Hanging by a Thread Read online

  “By then I wasn’t just out to rescue a fellow Lutheran; it was getting personal. So I paid attention, I got to know her schedule, and we’d meet while she was grocery shopping or on her way to and from work, friends’ houses, like that. He was always checking up on her, phoning her, making her account for her time, so it was tricky.” He smiled. “But I’m an efficient scheduler, and we got pretty good at it. Then I started pressuring her to leave him for me. I said I’d send her to live with my parents in North Carolina, or my sister in Las Vegas, until he gave up looking for her, but she said he’d never give up, and when he found her, he’d kill her and whoever was giving her shelter, so she just couldn’t do that. I was even looking into those ways of giving someone a new identity when it happened.” His face tightened.

  “You’re saying he’s the one who killed her,” said Betsy.

  “Of course. There was no one else, how could there be? He never let her get close enough to anyone, so there was no one else to love her or hate her enough to do that.”

  “You managed.”

  “And he found out.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because she phoned me from work the day it happened, to warn me to keep away from her, that Paul had gone from suspecting she was fooling around to being sure she was, and that I was involved. He’d actually started writing down the mileage on her car, and it didn’t match the driving she was supposed to be doing, so he figured she was going somewhere she shouldn’t. Which she was, of course. He’d seen me going into the bookstore and talking to her, and she smiled at me in a way that, he said, told him all he needed to know. That night it was her turn to stay and close up the shop, and normally we would have a few minutes together. But this time I walked up Water Street a little after five, just to look in the window and see her. It was pouring rain and when I waved at her, I got water up my sleeve—funny the things you remember. She waved back and I went on up the street. I wish I’d gone in, I wish...” He twisted his head, dismissing that futile thought. “He worked just two doors down from her, did you know that?”

  Betsy said, “Yes, in the Heritage gift shop on the comer.” Betsy could see it in her mind’s eye, it was light red brick and went around the comer in a curve just broad enough to accommodate a door. Its big windows were generally full of imported dishes, sweaters or dresses, and glassware.

  “He took that job to spy on her. He did freelance computer programming in an office in their house for very respectable pay; and he did some freelance home repairs, carpentry mostly, for which he got paid under the table. Not paying taxes made up for not getting union wages. He didn’t need that job at the gift shop.”

  “How long did Angela work at the bookstore?”

  “Not quite two years. She’d begged and pleaded with him and he finally said she could get a part-time job. It wasn’t for the money, not entirely, she just wanted out of the house. But he couldn’t stand the thought of her meeting strange men all day long, so right after she started, he got that job so he could watch her.” Foster smiled. “He wanted to work in the pet shop right next door, but she was allergic to cat hair, and he’d’ve come home with it on him. And he couldn’t work in the place on the other side of the bookstore, it’s a beauty parlor.” He ripped his bread stick into three pieces. “There’s the proof he was some kind of nut, taking that job just to spy on her. She was never, ever unfaithful to him.”

  Betsy’s eyebrows went up at that, and he said, “I mean it. We wanted to—God, how we wanted to! But he made her carry a cell phone and he called her about every fifteen minutes when she wasn’t home or in the bookstore, where was she, what was she doing, who was there with her. He said he loved her, but it was a crazy love. He was crazy, insane.”

  He looked up at Betsy. “So you see, when she was shot, I knew it was him. It had to be. It wasn’t me, and there wasn’t anyone else. The police thought so, too, when they figured out it wasn’t a robbery. But he’d rigged some kind of alibi, so when Gloria in the bookstore told them about me coming in to buy more books in six months than I’d bought in five years, and talking like a friend to someone I ignored when her husband was around ...” He made a pained face. “Funny how there’s always a slip somewhere, isn’t it? Gloria knew me because her husband hired me to remodel their house back when I was just starting out, and she’s a member of my church, which is where she saw me not speaking to Angela in front of Paul. We tried so hard to be cool in front of Paul that she noticed.

  “Anyhow, Mike Malloy came to talk to me. I told him that I was very fond of Angela, that she’d told me her husband was crazy jealous and beat her up every time the mood took him. I told him Paul had just found out about me and Angela, so it had to be Paul who shot her.”

  Betsy said, “But then Paul was shot.”

  Johns nudged a fragment of breadstick with a forefinger. “Turned everything on its head. Now they were looking for someone with a motive to shoot both of them. And the closest they can come is me.”

  “So why didn’t they arrest you?”

  “They did. But they had to let me go, because while I was near the bookstore that night, I had an alibi for the night Paul was shot.”

  “An alibi?”

  “Paul and my cleaning lady provided it between them. Damnedest thing. He phoned me at my office and said he wanted to see me. Well, I didn’t want to see him, but he said he had evidence of who murdered Angela. He said the cops would think he cooked it up, but if I was the one who brought it to the cops, they’d believe me. He said, ‘It’ll help you, too, Foster, because the cops are sure that if it isn’t me, then it’s probably you.’ I asked him, ‘Who did it?’—not believing him, of course—and he said, ‘It’s someone who’s after me. He killed Angela because he knows how much I loved her and he wants me to suffer before he kills me.’ And I asked him again, ‘Who is it?’ and he said I wouldn’t believe it, he had to show me, and that’s why he wanted to talk to me in person about it.

