Chapter 28
* * *
Joe O’Hara strolled into the kitchen just as Michael poured the last of the wine into Leigh’s glass. In one startled glance, he took in the dimmed lights and cozy scene, and tried to back out of the room. “Excuse me—”
“Wait, Joe—don’t leave,” Leigh said, anxious to correct his impression. “I want to introduce you properly to Mr. Valente—”
“We already met, Mrs. Manning. Remember? Last Friday?”
Despite all her very serious woes, Leigh laughed at his baffled expression. “Of course I remember. What I’m trying to say is that I didn’t remember that I knew Mr. Valente when I saw him on Friday. Many years ago, when I was in college and living downtown, he worked in his family’s grocery market on the corner, and I used to shop there. He had a beard and I didn’t know his name, but his aunt—who I thought was his mother until tonight—made shrimp pizzas just for me!”
O’Hara’s gaze bounced to the empty wine bottle, then shifted accusingly to Michael Valente. “How much of that wine have you given Mrs. Manning?”
“I am not drunk, Joe. I’m trying to explain why I didn’t recognize Michael until tonight. He saved me from being mugged—and probably much worse—one night.”
“And I guess you probably forgot to ask his name afterwards?” Joe O’Hara suggested, but instead of sounding skeptical, the loyal chauffeur sounded as if he were trying to believe the unbelievable. He approached the table, ready to acknowledge the formal introduction that Leigh, in her present state of mind, felt was absolutely necessary.
“I knew his name at the time,” Leigh explained, “but in those days, everyone in Michael’s neighborhood had nicknames. He was called Hawk back then—Falco in Italian—and Falco is the only name I knew him by, until tonight.”
O’Hara reached out to shake Michael Valente’s hand, but his announcement carried an unmistakable warning to the other man: “We had nicknames in my neighborhood, too,” he said bluntly. “My nickname was Bruiser.”
Leigh swallowed a laugh at Michael’s grave response. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
When Hilda returned from her afternoon out a short while later, Joe O’Hara imparted the same information to her about Valente while Leigh and Michael looked on. It was the only relief from anguish and suspense that Leigh had known in a week. It ended abruptly when the telephone rang.
Hilda answered it, spoke briefly to the caller; then she turned slowly to the table. “Detective Littleton and a Detective Lieutenant McCord are on their way up here.”
Leigh jumped up from the table and rushed into the living room, filled with hope and fear.
In the kitchen, Hilda looked worriedly at O’Hara and lowered her voice. “Detective Littleton wanted to be sure Mrs. Manning wasn’t alone. She wanted to be certain someone would be here with her—”
“That doesn’t sound good,” O’Hara said, turning automatically to Michael Valente for his opinion. “Does it?”
“No,” Valente said tightly. “It isn’t good.” He nodded toward the doorway. “Both of you need to go out there and stay with her.”
O’Hara did not suggest that Valente step into view along with them. He had already seen how Leigh was treated by the police when she was with him. Instead, Joe took Hilda’s arm and they went into the living room.
Michael Valente remained out of sight, listening to the voices in the living room, unable to protect her—or even stand at her side—while she heard news he knew was going to wound her more deeply that any assailant’s knife. . . .
Leigh looked at both detectives’ faces, her mind trying to reject what they were telling her. “You’re wrong! He wasn’t at the cabin. I was there. You found someone else!”
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Manning,” Detective Littleton said. “There is no doubt. His body was discovered in his car, in a garage cut into the hillside behind the house.”
Her tear-brightened eyes grew huge with anguished accusation. “He froze to death while you people wasted time—”
“He did not freeze to death,” the man who called himself Detective McCord told her unemotionally. “Your husband died of a gunshot wound to the head. The weapon was on the floor of his automobile.”
Wildly, Leigh shook her head. “Are you crazy? Are you telling me you found a man who shot himself in his car and you think it’s my husband? Logan would never do that! He would never, never, never do that!”
