4 Four Play Read online

  I recollected the elementary school desk debacle and studied the superintendent’s nose. It looked as good as new.

  “I am responsible for this campus,” Dr. Yates continued scolding the cop. She pointed to the barricade. “Kindly remove this obstacle.”

  “But the Captain said.”

  “Captain-Schmaptain! I am not accustomed to waiting.” She turned on her heel and gestured toward the portly guy who had driven her. “Gordon!” she commanded, and the man hopped to attention.

  He heaved the barricade aside, and Superintendent Gabriella Yates took off. “Gordon!” she called back, and said Gordon jogged into position beside her.

  Candy Poppe was on it. “We’re the superintendent’s secretaries,” she told the stupefied cop. “We’re here to take notes.” She grabbed Karen and me by the elbows, and we slipped around the barricade, close on the heels of Superintendent Yates.

  “I will burn in hell before I let that asinine Jimmy Beak get to the scene before me,” the superintendent told Gordon, and I stopped dead in my tracks.

  “Beak?” I squeaked.

  ***

  “The car!” Jimmy Beak screamed. Oh yes. Channel 15’s finest was smack dab in the thick of things. “Get footage of her car!” he ordered his cameraman.

  The good news? The vast majority of the car Jimmy was so keen on was covered by a tarp, and the body was nowhere in sight.

  The bad news? My rear license plate was clearly visible. Especially since one of Jimmy’s minions was pointing a high-wattage spotlight at it while the cameraman filmed.

  Jimmy pointed at my vanity plate. “Adelé!” he screamed. “That’s Add-a-lay!” He emphasized the pronunciation. “This is Jessica Hewitt’s car.” Some flapping of unnaturally long arms. “The borderline pornographer is involved in yet another murder!”

  I squeaked again, and Wilson, who swears he doesn’t believe in intuition, caught my eye. He offered me a quick cop-like look and turned away to deal with Superintendent Yates. While she barked questions at him from one angle, Jimmy Beak stood at his other side, microphone in hand.

  “We’re out of here,” Karen said.

  Candy yanked my arm, and we beat a hasty retreat. We sprinted past the cop from earlier, cleared that pesky barricade in what must have looked like a choreographed leap, and made a beeline for Karen’s van.

  ***

  “Do you think he saw us?” Candy asked.

  I strained my neck to look, but was propelled backward as Karen stepped on the gas.

  She checked the rear view mirror. “He’s not following,” she said. “No Channel 15 vans.”

  “Thank God,” the three of us said in unison.

  Trust me, my friends and I are seldom so easily intimidated. But this was Jimmy Beak. The man who had delighted in accusing me, and then Candy, of cold-blooded murder during the Stanley Sweetzer murder investigation. He’d given poor Karen a hard time, too. She was guilty simply for associating with me.

  “Did you guys hear him?” Candy was asking. “Add-a-lay! Add-a-lay!”

  “I’m beginning to rue the day I thought of that pen name.”

  Karen stopped at a red light. “It does describe your books, Jess.”

  “But Jimmy doesn’t have to harp on it. And I am not a borderline pornographer. No matter how often he claims otherwise.”

  This, too, went back to the Stanley Sweetzer fiasco. Borderline pornographer this, borderline pornographer that. Jimmy loved insulting me. And he had resurrected his borderline pornographer routine when I was asked to judge a writing contest for local teenagers.

  “He got me fired from the Focus on Fiction contest last month,” I reminded my friends. “He claimed I was morally unfit to judge teenagers. Morally unfit,” I sputtered. “I’ve been boycotting Channel 15 ever since.”

  Karen glanced in her rear view mirror. “Should we tell her?”

  “Tell me what?”

  “Umm, Jimmy has kind of been talking about you again,” Candy said. “He’s been calling the Romance Writers Hall of Fame, the Hall of Shame. Do you get it?”

  I looked at Karen.

  “Every night for a week now,” she said.

  “Why have I not been informed of this?”

  Karen told me not to blame the messengers, and Candy reminded me I was boycotting Channel 15. “We figured you didn’t want to know.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But now he’s found some brand new fodder to torment me with.” I stared out the window. “Let’s hope Superintendent Yates will distract him this time.”

