My Gal Sunday Page 4

  Alfred Barker relit the tip of his cigar and exhaled noisily, then leaned back in his chair. “What a shrewd cookie she was. A natural.”

  “And was it then that she started seeing you?” Sunday prodded.

  “Right. But then I had a little misunderstanding with the government and ended up in the can for a spell. She got herself a job with a fancy public relations firm, and when a chance to move to their Washington branch came up a couple of years ago, she grabbed it.”

  Barker inhaled deeply on the cigar, then coughed noisily. “Nope, you couldn’t hold Arabella down, not that I ever wanted to. When I got sprung last year, she used to call me all the time and tell me about that jerk, Shipman, but it was a good setup for her, because he was always giving her jewelry, and she was always meeting fancy people.” Barker leaned across the desk and said meaningfully, “Including the president of the United States, Henry Parker Britland the Fourth.”

  He paused, once again leaning back in his chair. He looked at Sunday accusingly. “How many people in this country ever sat down at the table and traded jokes with the president of the United States? Have you?” he challenged.

  “No, not with the president,” Sunday said honestly, remembering that first night at the White House when she had declined Henry’s invitation to dinner.

  “See what I mean?” Barker crowed triumphantly.

  “Well, obviously, as secretary of state, Thomas Shipman was able to provide great contacts for Arabella. But according to Mr. Shipman, he was the one who was breaking off the relationship. Not Arabella.”

  “Yeah. Well, so what?”

  “Then why would he kill her?”

  Barker’s face darkened, and he slammed his fist on the desk. “ I warned Arabella not to threaten him with that tabloid routine. I told her that this time she was running with a different crowd. But it had worked for her before, so she wouldn’t listen to me.”

  “She got away with it before!” Sunday exclaimed, remembering that this was exactly the scenario she had suggested to Henry. “Who else did she try to blackmail?”

  “Oh, some guy she worked with. I don’t know his name. Some small potatoes. But it’s never a good idea to mess around with a guy who’s got the kind of clout Shipman has. Remember what he did to Castro?”

  “How much did she talk about her efforts to blackmail him?”

  “Not much, and then only to me. I kept telling her not to try it, but she figured it would be worth a couple of bucks.” Unlikely tears welled in Alfred Barker’s eyes. “I really liked her. But she was so stubborn. She just wouldn’t listen.” He paused, apparently lost for a moment in reflecion. “I warned her. There was even this quotation that I showed her.”

  Sunday’s head jerked back in involuntary reaction to Barker’s startling statement.

  “I like quotations,” he said. “I read them for laughs and for insight, or whatever, if you know what I mean.”

  Sunday nodded her head. “My husband is very fond of quotations. He says they contain wisdom.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I mean! What’s your husband do?”

  “He’s unemployed at the moment,” Sunday replied, looking down at her hands.

  “That’s tough. Does he know anything about plumbing?”

  “Not much.”

  “Do you think he could run numbers?”

  Sunday shook her head sadly. “No, mostly he just stays home. And he reads a lot, like the quotations you were mentioning,” she said, trying to get the conversation back on track.

  “Yeah, the one I read Arabella fit her so well it was amazing. She had a big mouth. A real big mouth. I came across this quote and showed it to her. I always told her that her big mouth would get her in trouble, and boy it did.”

  Barker rummaged through the top drawer of his desk, then pulled out a tattered piece of paper. “Here it is. Read this.” He thrust a page at Sunday that obviously had been torn from a book of quotations. One entry on the page was circled in red:

  Beyond this stone, a lump of clay,

  Lies Arabella Young,

  Who on the 24th of May

  Began to hold her tongue.

  “It comes from an old English tombstone. Just like that! Except for the date, is that a coincidence or is that a coincidence?” Barker sighed heavily and then slumped back in his chair. “Yeah, I’m sure gonna miss Arabella. She was fun.”

  “You had dinner with her the night she died, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you drop her off at the Shipman house?”

