Three Bedrooms, One Corpse

"HOW DO you want it done?" Benita asked briskly. It was clearly the end of a long day for her. Her own red hair was wild and dark at the roots, and the beige-and-blue uniform all the operators at Clip Casa wore was rumpled and--well, hairy.

"Could you do it like this?" I'd spent my waiting time leafing through professional magazines.

"Yes," Benita said briefly after a thorough look at the enigmatically smiling model, and set to work.

It was one of those hairdos with the braid miraculously inside-out. French braiding, I thought it was called. I'd never understood how that was done, and now it was about to be accomplished on my very own head. In the picture the model's hair wasn't pulled back tightly but puffed around her face. The length of hair at the base of the neck was also braided, and the model had a ribbon around the end. I had no fancy bows, but Benita had some for sale, including a gold lame one I thought would be pretty. I didn't know if Martin would like the hairstyle, but it struck me as very fashionable.

Plus, it didn't seem possible that my hair could come loose, as all too often happened when I put it up myself.

"Roe," drawled a voice close by, and I recognized the apparition under the dryer as my beautiful friend Lizanne Buckley.

"I haven't seen you in a coon's age!" I said happily. "How are you doing?"

"Just fine," said Lizanne in her slow sweet way. "And you?"

"Pretty good. What have you been doing?"

"Oh, I'm still down at the power company," she said contentedly. "And I'm still dating our local representative."

Lawyer J. T. (Bubba) Sewell, whom I'd met in a professional capacity, would be home from the Capitol for the weekend, and he and Lizanne were also going to the realtors' banquet, she told me. In fact, Bubba was the speaker.

"Are you two engaged?" I asked. "That's what someone told me, but I wanted to hear it straight from the horse's mouth."

Lizanne smiled. She had a habit of that. She was stunningly beautiful, and no slave to the bone-thin convention of female figures. She was just right. "Oh, I expect we are," she said.

"Someone's finally going to walk you down the aisle," I marveled. Men had tried for years to marry Lizanne and she would have none of it, the world being the unfair place it is.

"Oh, I don't think we'll get married in a church," Lizanne demurred. "I haven't been in one since Mamma and Daddy died, and I don't expect to go. I believe Bubba sees that as my only drawback, a politician's wife not going to church."

There was no possible response, and Lizanne didn't expect any. I felt like someone who was walking over a familiar sunny beach, only to discover that it had changed into quicksand.

"I hear you've been dating that new man at Pan-Am Agra," Lizanne said after a few minutes. Lizanne heard everything.

"Yes."

"He coming with you tonight?"

I nodded until a sharp exclamation from Benita reminded me to hold still.

"I'll be glad to meet him; I've heard a lot about him."

I didn't know if I wanted to hear or not. "Oh?" I said finally.

"He's got everyone out there shivering in their shoes. There's evidently been a lot of slack and some thieving, and he was sent in to be the man to get everything straight. He's firing and moving around people and looking into everything."

Lizanne reached back and turned off her dryer, lifting the hood to reveal a head covered with large rollers. She patted them to make sure her hair was dry, took one down experimentally, nodded. "Janie, I'm done," she called to the beige-and-blue-uniformed beautician drinking a cup of coffee in the back of the shop. The phone rang, and Janie answered it. It was for Benita, one of her children with a household emergency, and with an exclamation of impatience, she ran to take the call. I noticed the whole time she talked, she worked on her hair with a comb she picked up from the counter; if Benita was standing, she was working on hair.

"I have a friend at the police station," Lizanne said casually, standing by my chair and looking into my mirror. "Jack Burns--your good buddy, Roe--has decided that since no one has been killing realtors until now, the murderer must be someone new to town. Some of the detectives don't agree, but since they questioned Jimmy Hunter and let him go, all kinds of people have been pressuring the chief of police to find someone else. Jimmy Hunter's parents have got lots of friends in this town, and the arrest of someone else would take the suspicion off Jimmy for good. So I hear the police are going to make an arrest soon in the murders of those two women. They're probably going to be taking someone in for questioning tomorrow."

My eyes met Lizanne's in the mirror. She was giving me a message. But I had to decipher it.

"My goodness, Lizanne Buckley!" exclaimed Benita, coming back at that inopportune moment. "Who told you that?"