  “Yikes,” Karen said.

  “She does seem rather scary.”

  “No, Jess. Yikes is her nickname.”

  “Jimmy calls her Superintendent Yikes,” Candy said. “You get it? Yates-Yikes?”

  I squinted at the street lamps as Karen turned onto Sullivan Street and headed for home. “The Clarence Courier doesn’t call her Yikes.”

  “The newspaper has some class,” Candy said.

  We were assessing Jimmy Beak’s complete lack of class when my cell phone rang.

  “Wilson’s gonna kill you,” Karen said.

  And yes, she did know who it was. It’s uncanny, but I swear my cell phone takes on a particularly angry ring tone whenever Wilson has something to kill me over. Let’s just say, it’s happened before.

  ***

  “What the hell were you doing?” he asked me. “Didn’t I tell you to stay away?”

  “It’s my car,” I said. “And you know I don’t follow orders very well.”

  He sputtered something I didn’t quite catch and commenced scolding me for butting in where I wasn’t needed.

  Yadda, yadda, yadda. I let him get it out of his system and interrupted only when he insisted I shouldn’t have brought my friends along. “Earth to Captain Rye,” I said. “I don’t have my car. Karen had to drive.”

  He went back to sputtering incoherently.

  “We’re home now anyway,” I told him as Karen turned into our parking lot. “We left the school the second we saw Jimmy. Why didn’t you tell me he’s been defaming my character again? Hall of Shame, my foot.”

  “Believe it or not, I don’t give a damn about Beak’s opinion of you.” Wilson paused. “Neither do you, right?”

  “Right.” I climbed out on the van. “Was it really murder, Wilson? How? Why? Who was she?”

  “Name’s Miriam Jilton. She was an English teacher—one of the chaperones for the Junior Prom. Strangled. Keep that to yourself, please.”

  “On the top of my car?” I asked as my friends and I entered our lobby.

  Wilson told me the victim had likely been killed closer to the school itself, but was carried to my car.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “That’s the million-dollar question.”

  We dropped Karen off at her door. She whispered goodnight, and Candy and I started climbing the stairs.

  “Another million-dollar question,” Wilson continued. “Concerns your friend Mr. Smythe. What was his role in this?”

  “I’m sure Frankie had nothing to do with it.”

  “How do you know that? How do you even know this kid?”

  I waved Candy goodbye at the second floor. She blew me a kiss, and I headed back to the stairs. “He was my neighbor on Maple Street. Back when I was married to Ian.”

  Wilson harrumphed.

  “I assume you’ve talked to Frankie?” I asked. “And Lizzie? She’s his date.”

  “No. And no. I’ve got three hundred kids swarming around out here, and none of them is Frankie. Or his girlfriend. What possessed you to give him your car?”

  “I didn’t give him my car. I merely loaned it to him for a special occasion.”

  Another harrumph.

  “I’ve known Frankie since the day he was born, Wilson. He’s a responsible person.”

  “Well then, where is he?”

  Okay, good question.

  “I can go look for him,” I said as I reached the top floor. “I could bor
row Karen’s van.”

  Needless to say, Wilson told me to stay put. “Call me if this Smythe character shows up on your doorstep.”

  I said goodbye to a dial tone and opened my door.

  To my credit I blinked only twice before returning to my cell phone.

  Wilson answered after half a ring. “Let me guess.”

  Chapter 3

  “He’s not on my doorstep,” I said. “He’s on my couch.”

  But not for long. Frankie sprang up and was hovering over me before Wilson could utter even one four-letter word.

  Hindered by her strapless gown and four-inch heels, the girl on my couch took a little longer to get to her feet. Lizzie, I assumed. I watched her totter over, and was trying to remember where I had seen her before, when Wilson started asking questions.

  At least I could answer the first one. “No, they did not break into my condo. Frankie had a set of my keys. They must have let themselves in?”

  I glanced at the teenagers for verification, and they nodded a few hundred times.

