Mahjonged (An Alex Harris Mystery) (22 page)

I sat in my car for a few minutes and then wedged myself between two patrol cars leaving. If I was being followed, I wanted an escort. I managed to stay between the two cars for several blocks until one veered off to the right. I stayed with the other one for another couple of miles and then it pulled onto the turnpike. I kept my eyes on the rearview mirror and didn’t see another car behind me until I turned into Penelope’s area. A car had come off of a side street and got in line behind me, but a block later it pulled into a garage where presumably it lived.

I parked in front of Penelope’s without seeing anyone else and got out, locked my car and just about sprinted to the front door. Lights flooded the house and I saw another car in the driveway parked next to Penelope’s.

Els answered the door and invited me in.

“Alex, this is Lois. She was a good friend of Penelope and I invited her back here to pick something out to remember Pen by,” Els said to me. “Let me go get another cup.” She headed toward the kitchen and I took a seat on the sofa across from Lois.

“You and Penelope were good friends?” I asked.

“Oh, yes. For many years before she moved to Europe and then we lost touch for a while. I got married, had children, you know how it is?” Lois said, as she reached for her cup and took a sip. “But once she moved back to the States, we picked up again like no time had passed at all. And how did you know Penelope?”

“It was at Alex’s house where Penelope died,” Els said, as she sat next to me and reached for the tea pot and filled my cup.

“Oh my,” Lois said. Like Penelope, Lois was also a good looking woman and judging from her clothing and perfectly coifed white hair, she probably had money as well. Her skin looked luminescent and she had lovely blue eyes. The hair, rather than making her look older, actually blended beautifully with her skin and I wondered if it was natural or if she dyed it.

“I had just met Penelope Friday night. She came with a good friend of mine. We played mahjong,” I said.

“Yes, Penelope told me she had plans to meet a group of women to play. Are the police any closer to solving her murder?” Lois asked.

Before I could answer, Wilhelm plopped himself down next to me and thrust a plate of cookies in my face.

“Stroopwaffle?” he asked.

“Ah, well, yes, thank you, Wilhelm,” I said as I took a chocolate-covered cookie. I felt famished and I grabbed another before he pulled the plate back. I turned to Lois. “I’m not sure how the investigation is progressing but so far no one has been arrested.”

I took a bite of the cookie and then a sip of tea. I wanted to ask Els about the picture and show it to Lois as well, but I didn’t want to bring it out in front of Wilhelm. I didn’t know if Els had shared the finding of the other picture with him or not and I didn’t want to be the one to bring it up if she hadn’t. And then as if he could read my mind, Wilhelm stood up.

“If you’ll excuse me, I have some errands to run.” Wilhelm took his coat from the front closet and then left.

As soon as I heard the car pull out of the drive, I took the picture from my purse.

“Els, did you by any chance drop this picture today at the grave site?”

Els took the copy I made from my hands and looked at it for a few moments. “Is this the same man we found in the other photo?” she asked looking at me.

“It seems to be, yes. You’ve never seen it before?”

Els shook her head. “No. Never. You say you found it at the cemetery? I don’t understand.”

“Neither do I,” I said. I took the picture from Els and passed it across the table to Lois. “Lois, do you have any idea who this might be?”

Lois studied the picture for a moment. “No, I don’t believe so. What does it have to do with Penelope?”

“I found it beneath the casket. It got caught between the casket and the metal contraption they use to lower it into the ground.”

Lois handed it back to me and smiled. “Well, there, it probably just blew into her grave. It must be from another service.”

“No, Lois, it’s the same man,” Els said. “Just a minute.”

Els ran upstairs and a few minutes later came down with the little box. She sat next to me and untied the ribbon and took off the lid. She pulled out the picture of Penelope with the man and handed it across to Lois.

Lois put her hand to her heart. “Oh, my.” She looked at me “And you have no idea who it could be?”

“No, I don’t and Els said she’s never seen him before. But from the ticket stubs in the box and some other things, it looks like it must be someone she knew when she lived in Europe. Did she write to you during that time?” I asked Lois.

