Dead Over Heels

Chapter Five

When I came in to work the next morning, I was not feeling exactly cheerful. The discussion with Sam the day before had gone about as I’d expected it to go, Beverly stoutly denying she was difficult to work with, accusing me of many things, all but saying that had she had my education she would now have my job. That may have been true, but it was not the issue we were there to discuss. Even if I’d agreed with that assumption, it wouldn’t have changed a thing.

After an upsetting forty-five minutes, during which nothing had been settled and Sam’s hair had turned a little grayer right before my eyes, I’d gone to pick up Madeleine at the vet. They’d gotten the blood sample and sent it to a lab, Dr. Jamerson had told me with determined cheerfulness, and he expected to get a reply from the lab in a few days, maybe a week. I’d loaded Madeleine in my car with the strong feeling that the vet and his staff wouldn’t have minded a bit if the hypothetical drugger had used something stronger and more lethal, or perhaps tied that bow a little tighter.

Somehow I’d expected Dr. Jamerson to have the answer ready right then-had Madeleine been drugged or had she not?-and not knowing had thrown me even further off course. As Madeleine yowled on the way home, I had found myself thinking of getting a dog, a medium-sized stupid one who was everyone’s friend. A mutt with brown rough hair and a black muzzle… but Jane Engle, who’d left me Madeleine and a heck of a lot of money, had somehow astral-projected her strongly disapproving face right into my consciousness.

So I trudged into the library’s back door feeling dispirited. At least Angel had been out running this morning as I was driving in to town. She’d grinned and waved at me. A smiling Angel-and one with a bulging abdomen-was something I would have to get used to. I smoothed my own oversized orange T-shirt over my stomach; I was wearing orange leggings, too, and there was a big gold sun on the front of my tee. I was hoping the children would think it a cheerful outfit. I’d pulled my hair back with an orange-and-gold barrette, and I was wearing my gold-framed glasses. Just a blaze of color, that was me.

“Who was that woman who came in to see you yesterday?” Perry asked, as I stowed my purse in my locker. He was using the microwave to make hot chocolate, which he drank regardless of the outside temperature; he had quite a sweet tooth, though by his leanness you wouldn’t have guessed it.

Here I was, I thought wryly, glowing all over the place, and as usual, I was being asked about… my bodyguard.

“Angel Youngblood.”

“She’s not local.”

“No. She’s from Florida.”

“Married?”

Well, well, well. “Very,” I said firmly. “And a black belt in karate, as is her husband.”

Perry didn’t seem dismayed by this news. “She’s just stunning,” he said. “I could tell by the way she walks that she’s an athlete. And her coloring is so unusual.”

“Yep, she’s gold,” I answered, burrowing in my locker for a tube of breath mints. I’d had this conversation with many men (and some women) about Angel. “I thought you were pretty tight with Jenny Tankersley?”

“Oh, we’re dating,” Perry said casually, though his mother Sally had told me they were all but engaged.

Jenny wouldn’t have been pleased to hear Perry dismiss her so cavalierly, from what I’d heard of her. She’d been married for a few years to a man who ran his own crop-dusting service, and when Jack Tankersley had made a fatal mistake regarding plane altitude one summer, Jenny had ended up selling the business and doing very well for herself. She’d stayed on as general dogsbody for the three pilots who’d bought it, doing every task from answering the phone to ordering supplies to making out the checks, and occasionally she flew herself, as she had with her husband.

Perry seemed drawn to strong women.

“Your friend Angel must be the woman Paul was talking about last night,” Perry said, stirring his Swiss Miss with a plastic spoon. I was standing awkwardly, my weight on the foot closest to the door, waiting to terminate this conversation so I could get to my area, though I was dreading seeing Beverly. I had a kindergarten class coming in fifteen minutes, and I’d left a note requesting yesterday’s volunteer to cut out twentytwo spring flowers, one for each child to write his or her name on, to stick to the ends of the bookshelves. Hopefully, each child would bring a parent into the library to see the flower, and the child and the parent would both check out books. I had to get out the yellow stickum, and I had to count the flowers…

“You had supper with your mom’s ex?” I said with some surprise.

