Murder at the Book Group Read online

  “Then I guessed right, you are B.J.” I went for a carefree laugh, feeling like a talk-show host. As with Linda, putting him at ease seemed the best way to acquire information and remain safe during what were amounting to high-wire acts. “I just ran into Linda, your ex, in the locker room. She calls you B.J. and said that you once lived in Cincinnati. The hat”—I glanced up at his head—“tipped me off.”

  “I bet she gave you an earful about me.”

  “Actually, we were talking about Carlene.” In response to his “Who?” look, I clarified, “You know, the woman who died last week at my book group. Linda was there. And, interestingly enough, Linda said you and Carlene worked together in L.A.”

  “Oh, right. Carlotta. That’s how I knew her back in L.A.”

  I wasn’t up to dealing with the multiple names at the moment. “Well, I knew her as Carlene, so that’s what we’ll call her.” I didn’t wait for his yea or nay on the matter. “That explains why you came to her memorial service the other day. Linda said it was you sitting with her and her husband, right behind me. I didn’t recognize you—the different clothes and shades made it hard to tell.” I felt my nervousness rising. For all I knew B.J. and Linda were in cahoots. “So how did you find out about Carlene’s death? From Linda?”

  “Yeah, she told me. And like she told you, Carlotta—excuse me, Carlene—and I worked together, so she thought I’d be interested in knowing about it.”

  We spent a moment shaking our heads, assuming the grim looks people assume when faced with the reality of death. Cutting the commiseration short, I started, “Tell me about Carlene. How long did you work together? And where?” I explained that I had spent many years in L.A. working in the same field. B.J. told me about Soyars, a midsize publishing company, where he and Carlene had been coworkers during the 1990s. His description of Carlene as an attractive, bright, professional coworker made me wonder how many of my professional coworkers had done it on an office desk.

  B.J.’s eyes darted around. I imagined he was looking for a way out of this conversation. Before I managed a follow-up question, he smirked and said, “Maybe Linda told you this—she likes to tell anyone who’ll listen what a crappy husband I was. Carly and I—uh, we were more than coworkers. We, uh . . . we had an affair.”

  This was going better than I’d dared hope. Prompted by my cool “Really?” B.J. gave a sketchy account of the affair, adding little to what Linda had told me, except more about the desk encounter than I needed to know. He left out the part about the tapes. When I asked why the affair had ended, he hesitated before saying that Carlene had suddenly stopped speaking to him. “Then she just as suddenly left Soyars and moved away. I had no way of contacting her and I couldn’t locate her online, either using her last name of Gennis or her fiancé’s name, which I’ve already forgotten.”

  Like Linda, B.J. had managed to forget the fiancé’s name. Recognizing my cue to pretend I didn’t know something that I did in fact know, I put on my best wide-eyed look and asked, adding a note of incredulity, “Fiancé?”

  “Yeah. She was engaged.” He had the grace to look embarrassed at that last admission, but I suspected the look was for show and didn’t alter the fact that he was a sleaze. But sleazes of both sexes populated this tragedy. “Some really religious guy who didn’t believe in sex before marriage. Carlene brought him to the Soyars Christmas party. How she wound up with someone like that . . . I dunno, pretty amazing. Oh, he was a nice guy and all, just didn’t seem like Carlene’s type. It wasn’t long after that party that she vanished and I knew nothing of her until the other day.”

  “Funny how you all wound up in Virginia.” B.J. allowed that it was funny, adding that he and Linda lived in Cincinnati for a while. He touched the bill of his cap and said, “Hence the cap.”

  “And you’ve had no contact, no knowledge of Carlene for all these years?” I couldn’t keep the note of skepticism out of my voice. “Nothing at all until Linda told you about her death?”

  “Well . . .” He drew out the “well,” probably to gather his thoughts. “Actually—actually Linda told me about her a few weeks ago.”

  I said nothing, just waited for him to continue. I wondered how closely his and Linda’s accounts would match. “Linda told me she saw Carlotta—I mean Carlene—at a book signing. She’d changed her first name to Carlene and her last to Arness.”

