Cruel & Unusual

  She nodded. “Oh, yes. I remembered went through my mind it was a good night for a fire. But fires were always Jimmy's job. He never showed me how, you see. When he was good at something, that was his. So I quit on the fires and had the electric log put in.”

  Jimmy Clary was looking at her. I wondered if he knew what she was saying.

  “I like to cook,” she went on. “This time of year I do a lot of baking. I make sugar cakes and give them to the neighbors. Yesterday I wanted to drop one by for Jenny, but I like to call first. It's hard to tell when someone's in, especially when they keep their car in a garage. And you leave a cake on the doormat and one of the dogs around here gets it. So I tried her and got that machine. All day I tried and she didn't answer, and to tell you the truth, I was a little worried.”

  “Why?” I asked. “Did she have health problems, any sort of problems you were aware of?”

  “Bad cholesterol. Way over two hundred's what's she told me once. Plus high blood pressure, which she said ran in the family.”

  I had not seen any prescription drugs in Jennifer Deighton's house.

  “Do you know who her doctor was?” I asked.

  “I can't recall. But Jenny believed in natural cures. She told me when she felt poorly she'd meditate.”

  “Sounds like the two of you were pretty close,” Marino said.

  Mrs. Clary was plucking at her skirt, hands like hyperactive children. “I'm here all day except when I go to the store.”

  She glanced at her husband, who was staring at the TV again. “Now and then I'd go see her, you know, just being neighborly, maybe to drop by something I'd been cooking.”

  “Was she a friendly sort?” Marino asked. “She have a lot of visitors?”

  “Well, you know she worked out of the house. I think she handled most of her business over the phone. But occasionally I'd see people going in.”

  “Anybody you knew?”

  “Not that I recall.”

  “You notice anybody coming by to see her last night?” Marino asked.

  “I didn't notice.”

  “What about when you went out to get your mail and saw the smoke coming out of her chimney? You get any sense she might have had company?”

  “I didn't see a car. Nothing to make me think she had company.”

  Jimmy Clary had drifted off to sleep. He was drooling.

  “You said she worked at home,” I said. “Do you have any idea what she did?”

  Mrs. Clary fixed wide eyes on me. She leaned forward and lowered her voice. “I know what folks said.”

  “And what was that?” I asked.

  She pressed her lips together and shook her head.

  “Mrs. Clary,” Marino said. “Anything you could tell us might help. I know you want to help.”

  “There's a Methodist church two blocks away. You can see it. The steeple's lit up at night, has been ever since they built the church three or four years ago.”

  “I saw the church when I was driving in,” Marino replied. “What's that got to do -”

  “Well,” she cut in, “Jenny moved here, I guess it was early September. And I've never been able to figure it out The steeple light. You watch when you're driving home. Of course...” She paused, her face disappointed. “Maybe it won't do it anymore.”

  “Do what?” Marino asked.

  “Go out and then come back on. The strangest thing I've ever seen. It's lit up one minute, and then you look out your window again and it's dark like the church isn't there. Then next thing you know, you look out again and the steeple's lit up just like it's always been. I've timed it. On for a minute, then off for two, on again for three. Sometimes it will burn for an hour. No pattern to it at all.”

  “What does this have to do with Jennifer Deighton?” I asked.

  “I remember it was not long after she moved in, just weeks before Jimmy had hi stroke. It was a cool night so he was building a fire. I was in the kitchen doing dishes and could see the steeple out the window lit up like it always was. And he came in to get himself a drink, and I said, 'You know what the Bible says about being drunk with the Spirit and not with wine. 'And he said, 'I'm not drinking wine. I'm drinking bourbon. The Bible's never said a word about bourbon.' Then, right while he was standing there the steeple went dark. It was like the church vanished into thin air. I said, 'There you have it. The Word of the Lord. That's his opinion about you and your bourbon.' “He laughed like I was the craziest thing, but he never touched another drop. Every night he'd stand in front of the window over the kitchen sink watching. One minute the steeple would be lit up, then it would be dark. I let Jimmy think it was God's doing - anything to keep him off the bottle. The church never behaved like that before Miss Deighton moved across the street.”

  “Has the light been going on and off lately?” I asked.

  “Was still doing it last night. I don't know about now. To tell you the truth, I haven't looked.”

  “So you're saying that she somehow had an effect on the lights in the church steeple,” Marino said mildly.

  “I'm saying that more than one person on this street decided about her some time ago.”

  “Decided what?”

  “About her being a witch,” Mrs. Clary said.

  Her husband had started snoring, making hideous strangling noises that his wee did not seem to notice.