“Paul and I have always gotten along. He’s been more like a father than an uncle to me. Especially since I’ve only seen Dad a few times in my whole life,” Perry added with understandable bitterness.

The fact that Sally’s latest ex, Paul Allison, was the brother of Sally’s first ex, Perry’s father Steve, made the situation a little complicated emotionally. I was glad there wasn’t a third Allison brother, and I was willing to bet Sally was too.

“Jenny’s giving flying lessons now,” Perry said, determined to chat. “I’m taking, and so is Paul, and your friend Arthur Smith…”

“That’s great, Perry, and I want to hear more about it later,” I said insincerely. “I’ve got to get to work now, I’ve got a group coming in.”

But even as I banished visions of the Lawrenceton police force on air patrol, focusing instead on visions of little kids who were going to want some individual recognition in about ten minutes, Sam came out of his office and strode over to us looking very worried. Sam is not very good with people; he is a great manager of things, but not a great personnel guy. He’s become aware of that in the past few years, and whenever he has to say anything that is going to upset someone, he stews over it.

That’s why I didn’t expect anything awful; he was probably going to tell me the board had decided to hire a full-time children’s librarian and my job was terminated. I had a moment to think of this before he put his hand on my arm and said, “In view of our conference yesterday, I don’t know how you’re going to take this, but Beverly Rillington was so badly beaten last night they don’t know if she’ll live.”

“What? Why?” I asked.

“Sit down, Roe, you’re white as a sheet,” Sam advised. He pulled out one of the chairs that had been tucked under the round table.

Perry sat down right by me, and I noticed he was on the pale side, too.

“Beverly’s mother Selena was hit by a drunk driver a month ago,” Sam said. “She’s still in a coma at the hospital. Beverly goes to see her every night. When Beverly got out of her car at her house after visiting her mother, someone jumped on her from behind and hit her with a piece of pipe. More than once.”

“Oh my God,” I said. I shook my head. What a dreadful thing. “Sam, did you know about her mother?” Beverly hadn’t breathed a word to me, and I suddenly realized the pressure Beverly had been under. Had pride kept her silent?

“She didn’t tell anyone here,” Sam said, shaking his head.

“It was in the paper,” Perry volunteered. “The wreck, that is. But I didn’t realize the injured woman was Beverly’s mom.”

“So… is Beverly… how bad is it?” I asked.

“Severe head wounds,” Sam answered succinctly. “Listen, I’ve got to tell the others, and send a flower arrangement to the hospital; don’t you have a group coming in this morning, Roe?”

I glanced at my watch and shot out of the chair.

Five minutes later, I met the kindergarten class at the door with a shaky smile, and hoped they wouldn’t notice my hands were trembling as I passed each of them a bright construction paper flower.

After they’d left, I had a little time to think between helping patrons. I wondered if someone had it in for Beverly’s family. Had her mother’s accident really been an accident? Or was the attack on Beverly totally unrelated, a kid on some kind of high taking the easiest money available?

A person would definitely have to be chemically altered to have the nerve to tackle Beverly, who was physically as well as mentally formidable. As I sat with my hands folded in my lap at my little desk, staring blankly at the shelves of books that walled me in, I wished Beverly and I hadn’t had our fracas the day before-and when I thought twice about it, I wished even more it hadn’t been witnessed by so many people.

Sure enough, when I was called to the phone, Arthur Smith was on the other end, at the police station. The Rillingtons’ house was in the city limits, so the city police were handling the investigation into the attack on Beverly.

“Roe, I wonder if I could talk to you after you get off work, about that incident in the library yesterday,” Arthur said. He had always been blunt. Once upon a time, I’d found that directness very exciting.

“Okay,” I said with a detectable lack of enthusiasm.

“Could you come by the station this afternoon, say around two o’clock?”

“I guess so. Why the station?”

“It’ll just be more convenient,” he said.

