Fat-Free and Fatal (A Kate Jasper Mystery) (6 page)

Maybe his illegitimacy was the reason that Wayne had wanted to marry me so badly. Whatever his reasons, I was glad he had finally settled for living with me. My first, and last, marriage had left me gun-shy. And up to the time of Vesta’s arrival, Wayne and I had been happy together, fixing our separate vegetarian and meat meals, but sharing our lives and a bed.

Sweat dripped down my forehead. I closed my eyes. That wasn’t a good move. Sheila’s strangled body flashed into my mind instantly. My eyes popped open and I wondered how much time would have to pass before that image would fade from my mind’s eye. I splashed my way out of the tub much to C.C.’s loud disapproval.
Wayne
, I thought,
I’ve got to tell Wayne
.

He was waiting for me in the bedroom, sitting on my velour-draped Goodwill couch. His face was creased by lines of misery.

“Kate,” he greeted me as I walked in, the lines in his face softening.

He was with me in three long steps. He scooped me up in his arms and held me to him, soaking the front of his flannel shirt. If he noticed I was wet, he didn’t say so.

By the time he set me back down, he was apologizing about Vesta, about himself, about everything. Two hours later, he was still apologizing and making plans to move Vesta out of my house. I never did get a chance to tell him about Sheila Snyder’s murder. I fell asleep with my head on his chest and dreamed of strangled bodies rising like Lazarus.

I didn’t get a chance to tell him the next morning either. Wayne got up, cooked Vesta breakfast and told her she would have to leave. Vesta began to cry in long heart-rending sobs.

I sat at my desk, paying Jest Gifts bills, and listened to Wayne’s gruff voice get progressively higher and more defensive in the kitchen. He didn’t look me in the eye when he kissed me goodbye. He growled “business downtown,” and left.

Vesta looked me in the eye, though. I was lucky she didn’t spit in it. She flounced into my ex-dining room, now my home office, and gave me a big smile.

“You’ll never win,” she told me.

I wondered if she was right. If this was a game, the score was about forty-five to zero, her favor. But I smiled back steadily until she left my office to sit in the living room, where she complained loudly that I had to be crazy not to own a television set.

Once she was gone, I grabbed my Safeguard check ledger, a calculator and the stack of bills on my desk and threw them all into a box. I added payroll cards and some tax forms. I knew Wayne probably did have business downtown at one of the string of restaurants he owned and managed. But if he wasn’t going to stick around, I wasn’t going to either. I didn’t have to work at home today. I didn’t have any designing to do, only paperwork. I could visit the Jest Gifts warehouse across the bay and work in that closet we called the office. Or I could go to the library and work there. I could even go to Barbara’s if she was home today. As a free-lance electrician, she made her own hours. I dialed her apartment number, betting she’d be there.

“Hey, kiddo, I was waiting for your call,” Barbara told me as she picked up the phone. Maybe her psychic powers had returned. “You can work over here if you like,” she added, confirming my guess.

I was halfway out the door when the phone rang. Vesta pounced on it. I heard her talking in a low voice. Wayne? I wondered. Or maybe a pesky salesman?

Shrugging, I picked up my box of paperwork and started down the stairs.

“Oh, Kate,” Vesta called out cheerily.

Why was her voice so friendly? I dropped the box and walked back up the stairs.

“Your husband, Craig, is on the phone,” she said.

“My ex-husband!” I snapped and reached for the receiver, remembering how Vesta’s eyes had lit up when she had met Craig. My ex-husband would have liked to be my husband again. He wasn’t pushy about it, but his desire was obvious. Vesta was only too delighted to encourage him.

“What do you want?” I greeted him curtly.

“Just to see how things are with you,” Craig answered cheerfully. “Vesta tells me you and Wayne aren’t getting along.”

“Goddamm it!” I shouted. “That is not true!” I saw Vesta’s rapt face watching me and modulated my tone.

It took me another ten minutes to convince Craig that Wayne and I were doing fine. Just fine, thank you. Then I left for Barbara’s, wishing it were true.

