Confession Is Murder (17 page)

Something didn’t seem right. She hadn’t seen Mrs. B. in a couple of days, and like the girl said, the old lady was as regular as the evening news—her car was in the church parking lot every day. So where was she now?

The girl had already disappeared up the stairs. Lucille left the front door ajar and went back outside.

The parking lot was in the back. Lucille walked up and down, looking for Mrs. B.’s Impala. She found it in the last row.

She didn’t like the feel of this. No sight of the old lady for days, apartment completely quiet, not even the TV on, and now here’s her car still in the parking lot.

She went back around to the front of the building and tried to peer in Mrs. B.’s window, but the sheers were just dense enough to keep her from seeing in.

She couldn’t just leave. Never mind that she wanted to talk to Mrs. B., what if the old lady was hurt or something? Fell in the tub and couldn’t get up or had a heart attack and was lying there paralyzed?

She’d call Gabe, she decided. Ask him to come round and have a look.

Good thing she’d propped the door open. She went back into the entrance hall and waited a second for her eyes to adjust to the darkness.

She was panting by the time she’d climbed the steep flight of stairs to the second floor. Good thing she’d signed up at the Y. A couple of weeks of working out, and she’d be in great shape.

She rapped on the door at the top of the stairs.

“Sorry to bother you,” she said when the girl opened up. She could hear the baby crying in the background. “But could I use your phone? I don’t have one of them cell phones, and I think I should call the police about Mrs. B not answering her door.” Lucille jerked her head in the direction of Mrs. Batalata’s apartment.

Lucille was waiting outside when a patrol car arrived, sirens blaring. It did a U-turn in the middle of the street, narrowly missing a parked car, and pulled up, facing the wrong direction, in front of Mrs. Batalata’s apartment building.

Gabe got out and trotted across the lawn toward where Lucille was standing, his hand on his gun. Sheesh, did he think he was going to a shoot-out?

His partner followed at a slower pace, his hat pushed back and an angry red crease running across his forehead.

Gabe danced around like a kid playing cops and robbers. “Think we should go on in, Sean?”

Sean put out a hand. “Hang on, hang on. Let’s hear what the lady has to say first.”

His face was beet red, and he was sweating in spite of the brisk day. Lucille wondered how long it had been since he’d had his blood pressure checked.

“Ma’am, you want to tell us what you’re doing here?”

“It’s like this. I stopped by to see Mrs. Batalata, but she’s not opening her door. Her car is here, I saw it out around back.” She gestured toward the parking lot. “And I started to get kind of worried. She usually comes to church every day, seeing as how she’s in the middle of this fifty-four-day novena, but it’s been a couple of days now since I seen her.”

“You a friend of hers?”

“Yeah.” Sheesh, Lucille thought. How many lies was this now? She was going to go to hell, and it was all gonna be on account of Joseph.

“Let’s see what we find.” Sean pulled his hat back down onto his forehead and started up the steps.

Lucille tagged along in back of the two policemen. She kind of hoped they would be breaking the door down. She’d always wanted to see that.

Gabe tried the door.

“I already did that.” Lucille gave him a dirty look.

“It’s procedure,” he assured her. “You’d be surprised how many times the door turns out to be open, right, Sean?”

Sean grunted. He stretched up and felt along the top edge of the doorjamb.

“Dust,” he said and rubbed his hands down his pants. “Sometimes they hide a key there. You know, in case they accidentally lock themselves out.”

Lucille couldn’t see Mrs. Batalata doing that. She’d need a chair to get it down, and where would she get that if she was locked out? But she didn’t say anything—the police knew what they were doing.

Gabe lifted up the mat, but there was nothing there either.

“Wait a minute, the geraniums,” Lucille said, and they both stared at her like she was nuts or something.

“My aunt Geri, may she rest in peace, always kept a key in the potted plant she had by her back door.”

“It’s worth a try,” Sean grumbled.

Lucille felt around in the loose dirt at the top of the planter. Something crawled across her hand, and she had to stifle a scream. “Here it is!” She pulled the key out and held it up.

“I’ll take that.” Sean held out his hand.

It didn’t seem fair, Lucille thought, she was the one who found the key.

In the end she was grateful they went in ahead of her.

