Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder

of.”
    Asked about the woman’s name, Lita Bowen didn’t know it. All she knew was what Dorothy had told her.
    Lita said that she had thought a lot about something that had happened on Sunday night/Monday morning, only about fourteen hours before Dorothy Jones died.
    “I went out Sunday night, and Dorothy had plans to go to the Esquire Club. When I got home at four in the morning, there was a message that Dorothy had called me at three. I didn’t call her back because I was exhausted and I figured she’d just called to tell me that she’d had a good time or something. I decided to call her when I woke up. Well, she called my apartment again at three on Monday afternoon to say she wanted to talk to me. She told my roommate to tell me she’d gone to see about some shoes for Carl and would be back shortly. I called her at five, five-thirty, and five-forty-five. But nobody answered. I figured she’d changed her mind about going to bingo so I went without her. I didn’t find out she was dead until the next day. Now, I really wish I’d called her at 4 A.M. on Monday morning. Maybe I could have saved her life or something.”
    Witnesses had seen Dorothy Jones about to enter her house at 5 P.M. on Monday afternoon. Yet she didn’t answer any of the calls made to her between five and six. Someone had picked her phone up once during this time—at about 5:20—but whoever did that didn’t say anything, and the receiver had been replaced. Was someone waiting inside for Dorothy—perhaps someone who would not permit her to answer her phone?
    Lita Bowen verified further that Dorothy Jones was almost paranoid about keeping her doors and windows locked. She reiterated that Dorothy didn’t smoke and discouraged smokers. “She said, ‘You can smoke—but don’t blow it in my face,’ so nobody felt comfortable smoking in her house. And she never allowed ashtrays upstairs in the bedrooms.”

    It was January 11 when Inspector Jim Reed found Dante Blackwell, the man rumored to be Dorothy Jones’s lover. Blackwell, forty-three, was a handsome and expensively dressed businessman, somewhat flamboyant and very confident. He didn’t deny that he and Dorothy had been intimate friends. He said he had been dating her for four months and paying some of her bills.
    “I gave her $300 to buy her plane ticket to Texas,” he said. “She was very excited about the trip. She had lots of friends there, and she loved to travel.”
    “When did you see her last?” Reed asked.
    “Monday—that last Monday. She came into my store. We’d been to the Esquire Club until two-thirty the night before. She was on her way home when I saw her in the store. She said she was going to see the shoe man and said she wanted to buy me a pair of shoes, too. When I told her I didn’t want any, she said she could buy me a present if she wanted to, so I told her to do what she liked. Then she left, but she called me from home about five. She was upstairs and I could hear the TV. We only talked a minute or two.”
    Blackwell said that Dorothy was afraid of something, and that she planned to have her door locks changed. He didn’t know, though, specifically what she feared. Asked about the man who’d threatened her at the club, Blackwell shook his head slightly. “I think that was just a guy who wanted to date her and she told him to forget it, but I don’t think she was upset about it—or scared.”
    Blackwell said that man had a reputation as a woman beater, and Dorothy didn’t like him.
    Dorothy had told Dante that she planned to place her valuables in the trunk of her car and park it at his house while she was in Texas over the Christmas holidays.
    Blackwell, too, said that Dorothy was a very modest woman who never walked around naked. “She wouldn’t even walk from the bedroom to the bathroom without slipping on a robe.”
    Lita Bowen had said that Dorothy hadn’t allowed ashtrays in her bedrooms, but Blackwell explained the one arson investigators had found next to her burning bed.
    “She put it there as a favor to me,” he said. “I like to smoke—after…well, you know.”
    Dante Blackwell said that Dorothy had had three expensive diamond rings that she routinely wore. This was surprising because she certainly hadn’t been wearing them when she died, and they had not been found in her jewelry chest. For some people, rings worth a few thousand dollars might have been enough motive for murder.
    Blackwell had a solid alibi. He said