Natalie told him about hearing a door latch click as she was leaving. “I thought at the time that Robert might be hiding upstairs, trying to avoid me. Now—” Natalie’s voice quivered and broke. “Now I wonder if someone was hiding in a closet or something.”
Monroe excused himself for a moment. While he was gone, Sterling Johnson patted Natalie’s shoulder. “You’re fine,” he assured her. “He believes you. I can tell.”
“Really?”
The lawyer nodded. “Who would dream up a story like this?”
When Monroe returned, he said, “A car is being sent out to your home to pick up the wine goblets.”
Natalie sent him a worried look. “Why do you need them?”
“To have them examined for prints and trace elements.”
That seemed reasonable. Nevertheless, Natalie said, “I do hope the people in your lab will be very careful with them. Those goblets date back to the seventeen hundreds, straight from Bayel, a village in Basse Champagne on the banks of the Aube.”
The detective pushed his eyeglasses up his nose. “To me, they’re just evidence in a murder case.”
Chapter Twelve
Before taking Natalie home, Zeke stopped by a diner to get something in her stomach. It was going on five o’clock. She’d been running on nothing but nerves all day. Once she reached the house, he knew she’d be too upset, trying to comfort her children and deal with her zany family, to think about food.
“I’m really not hungry,” she insisted when he opened a menu and pushed it into her hands. “Maybe a glass of milk.”
“Eat,” Zeke ordered. “They serve breakfast all day. How about some poached eggs on toast?”
She peered at him over the menu. “Poached eggs when I’m a murder suspect?”
“Monroe just questioned you, honey. That doesn’t mean you’re a suspect.” Zeke reached across the table to lay a hand over hers. The circles of exhaustion under her eyes worried him. “You need to calm down. Making yourself sick won’t help the situation.”
“What will help the situation? I left prints all over the place. I didn’t hear the car running in the garage.” Panic flared in her eyes. “If I were Monroe, I’d think I was guilty.”
“I know you’re scared, but try to look at it from his point of view. First off, you don’t have the necessary strength to carry a full-grown man out to the garage and stuff him in a car.”
“I could do it if my adrenaline were up,” she insisted.
“But a man could do it more easily,” Zeke argued. “Secondly, the very fact that you left prints all over the house points to your innocence. You clearly weren’t worried about leaving evidence behind. How many murderers do you think he’s run across who made no attempt whatsoever to cover their tracks?”
Her shoulders relaxed slightly. “You’re good for me. You know that?”
“I’m just pointing out the obvious. Monroe has to take evidence into account when he’s working on a case. I won’t argue the point. But he’ll also go with his instincts. You obviously aren’t a dim-witted woman. If you had killed Robert, would you have stolen a set of crystal while you were at it? It makes no sense that you’d commit cold-blooded murder, then go into Neiman Marcus mode before you left the house.”
She sighed. “You’re right. The case against me doesn’t hold together very well when you look at it like that.”
“Damn straight it doesn’t, and if they’re dumb enough to think it does, Johnson will rip it apart in court.”
“Court?”
Zeke squeezed her hand. “Sweetheart, it’ll never come to that. Where’s your motive? Women don’t kill men for back child support. That’d be tantamount to killing the goose that lays the golden egg. You had no plausible motive.”
“Who did?” she asked in a hushed voice.
“Good question, one that we should probably be asking ourselves.” Zeke studied his menu for a moment. “Maybe draw up a list of people who might have had reason to want Robert dead.”
“Just the thought exhausts me. There are so many people who might have had it in for him.” She laid her menu aside. “My mom, for instance.”
Naomi Patterson had had murder in her eyes when she looked at Pete that morning, but Zeke didn’t have her pegged as a killer. “Nah. Why would she have wanted Robert dead?”
“Mom detested him. I can’t count the times she said she wanted to kill him.”
“That’s only a figure of speech.”
