The Further Investigations of Joanne Kilbourn

by Gail Bowen

  On the television, a man was shouting, “you ruined my life … you ruined my life,” as the studio audience cheered.

  Nobody home but Ricki Lake. I turned to go back down, but when looked at through three flights of metal staircase, the ground seemed a dizzying distance away. It didn’t take me long to decide that slipping into the house and leaving by the front door made more sense than plummeting to my death. I pushed the back door open and stepped inside. The kitchen was small and as clean as it would ever be. The linoleum had faded from red to brown, and it was curling in the area in front of the sink, but the floor was scrubbed, and the dishes on the drainboard were clean. The refrigerator door was covered with children’s drawings and an impressive collection of the cards of doctors at walk-in medical clinics.

  The curtains in the living room were drawn; the only illumination in the room came from the flickering light of the television. Still, it was easy enough to pick out the front door, and that’s where I was headed when my toe caught on the edge of the carpet. As I stumbled, I caught hold of the back of the couch to break my fall. That’s when I saw the woman. She was lying on the couch, covered with a blanket, but when our eyes met, she made a mewling sound and tried to raise herself up.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I was looking for someone.”

  She stared at me without comprehension. She was a native woman, and she seemed to be in her thirties. It was hard to see her clearly in the shadowy room, but it wasn’t hard to hear her. As she grew more frantic, the sounds she made became high-pitched and ear-splittingly intense.

  I tried to be reassuring. “It’s okay,” I said. “I’m leaving. I’m not going to hurt you.” I reached the door, but as my hand grasped the knob, the door opened from the outside.

  The woman who exploded through the door was on the shady side of forty, but she had apparently decided not to go gently into middle age. Her mane of shoulder-length blond hair was extravagantly teased, her mascara was black and thick, and her lipstick was a whiter shade of pale. She was wearing a fringed white leatherette jacket, a matching miniskirt, and the kind of boots Nancy Sinatra used to sing about.

  She was not happy to see me. “Who the fuck are you?” she rasped. “And what the fuck are you doing in my living room?”

  “My name’s Joanne Kilbourn, and I’m trying to find Kellee Savage.”

  She reached beside her, flicked on the light switch and gave me the once-over. “Social worker or cop?” she asked.

  “What?”

  She narrowed her eyes. “I asked you if you were a social worker or a cop.”

  “Neither. I’m Kellee’s teacher.”

  “Well, Teacher, as the song says, ‘take the time to look around you.’ This isn’t a school. This is a private residence.”

  I reached into my pocket and pulled out the cigarette flap with the address. “I found this in Kellee’s mailbox. It has your address on it. Are you B?”

  She took a step towards me. Her perfume was heavy, but not unpleasant. “Teacher,” she said, “let’s see how good you are at learning. Listen carefully. This is my home, and I want you out of it.”

  “I just wanted to ask …”

  She wagged her finger in my face. “You weren’t listening,” she said. She grabbed my arm and twisted it behind my back. As she propelled me through the door, she gave me a wicked smile and whispered, “Class dismissed.”

  It was almost 5:00 when I got home. The dogs came to greet me, but the house was silent. The kids would be barrelling through the front door any minute, but for the time being I was alone. I was also miserable and hungry and tired. I decided I would meet my needs one at a time. I poured myself a drink, took it upstairs, ran a bath, dropped a cassette of Kiri Te Kanawa singing Mozart’s “Exsultate, jubilate” into my cassette player, and shut out the world. By the time I got out of the tub and towelled off, I wasn’t quite ready to “rise up at last in gladness,” but I had improved my chances of getting through the evening. As I pulled on fresh sweats and a T-shirt, I sang along with Kiri, but even Mozart couldn’t block out the images of the kerosene-soaked kitten and the native woman’s terrified face. The memories of that afternoon were a fresh bruise, but I was no closer to Kellee Savage. It seemed that, like the Bourbons, my destiny was to forget nothing and learn nothing.

