

“I looked at her lying there, and I … she looked so different I hardly knew her. How could I not know my own mother?”

Dixie recalled Edna’s appearance as she’d stood in the bank lobby that morning, slender, sophisticated. “When was the last time you saw her?”

“I don’t know—Christmas? Sure, Christmas. I dropped in a couple days early, took her to
The Nutcracker.
She’d lost a few pounds—taking aerobics classes, she confessed—but she still looked like … like
Mom.”

He drained the second glass. Amy took Carl’s untouched one and traded with Marty again.

“Did Edna mention new friends? New interests?” Dixie asked.

“Friends?” He rose abruptly, paced past a shelf of framed photographs, and snatched one up. It showed the Pines and the Flannigans on one of their camping trips. “You were her
friend
, weren’t you?” His pale, damp eyes smoldered with sudden anger.

“Of course I was, Marty, but—”

“What was she doing there? Did she even bank at Texas Citizens, for Christ’s sake?”

Dixie met his glare frankly. “Edna was
robbing
Texas Citizens Bank, Marty.”

“That’s a lie! A story the police trumped up to cover their murdering asses.”

“I was there, Marty. I saw her.”

“You?”
His anguished gaze roved over her face. “The police said there were witnesses. But … if
you
were there, you could’ve stopped it. Could’ve told them she was no bank robber.”

“She had a .38 that spoke louder than I could’ve.”

“That’s crazy! A handgun? Can’t you hear how crazy that sounds? Where the hell would Mom get a handgun?”

“Any sporting goods store,” Carl put in. “No problem buying a gun.”

“Well … she’d never have used it.”

He looked so miserable, Dixie wanted to hug him again, assure him this was all a mistake. But she couldn’t do that.

“She used it, Marty. She fired at me.”

“No.” His shoulders sagged. Amy hugged him silently as he stared down into the wine. “What happened, Dixie?” Marty’s lips looked stiff around the words. “You lived right next door. How could you not know—not
see
that something was wrong? What does that say about you as a neighbor?”