  “Sounds to me like your husband there started doing poorly about the time Miss Deighton moved here and the lights staffed acting funny,” Marino said She looked startled: “Well, that's so. He had his stroke the end of September.”

  “You ever think there might be a connection? That maybe Jennifer Deighton had something to do with it, just like you're thinking she had something to do with the church lights?”

  “Jimmy didn't take to her.” Mrs. Clary was talking faster by the minute.

  “You're saying the two of them didn't get along,” Marino said.

  “Right after she moved in, she came over a couple of times to ask him to help out with a few things around the house, man's work. I remember one time her doorbell was making a terrible buzzing sound inside the house and she appeared on the doorstep, scared she was about to have an electrical fire. So Jimmy went over there. I think her dishwasher flooded once, too, back then. Jimmy's always been real handy.”

  She glanced furtively at her snoring husband.

  “You still haven't made it clear why he didn't get along with her,” Marino reminded her.

  “He said he didn't like going over there,” she said. “Didn't like the inside of her house, with all these crystals everywhere. And the phone would ring all the time. But what really gave him the willies was when she told him she read people's fortunes and would do it for him for nothing if he'd keep fixing things around her house. He said, and I remember this like it was yesterday, 'No, thank you, Miss Deighton. Myra's in charge of my future, plans every minute of it.'“

  “I wonder if you might know of anybody who had a big enough problem with Jennifer Deighton to wish something bad on her, hurt her in some way,” Marino said.

  “You think somebody killed her?”

  “There's a lot we don't know at this point. We have to check out every possibility.”

  She crossed her arms under her sagging bosom, hugging herself.

  “What about her emotional state?” I inquired. “Did she ever seem depressed to you? Do you know if she had any problems she couldn't seem to cope with, especially of late?”

  “I didn't know her that well.” She avoided my eyes.

  “Did she go to any doctors that you're aware of?”

  “I don't know.”

  “What about next of kin? Did she have family?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “What about her phone?” I then said. “Did she answer it when she was home or did she always let the machine do it?”

  “It's been my experience that when she was home, she answered it.”

  “Which is why you got worried about her earlier toda
y when she wasn't answering the phone when you called,” Marino said.

  “That's exactly why.” Myra Clary realized too late what she had said.

  “That's interesting,” Marino commented.

  A Bush crept up her neck and her hands went still.

  Marino asked, “How did you know she was home today?”

  She did not answer. Her husband's breath rattled in his chest and he coughed, eyes blinking open.

  “I guess I assumed. Because I didn't see her pull out. In her car...” Mrs. Clary's voice trailed off.

  “Maybe you went over there earlier in the day?”

  Marino offered, as if trying to be helpful. “To deliver your cake or say hello and thought her car was in the garage?”

  She dabbed tears from her eyes. “I was in the kitchen baking all morning and never saw her go out to get the paper or leave in her car. So mid-morning, when I went out, I went over there and rang the bell. She didn't answer. I peeked inside the garage.”

  “You telling me you saw the windows all smoked up and didn't think something was wrong?” Marino asked.

  “I didn't know what it meant, what to do.”

  Her voice went up several octaves. “Lord, Lord. I wish I'd called somebody then. Maybe she was -” Marino cut in. “I don't know that she was still alive then, that she would have been” He looked pointedly at me.

  “When you looked inside the garage, did you hear the car engine running?” I asked Mrs. Clary.

  She shook her head and blew her nose.

  Marino got up and tucked his notepad back in his coat pocket. He looked dejected, as if Mrs. Clary's spinelessness and lack of veracity deeply disappointed him. By now, there wasn't a role he played that I did not know well.

  “I should have called earlier.” Myra Clary directed this at me, her voice quavering.

  I did not reply. Marino stared at the carpet.

  “I don't feel good. I need to go lie down.”

  Marino slipped a business card out of his wallet and handed it to her. “Anything else comes to mind that you think I ought to know about, you give me a call.”

  “Yes, sir,” she said weakly. “I promise I will.”

  “You doing the post tonight?” Marino asked me after the front door shut.

  Snow was ankle-deep and still coming down.

  “In the morning,” I said, fishing keys out of my coat pocket.

  “What do you think?”

  “I think her unusual occupation put her at great risk for the wrong sort of person to come along. I also think her apparent isolated existence, as Mrs. Clary described it, and the fact that it appears she opened her Christmas presents early makes suicide an easy assumption. But her clean socks are a major problem.”

  “You got that right,” he said.

  Jennifer Deighton's house was lit up, and a flatbed truck with chains on its tires had backed into the drive way. Voices of men working were muted by the snow, and every car on the street was solid white and soft around the edges.

