A Candidate for Murder (17 page)

“Then it’s too glary. I’m fine, Mom. Honest.”

Mom bent and kissed my forehead. “See you later, honey,” she said, and gently shut my bedroom door when she left.

It was quiet in the house. The telephone wasn’t ringing
because I’d taken it off the hook. I would have liked to talk to Allie, but I absolutely had to catch up on my homework. I knew that Velma would be snug in her apartment off the kitchen, watching her usual television programs. Dexter, of course, would have gone to his garage apartment right after an early dinner. It was wonderful, for a change, to have a quiet house that wasn’t filled with people. And I didn’t have to worry. The police were keeping an eye on the house. Occasionally I’d seen a police car drive past, and I was awfully glad to know they were nearby.

An hour later there was nothing left to eat, and I was practically falling asleep over some long poem by Robert Browning, which at the moment wasn’t making sense, when I heard the small squeak of the creaking board outside my door.

As I reached up and snapped off my lamp, the darkness swooped in, smothering me. My throat was dry, and I was afraid to breathe. I sat very still while my eyes grew used to the dark. I waited. And waited. And listened intently for another sound.

A narrow streak of light from the hallway lay like a bright border at the bottom of my door, but as I watched, a shadow broke it, then another.

Someone was standing right outside my bedroom door!

F
rantically, I looked toward the telephone, but it would take too long to hang up, wait for a dial tone, and call 911. And it would make too much noise. Whoever was in this house was waiting and listening, too.

At any minute he was going to enter my bedroom, and there was nowhere I could hide.

But as I stared at the shadow, holding my breath as he shifted his feet, it came to me that there was one place in which he wouldn’t see me if he opened the door. I’d hide
behind
the door.

Carefully and slowly, I stepped closer and closer to the door and the shadow, knowing that at any moment the person outside the door might open it, and we’d be face to face. Numb with terror, I saw the doorknob begin to turn, and I slid into place against the wall just as the door opened. My heart pounded.
Please
, I begged,
don’t let him hear it!

The shadow, accented by the light in the hall, stretched its long dark limbs across my carpet and grew into the figure of a man who walked into the middle of
my room. Cautiously, he turned his head from left to right as he scanned the room, and I could easily see who he was. Dexter.

What did he think he was doing, creeping into my room!

I couldn’t confront him here. I didn’t know what he had in mind. I only knew that I needed help. And soon. At any moment he might turn around and discover my hiding place.

I moved forward stealthily, squeezing around the edge of the door. Then I ran, my adrenaline pumping like super-fuel, propelling me down the stairs.

“Cary!” Dexter shouted. “Stop!” He was right behind me.

I jumped the last three steps and ran across the entry hall, yelling, “Help! Velma! Help me!”

But a hand came down on my shoulder, and I was spun around so hard I fell against Dexter.

He righted me, keeping his grip on my shoulder, as he said, “I didn’t mean to scare you. I didn’t know you were home. I thought you’d gone with your parents.”

I could hardly get the words out. “What are you going to do?”

“Apologize,” he said. “That’s what I’m trying to do.”

“Why were you in my room?” I took a deep breath and tried to speak more normally.

“I thought I heard someone upstairs. I had to check it out, so I went upstairs to look around.”

“I wasn’t making any noise. I was just sitting there, reading.” I jerked my shoulder, trying to pull away, and Dexter released his grip.

“You may not have been aware of making noise,” he said. He stood a little straighter, held his chin a little higher, and assumed his usual expression of detachment. “One’s chair squeaks; one brushes a foot against the desk. It’s easy not to notice.”

Dexter was back to being a butler, but I knew he wasn’t a real one. I’d caught him off guard, and now I was sure. He was a fake.

What was he
really
doing upstairs while he thought Mom and Dad and I were out of the house?

Velma scurried into the entry hall, fumbling with the tie on her robe. “What’s the matter, Cary?” she asked. “What are you doing here? I thought you were in Fort Worth with your parents.”

“I’m afraid I unwittingly startled Miss Caroline,” Dexter told Velma. “I believed that the entire family had gone, so when I heard a car pull into the drive, then leave, I wanted to be positive that the house was secure. I was in the living room when I heard a sound over my head, so I went upstairs to find out what it was and, in the process, I frightened Miss Caroline.”

