Jessie managed to find her voice. “I do understand. I do.”
“But I think about her all the time there in the ground. And her not wanting to be where she is.”
Jessie took Kate’s arm. “I think she’d want exactly what you wanted,” she said quietly, firmly. “I think she’d understand. I think she wouldn’t mind.”
Kate turned to Jessie, slid an arm around her waist, walked with Jessie toward the police car.
V
Velma could not remember the precise moment when she made the clear and irrevocable decision to kill Walter, but it was soon after that morning when she waited in the car as Walter paid his weekly visit to Alice’s grave. She observed the cemetery custodians rolling a freshly sodded grave, completing the interment process for a funeral held the day before, and she realized then that the true key lay not in foolproof method but in foolproof disposal of the body.
In the days afterward she deduced a method for ending Walter’s life that would leave no evidence behind, deduced the exact circumstances that would allow her to handle more than a hundred and seventy pounds of dead weight. She decided that she would roil the waters of an investigation by withdrawing ten thousand dollars—any lesser amount seeming insufficient to confuse the issue of Walter’s disappearance—and stash the money under the flower beds where it could remain until safe to remove; and if it was discovered in the meantime, what did that prove?
To validate her choice of weapon she made several trips to the library. Then she carefully fashioned her disposable, untraceable bludgeon from sand mixed with heavy steel bolts she found in Walter’s tool chest, packing the material into one of Walter’s thick wool socks until she was satisfied with the weight and heft. Knowing the act itself would take every ounce of strength, her every fibre of nerve, she waited in a state of feverish dread for ideal conditions.
Each morning she wrenched open the Courier to the obituary page. Over a period of the next five weeks there were seven burials at Rolling Hills—but either they were in the old section of the cemetery, or the weather was clear. Twelve times it rained—but there was no funeral.
Each morning as Walter ate his breakfast and prepared for a new day of golf or fishing or gardening, her anxiety grew. It was now March, and the prime rainy season along the Pacific coast was waning. She might very well have to wait until late in the year before the rains returned—six more months at least of living with Walter in this dismal town before she had a likely opportunity.
Then she rose on a Friday morning to gathering black clouds over the ocean and a forecast of rain, occasionally heavy, throughout the day and night. She pulled from her apron pocket a two-day-old obituary:
GRANT R. PAXTON, 68, beloved husband of Margaret Paxton; loving father of John and Edward Paxton; devoted grandfather of Christopher and Julie Paxton. Services Friday, Mar. 7, 11:00 a.m. at First Presbyterian Church; internment at Rolling Hills Cemetery.
She had already checked out the Paxton plot; it was located near the cemetery road and held two Paxtons already, with room for four more. Best of all, tonight was poker night; she would not need a pretext to lure Walter to the car at a late hour. Fearful as she was, just as well he would not be home until that late hour.
Pacing the living room, she heard his car pull into the detached garage just before midnight. She flung a raincoat over her shoulders and dashed from the house, her heart thudding, a hand clutching the crude truncheon weighting down her apron pocket.
Walter, his black plastic raincoat shiny with rain, emerged from the car and blinked at her in surprise.
Her voice raspy with strain, she gasped, “I just noticed I lost the diamond in my ring. I’m positive it’s in the back of the car.”
With a muffled exclamation he turned and yanked open the rear door. Her heart hammering against her ribs, she pushed the raincoat from her shoulders and stepped swiftly up beside him. Gripping the weapon in both hands she swung it behind her to give it the widest possible arc.
He bent down to climb into the car, then started to rise. “The car’s been at Phil’s station. How —”
She hit him squarely and with all of her strength just along the side and toward the back of the head, exactly where the medical and anatomy books said it was most dangerous to sustain a heavy blow.
There was a single sound from him, a grunted expulsion; then he pitched forward onto the back seat.
She stared, appalled at the concavity in his head, the gray matted hair welling with blood. What had she done wrong? There shouldn’t be any blood—there couldn’t be any stains on the car’s upholstery. Panic-stricken, she stuffed the weapon into her apron pocket, hastily untied the apron, and climbed over Walter’s back to roughly, tightly bind his head.
