Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 51, No. 1 & 2, January/February 2006

21 Steps by O’Neil De Noux

Detective John Raven Beau watched two coroner’s assistants carry the black body bag down the steps from the victim’s front porch, down the brick walkway, through the black wrought-iron gate, to the white Coroner’s Office van parked against the curb. They slid the body bag into the back and slammed the door.

Beau, standing six two, a lean one-eighty pounds, was thirty, a square-jawed man with dark brown hair and light brown eyes. The long sleeves of his white dress shirt were rolled up on his muscular forearms, his light blue tie loosened, and his nine-millimeter Beretta Model 92-F was snug in its black canvas holster on his right hip. A gold star-and-crescent New Orleans Police badge was clipped to his belt above the left front pocket of his navy blue suit pants.

“I was up on the pole all morning,” said the man standing next to Beau. His name was Jerol Philiber, forty-eight years old with short black hair, skin as dark as oak bark, standing six feet even, weighing two-twenty, and wearing a blue denim work jacket and denim pants.

Beau copied Philiber’s pertinent information in his notes, taking it from Philiber’s driver’s license and Community Cable-TV ID card, before handing them back to the cable installer.

“We’re rewiring this whole part of St. Charles Avenue,” Philiber volunteered. “I’m still not finished. Been here since six A.M.”

Beau looked at the telephone pole ten feet from the victim’s front gate, then up at the wires above, green metal box open where Philiber was working.

“Noticed her front door was cracked open,” the cableman went on, Beau jotting quickly to keep up, letting the man talk. “When I came down for lunch, I saw the next-door neighbor in her front yard and started to ask about the house, but she ran inside like I was the bogeyman.”

Beau looked into Philiber’s eyes. Neither man said it, but the elderly woman neighbor was probably frightened by the large black man.

“She called y’all, and I told the uniformed officer about the door.”

Beau had already interviewed the first officer on the scene, who had knocked on the door, rung the doorbell, and gone inside with the neighbor lady. It took him eleven minutes to find the eighty-year-old victim’s body in the hall closet.

“You said you’re from Homicide. I take it she didn’t die a natural death.”

Beau nodded, still looking in the man’s eyes. Philiber didn’t look away, didn’t even blink.

“Hey!” came a voice from the porch. Crime Lab Technician Ned Howland stood at the top step, evidence case in one hand, keys in the other. “Want me to lock the door?”

Beau raised a hand over his eyes to shield them from the bright sunlight. Although it was early winter and cool in New Orleans, it wasn’t cold yet, especially beneath the strong sun.

“Hold on a second,” Beau called back and crossed the brick walkway to the steps, counting them on the way up. Twenty-one concrete steps led up to the porch, which was actually a gallery with an overhang above supported by wooden columns and decorated with gingerbread trim. White, the entire house was painted white, even the window frames and door trim.

Howland handed the key chain with its two silver keys to Beau.

“Dusted them?”

“Of course.” Howland picked up his camera case with his free hand. “Not a thing.”

They’d found the keys inside the door, sitting in the lock. Beau carefully locked the half glass front door, checking the lock, which worked fine, then followed Howland down the steps.

“Can you leave me some evidence tape?” Beau asked as they moved through the gate. Howland stopped, reached into his evidence case, and tossed a partial roll of yellow-and-black plastic evidence tape, which wasn’t adhesive tape, but an unbroken roll of plastic.

Beau closed the gate, tied the end of the evidence tape to the fence post next to the gate and extended the tape across the gate to the next fence post, leaving the roll next to the fence as he stepped back to Philiber, still standing on the sidewalk.

A streetcar rattled along the neutral ground in the center of St. Charles Avenue, curious faces looking toward Beau and the bright evidence tape. A little girl with a ponytail waved and Beau waved back and smiled. The girl ducked back in shyly.

“I see you have a way with the fairer sex.” Philiber was trying to be friendly.

“Only the ones who don’t know better. Did you see anyone else around this morning?”

“Guy in a red car parked right where your van’s leaving.” Philiber pointed to Howland’s Crime Lab van as it pulled away from the curb. “Opened his hood and worked under it before going up the steps and ringing the bell.”

“He go in?”

“Nope. No answer, so he left. Came straight back to his car, tinkered under the hood for a minute, and got the car started and drove off.”

Beau got a description of the man: white male, late twenties, tall, thin, with short blond hair. Car was a late-model red Olds or Pontiac.

“You see anything else?”