I wished he’d stop talking like that. He didn’t have to. I’d heard him when he’d dropped the butler pose.

I realized that Velma was looking at me, waiting for whatever I’d have to say. What could I do except go along with Dexter’s smooth explanation? “It was about like that,” I mumbled. “I didn’t know Dexter was in the house.”

“Why didn’t you go to the barbecue?” Velma’s thoughts made an abrupt shift. “Oh, my, you didn’t
have dinner. Are you hungry? Do you want something to eat?”

“No, thanks,” I said. I looked at Velma, unwilling to meet Dexter’s eyes, and mumbled, “I’m sorry I got so upset and made so much noise. Okay?”

“Okay,” Velma said and smiled reassuringly.

“Of course,” Dexter said. His steady gaze felt like lasers boring into my skull.

Velma. The envelope. I suddenly remembered. Velma had told me that Sally Jo brought it, and I’d taken it upstairs and hidden it. Was that envelope what Dexter had been after? Or was it me?

“Good night,” I said and made a dash for the stairs. Once I was safely inside my room, I carefully locked the door.

I slipped the envelope from under the clothes in the bottom drawer and dumped out the contents on my desk, under the reading lamp. There was a short note from Sally Jo in which she said she was enclosing a computer printout about Ben Cragmore.

“I skimmed some of it,” she wrote, “but didn’t have time to go through it in detail. We can do this tomorrow. John Lamotta is in each of the pictures. Do you recognize him?”

Did I ever!

There were three newspaper photographs—small groups of men—and even though the faxed copies weren’t as clear as real photographs, there was no mistaking the man I’d seen with Ben Cragmore.

And there was no mistaking the girl in the fourth
photograph. The caption underneath that photo identified her as Francine Lamotta, John Lamotta’s daughter.

I read through the printout next. There were a million uninteresting things in it about Ben Cragmore. I did find out that he’d been before a grand jury a couple of times but hadn’t been indicted. There was something about a sale of stock under question and about falsified receipts on supplies, but he’d never been officially charged, and he’d never gone to trial. However, he’d been sued at least a half-dozen times by other firms. Twice he’d lost and had to pay up. One case was still on appeal.

He’d had companies and partnerships under a number of names, and all his partners and company officers were listed. I studied the lists of names carefully. Lamotta was there, but it wasn’t John. It was Francine. I bet her father hid behind her name. It was easy to see why Mr. Lamotta couldn’t let it be known he was one of Ben Cragmore’s partners, since he was on the governor’s staff and probably had a lot of influence in deciding where contracts would be awarded.

There was information about Mr. Cragmore’s professional and social clubs; the taxes he paid; the value of his property; and even the members of his family, which included a wife, Mabel Broussard Cragmore, three grown children, Ben, Jr., Robert, and William, a brother, Horace, and Mabel’s mother, Nora Broussard.

Nora!

I nearly swept the papers off the desk. Nora! It had to be the Nora who’d called me, didn’t it? The Nora who’d
know why I was in danger. The printout even listed all their addresses.

I had to talk to Nora. She held the key to this whole thing. Nora had wanted to talk to me before but had chickened out. I might get her to change her mind and tell me what she’d wanted to say. Should I tell that detective, Jim Slater, about Nora? No. I was sure Nora would never talk to the police.

I called Justin. “You said you’d help me,” I told him.

“I will,” he said. “Anything you want, Cary.”

“I think I found out who Nora is. I want to go and see her.”

“Right now?”

“No,” I said. “Can you make it after school tomorrow?”

“Sure. Want me to pick you up, too?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’d like that a lot.” I wished I could reach through the phone and hug him. Everything was better than ever between Justin and me. He couldn’t possibly know how lonely I’d been without him. I was selfish enough to hope that he’d missed me just as much.

All everybody at school could talk about was Cindy and the crazy driver. It hadn’t occurred to anyone that the driver’s actions were deliberate. Things like that didn’t happen at schools like ours.

