“So. So I didn’t want to be seen, particularly, so I drive up and park in the alley behind the church. And I see the back door’s open, so I’m pissed, because he didn’t close it, but I’m happy and relieved because at least he’s gone. So I go inside, just to check things out—make sure he didn’t set a fire in the wastebasket or anything, I mean, you wouldn’t have believed the things I thought up while I lay awake, only murder wasn’t one of them—and before I even get into the central meeting room, there’s all this blood.”
Derek began to cry, so that his following words were choked out. “I’ve never been so scared, I didn’t know what it was like to feel so scared. I thought I’d die right there, looking at all that blood. I mean, I just hauled ass out the back door, and I got in my car, and I drove away.”
“Derek,” I said, on an intuitive impulse, “did you call me several times and hang up?”
He nodded.
So he was my anonymous caller.
“I wanted so bad to talk to somebody, but every time I called, I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t … talk about it.” He was making a heroic effort to control his emotions. Personally, I wished he’d let them fly; then maybe he could land on solid ground again. “Jenny, after I called the cops, I figured I was … finished. I still feel that way.” Derek stretched out his arms and stared at the backs of his hands. “As if something’s dying in me.” He clenched his hands into fists and drew them up into his abdomen. “You’d already fired me. I didn’t have shit in my life. And now I’d let this bum into that basement, and something really terrible had happened as a result, and I knew it was all over. I was scared, and I felt guilty, and I drove over to the office, and I just cleared everything out. And then I drove around in the snow for a long time, hell, I drove nearly to Boston that morning before I turned around and started back home. I figured I had to face up to this stupid thing I’d done. But then—”
He breathed in two shuddering, ragged gasps.
“Then on the way back, I heard on the radio that somebody had been killed at the church, and they gave his name, and it was Rodney Gardner, and I remembered that was the creep we’d interviewed, and I thought, oh my God, he’s got a pregnant wife, and it’s all my fault! Jesus, it’s my fault!”
“Oh, Derek,” I cried, and moved over instantly to sit beside him and to put my arms around him. He let himself be held, but when I murmured, “Poor Derek,” he looked at me with horror in his eyes.
“Poor Derek! No!” he protested. “No, Jesus, Jenny, it was my fault! Poor Sammie, poor baby …”He laughed and sobbed at the same time, wildly. “Poor creep. Poor dead creep. Poor dead creep who’d still be alive if I hadn’t let a couple of maniacs in to spend the night.” Derek pulled away from me to place his face in his hands. Then he leaned his head back on the couch and spoke dully to the ceiling. “So I knew I was responsible. And how was that girl going to manage, no husband, a baby on the way? I had to help her. I had to do something. So that night, the next night, I called her from this motel room out of town, and I told her who I was, and what I’d done, and I said, ‘Let me help you, please, I’ll do anything.’ And she told me to come over to her house and she’d talk to me. So I did, and she said she needed help, that I had to stay with her and help her now that Rodney was gone.” Derek closed his eyes. “So I did.”
“And now you can’t get out of it,” I said.
He sat up, looking angry for the first time and defensive. “I don’t want to! It’s my responsibility. It’s the least I can do. I owe her.”
“Your life?” I asked, incredulously.
“You don’t understand,” he said, leaning his head back and closing his eyes again.
Geof and I glanced at each other. We understood, all right. Derek was caught in a trap of sex, death, and guilt, spun by a seductive little blond spider who’d eat him alive if his soul didn’t reject the poison of guilt that infected it. We didn’t try to talk him out of that trap, not then. While I perked coffee for the three of us, Geof asked him concrete questions in a straightforward, matter-of-fact voice that acted more like a tonic on Derek than my coffee did.
“Derek, would you try to describe for me the man and the woman you admitted into the church?”
The man he described sounded like Mob; the woman sounded like Rosalinda.
“We needed this information, Derek,” Geof said. “We knew about the man, but we didn’t know about the woman.”
“I’m sorry,” Derek admitted. “I’m sorry about everything.”
“Well, tell me what you noticed when you entered the back door the next morning. I’d like to hear about everything you saw, felt, touched, heard, or even smelled, Derek.”
Blood, what he noticed was the blood, the sight of which knocked out almost all other memory.
“Do you have the key to the basement with you?”
“Yes,” Derek said, sounding almost calm now.
“May I have it, please? And Derek,” said Geof casually, as he reached for the fateful key, “I’m curious about something—does Sammie own that condo?”
“Yeah.”
“Pretty nice. How’d she manage that?”
Derek shrugged, as if he couldn’t care less. “Money from an aunt of hers. Sammie and Rodney lived with the aunt. The aunt died and left Sammie some money, and they used it to buy that house they were living in, and then the condo.”
“What was the aunt’s name, do you know?”
Derek shrugged again, looking weary now and beaten down.
“I wish you’d go see my friend Marsha Sandy,” I told him.
“I don’t need a psychiatrist.”
“The hell you don’t.”
“Jenny’s right,” Geof said.
Derek’s answer was to push himself up from the couch and to insist on leaving. We let him go, but we stood at the window together, our arms around each other’s waists, watching Derek get into his Toyota and drive off.
