A LEOPARD’S SPOTS
“I know these events are very upsetting ...” The deputy sheriff’s tone was steeped in sympathy; a line between her gray-green eyes distinctly deepened. “May I know your names, please?”
Distraught as she was, Ruth Whitman nevertheless was interested that a small, coastal California county would have a woman on its police force, and a bulky, middle-aged one at that.
A reedy voice came softly from beside her: “I’m Benjamin Dickinson. My friend here is Ruth Whitman.”
“Dickinson and Whitman,” the deputy repeated, writing in her notebook, her face still somber but the crease between her eyes lightening. “Like the poets.”
“Last Halloween somebody did call me Emily,” Dickinson offered. “But I was trying to be Eleanor Roosevelt.”
Bannon cast a brief glance of amusement at him, then said, “Ms. Whitman, would you step outside with me? Mr. Dickinson, I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
“Everyone calls us by our last name,” Whitman said. Catching Bannon’s eye, she nodded meaningfully toward Dickinson.
This time Bannon’s glance evaluated the grayish pallor in Benjamin Dickinson’s face, the sag in his thin shoulders. She said to him, “On second thought, let’s you and me have a brief chat.”
Dickinson pulled his pea coat from the coat tree and donned it as he followed Bannon from the parlor of the Pinckney house out onto the porch.
Whitman sank heavily into the yielding depths of the brown corduroy sofa. Deferring to Dickinson as the first to be questioned had been an act of pure altruism. Grieved and heartsick over what had occurred here, she was anxious to tell what little she knew and leave this place; the superficial conversation with Bannon had in itself taxed her reserves of strength. But she owed Dickinson extra consideration; he had lost Roy to a heart attack less than a year ago, while her own loss of Margaret was in its eighth year—a bereavement she felt no less keenly, she was certain, than Dickinson suffered his more recent loss.
She leaned over to prop her elbows on her knees, rubbing her face with both hands. For months, death had hovered over this house, and had now struck twice, turning it into a place of horror ... with more horror to come. Six friends had come here today, friends who were undergoing the same police questioning as herself and Dickinson. Which of the six was a murderer? And why?
Dickinson eased himself into the old-fashioned bench swing on the porch; Bannon sat opposite him, gingerly arranging her bulk in a flimsy canvas deck chair.
“I understand what’s going on here.” The swing creaked beneath him as he looked out at the powder blue squad car parked in the lane. “You’ve separated all of us because we’re witnesses and you police need to interview us individually.”
Bannon contemplated the slight, elfin man, meeting his shrewd blue eyes as he turned back to her. She said equably, “Sir, what’s your relationship with the victim?”
“She’s—she was a friend. To all of us. A friend of long standing.”
She nodded, and wrote in her notebook. “What brought you and all the other people together here today?”
“The same activity that’s always brought us together—except for the past few months, of course. Our weekly poker—I mean card game,” he amended hastily.
Waving a hand, she said brusquely, “I don’t care about any gambling in a poker game, only Grace Pinckney’s death. You said the group hadn’t met for the past few months. Why?”
“Ralph got a lot worse—”
“You’re referring to Ralph Pinckney, the victim’s deceased husband?”
“Yes. He had the upper hand on prostate cancer till he got a bad case of flu.” Sighing, he sank back into the swing and crossed his arms to encourage more warmth from his jacket. “Fighting on one front is hard enough ...”
“I saw the obit in the Clarion—just last week, wasn’t it? Ran the Hearth Insurance Company, isn’t that right?”
“Yes.” He raised his gaze to a sky milky with fog. “Poor Dan and Gene came up from San Jose for their father’s funeral, and now they have to come right back and bury their stepmother ...”
“A tragedy indeed,” Bannon murmured. She asked softly, “What happened here today, Mr. Dickinson?”
Dickinson massaged his eyes with his fingertips. He did not want to talk about it. He did not want to remember.
Bannon put aside her notebook. She said, “Just tell me what you saw.”
Whitman helped herself to her plaid wool jacket on the coat tree, tucked herself into a corner of the sofa, and pulled the jacket around her. The parlor, cozy as it appeared with its gold curtains and oval hooked rug and corduroy sofa, had grown colder on this chilly October day. The log fire Grace and Chris had built in the living room fireplace had long since burned low; foggy sea air was permeating the house from doors opening and closing as the deputies and Doc Phillips went about their work.
She knew that the scenes of this day would remain imprinted on her mind like a series of engravings. Arriving here fifteen minutes late because of Dickinson’s usual dithering—although she didn’t blame him this time. Even though they’d all rallied around the Pinckneys as Ralph sank toward death, she herself had been reluctant to return to a house void of Ralph’s presence, and Dickinson had too recently gone through his own tortures ...
The round dining room table had been moved into the living room and set up for poker as usual, exactly the same as before, when a robustly alive Ralph presided over the game in jovial tyranny. The Andersons, Pete and Gladys, sat in their usual places at the table, Fernando across from them; Grace had set out cheese and crackers, tortilla chips and salsa, the wine glasses already in front of everyone, including Grace’s special glass from the breakfront, which stood beside Chris’s glass on the mantel. Chris coming in with the bottle of wine. Chris, so handsome in his blue turtleneck sweater and crisp jeans, had had the wine ... And Chris had poured the wine.
Bannon was writing in her notebook. “So no one ate or drank anything till Christopher Fontaine brought in the wine. Are you certain it was Mr. Fontaine?”
Dickinson sighed. “Yes, it was Chris.”
“Had the bottle been opened?”
“It had. The cork was still in it, but it’d been pulled.”
“And who poured the wine?”
He admitted, reluctantly, “Chris.”
“You seem very unhappy with the statements you’re making,” Bannon observed.
He closed his eyes for a moment, against the image of the disbelieving horror in Chris’s chalk-white face when Doc Phillips had pronounced Grace dead. “I haven’t known Chris that long,” he said candidly. “None of us has. But he’s a good man, he was here for Ralph all hours of the day and night—”
“I understand he’d been Mr. Pinckney’s private nurse.”
Dickinson nodded. “Ralph couldn’t manage to get himself out of bed at all some days, Grace couldn’t really look after him, she needed someone—”
“My brother-in-law had cancer,” Bannon murmured. “It’s a terrible thing.”
Roy at least hadn’t suffered, Dickinson thought, and he quoted the ancient words of the Latin poet Martial that had brought him a degree of solace: “‘Life’s not just being alive, but being well.’”
“Very true, Mr. Dickinson. So, Christopher Fontaine came in with the bottle of wine and poured glasses all around. What happened next?”
“We drank a ritual toast to our missing player. To Ralph.”
Whitman was reliving the scene. All of them on their feet, awkwardly holding a long-stemmed glass of red wine, Fernando emotional as always, excusing the tears rolling down his cheeks by mumbling about his Latin heritage, Pete and Gladys holding hands, Gladys sniffling, the deep network of lines in Pete’s face as he tried to conceal his own sentiment. An arm around Dickinson to give him physical as well as moral support to get through this moment, she and Dickinson had joined Grace and Chris who were standing at the mantel. All of them with their glasses raised. Grace in he
r white wool dress, looking younger and fresher than she had in months, saying: “To you, dear Ralph. I know you’re watching, just like you promised ...”
Grace taking a ceremonial sip of the Brown Brothers cabernet, then placing the wineglass on the table.
Everyone gathering at the poker table, and Grace drinking more of her wine; everyone knew she loved good red wine on the very rare occasions when she did take a drink. Then she had dealt the first hand ...
Then Grace uttering, “I feel dreadful,” and getting up and staggering toward an armchair and collapsing into it in stark confirmation of that fact. Seconds later, a faint reddish mottling rising in her face: “I can’t breathe—” Fingers at her swelling throat: “Oh God, it’s penicillin—get Doc Phillips. Quick!”
Chris looking on in frozen, open-mouthed horror, then running for the phone; Dickinson springing into motion, rushing to her aid ...
Bannon asked Dickinson, “So at first you had the victim sit up?”
