Perfectly Criminal

by Celeste Marsella

  “And Jake doesn't buy Boardman's alibi either. Apparently, Boardman and this Stanford gal who's giving him the alibi were having an affair. I think Jake's scared of being somehow complicit in these murders, so he's asking me for a favor. Like he knows Boardman's career is over, so Jake's trying to save his own ass. You know what I mean? And maybe he wants me to go easy on Boardman. I mean, the poor slob probably did kill the wife in the heat of passion. I mean… I'm thinking… what would I do if I found you slobbering between the legs of another broad?”

  Just for variation, and to keep from falling asleep, I straightened my head and tucked my chin in, because this nonsense Chucky was spewing didn't deserve much more than a yawn. There's no way the Charles Sewell I knew would go easy on some guy who murdered his wife, heat-of-passion notwithstanding and no matter how friendly Chucky was with this Jake Weller guy. And he might suffer a few sleepless nights, but Chucky would rat out his own brother if he knew the guy hurt a woman. But I was bored playing this game with Chucky, so I finally said, “Your buddy Jake Weller is playing with the facts. Scott claims to have called Jake Weller after he got off the boat and found the women dead, and Weller agreed to meet him at Al Forno later that night. And I was at the restaurant. Weller never showed. I don't know what Weller's claiming, but as far as I'm concerned, Scott's telling the truth.”

  Chucky shook his head at me. He was probably confused. I know I was.

  “You're gonna continue with this guy, aren't you? Making up all kinds of excuses for him. You don't care that he's a fucking liar—most likely a murderer—and a dirty politician to boot! I hope you're not doing it just to bust my agates, Shannon, because—”

  I stood and walked to the door. “Get over yourself, Chucky. Believe it or not, most of my choices in life have nothing to do with you. I'm not your wife who thinks you walk on water—”

  “Leave her out of this!”

  “Fuck you,” I said calmly. “Marjory's never been out of this. It's always been you, me, and her. What did the dead princess say? ‘There are three of us in this marriage.’ Maybe it's time I took me permanently out of the equation.”

  “Shannon, please. I'm just worried about you—”

  “My ass you are. Mike McCoy is more worried about me than you are, and he's only worried because Marianna will blame him if anything happens to me. You, Chuck? You just don't want to lose. It's about me and Boardman, and the fact that we're attracted to each other, and that I don't think he's a killer. That's what this is all about. So you do what you gotta do, and I'll take care of my own business, which, by the way, is no longer any of yours.”

  I walked quietly out of Chuck's office and slowly back to mine, thinking hard about what I'd just done—severed my relationship with Chuck Sewell, a man with whom I never fought until Scott Boardman entered the scene. Sure, we'd had our spats—and then the enhanced-by-anger make-up sex after—but was Boardman a catalyst for the real resentment I'd been hoarding for years against Chucky? Was Boardman what I needed to finally dump Chuck and get on with my life (such as it was)?

  My anger was regressing dangerously toward an odd feeling of loss, a dark, unfamiliar place that Marianna would no doubt characterize as a “depressive state.” Other than the girls, and a pretty good relationship with my mailman, what exactly was my life? Nothing. It was nothing.

  When I got off the elevators to my office, I was actually shaking. This depression crap was so not for me. No wonder Marianna was always questioning herself, afraid to make a wrong turn here or a right turn there. I felt a slight paralysis coming on, a weakness in my stalky limbs. Depression was like a car running on empty. Anger was the fuel I needed. So I started looking for a fight. Anyone would do, but I chose Vince, even though he was so insensitive to my assaults that it wasn't even any fun fighting with him anymore. He'd think we were just having our daily chat over the newest cases.

  I stomped straight to his office, where I found Andy leafing through landscape design magazines. The place was deserted.

  “Was there a bomb scare?” I asked him.

  “Honey,” he answered without looking up, “I would have been the first one out. Your girlfriends are with the Pig at the Dial-up.”

  “They went to the Dial-up dump without me?”

  Andy looked up from his magazine. With narrowed eyes, he said, “Pig's invite. Are you okay?”