Barbara met me at her apartment door wearing a ratty turquoise T-shirt under farmer’s overalls. She still looked like a fashion model. But it was the piece of paper in her hand that caught my attention, the sign-up sheet for last night’s class.

“Hey!” she greeted me, smiling into my worried face. “Don’t worry. We’re just gonna talk to a few folks.”

“Barbara,” I said, holding my box of paperwork out in front of me. “I’ve got work to do.”

Her face grew more serious. “So do I,” she told me. “I turned down two possible gigs today. But settling this murder is far more important.”

She motioned me through the doorway. I sighed and walked in. Barbara’s living room was furnished with a couple of blue futons folded into couch position, an old arcade fortune-teller machine featuring a woman’s head in a gypsy scarf that lit up and nodded and cackled when you put in your nickel, a few stacks of books, and a dozen crystal balls. They were real quartz-crystal balls, mounted on carved stands all over the room.

“We don’t know that it even
was
one of the people in the class who murdered Sheila,” I argued as I set my box down. “How about letting the police handle it?”

“It was someone in the class,” Barbara told me, her eyes serious. “I’ll bet it was because she hit her little girl.”

I pushed a pile of tarot cards to the side of the nearest futon and took a seat. “If people went around killing everyone they saw hitting children,” I replied, equally serious, “there would be a helluva lot more dead bodies around.”

None of my arguments made a dent in Barbara’s resolve. Half an hour later, we were making phone calls. Barbara was in her bedroom using her personal phone line. I was in the living room using her business line. And worse, I was setting up appointments to see potential murderers in person. I’d agreed to the plan only when Barbara had promised me that we would visit any suspects as a team. Her capitulation had been all too swift. I rubbed my throbbing temples. I had been suckered again.

I got Alice Frazier the first try, on duty at the reception desk of the Stanton-Reneau Insurance Agency in downtown San Francisco. And Meg was there too, Alice told me, doing temp work. I invited them to lunch. Alice put me on hold for a minute or two, then returned to accept the invitation. Barbara and I could meet them at their office, she told me. She sounded perfectly happy about the arrangement, unafraid. That made one of us.

I called Iris Neville next. She was breathless with excitement at the prospect of being interviewed.

“So glad to be included,” she assured me.

I told her we’d see her within the hour, and wondered what was wrong with these people. I could be the killer. They should be nervous.

I was on my way into Barbara’s bedroom to tell her the news when she yelled my name. I ran the last few steps, visions of murder, even kidnapping, flooding my brain. But Barbara was only held captive by the screen of her television set.

“Look,” she said pointing. “Our murder’s on TV.”

“—deeply upset by this recent act of violence,” a well-dressed, olive-skinned man with large mournful eyes was saying to a microphone-wielding reporter. “The members of the San Ricardo Police Department are working around the clock to discover the identity of the perpetrator.”

“Lieutenant Madrid, do you have any suspects yet?” the reporter asked.

“I cannot say at this time,” the man answered.

As the reporter turned back to the screen, Barbara touched a button on her remote control and the picture disappeared.

“Jeez-Louise,” she said. “If that’s the head of the detective bureau, we’re in trouble.”

I shrugged my shoulders. However politic his words, Lieutenant Madrid had a better chance of solving this murder than we did.

“Okay,” Barbara said, all business now. She picked up a notebook. “There’s no one at Ken Hermann’s but an answering machine. I left a message. Leo didn’t write down his last name, but his phone number is connected to an art gallery. The woman who answered said Leo’d be in most of the day. Paula Pierce and Gary Powell wrote down the same number, but it’s busy.” She paused to scribble down some notes, then looked up at me. “So what’d you get?” she asked.

Barbara was impressed when I told her about our two appointments. She leapt off her bed and gave me a big hug in celebration, then changed into a pair of beige slacks and a conservative silk print blouse in a matter of seconds.

I looked down at my own MY CAT WALKS ALL OVER ME shirt, complete with paw prints. My mother had given it to me for my birthday.

Barbara saw the look and tossed me a lavender silk blouse. Luckily she wore her clothes loose. I changed into the silk blouse and tucked it into my jeans. I wondered if she’d let me keep it.

