Widows' Watch (22 page)

Saturday, October 9, 9:00 A.M.

“You're not on duty today, are you?” Harmony asked. They were having a leisurely breakfast on Elena's covered patio, enjoying one of those perfect autumn days in Los Santos—blue skies, sunshine, the temperature in the low 70's, the baking heat of summer temporarily gone and the inversion layers and low-lying smog of winter not yet upon them.

Elena smiled at her mother. “I'll be back before noon. I just want to ask some questions around the Stoltz neighborhood. I've found another old man who was killed in his house during a daylight robbery. This one about five years ago.” She spread some of her mother's peach preserves on a biscuit. “It's really peculiar, because his wife was dead. She had been connected with the center, but he killed her. And she has ties to people who may have ties to the other four murders. Including Boris Potemkin's.”

“Really? In that case, I'm sure I could get some information for you. I'm at the center every day. Who do you want investigated?”

“Mom, I don't want you saying a thing to anyone about this. If there's a serial killer, I don't want him or her zeroing in on you.”

“A serial killer? At Socorro Heights? It's mostly women, dear, and women are not serial killers.”

“I hope not,” said Elena, trying to imagine herself arresting the Forrest-Marks-Lemay-Beeman bridge group and hauling them off to jail. The department would be attacked not only by the Socorro Heights people, but A.A.R.P., the Gray Panthers, and whatever other groups supported the rights of senior citizens. “Just stay out of it. O.K., Mom? I don't want Pop roaring down here because you got hurt messing in one of my cases.”

“Well, I don't want him roaring down here because you got hurt either, Elena. Maybe I'll check auras at the center.”

Elena was sufficiently confused about her case to be tempted by the offer of an aura check. But she wasn't going to get any search warrants on aura information. She could just see her submission to the judge. Informant: Officer's mother, Harmony Waite Portillo, whose information suggests that Portia Lemay has a suspicious aura and T. Bob Tyler's is dark red.

“What are you giggling about, Elena? This is a serious matter.”

“You don't have to tell me, Mom. Five people are dead!”

“Not to mention that poor woman in the trunk of the car. You could hardly eat your dinner last night, and that was an excellent recipe. I got it from Juanita. Tlapeno soup. What a lovely idea. Pouring the soup over avocado slices.”

Elena agreed, her mind wandering off to the interviews she hoped to conduct that morning. Forty-five minutes later she was in Kern Place, an older neighborhood near the university, large trees, delicious houses whose interior walls curved up into their ceilings, with graceful arches and French doors leading from room to room. The Stoltzes had owned a house on a quiet back street, occupied now mostly by young families with children. Elena had trouble finding people who had known the Stoltzes. Her first success was an old man who had been a friend of Herbert's.

“Why shouldn't he get off?” said Mr. Evans, who was short, stout, bald, and wearing eyeglasses as thick as the bottom of a highball tumbler. “He supported the woman for forty or fifty years; then she up and decides to leave him. Marriage is about loyalty. I'd say she got what she

deserved. That jury shouldn't have found him guilty at all. The suspended sentence was an insult to a man who served his country honorably in two wars.”

“Do you know whether he abused her?” asked Elena.

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“Did her physical injury.”

“Of course he didn't! He was an officer and a gentleman. His kind doesn't go around hitting women. I don't know what the police are thinking of. Hiring women officers. A male wouldn't be asking me these stupid questions. Good day to you, young woman.” The elderly gentleman slammed the door in Elena's face.

She found one other person on the street willing to talk about the Stoltzes and knowledgeable enough to do so, Mrs. Viola Ramsey, an older lady digging up bulbs and geranium plants in her front yard. “I let the geraniums rest in the garage over the winter months,” she said, “and replant them the next year. Do you like spring flowers? Daffodils? Tulips? Iris?”

“I certainly do,” said Elena.

“So do I,” said Mrs. Ramsey. “When I see the first daffodils, I feel as if life is starting anew. I've been digging up bulbs and separating them. Here. You must take some home with you.”