  “It’s interesting that you and Linda are still close.” When B.J. looked puzzled, I clarified. “Well, Linda told you about seeing a woman you had an affair with during your marriage. I would think it would be a bad memory for her.”

  “Oh, Linda never knew about our affair. She just thought we were good friends, that’s all.”

  “Ah.” I smiled.

  B.J. said with a shrug that emphasized his muscles, “At least I don’t think she knew.”

  “So what did Linda tell you about Carlene?”

  “That she didn’t remember us. That sure didn’t sound right.” He looked smug and pleased, confident that no woman could forget him. “Linda said this Carlene looked so remarkably like the woman we’d known that she, meaning Linda, couldn’t possibly be mistaken. So when Linda told me she was going to Carlene’s book group, she gave me her website name.”

  “So then what happened?” I glanced at the shiny gold band on his left hand, but didn’t comment on his marital status.

  Not answering my question directly, he said, “There was a number to call on the book group site. And so I called. From a pay phone.”

  “Pay phone?” Did pay phones even exist anymore?

  “I didn’t want my wife checking my calls. She does that when I’m in the shower. She’s suspicious as all get out.”

  I could well imagine why she’d be suspicious, but I silenced the sarcastic responses that came to mind. I settled for a mild, “And what happened when you called Carlene?”

  “She agreed to meet me at the library. We talked for a long time.”

  “And when you ran out of things to talk about, you wound up in her car.”

  “Well . . . yeah.” I caught the pleased look on his face. Then it struck him that I had unexpected knowledge. His eyes narrowed and he asked, “How did you know that?”

  “Several people from Carlene’s book group saw the two of you in her car.” I rushed to add, “They didn’t see your faces, but they knew her car, so they figured it was her—with someone.” Again, the pleased look. Part of me wanted to smack it off his face. But the man was temptation itself, I granted him that. Jeanette was right, he had that bad-boy appeal that draws some women like a magnet.

  “It was amazing to see her again. It was ten years or so since I’d seen her, but she looked the same. I had to agree with Linda about that.” This squared with the testimony I’d heard from others. “It was like she was, I don’t know—frozen in time.” He looked dreamy, perhaps thinking of other ways in which he’d found her to be the same.

  “Did you ever go to her house?”

  “No.” He looked cautious. “I don’t even know where she lived. I only saw her that one time. After that, she wouldn’t return my calls or e-mails. I didn’t even know she was married until the other day at the service.”

  Somehow I doubted that—in fact, I’d told him she was married just a few days before at the gym—but it wasn’t an important enough point to pursue. “What did Linda tell you about the book group? About how Carlene died?”

  B.J. gave me another wary look, then looked behind me and muttered, “Speak of the devil.”

  I turned to see Linda, blowing kisses in our direction, her jacket a blinding orange color rarely seen outside of prisons. As she pushed open the door and left the gym, she shot us an impudent look.

  When I turned back I caught B.J. disappearing into the locker room. I called out but either he didn’t hear me or he pretended not to. Likely the latter. He’d seen his opportunity to bolt and had taken advantage of it. Oh well, I told myself, I probably got as much information from him as he was going to
give. Maybe he’d even told me the truth as he knew it. As for the tapes, he’d probably deny their existence, but his reaction could be interesting.

  I knew that a treadmill session would help to order the thoughts spinning out of control in my beleaguered brain. It didn’t. At one point, I caught B.J. slinking out the door. After forty-five minutes of walking nowhere my brain was nowhere as well. Even David Bowie’s “Modern Love,” usually a sure energizer, didn’t help.

  Kat finished with her training session and we sat in the café. When I told her the latest revelation in Carlene’s abundant sex life, her thrilled reaction was as expected. “Sex tapes? Carlene? You’re kidding me! My sister gets wilder by the minute. So . . . Cincinnati Joe, B.J., and the man in the car are all one and the same. He hit on me, more than once. Believe me, I was tempted, but I have a rule about married men—strictly off limits.” Then she pronounced, “Linda did it. You mark my words, Hazel.” Kat looked mutinous. “So how are we going to nail her?”

