Karma (18 page)

If the murderer hadn’t found her before my race through the buildings here, he could have after I’d left. And—I stopped in my steps—it wasn’t only the crew here I had to worry about. I didn’t know whether they’d heard what Heather had said, but I had repeated all the salient points with Vernon Felcher sitting right beside me. I’d announced where Heather was, what she knew and the fact that she was alone.

I moved slowly to the temple door.

A hand touched my shoulder.

I whirled.

Heather smiled. “You don’t waste much time. But I want to go to Priester’s.”

I leaned back against the temple wall. “Where have you been? Are you all right? No one bothered you?”

“Yeah, sure. I’m fine. I just went to the all-night drugstore. You know that far-out rouge I had? Scintillatingly Scarlet, it’s called. Well, I lost it and—”

“You held up a murder investigation to buy rouge?” The fury was evident in my voice.

Heather turned, stalked to the patrol car and treated me to an icy silence all the way to the restaurant. It wasn’t till after we were seated and she had ordered herself a cheeseburger deluxe, their special salad and a Coke that she said, “Okay.”

“So who’s the killer?” I asked in a half whisper.

“Vernon Felcher, the real-estate man.”

“Felcher!”

“Felcher. Yeah.”

I leaned forward. “How do you know it was Felcher?”

“I don’t
know.
I didn’t say that I knew for sure. I just figured it out because everything points that way.”

“What things?”

The waitress arrived with Heather’s meal and my cup of coffee. Seeing the food, I wished I’d ordered something to eat, too.

“What things?” I repeated.

“Well, there’s motive. I mean, he was Bobby’s father. I can see where he’d be really pissed off that Bobby died in the ashram. I mean, as a mother, I can understand that. I mean, I can see where he might blame Paul.”

I felt irritation setting in. “Any other motive?”

“Well, there’s the land. I know he wants the land.”

“Anything else?”

Heather strained to think. She obviously wanted to tell me enough to ensure her right to leave town. She would have personally placed Felcher before a firing squad if it would have reunited her with Chattanooga Charlie.

“Well,” she said, “there are other things besides motive. I mean, he was right there.”

“Where?”

“He was at the ceremony.”

That was news. Felcher had told me he was at a movie. “Are you sure?”

“Yeah, Leah told me. I remember because I was surprised he’d have the gall to come, particularly on that night when there was so big a crowd they’d had to turn people away.” She looked more confident now. Biting into the cheeseburger, she watched my reaction. My mouth was watering—one reaction.

“His being there doesn’t prove he killed Paul,” I informed her. “As a matter of fact, if he was in the audience it means that he was not under the stage. He was not in a position to knife Paul.”

Heather chewed hurriedly. “No. Umm. Listen, Leah said he was sitting right up front. On the aisle just a couple of rows from her.”

I remembered Leah deVeau, sitting in the front row. I remembered her lifting her hands to Padmasvana. “You’re sure she said he was on the aisle?”

“Ye … yes, I’m sure.”

I sipped my coffee, barely aware of the taste. “Heather, I still don’t see how that implicates him. If he’d gotten up, walked to the back of the room, out and around to the basement steps, through the basement to the trapdoor, to—”

“No. Umm.” She put up a hand and swallowed quickly. “He didn’t have to do that. That’s the point. He would be right by the door under the stage. All he had to do was slip through there, pop up through the trapdoor, plunge the knife and sit back down.”

“Don’t you think that would have been rather obvious?”

“Jesus! Don’t you remember what that room was like? I looked in once or twice during the ceremony. Felcher could have set off a firecracker and no one would have noticed.”

I lifted the coffee cup halfway and held it. Heather had a point. Felcher could have slipped through the stage door, killed Paul and, in the ensuing panic, slipped back into his seat. People had jumped up; they’d screamed; one or two had fainted. It would have been no problem at all to melt into the swarming crowd. Even Felcher, an outsider, would have had no trouble. And, likely, he had access to the murder weapon.

There was one problem with this theory, of course. The Penlops at the door had sworn no one had left the building or grounds after the stabbing, and Felcher had not been on our list of people in the audience. Still, I supposed he could have been there and managed to sneak away somehow.

“Anything else?” I asked as Heather started in on her salad.

