Dirty Tricks: A Kate Lawrence Mystery (15 page)

Strutter
reeled off the number, and Emma wrote it on a scrap of paper from May’s desk. “He
may know something, or he may not, but either way, these people are going down
tonight. Here’s what we’re going to do.”

Twelve

By the time Margo made her belated
way to Vista View, we were more hopeful and looking forward to carrying out
Emma’s plan. There are few things worse than feeling helpless in the face of
adversity, and thanks to Emma, we no longer were. Victim was a role that suited
none of us. We were eager to turn the tables.

At dusk, which came early at this
time of year, May drove home, changed into clothes suitable for a casual dinner
out with friends, drew her new, insulated drapes firmly closed across the front
windows in her living room, and switched on the outside lights on her front
porch and the lamppost where the sidewalk met the driveway. Carefully leaving a
small night light burning in the downstairs bathroom and the back door to the
house unlocked, she made an ostentatious exit through the garage.

First, she backed her car out,
then
stopped at the end of the driveway to collect her mail
from the box. She left her car door open and the radio blasting. Next, she
shuffled through the junk mail and bills very slowly to give the entire
neighborhood plenty of time to notice her imminent departure. Finally, she
returned to her car, pressed the remote on its visor to lower the garage door
and drove off.

At Prospect Street, the nearest
main road, she turned right and drove two miles or so to The Birches, where
Margo,
Strutter
, Emma and I waited for her at my
place. We all piled into Emma’s little Saturn for the trip back to Folly Brook
Boulevard, which ran perpendicular to Wheeler Road. Giggling like schoolgirls,
we slipped through back yards in the darkness to reach May’s house unseen. Our
route had been chosen with an eye to avoiding neighborhood dogs, who would feel
honor bound to alert their humans to our presence. The only living creature we
encountered was a startled tomcat, embarking on his evening prowl. Embarrassed,
he immediately sat down and groomed his whiskers with elaborate nonchalance.

One by one we slipped through
May’s unlocked back door into her kitchen. Emma brought up the rear, lugging
our take-out Chinese dinner. After assuring us that the glow could not be seen
through the drawn drapes, May switched on the gas fireplace, and we fell upon
our food like wolves.

“Nothing like a secret mission and
a little stroll before dinner to sharpen up the appetite,”
Strutter
noted as she crunched on an egg roll.

“There had better not be any MSG
in this food.” Margo poked suspiciously through the carton in her hand, then
speared a plump shrimp and took a sniff.

Emma and I both laughed at her. “I
don’t believe you can smell it, sweetie,” May told her niece.

“You won’t have a clue until two
o’clock in the morning when your tongue feels like an old gym sock, and you’re
dying of a thirst no amount of water will quench,” I reminded her. We’d been
down this road with Margo before.

“Wonderful. We’re
eatin
’ this unhealthy, potentially dangerous stuff why?”
Margo pouted.

“Because John is playing cards
with J.D. and some other buddies at our house, where they’re feeding the kids
pizza and making a big old mess, which I’ll have to deal with when I get home,
so we decided I got to pick what we ate on surveillance here, remember?” She
peered at the cartons arrayed on the coffee table. “Where’s the General
Tso’s
chicken?”

“Besides, it’s yummy,” Emma said
with difficulty around the spare rib she was gnawing. “It’s weird to eat only
healthy food all the time.” She wiped her greasy fingers on a napkin and
grinned.

“Huh,
look
who’s
talkin
’,” Margo retorted. “If you ask me, weird
is deliberately
choosin
’ to start a relationship with
a man who lives about as far from Connecticut as a person can get and still be
in the lower forty-eight. Have hormones completely trumped your reason?”

There ensued a lively, albeit
hushed, discussion of the pros and cons of long-distance romances. As usually
happened when Emma joined the group, the conversation was spirited and frank,
and I enjoyed every minute of it. Every mother of a daughter revels in the
moment when she realizes her baby has become a friend. These were the most
important women in my life, and I took enormous satisfaction in knowing how
much they valued each other. Although she was decades younger than the rest of
us, Emma was accepted as a peer, not just my daughter, probably as a result of
our having worked together as real estate professionals for the past several
years.

