Fat-Free and Fatal (A Kate Jasper Mystery) (25 page)

I thanked Felix for the information and left before he and Barbara could start arguing again.

My own house was surprisingly quiet as I stepped in the door. Wayne was waiting for me on the living room couch. And he was smiling. I smiled back and felt all the muscles I hadn’t realized I’d tensed relaxing.

“Nurse came out from the registry to visit while you were gone,” he told me as I sat down next to him. “Real nice woman. Left us her home number. Retired psychiatric nurse.” He whispered in my ear, “I think Mom actually liked her—”

The phone rang. Wayne ran and caught it before the answering machine kicked in. It was for me. Barbara. I grabbed the receiver impatiently.

“Listen, kiddo,” she said, her voice vibrating with excitement. “You’ll never guess who called after you left.”

“I wouldn’t even try,” I drawled.

“Ken Hermann,” she told me anyway. “He said he’ll be home the rest of the day. His audit’s over. He wants to talk to us.”

“Barbara,” I groaned, my muscles all tense again. “I’m in the middle of something here.”

“Yeah, I know,” she said good-humoredly. “The thing with Vesta. That’s cool. I’ll go by myself.”

“Wait!” I yelped, a vision of Ken Hermann’s strange smile flashing into my mind. “Don’t go alone.” I sighed, then yielded. “I’ll pick you up in a little while,” I promised.

“I thought you would.” She giggled and hung up.

I turned back to Wayne. His brows were low over his eyes. He wasn’t smiling anymore. I felt a spasm of misery squeeze my chest.

“How’d you like to come with us?” I asked, shaking off the feeling.

“I hate to leave Mom,” he said softly. “But maybe—”

“Oh, don’t worry about me, Waynie,” Vesta shrilled. I jumped, startled. I hadn’t even seen her come down the hall. “Not that you ever do,” she spat at him. “I’ll be fine.”

She fastened her steely eyes onto Wayne’s. He began shrinking in place, beginning with his shoulders, which rolled inwards. She smiled.

“By the way,” she added in a low, almost seductive tone. “I called that nurse of yours. I told her we wouldn’t be needing her services—now or ever.”

“OH, MOM,” WAYNE sighed.

My own heart contracted just hearing the pain in his voice. Then I got mad. My face was burning when I turned to Vesta.

“Don’t you see what you’re doing to him?” I exploded.

Wayne put up a quick hand to stop my words. He was right. This was between the two of them. I swallowed the rest of my tirade, unsaid. My stomach churned angrily, unable to digest it.

“Waynie,” Vesta said softly. She put her hand on her heart. “If that condo you were looking at is big enough for two, why can’t we both live in it? We won’t be any more trouble to Kate. And—”

“No, Mom,” Wayne said quietly. He straightened his shoulders.

I gave a silent cheer. He wasn’t going to cave in. He was going to fight. He didn’t need me here anymore.

“I’ll see you in a couple of hours,” I told him, standing on tiptoes to kiss him goodbye. He bent down to meet my lips.

“Waynie!” Vesta shouted. “You listen to me when I’m talking to you!”

Wayne’s head popped up like a jumping jack. My hands clenched into fists. I took a deep breath and unclenched them, resisting the urge to turn toward Vesta. Then I reached around the back of Wayne’s neck, pulling his head back where it had been. He closed his eyes and kissed me gently. I gave him a quick hug, then let him go.

I left the house without looking back. I made it halfway down the stairs before I heard Vesta’s shriek and Wayne’s answering rumble. I ran the rest of the way to my car.

Wayne was a big boy, I told myself as I drove to Barbara’s. He could handle his mother. I sighed. At least I hoped so.

“So how’s Vesta?” Barbara asked as she climbed into the car.

“Fine,” I grunted unencouragingly.

“That bad, huh?” she said with a wink. “Okay, I’ll talk about something else. Like Ken, for instance. I think he’s the one, Kate…”

I should have let her talk about Vesta.

