by Diane Capri
When I arrived, I was able to park near Deborah Andrews’s house this time. The house had once been grand, but it had changed, gotten older along with the rest of us. Apparently, no one here loved gardening and the lawn service didn’t do the world’s best job. All the plants were overgrown and out of control.
The normally delicate liriope resembled the larger, more robust philodendron. Tropical plants overcrowded every section of the walkway and grew tall enough to cover the windows. The lawn looked well-trimmed, but it had bare brown patches all over it, as if it was diseased and no one had bothered to plug it.
Nothing had been painted in much too long. The door hinges and hardware were rusted. The place seemed abandoned, unoccupied. An army man is often away from home, but Deborah had been living here for years, waiting for her husband to come back from wherever he’d been posted. Whatever she did to keep herself busy didn’t include house maintenance or gardening.
I rang the bell and eventually I heard someone shuffling toward the door, and talking. “Elizabeth, Judy, Caesar, get out of the way so I can open the door.”
The knob turned. I heard no lock being opened. The house was out in the country, but someone had come onto this property and murdered Deborah’s husband just a few days before. I would have had four locks, an alarm system and an armed guard installed by now, if I’d stayed here at all. It was curious that Deborah had done none of that.
Deborah opened the door wide, displaying no concern for the axe murderer who could have been standing there.
“Hello, Willa. Come on in,” she said, as she bent down and scooped up a long-haired cat. “Elizabeth, look who’s here. It’s Willa Carson. You remember Willa, don’t you, Judy?” This last was directed at another cat, standing near the door, off to the left.
I pushed the screen door open and it squeaked loudly enough on the rusty hinges that Deborah might not have needed an alarm after all. I stepped around Judy and two other cats, moving quickly to keep them from running out the door as I entered. “I don’t remember you, Judy,” I said, trying not to sound judgmental about the cats’ behavior, or their smell, which had been noticeable the last time I was here and was now overwhelming.
“You like cats, don’t you?” Deborah asked, as she walked farther toward the interior, in the same way she might have asked if I liked oxygen.
The house was dark and cool inside. Even without my small flashlight to illuminate the gloom, I noticed at least six other cats lying on the floor tile.
The litter boxes were out of sight, but definitely not well tended. The odor of ammonia from cat urine activated my gag reflex. I popped a piece of gum in my mouth and tried not to breathe.
“Sure, I love cats. George is allergic, though. What are their names?” I said, to be friendly.
“This one,” she said, stroking the cat she still held in her arms, “is Elizabeth Montgomery. Kind of looks like her, don’t you think? I always thought Liz had green cat eyes. Kind of like yours.”
Beautiful green cat eyes, George would have added, if he’d been here.
His absence ambushed me again. I felt the prickly sensation behind my eyes and quickly focused on something else.
Deborah prattled on. “Here is Judy Garland and that’s Caesar Romero.” She pointed to each cat as she introduced them to me. “The others are Betty Grable, Jimmy Stewart and that old one over there is George Burns. I’ve had him forever.”
I reached down to pick up Jimmy Stewart. Like his namesake, he was long and skinny and easy-going. He purred immediately, and I carried him along while I followed Deborah into the living room where cats sat on every available cushion.
“Marilyn Monroe,” Deborah said to another white cat, “move over and let Willa sit down.”
Marilyn showed no such signs of life, so I gently pushed her aside and sat down. White cat hair would be all over my navy wool slacks.
My hostess continued talking. “I collected the cats when all the children left home.”
“How did you ever come up with names for all of them?” I asked as I put Jimmy Stewart down on the floor. He didn’t go anywhere, just lounged at my feet. Marilyn Monroe jumped up to replace him in my lap. Swell, I thought. Now there would be long white cat hair on my thighs as well as my rump. I’d look like a sweater.
Deborah explained her methods of cat naming, in a long prattling paragraph that left no opening for me to respond. “I was in Key West with Andy once and we visited Hemingway House.
Hemingway loved cats. He had six-toed ones. They’ve kept descendants of his cats on the grounds and named them after movie stars. Andy thought that idea was so stupid, but I liked it. He didn’t like my cats anyway, so I just picked names for mine the same way. None of my friends have six toes, though.” She held up one of the cat’s feet to demonstrate.
She stopped a moment to breathe and then continued. “They’re so much better company than people, don’t you think?” She hugged Elizabeth and Judy at the same time.
Marilyn simultaneously kneaded my leg with her front paws and purred in my lap. I don’t know if she was better company than people, but the kneading was comforting.
She put Judy down and Caesar Romero jumped up in her lap. Elizabeth Montgomery moved over for him to sit down. He was polite about it.
Deborah began another of her monologues, which allowed me time to examine the cluttered, unkempt room. The same lack of maintenance that was evident outside carried through to the interior. “My friend gave me George Burns when Andy went off to the Middle East the first time. I was so lonesome here then. He’d been traveling on short trips for years, but he hadn’t been on assignment away from home since the children left.”
She continued talking, but my attention wandered. The cobwebs in every corner were barely visible in the gloom. Dust balls flew over the tile floor, propelled by small breezes from an open window somewhere. Table tops were marked with paw prints and long cat hair blanketed the upholstery.
