Murder is a Girl's Best Friend by Amanda Matetsky Page B

called out, “Are all of the apartments in this building the same as yours, Mrs. Londergan? Same layout, same number of rooms?”
    “Yep!” she answered, running some water, clanging a pot on the stove. “They’re all the same. Skinny little railroads with open-ended rooms. Makes it easier for the cockroaches to get around. The only room that has a door is the bathroom. Gotta be grateful for small favors.” She had a deep voice for a woman, and a flat midwestern accent.
    “Judy Catcher lived right across the hall from you, right? In 2D?”
    “That’s right,” she said, adding nothing but a long, sad, heavy sigh. She opened and closed the refrigerator, scraped and scrambled through the silverware drawer, then rattled some china around. I thought she was making more noise than was absolutely necessary, but I could have been imagining things. Or maybe this was just the normal kind of racket made by a very large woman living in a very small space.
    “Did you hear or see anything the night Judy was shot?” I asked.
    “No. I wasn’t home. I was down the street at Milly Es terbrook’s playing canasta. Our landlord discovered the body and it had already been removed by the time I got home.”
    “Terry told me that you and Judy were really close—that she was like a daughter to you.”
    “That’s true,” she said. “I really loved that girl. Did my best to help her. Her mother died when she was just a baby, so . . . hey, whaddaya want in your tea? Cream? Lemon? Sugar?”
    “Nothing at all, thank you,” I said, just hoping to speed the process along. I really wanted cream and sugar, but I didn’t want to make her take the time. My throat was getting sore from talking so loudly. “So what was Judy like?” I probed, trying to get her involved in the conversation instead of the tea preparation. “Was she as tough and feisty as Terry said she was, or was that just an act—a ploy to hide her insecurity?”
    For some reason, that question got Mrs. Londergan’s undivided attention. Suddenly planting her large body in the doorless doorway from the kitchen to the sitting room, she propped both hands on her hips, craned her sharply sculpted chin toward me, and said, “Okay, Paige Turner. Why are you really here? You say you’re a friend of Terry Catcher’s, but how do I know that’s true? You could be a goddamn insurance investigator, for all I know. Why do you want to talk to me about Judy? Why are you asking me all these sneaky questions?”
    “I’m sorry, Mrs. Londergan,” I quickly replied. “I should have explained myself sooner. I’m a writer, a true crime reporter. I work for Daring Detective magazine, and Terry Catcher has asked me to look into the facts surrounding his sister’s death. He believes Judy was intentionally murdered, not killed during a random burglary.”
    She softened her wide shoulders and pulled in her chin. “Oh,” she said, staring down at the sitting room carpet for a few seconds. Then she returned to the kitchen and knocked some more china around. Finally, after what seemed like an hour but was probably less than a minute, she came back into the sitting room carrying two cups of tea on a small tray. She set the tray down on the table, and sat herself down in the chair across from me.
    “You know, I wondered about that myself,” she said, aiming her eyes (which were every bit as blue as the Duke’s) directly into mine. “I thought, what if there really wasn’t any burglary? What if Judy knew the person who killed her? I asked the police about this, but they said I was barking up the wrong tree—that I had no reason to question their findings. The detective in charge, a nasty little man named Sweeny, actually told me to stop being a busybody. I don’t know about you, but I really hate it when a man patronizes me like that. Makes me want to knock his block off.”
    I laughed out loud. Not only did I share Mrs. Londergan’s sentiments about patronizing men, but I knew that