up with a figure like that?”
“Her bank account?”
“She was getting the Old Age supplement.”
That didn’t mean anything. I knew people working three jobs who collected EI.
“I wouldn’t count on spending any of that thousand,” Bernie warned me.
“It’s handwritten, a valid will.”
“That wasn’t what I meant.”
“She wasn’t senile,” I said, real slow.
“Okay. By the way, did she have a cleaning lady?”
“She never said anything about one.”
He had a hard time believing a woman of Mrs. D.’s age could keep an apartment that clean. “She must have spent all her time polishing.”
All those evenly coated surfaces came back to me. “Are you saying there were fewer fingerprints than you’d expected?”
That’s just what he was saying, and we argued some more about Mrs. D.’s ability to look after herself and her home.
“Her place was always immaculate,” I said, as if her standards were normal. “I mean, she wasn’t anal about it, but she didn’t have a heck of a lot else to do.”
“Gee, I didn’t know you were so busy,” Bernie wisecracked. I definitely had to keep that man out of my kitchen.
“If he knew about the money, he could have killed her so he could inherit it,” I said.
“She could’ve just fallen, Annie.”
“But not from a brain seizure or anything?”
“No.” Bernie knew he’d upset me and gracefully changed the subject by asking me to drop off the will.
I looked at the lavender paper again. She’d signed it Léonie DesRochers (Mrs.). Until I’d opened it, I hadn’t even known her first name. Léonie, the acute accent a bold stroke, almost a tick. She’d probably been born Francophone. I admired her Scrabble prowess even more. “He’s a slimeball,” I said, thinking aloud.
“Yeah. Annie, if you see him again, just walk away. And call me.” He gave me his home phone number. I felt like I’d been promoted.
Bernie’s shot at my housekeeping skills hadn’t bothered me, much. But I got to thinking about myself at Mrs. D.’s age. Would I end up one of those crones with six cats? (Highly improbable.) Blue hair? (Almost impossible.) In an apartment crammed with odd bits of my life? (Very likely.) So maybe I should clean up. Right. As soon as I did more important things, like…
Bernie’s not lazy; why wouldn’t he link the bruise on her arm to the crack on her head? Why wasn’t he working from the assumption she’d been shoved against that radiator? On the other hand, why was I so sure that Mrs. D.’s death hadn’t been old age catching up with her?
No, I didn’t “rather she was murdered.” Maybe I was just looking for something to occupy my idle brain; maybe I resented Bernie’s insinuation that old people die so easily; maybe I didn’t want to think about myself dying all alone like that. Finally, I decided the reason didn’t matter as much as proving that somebody had murdered her.
Crime see Suspect see Motive. Okay, a slimeball’s a pretty good suspect, and money’s a pretty good motive. If Mrs. D.’s $54,133.72 was real, and Frank knew about it.
Presumably Mrs. D. knew about it, so why were her kitchen cabinets full of yellow-label cans? Would she have been saving it all to give to Guide Dogs for the Blind? How could we have talked so much without her telling me more about herself?
There’d been a Mr. DesRochers, but all I knew of him was that he’d been in the War. And she knew Pitman shorthand, which she’d offered to teach me. I’d never had the heart to tell her voice-recognition systems were doing to stenography what hypertext had already done to book indexing.
At that dead end, I went back to thinking about why Frank had killed his mother. I even said it out loud that way: Why did Frank DesRochers kill his mother? It’s a different question from: Why did Frank DesRochers kill Mrs. D.? It got me figuring another way.
The first thing I figured was: he didn’t do it on purpose. Even if he was a slimeball pimp-drug pusher, he didn’t strike me as the type who would cold-bloodedly kill his mother. Besides, he didn’t have the brains to plan a trip to the video store. And the way she fell made it seem likely she was pushed. He was there, they got into a fight, and he pushed her. Then he didn’t ransack the place looking for whatever he wanted, because Mom’s dead, and he’s in a hurry to scram. But he did do a cursory search, because he knew he wouldn’t find anything when he opened drawers while I was there.
It was an easy scene to envisage: They shout, he shoves, she falls. He runs to check her, finds she’s dead. Maybe gets some blood on him. Uses the towels to clean his hands, wipe up fingerprints, which means he had a reason to worry about leaving fingerprints. And he searches the place. Search see Hidden see Secrets. Mrs. D. had a lot of them, including her own son. And the envelope. Which she gave to me to keep secret from Frank? So he wasn’t looking for the envelope, because how could he look for something he didn’t know existed? So what the hell was he looking for?
Looking for…searching for…searching…the web. But you can’t search the web for answers when you don’t even know the questions. Okay, try another tack. Play devil’s advocate. Pull a Bernie.
Could Mrs. D. have simply lost her balance and fallen? Did that really happen to old people? I got onto Google.com, and worked out the most efficient way to enter the search criteria. Old, people, and falling were just too vague. Okay, losing your balance. Losing balance? Balance was the most specific word, which should always come first when you’re using a search engine. I typed in “balance lost.” What I got was:
Results 1-10 of about 298,000 for balance lost. Search took 0.91 seconds.
Blueberries May Restore Some Memory, Coordination and Balance Lost with Age/S
…Some Memory, Coordination and Balance Lost with Age By Judy…
www.ars.usda.gov/is/pr/1999/990910b.htm
U-M freshman not drunk, may have lost balance
…freshman not drunk, may have lost balance Detroit Free Press…
www.freerepublic.com/forum/a362c2f0e24de.htm
C&EN 6/29/98: FINANCIAL ANALYSIS: Firms lost ground on income and balance sheet
…ANALYSIS: Firms lost ground on income and balance sheets CAPITAL…
pubs.acs.org/hotartcl/cenear/980629/anal.html
Lost your bank balance?
news sensation The Ketamine look, the Fashion world has been shocked this week…
www.nwnet.co.uk/n-23/xavier.htm
Bank balances and fashion. And Bernie thinks I think weird. The next
