Birthday Party Murder Page 3

  Bob took off his eyeglasses and rubbed his eyes, remembering the Sutcliffe case. All the evidence had weighed heavily against Tim Sutcliffe, who eyewitnesses agreed had robbed the Quik Stop one steamy July night, shooting the clerk and leaving her for dead. Even Bob had figured Sutcliffe was really guilty, given his extensive record. But Sherman had plugged away, persistently questioning the eyewitnesses and proving, one by one, that they hadn’t really seen the robber that well. Only the clerk had remained certain it was Sutcliffe. And then, just when the case was to go to the jury, hadn’t somebody else confessed to the crime?

  No, thought Bob. Sherman never gave up, even when it seemed hopeless, and he wouldn’t have killed himself. Which meant somebody else had to have done it.

  Suddenly, Bob remembered the overturned trash can and the unlatched door. Of course. Someone had come in last night when Sherman was working late and shot him. Then they’d left the gun so it would look like suicide. He reached for the phone, intending to call the police, when a surge of grief hit him. He’d missed his chance to tell Sherman how much he appreciated all he’d done for him.

  Chapter Four

  “You can fight the aging process!” promised the perky little blonde on the TV screen. Perfectly proportioned and perfectly tanned, she bared her perfect white teeth in a perfect smile and nodded, making her perfectly bleached blond curls bounce.

  “Is she for real?” asked Sara. Lucy’s thirteen-year-old daughter was lounging on the sofa with an open bag of M&Ms on her stomach.

  Zoe, who was in second grade, was perched in front of the family computer, playing an action game. Lucy’s older kids, Toby and Elizabeth, were away at college.

  “I’m not looking for a relationship here,” panted Lucy, straining to follow a complicated combination of steps. “I just want to lose ten pounds.”

  Lucy was dressed in an old pair of leggings, so old the seams were splitting, and one of Bill’s T-shirts. On the TV screen, Debbie was dressed in an orange bikini, only a shade brighter than her orange skin.

  “You can lose those last ten pounds!” exhorted Video Debbie, making Lucy wonder if the TV was really a two-way communication device. Maybe Debbie could read her mind. “But losing weight is only one reason to exercise. Exercise is good for you! It helps fight heart disease, it keeps you limber, and it acts as a mental filter. Exercise makes you happy!”

  “Are you happy, Mom?” asked Sara, popping an M&M into her mouth.

  “I’m trying,” panted Lucy, tripping over her feet as she attempted to execute a grapevine step.

  “Don’t stop!” cautioned Debbie. “I’ll be right back for your Tummy Tune-up!”

  Lucy reached for her water bottle, and attempted to march in place while she tilted back her head and drank. Water spilled down her chin.

  “Way to go, Mom,” observed Sara.

  “Listen, this is harder than you think. Especially when you’ve worked all day and you’re tired.” Lucy paused. “How does she do it? How does she talk? I can hardly breathe.”

  “She’s in shape,” said Sara. “You’re not.”

  “Thanks for the encouragement,” said Lucy, painfully lowering herself to the floor for tummy crunches.

  “This is our toning segment,” said Debbie, who had perched her round little bottom on an exercise mat that was color-coordinated to complement her bikini. “Our goal here is to condition our muscles, while keeping our heart rate up. Let’s begin. Now I want you to lower yourself vertebra by vertebra—but not all the way! Hold it, hold it; now bring yourself back up. Feel that?” Debbie pointed to her flat tummy with a perfectly manicured finger. “I certainly can!”

  “Uhhh,” said Lucy, collapsing onto the floor. A sympathetic shriek rose from the computer.

  Debbie was now bringing her knees to her chin and then extending her legs, toes pointed. It looked easy. “You want your legs to float, to be weightless,” she advised.

  Lucy raised her head, drew her knees in and then extended them. A horrible howl escaped her lips as her legs thunked to the floor.

  “Are you okay, Mom?” Zoe turned her head in concern.

  “I think I pulled something,” gasped Lucy, clutching her abdomen and moaning.

  On the screen, Debbie was bicycling her legs. “Don’t stop! It’s worth it, I promise you.”

  Lucy rolled onto her side, curled in a fetal position.

