“I want to help if I can. I didn’t know Penny Woertz very long. But… I liked her a lot.”
He pulled on the cigar. “Amateur help? Run around in circles and get everything all confused?”
“Let’s just say it wouldn’t be quite as amateur as the help you’re running around with right now, Stanger.”
“It like to broke Lew’s heart when they picked him off his motor-sickel and give him to me. What you might do, if it wouldn’t put you out any, is see if Rick Holton made the trip he said he made. It’s unhealthy for me to check up on a man in Holton’s position. I think maybe Janice Holton would be easy to talk with, easier for you than me.”
Once again I remembered Harry Simmons, and I said, “If she phones you to check on me, confirm the fact that I’m an insurance investigator looking into a death claim on Dr. Sherman.”
“Going to her instead of to Holton himself?”
“Just to see if she thinks he’s sincere in believing it was murder or if he’s been faking it in order to snuggle up to Nurse Woertz.”
He whistled softly. “You could lose some hide off your face.”
“Depending on how I work up to it.”
“If they’d both been in town, both Rick Holton and his wife, and they weren’t together, I’d want to make sure I knew where she was at the time that girl got stuck with the shears.”
“She capable of it?”
He stood up. “Who knows what anybody will do or won’t do, when the moon is right? All I know is that she was Janice Nocera before she married the lawyer, and her folks have always had a habit of taking care of their own problems in their own way.”
I remembered the pictures of her and the kids, the ones I had taken out of Holton’s wallet. Handsome, lean, dark, with a mop of black hair and more than her share of both nose and mouth, and a jaunty defiance in the way she stared smiling into the lens.
“And I’ll be checking you out a little more too,” he said, and gave me a small, tired smile and went out.
10
PAGE ONE of the Fort Courtney Sunday Register bannered LOCAL NURSE SLAIN. They had a sunshiny smiling picture of her that pinched my heart in a sly and painful way.
Very few facts had been furnished by the law-just the way the body had been discovered, the murder weapon, and the estimated time of death. As usual, an arrest was expected momentarily.
It was almost noon on Sunday when I phoned Biddy. She sounded tired and listless. She said Tom had flown up to Atlanta for a business meeting and would be home, he thought, by about midnight. Yes, it was a terrible thing about Penny Woertz. She had always been so obliging and helpful when Maurie had been Dr. Sherman’s patient. Such a really marvelous disposition, never snippy or officious.
“Suppose I come out there and see if I can cheer you up, girl?”
“With songs and jokes and parlor tricks? I don’t think anything would work today. But… come along if you want to.”
I pressed the door chime button three times before she finally came to the door and let me in.
“Sorry to keep you standing out here, Trav. I was putting her back to sleep.”
She led the way back into the big living room, long-legged in yellow denim shorts with brass buttons on the hip pockets, and a faded blue short-sleeved work shirt. She had piled her long straight blond hair atop her head and anchored it in place with a yellow comb, but casual tendrils escaped, and when she turned and gave me a crooked smile of self-mockery, she brushed some silky strands away from her forehead with her fingertips. “I’m the total mess of the month, Travis. Would you like a drink? Bloody Mary? Gin and tonic? Beer?”
“What are you having?”
“Maybe a Bloody would be therapeutic. Want to come help?”
The big kitchen was bright and cheerful, decorated in blue and white. The windows looked across the back lawn toward the lake.