She felt for the pulse in his wrist, his neck, as the books had said, as she’d practiced on herself. A second blow would not be necessary; there was no pulse. And she could see that the apron had staunched any flow of blood. Calmer now, she climbed out of the car and went around to the other door. Gripping his shoulders, she pulled and tugged at him, sliding him across the seat on his slick plastic raincoat until he was fully in the car. She closed both doors and retrieved her raincoat, and prepared for the rest of what needed to be done.
VI
Hands in the back pockets of her jeans, Kate stared out the huge windows of Jessie’s living room, across the redwood deck at the fog-shrouded lights strung out along the ocean shoreline. As Barbra Streisand sang from Jessie’s tape player, Kate prowled the room, looking over the record and tape collection, the bookshelves, poking at the fire, looking at the books again.
“Woman, what’s bugging you,” Jessie growled. “Sit down and relax, you’re making Damon nervous.” The marmalade-colored cat in her lap was stirring, its ears pricked.
Kate obediently lowered herself into the armchair beside the fire, picked up her scotch. “You sure I can’t get you something, Jess?” She gestured to the wicker wine rack against the dining room wall. “You’ve got some nice reds over there.”
Jessie shook her head. “Haven’t had a thing to drink since this all began. It’s enough trouble as it is to keep my head clear. I’m so tired, a glass of wine would put me out like a light.”
“How about some coffee?” Kate’s tone was solicitous. “Be glad to make it for you.”
“Nope, that’ll keep me wide awake and I hope to sleep a few hours tonight.” She looked sharply at Kate, who was fidgeting with her scotch. She reiterated, “What’s bugging you, woman?”
“Jess ...” Kate put the scotch down on her coaster.
It was the same quiet use of her name as at the cemetery, and Jessie watched her uneasily.
“There was a funeral last week at Rolling Hills Cemetery,” Kate said. It was a statement, not a question.
“Probably,” Jessie answered, a prickling sensation along the back of her neck. “There’s usually about one a week. I know for sure they buried Grant Paxton there. He ran Seacliff Realty, I knew him to say hello to.”
“He was buried last Friday,” Kate stated.
Jessie stared at her. “I don’t know about that, but I can check it in a second.”
She pulled herself out of her leather recliner and moved to the stack of papers on the brick hearth. “I haven’t looked at a newspaper in days ...” She sorted through the stack until she found last Friday’s Courier, opened it to the obituary page.
Jessie dropped the paper back onto the stack, sat down on the hearth, and looked up at Kate. Her hands, all of her flesh was cold. “Like you said, Paxton was buried Friday. What are you telling me, Kate?”
Kate closed her eyes. “I’m sorry, Jess. Your gut feeling about Walter ... is right.”
Jessie rubbed her arms, edged closer to the fire. “I knew it.” But still she had hoped ...
“I’m sorry, Jess,” Kate repeated.
“It’s better I know. Just tell me how this was done.”
VII
Driving slowly through the sheeting wind
blown rain, Velma pulled onto the road above Rolling Hills Cemetery and extinguished the car lights. The night was opaque in its blackness, and she drifted the car along until the fourth white roadside marker loomed by her side window. She pulled carefully over onto the grassy side of the road just beyond the marker and turned off the engine. She stripped off her raincoat; it would be useless in this downpour, and encumbering. She got out, opened the rear door of the Toyota.
Pulling, tugging Walter by his shoulders, her foot braced against the side of the car, she inched him across the seat until his head emerged from the car and struck the grass. Quickly she climbed into the car behind him and pushed his legs until he pitched fully out.
She closed the car doors, got the shovel out of the trunk. Again she pulled and tugged at Walter until he lay sideways on the hill. Bracing herself once more, she gave his body a mighty shove. He tumbled down the slope, his head flopping; she lost sight of him in the rain-filled blackness.
