Catch a Falling Knife

Chapter 28

I still didn’t know for sure who had given Elise a ride back to her apartment the night she was killed. She must have been picked up either in the parking lot at Club Cavalier, or nearby, since she hadn’t gone to Frank’s house.

I was convinced that Eric couldn’t have picked her up. How about Donna? Apparently, Donna was the designated picker-upper. That would help to explain how she knew as much as she did about Elise’s dancing. Of course, just the fact that she was Elise’s roommate explained that.

I had heard from Burt that Donna and her boyfriend disagreed as to when she had left him that evening. It was somewhere between 10 and 10:30 p.m., depending on which one you asked, but that range was wide enough to explain any number of scenarios. They also disagreed on when she had arrived at his place. He said it was later than she did. Burt had also said that “boyfriend” appeared to be too strong a word for their relationship. The guy had told the police they were just friends.

If Donna had driven Elise back to the apartment, Donna would have been there when Eric was there. She would have been there when Eric killed Elise. Why hadn’t Eric killed Donna at the same time? And if Donna had managed to escape, why hadn’t she told the police? Questions for which I had no answers.

Mark was still at work when I arrived back at my apartment so I called Wesley. Wesley had a computer and he was conversant with the Internet. He told me to come on over.

“Okay, what’s the URL of the website?” Wesley asked when we were seated in front of his computer.

“You mean the address?” I was beginning to catch on to the lingo. I produced the piece of paper on which I had carefully recorded the address of Eric’s infamous website.

Wesley typed it in and a screen appeared announcing the crusade against the destroyers of family values. The license numbers of the cars of the offending citizens, the ones who had visited Club Cavalier and other strip clubs in the Bethany area, were conveniently displayed by date.

Somebody had been maintaining the site since Elise’s death because the numbers collected on the day she was killed were posted. Apparently, Eric had found it in his heart to continue his good works.

I had also brought the license plate number of Donna’s car. I had written that down the first time I saw her car. We scanned the list for Club Cavalier on the date of Elise’s murder, but it wasn’t there. We did a search to see if it appeared anywhere in the database for any date. We came up empty.

“What is Mark’s license plate number?” Wesley asked.

The question surprised me. “Why do you ask?”

“Aren’t you even faintly curious as to whether he was at Club Cavalier on that particular evening?”

“I am completely convinced that he wasn’t, but I know his number.”

If I had said anything else I would have had to acknowledge that deep down inside me I had some nagging doubts about Mark’s innocence. And if I didn’t check for his license number now those doubts might not go away. I wouldn’t admit to Wesley that I had any trepidation about making the check, but I hesitated long enough so that he probably had a suspicion.

I had memorized Mark’s license plate number because he had been driving me around some of the time and I wanted to be able to locate his car when it was parked. My mathematical background helps me to memorize numbers, such as those on license plates. I memorize the letters on license plates by making unlikely acronyms out of them. For example, ZUP might stand for “zipped up pajamas.” I gave Mark’s license plate information to Wesley.

“Nope. It’s not there,” Wesley said, after a search.

“That’s good news,” I said, my tone understating my relief. But Eric and Ted had only recorded license plate numbers up to the time they went into Club Cavalier that evening. If either Donna or Mark or anybody else, for that matter, had showed up around 10 o’clock or later they wouldn’t have been recorded.”

“Perhaps you’ve done all you can on this murder,” Wesley said. “Maybe it’s time to rest and let the police handle it. You missed the bridge club again today. The chess club meets tomorrow afternoon. Maybe it’s time for you to get back into society.”

Wesley had taken a greater interest in my well-being since our friendship had deepened. I tended to agree with him. I had helped to dig up enough evidence to point the finger of suspicion away from Mark. What else could I do?

Back in my own apartment, I decided to take Wesley’s advice and put the murder behind me. What had I done in the afternoons back when I was living a normal life? Sometimes I took a short nap. I didn’t feel sleepy. I read magazines like Reader’s Digest. I picked up the latest copy, which I hadn’t looked at yet. Maybe it would have a heart-warming story about somebody who had survived a disaster by overcoming overwhelming odds.