  When I went downstairs to start dinner, I discovered the cupboard was bare. I thought about take-out, but I’d given Alma my last twenty dollars. What I had on hand was half an onion, a bowl of boiled potatoes, a pound of bacon, and eleven eggs. Wolfgang Puck could have whipped these homely staples into something transcendent, but Wolfgang had never paid a visit to Dahl Street. I pulled out the frying pan and started cracking.

  Angus had been outdoors all afternoon, and once again proving the adage that the best sauce is hunger, he inhaled everything I put in front of him. Taylor was finicky. Slava had spoiled her.

  “She gave me tea with milk and sugar in a little cup that was so thin you could see through it, and cakes with pink icing, and we talked about art and her house when she was a little girl.”

  “Would you like to invite Slava for tea some day?”

  Taylor’s eyes lit up. “Do we have any of those little cups?”

  “Of course,” I said. “It’ll take some digging to find them, but I distinctly remember getting some when I got married.”

  “When you got married,” Taylor said dreamily. “Did you have a big dress?”

  “The biggest,” I said.

  “I’d like to see that dress,” Taylor said.

  “I’m afraid the dress is long gone, T, but I do have some pictures. I’ll hunt them up for you when I’ve got a bit more time.”

  “Good,” she said, “because I’d like to draw a picture of you dressed as a bride.”

  Julie came just as I was clearing off the dishes. Before our sisterly reconciliation at Easter, I would have cringed if Julie had spotted yolk-smeared plates on our table at 6:00 p.m., but our relationship had entered a more equitable phase. I smiled at her. “One of those nights,” I said.

  She shrugged. “I ate the first two things I found in the freezer: a Lean Cuisine that I think was a pasta entrée and a pint of strawberry Haagen Dazs.”

  “Then we’re both ready for coffee,” I said. I poured, and Julie and I sat down at the kitchen table. She was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt and, for the first time since I’d known her, no makeup. She asked about my kids and about Alex and then finally she began to talk about Reed. As she remembered their life together, her brown eyes danced, and she smiled often. I recognized the syndrome. I’d felt that warmth, too, when someone let me talk about Ian in the months after he’d died.

  Finally, the memories grew thin, and Julie returned to the present. “I’ve got to know what happened the night he died,” she said simply. “When we were at the conference in Hilton Head, he gave the most wonderful speech, and he ended it with a quotation. He said it was just an old chestnut, but I can’t get the words out of my mind. ‘The journalist’s job is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.’ That’s what he said. Joanne, the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that my husband’s death was connected to his work.”

  “Do you mean at the university?”

  She shook her head vehemently. “No, not there. Downtown. On Scarth Street. Joanne, I think Reed had discovered something in that house that someone didn’t want brought to light.”

  “You think he was murdered?” I asked.

  “It sounds so melodramatic when you say it out loud. But it’s the only explanation that makes sense. Joanne, Reed and I hadn’t been married long, but we’d been together since the first week he came here. I knew him. He was a healthy man. I don’t mean just physically, but psychologically. He didn’t have dark corners, and” – she smiled at the memory – “he was a very ordinary lover. Nothing kinky. Just lights-out, garden-variety sex. Don’t you think I would have known if he had those tendencies? There was nothing, nothing in the man I knew th
at would connect him to that …” Her voice was breaking, but she carried on. “To that nightmare I walked in on.”

  “Did you tell the police this?”

  “Not when he died. I wasn’t thinking clearly. I was so humiliated. Seeing him like that. Try to put yourself in my place, Joanne. We’d been married five weeks. I loved him, and I thought he loved me. But after I followed him to Kellee Savage’s room, anything seemed possible. Now … Jo, so many things don’t add up, and I told the police that.”

  “You’ve talked to them recently?”

  “Yesterday. They say the case is closed. They were civil enough, but I know they were thinking I was just a neurotic widow.” She laughed ruefully. “They don’t have your perspective, Joanne. If they did, they’d see that I’m less neurotic now than I’ve been in years. Not that that’s saying much.”

  “You’re doing all right,” I said.