  “Nah. I told her she should give it a rest, but she wouldn’t listen. So I put her in a cab. She was planning to borrow his car to get home.” Barker shook his head. “Only she wasn’t planning to return it. She was sure he’d give her anything just to keep her from talking to the tabloids.” He fell silent for a moment. “Instead, look what he did to her.”

  Barker stood up, his face twisted with fresh anger. “I hope they fry him!”

  Sunday got to her feet. “The death penalty in New York State is administered by lethal injection, but I get your drift. Tell me, Mr. Barker, what did you do after you put Arabella in a cab?”

  “You know, I’ve been expecting to be asked that, but the cops didn’t even bother talking to me. They knew they got Arabella’s killer from the start. So, after I put her in the cab, I went to my mother’s and took her to the movies. I do that once a month. I was at her house by quarter of nine, and in line to buy tickets at two minutes of nine. The ticket guy knows me. The kid who sells popcorn at the theater knows me. The woman who was sitting next to me is Mama’s friend, and she knows I was there for the whole show. So I didn’t murder Arabella, but I know who did!”

  Barker pounded his fist on the desk, sending an empty soda bottle crashing to the floor. “You wanna help Shipman? Decorate his cell.”

  Sunday’s Secret Service guards were suddenly beside her, staring intently at Barker. “I wouldn’t pound the desk in this lady’s presence,” one of them suggested icily.

  For the first time since she had entered the office, Sunday noticed, Alfred Barker was at a loss for words.

  Thomas Acker Shipman had not been pleased to receive the call from Marvin Klein, Henry Britland’s aide, informing him of the president’s request that he delay the plea-bargaining process. What is the use? Shipman wondered, disgruntled by not being able to get on with it. It was inevitable that he would have to go to jail, and he just wanted to get it over with. Besides, this house already had taken on the aspects of a prison. Once the plea-bargaining was finished, the media would have a surge of interest in him, but then he would be dropped and they would be on to another poor slob. A sixty-five-year-old man going to prison for ten or fifteen years didn’t remain hot copy for long.

  The only thing that keeps them churning so much, he thought as he once again peered out at the mass of reporters still camped outside his house, is the speculation about whether or not I’ll go to trial. Once that’s been resolved, and it’s clear that I’m taking my medicine without putting up a fight, they’ll lose interest.

  His housekeeper, Lillian West, had arrived promptly at eight o’clock that morning. He had hoped to discourage her coming today by putting on the safety chain, but apparently all he succeeded in doing was in making her more determined than ever to get in. When her key did not gain her entrance, she had pushed the doorbell firmly and called his name until he let her in. “You need taking care of, whether you think so or not,” she had said, sharply brushing aside the objection he had voiced yesterday, that he didn’t want her private life invaded by the media, and that, in fact, he really did prefer to be left alone.

  And so she had gone about her usual daily chores, cleaning rooms that he would never again get to live in, and fixing meals for which he had no appetite. Shipman watched her as she moved about the house. Lillian was a handsome woman, an excellent housekeeper, and a cordon bleu cook, but her overly bossy tendencies occasionally made him wistfully remember Dora, the hou
sekeeper who had been with him and Connie for some twenty years. So what if she had sometimes burned the bacon, she had always been a pleasant fixture in their home.

  Also, Dora had been of the old school, while Lillian clearly believed in the equality of the employee to the employer. Nevertheless, Shipman realized that for the short time he would be in the house before going to prison, he could manage to put up with Lillian’s takeover attitude. He would just make the best of it by trying to enjoy the creature comforts of delicious meals and properly served wine.

  Recognizing that he could not cut himself off completely from the outside world, and acknowledging that he actually needed to be available to his lawyer, Shipman had turned on the telephone answering machine and had begun taking calls, although screening out those that weren’t necessary. When he heard Sunday’s voice, however, he gladly picked up the phone.

