Charlaine Harris - Real Murders

“Good,” I said. “Someone’s got to be out of the running.”

“And thank God it’s me, since the department needs every warm body it can get on this one. I’ve got to go.” He heaved himself to his feet, looking tired again.

“Arthur… what about me? Does anyone think I did it?”

“No, honey. Not since Pettigrue, anyway. His old house had one of those claw-footed tubs, way off the floor, and he was a tall man, maybe six-three. You couldn’t have gotten him in that tub alone, no way. And around Lawrenceton enough people would know if you were steadily seeing some guy who’d help you move the body. No, I think Pettigrue definitely let you off the hook in just about everyone’s mind.”

It was unnerving to think that my name had been spoken by men and women I didn’t know, men and women who seriously considered I might have killed people in brutal and bloody ways. But all in all, after I’d talked to Arthur, I felt much better.

I saw him off with a light squeeze of his hand, and sat down to think a little. It was about time I thought instead of felt. I had crammed more feelings into the past week than I had in a year, I estimated.

The hair the police had found was probably brown, since it might be Lizanne’s and hers was a rich chestnut. Who else could have shed that hair?

Well, I was a member of Real Murders who had long brown hair. Luckily for me, I’d been repairing books with Lillian Schmidt all morning. Melanie Clark had medium-length dull brown hair, and Sally, though her hair was shorter and lighter, could also be a contender. (Wouldn’t it be something if Sally had committed all these murders so she could report them? A dazzling idea. Then I told myself to get back on the track.) Jane Engle’s hair was definitely gray… then I thought of Gifford Doakes, whose hair was long and smoothly moussed into a pageboy or sometimes gathered in a ponytail, to John Queensland’s disgust. Gifford was a scarey person, and he was so interested in massacres… and his friend Reynaldo would probably do anything Gifford wanted.

But surely someone as flamboyant as Gifford would have been noticed going into the Buckleys’ house?

Well, discarding the possible clue of the hair for the moment, how had the murderer gotten in and left? A neighbor had seen Lizanne enter, too soon before I’d arrived to have done everything that had been done to the Buckleys. So someone was in a position to view the front of the Buckley house at least part of the morning. I considered other approaches and tried to imagine an aerial view of the lot, but I am not good at geography at all, much less aerial geography.

I sat a while longer and thought some more, and found myself wandering to the patio gate several times to see if Robin was home yet from the university. It was going to rain later, and the day was cooling off rapidly. The sky was a dull uniform gray.

I pulled on my jacket finally and was heading out on my own when his big car pulled in. Robin unfolded from it with an armful of papers. Why doesn’t he carry a briefcase? I wondered.

“Listen, change your shoes and come with me,” I suggested.

He looked down his beaky nose at my feet. “Okay,” he said agreeably. “Let me drop these papers inside. Someone stole my briefcase,” he said over his shoulder.

I pattered after him. “Here?” I said, startled.

“Well, since I moved to Lawrenceton, and I’m fairly sure from here in the parking lot,” he said as he unlocked his back door.

I followed him in. Boxes were everywhere, and the only thing set in order was a computer table suitably laden with computer, disc drives, and printer. Robin dumped the papers and bounded upstairs, returning in a few seconds with some huge sneakers.

“What are we going to do?” he asked as he laced them up.

“I’ve been thinking. How did the murderer get into the Buckleys’ house? It wasn’t broken into, right? At least the papers this morning said not. So maybe the Buckleys left it unlocked and the killer just walked in and surprised them, or the killer rang the doorbell and the Buckleys let him-or her-in. But anyway, how did the killer approach the house? I just want to walk up that way and see. It had to be from the back, I think.”

“So we’re going to see if we can do it ourselves?”

“That’s what I thought.” But as we were leaving Robin’s I had misgivings. “Oh, maybe we better not. What if someone sees us and calls the police?”

“Then we’ll just tell them what we’re doing,” said Robin reasonably, making it sound very simple. Of course, his mother wasn’t the most prominent real estate dealer in town and a society leader to boot, I reflected.

But I had to go. It had been my idea.

So out of the parking lot we went, Robin striding ahead and me trailing behind, until he looked back and shortened his stride. The parking lot let out in the middle of the street that ran beside Robin’s end apartment. Robin had turned right so I did, too, and at the corner we turned north to walk the two blocks up Parson to the Buckleys‘. Perhaps as I’d driven past the Buckleys’ on my way home to lunch the day before, the Buckleys were being slaughtered. I caught up with Robin at the next corner, shivering inside my light jacket. The house was on this next block.

Robin looked up the street, thinking. I looked down the side street; no houses faced the road. “Of course, the trash alley,” I said, disgusted with myself.

“Huh?”

“This is one of the old areas, and this block hasn’t been rebuilt in ages,” I explained. “There’s an alley between the houses facing Parson Road and the houses facing Chestnut, which runs parallel to Parson. The same with this block we’re standing on. But when you get south to our block, it’s been rebuilt, with our apartments for one thing, and garbage collection is on the street.”

Under the gray sky we crossed the side street and came to the alley entrance. I’d felt so pursued and viewed yesterday, it was almost eerie how invisible I felt now. No houses facing this side street, little traffic. When we walked down the gravelled alley, it was easy to see how the murderer had reached the house without being observed.

“And almost all these yards are fenced, which blocks the view of the alley,” Robin remarked, “and of the Buckleys’ back yard.”

The Buckleys’ yard was one of the few unfenced ones. The ones on either side had five-foot privacy fences. We stopped at the very back of the yard by the garbage cans, with a clear view of the back door of the house. The yard was planted with the camellias and roses that Mrs. Buckley had loved. In their garbage can-what an eerie thought-was probably a tissue she’d blotted her lipstick with, grounds from the coffee they’d drunk on their last morning, detritus of lives that no longer existed.

Yes, their garbage was surely still there… everyone on Parson Road had garbage pickup on Monday. They’d been killed on Wednesday. I shuddered. “Let’s go,” I said. My mood had changed. I wasn’t Delilah Detective anymore.

Robin turned slowly. “So what would you do?” he said. “If you didn’t want to be observed, you’d have parked your car-where? Where we came into the alley?”

“No. That’s a narrow street, and someone might remember having to pull out and around to get past your car.”

“What about at the north end of the alley?”

“No. There’s a service station right across the street there, it’s real busy.”

“So,” said Robin, striding ahead purposefully, “we go back this way, the way we came. If you had an ax, where would you put it?”

“Oh, Robin,” I said nervously. “Let’s just go.” We were leaving the alley as unobserved as we had entered, as far as I could tell, and I was glad of it.