Knit Your Own Murder (8 page)

L
ater
that day, Betsy wondered again what would happen to the property on Water Street. She called her attorney, Jim Penberthy, to ask.

“Real estate, especially commercial real estate, is not my area of expertise,” he said. “I think the property belongs to Ms. O'Leary's estate. But let me check and I'll call you back.”

Betsy returned to the struggle to assign her part-timers slots that met her needs and the desires of her employees. One never wanted to work on Wednesdays, another wanted to work only half days, and the third wanted to continue working even though she was two weeks overdue in her pregnancy.

So it was a relief to take a break when the phone rang. But it wasn't Penberthy. It was Bershada.

“Welcome home!” Betsy said. “How was the wedding?”

“Don't ask. And now Chaz is hanging around my house
making me crazy. I finally sent him to the store, but he'll be back in a few minutes. Will you please take him off my hands for a couple of hours? He would be wild to talk about Maddy with you, if you'd care to ask him.”

“Yes, I'd like that very much. I was going to ask him to talk to me about her, if he would. What would be a good time?”

“Well, what are you doing this evening? Could your menu possibly stretch to a third person? Be warned, he eats like a horse.”

“I think we're having beef stew. I'll call Connor and ask him and call you back.”

Connor said he'd make biscuits to stretch the stew and prepare something with Jell-O to fill in the cracks. “Do you want me to make like a hoop and roll away after dinner?” he asked.

“No, please don't. You have a good ear for things; you might pick up something I miss.” Betsy called Bershada back to say yes, and she said, “He's right here, talk to him.”

In a few seconds a very pleasant man's voice came on the line. “Hello? Mom told me about you, but I don't think I've ever met you.”

“Not formally,” said Betsy, “but I saw you at Maddy's funeral and was impressed, plus I've often heard good things about you. Are you available to talk this evening? We'll feed you supper.”

After a brief, surprised pause, he said, “Well, sure! Okay! What time?”

“About six thirty?”

“Okay. Thanks.”

“Now, can I talk with your mother again?”

“Sure.” His voice faded as he talked away from the phone. “Mom, she wants to talk to you some more.”

In a few seconds Bershada came back on. “What is it?” she asked.

“You said you helped Harry Whiteside's second wife pack her clothes when she left him.”

“Yes, I did.”

“Were you and she friends?”

“Yes, she volunteered at libraries all over the nine counties that make up the Twin Cities, and the first time she came to Excelsior, we struck up a friendship. I didn't pry too much, and she liked that. But we talked about everything else. She was especially good with children, which was my area of expertise at the Excelsior library. She started coming regularly, and every time we'd wind up talking nineteen to the dozen, at work, over lunch, even sometimes over dinner. She was a kind woman, with a silly sense of humor the children loved.”

“Did she talk about her husband?”

“Not at first. If I asked her about him, she'd say, ‘Oh, he's so busy with work, I've almost forgotten what he looks like.' Or, ‘I'm glad I've got my volunteer work. Harry doesn't want me to work for pay, and I'd go crazy just sitting at home, especially now all the boys are gone.”

“So how did you find out she wanted to leave him?”

“She came to work with a bruise that went from just above her left eye nearly to her jawline. She'd tried to cover it up with makeup, but it wasn't just black and blue, it was swollen. I marched her into the ladies' room and ordered her to tell me what happened. She tried to say she'd fallen, but I could tell she was lying, and she started to cry. He
didn't often hit her, but when he did, he'd do it where the bruise didn't show. And he was always telling her she was worthless and stupid—all the things that that kind of man does to his wife. She absolutely refused to make a police report, I think because she was afraid he might kill her. She said she'd been secretly saving money and had just barely enough for a bus ticket to Columbus, Georgia, where her sister lived. But this hit on her face was absolutely the last straw. I drove her home and helped her pack and took her to the station and sat with her until her bus was called. She wrote me a few weeks later, saying Harry had found out where she was and called, but her brother-in-law told him that if he came down there, he'd introduce him to his backhoe in the east forty and nobody would ever see him again.”

Bershada chuckled and said to Betsy, “He must have sounded very convincing, because Harry didn't even come down to contest the divorce.”

“Do you still correspond with her?”