"Little bird," Lizanne said laconically, and wandered off to her beautician's station, where she began to remove her own rollers, tossing them in one of the wheeled bins. Janie drained her cup and unhurriedly began helping Lizanne, whose easygoing attitude seemed to rub off on people. I remembered Bubba Sewell's slow good-ole-boy manner and his sharp brain and decided (in a remote corner of my own brain) that he and Lizanne would make a most interesting couple.

But mostly I was trying to figure out what Lizanne had meant. We'd been talking about Martin. Then she'd talked about the arrest. Surely she didn't mean the police suspected Martin?

She had been letting me know Martin was going to be arrested. At the least, taken in and questioned.

I stared at the mirror as two spots of color rose to stain my cheeks. I was gripping the padded arms of the swivel chair with undue force.

"Honey, are you cold?" Benita asked. "I can sure turn up the heat."

"Oh. No, I'm fine, thanks."

Ridiculous. This was ridiculous.

The police had been wrong once. They were wrong again. Of course they were wrong again, I told myself fiercely. The thefts. They'd begun long before Martin had moved here.

But the murders, of course, had begun after.

I remembered my mother wondering what on earth Martin was doing looking at such a large house. Logically, a bachelor would be looking at a smaller place, not a virtual mansion like the Anderton house. The police might think he'd made an appointment to see the Anderton house because he wanted his handiwork found. Martin had been in town some weeks before I met him, long enough to meet Tonia Lee and Idella. Tonia Lee, who would go to bed with almost anyone, would undoubtedly have licked her chops when she met Martin. Idella, wispy, palely pretty, and lonely, would have been thrilled to meet someone who could pay such close and flattering attention to her.

Of course, that was what the police might think.

I shut my eyes.

"Are you okay, sweetie?" Benita was asking with concern.

"I'm fine," I lied automatically. "Are we about finished?"

"Just about. Do you like it?"

"It's different," I said, startled enough to peek out from under my personal black cloud. "Gosh, I don't look like me."

"I know," said Benita proudly. "You look very sleek and sophisticated. Just beautiful."

"Gee," I said slowly. "I do."

"All you need to do is go home and put on your dress and some lipstick, and you'll be ready to step out."

I did need lipstick. And I needed some spine, too, I decided grimly. I wasn't going to let these black thoughts overwhelm me. I knew Martin, on some level, knew him thoroughly.

I thought.

I paid Benita handsomely, and went home to slide into my green flouncy dress and put on some lipstick. I'm going to go and have a good time, I told myself. I'm going with a handsome, sexy man who considers me absolutely necessary. He might have wanted to kill nasty Sam Ulrich last night, but he wouldn't have killed Tonia Lee and Idella. Absolutely not.

At least my inner turmoil wasn't showing on the outside. When I looked in my bathroom mirror to put on my bronzy lipstick, I looked just as good as I had in the beauty shop.

I almost wished I'd polished my nails, but that would have been absolutely out of character; and with my hair put up, I hardly knew myself, as it was.

Instead of bustling around thinking of something to do, I sat on the ottoman in front of my favorite chair, my current book lying neglected on the table beside it. I decided to pop the dress on at the last second. It hung on the bathroom door, looking festive and fancy, mocking me. I stared into space and thought about Martin gone, Martin in jail, Martin on trial.

He was as necessary to me as he said I was to him.

When the doorbell rang, it actually surprised me. I pulled off my robe, pulled the dress over my head, and zipped it up in record time. I slid my feet into my high-heeled pumps and pulled myself together to answer the door, wondering vaguely why everything looked so funny.

Martin took in a deep breath when I opened the door. He looked down at me with some unreadable emotion.

"Do I look all right?" I asked, suddenly anxious.

"Oh, yes," he said. "Oh, yes."

"Do you like the hair?" I asked nervously when he still stared.

"Yes ... very much." He finally stepped in so I could close the door against the cold. He was wearing a black overcoat, and his white hair was strikingly attractive.

Once again I had the unsettling feeling that he was grown up and I wasn't. "Where are your glasses?"

"Oh," I exclaimed, "that's why everything looked so funny." In some relief, I found them on the little table beside my chair and popped them on. "I tried contact lenses," I told him defensively, "but I'm one of those people who can't wear them. They just drove me crazy."

