Widows' Watch (8 page)

Thursday, September 30, 1:00 P.M.

When Leo returned to headquarters, Elena told him that the bicycle lineup hadn't worked out.

“Couldn't they pick one?”

“Oh yeah—a pink ladies' cruiser and a green Schwinn—both with baskets. The suspect vehicles belonged to Pete Amador's daughter and Manny Escobedo's girl,” said Elena dryly.

“Well, both of them admitted they couldn't see well. Even if they'd identified one of Potemkin's bicycles, they wouldn't have made good witnesses. So let's check into the son's background. Where do you want to start?”

“How about with the people who live downstairs? See if his alibi checks out.” Leo agreed and they headed for the first floor of the prairie bungalow, where a bleary-eyed woman came to the door. They identified themselves, and Elena's first question was, “Are you ill, ma'am?”

“Don't I look it?” said Carlene Whittier. “If I didn't have the mother of all flus, I'd be at work. And if I were you, I'd stay down the end of the walk.”

Elena and Leo cast startled glances at one another. “Do you think you could have caught it from Lance Potemkin?” asked Leo.

“Are you asking me if I'm having an affair with Lance?” said Mrs. Whittier, amazed. “I gotta sit down.” Waving them in, she staggered back to her living room and sank into a large, pillowy orange recliner. “He's gay, and I'm happily married.” She began to cough.

“Yes, ma'am, but he's your tenant,” said Leo.

“Right. Best tenant we ever had. Pays on time. Isn't noisy. Doesn't have pets.”

“We're interested in the period from September twenty-sixth to September twenty-ninth, particularly the twenty-seventh. Did you see him then?” asked Elena.

Mrs. Whittier fell into a coughing fit, then gasped, “Would you hand me that brown bottle on the coffee table?”

Elena gingerly picked the cough medicine up, glanced at it, and passed it to the woman. The label, sticky with spilled liquid, said “Phenergan with codeine.”

“Haven't seen him in a couple of weeks,” said Mrs. Whittier after drinking straight from the bottle.

“Did you hear him moving around upstairs?” Elena pressed.

“That's—ah—Sunday through Wednesday, right? Hand me that appointment calendar.”

Leo passed Mrs. Whittier the notebook, and she thumbed through. “I was in Houston on business Monday. Probably where I caught the damn flu. Can you believe this? Flu in September? Anyway, I didn't get home till—I don't know—eleven-thirty Monday night. Didn't hear anything. I was at work Tuesday and Wednesday. Didn't hear anything those nights—or Sunday, and I was home all day getting ready for the trip.”

“You didn't see or hear him on the steps?”

“Nope.”

“Do you usually?”

“Nope,” said Mrs. Whittier. She plucked two Kleenex from the box beside her chair, blew her nose, and tossed the used tissues on the floor.

Elena winced, picturing little flu viruses crawling across the carpet in her direction. “What about your husband? Did he mention seeing or hearing Lance?”

“Call him.” Mrs. Whittier gestured toward the telephone. “The number is 555–7955.”

Elena didn't want to pick up that telephone. She turned her back to Mrs. Whittier, surreptitiously wiped off the receiver with her jacket sleeve, wishing she could spray with Lysol, and called Mr. Whittier, who hadn't seen or heard Lance either, not Monday night when his wife was away, or any other time.

“You didn't see him leaving for work in the morning?”

“No,” said Mr. Whittier, “but then he leaves before sunrise. Rides a Merlin Titanium. That's a bicycle,” he added.

“Right. Seems to me you might have heard him taking it downstairs since he keeps it hanging on his wall.”

Mr. Whittier's answers were somewhat difficult to make out because Elena, virus conscious, was holding the receiver as far away from her ear as she could.

“He's a very quiet tenant. Is that my wife coughing?”

“Yes, she's pretty sick.”

“Boy, I hope I don't get it,” said Mr. Whittier.

Silently Elena echoed that thought.

“Why are you asking about Lance? Is he kin to the Potemkin who was killed earlier this week?”

“His father,” Elena replied.

“And you think Lance did it? Well, everyone knows about the police department. If they can pin it on a gay, they will.”