  Back in the privacy of my office, I sat a minute, critically analyzing the strange tug in my chest. Was it a clinically diagnosable heart attack or was I just mad as hell? I dialed Marianna on her cell for an expert opinion. I felt a new simpatico with her, like we'd caught the same bug—the parasite of self-doubt.

  Sure enough, Vince and the girls were having a powwow at the Dial-up Modem Diner. They'd had a late afternoon craving for pancakes and eggs, Mari explained, as a defense to their restaurant decision.

  “I like pancakes too,” I said, my voice strangled by a strange choking sensation.

  “Are you crying?”

  “I don't know, Mar,” I growled, “tell me what it feels like and I'll let you know.”

  Marianna then announced, as calm as a floating glacier, “So, okay, Vince is sending me to Newport tomorrow morning to interview the mother, Virginia Booth.”

  “Why? Her chauffeur won't come to Providence?”

  “Vince is trying to low-key the investigation, so I'm going to her turf. Oh… and… um… Pig said you probably shouldn't come.”

  “Hey, Marianna, how are your fucking pancakes?”

  Marianna and I had known each other so long that even over the wire I knew—without seeing it—that she was grinding her jaw.

  “I'll meet you for a drink after,” she said, “to fill you in.”

  “Hey, don't worry about me, okay? All this sudden interest in my welfare is making me claustrophobic.”

  “Fine, Shannon. But hear this… Andy told us Brooke left the office Friday at noon. She had enough time to take a little drive with Boardman. In other words, she could be telling the truth about being with him. And if she knew we were going to Al Forno—just think about this—are you sure that Scott Boardman didn't plan on bumping into us—all AAG's—and entangling us in his web to set the stage for a one-act slam-dunk mistrial?”

  I hung up on her before she could scratch another word into my wounds.

  I had never been barred from a case before, always priding myself on my ability to remain neutral and unemotional—I was the one Vince recruited to finish the job when everyone else (read Mari) was making emotionally rash decisions. And what's worse, I'd hoisted this leprous condition on myself by falling in lust with a murder suspect and then stubbornly refusing to abandon the ill-fated affair. Sometimes life deals you a losing hand, and the meekest of us throws in her cards. I like to think I was made of tougher stuff. In the past nothing could scare me into dropping my jacks with someone just because he was suspected of being a bad guy. So my recent dip into the dumps notwithstanding, I was going to pull myself up by the bootstraps and straight into Scott Boardman's lifesaving arms, hell-bent on proving them all wrong.

  WISEGUYS

  THE NEXT MORNING I DROVE MY CAR PAST Bailey's Beach Club in Newport, into which, after a transfusion of blue blood, you could be sponsored as a potential member. Without the blood transfusion, or a keepsake vomit bag imprinted with the Mayflower insignia, you were just another ship at sea as far as Bailey's was concerned.

  At 9 a.m. the gardeners, having waited until most of the pretty sailboats and their owners had already luffed out to deeper water, were grooming the New York Yacht Club. Why the New York Yacht Club was sitting in Newport, Rhode Island, I had never before questioned. But since I was presently slumming in its neighborhood, I made a mental note to ask Beth—whose family were members—why in hell it wasn't named the Newport Yacht Club since here, in fact, was where it hid behind towering stone walls that were about as inviting to the outside world as a leper colony, except, of course, Marianna and I, as nonmembers, were the lepers being kept
out.

  Virginia Booth lived just down the road. I had MapQuested her address but still drove past the ten-foot hedges three times before I saw Marianna's black Jeep pulling into the driveway. Like a spy, I followed, and pulled up next to her as she was jumping from its cockpit.

  Having already marked my white Suburban, she didn't bother looking at me as she tendered her loving version of Good morning.

  “What the fuck, Shannon.” She was locking her car, still avoiding my eyes.

  “Cut the surprise act, Melone. You knew I'd be here.”

  “Yeah, so I did. And I'm so very sorry about the waste of gas, but when the Pig finds out—and he will find out, because you're not in the office this morning where you're supposed to be—he'll think I took you with me— against his direct orders.”

