A Killer Closet by Paula Paul Read Free Book Online Page B

should be more careful.”
    “I locked my door before I left!” Irene said. “I’m sure of it.”
    “Calm down,” Andy said, putting a hand on her shoulder.
    Irene wanted to protest that it was not possible to be calm when two women had been found dead in her store in a matter of days, but she lost her voice when she saw Susana’s body on the floor, a pool of blood surrounding he head. “Oh, no!” she whispered. The sight of the body affected her more than she’d expected it to. She’d seen plenty of dead bodies in her career, but never anyone she knew, and certainly not one she’d just been speaking with a few hours earlier.
    “A night patrolman noticed the open door and came in to have a look around. That’s how we found the body.”
    “I locked the door!” she said again, sounding even more emphatic. “Someone else must have a key.” The thought scared her.
    Andy took out a notebook. “You’re sure you locked the door?”
    “I’m absolutely certain.”
    “You knew the victim, of course.”
    “She was a friend of my mother’s, and she left clothes here for me to sell on consignment.”
    Irene went on answering questions, including what time she left the store, whether or not she’d noticed anyone around the store when she left, when the last time she saw Susana was, and what had they talked about. She even told him about the telephone call she’d received telling her to stay away from Susana and answered no when the chief asked if she recognized the voice. Then she told him about Susana’s strange request that her two friends search her mountain home in the event something happened to her.
    For the first time the chief showed some interest. “Search her home? What were they supposed to be looking for?”
    “No one knows,” Irene said. “Adelle said she and Mrs. Baumgarten dismissed Susana’s remarks as melodrama.”
    “Oh, yes,” Andy said.
    “You must have known her,” Irene said.
    “She was one of those people everyone knows.”
    “So, was she melodramatic?”
    “That’s not something I can discuss,” he said. He asked a few more questions before he finally closed his notebook and told her she wouldn’t be able to open her store for the rest of the day because of the investigation, and he assured her the body would be removed through the back door.
    “You mean I’m not a person of interest again?” she asked.
    “Not at this time,” he said, “but I don’t want you to leave town. Your mother, either.”
    “I have no reason to leave town,” she said.
    “Good,” Andy said. “Now I suggest you go home. We have a lot of work to do here.”
    Irene started to protest, but she thought better of it and walked out of her store and onto the plaza. Across from her, the steeple of the Basilica of Saint Francis pierced the deep blue, cloudless sky.
    Harriet, she remembered, attended Mass at the Basilica of Saint Francis every morning. She decided to wait for her, hoping she could give her more information than Adelle could provide about why Susana had asked the two of them to go to her mountain home and search it in the event that something happened to her.
    Harriet Baumgarten and her husband were both Santa Fe aristocracy, although they weren’t old aristocracy, as Adelle and Susana were. While it might be reasonable to expect someone with a name like Baumgarten could be Jewish, while Susana Delgado would most likely be Hispanic Catholic, few things in Santa Fe were reasonable. Its nickname was, after all, the City Different. Harriet and her husband were midwestern German Catholic stock and had inherited the Baumgarten family’s Santa Fe mercantile fortune that was established in the nineteenth century, while the Delgado family was one of the Marrano or crypto-Jewish families who pretended to convert to Catholicism during the Inquisition, as were Irene’s ancestors, the Mendozas and
Abuela
Teresa’s family, the Silvas.
    Though it was July and the height of the tourist season,