“Nope.”

Beau thanked him and Philiber climbed back up the pole to finish his work, while Beau walked next door to the elderly lady who had gone into the victim’s house with the reporting officer.

Louisa Smith, seventy-one years old, with thinning gray hair and a face lined with deep wrinkles, preferred speaking to Beau through a latched screen door. Her house was only a one-story brick home, looking like a track house from the suburbs, sandwiched between the larger homes along the 7800 block of St. Charles.

Understandably frightened, she spoke in a low voice, Beau having to pull the words from her. She knew the victim, but not well, didn’t even know her last name, just knew her as Lily.

“She has a twin sister in California.”

Beau had found the sister’s name and number in Lily Chauchoin’s address book, had already spoken with the sister, who’d told him about Lily’s life.

“She didn’t come outside,” Louisa said. “She had her groceries delivered.”

“From where?”

“DiMarco’s Grocery. Around the corner.”

Beau knew the place. A neighborhood grocery store still hanging on against the supermarket chains.

“Did you see anyone around Lily’s the last couple days?”

“That big man on the telephone pole.”

“Did he go near Lily’s house?”

“No. I been watchin’ him.”

“You see anyone else?”

“Just the boy with the red car.”

Yes, she saw the blond guy go up the steps to Lily’s front door and saw him come down a minute later, then drive away. No, she knew of no suspicious characters around the neighborhood.

“I wonder who’ll move in there now,” Louisa said, moving to her left to look at the steps next door. “Some people think it’s an antebellum house. But it was built after the Civil War.”

“How do you know that?”

Lily had been talkative once, years ago, long before she became a “recluse,” as Louisa described her.

“Your accent,” Louisa said as Beau closed his notebook. “It isn’t... I thought you were... Mexican.”

“I’m half Oglala.”

“Huh?”

“Lakota.” No way that would register, so he relented, telling her the name the enemies of the Lakota, including the white man, gave to his mother’s tribe. “Sioux. I’m half American Indian.”

He thanked her and turned away.

“What’s the other half?”

“Cajun. That’s the accent you’re hearing.”

She didn’t look like she believed a word.

Beau canvassed both sides of the house with the twenty-one steps, learning nothing of value. Returning to Lily Chauchoin’s gate, Beau was approached by a newspaper reporter and a television reporter who was hurriedly trying to get her cameraman set up.

“No comment,” he said, ignoring their questions as he untied the evidence tape, went in the gate, retied the tape, and climbed the steps, counting them again, like a mantra. He’d already checked the outside of the house with the crime lab technician, finding all windows locked, the back door locked, nothing amiss. He’d checked inside but wanted to take his time in a longer, second search.

Looking down from the gallery, he noted on his notepad, “lawn care.” Someone was taking care of the lawn, which appeared freshly cut. The banana trees and azalea bushes along the sides of the house were well tended, as were the camellia bushes in the front yard.

Beau unlocked the front door and went in. He finally recognized the smell. Vanilla. He’d seen candles dotting the living room, small scented candles in glass cups. Standing in the foyer, he looked at the living room on the left, formal dining room on the right, stairs leading to the bedrooms upstairs.

The walls were lined with cardboard boxes stacked up to three feet, each filled, some with magazines, some with books, some with lampshades and other odds and ends. He followed the narrow path through the boxes into the dining room where the long mahogany table was almost completely covered with boxes. The end nearest the kitchen was bare, enough for one person to sit and eat.

Beau inched his way through the kitchen to the back steps and down into the first floor of the house, which served as a basement — because of its high water table, no one had underground basements in New Orleans, the only major American city built below sea level atop a vast marsh. He could barely make his way through rooms cluttered with old furniture and more boxes.

It took Beau an hour to check out the lower rooms, sifting through the accumulations of the eighty-year life of Lily Chauchoin, who had once been a princess at the Krewe of Momus Mardi Gras Ball, who had also graduated from Newcomb College, long since a part of Tulane University, who had taught at Sacred Heart Academy down St. Charles Avenue for forty-two years, according to Lily’s lone sister.

He found a picture of Lily’s husband upstairs in the master bedroom, a black-and-white photo in a wooden frame on the end table next to the double bed. The picture showed a plain-faced man in khakis. Lily’s sister had explained that he was airborne, killed in Korea when the Chinese overran his outfit, November 1950.

