“I’m Erin,” she announced. “Are you Detective Beaumont?” I nodded. “Thank you for hurrying,” she added. “Gran is worried sick.” She turned away from me and called back over her shoulder, “He’s here.”
An older woman appeared in the doorway to the dining room. She was angular and spare, with her arms clasped nervously around a narrow waist. She moved swiftly across the room, reaching out a hand in greeting.
“Thank you for coming so quickly,” she said. “I’m LaDonna Riggs, but everyone calls me Belle. As soon as I found it, I told George to call you. I wanted that thing out of the house immediately.”
I looked from the older woman to the younger one. “What ”thing‘ are we talking about?“ I asked.
“Why, the gun, of course. Didn’t George tell you about it on the phone?”
Now an older man wearing jeans and cowboy boots stepped into the dining room doorway. Sidled more than stepped. He stood there, leaning against the jamb with his hands shoved deep in his pockets.
LaDonna Riggs turned to face him. “Why didn’t you tell him about the gun, George? I told you to tell him.”
George Riggs shrugged his shoulders. “I must’ve forgot, sweetheart. I can’t always remember everything, you know.”
“What’s all this about a gun?” I asked.
“Daddy and I came over to get Marcia’s things to take down to the mortuary,” Belle Riggs explained. “She wasn’t married in the temple, you see, so she doesn’t have any temple clothes, but we found her a nice white dress to be buried in all the same. And I wanted to find her some nice white underwear, too. New underwear. Marcia was always particular about her undies, and I knew she’d have some nice things put back. She was a saver, you know. That was one thing she was good at. She’d buy bras and panties on sale…”
“Gran,” Erin interrupted impatiently. “Just tell him about the gun.”
“Well, I’m trying to. Anyway, I checked her bottom drawer, thinking that’s where she’d keep any new things she hadn’t worn yet, and that’s where I found the gun. It was there under a stack of panties that were still in their plastic containers.”
“Maybe you’d better show me,” I said.
Erin led the way up a carpeted stairway and into a cheerful master bedroom. The bed was made, the pillows plumped under a Wedgewood blue spread. I wondered if Pete Kelsey had made the bed-I still couldn’t adjust to thinking about him in terms of John David Madsen-or if that was something Belle Riggs had handled before she went searching for her dead daughter’s underwear.
The bottom drawer of a sleek teak dresser still stood open. I walked over to it and peered inside. The rough checkered handle of a. 25 Auto Browning was partially hidden under a stack of shrink-wrapped panties. The barrel was completely visible. It was an old-fashioned gun, well made-almost quaint-the kind of weapon an eccentric Auntie Mame type might have packed in a dainty purse. Old-fashioned and quaint maybe, but at point-blank range, very, very lethal. I recalled from my cursory reading of Doc Baker’s autopsy that the misshapen slug that had severed Alvin Chambers’ spinal cord before tearing through his internal organs had been from a. 25-caliber something.
“It’s not Marcia’s,” Belle Riggs was declaring firmly to the room in general. “It certainly isn’t Marcia’s. She wouldn’t have allowed a thing like that in her home, to say nothing of in her underwear drawer.”
I took a deep breath and turned to Erin. “Where’s your dad?” I asked.
“Mrs. Damon, one of the ladies he did some remodeling for a few months ago, called early this afternoon. One of her pipes had burst and she wanted to know who to call. She didn’t want to bother Dad, and she didn’t want him to go over, but he did anyway. He should be home any time now.”
“Did anyone here touch this?” I asked.
“No way!” Mrs. Riggs responded at once. “I wouldn’t let anyone near it. You’ll take it with you, won’t you?”
Of the three people in the room, Erin, young as she was, seemed most in possession of her faculties. “Can you find me a shoe box?” I asked her.
“A shoe box?” she repeated with a puzzled frown.
“Yes. A shoe box and some string.”
Erin nodded and hurried away.
“What do you need that for?” Belle Riggs asked indignantly. “A shoe box, of all things.”
“I can’t tell whether or not this weapon is loaded. I’ll have to secure it in the box in order to take it down to the crime lab.”
Erin returned at once with the shoe box. “The string is down in the garage. I’ll be right back.”
Carefully I picked up the Browning, holding the grip gingerly between my thumb and fore-finger as I placed it in the box. Television detectives to the contrary, lifting guns with pencils to preserve fingerprints is not only dangerous-you never know whether or not it’s loaded-it ignores the reality that the rough surfaces on most pistol grips are totally unsuitable for fingerprinting techniques.
“The crime lab?” Belle Riggs asked suddenly as though the words had finally penetrated her consciousness. “You don’t think this is connected to what happened. That’s impossible. It couldn’t be. I just wanted the thing out of the house.”
“It’s possible,” I said grimly.
Much as it pained me to admit it, mounting circumstantial evidence made it look more and more as though Detective Kramer was right, and Pete Kelsey was our man. As the saying goes, I may be dumb, but I’m not stupid, and I wasn’t about to ignore facts that jumped up and hit me in the face.
Erin returned, carrying a ball of string and a pair of scissors. I punched holes in the bottom of the box and immobilized the gun, tying it off with a piece of string. At my request, Erin once more disappeared, returning this time with a Magic Marker. Across the top of the box I scrawled the words “Possibly Loaded” in huge red letters.
A dismayed Belle Riggs had retreated to the bed. She sat on the edge of it, rocking back and forth in a dazed sort of way. George came on into the room and sat on the bed beside her, consolingly patting her hand.
“Now, Mama,” he said. “Don’t you worry. It’s going to be all right.”
“But, George, how can they possibly think that Pete…”
Erin had been out of the room during the first exchange, but now she was back. Squatting on the floor in front of me, she looked at me across the gun-laden shoe box, her green eyes flashing fire.
“My father didn’t do this,” she said in a calm, measured voice that belied the smoldering anger in her eyes. “I know my father. He couldn’t.”
There was a whole lot about her father that I knew that Erin Kelsey didn’t. Somebody was going to have to tell her, and I didn’t want that person to be me.
“Who else besides your father has access to this room?”
“No one, except me, I guess,” she answered.
“What was your mother’s maiden name?” I asked.
“Riggs,” Erin Kelsey replied firmly. “What kind of question is that?”
“Your real mother,” I said. “What was her name?”
For the first time, Erin Kelsey’s lower lip trembled as she answered. “Marcia Riggs Kelsey was my real mother, Detective Beaumont. She was the only mother I ever knew. She changed my diapers and bandaged my knees and taught me how to drive. My birth mother’s name was Carol Ann Gentry Kelsey.”
“Where was she from?”
“Ottawa, like my dad.”
“Have you ever met any of your Canadian relatives?”
Erin shook her head. “No. None of them. My dad was sort of an orphan and there was some kind of trouble with my mother’s parents when my parents got married. I think my birth mother was disowned. That’s why we ended up living in Mexico, and that’s where we were when the car wreck killed my mother. But what does any of this have to do with this gun? I don’t understand.”
“I’m just trying to put together some background information.”