By the time we reached Ken’s condominium I was trying to remember exactly what we were doing there. If Barbara was right and he was the murderer—

“Here’s his name,” Barbara said eagerly before I could finish my thought. She pushed the lobby intercom button.

“Who is it?” came a distorted voice that could have been Ken Hermann’s.

“Barbara Chu and Kate Jasper,” Barbara answered.

“How do I know it’s you?” the voice said.

I looked at Barbara. She looked back, shrugged, and then spoke into the intercom again.

“We met at the vegetarian cooking class,” she told him.

“Okay,” he said and buzzed us in.

I got a sinking feeling as we took the elevator up. And it wasn’t just the elevator. It was Ken. Did he think he was safer with people he’d met at the scene of a murder than with strangers? Was he crazy?

Ken opened his front door the two inches his chain lock allowed when Barbara rang the doorbell. He peered out for a moment. I caught a quick glimpse of his nose, then saw the glint of his glasses as he turned his head.

Finally, he opened the door. As we stepped over the threshold, I got a perverse urge to sell him encyclopedias—or magazines—or rug cleaner. Anything to compensate for the trouble we had gone to in order to get in.

“Hey, Ken,” Barbara greeted him, her voice filled with camaraderie. “How’s it going?”

Ken stared at her through his thick tortoiseshell glasses without answering. I took a closer look at him as he chewed a fingernail. Now that I knew he was Leo’s son I could see the family resemblance. The pear-shaped body and close-set eyes were a dead giveaway.

“Do you want to sit down?” he asked after a few moments. The words were right, but the shrill tone of his voice robbed them of their graciousness.

Barbara and I seated ourselves on the gray leather couch he indicated. He flopped down onto another identical couch across from us. They were nice couches. They didn’t seem to match the rest of the decor, which included a couple of dilapidated bookshelves bursting with science-fiction paperbacks and an unframed poster of a buxom young woman in a space helmet fighting off the advances of what looked like a ten-foot-tall lizard. Ugh.

I lowered my gaze to the coffee table between us and noticed the glass terrarium built into it. I looked closer, expecting to see plants, but saw only one branch, a rock and a scaly, greenish-brown lizard staring back at me. I flinched involuntarily and lifted my gaze to Ken’s face. He was smiling now. And his smile looked genuine.

“He’s an American chameleon,” he told us, his voice less shrill than before. “He’s really quite attractive, isn’t he?”

I nodded, forcing a smile onto my face. The best thing I could have said about the lizard was that he was small, maybe five inches. I hoped he wouldn’t grow up to be the size of the one on the poster.

“Beautiful,” Barbara cooed. “The throat sac is a great color.”

I kept the smile on my face. Throat sacs, ugh.

“What do you feed him?” Barbara asked.

“Live crickets, every other day,” Ken answered. I flinched again, but he continued without appearing to notice. “I pick them up from the pet store on the way home from work.”

“How about when you’re out on an audit?” Barbara pressed.

“Oh, my mom feeds them then,” he said blithely.

God, the poor woman, I thought. Married to Leo and feeding live insects to her son’s lizard.

“I’ve got an ant farm in the bedroom,” he told us, his voice vibrating with excitement. “Wanna see it?”

“Maybe later,” I said. Was this offer his version of “come up and see my etchings”? I looked at his face. His open smile looked like a ten-year-old’s. I nixed the etchings theory.

“I’m gonna get an iguana, too,” he went on happily. “And maybe some scorpions. They’re really neat. I saw some at the insect zoo.”

Even Barbara’s bright smile faded when he mentioned the scorpions. And even more amazing, Ken seemed to notice. He stared at her for an instant, then changed the subject.

“So, are you guys investigating?” he asked, his eyes widening under his thick glasses.

We both nodded in sync. I thought about explaining that we weren’t official investigators, but Barbara poked me with her elbow as though she had heard the thought. I kept my mouth shut.

“I’m sorry I was unavailable before,” he said. He rubbed his hands together, massaging his knuckles. “I was out on an audit.”