Mrs. Batalata was sitting on the sofa, looking almost as though she were expecting them. She had a crocheted afghan over her lap, and a box of tissues on the coffee table in front of her. A bed pillow was on the sofa next to her, and a wastebasket, filled with crumpled tissues, was nearby.

Her eyes were open and staring, and her face had a bluish color to it. Lucille had seen enough television shows to know that meant she was dead.

She backed toward the door as the two policemen went over toward the sofa.

“No pulse,” Sean called to Gabe, who was on his radio summoning an ambulance.

Lucille looked down and was surprised to see her hands shaking. She couldn’t stop them, no matter how hard she tried. Finally she shoved them in the pockets of her leather jacket and made a prayer to St. Gertrude of Nivelles, patron saint of the recently dead.

Sean and Gabe were busy discussing what to do, and Lucille felt too nervous to just stand there, so she began to look around the apartment. It was small but neat, with a bunch of furniture that looked like Mrs. B. must have picked it up at a secondhand store. Nothing quite went with anything else.

No one was watching, so Lucille wandered into the kitchen. There was a plate sitting out on the counter with a cake on it. Lucille went over for a closer look and gave it a sniff. Carrot cake with cream cheese icing, she was pretty sure. It looked good. She was feeling kind of hungry since she’d skipped lunch waiting for Jeanette to go out on her break.

The plate was pretty, too. Beige with pink trim around the edge. Lucille’s plates were all plain. Her sister, Angela, had talked her into buying them—said they would go with everything.

More policemen arrived and crammed into the tiny apartment. Lucille’s back hurt, and she wanted to go home, but they said she had to wait until Detective Sambuco got there.

Sambuco arrived ten minutes later. Lucille could hear the squeal of brakes as he pulled up in front of the building. He stood on the threshold of the apartment for a moment and looked around, then sauntered over to where Lucille was waiting.

“What is it with you and dead bodies?” He had a toothpick in the corner of his mouth and was rolling it around with his tongue.

Lucille backed away until she was against the wall. “I didn’t have nothing to do with it.”

“Who is the deceased this time?”

“Mrs. Batalata. Mrs. Luigi Batalata.” Lucille hoped he wasn’t going to ask her for Mrs. B.’s first name.

“She a good friend of yours?” Sambuco asked.

Lucille nodded.

“Known her a long time then, huh?”

She made a vague gesture with her hand. She had the feeling he could tell she was lying.

“Would that be one year, two years?” Sambuco leaned a little closer.

“A little over a year.” Lucille had her fingers crossed behind her back. Well, it was
sort of
true. She’d seen Mrs. B. her first day on the job, when she went to change the flowers on the altar, and it had been a year and a half now she’d been working at St. Rocco’s. “Is she really dead?”

Sambuco nodded.

“Heart attack, I bet. I had an uncle once who keeled over just like that.” Lucille snapped her fingers. “Happened at our Memorial Day barbecue. All those people around, and there wasn’t nothing we could do to help.”

“What brought you over here today?”

“Who, me? Just dropping by to say hello. I hadn’t seen her in church lately, so I was kind of worried.” That part was true at least.

“She’s a regular churchgoer, then?” Sambuco moved the toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other.

Lucille watched the toothpick, fascinated. Suddenly she could remember how it felt kissing Sambuco in the backseat of his car. She blushed. “She’s there most days, sitting in the back of the church.” At least she was on firmer ground here, Lucille thought.

“She must be pretty holy.” Sambuco laughed.

“She was making this special novena. Fifty-four days straight. But I think she really went because she was lonely and didn’t have nobody to talk to.” Lucille had a sudden vision of poor old Mrs. B., the son who never came to visit and the great-granddaughter she’d never even met. She dabbed at her eyes with the hem of her shirt.

“Here”—Sambuco patted his chest and winked—“I got a shoulder you can cry on if you want.”

Lucille straightened up, and he grinned at her.

“She have any family around?”

“Not that I know of.” Lucille couldn’t meet his eye. Well, the girl upstairs hadn’t seen any family coming or going, so that was probably more or less true.

Sambuco grunted. “When you got here, was the door locked or what?”