Carrying the shovel, wiping the pelting rain from her eyes, she staggered down the steep hill and nearly stumbled over his body. She slid the shovel down the hill, knowing she could find it later, then pushed Walter, rolling him over and over in the spongy Bermuda grass, the apron coming off his head.
Standing between his legs as if she were pulling a plow, she dragged him farther, the wet slippery grass and Walter’s slick plastic raincoat enabling her to maneuver him, as she had judged they would. She and her mother had once used a similar method—a quilt under a huge heavy chest to move it down into the basement. But she had been so much younger then ...
Rain streaming from her hair into her blind eyes, she moaned with her straining effort. Would she ever get there? Then she tripped over the edge of the tarpaulin and pitched headlong onto the mound of the newly dug Paxton grave.
She sat on the tarpaulin and rested a few moments, her chest heaving. Then she climbed to her feet and used her tiny flashlight to locate the shovel as well as the apron which had come off Walter’s head. She removed the rock-weighted tarpaulin, then the freshly laid strips of sod over Grant Paxton’s grave, placing the strips with care on the tarpaulin to keep them intact.
Frenziedly, she began to dig, throwing shovel after shovel of the loose dirt onto the tarpaulin; the earth was becoming heavier as the teeming rain soaked it. When she reached a depth of several feet, she turned quickly to Walter.
Gritting her teeth, her arms quivering with the effort, she tugged and maneuvered him to the edge of the grave. Then gave him one final push. He thudded into the grave, face down. She threw in the apron, the weapon still in its pocket, and Walter’s car keys.
She shoveled the earth back, grunting with the heaviness of each shovelful, her entire body trembling with this final exertion, and reshaped the mass of it into a mound, the surface a rapidly smoothing mud. Then she lay the strips of sod back and reset the tarpaulin. And the rocks weighting the corners of the tarpaulin. Then she shook the muddy earth from the shovel, wiped it on grass.
Her legs giving way, her limbs jerking, she collapsed on the hillside in an agony of exhaustion, thinking she might die here herself. The rain picked up in fury, pelting her mercilessly, and she lay unmoving, allowing it to slash the mud from her hands, her feet and legs, her clothes, her face.
As strength seeped back into her, she reviewed her next steps—no time now to make the slightest mistake. She would drive home, change into dry clothes. Destroy Walter’s handwritten will in the fireplace and pulverize the ashes—
Abruptly she sat up. She had already made a mistake. The key to the desk was on Walter’s keychain; she had buried it along with Walter. She lay back down again. It wasn’t that much of a mistake. A sturdy kitchen knife would be sufficient to spring the desk drawer. After taking this much risk she definitely would not share any of her gains with anyone. It was now nearly one o’clock; at two she would call the Sheriff’s office and report Walter missing, and then it would all be finished.
When her limbs finally ceased their trembling she struggled to her feet and switched on the small flashlight and inspected her handiwork. The Paxton grave looked untouched, the thundering rain continuing to wash away all traces of her presence. Even the shovel had been scoured clean of its evidence. Finally she summoned strength for the climb up the hill to the car, and to freedom. She had done it. And no one could possibly guess how.
VIII
Jessie moved away from the fire. She was warm, heated by anger, her mind seething with the image of the false grief on Velma Kennon’s face that Saturday morning, scant hours after Velma had ruthlessly killed her own husband and Jessie’s irreplaceable friend.
“I’m sorry,” Kate said softly. “There was no good or gentle way to tell you any of this.”
No one, Jessie thought, could have been more gentle than Kate. Not even Irene would be as good with her as this woman, with whom she shared an alien profession whose daily stock in trade was violence, who had herself been touched by the annihilating hand of death.
Kate said, “Of course, you won’t know if I’m right until ...”
“I know it now.” Jessie took a deep breath. “Everything you’ve theorized makes perfect sense. It does. To do what she did and then put him in someone else’s grave—” She hissed, “It’s obscene.”
Kate murmured, “Maybe I can get you some of that wine now?”
Jessie shook her head. She walked over to Kate, sat down on the ottoman in front of her armchair. “I can’t imagine how you figured this out.”
