“So? Why?”
“Because in order to get aid for dependent children, we have to have a paternity test proving the man the woman claims is the father really is the father. I guess now we know why she didn’t want him to take that test, don’t we?”
I groaned while Sabrina hooted with laughter in my ear.
“I thought she was afraid to ask him to help her, like it would offend his pride or something, a lot of men are like that. Little did I know …” I heard another throaty chuckle. “By the way, I have an address …” She said it in a way that was meant to tantalize me, but her next words revealed who had the curiosity. “The address when she was married to Dennis Clemmons. Maybe he still lives there. Maybe you should come pick me up at noon tomorrow, and we’ll go drive by on my lunch hour and see what it looks like …”
I glanced over at my lieutenant husband, but he had picked up his plate and mine and left the table and now he was busy at the sink.
“Sure, why not?” I said. “Anything else, Slick?”
“Adoption,” she said.
“What? Dennis Clemmons adopted David?”
By that time, Geof was pouring powder into the dishwasher. But now he straightened up and stared back at me.
“No!” Sabrina was laughing. “You could adopt the kid out to somebody else. Or maybe a foster home?”
I said warningly, “Sabrina!”
Geof demanded, “What’d she say?”
“Sabrina said that Judy inquired about public assistance when she was married to Dennis Clemmons, but that she lied about a lot of things, like not reporting her previous marriage or any alimony or child support and claiming that Clemmons was David’s father. Sabrina also said she’d like to be a sort of foster mother to David.”
“I did not!” she screeched in my ear.
“She did?” Geof looked baffled but pleased as he turned away to finish his work. “Really?”
“Basketball?” I said to her as if she’d asked me a question. “Sure, I think that playing basketball with him is a great idea, Sabrina, you being a former collegiate all-star and all, and you could take him to a movie once a month, go bowling, whatever you like.”
“Like hell.” She was laughing again.
“Better thee than me,” I said softly so Geof couldn’t hear me over the racket of the dishwasher starting up. “See ya, Slick.” I hung up. To my husband, I said in a voice that carried quite well over the noise of the dishes rattling in the machine, “Well, it seems your girlfriend was a liar, too.”
Immediately, I regretted my hard humor.
Geof looked as if I’d slipped a small, thin knife between his ribs, and he was trying hard not to let me see how much it scared him, how much it hurt. I knew what he was thinking: If she’d lied twice about David’s paternity—first saying the father was Ron, then claiming it was Dennis Clemmons—she might have lied about it really being Geof. If she had no scruples about divulging confidential information, if she’d slept around like a cat during high school, and if she’d tried to cheat the welfare system, then the adult Judy Baker Mayer might have been a pathological liar at best, an entirely unethical woman at her worst. By now, after twenty-four hours of allowing himself to entertain the possibility, Geof really wanted this “child” to be his. It was written all over his face. At that moment of recognizing the depth of his desire, I felt a sharp quick stab of fear in my own heart as well. Part of the fear was for me in case it was all true and we were really going to have that difficult, spooky boy in our lives. But part of my fear was for him in case it wasn’t true.
Not looking at me, his voice as calm as if he weren’t concerned about anything more than the fact that Sergeant Lee Meredith was due to show up with the case files in a few minutes, he said, “How about some ice cream?”
8
THE NIGHT FINALLY LIVED UP TO ITS NAME and darkened, but that lowered the air temperature only infinitesimally. The air was so heavy inside the house and out that you’d have thought a storm was coming; the weather reports said it wasn’t. An upper air stream had stalled, that was all, trapping summer indefinitely down on the baking ground in Massachusetts.
“Come on, Fall,” I urged as I stood on our front stoop, staring at the headlights coming toward me. “Change things.”
“What?” called Geoffrey from inside. “Is Lee here?”
“Just driving up,” I called back in to him, “like a breath of fresh air.”