“We wrote to each other for about six months, but then like I said, I met someone and got married, and Penelope worked all the time. She said she loved it but the Amsterdam office was very demanding. Wait! I do remember something.”

My heart began to race and Els leaned forward, clearly as eager as I to find out the identity of the mystery man.

“What do you remember?” I asked, though it probably came out more as a bark I was so anxious to hear what she knew.

“In one of our last letter exchanges I told her about meeting Glen and how I knew it was very quick, but we planned to get married. Just a very small affair, not a big wedding,” Lois said with a wave of a perfectly manicured hand which supported some very fine rings. “And my instincts must have been right because here we are still married.”

“Lois, the picture,” Els prompted.

“Oh, yes. Penelope wrote back and told me how much work she had to do and it was very demanding like I said. She used that word,
demanding
, but then she wrote she had found herself a very pleasant diversion to ease the pressure at work. She said maybe she had met her own Glen. So I assumed her diversion was a man. Penelope liked having a man in her life.”

“But maybe it was Pieter?” I asked.

“When exactly was this?” Els asked Lois.

“Well, we only wrote for about six months so probably about that time, five or six months after her arrival in Amsterdam.”

“No, I mean what year,” Els pressed.

“Oh, dear, let me think, well, it must have been about nineteen eighty-four or five, I would imagine. Probably the first month or two of eighty-five.”

“Then it wasn’t my father,” Els said firmly.

I turned to look at Els. “How can you be so sure?”

“Because Poppy worked in the French office then. We all lived in Paris and he came home every night. I remember distinctly he never traveled at all during that time. The Paris office kept him so busy and every night at dinner he would drill Wilhelm and me about our French lessons and he only allowed us to speak French. I was very glad to get back to Holland, but I admit knowing French serves me well working at the hotel. We didn’t move back to Amsterdam until almost the end of nineteen eighty-five. In October, I believe.”

“Then this must be her little diversion,” I said.

“But how did this picture end up in her grave?” Els asked.

That seemed to be the million-dollar question and one for which I did not have an answer except the killer must have tossed it in there, but why? And then Lois said something that made Els and me turn to her and that creeping piece of ice started its crawl up my back again.

“Maybe he came back.”

“Wait. What? Maybe he came back?” my sister asked the next morning. “What the hell does that mean and how does it bring us any closer to finding out who the killer is?”

I shrugged. “It doesn’t, I guess. But it’s an interesting theory.”

“But if the person who placed the picture in the grave is the killer, as you’ve hypostatized, then that means the killer is a man,” my sister said to me as she took a large bite of her toast.

“But there was only one man at my party.”

“Right. Bert. Oh my God,” Sam said as she put the muffin down. “Bert must be the man in the photo.”

I looked at my sister and just stared. I couldn’t even manage an eye roll at this idiotic suggestion. “Twenty something years ago Bert would have been, let’s see,” I said, taking a long pause, “about twelve. Idioot.”

“Oh, yeah, I guess he would be, wouldn’t he.” Sam started to giggle and I had to give in. Penelope seemed to like her men, but could she have been into boys? Yuck.

“What are you laughing at Mom?”

Henry came hopping into the kitchen. He liked not using his crutches and had taken to hopping all over the house. I didn’t know if it was a good thing to be hopping all over and shaking up his little insides, but he seemed no worse for wear.

He came over to my side and I lifted him onto my lap. My sister had given him a good sponge bath the night before and washed his hair, carefully avoiding the cut on his forehead that would probably leave a scar. She told me he was quite proud of having a scar like Harry Potter. I sucked in the smell of him and wrapped my arms around him tighter.

“You’re squishing me, Auntie.”

“Oh, sorry, Henry,” I said easing up on my grip a bit.

“I know. I keep squeezing the hell out of him myself,” Sam said to me.

Would we ever get over almost losing him and let him get back to a normal life or was the kid destined to be pampered and hovered over for the rest of his days? Just then my father called from the living room. Henry hopped off my lap and took off in a shot.

“Dad’s taking them to the library and Mom’s over at Meme’s playing pinochle with Theresa and Jean. What are you doing today?”