  “I already called in sick. He accused me of having a hangover and I didn't deny it, so I protected your ass—as usual.”

  During our whispered discourse we'd advanced to the front door, where a housekeeper dressed in an ash gray uniform and starched white blouse answered our ring and escorted us into a sunroom overlooking the whole freaking Atlantic Ocean. Relatively happy with what life had dished me, I wasn't the green-eyed type, but the view made me so sick with envy I could have used Mrs. Booth's Mayflower-embossed vomit bag right about then.

  Like two mud-stained kids behind a chain-link fence, Marianna and I stood at the window staring speechlessly at the infinite heaven of ocean before us when we heard a lilting voice behind us.

  “Ladies?”

  In the doorway stood a stocky woman about five-ten. Gray hair with a distant memory of faded blond was corralled off her boxy face by a narrow headband. Some kind of printed tent covered her shapeless body. Shit, I didn't know Lilly Pulitzer even came in a size 20.

  As I was giving her the once-over, Marianna rushed to make the intros, because this woman was clearly not revealing anything without making us work.

  “Mrs. Booth?”

  The woman lowered her chin and examined us from behind oversized silver-framed glasses.

  “I'm Marianna Melone and this is Shannon Lynch. We're assistant attorney generals for the state. We'll be… well, I'll be prosecuting the Boardman murders. We're so sorry about your daughter.”

  Virginia Booth raised her chin and lifted one side of her thin lips into a rueful smile. Her eyes remained a cold blue.

  “The ‘Boardman murders’?” She enunciated clearly as if testing the sound in the air. “Is that what this tragedy is being referred to in the press?”

  Marianna answered, “I suppose it sells more papers with the senator's name appended to it.”

  “Thankfully,” she said succinctly. “Please sit.”

  She directed us to a couch slip-covered in faded linen and stood while she addressed us. “I would like it clarified from the onset that my daughter was married for fifteen years and had just recently been divorced—from a man. Any suggestion that her sexual proclivities bent in any way toward an attraction to Mrs. Patricia Boardman should be immediately put to rest.”

  I wondered if Virginia Booth purposely chose sibilant words or if they just seemed to be rife with s's, because her words sliced the air, emitting a frigid breeze in their wake.

  “Lesbian, indeed,” she muttered as she settled into one of the two slip-covered barrel chairs facing us.

  Marianna tapped my knee. I would have liked to think she was giving Virginia Booth a little of what Vince would call agita by suggesting, ever so slightly, that Marianna and I were gay and that she—Virginia Booth—was full of crap, but I knew Marianna better. She wouldn't stoop as low as I would. She was just warning me to keep my mouth shut because she knew I was champing at the bit to describe in bloody detail the way we'd found her daughter's heterosexual naked body in an interrupted state of cunnilingus with the senator's wife.

  “Be that as it may,” Marianna said, “we're concerned with your daughter's personal life only insofar as it relates to any enemies she may have had. It can't be ignored that your daughter may well have been the target, and Mrs. Boardman merely an unfortunate bystander.”

  Virginia Booth shook her head so violently she had to readjust her headband. “Nonsense! My daughter was too much the emotional philanthropist, trying to help Pat Boardman in an impossible marriage with that philandering husband of hers. My daughter was the innocent bystander, and anyone who thinks otherwise will be wasting her time.”

  “Well then,” I piped in as Marianna threw me a sharp side-glance. (I mean, really, did Marianna think I was going to keep my mouth shut the entire time?) “Is there anyone you can think of who might have wanted to hurt Pat Boardman?”

  Mrs. Booth offered us a bigger smile this time, but her eyes still weren't sparkling in concert. “Brooke Stanford, of course. She's been trying to get Scott to leave Pat for years. And Pat knew all about them. Miss Stanford is a twenty-eight-year-old opportunist whose social and biological clock is ticking. She is looking for a quick entree into a world for which she hasn't been groomed.”

