A Bitch Called Hope (4 page)

She thanked Sarge and let him get out of the rain. Looking out her office window at the chickadees as they picked through the empty husks beneath the feeder, she reached for the phone again and called her mother. Who was only too happy to have a date for Bill’s funeral.

Of course, it wasn’t just a funeral, but a Catholic funeral, and not just a Catholic funeral, but three priests and a cathedral and over an hour and a half long. There was enough incense to bring an ox to its knees. The Pikes were apparently an even bigger deal than she’d remembered.

After all the Catholic falderal, Lennox and her mother drove back up the hill for a reception at the Pikes’ house. The Christmas tree, the snow globes on the mantel and the evergreen swags had been removed since the party. Huge vases of white lilies and roses replaced the poinsettias. The smell was as overpowering as the incense had been at the church.

Lennox situated her mother on one of the sofas and watched people drift from the front entry through the living room to the buffet set up on the dining room table. People in black. People, if not looking heartbroken, at least solemn. Most likely one of them was the murderer. The question was—which one? Here Lennox sat, ready and able, without an idea how to get from the sofa to the investigation short of passing around her business cards.

Enter a girl dressed in a short black cocktail dress. Lennox pegged the girl at five-seven, size four. She looked fresh out of high school.

Aurora jammed an elbow in Lennox’s ribs. “There’s Scott’s girlfriend, Priscilla,” she hissed in a not very low whisper. “Delia caught her with Bill.”

“Tell me,” Lennox said.

“That night. They were behind a door or in the hallway, I don’t have the details. Anyway, Delia caught them groping or kissing.” Aurora shot an evil look Priscilla’s way. “I’ve never liked that girl. She’s a gold bricker.”

“You mean a gold digger?”

“Whatever,” Aurora said. “There’s Delia.” She put her wine glass on the table and brushed crumbs from her lap.

Delia Pike. She stood next to the same doctor that argued with the cops. She was still dressed in the severe black suit she’d worn at the funeral. Here was the weird thing, though, the thing that surprised the hell out of Lennox, and given her career she was a hard one to surprise. When Delia lifted her arms to hug a well-wisher, the thinnest sliver of lace peeked below her hemline. Delia Pike was wearing a hot pink slip.

Lennox hadn’t wrapped her mind around the hot pink when Dan and Scott entered the room. Lennox noted that Dan had stopped growing at just over six foot, his nose like Tommy’s only his was straight. His stomach was flat, his eyes black.

His eyes landed on her and she sat a little straighter, turned her face in such a way he got her best angle.

Aurora said, “The family’s here. Let’s say hello.” Her mother’s face was a shade too eager.

The thought of being shoved in front of the Pikes by her mother was more awkward than Lennox could bear. “You go ahead,” she said.

Aurora’s expression turned irritable. She left to join Delia just as Dan walked over to her. He didn’t see Aurora turn and give Lennox the thumbs up.

“Remember me?” he said to Lennox.

From the sofa, Lennox found herself with a discomfiting view of his crotch.

“Of course,” she said. “How are you?” Stupid, stupid! How
was
he? His father had just died.

“I’m okay,” he said. “How long has it been?”

“Twenty-four years,” she said.

“How about a brandy?” he said. ”We can get caught up.”

He stepped back a pace to allow her to stand up. The top of her head came up to his collarbone. He smelled of soap. A hank of dark brown hair fell over his eyebrow. She tamped down the urge to reach up and smooth it back and followed him down a long hallway past all the framed photographs of his family. The boys before they were school age, another of Dan on his bike, maybe ten years old.

Dan opened the door on a study. Lots of dark upholstery and brass lamps. A rainy half-light came from the windows. A leather sofa was pushed against the far wall. Two wingback chairs faced an oversized desk. Lennox decided on a chair.

“Last time I saw you was what?” he said. “You were ten?”

Fourteen, but who was counting? She said, “I’m sorry about Bill. I always liked him.”

“Thanks.” He put some muscle into that thanks as if she’d offered him something valuable. He turned and brought the glasses of brandy over to the desk, moving his chair a few degrees so that it faced her.

“I can’t believe it’s you,” he said. “You’re gorgeous.” He swallowed. “I mean, not that you were ugly before.”

“You used to call me Cankle,” she said. Translation:
Fat Ankles
.

