Murder Among Friends Read online

  “Did you move anything?”

  Talbot turned and looked at me. I returned his stare, trying to think only bland thoughts so nothing would appear on my face. He was good at reading expressions and emotions. No, he was simply good at pushing all my buttons.

  “I didn't touch anything,” I said firmly. I even added a smile for good measure.

  Paul simply shook his head.

  “How are you, Mrs. Roberts?”

  There, the first comment directed solely at me.

  “I’m just fine, thank you.” If he noticed the pleasantries weren’t reciprocated, he didn’t comment.

  Turning, I walked off in the other direction. The study windows faced an inner courtyard and I stared, unseeing, at the elephant ear philodendrons. I wondered what precautions Evelyn used to protect them from the occasional freezing days of winter. I looked at her bookshelves. Were there any books there I hadn't read? Would it rain soon? This was Texas. We always needed rain. What would Maude make for dinner?

  I was trying to think of anything but Evelyn being dead.

  My hands were shaking, so I clasped them tightly together. I wanted to be gone from here, away. I'd read something. I'd watch TV. I'd go to sleep and when I woke, Evelyn would be at the back gate, standing there with a tray, a smile, and a story about her day.

  Paul came to stand beside me. Before I could move away, he enveloped me in a hug.

  “I don't know what I would've done without you, Jennifer. She loved you so much."

  I closed my eyes, held onto him for a moment, then pulled back.

  He didn't, thankfully, seem to expect me to say anything. Words were the cork on my tears. If I spoke them, the tears would escape.

  I made my way to the kitchen. I was opening the door when I felt a touch on my shoulder. I saw a green sleeve out of the corner my eye and took a deep breath before turning.

  “If you can think of anything else,” Talbot said in that quiet manner of his, “will you let me know?”

  “When haven't I cooperated with the police?”

  Too many times to count. The unspoken admission hovered in the air between us.

  He didn't rise to the bait, and I suppose that made him a better person than I. He only smiled, nodding once before closing his notebook and stepping back, all Mussolini green and black leather.

  I could feel his gaze on me as I left the house. Instead of following the path to the alley connecting the rear of the houses and adjoining a dense strip of trees - we call it the Woods, which is pretentious as hell, but we do things like that in the King Lion District - I retraced my steps and walked around to the front of Evelyn’s house.

  My head was down, my gaze on the cracked sidewalk. Tom said once he’d seen me in the mall and stood there watching as I’d crossed the expanse of tiled floor. Not once had I looked up, as if afraid I might fall if not monitoring my feet.

  “Who are you mad at?” he asked me when I reached him.

  “No one," I said, surprised at the question.

  He smiled, then, and patted me on the arm, one of those avuncular gestures he was fond of performing. If Tom ever kissed me in full view of anyone, I’d be surprised enough to faint.

  “I guess that’s your thinking face, then,” he said.

  So here I was, walking back home with my thinking face on.

  Why hadn’t Paul called 911 himself? Why come to my house?

  Today was one of those warm and wonderful days in October where the sky is a brilliant blue and the hint of night blooming jasmine lingers in the air.

  The red oaks had just barely begun to fade to copper. Autumn had finally come to Texas, but it did so grudgingly, and would extend the season long past its normal boundaries. When the rest of the country would be celebrating winter, the leaves in San Antonio would finally fall. When snows blanketed the northern states, we Texans would be holding our sweaters together and grumbling about the cold, never mind it was barely fifty degrees and breezy. We might get down to the twenties, but the winter weather only lasted a few days.

  Mrs. Maldonado nodded to me from across the street. The matriarch of the Maldonado family was a short, rotund woman with a thick head of black hair. For years I thought I terrified Mrs. Maldonado, because every time I approached her, she retreated, nodding at me, smiling, and tucking her hands beneath her apron. More times than I can count, I’ve been left standing alone in the driveway with a burgeoning smile of friendship glued to my face. But a conversation with her son revealed the older woman didn’t speak any English. Evidently, she had no faith in my Spanish, such as it was.