  “Am I?” she asked, and her voice was thick with tears. “I can’t even remember the last time I slept for more than two hours. And when I’m awake, all I do is think about everything I’ve done wrong in my life. Joanne, I’ve made so many mistakes. I set up expectations for everyone I loved, and when they didn’t meet those expectations, I walked away. I’ve walked away from so many people: my first husband, my son, my daughter-in-law, my grandchildren.” The tears were streaming down Julie’s face, but she didn’t seem to care. “And at the end, I walked away from Reed. But I’m not walking away any more. Reed was a good man, and I’m going to find out what happened to him.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  She took out a tissue and wiped her eyes. “I thought I’d start by talking to the superintendent of the building where Reed died.” She looked at me hopefully, seeking approval.

  I thought of Alma Stringer saying that if shit were luck, she wouldn’t have had a sniff. Finding another middle-aged matron in search of truth on her doorstep wasn’t going to make Alma feel any luckier. I reached out and touched Julie’s hand. “I’ve already talked to the landlady,” I said. “So have the police. I don’t think you’re going to get very far there. But if you think Reed’s death is connected with his work, why don’t you go through his papers?”

  She blew her nose. “I can’t go through his papers,” she said. “They’re gone. I went up to the university the morning after I got back. I couldn’t even get into his office. There was a work crew there. They said the office had been vandalized. Apparently, somebody from the School of Journalism tried to retrieve what they could, but there wasn’t much that was salvageable.”

  Julie ran her fingers through her hair in a gesture of frustration. “Everything Reed was working on was at the university. He didn’t believe in bringing work home. He always said if you have to bring work home with you, your job needs redefining or you need retooling.”

  “Would the people in his department know that everything he was working on was at the university?”

  Julie nodded. “Everybody knew.”

  The only association I’d made between the chaos in Kellee Savage’s place on Scarth Street and the scene at the J school had been the fact that both places had been an unholy mess. The vandalism at the university had so obviously been the work of gay-bashers that I hadn’t connected it with what I’d seen in Kellee’s room.

  Julie leaned towards me. She was frowning. “You look as if you’re a million miles away,” she said.

  “Sorry,” I said, “I guess I was wool-gathering. I’m back now.” But I wasn’t back, not really. I was still in room 6 of the house on Scarth Street, assessing the holes that were appearing in Ed Mariani’s theory that Kellee Savage had been blackmailing Reed Gallagher. The possibility that whoever had wrecked Reed Gallagher’s office had vandalized Kellee’s room on Scarth Street had ceased to be a long shot.

  I thought again about Reed’s destroyed papers, and about Kellee’s fortress in Indian Head. Another possibility was beginning to seem less remote; there was a strong chance that the vandalism I’d seen had been a smoke screen thrown up to camouflage two coolly deliberate missions of search and destroy. If that hypothesis were true, there was an adversary out there who was far more deadly than a pack of hate-filled kids.

  But who was that adversary? No matter how much I wanted to turn from the thought, one name kept insinuating itself into my consciousness. From the beginning, Ed Mariani had been front and centre. He had been Reed’s rival for the position of head of the School of Journalism. He had been with Reed the night before he died. Suddenly, there were troubling memories: of Alex, perplexed by the presence of amyl nitrite at Reed’s death scene because amyl nitrite was most often used by gay men; of Ed seeking me out the night of Tom Kelsoe’s book launch; of Ed, Johnny-on-the-spot with a dinner invitation the day I’d been at the J school and seen the vandalism. He’d been there all along, offering explanations, shaping my perception of Reed Gallagher, and, finally, conjuring up the blackmail scenario that I’d seized on with such alacrity.

  I’d been wrong about the blackmail. I was convinced of that now. But if I’d been mistaken about the blackmail, it was possible that my perception of other events had been faulty, too. I had to go back to the beginning, try to look at everything afresh. If Julie was right about Reed Gallagher’s sexual style, it was possible that the bizarre sexual scene the police had found when Reed Gallagher died was staged. And if Reed’s death scene were bogus, where was the truth?