After classes, when I climbed into Justin’s car, I said, “Could we stop by the campaign office for just a couple of minutes, first? I’ve got some questions to ask Mr. Sibley.”

Justin grimaced. “As long as those women don’t make me carry heavy boxes around.”

“You can stay in the car if you want to. I won’t be long.”

Justin parked on Commerce Street, just a few doors from the office, and I went inside. As I came through the front doors, I saw Mr. Sibley going down the hallway toward the back offices.

I followed him, but Delia grabbed my arm and managed to pat my shoulder at the same time. “Thank goodness you’re here,” she said, as she steered me toward a table near the back of the room. “There are jillions of things to get done, and two of our steady helpers are home with some kind of virus.”

“I can’t stay,” I told her. “I just stopped by for something.”

Delia rolled her eyes as though it was all she could expect from me and strode toward the front door to greet a woman who had just come in. I ducked down the hallway after Mr. Sibley.

He saw me, I know he did, but he scooped up a large, heavy cardboard box that was probably filled with trash and staggered with it out the back door into the alley. Good. A private place where we could talk was exactly what I wanted.

I slipped through the door just before it shut. “Mr. Sibley, could I please talk to you?” I asked.

His eyes were frightened. He dropped the box on the ground, looked to each side as though searching for an escape route, then suddenly slumped, his shoulders rounding, as though he’d given up.

“What’s the matter, Mr. Sibley?” I asked him. “I just want to talk.”

“You want to ask me questions about the address I gave.” He sounded so defeated I hurt for him.

I spoke softly, the way I would to a skittish animal. “Yes. I wondered why you gave the address of a vacant store on a nonresidential street.”

“Because I’m no longer clever,” he said. “I picked a street name at random from the Dallas phone book. I should have chosen the right kind of house on the right kind of street. Then no one would have suspected.”

“I don’t understand,” I told him. “You gave a phone number where you could be reached but the wrong address.”

He raised his head and looked into my eyes. “And you want to know why. Is it so important?”

“I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t.”

He just stared at me for a few moments, his pupils distorted and blurry behind the thick lenses, so I said, “Mr. Sibley, there have been some—some threats.” I didn’t know what to call them.

At this he jerked as though he’d been given an electric shock. His voice was a whisper as he asked, “You think I’ve had something to do with threats?”

Mr. Sibley sat on an upturned crate near the trash bin and rested his forearms on his thighs. “These clothes I wear,” he said. “Have you ever wondered why I wear the same clothes, day after day?”

Of course I had, but I couldn’t tell him that, so I didn’t answer.

“I wash my shirt and iron it each day. I take my pants
and vest to the dry cleaner when I can because I have no other clothes suitable to wear to this office, only a set of khaki work clothes to change into.”

“Mr. Sibley,” I began, miserable at his embarrassment, but he interrupted me.

“The telephone is not in my name because I don’t live in a home of my own. I live in a recovery house, a halfway shelter for former drug abusers.”

“Oh,” I mumbled and frantically searched for the right thing to say. I couldn’t find it.

He sat upright, and again his eyes met mine. “I used to be a successful accountant for an oil company—not your father’s,” he quickly added. “But I’ll never be able to go back to the kind of life where I work and socialize with intelligent and interesting people. This political volunteer work is the closest I can come to the lifestyle I once knew.”

Tears came to his eyes, and he grunted, “Now this is over, too.”

“No!” I cried out. “I won’t tell anyone what you told me. I promise!”

“I believe in your father’s ideas,” he said as his face flushed a deep red, “even his tough stance against drugs.”

“Then please keep working for him,” I begged.

Mr. Sibley got to his feet and tried to lift the large cardboard box up over his head to drop it into the trash bin, but it was so heavy he couldn’t raise it that high. I hurried to help him, taking one side of the box, but just in time I jerked it back, nearly knocking poor Mr. Sibley
off his feet as I shouted, “Stop! Wait! These are some of the brochures!”

Mr. Sibley stared at the contents of the box in astonishment and blushed again. “It was next to the trash box,” he said. “I picked up the wrong box. I made a mistake.”

I hoisted the box into my arms and walked to the back door, waiting while Mr. Sibley opened it for me.