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Chapter 19

Friday, May 11

The first thing I had to do was get Kenneth Kingzette out of my system. Take my measure of him. The way I’d taken my measure of Mickey Gitlin.

The question was how. I didn’t want to foul up Detective Grant’s investigation. And I sure didn’t want to end up missing like Donald Madrid.

The answer didn’t come to me until that Friday night, when I was curled up on my back porch, watching James watch me. I was also reading the
East Side Leader.

Hannawa has only one daily newspaper,
The Herald-Union
. But like any big city, there are also a number of neighborhood weeklies:
The South End Trader, The Greenlawn News, The Brinkley Bee,
there are just oodles of them. Once a month or so I go through them to make sure I haven’t missed anything important. So I was making my way through
The East Side Leader
when I saw a promising solution to my Kingzette problem. It was in the classifieds, under FOR SALE, MISCELLANEOUS:

I’d been thinking about buying new furniture for my porch for years. The wicker set I had out there now was wobbly and musty smelling, real bird’s nest material. Lawrence and I bought it the same year we bought the house. Now here was a way to feed two fish with the same worm, as my Uncle Wally used to say, assuming that patio set was as charming as the classified promised.

***

Saturday, May 12

Saturday morning I called the number listed with the ad, to make sure the patio furniture was still available. The eager woman on the other end told me it was. I made sure James’ food bowl was full and headed toward Union City.

Union City is anything but a city. It’s a little nub of a community on the eastern edge of Hannawa’s suburban sprawl. There are some impressive houses out there these days. And some pretty modest ones. The woman with the patio furniture lived in one of the modest ones. She led me through her house to the patio. It was a ten-foot square of red brick overlooking the back alley of a strip mall. “When we moved here it was a beautiful woods,” she lamented. She was in her late fifties, overweight, overwrought and newly widowed. She was selling her house and moving into a condo.

Well, the patio set was not exactly charming. But it wasn’t horrible either. The iron frames on the chairs and tables were painted a pale yellow. There were a few speckles of rust here and there. The cushions were faded from years in the sun, making the crazy red and orange floral pattern a tad bit easier on my eyes. “This is exactly what I’ve been looking for,” I said. I wrote a check for the full $250.

When I got home I bolstered my nerve with a strong cup of tea and then called the Kingzette Moving Co. “I just bought this patio set on the other side of town,” I told the unfriendly man on the other end, “and I was hoping you could help me out.”

“That’s why we’re in business,” he said. From the pitch of his voice I gathered he was a younger man, presumably Kingzette’s son.

And so I made arrangements for them to deliver my patio set the following Thursday afternoon. It would cost me another $150.

***

Thursday, May 17

Right after lunch I told Eric I was starting to “feel a little woozy.” Which was a lie. I was actually feeling a lot woozy. My wooziness had been growing all week, since I’d made those arrangements to have Kingzette Moving deliver that awful patio set.

Eric dislodged the Mountain Dew bottle from his mouth long enough to speak. “I suppose that means you’re going home early.”

“You think I should?”

He rolled his Chinese-American eyes. “Maddy, you’ve been preparing to go home since you got here.”

So I drove home and camped in front of my picture window, getting woozier and woozier waiting for that truck to pull up.

It pulled up at three. There was a big gold crown painted on the side, along with these words:

I looked over my shoulder at James, who was sprawled on the floor in front of my sofa, gnawing on a log of rawhide. “I don’t expect you to turn into Lassie—dial 911 with your snoot or anything—but if things start going wrong I do hope you’ll reach down deep in that wolfen soul of yours and maybe growl a little.”

James gnawed away, promising nothing.

Two men slipped out of the truck. The driver was young and tall, and had way too many muscles for his tee shirt. The other man was a foot shorter, but just as burly. He had the thin gray hair of a man pushing sixty. He leaned against the fender and lit a cigarette while the younger man headed for my door. I opened it before he could knock. “You’re Mr. Kingzette, I gather?”

“One of them,” the young man said. His face was as sour as Howard Shay’s lemonade.

I nodded toward the older man. “And that’s your father?”

“Where you want the furniture?”

I ignored his impatience. “It must be nice to work together like that—I remember how I used to help my father milk the cows.”

“Patio in the back, ma’am?”

“Screened porch,” I said.

I followed him back to the truck. There were only six lousy pieces of furniture in there. If I was going to make an adequate appraisal of the older Kingzette, I’d have to get in their way as much as I could.

I greeted Leonard Kingzette with a wiggle of my fingers. He nodded at me. Took a long, painful drag on his cigarette and then flicked it into the street. I joined them at the back of the truck.

They unloaded the furniture onto my front lawn. It took about thirty seconds. The son picked up the two chairs and headed for my backyard. I helped his father with the coffee table. “I have a confession, Mr. Kingzette,” I said, as we waddled sideways with the table. “When I told my neighbor who I’d hired, he got a little nervous. Because you’d been in prison.”

The word
prison
hit Kingzette like one of those poison darts Indians in the Amazon use to shoot monkeys out of treetops. His chest caved in. His eyes sagged against the bridge of his nose. The coffee table between us quivered. I moved quickly to reassure him. “But I said, ‘Good gravy, James, if the man has done his time, then the man has done his time. He has the right to make a living.’”

He recovered. Gave me a quick, uneasy smile. “Not everybody’s so charitable.”

“James is a real worrywart. He’s probably peeking out the window right now. Anyway, you checked out just fine.”

A second dart struck him.