“That's very kind of you, but I can't. It would be considered—I don't know—unethical, I guess, for a law officer to accept—”

“My dear, it's not as if I'm offering you a bribe. I'm just giving you bulbs I'd have thrown away. These irises are the most beautiful red-brown shade, and I have yellow ones too. Some beautiful tulips. Daffodils.”

Elena looked longingly at the basket.

“Is your car unlocked?” asked the lady.

“In Los Santos? Of course not.”

“Well, give me the keys. You go sit on my front porch in the glider and turn your head. Look at those sweet children playing next door, and I'll just slip these into your trunk. You'll be the victim of reverse thievery.”

Mrs. Ramsey deftly snatched the car keys from Elena's hand and pattered off with her woven basket of bulbs to that rotten Ford Escort, whose fuel pump had turned off, leaving Elena stranded on Murchison. Unable to resist the temptation, imagining the scene Lieutenant Beltran would make if he knew she had accepted gifts from a witness, Elena sat down on the glider and watched two little girls playing hopscotch on the sidewalk in front of the old Stoltz house.

It was nice to know that little girls still played hopscotch. Elena used to play in front of Grandma Waite's but never in Chimayo because there were no sidewalks on which to chalk the squares. She supposed she should arrest those children for defacing a public sidewalk. Hopscotch graffiti. By the time that bizarre thought had occurred to her, Mrs. Ramsey had plopped herself down beside Elena on the glider, setting it into gentle motion. It had a soft squeak, not abrasive, rather soothing in fact.

“Now what was it you wanted to ask me, Detective? Goodness, I've never been interviewed by a policeman—police person. Is that the thing to say? I do try to be politically correct, but it's hard at my age.”

“I wanted to ask you about the relationship between Herbert and Frances Stoltz.”

“Well, dear me. That was a tragedy all around, wasn't it? Frances was the loveliest woman. And he killed her. I couldn't believe it. And then someone killed him. Almost as if God stepped in when the courts wouldn't.”

A familiar theme in this case, thought Elena. “Before he killed her, did he abuse her?”

“You mean did he beat her up?”

“Yes, ma'am. That's pretty much what I mean.”

“Well, I wouldn't say so. Of course, she broke some bones, but then that's old age for you. Our bones get brittle. I think I'd have noticed anything else because I saw her most every day. She did spend a lot of time at the center, which Herbert didn't like at all.”

“Why not?”

“He thought she should be home working in the house and yard. He fired their maid when he retired. Herbert was an Army officer. He had a good pension, so he had no call to fire the maid. It's not as if maids are all that expensive around here, and with Frances getting older, it was downright unkind.

“The thing is, Herbert must have been forty-some odd years in the Army if you count his cadetship at West Point. By the time he retired, he was used to running things. Commanding, you know? So he commanded Frances. Poor woman. Herbert trailed her every step, telling her what to do and how to do it. That's probably why he fired the maid. He didn't speak Spanish well enough to boss her around.

“So there was Frances, who'd been running her own house all those years, often as not without him because he was fighting in some war or on maneuvers. Then Herbert retired and took over. Not in the sense that he helped. He would have thought that beneath him.

“Even in the yard. Frances was so proud of her yard. She may have wanted a maid for indoors, but she did all the outside work herself. And Herbert trailed right after her, telling her how to do it. Deciding she should dig up something in one place and plant it somewhere else. Even telling her how to water. I can remember him standing behind her, saying, ‘Stop putting that water in the ground, Frances. Get some on the leaves there. They look thirsty.' Insisting that she stand around holding the hose, watering every plant and tree separately. Well, that's not the way to do it, not here in Los Santos. Because of Herbert, she lost a lot of shrubbery. You just don't put water on the leaves, but then you probably know that. You seem to be interested in gardening.”

Elena nodded. The man had evidently abused Frances Stoltz physically (the A.D.A. hadn't thought those breaks were the result of osteoporosis) and psychologically. And it seemed that Frances Stoltz put up with it, at least for a time. “Was that why she wanted to leave him?”

“I think it was the yard that did it. She had a beautiful rose garden out back, and it developed the worst case of black spot you ever saw. She lost six bushes that last summer. And all because Herbert had her out there in the evening watering the leaves. No matter how often she told him, he insisted that was the way to do it. Losing those rose bushes was the final straw for Frances. She told him she was leaving.”