I was glad I was wearing the silk blouse when we got to Iris’s house in the San Ricardo hills. Iris was in silk too, an embroidered, cream-colored silk tunic over matching pants. She opened the door and her wide blue eyes took in our outfits approvingly.

“Oh, my,” she said, “you both look so nice.”

I imagined that she was comparing
my
blouse to the zoo T-shirt I had worn the night before. I’m often subject to these flashes of style paranoia.

“What a beautiful tunic,” purred Barbara.

That got us into the living room, a large, beautifully decorated room in tones of gray, mauve and cream. A group of couches in muted floral patterns formed a conversation area at one end of the room. A grand piano dominated the other end.

“Do you play?” I asked politely. I figured it wouldn’t be socially correct to ask her outright if she had murdered Sheila.

“Yes, I do,” she trilled. She toyed with what looked like a chopstick stuck into her silver French twist. “Are you musical, yourself?” she inquired.

I shook my head violently. The closest I’d ever been to music was an old boyfriend who had strummed the guitar far more lovingly than he had me.

“You could play piano with those fingers,” she said, looking at my hands.

She reached toward me. “May I?” she asked and clamped her cool fingers around my wrist, pulling my hand up in front of her intent face. “Such nice, long fingers. Such a good spread,” she said, stroking the fingers in question.

“Uh, thanks,” I replied, feeling vaguely embarrassed, as if she’d peeked at my underwear. She let go of my hand.

“My fingers, alas, were never long enough to be a true concert pianist’s,” she confessed, holding out her small hand as evidence. “I practiced and practiced when I was a girl. I had the ear, but not the hands.”

She sighed and put her inadequate hand to her chest. Tragedy became her. Her strong features were noble in their sadness, her straight back unbowed.

How in the world was I going to segue into murder? I checked for Barbara at my side. But she was gone, looking at a series of photographs on the wall behind the piano.

“Ah, you’ve found my little collection,” said Iris, her voice cheery again.

I stepped past the piano and looked more closely at the rows of framed black-and-white photographs. They were all pictures of pairs of hands. Nothing else, just rows and rows of disembodied hands. An image of Iris’s small hands wrapping electric cord around Sheila’s neck superimposed itself onto the wall of photos. I swallowed hard and it disappeared.

“These hands are Liberace’s,” she told us, pointing to a pair at the bottom. “Can’t you just see the music in them?”

I nodded insincerely.

“And these are Van Cliburn’s,” she continued.

She pointed out the hands of some two dozen musicians, then went on to other celebrities: Saddam Hussein’s—”so evil,” Albert Schweitzer’s—”such kindness in them,” Richard Nixon’s, John F. Kennedy’s, and on. And on. Finally, she reached the top row.

“Let’s see if you can guess whose hands these are,” she challenged us, her finger on a photo at the far end of the row.

They looked like everyday hands to me, four fingers and a thumb each. I glanced in Barbara’s direction. It was going to take a psychic to come up with a reasonable guess.

“I’ll give you a clue,” Iris said. She smiled broadly. “Murder.”

“Murder?” I repeated, my voice squeaking.

“Speaking of murder,” said Barbara calmly, “did you see anything suspicious last night?” Not the most graceful segue, but certainly better than I had accomplished.

Unfortunately, Iris hadn’t seen anything suspicious. She hadn’t known Sheila Snyder, nor anyone else in the class previously. She couldn’t imagine who had done such a thing. And she was very sorry she couldn’t be of more help.

We did learn that she had been a nurse before she married her late husband, Norris, a dear man who had also played the piano. They had owned a lovely little music store in San Francisco for many years, such a joy. Now she volunteered her time at hospices and shelters for abused women. So many good causes.

She asked us if we’d like some tea. She had herbal, she assured us, and some delicious little cookies from the health food store. I felt a pang of guilt as we refused. This woman was a different breed of social creature than I, but she was intelligent, lively, and good-humored. And she was lonely. You could see it in her eyes, especially when she spoke of her late husband.