“What more do you need!”

“Then that’s it?”

“Yeah. Isn’t it enough? Can’t I go? Chattanooga will be leaving.”

“I can’t let you go until we have an arrest. It could be soon, or maybe not. Get Chattanooga’s schedule and meet him along the way. If it’s true love,” I said with a straight face, “it will survive.”

“Shit!”

Ignoring my suggestions to hurry, Heather dallied over her salad, ordered a slice of banana-cream pie and, finally, announced that she would get home alone. I reminded her that Felcher was loose and that, if what she implied were true, he could be dangerous. Heather was not impressed. She’d walk back along the Avenue, under the streetlights. At the temple there’d be people. She’d be okay, she assured me. And anyway, she kind of knew this guy a couple of booths down and she wanted to say hello and…

Reiterating my warning, I left and drove back across town to Comfort Realty.

The building was dark. Felcher was gone. How soon after Heather’s call had he left? Had he kept the appointment with his unidentified caller? Or had his need to find Heather preempted that?

Hurrying back to the car, I drove to Felcher’s apartment in the hills by the Kensington city line. It was the bottom unit of a duplex and it, too, was dark. I banged on the door to the upper unit. Irritated, a middle-aged woman shuffled down to the door and responded that no, she had not heard Felcher tonight. No, that was not unusual; he rarely came home before eleven. Yes, she was sure he hadn’t been there. She’s been watching a movie on television—one that she was now missing—and she would have had no trouble hearing Felcher’s car.

Could Felcher have left town? Should I alert the airports, the bus depots and the Santa Fe station? Was he somewhere on I-5 headed south? Or driving madly toward the open spaces of Nevada or speeding north for the Oregon line?

Or was he hiding around the ashram, waiting for Heather?

I turned the car, put on the pulsers and raced back down the hill, calling in an all-points to the Highway Patrol on the way.

It was almost seven o’clock. I called in again to ask for backup as I pulled the patrol car up in front of the temple.

Shutting the car door quietly, I started across the courtyard. Footsteps hit the walkway behind me.

I turned.

“Heather!” I stopped. “This is the second time tonight you’ve done that.”

“Done what?”

“Never mind. I’m just glad you’re all right.”

“I’m
not
all right. I’m lousy! Chattanooga Charlie’s already left. Someone at Priester’s saw him pack up. He didn’t even tell me he was going. He didn’t even bother.”

Her face drooped. The scowl that usually marked it was replaced by a genuinely woebegone expression. For the first time, I felt some sympathy for Heather, some sense of kinship. I put my hand on her shoulder. “Come on, maybe it’ll help to talk about it.” It wouldn’t hurt for me to sit in the tepee until the backup crew arrived and listen. I’d run out of nearby places to look for Vernon Felcher, anyway.

Heather nodded, and together we walked across the courtyard. She lifted the tepee flap, stepped inside and screamed.

T
HERE ON THE FLOOR
amid broken makeup bottles lay Vernon Felcher. The back of his head was caved in. His blood had stained the bottles and streaked the white paint on the table as he slid down. There was blood on his jacket, blood on what I could see of his face. And there was blood on the marble lamp, lying beside Felcher’s body.

Pushing Heather outside, I followed, inhaling deeply, trying to control my nausea. Heather leaned against the tepee and retched. I took another breath and started across the courtyard to my car radio.

As I reached it, the backup crew I’d called for arrived. I told them. “It’s a one-eighty-seven—bludgeoned with a marble lamp. Outgrowth of the guru stabbing here Wednesday.”

“Your case?”

“Yeah.”

He nodded with a touch of disappointment. Of course, he hadn’t seen Vernon Felcher’s body. He hadn’t known Felcher alive. “I’ll run logistics: you want to take the suspects, since you know who they are?”

“Right. Thanks.”

In another ten minutes the courtyard was alive with lights, as warm with uniforms. The photographer and the print man arrived and headed for the tepee. The Penlops were herded into the dining room for questioning, their formerly glazed countenances now sullenly angry. One backup man went to find Braga, two more covered Joe Lee and Leah. And one drove off to keep an eye on Garrett Kleinfeld.