  “Now she’s doing yoga,” said Sara, helpfully informative.

  On the screen, Debbie had twisted her legs into a lotus position.

  “I know I can’t do that.”

  “You can do it,” said Debbie. “Start by sitting with your legs crossed and with time, you’ll be able to do more.”

  Lucy sat Indian-style, rubbing her tummy.

  “Now, let’s stand up and try Warrior.”

  Debbie unfolded herself and rose effortlessly, bending her front knee and extending her back leg in a lunge. By holding on to the coffee table, Lucy was able to struggle to her feet, but Warrior position proved harder than it looked and she lost her balance and rolled back onto the floor.

  “It’s a good thing we got that extra-thick pad for the new carpet,” she said, crawling over to the couch. “I could’ve hurt myself.” She sat on the floor, resting her back against the sofa. “I hope I won’t have sore muscles tomorrow.”

  “You know what the best part of the workout is?” inquired Debbie.

  “The end,” muttered Lucy, finding herself speaking in unison with the perky blonde on the TV. This was spooky.

  “Because you’ve done it! You’ve accomplished something that’s good for you!”

  “I think I deserve a reward,” said Lucy, reaching for the M&Ms and checking the nutrition information label. “Three hundred calories per two ounces. That’s not very many, is it?”

  Sara shrugged.

  Lucy reached for the remote and pushed the rewind button. “I bet I burned a ton of calories in that workout. I’m sweating, you know.”

  “Mom, you don’t have to share everything.”

  Lucy fanned herself with one hand and reached for more M&Ms with the other. “How many calories do you think I burned? Five hundred? A thousand?”

  “Probably a million, Mom. Listen, I want to ask you something.”

  Lucy chewed happily. “Shoot.”

  “You know how my birthday’s coming up?”

  “Oh, that’s right. You’ll be thirteen! A teenager!”

  “No, Mom. I am thirteen. I’m going to be fourteen.”

  Lucy helped herself to another handful of candy. “Are you sure?”

  Sara rolled her eyes. “I know my own birthday, Mom. And I was thinking that I’d like to have a sleep-over and invite some of my friends.”

  “That would be nice,” said Lucy. “How about having a Night of Beauty party? You could do each other’s hair and nails, stuff like that.”

  “Cute idea, Mom,” said Sara, sarcastically. “But I was thinking of something a little different. I want to invite some of my boy friends.”

  Lucy’s eyes widened in shock. “A coed sleep-over?”

  “Yeah, Mom. Everybody’s doing it.”

  “They are? How come I haven’t heard, if everyone’s doing it?”

  “ ’Cause everybody’s doing it,” said Sara, loftily. “It’s not like something you need to talk about, you know. It’s like brushing your teeth. You don’t talk about it because everybody does it.”

  The phone rang and Zoe snatched the receiver. “It’s for you, Mom.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Lucy, shaking her head and getting up slowly. If the way she felt now was any indication, she was going to be very sore tomorrow.

  It was Rachel and she sounded upset.

  “What’s the matter?” asked Lucy.

  “Something terrible has happened. Bob’s partner is dead.”

  “Sherman Cobb?” Lucy pictured him: a trim gentleman with a distinguished touch of silver at his temples. “He wasn’t very old, was he? What did he
die of?”

  “Not very old. In his sixties, I think, but he didn’t die of natural causes.” Rachel hesitated. “He was shot.”

  “Shot?” Lucy couldn’t believe it. People didn’t shoot each other in Tinker’s Cove. In fact, most people didn’t even bother to lock their doors.

  “The police think it was suicide, but Bob and I don’t think so.”

  Lucy hadn’t thought of suicide, but now that it had been mentioned it seemed a lot more likely than murder. “Why not?”

  “A lot of reasons. That’s why I’m calling. Bob and I were hoping you could maybe investigate a little bit. Since the police won’t.”

  Lucy hesitated. She’d been warned more than once to keep her nose out of police business. And her husband, Bill, didn’t much like her penchant for investigative reporting, either.

  “I don’t know,” she demurred.

  “Please. You have no idea how much this would mean to Bob. Could you just stop by his office tomorrow and hear him out? Then, if you don’t think there’s anything to investigate, well, that’ll be it.”

