Satisfied that it might not spread ptomaine poisoning, I stuck the spoon in the sugar bowl. Then I unplugged the baby’s warming dish, and stacked it and the dirty mugs on the counter. I swept crumbs off the table into my hand.
Geof said, “Are you going to do the laundry next, Jenny?”
I laughed weakly. “All right, I’ll stop.”
It was only motion for the sake of motion. I was nervous, not the least about meeting a woman the day after she killed her husband. I dumped the crumbs in a waste-basket and sat down between the men.
A woman I assumed to be Eleanor Hanks thrust herself into the room at that moment and collapsed into the first chair she came to. Immediately, my fantasy began to change. She was about ten pounds heavier than I’d imagined her and more attractive. I’d pictured a brunette, but this was a graying blonde, who looked as if she’d thrown on her clothes without looking at them, and then frantically patted her hair down. She stared at each of us in turn. Whatever she saw in our faces evidently caused her consternation, because first her lips quivered, then her face crumpled, and then she bent her head onto her folded arms on the table and began to cry, solidly and seriously as if she would never stop. Beside me, Willie muttered, “Shit.”
“You remember we met last night, Mrs. Hanks,” Geof said in a loud voice. “I’m Detective Geof Bushfield, this is Jenny Cain, and this fellow over here is Detective Willie Henderson. I know this is a terrible time for you, but you want to help us find out who killed your husband, isn’t that right?”
He was the snake charmer playing his oily, hypnotic tunes of persuasion, and she was the captured cobra, one that had struck and killed, even if only after being tormented. Perform for us now, Eleanor! Rise from your dark basket of fears, uncoil those memories and truths, and spit them out at us! She looked so plain, so normal, so suburban. This woman, who resembled any dozen women I knew, had shot and killed a human being. I stared at Eleanor Hanks as tourists stare at exotic snakes in baskets—feeling sorry for their reduced circumstances, but wary of their latent, lethal power.
She suddenly stopped crying, as if she’d swallowed it whole. After a very quiet moment in which nobody moved, she nodded, then raised her face. I found myself looking at yet another discolored, swollen female face, although this damage might have been caused by the violence of her own weeping.
“Yes,” she said in a whispery, shaky voice, “I want to help.”
“Why don’t you help her, Bushfield?” Smithy barged back into the dining room, jarring the atmosphere. She had a plate of bacon and eggs and a fork in her hands. “Tell her she needs a lawyer.” She banged the plate down in front of her wounded lamb and stuck the fork in Eleanor Hanks’s right hand. “You need a lawyer. Eat.”
“Lawyer?” Mrs. Hanks looked blankly at Smithy, then at the fork, then across the table at Geof. The food might as well have been plastic for all the attention she paid to it.
“That’s up to you,” Geof said vaguely, smoothly. “We only have a few simple questions that we need to pursue in the course of our normal investigations.”
Smithy grunted.
“Mrs. Hanks,” Geof persevered, “would you tell us again about last night, please? And it would be helpful if you would be specific about times and places. Can you do that for me?”
“Yes,” she whispered, and ducked her head once. “I think so.”
“Good,” Geof said warmly. Smithy compressed her lips and frowned at me as if demanding to know how I could associate with such a manipulative swine. “Let’s begin about six o’clock last night. May I call you Eleanor?”
“Yes,” she said obediently.
“Tell me what you were doing at six o’clock last night, Eleanor.” Geof was folksy enough to be her neighbor. On the other side of me, Willie began taking unobtrusive notes on a pad on his lap, under the table.
“I was at work,” she said promptly.
“Right,” Geof said approvingly, as if she’d lived up to his high expectations of her. In his tone, there also was a hint, a warning: Right. You’ve told the truth. You’ve confirmed what we already know. And you’d be surprised how much we know, Eleanor, and how ready we are to trap you in a lie.
“And you left work . . . when?”
Her story, told with much crying and hesitancy, hardly matched my fantasy. Or was it her fantasy that didn’t match reality?
