“You’d better get up.”
It was the tone of Iris’s voice that made Marcie suddenly alert. Gone was the tender warmth of last night. It had been replaced by something cool and suspicious. Her heart raced. “What is it?”
“The police are here.” Iris paused. Her mouth was tight and her spine stiff. This was not good at all. Marcie pushed herself upright.
“You okay, Iris?”
“They say you have to get dressed. They have a warrant for your arrest.”
And with that, Marcie knew her house of cards had crumbled.
Be kinder to yourself, Marcie. Nobody’s perfect.
No one would be saying anything like that to her again for a long time.
51.
“You know something?” Kate Anderson looked almost entertained on the other side of the interview table from Marcie. “I don’t think I’ve ever worked a case where my problem was having too many suspects who could all easily be guilty. The issue I have is—and don’t take this personally—that you’re all such truly atrocious people.”
The second detective, a muscle-bound hulk of a man whose skin was so dark it shone, smiled as Anderson paused and sipped her coffee. Marcie was letting her own grow cold. She knew how it would taste from a Styrofoam cup. Plasticky, too cheap, and too strong. She’d been in a room like this before with an equally useless court-appointed lawyer beside her, just like now. The coffee was meant to amp up whatever jitters the suspect had.
“First,” Anderson continued, “there’s the beautiful, very young, and slightly unbalanced new foreign wife, who saw the opportunity to stick her claws into a wealthy widower far away from home. A hasty, unhappy marriage that William Radford was already regretting and planning to be free of with no financial loss.” She sighed, enjoying the theater of her statement. Marcie had thought the detective was dour, but there was definite humor glinting in her eyes now. It made her look younger and happier. None of it stopped Marcie from wanting to smash her in the face. “Isn’t that so often the way?” Anderson continued. “Pick something up on your vacation that looks great in its natural location and then when you get it to your house you realize it doesn’t really fit with the rest of your stuff and you end up throwing it away?”
Marcie said nothing, but she got the feeling that Detective Anderson didn’t much like what she knew of William any more than the people she was investigating for trying to kill him.
“Then, of course, we have your husband, Jason Maddox, Mr. Radford’s colleague and close friend. We’ve found enough . . . discrepancies, for want of a better word, in the Radford and Partners accounts to be preparing to charge him with embezzlement. The way I see it is that William came back from Europe six months before he planned to and Jason didn’t have time to cover all his tracks. So, both Keisha Radford and Jason Maddox had motive and opportunity to try to kill William Radford, and to be honest, I was veering very much toward Jason being the more likely candidate—he’s too smooth for my taste—until he asked to speak to me at five a.m. this morning.” She leaned across the table. “When he told me to go look in the air vent in your dressing room, where he’d hidden this.” She pushed the old yearbook across the table, the pages open to where Marcie’s young sullen face stared back. “And so here we are, Savannah Cassidy.”
Her air vent. Of course that’s where Jason had put it. Right back where she’d hidden everything. She stared at the old photograph. Savannah Cassidy. A name that had become her destination. With everywhere on the map to choose from, she’d moved someplace where she’d at least never forget the name she was given at birth. She looked up at Anderson.
“My name isn’t Savannah Cassidy. It’s Marcie Maddox. I changed it legally to Marcie Brown before I left Boise. I have the paperwork.” She wasn’t waiting for the poor excuse of a publicly appointed attorney beside her to interject. “Or I guess I presume you do if you have my box of private things.” Any tears she may have been holding back burned dry as a flash of anger heated her.
Anderson turned the pages of the yearbook before sliding it over again. “Jonny Newham. Your high school sweetheart. So, as the mysterious note that was sent to your husband along with this asks, what happened to Jonny?”
“You know what happened to Jonny,” Marcie sniped back. She wasn’t going to go through all this again. Not over Jonny. That was dead and buried. The past. Screw Anderson and her shovel.
“Do we?” Anderson raised an eyebrow. “Why don’t you tell us to make sure.”
“Jonny died. He killed himself.” Her back straightened even though she knew where this was leading. She was walking on quicksand that could drag her down at any moment. “We got married straight out of high school. He got us a trailer in the mobile home park. I worked shifts in the diner and he worked in a car shop a mile or so away. We were poor but happy and thinking of starting a family. Then there was an accident and Jonny’s leg got crushed under a truck. He should have gotten compensation, but it turned out he’d been drinking on his lunch break and it was likely his fault. He didn’t fight it.” She sighed. “Things got bad after that. I worked more shifts and Jonny drank all our extra money. He started on drugs. He was a different person.”
“But he’d straightened out before he died.”
“Yes, or so he said. Who knows really?” Her voice was soft. She hadn’t spoken of this in so many years and now here she was, telling her sorry tale for the second time in a week. “But probably. He definitely seemed straighter for a month or so. He’d been doing some cash work on people’s cars when he could. We were getting back on track. Talking about a baby some more. A compensation company had even come along and said they could get him some money for his accident.”
“And they did, didn’t they? You got that.”
“I did. After he died.”
“So, I repeat the question. What happened to Jonny, Marcie?”