“Willa?”
I gave her a quizzical look. I came here because I thought either Deborah or the house would tell me something about Andy’s death. Now, I wondered whether I’d wasted my time.
She repeated, “I said we could film an epic here with all the talent we have now, right?
She was kidding. I think. She didn’t really seem to be talking to me at all. She seemed to know who I was, but she was distracted, unfocused.
Drinking? The last I’d heard, Deborah had entered a high-priced clinic and sobered up. Perhaps she’d had a relapse. God knows, she had been through enough stress lately to bring one on.
But I didn’t smell the acrid odor of metabolized alcohol. Then again, there was hardly anything I could smell except cats.
“Deborah,” I said gently, “I’m very sorry about Andy’s death. I wanted you to know that.”
She turned her blue eyes to me then, and looked squarely into my face for several moments before blinking slowly, like one of her cats. Then she smiled. Conversationally, she said, “I know you are, Willa. Just like I know George didn’t kill Andy. George is a good man.”
Given her daughter’s behavior, I’d worried that Deborah would be as nasty as Robbie had been.
I shouldn’t have worried. Deborah was so forgiving. That was probably what made her such a doormat to her husband and children all the years I’d known her.
“You must miss Andy,” I suggested, removing Marilyn Monroe from my lap and attempting to deposit her onto the floor. A mistake. As soon as Marilyn got down, Cary Grant jumped up.
I gave up and accepted a cat as a part of my suit. At least Cary Grant was black and his hair wouldn’t be so obvious on my slacks.
“Miss Andy? Not really. I hadn’t spent any time with him in years.” She said this lazily, without rancor. Maybe she was taking tranquilizers. Her affect was so flattened, her response time so delayed, that she must have been taking something.
I gently pulled all ten of Cary Grant’s claws out of my left thigh, and he just as gently hoo
ked them back in my right thigh, making holes through which my patience was leaking out.
I stood up and walked around the room. Curiously, there were no photographs of Andy or Deborah anywhere. There was one formal portrait of their three children hanging over the fireplace. The portrait was several years old.
“I guess I thought you two had been together more since you became empty nesters, but Andy’s job probably took him away quite a bit,” I said.
“Andy had been away quite a bit, as you put it, all of our lives. When the children left home, that reduced the number of excuses he had to make.” Deborah stood up now, too. “Would you like a cup of tea?”
As an excuse to get away from the fur lap robes, I accepted. We walked into the kitchen, Deborah still carrying Caesar Romero. A trail of cats followed behind me. How many were there? I’d stopped counting at twenty.
In the dark kitchen there were six chairs, none of them empty. I remained standing.
Looking out the windows, I saw that the boat in which Andy died was still tied up at the dock. I’d thought it would have been impounded and removed by the crime scene investigators.
But this was a break for me. I’d walk down there after I’d finished with Deborah.
I returned to the living room, where I retrieved the tote bag containing my camera and slung it over my shoulder.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
Tampa, Florida
Saturday 11:30 a.m.
January 29, 2000
WHEN I ENTERED THE kitchen, Deborah had managed to fill the tea kettle. I watched as she opened the cupboard. Another cat perched on top of the plates stored on the cabinet’s bottom shelf.
“Dean Martin,” Deborah chided, “I’ve been looking for you.”
She petted his head, but didn’t ask him to move, then removed two lovely antique china cups and saucers of different patterns.
She left the cabinet door open. So he could see us, I guess. Deborah walked around the kitchen collecting the tea things as well as a box of what the English call biscuits and I call crackers. She set them all on a beautiful old silver tray with a silver tea service.
All this she accomplished with one hand, while still holding one or another of the cats. Cats occupied every available space, every cabinet she opened, every flat surface I could see.
Finally, Deborah finished the tea service and was forced to put the cat down to carry the tray. “Shall we go out onto the patio? It’s lovely out this morning in the garden.”
After I had moved Robert Mitchum off the chair I wanted and Deborah had convinced Grace Kelly to let us put the tray down on the coffee table she was sunning herself from, I quickly picked up my cup and held it in my lap.
Robert Mitchum eyed me from the floor right by my feet. It was a little difficult to maneuver the cup and plate, eat the stale crackers and keep an eye on Robert Mitchum while investigating murder. I realized the absurdity of the situation, but I didn’t know what to do about it.
“Haven’t you been lonely out here by yourself all these years, Deborah?” I asked her.
I felt more than a little ashamed that I hadn’t kept in touch with her. One can never have too many friends and I’d always liked Deborah. She badly needed a human friend.
A wave of shame washed over me then, as it always does when I know my behavior would have disappointed my mother. I could do better. Most of the time, I try. It’s irrational, at my age, to feel I’m disappointing a mother who died half my lifetime ago, but the emotion was visceral now.
Deborah allowed a smile to light up her face. “Not really. I have all my cats to keep me company, and you can see it’s hard to get lonely with them around.”
Then, the smile drifted away. “Besides, I’ve felt like a widow for years. In my heart, I buried him a long time ago.”
Completely nonplussed, I blurted out the first thing that popped into my mind. “Do you mean you’ve been having an affair?”