  Now, I didn't even bother attempting to communicate beyond a smile.

  Across the street, Mr. Fehr stood on his front lawn holding a rake. He’d had heart bypass surgery a year ago and went walking every night with his roommate. The two gentlemen were nearly indistinguishable from each other. Their balding heads looked like the stamens of flowers, knobby and pale, too fragile for their even more delicate necks. They had the same shrunken shoulders and caved in chests.

  Someone must have told them they looked good in their silk shorts, because each man insisted upon wearing them despite the weather, revealing pale sticks of legs ending in calf high athletic socks and thick sneakers. The walking outfit was topped with white T-shirts and wide watches I suspected doubled as blood pressure monitors.

  Tom refers to Mr. Fehr and Frank as “those” men. He has never, in any way, fashion, or form every criticized their lifestyle. But he wouldn't, being in the law and cognizant of the potential for litigation.

  Sometimes, I think Tom is strangled by the legal system he loves. One day, he may have a nervous breakdown and simply start saying all those politically incorrect comments he's been restrained from uttering all these years.

  Mr. Fehr leaned his rake against a tree and came toward me in an oddly endearing knock kneed gait.

  “What happened?” he asked, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down in his neck like a yo-yo.

  “Evelyn is dead,” I said, as gently as I could. The words, only three of them, lodged in my throat. I pushed back my emotions, and concentrated on Mr. Fehr's reaction. When I was alone, I would cry, but not here and not now.

  His mouth wrinkled up, making the bridge of his nose fold into itself.

  “Dead? Murder?”

  “No,” I said, surprised.

  “No knife wounds? No bullet holes? No blood?”

  “I’m afraid not,” I said, wondering at his questions. He’d never struck me as a particularly bloodthirsty man before. “It looks more like a heart attack.”

  “Are you sure?” he asked when I remained silent. “I never liked that Paul character. Any man who lives off a woman isn't really a man.”

  “I don’t think he was living off Evelyn,” I said. “Isn’t he an artist?”

  His snort of disgust told me how he felt about that.

  Paul was a stained glass artist, but I’d never seen anything he’d done. He and Evelyn had only been together a few months and in that time my attention had been directed inward.

  I hadn't cared about anyone or anything, even myself.

  I turned to say goodbye, conscious of the stillness in the air. Then I realized the workmen had quit. I glanced at my watch. I'd gotten so used to the hammering over the last few weeks that I noticed it only when it stopped.

  When Tom learned the price paid for the house on the corner, he chortled for days. The ensuing noise of saws, drills, and hammers was one of the prices we paid for living in a newly discovered area. San Antonio hadn't suffered the downturn in the economy as most cities. For that matter, Texas was booming while other states were hurting in the recession.

  “When are they going to finish?” I asked.

  “They're nearly done,” Mr. Fehr said. “They have the downstairs molding to do, new windows, and the rest of the lighting."

  I wasn't surprised Mr. Fehr knew their schedule. If there was an unknown car in the neighborhood, Mr. Fehr wrote down the license plate.
If a dog didn't have a leash, he had its tag number. If a neighbor was slow to mow his lawn, Mr. Fehr left a diplomatically worded note in his mailbox. Most people thought him a pain, but I understood him. He was trying, in his own way, to keep his world as normal as possible.

  Good luck with that.

  Fresh out of endurance and wanting to be alone, I said goodbye and turned toward my house.

  The steps I'd descended earlier now loomed like the Himalayas. The back entrance was more level and there weren't any steps to climb. I began the slow trek up the driveway. Instead of facing Maude, I closed the door softly and turned right, heading for my office where I shut the door.

  Only then did I cry for Evelyn, and a little for myself.

  3

  Tom worked late, which was just as well. I didn't want to talk to him. I'd called him a few hours ago to tell him about Evelyn. After passing through his gatekeeper, Claire, a woman of great skill and tact, I finally told him what had happened.

  "I'm sorry to hear that," he said, taking the news of Evelyn's death with an annoying composure. "She was a good friend to you."