  That didn’t sound unreasonable to Lucy. “Okay. I was planning to interview Miss Tilley, but I guess that can wait.”

  “Thanks, Lucy. You’re a pal.”

  Lucy replaced the phone slowly, absorbing the news of Sherman’s sudden death. He would be missed, she thought, as she wandered back into the family room to turn off the TV. Sara, however, was watching MTV.

  “Have you done your homework?” asked Lucy. It was a reflex, really. She was really thinking about Sherman, trying to reconcile his quiet life in Tinker’s Cove with violent death. The police were probably right; it was probably suicide.

  “Mom, what about that birthday party? Can I have it?”

  Lucy was lost in thought. “Of course,” she said, talking to herself, “the police have been wrong before.”

  Sara didn’t wait to hear the rest but jumped to her feet and gave Lucy a quick hug.

  “I wonder what that was all about,” said Lucy, still talking to herself as she pushed the eject button and removed the videocassette from the machine. She glanced at the sleeve as she slid the cassette inside. “Burns calories—up to 300 every workout!” was emblazoned on the front, beneath the color photo of Debbie’s smiling face.

  That must be wrong, she thought. She’d probably eaten more than three hundred calories worth of M&Ms and she hadn’t even done all of the workout. While Debbie had been bending and stretching and bouncing, she’d been lying on the floor, moaning. And moaning, she guessed, didn’t really use up very many calories.

  She lifted the T-shirt and looked down at her round, bulging tummy. It was going to be a lot harder than she thought to get rid of the darned thing. And now that she’d agreed to look into Sherman’s death, when was she going to find time to exercise?

  Chapter Five

  Bob’s secretary, Anne Shaw, greeted Lucy warmly when she arrived the next morning, but her face was drawn and her eyes were puffy, as if she had been crying.

  “Hi, Lucy. I’m so glad you’re here. Bob’s expecting you. You can go right in.”

  “I’m awfully sorry for your loss,” said Lucy. “I know it’s hard to lose someone you work with.”

  “Sherman was more than my boss,” said Anne, reaching for a tissue. “I worked for him for almost thirty years, you know. After all that time he was my friend, too.”

  Anne buried her face in the tissue, relieving Lucy of the need to reply. She always wished she could get past the platitudes when faced with grief, but she could never think of anything comforting to say that didn’t sound false and hollow. Sometimes she thought there was no real comfort to be offered; the pain just had to wear itself out.

  She gave Anne a sympathetic nod and limped painfully toward Bob’s office. As she’d expected, her muscles were protesting yesterday’s workout. She knocked softly on the open door.

  “Lucy!” exclaimed Bob, jumping to his feet. “Thanks so much for coming.”

  “Of course I’d come,” she said, taking Bob’s hand. “I’m so sorry about your partner. It must be very difficult for you.”

  “Difficult doesn’t describe it,” said Bob, who suddenly seemed exhausted after greeting her so energetically. He subsided into his chair, like a leaking balloon, and offered her a seat with a wave of his hand. “I really don’t know where to begin.”

  “At the beginning,” said Lucy, seating herself carefully and giving him an encouraging smile. “Just tell me what happened.”

  Bob ran his hand through his thinning brown hair and took a deep breath.

  “I knew something was wrong as soon as I got here yesterday morning—Tuesday.” He was staring at the calendar on his desk. “I can’t believe it was just yesterday,” he finally said. “It seems like eons ago.”

  Lucy nodded sympathetically. “You said something was wrong,” she prompted him.

  “Right,” he said, sitting up a bit straighter in an attempt to pull himself together. “The door wasn’t locked and the wastebasket was tipped over.”

  “Whoa,” said Lucy. “You need to go back a bit. Why did you think the door should be locked? Wasn’t Sherman’s car here?”

  “No,” said Bob. “He lived just a few blocks from here. He usually walked. The parking area was empty.”

  “And you’re usually the first one to arrive in the morning?”

  Lucy was appalled when this seemingly innocent question caused Bob to swallow hard and blink back tears. Questioning him was going to be a more delicate task than she had expected.

