“There is,” Leslie said, his hands at ten o'clock and four on the wood-rimmed wheel of his Lexus, “a substantial element of insanity in this. No coveralls, no gloves, no hairnets. We are shedding DNA every step we take.”
“But it's eighty percent that we won't have to do anything,” Jane said. “Doing nothing would be best. We pooh-pooh the newspaper clipping, we scare her with the police, with the idea of a trial. Then, when we get past the lumpy parts, we might come back to her. We could do that in our own good time. Or maybe she'll just drop dead. She's old enough.”
They were on Lexington Avenue in St. Paul, headed toward Como Park, a half hour past sunset. The summer afternoon lingered, stretching toward ten o'clock. Though it was one of the major north-south streets, Lexington was quiet at night, a few people along the sidewalks, light traffic. Marilyn Coombs's house was off the park, on Iowa, a narrower, darker street. They'd park a block away, and walk; it was a neighborhood for walking.
“Remember about the DNA,” Leslie said. “Just in case. No sudden moves. They can find individual hairs. Think about gliding in there. Let's not walk all over the house. Try not to touch anything. Don't pick anything up.”
“I have as much riding on this as you do,” Jane said, cool air in her voice. “Focus on what we're doing. Watch the windows. Let me do most of the talking.”
“The DNA…”
“Forget about the DNA. Think about anything else.”
There was a bit of a snarl in her voice. Leslie glanced at her, in the little snaps of light coming in from the street, and thought about what a delicate neck she had…
They were coming up on the house. They'd been in it a half-dozen times with the quilt-study group. “What about the trigger?” Leslie asked.
“Same one. Touch your nose. If I agree, I'll touch my nose,” Jane said.
“I'll have to be behind her. Whatever I do, I'll have to be behind her.”
“If that finial is loose…” The finial was a six-inch oak ball on the bottom post of Coombs's stairway banister. The stairway came down in the hallway, to the right of the inner porch door. “If it's just plugged in there, the way most of them are…”
“Can't count on it,” Leslie said. “I'm not sure that a competent medical examiner would buy it anyway.”
“Old lady, dead at the bottom of the stairs, forehead fracture that fits the finial, hair on the finial… What's there to argue about?” Jane asked.
“I'll see when I go in,” he said. “We might get away with it. They sure as shit won't believe she fell on a kitchen knife.”
“Watch the language, darling. Remember, we're trying.” Trying for elegance. That was their watchword for the year, written at the top of every page of their Kliban Cat Calendar: Elegance! Better business through Elegance! Jane added, “Two things I don't like about the knife idea. First, it's not instantaneous. She could still scream…”
“Not if her throat was cut,” Leslie said. Leslie liked the knife idea; the idea made him hot.
“Second,” Jane continued, “She could be spraying blood all over the place. If we track it, or get some on our clothes… it could be a mess. With the finial, it's boom.
She goes down. We won't even have to move her, if we do it right.”
“On the way out.”
“On the way out. We're calm, cool, and collected while we're there,” Jane said. She could see it. “We talk. If it doesn't work, we make nice, and we get her to take us to the door.”
“I walk behind her, get the glove on.”
“Yes. If the finial comes loose, you either have to hit her on the back of her skull, low, or right on her forehead. Maybe… I'm thinking of how people fall. Maybe we'll have to break a finger or something. A couple of fingers. Like she caught them on the railing on the way down.”
Leslie nodded, touched the brakes for a cyclist in the street. “I could pick her up, and we could scratch her fingernails on the railing, maybe put some carpet fiber in the other hand. She's small, I could probably lift her close enough, all we need to do is get some varnish under a fingernail…”
“It's a plan,” Jane said. “If the finial comes loose.”
“Still, the knife has a certain appeal,” Leslie said, after a moment of silence.
“Two older women, their skulls crushed, three days apart. Somebody is going to think it's a pretty heavy coincidence. The knife is a different MO and it looks stupid. Another little junkie thing. And if nothing is taken…”
“Probably be better to take something, if we do it with the knife,” Jane said. “I mean, then there'll be no doubt that it's murder. Why kill her? To rob her. We don't want a mystery. We want a clear story. Kill her, take her purse. Get out. With the finial, if they figure out it was murder, there'll be a huge mystery.”
“And they'll see it as smart. They'll know it wasn't some little junkie.”
Jane balanced the two. “I think, the finial,” Jane said. “If the finial works, we walk away clear. Nobody even suspects. With the knife, they'll be looking for something, chasing down connections.”
Then, for about the fifteenth time since they left home, Leslie said, “If the finial comes out…”
“Probably won't do it anyway,” Jane said. “We'll scare the bejesus out of the old bat.”
Marilyn Coombs lived in a nice postwar home, the kind with a big picture window and two-car garage in back, once unattached, now attached with a breezeway that was probably built in the '60s. The siding was newer plastic, with heated plastic gutters at the eaves. The front yard was narrow, decorative, and steep. Five concrete steps got you up on the platform, and another five to the outer porch door. The backyard, meant for boomers when they were babies, was larger and fenced.
They climbed the steps in the yard, up to the porch door, through the porch door; in these houses, the doorbell was inside the porch. On the way up, Leslie pulled a cotton gardening glove over his right hand, and pushed the doorbell with a glove finger, then slipped the hand into his jacket pocket.
Coombs was eighty, Jane thought, or even eighty-five. Her hair had a pearly white quality, nearly liquid, fine as cashmere, as she walked under the living room lights.
She was thin, and had to tug the door open with both hands, and smiled at them: “How are you? Jane, Leslie. Long time no see.”
“Marilyn…”
“I have cookies in the kitchen. Oatmeal. I made them this afternoon.” Coombs squinted past Leslie at the sidewalk. “You didn't see any gooks out there, did you?”
“No.” Leslie looked at Jane and shrugged, and they both looked out at the empty sidewalk.
“Gooks are moving in. They get their money from heroin,” Coombs said, pushing the door shut. “I'm thinking about getting an alarm. All the neighbors have them now.”
She turned toward the kitchen. As they passed the bottom of the stairs, Leslie reached out with the gloved hand, slipped it around the bottom of the finial, and lifted.
It came free. It was the size of a slo-pitch softball, but much heavier. Jane, who'd turned her head, nodded, and Leslie let it drop back into place.
A platter of oatmeal cookies waited on a table in the breakfast nook. They sat down, Coombs passed the dish, and Jane and Leslie both took one, and Leslie bolted his and mumbled, “Good.”
“So, Marilyn,” Jane said. “This newspaper clipping.”
“Yes, yes, it's right here.” Coombs was wearing a housecoat. She fumbled in the pocket, extracted a wad of Kleenex, a bottle of Aleve, and finally, a clipping. She passed it to Jane, her hand shaking a bit. Leslie took another cookie.
A noted Chippewa Falls art collector and heir to the Thune brewing fortune was found shot to death in her home Wednesday morning by relatives…
“They never caught anybody. They didn't have any leads,” Coombs said. She ticked off the points on her fingers: “She came from a rich family, just like Connie. She was involved in quilting, just like Connie.
She collected antiques, just like Connie. She lived with a maid, like Connie, but Claire's maid wasn't there that night, thank goodness for her.”