Grime and Punishment

Finally, she hung up and came back to the table. Jane poured them each coffee from a fresh pot. It was after eight, so she'd switched over to decaf.

“He wants to leave a man in the house overnight.”

'Well, he didn't say so in so many words, but the gist of it was that he has absolutely no motives or suspects yet.'

“Greed, fear, mercy, revenge?Nothing?' She wondered why, with so many motives available, he hadn't found one he liked.

“No, he told me he'd spent the evening interviewing her coworkers. It seems she's a childless widow who's only lived in the area for two months and has been on welfare most of that time. Some private agency for indigent widows. Before she came here, she drove a paper route in a little farm community in Montana and taught Sunday school.'

“Nobody would want or need to kill somebody like that,' Jane said.

“But somebody did,' Shelley reminded her.

SIX

Jane hardly slept all night. Dreams of vacuum cleaners run amok and red MGs coming out of dishwashers haunted her. At one point, a vacuum cleaner cord turned into a boa constrictor and wound itself around her. An army of identical women in blue uniforms marched in the house and changed everything and it wasn't her house anymore. When she woke before the alarm, sweating and exhausted, she could smell coffee. Shelley was already in the kitchen, puttering around silently. She had on faded jeans and a baggy pink cotton shirt that was wrinkled just enough to be trendy without looking sloppy. But for the first time Jane could remember, her friend looked tired and worried.

“Paul called from the airport,' she said as she poured Jane a cup of coffee.

“I didn't hear the phone.' Apparently she'd slept more soundly than she realized.

“I got it on the first ring. He got some sort of middle-of-the-night milk flight and is on his way now, after about sixteen stopovers.'

“You don't have to go to the airport, do you?”

“No, he left a company car there.”

Jane took a cautious sip. Shelley's coffee had a reputation for burning the bottom out of cups. Steve used to say you had to use a blowtorch to cool it. But this time it wasn't bad. Jane dragged out a package of grocery-store donuts and offered Shelley one. They sat together in companionable silence for a few minutes, and finally Shelley sighed and brushed the donut crumbs into a neat pile in the center of her paper napkin. 'So, what are you doing today?'

“Whatever you need me to do.'

“I don't think I need anything, but that's sweet of you. It's all over now, or at least I hope to God it is. Don't you drive your blind children this morning?”

One of Jane's volunteer activities was to take a group of blind children from the high school to a weekly session in special techniques in daily living. 'Not until Friday.'

“This is Friday.'

“No! It is! I was supposed to have Edith to clean for the first time today. Oh, Lord! I haven't even straightened up enough for her to work on the actual dirt. Do you think they'll send her, after what happened?'

“I can't imagine why not.”

Jane was already scurrying around the kitchen, throwing things in the dishwasher and wastebasket with random abandon. Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed a car coming down the street. Shelley was instantly on the move.

“There's Paul,' she said, slipping on her immaculate tennis shoes.

“Get along, then. I'll check with you later and see if there's anything you need.”

Jane went through the house like a demented whirlwind. Steve used to have a fit about Jane's feeling that she had to tidy up for the cleaning lady's arrival. 'That's what you're paying her to do,' he'd say as she snatched the newspaper away from him to dispose of it the moment he was through.

“Men just don't understand. I'm paying her to do the real cleaning, the stuff I hate,' she'd explained repeatedly. 'The icky corners of the bathroom, the windowsill dusting, the serious clear-to- the-corner vacuuming, scrubbing the stains out of the sink. But a cleaning lady can't get to that unless everything is picked up.”

As she passed the door to her bedroom, she heard her alarm buzzing and realized she'd forgotten the time in her frantic haste to prepare for Edith. She roused the boys without much sympathy for their sleepy pleas for another five minutes. Katie was already up, doing her hair. 'Put away all those bottles and tubes and cans, Katie. I'm having a new cleaning lady today and I don't want—'

“Mother! You're having a cleaning lady? What if she gets killed too?'

“Katie, don't be ridiculous!”

Jane said it with a conviction she didn't feel. Lightning doesn't strike twice in the same place, she'd been telling herself, but that didn't necessarily apply to murder. At least, she supposed it didn't. Still, she went back and gave Katie a hug that both pleased and embarrassed her. 'Don't worry, kiddo.”

As she headed out later with her first car pool, she noticed the red MG back in front of the Nowacks'. Now that Paul was back, VanDyne was probably questioning him. Did Paul Nowack have enemies who might have had something to do with the murder? Jane wondered. Who could guess? For, as much as she and Shelley saw of each other, Jane never felt she knew Paul at all. He traveled a great deal, and Jane had few opportunities to make her own assessment of him. As a neighbor, he was nice in a quiet way. But it wasn't any sort of shyness — more a sense of a powerful personality that was at rest. It had to be. How else would a Polish steelworker's boy turn into the man who owned a nationwide chain of Greek fast-food restaurants? That sort of thing didn't happen to wimpy men.

Questions started popping into her mind. Some pertinent, some idiotic. Why not Polishfast food, at least? Even if he were involved in something unsavory — which was highly unlikely — a disgruntled business enemy would hardly think killing his wife's cleaning lady would intimidate him.

Besides everything else, very few people had any idea where he lived. Shelley had said many times that he felt business was business and home was home. They even had an unlisted phone number, because he didn't want his franchisees being able to call him at home. In fact, his office staff didn't know how to find him; only his private secretary knew their home number. 'The franchisees will call him in the middle of the night to ask how the dishwasher worksotherwise,' Shelley had said once when Jane asked about it.

That in itself was odd, now that she was thinking about it, in the light of a recent murder in the Nowack home. Was that really the reason for the unlisted number? Or was there a more sinister reason for keeping their number and address secret from the outside world? That is ridiculous! Jane told herself. Suspecting Paul of dark secrets was as insane as suspecting Shelley.

… suspecting Shelley?..

“No!' she said out loud.

“No what?' Mike asked.

She'd forgotten Mike and Katie were in the car. 'Nothing. Just a crazy thought I had.'

“You know what they say about people who talk to themselves,' Katie said meaningfully.

“No, and I don't want to know,' she said.

Jane dropped Katie off at the junior high and Mike and his group at the high school. Mike had the wisdom to refrain from asking to drive this morning, which she thought showed a nice sense of maturity. When she got back home, Todd was sitting on the front porch, playing with a neighborhood cat.

“Todd, I told you to stay inside with the house locked until Mrs. Wallenberg got here,' Jane said. She must not have worded it strongly enough in her efforts to keep from frightening him with the implications.

“I know, but she called and said her car won't start and could you drive us today?'

“Oh, dear.All right. Hop in,' Jane said, glancing at her watch. She'd wanted to be sure to be here when the cleaning lady arrived, but that was hardly reason to make the whole bunch of kids late for school.

Dorothy Wallenberg was in her driveway, pacing around on sturdy legs and slashing at grass blades with a