“I don’t know. I went to work. I had an eight-hour shift that evening, finishing at eleven. When I went he was watching daytime TV and there were leftovers in the fridge. He was having a bad day with his leg and he was in a real mean mood. It didn’t make me want to come home. I needed a beer, so I went to the late-night place out by the freeway to meet up with Janey Spence, one of the other waitresses. I wanted to be young. Have a good time. Drink. Dance. All that stuff.”
“You danced with some men that night.”
“Yes, I did. Everyone knows that. It’s in the files you’ve probably read and it was all over the local TV and radio. I danced. I got drunk. And then I went home with some guy and passed out drunk, so don’t ask if I screwed him because I don’t know. He said I didn’t. I’ll take his word for it. In the morning, I woke up hungover and feeling guilty and went back to my trailer. Jonny was cold and dead on the floor. There was a half-empty bottle of whiskey beside him.” She blinked and behind her eyes in that instant she could see it all again.
His eyes were wide open and he’d fallen from the chair onto the shitty carpet with piss stains on it that they’d never been able to afford to change and that frozen expression had looked so terrified and in pain but she knew he was gone and she didn’t know what to do next and then Janey came in behind her and shrieked and broke the spell and then with shaking hands Savannah had called 911 and then the circus had begun.
“It wasn’t the whiskey that killed him though, was it?”
“They thought so at first,” Marcie said. “I thought so too. That he’d drunk himself stupid and his organs couldn’t take it anymore. Not after a few weeks clean. But they tested the bottle and then they found it.”
“Say it out loud, Marcie. For the tape. What did they find in Jonny’s whiskey?”
“Coolant.” The word was barely a whisper.
Anderson sat back in her chair. “Just like with William.”
“Mrs. Maddox was found to be not responsible for Jonny Newham’s death.” The barely awake man beside Marcie finally spoke. “His death was ruled a suicide, as is clear from the records.”
“Eventually it was, yes,” Anderson said. “Although there was a nasty air of suspicion left hanging over you, wasn’t there, Marcie? Enough that I imagine the Boise police department will be taking another look into Jonny’s death now. I mean, what are the odds of two men you know being poisoned the same way? Ingesting coolant in a drink?”
Marcie’s blood chilled. “You think it was me? You think I poisoned William?”
Anderson looked down at the yearbook and then back up at her wryly. “Well, it would be fair to say that you might have a prior. Even if you didn’t kill Jonny, his suicide could have given you the idea. From his death you knew that ethylene glycol—coolant—disappears from the body quickly. If it hadn’t been found in the liquor bottle then it’s possible no one would have known how he really died. Same could be said for William. Another few hours and no trace may have been found in his system. So yes, it’s possible.”
“But why?” Marcie asked, aghast.
“Jason was in financial trouble. Maybe he’d told you about what he’d been doing and how he was close to getting caught. With your background it would be hard to give all this luxury up and live in some shitty condo, waitressing to pay the rent, visiting him in jail every couple of weeks for years. Or maybe you did it for Keisha? Maybe she was the better bet.”
“Detective Anderson, this line of questioning—” Her attorney at last made a half-hearted attempt to do his due diligence in the room even though he looked exhausted and just wanted to get home rather than sit in with a murder suspect.
“I’m not asking a question,” Anderson cut in. “I’m simply telling Mrs. Maddox my thoughts.” She turned her attention back to Marcie. “We’ve seen the texts between you. Very close. Maybe too close. You two have been hanging out a lot and my colleagues in London tell me that Keisha preferred women sexually before she met William. Played for both teams at the very least. She’d been seeing one girl back home who she stayed in touch with when she got here, a Dolly Parker, but she cut off contact with her recently. Maybe she’d fallen in love with someone here? Maybe you?”
This was all crazy. “If you’ve seen our texts then you’ll know that I was backing off from Keisha. She was too unstable. Too unhappy. Maybe you should try asking her about William again. She had the most to gain from his death. She was always saying she wished he was dead!” She stung with her own betrayal. It wasn’t Keisha who’d put her here. It was Jason. Her supposed beloved husband had sold her out.
“I’m sure we will. But Keisha Radford commented on the coolant right after spending the morning with you. Maybe you’d had time to loosen the cap at some point. You knew about the hidden needles and syringes. You had as much motive and opportunity as either Keisha or your husband.”
“Maybe I did!” Marcie finally snapped. “But even if I’d wanted to kill William—even if I’d known about the shit Jason had gotten himself into—why would I be so stupid as to try to murder William with coolant? After what happened with Jonny? What I went through with that?”
“Like I said, maybe you thought there would be no detectable traces left in his body by the time he was found. He was lucky he was found so early.”
“I know how coolant kills people. Massive organ failure? There’s no way that there would be no investigation into that, especially for someone so powerful and influential in this town as William. And then the carton would be found and that would be that.”
“True. But the obvious suspect would be Keisha, not you.”
“Except that someone out there sent that yearbook and note to Jason on the night of the party. It literally arrived a couple of hours before we left and he demanded I explain everything, which I did. And it wasn’t pleasant. He wouldn’t even speak to me. Why on earth would I then go to William’s house and calmly try to poison him that night, knowing that Jason would think it was me, and more importantly someone else out there who knew about Jonny would think it was me? I didn’t do it. Someone else did. Maybe whoever sent that yearbook to Jason did it. Maybe it’s the same person who tipped you off to investigate him?” She sat back in her chair, breathing hard.