“What a bastard I was. Will you forgive me?” Did his eyes stray to her ankles? No, they stayed on her face.

She felt herself grinning. She clicked glasses with Dan, allowed herself to relax. He closed his eyes and took a good pull from his brandy. All the boy had melted from his face leaving good strong cheekbones. When he opened his eyes he caught her staring at him.

She smiled and looked down quickly.

“Mom said you were a cop?” he said.

She told him about her investigative business. He talked about finance. And Chicago. Lennox was a big fan of the Cubs. His arm moved a little closer to hers. That soap he used was lime scented. Nothing was firm yet, he said, but it looked like maybe he’d stay in Portland.

There was a knock on the door. It opened wide enough for the same doctor to poke his head through. “Your mother wants you,” he said to Dan.

A muscle jumped in Dan’s jaw. “I’ll be there in a minute,” he said.

“Now,” the doctor said. Taking that same imperious tone he had used with Sloane, like he was running the show.

Chapter 5

Lennox pulled the Bronco, fresh from the body shop, into the taxi zone in front of the Heathman Hotel. She handed her keys to the valet, who looked as if she’d just laid a dog turd in his gloved hand.

The tearoom at the Heathman was decorated for Christmas exactly as it had been when Aurora first reserved a table the year Lennox was in sixth grade. Every year the twenty-foot Christmas tree was decorated with the same beach-ball-sized purple and gold ornaments, the tables set with same arrangements of holly, red roses and paperwhites. She and her mother always ordered the cucumber sandwiches, the pâté with Roquefort and pistachios, the scones, the sherry, the Earl Grey tea. The room always smelled of pine and bayberry and bergamot. Gary, the ageless piano player, played Christmas music on the baby grand at the far end of the room. And every year since that first one, Lennox dressed in her best clothes, wore her highest heels: an inch high when she was eleven, four inches now that she was grown up.

She had always loved it since she was a kid, but this year felt a little off, everything all the same and all of it a little stale.

December’s puny light barely penetrated the tall windows above Lennox and Aurora’s table. The host seated a sleek blond woman and her two offspring at the table next to theirs. The children ranked high in adorableness.

It was depressing to be reminded of the choices that had brought Lennox to this particular juncture in her life, the children she didn’t have, not to mention the father of the children she also didn’t have. And at Christmas: the hollyest, jolliest time of the year.

The waiter took Lennox and Aurora’s order and, minutes later, like magic whisked a teapot and plates of sandwiches and scones onto the table. Gary played the first bars of
“Let it Snow.”

“You tell that friend of yours.” Aurora wagged a manicured finger at Lennox. ”Detective Pavlik. He’s married, you know, I saw his ring, you tell him to quit bothering Delia.”

Lennox glanced back at the Christmas tree. The ornaments were definitely showing their age.

“That caterer woman.” Aurora’s voice grew shrill. “She’s your murderer.”

The mother at the table next to them, who had been laughing at some charming thing her daughter said, looked over at Aurora with alarm. “Murderer” had that effect on people.

Lennox said, “They held her for questioning and released her.”

Aurora stopped chewing and didn’t bother swallowing. “You released her? She could go after Delia now. My God! What is wrong with you people?”

“You people?”

“Your friend, Detective Pavlik, what kind of policeman is he? It’s obvious that Bill caught the woman stealing and she put poison in his drink.”

Why had Aurora fixed on poison? Lennox studied her mother over the rim of her teacup. “You think Bill was poisoned?” she said, making it sound casual.

“What else?” Aurora pulled her cashmere wrap closer around her shoulders. “He was lying by the foot of the bed. There was no blood.”

“Strangled, bludgeoned, smothered, there are any number of ways to kill a person without spilling blood.”

The sleek blond mother summoned the waiter, who escorted her adorable family to a distant table.

Aurora didn’t seem to notice. But she’d been surprisingly observant about Bill. He was lying on his side, one leg underneath him,
crumpled-looking
was the way Aurora put it.

Of course, Lennox couldn’t share the piece about the insulin. She said, “The poison theory is a good one. But there are problems with the caterer piece.”

The butler did it. That’s what Aurora and Delia and their whole privileged class wanted to believe.

