Widows' Watch (28 page)

Wednesday, October 13, 12:30 P.M.

Elena slept in, exhausted after the aura lessons. Staring into a mirror when you'd just put in a twelve-hour day and knew you were disappointing your mother was tiring business. She signed in for her shift at noon and typed up her solo interview with T. Bob Tyler at the jail, detailing the alibi of a man who claimed he had been stealing flowers in a cemetery at the time a murder was being committed.

Leo was out on another case, domestic assault; there sure was a lot of that, in the Potemkin-maybe-serial-killer case as well as elsewhere. Elena decided to visit the Fort Bliss National Cemetery by herself. It wasn't as if she'd need backup while she checked out cemetery visitors.

She discovered very quickly from obsessive military record-keeping that T. Bob Tyler had signed in at 1:45 P.M. on the day of Boris Potemkin's death. “Old boy comes by regular,” said the soldier on duty. “Visitin' comrades from World War II, don't you reckon? Kinda touchin'. Hope someone comes to visit me when I'm dead.”

Elena nodded. “When did he sign out?”

“We don't sign folks out. Who'd want to stay in a cemetery after it closes?”

Boris had been killed between two and three. “I don't suppose you saw Mr. Tyler leave?”

“Hey, lady, I don't even know if I was on duty that day. I'm just tellin' you what the records say.”

So T. Bob could have come straight out, driven over to the Potemkins', and killed Boris. Maybe he'd figured on establishing an alibi by coming to the cemetery. Still, was he clever enough to have thought up the flower-theft alibi? Elena had seen the lilies he claimed to have stolen for Dimitra from the grave of Pearl Abbott. “Could I use your telephone?”

“Sorry, ma'am. Only military personnel—”

“This is official police business.” Elena flashed her badge again.

“Well, I guess,” said the soldier and allowed her into his guardhouse, from which she called Evergreen Cemetery to see if Pearl Abbott had been buried the morning before T. Bob hit Omar with his fist and a handful of lilies. Pearl had. Shoot! Another suspect down the drain. Unless T. Bob was smarter than she thought. Then Elena remembered Lydia. “Did you have a visitor that day named Lydia Beeman?” she asked.

The guard, looking pained, checked the records again. “No, ma'am.”

“No?” She had pretty much believed Lydia when the woman said she was visiting her husband's grave on the anniversary of his death. “Would you know the date a Colonel Beeman died? He's buried here.”

“No, ma'am, I wouldn't, but I can point you to his grave. I've got a directory. What was the name?”

“Beeman. B-E-E-M-A-N.”

“First name?”

“I don't remember.”

“Well, we might have more than one. Got a lotta graves. Lotta dead soldiers. Kinda depressin' when you think about it. Still, you know that name rings a bell. There's this old lady who comes out to visit a grave. Reason I remember her is she rides a bicycle.”

“A bicycle?” A shiver ran up Elena's spine. “What color?”

“I don't know. Strange enough, a woman her age ridin' in on a bicycle. One of the gravediggers told me she talks to the stone. Tall woman. Kinda snippy. ‘Course it could be she hates blacks. That wouldn't be anything new,” said the black soldier cynically. “But she wasn't here that day.”

“The guard couldn't have missed her?”

“Not likely. ‘Course I don't know who had the duty on the twenty-seventh.” The soldier checked the plats, found only one Beeman, and gave Elena directions to the grave.

Elena located it. In the new section. Ambrose Beeman had died on May 17, not September 27. If Ambrose was indeed Lydia's husband, Lydia had lied twice. She did know that Boris had broken Dimitra's hip. And she hadn't been visiting her husband's grave when Boris died. On the other hand, T. Bob Tyler didn't really have an alibi either. Sifting through the new information, putting it together with the old, coming up with nothing conclusive, Elena went back to headquarters. She and Leo had a meeting with Lieutenant Beltran to discuss the case.

Wednesday, October 13, 2:00 P.M.

The meeting with Beltran started promptly at two. He described the pressure he was getting from upstairs. Leo described the case against T. Bob Tyler: his previous and present assaults, his previous dancing association with the widow, the fact that he began to date her immediately after Boris Potemkin's murder, the discovery of the obituaries of all the murdered husbands and the pictures of the wives.

“Sounds like a serial killer to me,” said Beltran. “Keeping a scrapbook of his victims. Even his alibi involves a cemetery. And funeral flowers. A psychiatrist would make something of that. What did you find out about the alibi, Jarvis?”

