First Murder (12 page)

“Whew.” Carol said once they were in the car. “You went up against her in court? And lived to talk about it?” She was chuckling while she lit a cigarette.

“It wasn’t too bad for me, but she got the guy off.” Ray shrugged.

“Did he do it?”

“I think so.” He turned to her in the car. “I got it straight in my mind a long time ago, Carol. We catch ’em. The DA prosecutes ’em. Someone in Minneapolis screwed up or something. Not my problem.”

“Yeah, I think that way too.” She nodded. “But sometimes…don’t you get mad sometimes when some junior ADA screws up and one of the bad guys walks?”

“Not mad. I don’t need to waste my energy on mad. I just try to get the next one so airtight, so perfect, that
anyone
can prosecute it.”

“Bullshit.” Carol tossed the half smoked butt out the window and started the car. “You get mad.”

T
ed Lipka and Vang Pao were leaning against Connor’s squad car. Tony remembered they were still interviewing the neighbors so they must have been nearby. He joined them, curious if the canvassing had produced anything. An old man in a red plaid jacket was herding a small pile of leaves near the curb two houses over. Tony noticed he was keeping an eye on the activity around the police car. Greetings out of the way, talk turned to the case.

“Anything?” Both of the older detectives shook their heads.

Ted flipped a page back on his pad. “Not much. One lady, Grober’s her name, lives in the blue house over there.” He pointed east, toward the busier cross street and the gas station two blocks over. “She said she saw a young man wearing a hooded sweatshirt walking toward the bus stop early Monday morning. She said she didn’t recognize him.”

“She seems to be the unofficial neighborhood watch,” Vang added. “She remembered the Graves woman walking her dog, a Mr. Hendricks was running late and had to trot to catch the 8:15, and that someone named Aldo got his paper that morning in his boxers.”

“That might be something then,” Tony sounded hopeful.

“She only saw him from the back. Couldn’t tell if he was black or white. Couldn’t remember if the sweatshirt had any writing on it. No idea about size. Might not even have been a guy.”

“He was carrying a backpack.”

“That’s not much.” Then Tony remembered something Mae had said, something about hearing a car door. “Did she say anything about a car here at the house? Out front or in the drive?”

“No, but she wouldn’t have been able to see this house.” Ted pointed again toward the blue house. It was on the same side of the street and only three down. Unless the Grober woman had been on the lawn she wouldn’t be able to see the Fredrickson’s.

“What about you? Talked to the last roommate yet?”

It was Tony’s turn to shake his head. “He seems to be a busy boy. I don’t think he’s ducking me but he’s not calling me back either. What do you guys think?” Tony wasn’t above asking advice. Ted and Vang were veterans. Neither of them exuded the presence that Ray did but he knew they were both competent investigators. And
everyone
had more experience than he did.

“A college kid not bending over backwards to talk to a cop? That’s not surprising.” Vang had a frown on his face. “But…we need to clear him. You’ve left messages?”

“Several.”

“We need to clear him. These kids live on their damn cell phones.” Vang’s tone of voice told Tony that talking with Stuckey was important. He felt a swell of urgency.

“I’m thinking of staking out the house. Ray’s left me kind of twisting here.”

Lipka chuckled. “That sounds like Ray. He doesn’t hold hands, Tony. I’m guessing he said something like ‘talk to the last roommate’ and not much else.”

Tony nodded. That was exactly what he’d said. Ray was testing his resourcefulness. He wanted to see how he would solve the problem. Well, Tony thought, I guess I’d just better go solve this problem.

“Anyone want to join me on a stakeout?”

That got a laugh.

Roxie Kennebrew was a mess. There was no other way to describe it, Ray thought, looking at her. Her red hair was barely combed. Her makeup was smudged, what was left of it. She looked to have been crying for days. Her eyes were tortured, the lids rubbed pink by a hundred tissues. There were the last traces of lipstick at the corners of her wide mouth. She hadn’t seen a tub or shower in a while, he could tell. Ray decided that Roxie Kennebrew was either despondent over the death of her friend or a very good actress.

Ray steeled himself for this chat. Even though he was inclined to feel some sympathy for her he was tired of the lack of progress. Deanna the good mother. Deanna the volunteer. Deanna the dutiful wife. There was something Deanna had done that had driven someone to murder. If Roxie Kennebrew was truly devastated maybe she’d open up, talk about the group dynamics of the ‘Go Girls’, let something out, let something slip. If she was acting, Ray was sure he’d be able to tell.

