ILL-TIMED ENTANGLEMENTS (The Kate Huntington mystery series #2) (9 page)

“We’ll be fine,” Kate reassured him. “This guy’ll wait to see if he’s managed to scare us off before trying something else, I would think.”

“Probably.” Skip thought for a moment. “And a direct attack against you, that didn’t look like an accident, would clear her and intensify the investigation, neither of which would be his desired result. You got my cell number?”

Kate smiled up at him. “Yes, you’re still in my contacts list. Actually your speed dial number is five, if I remember correctly.”

He returned her smile, then left.

•   •   •

Kate did not sleep well. Almost being clobbered by a potted plant had rattled her more than she’d realized. With every little night-time noise outside her window, adrenaline shot through her system.

When she did doze off, she started dreaming about being on trial for murdering her neighbor up the street, a grumpy little man who let his dogs poop on everybody else’s lawn. The prosecutor was telling her that if she didn’t take a plea bargain she wouldn’t see Edie again until she was grown.

Kate jolted awake. She breathed a sigh of relief when she realized it had been a dream, then punched her pillow and tried to find a more comfortable position on the thin mattress.

At one o’clock in the morning, she was just drifting off again when she could have sworn she heard the apartment door open and close. She lay perfectly still, listening intently. She knew she would never get to sleep until she investigated. Putting on her bathrobe, she slipped quietly out into the main room of the apartment that served as living and dining areas. Going to the door, she saw that it was locked, the safety chain in place.

Back in bed, she endured a couple more hours of dozing on and off before she finally fell into a sound sleep.

And of course, she overslept. The smell of coffee brewing finally penetrated her sleeping brain. She stumbled out to the breakfast bar in her bathrobe.

Skip was already there. When he wished her a cheery “Good morning,” Kate stuck her tongue out at him.

“Ah, so we discover she is not a morning pers…” He was cut off by a blood-curdling scream.

Skip unlocked the apartment door and threw it open. He raced down the short hall to the atrium, Kate on his heels, no longer the least bit sleepy.

As they turned the corner into the atrium, a young Hispanic woman in a maid’s uniform was running frantically toward them, yelling in Spanish. The only word Kate could make out was “
policia.”

As doors began to pop open on both levels of the building, Skip intercepted the woman. He held her by the forearms and shook her gently. “Stop! Tell me what’s the matter.”

She started babbling. It sounded like English but stress was thickening her accent and her words were indecipherable. Kate stepped up beside her and wrapped an arm around the smaller woman’s shaking shoulders. “Calm down. Take a deep breath.” She demonstrated by taking an exaggerated deep breath herself.

Skip stepped back and said, “
Señorita, por favor. ¿Cual es el problema
?”

The young woman took a deep breath that ended on a shudder. “
La Señora
…” She pointed to a door standing open several apartments away.
“¡Está muerta!”

Kate’s eyes followed the direction of the young woman’s finger, to the small wreath of dried flowers on the apartment door. “Frieda! Frieda McIntosh?” she cried.

“
Si. Señora
McIntosh. She eez dead!” The young woman mimicked stabbing herself in the chest.

Kate’s knees buckled. Skip grabbed her arm to keep both her and the young maid from falling. “Are you okay?” he whispered, concern in his voice.

Kate shook her head. “No, but thanks for asking,” she said, when she found her voice.

Skip tilted his head toward Frieda’s door. Kate nodded and he headed toward the apartment to investigate, being careful not to touch the door as he slipped inside.

Kate led the still shaking maid to a bench in the atrium. In stumbling English, she explained that she always cleaned the
Señora’s
apartment first thing on Tuesdays. Apparently Frieda was an early riser and the maid had expected her to have already left for breakfast in the cafeteria.

“¡
Dios mio!
I was in de living room cleaning for long time, and she…” The young woman crossed herself. “She eez laying dead, in de bedroom.”

Betty, pale and shaking, was standing in the middle of a group of residents who had gathered at the corner of the atrium. Skip came out of Frieda’s apartment, again slipping sideways past the door without touching it.

Kate patted the maid’s arm again, before getting up and going over to him. He shook his head slightly , then whispered, “She’s in bed. Knife sticking out of her chest.”