  With Wilson bombarding me with questions from his end of the phone, and Frankie and Lizzie bombarding me with more questions and even a few answers, it got a bit confusing. At some point I grew tired of being the middleman and suggested I hand the phone over to the teenagers.

  “No!” Wilson said in no uncertain terms. “I want their parents present and a court-appointed social worker. Detain them while I round up the troops.”

  Detain them?

  I frowned at the six-foot-two Frankie Smythe, who kept apologizing for ruining my car, and at his much shorter girlfriend Lizzie, who continued to explain that, like, this whole thing was, like, nothing she ever expected to happen, like, in a million years!

  Somehow I knew it was going to be a very long night.

  ***

  “Tea,” I said for the fifth or sixth time as Frankie repeated for the fifth or sixth time how he hoped I didn’t mind they had let themselves in.

  For the fifth or sixth time I assured him I did not mind and physically steered him and his girlfriend back to my couch. I pointed emphatically, and they finally sat back down.

  That herculean task accomplished, I moved on to the tea preparations.

  Frankie, meanwhile, moved on to the tangent of how he and Lizzie had expected me to be home when they arrived. And how they had waited for me to come back home so they could explain. And how he had expected me to be home. And how, since I wasn’t, he wasn’t sure what to do, and so that’s why he let himself in, and he hoped I didn’t mind, but they didn’t know what else to do, and the taxi had already left, and so they decided to stay until I got home, and he really hoped I didn’t mind.

  Testimony to my infinite patience, I listened. And listened. At some point, I even managed to serve tea. I calmly sipped my beverage, hoping that my own serene aspect might rub off. Lo and behold, eventually Frankie did have to breathe.

  He shut up, but that only gave Lizzie a chance to get rolling. “It’s, like, all my fault, Ms. Hewitt. It was me who wanted to go out to the car in, like, the middle of the dance. We were in line to get our picture taken and I was, like, ‘I lost my lipstick,’ and, like, I thought maybe I dropped it in the car, and so Frankie was, like, ‘Let’s go look for it,’ and so we went back to the car, and that’s when we saw Ms. Jilton, and she was, like, dead.”

  I was relieved she put a period there, but before I could get a word in edgewise, Lizzie was, like, talking again.

  “And then Frankie, like, panicked and started running away, and I was, like, trying to keep up but I couldn’t go fast in these shoes.” Lizzie picked up the corner of her red satin dress to display her ruby red stilettos. “But then Frankie noticed I wasn’t keeping up, and he, like, stopped and by then we were three blocks from the school, and we tried to figure out what to do next. I was, like, ‘Maybe we should go back to the school,’ but Frankie was, like, panicking about your car. So, like, he called you, but you didn’t answer!”

  Lizzie stopped long enough to frown, and it occurred to me Frankie only had my land line number.

  I got up to check my messages as she continued, “Frankie was, like, all afraid you’d be mad at him for wrecking your car, and I was, like, ‘Why don’t we go tell her what happened in person?’ But then we remembered we didn’t have a way to get here, since, like, we didn’t think it would be a good idea to take Ms. Jilton off your car and drive it.”

  She looked at me for verification, and I agreed that yes, it probably was best they had not moved the body.

  Lizzie continued, “So then Frankie was, like, ‘I have my father’s credit card tonight,’ so we called the cab company and, like, neither of us had ever called a taxi before, but, like, we figured it out, and then the cab came, and we got here, but you weren’t home!”

  She stopped. But it took me a moment to realize she had finished and was expecting a response.

  “Umm,” I said.

  ***

  “Elizabeth!” Lizzie’s mother shouted from my doorway. She was the last of those troops Wilson had promised me to arrive. The last, but certainly not the least.

  She propelled herself into my living room as Frankie’s parents, Greg and Laura Smythe, caught my eye. “Rita Sistina,” they told me as the newcomer bounded over my coffee table and landed in front of her daughter.

  Lizzie was again having trouble standing up, but her mother paid no attention to the cut of that dress. She yanked her daughter to her feet as Lizzie desperately tried to keep her strapless gown in position. But the person who would have been interested in the peep show missed it. Indeed, Frankie had moved rather quickly out of Rita’s way and was headed for the door when Wilson blocked his path.