  “Tommy, I’m in the car and on my way to your house from Yonkers,” Sunday explained. “I want to talk to your housekeeper. Is she in today, and if not, do you know where I can reach her?”

  “Lillian is here.”

  “Wonderful. Don’t let her leave until I have had a chance to visit with her. I should be there in about an hour.”

  “I can’t imagine what she’ll be able to tell you that the police haven’t already heard.”

  “Tommy, I’ve just talked with Arabella’s boyfriend. He knew of her plan to extort money from you, and from what he said, I gather that it was a stunt that she had pulled on at least one other person. We’ve got to find out who that person was. It’s entirely possible that someone followed Arabella to your house that night, and we hope that when Lillian left she might have seen something — a car, maybe — that didn’t seem significant at the time but could prove to be important. The police never really investigated any other possible suspects, and since Henry and I are convinced that you didn’t do it, we’re going to sniff around for them. So buck up! It ain’t over till it’s over.”

  Shipman hung up and turned to see Lillian West standing in the doorway to his study. Obviously she had been listening to his conversation. Even so, he smiled pleasantly. “Mrs. Britland is on her way here to talk to you,” he said. “She and the president seem to feel that I may not be guilty of killing Arabella after all and are doing some sleuthing on their own. They have a theory that might prove to be very helpful to me, and that’s what she wants to speak to you about.”

  “That’s wonderful,” Lillian West said, her voice flat and her tone chilly. “I can’t wait to talk to her.”

  Sunday’s next call was to Henry, on his plane. They exchanged reports on what they had learned so far, he from the countess and she from Alfred Barker. After Sunday’s revelation about Arabella’s habit of blackmailing the men she dated, she added a cautionary note: “The only problem with all this is that no matter who else might have wanted to kill Arabella, proving that that person walked into Tommy’s house undetected, loaded the gun that happened to be lying there, and then pulled the trigger is going to be difficult.”

  “Difficult maybe, but not impossible,” Henry said by way of reassurance. “I’ll get Marvin started right away on checking out Arabella’s last places of employment, and maybe he can find out who she might have been involved with there.”

  After saying good-bye to Sunday, Henry sat back to ponder what he had just learned about Arabella’s past He felt a strong sense of unease, but he couldn’t quite put it together. He had a growing premonition that something was wrong, but he couldn’t put his finger on just what it was.

  He leaned back in the swivel chair that was his favorite spot on the plane, other than the flight deck. It was something Sunday had said, he decided, but what was it? With almost total recall, he reviewed their conversation. Of course, he said to himself when he reached that point in his recollection, it was Sunday’s observation about the difficulty in trying to prove that some unknown person had walked into Tommy’s house, loaded the pistol, and pulled the trigger.

  That was it! It didn’t have to be an outsider. There was one person who could have done that, who knew that Tommy felt both sick and overwhelmingly tired, who knew that Arabella was there, who in fact had let her in. The housekeeper!

  She was relatively new. Chances are that Tommy hadn’t really had her checked out, probably didn’t know much of anything about her.

  Quickly, Henry phoned Countess Condazzi. Let her still be home, he prayed silently. When her now-familiar voice answered, he wasted no time in getting to the point of his call: “Betsy, did Tommy ever say anything to you about his new housekeeper?”

  She hesitated before answering. “Well, yes, but only jokingly.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, you know how it is,” she responded. “There are so many women in their fifties and sixties who are unattached, but there are so few men. When I spoke to Tommy last — it was the morning of the day that poor girl was killed — I said I had a dozen friends who are widowed or divorced who would be jealous because of his interest in me, and that if he showed up clown here, he would be the center of attention. I remember that he said that except for me, he intended to steer clear of unattached women, and that, in fact, he had just had a most unpleasant experience in this regard.” She paused before continuing. “It seems that only that morning he had told his new housekeeper that he was putting his house on the market and would be moving to Palm Beach. He confided to her that he was finished with Arabella because someone else had become important to him. Later, when he was thinking back over the conversation and her reaction to it, he realized that the housekeeper may have gotten the crazy idea that he had meant her. So he made a special point of informing her that, of course, he would not need her services once the house was sold and, naturally, would not be taking her with him to Florida. He recounted that she at first had seemed shocked and then had become cool and distant.” Again the countess paused, then gasped, “Goodness, you don’t think she could have had anything to do with this mess Tommy’s in, do you?”

