Frazier was a short man in his fifties, stout, with iron gray hair cut into a flattop. He was wearing khaki slacks, a red golf shirt, and a blue sport coat. His nose was red, and spidery red veins webbed his cheekbones. He looked like he should be carrying a bowling bag. He took the phone away from his mouth and asked, “Davenport?”
Lucas nodded and Frazier said into the phone, “Could be a while, but I don’t know how long.” He hung up, grinned at Lucas as they shook hands, and said, “My old lady. My first priority is to get the dry cleaning and the cat food. My second priority is to solve the Donaldson killing.”
“You gotta have your priorities,” Lucas said. He looked up at the mansion. “That’s a hell of a house,” Lucas said. “Just like the Bucher house. When are the Booths…?”
“Probably about seven minutes from now,” Frazier said, looking at his watch. “They always keep me waiting about seven or eight minutes, to make a point, I think. We’re the public servants, and they are…I don’t know. The Dukes of Earl, or something.”
“Like that,” Lucas said.
“Yup.” He handed Lucas a brown-paper portfolio, as thick as a metropolitan phone book. “This is every piece of paper we have on the Donaldson case. Took me two hours to Xerox it. Most of it’s bullshit, but I thought you might as well have it all.”
“Let me put it in the truck,” Lucas said.
He ran the paper back to the truck, then caught Frazier halfway up the sidewalk to the house. “Isn’t a hell of a lot to see, but you might as well see it,” Frazier said.
FRAZIER HAD KEYS. Inside, the house smelled empty, the odor of dry wallpaper and floor wax. The furniture was sparse and to Lucas’s eye, undistinguished, except that it was old. The few paintings on the walls were mostly oil portraits gone dark with age. As they walked around, their footfalls echoed down the hallways; the only other sound was the mechanical whir of an air-conditioner fan.
“What’s going on here is that the house isn’t worth all that much,” Frazier said. “It’d need a lot of updating before you’d want to take out a mortgage on it. New wiring, new plumbing, new heating system, new roof, new windows, new siding. Basically, it’d cost you a million bucks to get the place into tip-top shape.”
“But the woman who lived here was rich?”
“Very rich. She was also very old,” Frazier said. “Her friends say she didn’t want to be annoyed by a lot of renovation when she only had a few years left. So. She didn’t do some things, and the house was perfectly fine for the way she used it. Went to Palm Beach in the winter, and so on.”
After Donaldson was murdered, Frazier said, the Booths tried to sell it, but it didn’t sell. Then somebody came up with the idea that the Booths could donate the place to the city as a rich-lumber-family museum. That idea limped along and then somebody else suggested it could be a venue for arts programs.
“Basically, what was going on is, the Booths couldn’t sell it, so they were encouraging all this other bullshit. They’d donate the house and a few paintings and old tables to the city at some ridiculous valuation, like two million bucks, which they would then deduct from their income tax,” Frazier said. “That’d save them, what, about eight hundred thousand dollars? If they can’t get that done, if the house just sits here and rots…well, what they’ve got is about two city lots at fifty thousand dollars each, and it’d probably cost them half of that to get the place torn down and carted away. In the meantime, they pay property tax.”
“Life is tough and then you die,” Lucas said.
“Wasn’t tough for the Booths,” Frazier grunted. “They’ve been rich forever…You want to see where the murder was?”
Donaldson had been killed in the kitchen. There was nothing to see but slightly dusty hardwood floors and appliances that had stepped out of 1985. The refrigerator and stove were a shade of tobacco-juice yellow that Lucas remembered from his first house.
“Very cold,” Frazier said. “I’d talked myself into the idea that it was a traveling killer, passing through, saw a light and wanted money and a sandwich, and went up and killed her with a crappy .22. Stood there and ate the sandwich and looked at the body and never gave