“You don’t know my mother. Robert hurt me a thousand times if he hurt me once. Mom is very protective of her kids and grandkids. And then there’s Valerie. She once backed Robert against a wall with a fingernail file to his crotch.”
Making a mental note never to cross her mother or sister, Zeke rested his elbow on the table and propped his chin on the heel of his hand. “As far as I know, Robert’s manhood was still intact.”
“You know what I’m saying.”
He conceded the point with a nod. “I just don’t think either of them has a violent streak.”
“Neither do I. But they did have reason to hate my ex-husband. So did Pop. He threatened Robert with a shotgun after I got pregnant with Chad, and he never really forgave Robert for ‘preying on his little girl,’ as he so succinctly put it. Even Gramps got into it with Robert once. And that’s not counting all the people Robert screwed in business deals. Or all the women he did dirty. Even his mother threatened his life the last time I saw her. I could draw up a list of at least twenty people who might have wanted Robert dead.”
Zeke tossed his menu down on top of hers. “You’re right. I guess there are a lot of people we could put on a list.”
Natalie shivered. “And one of them did something about it.”
Zeke searched her worried brown eyes. “Any educated guesses?”
“If it weren’t for the strength issue, my first suspect would be Bonnie Decker, Robert’s last girlfriend. I’ve never met her or anything, but if I know Robert, he led her on, making her think she was the love of his life. She was probably devastated when he dumped her. Most of them usually are.” She unrolled the napkin from around her silverware. “I can’t count the times a hysterical girl called the house, sometimes to talk to Robert, other times to plead with me.”
“Plead with you? About what?”
“To let him go—to stop being unreasonable and give him a divorce.” She began rubbing her temple as though it ached. “Robert wasn’t very original. He told the same old clichéd story that adulterous men have been telling for centuries, that he was married to a heartless witch, miserably unhappy, and couldn’t get a divorce. Some of the girls grew desperate when he dumped them, so desperate that they followed him around, or telephoned the house at all hours, or even lied, claiming to be pregnant so he’d go back to them. What’s to say one of them didn’t go completely off the deep end and murder him?”
Until that moment, Zeke hadn’t really understood all that Natalie had been through during her marriage. He gave her fingers a squeeze, wishing that he could go back in time and rewrite the story of her life. Only then she might not be sitting across from him now.
“Exactly how young is Bonnie Decker?” he asked.
“Early twenties would be my guess.”
“Wasn’t Robert over forty?”
“Yes, but that never stopped him. Remember when I told you I thought he had an inferiority complex? One of the reasons I believe he preferred young girls is because they’re easy to impress. Robert liked to play the big shot, and he needed the mindless adoration that only a young woman without much experience is likely to feel.”
Zeke had known men like that, and he had little, if any, respect for them. He ran his thumb over her knuckles, vaguely aware as he did of how delicately she was made. “Did you hear what you just said?”
She gave him a questioning look. “That Robert liked to play the big shot?”
“And needed to be worshiped. It can’t have taken you very long to realize that your princ
e was actually a toad. Has it ever occurred to you that the reason Robert repeatedly had affairs wasn’t due to any physical flaws you may have had, but because you no longer mindlessly adored him?”
A tiny frown pleated her brows. “No. In the early years, I still thought I loved him, and he was having affairs even then.”
“Ah, but love is different from adoration, Natalie. We can love someone in spite of his faults. Instead of love, maybe what Robert really needed was for you to make him feel like a god, and after the new wore off, you no longer did that. Think about it. He flitted from one young woman to the next. Isn’t it possible he always bailed out because his lovers began to see the cracks in his veneer?”
A confused, incredulous expression entered her large, dark eyes. Then, as if an invisible hand moved over her face to alter her expression, her mouth softened, and her lips curved up at the corners in a tremulous smile. “Maybe so,” she agreed. “Probably so. There were a lot of cracks in his veneer. It didn’t take long for me to start seeing them.”
“Exactly, and suddenly his interest in you palled. One moment he loved you—or at least you thought he did—and the next, he was with someone new. I can’t even start to imagine how that must have hurt. If you suddenly stopped loving me tomorrow, I’d drive myself nuts wondering why, and I’d automatically assume it was something that I did—or failed to do. I can see how it could really mess with your mind.”
“I got through it,” she said faintly. “I had my family to support me, and I had my kids to love. If I’d had to go through it alone, heaven knows what I might have done. Sometimes I felt such rage.” She ran the tip of her tongue over her bottom lip. “An unreasoning rage that led me to do things I never would have done otherwise. I once cut all of his silk boxers into ribbons with a pair of manicure scissors.”
“Good for you.”
She smiled. “Yeah, right. I was over the edge. When I remember doing that—when I recall the state my emotions were in at the time—I can easily imagine one of his girlfriends totally losing it.”
“It could have been a jilted lover, but I’m more inclined to look at men.”
“Chopin was playing on the stereo,” she murmured.
Zeke didn’t see how that pertained until she added, “Robert liked to play Chopin when he had sex. My first thought when I rang the doorbell and heard the music was that he was upstairs with his girlfriend. But when I went inside, no one was there, not Robert, not the girlfriend, no one. At the time, I thought Robert was hiding somewhere in the house, pretending not to hear me. Only now I know that wasn’t the case at all.” She leaned closer. “So why was Chopin playing on the stereo?”
Zeke realized he was gripping her hand too hard and forced his fingers to relax. “Are you saying he only played Chopin when he had sex?”
“As far as I know, yes. That’s why I keep coming back to the killer being a woman.” She turned her wrist to curl her fingers around his. “What if Bonnie—or one of the others—came to the house to confront Robert and caught him with Cheryl, the new girlfriend? Maybe there was a scene. Robert might have asked Cheryl to leave for a while so he could calm Bonnie down. Maybe, after Cheryl left, Bonnie grew distraught and killed him.”
Zeke shook his head. “Someone slipped a sedative into his wine. You have to plan ahead to pull something like that off.”
“Maybe Bonnie or one of the others went there, intending to kill him. She could have deliberately caused a scene to get Cheryl out of there.”
“Did you mention any of this to Monroe?”
“No. I was afraid to start pointing the finger at anyone. That’s what guilty people do.”
Zeke chuckled even though the subject under discussion wasn’t humorous. “You need to stop worrying about stuff like that and give the man all the information you can. On the surface, the type of music playing in the house doesn’t seem important, but if it’s true that Robert only played Chopin when he had sex, it could be extremely important.”
The waitress came to take their order. Zeke asked for poached eggs on toast. Natalie ordered a three-egg omelet. She blushed when Zeke looked questioningly at her. “I’m feeling a little better.”
“Good. You need to eat.”
“I’ll skip lunch tomorrow to make up for it.”
“Over my dead body.”
“Don’t say that. It gives me cold chills.”
It was just turning dusk when Zeke parked the Dodge truck in his driveway. Natalie sat huddled against the passenger door, her face still pale, her eyes still haunted. After cutting the engine and releasing his safety restraint, Zeke turned to cup a hand over her shoulder.
“You going to be okay?”
A tiny muscle under her eye twitched. “Yes. I just wish—”
“What?” he asked.
“I just wish you could come home with me.”
Zeke rasped his fingertips lightly over her blouse, acutely conscious of how small and delicate her bones felt under the layer of cotton. “I wish I could, too, sweetheart.”
She reached up to lay her hand over his. It was unnecessary for either of them to say more. Her children had lost their father. Chad, especially, was going to need her undivided attention tonight and possibly for several days to come.
“If there’s anything I can do, I’ll be a phone call away.”
She unbuckled her seat belt and reached for the door latch, her movements jerky. As she pushed the door open, she turned to look at him. Then, without warning, she launched herself into his arms, the tension in her body conveying a desperation and need that made his heart hurt for her.
“It’s going to be okay,” he whispered against her hair. “Everything, all of it. You’ll see.”
She nodded, her arms still locked around his neck. “I wish I could sneak over after the kids are asleep, but they might wake up and need me.”
Zeke ran his hand slowly up her spine. “Maybe I’ll pay you a surprise visit instead. How would that be?”
“Fabulous,” she murmured.
“Which window’s yours? I don’t want to surprise the wrong person.”
She answered his question, then sat back and smiled. “Up the drainpipe and through my window? I’m afraid you’ll break your neck.”
Zeke trailed the pad of his thumb lightly over her cheek. “Not to worry. I became an accomplished second-story man as a teenager.”
“You sneaked into a girlfriend’s house?”
He grinned and kissed the tip of her nose. “No, I sneaked out of my own.”
She laughed. “Is that what lies in store for me when Chad becomes a teenager?”
“Probably. Not to worry, though. I’ll know what he’s going to do before he thinks of it and head him off at the pass.”
Her mouth curved into a wondering smile. “Say that again.”
“Say what again?”
“That you’ll still be with me when Chad becomes a teenager.”
He bent his head to kiss her, a sweet, lingering kiss devoid of passion, yet full of promise. “Count on it, Nattie girl.”
When Natalie got home a few minutes later, her mother was in the kitchen, cooking dinner. The smell of simmering beef and onions wafted warmly on the air. Naomi had kicked off her heels, wore a faded bib apron over her skirt and top, and had her hair pulled back in a ponytail. The scene was so reminiscent of days gone by that Natalie rested her back against the door for a moment, memories of her childhood and happier times moving through her like a caress. The worn speckled linoleum, the scarred gray table, the nicked white cupboards, the ugly green countertop—over the years, this room had never changed. Natalie couldn’t count the times as a child that she’d walked into the kitchen and found her mother cooking in her bare feet, wearing an apron similar to the one she wore now.
“You’re here!” Naomi cried when she saw her daughter. She wiped her hands and hurried across the kitchen to give Natalie a hard hug. “I’ve been so worried! How did it go?”
Natalie returned her mother??
?s embrace. “It went. That’s all I can say.”
“The police were here. They asked to go upstairs and get something from your room. Charlie pitched a holy fit and wouldn’t let them inside the house until they had a search warrant.”
“Oh, no. Did they go get one?”
“Yes. They weren’t upstairs for long. They left with a paper sack full of stuff.”
Natalie drew back to look into her mother’s eyes. “It’s okay, Mom. I knew they were coming out to get the bag.”
“What was in it?”
“Grandma Devereaux’s crystal.”
“What? I thought it was lost in storage.”
As briefly as possible, Natalie told her mother about her visit to Robert’s house the previous evening. During the recounting, Naomi’s face drained of color. “Oh, dear God. You were in the house at the time of the murder?”
“They estimate time of death between five and eight. I stopped by on my way to the club, sometime around six thirty.”
“Oh, my God.”
Natalie put her purse on top of the refrigerator, an ancient Frigidaire gone yellow with age that her father continually repaired. “That’s why I’m so late. Zeke took me to see a lawyer, a man named Sterling Johnson who looks like a corpse propped up in a chair. He insisted that I return to the station and make a clean breast of it.” Natalie went on to recount the rest of the story. “For better or worse, Detective Monroe knows everything now.”
“He didn’t press charges. That’s a positive sign.”
“Yeah. Now it’s a wait-and-see game.”
Naomi bussed Natalie’s cheek. “I called the club. Frank says he’ll manage without you tonight and not to worry.”
The club. Natalie hadn’t given it a thought all day. In a twinkling, all her money worries came crashing back over her. She sighed and rubbed the back of her neck. “Where are the kids?”
“Rosie’s watching a movie Valerie rented for her. Chad’s upstairs.”
“How are they doing?” Natalie asked.
“Rosie’s great. When I told her the news, it was almost as if we were talking about a stranger.”