Free Wound Up In Murder by Betty Hechtman Page B

registration table danced anxiously through my mind. And contributing even more to my feeling of anxiety was seeing Sammy’s silks.
    A cop finally had come by to take my information and my statement. I simply told him what I had seen and done. I hesitated when I got to the end. There was no reason to mention what I’d seen on the ground after Diana was removed. But I couldn’t get the image of the brightly colored prop out of my mind. What had Sammy done? I got up to leave. “Not yet,” he’d said, gesturing back toward my seat.
    The officer didn’t explain why he wanted me to stay but I thought I knew the answer. When the door opened and Lieutenant Borgnine came in, I realized I was right. He glanced around the room and his gaze stopped at me. There was a flicker of “oh no” in his expression. Not that it was a surprise. And the feeling was mutual.
    Lieutenant Borgnine had moved up to Cadbury after spending years working for the Los Angeles Police Department. I think he viewed working in Cadbury as retirement with pay since the crime rate was very low in the small town. Murder had been unheard of for years. And then suddenly there seemed to be an upturn in the homicides, which unfortunately seemed to coincide with my moving to town. It wasn’t my fault, honest. There was a little more to the tension between us. Let’s just say he’d been wrong and I’d been right on a number of cases.
    He was just a little taller than me with a firepluglike shape. His hair was salt and pepper, heavy on the salt, and cut so short it was more like stubble around a generous bald spot. The rumpled gray-toned sport coat seemed to be his uniform. I still hadn’t figured out if he had a number of them that all looked the same or he just always wore the same one. The surprise was, he had jeans on instead of his usual slacks. They weren’t the form-fitting kind of jeans that Dane wore. I’d classify Lieutenant Borgnine’s loose-fitting pair as grandpa jeans.
    He had zeroed in on me and crossed directly to where I was sitting. “I dressed in a hurry,” he said in a curt voice, apparently noticing that I had focused on his pant choice. “Let’s get down to business,” he said, taking out his notebook. “I understand you found the victim.” He was doing his best to sound professional, but there was a tinge of disappointment as if, if there had to be a victim, he wished anybody else in the world had found her.
    I nodded and he continued. “Is the victim one of your retreat people?”
    â€œNo,” I answered.
    â€œAny personal involvement with her?” Again I said no and he seemed a little relieved. “Then you’ll just answer any question without a problem.” He said it more as a statement but left it hanging like a question. Maybe we’d had a little problem in the past of me asking him too many questions and answering too few of his.
    I wasn’t looking to be disagreeable. In fact, I wanted to give him the information about her as quickly as possible, hoping he’d let me go without bringing up the long tail of silks. I was hoping that the lieutenant would think it was just a scarf she’d been wearing.
    â€œDiane Rathman is the wife of the president of the organization putting on the My Favorite Year 1963 retreat.” I still used the word
is
. Wishful thinking maybe? “I don’t know her. In fact, I have never even spoken to her.” I mentioned that I’d been with Madeleine Delacorte, hoping that he was like the rest of the town and viewed her as local royalty. “I overheard a conversation with her husband, Norman Rathman, and he seemed surprised that she’d come. And not so happy about it, either.” As I said it, I dipped my head toward where Norman Rathman was sitting. I wanted to imply something without saying it. To somehow make it so that Lieutenant Borgnine would think it was his