"I'm glad you wear glasses."

"Why?"

"So no one else can see you with them off," he said, and bent to give me a kiss on the cheek. His finger traced the line of my neck. I shivered. My fears abated now that I was with him. When I was close to him, I felt that Martin would not let himself be arrested.

"Come look in the bathroom mirror," he suggested.

"What?"

"Just for a minute; come with me."

"Is my hair coming down?" My hands flew up.

"No, no," Martin said, and smiled.

So into the bathroom we went, and I looked at myself in the mirror, Martin's face rising neatly above mine in the reflection. He pulled off his gloves, and his hand went into a pocket.

Suddenly I realized I should be absolutely terrified.

But if he wanted to kill me, he would. I took a deep breath, looking steadily at his eyes in the mirror, and from his pocket he pulled a little gray velvet box and set it on the counter. Gently and expertly he removed my earrings, plain gold balls, and opening the velvet box, he extracted gorgeous amethyst-and-diamond earrings and with no fumbling at all fixed them in my ears.

"Oh, Martin," I said, stunned. I felt as if I'd put on my brakes at the edge of a precipice.

"Sweetheart, do you like them?" he said finally.

"Oh, yes," I said, trying hard not to cry. "Yes, Martin. They're beautiful." My hands were shaking, and I clenched my fists so he wouldn't notice.

"Didn't you tell me November was your birthday?"

"Yes, it is."

"And here it is November. I didn't know which day, but I wanted to get you a present. I know topaz is your birthstone, but none I saw seemed warm enough to me. These look like you. If you didn't know it, you look beautiful tonight."

The stones glittered. The amethysts were rectangular and edged with small diamonds.

"I'm overwhelmed. Martin, I don't know what to say." I'd never spoken truer words.

"Tell me you love me."

I looked into the mirror.

"I love you."

"That's all I wanted to hear."

"Martin."

His hand touched my cheek.

"Do you--?"

"Yes," he said into my ear, kissing my neck. "Oh, yes. I love you."

After a while he said, "Do we have to go?"

"Unless we want my mother coming here to find out what happened to me, yes."

Actually, I needed a space to think, to calm down. If we stayed here, I certainly wouldn't get it.

Talk about warring emotions. Someone loved me. I loved him back. He might be questioned tomorrow for murder. He'd given me the most romantic gift, the kind women wait a lifetime for. And I'd thought for a moment that he was going to strangle me.

Martin fetched my coat from the closet while I reexamined my earrings in the mirror. "Can you stop looking long enough to put on your coat?" he asked, laughing.

"I guess so," I said reluctantly. The moment of terror was oozing out and filling up with delight. "Martin, what's that clipped to your coat pocket?"

"Oh, a beeper. We've been having trouble with a particular man on the night shift. His supervisor is watching him tonight, and if he catches him stealing, he's going to beep me so I can go have it out with the guy."

In my now almost complete wave of euphoria, I did a Scarlett O'Hara and decided to think about the bad stuff later. Maybe I couldn't put it off until tomorrow, but I could savor this minute, surely.

Martin and I were a little late, among the last to arrive. We picked glasses of white wine off the tray a waiter carried by. I spotted Lizanne and Bubba Sewell immediately. Lizanne did not hint in her greeting to me that she had given me a warning that afternoon. Maybe her liquid dark eyes rested on me a little sadly, but that was all. Bubba started one of those conversations with Martin designed to link them in the male network: he connected what he was working on as a representative with what Martin was trying to achieve at Pan-Am Agra, he told Martin that he could call him any time he wanted to "talk things over," he illustrated his intelligence and grasp of Pan-Am Agra's interests, and he implied that Martin was the best thing that had happened to the company since sliced bread.

Martin responded cautiously but with interest.

Lizanne told me how pretty my hair looked, and admired my earrings.

"Martin gave them to me," I said proudly.

She looked worried for a minute, then properly complimented me and drew Bubba's attention to them.

"Did you show them your ring?" he responded after a token remark.

Lizanne, with her lovely slow smile, held out her hand on which glittered a notable diamond. "My engagement ring," she said calmly.

"Oh," I said. "Oh, Lizanne, it's beautiful." I sighed, suddenly realized I was doing so, and tried to make it silent. "When's the wedding?"

