Catch a Falling Knife Page 21

  Eric was sitting up, obviously hurting. He had some scrapes and he required more help than I could give him to get to his feet. I returned his cane.

  He said, “I never should have lent her that gun. She said she needed it for self-defense.”

  “Defense from whom?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure. Maybe Mark.”

  “You knew she had killed Elise, didn’t you?” I said. “You must have caught her in the act.”

  Eric cringed. I had never seen a man look so beaten.

  “I don’t know what got into me,” he said. “When I arrived at the apartment I heard screams. The door was locked so I broke the window with my cane to get in. It was a struggle for me to get through the window. By the time I got inside Elise was dead. My first impulse was to attack Donna, but that wouldn’t have brought Elise back.”

  “You would have killed her if I hadn’t,” Donna said, from where she sat in Lefty’s grasp, her mouth dripping blood onto Lefty’s beautiful tie. She slurred her words. “Your own guilt stopped you from doing anything to me. That and knowing you could get sexual favors from me in return for your silence.”

  Lefty shook his head and said, “Neither one of you can hold a candle to the Star. For two cents I’d do you both in. Maybe I should have let you swallow that pill. What is it, cyanide?” He opened his hand and examined it.

  For answer, Donna grabbed the capsule out of Lefty’s hand and threw it backward over the wall that bounded the parking lot. Lefty, who had instinctively clapped his other hand over Donna’s mouth to prevent her from swallowing it, tensed his muscles and appeared to want to do her bodily harm. His body vibrated. Then he slowly relaxed and the tension seemed to drain out of him.

  As the only mobile member of the group I made a move to go after the capsule, but Lefty said, “Leave that for the police. It’s their job. You’d never find it in the weeds, anyway.”

  “That was the ending Donna wrote to her story,” Sandra said, still pressing the makeshift bandage to Mark’s shoulder. “Kill Mark and then kill herself. That way, she wouldn’t have to face the consequences. She’s a romantic and a pathological liar. With that combination, she can’t stand too much reality.”

  Donna dabbed at the blood dripping from her mouth with her bare hand as sirens wailed in the distance, coming steadily closer.

  Chapter 32

  By Sunday, Mark felt well enough to attend the family brunch at Albert’s farm. Sandra brought him from her condo, where he was recuperating from his wound. That was where he belonged—with Sandra. I would do everything in my power to keep him there. And I was determined to crush any evil forces that might pull them apart, such as gossip about Mark and Elise.

  Medically, Mark’s prognosis was good. The damage to bone and muscle was reparable and no organs had been hit. He was somewhat stiff, but the doctor said he would regain full movement of his arm and fingers. Except for a scar, he would be as good as new.

  For the first time in the history of the Sunday brunch we had a stripper and the owner of a strip club present. I had invited them, with Sandra’s concurrence. The stripper, or exotic dancer as she preferred to be called, was Cherub, and of course Lefty was the owner. They were on their best behavior. Lefty wore one of his beautiful ties and carried on an intelligent, high-level conversation. Cherub wore more clothes than some of the women Albert had invited to past brunches and talked about cars with Winston.

  Mark had been carried off in an ambulance from Club Cavalier without answering any questions. I had talked to him several times since, but not about Donna because he needed peace and rest. Now that he felt better, I debated whether it was a good idea to bring up the subject. Albert beat me to it.

  “I thought you were more intelligent than to go on a date with a murderer,” Albert said to Mark, half seriously.

  Mark smiled, ruefully. “I didn’t know she was a murderer then. I had bought into the theory that Eric killed Elise. She called me at the restaurant and said she had more information for me. She pushed the right button and I jumped.”

  “And it was logical for you to have your meeting at Club Cavalier.”

  “Lots of business meetings are held at Club Cavalier,” Lefty said.

  “We take good care of businessmen,” Cherub added.

  Mark looked uncomfortable and would have welcomed further interruption, but he couldn’t get out of answering.

  “Donna said the Club was important. I guess I shouldn’t have let her call all the shots, if you’ll pardon the expression.”

  “She was trying to convince you that she was good and Elise was bad,” Sandra said, putting a protective arm around Mark. “Before she killed you and then killed herself, which was her idea of a tragic but poetic solution to the mess she was in.”