Lily’s jewelry box, overturned on the dresser, was dirty with black fingerprint powder, as were the drawers the burglar pulled out, tossing Lily’s clothes across the floor. Lily’s dresses, yanked from their hangers, littered the closet floor, as well as a dozen shoe boxes and shoes, mostly black and brown.

When he spotted the broken glass box under the bed, he knew he’d have to call the crime lab back to take a picture and dust it for prints. Nothing picked up fingerprints better than glass.

He found a color photo of Lily’s son, who looked a lot like his father, only he was in fatigues and wore a helmet. Beau could see jungle in the background of the photo. The son was killed at Da Nang during the Tet Offensive, 1968.

Beau realized when he saw the son’s room that it hadn’t been disturbed, except for dusting, since the sixties, that the entire house had an old feeling. He went back through it and found nothing new, as if the house and its contents had been frozen in time. No microwave in the kitchen, no answering machine next to the phone, no home computer, no VCR.

He found hundreds of food coupons carefully clipped from the newspaper, generic drugs in the medicine cabinets, Lily Chauchoin’s well-worn clothing, old sofas, mismatched lamps. Beau went back to Lily’s purse, which he’d found in the kitchen cupboard, behind a can of flour.

He found nine dollars in cash and a checkbook but no credit cards, no bank debit card. Thumbing through her checkbook confirmed what Beau suspected. Although she lived in a large house on one of the most exclusive avenues in uptown New Orleans, although she kept the exterior of her home immaculate, even the lawn, she had little money for anything else. He carefully put everything back in the purse and put it back where she’d left it.

In the closet where Lily’s body was found, Beau discovered another piece of glass, rectangular in shape. As he called Howland back to the scene, he bent over and saw the glass was actually the lid from the glass box upstairs.

After photographing them, Howland lifted three partial prints from the glass box beneath Lily’s bed and one excellent thumb print from the glass lid from the closet. Beau thanked him for coming back so quickly.

“It’s what I live for,” Howland snarled, then smiled. “See you at the autopsy.”

DiMarco’s Grocery, along the first floor of a two-story wooden building painted pale blue, sat at the corner of Hampson and Burdette Streets. The smile on Sal DiMarco’s face disappeared when Beau told him what had happened. Sixty-six years old, five seven, a hundred and forty pounds, with thick gray hair and a matching mustache, Sal’s eyes teared up and he had to take a seat.

Beau leaned against the counter and accepted a Coke from Sal’s son Joe, who was missing both hands and used old fashioned metal hooks, instead of prosthetic hands.

“Was a firefighter,” Joe explained. “Lost both hands in a fire back in ’61. In the French Quarter, thought we’d lose an entire block, but only lost two houses and two hands.”

Joe delivered Lily’s groceries. His last delivery was three days earlier. Lily would call in her order and he’d deliver it, but never went inside. Lily always met him on the back porch, always paid with cash, and always carried her own stuff in from the porch.

“Do you know what drugstore she used?” Beau chided himself for not copying the names of any pharmacy from the prescriptions in Lily’s bathroom cabinet.

“Ours.” Joe explained they had a pharmacist in the back. “I offered to carry the stuff in every time, but she never let me. Rich people are sometimes odd. She was very quiet, never really looked me in the eye, but I liked her.” Joe, in his late forties, stood six three, two-eighty, balding, lifted his apron with the hook on his right hand and wiped tears from his eyes.

“You’re from Homicide?”

Beau nodded, taking another sip of Coke.

“She was murdered?”

Beau nodded again.

“This is horrible,” he said. “Absolutely horrible.”

“How long was Lily a customer?”

Sal answered for his son. “Forty years. More. She used to come in till her son was killed in Vietnam. We been deliverin’ ever since.”

As Beau jotted the DiMarcos’ contact information in his notes, Sal leaned on the counter and asked, “Did Lily suffer?”

Beau gave him the stare, the expressionless stare of his ancestors, those lean plains warriors who said little and showed no emotion in their faces, ever, even when dying at the hands of the white man.

The old man’s eyes became wet again.

Beau thanked them for the Coke and left his business card, in case they heard anything. He spent the next four hours in a futile canvass of Hampson and the side streets around the house with the twenty-one steps.

Standing in front of Lily’s gate in his tan suit pants, badge clipped to his belt, Beretta in the new beige canvas holster on his right hip, Beau removed the evidence tape he’d forgotten to remove the previous evening. He slipped on his extra-dark Ray-Ban sunglasses. Time to canvass.