“Well, he was there. He signed in. The problem is they don't sign people out, so if he left quickly, he could have got over to the Potemkins' and killed Boris within the two-to-three time frame the coroner gave us. On the other hand, no one saw him or his truck near the Potemkin house that day. Admittedly, people in my neighborhood might not notice an old man, but you can't miss that truck. Looks like a pile of rust held together with Silly Putty.”

“So he parked it on another street and walked over,” Leo suggested.

“It's possible,” Elena agreed. “Still, no witnesses put him at the scene, and we've got no fingerprints. I had his from the jail booking compared to those we took at the Potemkin house.”

“So he wore gloves,” said Beltran.

Elena stared at her lieutenant. Lydia was the one who always wore gloves.

“As for eyewitness reports, they aren't that great,” said Beltran. “We've had three cases this month blow up in court because the eyewitnesses didn't know what they were talking about.”

“One of them was mine,” muttered Leo. “And Tyler's got motive. I guess. He doesn't approve of husbands hurting their wives. The men were all batterers; Elena's pretty well proved that. And Tyler wants to get married. He asked the women out after their husbands were killed, so he obviously had his eye on them as ladies who could support him and take care of him in his old age.”

“Lieutenant.” Elena hesitated to bring up the second possibility, knowing Beltran would find fault with it. Still—”There's another suspect who's, in one way, more unlikely than T. Bob Tyler. In another way—well, we could make a case against her.”

“Her?” Beltran stared at Elena. “You're suggesting we've got a female serial killer at work here?”

“I know what you're thinking. Statistics are against us, but still you ought to hear what I've dug up,” and she began to detail the case against Lydia Beeman. “Everybody agrees that she was devastated when her friend was killed by the husband, Herbert Stoltz. Even more so when the court gave him probation. And then he was murdered. Now, we can't really tie T. Bob Tyler to that one because there was no wife left for him to court.”

“Frances Stoltz wanted to leave her husband. Maybe she was going to move in with T. Bob,” said Leo.

“She planned to move in with her daughter in Ohio.”

“So she was lying to her husband about that. Then the husband kills her, and T. Bob kills the husband in revenge,” Leo speculated. “Anyway, we can't for sure tie the Stoltz murder to the rest.”

“Well, I don't know. Frances was close from childhood with everyone in that bridge group. Emily Marks was her sister, Lydia Beeman her best friend.”

“You're postulating a conspiracy of old ladies? What was this woman's name you think did the actual killings?”

“Lydia Beeman.”

“She wouldn't be Ambrose Beeman's wife, would she?”

“Yes,” said Elena, surprised. “Did you know him?”

“The man held the Congressional Medal of Honor,” said Beltran. “You want to go to the D.A. and ask him to prosecute the widow of a war hero?”

“At least hear me out, Lieutenant,” said Elena.

Beltran sighed, long-suffering. “I'd be a lot happier if we were talking about poisonings. A woman might poison five men. It's been done. But shoot them?”

“She grew up on a ranch, married a military man. She probably knows how to shoot. She certainly knows how to take care of guns. Anyway, all those women whose husbands died were substituting in that bridge group at the time of the murders, and the person they substituted for was Lydia Beeman.”

“I didn't know that,” said Leo.

“That's what my mother says. She's been asking questions at the center, which I wish she hadn't done.”

“That doesn't mean Mrs. Beeman wasn't out running legitimate errands at the time the crimes went down,” said Beltran.

“Yeah, I know, and for the other four murders, it's going to be hard to check alibis, but it's also hard to believe that her being gone every time one of them died is just a coincidence. And she's talked to me a lot about justice. She's really hung up on the subject.”

“That a crime?” demanded Beltran. “If more people were hung up on justice, you wouldn't be carrying a forty-two case load.”

“Maybe she thinks if the courts won't do the job, she has to mete out punishment herself,” said Elena doggedly.

“What about the Potemkin murder? You can check her alibi for that.”

“I did. She lied.”

“That's what you found out today?” asked Leo, frowning.

“Uh-huh. In fact, she's lied a couple of times. Yesterday she acted like she didn't know that Boris was responsible for Dimitra's broken hip, but Emily Marks says Lydia knew it. And then Lydia said that on the day Boris died, she was at the Fort Bliss National Cemetery visiting her husband's grave. Well, that sounded reasonable to me, but when I went over to check whether T. Bob had been there, I checked on her too. She wasn't on the sign-in list.”