“Good.” Suddenly he was behind me, pressing close for an instant, wrapping my hot body in his arms, but briefly. “We could goddamn well use some.”
With a face like a cherub and a body like a wrestler, Lee Meredith was a walking paradox: Geof claimed that sweet round face, with its halo of soft brown hair, could wring a tearful confession out of a killer, while her fireplug arms and legs could disable a man twice her size. She was twenty-nine years old, five foot eight inches tall, and the first female sergeant in Port Frederick history.
“Hey,” I greeted her in our living room. “How you doin’, Sarge?”
She grinned back at me. “Hi, Mom.”
I turned toward Geof. “Who invited her?”
Behind me, she laughed, while Geof just shook his head at us.
“I guess you know about everything,” I deadpanned to her.
Her smile broadened to include her so-called superior officer, the lieutenant. “Must have been a C-section, Jenny? It’s a hell of a late-term delivery.”
“The episiotomy was a bitch,” I said.
“You two!” Geof looked uncharacteristically helpless. Lee and I snickered at each other and at him. “Get in here!” He faked a blustering swagger. “Both of you! Dammit!” We faked obedience and, still snickering behind his back, followed hum into the dining room, which he and I had cleared so the sergeant could lay out her files for us. Lee brought into our house an aroma of the pipe tobacco that her husband, Charlie, smoked, and it intertwined comfortably with our own lingering garlic. We were all in shorts and T-shirts, but the dining room was the hottest room in our house, having no cross-ventilation, so I’d brought in a floor fan, which I now turned on, aiming it at our legs under the table, so the breeze wouldn’t ruffle her papers. Lee’s outfit, a starkly plain tank-top T-shirt atop equally plain tan cotton shorts, displayed the fact that she was sweating lightly—and the powerful quads and biceps that helped her compete successfully on police martial arts teams.
I took a seat at one end of the table, Lee and Geof sat opposite one another.
She dumped two bulky files with a thud on the tabletop and then released the contents from the rubber bands that bound them.
“This was a clear case,” she said firmly as she sat down.
She started right in, working rapidly, efficiently, pointing to papers with her powerful, stubby fingers, their nails filed into short, clean mounds. (“Keep an edge on ’em,” she had once advised me, “for good defensive weapons.”)
“Here’s my sketch of the crime scene, Lieutenant. Here’s the report of the first uniform on the scene. Here’s my initial report. Lab reports. And here’s everything that came after, right up to the time we closed it.” She grabbed a neatly paper-clipped pile. “I clipped these newspaper articles, too. Not everybody does, but I think they should, because sometimes reporters talk to people we don’t, and sometimes they print stuff we don’t know about.” She nodded toward Geof, then grinned at me. “Those are quotes. I’m brownnosing.”
He pulled at the nose and smiled slightly.
“I’m trying to show I can do it the way he taught me to do it,” she joked with me. “You never know, he might make chief someday, and I want to stay in good with him.” She grinned at him. “Dad.”
“Yeah,” he said dryly, “that’s the way, all right.”
But Lee was irrepressible. She arched her eyebrows in a comical way, then pointed at all the forms littering our table. “So, it’s all here, like you requested, Geof. What I suggest, if you don’t mind my suggesting something in your
esteemed presence, is that we take the time right now for both of you to read whatever you want to—I’m assuming you want to, Jen?”
I nodded. “Yep.”
“Great, and you can ask me anything, and we’ll talk about it.”
Geof took the laboratory reports, while I went for her sketch of the crime scene. Her pencil strokes were thick and bold, and although her artistry would never hang on anyone’s wall, the sketch was clear enough for its single purpose.
“Living room?” I said.
“Between the living room and the dining room,” she corrected me.
“Judy’s body was found in this chair you’ve drawn here?”
“Right.” Lee’s voice was encouraging, as if I were a recruit she was training. “The chair had been pulled in from the dining room and placed in the doorway between the two rooms, facing the living room. It was one of the dining room chairs.”