Eleanor Hanks claimed that at about six-fifteen she left the fast-food restaurant where she worked as day manager. She said she drove to her neighborhood grocery store to pick up the weekend’s supply of food for her family, then to the dry cleaner’s to pick up a suit of her husband’s, and then to a discount store for diapers, baby wipes, shampoo, and other dry goods that she said were too expensive at grocery store prices. Finally, she drove home, stopping one more time, to fill the car with gasoline, putting in the gas herself and paying cash “for the discount.” By then it was, she estimated, nearly eight-thirty. She remembered feeling “kind of frantic,” because she hadn’t had anything to eat since noon, and she was running late for her once-a-month card game with “the girls.”
She volunteered the information that when she got home, her husband was annoyed with her for not having fixed a casserole he could stick in the oven for his dinner. He complained that the baby had fussed, hadn’t taken his bottle easily, was hard to put down. She said that while she took a shower, he sat on the lowered seat of the toilet grousing about his day in general and her failings in particular.
“Bad argument?” Geof asked sympathetically.
“Oh, it wasn’t really an argument,” she said quickly. “Dick was just in a bad mood, that’s all.”
“Did he yell at you?”
“Oh, no!”
“Did he hit you?”
“Oh, good heavens, no!”
“Where’d you keep the gun, Eleanor?”
“What? I didn’t. . . Dick kept it in the drawer. Oh!”
She suddenly put her face in her hands and began to sob again. Smithy patted her forcefully on the back as if she were choking instead of crying. When she recovered, Geof resumed from another direction, simply asking her to continue telling us about her evening.
She claimed she got dressed, checked on the baby, and left Dick eating a sandwich in front of the television. What time was that? Nine-thirty or so. What time did she reach her friend’s house? Nine forty-five. How long did she stay at the card party? Until after eleven-thirty, but it wasn’t much of a party, nobody else showed up. But she stayed anyway? Oh, sure, it was her night out! She didn’t leave and go home at any time before eleven-thirty? Oh, no. And when she got home, she found what? Her husband, lying in blood on the bedroom floor. She screamed when she saw him, embraced him, tried to revive him, screamed again at the blood that now covered the front of her clothes. More sobbing. Who was her friend? Lizbeth Miller, but Detective Bushfield had already asked her that last night, why did he need Lizbeth’s name?”
“Because you need an alibi,” Smithy said with brutal directness.
“Alibi...” Eleanor Hanks stared at us, her eyes wide, frightened, her mouth hanging slightly open. It was hard to believe she hadn’t come to the same conclusion on her own, and much earlier. “Oh, no! Oh, I didn’t! I didn’t! Oh, my God in heaven, Lizbeth will tell you . . .” She thrust her face into her hands again, and the sobbing that seemed to come from some inexhaustible well of tears rose to hysteria. Smithy pulled Eleanor Hanks to her feet and forcefully propelled the sobbing woman back up the stairs. With her palms on Mrs. Hanks’s back, Smithy turned her face toward me and mouthed, “Go away.”
The women vanished onto the second floor.
“That poor woman,” I murmured.
“You feelin’ sorry for her?” Willie looked directly at me for the first time. “Maybe you want to remember, she ain’t the one who’s dead.” He shifted his gaze back to Geof. “I talked to the Miller woman last night. Woke her up, pissed off her husband.” Willie smiled slightly, as if the memory pleased him
.
“And?”
“She says little old Eleanor sat right by her little old side all night long, until around eleven-thirty. Talkin’. And drinkin’ Diet Pepsi.” Willie was putting on a falsetto Southern accent that was deadly accurate, but not funny. “Why, honey, Eleanor and Dick got along just fine most of the time, why she just couldn’t imagine who’d want to do such a terrible thing, but it surely wasn’t little old Eleanor, she could surely vouch for that.” Willie resumed speaking in his normal voice. “Mrs. Miller was as nervous as a Southern belle in a roomful of Yankee soldiers the whole time I talked to her.”
“Being questioned in a murder case is enough to make anybody nervous,” I suggested.
“Especially if they’re lying,” he retorted.