“Geof, I feel as if we’re letting him walk back into a burning building.”
“I know. But if we tried to stop him, he’d break away from us again. I suspect he’ll have to find his own way out of this, Jenny.”
“It’s because I fired him …”
“Oh, come on, Jenny …”
“Let me finish. I mean, it’s because of the emptiness he felt when I fired him. There was a void in Derek, Geof, and before anything good had a chance to fill it, little Sammie rushed in. Now he’s got a commitment, all right, now he’s got a cause. But it’s awful, it’s evil.”
He shook his head. “It’s his battle.”
“But he needs help, and I played a part in this, and I care about him.”
“There’s nothing you can do.”
“Oh, I don’t know.”
He sighed. “I was afraid you’d say that.”
38
The next day Geof left early, saying he was headed for Marsha Sandy’s house—to see if she’d talk to him about her client before he put out a pickup order on Rosalinda.
He was going to try bribing Marsha to get her cooperation: if she’d help him, he’d let her pick up Rosalinda herself and personally take her to the station to be interrogated as a probable witness to, and perhaps even participant in, the crime. Or crimes.
I went to the office, where I called Marianne Miller and asked her to telephone me immediately if she saw Sammie Gardner—alone—at her old house. She wanted to know why. I told her it was “foundation business.” Well, Derek was still an employee of the foundation, so …
Marianne called me back at ten-thirty.
The merry widow had returned.
She didn’t even look particularly surprised when she responded to the doorbell and found me standing there. If anything, she seemed almost pleased.
“May I come in?” I asked her.
Sammie Gardner smiled in her slow, sly way. “Why not.”
“Where’s Derek?”
“Pickin’ up stuff from his condo.”
Damn, I thought,
he’s really moving in with her.
Inside, the old saltbox was everything her expensive new home was not: slovenly, dirty, and scattered about with grubby, mismatched furniture that she wasn’t even bothering to move out. The rooms I saw were “decorated” with graffiti, most of it either obscene or profane, that was scrawled across the walls in many different pens by many different hands, as if Sammie and Rodney—that fun couple—had invited their friends to have a go at expressing themselves. From what I read, their friends were barely literate, being unable to spell words longer than four letters.
“It’s charming,” I said as I stood with my hands in my coat pockets in the middle of the living room. “I don’t know how you can stand to leave it.”
She laughed out loud, briefly, holding her hands over her pregnant belly. Then she just stood, staring at me, and waiting for me to say my piece. Even as pregnant as she was, Sammie Gardner was God’s way of defining sexy. The pregnancy that rounded her face and her breasts may have even added to her allure, sending out a message of ripe and ready fecundity. But it was the sly smile and the tumbling blond hair that really did it, that said, “Ready, honey, whenever you are.” She was even looking at me that way, which had me shifting uncomfortably from foot to foot. Maybe Marianne Miller was right, maybe Rodney had watched, maybe the three of them—Rodney, Sammie, and Perry Yates—really had wanted to put together a quartet. Maybe she thought that I had come to apply for a spot in a trio.
Clearly, this was a doomed and idiotic mission to rescue a self-made hostage. I had been unprepared for the sheer unfeeling selfishness of the girl. Now I felt absolutely ridiculous saying what I’d come to say to her, which was, “Please let him go.”
“Derek?” She smiled her sly smile. “You talkin’ about him? Last time I seen him, he wasn’t, like, locked up. He ain’t wearin’ no chains, you know.”
“He feels guilty—”
“Yeah,” she said petulantly, “he should.”
“But he needs help; he needs counseling.”
“Don’t we all, lady. Me, I’m a grieving widow. Maybe he’s my counselor. Maybe I’m his counselor.” The smile disappeared into a yawn. She scratched her left breast and then lowered her bulk onto a sofa. Already, I was boring her. I decided not to wonder how Derek was managing to keep her attention. No wonder he looked so tired.
“I don’t get it,” I told her. “He doesn’t have any money—”
“Yeah, well, I do.”
“He doesn’t have a job—”
“Thanks to you, right?”
“He can’t be very good company—”
She laughed. “I don’t require much in the way of what you call conversation, you know? Like, Derek’s plenty good company for me right now. I need him, like. I got this move to make, I got things to do, and somebody’s gonna have to take me to the hospital, and then look after the baby. I’m gonna get me a neat job, and Derek’s gonna take care of things for me—”
“That’s despicable, Sammie.”
She looked as if she might get angry at that, but then she only smiled and said, “How do you spell that?”
So, I thought, you’re ignorant, but you’re not stupid.
“Where’d you get the money?”
I thought she’d tell me it was none of my business, but evidently she wanted to boast. “I had this rich aunt, see, and she left it all to me. Roddie and me, we was always real nice to her. We lived with her and took care of her, so now she’s takin’ good care of me.” She patted her stomach possessively. “Me and her little niece. Bless my old auntie.”
“What do you need Derek for, when you’ve got Yates?”
That didn’t goad her either, but only twisted her smile up another notch. “I’ll bet you been talkin’ to that crazy wife of his, right? Did you know she’s crazy? Like, when she threw him out, you know what that crazy bitch did? Threw all his clothes and stuff in his car and set fire to it! No shit! She really did! God, and it was a nice Chrysler, too. I couldn’t believe it. I mean, like, she’s Looney Tunes.”