  “With proof, Kat. So far we haven’t a shred of that.”

  “We’ll get proof, Hazel. We’re so close.” Close? It felt immeasurably far to me.

  I asked, “But why would Linda kill someone she was planning to blackmail? Wouldn’t it defeat her purpose?”

  “We don’t know that she was ever going to blackmail Carlene. She’s conveniently using the blackmail story to fool you into believing she didn’t kill her. But she did. She did.”

  I FINALLY LEFT the gym and sat in my car. I called Lucy, who listened agog as I summarized my date with Vince. I refused to share all the details, but assured her that he’d stayed the night. Then I tried to move on to recounting my conversations of the past two days.

  “Not so fast. Where did you have dinner last night?”

  I tended to keep anything about Vince to myself. That was due to our erratic history and because Lucy was so intense about our relationship, whatever stage it happened to be in at any given moment. But I did cave in and confess that we never got to dinner. “Got right down to it, huh?” Lucy chuckled. “So, when are you two getting together again?”

  “We didn’t make plans.” Feeling exasperated, I pleaded, “Okay, now can I tell you about my conversations?” When Lucy agreed and I filled her in, she exclaimed, “Blackmail? How many times has that word popped up? And how bad could the tapes be, anyway?”

  “Well . . . I don’t know. Bad enough, I guess. Jeanette said Carlene and some guy went in for kinky stuff. I don’t suppose Carlene wanted Evan or the religious fiancé to see her having sex, kinky or not, with someone else.”

  “You’re probably right,” Lucy admitted. “Well, I’ll see you in a while. About ten.” Sounding sly, she added, “Unless of course, you and Vince—”

  “Good-bye,” I sang as I ended the call.

  Back home, I sat in the morning room, sipping green tea and writing down all the bits and pieces of information I’d recently acquired: sex tapes, celibate fiancé, desk sex, love fugitive, man in the car. Identifying the man in the car was an accomplishment, but my least valuable one, as it only satisfied my curiosity, doing nothing to pinpoint Carlene’s poisoner.

  Now what?

  I thought back to the fiancé portion of my conversation with Georgia. Georgia thought that someone other than the fiancé had fueled Carlene’s return to the East Coast. I now could name the someone, or someones: Linda and B.J. Possible remorse over the broken engagement no doubt contributed to her decision to move. And, thinking of Carlene’s name change, she had an opportunity for a fresh start—in other words, reinvention.

  Funny, tradition had it that people moving to L.A. to reinvent themselves started over from scratch. They hoped to escape their pasts in Wichita, Pittsburgh—or, in Carlene’s case, Northern Virginia. For those who didn’t fancy L.A., San Francisco and San Diego offered the same reinvention opportunities. Few chose the more traditional cities of Bakersfield or Fresno. Many succeeded in their mission to start over, living happily ever after. For others, someone who knew them from their pre-reinvention days might show up on their doorstep and blow their cover.

  For Carlene, that process reversed itself, with her flight from L.A. to Virginia. She changed her name, toyed with religion, resumed her pleasure-seeking ways, and took up marriage, again changing her name. But eventually, Linda and B.J. showed up on her doorstep, metaphorically speaking.

  For the first time since the onset of this exercise in futility, I sensed the pain and fear that Carlene must have carried around with her. No wonder she’d been so reserved. I pictured her looking over her shoulder all these years, not knowing if she was fleeing from B.J. or from Linda. Unless she actually knew who sent her the tapes, I was right—she could as easily have been fleeing from a woman as from a man. And to see Linda at the signing . . . I shook my head. I thought back to the night of the book group when Carlene went on about the love fugitive. Had Linda suspected that Carlene was talking about her? I remember Linda saying, using a mocking tone, “What do you mean, love fugitive?” More or less a harmless remark on the face of it, but seen through the light of recent revelations, it loomed in significance. Was she taunting Carlene for sport?

  Without the no-proof hurdle thwarting me at every turn, I’d feel confident in naming Linda my number-one choice for killer.