“Why are you so sure Mrs. Hanks killed him?”
He didn’t even bother to reply this time, but only gave me a cynical, impatient look.
“Means,” Geof explained, “motive, and opportunity, that’s why. It’s all too familiar, Jenny, it’s just a classic case of domestic homicide.” He led us back to the front door. “Willie, I have a couple of things to do with Jenny, but I’ll be back to the station in half an hour.”
Willie nodded to me before walking off toward his car.
I felt like crawling back into bed and closing my eyes to this vision of the world that revealed black eyes, sobbing women, cynical cops, and dead men. It was a relief to get out of Sunrise House.
“All right,” I said to Geof when we were back in his car. “That was awful, but it wasn’t any worse than a lot of other cases. So what is it, exactly, about this one?”
“It’s not just this one.” He turned the key in the ignition. “There’s more.”
5
WE DROVE AWAY FROM THE SHELTER.
In a grim voice, Geof said, “We were going to look at houses today, and that’s what we’re going to do. They just won’t be any houses we’d want to live in.”
It turned out to be a strange, sad homes tour.
A few blocks from Sunrise House, he pulled over to the curb and pointed. “Look at that stone house with the loose gutters.”
I did that.
“Once upon a time,” he said, “there was a mommy and a daddy and five children. Daddy broke Mommy’s jaw, one of her arms and a couple of her fingers, not all at the same time, you understand, and not necessarily in that order. There was a miscarriage, too, that seemed suspicious to us. We’ve been called out something like twenty times in the past three or four years to that little stone house. His name is James, her name is Lanny, they’re about twenty-five years old. Every Saturday afternoon they let the kids go to her mother’s, and they sit in that house and get drunk as two lords. He gets drunk because he’s an alcoholic; I think she gets drunk for anesthetic, so it won’t hurt so much when he beats her. She’s left him several times, and she won’t ever say why she goes back to him, but I suspect it’s because he threatens her, or the children, or maybe her mother.”
I wanted him to drive quickly away from that house before its unhappiness infected us. Judging from the strain in his voice and the stoic set of his mouth, it had already sickened him.
Ours is a small city, and so I asked the obvious: “Do I know them?”
“You saw her this morning.”
“Which?”
“Mrs. Gleason, the black one.”
“She’s twenty-five years old?”
“Nobody knows the trouble she’s seen,” he said, wryly. “That little stone house over there could be the scene of a murder, Jenny—it just hasn’t happened yet, that’s all. But one of these nights we could find one dead Gleason, or two, and maybe the children. That depends on how desperate she gets or how crazy he gets.” He shifted the car back into drive. “Okay, you’ve seen this one. Let’s go.”
“I can hardly wait.” I gazed out the windshield and spoke to an imaginary person seated on the hood of the car: “And what did you and your fiancé do to get ready for your wedding day, Jenny? You probably had a lot of fun going to parties and picking out china and planning your honeymoon. Oh, no, actually we interviewed a woman who’d just killed her husband, and we met another couple of abused women, and then we drove around town and watched marriages disintegrate. It’s fun, really, it ought to be required of every young couple, like a blood test.”
“I’m sorry.” He reached over to stroke my cheek with the back of his fingers.
“Good.” I kissed his knuckles. “Now that I’ve got that out of my system . . .”
We drove past three other homes where fate sat like a malevolent fat man on the front stoop, gorging on the violence, waiting for either the husband or wife to open the door for the final feast and say, “It’s time. Come in.”
Finally, we parked in front of a white frame one-story house on the corner of a block of similar homes.
“That’s the Hanks house,” Geof told me, unnecessarily, since that fact was obvious from the presence of the two police cars in the driveway and the wide plastic ribbon that surrounded the property and marked it as a crime scene: do not enter, danger, forbidden. “This is where it happened last night, Jenny.”
It was much like the house of my imagination—small, ordinary. I pictured her driving into the garage, parking, pausing wearily; only now I had a real face to put on the woman of my fantasy, a worn, sad, tired, confused, hiding face.