  “Only recently,” Bob finally said. “Sherman was always first, for years and years. Then a few weeks ago he said that since he was the senior partner, he thought he’d come in a little later. I never thought anything of it, but now that I look back, it was probably the beginning of his illness.” Bob stared out the window at a leafless, gray tree. “I should have known something was wrong. Doc Ryder says he had pancreatic cancer. He only had a few months, maybe not even that.”

  “How could you have known?” Lucy said, speaking softly. “It seems logical enough for a man who’s getting close to retirement to cut back a little bit.”

  “Not if you knew Sherman,” insisted Bob. “His work was his life. He didn’t have any family, you know. He didn’t go on vacations. His only interest was his Civil War reenactment group.”

  “Those people who dress up in uniforms and camp out pretending they’re soldiers?”

  “Yeah.” Bob nodded, managing a small smile. “Sherman loved it. I think he was a colonel or something. It’s a big deal, you know. More than sitting around the campfire. Everything has to be authentic. He’d spend months tracking down stuff like antique buttons and wool socks. They had to be one hundred percent wool, no synthetics allowed. Even the food had to be exactly right. Beef jerky and coffee and biscuits. He loved nothing better than spending a weekend camping out in the rain somewhere, marching through mud and fighting the battle of Gettysburg all over again.”

  Lucy chuckled, relieved that Bob was temporarily distracted from his grief. “It’s hard to believe that a man who enjoyed that sort of thing would commit suicide,” she said. “He seems like the kind of guy who wouldn’t give up without a fight.”

  “Exactly,” agreed Bob. “His favorite expression was ‘Hold the fort!’ Even sang it to a little tune, some Civil War song. He used to say it led the hit parade in 1864.”

  “That’s all very well and good,” she said firmly, “but I don’t think he was killed by a Confederate sharpshooter.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said Bob. “That theory makes about as much sense as anything else I can come up with. I just can’t think of any reason for somebody to kill him.”

  “No controversial cases, no nasty divorces?”

  Bob shook his head. “This is a small-town law practice. We do wills and real estate closings. Occasionally we handle a divorce or a criminal matter, but nothing like that’s going on right now. I had the same thought myself, an
d I looked through the current files on his desk. It was all pretty straightforward stuff: a couple of planning board variances and a historical commission application, a partnership agreement, a few appeals . . .”

  The phone rang and he reached for it, giving Lucy an apologetic half smile.

  “Yes, Mrs. Delaporte,” he said, speaking into the receiver. “It’s true that Sherman has passed away.” He nodded. “Yes, yes, indeed. It’s a very great loss for all of us. But I can assure you that your affairs are in order and that I’m here to help you if the need arises.”

  Lucy could hear little squawks coming from the phone and Bob rolled his eyes.

  “No, Mrs. Delaporte, I can assure you I’m fully qualified. I’ve been practicing for over twenty years now.” He shook his head. “No, I don’t have any plans to bring in a new partner.”

  He fell silent and Lucy’s attention drifted to the diplomas on the wall, the Currier & Ives prints, the Waverly plaid curtains.

  “Thank you for calling, Mrs. Delaporte. Have a nice day, now. Good-bye.”

  Bob replaced the receiver and turned his attention to Lucy.

  “I’m afraid a lot of our older clients are going to be pretty upset—they consider me the junior partner.” His face went pale and he looked down at his blotter, chewing on his lip. “Not anymore,” he whispered. Then, adopting a brisk manner, he stood up. “Do you want to take a look at Sherman’s office?”

  “Sure. If I can.”

  “Why couldn’t you?”

  “Well, usually there’s crime scene tape and it’s sealed off until the police have gathered all the evidence . . .”

  “Not this time. The police think it’s an open-and-shut case of suicide.”

  “Well, that may not be so bad after all,” said Lucy, wincing as she got to her feet and followed him into the adjoining office. “I won’t have to worry about stepping on anybody’s toes or disrupting an investigation.”

  “Well, here it is,” said Bob, gesturing at the empty room.

  Lucy glanced around. A typical office. Pictures on the wall, bookcases filled with law books, new commercial-grade carpeting in a beige Berber, a credenza holding stacks of manila folders. She took a quick breath, bracing herself to examine the substantial desk that stood in the middle of the room, but when she looked closer she saw no trace of violence. Not even a bloodstain.