Charlaine Harris - Real Murders

“There was a phone call before you got here,” I began, and they focussed on me with interest. But before I could tell them about it, I heard a luscious ripple of laughter from the opening door. My friend Lizanne Buckley came in, accompanied by a very tall red-haired man. Seeing Lizanne here was a surprise. Lizanne didn’t read a book from one year to the next, and her hobbies, if she had any, did not include crime.

“What on earth is she doing here?” Melanie said. She seemed really put out, and I decided we had here another Mamie Wright in the making.

Lizanne (Elizabeth Anna) Buckley was the most beautiful woman in Lawrenceton. Without Lizanne exerting herself in the slightest (and she never did) men would throw themselves on the floor for her to saunter on; and saunter she would, calm and smiling, never looking down. She was kind, in her passive, lazy way; and she was conscientious, so long as not too much was demanded of her. Her job as receptionist and phone answerer at the Power and Light Company was just perfect for her-and for the utility company. Men paid their bills promptly and smilingly, and anyone who got huffy over the telephone was immediately passed to someone higher on the totem pole. No one ever sustained a huff in person. It was simply impossible for ninety percent of the population to remain angry in Lizanne’s presence.

But she required constant entertainment from her dates, and the tall red-haired man with the beaky nose and wire-rimmed glasses seemed to be making heavy weather of it.

“Do you know who he is, the man with Lizanne?” I asked Melanie.

“You don’t recognize him?” Melanie’s surprise was a shade overdone.

So I was supposed to know him. I re-examined the newcomer. He was wearing slacks and a sport coat in light brown, and a plain white shirt; he had huge hands and feet, and his longish hair flew around his head in a copper nimbus. I had to shake my head.

“He’s Robin Crusoe, the mystery writer,” Melanie said triumphantly.

The insurance clerk beats the librarian in her own bailiwick.

“He looks different without the pipe in his mouth,” John Queensland said from behind my right shoulder. John, our wealthy real-estate-rich president, was immaculate as usual; an expensive suit, a white shirt, his creamy white hair smooth and the part sharp as an arrow. John had become more interesting to me when he’d started dating my mother. I felt there must be substance below the stuffed-shirt exterior. After all, he was a Lizzie Borden expert… and he believed she was innocent! A true romantic, though he hid it well.

“So what’s he doing here?” I asked practically. “With Lizanne.”

“I’ll find out,” said John promptly. “I should greet him anyway, as club president. Of course visitors are welcome, though I don’t believe we’ve ever had any before.”

“Wait, I need to tell you about this phone call,” I said quickly. The newcomer had distracted me. “When I came in a few minutes ago-”

But Lizanne had spotted me and was swaying over to our little group, her semi-famous escort in tow.

“Roe, I brought you all some company tonight,” Lizanne said with her agreeable smile. And she introduced us all around with facility, since Lizanne knows everyone in Lawrenceton. My hand was engulfed in the writer’s huge boney one, and he really shook it, too. I liked that; I hate it when people just kind of press your hand and let it drop. I looked up and up at his crinkly mouth and little hazel eyes, and I just liked him altogether.

“Roe, this is Robin Crusoe, who just moved to Lawrenceton,” Lizanne said. “Robin, this is Roe Teagarden.”

He gave me an appreciative smile but he was with Lizanne, so I realistically built nothing on that.

“I thought Robin Crusoe was a pseudonym,” Bankston murmured in my ear.

“I did too,” I whispered, “but apparently not.”

“Poor guy, his parents must have been nuts,” Bankston said with a snigger, until he remembered from my raised eyebrows that he was talking to a woman named Aurora Teagarden.

“I met Robin when he came in to get his utilities turned on,” Lizanne was telling John Queensland. John was saying all the proper things to Robin Crusoe, glad to have such a well-known name in our little town, hope you stay a while, ta-dah ta-dah ta-dah. John edged Robin over to meet Sally Allison who was chatting with our newest member, a police officer named Arthur Smith. If Robin was built tail and lanky, Arthur was short and solid, with coarse curly pale hair and the flat confrontive stare of the bull who knows he has nothing to fear because he is the toughest male on the farm.

“You’re lucky to have met such a well-known writer,” I said enviously to Lizanne. I still wanted to tell someone about the phone call, but Lizanne was hardly the person.

She sure didn’t know who Julia Wallace was. And she didn’t know who Robin Crusoe was either, as it turned out.

“Writer?” she said indifferently. “I’m kind of bored.”

I stared at her incredulously. Bored by Robin Crusoe?

One afternoon when I’d been at the Power and Light Company paying my bill, she’d told me, “I don’t know what it is, but even when I pretty much like a man, after I date him a while, he gets to seem kind of tiresome. I just can’t be bothered to act interested anymore, and then finally I tell him I don’t want to go out anymore. They always get upset,” she’d added, with a philosophical shake of her shining dark hair. Lovely Lizanne had never been married, and lived in a tiny apartment close to her job, and went home to her parents’ house for lunch every day.

Robin Crusoe, desirable writer, was striking out with Lizanne even now. She looked-sleepy.

He reappeared at her side.

“Where do you live in Lawrenceton?” I asked, because the newcomer seemed dolefully aware he wasn’t making the grade with our local siren.

“Parson Road. A townhouse. I’m camping there until my furniture comes, which it should do tomorrow. The rent here is so much less for a nicer place than I could find anywhere in the city close to the college.”

Suddenly I felt quite cheerful. I said, “I’m your landlady,” but after we’d talked about the coincidence for a moment, a glance at my watch unsettled me. John Queensland was making a significant face at me over Arthur Smith’s shoulder. Since he was president, he had to open the meeting, and he was ready to start.

I glanced around, counting heads. Jane Engle and LeMaster Cane had come in on each other’s heels and were chatting while preparing their coffee cups. Jane was a retired school librarian who substituted at both the school and the public libraries, a surprisingly sophisticated spinster who specialized in Victorian murders. She wore her silver hair in a chignon, and never never wore slacks. Jane looked sweet and fragile as aged lace, but after thirty years of school children she was tough as a marine sergeant. Jane’s idol was Madeleine Smith, the highly sexed young Scottish poisoner, which sometimes made me wonder about Jane’s past. LeMaster was our only black member, a stout middle-aged bearded man with huge brown eyes who owned a dry cleaning business. LeMaster was most interested in the racially motivated murders of the sixties and early seventies, the Zebra murders in San Francisco and the Jones-Piagentini shooting in New York, for example.

Sally’s son Perry Allison had come in too, and had taken a seat without speaking to anyone. Perry had not actually joined Real Murders, but he had come to the past two meetings, to my dismay. I saw quite enough of him at work. Perry showed a rather unnerving knowledge of modern serial murderers like the Hillside Stranglers and the Green River killer, in which the motivation was clearly sexual.