"In the spring," Lizanne said offhandedly. "We've got to sit down with a calendar and pick a date. It depends on the legislature, and of course I have to give notice at my job."

"You're quitting work?" I didn't mean to sound startled, but I was. What on earth would Lizanne do all day?

"Oh, yes. We're going to be living in my house for a while, until Bubba's career plans are finalized, but there's a lot I need to do to it... and I'm bored with my job anyway."

I hadn't known boredom was a concept Lizanne understood. Also, Lizanne heard every bit of news in her job, since the power company was a place everyone had to go sooner or later, and she had the most amazing capacity to attract confidences. I would have supposed Bubba would want Lizanne right where she was.

"Congratulations, Lizanne," I said quietly as Bubba drew Martin off to meet another Lawrenceton mover and shaker.

She bent down to kiss me on the cheek. "Thanks, honey," she murmured. Then she whispered, "They're going to take your friend in tomorrow for questioning. For sure. I'm not going to tell you how I know."

That was why she was so popular. She never told how she knew. And she certainly hadn't told her fianc?; otherwise, he wouldn't be sucking up to Martin. He'd be avoiding him as though Martin were a leper.

"Thanks, Lizanne," I said in almost as low a voice. Suddenly curious, I asked, "Why are you telling me?"

"You helped me the day my parents were killed."

I nodded, and pressed her hand. I had never been sure Lizanne had been aware of my presence or my identity on that horrible day. She and I gave each other a look and drifted apart, and I strolled over to my mother, my wineglass clutched in a death grip.

"Where'd you get the earrings?" she asked instantly. "They're gorgeous."

"Martin gave them to me tonight," I said numbly, turning my head from side to side so she could get the full effect, all the time wondering what I could do to prevent tomorrow from happening.

"He did?" Mother raised her perfect brows. "But you've only known each other such a short time!"

I shrugged.

"Oh, you have got it bad," she said darkly. "But at least he does, too. They're very nice, dear."

"What are you admiring, Mrs. Queensland?" Patty Cloud, in her favorite pink, this time a rose shade, appeared at my mother's shoulder, trailing a delicate cloud of expensive perfume and a staggeringly handsome date, some man from Atlanta she'd met at a Sierra Club meeting, she managed to let me know. I talked to them for a few minutes of stultifying conversation about white- water canoeing before Martin rescued me.

"How'd you get along with Bubba Sewell?" I murmured as we went to our places around the table. "He's on the rise," Martin said thoughtfully. "I won't be surprised if he makes U.S. Senate some day."

"Really?" I tried not to sound skeptical.

"He's doing everything right. A lawyer, but not a criminal lawyer. Comes from a local family with a clean record, worked himself through law school, practiced for a while before running, going to marry a beautiful wife who can't possibly offend anyone. She's planning to quit work and stay at home, producing the right picture, and I bet they have a baby before they've been married two years. It'll look good on the campaign poster, a family picture."

I tried to think about this, to care about Bubba's career, all the while turning nonsensical schemes over in my mind. I should tell Martin. Then he could brace himself. Or run. (I staved that thought off.) I should not tell Martin, so he would show unfeigned surprise when the police came to Pan-Am Agra. I pictured Martin being taken from his office, his humiliation; at least the people who worked for him would see it as humiliation. I checked the rein on my imagination; surely the police could not arrest him without warning, on the little or no evidence they had. But still...

Of all the people I knew, the one best qualified to fend for himself was Martin. Why was I worrying?

I yanked myself out of this anxious silent yammering to introduce Martin to Franklin Farrell and his date, who were seated across from us. Franklin must have been calling his reserve list, the day he'd called me; maybe this woman had been next, in alphabetical order. She was in her late forties, remarkably well groomed and dressed. Physically she was a good match for the immaculate Franklin. She glittered in a hard way, and her practiced conversation aroused my instant distrust. Her name I didn't catch, but she was full of glib comments that gave no clue to her character. She was playing up to Franklin in a rather desperate way, and I could tell they hadn't been out together before. He was being courteously cool.

The meal was served, and I talked to Mackie on my left, and Martin on my right, and Franklin and Miss Glitter across the way, though what I said I couldn't have told you afterward.