Carol pointed out the two empty brandy bottles in the trash. Ray considered that the woman was drowning her sorrows, self-medicating, drinking to make the pain of loss go away. He knew that never worked, that all the drinking would do was sharpen the edge of self pity so it could cut a little deeper. He’d had some experience with that. He also considered that she might be drinking away her loathing for the evil deed she’d done.

Then, too, he remembered that more than one of her friends had commented that she was a drinker, that she…what was it…liked to let loose? Maybe it was as simple as that. Maybe she was just a drunk. Whatever the case, Ray was still a little gritty from the interview with Allyson Couts . Too bad, Roxie, he said to himself. Ray Bankston doesn’t suffer drunks.

“Tell me about your Monday morning, Mrs. Kennebrew.” It was a command, not a request.

“Monday morning.” Roxie looked down at the table. She had both hands wrapped around a coffee mug and stared at it with bleary detachment. “Nothing really. I, uh, went to the gym about 9:30. Then I called Dee’s house, I think about noon. Yeah. Noonish.”

Carol nodded. There had been a message on the Fredrickson’s answering machine.

“Earlier?”

“Ken. Ken had already gone to work. I got up about 7:30. Made some coffee. Read the paper. You don’t think
I
killed Dee…you can’t!” That brought a fresh wave of tears; deep, heaving sobs. An already sodden tissue was reduced to pulp and shards. Carol spied a box on the counter and fetched it for her.

“So no one can verify where you were or what you were doing early Monday.” Carol tried to signal Ray with her eyes that he was pressing too hard. After another minute of crying, softer this time, she sat up straight, sniffed loudly and glared at Ray.

“I want my lawyer here if you’re going to accuse me of killing Dee.”

Carol shrugged as if to say to Ray ‘I told you so’.

“That’s certainly your right. I’m not accusing you of anything though, not at all. Your friend was murdered very early Monday morning. We’re trying to place everyone who knew her, everyone she was connected with.” Roxie eyed Ray warily.

He thought he could smell liquor and wondered if she might have fortified her coffee.

“I told you where I was and what I did. I didn’t see anyone until I got to the gym. Gold’s, over on County Road E.”

“All right. We’ll let that go for now. Tell me, do you think Mr. or Mrs. Fredrickson could have been having an affair? Either of them?”

Ray hoped to slide past her request for a lawyer by ignoring it. They were still groping for a motive. When she answered he knew he’d pulled it off.

“No way in hell. Dee doesn’t fool around and neither does Scott. I’d know.”

“Can I ask how? How would you know?” Ray sat back, waiting for another chapter of
Snow White
.

“Because Scott knows he has an open invitation any time he wants some, for one thing.” Ray took a look at Roxie Kennebrew again. Beneath the tired eyes, streaked makeup and shapeless housecoat she was another very attractive member of the ‘Go Girls’. He could imagine Scott Fredrickson being tempted, at least, by her looks and the figure she was hiding behind the terrycloth.

“But he never, ah…took you up on the offer?”

“Never. Not that it’s any of your goddamn business.”

Ah, but it is, Ray said to himself, keeping his face neutral.

“And Dee…I’d just know. We didn’t have any secrets.” Ray hesitated with the comeback he wanted to use. It would just piss her off.

She surprised him when she confronted it head on. “She even knew I wanted to screw her husband. We laughed about it. That’s how I know, detective.”

“That’s pretty telling.” Ray wondered if it was the truth.

“It’s the new millennium. We’re all adults. And we’re really good friends. Why keep secrets?”

Why indeed, Ray thought. But someone’s got a secret and it’s important enough to kill for. And it’s someone you probably know, he wanted to tell her.

“Okay, no secrets. Tell me what it was really like on the trips you all took. What happened in Vegas? What happened in Mexico and LA?” Roxie shook her head. She still had the same sad serious look on her face when she answered him.

“You’re not one of my friends. You’re not one of us. Not one of the girls.” She gave a short bark of a laugh. “Not one of the husbands, either. You, we can keep secrets from. I can anyway.”

“Why would you want to?”

