by AR Simmons
“You still have no idea as to who it could have been?”
“If I did, I would have given his name to Adams—not that it would have done a lot of good.”
“Molly, I’m going to talk to him. If there was a boyfriend, he needs to know about it.”
“He don’t care about Katie any more than he does me, Mr. Carter.”
“He wants to catch her killer.”
“Then why didn’t he talk to me about her? I was one of her clients.”
“Not at the time she was killed,” he reminded her.
“Mancie wasn’t taken that long ago, Mr. Carter. You know he should have questioned me. You think Katie being killed had something to do with Mancie. Why don’t he?”
He started to answer, but she cut him off.
“I’ll tell you why. It’s because he knows I done something to Mancie. It’s what he’s always thought. That’s the reason he never looked for anyone else. He’s a stupid man, Mr. Carter. Stupid and lazy, and if I never get my baby back, it’s his fault!”
“Being angry doesn’t do us a lot of good, Molly,” he said. “Let’s try to stay on good terms with him. We don’t have to like him, but we need him.”
“Sorry to go off on you like that, Mr. Carter. Want me to see if I can come up with another list?”
“A list would be good. Tell you what, you think about the man who Katie might have been seeing. I’ll meet you tomorrow at the café, okay?”
Chapter 8
October 22
“You think I’m stretching credibility?” said Richard. “How about your dismissal of the babysitter’s murder as unrelated to Mancie’s disappearance?”
He had walked to City Hall after work, and was due to meet Molly at the café in an hour.
Adams ran both hands over his fleshy face. When he shook his head, the flab at his neck quivered like a turkey’s wattle. “So where’s the kid?”
“I don’t know,” Richard admitted. “Maybe with whoever—”
Adams cut him off. “And how about the second baby?”
“What? Oh, the one found at the dump. I have no idea.”
“Finally we agree on something,” said Adams as he leaned back in his swivel chair and appraised Richard through bloodshot eyes.
“Carter, can you appreciate how bizarre this is? I don’t mean you waltzing in here like you’re on official business. That’s par for the course when you’re on a mission from God, I guess. I mean the fact that I actually listen to you instead of throwing you out on your ass. Maybe the diabetes is making me senile.”
Richard suppressed a retort in favor of riding out the soliloquy. He needed Adams.
“Carter, we gotta stop meeting like this. It’s getting embarrassing. See, I’m being nice about it. But the fact is: I don’t want to see you in here anymore. Got it?”
“I thought you told me not to withhold any information I came across.”
“Right. Send me a letter or give me a ring.”
“All right, but before I go, I thought of something you might want to consider.”
“I’m sure you did,” said Adams condescendingly.
“It concerns the half-life of Valium. Have your experts worked it backward to get a time for the ingestion?”
“You mean do we know when she doped herself up? Does it matter?”
“It does if someone else slipped the stuff to her.”
“She had a prescription for the damned stuff, Carter! She’s also a meth-head!”
Richard felt like shouting, but resolved to check his irritation. It didn’t work.
“So how long has she been a doper, Adams? Do you know or even care? Check her criminal record and then check her damned medical records!”
“I did,” replied Adams mildly. “No record doesn’t mean she didn’t use. It just means she didn’t get caught, which was too bad for the kid.”
“Look,” said Richard, trying to calm himself. “I don’t know what happened to her baby any more than you do, but I know her. She’s not what you think she is.”
“I don’t think. I know. I had her pegged from the start.”
“Sure you did,” said Richard, mimicking Adams sarcasm. “What you don’t know, because you didn’t bother to find out, is that she only started using meth after losing her baby and then seeing a police force not trying to do a damned thing about it except accuse her!”
Adams gaped, snorted contemptuously, and then smiled. “You got a thing going with her!” he laughed. “You gotta be crazy.”
Richard got up to leave. “Jump to all the conclusions you want. The only thing I’ve got going with her is trying to find out about her baby.”
“Hey, Carter!” said Adams as Richard reached the door. “You’re little girlfriend is smarter than you think she is. Trust me on that. I’m pretty good at reading people.”
“Maybe you should try reading tea leaves. That way, you could solve all you cases without getting off your butt.”
The parting shot was counterproductive as well as unsatisfying. It wasn’t even witty. Richard realized his mistake before he reached the door. As soon as he was outside, he turned and went back in. Adams saw him and frowned.
“Don’t bother apologizing,” he said.
“I’m not. I just came back to tell you something I forgot. I know you don’t put much stock in what Molly says, but she thinks Katie Nash might have been seeing someone.”
“Who?”
“She doesn’t know, but thinks it might have been a married man.”
“You got to watch those sudden rememberings, Carter. They’re first cousins to story changing. I’m sure as a detective you know what that means.”
“You mean she’s amending a lie to explain contradictory evidence?”
“It’s what the guilty ones do. A changed story is a kind of confession.”
“Molly hasn’t changed her story. And you haven’t developed any new evidence for her to explain,” Richard pointed out.