Leigh believed none of it, none of it . . . except that Logan was dead. No matter how much she stood there, trying to argue, she already knew he was dead. He would have come home to her days before if he’d been alive. He would have crawled or hitchhiked or dragged himself. She felt Hilda’s arm slide around her shoulders, and she twisted the hem of her sweater like a frantic child trying to understand why the grown-ups were punishing her. “He—he did NOT kill himself, do you hear me?” she cried. “You’re lying. Why are you lying?”
“We don’t think your husband took his own life,” McCord told her bluntly. “We’ll know more tomorrow, but at this point, we have reason to believe someone else pulled the trigger on his revolver.”
Leigh’s vivid imagination chose that moment to display a horrific scene—Logan, with a gun held to his head by someone else. Someone else pulling the trigger, ending his life. Ending her life. The room began to sway and twist, and she clutched at Hilda’s sleeve. Her eyes swimming with scalding tears, she looked at the kinder of the two detectives, and she nodded her head, as if by nodding at Sam Littleton, she could force the other woman to nod, too, and agree with her. “He’s wrong, isn’t he? He is. Say he is.” She held out her hand to her. “Please. Say he is.”
Detective Littleton’s soft voice was sympathetic but certain. “No, Mrs. Manning, he isn’t wrong. I’m very sorry . . .”
HILDA PUT HER TO BED that night. O’Hara fixed two stiff drinks and made Hilda have one of them. He finished his, and escorted the heartbroken housekeeper to her room; then he went to his own room and had two more drinks, leaving Michael Valente to let himself out.
At eleven o’clock, Joe got up to make certain everything was locked up. He was partway across the silent living room when he realized Valente hadn’t left. The man was sitting on an uncomfortable, straight-backed chair at the far end of the living room, next to the hallway leading to the master bedroom. His head was bent, his forearms propped on his thighs, hands clasped loosely in front of him. He was listening to the anguished weeping of the woman down the hall.
He had stationed himself there like a centurion.
As Joe silently moved closer, trying to decide what to say, Valente wearily rubbed his hands over his face.
“Are you plannin’ to sit there all night?” Joe asked softly.
The other man jerked his hands away and looked up. “No,” he said.
If Joe hadn’t had those drinks, he would have kept his realization about the other man’s motives to himself, but he had been drinking, so he didn’t do that. Instead, he said, “You might as well go home and get some sleep, Hawk. You can’t do anything to protect her from what she’s going through tonight.”
Valente neither confirmed nor denied Joe’s interpretation of his motives for being there. Instead, he stood up and slowly put on the jacket he’d hung over the back of his chair. “In that case, Bruiser, I’ll leave her to you.”
Chapter 29
* * *
“I know this is a difficult time for you, Mrs. Manning,” Sam Littleton said as she and McCord sat down in the living room the next morning. Shrader was in the kitchen, interviewing the housekeeper, the chauffeur, and the secretary. “We’ll try to make this visit as brief as possible,” Sam continued. “There are some questions we need to ask you, and some of them may seem offensive or even cruel, but I assure you they are just routine. They’re the same questions we ask every spouse after a homicide.”
Sam paused, waiting for some response from the pale, shattered woman across from her. “Mrs. Manning?” Sam prompted.
>
Leigh pulled her gaze from the large crystal starfish on the end table next to McCord’s elbow. Logan had fallen in love with the beautiful crystal piece in Newport last summer, and she’d surprised him with it when they got home. “I’m sorry, I was thinking about something else. What do you want to ask me?”
“Now that you’ve had a few hours to adjust to the tragic news of your husband’s death, can you think of any reason why someone might have wanted to kill him?”
A few hours to adjust, Leigh thought in disbelief. She was going to need a few lifetimes to adjust. “I—I stayed awake all last night, thinking about that, and the only thing that makes any sense is that it was some sort of hideous, unplanned event. Maybe some lunatic vagrant has been living up there, and he felt—believed—the place belonged to him. Then, when he saw Logan bringing things into the house and putting his car away, he got out his gun and—he killed him.”