Even through the worry, I could tell Martin and I were attracting a certain amount of attention. The tables had been arranged in a large U. Martin and I were seated on the outside of one arm of the U, and as Franklin bent to retrieve his lady friend's napkin, I realized someone across from us at the far side of the U's other arm was staring. With some amazement, I recognized my former flame Arthur Smith sitting with his wife, homicide detective Lynn Liggett Smith. Who on earth had invited them? Arthur was looking at me with all too apparent concern, his fair brows drawn together and his fingers drumming on the table. Lynn was eating and listening to Eileen Norris, who had come in with Terry, announcing to the room at large that the single ladies had just decided to come together.

I raised my eyebrows very slightly, and Arthur looked down, flushing red.

I knew then that Lizanne was right. Martin was under suspicion. Perhaps I hadn't been quite sure Lizanne had gotten the true word before, but I knew it now.

"Are you all right?" Martin asked me.

"I'm all right. I need to--" I started to say "talk to you later," but what an irritating thing that is to do to someone. "I'm fine," I said clearly. "Do you like this salad?"

"Too much vinegar in the dressing," he said critically, but his sharp look told me he knew something was in the wind.

Somehow I did the right things through the meal, but when Bubba got up to make his address about new legislation for the real estate industry, I was able to tune out completely. In fact, it was hard to keep my eyes aimed in the right direction. I gnawed at my problem, poked at my fear, which was like a monster with many faces; I was afraid of Martin's getting arrested, afraid of losing him, afraid of what it would do to his job and self-esteem to be questioned at the police station; and maybe afraid he was guilty.

My eyes traveled across the faces around the Carriage House's elaborate wine-and-cream banquet room. All these faces, almost all familiar. One of these people was most probably the person the police really wanted, if I could just make them see it.

The murderer was a realtor, or connected with realty in some way--someone who'd known how to get the key replaced.

The murderer had been able to arrive at the Anderton house without a car and had been part of the scenery while doing so--someone who ordinarily walked or jogged or biked in the evening.

The murderer had to be someone Idella Yates trusted, someone she'd been willing to risk a lot for, since it seemed pretty certain Idella had replaced the key.

I looked at Mackie's dark neck as he turned his face politely to the speaker. His date beyond him was picking at her nails, though she, too, was keeping a courteous face turned in the right direction. Across the room, Eileen was dabbing her lips with her napkin. Beside her, Terry, in a dark blue dress with big fake diamond buttons, was listening to Bubba with a skeptical lift to one corner of her mouth. Mark Russell and his wife were sitting with the practiced posture of those who listen to many speakers; his partner, Jamie Dietrich, a lanky man with a huge Adam's apple, stifled a yawn. Patty was all attention, though her date was doing something surreptitious under the tablecloth that brought a tiny secret smile to her face. Even young Debbie Lincoln, more beads woven into her hair than I would have thought possible, was turned to Bubba and trying to pay attention, though her date was openly, elaborately bored. Conspicuously alone, Donnie Greenhouse had deliberately left an empty chair beside him to remind people that he was a brand-new widower. Somehow I'd known he wouldn't miss an opportunity to star in a public drama, even if he had to point it out himself.

Close to Lizanne, my mother inclined her head regally to one side, her resemblance to Lauren Bacall especially pronounced. John was resting his arm on the back of her chair. John looked ready to go home. Across the table from Martin, Miss Glitter appeared riveted. Franklin was listening with slightly drawn mouth, his long, thin hands arranging and rearranging his cloth napkin.

He pleated it, unpleated it. I returned my eyes to Mackie's neck, prepared to plunge back into my fears and my dreadful burden of love. Then my attention shot back to Franklin. He pleated, unpleated. Then he folded the napkin into neat triangles, triangles that got smaller and smaller but never less neat. His long white fingers smoothed the napkin out. Then he pleated it. Then again, the triangles. Meticulously neat triangles. Where had I--?

His eyes began to turn toward me, and I instantly looked forward, my heart thumping.

Through no great feat of ratiocination, I, Aurora Teagarden, had solved a mystery.

Franklin Farrell was the murderer.

He was folding and refolding his napkin in the same curious way Tonia Lee's clothing had been treated. It was as unmistakable as a fingerprint.

Franklin Farrell.