Chapter 17
TWENTY MINUTES LATER, when I opened the door to my apartment, I caught the aroma of food coming from the direction of the kitchen. Whatever it was smelled delicious, and made me realize how hungry I was. My salivary glands sprang into action. That had to be the work of the best cook I’ve ever known.
“Penny?” As I called her name, I wondered how she’d gotten into the apartment, but realized Walter must have let her in.
At the sound of my voice, Magic came loping down the hallway and shocked me by making a graceful leap up onto my shoulder. “Wow,” I said, stroking his head. “When did you learn to fly?”
I was in for another surprise when I entered the kitchen. It wasn’t Penny at the stove, it was Walter, and he was stirring something in a wok. I’d never owned a wok.
“Hi,” I said. Magic stayed on my shoulder, but he was fascinated by what was going on at the stove.
“How’d it go with the lawyer?” Walter asked.
“He’s smart, and energetic.” I put my handbag on one of the four chairs at the kitchen table and sat down carefully, so as not to jolt Magic. “I just hope I’ve done the right thing for Nancy.”
As Walter continued his activity at the stove, I told him about my meeting with Wayne, seeing Nancy for a few minutes, and about the subsequent fight in the diner with Matt.
“That boy’s sweet on you,” Walter said. His back was to me, but I heard a smile in his voice.
“Maybe he was once, but not now.” Eager to change the subject, I asked, “What did you do while I was gone?”
“Went shopping. Bought some groceries, an’ this pot. You didn’t have anything in the house except cat food, an’ a few cans of tuna. Looks like you take better care of the cat than you do of yourself.”
“The neighborhood’s full of restaurants and takeout places,” I said, a little defensively. “I don’t have time to cook.”
Walter took a big wooden spoon—also new—out of the wok. He opened the door to the oven and checked whatever was happening inside.
“When Junie found out she wasn’t going to be around,” he said, “she made me promise to eat healthy, an’ she taught me some things. You never know what they put in restaurant food.” Walter closed the oven door, took a step toward me, and reached into his shirt pocket. With a grin, he pulled out a shiny new cell phone and held it in one large hand. “I joined the twenty-first century today.” Nodding toward a pad on the table, he said, “I wrote the number down for you.”
WALTER AND I were sitting at the kitchen table, eating stir-fried chicken and vegetable teriyaki, and the corn muffins he’d baked. Magic was curled up on a pile of newspapers by the back door that led out to the service elevator. He was awake and watching us, but I suspected that the sound of our voices wasn’t as interesting to him as the scent of chicken.
“You’ve never met her, but I want you to know that Nancy’s not guilty.”
“Tell me why Matt thinks she is.”
“Circumstantial evidence.” Even as I said the words, I realized how weak that sounded.
Walter lifted one shaggy eyebrow and cocked his head. “What ‘circumstances’?”
“Nancy went to see Veronica. They’d arranged to meet in the empty apartment, the one Veronica was supposedly decorating for herself and her daughter. The door was standing open a couple of inches. Nancy went in. She saw Veronica lying on the floor, her head bloody. She knelt down to see if she had a pulse, but there wasn’t one. That’s when Veronica’s daughter came in and started screaming.”
“That can was the murder weapon . . . Fingerprints?”
“No prints at all.”
Walter shook his head in dismay. “The prosecutor’s gonna say she wiped the can clean, but that she didn’t have time to get away before she was discovered there.”
“Nancy has never had even so much as a speeding ticket. She votes in every election, pays her taxes. There’s nothing about her that would suggest to any thinking person that she could commit a murder. She was just in the wrong place, wrong time.”
“Any cop worth the tin in his badge would figure she’s the most likely suspect. Be fair now. You can’t really blame Matt for thinking she’s guilty, can you?”
I sighed. “Okay, I suppose you’re right. But I know as surely as I’m sitting here that Nancy didn’t kill Veronica Rose. She found her after she was already dead.”
Walter pursed his lips in thought. “What about motive?”
“Veronica was trying to break up Arnold and Nancy, but that’s not enough reason to kill someone!”
“In one of my cases, a man beat a stranger to death with a tire iron over a fender bender. Now that’s pretty unusual, but history’s full of people who killed out of jealousy.”
“Not Nancy,” I insisted.
Walter swallowed a mouthful of stir-fry. “Taking your word for it that your friend isn’t the killer, let’s look at the victim. What do you know about her?”
“She comes from Boston, from a rich family. She married Arnold Rose about fifteen years ago. They had one child, Didi. She’s twelve. Three years ago, Arnold and Veronica Rose divorced. She took Didi and moved back to Boston. Then suddenly, a couple of months ago, she decided to move back to New York. I think she did it because Didi told her that Arnold was in love with Nancy and it was Veronica who was jealous.”
“What you think isn’t evidence,” Walter said gently. “We need to find out exactly why she came back.”
I was as surprised as Kent Wayne had been earlier, when I’d said something similar in his office. “We?”
“Used to be a pretty damn good investigator in my day,” Walter said. “Fact is, when I was out shopping this afternoon I bought me a computer—one of those notebook things that fold up an’ fit in a briefcase. Your friend Bobby asked me to do some employee background checks, for a business client he’s got.”
“It’s great, that you’re helping Bobby. I’m glad you two hit it off. But you need the Internet—”
“Got that covered,” he said proudly. “Old Walter didn’t just fall off the turnip truck. I found a coffee shop down the block has Internet access. You just plug the little bugger in one of their outlets. Only drawback is you gotta spend three dollars for a cup of coffee.”
“You can work here,” I said. “Use my Internet access. I do most of my computer work at the office.”
“That’s right nice of you—but you’re not stuck with me. I’m havin’ the cell phone bill sent to Florida. I’ll be back there ’fore it comes due.”
An unexpected—and unfamiliar—emotion suddenly washed over me: a pang of loneliness. “I didn’t realize you would be going back so soon,” I said. “Don’t rush away. There’s plenty of room here.”
He looked dubious. “You know what they say: after a week or two guests and fish begin to stink.”
Before I could think of a response, Walter picked up the discussion of Veronica Rose. “Most murder victims aren’t killed by strangers. Who are her friends?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“There are a couple ways to go: find out what kind of life she was leading up in Boston—if she had any enemies. An’ find out if there’s anybody there or here she could have made mad enough to kill her.”
I remembered something Betty Kraft had said, and it gave me an idea.
“What you thinkin’?” Walter asked.
“My assistant, Betty Kraft, is very observant. After Veronica and Didi visited the studio, Betty told me that Veronica was greedy. She described her as the kind of woman who had to have men wanting her.”
As I told him about Betty, and her pre-Global Broadcasting background as a psychiatric nurse, Walter was scraping teriyaki sauce off of a couple of little pieces of chicken. He put them on a paper napkin and took it over to Magic, who immediately began to munch on the unexpected snack.
“You got a loose-leaf notebook somewhere?” Walter asked. “An’ one of those three-hole punchers?”
“Yes, both. With some other office supplies in the bedroom closet.”
“Good. We’ll need them to start our own murder book,” he said.
“A book?”
“Over the years, we had our share of murders in Downsville County. Always made me a book. Most investigators do. We put in notes on everything we learn ’bout the case. After a while, we start to see what the story is.”
Remembering my days as a photographer, I said, “Just like seeing a blank sheet of paper turn into a photograph in the developing solution.”