  “Sit,” he ordered. “Everyone sit,” he said, and everyone scrambled to obey.

  Everyone except the cat and I. We chose to stay out of the fray. Snowflake found a spot on top of the fridge to watch the musical chairs, and I escaped behind the kitchen counter.

  Greg and Laura, both as thin as their son, settled themselves into one of my overlarge easy chairs. The social worker, whose name I never did catch, ended up in the other easy chair, and Wilson and his right-hand man Lieutenant Russell Densmore grabbed the two bar stools.

  Rita Sistina took another yank at Lizzie’s dress, and mother and daughter plopped onto my sofa, where Rita continued pulling and tugging at Lizzie. The girl tolerated what might have passed for a hug and stared forlornly at my front door.

  Frankie was the last to sit. He shrugged at Wilson, perhaps implying there were no spots for him. Wilson pointed toward the couch, and Frankie frowned at the space remaining next to the older Ms. Sistina. The kid braced himself visibly and took a seat.

  This distracted Rita from her interminable hug. She let go of her daughter to face Frankie. “What have you done to my daughter?” she demanded.

  Wilson cleared his throat and insisted he would be the one asking questions. An argument ensued as Ms. Sistina pointed to Frankie and insisted she had a right to know what “this stupid goofball” thought he was doing.

  “Goofball?” Greg Smythe said.

  “Stupid?” Laura Smythe asked.

  But Rita was only interested in the youngest Smythe. “Ms. Jilton is dead!” she said, and Frankie flinched. “Murdered!” More flinching. “On your car!”

  “Actually, it was Miss Jessie’s car,” Frankie said quietly, and Rita re-directed her wrath.

  “Your car!?” She glared in my direction. “What were you thinking!?”

  Bless his heart, Wilson rescued me, and reminded everyone he was the one asking questions. No doubt Rita would have argued some more, but the social worker sided with Wilson. He explained the process—why the parents were there, and why he was there. “The police need to ask you some questions,” he told the teenagers. “But no one is in trouble, okay?”

  “Okay!?” Rita shrieked. “Then why is my daughter under arrest!?”

  “Arrest!?” the teenagers shrieked.

  �
��No one is under arrest.” Wilson did not shriek, but his voice was loud and firm. He looked directly at Rita. “No one,” he repeated, and the woman positively glowered.

  “My daughter intended to go to law school,” she hissed. “But this!” She waved a hand in Frankie’s face and raised her voice considerably. “This boy and his shenanigans have ruined Elizabeth’s chances for a career in the law. What’s she going to do now, Captain Rye? Answer me that!”

  I do believe my beau the cop—make that my fiancé the cop—was at a loss for words. But Lieutenant Densmore helped him out. “Your daughter can still go to law school,” he said, all calm and rational. “She’s not under arrest, Ms. Sistina. At this point she’s not even under suspicion.”

  “Suspicion!” Rita grabbed her daughter’s hand. “Your father will hear about this. Sistinas do not tolerate police brutality.”

  Wilson rolled his eyes and turned to me.

  “May I get you an Advil?” I asked him, and several hands shot up.

  ***

  I chalked it up to decades of dealing with hardened criminals, but by the time I found the Advil, Wilson had actually managed to move the interview along. He and Lieutenant Densmore, with the occasional clarification from the social worker, asked questions, Frankie and Lizzie answered, Laura and Greg Smythe popped pain relievers, and Rita Sistina interrupted. A lot.

  Even so, Wilson got the basic story out of the kids. And they had made it all the way to the critical juncture when Frankie had started running away from my car before Rita was back at it.

  “You ran away?” she screamed. “How stupid can you be!?”

  Laura Smythe shot forward in her seat. “If you call my son stupid one more time.”

  “He is stupid!”

  “No one is stupid,” Wilson said. “The kids were in shock, Ms. Sistina. Running away might not have been the best idea—” Laura made as if to argue, but he held a hand up to stop her, “—but many adults would have done the same.”