Maybe the death of Willie Henderson would end the plague.
But if it didn’t, who’d be next?
I reached the front steps of Sabrina’s duplex and knocked.
“Jenny!” Her smile was unexpectedly warm, even welcoming. She was wearing a full-length white bathrobe and no makeup, and her hair was pulled back in a ponytail. She looked lovely. I felt haggard, just looking at her. Her eyes were shining with what appeared to be happiness, or some inner source of peace. “Oh, don’t look so scared, Jenny, everything’s okay now. Come on in!”
I followed her into the living room.
Like its owner, it was sleek, chic, displaying a bold taste in strong colors and modern accessories. She headed for the kitchen, saying she was going for coffee. I sat on the edge of her white leather couch. Sabrina didn’t travel, didn’t invest; she spent almost all of her relatively small salary on clothes and furnishings. It seemed to imply breathtaking trust in the future—or none at all.
She came back in a few minutes, handed me a white mug, and offered cream and sugar.
“No,” I said.
“Don’t be angry,” she said, and smiled. She sat down next to me on the white couch and smiled again. “I didn’t do it, Jenny, I told him no. You see, I got to thinking about what you’d said—about luck and fate—’and about self-pity, too. And, I couldn’t say this to just anyone, but I can tell you. I got to thinking about poor, deprived little Sabrina, and how all the poor little thing had was good looks, and intelligence, and an education, and loving parents, and great athletic ability, and a decent job, and wasn’t it just a shame how terribly deprived she was?” She shook her head and laughed. “And then I thought about him—that little old, scrawny, ugly thing who wanted to cheat on his pregnant wife. And I thought, Jesus, Sabrina, what’s the matter with you? So, don’t look as if you’ve just lost a friend, Jenny, because believe me, you’ve got one for life.”
I put the coffee cup on the glass table in front of the couch.
“Then you won’t be so hurt by what I came to tell you,” I said. “Willie’s dead, Sabrina. It looks as if Gail shot and killed him last night while he slept. That’s what I came to tell you.”
She sucked in her breath at my announcement, and her hands jerked, so that coffee spilled over onto the pristine white robe, spreading a brown stain. Quickly, she got up from the couch, carrying her cup and saucer, saying something about getting the stain out. She was gone, in the kitchen, a long time. When she came back, the stain was gone, and the peaceful look had returned to her eyes.
“It’s funny, but I feel kind of the way I did when my ex-husband died,” she said, easing herself gracefully down” on her white couch. “That was just a couple of years ago. He got in one fight too many, I guess. And I remember that most of what I felt was just. . . relief. You know, Jenny, maybe the world’s just better off without some people. Some men. Maybe it’s for the best.”
I was exhausted, filled with chaotic, disturbing images of Gail Henderson and her two children I’d never met, and I was suddenly angry, as well, though I tried to tamp it down.
“That’s not how you felt Saturday night, Sabrina.”
“Well.” She smiled, not the cynical half smile I was used to, but a warm, wide, sympathetic smile that relaxed her whole face. She looked extremely beautiful. “I’ve been wrong about other things, haven’t I?”
And this is just one more, I thought furiously. But all I said was, “I don’t know, Sabrina. I’m tired. I’m going home.” I could have asked her for a ride, hell, I could have called a taxi. But I was upset, confused. I wanted to stomp home by myself, like some stubborn child who’d rather do it himself.
Talk about your self-pity.
It piled up further when I discovered the two messages that were waiting for me on the telephone answering machine at home.
“I’m calling from the hospital,” Gears voice said. “I thought you’d want to know that Gail will be okay, although they’re not sure about the baby. There’s some worry about whether it got enough oxygen while she had that attack. And she’s under sedation now, which isn’t wonderful for a fetus either, I guess.”
The message continued, as if he were conversing with me.
“What I can’t understand is how she got rid of that gun so completely and so quickly, unless maybe she planned the whole thing. Well. My gun will soon be missing from our house, too. That’s my wedding present to you, love. What happened with Willie is what stress can do to a cop, and I don’t want it. No more late nights. No more busted parties. No more lonely weekends. I quit. Finis. Ten-four. Over and out.”
