11th hour

Chapter 79

We turned down the offer of refreshments and arrayed ourselves around the small room.

I leaned against the kitchenette counter, Cindy grabbed the only chair, and Conklin took up a position against the door. Connie Kerr stood like a flagpole at the center of the room.

“How can I help you?” she said.

“Harry Chandler,” I said. “How do you know him?”

“Oh, well. Harry. I was his girlfriend a long time ago. He was a star and I was blinded by his light. It was just a fling,” she said, laughing, “but I really had fun and I have no regrets.”

“When did you see him last?”

“Don’t hold me to the exact day, but I’m sure I haven’t seen him in twenty years or more.”

“But Harry lets you live here?”

“He doesn’t know that I’m here. But he wouldn’t mind. I’m no trouble. I live like a little mouse.” She laughed again, a shrill, crazy kind of laugh. “I’m working on a book, you know. I’ve written ten novels so far and I’ve just started another. They’re thrillers. Murder mysteries.”

“Do you use your real name?”

Cindy asked. “Cindy, is it? I’ll use my name when I’m published. I think the story I’m working on now has a real chance of getting into print.”

Connie Kerr took us on a tour of her fairly wild imagination, showing us loosely connected plot diagrams that she’d drawn on brown butcher’s paper and taped to the walls.

As she talked about her characters, she used broad gestures, did pirouettes, clasped her hands to her chest as though she were still a young girl and not a fifty-year-old squatter in someone’s abandoned digs.

Had this eccentric mystery writer witnessed a crime through her window? Or had she gone beyond writing about murder and actually committed it?

“What can you tell us about the heads we found in the garden?” I asked.

“I know that they make a whopping good mystery,” she said.

She was grinning and clapping her hands when my partner broke her mood.

“We don’t like mysteries,” Conklin said. “Ms. Kerr, here’s the thing. We’re going to need you to come with us down to the Hall and make a statement. Officially.”

Kerr’s radiant smile left her face. “Oh no. I really can’t leave the house. I never do.”

“You never go outside?” Conklin asked.

Kerr shook her head vigorously.

“How do you get food?”

“A friend brings me what I need and leaves it for me on the back steps.”

“Who is this friend?”

“I don’t have to say.”

“Let me put it another way. Can this friend vouch for your whereabouts last weekend?” I asked her.

“You don’t understand. I live alone. Nobody ever sees me. You’re the first guests I’ve had here — ever.”

Conklin said, “We’ve got seven dead people, Ms. Kerr. Not fiction. Truth. I think you know what happened to them.”

“I did nothing. I saw nothing. What can I say to make you believe me? I’m the last person you should ever suspect, Mr. Conklin.”

Conklin said, “Do you have a coat?”

“A coat?”

“Here,” he said, taking off his jacket and putting it over her shoulders. “It’s raining outside.”