When I had finished I was faced with an evening with nothing special to do. In spite of making a show of moving ahead, with Tess and Wesley, I didn't have a plan for continuing the murder investigation.
I had possibly contributed to nailing Carol as an embezzler. I should be glad about that because with her gone I could probably return to Silver Acres. Still, it was too soon to award me a Nobel Prize for scam-busting. I pulled out my copy of Carol's code. Wesley had made his own copy on the machine at Silver Acres.
I looked at the number scribbled in the corner of the sheet. Was it a telephone number? I picked up the phone and punched it in. On the fourth ring I heard a hello from a voice I recognized. I waited for the hello to be repeated, to make sure. Then I hung up.
CHAPTER 25
The timing had to be perfect. I don't usually sweat very much, but my skin was clammy and I felt the kind of excitement I hadn't felt since riding on the Matterhorn Bobsleds at Disneyland many years before.
I waited outside the door to the recreation room as the bridge players strolled in. I greeted most of them. A few looked surprised to see me; Ellen didn't look at me at all. After she passed me and entered the room I surreptitiously followed her with my eyes. She picked up her table assignment from Wesley, just as we had planned, and went directly to her table. She placed her handbag on the seat of her chair, as was her custom, and stood talking to Ida, her partner.
I glanced at my watch; the time was three minutes past one. I got more nervous with each second. Maybe Tess couldn't be able to do her part. Wesley liked promptness, but he had said he would give me until five after one before he kicked off the activities.
It was important that we do this today because the bridge club had been cancelled for next week. The residents had received a notice that some renovation was going to take place in the room-something about the heating system. Joe must have been taking measurements for that last week.
I watched the minute hand creep around my watch dial. Four minutes past one. We would have to cancel the show for today. Like the king who wanted to control the tides, I wanted to control time. Then, just as the minute hand passed the six and started its inexorable climb toward the twelve my cell phone rang. Adrenaline surged through my body.
“Hello,” I said, softly, into the phone, my voice shaky. The noise of the talking inside the room and the fact that I stood outside drowned out the ring for the bridge players; only I had heard it.
“All systems go,” Tess said. She immediately hung up.
I walked into the recreation room and signaled Wesley, who was already looking at me, anxious to get started. He got everybody's attention by striking a coffee cup with a spoon and said, “Ladies and Gentlemen, Lillian has honored us by baking some of her famous apple pies. Let's enjoy them now while they are still warm.”
As I had anticipated, everybody moved toward the table on which the pies sat. They were purposely not sliced yet; Ellen, who had complimented my apple pie at our ill-fated lunch, grabbed a pie server. So far so good.
Nobody looked in my direction. Even so, I moved back outside the door and two steps down the hall so I was out of sight from the room. I punched Carol's beeper number into my phone. When the proper tone sounded I punched in the number from her code sheet. Then I quickly replaced the phone in my purse and entered the recreation room. I went to the table to help with the pies.
When a telephone rang a minute later I pretended to ignore it since it wasn't mine. Ellen raced over to her purse and pulled out her phone. I was close enough to hear her conversation.
“Hello…I didn't beep you…I don't know…I tell you I didn't do it…I won't…” She hung up without saying goodbye. She walked back to the pie table with a frown on her face.
“When Carol called Ellen in response to your beep she knew who she was calling,” Tess said. “She didn't hesitate or check to see whose number it was; she immediately called it. Her first words were, 'Why did you beep me?' She didn't even identify herself.”
“I'm glad I had you watching her. Was she suspicious when you barged into her office?”
“Of course not. I followed her in when she returned from lunch, right after I called you from the reception desk. Fortunately, Ophah hadn't returned and wasn't there to see me use her phone. And I had a legitimate question for Carol regarding housekeeping. But I was afraid she wasn't going to make it back from lunch before the bridge club started. I almost thought it was too late to call you.”
“It almost was. It's a good thing we synchronized our watches. We're getting good at this.”
“I have more information,” Tess said. “Dutifully following your orders, I talked to Joe.”
“What did he say?”
“Joe told me the fire alarm that was set off is the one near the reception desk,” Tess said. “You have to reset it manually to stop the alarm.”
“Good work,” I said.
“Listen, that's not all. Because of your interest in Carol, I checked with her secretary. Carol was in a meeting in her conference room all morning of the day Gerald was killed.”
“Which is near the reception desk.”
“The meeting ended about noon…”
“Which is when the bridge club started, back in the days when it included lunch. And when Ellen made a call on her cell phone the day Gerald died. And when the fire alarm went off.”
“Right. Do I get my gold star?”
“Two of them.”
But my euphoria resulting from finding out that Carol and Ellen knew each other better than I had suspected and that Carol might have some involvement in Gerald's murder was already fading, as we sat in Tess' living room after the bridge club. I had more circumstantial evidence that a crime had been committed, but as usual nothing I could take to the police.
“I don't understand why you think Carol might have a part in this,” Tess said. “Why would she want to see Gerald dead? Does it have something to do with the gift to Silver Acres in his will?”
I couldn't tell Tess that Carol might be an embezzler because of my promise to Wesley. I said, “It does, but don't worry about it for the moment. Think about the fire alarm; who gave us the all clear afterward so we could go back inside.”
“Carol did. I remember distinctly; she came out of the same door we did-the one across the hall from the recreation room.”
“That's what I remember, too.”
“Joe told me Carol's job when the fire alarm rings is the same as his-to see that everybody gets out of the building. She must have walked from her office toward the recreation room, checking to see that anybody in the rooms along the way was exiting the building. One reason that's important is because some of our inmates are deaf and might not hear the alarm.”
“Because they're not wearing their hearing aids.” This remark was aimed at Tess, who sometimes forgot hers. My brain, after a layoff, was working again. “How soon after the fire alarm went off did she tell us it was okay to reenter the building?”
“Not long. Less than five minutes.”
I got up and paced up and down. “Assuming that Carol was at or near her office when the alarm when off, would she have had time to walk to the recreation room, back to her office and then return to the recreation room again before she told us we could go inside?”
“No,” Tess said, positively. “Not if she checked all the rooms.”
“Now for he $64 question. Was she holding anything in her hands when she told us we could go in?”
“Not that I can recall.”
“Nor I.” I stopped in front of Tess. “One of our biggest problems in proving that a murder was committed is
