Читать книгу Murder At the Cubbyhole - Alice Zogg - Страница 9

At eleven o’clock on Saturday morning, R. A. Huber stood on the sidewalk and looked up at the building with large lettering across its façade: Pine Forest Apartments. Shaking her head, she paused before ascending the exterior stairs to apartment number 9C on the second floor. There were neither pines nor forests anywhere near the apartment complex, located a short distance away from Pasadena City College.

Loud music was sounding from apartment 9C and she had to ring the doorbell twice before being heard. When the door finally flew open, Huber was looking at a slightly out of breath young woman with sharp features and hair pulled back into a pony tail. She was barefoot, wearing an athletic bra and exercise shorts, barely covering her buttocks.

“Amber Pierce? I’m R. A. Huber.”

“Oh, is it eleven already?” Amber asked, her breathing returning to normal. “Come on in.”

She pushed the “off” button on the CD remote, pointed to the only available chair in the room, and said, “Have a seat. I was choreographing a new aerobic dance routine.” She cleared away one corner of the sofa piled with laundry, and flopped herself down.

Huber asked, “You work at a local gym, correct?”

“That’s right. It’s just around the corner. I teach aerobic fitness classes and am also a personal trainer.”

“I can see that you’re a good role model for your clientele; you look perfectly fit!”

“Thank you!”

“Now let’s get to the reason I came to see you.”

Amber said, “Like I mentioned on the phone and already told the police weeks ago, I didn’t know Megan well. We were just roomies.”

“That is actually a plus.”

“What?”

“Not having been close, perhaps you can give me a more objective account of the kind of young woman she was.”

“I guess so. And since you’re asking, let me tell you, she wasn’t the easiest person to live with. Stuck-up is what I’d have called her. You couldn’t keep a real conversation going as she walked around the place forever practicing her lines. Every morning she hogged the bathroom, getting herself all dolled up before going to work. Worst of all, she was a neat freak. If I left anything sitting around without putting it away in what she considered ‘its proper place’, she tossed it in the trash.”

Huber glanced around the messy room and remarked, “I take it that your present roommate is not plagued by neatness.”

Amber stated, “I haven’t found a replacement yet.” And she could not hide the resentment in her voice when she added, “Megan left me stranded and I have to come up with the rent money all by myself.”

“Did she have many friends?”

“Not real friends; she mostly hung around her theater group crowd. She did call and text an old girlfriend in Portland a lot, though.”

“Any boyfriends?”

“When she first moved in, a guy hung around, but she wasn’t interested.”

“Do you know his name?”

“I can’t remember.”

“Anyone else?”

“She had lots of admirers and dated some of them. Megan was good looking, I grant her that.”

“But no one serious?”

“Not that I’d noticed.”

“How long have you known Megan?”

“Two years.”

“So the two of you found this apartment to share?”

“Oh please! I’ve been renting here for four years and had other roommates before her. I just put an ad in the local paper, you know, ‘Room for rent.’”

Huber said, “Now tell me what you know about what happened on the evening of the premiere at the Cubbyhole Theater.”

“I have nothing to tell. The explosion was as much of a shock to me as to everyone else.”

“Were you there?”

“Sure. Megan talked of nothing else for days, so I felt pressured to see the play.”

“Did you enjoy it?”

“What a morbid thing for you to ask!” she answered, clearly offended.

“I meant before the explosion.”

“Oh! Yes, I did like the stage performance of From Sin to Virtue. I’ll admit Megan was really good as Vanity.”

“Was her behavior different that day or the days before the opening of the play?”

“She was excited and a bit nervous, but otherwise her usual arrogant self.”

“Do you think she was frightened of anyone?”

“No, and if she was, she wouldn’t tell me. As you figured, we weren’t that close.”

“Did you hear the explosion?”

“It was hardly a thing you could’ve avoided hearing and feeling the vibrations from.”

“Where exactly were you when the blast hit?”

“I was just coming back from the ladies room and we were on our way out of the theater when we heard the explosion. We hit the floor, covering our heads with both arms, thinking it was either an earthquake or a holdup.”

“Who is ‘we’?”

“Me and my boyfriend. I’m sure he doesn’t want to get involved, so I’d rather not give you his name.”

“Did Megan have any enemies?”

Amber thought about it for a moment before she answered, “I imagine that she was a pain in the neck to many people, but I can’t see that anybody hated her enough to want to murder her.”

“Do you have a theory as to the incident at the Cubbyhole?”

“Maybe the bomb was meant to kill someone else and was placed in the wrong spot. The target might have been somewhere else backstage or even sitting among the spectators.”

“That’s an idea. I’ll keep it in mind.”

R. A. Huber got up to leave and said, “Thank you for your time. And good luck with finding a new roommate.”

Before she was halfway down the stairs, she could hear the music blaring out of Amber’s apartment again.