"Don't open it!" I shrieked, as Robin opened it, and out fell a bloodstained hatchet, to land with a thud on the packed leaves in the ditch.

Chapter 14

While Robin stood guard over the horrible thing in the alley, I knocked on the door of one of the apartments. I could hear a baby screaming inside, so I knew someone was awake.

The exhausted young woman who answered the door was still in her nightgown. She was trusting enough to open the door to a stranger, and tired enough to accept my need to use her telephone incuriously. The baby screamed while I looked up the number of the police station, and kept it up while I dialled and talked to the desk officer, who had some trouble understanding what I was trying to tell him. When I hung up and thanked the young woman, the baby was still crying, though it had ebbed to a whimper.

"Poor baby," I said tentatively.

"It's colic," she explained. "The doctor says the worst should be over soon." Aside from occasionally babysitting my half-brother Phillip when he was small, I knew nothing about babies. So I was glad to hear that the child had a specific complaint. By the time I thanked her and she shut the door behind me, I could hear the child starting to cry again.

I trudged back to the alley where Robin was sitting glumly, his back propped against the fence on the side opposite the apartments. "Me and my great ideas," I said bitterly, plopping down beside him.

He let that pass in a gentlemanly manner.

"Cover it up," I suggested. "I can't stand it."

"How, without getting fingerprints on it? More fingerprints, that is." We solved that problem as a mist began to dampen my hair against my cheeks. I found a stick and Robin stuck it under the edge of the briefcase, lifting it and dragging it over the hatchet with its dreadful stains. We settled back against the fence, able now to hear the sirens approaching. I felt oddly calm. "I wonder if I'll ever get my briefcase back," Robin said. "Someone came in our parking lot and reached in my car, and took my briefcase, so he could use it for hiding a murder weapon. I'd been thinking, Roe, when this case is all over, if it ever is, that I might try my hand at nonfiction. I'm here, I'm involved through knowing some of the people. I even met the Buckleys the very night before they were killed. I was there when you and your mother opened the chocolates. Now I'm here finding a murder weapon in my briefcase, and I'm telling you, I don't like this much anymore. I don't think I even want the damn briefcase as a memento, now that I think of it." But after sitting for a moment in silence, he murmured, "Wait till I tell my agent." The surface of his glasses began to be speckled with tiny drops of moisture. I took my own off and wiped them with a Kleenex. "I've got to admire your lack of fear, Robin," I said.

"Lack of fear?"

"You think they're not going to want to ask you a few questions?" I said pointedly.

He had only seconds to absorb this and look dismayed before an unmarked car pulled in the alley, with a patrol car right behind it. For some reason, we stood up.

And God bless me, who should emerge from the unmarked car but my friend Lynn Liggett, and she was mad as a wet hen.

"You're everywhere!" she said to me. "I know you didn't do these murders, but I swear every time I turn around you're right in front of me!" She shook her head, as if trying to shake me out of it. Then words seemed to fail her. Her glance fell on the overturned open briefcase, with the handle of the hatchet protruding slightly from underneath.

"Who covered it up?" she said next. After we told her, and she lifted the briefcase from the bloody hatchet with the same stick, all her attention was on the murder weapon.

Yet another car appeared behind the patrol car. My heart sank even deeper as Jack Burns heaved himself out and strolled towards us. His body language said he was out for a casual amble in a pleasant neighborhood but his dark eyes snapped with anger and menace.

He stopped at the patrolmen, apparently the ones who had conducted the original alley search the day before and blistered them up and down in language I had only seen in print. Robin and I watched with interest as they began to search the alley for anything that might have been left by the murderer. I was willing to bet that if he'd left any other trace in the alley, this time it would be found.

People began to emerge from the apartments, and the alley that had seemed so silent and deserted began to be positively crowded. I saw the curtain move at the apartment of the young mother, and hoped the baby had calmed down by now. It occurred to me that this woman was the most likely to have seen something the previous day, since she was probably up almost all the time. I started to suggest this to Detective Liggett, but I reconsidered in time to save my head from being bitten off.

The hatchet and briefcase bagged, the policewoman turned back to us.

"Did you touch the briefcase, Miss Teagarden?" she asked me directly.

I shook my head.

"So you did," she said to Robin, who nodded meekly. "You're someone else who turns up everywhere."

Finally Robin began to look worried.

"You need to go down to the station and have your fingerprints taken," Lynn said brusquely.

"I had them made the other night," Robin reminded her. "Everyone at the Real Murders meeting had his or her prints taken."

This reminder did not endear him to the detective.

"Whose idea was this stroll through the alley?" Lynn counterattacked.

We looked at each other.

"Well," I began, "I started wondering how the Buckleys' murderer had reached their house without being seen..."

"But it was definitely me that wanted to go through this alley as well as the one behind the Buckley house," Robin said manfully. "Listen, you two," Lynn said with an assumed calm, "you don't seem to understand the real world very well."

Robin and I didn't care for that accusation. I felt him stiffen beside me, and I drew myself up and narrowed my eyes.

"We are the police, and we are paid too damn little to investigate murders, but that's what we do. We don't sit and read about them, we solve them. We find clues, and we track down leads, and we knock on doors." She paused and took a deep breath. I had found several flaws in her speech so far, but I wasn't about to point out to her that Arthur read a lot about murders and that the police so far hadn't solved a thing and that the clue of the hatchet would still be in the damn ditch if Robin and I hadn't unearthed it.

I had enough sense of self-preservation not to say those things. When Robin cleared his throat, I stepped on his toes.

I was sorry I'd stopped- him a moment later when Lynn really began questioning him. I wouldn't have stood to her questioning as well as he, and I had to admire his composure. I could see that it did look peculiar,- Robin arrives in town, the murders start. But I knew that Mamie Wright's murder had been planned before Robin came to live in Lawrenceton, and the chocolates had been sent to Mother even earlier. The officer pointed out, though, that Robin had been present at the discovery of Mamie Wright's body, having invited himself to a Real Murders meeting on his first night in town. And he'd been at my house when I'd received the chocolate box.

Lynn was certainly not the only detective who thought Robin's presence at so many key scenes was fishy. And perhaps I was not as clear and free of suspicion as Arthur had assured me, because when Jack Burns took up the questioning he was looking from Robin to me with some significance. Here, he seemed to be thinking, is someone big who could have helped this woman get Pettigrue's body in the bathtub.