“And this is his body on the floor at her feet.”
“Yes.”
“Geof, are we bothering you by talking out loud like this?” I asked him. “Can you concentrate while Lee and I are talking?”
He didn’t even look up.
“Geof?” I smiled at Lee. “I guess we’re not bothering him.”
“He’s used to a heck of a lot more commotion than we’re making, Jenny. The lieutenant has amazing powers of concentration.”
I knew that—in ways that his fellow and sister cops down at the station would never know—and I kicked him under the table to remind him.
“Darn right,” he muttered without looking up.
“Is there anything else I should notice here, Lee?” I asked her.
“I don’t know. Tell me what you see.”
“Just four walls and the furniture you’ve drawn here. As you said, her chair is in the middle of the doorway. The rest of the furniture around the walls of the living room includes, let’s see, two couches, a couple of arm chairs, a TV, two coffee tables, four end tables. Lot of furniture. Sort of a strange arrangement, all pushed up against the walls like that? Not exactly a cozy conversational grouping, was it?”
“Plenty of room for a wheelchair to get around in though.”
Geof and I both looked up. I spoke first: “Judy was in a wheelchair?”
“Parkinson’s,” Geof told me. To Lee, he said, “She was really that much of an invalid?”
“She was that much of an invalid, yes …”
Lee left the rest of the sentence hanging.
I reached for a stack of color photographs, eight-by-tens that showed every inch of the crime scene. The officer who took them had stood in the front doorway and snapped overlapping shots of the rooms, and then he or she had walked to the opposite wall and shot overlapping pictures from there. There was a log in which the picture taker had noted the time of each shot, the brand and speed of film, the F-stop, and the subject of each photograph.
My stomach rolled, and I drew in my breath.
What had until that moment been only outlines and x’s on Lee’s sketch now turned into detailed, graphic, bloody reality. Now I could see that the chair in which Judy had died was a dark brown ladderback with no arm rests. I could see that she was wearing a white long-sleeved pullover blouse when she died and a full white skirt with an elasticized waistband and no belt. It looked like clothing that might be easy for a disabled woman to pull on and off. She was soaked in blood. She was slumped over to her right, as if the force of the bullet had shoved her there, pinioning her against the chair with her head hanging over the back, turned slightly to the right.
“She was shot twice,” Lee offered. “Left temple. Heart.”
Geof interjected, reporting on what he was reading: “The first bullet sliced through her cerebral cortex, massive damage, exit wound consistent with her husband kneeling on the floor at her feet, holding the gun to her temple, looking up. The second was dead center in her heart. It says he was covered with her blood as well as with his own, but her blood was smeared on him, as if he had embraced her after he shot her.”
On hearing that Ron had hugged Judy after he killed her, Lee and Geof and I glanced at one another, each of us appearing to bite back the comments on the tips of our tongues. I tried to think about it charitably: Okay, maybe he loved her, maybe she begged him to do it, maybe it broke his heart, maybe it was like that.
“Kneeling at her feet?” I said, but then it burst out of me. “What crap! Who do these men think they are? They kill themselves and take the little woman out with them, like they think she couldn’t possibly live happily without them. You ever hear about women doing that?”
“Hell, no.” Lee agreed. “They want to get away from the son of a bitch, they don’t want to take the bastard with them when they go!”
She and I both laughed, but Geof said, “It wasn’t like that, ladies, it was the other way around. The note he left said she was the one who wanted to die, and he was the one who thought he couldn’t live without her.”
“He said so,” I argued. “But maybe it was all getting too hard for him to take care of her and to watch her suffering, maybe that was ‘their’ problem. Maybe she could have stood it a good while longer if he hadn’t wimped out on her.”
“Wimped out?” Geof smiled.
“There are other choices,” I said.
“Even so,” Lee pointed out, “it’s still murder/suicide.”
“What about him?” I asked to change the subject, to calm myself down a little. They were pros at this, I was the emotional, indignant amateur. “How many shots?”