“Poor Delia’s been through hell and your friend keeps coming back. He was at the funeral, you know. Delia said she saw him standing by the doors— him and that other one. In their cheap jackets watching all of us.”

Lennox hadn’t seen Tommy at church, but she could feel him staring at the back of her head. Willing her to turn around, so he could flash that razzle-dazzle grin at her.

“Maybe he keeps coming back because Delia is his chief witness,” Lennox said. “She knows more about Bill and about everybody at the party than anyone else.”

“I told her, ‘Sounds to me like police harassment.’”

Lennox said, “That’s the thing, though, sometimes when you are upset, you misremember things.”

“She is not misremembering things,” Aurora said. “And neither is Doctor E.”

Lennox brushed the scone crumbs off the tablecloth with the side of her finger. “Doctor E—is he a friend of Delia’s or Bill’s?”

Aurora waved a fork at her. “You listen to me, Missy. These people are not killers and they’re not people who are used to being treated this way. You call your friend, Detective Pavlik, and tell him.”

Her friend Detective Pavlik would probably make captain by the time his two adorable kids were in high school. And Lennox would probably still be single, still sitting in her car running surveillance. She said, “He’s not my friend.”

Aurora said, “But you were a cop. You know what’s going on.”

Lennox put the half-eaten scone back on her plate. “You really want to hear this?”

The way Aurora pointed a fork at her, Lennox was afraid the old girl was going to launch into another anecdote about her shocking hippie youth. But that was a lifetime ago. The last time anyone said anything gritty in her company was probably when one of her set drank one too many glasses of seventy-dollar wine and used the f-word.

“Statistically, the spouse is implicated in a domestic homicide. Then your method of murder tends to run along gender lines,” Lennox said. “Take guns: usually it’s a man who will use a gun or they’ll use their hands, beating or strangulation. Like that. Women tend to employ knives or poison. If you’re right about the poison angle, do you know what the statistics are? Only one in five thousand poisoners is male. That’s probably what Tommy is thinking.”

Gary, the piano player, started in with “My Favorite Things.” Raindrops on roses for Pete’s sake. The waiter brought a new pot of tea and a plate of cakes. Lennox helped herself to the layered torte and watched her mother. Aurora looked truly horrified. Whiskers on kittens, bright copper kettles.

“I’m sorry,” Lennox said. “If this is too upsetting, we can talk about my Christmas list. Or your Christmas list.”

“But she’s innocent.”

“I don’t mean to be crass,” Lennox said. “But really, Aurora, put the whole ‘these things don’t happen to people like us’ issue aside. Bill made a ton of money and from what I’ve heard in the last few days, he was a womanizer. Maybe Delia wanted a divorce, maybe she just wanted him gone.”

“What she went through with that man,” Aurora said. “Time after time he’d swear he’d never do it again.” She sighed. “I told her leave him, but those Catholics are like geese. They mate for life.”

“So she gets herself a Texas divorce,” Lennox said. “No messy entanglements, just kill the no-good so-and-so.”

“That’s ridiculous. Her party took months of planning. You can’t tell me Delia spent all that time working her patootie to the bone to murder her husband in front of her two boys and all of her friends.”

Aurora definitely had a point. And it was a whole lot more compelling than the statistics. “Tell Delia to hire Bowersox, Kline and Hansen,” Lennox said. “They’re the best criminal attorneys in town.”

“Criminal? They’re going to arrest her?” Aurora’s hand shook badly enough that she splashed tea on her sleeve. She set her cup down. “You have to do something! You have to help her. We’ll drive over there this afternoon. You can tell her what to do.”

Lennox said. “It’s unprofessional for me to stick my nose in police business and advise a person under investigation.”

“What do you mean unprofessional?” Aurora’s voice grew shrill. “This
is
your profession.”

Delia hadn’t been charged with anything, but Lennox couldn’t help hoping for a chance. “If Delia hired me,” she said.

“Is that all that’s stopping you?” Aurora said. “Give me your card. I’m going there tomorrow for dinner.”

There. It was happening. Lennox would make her pitch to Delia. And to hell with poaching on Tommy’s turf. Tommy was just going to have to deal with it. But could Aurora be trusted to make a pitch to Delia?

Lennox leaned over in her chair and pulled a cell phone out of her handbag. “Let’s call her. We can drop over this afternoon.”