  I followed Marino's gaze above the roof of Miss Deighton's house. Several blocks away, the church was etched against the pearl gray sky, me steeple shaped weirdly like a witch's hat. Arches in the arcade stared back at us with mournful, empty eyes when suddenly the light blinked on. It filled spaces and painted surfaces a luminescent ocher, the arcade an unsmiling but gentle face floating in the night.

  I glanced over at the Clary house as curtains moved in the kitchen window.

  “Jesus, I'm out of here.” Marino headed across the street.

  “You want me to alert Neils about her car?” I called after him.

  “Yeah,” he yelled back. “That'd be good.”

  My house was lit up when I got home and good smells came from the kitchen. A fire blazed and two places had been set on the butler's table in front of it. Dropping my medical bag on the couch, I looked around and listened. From my study across the hall came the faint, rapid clicking of keys.

  “Lucy?” I called out, slipping off my gloves and unbuttoning my coat.

  “I'm in here.”

  Keys continued to click.

  “What have you been cooking?”

  “Dinner.”

  I headed for my study, where I found my niece sitting at my desk staring intensely at the computer monitor. I was stunned when I noticed the pound sign prompt. She was in UNIX. Somehow she had dialed into the computer downtown.

  “How did you do that?” I asked. “I didn't tell you the dial-in command, user name, password, or anything.”

  'You didn't have to tell me. I found the file that told me what the bat command is. Plus, you've got some programs in here with your user name and password coded in so you don't get prompted for them. A good shortcut but risky. Your user name is Marley and password is brain.”

  “You're dangerous.” I pulled up a chair.

  “Who's Marley?”

  She continued to type.

  “We had assigned seating in medical school. Marley Scates sat next to me in labs for two years. He's a neurosurgeon somewhere.”

  “Were you in love with him?”

  “We never dated.”

  “Was he in love with you?”

  “You ask too many questions, Lucy. You can't just ask people anything you want.”

  “Yes I can. They don't have to answer.”

  “It's offensive.”

  “I think I've figured out how someone got into your directory, Aunt Kay. Remember I told you about users that came with the software?”

  “Yes.”

  “There's one called demo that has root privileges but no password assigned to it. My guess is that this is what somebody used and I'll show you what probably happened.”

  Her fingers flew over the keyboard without pause as she talked. “What I'm doing now is going into the system administrator's menu to check out the log-in accounting. We're going to search for a specific user. In the case, root. Now we'll hit g to go and boom. There it M She ran her finger across a line on the screen. .

  “On December sixteenth at five-oh-six in the afternoon, someone logged in from a device called t-t-y-fourteen. This person had root privileges and we'll assume is the person who went into your directory. I don't know what he looked at. But twenty minutes later, at five twenty-six, he tried to send the note 'I can't find it' to t-t-y-oh-seven and inadvertently created a file. He logged out at five-thirty-two, making the total time of the session twenty-six minutes. And it doesn't appear anything was printed, by the way. I took a look at the printer spooler log, which shows files printed. I didn't see anything that caught my attention.”

  “Let me make sure I've got this straight. Someone tried to send a note from t-t-y-fourteen to t-t-y-oh seven, “ I said.

  “Yes. And I checked. Both of those devices are terminals.”

  “How can we determine whose office those terminals are in?” I asked.

  “I'm surprised there's not a list somewhere in here. But I haven't found it yet. If all else fails, you can check the cables leading to the terminals. Usually, they're tagged. And if you're interested in my personal opinion, I don't think your computer analyst is the spy. In the first place, she knows your user name and password and would have no need to log in with demo. Also, since I assume the mini is in her office, then I also assume she uses the system terminal.”

  “She does.”

  “The device name for your system terminal is t-t-y-b.”

  “Good.”

  “Another way to figure out who did this would be to sneak into someone's office when they aren't there but are logged in. All you've got to do is go into UNIX and type 'who am I' and the system will tell you.”

  She pushed back her chair and got up. “I hope you're hungry. We've got chicken breasts and a chilled wild rice salad made with cashews, peppers, sesame oil. And there's bread. Is your grill in working order?”

  “It's after eleven and snowing outside.”

  “I didn't suggest that we eat outside. I simply would like to cook
the chicken on the grill.”

  “Where did you learn to cook?”

  We were walking to the kitchen.

  “Not from Mother. Why do you think I was such a little fatso? From eating the junk she bought. Snacks, sodas, and pizza that tastes like cardboard. I have fat cells that will scream for the rest of my life because of Mother. I'll never forgive her.”