She laughed. “Only with Cary Grant and Robert Mitchum here.” Then, she sobered quickly. “Sex has never meant that much to me, or to Andy. It’s never been worth it.”
I didn’t understand her meaning. “Worth what?”
Instead of answering me, she asked a question of her own. “Did I ever tell you how I got Andy to marry me?”
Without thinking, I almost asked her the question I’d had since the day Craig Hamilton was shot: why she’d wanted Andy to marry her and whether she’d been glad he did, but I just shook my head.
She looked dreamy, as if she was remembering her childhood’s happier times. “I was the lonely little girl next door. Andy never paid me any attention at all, but I was in love with him from the time I was five years old. My own parents were dead. I was always at Andy’s house and his parents became very dear to me.” I itched to find my recorder in my tote bag, but I didn’t want to interrupt her.
“Albert, Andy’s dad, was my special favorite. He was disabled, you know, in World War II. He operated an old country store at the crossroads of nowhere and back, and I helped him out after school. When he didn’t have any customers, he’d tell me stories about our town, the war, and Andy. How he loved his son!”
She offered more weak tea and stale biscuits. I took both, just to keep Robert Mitchum off me. The real Mitchum hadn’t had as much trouble with women, I’m sure.
“Anyway, I was determined to marry Andy and to have Albert for my dad, too. When Andy graduated from college, we had a big party back at the house. Andy had been in ROTC and was going into the army with a commission two weeks later.”
She stopped her tale for a while.
When I thought I’d have to ask her to continue, she said, “I got Andy drunk and seduced him. When I turned up pregnant, he had no choice but to marry me.”
Deborah turned her bright, empty smile toward me. She looked so fragile, a small woman, left alone too soon, living in seclusion with only her cats to console her. Sympathy smothered my pluck. There were plenty of tragedies in this story. Too many.
When I said nothing further, Deborah told me bravely, understanding, perhaps, that she was not the only casualty of her marriage, “I always felt sorry for Robbie. Andy wanted a boy desperately. He was so disappointed when Robbie was born. He never got over it.”
What could I have said to that? Might I have said that Robbie was a vicious woman who could more than take care of herself? I couldn’t bring myself to do so. “Well,” I told her instead, “it sounds like Andy participated in the seduction, too. It wasn’t totally your fault.”
Deborah’s eyes widened and her mouth formed a little O of surprise. “Actually, he didn’t. Even when he was drunk, he didn’t seem interested at all.”
Then, flatly, as if the past was old, uninteresting history, “And after that, we only made love because Andy wanted sons.”
I was appalled. Deborah was one of the most gracious, pleasant women I’d ever met. Many men must have wanted her. It was such a waste that she’d never been loved, except by her cats.
She took a deep breath then, and petted the cat on her lap in what might have been real contentment. “So you see, Willa, I didn’t really miss him all that much. He was just someone else to wait on. And he treated all of us as if we were privates. We were allowed to do only what he ordered us to do. Andy was a very unhappy man and when he was around, he made the rest of us unhappy, too. It was a relief when he left, actually. Now that he’s never coming back, I can’t say I’m sorry.”
She’d bowed her head and I couldn’t see her face clearly. Was she rationalizing her empty life? Or was this the truth?
When George and I came to this house the day after Andy died, Deborah had played the part of the bereaved wife so beautifully. But then, she’d played the part of the army wife perfectly all those years, too. You never knew a marriage until you’d lived in it.
“It was worse for the children, though,” she said, without being prompted.
“Why?”
She looked straight at me now, candid, sharp
. “Because I chose Andy. I chose my life. They had nothing to say about it. These happy babies, growing up with a father who hated them. I’ve never forgiven myself for that.”
“Surely you’re exaggerating,” I know I sounded shocked to her, because I sounded that way to myself.
She shook her head back and forth.
“Unfortunately, I’m not. It took years of alcoholism followed by more years of therapy for me to deal with it all. The children never enjoyed the escape of booze. It’s ironic,” she said with a quirky little smile in the corner of her mouth. “Andy wanted to be a family man because he thought he needed it to get promoted. You can’t be a single general, you know. But he didn’t want a family. And now, none of his children are sorry he’s dead. Sad, isn’t it?”
She didn’t sound sad. She sounded kind of satisfied, actually. Like she’d won, in the end.
Her tone made it easier for me to ask her about Andy’s death. She didn’t seem quite so vulnerable at the moment. “We both know George didn’t kill Andy. But, who did?”
People seldom ask direct questions. Even media interviewers. Unlike cops, normal people never just come out and ask: Did you do it? It’s surprising what you could learn when you asked questions directly.
As if she was discussing strangers, Deborah replied, “It’s hard to say. There are so many possibilities.” She’d given me the impression that all three of her children might have murdered their father, and she didn’t try to correct that impression.
Based on my experience so far, I thought Robbie, at least, was capable of murder. And after this interview, I had to accept that Deborah would have had reason to kill her husband, too. She was the one who was here, in the house with him the night he died. Had we all simply overlooked the most obvious suspect?
“Were you here the morning he died? Did you hear or see anything that might help me?”
