“She was shot,” Jane said. “Connie was killed with a pipe or a baseball bat or something.”
“I know, I know, but maybe they had to be quieter,” Coombs said. “Or maybe they wanted to change it, so nobody would suspect.”
“We really worry about getting involved with the police,” Jane said. “If they talk to you, and then to us, because of the quilt connection, and they say, 'Look, here's some people who know all of the murdered people… then they'll begin to suspect.
Even though we're innocent. And then they might take a closer look at the Armstrong quilts. We really don't want that.” Coombs's eyes flicked away. “I'd feel so guilty if somebody else got hurt. Or if these people got away scot-free because of me,” she said.
“So would I,” Jane said. “But…”
And Coombs said, “But…”
They talked about it for a while, trying to work the old woman around, and while she was deferential, she was also stubborn. Finally, Jane looked at Leslie and touched her nose. Leslie nodded, rubbed the side of his nose, and said to Coombs, “I have to say, you've talked me around. We've got to be really, really careful, though.
They've got some smart police officers working on this.”
He stopped and stuffed another oatmeal cookie in his mouth, mumbling around the crumbs.
“We need to keep the quilts out of it. Maybe I could send an anonymous note mentioning the antique connection, and leave the quilts out of it.”
Coombs brightened. She liked that idea. Jane smiled and shook her head and said, “Leslie's always liked you too much. I think we should stay away from the police, but if you're both for it…”
Coombs shuffled OUT to the front door as they left, leading the way. In the rear, Leslie pulled on the cotton gloves, and at the door, Jane stepped past Coombs as Leslie pulled the finial out of the banister post. He said, “Hey, Marilyn?”
When she turned, he hit her on the forehead with the finial ball. Hit her hard. She bounced off Jane and landed at the foot of the stairs. They both looked at her for a moment. Her feet made a quivering run, almost as though dog-paddling, then stopped.
“She dead?” Jane asked.
Leslie said, “Gotta be. I swatted her like a fuckin' fly with a fuckin' bowling ball.”
“Elegance!” Jane snapped.
“Fuck that…” Leslie was breathing hard. He squatted, watching the old lady, watching her, seeing never a breath. After a long two minutes, he looked up and said, “She's gone.”
“Pretty good. Never made a sound,” Jane said. She noticed that Leslie's bald spot was spreading.
“Yeah.” Leslie could see hair, a bit of skin and possibly a speck of blood on the wood of the finial ball. He stood up, turned it just so, and slipped it back on the mounting down in the banister post, and tapped it down tight. The hair and skin were on the inside of the ball, where Coombs might have struck her head if she'd fallen.
“Fingers?” he asked. “Break the fingers?”
“I don't think we should touch her,” Jane said. “She fell perfectly… What we could do…” She pulled off one of Coombs's slippers and tossed it on the bottom stair.
“Like she tripped on the toe.”
“I'll buy that,” Leslie said.
“So…”
“Give me a minute to look around,” Jane said. “Just a minute.”
“Lord, Jane…”
“She was an old lady,” Jane said. “She might have had something good.”
Out in the car, they drove fifty yards, turned onto Lexington, went half a mile, then Leslie pulled into a side street, continued to a dark spot, killed the engine.
“What?” Jane asked, though she suspected. They weren't talking Elegance here.
Leslie unsnapped his seat belt, pushed himself up to loosen his pants, unzipped his fly. “Gimme a little hand, here. Gimme a little hand.”
“God, Leslie.”
“Come on, goddamnit, I'm really hurtin',” he said.
“I won't do it if you continue to use that kind of language,” Jane said.
“Just do it,” he said.
Jane unsnapped her own seat belt, reached across, then said, “What did you do with that package of Kleenex? It must be there in the side pocket…”
“Fuck the Kleenex,” Leslie groaned.
The next two days were brutal. Kline was hot, and Lucas had no time for the Bucher case. He talked to Smith both days, getting updates, but there wasn't much movement.
The papers were getting bad tempered about it and Smith was getting defensive.
Reports came in from the insurance companies and from the Department of Corrections; the halfway house was looking like a bad bet. The St. Paul cops did multiple interviews with relatives, who were arriving for the funeral and to discuss the division of the Bucher goodies. There were rumors of interfamilial lawsuits.
Despite the onset of bad feelings, none of the relatives had accused any of the others of being near St. Paul at the time of the murder. They'd been more or less evenly divided between Santa Barbara and Palm Beach, with one weirdo at his apartment in Paris.
All of them had money, Smith said. While Aunt Connie's inheritance would be a nice maraschino cherry on the sundae, they already had the ice cream.
Lucas had three long interviews over the two days, and twice as many meetings.
The first interview went badly.
Kathy Barth had both tits and ass: and perhaps a bit too much of each, as she slipped toward forty. Her daughter, Jesse, had gotten her momma's genes, but at sixteen, everything was tight, and when she walked, she quivered like a bowl of cold Jell-O.
While she talked like a teenager, and walked like a teenager, and went around plugged into an iPod, Jesse had the face of a bar-worn thirty-year-old: too grainy, too used, with a narrow down-turned sullen mouth and eyes that looked like she was afraid that somebody might hit her.
At the first interview, she and Kathy Barth sat behind the shoulder of their lawyer, who was running through a bunch of mumbo-jumbo: “… conferring to see if we can decide exactly what happened and when, and if it really makes any sense to continue this investigation…”
Virgil Flowers, a lean, tanned blond man dressed in jeans, a blue cotton shirt with little yellow flowers embroidered on it, and scuffed black cowboy boots, said, “We've already got her on tape, Jimbo.”
“That would be James' to you, Officer,” the lawyer said, pretending to be offended.
Flowers looked at Lucas, “The old Jimster here is trying to put the screws to Kline.”
He looked back at the lawyer. “What'd you find? He's got some kind of asset we didn't know about?” His eyes came back to Lucas: “I say we take a research guy, pull every tax record we can find, run down every asset Kline has got, and attach it. Do a real estate search, put Kline on the wall…”
“Why do you want to steal the rightful compensation from this young woman?” the lawyer demanded. “It's not going to do her any good if Burt Kline goes to jail and that's it. She may need years of treatment-years!-if it's true that Mr. Kline had sexual contact with her. Which, of course, we're still trying to determine.”
“Motherfucker,” Flowers said.
The lawyer, shocked-shocked-turned to Jesse and said, “Put your hands over your ears.”
Jesse just looked at Flowers, twisted a lock of her hair between her fingers, and stuck a long pink tongue out at him. Flowers grinned back.
“She's hot,” Flowers said when they left the house. They had to step carefully, because a yellow-white dog with bent-over ears, big teeth, and a bad attitude was chained to a stake in the center of the yard.
“She's sixteen years old,” Lucas said, watching the dog.
“Us Jews bat mitzvah our women when they're fourteen, and after that, they're up for grabs,” Flowers said. “Sixteen's no big thing, in the right cultural context.”
“You're a fuckin' Presbyterian, Virgil, and you live in Minnesota.”
“Oh, yeah. Ya got me there, boss,” Flowers said. “What do we do next?”