  “I’m afraid I’m beginning to, Betsy,” Henry replied. “Look, I’ll get back to you. I’ve got to get my man on this right away.” He broke the connection and swiftly dialed Marvin Klein. “Marvin,” he said. “I’ve got a hunch about Secretary Shipman’s housekeeper, Lillian West. Do a complete cheek on her. Immediately.”

  Marvin Klein did not like to break the law as he would be doing by penetrating private computer records, but he knew that when his boss said “Immediately,” the matter had to be urgent.

  It was only a matter of minutes before he had assembled a dossier on fifty-six-year-old Lillian West, including her rather extensive record of traffic violations and, more to the point, her employment history. Marvin frowned as he began to read. West was a college graduate, had an M.A., and had taught home economics at a number of colleges, the last one being Wren College in New Hampshire. Then, six years ago, she had left there and taken a job as a housekeeper.

  Since then she had held four different positions. Her references — citing her punctuality, her high standard of work, and her cooking ability — were good but not enthusiastic. Marvin decided to check on them himself.

  Less than a half hour after Henry’s call, Marvin was on the phone to the former president, who was still winging his way back from Florida. “Sir, the records indicate that Lillian West, while employed in various college-level teaching positions, had a history of troubled relationships with her superiors. Six years ago she left her last teaching job and went to work as a housekeeper for a widower in Vermont. He died ten months later, apparently of a heart attack. She then went to work for a divorced executive, who unfortunately died within the year. Before she went to work for Secretary Shipman, her employer was an eighty-year-old millionaire; he fired her but gave her a good reference nonetheless. I spoke to him. He said that while Ms. West was an excellent housekeeper and cook, she also was quite presumptuous and seemed to put no stock in the more traditional relationship between the head of the hou
se and the housekeeper. In fact, he said that it was when he became aware that she had set her mind on marrying him that he decided she would have to go, and shortly after that he showed her the door.”

  “Did this man report ever having any health problems?” Henry asked quietly as he absorbed the possibilities that were presented by Lillian West’s troubled history.

  “I did think to ask him that, sir. He said that he is in robust health now, but that during the last several weeks of Ms. West’s employment, specifically after he had given her notice, he experienced extreme fatigue, followed by an undiagnosed illness that culminated in pneumonia.”

  Tommy had spoken of a heavy cold and overwhelming fatigue. Henry’s hand gripped the phone. “Good job, Marvin. Thanks.”

  “Sir, I’m afraid there’s more. According to the records, Ms. West’s hobby is hunting, and apparently she is very familiar with guns. Finally, I spoke to the president of Wren College, where she had her last teaching job. As he remembered it, Ms. West was forced to resign. He said that she had displayed symptoms of being deeply disturbed but refused all attempts at counseling.”

  Henry ended the conversation with his aide as a wave of anxiety swept over him. Sunday was on her way right now to see Lillian West, totally unaware of any of the background Marvin had uncovered. She would unwittingly alert the housekeeper to the fact that they were looking into the very strong possibility that someone other than Thomas Shipman had murdered Arabella Young. There was no telling how the woman might react. Henry’s hand had never shaken even at summit meetings, but right now his fingers could barely punch the numbers to reach Sunday’s car phone.

  Secret Service agent Art Dowling answered. “We’re at Secretary Shipman’s place now, sir. Mrs. Britland is inside.”

  “Get her,” Henry snapped. “Tell her I must speak to her.”