“The same. Two shots, both to the chest.”
“Could a person really do that to himself?”
“Oh, sure. You’d be surprised.”
I suppressed the wow I felt like saying and merely shook my head to show my amazement: what determination to shoot oneself twice in the chest. The man had definitely wanted to die. “He shot her from close range?”
“Yes, he held the gun right up to her.”
His body—Ron’s—lay at her feet, on his right side with his head touching the toes of her brown loafers that looked too big for her. She was a short woman and plump. Boobs, I thought meanly, Judy Baker always had boobs. He was stocky, like the ex-high school football player he was. Her left hand had fallen to her lap, palm up, and her right arm dangled to the side of the chair, as if she were reaching down for him.
“She looks like somebody slapped her,” I said, “the way her head’s thrown back.” Her face was invisible behind a coating of blood that had also sprayed her hair, which was a dark ash blond. I examined the picture of the body of Ron Mayer. He was face down, and he was wearing a brown business suit, business shoes. Taking care of business, I thought. “The way he’s dressed … it’s an odd way to dress to die.”
“What is?” Geof held out a hand for the photo I was examining, and I passed it to him.
“A business suit. He didn’t even change clothes.”
“How would you dress to die?” Geof asked, then he glanced at Lee. “You want something to eat or drink, Sergeant, or a beer?”
“Thanks, no. I had a huge dinner. You couldn’t tempt me to eat anything.” She glanced at the stack of photos, then grinned at Geof. “Unless you kneel, Lieutenant. Maybe if you get on your knees and plead with me—”
“In your dreams,” he told her.
“I’d get comfortable,” I said.
They looked at each other, then at me.
“What are you talking about?” Geof asked me.
“How I’d dress to die. I’d get comfortable.”
“You’d get naked,” he said.
Lee let out a “pssh” of laughter, and Geof grinned at me.
“Sweats,” I continued, rolling my eyes for Lee’s benefit. “Tennis shoes. I don’t know. I’ll have to admit that it’s something to which I’ve never given a lot of thought. What about you guys?”
“Naked is good,” Lee concurred. “I think I’d go sit in a shower with my back propped against a corner, m
ake it easier for people to clean me up afterward. They could just turn on the shower and spray me down.”
“That’s thoughtful of you,” I said. “Geof?”
“My wet suit,” he declared without hesitation. I’d put on my wet suit and then I’d shoot myself through it in as many places as I could manage, so the medical examiner would have a hell of a time cutting it off me and figuring out which shot killed me. It’d be a holy mess inside the suit, she’d have to scrape it to get all the tissue. She’d cuss me every inch of the way, and I’d be looking down and laughing at her for all the times she rapped my knuckles when I missed some scrap of evidence that only a microscope could have picked up. I’d look like a whale that got harpooned.”
“You’d be looking up at her,” I corrected.
“Huh?” He thought about it, then laughed. “Oh, right.”
“You married a really strange man,” Lee said to me.
“This is nothing,” I assured her. “What time did this crime occur?”
“Can’t you tell from the photos?” Geof inquired.
“Are we getting cranky, dear? No, I can’t. The living room curtains are pulled shut, so I can’t tell whether there’s a sun or a moon outside, there’s no clock on the wall and there’s no close-up of a wristwatch on either of their arms. You want to just tell me?”
“He doesn’t know,” Lee said, “but I do. Ron Mayer called 911 at five forty-six that afternoon to say he’d shot his wife and he was going to kill himself.”
That was the dramatic and horrifying tape that everybody in town had heard all too many times on the newscasts. Some national broadcasts had even picked it up.
“The medical examiner agrees with that,” Lee continued, “and she said he probably died very soon after that. In fact, he was dead when the paramedics got there at six-oh-one.”
“How’d they get in?” Geof asked.
“Front door was open.”
“Did you confirm that the voice on the 911 tape was his?”