“Unfortunately, that theory isn’t supported by the facts,” Sam told her. “The thirty-eight-caliber revolver found on the floor of your husband’s vehicle was registered to your husband.” When Leigh stared at her, Sam said, “Did you know your husband owned a handgun?”
“No. I had no idea.” Leigh couldn’t, wouldn’t believe that anyone had actually planned in advance to murder her husband, so she tried to make the new facts fit her scenario. “If there was some psychopath living in the cabin, then it’s possible he followed my husband to his car, and when Logan got out the gun, there was a struggle, and the gun went off accidentally.”
Detective Littleton evidently thought Leigh’s theory was too far-fetched to consider because she ignored it and asked another question. “Can you think of some reason why your husband might have felt he needed to carry a gun?”
Leigh tried to think of an explanation, no matter how outlandish. After a few moments, she said slowly, “In the last few years, Logan has branched into commercial construction. I know there are labor unions involved, and from what I’ve read, things can get—” Leigh stopped. “No, wait—I was being stalked. That must be why Logan bought a gun.”
“When did you first become aware of this stalker?”
“A couple of months ago. We filed a police report. You have the records.”
Sam made a note, but she already knew the police report had been filed in September, six months after Logan Manning purchased his handgun. “How would you describe your relationship with your husband? Were you happily married?”
“Yes. Very.”
“Did he confide in you?”
“Of course.”
“Think carefully. Did he mention being worried about anything—business problems, for example.”
“Logan’s business has been doing extremely well. Particularly for the last two or three years. He didn’t have any business problems.”
“Has he seemed preoccupied?”
“No more than usual.”
“Would you mind if we spoke to the people at his office?” The question was purely rhetorical, since McCord had already compiled the employees’ names and divided them between Sam, Shrader, and himself for later questioning.
“Please speak to anyone you like,” Leigh said. “Do whatever you think you need to do.”
“Who else did your husband confide in, besides you?”
“No one.”
“He didn’t have any close friends?”
“We were each other’s closest friend.”
“I see. Then you don’t have any close friends, either? People you confide in?”
She said it in a way deliberately designed to make Leigh feel like an antisocial loner if she couldn’t come up with a single friend either of them had, and the ploy worked. “I’m in show business, and my friends are mostly in the arts and entertainment world. They tend to be people who enjoy publicity more than privacy, so they aren’t very good at keeping secrets—their own or mine. I’ve learned not to confide things that I don’t want to appear in Liz Smith’s column or the Enquirer.”
Detective Littleton nodded as if she completely understood, but her words proved she was frustratingly single-minded. “According to an item I read in Page Six in the Post about your birthday party, there were over three hundred people here to celebrate with you. Didn’t you or your husband know any of them well enough to confide something, sometime?”
Leigh realized that if she didn’t give Sam Littleton some names, the detective was likely to keep pressing her on this pointless topic until nightfall, so she mentally replayed a few minutes of her party, and gave Sam Littleton the names of the first people who came to mind: “Jason Solomon is a friend of mine.”
“Personal as well as business?”
“Yes. Sybil Haywood is another friend; so is Theta Berenson . . .”
“The artist?”
“Yes. Oh, and Sheila Winters. Dr. Winters is a friend of mine and also of my husband’s.”
Sam made a note. “Dr. Winters? Did your husband have any serious health problems?”
“No. Sheila is a psychiatrist.”
McCord spoke for the first time. “Were you patients of hers?”
Leigh felt uneasy about the question, as if she’d laid a trap for herself. “We saw her briefly several years ago as patients. Now she is simply a close friend of ours.”
“Who needed the psychiatrist?” McCord said bluntly. “You or your husband?”
