“Titta told us she and Neda didn’t get along,” Odelia said, steering the conversation back to Neda’s private life, hoping to discover what had made the woman tick. “And that they hadn’t been in touch in years. Doesn’t that strike you as odd?”
“Oh, for sure,” said Cher as she hugged herself. A dark cloud had edged in front of the sun, and it was a little chilly out. “Neda was a formidable woman, no doubt about it, but in my personal dealings with her I never had any complaints. She was possessed with a forceful personality, but notan unkindly one. She always treated me with respect, was meticulous about her paperwork, and was generous to a fault.”
“She wasn’t very well-liked by the members of the choir,” Chase pointed out.
“Only after she became director. Before that there were never any complaints.”
“And afterward?”
“Jealousy and spite,” she said, echoing Father Reilly’s words. “As long as she was one of them, they were all friends. But the moment she became director, they all started bitching and moaning.” She shrugged. “Human nature. Nothing you can do about it.”
“Did Neda find it annoying that people resented her?” asked Odelia.
“She wasn’t happy about it, but she told me she was sure that the whole hullabaloo would soon pass. Just give it time, she said, and they’ll see that I simply want what’s best for the choir. She had plenty of plans, you know. She was going to turn St. Theresa Choir into one of the best choirs on Long Island, and maybe even the state.”
“Ambitious, huh?” said Chase.
“She certainly was very ambitious, and I’m sure that if she’d lived, she would have fulfilled the promise she made to that choir.”
“And shut up her detractors?”
Cher gave him a keen look.“Do you think a member of the choir did this to her?”
“We’re keeping our options open. And looking at every possible angle.”
“You’re wrong,” said the secretary, suddenly speaking in uncharacteristic blunt fashion. “I told you who killed Neda. Raban Pacoccha did it. I’m absolutely sure about it.”
“We talked to Mr. Pacoccha, and he claims he wasn’t anywhere near the house yesterday.”
“We found him working in Janette Bittiner’s garden,” Odelia explained. “Where he said he’d been all morning.”
“It’s only two miles from here! He could easily have come over, trying to wheedle more money out of Neda, and when she wouldn’t budge, killed and robbed her.”
“We’re not ruling out that possibility, Miss Shorn,” Odelia said, trying to mollify the secretary, whose face had turned a little flushed, and her voice a little sharp.
“Well, I hope you don’t. That man is a drug addict, and we all know what drug addicts are like: they’ll just as soon hug you than kill you, if that’s what it takes to get their next fix.” She pointed a finger at the house. “If you don’t go after that man, I’ll be very disappointed. Very disappointed.” And with these words, she stepped away and took a ramble around the garden, taking out a packet of cigarettes and lighting one up.
Odelia and Chase shared a look.“Maybe she’s right,” said Odelia. “Maybe we have let Raban off the hook too easily.”
“We haven’t let him off the hook,” said Chase. “He’s one of our suspects. Though as far as I’m concerned, I like the choir rivalry angle a lot more. There was real hatred there.”
“And what about Cher?” asked Odelia as she glanced at the secretary, who stood a little distance away, blowing out a plume of smoke. “How does she fit into the story?”
“Why would she kill her employer?”
“I don’t know, Chase, but she’s the only person we’ve spoken to so far who hasn’t said a bad word about Neda. On the contrary, she painted her in such a favorable light it’s almost as if she were preparing to have her declared a saint. Neda Hoeppner wasn’t a saint, or at least I don’t think she was.”
“She was no monster either.”
“No, but if you work together for fifteen years, there are bound to be clashes. And maybe they had such a clash yesterday. Of all the people we’ve spoken to, Cher is the person most likely to know the combination of Neda’s safe. So what if she and Neda came to blows over something? And Neda accidentally ended up dead? It would be a cinch to open that safe and make it look like a burglary gone wrong, wouldn’t it?”
“Mh,” said Chase, but I could tell from the expression on his face when he looked at Cher Shorn’s back that Odelia’s argument had been a most convincing one.
22
While Chase returned to the station, to drill a little deeper into Cher’s background, as he announced with a touch of relish, we went to the offices of the Hampton Cove Gazette instead, where a mountain of work awaited our human, since she’d already spent all day yesterday and part of today trying to figure out who had killed Neda Hoeppner, and now it was time to devote some of her time to her actual job.
When we arrived there, and Dooley and I took up position in the corner of her office, where she’s created a cozy little nook for us to relax and nap, she was surprised to find a small note stuck between the keys of her keyboard. It was her editor’s way of drawing her attention to something important.
She picked up the note and read it, a frown cutting a deep groove between her brows.
“If she isn’t careful that’s going to create a wrinkle, Max,” said Dooley. “And once it’s there, it’s going to stay there forever, and she’ll have to start using Botox, and that has to be painful, with all those needles being stuck in your face.”
“I don’t think Odelia will ever resort to Botox,” I told my friend. “Even if she has wrinkles.”
“Oh, but she must. She won’t have a choice.”
“Of course she has a choice.”
“But she’ll want to keep on looking beautiful. Men don’t like women with wrinkles, everybody knows that. And if she gets all wrinkled and looking like an old lady, Chase will want a divorce, and then she’ll end up all alone, like Gran.”
“It’s true that for some men their affection is only skin-deep, Dooley. But lucky for us Chase isn’t one of those men. The affection he feels for Odelia is the real deal, I’m sure.”
“Are you sure?” asked my friend. “Because in General Hospital men are always cheating on their wives and their mistresses are always a lot younger than they are.”
“General Hospital isn’t a reflection of real life, Dooley,” I told him. “It’s fiction.”
“Still,” he said, musing.
In a sense he was right, of course. There is a certain group of men out there who will only date women of a certain age, and even though their own age keeps edging north, the age of their dates seems to go south. It’s a sad phenomenon, but I firmly believed that Chase wasn’t part of that small and frankly pitiful segment of the population.
“You guys,” said Odelia suddenly as she waved the little note. “What do you make of this? ‘Look no further than RP for the murder of NH.’”
“RP?” I said. “That has to be Raban Pacoccha, right? And NH is Neda Hoeppner.”
Odelia glanced in the direction of the door. That thought wrinkle was deepening, and Dooley whispered,“She’s doing it again, Max.”
“It’s a natural human response when something baffling occurs,” I said. “They frown.”
“But why? What’s the point?”
“What’s the point of any human expression? To signal an emotion to other humans.”
“But we don’t do that,” said Dooley. “We never smile, or frown, or at least not so that it messes up our fair complexion.”
“We don’t have a fair complexion, Dooley.”
“Yes, we do—only you can’t see it because of all the hair. But it’s there, Max. And in fact I think your complexion is probably even fairer than mine.”
“And why is that?”
“Because you’re a ginger. Everybody knows that gingers have fair skin. With freckles. Here, I’ll show you.”