Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 44, No. 7 & 8, July/August 1999

“Sorry to bother you this morning.” He showed identification. “I’m making some routine inquiries about a homicide in the neighborhood.”

“In this neighborhood?” She yawned and clutched her terrycloth bathrobe more tightly around her. “Come in.”

As Auburn stepped into the entry hall, she touched a wall switch. Instantly a long corridor came alive with a blaze of multicolored fights that was like nothing he had ever seen outside of a penny arcade. Illuminated beer signs in seven colors of neon, some flashing off and on and others with moving parts, clustered so thickly along both sides of the passage from floor to ceiling that hardly a square inch of wall showed anywhere. The blaze of fight was so sudden and so dazzling that Auburn couldn’t suppress a start.

“Wild, isn’t it?” said the woman.

“Makes me thirsty just looking at them.” It seemed the sort of thing he was expected to say, though as a matter of feet beer gave him violent headaches. “You’ve got some money tied up there.”

“Oh, beer signs are cheap. It’s the animated displays and antique toys that break you up.” She padded ahead of him in her furry mules to a sunny morning room where half a dozen miniature merry-go-rounds were set out on tables and stands. One was a miracle of gold filigree work. Another had been built along the fines of a Gothic cathedral and had statues of the twelve apostles instead of horses.

“We’re doing a book on elektrokitsch,” she explained through another colossal yawn.

“A book on which?”

“Elektrokitsch. You know what kitsch is, right? Tacky, tasteless junk that passes for high art with the working classes? Extruded plastic stuff, gimcrack souvenirs, paintings on black velvet. That kind of trash. Well, we collect elektrokitsch. Statues of saints with haloes that light up. Statues of Elvis that wiggle their pelvis. Here, look at this.”

She turned on one of the merry-go-rounds, which sprang into life with flashing multicolored lights and a raucous carnival tune produced by a miniature band organ.

Auburn smiled and nodded. He was relieved when his pulling out a blank file card prompted her to shut the thing off.

“May I ask your name?”

“Monica Rayster,” she said, adding, “Mrs. John D.,” as if that should mean something to him. It didn’t.

“Were you home all day yesterday?”

“Yes. All day and all night. My husband’s in South America buying wood.”

“Did you have any visitors here at the house yesterday or last evening?”

“No.” She was struggling desperately to wake up. “Did I hear you say somebody was killed?”

“A body was found this morning down by Route 5.”

“Oh, I’m not surprised. You wouldn’t believe what goes on down there at night. Sometimes we can hear them yelling at three o’clock in the morning. Mostly kids. And they love to throw their beer cans up in our woods.”

“Did you hear anything last night?”

“Not that I can remember.”

“Did you notice anything happening in the neighborhood last evening — unusual activity at the neighbors’, strange cars...”

“Oh no. The Roetherls go to bed at eight o’clock, and there’s never any traffic on the road out there.” She was yawning so intensely and repeatedly that Auburn had to struggle to keep from doing it, too.

On his way out he caught glimpses of two other rooms full of elektrokitsch. As he retraced his steps along Roseland Court, he pondered the irony that a woman who expressed such contempt for the taste of the working class — to which Auburn was proud to belong — should fill her house with the very rubbish she affected to despise.

He arrived back at his car just as the mortuary crew — private contractors looking more than ever this morning like a couple of hoodlums — drove away with the body in an unmarked, low-slung, silver-gray hearse that belonged in a museum.

Stamaty was rolling up pieces of yellow plastic tape and stuffing them in his pockets. “Get anything up there?”

“I don’t think so.” He filled Stamaty in on the residents of Rose-land Court.

“Karl Roetherl? How old?”

“Maybe sixty-five.”

Stamaty meditated. “Couldn’t be the same guy. A Karl Roetherl built both of the steel bridges downtown and half the buildings, including the county courthouse and Pierce Hall. But that was back in the twenties and thirties. This guy could be his son, maybe grandson.”

“Let’s head for Brendel’s place.” Auburn gave him the number on Whatman, and they drove there, together but separately.

Kestrel had taken Brendel’s car keys, but Stamaty had the rest of the ring. They knocked twice before entering the apartment, which was on the ground floor and had its own entrance off a closed court.