Motion for Malice (7 page)

"Tippi Hedren," Maizy said immediately.

"That's it," Charlotte said. "Tippi something. Dorcas said she'd noticed this Tippi person following her here and there. It was quite unsettling. She was considering a restraining order."

Interesting.

"I'm sure she's not here now, though," Charlotte added. "Although it's quite a turnout, isn't it?" She glanced around at the rows of empty chairs. "But of course, everyone loved Dorcas. Poor Weaver is absolutely shattered."

I had to agree with her there. The line of mourners had trickled to a stop, and Weaver was currently weeping into his brother's neck. Seaver was patting his head in that
there, there
sort of way men have when the strong shoulder role doesn't fit comfortably.

"Isn't that interesting," Charlotte said. "Artemis Angle showed up. I'm surprised he had the nerve."

I leaned a little closer to her. I felt Maizy lean closer to me. "Artemis Angle?" I asked.

Charlotte made a very subtle movement that somehow pointed me right to Future Curt. I glanced over my shoulder and collided with his stare. And I didn't think he was staring because I was looking hot in my elastic waist skirt and bargain bin blouse. It was as if he could hear our conversation and didn't much like it. I pulled my attention back to Charlotte before my skin started to melt from the heat of his anger.

"He's the president of the SOS," she told me. "He and Dorcas had a terrible falling out over her wanting to leave. She was practically the face of the SOS, you know."

"Will you excuse me?" Maizy said suddenly. Before I could grab her, she sprang up and hustled off.

"Lovely meeting you, dear," Charlotte called out after her.

I sat back, thinking, fitting what Charlotte had said with Dorcas's obituary. SOS had to be the Society of Seers. Mr. Intensity must be its president. "What was the fallout over?" I asked. I wanted to look at him again, but I had that spooky someone-is-watching-me feeling, and that someone was probably him.

"Money, of course." She sniffed her distaste. "Dorcas had a brilliant plan to franchise psychic kiosks in malls nationwide. She would have made a mint. But she was his golden goose."

My eyes went wide. "He's a psychic?"

"Please." The word dripped disgust. "He's a car mechanic. He doesn't have a fraction of the talent Dorcas had. Such a fraud."

Oh boy. I could practically feel the heat from the fraud's eyes burning a hole in me. I angled away a little so that I could avoid the flaming ball of fire he might hurl at my head.

"But Dorcas, she had a real gift. The things she could tell just by gazing into that crystal ball of hers." She bound the prayer cards with a rubber band and returned them to her bag. "I offered to buy it from Weaver, but the poor dear told me it's being held as evidence at the police station. Apparently it was the murder weapon." She shook her head. "It's just so very awful. I do hope the fiend left fingerprints on it. Dorcas deserves justice. Well," she sprang to her feet with incredible spryness, "I have another wake across town and only an hour before it ends. It was lovely to speak with you, dear." Off she went to rid another funeral home of its supply of prayer cards.

I didn't answer her. I was barely aware she'd left. It hadn't even occurred to me that the police would check the crystal ball for fingerprints. Of course they would. And when they did, they'd find that
I'd
left fingerprints on it. A lot of them, maybe even all ten fingers and my palms, too, when I'd tried to push it across my desk. I'd left everything but a photograph. And now the police had taken my fingerprints, too. Plus I'd been the one to discover Dorcas's body. Only the police might not see it as discovering so much as causing.

Of all the things Dorcas had claimed to see, there was one whopper that she'd missed. Dorcas's murder had
me
written all over it.

*   *   *

"You said you couldn't even lift the thing," Sherri said later. When I'd gotten home and found Curt nowhere in sight, I'd called her in a state of panic. She'd rushed right over ninety minutes later. "How could you have gonged her over the head with it?" She glanced over at Frankie Ritter, who'd oozed into my apartment behind her and right onto my sofa, where he'd immediately commandeered the remote control. "Right, honey?"

"Babe, I'm working," he told her, without taking his eyes off the TV. If he thought he was ordering dirty pay-per-view movies on my dime, he was in for a gonging of his own. He was lucky I didn't make him wait on the landing. He was more repugnant than usual in sagging jeans that showed way too much skin and an ancient looking Aerosmith T-shirt that he was sweating through even though the temperature was in the forties. His shoes were off. His blond tips were gelled and spiky. His facial hardware was in place.