“Now.” I turned to face Geof. “Tell me.”
He sighed, shrugged, and suddenly looked every bit as tired as the real Eleanor Hanks and the one in my imagination. “I’m sick of losing this game, Jenny. It used to be I felt sorry for the women, and maybe even a little compassion for the men, but not anymore, I just mostly feel sick of all of them. I’m losing my patience with the women, and I’m ready to throw the men through brick walls. I’m so sick of these domestic cases I could puke, and this Hanks business just tops it. It just goddamn tops it.”
“Why?”
“Maybe . . . because I knew them.” He said it hesitantly, as if he were still working it out in his own mind. His eyes seemed to look inward, as if he were reviewing mental photographs and finding them disturbing. “It’s a funny thing, Jenny, but in police work you get to know a lot of people, not well, but intimately. I wouldn’t have recognized either one of them if I’d seen them on the street, and yet I knew one of their most intimate and awful family secrets, which was the fact that he beat her up. I knew it, Jenny, I’d been called out to that house twice, and I still didn’t do a damn thing to prevent this from happening.”
“Didn’t, or couldn’t?”
“It may have been couldn’t, but it feels like didn’t.”
“I don’t believe this responsibility belongs to you.”
“I think part of it does.”
There was a police-issue shotgun between us that kept me from sliding across to embrace him, so I had to settle for placing my hand against his face. “So you’re going to quit.”
Something that looked like pain appeared in his eyes.
“It’s funny, isn’t it? I’ll bet I’ve seen a thousand domestic disturbances, but it’s number one thousand and one that finally gets to me. Hell, Jenny, I don’t want to be one of those cops who’s so numb he doesn’t give a damn. I’d rather quit first. But listen.” He took my hands in his and squeezed. “I don’t want you to worry about this.” He blinked and then laughed suddenly, wryly. “Listen to me. Here, we’re getting married in two weeks, and I tell you I hate my job and I’m going to quit, and then I say, hey, don’t worry about it. Christ. I sound like the cheating husband who confesses to his wife because it makes him feel so much better.”
“You don’t have anything else to tell me, do you?”
“Not along those lines.” He tried to smile, a brave attempt that wrung my heart. “No, you only have to marry me, you don’t have to be my psychotherapist. I just want you to understand what’s going on with me, that’s all. I don’t expect you to fix it. Anyway, it’s only a job, it’s not the e
nd of the world. I’ll tell you what. . . maybe I’ll get finished early enough so that we can still see that minister today. All right? You want to?”
“Sure.”
But it wasn’t all right.
Suddenly, nothing was.
He dropped me off at home on his way back to the station. When I walked in, the phone was ringing. I thought about ignoring it, but changed my mind, picked it up, and said hello.
“So, get married without telling your own sister.”
“Sherry.” I tried to sound glad to hear from my only sibling.
“Tell everybody else, but don’t—”
“We’ve hardly told anybody, so how’d you—”
“You told Dad,” she said accusingly.
I slumped onto the stool by the phone and tried to rise from Geofs depths to her superficiality without getting the bends.
“Well, yes, we had to let him know early enough so he’d get airplane reservations, but—”
“So what do I need to do, move out of town to find out?” My little sister’s humor was the sharp, pointed kind that some women throw out ahead of themselves defensively, like spears. “You’d better not expect me to be matron of honor, because I don’t have time to shop for a dress.”
“I don’t.”
“Oh. Well, I can manage to have a wedding shower for you, although I certainly would have appreciated a little advance notice, like two months in advance instead of two weeks! I’ve been thinking about it ever since Dad called, and here’s what I want you to do—get me a list of twenty-five of your friends by this afternoon and I’ll mail the invitations tonight. We can’t have it during the week because that’s not enough time, and anyway, we’ve got a ball game Monday night, and Lars has his tennis on Tuesday, and I’ve always got church guild on Wednesday nights. We’ll have it next Saturday night over here at our house. I thought about having it at our club, but considering some of your friends . . .”
“Send me your poor,” I murmured, “your blacks, your gays, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”