“And that's why he killed her?”

“I imagine so. Frances was a quiet woman, not given to arguing. But they had a couple of humdingers once she announced that she was leaving. Herbert had a fit! He simply told her he wouldn't allow it, and Frances went right on packing her things. She was going to live with her daughter in Ohio. And she would have if he hadn't shot her.

“My goodness, I cried. I can't tell you how many tears I shed over Frances. If I'd known what he was going to do, I'd have gone right over there and taken her home with me, called the police. Maybe I should have guessed. The man had a house full of guns. Military, you know. They're all in love with guns.

“And then he hired some smart lawyer who got him off. Must have cost him a fortune. That's another thing. Herbert was so stingy. Frances had to have a radical mastectomy ten years ago. She must have been about sixty-five then. The cancer didn't come back, but she wanted reconstructive surgery.

“Now if a woman wants reconstructive surgery, she ought to be able to have it, don't you think? I certainly do. Frances said those special brassieres hurt her scars. Poor thing. She went through all that therapy to redevelop the muscles, and Herbert, who was as tight as a tick—I guess I told you that—he said a woman her age didn't need that kind of surgery. It was just vanity. If he didn't mind the way she looked, she shouldn't. She could have had it done for nothing out at the Army hospital, but Herbert wouldn't let her. I call that mean and stingy, him talking so self-righteously about the taxpayers having to pay for cosmetic surgery and he was a better citizen than to ask it of them. It wasn't his chest that hurt, was it? Anyway, that's the story.”

They were still rocking gently in the glider, but tears slipped down Mrs. Ramsey's wrinkled cheeks. “Dear Frances. I still miss her. I visit her grave every year, and do you know, someone puts flowers on it, on both his and hers. I can understand on hers, but why his? He doesn't deserve flowers. It's not as if the children are in town.

“You know what I did? I hope you won't arrest me for this. I took those flowers off his grave and threw them away. I didn't even transfer them to Frances' stone. I didn't think she'd want his flowers, not after he killed her.”

Elena stared across the street at a house where a young man was scraping paint off his windowsills. The whole story was pretty depressing. “Do you know if Herbert Stoltz had any enemies?”

“No, not really,” said Mrs. Ramsey. “He didn't see that many people, and at our age, even your enemies begin to die off. I'm sure it was a burglar, caught robbing the house. Must have killed Herbert and run out the back way. That's why I didn't see anything. I did hear the shot. I was having a nap, and I heard that gunshot. Knew just what it was. When I was a girl, out on the farm, we used to hunt or just shoot guns for the fun of it, my brothers and I, so I recognized the sound.”

“But you didn't see anyone.”

“No, there wasn't a thing you wouldn't ordinarily see in this neighborhood. A few children playing. Ann Malone pedaling her bicycle up the street. She rode every day up to the week she died. Imagine having the nerve to shoot someone in the middle of the day with people around the neighborhood. It's become a violent world since I was a girl.”

A bicycle? There had been one behind the Potemkins'. “You're sure the bicycle rider was your neighbor?” Mrs. Ramsey nodded. “Did she have any reason to dislike Herbert Stoltz?” Mrs. Ramsey thought Ann Malone had considered him husband material, even considering that he'd killed Frances. “Did Mrs. Malone belong to the Socorro Heights Center?” No she hadn't. Elena gave up on Ann Malone.

“Did you know any of Francis Stoltz's friends at the center?” she asked.

“Can't say as I did. I guess our lives were sort of compartmentalized. I knew her from chatting when we were working in our yards. Saw her at the grocery store. You know the one down on North Mesa and Kerbey? Occasionally, we'd have a block party but not very often. Frances had two sets of friends, same as I do. The neighbors and the outside friends. Hers were at the center. Mine are at the church. I go to St. Clement's. Work a couple of days a week at the Bargain Box. You know the Bargain Box? You can get the most wonderful clothes there for practically nothing. If you have children, it's a great saving. I'll swear, some of the things have never been worn.”