I liked this less and less. But it seemed paranoid to wonder if I needed a lawyer. Why was Arthur calling me, anyway? He was a robbery detective. Lynn Liggett Smith, his wife, was the only homicide detective on the Lawrenceton force, so other detectives were detailed to her sometimes, but why Arthur?

I began to wonder if I shouldn’t call Martin out of his seminar in Chicago and ask his advice. Nah. I’d talk to him tonight. Then I wondered if I should call my mother, and it didn’t seem like such a bad idea to tell her where I was going. Naturally, since Mother owns a prosperous realty business, the line was busy. So I figured I’d just stop by on my way to the police station.

Mother’s office, established in an old house and redecorated in calm, elegant colors, always made me feel inadequate. I’d hoped once to get interested in real estate, had even started studying for my license, but at last I’d had to admit that my only interest in real estate was in buying my own. When terms like “equity” and “Fannie Mae” and “assumable mortgage” began to be bandied about, my brain glazed over. But when I watched the controlled and purposeful bustle on good days at Select Realty, I felt a pang of regret.

Mother’s terrifyingly perfect receptionist, Patty Cloud, had graduated to office manager and then to realtor. Her understudy, Debbie Lincoln, now controlled the desk in the reception area. Debbie had done some evolving of her own, from a rather slow, silent girl with cornrowed hair and baby fat to a slim, streamlined, fashionable babe who’d become the office computer expert. In the process, Debbie had gained a lot of artifice, and shed some of her natural charm. She’d also acquired confidence and lost her diffidence around older people.

As I entered, she gave me an “I see you but I’m in the middle of this” smile and waggle of magenta fingernails, the phone clamped between ear and shoulder, her fingers busy separating computer sheets, collating and stapling them.

“Uh-huh. Yes, Mrs. Kaplan, she’ll be there at three. No, ma’am, you don’t need to do anything special. She’ll just look over the house and tell you what she’d recommend you ask for it… no, ma’am, that doesn’t obligate… no, ma’am, you can call in as many as you like, but we hope you’ll list your house with us… right, three o’clock.” Debbie blew a breath out after she’d hung up.

“Difficult?” I asked.

“Girl, you know it,” Debbie said, shaking her head. “I half hope that woman doesn’t decide to list with us. Dealing with her is almost more trouble than it’s worth. Your mom is showing a house now, so if you wanted to see her, you may have quite a wait.”

“Heck,” I said. I wondered whether I should leave a note. “Debbie, do you know Beverly Rillington?” I asked out of the blue.

“Oh, isn’t that terrible, what happened to her?” Debbie stapled the last batch of papers together and tossed the result into Eileen Norris’s basket, which was half full of phone message slips already. Debbie followed my glance. “Eileen can’t get used to coming out here every time she comes back in the building,” Debbie said. “So her stuff kind of piles up. I don’t really know Beverly that well, she goes to a different church,” she added. “But Beverly has always been a real tough individual, a real loner. She had a baby, you know, when she was just fourteen… and then, when that baby was about a year old, it choked on a marble or something and died. Beverly hasn’t had it easy.”

I tried to imagine being pregnant at fourteen. I tried to imagine my baby dying.

I found I didn’t want to imagine that.

“I guess I’ll just leave Mother a note,” I told her, and started down the hall to Mother’s office. It was the biggest one, of course, and Mother had decorated it in cool, elegant gray, with a slash of deep red here and there for eye relief. Her desk was absolutely orderly, though covered with the paperwork on various projects, and I knew the notepads would be in the top right drawer-and they were-and that all Mother’s pencils would be sharp… and that I would snap off the point of the first one since it was so sharp and I pressed so hard. Having gone through that little ritual, all I had to do was compose a message to let her know I was going to be at the police station at a detective’s request, without propelling her out the office door with her flags flying.

Maybe such a composition wasn’t possible, I decided after sitting for several blank seconds with the (now blunt) pencil actually resting on the paper.