"But
why
couldn't I lift it?" I asked.

"Power of suggestion," Frankie said, still not looking at us. "You got any cheese Jax? I get hungry when I work."

"She didn't suggest anything," I said. "She hardly even noticed I was trying to move it."

"That's what she wanted you to think," Frankie said. "She probably put some kind of weakness hex on you. Do you have trouble holding onto the soap when you're naked in the shower?"

I looked at Sherri. "You need to castrate him."

"Oh, I get it," Frankie said. "You think spells and hexes don't exist. You keep right on thinking that when you don't have enough strength to put on your pajamas anymore, and you have to sleep in the nude." He got a weird far-off look in his eyes, and I could tell he was picturing me naked.

"Knock it off, Frankie," I told him. "Seriously," I said to Sherri, "what are you feeding him?"

"Well, you
can
be weak and ineffectual," Sherri said. "Sometimes."

I stared at her.

"That's not nice, babe," Frankie told her. "Your sister might not be smokin' hot, but she's not ineff—what you said."

"Thanks," I said, "a lot."

"Hey, I'm all about the females," he said. "So you got those Jax or what?"

"Honey, enough with the Jax," Sherri said. "Can't you see she's upset?"

He went back to channel surfing with a shrug.

"I know what I'll do," I said suddenly. "I'll call the police and just tell them why my fingerprints are on the crystal ball."

Sherri brightened. "That's a good—"

Frankie blew a raspberry into his palm. "Bad idea, Jamie. You gotta make them work for it. After all, Jersey's a death penalty state."

My stomach did a slow roll around my spine. "But I didn't kill her."

"And folks
never
go to prison for killing people they didn't kill," he said.

My mouth snapped shut. He had a point. A horrifying point. Everyone had heard stories of innocent people in prison. Some spent decades behind bars before DNA evidence set them free. I tried to imagine myself after thirty years in lockup. Gray hair would be a given. Not so bad. I had a couple of those already. I'd probably have a collection of tattoos. I could live with that. I had nothing against art. Then there was the middle-aged spread, which I'd get by eating the cakes Sherri would bring every week with files baked into them. The files of course would be confiscated, but the cakes themselves would finally give me some shape, albeit the shape of a Weeble. So I had that to look forward to.

"You're among friends here," Frankie said. "We won't think any less of you if you tagged the old broad. Fact, we might think more." He smiled at my sister. "Make her more interesting, dontcha think?"

"I didn't tag anyone!" I practically yelled.

"And I don't think that would make her more interesting," Sherri added.

I sighed. "What's your point?"

"My point is don't serve yourself up on a silver platter." He waggled his eyebrows. "Not to the cops, anyhow."

Eww. "But I didn't kill her," I repeated. "I could help clear things up."

"Yeah." He snapped off the television, did a lot of wriggling and grunting, and eventually wound up angled more or less toward me. "Look, I can see you need guidance here. Again."

So Frankie's extensive knowledge of all things perverted had been helpful when I'd been investigating Doug Heath's murder. Big deal. It wasn't as if he'd drawn a map to the killer's door.

"You got nothing to worry about," he said. "We already know you left fingerprints and clothing fibers and probably strands of hair—"

Swell. Something else I hadn't thought of that would keep me awake all night.

"But did you leave anything else?" he asked. "Like, I don't know, a sweater you might've forgotten? One of those sappy
Sorry I missed you
notes chicks like to write? A brassiere?"

"Why," I said acidly, "would I leave a brassiere?"

He shrugged. "Who knows why you broads do what you do?"

I snatched the remote away from him. "Go home, Frankie."

He squirmed around some more before Sherri helped haul him, panting, to his feet. I glanced at the dark patch on the sofa where he'd spent the last half hour sweating and made a mental note to buy some Febreze in the morning. And plastic slipcovers.

"Listen," he said, when he'd caught his breath, "I'm really gonna help you now."

"I seriously doubt it," I told him.

"You're not in AFIS, are you?"

"I don't know," I said. "What's AFIS?"