“So she’s fried her brain cells. Who knows what she’s thinking? Have you ever considered that she might be making all this stuff up because she can’t live with the truth?”
“The truth being that she killed her baby?”
“She probably didn’t do it on purpose, if that’s any consolation. All the rest is probably just some make-believe something or other to get away from the guilt. It’ll all come out sooner or later.”
•••
Molly sat parked across and down the street from the restaurant until she saw Richard approaching on the other side. She got out and hurried across, angling to intercept him. Except for the manila pad she carried, a stranger might assume that she was meeting her husband or boyfriend for lunch, an impression of which Richard was acutely aware after Adams’s comments and yesterday’s argument with Jill. Maybe meeting in a public place wasn’t such a good idea. Molly was uncomfortable too, but like Richard, pretended not to be.
“What have you got there,” he asked as they reached the door to Carol’s Place.
“Just a tablet. There’s nothing on it.”
He frowned questioningly as he held open the door. “I just thought it would look more business like,” she explained.
They sat at a booth near the door and ordered coffee.
“I went to see Adams today,” he said as soon as the waitress was gone. “I wanted him to have his toxicology expert try to pin down the time the Valium got into your system.”
“They drugged me, so they could come in and take Mancie without me waking up,” she said slowly as she thought her way through the implications.
When it hit her, she impulsively reached across to clutch his arm.
“If you can find out the time, then we can figure out who did it!” she said excitedly. “Adams can arrest him and make him tell us where Mancie is.”
“It’s not that simple, Molly. There are a lot of variables in figuring how long it takes for the level of the drug to fall off. What I asked him to do may not even be possible.�
��
The truth was that Adams might not even speak with him again, much less follow up on his suggestion to talk to the toxicologist.
“There is one thing I’m pretty sure of, however,” he said. “You didn’t take Valium in place of your Tylenol after you got home that morning. The level would have been higher than it showed, even if you only took one pill at the therapeutic dose.”
“Wait. What did you mean about the variables? I thought they could figure that sort of thing out pretty accurately.”
“People metabolize things at different rates. Then there’s the alcohol you took with it. On top of that, we don’t know the size of the dose, or if it was given to you all at once or in increments.”
The excitement drained slowly from Molly’s face as he spoke. Then something struck her.
“But we do know a couple of things. See, if I didn’t take it after I got home, then it had to have been while I was at work or at Kirk’s. So that narrows it down a lot.”
“What about Katie?”
She shook her head dismissively. “Katie could never do anything like that. She was … well, she was just Katie, you know. What you saw was what you got. It has to have been one of the guys at the bar or Kirk.”
He nodded absently.
“Molly, there’s something I’ve been wondering about. It’s one of the things that has kept Adams from believing you.”
“You mean about the drugs—the meth. I already told you about that. I never took none of that stuff until later.”
“No. I mean, that obviously didn’t make Adams take you any more seriously, but I think the main thing is that no one broke into your apartment that night.”
“Katie probably forgot to lock it. I already told you that. She usually did, but it was real late when she left. And I forgot to put the chain on.”
“But you said that she was really good with routine, and didn’t you tell me that she always locked it when she left?”
“If I didn’t let her out, she did.”
“So what do you think the chances are that she forgot on the one night when you were knocked out on Valium and alcohol?”
“She left it unlocked on purpose? You think that she was part of it?”
“Did anyone else have a key?”
“Sure, the landlord. Oh yeah, and Pat probably still has his.”
“You’re ex-husband has a key to your house? Did you tell Adams about that?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because the stupid man didn’t ask,” she said. “He should have, but it don’t matter because Pat didn’t take her. He never wanted either one of us. It would probably have been best if he had listened to his parents.”
“They wanted him to get custody?”
“I told you they never thought I was good enough for him, especially his momma. I can kind of understand her feelings, I guess. You want the best for your children, and she saw me as kind of a step down for Pat because my family ain’t like theirs. You know how rich people are.”
He remembered her remark about being considered “trailer trash.”
“But they loved Mancie.”
“Mr. Allsop never seemed to care one way of the other about her, but her Grandma took to her like natural. She came to visit even after Pat left me. I thought she kind of got to like me.” Molly’s face lost all expression. “She won’t talk to me now.”
Molly was far from the muddle-minded druggie Adams took her for. She had shown Richard astute intuition when it came to people, perhaps a talent hard-taught by disappointment.
“Could Pat have taken Mancie?” he asked.
“You mean for his momma?” Molly shook her head violently. “She ain’t took my baby. I wish to God that she did.”
“I know it’s hard to believe, but are you sure she couldn’t have done it?”
“I called her the day after it happened. It was terrible. I needed so bad for someone to talk to. She screamed that I done something awful to Mancie. I begged her to believe me that I didn’t. We was both crying. No, Mr. Carter. I’d give anything to know that she did, but she didn’t.”
And Pat wouldn’t. After meeting him, Richard could believe that.