“That’s what your receptionist told us,” Barbara commented softly. She was smiling again. “It must be tough at Rutherford, Rutherford and Kent.”

He leaned forward. “It’s a jungle,” he whispered. Even his whisper had a shrill edge. “People think that accounting’s an easy profession. That there’s no competition.” He shook his head violently. His voice grew louder and shriller still. “Uh-uh! You have to be on your toes all the time. And if you want to make partner, boy, do you have to work hard.”

“Oh, my,” Barbara trilled encouragingly. She was beginning to sound like Iris.

“At Rutherford, Rutherford and Kent, people argue all the time,” Ken went on, whispering again. He popped one of the knuckles he had been massaging. “They even throw things. This one guy who got passed over for promotion threw his hamburger really hard. Right in front of a client! It hit the wall with this big
splat
and then sorta slid down to the floor. It was really gross.”

“What happened to him?” I asked, my curiosity piqued.

“Gone the next day,” Ken said, cracking another knuckle. “He’ll never be able to get a job with one of the top firms again.”

“Well, at least the receptionist is on your side,” I assured him.

“Huh?” he said.

“The receptionist,” Barbara explained with an exaggerated wink. “She likes you.”

Ken’s brows were furrowed in confusion. He began to chew his thumbnail, then suddenly his eyes widened. He dropped his hand.

“She likes me?” he yelped. His skin turned a deep, hot pink.

“Back to the night of the murder,” I said hastily, sorry I had mentioned the receptionist. “Did you notice anything important?”

“That woman who owned the restaurant sure made people mad,” he answered after another therapeutic bout of nail chewing.

“Like your father?” Barbara prodded.

“Oh, Dad,” Ken said dismissively. He lowered his eyes. “He’s always, you know…”

“Coming on to women,” Barbara filled in for him.

“Yeah,” he agreed, his eyes still lowered. “And they get mad at him most of the time.”

“Who else was mad?” I asked.

“The older lady with the gray hair who was dressed in a linen suit like Dad’s,” he said. He tapped the glass of the terrarium absently. Was he losing interest?

“That was Iris,” I told him.

“And the lady who’s married to the black guy,” he added. I followed his gaze down to the terrarium. The lizard was frozen in place, its skin a brighter green than I remembered.

“How about you?” Barbara asked softly.

“Huh?” he yelped, his head jerking up.

“She made fun of you when you told her about the poisons in dairy products, didn’t she?” Barbara pressed.

“But everybody does!” he objected. He waved a hand in the air. “Nobody ever takes me seriously. I even tried to tell Mr. Rutherford about the stuff in the water—you know there’s awful stuff in tap water: industrial waste, tin, cadmium, aluminum—and he told me I’m not allowed to talk about it anymore—”

“Back to Sheila Snyder,” Barbara said.

Ken shook his head violently. “The police asked me about arguing with her, too. I tried to explain what I meant—about the growth hormones and antibiotics and stuff—but they wouldn’t listen. No one ever does.”

I believed him. He probably did tell everyone. And they probably did all laugh at him. So why would he have killed Sheila Snyder?

I asked Barbara that question on the way back to her apartment. We hadn’t learned much more from Ken. He claimed he couldn’t remember anything else suspicious. Barbara had even asked him why he had smiled after the body had been discovered. After a few minutes of thought, he told her he’d probably been thinking about the iguana he was going to buy, to distract himself from thinking about the dead body. It sounded strange enough to be true.

“Just because we don’t know
why
Ken killed Sheila doesn’t mean that he didn’t,” Barbara said, but there wasn’t much heart in her voice. I stole a glance at her. She looked tired. Her face was showing its age for once.

I dropped her off at her apartment and drove on home. When I opened my front door, Wayne and Vesta were still standing right where I had left them.

“You just don’t love your mother,” Vesta was telling him. Her voice was barely above a whisper now, both of her hands crossed over her heart. “Is it too much to ask for a little love, a little kindness?”

Wayne’s face showed nothing, but his shoulders were rounded again, his head hanging. “Mom, you know I love you,” he muttered.