Before any conclusions could be
reached about Emma’s plans, not that they ever would be, we were startled by
the sound of May’s house phone ringing.

“You still have a land line?” Emma
asked, incredulous. The ringing stopped, and the call presumably went to voice
mail.

“I do,” said May tartly. “I don’t
care to give myself a brain tumor and arthritic thumb joints by
spendin
’ all day on my cell. That’s for emergencies and
photos to e-mail to my friends. Besides, the sound quality on my house phone is
ten times better.”

She got up to check the possible
message, and I smiled triumphantly at Emma, who knew that I clung fiercely to
my land line at The Birches for precisely the same reasons May had just laid
out—well, plus the fact that I was forever forgetting to put my cell phone in
the charger.

May listened for a moment and
returned the phone to its base. “That’s odd,” she mused, returning to her seat.
“Carla Peterson wants to speak with me as soon as possible, says it’s
important, and she’ll try to reach me again in a little while.”

“Do you think she finally found
out who put Duke in your dining room?” I asked.

“It must have something to do with
that,”
Strutter
agreed. “I hope you’re right, Emma,
about this being just teenagers’ pranks. Remind me again why we don’t think
this might be the work of a disgruntled author?”

“We had that conversation earlier
today, remember? It simply doesn’t make sense. There are far easier ways to
exact vengeance,” May laughed.

“By the way, Emma, what did my
Charlie have to say?”
Strutter
picked up our earlier
thread.
 
“I haven’t had a chance to talk
to him today.”

“I texted him, and he replied a
little while later. He said he didn’t know anything specific, but he’d ask
around.”

“Good Lord, I hope he’s being discreet
about it,”
Strutter
fretted. “I don’t want ours to be
the next house to have its doors sealed shut with us inside it.”

“Oh, I think we can trust Charlie
not to create any unnecessary drama—but Duane, maybe not so much,” Emma
chuckled, and we all joined in. Duane was Charlie’s best friend, gay, proud of
it and prone to what Charlie called reckless mouth syndrome.

A loud thump at the rear of the
house ended our mirth. Emma held up a hand and shushed us, instantly alert. She
got up from where she’d been sitting cross-legged on the floor and crept to a
back window. Margo, in her stocking feet, was close behind her.

“There’s a ladder propped against
the second floor gutter,” Emma hissed, “and a pair of very big sneakers
climbing the rungs. He’s got a sack of something dangling from one hand.”

Margo shoved her way in front of
Emma to get a look. “Let’s turn on the back lights and go and get the little
stinker,” she proposed gleefully, clearly itching to even the score on May’s
behalf.

“Not yet. I’ve got a better idea.
Mom, you and May and
Strutter
go upstairs and tell us
what you can see. I want to find out what this guy is up to,” Emma directed,
and we scrambled to comply.

“This would be a lot easier if we
had some light,”
Strutter
groused.

“Try not to break any expensive
bones. I’m not sure my homeowners liability insurance has kicked in yet,” May
advised, feeling her way along the stair wall.

“Right or left?” I asked as we
reached the top.

May hesitated, then turned left
and led us down a short hallway to her office, which overlooked the back yard.
“Careful,” she warned us, “the legs on my desk chair are lethal.”

“Ouch!”
Strutter
yelped.

“Oops, too late,
sorry.”
May leaned across her computer desk and peered out the window.
“I can’t see anything except the rungs of a ladder that looks as if it’s
propped against the dormer. Wait! Hear that?”

Sneakered footsteps thudded across
the roof, which was now only a few feet over our heads.

“No attic?” I asked May softly.

“Just a crawl space,” she
whispered back. “He must be right over us.”

“Damn it, T.J.,” expostulated a
youthful baritone voice, so close that we all jumped and shrank back from the
window. “The old broad has a cap on the chimney. Didn’t you check that out, you
idiot?”

Garbled protestations rose from the
lawn in response. It would seem that our visitor had a companion still on the
ground somewhere.

“Great,” snarled the roof-walker.
“What am I supposed to do with this sack of garbage now?”