“Dear God!” Kate swallowed a lump in her throat. “My cell phone’s in my purse on Betty’s coffee table. Lindstrom’s under contacts… I probably oughta put him on speed dial at this rate.”

As Skip headed off to retrieve her cell phone, Kate hurried to Betty’s side. The woman looked like she had aged a decade in the last ten minutes. Tears streaked her wrinkled cheeks and her hand shook as she reached toward Kate. “Is it really Frieda?” she asked in a wavering whisper. “Is she… Are you sure?”

Kate gathered the woman up in her arms. “I’m afraid so,” she said quietly. Betty started sobbing as Kate gently turned her and helped her back toward her apartment.

Rose arrived to witness Kate, still in her bathrobe, leading an elderly woman down a short hallway away from a crowd of people milling around the atrium. Her teasing remark about her friend’s attire died on her lips when she saw Kate’s pale face and realized the old woman was crying. Kate tilted her head toward Skip, who was talking on her cell phone, and she kept moving.

Rose quickly gathered the gist of the situation from Skip’s end of the conversation with Lindstrom. She pulled out her own cell phone.

Kate got Betty settled in the living room with a box of tissues and put the teakettle on to heat. She rummaged in cabinets until she found a box of tea bags. She put two in a couple mugs, along with a healthy dose of sugar.

When she offered one of the mugs of tea to Betty, the woman took it with a shaking hand. “Thank you, dear.”

For the next hour, Betty fluctuated between tearful reminiscences and bleak silences, during which she stared into space. Sitting next to her on the settee, Kate held her hand and listened, then waited patiently for the next round of grief.

Betty finally patted the younger woman’s hand. “I think I need to lie down for a little while, dear. Thank you for listening to an old woman’s rambling.”

“You weren’t rambling, Betty,” Kate reassured her. She helped the woman to her feet and watched as she slowly moved to her bedroom doorway. Holding onto the doorjamb with one hand, Betty took an audible deep breath and straightened her spine.

Kate waited until the bedroom door had closed before letting out her own breath. Betty was old but she was a strong woman, emotionally at least. She’d be okay in time.

Kate yawned. She figured with all the police running around they wouldn’t be able to do much investigating for awhile. Might as well take a nap herself.

She glanced at the apartment door. Reassured that the security chain was in place, she trudged into the den and collapsed onto the sofa bed without bothering to remove her robe. She was asleep in seconds.

It never occurred to her that the killer would make another move so soon, with police officers swarming all over the building.

K
ate jolted out of a sound sleep. Disoriented, she tried to figure out what had woken her. Had she heard a scream, or had she just been reliving the morning’s events in a dream?

She was noting that it was almost noon, according to the clock on the wall of the den, when she heard Betty yelling, “Kate, somebody’s breaking in!”

She bolted out into the living room. Betty was standing in the middle of the room, staring at the door. It was partway open, caught at the end of the security chain.

Kate raced to the door and started to shove it closed, only to be met with a resisting force on the other side. She screamed, “Police!”

“That you, sweet pea?”

Kate fumbled with the chain. Mac Reilly was the only person on the planet who called her sweet pea.

Betty watched, horrified, as Kate slipped the chain off and pulled the scruffiest looking man she had ever seen into her living room, then slammed and locked the door.

Kate quickly explained, “It’s okay. He’s a friend.” She turned to Mac. “I didn’t know you were coming up.”

“Rose called. Told me ’bout the other old lady. Figured you could use reinforcements,” Mac replied.

“But why…?” She was totally confused. Mac wouldn’t break in.

“Heard screamin’. Saw the door, partway open,” Mac said in his usual cryptic manner.

Betty finally found her voice. “I heard a noise as I came out of the bedroom. Then the door popped open and caught on the chain. That’s when I screamed.”

“You must have scared him off, Betty. Did you see anybody running away?” Kate asked Mac.

“Just a flash of movement. Behind the foliage. What’s with the jungle out there? Thought I was back in…” Mac caught himself. He had worked covert operations, years ago when he was Special Forces. But he wasn’t supposed to admit to where he had been stationed.