“With the Better Business Bureau,” I said quickly. “They didn’t have a single complaint.” That part of my lie was true. I had checked with the BBB.

Kingzette managed another smile. “Well, Mrs. Sprowls, I appreciate your going the extra mile.”

We reached the back of my house. Kingzette’s son trotted past us, heading back to the truck for more. “Your son’s all business, isn’t he?” I said.

Kingzette pushed the porch door open with his backend. “He sees to it I don’t get into any more trouble—that’s for sure.”

And that was pretty much it. By a quarter after three, the patio set was on my porch, the old wicker crap was on my tree lawn, the Kingzettes were on their merry way. And I was regretting the whole miserable affair.

Oh yes, I’d had a few minutes to take my measure of Kenneth Kingzette. But like the damned fool I am, I’d also given Kenneth Kingzette a few minutes to take his measure of me. So instead of enjoying my new patio set that evening—sliding back and forth in my glider with a mug of tea, sleeve of Fig Newtons and that new Dana Stabenow mystery I’d been dying to read—I was perched by my living room picture window, in that uncomfortable wingback chair I just hate, watching the street like a nervous parakeet. I had my phone on one armrest and my butcher’s knife on the other. I just knew that any minute I was going to spot Kenneth Kingzette sneaking through my hostas.

There were so many things about my encounter with Kingzette that bothered me. For one thing, he’d called me Mrs. Sprowls. “Well, Mrs. Sprowls,” he’d said, “I appreciate your going the extra mile.” Fair enough. It was my name. It was written on the bill. But he’d said it in such a familiar way. As if he were sending a subtle message that he knew who I was.

And why wouldn’t he recognize my name? I was no longer the anonymous newspaper librarian I used to be, was I? My name was all over the news during that Buddy Wing business. And just a few weeks ago that awful girl with the green hair told the whole world I was looking into Gordon’s murder.

And even if he hadn’t recognized my name at first—even if he’d arrived at my house thinking I was just some sweet old penny-pinching broad—I’d sure given him a lot to worry about. I told him I knew he’d been in prison. I told him I’d checked him out. What if I’d made him as nervous as I’d made myself? Nervous enough to check
me
out?

I sat by that picture window all evening. The darker it got outside the madder I got inside. Mad at myself for concocting such a damned-fool idea. Mad at myself for not realizing it was a damned-fool idea until it was too late.

What exactly had I expected Kingzette to do? Confess his sins to me? Somehow convince me with his body language, or some soulful Bambi-like look in his eyes, that while he’d once been callous enough to dump those drums of toluene, he wasn’t the kind of man who shot people in the back of the head?

The thing that was bothering me most, of course, was that little quip he’d made about his son. The one when he went rushing by us, and I commented about him being all business. And he said: “He sees to it I don’t get into any more trouble—that’s for sure.” Good gravy! What did he mean by that? Was I worried about the wrong Kingzette?

I kept my vigil by the window until midnight. Then I Kingzette-proofed my bungalow. I put spoons and forks in empty water glasses and put two glasses on every window ledge, so there’d be plenty of clanging and crashing if somebody tried to crawl in that way. I slid my dining room table against my front door and my kitchen table against the back. I turned on every light. I mined the hallway floor with James’ squeak toys. I tethered James to my dresser. I got into bed, fully dressed, with my phone and my butcher’s knife. I even put a paring knife under my pillow as a backup.

The one thing I didn’t do was call Detective Grant and confess my stupidity. Pride trumps fear every time.

***

Tuesday, May 22

After five sleepless nights in that booby-trapped bungalow of mine I called Detective Grant to confess. Even a proud woman needs her eight hours.

I caught him just as he was leaving for the day. We traded hellos and our thoughts about the rainy weather and then I got right to the heart of the matter. “I may have done something a little on the stupid side,” I began.

“A little on the stupid side?” he asked. “I hope you’re not just being modest.”

“You and me both,” I said. I swallowed the last half-inch of cold tea in my mug, motioned for Eric to turn around and mind his own business, and then told Grant about my encounter with the Kingzettes.

“What’s done is done,” he said.

I wasn’t expecting sympathy, but I was surprised by the indifference in his voice. “That’s it? What’s done is done?”

“What do you want me to do? Put a moat filled with alligators around your house?”

I didn’t like that smart-ass question of his one bit. “I just want you to tell me if I’m in any danger, Detective Grant, that’s all.”

He snapped right back at me. “You’ve inserted yourself into a murder investigation, Mrs. Sprowls. Of course you’re in danger. But probably not from the Kingzettes.”

“Probably not? I was hoping for a little more reassurance than that.”

He rattled my eardrum with a long, late-afternoon yawn. Then he said this: “Just hang in there for a few more days, Mrs. Sprowls. Okie-dokie?”

***

Thursday, May 24

And so I hung in there—not that I had any choice—lights on, squeak toys in the hallway, knives under the pillow, water glasses on the window sills, wondering exactly what Detective Grant was hinting at. The answer came at three-thirty Thursday afternoon. It was in the budget for the next day’s paper. I was so angry I screeched like a 500-pound piece of chalk.

Eric was bent over his new issue of
Spider Man
, feeding miniature doughnuts into his mouth. “And just who’s ruffling your feathers today?” he asked.

I tossed the budget at him. “Grant!”

I should explain that the budget has nothing to do with money. Not directly, anyway. The budget is the list of the stories the paper will be covering for the following day’s edition. It includes local stories as well as the big national and international stories. Among the dozens of stories listed was this one: