The Tattered Thread

CHAPTER SEVEN

  The police called everyone into the library one at a time to get each person’s version of what went on the night before. Elaine was the last person Detective Connery had asked to come in; it was almost two in the morning before he got to her. She should’ve been tired, but instead she felt wide awake. To assume that someone she’d been acquainted with for months had been capable of murdering two people in cold blood, even if the victims hadn’t been the most pleasant men to know, was a very frightening proposition.

  Elaine went to the library and stood in front of the closed door for a minute, afraid to let the detectives know that she was there but even more afraid not to. Finally, she did knock and then waited for a response.

  “Come in, please,” Connery said, so she opened the door and then stepped inside the room.

  The detective looked up from his notes and stared at her. Somehow managing a smile, the side of his chin dimpled slightly. “Have a seat, Elaine,” he said, pointing to the tufted carmine-colored chair close to the flat-top desk he was occupying. As she sat down, Detective Slye, who was sitting in an armchair with Victorian portrait heads and torsos of women adorning each of the curved arms, nodded his head to her. His greeting didn’t feel warm. Each of his fingertips grasped the carved torsos just below the bustlines, although he probably wasn’t aware of it.

  “Would you like something?” Connery asked, pointing to a beautiful solid silver tea set on a table in the middle of the room. “Some coffee or tea?”

  “No, thanks. I’m wide awake already.”

  “What has happened must be unsettling for you,” he said, sitting back in his seat.

  “Yeah, you could say that. I know you must be used to seeing dead people, but I’m not. Finding Mr. Kastenmeier’s body lying there will haunt me for the rest of my life.”

  Connery nodded, running his hand through his dark brown hair to brush it back from his forehead. Holding a silver pen in his hand, he leaned forward to jot something down. Choosing not to use the gold-plated quill set on the desk, he pressed so hard with his pen, every letter could be heard as he scratched it out. A southpaw, Elaine couldn’t help but notice that there was no wedding band on his finger. His hands were small for a man and well cared for; each nail was neatly trimmed and filed. Organization and good grooming seemed important to him, so he must’ve felt at home in a house like this.

  Elaine looked at Slye as he sat there staring at her. A world globe rested on a stand beside him, and he spun the sphere slowly. He could have passed for a professor sitting near rows and rows of built-in, glass-enclosed bookcases. Most of the books, at least the ones in view, boasted book covers made of suede and fine, nineteenth-century beadwork.

  Connery looked up, taking Elaine by surprise. His eyes met hers with an intensity which nearly caused her hair to stand on end. After awhile, his disposition mellowing, Connery eased back in the chair and folded his hands together, his elbows resting on the lacquered mahogany desk in front of him. It was one of Lois’s favorite antiques.

  “Sorry I kept you waiting so long,” he said, and his apology and the tone of his voice relaxed her. “I’d wanted to speak with you after I’d had the chance to talk to everyone else who’d been here during the explosion.” He paused. “With the obvious exceptions of Tasia McAvoy and Vic Kastenmeier, of course.”

  She was astonished to hear that. “Why did you want to talk to me last? What could I possibly tell you that no one else could?”

  “You’ve only been employed here for five months, and I feel that your perspective of the situation here would be clearer than any of the others.”

  “I don’t know what I can tell you that you haven’t been told already. I figure everyone else knows more about the inner workings of this house and the people involved better than I do.”

  “And they’d be more biased as well,” Connery said, and then reviewed some of his notes. Meticulous and precise, he seemed to be the kind of man who couldn’t be rushed. He also seemed dedicated to solving this puzzle.

  A police car came up the drive, passing the morgue truck and an unmarked vehicle. Elaine paused to watch it stop behind another squad car already parked in the yard. It was easy to see it because the outside floodlights were on. Two policemen got out and opened each of the rear doors. Zachary Cutteridge stepped out from the right side and Tasia from the left. Looking toward the house, Tasia’s eyes settled fast on Elaine sitting beside the window. Tasia looked as pale and as exhausted as she had a few hours ago. She’d probably do anything to avoid a police interrogation. That revelation frightened Elaine, knowing all too well that Tasia was prone to using suicide as a way out of the sticky situations she often found herself in.

  “Mary Magdalene,” Detective Connery said, understanding the connection between Tasia and the woman in the fresco Zach had painted in the drawing room. “Is that Tasia McAvoy?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “And the man?”

  “He’s Zachary Cutteridge, the painter and landscaper Mr. Kastenmeier had fired several weeks ago.”

  Slye got up to have a look, rubbing his thick mustache. “The painter and landscaper,” he repeated. “And the boyfriend.”

  “Did you know that Tasia was having an affair with Carl Kastenmeier?” Connery asked her.

  “Yes. Everyone did.”

  “Was it a mutually consenting relationship, or was she forced to comply?”

  “Coerced is a better word.”

  “What’s the difference between ‘forced’ and ‘coerced’?” Slye asked, turning away from the window and crossing his arms. He kept coming toward her, closing in fast like a shark looking for lunch. No doubt about it, the big man was hungry, tired, and wanted to wrap things up as soon as possible.

