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Was she crazy? Not if my life depended on it. I didn’t care how nice Tyler was. Or what sort of job Sister Mary Agnes might offer me. Never in a million years was I seeing this spawn from hell again.
“Probably not. I think I’m going to be out of town on a business trip.”
Was it my imagination, or did I see a flicker of disappointment in her eyes?
“Who cares?” she said, with an exaggerated shrug. “I didn’t want to go anyway. I bet it’s just a bunch of dorks standing around drinking punch.”
And then, out of nowhere, she started gasping for air.
“Angel, what’s wrong?”
She shook her head, unable to speak, and groped around in her purse. Finally she found what she was looking for. An inhaler. She clamped her lips around it and began pumping intently.
After a few terrifying seconds, she began breathing normally again. “Quit worrying,” she said, seeing the fear in my eyes. “It’s nothing. Just asthma. I’ve had it since I was a little kid.” She tossed the inhaler back her purse. “Well, see ya round.”
Then she started up the steps to her apartment, her bony shoulders stiff with pride.
As I watched her pathetic leopard skin purse flap against her hip, I was suddenly overcome with guilt. This poor kid was not only motherless, she had a debilitating illness. What sort of cold-hearted bitch was I to bail out on her after just one hellish date?
“Wait a minute,” I called out.
She stopped in her tracks and turned to look at me.
“Yeah? What is it?”
“That business trip. I think I maybe be able to get out of it.”
“Don’t do me any favors. You just feel sorry for me because I’ve got asthma.”
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“That’s not true,” I lied. “I really think I can make it.”
She shot me a skeptical look.
“Honest.” By now I was begging. “I really want to go.”
“Well, okay,” she said, clomping back down the steps to my side. “And in case you decide to bring me a gift, here’s what I want.” She thrust an ad torn from a newspaper into my hand.
The kid never gave up, did she?
Then she tore up the steps to her apartment and began banging on the door with the relentless drive of a jackhammer.
“Pop!” she shrieked. “Open up!”
Kevin Cavanaugh opened the door, his face crumpling at the sight of her.
“Back so soon?” he called out to me over the roar of the freeway.
I pretended I didn’t hear him and, with a merry wave, dashed off to the sanctuary of my Corolla.
Chapter
! Seven #
Iwoke up the next morning, still recuperating from my encounter with Angel Cavanaugh (or, as I was now calling her, Rosemary’s Other Baby).
I’d staggered home from our date, damp and shivering, and spent the next hour or so soaking in the tub, Prozac gazing down at me from her perch on the toilet tank.
I told you you should’ve stayed home and scratched my back.
I’d whiled away the rest of the day mindlessly watching sitcom reruns, getting up only to run out for some Chinese takeout. Okay, so I ran out for some Ben & Jerry’s, too—to reward myself for surviving a whole hour and forty-six and a half minutes (but who’s counting?) with Angel.
Now, after a restless night dreaming I was being chased down the Santa Monica Pier by a giant nacho, I lay in bed, gazing up at the ceiling. I thought about bailing out on L.A.
Girlfriends and leaving Angel to another mentor, preferably one who’d spent some time as a prison warden.
But then I remembered how vulnerable she’d looked gasping at her inhaler, and I knew I had to give her another chance.
Somehow, I vowed, prying myself out of bed, I had to make our relationship work.
I’d just sloshed some Hearty Halibut Guts into a bowl for 208
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Prozac and was standing at the kitchen counter, breakfasting on a cold egg roll, when the phone rang.
Seymour Fiedler came on the line, sounding light years more cheerful than the last time we’d spoken.
“Good news, Jaine. I just talked with my lawyer, and I may be off the hook for Garth Janken’s death.”
“That’s great, Seymour.”
“Now the cops think it was premeditated murder. In fact, they just brought somebody in for questioning. A guy named Willard Cox. Apparently they found some incriminating evidence linking him to Garth’s death.”
“What evidence?”
“I have no idea. All I know is they’re questioning him.”
“Do you want me to continue my investigation?”
“You may as well. Just in case they change their minds.”
I hung up with an uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach.
Some of it was probably indigestion from that egg roll. But mainly, I was concerned about Willard. Something in my gut told me he was innocent.
I know he hated Garth, but there’s a big difference between wishing somebody were no longer around to bother you, and actually trying to kill him. Besides, if Willard were really the killer, would he have been so openly vitriolic about Garth?
No, my gut was telling me that the cops had brought in the wrong suspect for questioning.
But what, I wondered, was the incriminating evidence they’d found?
I decided to pay a little visit to Ethel Cox and find out.
I made my way past the frolicking reindeer on the Coxes’s front lawn and rang the bell.
Ethel came to the door, still in her nightgown. A far cry from the happy hausfrau I’d met the other day, her gray curls had lost their bounce and her once rosy cheeks were drained of color.
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“Ethel,” I asked, in what had to be one of the Top Ten World’s Most Rhetorical Questions, “are you okay?”
“Willard’s gone!” she cried, her eyes wide with fear. “The police took him away for questioning!”
“Try not to worry, Ethel. They’ll probably release him in a few hours. Let me come in and make you some tea.”
She nodded numbly and allowed me to lead her down the hallway to her kitchen.
Minutes later, we were seated across from each other with steaming cups of tea, laced with lemon and plenty of sugar.
The warmth from the tea seemed to calm her a bit.
“Oh, Ms. Austen,” she said, taking a grateful sip. “It’s just awful. The police found a Fiedler on the Roof cap in Willard’s toolbox out in the garage. They think he was the one who loosened those shingles on Garth’s roof.”
So that was the evidence Seymour had been talking about.
“I don’t know how it could’ve gotten there,” she said, bewildered.
Clearly this woman didn’t have a suspicious bone in her body.
“Somebody may have put it there, Ethel. To frame Willard for Garth’s murder.”
“Oh, dear.”
“Did any of the neighbors have access to the garage?”
“Actually, they all did. There’s a little door on the side of the garage we never lock. In case the gardener wants to get in.
“To think,” she said, the color rushing back to her cheeks, “that some awful person would try to blame Garth’s death on Willard. Who would do such a terrible thing?”
The first person who sprang to my mind was my lead suspect, Libby Brecker. Hadn’t she said she’d been watching the roofers work? What if she’d seen one of them leave his cap behind? How easy to snatch it up, disguise herself as a roofer, and clamber up the roof to set Garth’s deathtrap. And how 210
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easy to slip over when the Coxes were away and plant the cap in Willard’s toolbox.