He declined Molly’s offer of a ride, mainly because he wanted to walk and think, but also because he didn’t want Jill to see them riding together. He had no intention of keeping his meetings with Molly a secret, however. Despite Molly’s rejection of the idea, on the way home he tried to imagine a conspiracy involving Molly’s ex, her mother in law, and the unknown third person needed to slip Molly the tranquilizer. As a fourth, he added Katie Nash whose role presumably was to leave the door unlocked. Thinking it through only made the dubious scenario more incredible, yet he had to visit the Allsops.
•••
Jill paced, able to concentrate on neither academic nor domestic work as she waited for Richard to come home. Her husband was oblivious to the real cause for her concern, which was just as well since she couldn’t discuss it with him. All she could do was worry. She didn’t fear losing him to Molly. However, she did wish the woman was out their lives. Although she ached for the poor mother’s loss, she would willingly sacrifice her for Richard. She hated his obsession with finding the baby, and she dreaded his inevitable failure, fearing that it would send him into the abyss that had yawned to take him away from her since the night he killed Mic Boyd.
Closing her eyes, she saw again the way he was on her return from her aunt’s funeral.
“Please, God,” she prayed.
That homecoming had shattered her hopeful illusion that he was coping with his depression. He couldn’t sleep through the night, and he couldn’t keep a job, yet he stubbornly refused to see a mental health specialist. He flew into a tirade about mood-altering drugs whenever she mentioned professional help. His use of alcohol had never been more than casual, but she feared that might change. Every day she came home she looked fearfully for signs of surreptitious drinking.
She stopped willing him to change; now she would gladly settle for things to remain as they were. If only he could cope, then she could cope as well. It galled though. Coping meant managing the problem instead of fixing it. She resented having to live that way. The realization of her resentment came earlier in the day. She had been trying to deny it, but it was there. Now, like another layer of affliction, she was ashamed of herself for resenting Richard’s weakness.
“I didn’t ask for this,” she said to herself.
“You didn’t ask to be born into this wonderful world either, my child,” she imagined her Aunt Mirabelle replying in her wonderfully accented English.
The thought brought a pang of loss made sharper by her present need to be what her aunt had always been to her, strength and encouragement. For the first time, she suspected that her aunt had never really possessed that certainty she had always displayed. But Mirabelle would never succumb to tears, and neither would she.
So she peered through the curtains and waited, as she waited every day whether at home, or on the steps of the college. She waited, dreading the time when he would fail to appear. Jill knew that it was foolish to think that nothing could happen to him if she were near, but that feeling had become a conviction.
He came around the corner, walking head down with no trace of the limp now. Preoccupied, he walked past before retracing his steps and coming across the lawn. She released the curtain and retreated to the kitchen.
“Jill?” he called when he came in.
“In here, Richard,” she called, coming into the front room with a cup of coffee for him.
“Thanks,” he said, taking a sip. “So how was your day?”
“Boring,” she said, beginning to relax now that he was with her and safe.
“Boring? I don’t think I’ve ever heard you use that word.”
“I taught my professor’s classes today, if you can call it that. I read his lecture aloud while the students dutifully took notes. Since freshmen are incapable of intelligen
t thought, the professor holds forth. Today he did it by proxy.”
“You could have spiced things up a little,” he suggested.
She shook her head. “Lèse-majesté. Lowly female graduate assistants do not add to or take away from the words of the ‘Great Man.’”
“So how long are you stuck working for Professor Chauvin? The entire year?”
“I shouldn’t complain,” she said, going back to the kitchen. “He’s nice and he’s an excellent scholar.”
“Just not a teacher?”
“The two do not always equate,” she said as she took a roasting pan from beneath the counter and grabbed the olive oil from the counter top.
“Do you think you could get celery and carrots from the crisper and dice them along with an onion?” she asked.
They were a family (at least the beginning of one), and Jill determined to ground him in family things.
“Sure. What are we fixing?” he asked as he opened the refrigerator and knelt to retrieve the vegetables.
“Roast chicken and root vegetables.”
How would a baby change things? she wondered.
“What’s wrong with these carrots?”
“Those are parsnips. Peel two of them along with three large carrots and one sweet potato. Chop two other carrots without peeling them and set them aside with the chopped celery.”
Don’t be a fool, Jill. Babies are problems, not solutions.
While Richard hacked up the vegetables, Jill took the chicken from the refrigerator, removed the packet from inside, rinsed it out, seasoned the inside with salt and pepper, and began packing some of the unpeeled vegetables inside the bird along with a halved lemon.
“Are we going to eat that?” he asked dubiously.
“No. All that goes inside and underneath just flavors and keeps it moist. The ones you peeled will go in a little later. We mustn’t overcook them.”
She trussed the bird, basted the outside, salted it, peppered it, and placed it on a bed of chopped vegetables in the roasting pan, tented it with foil, and put it in the oven. Then she brought up a subject that she hoped would please him.
