“What’s this about?”
“I think… I think there’s been a murder.”
“What? Randy, what’s going on? Who’s been murdered?”
“Jane,” he said. “Jane’s dead.”
“Randy, what happened to her?”
“She’s dead. Lindsay killed her.”
“Lindsay?”
“She works for us. Looks after Jane, takes care of the house. She did it. She killed Jane. She killed our dog, too. Bipsie. Bipsie’s dead. Lindsay killed both of them. I need you to come over. Barry, would you come over? Please, come over. She’s still here. Lindsay’s here. I told her she couldn’t go home yet.”
“I’m on my way,” I said.
Finley was waiting for me out front. He walked up to my car, spoke to me through the open window before I even had my seat belt off.
“I want her charged,” he said. “You need to charge her with murder.”
“Okay, Randy,” I said, getting out. “Let me get up to speed.”
“I was handing out water. Lindsay called me to say that Bipsie was sick. She’d been drinking out of the toilet.”
“Okay,” I said.
“That’s the same water that comes out of the tap,” he pointed out to me.
“I know.”
“So the dog started throwing up and died. And she called to tell me. And I said, ‘How could you let the dog drink out of the toilet when the water’s poisoned?’ and she says, ‘What are you talking about?’ Can you believe that? She didn’t know? How could she not know?”
“Tell me about Jane,” I said as we walked to the house.
“Lindsay poisoned her,” Finley said. He was moving slowly, as though he were pulling a concrete block with each leg.
“How did she do that?”
“Lemonade. She gave her lemonade. There’re a hundred bottles of fresh springwater in the fridge, plus a watercooler. But that stupid bitch thought it was too much trouble to crack open a few bottles. I’ve told her a hundred times, use the bottled stuff for everything. Drinking, cooking. But she made the lemonade-”
“You talking about the frozen stuff? You add four cans of water?”
“That’s right. I always told her, use the bottles. Because my water is better. Even before what happened today, my water is cleaner and better. But she thought it was easier to make it with water from the tap.”
“She didn’t know,” I said.
“That doesn’t matter,” Finley said. “It was murder.”
“Where is she?”
“She’s in the kitchen, crying her eyes out,” Finley said.
“I meant Jane.”
“Oh.” He swallowed hard. “She’s upstairs, in her room. Since she got sick-not today, but in the last year-I’ve been sleeping in the guest room so I wouldn’t disturb her with my snoring and turning over and all.”
“Sure,” I said. We were at the front door. “Why don’t you wait out here?”
“If Lindsay tries to leave, I’ll stop her.”
“Okay.”
I went into the house. The stairs to the second floor were right there in the foyer, but I went into the kitchen first. Just as Finley had said, Lindsay was sitting, and crying, at the kitchen table, a box of tissues in front of her, a mound of used tissues surrounding it. She looked at me when I came in, her eyes bloodshot.
“Lindsay?” I said. She nodded. I told her who I was and showed her my ID. “What’s your last name?”
“Brookins,” she said, dabbing her eyes.
“I’m going upstairs, and then I’m coming back, and we can talk.”
“I didn’t murder her,” she said. “What he says, that’s not true. I didn’t know.”
Something dark and furry in the corner of the room caught my eye.
“The dog,” I said.
“Bipsie,” she said. “I didn’t know. I really didn’t know.”
I nodded. “I’ll be back.”
I went up the stairs and found Jane’s room without help. All I had to do was follow my nose. The woman was sprawled diagonally across the bed, facedown, her legs up by the pillow. The bedspread was awash in vomit. It looked as though maybe she’d been in the process of trying to crawl out of the bed before she succumbed.
On the bedside table, a tall, narrow glass with half an inch of pink lemonade in the bottom.
I made my way back down to the kitchen. Lindsay’s version of events was not much different from Randy’s.
She had taken Mrs. Finley her lemonade around ten in the morning. Jane had said she was tired and probably going to go back to sleep. Lindsay returned to the kitchen to tidy up and start lunch preparations, then went to the basement to do laundry. It must have been around then, she said, when the fire trucks with their loudspeakers went through the neighborhood. She had heard some indistinct noises outside, but didn’t pay any attention to them.
It wasn’t her habit to listen to the radio or turn on the TV through the day. During her downtime, she read. She showed me a dog-eared, used copy of a John Grisham novel. I looked inside the front cover, where it had been stamped “Naman’s Used Books.”
“I was about to go upstairs and check on Mrs. Finley,” she said, “when Bipsie started to act weird.”
The dog was throwing up. She cleaned up after her once; then the dog was sick again. As Lindsay was wiping up after her a second time, the dog keeled over.
“I didn’t know what to do, so I called Mr. Finley to tell him. He said the water was poisoned. And then I thought, oh no.”
I nodded understandingly. “Okay,” I said.
“He says I murdered her. I didn’t murder her. It was an accident. I swear it was an accident. It’s just, he is always telling me to use his water, and sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t, because one time, his water had some brown flecks or something in it. A bad batch, he said. But ever since then, I don’t use it all the time. When I make Mrs. Finley lemonade, I just use the tap, but I didn’t tell Mr. Finley. If he knew the water was poisoned, he should have told me before he went out.”
It wasn’t in my nature to come to Randy’s defense, but I said, “He probably didn’t know then. And once he did, he probably didn’t think he needed to call home. Because of what he was always telling you.”
She had both hands up to her mouth. “Oh God, I did kill her. I did. But I didn’t mean it.”
I went back outside, found Randy standing under a tree.
Weeping.
I came up on him from behind and placed a hand on his shoulder. “I’m sorry, Randy.”
He had one hand on the tree trunk, supporting himself. He struggled to regain his composure, then said, “You saw her?”
“Jane? Yes.”
“She looks so… she’d be so humiliated.”
“She’ll be taken care of.”
“You talked to Lindsay?”
“I did.”
“What did she tell you?”
“It’s an accident, Randy. She didn’t know. It’s not murder.”
Finley turned, put his forearm on the tree, and rested his head on it. “I know.” He started twice to say something, then stopped. The third time, he managed. “It’s my fault. Soon as I knew what was happening, I should have called. I just thought-no, I just didn’t think. I was so consumed with… with taking full advantage of what was going on. That was all I could see.”
I said nothing.
“It was a tragedy, I knew that. It’s not like I didn’t care. I did care. But I saw an opportunity, and I took it.” He turned his face around enough to see me. “That’s what I do.”
“I know. It’s in your DNA.”
“I got so focused on that, I never thought about… and the thing is, she’s the whole reason I’ve been doing it.”
I took a step toward him. “What do you mean?”
A self-effacing smile came over his face. “You know what an asshole I am, right, Barry?”
Who was it who said “never bullshit a bullshitter”?
“Sure.”
“I was trying to show I wasn’t. Maybe not to you. I could never convince you. But after all the dumbass things I’ve done over the years, especially that stuff with the hooker a few years ago, I wanted to prove to Jane there was more to me than that. I was going to be mayor again, I told her. I was going to do some good. Some real good. I even had an idea to get some jobs here. I was working a deal with Frank Mancini. You know Frank?”