“Going to the mall and then meeting Mary-Beth for lunch. Want to join us? If we leave now we can get some shopping in before lunch.”

Several hours later, and with much lighter wallets than when we first arrived at the mall, Sam and I joined Mary-Beth at a wonderful little restaurant.
Soprano’s
had opened up a year earlier and no one knew if the name came from the fictional mob family in a very successful cable TV show or not. From the menu everything looked wonderful and after much consideration we all decided to have a concoction of carrots, celery, onions, and osso bucco cooked together in a tomato sauce enhanced with orange zest and then poured over a steaming bowl of polenta or corn-meal mush as Meme always called it. A generous heaping of freshly grated parmesan cheese tossed on top completed the dish and we ate with gusto.

“Tell me all about Henry,” Mary-Beth said between bites. “Is he back to normal?”

“You mean does he have the run of my parents’ home? Is he terrorizing his sister with his oozing wounds as he calls them? Is he talking non-stop and destroying all the raked leaf piles in my parents’ back yard? Then yes, he’s back to normal. Henry normal.”

Mary-Beth reached over and placed one of her hands over Sam’s hand and her other over mine. “That child is a precious gift and as long as he’s back to normal, whatever normal is for Henry, then that’s all that matters.”

“Thank you, Mary-Beth,” Sam said softly.

Mary-Beth took her hands back and started to eat again. “So, what’s new with the investigation?”

I thought about this for a moment or two while I ate a few more bites of my lunch. What exactly was new with my investigation? “Truly, not very much I’m afraid. I keep running into brick walls, but I did discuss something with Els last night before I left, a new theory of sorts, and I need to get to the library to check a few things out.”

Sam and Mary-Beth looked at each other and then back to me.

“Well?” they both said in unison.

“You’re not going to just throw that tidbit out there and keep the rest to yourself, are you?” Mary-Beth asked.

“No, she’s not. I drove and if she wants a ride, she had better start spitting out details.”

My sister’s threat was worth nothing. She may have driven us to the mall, but I had her car keys in my pocket, having picked them up when she dropped her purse while trying to find her cell phone. I’ve been telling her for years you need to have a lot of compartments in a purse to keep everything in its place, but she never listens.

I wiped a bit of sauce from my chin. “Okay,” I started as I leaned on the table. “Penelope was a lawyer and I got to wondering whether or not she still practiced. Turns out she was of counsel to a firm in New Haven.”

My two companions looked at each other and shrugged as if to say this new theory of mine hit another brick wall.

“When I got home last night I did a search on my iPad of the law firm. It’s a relatively small practice and it specializes in medical malpractice.” I settled back in my chair and took a good-sized spoonful of my osso bucco waiting for the accolades to wash over me.

“Medical malpractice?” Mary-Beth asked. “So what?”

I sighed. I tried not to, but I couldn’t help myself. “Mia. Liz. The yelling and the screaming. The accusations of
you killed my father, you killed my father
.”

“Oh my gosh! Did Mia hire Penelope?” Sam asked.

“I don’t know. That’s why I want to go to the library tomorrow and look through old newspapers and see what I can find out. It all might just be a coincidence or maybe Penelope represented Liz. ”

“Why don’t you just ask them if they hired Penelope?” Mary-Beth said.

“Because I don’t want to tip them off. I want to go to them with evidence in my hand. And maybe Penelope had absolutely nothing to do with their case at all.”

My sister pushed a strand of her lovely honey-colored hair away from her face and leaned forward with gleaming eyes.

“This is good, Alex. All along we’ve been wondering what on earth could have possibly induced anyone to stab Penelope and now we have our answer. It’s so simple.”

“It is?” I asked.

Mary-Beth and Sam looked at each other and smiled and then they turned to me and said in unison, “Because she was a lawyer.”

Lawyers. They always get a bum rap. They’ve become a necessary evil in so many things and they don’t come cheap.

But when you’re in some kind of trouble, legal trouble, the first thing you think of is finding a lawyer. So there it was, right in front of me. Both Liz and Mia more than likely needed a lawyer at some point after Mia’s father died. The hospital must have had a lawyer as well, though they probably had an army of them on staff.