“That’s obvious isn’t it?”

“Not really. One member of your little clique is dead. Murdered. I would think you’d want to share anything that might help us find out who killed Deanna Fredrickson. She knew the killer. She let the killer into the house. She
knew
her killer.”

Ray hadn’t raised his voice at all. He’d spoken in precise measured tones, stating facts, facts that he normally wouldn’t share with a potential suspect.

Roxie froze when he said that. She looked directly into his eyes, not moving. It had hit a nerve—paralyzed her. Ray could barely make out that she was breathing she was so still. He thought he could see her thinking, could see images passing behind her red eyes, questioning, wondering who Deanna knew that could have killed her. He saw fear there. Roxie was wondering if she knew the killer too, he was certain of it. The only sound that intruded was a clock ticking somewhere in the house.

“Nothing.” Roxie sighed heavily, a deep cleansing breath. “We never fought. There could be a little…cattiness, I guess you’d call it, but it was always in fun. It was never serious.”

“It might not have been on the surface.”

Roxie went into another trance, looking deeper, thinking harder whether any of her friends could even be capable of such hatred, because, she reasoned, only hatred could make you kill someone you cared for, someone you loved.

“We never fought,” she said again, still sifting through memories, through conversations and teasing, through taunts and jokes and a thousand things they’d said to each other. Ray remembered Erika’s story about the strip club in LA.

“You fought in LA, at the strip joint.”

Roxie’s brow furrowed. “Who told you about that?” Her tone wasn’t accusatory. She seemed merely curious to Ray.

“It doesn’t matter. I’m just wondering if there could be any hard feelings.”

“From who? I got smashed and Karen and I were acting like jerks. We teased Erika. We probably pushed it too far. I can’t remember all of it.”

She paused to collect her thoughts, dig into the memory of it. “Dee hustled us all out of there. I remember that. Karen was kind of wired that night. It was a bad idea to go there. We all agreed on that later, at the bar. We laughed about it.”

“You went to another bar?”

“Near the hotel. It was nicer than the hotel bar. It was pretty late. We didn’t fight though.”

Ray’s tone softened some. “Sounds innocent enough.”

“If anyone was mad it would have been Erika, and Dee was the one who broke it all up.” Ray had to agree with her on that point. He was trying to fit it together when Carol spoke up for the first time.

“So you all went to a bar, had a few drinks and patched things up. No harm, no foul?”

“Lakisha and Erica left after one drink, I think. I stayed for a while, but I probably shouldn’t have. Sometimes I drink too much. Someone has probably told you that already, too.”

Ray kept his face impassive, stayed silent. Carol was doing okay.

“So they took you back to the hotel?”

“I got back there on my own. Dee and Karen stayed for a while. I think Dee was keeping an eye on her, on Karen. She was pretty wound up after the club.”

“Drunk?” Ray probed.

“More like horny. No…not horny.” Roxie searched for another word. “Frisky. When she’s not around Gary she’s a huge flirt.”

“And Deanna was flirting too?”

“No. Dee was running interference. She and Karen go way, way back. She was just staying close so Karen wouldn’t do something stupid.”

“Was this normal?” Ray probed deeper.

“Yeah, but not like you think. Dee watched out for all of us. She called me cabs or drove me home. She ran interference for Erica too. She would talk to Lakisha about her spending and antagonizing Mr. Marland.”

Ray interrupted her. “Why does everyone refer to him as Mr. Marland? Off the subject. Sorry.”

Roxie laughed softly, the first time she’d done so throughout the whole conversation. “She never uses his first name. Never. He’s been Mr. Marland for ten years, maybe longer. I have to think what it is. Funny, huh?”

Ray allowed himself a brief smile. Carol frowned at him for breaking the rhythm they had built up.

“Why would Deanna have needed to run interference at the bar? Was Karen
that
frisky?” Carol asked, trying to get back on track.

“I don’t remember. I think Karen was eye fucking some guy at the bar. I’m not sure. I do remember that it was our last night in LA and it was a very quiet flight home.”

“You all stayed at the same hotel?”

“Sure. I had a room with Ally. Karen and Dee shared a room, so did Lakisha and Erika. It saves money.”

“And everyone made it back in their rooms that night?”

“Yeah. I mean we all met in the lobby for the shuttle.”