Charlaine Harris - Real Murders

By this time I felt that Arthur Smith was my oldest and dearest friend, so much safer did he seem than this terrifying man with his terrifying questions. And he stepped out from behind his sergeant now, his face blank and his eyes cautious. He’d heard at least some of this conversation, which would have sounded almost routine without Burns’s menacing manner.

“Miss Teagarden,” Arthur said brusquely, “will you go into the room with the others now? Please don’t discuss with them what’s happened out here. And thanks.” With Gerald presumably grieving in the small conference room and Mamie dead in the kitchen, I had to join the others unless he wanted me to stand in the bathroom.

With a medley of feelings, relief predominating, I was pushing open the door when I felt a hand on my arm. “Sorry,” murmured Arthur. Over his shoulder, I saw the plaid back of Sergeant Burns’s jacket as he held open the back door to admit uniformed policemen loaded down with equipment. “If you don’t mind, I’ll come to see you tomorrow morning about this Wallace thing. Will you be at work?”

“Tomorrow’s my day off,” I said. “I can be at home tomorrow morning.”

“Nine o’clock too early?”

“No, that’s fine.”

As I went in the larger room where my fellow club members were clustered anxiously, I thought about the intelligence pitted against Arthur Smith’s. Someone was painstaking and artistic in a debased and imaginative way. Someone had issued a challenge to whoever cared to take it up. “Figure out who I am if you can, you amateur students of crime. I’ve graduated to the real thing. Here is my work.”

I felt an instinctive urge to hide what I was thinking. I wiped my mind clean of my nasty thoughts and tried not to meet the eyes of any of my fellow club members, who were all waiting tensely for me in the big room. But Sally Allison was a pro at catching reluctant eyes, and I saw her mouth open when she caught mine. I knew beyond a doubt she was going to ask me if I’d found Mamie Wright. Sally was no fool. I shook my head firmly, and she came no closer.

“Are you all right, child?” John Queensland asked, advancing with the dignity that was the keystone of his character. “Your mother will be terribly upset when she hears…” but since John, who was after all a wee mite pompous, realized he had no idea what my mother was going to hear, he had to trail off into silence. He asked me a question with a look.

“I’m sorry,” I said in a tiny squeak. I shook my head in irritation. “I’m sorry,” I said more strongly, “I don’t think Detective Smith wants me to talk until he talks to you.” I gave John a small smile and went to sit by myself in a chair by the coffee urn, trying to ignore the indignant looks and mutters of dissatisfaction cast in my direction. Gifford Doakes was walking back and forth as if he were pacing a cage. The policemen outside seemed to be making him extremely nervous. The novelist Robin Crusoe was looking eager and curious; Lizanne just looked bored. LeMaster Cane, Melanie and Bankston, and Jane Engle were talking together in low voices. For the first time, I realized another club member, Benjamin Greer, was missing. Benjamin’s attendance was erratic, like his life in general, so I didn’t put any particular weight on that. Sally was sitting by her son Perry, whose thin slash of a mouth was twisted into a very peculiar smile. Perry’s elevator did not stop at every floor.

I poured myself a cup of coffee, wishing it were a shot of bourbon. I thought of Mamie getting to the meeting early, setting everything up, making this very coffee so we wouldn’t have to drink Sally’s dreadful brew… I burst into tears, and slopped coffee all down my yellow sweater.

Those awful turquoise shoes. I kept seeing that empty shoe sitting upright in the middle of the floor.

I heard a soft sweet soothing murmur and knew Lizanne Buckley had come to my aid. Lizanne generously blocked me from the view of the room with an uncomfortable hunch of her tall body. I heard the scrape of a chair and saw a pair of long thin trousered legs. Her escort, the red-headed novelist, was helping her out, and then he tactfully moved away. Lizanne lowered herself into the chair and hitched it closer to me. Her manicured hand stuffed a handkerchief into my stubby one.

“Let’s just think about something else,” Lizanne said in a low even voice. She seemed quite sure I could think about something else. “Stupid ole me,” said Lizanne charmingly. “I just can’t get interested in the things this Robin Crusoe likes, like people getting murdered. So if you like him, you’re welcome to him. I think maybe you and him would suit each other. Nothing wrong with him,” she added hastily, in case I should assume she was offering me something shoddy. “He’d just be happier with you, I think. Don’t you?” she asked persuasively. She just knew a man would make me feel better.

“Lizanne,” I said, with a few gasps and sobs interposed here and there, “you’re wonderful. I don’t know anyone to top you. There aren’t too many single men our age in Lawrenceton to date, are there?”

Lizanne looked puzzled. She’d obviously noticed no lack of single men to date. I wondered where all her men came from. Probably drove from as far away as two hundred miles. “Thanks, Lizanne,” I said helplessly.

Sergeant Burns appeared in the doorway and scanned the room. I had no doubt he was memorizing each and every face. I could tell by his scowl when he saw her that he knew Sally Allison was a reporter. He looked even angrier when he saw Gifford Doakes, who stopped his pacing and stared back at Burns with a sneering face.

“Okay, folks,” he said peremptorily, eyeing us as if we were rather degenerate strangers caught half-dressed, “we’ve had a death here.”

That could hardly have been a bombshell-after all, the people in this group were adept at picking up clues. But there was a shocked-sounding buzz of conversation in the wake of Burns’s announcement. A few reactions were marked. Perry Allison got a strange smirk on his face, and I was even more strongly reminded that in the past Perry had had what people called “nervous problems,” though he did his work at the library well enough. His mother Sally was watching his face with obvious anxiety. The red-haired writer’s face lit with excitement, though he decently tried to tone it down. None of this could touch him personally, of course. He was new in town, had barely met a soul, and this was his first visit to Real Murders.

I envied him.

He saw me watching him, observing his excitement, and he turned red.

Burns said clearly, “I’m going to take you out of the room one by one, to the smaller room across the hall, and one of our uniformed officers will take your statement. Then I’m going to let you go home, though we’ll need to talk to you all again later, I imagine. I’ll start with Miss Teagarden, since she’s had a shock.”

Lizanne pressed my hand when I got up to leave. As I crossed the hall, I saw the building was teeming with police. I hadn’t known Lawrenceton had that many in uniform. I was learning a lot tonight, one way or another.

The business of having my statement taken would have been interesting if I hadn’t been so upset and tired. After all, I’d read about police procedure for years, about police questioning all available witnesses to a crime, and here I was, being questioned by a real policeman about a real crime. But the only lasting impression I carried away with me was that of thoroughness. Every question was asked twice, in different ways. The phone call, of course, came in for a great deal of attention. The pity of it was that I could say so little about it. I was faintly worried when Jack Burns stepped in and asked me very persistently about Sally Allison and her movements and demeanor; but I had to face the fact that since Sally and I were first on the scene (though we didn’t know it at the time) we would be questioned most intensely.