Jill Churchill - Silence of the Hams

It was, on the surface, a reasonable, inoffensive sentence, but Jane found it obnoxious. She was tempted to say, "Oh, we're just a couple neighborhood muggers, stopped to beat and rob you." Shelley's grim expression hinted that she was thinking along the same lines.

“I'm Jane Jeffry and this is Shelley Nowack. Do you need—"

“Jeffry. Jeffry? Oh, yes. The house with the driveway that needs repairing," Hanlon said. "And Mrs. Nowack is next door. You could use a bit of paint on the trim around your windows, Mrs. Nowack."

“And you—" Shelley began.

Jane elbowed her and said, "I don't know anything about engines either, but we'd be glad to give you a lift to a service station. Wouldn't we, Shelley?"

“ Oh, of course," Shelley replied with dangerous cheerfulness. "By way of the nearest sheer cliff," she finished under her breath.

“I — well, what I really need is a lift home. I've got groceries in the car that are melting. If you wouldn't really mind."

“Not at all," Jane said. "We'll just help you put them in the back of the van.”

He had a surprising number of grocery sacks, including one holding two bags of ice that were already beginning to drip. "Mrs. Nowack, you are aware of the speed limit here, aren't you?" he said as Shelley took off like a rocket.

She slammed on the brakes, flinging him forward. "Oh, I must have forgotten for a moment," she said sweetly. "You didn't get hurt, did you?”

The rest of the way, he acted like a demented tour guide. "There's an example of neglect," he said. "Perfectly sound house but the cracks in the foundation are just being patched instead of getting to the real problem. And over there. That yard is a disgrace. There are more dandelions than grass. No excuse for it. Causes grief for all the neighbors who keep their lawns nice. It's not that much trouble. Just mowing, seeding, fertilizing, weed killer, occasional de-thatching — the neighborhood association has a nice pamphlet on proper lawn care for anybody who needs it. I keep a stack of them in the car and drop them off to people when I see their lawns suffering neglect."

“I wonder," Shelley said dreamily, "if anybody has done studies on a possible connec‑ tion between neighborhood associations and the neo-Nazi movement?”

This remark seemed to genuinely puzzle him and he was quiet for a bit.

Jane leaned forward on the pretense of finding something on the radio and whispered to Shelley, "We're trying to find out about a murder, not commit one!”

His house was just what Jane would have expected. It was an oversized Cape Cod, immaculately kept. The windows gleamed as if polished only moments before. The paint almost looked as if it were still wet. The lawn was lush jade-green and still showed the tidy diagonal mowing marks. You could have eaten off the driveway. A row of neat forsythia bushes bordered both sides of the lot separating him from his neighbors. They'd been trimmed into tortuous cubes of precisely the same size.

“Let me take this ice inside for you," Jane said. She was determined they wouldn't just drop him off and go on their way. Shelley understood and sulkily picked through the bags in the back of the van for the lightest one.

The inside of the house matched the outside. It wasn't stark, in fact there were a lot of pictures, ornaments, and furniture, but everything was so clean, fresh, and geometric that it seemed unreal, as if it had been created on a computer. The sofa in the living room was precisely positioned in front of the empty, spotless fireplace in which there had obviously never been anything so sloppy and uncontrolled as a fire. Two matching chairs sat at exact right angles. A stack of National Geographics on the coffee table were in date order and each was offset an inch and a half from the others.

Jane wondered if there was a wife who went along with this and had the vague recollection of having heard that Foster Hanlon was a widower. She took the bags of ice to the sink, punched a hole in the bottom of each to drain out the melted water, and opened the freezer door. There, not surprisingly, banks of frozen vegetable packages were neatly stacked. She was afraid to look too closely for fear of finding that they were actually in alphabetical order.

“Go ahead and call the service station," Shelley said. "We can put this away for you," she added with a gleam in her eye.

Hanlon looked disconcerted by this upheaval in his tidy life, as well he should. The moment he left the kitchen, Shelley set a package of cereal in with the canned goods and added a package of paper napkins before closing the door with satisfaction. It would take him all day to get everything back the way he wanted it.

When he was through phoning, Jane and Shelley had everything put away. Somewhere. "They're picking me up in about ten minutes," he said.

“Oh, good," Jane said cheerfully. She settled in at the kitchen table with a vacuous expression. "It's been an unusual week for you, hasn't it? For all of us, really."

“Has it? In what way?" he asked, reluctantly sitting down across from her. Shelley took the chair between them.

“Well, with Robert Stonecipher's death and then Emma's."

“Emma?" he asked.

“Emma Weyrich. His assistant," Jane said. "Hadn't you heard?"

“No, I'm sorry, but I don't even recognize the name," he said.

“Surely you knew her," Shelley said. "She came to the deli with you and Mr. Stonecipher."

“I went to the deli opening on my own," he said firmly. "Oh, that athletic young woman. Is that who you mean? What happened to her?"

“She was murdered," Jane said. Surely someone as nosy as he must know this. "Oh?" he asked. "Where?"

“In her apartment," Jane said, curious why he'd asked the question.

“Oh, well — an apartment resident," he said. "I've never approved of apartments in goodresidential areas. It brings in the aimless, irresponsible element of society. When you aren't a property owner, your interest in the welfare of the community is seriously diminished.”

Jane and Shelley gawked at him. Jane was the first to recover. And to steer the conversation in a different, potentially more useful direction. "I don't see how you could not know who she was. After all, she was Stone-cipher's assistant. You and he must have worked pretty closely together on the zoning." She fumbled for a word other than "outrage" and could only come up with "thing."

“I wouldn't say we worked together. We had a common interest in that particular problem, naturally, as should the whole neighborhood," he said, apparently offended. "But Mr. Stonecipher and I were certainly not close friends or frequent companions.”

Shelley raised an eyebrow. "So you didn't like him much?"

“No, I didn't say that," he said carefully. "It was merely that we had only a few, very specific things in common. Like the problem of the deli. Unfortunately, he had a most unpleasant personality."

“Did he?" Jane asked. "I hardly knew him at all. What was he like?"

“Very opinionated—" Foster Hanlon said.

Jane nudged Shelley with her knee to keep her from exploding.

“—and unwilling to listen to other views," Hanlon went on. "In fact, I had rather strong words with him over his proposal to put in bicycle lanes. He felt strongly about it, of course, but was blind to the fact that it would have been terribly expensive to widen the roads and repave them. It would have meant condemning a few feet of property along the entire length of the routes he proposed. The way the city code is drawn up in regard to benefit districts, it would have raised taxes so that the very people who were losing their land would have ended up paying for the loss.”

Shelley said, "I presume this street was one of the ones he wanted to widen."