I read some of the jokes and anecdotes because I couldn’t concentrate on anything longer. The stories in the “Life in these United States” section didn’t make me laugh. “Humor in Uniform” wasn’t humorous. I tossed the magazine aside and went looking for the poems I had copied from Donna’s personal notebook.

After a five-minute search I found the poems underneath a pile of papers on top of my small desk. I carried them to my sunroom and sat on the sofa, basking in the afternoon rays that streamed through the wall-to-wall windows on three sides. I read all the poems I had copied and then read them again. I came back to one and read it for a third time. It was one Tess and I had puzzled over before. It had no title-none of the poems had-and it went like this:

Will I shoot seven or eleven?

Will I find a jewel that gleams?

Will you lend your wand to me

So I can wave it at my dreams?

Keep it, Lady Luck.

Each lass is Satan’s earthly prize.

He makes angels run amuck

And blinds them with his laser eyes.

There was something wrong with this poem. At least, it wasn’t like Donna’s other poems, which were laid out in neat patterns. For example, the two limericks she had written, one about Elise and the other about Mark. The first four lines of this poem were smooth enough, but the line, “Keep it, Lady Luck,” was jarringly out of place.

Perhaps Donna did that for emphasis, to call the reader’s attention to it. Poets, writers, were known to use various tricks. It was not a happy poem. Apparently, it was about unfulfilled dreams and the lure of sin. Girls had always dreamed; some girls were tempted to do things society didn’t approve of. Some wrote poems about their dreams and temptations. So what was new or different about this poem?

In the limerick about Elise, Elise’s name had been spelled out by the first letters of each line, but no word in my dictionary started with three w’s. My field was mathematics and logic, not literature. I needed help. Sandra taught English. When did she get home from school?

I called her number. She didn’t answer so I left her a message, saying that I was on my way over to her place.

Sandra’s condo was located not far from Silver Acres and I had been to it quite often so I had no trouble getting there. The condominiums were wooden, two-story buildings, on a cul-de-sac. They didn’t have garages so the owners parked on the street. Fortunately, there was a space next to Sandra’s little red Toyota; I pulled in there.

I was happy to see that she was home now as I was too antsy to mount a stakeout. I went up the walkway and two concrete steps to the front door. These buildings were quite new and in good repair. Everything worked, including the doorbell, although this one’s ring had only two notes instead of the four notes of Frank Scott’s bell.

Sandra opened the door after a short pause and said, “Hi, Gogi,” as if she was surprised to see me.

She still had her teaching clothes on, consisting of a long skirt and a tailored blouse, and her long blond hair was in a pedagogical bun. She must have just arrived home and not checked her telephone messages yet.

I kissed her, apologized for barging in on her and told her I needed help.

“Give me five minutes to change my clothes and I’ll be right with you,” Sandra said. “Winston can entertain you while you wait.”

She called, “Winston, Great-Grandma is here.”

Sandra went up the stairs and a minute later Winston walked down them, holding on to the handrail, just like a grownup. He had a Dr. Seuss book in one hand.

“Hi Great-Grandma,” Winston said, “how is your blue car?”

“My blue car is fine,” I said, catching him and giving him a kiss. “Would you like me to read you the book?”

He acquiesced to that so we sat on the couch and read about the cat in the hat. In a few minutes Sandra reappeared down the stairs, wearing shorts and a sweatshirt, with her blond hair cascading down to her waist. She looked years younger and more carefree. I finished reading the book to Winston and then gave him my car keys, as a condition of leaving him.

Sandra and I set up shop on her small breakfast table in a nook beside the kitchen. I opened the manila folder in which I had carried the poems and showed them to her. There weren’t that many so she quickly read all of them. They included the limericks about Mark and Elise.

When she had finished she said, “She has an obsession with Elise and Mark. I knew when I met her that I didn’t want her around Mark.”