Nine A.M., time people should be up. Beau had attended Lily’s autopsy at six A.M., confirming the manner of death was homicide, the cause of death: asphyxia from ligature around her throat. The pathologist carefully removed the curtain cord from Lily’s frail neck. Beau had already found the cord’s source, a front room window. The pathologist set the time of death between four and eight P.M. the evening before the body was found.

Beau walked over to Louisa Smith’s small brick home and rang the bell.

Louisa cracked open her door and peeked through the screen door. “What is it now?” She seemed more annoyed than frightened.

“I forgot to ask if you knew what lawn service Lily used?”

“Lawn service?”

“Yes, who took care of Lily’s yard?” Beau moved to the side and pointed toward Lily’s yard.

“I’ve been using the same gardeners for twenty years, but Lily used people going up and down with lawn mowers. Kids sometimes. Men too, but nobody steady.”

Beau asked for the name of Louisa’s gardener and had to explain he needed to speak with anyone remotely connected to the neighborhood.

“Wait a second.” Louisa shut the door and came back a minute later with a card she pressed against the screen door and told Beau he could take down the information, but she couldn’t understand why.

The lawn service was in Metairie. Something to follow up later.

“Have you seen anyone from the electric company, gas company, phone company around lately?” Beau had already made a note to check with those companies for any recent service in the area because you never knew, they may have a murderer working for them, or if they came around, they might have seen something.

Louisa’s eyes narrowed. “That man up on the pole yesterday.”

Beau leaned closer. “Are you all right, ma’am?”

“Of course. Except for you bothering me.”

Beau thanked her again and she huffed, “With all Lily’s money, I don’t know why she didn’t have a regular lawn man.”

He rolled his sleeves up and continued his canvass of Lily’s neighbors.

Three doors from Lily’s house, at another white house, this one with twelve steps leading up to its front gallery, Beau found Sally Branson: forty-four years old, tall and thin, with light brown skin, hair cut in a short afro, brown eyes, and a ready smile. Sally wore a white maid’s dress and white shoes.

Her smile disappeared when she spotted Beau’s badge. “I saw it on TV last night. Poor woman.”

Beau went through his questions, coming up with only one new piece of information. Sally didn’t want to cast suspicions on someone who might be innocent, but there was a man who’d been going around, knocking on doors, asking about odd jobs.

“What’s he look like?”

Sally described a white male in his forties, a little shorter than Sally’s five ten, with short brown hair and tattoos on both arms.

“He was polite, but I didn’t like his eyes.”

“What about his eyes?”

“They were set too wide apart.” Sally put a hand in front of her mouth and shrugged. “Sounds silly, but my gramma always said be wary of men with their eyes set too wide apart. Too much trash going on inside the head of those kinda men.”

“Did you catch this man’s name?”

Sally hadn’t. She apologized for “generalizing” about the man because of an old gramma’s tale.

“No need to apologize,” Beau said. “My mother’s full of such notions.”

“Really?” Sally’s eyes lit up. “About what?”

Beau shrugged. “The White Eyes.”

“Who?”

“White folk.”

Sally’s head tilted to the side.

“Especially men in blue riding horses.”

Sally put a hand on her hip, a mischievous look on her face. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Beau took a moment to tell her about the Battle of the Greasy Grass, when his great-great-grand uncle Crazy Horse went up against Custer and his boys in a battle the whites called Custer’s Last Stand, better known, now in the twenty-first century, as the Battle of the Little Big Horn.

Sally’s mouth formed an “O” as Beau passed her a business card and asked if she thought of anything else, to call.

At a small diner on Hampson Street called Café Bayonne, Beau discovered a great steakburger meal and the name of the man with the tattoos — Lee Rumbold.

Waitress Ann Falimy, mid thirties, five five, on the heavy side, with short brown hair and a lean face with a pointy chin, described Lee Rumbold as a “pretty regular customer the last few weeks.”

The well-seasoned steakburger, the Bayonne Burger Special, came with curly fries and a chocolate malt. Between juicy bites and Ann’s waiting on other customers, Beau learned that Lee Rumbold sometimes parked his lawn mower and edger outside when he came in.

“I think he does odd jobs for people around here. He’s nice. Quiet.”

“Do you know where he lives?”

Ann wasn’t sure but thought Rumbold lived in one of the cheap apartment houses up Hampson on the other side of Carrollton.

“We’ve only spoken once for more than a minute. Couple days ago. He came after the lunch rush.”

“He mention anything about working up on St. Charles?”