  When Julie left, I told her to take care of herself, and it wasn’t just a pleasantry. Something was very wrong. Remembering Kellee’s room in the house in Indian Head, I decided Julie wasn’t the only person who needed a reminder about being careful.

  Neil McCallum answered the telephone on the first ring, and he sounded so sane and cheerful he seemed like a citizen of another planet. He and Chloe had been for a walk on the prairie, and they’d found crocuses.

  “I wish I could see them,” I said.

  “You can,” he said. “Just come out here. I’ll show you where they are.”

  “It’s not that easy,” I said.

  “Sure it is,” he said. “People always make easy things hard. I don’t get it.”

  I laughed. “Neither do I. But Neil, I didn’t just call to talk. I wanted to ask you to keep a specially close watch on Kellee’s house. Make sure the front door and the door to her office are always locked.”

  “I always do that.” He paused. “Have you heard something bad about Kellee?”

  “No,” I said. “I haven’t heard anything. Honestly. But Neil, you’ve got to promise me you’ll be careful. If anyone you don’t know comes around, make sure you’ve got Chloe with you, and don’t tell them how sweet she is. Make them think she means business.”

  “Like on TV,” he said.

  “Yes,” I said. “Like on TV.”

  For a moment, Neil was silent. Then he said, “But this isn’t TV, and I’m getting scared.”

  That night I couldn’t sleep. I was getting scared, too. For the first time since Alex had gone up north, I wanted him with me not because he was a man I cared about, but because he was a cop and he’d be able to put together the pieces. He had told me once that police investigations involved a lot of what he called mouse work. He’d pointed to the medicine wheel on his wall and talked about the Four Great Ways of Seeking Understanding. One of them was Brother Mouse’s: sniffing things out with his nose, seeing what’s up close, touching what he can with his whiskers. Alex had told me that when a police officer had a treasure trove of facts and information, it was time for him to stop seeing like a mouse and start seeing like an eagle. As I tossed and turned, mulling over my accumulation of fact and theory, only one thing was certain: as far as insights were concerned, I’d never been more earthbound in my life.

  The next morning when I got to the university I went straight to Physical Plant. The cheerful woman who’d given me the extra key to the office for Ed Mariani was moving a tray of geranium slips in peat pots from a window on the west side of the office to
a window on the east.

  “Caught me,” she said, and the lilt of her native Jamaica warmed the room. “There’s so much light here, and I want my babies to get a good start. When spring comes, that garden of mine is my life. Now, don’t tell me, let me guess. You lost your extra key.”

  “No,” I said. “It’s something else, but, in a way, it’s connected to the key. The man who’s sharing my office now is from the School of Journalism. I wondered if you’d heard how things were shaping up about that vandalism case.”

  She looked fondly at her sturdy little geranium plants, then she turned back to me. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to be a Good Samaritan for a couple more weeks,” she said. “The vandals really did a job on that place.”

  “Did the police catch them?”

  She shook her head. “No. It’s scary too, because it looks like it might have been an inside job. We’ve put a security officer in there all night now and a surveillance camera, but, if you ask me, we’re closing the barn door after the pony’s gone.”

  “What makes you think it’s an inside job?”

  “Whoever did it had to get through the outside doors somehow, and the lock wasn’t forced. They must have had keys. There were no fingerprints, but that’s hardly a surprise since they used gloves.” She flexed her fingers. “Latex gloves. Ours. The gloves were traced to the Chemistry department, as were the lab coats.”

  “Lab coats?”

  “To keep the paint off their clothes, I guess. Anyway, we got the gloves and the lab coats back, and the computer they took. It was a Pentium 90 – cost five thousand dollars. And they just pitched it in the garbage bin back of the Owl.”

  “When did you find it?”

  “Last Friday. It hadn’t been there long. Whoever took it must have decided it was too hot to keep around. Those Pentiums are great little machines. The one in the garbage was still functioning, but the memory on the hard drive had been reformatted.”

  “Who would go to all that trouble?”

  She chuckled. “Somebody who had big plans, then got cold feet.”