“You don’t scream at your sister, do you?”
“Well, at least not at your house.”
“You don’t kill people, do you?”
She asked that with a panicky little catch to the words, almost a sob. I said, “I’m about five minutes away. I’ll be right over.”
“Thank you,” she said, as if she meant it, and hung up.
When I arrived, expecting the usual chaos, I was surprised to walk into a quiet house. She’d put the girls down for their afternoon naps. “Normally, I’d be working now,” she said with a nervous twist of her hands, “but today I just can’t….” She glanced back over her shoulder, as if looking through the wall of her house toward the church basement and Grace Montgomery’s house. “Did you hear what happened to Mrs. Montgomery?” When I told her I had, without elaborating, she wrung her hands some more and said, “Oh God. There was this awful screaming. I told the police I heard a woman screaming, and I just can’t bear to think that might have been Mrs. Montgomery, that she might have suffered that much….”
“That was somebody else,” I said quickly. “Do you mind if we sit down?”
“Oh God, no, I mean, sure, of course …”
She let me hang up my coat this time and used her own hands to wring and stroke, instead. Once more, we walked into her living room, and I sat on the couch, while she pulled up the rocking chair. I didn’t want to tell her where I’d found Derek, but I did want to get some information from her about the woman I’d found him with. The task, therefore, was to question her, without letting her know why.
“It looks like we’ll buy the church,” I began.
“What? Oh, good. I’m glad, really.”
“I’m going to send letters to the neighbors to keep all of you informed about what we’re doing. Do you think there’s any point in sending one to Rodney Gardner’s widow?”
She tensed suddenly and focused on me as if she’d just seen a wasp on my nose. “To Sammie?” Her mouth seemed to curl with involuntary distaste. “Yeah, send her a letter … the exploding kind, with a bomb in it!” Her expression of distaste altered, seeming now to focus on herself. “Gosh, I shouldn’t say things like that, she’s pregnant, I wouldn’t want to hurt the baby. But …” She leaned back in the chair, flopped her arms wearily over the sides, and sighed. “Oh hell, don’t bother with her. She’s moving. Besides,” she added, witheringly, “I doubt if she can read.”
“You don’t like her,” I said with deliberate understatement.
“Hah.” She clamped her teeth, then barely opened them to say, “I hate her. I’ve got a friend who says I should be grateful to Sammie Gardner, may she roast in hell, because she was the final straw that broke up my rotten marriage. But how am I supposed to be grateful to a slut that called over here for my husband all the time and talked to my girls in that sexy, mocking way she’s got, so they were asking me questions about Daddy and That Lady. Bitch. Bitch.”
“Did Rodney know?”
She shrugged, heavily. “For all I know, Rodney watched. He was just that kind of nasty person. They were just that kind. He was always coming on to me, so maybe he wanted to make it a quartet, heck, I don’t know, it was so sickening….”
“Does she still see him?” I asked.
“Who? Perry?” Marianne didn’t seem to notice the surprise with which I registered that name. “Heck, I don’t know, aren’t I supposed to be the last to know? Or, I guess that’s the wife, isn’t it, and I’m no wife anymore. Thank goodness. Thank God.”
“You were married to Perry Yates?” I asked, disbelieving.
This time she caught my surprise, and she laughed bitterly. “I know. I’m nuts. But I was used to dating flaky artists, you know, and he seemed so kind of serious and stable, like he’d be good for me. Good for me! That’s a laugh. The best I can say about Perry is that I got my girls through him. And the bastard even tried to take them away from me. If I hadn’t given up all my rights to everything we owned, including this house, he’d have gotten them, too. Bastard.”
“It must be hard, having him right down the street.”
She shivered. “It’s awful. I hate it.”
“Did he do that on purpose?”
“You bet he did.” But she grimaced. “Aw, I don’t know. The truth is, Perry doesn’t have any sensitivity to other people’s feelings, it’s like this handicap, like he’s crippled only he’s not in a wheelchair. When I’m really into hating him, I think he moved in down there just to make my life more miserable, but the truth is, he doesn’t think enough about me to care whether he makes me happy or miserable. I expect he just moved there because he already owned it, and he needed a place to stay. Believe me, it wouldn’t have occurred to him to move tactfully out of the neighborhood!”