“Nothing specific, but he did complain how rich people didn’t pay well. He preferred cutting smaller yards away from St. Charles.”

Ann stepped away for another customer and Beau went back to his burger. When she eased back, he asked through a mouthful, “He ever mention any elderly women customers?”

“No. As I said. Nothing specific.”

He left Sally a tip to match the bill and his business card. “If Lee Rumbold comes in, call this number and tell the dispatcher for me to 10–19 Bayonne. I’ll know to come right away.”

“Should I be afraid of Lee?”

Beau shrugged. “He could be completely innocent.”

Sally chuckled. “Nobody’s completely innocent.” She winked at Beau as he stepped out.

Lee Rumbold stayed at the Capri Apartments on Hampson, half a block from Carrollton Avenue. Six apartments had been carved from what once was a southern mansion with six columns out front. Two more apartments had been created from the garage. Lee occupied the lower garage apartment and wasn’t in. The manager didn’t seem concerned, having a cop ask about a tenant.

“You wanna see his lease?”

Beau was tempted, but if this Lee was involved, he’d better get a search warrant.

“If you could tell me his date of birth, that would help.”

Sitting back out in his unmarked black Chevy, Beau ran Lee Rumbold through the police computer, discovering the man had two arrests for disturbing the peace by being drunk in public.

Beau went back into the Capri to use the phone to call the Crime Lab and ask to have Rumbold’s prints compared to the prints from the scene.

“Any luck with the other prints?” Beau asked.

“No. Everyone came back negative.”

Beau mentally crossed off cableman Jerol Philiber as well as the nine known burglars arrested in the area over the last two years. He’d asked the Crime Lab to compare their prints to the ones lifted from Lily Chauchoin’s glass box.

“There he is now.” The manager pointed outside. Beau caught a glimpse of a man pushing a lawn mower around the corner toward the garage apartment. Beau followed him, catching him before he got inside.

“Police,” Beau said, showing his credentials. “How’s it going today, Mr. Rumbold?”

Rumbold was thirty-nine, stood around five nine, about one-fifty, with short brown hair that looked as if Rumbold had cut it himself.

Looking around Beau, batting his wide-set brown eyes, Rumbold shrugged. “I’m okay, I guess.”

Tattoos ran down both his arms, an anchor and mother on his left arm, a sailing ship and usn on the right arm.

“I’d like to come in and talk with you,” Beau said in a flat voice, not friendly but not unfriendly.

Rumbold closed the door of his apartment, said, “You can’t go in.”

“Then let’s go to my place.” Beau smiled now, but not friendly at all.

Rumbold insisted on locking up his lawn mower and edger in the small wooden shed attached to the back of the apartments and followed Beau back to his car.

“You have any weapons on you?” Beau asked, opening the back door of his car and patting Rumbold down quickly. No knives, no guns.

“No.” Rumbold’s voice sounded tired.

He never said another word all the way to the Detective Bureau.

Beau’s former partner, Detective Jodie Kintyre, sat at her desk, which abutted Beau’s in the Homicide squad room. Jodie was thirty-six, stood five seven, slim, with blond hair cut in a page boy. She wore a white blouse and black slacks, her weapon in a shoulder rig hanging beneath her left arm. A blond-haired civilian sat in the folding chair next to her desk. He looked to be about twenty.

Beau winked at Jodie as he led Rumbold into one of the small, windowless interview rooms and sat him behind the small table, leaving him to simmer for a half hour.

Jodie joined Beau at the coffee pot, her catlike hazel eyes more narrow than usual as she nodded back toward her desk. “He turned himself in.”

“For what?”

“Said you were looking for him.”

Beau realized this was the blond guy with the red car and smiled, stirring his coffee as he approached their desks. Beau didn’t say a word, letting the man explain how a TV cableman told him Beau was looking for him, how he was a student at Tulane, and how his car breaks down just about every day.

“I rang the doorbell but didn’t go inside. Really.”

Beau secured the man’s driver’s license and ran him on the computer. No arrests, but he’d been fingerprinted. Tulane ROTC. So Beau had his prints compared to the ones from the scene. For the next twenty minutes the three sat and talked, Jodie smiling as the young man tried to flirt with her, awkwardly, nervously.

“Olds or Pontiac,” Beau asked.

“Huh? Oh. Pontiac.” He seemed to relax slightly.

When the phone rang, Beau snatched it up before the first ring was finished. It was the Crime Lab.