“We did for about eighteen months, then she wrote she was getting married and moving to Costa Rica, and that's the last I heard from her.”

*   *   *

I
t
was just about closing time. Betsy was running the cash register and Godwin was cleaning the toilet when the phone rang.

“Crewel World, this is Betsy, how may I help you?” she said into the receiver.

“Betsy, this is Jim Penberthy. I was right about the Water Street property. The estate has possession of it—or rather the option to buy it. They can either proceed with the
purchase, or they can offer the option to interested parties. But the original owner no longer has any ownership in it.”

“Well, that's interesting. Thanks, Jim.” So that at least removed one motive for Joe. Killing Maddy and Harry didn't give him the right to buy the Water Street property. It did, however, give him the opportunity, which he'd lost when Maddy won it in the original auction if her executor decided to put it out for bids.

*   *   *

C
haz
arrived about five minutes early at the downstairs entrance. Betsy opened the door to her apartment to wait for him.

He was as she remembered him, a little above medium height, slim, his face a masculine echo of his handsome mother's, and as dark complexioned. His hair was cropped short. He wore a dark red wool shirt under a light tan leather jacket, close-fitting jeans, and moccasins. An interesting touch was his pair of gold-rimmed spectacles—he hadn't worn glasses at the funeral or in the shop. They gleamed in the staircase lights, hiding his eyes.

“Ms. Devonshire?” he asked as he came up the last few steps into the broad hallway outside her door. His voice was the pleasant tenor she remembered from the funeral, unaccented.

“Yes, and thank you for agreeing to come.”

“No problem.”

She stepped back, gesturing for him to come inside.

C
haz
paused in the entrance hallway to the Devonshire apartment. It was small, with a narrow door that was very probably a coat closet. A nice warm smell of beef stew, the kind with a mix of vegetables, was in the air. Beyond the closet door on his left was a galley kitchen, and in the kitchen stood a tall white man with graying hair, his two hands working in a big bowl. Facing Chaz was Betsy, a short, plumpish, middle-aged blonde with penetrating blue eyes. She was wearing a long blue skirt the color of her eyes and a pale ivory sweater in a complicated weave. She was smiling—she had a nice smile—and had her hand out, so he took it.

“Hello, Chaz,” she said in a warm, pleasant voice. “I'm glad you could come.”

“Hi, Betsy,” he replied. “Offer to feed me, and I'll follow you anywhere.”

She chuckled. “This way.”

She turned and led him straight ahead to a wide, low-ceilinged living room. She let him pause for a few seconds to take his jacket off and look around the room.

The walls were painted a quiet mauve, and the carpet was a very pale cream, which Chaz thought daring. These people must rarely have visitors, especially children, over. On the wall to the right was a triple set of windows covered with drapes that were two shades darker than the carpet. Under the window was one of those cat beds that looked lined with sheepskin, and in the bed was a very large cat with tan and gray spots on its head and down its back. It regarded him with cool yellow eyes. A second cat bed, this one dark brown, was unoccupied.

Betsy came back from hanging up his jacket. “Would you care to sit down?” she asked. She went to stand beside a couch upholstered in narrow stripes of mauve, olive green, and cream with too many hand-stitched pillows on it. But it looked comfortable—and was, once he moved two pillows aside.
Why are women so nuts about pillows?
he wondered. “Thank you,” he said. “This is a really nice place.” Because apart from the pillows, it was.

“Thank you,” Betsy said.

The tall man, who looked somewhere in middle age but was very fit, came into the living room from the other end of the kitchen. “Hello,” he said, and Chaz stood up.

“Connor, this is Charles Reynolds, Bershada's son.”

“Call me Chaz,” Chaz said.

“Chaz,” repeated Connor. “I'm Connor Sullivan. Nice to meet you.” He came forward, and the two shook hands. “Dinner will be ready in about fifteen minutes.”

“Great.” Chaz sat back down. Betsy sat in the comfortable
chair positioned ninety degrees to the couch, and Connor sat at the other end of the couch.

Betsy's chair was an olive green wingback chair, low to the floor so it suited her petite stature. Behind the chair was a silver lamp with a flexible neck curved to look over the shoulder of someone sitting in it, and beside it was a small wooden folding frame holding a bag made of napless carpet. He'd seen those carried by his mother's stitching friends.