“Does he still own this house?”
She nodded grimly.
“But how could he have taken the girls from you?”
She put the fingers of her right hand over her mouth and rubbed it. Her eyes focused on her feet as she murmured, “He’s just that way. He gets away with things. He just would have, that’s all.”
Probably because he had something over you, I thought. But what? Whatever it was gave him enough leverage to keep this house. Was this one of the properties that Michael had been planning to purchase from Yates? Would her ex-husband kick out his own children if the money were right? Somehow, I suspected that Perry Yates would do just that. A cynical voice inside me said: No wonder she had seemed so tolerant of the proposal for the recreation hall and even so tolerant of an alleged murderer—it might have seemed to her that almost anything would be better than Michael’s project that might lead to her losing her home.
“Have you heard from Derek?”
I nodded.
“I thought maybe he’d call me.” Her face clouded over, but she tried to smile at me, making an effort to appear nonchalant. “Men.”
“Some men,” I agreed. Maybe she’d hear from somebody, somewhere, about Sammie Gardner’s latest conquest, but that particular bit of bad news wouldn’t come from me. “I’d better go, Marianne, so you can get some work done if you want to. Thanks for letting me drop by again.”
“Anytime.” But she looked puzzled, as if she had just noticed that my purpose in coming to see her again wasn’t at all clear to her. “Did you just come to tell me you bought the basement?”
“Yes,” I said. Liars, as Geof was forever telling me, hang themselves by talking too much. I retrieved my coat and left her house quickly, before my tongue tied a noose.
I returned to the office, where Faye and I worked steadily and quietly together through the rest of the afternoon. She apologized to me, saying, “I feel like a fool.” I was frank with her; I told her that the way she had acted—especially in stomping out of the office and then in not even showing up the day of the board meeting—was unacceptable. I told her that I thought I understood why she had acted as she did, but that I wasn’t ready to respond to it yet. In the meantime, I was glad to have her back, I was glad Derek was found, and if she didn’t have any objections, could we please get some work done? I was as pompous as a prime minister, and that last bit—about getting some work done—was sheer petulance, of course. But she wasn’t in any position to call me on it, and I wasn’t in any mood to apologize to her. For anything. By the close of the workday, we had reestablished a sort of companionable relationship, but it wasn’t all smoothed over. My feathers had been good and ruffled. I wasn’t sure I even wanted to keep her on the staff, much less move her into Derek’s job.
36
That evening, Geof and I shared the unusual experience of eating dinner together, at the same time, in our own house. He called to let me know he was on his way and then showed up just as I was setting out the place mats. It was long after dark.
“Hello!” I said, looking across the dining room table at him. “Who are you, Stranger?”
He pretended to reach for his back pocket. “I have some identification on me.”
/> “I’ll bet you do.”
He laughed and walked over to kiss me.
“Good steak,” he commented later.
“Nice wine,” I told him, after a few sips of the California burgundy he’d brought home with him for this special occasion: dinner together.
“Well,” Geof said, stabbing his salad, “Derek kept his promise to you and called to tell me where he was living. So I went over there personally, to talk to him.” He forked in a mouthful of the cucumbers and red onions that I’d tossed in Italian dressing.
“And?” I coaxed.
“Um.” He pointed to his mouth. After he had swallowed, he said, “You’re not going to like this. When we got there, the cupboard was bare.”
“I hate riddles. What does that mean?”
“I find it hard to believe that you hate riddles. I mean he was gone again, Jenny, and so was she. Nobody home. There wasn’t even a message on the door, telling us to have three pints and a loaf. What the hell’s with Derek?”
I laid down my fork. “Damn. Geof, maybe she killed her husband? Look—she moves into a condo that’s worth at least a hundred thousand more than the house she’s leaving. How does she manage that? Did he leave her a lot of money, or property, do you suppose?”
