Amanda Matetsky: Murder Is A Girl’s Best Friend

“Anyway,” he went on, “it doesn’t matter if anything else was stolen or not, because if it was, it was taken just for show. This was no burglary, I’m telling you! Judy was intentionally murdered! And her apartment was trashed because the murderer was looking for something specific-something he never was able to find.”

Terry was so adamantly convinced of his theory, I found it hard to argue with him. “What do you mean by something specific? ” I asked, crushing my half-smoked cigarette in the glass ashtray. “Do you know what the murderer was looking for? And how do you know he never found it?”

“Because I found it myself!” Terry declared. He locked his eyes onto mine and pierced me with his pure blue stare.

“Go on,” I coaxed. “Tell me everything.”

“I’ve been living in Judy’s apartment for the past three weeks,” he began, speaking very slowly and intently now. “I had to come into town to identify her body… then I stayed on to make her burial arrangements… sell off her furniture and stuff… pack up her clothes for Goodwill… clean all her blood off the carpet…” His chin started trembling again. “I had to dispose of the food and pack up the dishes-clear everything out of the apartment for the landlord. That’s when I discovered it, when I was sorting through the stuff in the kitchen cabinets.”

“Discovered what?” I urged, acting as solemn as Madame Curie, but feeling as sleazy as Hedda Hopper. I probably shouldn’t admit this to you (or anybody else, for that matter), but rather than shrinking from the horror of the things Terry was telling me, I was yearning to know all the dirty details. The truth is always lurking in the details. “What was it you found?” I asked again.

Terry sat up straight, lifted his chin, and squared his wide, muscular shoulders. “The buried treasure,” he announced in a deep, resounding, pirate-like voice. “I found the buried treasure.”

I thought my ears weren’t working right. “What did you say?”

“I found it yesterday afternoon,” he went on, “wrapped in tissue paper and buried in a box of Quaker oatmeal.”

“Oatmeal?” I asked, suddenly wondering if, along with his courage, Terry had lost his marbles in Korea, too.

“I took everything, including the oatmeal, straight to the police first thing this morning,” Terry rattled on, “but they still don’t believe me. They said this doesn’t prove anything. They’re so damn sure Judy was killed during a random robbery, nothing’s ever going to change their minds!” His face was turning purple now.

“What-exactly-did-you-find?” I pronounced the words calmly and carefully, as though speaking to a hysterical child.

“Here! I’ll show you!” he cried, in a voice so clamorous the fat gray-haired woman sitting to our right looked up from her macaroni and cheese and gaped openly at us, her heavily rouged cheeks sagging in surprise. She continued to stare as Terry shoved his hat and gloves aside and slid the Thom McAn shoebox into the center of our small table. He untied the twine, lifted the lid, and pulled out a cylindrical cardboard Quaker oatmeal container.

“Go ahead, open it!” Terry said, pushing the round, red-white-and-blue cereal box toward me. “See for yourself what’s inside.”

I was so curious I wanted to seize the carton, yank off the top, and dump the contents out on the table. But I didn’t want to make a mess. Or a scene. And I didn’t want the nosy old girl sitting next to us to see what was in the box. I mean, what if it was something really gruesome-a mutilated ear, or a severed toe, or something horrible like that? (I had just written a story about a recent murder case in which a plucked eyeball had provided the major clue, so I wasn’t being overly imaginative.)

Carefully pulling the container in close to my chest, I propped my elbows on either side and hunched my shoulders over the top, creating a darker, more private space. Then I sank my head low over the carton and slowly, gingerly, removed the saucer-shaped lid.

The dusty smell of oatmeal was distinct. And there, sitting on top of at least three inches of grain, was a crumpled mass of white tissue paper which, I discovered as soon as I touched it, contained something hard and beady and prickly, something that moved when I poked it with my forefinger. Overcome with curiosity, I stuck all of my fingers into the cardboard cylinder and pried a wide opening in the tissue paper, exposing the contents of the crumpled package.

I was bedazzled. Even in the confined space and murky shadows of my lowered head and hunched shoulders, the mound of diamonds sparkled, sending a thousand tiny but brilliant shafts of light into my astonished, disbelieving eyes.

“Are these real?” I gasped. “Or are they rhinestones?”

“They’re real,” Terry said. “I had them appraised before I showed them to the police. There’s a necklace, a pin, a pair of earrings, and two bracelets. Altogether, they’re worth about thirty thousand dollars.”

“Wow.” I wanted to take the diamonds out of the oatmeal carton and examine them more closely, but I didn’t dare. I thought the snoopy old lady sitting next to us might see them and swoon, her heavily rouged face landing smack in the middle of her mac and cheese casserole.

“There’s no way on earth Judy could have bought that jewelry herself,” Terry said, in a calmer, more serious tone. “So it was either given to her by somebody who’s very rich, or it was stolen.”

“Could she have stolen it herself?”

“No! Absolutely not. Judy would never steal anything. She was a bit on the wild side, but she was no thief. She could, however, have been talked into hiding stolen goods for somebody else-if that somebody was a man, and if she fancied herself to be in love with him. Judy would do anything for the man she loved, even if she’d only just met him, and loved him for just a few hours. That’s just the way she was. Every time she fell for a guy-which was way too often, if you ask me-she gave herself to him completely.”

“Was she in love at the time of the murder?”

“Not according to Mrs. Londergan, the older woman-a widow-who lives across the hall. She told us-me and Detective Sweeny-that she and Judy had developed a very close relationship, a mother/daughter kind of thing. She said my sister often confided in her, and she claimed Judy definitely wasn’t involved with anybody at the time of her death. She was, as Mrs. Londergan put it, “between boyfriends.”

“That implies a new boyfriend was on the horizon.”

“With my sister, a new boyfriend was always on the horizon.”

“Did Judy ever have any rich boyfriends?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did Mrs. Londergan know?”

Terry shook his head and shrugged. “I never asked her. Before I found the jewelry I had no reason to ask her, and after I found it I had no time to ask her. I didn’t discover the diamonds until late yesterday afternoon, remember, and after that I was so busy getting them appraised, and taking them to the police, and trying to convince Detective Sweeny they proved that Judy was murdered-and then, when he didn’t believe me, trying to contact you -that I never had a chance to speak to Mrs. Londergan again.”

“I’m surprised Sweeny didn’t confiscate the diamonds.”

“He did.”

“What?!!!”

“He said he was going to catalog them and keep them as possible evidence, but I knew by the way he was acting he’d just stick them away in a locker somewhere, never use them to try to solve the case. So when he left his office to get the proper forms to fill out, I grabbed the oatmeal container off his desk, stuffed it back in the shoebox, snuck down the hall, and scrammed.”