“I was trying to help her breathe. My partner got pneumonia twice. He tended to hyperventilate ...” He paused, bitterly aware of the irony that Roy’s death had released him from reticence about his relationship with the man he had loved in secret for thirty-two years. “Doc Phillips got here in fifteen minutes but ... she was gone.” He looked out toward the shrouded ocean and shuddered in agonized memory of Chris’s screams of desperation, Chris seizing Grace’s shoulders as if he would shake the breath back into her. “I tried everything. CPR, everything—” Coughing, he broke off.
“Mr. Dickinson—”
He turned back to her. “I’m all right. Bad enough we couldn’t save Grace, now we have Doc Phillips going around demanding which one of us gave her the penicillin that killed her ...”
Seeing Bannon’s mouth tighten, he said, “Doc was upset. We were all upset. Hysterical, if you want to know the truth.”
Bannon asked, “How did Grace come to know you, Mr. Dickinson?”
“Our profession. We’re all ex-professors, we moved here to retire. Well, except for Ralph and Gladys and Fernando.”
“So you’re from out of town.”
“Not very far. I taught at San Francisco State, so did Grace. Whitman was UCLA. Pete originally taught at Duke—”
“Beyond that, how would you characterize Grace’s relationship with the other people here?”
An image of Whitman filled his mind, the fortitude in her slender, lined face, the wiry body that seemed possessed of a confident resilience, a tensile strength. How would he ever have managed this past year without that sturdiness to lean on? He decided that she could answer this deputy’s question instead of him. He told Bannon, “As old Queen Bess once said, ‘I would not open windows into men’s souls.’ I won’t, either.”
Bannon shook her head. “Sir, I’m not asking you to open windows. I’m just looking for a few facts.”
He did not reply. Bannon regarded him for several moments, then tucked her notebook into her shirt pocket. “Why don’t I have a deputy drive you home. We can take down your official statement later, when you feel better.”
“I came with Whitman, I’ll leave with her.” He added, “But I’d like to remain out here on the porch, if you don’t mind.”
As Bannon sat down beside her on the corduroy sofa, Whitman looked at the bronze name tag above the pocket of the deputy’s khaki shirt. She asked, “Would you be any relation to Ann Bannon?”
Bannon shook her head, and Whitman shrugged; the allusion to the legendary author of classic lesbian novels of the fifties and sixties had been a mild litmus test as to whether Bannon was a member of the club.
Bannon repeated the question she had directed to Dickinson: “How would you characterize the victim’s relationship with the people here?”
“We were all friends. Good friends. Fernando Cabrillo goes back the longest, he’s known the Pinckneys for years. He’s just devastated by this.” Whitman remembered with anguish that during the fifteen or so minutes of Grace’s dying, Fernando seemed to have aged twenty years. “He courted Grace after her first marriage, before she married Ralph.”
“Did Mr. Cabrillo hold it against Ralph or Grace?”
Whitman’s smile was brief and humorless. “Ralph was the one. He never said anything, mind you, but he gave the impression that he’d come galloping in to rescue a high class Anglo woman from Fernando’s Latino clutches.”
Bannon grunted noncommittally. “If he felt that way about Mr. Cabrillo, it’s odd he’d welcome him in his house.”
“It was Grace who made us all welcome,” Whitman said. “It never ever mattered to Grace that Fernando was Hispanic. Or about Dickinson and me, either.”
Bannon said, “I hadn’t noticed before that you and Mr. Dickinson were Hispanic.”
Grinning, surprised by Bannon’s mischievous humor, Whitman responded, “Ralph discovered there was some cachet in having a few friends ... off the beaten track, shall we say. I think it was Walpole who said, ‘It is charming to totter into vogue.’ But I never thought I’d live to see the day when gay people ... Anyway, Ralph indulged Grace’s every whim, including the friends she chose. It kept her under his thumb, you see. He ran roughshod over the rest of us in a mocking, congenial sort of way. Ralph Pinckney was one of those bullies who mask it under bluff heartiness.”
“I know the type. What can you tell me about the male nurse who looked after Mr. Pinckney?”
“Chris? Not much,” she responded cautiously.
“Ms. Whitman, neither you nor Mr. Dickinson seem to welcome the subject of Christopher Fontaine.”