I thought that was all, but after the tape played in silence for a couple of seconds, there was Geofs voice again, sounding bewildered, angry, exhausted.
“What the hell’s going on around here, Jenny? This is three domestic homicides in two weeks. Maybe it’s’ in the water. Fluoride causes homicide.” There was another silence while the tape played, and I waited. “Jesus,” he said finally, “don’t brush your teeth. I’ll buy some bottled water. What the hell is going on around here?”
I waited, but the next voice I heard on the tape was my sister’s.
“Where are you at this hour of the morning? In the shower? Get out of there and call me immediately! The more I think about this, the more furious I get! Call me as soon as you get this message, do you hear me?”
I started to call her, but then it occurred to me that she might have found out about what I had discovered in the old trunk in her basement, and that’s why she was so upset. I didn’t have the heart to face that argument this morning, so instead of returning Sherry’s call, I made a hot of coffee.
When it was perked, I drank three cups of it in a row.
You can do a lot of thinking on three cups of coffee. Fast thinking, very fast thinking. It doesn’t necessarily head you to any welcome conclusions.
23
I DECIDED I’D BETTER HAVE IT OUT WITH SHERRY.
But when I called her, she didn’t give me a chance to explain my side of things.
“Your friend,” she exclaimed immediately, furiously, when I reached her, “your friend Kathy Ingram called me yesterday morning to ask if her husband, that awful man, could stop by. Well, of course I said yes, I mean I didn’t know, I mean the man’s a professional man, a doctor, of course I invited him over. Jenny! He sat down in my house, and I gave the man coffee ... I gave him coffee in my own house, and he seemed so interested in me and Lars, just so interested in our lives—where had we gone to school, what sort of families did we come from, how was the business doing? Well I just talked on and on, innocent me! Until finally he started asking questions, like did we argue very much, did Lars drink, did I drink, how did I track my ribs? Your friends seem to have gotten it into their heads that just because I have a few bruises, my husband beats me! That man, that Henry person had the serve, the ... the nerve to try to interview me for their study on violent marriages! I set him straight, you can certainly believe I set that man straight, but it was obvious he didn’t believe me! Not only that, but your friend, that say boy, called while I was out yesterday! Is he going to vite my husband to that group he has? I’ll call him back on a cold day in hell! And not only that, but that dumpy woman with all the hair, what’s her name?”
“Do you mean Smithy?”
“She called here, too, to invite me to her shelter, I suppose!”
“Sherry . . .”
“And as if that’s not enough, my doctor, my own physician is asking funny questions about these accidents I’ve sad! I feel absolutely humiliated, Jenny. I mean, outside if Mother’s going to pieces and Dad’s making the company go bankrupt and then marrying that floozy—not to mention you marrying a cop—this is just the most embarrassing dung that has ever happened to me, and I expect you to set your friends straight before they breathe a word of this to anybody. Do you hear me?”
“Yes, Sherry.”
“Good!” Her phone slammed down.
I called Tommy Ni
chol at his office at the mental health center.
“Tommy, this is a little odd, but I’m returning your call to my sister. She’s, uh, out of town, and she asked me to all and take a message from you. What, uh, what were you calling her about, Tommy?”
“I wanted to thank her for the party, Jenny.”
“That’s what I figured.”
“And—” suddenly he sounded hesitant, embarrassed, a little unsure of himself “and I was going to ask her if she’d give me the recipe for that cheese dip she served. It was fabulous. I’d like to serve it me next time I have guests over. Do you think she’d mind sharing it with me?”
“One twelve-ounce carton of sour cream to one large package of cream cheese and one package of Good Seasons garlic salad dressing. Make it the day before, and leave some clump in it.”
“Let me write this down . . . garlic . . . Thanks, Jenny.”
“You can thank my mom for that. ’Bye, Tommy.”
I gave Smithy the same spiel when I called the shelter.