  Marianna tilted her head. “But Miss Stanford is from a rather prominent family in Connecticut. She doesn't seem to need Scott Boardman's money—”

  “She is,” the alpha mater continued, “too uncultured and young to understand the concept of family unity. The Boardmans have two grown children. Scott Boardman is an aspiring politician. He was never leaving his wife for Brooke, despite the Stanford family's social superiority to Pat O'Neil Boardman. Scott made his marital bed, as ill-advised as it was at the time, and he intended to lie in it until death did them part. I might suspect him of hurting his wife if Scott weren't a man who has committed his life to politics. But he could never hope to advance politically by shooting his wife and bludgeoning my daughter to death on the way up, now could he?”

  “And how do you know about that?” I asked.

  Virginia Booth's eyes blinked once, and her head pivoted slowly from Marianna to me. Staring at me, she said nothing.

  Marianna caught the fastball like a pro. “How do you know the manner in which the women were killed, ma'am? That information hasn't been released to the public.”

  Then, as if her tone hadn't been clipped enough already, she spoke with a dagger in her throat, growling the words. “I am not the public, Miss… I'm sorry, I didn't quite catch your name,” she said to Marianna. “Italian, isn't it?”

  Oh shit, I thought. Marianna in the face of an ethnic insult from this woman was like taking a nail file to a fresh scab.

  Taking the punch for Mari, I stood. “Mrs. Booth, we don't have time for a poker game. Who told you the COD?”

  Virginia Booth, now suddenly crooning Mediterranean love songs, looked to her old paisan Marianna for a translation of “COD.” Marianna was done with her good-guy act and said nothing, so I became the wiseguy for her.

  “Cause of death,” I said. “Who gave you that information?”

  Back to me she looked, and none too happy that I was suddenly her main interrogator. “Scott Boardman, of course. He came to me immediately.”

  “Immediately when?”

  “He came here and told me he'd just discovered their bodies on the boat. I advised him to spend the night here and deal with the police in the morning. I was hoping to do some damage control—”

  “Damage control?” Marianna said incredulously. “Your daughter might still have been alive and you were worried about damage control? I would think 911 would have been a mother's first act—”

  “Scott assured me there was no way they could still be alive. And of course now I know why. I have since refined my theories on what happened that night. Scott was disoriented. But he refused to stay here, saying he had a driver waiting outside in the car for him and he was going on to Providence to report the incident to the police personally. Of course, now I realize why he wouldn't spend the night under my roof. Even he isn't so much the hypocrite that he could murder my daughter and then spend the night in her childhood home and freshen up in her bathroom t
o clean her blood off himself.”

  “Blood? You saw blood on him?” I asked as if there was a jury present.

  Her back stiffened in the chair. “I'm assuming… But I don't examine my guests' clothing. At the time, I had no reason to believe… I really wasn't looking.”

  Neither of us answered her. Sometimes the silent treatment works well too. Lets the suspect know we aren't buying any of their proffered crap.

  Virginia Booth stood and held her head back like a horse ready to run. “I was busy. I was busy dealing with my own shock at the time. I had just been told my daughter was dead. I wasn't looking for a murderer—especially not in Scott Boardman.”

  The fire in the woman's eyes had informed us that we were nearing the end of our welcome. Marianna stood too. “And did Scott Boardman use the bathroom?”

  Virginia Booth breathed deeply and clasped her hands in front of her like a supplicant waiting for the communion wafer. She turned slowly toward the front door. “I'll show you out now. I'm going to call my lawyer.”

  “We'll be getting a search warrant for this house,” Marianna said, following her to the door. “Your bathroom will remember if Scott Boardman was bloody.”

  I followed the two of them, pretty confused. I was glad we'd shaken Virginia Booth's composure, but not too happy about Scott's visit to her house right after the murders, a visit he'd conveniently forgotten to mention. I stifled the urge to snarl at the woman as I walked by her. I waited until Marianna and I got outside to lay the broad flat. “I'm calling the station. You call Vince. We need a warrant to search her house ASAP. Who does she think she is?”

  “Virginia Booth,” Marianna answered limply. “A billionaire heiress to a canned-ham fortune, who, even if we do manage to get her arrested, will be behind bars as long as Scott Boardman was.” Marianna turned her back to me and began unlocking her car door. “So you still think he's innocent?”