“Did you have anyone here at the house yesterday — repairmen, salesmen...?”
“Nobody. A nurse comes in most days to help me with Lambie, but she wasn’t here yesterday.”
“Did you notice any activity at your neighbors’ places yesterday or last night? Strange cars?”
Roetherl snuffed out his cigarette and lighted another before replying. “I don’t know about strange. This guy over here—” he jerked a massive thumb in the direction of Neldrick’s house “—has a steady stream of visitors. All women.”
“Did you notice anybody there yesterday?”
“Oh yes. Woman in a red sports car came around four o’clock. Pulled right into his garage, as usual.”
“You’ve seen her there before?”
“Many times.”
“Did you see her leave?”
“Wasn’t watching particularly. I noticed her coming because our kitchen window looks right down on his driveway.”
“This wouldn’t be Mr. Neldrick’s sister, who I understand—”
“No, we know Beth.”
“Did you happen to notice any cars or trucks parked out on the street yesterday?”
“No, sir.”
Before leaving the Roetherls’, Auburn walked out on an upper deck that overhung the slope to the rear. The roar of midmorning traffic on the highway was particularly evident here. Auburn almost thought he could smell exhaust fumes. But try as he might, he couldn’t catch a glimpse of the road or the fence down below, and it was obvious that Brendel’s body couldn’t conceivably have fallen or been thrown from up here to the place where it was found.
The last house on Roseland Court was a sprawling mansion of dark red brick with high-pitched slate roofs and numerous chimneys. Auburn’s ring was eventually answered by a woman who had palpably been asleep three minutes earlier. Her eyelids were swollen, her hair looked like a rat’s nest, and she had the befuddled air of someone who has just walked into a wall.
“Sorry to bother you this morning.” He showed identification. “I’m making some routine inquiries about a homicide in the neighborhood.”
“In this neighborhood?” She yawned and clutched her terrycloth bathrobe more tightly around her. “Come in.”
As Auburn stepped into the entry hall, she touched a wall switch. Instantly a long corridor came alive with a blaze of multicolored fights that was like nothing he had ever seen outside of a penny arcade. Illuminated beer signs in seven colors of neon, some flashing off and on and others with moving parts, clustered so thickly along both sides of the passage from floor to ceiling that hardly a square inch of wall showed anywhere. The blaze of fight was so sudden and so dazzling that Auburn couldn’t suppress a start.
“Wild, isn’t it?” said the woman.
“Makes me thirsty just looking at them.” It seemed the sort of thing he was expected to say, though as a matter of feet beer gave him violent headaches. “You’ve got some money tied up there.”
“Oh, beer signs are cheap. It’s the animated displays and antique toys that break you up.” She padded ahead of him in her furry mules to a sunny morning room where half a dozen miniature merry-go-rounds were set out on tables and stands. One was a miracle of gold filigree work. Another had been built along the fines of a Gothic cathedral and had statues of the twelve apostles instead of horses.
“We’re doing a book on elektrokitsch,” she explained through another colossal yawn.
“A book on which?”
“Elektrokitsch. You know what kitsch is, right? Tacky, tasteless junk that passes for high art with the working classes? Extruded plastic stuff, gimcrack souvenirs, paintings on black velvet. That kind of trash. Well, we collect elektrokitsch. Statues of saints with haloes that light up. Statues of Elvis that wiggle their pelvis. Here, look at this.”
She turned on one of the merry-go-rounds, which sprang into life with flashing multicolored lights and a raucous carnival tune produced by a miniature band organ.
Auburn smiled and nodded. He was relieved when his pulling out a blank file card prompted her to shut the thing off.
“May I ask your name?”
“Monica Rayster,” she said, adding, “Mrs. John D.,” as if that should mean something to him. It didn’t.
“Were you home all day yesterday?”
“Yes. All day and all night. My husband’s in South America buying wood.”
“Did you have any visitors here at the house yesterday or last evening?”
“No.” She was struggling desperately to wake up. “Did I hear you say somebody was killed?”
“A body was found this morning down by Route 5.”
“Oh, I’m not surprised. You wouldn’t believe what goes on down there at night. Sometimes we can hear them yelling at three o’clock in the morning. Mostly kids. And they love to throw their beer cans up in our woods.”
“Did you hear anything last night?”
“Not that I can remember.”
“Did you notice anything happening in the neighborhood last evening — unusual activity at the neighbors’, strange cars...”
“Oh no. The Roetherls go to bed at eight o’clock, and there’s never any traffic on the road out there.” She was yawning so intensely and repeatedly that Auburn had to struggle to keep from doing it, too.
On his way out he caught glimpses of two other rooms full of elektrokitsch. As he retraced his steps along Roseland Court, he pondered the irony that a woman who expressed such contempt for the taste of the working class — to which Auburn was proud to belong — should fill her house with the very rubbish she affected to despise.
He arrived back at his car just as the mortuary crew — private contractors looking more than ever this morning like a couple of hoodlums — drove away with the body in an unmarked, low-slung, silver-gray hearse that belonged in a museum.
Stamaty was rolling up pieces of yellow plastic tape and stuffing them in his pockets. “Get anything up there?”
“I don’t think so.” He filled Stamaty in on the residents of Rose-land Court.
“Karl Roetherl? How old?”
“Maybe sixty-five.”
Stamaty meditated. “Couldn’t be the same guy. A Karl Roetherl built both of the steel bridges downtown and half the buildings, including the county courthouse and Pierce Hall. But that was back in the twenties and thirties. This guy could be his son, maybe grandson.”
“Let’s head for Brendel’s place.” Auburn gave him the number on Whatman, and they drove there, together but separately.
Kestrel had taken Brendel’s car keys, but Stamaty had the rest of the ring. They knocked twice before entering the apartment, which was on the ground floor and had its own entrance off a closed court.
It was clean and neat for a bachelor apartment. The refrigerator was well stocked with premium beer. One of the two bedrooms had been converted into an electronics lab, with an oscilloscope, soldering irons, racks of tools, and trays of parts. A locked closet, whose key was on the ring, was crammed with VCR’s, midget TV’s, camcorders, CD players, parts, and chests of silverware — obviously a cache of stolen property. “Another job for Kestrel,” said Auburn, locking the closet again.
Stamaty was rooting through Brendel’s papers and personal articles. He came up with a stack of shiny metallic stickers bearing the legend “For Service Call 275-4224.”
In the other bedroom Auburn found a phone with an answering machine. “Same phone number as on the stickers,” he said.
He pressed a button on the machine. A voice, presumably the dead man’s, announced, “Hot Shot Fundamentals” — Stamaty heard it as “One Shot from the Middle” — “Please leave your name and number after the tone.”
Auburn pressed another button to playback messages. The first caller was a woman who didn’t identify herself. All she said was, “Lee, I’ll be at Dad’s all evening if you want to come over.” The only other message wasn’t so cordial. “Hey, Lee, this’s Hick,” snarled a harsh, surly male voice. “If you’re lost again, buddy, you better get found quick, or you ain’t gonna have no job. I mean it, now.”