Geof began sawing at his T-bone steak as if it had posed the tough question. I knew it was tender, so I figured he was taking out on it his general frustration.
“If Gardner left her anything but pregnant, we haven’t found it,” he said. “Besides, there was so much violence to the murder. It would have taken a fair amount of strength, so I have a hard time picturing the wife as the perpetrator. I have to admit, though, this latest disappearance raises some questions we didn’t have before.” He glanced at me, and his voice turned dry. “I’m sure you’re real glad to hear that.”
I shrugged, feeling helpless.
“Geof, I heard today that Sammie Gardner had an affair with Perry Yates. And that he is the ex-husband of Marianne Miller. Did you know that?”
“Yes,” he said. “The detectives have been picking up a lot of neighborhood gossip.”
“One of these days, I’m going to tell you something you don’t already know. Oh, well, here’s something-George Butts tried to make a pass at me today.”
Geof looked up. “Are you all right?”
“Oh, sure, nothing happened.”
“But it’s lousy for you.”
“Yes. I’m glad you understand.” I smiled. “Maybe Butts did it.”
Geof smiled slightly, too. “I’ll have him picked up and we’ll beat a confession out of him.”
“That would be fine,” I said. I sighed and picked up my fork again. “But you still think Mob probably did it?”
“Well, bloody fingerprints and a written confession do tend to incriminate,” he observed dryly. “What I think, Jenny, is that I’d like to find him and ask him.”
“Is MaryDell in trouble for, as they say, harboring him?”
“Yes,” he said, as he popped a piece of steak decisively into his mouth.
“I wish you’d ask her why she wanted that old church for the recreation hall. I know she’ll give you the routine about how it’s such a good site, et cetera, but ask her why she thought to look there in the first place. I’m curious. There’s no ‘For Sale’ sign on it, so how’d she even know to ask about it?”
“Why do you think she did?”
“I don’t know; that’s why I’m curious.”
“Why did the Marlboro Man think to look there?”
I laughed. “Michael? He doesn’t smoke, dear.”
“Not even after sex?”
“Please,” I said. “That is an old and terrible joke that only goes to prove how insecure you really are, and to which I will not deign to respond.”
“Uppity broad.”
He smiled at me. I smiled back at him.
“I don’t really know why he looked there,” I said, as I sliced my own T-bone. “But I think he was looking in the neighborhood anyway, and that building probably struck him as being a likely place to start his development. I suppose that could be more or less why it caught MaryDell’s attention, too….”
“I’ll ask her,” he offered.
“Did you bring dessert?” I asked him.
He spread his arms wide and grinned.
“I’m here, aren’t I?” he said.
But dessert didn’t turn out to be either cherry pie or sex. It turned out to be a visitor, who rang our doorbell at a most inopportune moment.
“Go away,” Geof muttered when the bell first rang.
But our cars were in the driveway, and there were too many lights on—at least in other rooms—in the house. The bell chimed insistently. We looked at each other-something of an acrobatic feat at the time—and sighed. Luckily, we were still downstairs. It did take us a while, however, to put the cushions back on the couch and to get reassembled.
37
Geof went to answer the door and then came back into the living room with our late-night visitor.
“Derek!” I exclaimed.
He was alone, and stammering all over himself in apology to Geof. When I spoke, he looked up and saw me.
“Jenny, I’m sorry.”
He said it so dramatically that it seemed to be an all-purpose apology—he was sorry for barging in on us, sorry for disappearing, sorry for everything. He was, I thought as I stared at him, a shocking, sorry mess. His sweater and trousers were rumpled, his blond hair looked greasy and unbrushed, his face had sagged into jowls like a much older man’s. He was as jerky as a monkey. When we asked him to sit down, it seemed to take a force of will for him to remain seated.
“Derek, are you on something?” I asked him.
“No, no.” He shook his head violently. “Listen. Please. I’ve got to get back, Sammie thinks I’m at the store, she’ll be worried, I mean, after what happened to Rod …”
I opened my mouth, but Derek shouted, “Listen!”