“Bingo,” said Howland. “Got a hit. Wanna guess who?”

“Rumbold.”

“Bingo again,” Howland said. “Good work, Detective.” He was teasing now and Beau was feeling good. He asked Jodie if she could take a brief statement from her young admirer as Beau headed for the interview room.

Turning on the video recorder, set on its tripod in the corner of the room, Beau read Rumbold his Miranda rights from a waiver-of-rights form, and Rumbold initialed next to each “right.”

No problem, Rumbold contended. “Sure, I’ll talk to you.”

Beau started with the preliminaries, Rumbold’s age, place of birth: Chicago. The usual background information revealed Lee Rumbold was a Vietnam veteran, U.S. Navy, in-country, gunner’s mate on a swift boat, a plastic patrol boat along the Mekong Delta.

“How long have you been cutting Lily Chauchoin’s grass?”

“Who?”

“The lady who lived in the house with the twenty-one steps out front. St. Charles Avenue.”

“Only cut it three or four times.”

“You ever go inside her house?”

“Nope.”

Beau kept his face expressionless as he went on, letting Rumbold paint himself into a corner he’d never get out of, letting him explain his whereabouts for the last three days.

“So the last time you cut Mrs. Chauchoin’s grass was three days ago?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know what happened to her?”

“Nope.”

“Don’t read the papers much, do you?”

“Nope.”

Beau watched the man’s eyes as he told him, “She was murdered.”

“No.” Rumbold blinked, then looked down at the tabletop and fidgeted as he sat in the hard wooden folding chair with its front legs shaved down a half inch to make the interviewee lean forward uncomfortably.

“Her house was burgled,” Beau continued. “Ransacked.”

Rumbold sat up and shook his head. “Why would anybody do that. She didn’t have any money.”

Beau continued staring into Rumbold’s eyes. “She pay you in cash?”

“Yep.”

“She tell you she didn’t have any money?”

“Huh?”

“How’d you know she had no money?”

Rumbold sat back and looked up into the video camera lens. Beau loved it when they did that, looking right at the jury with “guilty” written across the face.

“Everyone, even her next door neighbor of forty-two years, thought she had money.” Beau let that sink in a moment before repeating his question, “How’d you know she had no money?”

Rumbold swallowed loud enough for Beau to hear.

“All right, let me try another question. If you never went inside the house, how did your fingerprint end up on the glass box next to the body?”

Rumbold started shaking his head, putting his elbows up on the table, clamping his hands against his temples.

“We know what happened,” Beau said. “You wanna tell us how it happened?”

Rumbold took his time. Didn’t mean to kill her, of course. After cutting the grass, Lily brought him some tea in a paper cup, a paper cup. All the money in that big house and he wasn’t good enough to drink from a glass. That’s what sparked him to shove his way in and “rob the place.”

Unfortunately, Lily Chauchoin panicked. “I just wanted to shut her up,” he said.

As the statement concluded, Beau filled out the arrest form, charging Rumbold with first-degree murder. He looked into Rumbold’s eyes for a long moment and remembered what Sally Branson had said about being wary of men with wide-set eyes. “Too much trash going on inside,” she’d said. And he remembered Ann Falimy saying, “Nobody’s completely innocent.”

It was Beau’s job to prove Rumbold was completely guilty. After booking Rumbold, Beau would get a search warrant for the man’s apartment, certain he’d find something belonging to Lily there.

“Would you like a cup of coffee?” Beau asked, as he led Rumbold out.

“Yeah.”

Beau pointed to the coffee area. “All we have is Styrofoam.”

At ten the following morning, as Beau pulled up in front of Lily Chauchoin’s, a white van pulled in behind him and Jerol Philiber climbed out. They met next to the wrought-iron gate.

“That student come and talk to you?”

“Yeah. You read the paper this morning?”

“Didn’t mean to interfere,” Philiber said. “I see you caught the killer.”

The door opened and another version of Lily Chauchoin stepped out on Lily’s gallery. Her sister from California waited for Beau. She raised a hand and waved tentatively. She was waiting for the details of her sister’s murder, a job Beau never relished, but knew how to handle.

He thanked Philiber again. “Nosy citizens are appreciated. And you didn’t interfere at all.”

Philiber seemed relieved, shot Beau a smile as they shook hands. Beau opened the gate and told the cableman, “Keep your eyes open.”

“I will.”

Beau crossed to the steps and counted them on the way up, “One, two, three...” Like a mantra.