“Well, hell,” said Beltran. “The soldier at the gate could have been talking to a pal or sleeping, and she just drove through. It's not as if they keep the place locked.”

“You're right, but she said she went for the anniversary of his death. I looked at the stone. It said he died in May, not September. And there's the matter of the weapon. Or weapons. When I visited her yesterday, I got a quick look at her husband's gun collection. She hustled me out of the house after I showed an interest, but she had a lot of World War II side arms, and that's the vintage used in the murders.”

“You're saying she took a gun out of the gun cabinet, loaded it, went off and shot some old guy, came home, cleaned it, and put it back in the cabinet where anyone could see it?”

“I don't know,” said Elena, “but she did have access to the right kind of weapons. We didn't find any guns at Tyler's place or in his truck, which is not to say that he couldn't have dumped the weapon after each murder. Or maybe he keeps them somewhere else. Or borrows them from her. Even steals them from her. The cabinet isn't locked, and she has no alarm system. But there's one last thing.”

“Which is?”

“Bicycles. She rides a bicycle to the cemetery. The guard remembered that, and the Ituribes saw a bicycle in the alley behind the Potemkins' the afternoon he was killed.”

“You're right,” said Leo, “and didn't you say they identified two women's bikes in the lineup?”

“Uh-huh. Both with baskets. And Viola Ramsey saw a bicycle near the Stoltz house when Herbert Stoltz was shot, although she thought a neighbor was riding it.”

Beltran shook his head. “You've had how many weeks on the Potemkin murder? And this is the case we've got? An old cowboy or an old lady as our serial killer?”

“I guess it's back to the street with more questions,” said Leo gloomily. “Let's just hope nobody else abuses a wife from the center before we—”

“Detective Jarvis,” said Beltran's secretary, popping into the office, “there's a call for you. I said you were in conference, but she insisted that it's urgent.”

Frowning, Beltran waved at his phone, and Elena picked up. “Detective Elena Jarvis, Crimes Against Persons,” she said.

“Elena,” whispered her mother, “I'm sorry to bother you at work, but I was sitting out on the patio stitching pillows when Lydia Beeman showed up.”

Elena stiffened with alarm.

“She opened the back gate and rode right in on her bicycle.”

“Her bicycle?”

“Of course, dear. Lydia never goes anywhere except on a bicycle or on foot. She bores anyone who'll listen about how healthful—”

“Where is she, Mom?”

“In the house. I'm outside on the cordless phone. That's why I'm whispering. She complained about the heat out here, so I sent her in for lemonade. I know that's not very polite, but it gave me the opportunity to—”

“What color is the bicycle?”

“Green,” said Harmony.

“Oh God!”

“Well, there's nothing wrong with a green bicycle. It's actually rather nice-looking,” said Harmony. “I suppose I'm silly for calling you. I know how you feel about auras, but I swear I've never seen one like hers. It's tight and gold with these frightening flashes of red.”

“Mom, tell her to leave. Tell her you've got a migraine.”

“I've never had a migraine in my life.”

“She doesn't know that. Better yet, you leave. Run around the side of the house, get in your pickup, and drive down here.”

“I don't have the keys. Why in the world would you want me to leave a strange woman in your house?

“Because she's the one who murdered all those old men.”

“Are you sure?”

“I am now. Listen, Mom—”

“Well in that case, dear, I'll keep her here until you can come to arrest her,” Harmony whispered.

“Mom, don't do that! Just leave. Go to the Ituribes' or Gloria's.”

“Nonsense. The arrest will look marvelous on your record,” said Harmony, her voice dropping even lower just before she hung up.

“Mom? Mom!” Panic-stricken, Elena turned to Leo and Beltran. “Lydia Beeman's at my house with a dangerous aura.”

“A dangerous what?” asked Beltran.

“We've got to get over there before she hurts my mother. She's on a green bicycle, looking mean.”

“Your mother?”

“Lydia.” Elena was halfway to the door. “Get a SWAT team,” she called over her shoulder.

“You think she'd hurt Harmony?” asked Beltran, finally taking the situation seriously.

“Why not? She probably thinks my mother's responsible for us zeroing in on her.”

Beltran grabbed the telephone.

“No sirens,” Elena shouted at him, and she raced down the hall with Leo at her heels.