  I wrote down the top suspects: Linda and Annabel. Matching them to the motive-means-opportunity triad yielded no surprises—both had motive and both could have acquired cyanide. How they acquired it I couldn’t answer, but motive supplied means—a paraphrasing of the adage “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.” As for opportunity, both had that as well. It took nerve, but likely nerve wasn’t in short supply with this pair.

  I sat there, letting my mind wander until it came upon the recording from the memorial service—I still hadn’t listened to that. I nudged Daisy off my lap and went upstairs to get my quilted bag. Back in the morning room, I spent the next three hours listening, with the lofty hope of hearing a confession. But if anyone had confessed, it was in tones too low for my unsophisticated gadget to catch. One word did strike me as having significance: “insurance.”

  When Art had recited the list of jobs his mother had held over the years, I hadn’t noticed the insurance one. I’d been so floored at learning she’d been a clown that the rest of her jobs had escaped my notice. And insurance is, after all, a boring topic.

  But now a connection occurred to me: Evan worked in the insurance field in Rochester for many years before he retired and moved to Richmond. Could he and Helen have worked for the same company and known each other? If so, was that significant? I reminded myself that there was no shortage of insurance companies and that Rochester, a fairly large city, likely boasted several of them.

  Still, something sent me to my address book to look up the number for Donna McCarthy, a friend from college who worked for the same insurance company as Evan. Donna and I exchanged Christmas cards and talked on the phone every so often.

  After leaving a message on her machine, including my home and cell numbers, I pondered the possibilities beyond the book group. Someone, supplied with the deadly white powder, visited Carlene during the day of the book group. Like the mysterious early-evening visitor. Or, as Vince had speculated, was the visitor a hoax, fabricated by Janet? I entertained the idea of Janet as perpetrator, seeking revenge for an affair between her husband and Carlene—then I remembered Janet’s proclamation that she was a widow. But for how long? Had Carlene and the husband had an affair before his death? Had he died during the “act”? That would supply Janet with plenty of motive for killing Carlene.

  Looking at my notes, I realized that it boiled down to the same theme: Carlene liked sex and she took advantage of all opportunities to have it—wherever, whenever, with whomever those opportunities presented themselves, leaving a trail of lovers and scorned women, some of them mighty unsavory, in her wake. And the betrayed fiancé—why would she even have been with the man? Could he have showed up on Carlene’s doorst
ep on that fateful Monday, abandoning religious principles, seeking revenge? A crime of passion perhaps? No, poison is not the weapon of passion crimes.

  When considering the problems that plagued Carlene—separation, her love fugitive status, Linda’s resurfacing in her life, a possible guilty conscience from stealing other women’s men—suicide was looking more likely. Maybe her conscience became a burden.

  Assuming she had one.

  I HEARD A scratching sound and followed it to the living room. Daisy and Shammy used their scratching posts to good avail but fancied a nice piece of furniture on occasion. Shammy was indeed applying her paws to the chair, working at something behind the cushion. I reached around her and pulled out a MasterCard in the name of one Annabel M. Mitchell. I remembered her sitting there during her so-called impromptu visit on Wednesday.

  I put Annabel’s card in my purse, making a mental note to let her know that I had it. I punched Vince’s speed-dial button. After fulfilling his professional duty of admonishing me for talking to Linda and B.J., he said, “At least now you can stop going on about that man in the car.”

  “Well, it seemed worth going on about, as you so charmingly put it. I just wish it had turned out to be a more significant discovery. Instead the guy’s just a garden variety ne’er-do-well.” Then I brightened. “But Linda’s looking more and more like a suspect. Actually cosuspect. There’s still Annabel.”

  “Don’t be too sure,” Vince cautioned. “Your findings are interesting, but inconclusive. We don’t have enough to go on, Hazel. Not enough to move forward.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah. No proof.” Even after looking at this thing six ways from Sunday, I still couldn’t come up with proof.

  Vince expressed interest in the tapes, going so far as to propose watching them together. “No way, Vince, just forget it. Even if we had the tapes, which we don’t, I’m not about to watch my ex-husband’s deceased wife having sex with some—some low-life lothario.”

  “Just a thought.” Vince sounded unruffled.