  We had to go through some sort of a catharsis to rid ourselves of our association with Elise’s murder, just as I had had to rid myself of the smell of the garbage I had played in at Club Cavalier. Talking about the murder was perhaps the best way to do that, as long as it didn’t cause any new problems between Sandra and Mark. But Albert, who had been the least involved in the investigation, asked a lot of questions.

  He knew about Donna’s poem, but he wanted a more logical and less poetic explanation about why Donna had killed Elise and how Eric fit into the picture. I drew the short straw and had to answer.

  “The whole thing is rather complicated,” I said, trying to come up with a reasonable answer. “Donna and Eric had some sort of a relationship before the murder. Donna cultivated Eric, hoping that Eric would convince Elise that she needed Donna’s help to succeed as a singer. Donna worshipped Elise on one level, while at the same time she hated her success with singing and with men such as Mark—remember, this is Donna’s view—because Donna had a crush on Mark.”

  “But Elise charged Mark with harassment,” Albert said, puzzled.

  I was getting close to things I shouldn’t talk about. “Donna filtered that to fit her own theory, which was that Elise made a play for Mark, something that Donna could never have done, at least at that time. I don’t know what Donna thinks Elise and Mark did together, but I’m sure she thinks that Elise filed the harassment charge because she saw it as a way to explain to her boyfriend, Ted, why she wasn’t a virgin. In reality, Elise had had a previous lover. Donna’s imaginings were probably not that far from the truth, except that of course Mark fended Elise off.” I was glad I wouldn’t have to testify to that in court.

  “Since Donna couldn’t be Elise, or at least be her partner, she killed her,” Albert said, thoughtfully.

  Good. Now if only Albert had enough sensitivity not to say anything more about Mark and Elise.

  “Donna became Elise, temporarily,” Cherub said, “by pretending that she was the Shooting Star.”

  “That’s the best explanation I’ve heard yet,” I said, looking at Cherub with new respect. “But as far as events leading up to the murder, Elise had just made plans to sing with a band for the second summer in a row. She didn’t need Donna for anything and Donna knew it.”

  Albert looked at Mark and said, “I understand that the harassment charge against you has been dropped.”

  “Yes,” Mark said. “Apparently I’m off the hook. I have been asked to resume my teaching duties. Whoopee.”

  “Are you going back?”

  Mark shook his head. “Apologies to all the educators present, but I’ve been soured on teaching. Although I don’t want to go through life as a bartender, either. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

  “What about the murder charge against you?”

  “We expect that to be dropped shortly,” I said. “Burt is working on it.”

  “But we got sidetracked,” Albert said. “What was Eric’s part in l’affaire Donna? Why didn’t he turn her in to the police?”

  “I gather that Eric’s wife treats him like a demented cripple,” I said, “and won’t have much to do with him, physically. Donna appeared to like him, at least, and showed hi
m some physical attentions that I won’t go into here because I don’t know the details. When Eric found Donna with a bloody knife in her hand he apparently decided that this was too close for comfort to the urges he had after he discovered Elise was the Shooting Star. He didn’t want to have to explain to the police why he was at the apartment. So he made some sort of a deal with Donna that again I don’t know the details of.” And I suspected that not all the details would come out during Donna’s trial.

  “Which brings us to Elise, herself,” Albert said.

  “Ah, the Shooting Star,” Lefty said, rapturously. “The purest girl who ever worked for me—and one of the best draws, to boot.”

  “You never told me you looked for purity in your dancers,” Cherub said, acidly. “And Elise wasn’t all that pure.”

  Sandra chimed in, “Apologies to you, Cherub, but if Elise wasn’t pure, what does that make the others?”

  “Elise had a conflict,” I said, saving Cherub from having to answer. “She was trying to escape from her father’s control, but at the same time she had a need to please him. Witness her boyfriend, Ted, who didn’t seem to have much going for him except that Eric approved of him.”

  “In other words,” Sandra said, “she was like all girls.” She gave her father a dig in the ribs.

  “Her theme-song was ‘Don’t Let the Stars Get in Your Eyes,’” I said, “but she had stars in hers, I’m afraid. And a Shooting Star glows brilliantly and then flames out. Or, to invoke another Perry Como song, she tried to catch a falling star, but ended up catching a falling knife.”

  “I saw a star last night,” Winston said. “It was near the moon.”

  “I didn’t know you were a poet, Lillian,” Lefty said.

  Sandra said, “I think she’s mixing her metaphors.”