  She was a good friend to you, too. What about all the times Evelyn had steered business your way? What about all the times she'd called to tell you she'd given your card to one of her customers?

  I didn't say anything, dancing to the waltz Tom and I had perfected over the last eight months. Instead, I listened while he said he'd be late again, then dressed in a caftan, brought a pot of tea to my sitting room, and sat on my chaise.

  When my daughter was still a newborn Tom and I had gone to Christmas candlelight service, leaving Barbara at home with my mother. The choir had begun to sing "What Child is This?" and the image of an infant had flashed into my mind. The front of my dress was suddenly soaked with breast milk. I clutched my coat around me, and frantically whispered to Tom that we had to leave.

  What had happened to me was letdown, the spontaneous release of breast milk in response to a thought or a feeling. For the last few months, I'd been experiencing a similar phenomenon. Not breast milk, but tears.

  At one of my orthopedist appointments, I noticed a picture of his family on his desk and burst into tears at the sight of his teenage daughter. At the bank, I hadn't been able to stand in line after seeing a beautiful little girl in her mother's arms.

  Everywhere I went, something reminded me of my daughter. A certain hairstyle, a look between mother and daughter, a laugh – they were all acute and painful reminders of my loss and my changed life.

  Limiting my exposure to the outside world had been my way of protecting myself from those moments.

  Evelyn had known that yet she'd never left me alone for long. She'd come over and talk about anything and everything, forcibly giving me a breathing space between me and my life. She'd created, with her friendship, a buffer zone.

  "I love cowboys," she said a week or so ago.

  "You don't know any cowboys."

  "I do," she said. "The owner of the Bar M Ranch. I'm the officer on his account. Do you know, I've never had a conversation with him without him calling me ma'am? It doesn't matter what I say. Call me Evelyn. Call me Kermit. It's always ma'am."

  "Do you like being called ma'am? Ma'am."

  "I like the courtliness of being called ma'am, Jenn. I like being a little old fashioned."

  "Evelyn, you're living with a guy younger than you. You're hardly old fashioned."

  "Okay, maybe parts of me are old fashioned. Other parts aren't." She wiggled her penciled eyebrows at me and I had no choice but to join in her laughter.

  Even now, her laugh seemed to echo through my sitting room.

  I already had a huge hole in my heart. Now it seemed to expand to include losing Evelyn.

  How was I going to make it?

  I heard Tom come in, go into his study, and drop off his briefcase. He always brought it home and only rarely opened it. I asked him once what would happen if he left his briefcase at work. He looked at me as if I'd confessed to being a Martian before shrugging.

  My husband was not a garrulous man.

  I stood, walking with some stiffness because that's what my leg does after being in one position for awhile. Standing at the entrance to our bedroom, I asked him the question that had been bothering me all afternoon.

  “Why didn’t he call 911?”

  He ignored me, because he'd already begun to perform his nightly ritual - Undress, a play in one act. Each night, it was the same progression of steps, never varying from his routine.

  Tom was, as many young women in his firm have coyly remarked to me, distinguished looking – code for handsome when you're talking to the wife. Although he's in his late forties, he's one of those men who aged well. His eyes were blue as the Texas sky, his chin was firm, and he was as trim as he was in college.

  He removed his belt, then his shoes, pants, socks, tie, cufflinks, shirt, and underwear in that order. During the latter stages of Undress, he surveyed himself in the mirror – head up, slight turn, experimental smile – making me wonder when I'd become invisible

  No doubt his physique came from playing golf weekly as well as an occasional game of tennis. Or maybe it was due to his and Maude's strategizing. They concocted a dietary regime from which he rarely strayed: raw vegetables and some fruits, whole grains, chicken and salmon.

  Maybe he got some of Maude’s cookies.

  He didn’t talk during his disrobing ritual, but now it was finished, he still hadn't answered me.

  "Why do you think he didn't call 911?" I asked.

  He frowned. “Shock affects people in different ways, Jennifer. You can’t judge him based on your emotions.”

  True, and perhaps I had.

  Our tenth wedding anniversary present to ourselves had been a new addition to the master suite. We have separate bathrooms, a development for which I credit the fact we've been married twenty years next May.