After a false start or two, I settled on: “Mom, I’m going to the police station to tell them about working with Beverly Rillington at the library. She got hurt last night. Call me at home at four o’clock. Love, Roe.”

That should do it. I knew if I wasn’t at home at four she’d storm the bastions and get me released.

The car by which I parked at the police station/small claims court/county sheriff’s office/jail (known locally as “Spacolec” for Sperling County Law.Enforcement Complex) seemed very familiar, and after a second I recognized Angel’s car, the one Jack Burns had ticketed. Then I recalled Angel telling me she was going to the funeral because they’d worked out together; the two stories seemed mutually exclusive.

I mulled it over for a minute as I trudged through the hot parking lot to the glass double doors leading into Spacolec.

It was still making no sense when I saw Arthur Smith waiting for me right in front of the wall-to-wall admissions desk. Arthur had changed little in the three years he’d been married to Lynn. Marriage had not put a gut on him or lined his face; fatherhood hadn’t grayed his tightly curled hair, though it was such a pale blond that the gray, when it did appear, would be enviably hard to detect.

Perhaps he’d changed in the way he held himself, his basic attitude; he seemed tougher, angrier, more impatient, and that was so apparent that I wondered I hadn’t noticed it before.

Arthur, who’d been chatting with the duty officer, turned at the hissing sound of the pneumatic doors. He looked at me, and his face changed.

I felt acutely uncomfortable. I was unused to being the object of unrequited desire. Now, Angel (whom I now saw coming toward me out of the set of swinging wooden doors to the left of the reception desk) must have encountered panting men from adolescence onward. I would have to ask her how it made her feel. Right now she looked washed out, and her stride did not have its usual assurance.

“Are you okay?” I asked anxiously.

She nodded, but not as if she meant it. “I’m just going to go home and lie down,” she said. “I don’t think I’ve ever been this tired in my life. And I’m hungry. Really, really hungry.”

“Need help?”

“Nah. Shelby’ll be home in an hour.” She hadn’t spoken to Arthur directly, but her next words were aimed at him. “If you’re not home by then, I’ll call Bubba.”

Bubba Sewell was my lawyer.

“See you later,” I said, and she was out the glass doors and into the parking lot. I watched her reach her car, unlock it, stretch her arms up and rotate her shoulders to relax, each movement economical and controlled despite her weariness.

“Come this way, Roe,” Arthur said, snapping me back to the unwelcome present. He was holding open the wooden doors, nodding at the woman in uniform on duty at the desk behind bullet-proof glass, gesturing me forward. As I went through the doors, he put his hand on my back to steer me, a controlling gesture I particularly dislike. I don’t much care for being touched casually. I stiffened a little, but put up with it.

When I realized I was only tolerating his touching me because he had once been my lover, I stepped away a little quicker, leaving his hand behind, and his arm dropped to his side.

Arthur waved a hand at his own little cubicle to usher me in. He indicated the only other chair besides the one behind the desk, and murmured something about being back in a minute. Then he vanished, leaving me nothing to do but examine his “office.” It was a bit like being at a car dealership where each salesman has to usher you into a little area partitioned off at neck level, and there present you with pages of scrawled figures. I could tell Arthur worked there; there was a picture of little Lorna, though none of Lynn. But there wasn’t clutter, there wasn’t even much office material on the desk: no Rolodex, no blotter, no stapler. There were stacked in and out trays, and a chipped Christmas coffee mug holding some pens and pencils. That was it. I’d exhausted the possibilities of Arthur’s office.

Then I observed that though the partition walls were made of beige metal and padded with what looked like carpet, each panel contained a Plexiglas window. I could see down the row of similar cubicles. Lynn was two squares away, bent over some paperwork on her desk. She looked up as I was still gazing curiously in her direction. She gave me an unreadable stare and then looked down at her desk pointedly.

From being mildly uneasy at being here, I escalated instantly into very uncomfortable. Had I been brought here as some ploy in Lynn and Arthur’s marital wars?