“Mr. Whittier, I assure you—”

“If you take him to trial, I'll testify as a character witness. He's the best tenant we ever had.” Mr. Whittier hung up.

Mrs. Whittier, having finished her coughing spell, took another swig from the brown bottle.

“You can get pretty zonked out on codeine,” Elena cautioned.

“That's the idea,” said Carlene Whittier. “I'd rather sleep this off than stay awake coughing and sniffling.”

“Do you know anything about Lance's relations with his family?” Leo asked.

Mrs. Whittier drank some orange juice and replied, “His father's a troll.”

“A troll?” Leo looked surprised.

“A gnarled little guy with arms down to his knees and hair sticking up in every direction.”

Elena nodded. That wasn't a bad description of the late Boris Potemkin. “How did you happen to meet him?”

“I didn't,” said Mrs. Whittier. “He showed up here one evening, stood outside, and yelled at Lance for about fifteen minutes. Lance never even opened the door. I'm not sure he was there, but I gathered that the old man was furious because Lance had visited his mother in the hospital. Is that weird or what?” She plucked another tissue, blew her nose, then leaned her head wearily on one hand. “What's this about anyway?” she asked in a hoarse voice.

“Lance's father was murdered,” said Elena.

“You're kidding.”

“On Monday. Do you remember what Mr. Potemkin said—exactly? When he was in your front yard.”

“He said he'd shoot Lance if Lance ever got near the mother and no flowers. He said don't send her flowers.”

“And Lance didn't say anything?”

“Nope. So he's in the clear. Right?”

Neither Elena nor Leo commented on that dubious conclusion. As they were walking to the car, Leo said, “Now we know the old man threatened the son at least twice. Maybe Lance killed his father in self-defense. Went over to visit his mother, found Boris there instead; they got into an argument—”

“Boris didn't have a gun at that point,” said Elena. “Lance had the gun. Did he tell us exactly when he took it?” Elena got her case notebook out to jot down the information from the Whittiers and to check Lance's statement.

“Well, he didn't say it was the day of the murder,” Leo replied. “And Mrs. Potemkin didn't mention any other guns at the house. On the other hand, Lance may have really had the flu. Mrs. Whittier does.”

“And Marcella Escobedo.”

“Let's hope we don't get it,” said Leo. “So maybe Lance is telling the truth.”

“If he'd been coughing like his landlady, they'd have heard him,” said Elena.

“If they were home. Anyway, we need to find out more about Lance—and his family. I couldn't pull up anything on them from the computer files.”

“There's the university,” Elena suggested. “He went to U.T. Los Santos. And we could hit that gay bar he worked at. He told me it was the Gemini Lounge. Maybe he still goes there.”

“Yeah, we're gonna be real welcome at the Gemini. We might try for people who were taking English at the university when he was a student.”

“Gay bar first. Bartenders know a lot, and it's easier to get them to talk when there aren't a lot of customers hanging around. Besides that, in the middle of the afternoon we're not likely to get mobbed by gays who have quarrels with the department.”

They climbed into a blue Ford Escort, whose paint had long ago disappeared from the hood and roof, and headed for the Gemini Lounge, where they talked to Barney Allsop, bartender-owner.

“Sure I know Lance,” said Barney. “So what's up? You cops gonna start harassing gays again?”

One cop steps out of line, and all the rest of us pay for it, thought Elena. “We understand Lance worked here.”

“Yeah. Four or five years ago, when he was in college.”

“How did he happen to choose this particular job?”

“It paid good, and he was trying to get through school without any support from his family.”

“Family too poor to help?” asked Leo.

“The old man discovered Lance was gay and kicked him out.”

So much for Gloria Ledesma's theory that Lance had caught homosexuality at the bar, thought Elena.

“Not that they were paying his tuition,” the bartender continued. “His father was a first class s.o.b. Whoever offed him did Lance a favor, but if you're trying to pin it on Lance, forget it. He's not the violent type.”

“You know who Lance's friends are these days?” asked Leo.

“If I knew, I wouldn't tell you.” Barney Allsop turned away and began to rearrange his liquor shelves.

“Was Lance in here on Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday?” Elena asked.

“Sure, he's in here all the time.”