Whitman decided that if Bannon did not obtain the information from her, it would surface from another, possibly malevolent source. “Let me put it this way. A lot of people wouldn’t understand how bad a time Grace had with Ralph’s illness, how Chris was an angel of deliverance. You can’t imagine what an awful patient Ralph was—”
“I think I can. My brother-in-law had cancer. The sicker he got, the more abusive he became—sarcastic, very bitter and demanding—”
Nodding, Whitman thought that he couldn’t have been worse than Ralph Pinckney.
“It was an awful time for Sara, his wife,” Bannon continued. “Toward the end, she met somebody who ... consoled her.” She looked expectantly at Whitman.
Warily, Whitman nodded.
“Is that what happened here, with Mr. Fontaine?”
Whitman said carefully, “Let me ask you this. Did your brother-in-law ... object?”
“Charlie never knew. It would have killed him.” Bannon chuckled in embarrassment. “Killed him sooner, I mean.”
“Well, Ralph knew. And it didn’t kill him.”
“You don’t mean he approved,” Bannon said with clear incredulity.
“I mean it didn’t kill him. He went ballistic, as the young people say. Ordered Chris out of the house, called Grace every horrible name you can imagine, accused all of us of betraying his friendship. Then not a week later he turns right around and says he owes everything good in his life to Grace and he’s been selfish and stupid, and he hires Chris back and apologizes to the rest of us.” She could still hear the amazement and relief in Grace’s voice as she blurted out the news over the phone.
“Remarkable,” Bannon said.
“You seem more than a little skeptical,” Whitman observed.
“Somebody has to be, and it’s part of my job. Did you ever discuss Mr. Fontaine with Ralph Pinckney?”
“Of course not. All I know is, he’d truly forgiven Grace. I think, at the last, Ralph changed, and was trying to face his death with a little perspective and dignity. Or maybe I’d just like to believe there’s such a thing as deathbed conversion.”
“Maybe there is. But I couldn’t prove it by my brother-in-law. He died the way he lived. He was a bastard to begin with, his cancer made him worse.”
Lowering her notepad, Bannon looked around her, and Whitman followed her gaze, trying to see the house as Bannon would see it. A solidly built struc
ture from the forties, with such homey graces as a porch and a large backyard with fruit trees; simple, functional, comfortable furniture, Grace’s taste, not Ralph’s—he had leaned more to the ostentatious. A house filled with objects collected over the decades—in this room alone, delft plates and pitchers, a framed map of California shaped from plaster, an art deco lamp, the carved boomerang from Australia ...
“Mr. Fontaine and the victim aren’t married.”
Jarred back to the moment by Bannon’s statement, Whitman retorted, “Certainly not. Ralph only died last week. I’m sure Chris and Grace hadn’t even—” She broke off in embarrassment, then rushed on, “Grace would want an appropriate interval—”
“Of course.”
“So why would Chris do anything to Grace? He only needed to wait and he’d be married to her. They loved each other. You could see it. He’s not Grace’s heir—”
“How do you know? Have you seen her will?”
“No,” Whitman responded. “But I know Grace ...”
“Look, Ms. Whitman. One of the six people who came here today killed Grace Pinckney. Christopher Fontaine served the victim the wine. If he didn’t do this, then who did?”
Twenty minutes later, in the car, looking into Dickinson’s grim face, Whitman said, “You heard.”
“They’ve detained Chris,” Dickinson said, gazing disconsolately out the windshield into the swirling, thickening fog. “Doc told me. I guess he told you, too.”
Fingering her car keys, Whitman said, “Could Chris do a thing like this?” She felt reluctant to leave this place, as if events would spin even further out of control in her absence.
He sighed. “No way. You saw how he was—”
“Yes. Utterly distraught.” She added unwillingly, “How about Fernando? Grace married Ralph instead of him, then went on to someone else. And he’s always been in love with her—”
Tears filled his eyes. “We all loved Grace.”
Whitman started the Volvo, turned up the heater as Dickinson mumbled, “Pete and Gladys ... Remember when Ralph hinted they were giving hand signals at poker?”
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