Arthur reappeared just as I was thinking of leaving. He was holding two unmatched mugs of coffee, one with cream and sugar and one black. He put the black in front of me. “I remembered that was the way you like it,” he said.

I could read nothing in his tone. I thanked him and tried a sip. It was awful. I put it down carefully.

“Why am I here, Arthur?”

“Because you had a very public quarrel with Beverly Rillington yesterday. Because she was attacked and her purse stolen last night. When I heard Mrs. Youngblood had been present during the quarrel, I called her in too. Faron Henske just finished questioning her.”

So that’s why a robbery detective was handling the case. They were treating the attack on Beverly as a robbery gone berserk. “Why couldn’t you just ask me about it at my house, or over the phone, or at the library?”

“Because this was the best place,” he said, very male tough policeman.

I raised my eyebrows slightly. I pushed my gold glasses back up on my nose. “Then ask your questions.”

So we went through the miserable scene at the library again; the rising rage of Beverly, the arrival of Angel, Angel’s exchange with Beverly, the gradual defusing of the crisis.

“Did you think Beverly was physically threatening you?” Arthur asked quietly. He was sitting back in his chair, his gaze locked on me in a way I’d once considered flattering and exciting.

“I had a second of worry.”

“Weren’t you glad your bodyguard was there to handle it for you?”

I could feel my eyes fly open even wider, my shoulders stiffen.

Arthur looked pleased to get such a response. “Did you think we wouldn’t figure it out, Roe? Back when the Julius family turned up, we checked out your friends the Youngbloods. Shelby Youngblood and your husband have quite a history together, don’t they?”

“Martin and Shelby have been friends since Vietnam.”

“Involved in some murky doings after that, weren’t they?”

“What are you getting at, Arthur? You know Martin was out of town last night. Are you implying that one of the Youngbloods attacked Beverly Rillington because she gave me a few bad moments in the library?”

“There are telephones in Chicago.” Arthur had been leaning negligently back in his chair. Now he abandoned the relaxed pose and leaned forward, his hard eyes still fixed on me.

“So you’re saying that my husband was so upset that I had a few words with Beverly-in front of many witnesses-that he told the Youngbloods to beat her up.”

“I didn’t say that. But it seems pretty coincidental that after a decade of giving people grief, Beverly Rillington gets beaten within an inch of her life just after a quarrel with you and your bodyguard.” He gave the last two words a twist that was distinctly unpleasant. I began to think that Arthur had gone off the deep end of the pool without checking to see if there was any water.

“You’re certainly not suggesting that I did it,” I said reasonably, though I felt anything but reasonable. “I think Beverly has a few inches and pounds on me.”

“No,” Arthur said, never letting up on the stare. “No, not you. But someone who cares for you.”

I started to say, “What about someone who cares for Angel?” Because it seemed to me that Angel had been insulted publicly too, and if the theory that the incident in the library had sparked this attack held any water, Angel could be the inspiration for the beating far more feasibly than I. No one ever forgot Angel.

But expressing this would be tantamount to pointing the finger at Shelby, at least in Arthur’s present state of mind.

“So. You’re sure I didn’t hurt Beverly. So-why am I sitting here being questioned if you are telling me you’re sure I didn’t do it?”

And without pausing to give him a chance to respond, I gathered up my purse and stalked out of Spacolec. My back was tense with expecting him to call me at any moment, but he didn’t.

Like most of my grand gestures, this one was ruined by the situation I came upon out in the parking lot. Instead of sliding into my car and speeding away with a spray of gravel, I had to deal with two more angry people.

Angel was standing in front of her car, her face expressionless but her attitude tense. Beside her, talking into a radio, was Detective Paul Allison, who for once looked agitated. On the hood of Angel’s car, giving the impression of a spilled bag of garbage, was a battered black imitation-leather purse, gap-mouthed and leaking the miscellany of a woman’s life: comb, wallet, Kleenex, crumpled shopping lists, a tube of mints.

I recognized it. It was Beverly’s purse, surely the purse that had been stolen from her during the attack the night before.