The game resumed and so did Suzie. "We had the Jonnell family to a barbecue one night last summer, and I swear, the kid has the foulest mouth I've ever heard. And his mother! I saw her come within a hair of punching out the coach when he put the kid on the bench for it. Some people — Jane? Earth calling Jane? Are you there?”
Jane turned to her, eyes wide. "Could that be it? The uniforms?"
“What the hell are you talking about?”
Grabbing her arm, Jane leaned forward. "You said it was a shame it wasn't Edith killed instead of the other woman."
“I didn't really mean—"
“Shut up, Suzie. Listen. Nobody had any reason to kill the other woman, but there might be a reason to kill Edith. I don't know what, but suppose there was."
“Okay, what if there was?"
“Edith was supposed to be at Shelley's, and a woman in a Happy Helper uniform gets out of a Happy Helper van at the right house. They even looked alike, in a superficial way. Matter of fact, when Edith turned up at my house yesterday, it gave me a scare. I thought she was the other woman from a distance. They were both middle-sized, kinda hippy—"
“So who isn't?"
“—and they both had frizzy blond hair."
“So why didn't the killer notice they weren't the same person when he got up close?”
That stopped Jane for a minute. She leaned back, thinking. "Because — because he must have come up behind her. Don't you usually vacuum with your back to the doorway?"
“I never thought about it, but yes. I start with the corners and back myself out."
“So the cleaning woman would have been working with her back to the door, with the noise of the vacuum cleaner covering any sound an attacker might have made. He just had to pick up a loose loop of the cord, throw it over her head and — twist," she finished with a shiver. The memory of the dead Ramona Thur-good assaulted her, turning the mental exercise back into the real and very terrible event it was.
“He might not have ever seen her face," Suzie agreed. "You know, I think you may have something there, but you still have one problem: why would anyone kill Edith, assuming she was the intended victim? She's a distasteful sort, but if we went around killing people for that, it would be a pretty sparsely populated planet." She glanced around her and added, "I can think of a few who could be the first to go."
“I don't know — but I'm going to call that detective and tell him my idea. He gave me a number when he questioned me. In case I remembered anybody else who'd come to Shelley's that day."
“This detective — is he good-looking?”
“Oh, I don't know
“Bullshit. That means he is. Why don't you go see him instead of calling? You could take a divorced friend along for moral support."
“I want him to pay attention to what I'm say‑ ing, not to the gorgeous blonde drooling down his shirt front."
“Cruel, cruel.”
Impatient to call the detective, Jane stopped at a pay phone a block from the ball field. "Detective VanDyne, this is Jane Jeffry, Shelley Nowack's next-door neighbor."
“I know who you are, Mrs. Jeffry.”
Jane didn't preen, but she smiled. "I've figured out the murder. Well, I haven't exactly figured out who did it, but—"
“That's the end result we like.”
Jane bristled at this, but went on. "It had to do with uniforms. You see, one of the boys at the baseball game got hurt, and my friend Suzie thought it was her son because they all look alike in the uniforms, and that got me thinking—”
„
“—that the regular cleaning lady was the intended victim?"
“Oh." Jane was crushed. "You'd thought of that?"
“It's a natural thing to wonder when there doesn't appear to be any motive. It doesn't appear to be the case, but I'd be interested in hearing what supporting evidence you have for your assumption."
“Supporting evidence—? Oh, I see. Well, they looked alike. Not close up, but from the back, and when you vacuum, you usually have your back to the door."
“How interesting.Hmmm. I didn't know, of course, that the two women were similar, and that vacuuming thing is interesting. Only a housewife would think of it.”
Jane had been considering telling him about Shelley's pearls. After all, Shelley had, at one point, asked her to do so. But his tone changed her mind. She considered just calling him a condescending bastard and hanging up; Suzie would have recommended it, she was sure. But she rejected that course as well. VanDyne wasn't going to find out anything more from her, but she might want to learn something from him.
“Well, thanks for listening," she said with venomous sweetness. "If there's ever anything else you want to know about housework, I'm your woman. Just call — I'll be in the kitchen trying to decide which paper towel is more absorbent."
“Say, you're not mad, are you?”
Furious, insulted, pissed as hell
“No, I'm not mad, Detective VanDyne. Good-bye.”
She really should have turned Suzie loose on him.
Ten
On three out of every four Sundays they all ' went to church. On the fourth the kids went, and Jane stayed home to get ready for dinner. She didn't usually need the time, but the occasional quiet Sunday morning alone was a blessing itself. This monthly family dinner had been another tradition Steve had started and she had continued — with a few alterations and under considerable pressure from her mother-in-law Thelma.
It was by no means the only hold she still had on Jane, but she used it to the hilt, as if Jane and the kids might escape her iron circle of influence if she didn't show up monthly to tighten up the "ties that bind.”
These family dinners would have been unbearable if Thelma hadn't been diluted by the other guests. Steve's brother Ted and his wife Dixie Lee usually came along too. Ted was a quiet, pleasant man; not a thrilling conversationalist by any means, but amiable, and a neutralizing influence on his mother's antics. His wife Dixie Lee was an Oklahoma girl, hardly into her twenties, with a sweet disposition and an accentlike warm molasses. To Jane's delight, Thelma disapproved of her even more heartily than she disapproved of Jane.
“She'd expected Ted to stay home with her forever," Jane had explained to Shelley two years ago when Ted fell for Dixie Lee. She had been hired to demonstrate a new line of beauty products in the family's main drugstore, and Ted was instantly smitten. "Steve had escaped from Thelma's clutches when I — a scarlet woman if there ever was one — snared him. But this girl! Half Ted's age and too nice — or too dumb — to even notice Thelma's digs? It's too much for Thelma. She's about to go berserk.”
After all this time, Thelma was still fuming and casting barbed remarks at Dixie Lee, and Dixie Lee was still blissfully unaware of them. Ted shared her attitude. If he had any idea of what his mother felt, he didn't let on. Nor did he seem the slightest bit influenced by her unceasing attempts to denigrate his wife.
After Steve died, Jane had added a guest to the dinner roster: her honorary Uncle Jim, her father's life-long best friend. An ex-Army officer, he'd finished his twenty years and gone to work for the Chicago police department. Assigned to the most lawless part of the inner city, he was the happiest he'd ever been. Life among the pimps and pushers suited him right down to the ground.
“All I ever did in the Army was push papers around and go to drills for events that never happened," he explained. "In this job things are always happening, and from time to time I actually manage to do something worthwhile.”
Thelma hated his intrusion into the family circle with a fervor that sometimes approached frenzy. The first time Jim had joined them, last February, she'd attacked Jane for inviting him.
“After all, my dear, he associates with such unacceptable people. One would hardly think he was a good influence on the children."
“He's associated with my parents for forty years!" Jane shot back. "I don't have them near me, but I must have him."