Another had taken Heather to my car. She was sifting stiffly in the back seat when I arrived. I glanced at the patrolman, but he shook his head to indicate nothing worth reporting had happened.

I slid in beside Heather. “How are you holding up?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I keep seeing him, with his blood spattered all over my bed and my dressing table and my suitcase and my clothes.” Her hand tightened on her knee.

“Heather,” I said, “I want you to tell me exactly what happened tonight when you called me, and after.”

She shook her head. “What do you mean? I called you.”

“From Braga’s office, right?”

“Yes.”

“Did you notice anyone outside the window?”

“No. I mean, I didn’t look. You know, I really wasn’t thinking about that. I mean, I just decided to call you. I had to put all my energy on that. It wasn’t easy to get the police station to tell me where you were. I had to tell them it was life or death.”

Her voice trailed off, and we both sat silent for a moment, thinking of the prophetic value of her words.

“Then what did you do?”

“I met you and went to the restaurant.”

“Before that.”

“I told you, I bought the rouge. Do you want to see the sales slip?”

“That’s great, really great, Heather. You realize if you hadn’t waited that hour, we would have got back here sooner and Vernon Felcher wouldn’t be dead.”

“You can’t blame me! I didn’t ask him to get murdered in my tepee. That’s my home. Where am I going to sleep tonight? What about my suitcases? And my clothes? This is the thanks I get for trying to help you!”

I
had
overreacted, but an apology did not seem called for. I sighed. “Vernon Felcher overheard enough of our conversation to know what you’d told me. Why do you think he came here?”

She thought a moment, then shuddered. “He overheard, and he came to my tepee? He must have been after me.”

“Wait. You didn’t say you suspected him then. You said that later. Then, you only said you knew who the killer was. So, if Vernon Felcher didn’t stab Paul—and the odds are now that he didn’t—why would he come here?”

When Heather didn’t answer, I asked, “Was it to see you?”

“What? No. I told you I didn’t see anyone. Why would Felcher want to see me?”

“He might want to know what you knew. He might have been worried about you.”

She laughed. “I doubt that. He wasn’t interested in anything but land.”

I considered that. “Okay, Heather, after I left you at the restaurant, what did you do till you came back here?”

“I talked to this guy for a while. You know, the one I told you about. He’s kind of a strange guy, but he’s a great dancer. He’s—”

“Heather!”

“Okay, I was with him about ten minutes. I would have stayed longer, but he had his old lady with him, and she was getting very uptight and finally she stood up and made a big deal about wanting to split. So I left and came back here.”

“I’ll need his name and address.”

“Okay. I can give you his name—Bill Katz. I don’t know for sure where he lives. Somewhere around the Avenue. Now can I go? I might be able to catch Chattanooga in Eureka.”

“What?”

“Can I go now?”

“Heather,” I said, slamming my note pad shut, “don’t even think about leaving town. You’ve already handed me this line about knowing who the killer was—”

“I didn’t say I knew. What I told you was true. Felcher was in the temple. He could have slipped through the stage door. He could have done it.”

“Or you could have. Twenty-five percent of murders are committed by the victim’s husband or wife.”

She glared at me, her long sandy hair vibrating with her rage. “I wasn’t Paul’s wife, if that’s what you mean.”

“Close enough. You’re the mother of his child.”

“No.”

“No?”

“I’m not the mother of his child.”

I took a breath. This case had been filled with false representations—Paul Lee had not been a guru; the insignia on the murder weapon had not been a Buddhist or Bhutanese symbol—but this was too much for me to accept. “Heather, I can’t believe you’re not Preston’s mother.”

She shook her head in disgust. “Of course I’m his mother. But Paul wasn’t his father.”

Before I could ask, she added, “Joe.”

“I didn’t think she’d ever admit it.” Joe Lee sat back in his desk chair in the attic room. “Yeah, I’m Preston’s father.”

“Didn’t you mind everyone thinking Paul was his father?”

“Yeah, I minded. Of course I minded. It wasn’t my idea. All of a sudden Heather was telling everyone that. And Paul didn’t care. That was at the time he was beginning to get into being guru. He said something about everyone being fathers to everyone else.”

“And you did nothing?”

“What could I do? Who would have believed me?”

“There are blood tests.”

“Paul’s and mine were the same type.”