“Anne told me,” Kate said.
Jessie gaped at her.
“And then you told me the rest. The answers all came at Rolling Hills.” Kate’s eyes were fixed unseeingly on the fire; her voice was remote. “Looking over that place, I was remembering the day after Anne was buried. I drove out to the cemetery very early that next morning. I wanted to be with her ... I wanted to dig with my bare hands till I could be in there with her ...”
Jessie, her eyes stinging, kept her silence. Kate’s renewed anguish over Anne was her fault. In sharing Jessie’s sorrow, Kate had ripped the scar tissue from her own grief ...
Kate’s voice strengthened. “But you’re the one who’s responsible for solving this crime. How many investigating officers would have thought to check that Union Oil sticker? Velma Kennon would have gotten away with murder except for you. And your notion about Velma rolling him down the hill and all the way to the ocean—when I realized she wouldn’t have to roll him far at all, it came together then, how a new grave as soon as it’s rolled and sodded looks just like any other grave. And how Velma could use the rain, the slope of the cemetery and its bent Bermuda grass, Walt’s slippery raincoat—” Fixing her somber eyes on Jessie, Kate shrugged. “And aside from all that, it seems after thirteen years in the cop business I’m beginning to think right along with the criminals.”
Jessie sighed. She said softly, “You’d best get on to bed, Kate. Much as I want to, I can’t lock Velma up tonight—not a thing to be done till morning and I get the search warrant to go in and get Walt. You’ve got only these few days of vacation, I want you out of here bright and early —”
“I’ll stay up with you,” Kate said firmly.
Jessie shook her head. “It’s all on my shoulders now, Kate. I’d like to be alone with my thoughts.”
Kate said quietly, “I do understand that, Jess.”
With Kate settled in the guest bedroom, Jessie sat in her armchair and stared into the fire. But she did not yet think of Walt Kennon, or begin to mourn him; there was time enough for that. Instead she thought about Kate Delafield on vacation, making her solitary, lonely way up the California coast.
IX
The next morning, Velma again looked at the Courier’s obituary page. Margaret Paxton would be buried today next to her dead husband—and Velma’s. Velma swallowed the last of her tea and dismissed a brief impulse to attend. That would be foolish, would only arouse comment, if not suspicion. She had not realized that the bond of friends
hip between Walter Kennon and Jessie Graham ran as deep as it did—and she could not be too careful in these final days of the Sheriff’s investigation.
Velma looked up, to see a patrol car coming up the block toward her house. Odd. This was out of pattern—another patrol car had already performed its half-hourly surveillance routine only fifteen minutes ago.
Then the patrol car was joined by Jessie Graham’s car with its gold Sheriff’s insignia. With a surge of alarm Velma watched both cars turn into her driveway as yet another police car came from the opposite direction to join them, screeching to a stop in front of the house.
Feeling the blood drain from her face, Velma watched Jessie Graham climb out of her car and adjust the gunbelt over her dark brown trousers. The Sheriff reached into her car to retrieve some sort of plastic sack, then marched toward the house at a purposeful pace, flanked by three deputies who drew their weapons as they approached the door.
What could this be? What had gone wrong? She had made no mistakes, nothing had gone wrong, there was no way on earth Jessie Graham could know anything.
Harassment, she decided. A last-ditch, desperation attempt to panic her, stampede her into making a mistake. Seeing the neighbors gather on their lawns and sidewalks to observe, Velma angrily threw open her front door. “What’s the meaning of this ... circus?”
“You’re under arrest, Velma.” The words were said with barely controlled rage; the dark eyes were implacably cold.
Holding the plastic sack by a corner, Sheriff Jessie Graham held it up to Velma’s eyes.
A hand at her throat as if cyanide fumes were already choking her, Velma stared at her dirty, blood-stained apron.
BENNY’S PLACE
Depositing a sack filled with takeout food and a quart of bourbon, Benny stretched out on the army blanket that covered his air mattress. He wasn’t hungry yet, and his heart was still pounding.
Dreams and Swords Page 4
