Caught In The Act. Gayle Roper

shook her head. “He didn’t have a family. His mom’s dead and his dad disappeared when he was four. There are no brothers and sisters. And there’s certainly no pastor.”

      She sighed in pain. “I have to tell my parents face-to-face. It’s not telephone news, you know? My dad will be so upset. He loved Arnie. He was the son he never had.” She shook her head. “Poor Dad.”

      I looked at the man on the floor. Poor Arnie was more like it.

      Since Jolene had no calls to make, I quickly dialed The News, connecting with Mac’s desk.

      “Mac, I’m at Jolene and Arnie Meister’s house where we just found Arnie shot to death.”

      He made a distressed sound. “Let me talk to her.”

      I gave Jolene the phone and listened to her murmur into it. Suddenly she held it out. “He wants you.”

      “You know what you’ve got to do, right?” Mac asked.

      “Yeah, I know.” A story by deadline tomorrow. The News is an afternoon paper of twelve to sixteen pages, and our deadline for news is nine, editing ten, and it’s ready for delivery by noon.

      I hung up and led Jo to the foyer, away from Arnie. “Come on. We’ll wait in the living room.”

      She kept wiping her bloody hands down her coat again and again. I caught them and held them and felt them shaking.

      She looked over my shoulder. “He has the tree up.” She took a step toward the living room.

      “Give me your coat before you go in there.” There was no need to track blood through the house. I helped her slip out of it.

      I took mine off, too, and we dropped them in a pile on the parquet floor. Then we sat awkwardly next to the beautiful Christmas tree on the sofa bigger than my apartment. But there was blood on our shoes and clothes as well as our hands, and we marred the pale yellow carpet and the huge sofa. Jolene never noticed.

      She stood up almost as soon as we sat down. “I can’t leave him alone on the kitchen floor.” Tears wet her cheeks. She started unsteadily toward the kitchen.

      I nodded and followed her. “We’ll sit at the table.”

      “I want to hold his hand.”

      I remembered Sergeant William Poole of the Amhearst police saying to me once, “The first rule of any investigation is never touch anything at a crime scene. Never, never, never! It contaminates the evidence and makes convictions hard, should we find the perpetrator.”

      “I think we can’t touch him, Jo. I’m sorry.” I led her to a kitchen chair with a yellow plaid seat cushion.

      She sat and laid her head on her arms on the table. I looked at her sadly, wishing I could ease her sorrow and knowing I couldn’t.

      I turned to the room. Putting my hands behind me, I made a slow circle, looking at everything and anything. Who knew what would be important for my story? Or for the solution of the crime?

      “Jolene,” I said hesitantly. “I’ve got to take pictures.” It seemed so intrusive to go flash, flash here and flash, flash there.

      She raised her head. “For the paper?”

      “Yes. But also to reconstruct the scene and look for possible clues.”

      She gave me a watery, wavery smile. “You’ve got the detective bug.”

      “Sort of,” I confessed, blushing at the actual verbalizing of that thought. How pretentious of me, though I had actually solved another murder. “But I won’t take any pictures if you don’t want me to.”

      “The cops are going to photograph him, aren’t they?”

      I nodded.

      “Then you might as well, too. Just don’t put him in the paper like that.”

      “I’ll tell Mac,” I promised.

      I picked up my camera and began circling the room. As I walked, I talked, as much for myself as to keep Jo from falling prey to greater shock.

      “How’d you meet Arnie?” I snapped the refrigerator and the couple of notes that were held to it by magnets shaped like fruit. One note from a scratch pad said: Jolene—5:30. The other, an 8x10 printout on a certificate template, read: $50,000.00!

      Jolene looked at Arnie. “We met the first day of kindergarten. He was this shrimpy little kid with big glasses and a bigger mouth. He liked to boss everyone around. I hated him.”

      I glanced at Arnie. “He’s no shrimp now.”

      Jolene shook her head. “But he was all through high school. The littlest guy around. Mr. Brainiac. He and Airy were quite the pair. Two dweebs.”

      I thought of the beautiful Airy Bennett. “Dweebs? Airy? Arnie?”

      “Hard to believe, huh? I hung out with Airy because I felt sorry for her. And people were nice to Arnie because he’d tell you all the answers or write your paper for you or whatever—for a price. He loved that kind of stuff. But Airy wouldn’t even let you copy her homework. ‘It’s cheating, Jo.’” Jolene’s voice took on a hard edge. “She was the most self-righteous thing!”

      I’d never let anyone copy my homework either, but I thought I wouldn’t tell Jolene that little piece of trivia.

      In the sink I noticed two glasses with dark liquid dregs. I leaned over and sniffed. Iced tea. I looked for telltale lipstick on one of the glasses, hard to do since I couldn’t pick them up for fear of disturbing prints. If Jolene hadn’t been keeping Arnie company anymore, maybe someone else had.

      I sighed. She, if there was a she, either wore that lipstick that never came off or she wore none. Or she’d wiped the glass clean of any evidence. Interesting thought, that.

      I noticed a wastebasket tucked in the corner by a cabinet. I walked over and peered in. I saw crumpled paper towels with blue hearts and flowers on them, a clear plastic wrapper from some package, an empty half-gallon Tropicana orange-tangerine juice container and the box and plastic tray from a Lean Cuisine dinner, chicken marsala. No clues as far as I could see, but I took a picture anyway.

      “If Arnie was such a brainiac dweeb,” I said as I took a picture of the bullet lodged in the cabinet directly behind where he must have been standing when he was shot, “how did you two ever get together?” I glanced again at the man lying on the floor. “And how did he get to be such a handsome guy?”

      “After high school he went away to college,” Jolene said. “He’d earned all these scholarships and stuff. I didn’t see him for about almost four years. Then I went to a New Year’s Eve party, and there he was. I couldn’t believe it! He’d gotten so tall, and he’d started wearing contact lenses. And he pumped iron all the time. There’s all kinds of weight equipment in the room down the hall.”

      She looked at me vaguely “He was gorgeous, wasn’t he? I fell for him big-time.”

      “And he fell for you?” I prompted as I took a seat beside her. I pushed her purse, gloves and scarf away from the table’s edge.

      “Remember, he’d gone with Airy for years. It took me a couple of months to convince him to drop her.”

      I looked at Jolene. “Arnie had been going with Airy?”

      “Since seventh grade.”

      “And you cut her out?”

      “Yeah.” Jolene unconsciously sat straighter. “It was easy.”

      I nodded as the ladies’ room animosity suddenly made more sense.

      “Would you say Airy was a late bloomer, too?” I asked.

      “She’s still waiting to bloom,” Jolene said with more than a trace of the nastiness I’d seen earlier. I also recognized a case of wishful thinking. Airy