“Locked. That’s why I had to call Gabe. He’s my nephew, see. I didn’t want to bother the police, because, after all, there was probably no cause for alarm. I thought maybe Gabe could just run over and have a look-see.”

“Notice anything unusual when you got here?”

Lucille shook her head.

“How about the apartment. Anything missing or disturbed?”

Lucille looked down and dug her toe into the beige carpet. “Well, Mrs. B. and I usually saw each other at church. I’ve never been here before.”

Sambuco’s thick brows rose up as if pulled by strings. “So what were you doing here today, then?” He took the toothpick out of his mouth and put it in his pocket.

“Like I said, she hadn’t been in church lately, and so I got worried.”

“Did you happen to see this Mrs. Batalata in church the day you discovered the first dead body?”

“I don’t remember. She was the kind of person you could look right at and not notice, know what I mean?”

“Yeah, I do.” Sambuco nodded. “You said she’s a real regular at St. Rocco’s?”

“Yeah. Like I said, she’s been doing this here fifty-four-day novena, but I used to see her all the time before that, too.”

“So it’s possible she was in church the day Mr. Salmona was killed.”

Lucille nodded. Sambuco seemed to be coming to the same conclusion she had.

“So maybe she saw something,” Sambuco continued.

“Yeah,” Lucille said. “And maybe she didn’t have no heart attack or stroke or nothing. Maybe someone wanted her dead.”

Chapter 13

By the time Lucille pulled into her driveway, she was shivering and her teeth were chattering like a pair of castanets. She had decided to leave the investigating to the police. No more for her. Not now, what with Mrs. Batalata being dead. What a shame—she seemed like such a nice old lady. All she’d ever wanted was someone to talk to. Lucille felt guilty that she’d never done more than nod and say hello whenever she saw her. No, she didn’t want to end up like Mrs. B, sitting dead on her couch, waiting for someone to find her. She was keeping her nose clean from now on—going to do her work at St. Rocco’s, take care of her family, and that was that. No more detecting for her.

And she was going to call Frankie and tell him to come home. She didn’t want to be alone in the house no more with some homicidal maniac running around loose in town. So what if he took her money—that didn’t seem so important no more. They’d go to the lawyer together first thing in the morning, and he would explain to the police that Frank didn’t have nothing to do with Joseph’s death.

She could hear the thump of Bernadette’s CD player when she opened the front door. Dirty dishes were stacked in the sink, and a trail of bread crumbs led across the counter. Lucille sighed. That girl did next to nothing—only eat and breathe.

The light on the answering machine was flashing, and Lucille punched the button. First message was from Connie.

“Lucille? It’s me, Connie.” There was a high-pitched whine, and the tape cut off. There were four calls after that one—all hang-ups.

Sheesh, if people could take the trouble to call couldn’t they at least take the trouble to leave a message? Lucille thought.

“Yo.” Bernadette appeared around the corner of the kitchen door.

“You been home all this time?”

Bernadette nodded.

“How come you didn’t pick up the phone?” Ever since Bernadette got her own cell phone, she didn’t lunge for the telephone anymore when she heard it ring. Half the time she didn’t bother to answer it at all.

Bernadette shrugged. She looked at Lucille’s hands, and Lucille realized they were shaking again the way they’d done back at Mrs. Batalata’s apartment.

Bernadette continued to stare, shrugged again, and said, “What’s for dinner?”

“Canned soup, that’s what’s for dinner.” Lucille slapped her palm down on the kitchen table. “There’s canned soup in the pantry, some sandwich fixings in the fridge. Help yourself. I’m going out.”

She zipped up her jacket again. “And Bernadette,” she called over her shoulder from the front door. “Put your dishes in the dishwasher and clean the counter off. I don’t want to find no mess in there when I get home, okay?”

She slammed the door and walked out.

Maybe she should have called, Lucille thought as she walked up the driveway to Connie’s house, but if Connie wasn’t home, she’d pop over to Flo’s or her sister’s. She just didn’t want to be home with nothing but the sound of Bernadette’s CD player for company.

Connie answered the door almost immediately. “Lucille, come on in.” She pulled the door wider. “You got my message, I guess.”

Lucille shook her head. “Kind of. The machine cut you off after you gave your name. I was going to call you back, but to be honest with you, Connie, I really needed to get out tonight.”