  “Well, I didn’t know whether he had anything or not, but I didn’t want him in my house, so I said, ‘Come to my office with your proof.’ And we set a time of nine o’clock that night. Yes, it occurred to me that he might do something really stupid, like shoot me, too. But what if he really had something? I owned a little tape recorder, it had a switch position for sound activation; it stops when it’s quiet, then starts when people start talking. I put it in a desk drawer I left a little bit open, figuring that if he admits he did it, or if he pulls something, there will be a recording.

  “You know my place, it started life as a little gas station up on Third and Water back in the thirties.” Betsy nodded—the design of the little stucco building with its steep tile roof announced its origins. “I’ve got a reception area in front, and in back a room for the guy who helps me do estimates and supervises the crews at work and my own office, which I also use for meetings. I went out for supper at Hilltop about six-thirty, and since I had nothing else to do, I went back to my office. We have a cleaning lady but she was already done when I got back, and that saved my hide.”

  “How was that?” asked Betsy

  “Well, we’d been asked to take a look at the old Ace Hardware store—this was before the fire, and the owner wanted to upgrade the apartments over the store. He wanted my ideas and an estimate on remodeling. I hadn’t had a chance to look at the specs yet, so I got out the notes I’d taken when we talked, and the plans and my calculator, and did some work while I waited for Paul Schmitt to come by. Which he didn’t. At nine twenty I phoned his house, and when there was no answer, I assumed he was on his way over. But he wasn’t. I finally went home a little after ten, and the police came and woke me up around eleven. They wanted to know where I was between nine and nine forty-five and I said I was in my office. Alone, of course.”

  Betsy asked, “So how did your cleaning lady help give you an alibi?”

  “She told the cops that when she left my building at seven forty-five, my desk was clear and my office was perfectly cl
ean, but when I took the cops back over there, the wastebasket but was half full of wadded-up notes, and the top of my desk and a table were covered with plans and blueprints and estimates, and there were a couple of drawings pinned up on my bulletin board that weren’t there before. I’m a messy worker, and when I’m working on a job, I tend to leave things out, for which I thank God—and for not staying until I finished, because I would’ve put things away. I mean, it’s not the greatest alibi in the world, but it was good enough. That and the fact that there wasn’t a mark on me or any blood on my clothes, because there had been a knockdown drag-out at Paul’s house.”

  “Did the police find the evidence Paul said he had about who murdered Angela?”

  “The detective never mentioned that they found anything. Not that he would have, but I don’t know that anyone else was ever questioned about it. And they never arrested anyone else, damn it to hell.”

  “Do you think Paul ever had any evidence of who really murdered Angela?”

  “I don’t know. My first thought was that Paul set it up somehow, trashed his living room and ran into things until he was all beat up, then shot himself.”

  “Now wait a minute,” objected Betsy, “surely the police could tell the difference between someone running into something and the marks of a fist!”

  “Maybe he punched himself in the face.” Seeing her doubtful expression, he said earnestly, “Angela convinced me Paul was crazy,” said Foster. “Seriously crazy, as in mentally ill. He liked to get mad at her, she said, so he’d have an excuse to beat her. He’d set her up so no matter what she said he could convince himself he had a right to be angry. He’d come home in some kind of weird mood and she’d know that before bedtime, he’d find a reason to hit her. He never let anyone else see how things would get to him, so when he was angry about something, he’d still be nice and smiling to other people, but he’d come home and take it out on Angela. And he didn’t feel pain like normal people. She said one time he cut his knuckle on her tooth and wouldn’t even put a Band-Aid on it until she complained he was getting blood all over the sheets.”

  “All right, buying for a minute your theory that Paul was capable of beating himself up, where did the gun that shot him go?”

  “Yes, that’s what throws it all in the toilet, doesn’t it? The damn gun is gone. So maybe Paul was right, he had an enemy who really hated him, who murdered Angela to torture him and then beat him up before shooting him.”

  “Have you any idea who that might be?” asked Betsy.

  “Not an inkling. But”—he leaned forward to point a knobby index finger at Betsy—“don’t let the people you talk to make a saint of him, talking about his good deeds and that smile he always had on his face. Angela told me that his smile was like the smile of a dolphin. His face was just made that way, a kind of birth defect, it didn’t mean a thing. He had to make an effort to not smile. He would smile in his sleep and he would smile while he was punching her.”

  4

  Betsy gently rubbed the surface of a Christmas tree ornament done in shades of antique gold and deep red. Very Velvet was a narrow, ribbonlike fiber with a short, dense nap, luxurious to the touch. Her stocking design was painted on canvas by an artist named Marcy, and depicted a branch of long-needled pine hung with very elaborate ornaments and tinsel. She should be doing her books, but she was in a race with the calendar to get this stocking done in time to be “finished,” cut from its surrounding of blank canvas, lined, and sewn to a backing that would turn it into a real Christmas stocking.