“Yeah, Cain.” She sounded crisp, efficient. “I’m always looking for funders for the shelter, and your sister looks pretty well-heeled, so I thought maybe I could interest her in becoming one of our sponsors. Especially since you’re interested in us, I thought maybe that might convince her to come and look us over, maybe write us a check or two, what do you think?”
“I think you’d better leave me out of it, but I’ll pass along your invitation, Smithy.” It dawned on me that she would not yet have heard about Port Frederick’s latest domestic homicide. “Smithy, there’s been another homicide. Somebody killed Willie Henderson during the night.”
She made a strange choking sound before she said, “What do you mean, ‘somebody’? You mean Gail, don’t you?”
“I guess so.”
“I have such mixed feelings about these things, Cain.” Her voice was shaky, and she sounded, for the first time I’d ever noticed, confiding and unsure of herself. “On the one hand, these men are no loss to society, but on the other, this is a terrible thing for the women and the children.
Like Sabrina, she seemed to be reaching out to me unexpectedly this morning. Again, I couldn’t reciprocate. Willie’s words came back to me: “You feelin’ sorry for her? Maybe you want to remember, she ain’t the one who’s dead.” I didn’t repeat them to Smithy.
Two misunderstandings cleared up, one more to go.
I punched in the Ingrams’ number.
This one, I felt, might require more than a phone call.
“Kathy?” I said. “This is Jenny Cain. Is there any chance I could come over to see you sometime tonight?”
“Of course, Jenny,” she said warmly. “I’ll put the coffee on.”
Just what I needed, more coffee. Nevertheless, I made a date to see her at seven-thirty, thanked her, and hung up. Then I went to the office to face a day of normal, draining, hard work. It was a relief.
That night, in the Ingrams’ rented apartment, Kathy eyed her homemade lemon pie as critically as a surveyor would a piece of land, and then she cut two huge and perfectly divided pieces. She dipped one of them onto a china plate for me, then one onto another plate for herself.
“I’m sorry Henry’s out,” Kathy said, and smiled. As usual, she was dressed in a neat, dark shirtdress that gave her an auntly look of prim efficiency. “But that just means more pie for you and me.”
She handed me the plate, a heavy silver fork, and a straw-colored linen napkin. The napkin, which I spread in my lap, had been perfectly ironed by somebody—no scorch marks. Such things, the marks of deliberate, painstaking care, always seem remarkable to me. A perfectly ironed napkin. Worth remarking. The pie, too, was perfectly prepared and delicious.
I said so.
She thanked me.
There’s a chemistry to a friendship, every bit as much as to a sexual relationship, and we didn’t have it. As we ate the pie and drank our coffee and traded politeness, I tried to figure out why. I’d been working out a theory lately that you could tell the state of a marriage—and the people in it—by how their home was decorated. Too much dark wood, too much red, brown, and black, or too much generic beige furniture meant the marriage was out of balance, tilting toward the masculine at the expense of the wife’s taste and happiness. Either that, or the wife herself had an undeveloped or unasserted feminine side. An excessively neat house, on the other hand, where knick-knacks covered every square inch and all the curtains were flounced, spoke to me of a marriage where the husband only felt at home in the garage. The Ingrams’ rented apartment offered no clues. The furniture was bland and beige, but so is most rental furniture. It all seemed unnaturally neat and ordered, but they were both scientists, and Henry had always struck me as being at least as persnickety as Kathy might be. There wasn’t much personal decoration here, they didn’t seem to have brought much baggage with them when they made their temporary move to Port Frederick.
“Where’s your real home, Kathy?.”
She paused in her chewing, smiled. “Wherever we are.”
It was exactly the sort of nonreply that made it so difficult to get to know her. I tried to pursue her further. “Really, Kathy? Don’t you have a home you go back to between researcn sites?”
“Well . . .” She looked thoughtful, as if she were trying to remember something in the dim past. “We still have the little house in Cambridge, where Henry was living when I met him, and we keep most of our things there. But we try to make our home be wherever we happen to be.”
I said the obvious thing: “How nice.”
