Silent Murders by Mary Miley Page B

police come fast. They bring me here to ask questions. Then I understand maybe it is not accident that she is dead. The police say she maybe kill herself”—and she made the sign of the cross at the thought—“or maybe someone kill her. Then I remember—oh, no! Two cups with coffee and two plates on ze coffee table were there! But I wash them first thing this morning and clean kitchen. Then I go to clean bathroom, and then I see Miss McCall. Too late.”
    Magda’s efficiency had robbed the police of their chance to find fingerprints that might have identified who had been visiting Lorna.
    “Zey very angry at me but…” She shrugged her shoulders helplessly. “I just come in today and do my job. I never think Miss McCall is dead in ze bathroom. Ze doctor say she is dead ze day before.”
    “Since Sunday?”
    “Sunday.” She nodded. “Ze doctor say late afternoon.”
    With some relief, I realized I had been in police custody during those hours. Finally, a death they couldn’t connect to me!
    “But suicide?” Magda continued. “No. There are easy ways to do suicide. Miss McCall have bottles of pills in ze bathroom, rat poison in ze cupboard, gas in ze oven. If a girl want to do suicide, she never choose suicide in ze toilet.”
    That made sense to me. “Were the coffee cups empty when you picked them up?” I asked.
    Magda frowned. “One was empty. One was half full.”
    “Was there any lipstick on either cup?”
    “On one cup, yes.”
    “Which one? The empty one or the half-full one?”
    “Half-full.”
    “And the plates?’
    “One big plate with breakfast cake. I put it away. Two small plates with crumbs.”
    There had been someone at Lorna’s apartment Sunday afternoon, someone she trusted enough to let in, someone she knew well enough to serve food and drink. It could have been a friend who had left after eating and didn’t know Lorna would accidentally pass out in the toilet. Then again, it could have been the same person who killed Bruno Heilmann and who realized Lorna, like Esther, knew too much to leave alive. If that were the case, though, he was disturbingly versatile, with a different manner of killing each time.
    Eliminating suicide left two possibilities: accidental death and murder. I staged both in my head.
    A friend—man or woman—drops in and finds Lorna suffering the effects of the previous night’s excesses. She is staggering about, confused and ill. The friend makes coffee, cuts some cake, urges Lorna to drink up and eat something, and advises her to go to bed. If the friend is a man, he empties his coffee cup, the one without lipstick, and Lorna sips a little from the other cup. If it is a woman, she drinks some from the lipstick cup and Lorna, who has not yet put on her face, empties the other one. The friend leaves. Lorna feels sick, goes to the toilet to vomit, passes out, and falls forward to her death. For this story to be true, the honest, innocent friend would step forward as soon as he or she heard about Lorna’s death and tell the police, “I was there moments before the accident, and Lorna was in a bad way,” or something like that. Lorna’s death was not yet widely known, but we would soon see if anyone stepped forward.
    In the alternate version of my imaginary scenario, a person drops by and finds Lorna still woozy from the party. The person makes coffee and cuts some cake, or maybe Lorna is able to do it. The person is not a stranger to Lorna. The lipstick on only one cup could mean that the guest was male and Lorna had, indeed, put on her makeup that morning. If it is the man who killed Heilmann, he wants to find out how much Lorna saw or knows, and he will kill her if need be. Or he has come purposely to strangle her or hit her on the head with something heavy—surely he wouldn’t risk the noise of a gunshot on a Sunday in a busy apartment building. Too ill to be suspicious, Lorna goes into the bathroom. The person follows and seizes the unexpected