He rolled his eyes. "AFIS. The database? Automated Fingerprint…
AFIS
. You ever been arrested?" I shook my head. "There you go. You're just a set of fingerprints that go nowhere."

"But…" I stopped, gnawing on my lip.

Frankie made a
hurry it up
gesture.

"The police took my fingerprints," I said slowly.

"Oh. Well. Then you're screwed." He looped an arm around Sherri's shoulders. Her knees buckled slightly. "You ready to go, babe?"

"That's it?" I asked. "That's all you've got to say?"

He shrugged. "What else is there? Unless you go and do something stupid like confessing."

"I didn't…" I began.

"Save it for your defense team," he said. "I'll give you a coupla names." He planted a sloppy kiss on Sherri's cheek and dragged his tongue up her face to her ear. "Don't say I never did nothing for your family, babe." And he burrowed into her hair like a tick.

Sherri swiped a sleeve across her face. "Isn't he the best?" she asked. She sounded a little uncertain. She turned her head away from him—he stayed firmly attached—and toward me, lowering her voice. "Look, if you're that worried about it, just do your own thing like you did before."

I didn't want to admit I was sort of doing that already. "I didn't know what I was doing." Which was certainly true.

She tried to shrug but Frankie's arm made that impossible. "That didn't stop you then, and you figured it out."

I hadn't figured anything out. I'd gotten luckier than I could expect to get a second time. Even with Maizy's help.

Frankie removed his mouth from her hair long enough to say, "She's right. Give it a shot. Just let us know what bra and panties you want to be buried in."

That settled it. Sherri was going back to Wally if it killed me.

Assuming the state didn't get to me first.

*   *   *

I was half-asleep when my cell phone rang at eleven-thirty that night. I fumbled for it in the dark and squinted at the readout. Maizy.

"Are you sleeping?" She sounded wide-awake. "I know who Tippi is."

I yawned and rubbed my eyes. "What? Tippi who?"

"
Tippi,"
she insisted. "You know, that old woman was talking about her? At the wake? The one who was following Dorcas around?"

Oh. I vaguely remembered Charlotte mentioning someone named Tippi, but I'd been so creeped out by Artemis Angle's cauterizing stare that I hadn't been paying much attention.

"Her real name's Tamryn McWirth," Maizy said. "Her husband was a regular client of Dorcas's. So regular that he'd miss family functions to keep his weekly appointments. He was even late to his wife's birthday party. And get this. She once went to Dorcas's studio to confront her about bleeding their bank account dry, but Weaver threatened to call the police if she didn't leave. It was a whole ugly scene." She hesitated. "Are you still awake?"

"I'm awake," I told her. "How did you find all this out?"

"I'm
investigating,"
she said. "Wakes are a really good time to get the goods on people. Everyone's really chatty. I bet funerals are even better."

I sat straight up. "Don't you dare go to that funeral."

"I'm not going to go to the funeral.
God."
She paused. "Unless you want to give me a ride. We could probably learn a lot. Maybe even who killed her. That'd be good to know, right?"

Thoughts of my fingerprints on Dorcas's crystal ball flooded my mind. It'd be good to know, all right.

"Are you still awake?"

"Yes, Maizy," I said. "I'm awake. You can stop asking me."

"Well, I know this is like the middle of the night for old people," she said. "My Great-Grampy goes to bed at nine o'clock every night so eleven-thirty is like prime REM time for him. You don't want to wake up my Great-Grampy at eleven-thirty. He bites."

My mouth fell open. "He
bites?"

"Not hard," Maizy assured me. "He doesn't have teeth. Well, he does, but he takes them out before he goes to bed. Besides, sometimes it's hard to wake him up. Once we thought he was dead, and we called the paramedics and all. But the Ambien wore off before they got there."

I closed my eyes and took some deep breaths. Maybe one day I'd want to hear all about Maizy's Great-Grampy, but this wasn't the day. "As much as I want to know who killed Dorcas," I said, "you just can't go around asking people questions like that at a funeral."

"Fine. Have it your way. I don't see anything wrong with it, but I'll kowtow to society's arbitrary conventions." She was quiet for a moment. "Okay, how's this. We won't go to the funeral, but we'll go to the cemetery. No one even has to know we're there. Then we can see who shows up. How's that?"