My first priority is to get the dry cleaning and the cat food. My second priority is to solve the Donaldson killing.”
“You gotta have your priorities,” Lucas said. He looked up at the mansion. “That's a hell of a house,” Lucas said. “Just like the Bucher house. When are the Booths…?”
“Probably about seven minutes from now,” Frazier said, looking at his watch. “They always keep me waiting about seven or eight minutes, to make a point, I think. We're the public servants, and they are… I don't know. The Dukes of Earl, or something.”
“Like that,” Lucas said.
“Yup.” He handed Lucas a brown-paper portfolio, as thick as a metropolitan phone book. “This is every piece of paper we have on the Donaldson case. Took me two hours to Xerox it. Most of it's bullshit, but I thought you might as well have it all.”
“Let me put it in the truck,” Lucas said.
He ran the paper back to the truck, then caught Frazier halfway up the sidewalk to the house. “Isn't a hell of a lot to see, but you might as well see it,” Frazier said.
Frazier had keys. Inside, the house smelled empty, the odor of dry wallpaper and floor wax. The furniture was sparse and to Lucas's eye, undistinguished, except that it was old. The few paintings on the walls were mostly oil portraits gone dark with age. As they walked around, their footfalls echoed down the hallways; the only other sound was the mechanical whir of an air-conditioner fan.
“What's going on here is that the house isn't worth all that much,” Frazier said.
“It'd need a lot of updating before you'd want to take out a mortgage on it. New wiring, new plumbing, new heating system, new roof, new windows, new siding. Basically, it'd cost you a million bucks to get the place into tip-top shape.”
“But the woman who lived here was rich?”
“Very rich. She was also very old,” Frazier said. “Her friends say she didn't want to be annoyed by a lot of renovation when she only had a few years left. So. She didn't do some things, and the house was perfectly fine for the way she used it.
Went to Palm Beach in the winter, and so on.”
After Donaldson was murdered, Frazier said, the Booths tried to sell it, but it didn't sell. Then somebody came up with the idea that the Booths could donate the place to the city as a rich-lumber-family museum. That idea limped along and then somebody else suggested it could be a venue for arts programs.
“Basically, what was going on is, the Booths couldn't sell it, so they were encouraging all this other bullshit. They'd donate the house and a few paintings and old tables to the city at some ridiculous valuation, like two million bucks, which they would then deduct from their income tax,” Frazier said. “That'd save them, what, about eight hundred thousand dollars? If they can't get that done, if the house just sits here and rots… well, what they've got is about two city lots at fifty thousand dollars each, and it'd probably cost them half of that to get the place torn down and carted away. In the meantime, they pay property tax.”
“Life is tough and then you die,” Lucas said.
“Wasn't tough for the Booths,” Frazier grunted. “They've been rich forever… You want to see where the murder was?”
Donaldson had been killed in the kitchen. There was nothing to see but slightly dusty hardwood floors and appliances that had stepped out of 1985. The refrigerator and stove were a shade of tobacco-juice yellow that Lucas remembered from his first house.
“Very cold,” Frazier said. “I'd talked myself into the idea that it was a traveling killer, passing through, saw a light and wanted money and a sandwich, and went up and killed her with a crappy.22. Stood there and ate the sandwich and looked at the body and never gave a shit. In my brain-movie, he so doesn't give a shit, he doesn't even give a shit if he was caught.”
“Any proof on the sandwich?” Lucas asked, joking.
Frazier wasn't joking: “Yeah. There was a bread crumb in the middle of Donaldson's back. Loose. Not stuck on her blouse, or anything. It was like it fell on her, after she hit the floor. Sea-Bird brand sourdough bread. There was a loaf of it on the counter.”
“Huh.” Lucas scratched his forehead. “Let me tell you about these oatmeal cookies…”
The Booths arrived ten minutes later, in a black Mercedes-Benz S550. Landford Booth looked like a terrier, as short as Frazier, but thin, with small sharp eyes, a bristly white mustache, and a long nose with oversized pores. He wore a navy blue double-breasted jacket with silver buttons, and gray slacks. Margaret Booth had silvery hair, a face tightened by cosmetic surgery, and pale blue eyes. She wore a cranberry-colored dress and matching shoes, and blinked a lot, as though she were wearing contact lenses.
Landford was a well-tended seventy-five, Lucas thought. His wife about the same, or possibly a bit older.
Lucas and Frazier had just come back from the kitchen and found the Booths standing in the open front door, Margaret's hand on Landford's arm, and Landford cleared his throat and said, “Well? Have you discovered anything new?”
The Booths knew almost nothing-but not quite nothing.
Lucas asked about missing antiques.
Margaret said, “Claire was a collector-and a seller. Pieces would come and go, all the time. One day there'd be a sideboard in the front hall, and the next week, there'd be a music cabinet. One week it'd be Regency, the next week Gothic Revival. She claimed she always made a profit on her sales, but I personally doubt that she did. I suspect that what she really wanted was the company-people buying and selling. People to argue with and to talk about antiques with. She considered herself a connoisseur.”
“Was anything missing, as far as you know?” Lucas asked.
“Not as far as we know-but we don't know that much. We have an insurance list, and of course we had to make an inventory of her possessions for the IRS,” Landford said.
“There were items on the insurance list that weren't in the house, but there were things in the house that weren't on the insurance list. The fact is, it's difficult to tell.”
“How about sales records?”
“We have a big pile of them, but they're a mess,” Landford said. “I suppose we could go back and check purchases, and what she had when she died, against sales. Might be able to pinpoint something that way,” Landford said.
“Could you do that?” Lucas asked.
“We could get our accountant to take a look, she'd be better at it,” Landford said.
“Might take a couple of weeks. The papers are a mess.”
The Booths made one claim, and made it to Lucas, ignoring Frazier as though he were an inconvenient stump: “Somebody should look carefully at Amity Anderson. I'm sure she was involved,” Margaret Booth said.
Landford quivered: “There is no doubt about it. Although our sheriff's department seems to doubt it.”
Behind their backs, Frazier rolled his eyes. Lucas said to Margaret: “Tell me why she must have been involved.”
“It's obvious,” she said. “If you go through all the possibilities, you realize, in the end, that the killer-person, whoever he was, was inside the house with Claire.”
She put the last phrase in vocal italics. “Claire would never let anybody inside, not when she was alone, unless she knew them well.”
Landford: “The police checked all her friends, and friends-of-friends, and everybody was cleared. There was no sign of forced entry, and Claire always kept the doors locked. Ergo, Amity Anderson gave somebody a key. She had quite the sexual history, Claire used to tell me. I believe Amity gave the house key to one of her boyfriends, told him where Claire kept her cash-she always liked to have some cash on hand-and then went to Chicago as an alibi. It's perfectly clear to me that's what happened.”
“Exactly,” Margaret said.
“How much cash?” Lucas asked.
“A couple of thousand, maybe three or four, depending,” Landford said. “If she'd just gotten back from somewhere, or was about to go, she'd have more on hand. That doesn't sound like much to you and me…” He hesitated, looking at the cops, as though he sensed that he might have insulted them. Then he pushed on, “… but to a person like Amity Anderson, it probably seemed like a fortune.”