She sat back and said, “I think you may have important information to share with me. Your mother explained how I'm involved in trying to solve Maddy's murder?”

Her blunt question, coming in this comfortable place, struck him to the heart. Would he never even begin to heal? “Yes. I hope I can tell you something useful. But where do I begin?”

“I think by just talking about her. Her death hit you hard, I know. I'm so sorry that Maddy was taken like that, with no warning. But it's helpful that you agreed to talk with me about her. You probably knew her better than anyone. What was she like?”

“Well, like Pastor Woodruff said, she was a difficult person,” he said, reluctantly admitting to an obvious fault, “especially at first. But she was totally amazing once you got to know her. She was strong and smart, and she taught me more about business than all my college courses put together.”

“How long did you work for her?” asked Betsy, reaching sideways into that carpet bag, pulling out a long and narrow notepad. Where had he seen a pad like that? Oh, right, in a newspaper reporter's hand. Saves half a second when
you don't have to come back across a wide notebook when taking notes. Interesting that she had figured that out, too.She opened the pad, pulled loose a pencil stuck crosswise into its middle, and scribbled something on an upper corner of the page—probably the date, or his name. Or both.

“Seven years, or close to it. I started out collecting rents and trying to talk tenants into using automatic withdrawal to pay rent. Our tenants are good people, most of them, just trying to get by or even move up a little. But sometimes . . . disorganized.”

“Are you acting on behalf of Maddy's estate?”

Did she know this was an ardent desire of his, to remain involved in Maddy's business? Wait, she couldn't know. He said, “No, but I've got an appointment with her lawyer tomorrow. I thought it was about going over the books with him. Do you think—?”

“Think what?”

“That they'll let me continue to work with her properties?”

“I don't know. Would you want to do that?”

“I sure would. I really got to like the work. There was always something interesting going on, problems to solve, tenants and plumbers and glaziers and all to deal with, money to be collected, repairs to be made. She even taught me how to bypass locks some tenants would put on themselves. Plus—” He had to stop. How to explain?

Betsy said, “Plus it's a way of keeping her alive. I did the same thing with my shop. It was my sister's, and when she was murdered, it was a comfort to me to keep it going.”

“You really do understand! Thank you!”

“You're welcome. How familiar are you with the way her business was run?”

He sank back. “Only with the rental stuff. She had all kinds of properties: houses, stores, apartment buildings, even a lumberyard.” He shrugged. “And, of course, she was a real estate agent, too. I didn't know how big-time until I saw she was going after the Water Street property. That thing is going to cost millions to buy and build. Millions.”

“Was she overextending herself to try for it?”

“Oh, I think she must've been, yes. Or, no. Well, maybe.” He laughed at himself. “I really don't know. I thought I knew her business affairs pretty well, but I probably didn't.”

“Was she secretive?”

He twisted his shoulders in discomfort. “Not exactly. People thought she was . . . blunt. And of course she was. She'd say right out what she thought about things, if she was willing to talk about them at all. If she didn't want to talk, she wouldn't say anything. Like, when I first started to work for her, I thought she owned a couple of houses and an apartment building on the north side of Minneapolis. Then I found out she owned a couple of houses in Uptown. And a store. Then more houses in south Minneapolis, a small lumberyard in Golden Valley—and a start-up construction company up halfway to Duluth. Whenever she widened my responsibilities, I'd find out she owned more property. The latest was I found she had this plan to build a multipurpose building in Excelsior. She never hinted at something, she'd just spring it on me.” He shrugged, smiling wryly. “I think she liked to surprise me.”

Betsy was busy writing all of this down. Then she looked up from her pad to ask Chaz another question. “She usually struck me as angry or impatient. Was she like that with you?”

“Oh yes,” Chaz said. “That was her at her core. I think she was born mad.” He grinned. “I got used to it. She barked a lot, but she never bit me.”

“And she paid you well.”

“Yes, she did. She even bragged about me, in her own way. ‘At least Chaz doesn't shout at tenants for being late,' she'd say to a building manager she was about to fire. ‘He's a chameleon, he knows how to get along with anyone, even me,' she'd say to someone asking how I kept on working for her.”

“How do you know she said those things about you if she never said them to your face?”