“And now,” Marcie finished, “I think I’m done with answering your questions.”
52.
Mama. Mama had been on the news cussing her out, that’s what the guard had said, gleefully. As if it would hurt Marcie somehow that she couldn’t even rely on the support of her own blood. As it was, Marcie wasn’t surprised. Mama was still no doubt pissed that Marcie—Savannah—had disappeared into the sunset with most of Jonny’s injury payout and life insurance and never looked back. It hadn’t even been that much money. There was no way she’d been going to share it with Mama and her latest deadbeat boyfriend. That money had been her way out after all the crap flung her way after Jonny’s death. A cheap drunk whore, sleeping around as her crippled husband struggled to cope. Left him there to die alone in a stinking trailer, probably heartbroken. Always trouble, that Savannah Cassidy. Like mother, like daughter.
Marcie scratched at her scalp. Her hair was greasy after a night of crying and raging and sweating against the scratchy pillowcase. How had she ended up in this position again?
She hadn’t answered any more of Anderson’s questions. Maybe that made her look guilty, but it seemed the detective was already convinced of that. She had too many questions of her own. Were Keisha and Jason still in custody too? Were the police playing a game of eenie, meenie to decide which of them to charge? What if they found the syringe in their house? Who would they blame then? Her or Jason? It would be her, of course. She was the trailer-trash murderess, even if she’d never been charged, and Jason was a proven thieving liar. Mud always stuck.
She was pacing the cell again, thinking of the yearbook and the tip-off about Jason, about who hated them enough to do all this, her head an exhausted mess of half-thoughts, when Anderson’s sidekick, Washington, came and unlocked her cell.
“You’re free to go.” His drawl was deep and slow, a Mississippi-in-summer voice, and the words were so unexpected that she didn’t move.
“What?”
“You’re free to go,” he repeated. “Come on. I’ll take you to collect your things. We’re finished at your house, so you can return home.”
“You’re not charging me?” She still hadn’t moved, as if half-expecting the officer’s words to be some kind of cruel joke.
“No plans to at the moment. So unless you want to start paying rent on this cell, I suggest you move.”
“What’s happened?” Marcie scurried after him. He took the stairs two at a time and her stiff legs struggled to keep up even as her heart soared. Free to go. “Have you charged someone?” Jason or Keisha?
“Not yet,” he said. He pushed the door open and nodded at the woman behind the caged desk, who gave back her purse and cell phone, and then he led her out to the side entrance, ignoring her further questions.
“Marcie!”
She squinted in the sunlight at the call of her name. “Elizabeth?” Of all the people who might have turned up to take her home, Elizabeth was a surprise. Virginia maybe, after some gossip, or Iris out of kindness, but Elizabeth? No. “What are you doing here?” she asked.
“Turns out Ms. Glapion saved you.
“Thank you, Detective Washington,” Elizabeth said. The large black man nodded in reply and gave a half-wave before turning back inside. “We should get in the car,” Elizabeth said, opening the driver’s-side door. “There are news people around the front.”
“What did he mean, you saved me?” she asked. Elizabeth looked tired. This must have turned her world around too. Did she even have a job anymore? Probably not. The kind of assistance William was going to need was likely to be somewhat more specialized than Elizabeth could provide from now on. More bedpans than trips around the world.
“It was the coconut water,” Elizabeth said as they pulled away.
“What about it?”
“I asked the police if all the cartons in the refrigerator had
been injected with coolant or just the one William drank from that morning. Turns out they were all poisoned.”
Marcie frowned. “How does that affect me?”
“Because it means you couldn’t have done it.” Elizabeth looked across at her. “At the party, you were in the corridor looking for Jason to say you wanted to go home when I found you and then we left. We spoke and then I drove you to your place. You couldn’t have gone to the kitchen.”
“It’s been a long night, Elizabeth.” Marcie’s brain was still blank.
“The coconut water was fine then, because William went and got one as we were leaving. Remember? So whoever did it, it was after you left.”
An image came back to Marcie. The last time she’d seen William normal was as they drove away. He was in front of the house, and yes, he’d been drinking from a carton. Her heart thudded in relief.
“Anyway,” Elizabeth continued. “Once Detective Anderson confirmed that, she wanted to make sure you couldn’t have come back to the party without anyone knowing—which, given the masks and the number of people, was possible. But it turns out that your neighbors across the street had an attempted break-in a couple of weeks ago and installed security cameras. They don’t catch your house, but between theirs and some on a property farther down the block they could see that you didn’t go out again that night.” She paused, navigating the streets while Marcie let it all sink in. “So whatever terrible things you may or may not have done in the past, Marcie or Savannah or whatever your name is, you didn’t do this to William.”
“Look Elizabeth . . .”
“It’s not my business. I’m struggling hard enough to get my head around all of this as it is without getting caught up in things that happened in a different state to people I don’t know.”
Dead to Her Page 26