Silently, Geof sank down beside me on the couch.
“I’m sorry,” Derek said, miserably. “I didn’t mean to yell at you. I’ve got to tell you this, that’s all. I was leaving Marianne’s house. It was about nine-thirty or ten o’clock, I guess, and I’m walking to my car, I see what looks like this man huddling in the doorway of the old church basement. Well, it was cold, you know, and it had been snowing for hours, and I figured it might be a bum. I didn’t walk up to him right then, I mean I wasn’t that crazy, for all I knew he might have mugged me, but I guess somewhere in the back of my mind, I kind of doubted that any mugger would be out on a night like that. So, anyway, I called out from where I was standing on the sidewalk.
“‘Hello,’ I guess I said, ‘are you okay?’”
“‘We’re not bothering anything,’ he says back to me, or something like that—”
“We’re not?” Geof stared at him.
“Yeah, there was a woman with him—”
Geof’s astonished stare swung toward me: a woman?
“She was dumpy; she seemed real shy. He did all the talking—what little we did—she never said anything and hardly even looked at me. I think she was scared of me, or at least I thought so then.” Derek laughed a little, but bitterly. “I guess I should have been scared of her. Anyway, she was just this kind of cold-looking lump of a thing that clung to him the whole time I was there.
“He, the man, sounded scared to me, too—which goes to show how smart I am—and real cold. Well, hell, he was all huddled down into his coat, kind of hunkered down on his haunches. He looked like a kangaroo crouching in the dark. So, I thought, well this isn’t right, something’s weird here. And I immediately think they’re bums or drunks who don’t have anyplace to go, and I’m thinking, they’ll freeze to death. I can’t go on home and pretend I’ve never seen them.”
Them. I was still trying to digest that word.
“It was one of those things, you know, that would, like, haunt me. So I walked up a little closer to them a
nd I asked him if he had anyplace to go. He shook his head, or said no, or something. And I’ll tell you the truth, I really didn’t want to offer to take them over to the mission in my car. I was a little afraid of him, I guess. Not that I had any sort of intuition or premonition, I didn’t. It was just, here was this raggedy guy who I didn’t know from Adam, crouching out there in the snow, with this woman with him, and there just wasn’t any way for me to know what exactly I might be letting in my car if I gave them a ride.
“So, what happened was, I had the key to the basement that the landlord had given me. And, I knew I shouldn’t do it—let them in there—but what the hell else was I going to do? Take him in my car? No way. Call the cops? I couldn’t see doing that, I mean, they really weren’t doing anything wrong, except maybe trespassing. So I thought, well what the hell, why can’t they just spend the night in the church? They wouldn’t be bothering anybody. I didn’t see that they could do much harm in there.” Here, Derek barked out another bitter, scalding laugh at himself. “What I thought was, well, it would be cold, but at least they wouldn’t freeze. And I thought, I’ll do one good thing. Here’s one thing I’ll do that’s decent, that I won’t fuck up.
“So I said to him, I asked him, ‘You want to sleep in there tonight?’ and he said he did. So I asked him to step over away from the door a few yards—I mean, it’s not as if I really trusted him, I guess—while I unlocked the door. So I did that, and then I stepped back, and they went on in, and I asked him to leave before morning, so nobody’d see them, and he said okay, and that was it. I went on home and called you, Jenny.”
He rubbed his hands together and took a deep breath. “So I called you. At that point, everything was still okay.” Derek shook his head, and half-smiled. “Right, I’d been fired, and I’d let these tramps into the basement, which I didn’t have any legal right to do. But there wasn’t anybody … dead yet.
“I had a hard time sleeping that night, partly because of worrying about finding a new job, but mostly because of worrying that I’d be in deep shit for letting that bum in. So I finally gave up sleeping, and about, I don’t know, maybe five, five-thirty in the morning, I decided to drive back to the church, make sure everything was okay, and move the guy out of there with his woman.