Leigh was on the verge of telling him to mind his own business, and she would have if Sam Littleton hadn’t quickly said, “You don’t have to answer that question, Mrs. Manning, if it will make you feel at all uncomfortable. Lieutenant McCord and I haven’t worked together before, but from the sound of his question, he’s one of those men who prides himself on letting a cold turn into pneumonia rather than seeing a doctor. He probably changes the oil in his own car and pulls his own tooth, rather than going to a dentist.” She smiled warmly at Leigh. “Unlike the lieutenant, I know that intelligent, busy people who can afford it usually prefer to save time and effort by consulting with specialists in every field, whether it’s auto mechanics, computer technology, or”—she transferred her smile to the man beside her—“medicine.”
Leigh was so much in agreement with Sam that she felt compelled to prove Detective Littleton’s theory to the man who outranked her, and she explained the minor reason Logan and she had consulted with Sheila. “Logan didn’t know how to slow down and enjoy life. Sheila helped him realize very quickly that he was missing out on some of the best things in life by driving himself so hard.”
Detective Littleton leaned forward eagerly. “Is it possible that your husband might have confided in Dr. Winters—as his friend—that he’d bought a weapon, and why he bought it?”
“I don’t know. I doubt it. Sheila and Logan had lunch now and then, but it was purely social. They came from the same background and knew a lot of the same people. I called Sheila this morning and told her about Logan. She would have told me this morning if he’d ever mentioned buying a gun.”
“Maybe she didn’t feel that she could or should. Do you mind if we talk to her?”
Leigh shook her head. “No, but I’m sure Logan bought the gun because of the stalker.”
Detective Littleton’s expression turned somber. “I had hoped to spare you this knowledge, Mrs. Manning, but your husband purchased that gun in March—six months before your stalker entered the picture.” While Leigh was still reeling from that information, Detective Littleton said, “Now do you see why it’s important we talk to Dr. Winters? If your husband was afraid for his life, he might have—even inadvertently—given her some idea of why he was afraid . . . or who he was afraid of.”
“Then, by all means, talk to her.”
“We’ll need your written permission, and I’m sure Dr. Winters will require it also, before she feels entitled to breach doctor-patient privilege. Would you be willing to give us that permission?”
“Yes, if you promise to keep the information confidential.”
“We will be
very, very discreet,” Detective Littleton promised as she tore a small sheet of paper out of her notebook and handed it to Leigh, along with her pen. “Just write something out that says you authorize her to give us information about your husband.”
Leigh did it automatically, following wherever she was led . . . or pushed. When she handed the paper back to Sam Littleton, she said, “I keep thinking about the person who ran me off the road that night. Maybe that’s who murdered my husband.”
“We’re looking for him, and we’ve redoubled our efforts since finding your husband yesterday. We’d like your permission to not only talk to your husband’s employees, but also to remove and inspect any records we think might be pertinent to this case. We’ll see that they aren’t lost. Is that all right with you?”
“Yes.”
Sam closed her notebook and looked at McCord. “Do you have any other questions, Lieutenant?”
McCord shook his head and stood up. “I’m sorry about my reaction to the mention of Dr. Winters. Detective Littleton has me pegged right—I still change the oil in my own vehicle, and my computer at home hasn’t worked in two years because I won’t let someone else fix it. The only dentist I know is the one I’m investigating right now.”
Leigh accepted his apology, but she was startled by his humble tone because it seemed at odds with his cold gaze and perfunctory smile. “The medical examiner should be ready to release your husband’s body tomorrow,” he added. “Let us know about the funeral arrangements. With your permission, we’d like to have our people at the funeral services.”
Leigh grasped the back of the sofa for support, shuddering at the casual, unfeeling way he referred to her “husband’s body” and “funeral arrangements.” Logan was dead. He would never smile at her again, never pull her close to his body in bed when he slept. His body was in a morgue. She hadn’t given a thought to funeral arrangements yet, although Brenna had gently brought up the subject that morning when Trish Lefkowitz called to offer her help. “Why do you want your people there?” she asked when she could trust her voice.