  I heard him start the shower, so I went to sit on the end of the bed. I'd made a game out of timing Tom's showers. Seven minutes, start to finish. I'm sure he had a regimen of what got scrubbed when, but there's such a thing as too much knowledge in a marriage.

  “Maybe I'm being too hard on him," I said when he came out of the bathroom attired in his pajamas. Another difference in our lives. He never used to wear pajamas, sleeping naked until a few months ago. I can't remember exactly when he'd made the change.

  "Maybe, subconsciously, I think he’s a gigolo, like Mr. Fehr intimated,” I said.

  Tom looked blank. “Who?”

  “Paul Norton.” Hadn’t he heard anything I'd said?

  He headed for the bed, pulling down his side of the comforter.

  “Have you had a bad day?” I asked, turning to face him.

  Once he used to tell me about his cases or talk about the partnership. When had it stopped? Why hadn’t I noticed that sooner?

  “It was all right.”

  “Do you want to talk about it?"

  "There's nothing to talk about. It was a normal day at the office."

  He glanced at me as he plumped his pillow. Another ritual. When had they become so annoying?

  “Tom, what's wrong?"

  “My day was fine, Jennifer. Leave it alone.”

  He got into bed, removing the slippers he'd worn from the bathroom. An oddity that he didn't like bare feet while I hated to wear shoes.

  Wasn't it strange that, after being married so long, I was seeing our differences with greater clarity than our similarities?

  “Aren’t you upset about Evelyn?”

  He sighed. “Of course I’m upset about Evelyn. But I’m not going to analyze it to death like you. I’ll miss her. Isn’t that enough?”

  He regarded me in silence. Rumors floated about from time to time that Tom was being considered for a judgeship. With that look, he was guaranteed to strike fear into any approaching lawyer or defendant. But I'd seen him at his best, as well as his worst, and wasn't easily bullied.

  Maude could intimid
ate me, but not Tom.

  He grabbed his IPad, concentrating on something more important than me, repudiation in a gesture.

  “What’s wrong, Tom? You might as well tell me.”

  “When I'm ready to talk, I will. Until then, you’ll have to wait.”

  My fishing expedition had caught something. Did I really want to know what was on his mind?

  No, I didn’t. Not tonight.

  Without a word, I returned to the sitting room and sat on my chaise. Sally roused and put her head on my knee, a summons for attention. Although she tolerated Tom well enough, Sally was very much a one woman dog. I smoothed my palm over her head, watched as her ears folded back and disappeared in a sign of unbridled ecstasy.

  I wish I could please my husband as easily as I did my dog.

  Standing, I left the sitting room, Sally making a snuffling sound as she accompanied me. The staircase was in the center of the second floor, a waist high railing around it. At either side of the stairs was a hallway. Our bedroom was at the end of one. Tom's study was next door. Barbara's bedroom and three guest rooms were in the other corridor. I walked a path from one end of the second floor to the other, my leg a faint chorus of pain, high notes and low aches.

  Our house is a hundred and fifty years old and loud. The roof timbers groan. The narrow stairs in the back sometimes pop, the wood swelling like an old woman’s joints. Doors squeak, pipes gurgle and moan, the wind kicks hard against the walls and makes the house shiver.

  The most difficult sound for me is the echo of my own footsteps.

  The house has the original wooden floors. We sanded them ourselves, a job I'll never do again. They shine due to Maude's attention. I can hear each of my footsteps, the sound echoing against the high ceilings, warning the rooms of my approach. Even my sneakers make a muffled thump as I walk. Tonight, my slippers slid, whisper-like, across the well polished floor.

  I felt like a ghost. I should sound like one, too. Silent until I wish to be heard.

  I have nothing to say.

  On the second pass, I stopped in front of my daughter's room, as if to recall its one-time inhabitant.

  I couldn't open the door. I rarely did anyway, but Evelyn's death had made me doubly vulnerable. Instead, I placed my palm flat against the wood, bowed my head, and prayed for the strength to face another day.