“When was this, Sammie?”
“Six months ago, seven, I don’t know.”
So that was Perry’s leverage over Marianne, I thought.
“Did you ever see the man they’re looking for—Mob?”
“Oh, sure.” She said it casually, but then she didn’t seem able to repress a shudder. “God, what a geek. He’s crazy, you know? He used to hang around all the time, beggin’ and stuff like that? My aunt used to give him doughnuts and coffee and stuff, God, she even let him sleep on our porch a couple of times. Gave me the goddamn creeps! I hated having that Looney Tune hangin’ around me. God! She was crazy to let him hang around there, you know? I mean, God, look what he did to Roddie, I mean, like God, it coulda been me, you know? God!”
Her dismay over the fact and manner of her husband’s death was, it seemed, relative to her own well-being.
“This was your aunt’s house, then?”
“This?” She looked as if she were about to say something scornful, but then that sly, lazy smile reappeared on her face. “Nah, not this place.”
“How long did you and Rodney live here?”
She shrugged. “Couple years, I don’t know. Look,” she said, suddenly impatient, “I got things to do.” She flicked the fingernails of her right hand with her thumb, smiling her infuriating little smile at me. “Like Derek’s waitin’ for me, you know?”
“Oh, right.” I gazed around me again, making my appraisal as insulting as possible. “This time, like use some of that money on like wallpaper, you know?”
“Fuck you,” she said, and stuck her tongue out at me.
Amazing, I thought, as I walked out and closed her front door behind me: the only way to get a rise out of that girl was to criticize her interior decorating. But then she surprised me again.
“Hey, wait!”
I turned on her front walk to find that she had flung open the door to yell at me.
“Listen,” she called out, “wait a minute, will you? I’ll walk out with you, all right? Hold on.”
It couldn’t be because she liked my company, I thought; more likely, she wanted to taunt me some more about Derek. Still, curious, I waited until she appeared at the front door again, this time with her purse and a couple of paper bags. I walked back up onto the porch to take them from her and carry them to her car.
“That’s the last of it.” She nodded at the bags in my arms; they were full of small items of junk. “I ain’t comin’ back to this creepy place no more.”
I anchored the bags down on the floor in front of the passenger seat of her MG and slammed the door shut. She got in and pulled away, with no thanks, only a wave that had more than a touch of bravado to it. I didn’t wave back.
39
Two hours later, I had just invited Faye to step into my office for a little chat when Geof called from the station to tell me they had picked up Rosalinda and to tell me what she told them. It was, essentially, “I was there, but I don’t know anything.”
“She was fairly clear about it,” Geof told me. “She told us that she and Mob went to sleep on the floor of one of those smaller rooms off the central meeting space. She says she didn’t wake up until Mob woke her up, saying they had to leave immediately. It was still dark, she says, and he scared her because he had blood all over him—”
“Well,” I said, as if that piece of evidence settled things.
Geof continued: “Rosalinda claims that at first she thought—vaguely, I gather—that he had somehow cut himself. Then she got really frightened because she thought he might have tried to kill himself. But he told her he was okay, and it doesn’t seem to have occurred to her to wonder any more about it. He said he was okay, and she believed it. He said leave, and they left. He said, don’t tell anybody we were there, and she didn’t. He said, don’t tell anybody where I go, and she won’t. He told her not to worry about him, and I guess she hasn’t. He seems to have guided her out of that basement so that sh
e didn’t see, hear, or touch anything incriminating.”
“Either he was being smart,” I said, “or protective.”
“Yes, and either she’s smarter and a better actress than she seems capable of being, or else that woman really doesn’t have the slightest idea what’s going on.”
“Then why did she get so upset at your detectives when they came to question her here at the foundation?”
“Because they asked her about Mob. I take it that even she’s afraid of his demons. He had told her not to talk about him, and so it upset and confused her to be asked about him.”
“Then how’d you get her to talk?”
“Marsha did most of that.”
“So did Rosalinda tell you where he is?”
“I don’t think she knows.”
“I’m sorry. I thought this might be it.”
“Jenny?”
I waited, then said, “Yes?”
“Uh.”
What’s the problem? I wondered. “Yes, Geof?”
“I’m not sure how to say this.”
“You want to know if I think there’s any possibility that Marsha might be hiding him or that she might know where he is.”
“How did you know that?” He sounded relieved, but then he sounded worried again. “Yes. You mad?”
“No, it’s a fair question. And the reason I knew that is because I’ve asked myself the same thing. Honey-Lieutenant Honey—I really don’t think so. I can’t imagine her doing anything as dramatic as harboring a fugitive, and I don’t believe she’d take a chance of endangering the lives of other people by hiding his whereabouts. But why don’t you ask her again?”
He said he would, after which he requested that I never again call him Lieutenant Honey, and then he hung up.
It was then, a little late, that I thought of an exceedingly slim possibility that nobody had yet considered.
I called Geof back to tell him, and then I called Marsha Sandy’s house.