I thought about telling Sandra that if she wanted to protect Mark she should take him back. “Let’s concentrate on this poem,” I said, finding the one about dreams and the devil. I asked her what she made of it.

Sandra studied it for a minute and said, “She’s upset with what she thinks is her fate and this may lead her to do something she shouldn’t. Of course, you’ve got to understand that poets write about doing a lot of things they wouldn’t actually do. Many of them are rather passive people, but they momentarily escape from their unhappy lives through their words.”

“Isn’t the line ‘Keep it, Lady Luck’ out of place? The rhythm seems to be different.”

“Yes, it has only three feet while the other lines have four. That’s a good observation, Gogi. Maybe you missed your calling.”

Not likely. “You’re talking about something like iambic pentameter.”

“Well, tetrameter, at least for the other lines. But most of the feet are iambic.”

That was more than I cared to know about poetry. “I was searching for a clever idea, like how Donna put Elise’s name in the limerick about her.”

Sandra studied the poem again. Suddenly she stood up, almost knocking over the table, and said, “Look, Gogi. The first letters of the words, ‘Keep it, Lady Luck’ spell out the word ‘kill.’”

“Now that’s the kind of thing I’m looking for,” I said. “I came to the right place.”

“Of course, it might be coincidence,” Sandra said, sitting down again, “but the way she deliberately used that wording…”

“Let’s look at the next line: ‘Each lass is Satan’s earthly prize.’ The first letters of the first five words…”

“Spell out ‘Elise.’ Holy cow, do you suppose Donna killed Elise?”

“It’s never been very far from my thoughts. Look at the following line.”

“He makes angels run amuck.”

“If you take the first letters of ‘makes angels run’ and the last letter of ‘amuck’…”

“It spells Mark. Holy cow!” Sandra said again.

Teachers are conditioned not to swear, especially in the presence of their grandmothers. I said, “Is that too farfetched?”

“No. After all, it’s hard to find a good word that starts with k, especially at the end of a sentence. Gogi, Donna is going to kill Mark.”

“That may have been her original plan. But when he became a suspect she may have backed off, figuring that if he was convicted of Elise’s murder, she would still get her revenge on him for liking Elise instead of her-if that’s what infuriated her.”

“But with the new things you and Mark found out yesterday about Eric Hoffman, doesn’t that change things? Mark isn’t so much of a suspect, anymore.”

“How do you know about that?” I didn’t think anybody else knew what Mark and I had done yesterday.

“Mark called me last night after you were in bed.”

So that’s what the murmuring was that I had heard through my closed door. And I had thought it was the television set.

“We’ve got to warn Mark,” Sandra said, getting more agitated.

She picked up her cordless phone and called my number.

“He’s not there,” she said. She left a message for him to call her immediately.

Sandra couldn’t sit down. She began pacing around the kitchen. I tried to reassure her about Mark’s safety. She called the restaurant and asked if Mark had left. He had.

“He’s probably on the road between the restaurant and Silver Acres,” I said.

“I’m going to beep him,” Sandra said. She called his beeper number and left her phone number.

While we were waiting for Mark to call, Sandra fed Winston some hash for his dinner. He ate it with a spoon while sitting on a booster chair. He had announced some time ago that he was too old for a highchair. He was ambidextrous and could handle the spoon equally well with either hand. He also drank milk from a sippy cup.

I didn’t think Mark was in any immediate danger, but the fact that he hadn’t called was frustrating. I said, “I’ll go back to my apartment and check my messages.”

“Can’t you check them from here?” Sandra asked.

“Silver Acres has its own message system. I don’t think my messages can be checked remotely. If so, I haven’t figured out how to do it.”

“I can check my messages remotely. I’ll go with you.”

“Good. Then all of us can have dinner together in the Silver Acres dining room, You, Winston, Mark and me.”

“If he’s there.”

“I already ate dinner,” Winston said.

“But I bet you would like some ice cream,” I said.

“Can I have chocolate ice cream?”

Maybe this was serendipity because it would bring Sandra and Mark together.