“Which night?”

“Every night.”

“Was he in here Monday afternoon?”

“Sure was.”

Elena looked around the bar, which was practically empty.

“He says he was home sick with the flu,” said Leo.

“So maybe it was some other afternoon.”

Elena and Leo made a few more stabs at pinning down smart-mouth Barney Allsop, failed, and went to the state university where they checked yearbooks for graduating English majors, then the alumni files. They found one creative-writing graduate from Lance's year who was listed as a shoe salesman in the Westside Mall.

When they arrived at Shoe-gri-la, the one salesman was trying to sell a pair of gold evening sandals to a woman with thick ankles. “They're wonderful for formal occasions,” he assured her.

“I don't know,” she said. “Ninety dollars is pretty expensive.”

“Are you F. Scott Manning?” Leo asked the salesman, flashing his identification.

“Yeah, what's up?”

Leo drew him aside. “We understand you were a friend of Lance Potemkin at the university.”

“I knew him,” said Manning. “We were both creative-writing majors.”

“We're looking into Mr. Potemkin's background,” said Elena, edging F. Scott toward the counter in back.

“You think he killed his father? That was his father who got shot the other day, wasn't it? Or maybe you're looking for homosexuals. He's gay, you know.”

“We know. Can you tell us anything about his relations with his family?”

“He wrote some very Freudian poetry in a class we took together. Father-figure as the Great Satan. You know.” He glanced over at his customer, who was still preoccupied with the price of the sandals.

Elena wrote down “Great Satan,” doubtful that you could convict a man on his poetry. “Could you tell us who any of his friends were at that time?”

“Well, I'll tell you who his best friend was. Professor Donald Mallory. That's how Lance got his A in Renaissance Poetry. A lot of us were really ticked off about that. We graduate and can't get decent jobs, and Mallory moves to Herbert Hobart to teach Shakespeare to a bunch of rich kids and takes Lance with him. Now Lance is getting published, and I'm selling shoes.”

“Have you got a bow to clip on these?” the customer called, glaring at Leo and Elena. “I was here first, you know.”

“A bow?” The salesman suppressed a look of horror and, grabbing a display card, circled the row of chairs separating him from the woman. “I have just the thing you want, ma'am.” Selecting a pair of wide gold bows with gaudy rhinestone accents, he clipped them to the instep straps of the sandals. Elena, who could see the result from her place by the cash register, wondered how anyone could consider spending ninety dollars on a pair of shoes after making them look that bad.

Leo beckoned F. Scott back. “Would you know whether Professor Mallory and Mr. Potemkin are still—”

“—making it?” asked the shoe salesman snidely. “How would I know? Lance doesn't belong to any of the local writers' groups. Why should he? He gets published.” F. Scott scooted away again. “They're stunning on you, ma'am,” he said to his customer. “I'd never have thought of the bows.”

The woman looked pleased.

“And those are wonderful shoes for dancing,” added F. Scott.

“Well, I guess I'll take them, but I don't know what my husband will say about the price.”

Elena and Leo thanked the shoe salesman for his cooperation and drove off in their Escort. “I hope we don't have to do any big movie-type car chases in this baby,” said Leo.

“Yeah. Feels like it's going airborne on the curves,” Elena agreed as they snaked their way up the mountain toward Herbert Hobart University, where they discovered that Professor Donald Mallory was out of town at a Modern Language Association meeting, his plane not due in Los Santos until six o'clock. They were informed of this by Lance, who flushed when they asked to see Mallory.

“Are you still investigating me?” he demanded. “I gave you my father's gun. I let you search my apartment without a warrant and take my bicycles. What more do you want? Do you have to—to harass my colleagues?”

Elena wished there'd been some way to get at members of the English Department other than going through Lance.

“You seem to be over your cough,” said Leo.

“What cough?”

“You said you had the flu. Your landlady has it, and she's coughing.”

“She didn't get it from me,” Lance muttered.

“She didn't hear you coughing either,” said Leo.

Looking anxious, Lance hit a button on his computer. The printer burst into noisy life, and paper began to inch over the roller to the accompaniment of ratcheting sounds. Elena wondered whether he was hoping to drown out further questions.