The doorbell rang as Kate was searching in her purse for her cell phone. Skip and Rose had arrived to report that the police were allowing the building to return to normal activity.

Mac awkwardly gave Rose a peck on the cheek, which brought a pink tinge to her skin. He covered their mutual embarrassment over even that small show of affection by brusquely filling Skip and her in on the attempted break-in.

Just as Kate was about to dump her purse out on the coffee table, Skip realized what she was looking for and handed her the cell phone. “Sorry, I forgot to give it back to you. And maybe Lindstrom on speed dial isn’t such a bad idea.”

Kate started to chuckle, then realized he was serious. She located the number and hit the send button. It went straight to the detective’s voicemail. She left a message. Heading for the den to throw some clothes on, she said, “Nobody touch that outside door knob until the police get here.”

But when Lindstrom arrived, that precaution turned out to have been unnecessary. He didn’t seem to take the attempted break-in all that seriously.

After finding no scratch marks on the doorframe, he said, “Probably just somebody confused about where their apartment was. All these doors look the same.” Left unsaid was the implication that old people get confused easily.

Betty gave him an annoyed look. “Except for the big fat apartment numbers in the middle of them,” she pointed out.

Lindstrom just shrugged. “If you’re feeling vulnerable, ma’am, you could move to a motel for awhile. Just let us know where you are.”

Betty’s expression now turned from annoyed to downright angry, and stubborn. “I’m not letting this
bozo
chase me out of my home!”

“Again, ma’am, I don’t think this was an attempt to do you harm…”

Kate interrupted him. “Then how do you explain that the lock was picked, Detective?”

“Mrs. Franklin probably just forgot to lock it.”

Now Betty was shooting daggers at the man with her eyes. “I remembered to put the safety chain on but forgot to turn the lock on the knob? I am not senile, Detective.”

“It’s something anybody could forget,” Lindstrom said, with another shrug.

“Not, young man, when two people have just been murdered in the same building, within the last forty-eight hours!”

Before Kate could interject that she was the one who had locked the door earlier, the detective said, “Speaking of which, ma’am, I need to ask you some questions about Mrs. McIntosh. How well did you know her?”

Tears sprang to Betty’s eyes and her angry expression melted into sorrow. She sank into the nearest chair. Struggling not to break down, she motioned Lindstrom toward the settee. “Frieda was a good friend,” she finally said softly.

Kate sat down in the other armchair. The others stepped back, standing roughly in a line and looking like a military guard at parade rest.

As the detective asked several questions about Betty’s relationship with the deceased, he was having trouble staying upright on the slippery silk upholstery of the settee. It was a piece of furniture designed for nineteenth-century ladies’ tea parties, not for twenty-first century tall, lanky policemen. He had to keep his feet planted firmly in front of him. But he would occasionally forget and relax his legs. Then he would start to slither toward the edge of the antique’s short seat.

Kate struggled to keep a straight face. She glanced over at the others. Only equally tall Skip seemed to have noticed the detective’s plight. He winked at her and pinched his lips together in an effort to avoid laughing out loud.

Finally Lindstrom asked, “Did Mrs. McIntosh have any enemies that you know of?”

Betty paused to wipe her eyes that kept tearing up in spite of her best efforts to maintain control. She chose her words carefully. “Frieda could be provocative. She did not mince words. Some people found her candor… disturbing.”

“Could you be more specific, ma’am? Who found her disturbing?”

“Let me get paper and pencil.” Betty got to her feet and headed for the den. “I’ll make you a list.”

Once she was out of earshot, Kate quietly said, “She’s trying not to speak ill of her dead friend, but Frieda McIntosh was more than just forthright, she was also a gossip.” As Betty came back into the room, Kate added in a normal voice, “Frieda told us that Doris was a flirt, that she even flirted with married men. Maybe there’s a jealous wife involved.”

Lindstrom digested that for a moment. As he rose from his seat, he said, “It never occurred to me to have my people ask about romantic motives with this crowd. I’ll have to add that question to their list…”

Betty interrupted him, giving him a dirty look. “We’re old, not dead, Detective.” Then she looked chagrined at her poor choice of words.