  “Mr. Kastenmeier could be very intimidating,” she explained. “The two words are virtually the same, although I find coerced to be more specific to Tasia’s situation here. The boss would do things underhandedly to make her do as he wanted. Look, it’s hard for me to explain, and I feel very uncomfortable talking about this.”

  “Murder is always an uncomfortable situation,” Slye said, “especially for the guy who’s dead.” His words echoed across the room and then bounced off the rusty brown-toned frieze, field, and dado, hurting her ears. The subsequent stillness made his last word ‘dead’ seem as if he’d yelled it through a bullhorn.

  “If Tasia didn’t want him,” Connery said, “then why didn’t she put an end to the relationship?”

  Elaine looked at Detective Connery. It was hard to believe that someone could be so naive about what had been going on around here. Five months ago, Elaine had been just as clueless. But the past five months felt more like five hundred years. “She couldn’t end it,” she said, as if that should’ve been obvious.

  “Why do you say that? She could’ve left, moved to another state.”

  “Don’t you understand? She couldn’t leave.”

  “Are you saying Carl was holding Tasia prisoner? A nineteen-year-old with a culinary arts degree sounds quite self-sufficient to me. Seems as though nothing could’ve stopped her if she’d wanted to go.”

  “She did leave two months ago, but Mr. Kastenmeier forced her to come back.”

  “Forced?” Slye said, closing what little space there was between them. “Not coerced?”

  Elaine sighed. By this time, Slye was on one side of her and Connery was on the other. Those rusty walls were closing in fast. The two of them together were cutting off her air supply, and she was pushed to the point of demanding some of it back. “Use whatever word you’d like,” she said.

  Detective Connery sat back in his chair and rubbed the clip end of his ball-point pen against his bottom lip. He watched her as a bird would watch a worm. “Did you kill Carl Kastenmeier?”

  “I did not,” she said, flinching a little. She just couldn’t help it.

  “Did you kill John Linton?” he asked, his brows narrowing as if he were about to force a confession.

  Looking r
ight at him, she said quite emphatically, “No, I didn’t.”

  “Do you know who did?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “May I see your arms and hands, please?”

  “Sure.” That was easy, because she was wearing a short-sleeved blouse. Holding her arms up, he examined them carefully. Slye bent down and had a good look at them, too.

  “Turn your hands over, please.”

  She did.

  “You’ve got a smear of blood next to your elbow,” Connery said, looking up.

  “I do?” she said, trying to twist her arm around to look at the spot.

  “You leaned over Carl as he was dying, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “That’s probably how it got there.”

  Elaine reached over and took a pink tissue from a nearby dispenser. Trying to use it to wipe the blood off, she found it dry and stubborn. She had to scrape it off with a thumbnail. “What were you looking for? Blood on me?”

  “No,” Connery said. “I was looking for burns.”

  “Because of the explosion?” she said, giving her full attention to his response.

  He nodded.

  “Do you know if anyone had a grudge against Carl Kastenmeier?” Slye said, standing back as if her unscathed arms dropped her down a notch or two on his guilty list. “Someone who hated him enough to kill him?”

  Pausing, she ran a sweaty hand through her short, brown hair. The room felt sticky hot although the air conditioning was doing a perfect job of keeping the temperature a balmy seventy-three degrees Fahrenheit. Even the white marble busts of Carl’s father and mother were starting to look a little sweaty. “Everybody hated him.”

  “Enough to kill him?”

  “No, but most people really hated him.”

  “Even you?” Slye asked.

  “I said most people did. I didn’t know him well enough to form an opinion of him one way or the other.”

  “Yes, you did,” Slye said, not bothering to appear diplomatic about it.

  “You were the last person he spoke to, isn’t that right?” Connery asked.

  “That’s right.”

  “What did he say?”

  Hesitating for a moment, she said, “It wasn’t very flattering.”

  “I still want to hear it.”

  “Well, first he called out Tasia’s name, and then he told me….”

  “What?”

  “He told me to go to hell and then called me a bitch.” She paused, rubbing her right temple with a couple of fingers. “See, I told you it wasn’t very flattering.”

  Despite the warning, Connery seemed surprised to hear it. “Was Carl in the habit of referring to you as a bitch?”

  “No, thank God.”

  “You were the one who dialed 911 and placed the call with the dispatcher.”

  “Yes, I was.”

  “You even loosened his tie to help him breathe.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why would Carl refer to you in such a derogatory fashion if you were only trying to help him?”

  “Because he didn’t want my help. He didn’t want anybody’s help.”

  “But you offered to help him, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Why?”

  “Because nobody else would,” she said, this time her voice was the one echoing across the room. Silence ensued, however, hurting her ears once again.

  Slye leaned against the edge of a table, staring down at the reddish carpeting with black and shades of gray and yellow also in the design. He rubbed his chin until his fingertips turned red from so much contact with the dark stubble forming there. Connery wrote down a note or two in his book, and afterward tapped the end of the pen against his forehead. It was obvious that both officers were trying to size Carl up, to get a feel for the kind of man he’d been. By the looks on their faces, they were starting to get the general idea.

  “I guess Kastenmeier wasn’t up for any congeniality awards, huh?” Slye said, trying to be funny. He didn’t know how right he was.