“No, thank you.”
Becca urged me to sit down, so I perched on the edge of the couch. I didn’t want to stay long.
“Anthony’s gone to the car wash,” Becca told me. “I was sure it was him when you knocked.”
I waited for her to get to the point.
“If Anthony and I do go on this trip he’s planning,” she began, “would you be interested in being responsible for the apartments while I’m gone?”
“Tell me exactly what that means.”
She talked at me for some time, giving me details, showing me the list of workmen who kept a tab for the apartment-building repairs, and explaining how to deposit the rent checks. Becca was a sensible woman under all that makeup, and she explained things well.
The extra money would be welcome, and I needed the job just for the visibility. Used to be, I cleaned maybe four out of the eight apartments in the building, but that was a couple of years ago. And Pardon had hired me to clean the public parts of the building from time to time. I told Becca I’d do it, and she seemed pleased and relieved.
I stood up to go, and in that moment of silence before Becca began the courtesies of saying good-bye, I heard something upstairs.
From Deedra’s apartment.
Becca said, “Well, Lily…,” and I raised my hand. She stopped speaking immediately, which I liked, and she mouthed, “What?” I pointed at the ceiling.
We stood looking up as if we had X-ray vision and could see what was going on overhead. Again, I heard movement in the apartment of the dead woman. Just for moment, my skin crawled.
“Is Lacey here?” I breathed, trying to catch any sound I could. Becca and I stood together like statues, but statues whose heads were rotating slightly to hear as well as possible.
Becca shook her head, and the ribbon she’d tied around the elastic band holding back her long blond hair rustled on her shoulders.
I jerked my head toward Becca’s door. I looked questioningly.
She nodded and we went quietly across to her apartment door.
“Police?” I asked in the lowest voice that would carry.
She shook her head. “Might be family,” she whispered, with a shrug.
Nothing could creep like Becca and I up those stairs. We were familiar enough with the apartment building to know what creaked and what didn’t, and we were at Deedra’s door before I was ready for it.
We had no gun, no weapon of any kind besides our hands, while the person inside might have an armory. But this was Becca’s property, and she seemed determined to confront the intruder here and now. We both became comfortable with our stance, and I rotated my shoulders to loosen them.
Becca knocked on the door.
All movement inside the apartment stopped. There was a frozen silence as we two, hardly breathing, waited to find out what the intruder’s next move would be.
That silence went on too long for Becca’s taste, and she rapped on the door again, more impatiently.
“We know you’re in there, and there’s no way out but this door.” That was true, and it made the apartments something of a fire hazard. I remember Pardon handing out rope ladders to the tenants of the second floor for a while, but he got discouraged when they all left taking the rope ladders with them, so the second floor people would just have to fend for themselves if there was a fire. I had time to remember the rope ladders while the silence continued.
More silence.
“We’re not going away,” Becca said quite calmly. I had to admire her assurance. “Okay, Lily,” she said more loudly, “call the police.”
The door popped open as if it were on springs.
“Don’t call my sister,” Marlon Schuster begged.
Becca and I looked at each other simultaneously, and if I looked like she did, we looked pretty silly. Becca’s bright blue eyes were about to pop out of her head with astonishment and chagrin. To trap the brother of the sheriff in such a position, in the apartment of a murder victim… We’d cut our own throats with our bravado. No one, but no one, would thank us for this.
“Oh, hell,” Becca said, disgust in her voice. “Come down to my place.”
Like a whipped puppy, Marlon slunk down to the landlady’s apartment, looking smaller than ever. His black hair had been cut very short, I was guessing for the funeral, and now that I could watch him for a minute I realized that the young man was fine-boned and spare. I doubted if he could lift seventy-five pounds. I’d hoped we were catching Deedra’s murderer, but now I didn’t know what to think.
Without being told, Marlon sank onto the single chair that was squeezed in across from the couch. Becca and I faced him, and Becca told him to start talking.
Marlon sat staring at his hands, as if answers would sprout on them. He wasn’t too far from crying.
“How’d you get in?” I asked, to get him rolling.
“Deedra gave me a key,” he said, and he had a trace of pride in his voice.
“She didn’t give out keys.” I waited to see what he’d say next.
“She gave me one.” The pride was unmistakable now.
Becca shifted beside me. “So why didn’t you turn it in?” she asked. “I had to give the cops my key, and I own the place.”
“I kept it because she gave it to me,” Marlon said simply. I scanned his face for the truth. I am no human lie detector, but it looked to me like he believed what he said. I’d noticed before that Marlon was more like his father than his mother, at least as far as looks went. But Sheriff Schuster’s size had been belied by his ferocious reputation as a lawman who swung his nightstick first and asked questions later. If there was a similar ferocity in his son, it was buried mighty deep.
“So, you went in with a key given you by the tenant,” Becca said thoughtfully, as if she was considering the legality of his entry.
Marlon nodded eagerly.
“Why?” I asked.
Marlon flushed a dark and unbecoming shade of red. “I just wanted to…,” and he trailed off, aware that a sentence that began that way wasn’t going to end up sounding convincing.
“You went to get…?” Becca prompted.
Marlon took a deep breath. “The film.”
“You and Deedra made a video?” I kept my voice as neutral as possible, but the young man flushed even deeper. He nodded, and buried his face in his hands.
“Then you’re in luck, because I have all the home videos at my house,” I said. “I’ll go through them, and when I find yours, I’ll give it to you.”
I thought he would collapse from relief. Then he appeared to be screwing up his courage again. “There were other things,” he said hesitantly. “Mrs. Knopp shouldn’t see them, you know?”
“It’s taken care of,” I told him.
Becca’s eyes flicked from me to the boy, absorbing this information.
“You found her, Miz Bard,” Marlon said. He was staring at me longingly, as if he wanted to open my head and see the images there. “What had happened to her? Marta wouldn’t let me go see.”
“Marta was right. If you cared for Deedra, you wouldn’t have wanted to see her like that.”
“How was it?” he asked, pleading.
I felt very uneasy. I tried to keep looking the boy steadily in the eyes, so he’d believe me. “She was naked in the car with no visible wounds,” I said carefully. “She was sitting up.”
“I don’t understand.”
What was to understand? The plainest explanation of the scene was probably the true one, no matter what problems I had accepting it. Deedra had had one man too many. That man had lured her out to the woods, become angry with her or simply decided she was expendable, and killed her.
“Had she been raped?” he asked.