  Not that she would ever put anything in the stocking, of course. Such a beautiful and labor-intensive object would be strictly for display. She had other painted canvases by Marcy, and would hang this in her shop among them to show customers how lovely the finished project could be.

  Jill said, “Don’t rub the fuzz off,” but not with any rancor. Jill was a police officer, a young woman whose Scandinavian heritage showed both in her ash-blond coloring and the low emotional content of her speech. She loved subtle jokes, cross-country skiing, and needlepoint, and was pleased to see Betsy doing something elaborate in the last area.

  Betsy held the stocking at arm’s length by its scroll bars so she could admire it. The colors and pattern of this piece were already so complex that she’d decided to do all of it in basic basketweave, and add interest by using different fibers: overdyed silks, perle cotton, metallics, wool, a difficult tubular ribbon called Crystal Rays, and Very Velvet. Each fiber caught the light differently, adding depth and interest to the work.

  Jill, working on her own needlepoint canvas of a Siamese cat looking at itself in a mirror, asked, “Are you going to try to help Foster Johns?”

  Betsy replied, “I’m going to look into it a bit.” She cut a length of black wool and threaded her needle—there being no other color she hadn’t used, she was doing the background of the stocking in black. “I don’t have time to do a really intensive investigation, it’s about to become very busy in the shop—I hope.”

  “So you don’t think he did it?”

  “I don’t know what to think. What do you know about the night it happened?”

  “Which murder?”

  “Angela’s.”

  “I wasn’t on duty, so I wasn’t one of the first responders, but I got called in to stand guard at the back door of the bookshop.”

  Excelsior was a small town, with a small police department. All sworn officers had to be prepared to respond to a call to duty at any time. Fortunately, in law-abiding Excelsior, this was a rare occurance. Jill tilted her canvas back and forth under the light to see if the next few stitches were in the same shade of cream she was using or a lighter one. “I was new to the force at the time,” she continued, “so I didn’t dare say what I thought—that Malloy should call in the BCA. Those state fellows run a lot of crime scenes, while murder is a rare event around here.”

  “Did you get to see the crime scene?” Betsy ran her needle through some completed stitches on the back to anchor the yarn, then poked her needle through.

  “No, but I got an earful, then and later. No sign of a struggle. Apparently two shots were fired, but Angela was shot just once, from behind, and the bullet went through her chest and out the front window of the bookstore.”

  Betsy frowned. Someone had mentioned a broken window, but not this horrible detail. “Out the window—is that possible?”

  “Sure, with a magnum-style bullet. It punched a big hole in Angela, and a bigger hole in the glass.”

  “Oh, gah!” said Betsy, never fond of gory details. “You said two shots were fired. Could someone have shot Angela and then fired out the window?”

  “Why would someone do that?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he shot out the window and then shot Angela?”

  “Again, why?”

  “I don’t know. But why two shots?”

  “Oh, I thought you meant on purpose. I think he shot at Angela twice, missed the first time and got her the second. But they never found either slug,” Jill said.

  “That’s odd.”

  “Yes, it is. Of course, Mike didn’t find the second shell casing, either. His report says one shot, it went through Angela and out the window. One of the store employees found the second shell casing months later, when they were replacing some bookshelves.”

  “So you don’t think the murderer shot out the window on purpose?” Betsy asked.

  “Why would he do that? It called attention to the bookstore. The 911 operators reported three calls in less than two minutes. One said it was a bomb, one said it was a drive-by, one said it was a robbery in progress. Like most first calls, they were all mistaken. It wasn’t a bomb, the bullet came from inside the store, and nothing was stolen. Mike suspected for a while that it was an attempted robbery, and when the window blew out, the would-be robber ran out the back before alarmed passersby could catch him.”

  “Does he still think that’s a valid theory?” Betsy put a single angled stitch beside
the teardrop-shaped ornament.

  “Not really. Not since Paul was killed so soon after. But he still thinks Angela must have let the person in, because both doors were locked when the police arrived.”

  “So how did the murderer get out?”

  “The back door didn’t have the deadbolt keyed shut, just the Yale, which you can open by hand from inside and which locks itself when you close the door.”

  “Fingerprints?”

  “The only ones found were hers and the owner’s. Gloves, probably.”

  “Did she ordinarily let people into the store after it closed?”

  “I wouldn’t think so. You don’t let people in after you close, do you? Unless it’s an emergency.”

  “True. And more people think it’s an emergency that they need another skein of DMC 758 than that they need a copy of The Ten Stupid Things Women Do to Mess Up Their Lives,” said Betsy.

  “Malloy might agree, except for the part about needing an emergency skein of DMC floss. But you can see why, when Malloy and his partner went to tell Paul about his wife, they had some hope of arresting him for her murder.”

  “You mean Paul wasn’t standing outside the bookstore demanding to know what was going on?”

  “No, they found him doing paperwork in the gift shop.”

  “Hmmm.”

  “Why hmmm?” asked Jill.

  “Because he is alleged to have taken that job just so he could keep an eye on Angela. Presumably a fuss of any sort would have him right out there taking a look. There were sirens, right?”