A Motive For Murder by Katy Munger

returned with Julie Perkins’s
enrollment card and handed it to Auntie Lil with an uneasy glance
at the telephone. Surely the old woman wasn’t making long distance
calls? The young girl left nervously and hovered on the other side
of the office, wondering when Auntie Lil would leave.
    Auntie Lil examined the card carefully. “Remember
Bobby Morgan’s costar in Mike and Me? The one named Andrew
Perkins?”
    “You and Herbert remembered him. I didn’t.”
    “Julie Perkins has an ‘Andrew Perkins’ listed as the
person to contact in case of emergency on her Metropolitan Ballet
School enrollment card.” Auntie Lil turned the card over and read
further. “That’s odd,” she added. “No mother is listed.”
    “You think it’s the same Andrew Perkins?” T.S.
asked.
    “Of course it is,” Auntie Lil said. “And I’m going to
go talk to him.”
    “Why?”
    “Why not?” she replied. “Come with me?”
    T.S. sighed. He could not, in good conscience,
refuse. And if he admitted the truth—that his feet hurt too much—
she’d ferret out his ballroom-dancing efforts. “I’ll meet you
there,” he promised. “Don’t try anything on your own.”
    “Of course not,” she murmured sweetly. Getting her
own way always put Auntie Lil in a good mood.
     
     
    Andrew and Julie Perkins lived in an expensive high
rise co-op a few blocks from Lincoln Center. It was one of a dozen
or so brick buildings that had risen around the cultural area in
the seventies and eighties. Purchase prices and rents were
exorbitant. As Auntie Lil waited in the lobby for T.S. to arrive,
she surveyed the marble floors and the squad of doormen, then
decided that Andrew Perkins must be doing pretty well to afford
such a home.
    “Nice digs,” T.S. said, meeting her by the miniature
lobby waterfall. “He must have successfully revived his acting
career.”
    “He doesn’t act anymore,” Auntie Lil explained.
“According to Morgan’s former agent, he works on Wall Street
now.”
    “I should have known,” T.S. said piously,
conveniently ignoring the fact that he had spent thirty years on
Wall Street before retiring early at age fifty-five and leaving all
of the backbiting and obsession with profits behind.
    Auntie Lil asked the doorman to ring the Perkins
apartment. She was willing to settle for either Perkins, but was
expecting the daughter or, perhaps, the unlisted mother. After all,
it was the middle of a Tuesday afternoon and she was sure Andrew
Perkins would be on the job. But, surprisingly, he was the one
home.
    At first, he wouldn’t let them up. But when Auntie
Lil grabbed the house phone from the startled concierge and
explained her position on the Metro’s board, Perkins gave the okay
to show his visitors upstairs.
    “Upstairs” was an understatement. The Perkins lived
on the forty-fourth floor and enjoyed a breathtaking view of the
Hudson River. A long plate-glass window ran along the side of a
large sunken living-room area. If Andrew Perkins had not been
standing in front of the window with an unhappy scowl on his face,
it would have been a lovely vista.
    “What do you want?” he asked, waving reluctantly
toward a low seating arrangement that bordered the living room on
two sides. He remained standing, his gaunt figure made ghostlike by
the glare from the afternoon sun behind him. He was a tall man, yet
lacking in the grace that acceptance of his height would have
provided. He stooped, as if permanently tired. His blond hair was
thinning and brushed carelessly back from his forehead; the ends
were in need of a trim. His features did not match: his nose was
too broad for his thin lips and his small eyes looked lost in his
pale face. Yet his daughter, Julie, was beautiful.
    T.S. noted that the apartment was as sparse and
orderly as his own. Hardwood floors gleamed beneath white rugs, the
furniture was modern with clean lines, and not a single magazine
marred the coffee table’s glossy surface. No ashtrays either. This
was