  ***

  “I’ll do the dishes,” Sandra volunteered, when we had finished eating.

  “I’ll wash the pots and pans,” Lefty said, heaving his bulk out of his chair. “You can wipe.”

  “But you’re a guest,” Sandra protested.

  “I started out as a dishwasher. I’m a trained professional.”

  Lefty rolled up his sleeves and put on an apron. I suspected what he wanted was to talk to Sandra alone, but he had earned the right. And he didn’t have an icicle’s chance in a furnace of convincing her to become a dancer.

  Cherub came to me in the family room while Lefty and Sandra slaved away in the kitchen and Albert and Mark talked about Mark’s future. Cherub hadn’t volunteered for dish duty; she didn’t look like the domestic type.

  I had wanted to ask her a question. I said, “Cherub, did you or any of the other girls ever give Elise marijuana?”

  She looked startled and glanced over her shoulder at Lefty. The kitchen was three steps higher than the family room and separated from it by a wooden railing. Lefty and Sandra were making too much noise banging pots and pans to hear what she was saying.

  Nevertheless, Cherub lowered her voice to a whisper and said, “Lefty don’t allow drugs at the Club. He gave us a hard time after he heard the Star might have got a joint from one of us. Anybody caught with anything could be fired. He likes to think he runs a clean establishment.”

  “But...”

  “But—and don’t tell him this or my ass will be grass—occasionally somebody might have a little pot. And I liked the Star better than I let on. Like Lefty said, she had class.”

  “Thanks. I won’t pry any further.”

  “I appreciate that. May I say something to you now?”

  “Sure.”

  “When I started out as an exotic dancer it was a lot of kicks, you know what I mean? But I’ve been doing it ten years now and I don’t want to end up as a 50-year-old dancer. Every year I stay in it I lose some self-esteem.”

  “Why don’t you do something else?” I asked.

  “Because I’m scared. And because I have no training for anything else.”

  “But you have a lot of good experience you can use in any job,” I said, trying to see the bright side. “Look at all the people skills you’ve acquired. Controlling a roomful of unruly men, that takes a lot of skill. I’ll tell you what. I know a nonprofit organization that helps homeless people prepare to get back into the workforce. They help them find job leads, prepare resumes, practice interviewing—the whole works. You’re not homeless, but you are trying to change careers. I’ll put you in touch with them.”

  “I appreciate that, Grandma—Lillian. You know, not everybody treats us like real people, like you do. Some folks treat us like scum. Thank you for your help. And thank you for inviting me here today.”

  “You’re welcome. For my money you’re as good as anybody—and a whole lot better than people like Donna, or Eric Hoffman.” And I could go on and on with my list. But I won’t because at heart I’m an optimist. I really believe that the good people in the world outnumber the bad.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  After spending more than a quarter of a century as a pioneer in the computer industry, Alan Cook is well into his second career as a writer.

  Run into Trouble is about a footrace along the California coast in 1969 during the Cold War. But is the Cold War about to heat up? Drake and Melody, who worked undercover together in former lives, need to find the answer before all hell breaks loose.

  The Hayloft: a 1950s mystery and prize-winning Honeymoon for Three feature Gary Blanchard, first as a high school senior who has to solve the murder of his cousin, and ten years later as a bridegroom who gets more than he bargained for on his honeymoon.

  Hotline to Murder takes place at a crisis hotline in Bonita Beach, California. When a listener is murdered, Tony and Shahla team up to uncover the strange worlds of their callers and find the killer.

  His Lillian Morgan mysteries, Catch a Falling Knife and Thirteen Diamonds, explore the secrets of retirement communities. Lillian, a retired mathematics professor from North Carolina, is smart, opinionated, and loves to solve puzzles, even when they involve murder.

  Alan splits his time between writing and walking, another passion. His inspirational, prize-winning book, Walking the World: Memories and Adventures, has information and adventure in equal parts. He is also the author of Walking to Denver, a light-hearted, fictional account of a walk he did.

  Freedom’s Light: Quotations from History’s Champions of Freedom, contains quotations from some of our favorite historical figures about personal freedom. The Saga of Bill the Hermit is a narrative poem about a hermit who decides that the single life isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

  Alan lives with his wife, Bonny, on a hill in Southern California. His website is alancook.50megs.com.

  Table of Contents

  Catch a Falling Knife