But while her eyes were lowered to her píe, I glanced around at all the beige blandness. They hadn’t tried very hard. And it struck me that neither had Geof nor I tried very hard to turn his ugly contemporary house into our mutual home. Why? Because we didn’t lite the house, because we expected to move, because it had belonged to him and another woman, because we weren’t happy there, because we hadn’t yet settled in to being us? Whichever, the lack of color and warmth and small, loving touches seemed to suggest an emotional freeze, or a withholding on somebody’s part, possibly mine. I wasn’t sure I cared for my own comparison between this apartment and the place I lived, so I changed the subject in my mind, and got to the point of my visit.
“Kathy,” I began, “I’m afraid there’s been a misunderstanding.
She blushed, looked distressed, and put down the plate. “Oh, dear, this is about your sister, isn’t it?”
“Yes, really, she’s been clumsy since she was a child—this is nothing new. I’ll grant you she doesn’t usually wound herself so badly and in such rapid consecutive order, but otherwise it’s entirely in character, really.”
“Jenny.” Kathy smoothed the napkin in her own lap. She seemed to be searching for the right words. “I don’t know how to say this, and I wish I didn’t have to, because I feel it’s a violation of your sister’s privacy. But . . .” Again, she paused, glanced at me, looted down at the napkin. It was obvious that speaking so openly and intimately to me was difficult for her, and she was, accordingly, awkward. I wondered how she managed to interview couples about the most personal details of their lives, but then I remembered she had the formality of the questionnaire to protect her. “We’ve had so much experience at seeing the results of family violence, Henry and I have, and through the years we’ve come to recognize the accidents that aren’t really accidents, the coincidences that are too coincidental to believe, the denial that masks serious trouble.”
It sounded like an excerpt from a speech. I smiled, nearly laughed. “Come on, Kathy . . .”
“Please, listen to me.” She finally looked me in the eyes. “I know what your sister said to Henry yesterday, he told me how strongly she denied everything, how vehement she was, and how offended. And, Jenny, I’m sorry, truly sorry, that we jumped into this situation without preparing the way any better. You see, most of our referrals come from social welfare offices, so we were eager—probably too eager—to talk to a couple in
the upper-income bracket. That was a mistake, our mistake. And I should have gone along to smooth the way, I know Henry can be less than diplomatic at times. But, Jenny, our intentions were good. We do take these problems personally, they’re more than statistics to us because we both came from violent families. I know that’s one of the things that drew me to him, that sense he exuded of understanding how bad it was.” She was blushing deeply again. I felt moved at the courage it took for her to tell me all this. “I felt that Henry was determined to change things, as I am. We know what it’s like for these couples and their children, and we’re, oh, we’re so sympathetic. I know Henry doesn’t always seem like a sympathetic person, but he is, he is about . . . this. So, when we saw that your sister was hurting, we felt we had to do something to intervene. At the very least, we wanted to offer our concern to her. And our first impressions, Jenny, they were no mistake, Henry’s convinced of mat. There is trouble in that household, he feels strongly, and your sister is suffering from it.”
“Kathy.” I was beginning to feel as frustrated as a suspect who’s been accused of a crime she didn’t commit. All right, yes, there’s some financial trouble, out that’s it, there isn’t anything else. She fell in the garage, she twisted an ankle—
“Twisted an ankle? When?”
“Oh, Kathy, it was an accident, because she was walking awkwardly, because of her ribs.”
“How can you be so sure, Jenny?”
“Because I know her, because she went through her childhood in splints and slings and bandages!”
“Did your parents have a troubled relationship, Jenny”
“Oh, God.” I leaned my head against the sofa and closed my eyes. I wanted to laugh, but Kathy obviously wouldn’t share the joke. To add to my problem, all the coffee I’d had that day was beginning to get to me. “May use your bathroom, Kathy?”
She seemed as relieved as I at the abrupt change of subject, and she stood up to lead me to the hallway and to point. “Use mine, Jenny—it’s just inside that bedroom, to your left.”
Marriage Is Murder Page 16