Before
Strutter
or I could divine her intentions and stop her, May yanked open the window and
yelled at the top of her voice.

“You can get it the hell off my
roof, for starters, and yourself with it,” she bellowed. She turned around and
shoved past
Strutter
and me back to the stairs.
“Margo, Emma, call the police! There are a couple of punks on my roof and in my
yard, and I’ve had just about enough of this.”

She clicked on the light switch at
the top of the staircase, and the three of us half ran, half stumbled, back
down the stairs to find Margo already on her cell phone with the Wethersfield
Police Department.

The house phone rang again, but
May ignored it. “Where’s Emma?”

“Out here!” I followed my
daughter’s voice and dashed into the kitchen, snapping on lights along the way.
The back door stood wide open, and I rushed out and down the porch stairs with
Strutter
right behind me.

Emma stood at the base of a large
extension ladder, yanking in vain at the pulley ropes for the higher section.
Then she got between the ladder and the house and started pushing. “Help me
drop this thing, and he’ll be trapped up there until the police can get here.”

Strutter
and I ran to help her, and together we successfully pushed the ladder away from
the house until it fell flat in the yard. “Got you, you little creep!”
Strutter
exulted, shaking her fist at the roof. We were so
busy fist-bumping that we failed to notice two big feet and long legs sliding
backward over the dormer above us.

A shadowy figure unfolded itself
from the shrubbery where T.J., presumably, had been aiding and abetting. All we
could make out were jeans, some kind of zip-front jacket and a knitted cap.
T.J. took one look at the three of us and the fallen ladder before deciding
that discretion might be the better part of valor.

“Sorry, man, I’m
outta
here,” he yelled to the feet dangling over his head.
“My dad will kill me if the cops catch me here.”
 
He beat a hasty retreat, tearing around the
corner of the house with Emma in hot pursuit.

Margo and May appeared on the back
porch. “A cruiser should be here any second,” Margo reported. “A neighbor had
already called in a disturbance by the time I got through.” She followed the
direction of our eyes upward. “What’s
goin
’ on?” she
asked a split second before roof-walker lost his grip and plummeted fifteen
feet or so, still holding onto a section of May’s gutter. Luckily for him, but
not so much for
Strutter
, he landed half on top of
her, and they fell to the grass in a tangle of arms, legs and irate epithets.

“Oh, no!”
Margo covered her face with her hands for half a second before joining me where
I stood over the thrashing pair, trying to figure out how to help
Strutter
.

May
remained
on the porch, clearly aghast. A siren wailed nearby. “Hang on, help is on the
way,” she encouraged and scurried back through the house to let the arriving
officers know where the action was.

At first we couldn’t distinguish
the muffled moans and curses emanating from the bodies writhing at our feet.
Then a torrent of Jamaican expletives let us know that the moans and groans
were coming from the intruder, not
Strutter
.

“She’s okay,” I noted with relief.
“Those are some of her best cusses.”

A few seconds later our friend
succeeded in disentangling herself and promptly sat down on top of her
accidental attacker, who still thrashed feebly. “Don’t just stand there with
your mouths hanging open. Help me out,” she ordered, and Margo and I piled on.

Which is how two of Wethersfield’s
finest, a pair of young officers, who mercifully seemed unaware of our history
of misadventures, found us a moment later. That probably would have worked out
all right, were it not for the appearance of Lieutenant John
Harkness
and his good friend, J.D. Putnam, who brought up
the rear of the little group. The officers, who’d been filled in on the events
of the last half hour by May, offered each of the rest of us help getting up
before checking out the culprit on the ground. One of them disappeared to call
for an ambulance.

“Nice work, ladies,” said the
remaining cop, clearly impressed by what I’m sure he thought of as our geriatric
spunk. “Any idea
who
this is?”

Strutter
and Margo carefully avoided looking at their husbands. Then
Strutter
spoke up. “No. He’s about my son’s age, which would make him seventeen or so,
but he has a skinnier build. I’m pretty sure one of his legs is broken. I heard
a big snap when he fell off the roof.”