“Sometimes she'd leave the door to her office open just a little bit. She never praised me to my face, but she did that eavesdropping-enabler thing enough times that I began to realize it was intentional.”

His nose twitched. Was that the lovely smell of biscuits baking?

Betsy nodded, made a note, and said, “Now to the hard part: Did anyone you know truly hate her?”

Chaz laughed. “Oh God, yes. People she evicted would write terrible things about her on their Facebook accounts, or in anonymous letters, or even in spray paint on walls or the doors of their former houses or apartment buildings. People she outdid on business deals, too. Well, the business people didn't resort to spray paint. They'd sue. I think she kept one of her attorneys on speed dial.”

“Did any of these people threaten her life?”

“Frequently.” He smiled, remembering.

“How serious were these threats?”

“They were mostly just venting. Maddy didn't take them
seriously. Except some of the people who threatened to sue. She got right on those cases. Only one actually came to court while I worked for her, and she won that case.” He snapped his fingers. “Like that.”

“Did she ever sue anyone?”

Chaz nodded. “A couple of times, mostly small claims cases. One big one, but it got dismissed.”

“Against anyone we know?”

Chaz looked uncomfortable. “Harry Whiteside,” he admitted. “I think she was in the right, but Harry had a big-time law firm on his side, so she never had a chance. But at least she fought him to a draw.”

“Now, let's turn my question around. Who was Maddy angry with? Was there anyone she hated?”

Chaz leaned back into the couch and fell silent. Betsy bit her tongue, and Connor, after a glance at her, followed suit.

“Oh God,” sighed Chaz. “Harry came to Maddy's office a few days before he was killed. Now, he'd come before, just a few times, like less than once a year. I think there was bad blood between them going way back. Years before I came to work for her. I'm not sure what started it, or when, but whenever they communicated with each other, they tried to do it by letter or e-mail. If it was necessary for them to meet face-to-face, the temperature in the room would drop about thirty degrees when he walked in, and then the mercury would start to rise until they both came to a boil. Then the shouting would start. And a funny thing, she would meet him in the outer office where I could overhear at least the first part of their conversation. Maybe she wanted him to be aware there was an eyewitness.”

“What would they argue about?”

“Deals they were making. She'd find a property she liked and then discover he was the one selling it. Or vice versa. Or she'd bid on a project and find herself dealing with him somehow, like maybe he was financing another part of the build, or bidding against her. She was always sure he was rooking her somehow, and he was sure she was doing the same. He'd swear to God that one day she'd regret ever knowing him, and she'd say that he was the one who'd be sorry, and when he left she'd sit in her office knitting ninety miles an hour until she cooled off.”

“And this last time was different?”

He nodded. “It was like he was the one who won the bidding war. He was smirking and, and . . . well, it's hard to describe. He was standing like a winner. No, worse than that, like he was standing over her dead body and glad to be there.”

“Do you think he'd found some kind of weakness in the deal?”

He sighed lightly. “Well . . . no, I don't think so. Oh, I don't know! Like he beat her in some other area. Yeah, like that.”

“So this bidding war they got into wasn't just about acquiring the property.”

“No, it was about ‘doing' the other.” He grimaced.

“Was she expecting him to come in that day?”

“Yeah, I think so. She didn't act surprised to see him. But the look in his eye—and the look in hers—made me break out in a sweat watching them, scared they'd lose it and she'd grab my laptop and smack him upside his head, or he'd knock her down. But neither one of them ever took that swing.”

“What did he say that was different?”

“He said, ‘Have you had your windows replaced yet?'”

“Had there been some windows broken in her properties?”

“Not that I knew of. But there must've been, because that's when I got scared she was going to pop him one.”

“Does she have properties you're not aware of?”

Chaz stared at her, and suddenly she laughed. “Like you would know about some building you don't know about.”

He nodded, grinning. “Yeah, like that.” The grin faded. “On the other hand, if there was damage somewhere, I should've known. That was one of my jobs, arranging repairs. Or even doing them. I'm pretty good at replacing windows. Plumbing, not so much.”

“So what do you think?”

“I think you're right, there's a piece of property I don't know about, that nobody is supposed to know about, but Harry found out. And it's damaged; someone broke some windows.”