Adam and Evil (An Amanda Pepper Mystery)

by Gillian Roberts

  “Ray Buttonwood?”

  She pursed her lips and shook her head. “He hasn’t officially said anything, Mandy. He’s waiting until…”

  “Until he’s a properly respected, widowed single parent who then becomes engaged to some heiress who’ll help him, perhaps?”

  “Oh, please.” Then she closed her eyes a second and exhaled, opened her eyes and sighed again. “That isn’t a bad scenario, actually, but I don’t want to think about it.”

  She was silent long enough for me to think there was something—something about Ray—she was already thinking about. I waited while she idled with another crab claw.

  “Actually,” she said after silent deliberation, “Sam pooh-poohed this, but you’ll understand: Ray Buttonwood was there.”

  “He’s really taking his wife’s murder hard, isn’t he? Out glad-handing every night and all. He’s a natural for politics. No wonder he wants to run.”

  She shrugged. “The thing is, he frightened me. Went out of his way to tell me that he’d gone back to Emmy’s building and verified you weren’t a resident.”

  “I knew you shouldn’t have—”

  “That isn’t the point. He acted like he was sure we’d gone to Emmy’s.”

  “But we did.”

  “But he wasn’t to know. Nobody was to know! And he acted as if he wanted to blackmail me, or at least threaten me, about it.” Beth shook her head, affirming her disbelief at the man’s actions. “He said—” She cleared her throat and pitched her voice lower, imitating him. “‘I find it interesting how different your regard for the law is than your husband’s.’ He wasn’t making sense to me, and it must have showed, so he leaned very close and said, ‘Emily’s place. Before the police had a chance at it.’

  “I said, ‘And you, Ray?’ And he said that she was still legally his wife, the mother of his son, so there was nothing odd about it at all, but we had no legal reason for being there. Kept asking what Sam would think of my expedition.”

  “Is Sam going to be upset if this jerk tells him?”

  Beth’s expression was cryptic—bemused and still a little annoyed. “Why would he be? I told him before I went.” I really did not know this woman who was my sister.

  “But you said—”

  “Oh, that. About making up an excuse for you? About your so-called breakup? That was for your benefit. I thought you’d be more likely to go with me if you thought I was sneaking behind Sam’s back.”

  “Beth.” I frowned with disapproval, then couldn’t sustain it. She was right. I broke into a grin. I’d never have roused myself for a legal, Sam-approved expedition. “All that aside,” I said, “do you mink Ray Buttonwood killed his wife? Would there be any reason? I did see that man in the pinstriped suit, and so did Emily.”

  Beth tilted her head and looked sourly amused. “Reason?” she said. “Sure. Precisely what you intimated. That way, he’d be a sympathetic widower, not a cold-hearted man dumping his wife and leaving her penniless, and stealing her kid. This way, he can marry the money that would help his campaign, plus he can probably run on an antiviolence platform and be a shoo-in. So sure, there are reasons. But Mandy, I’m positive that Sam would testify that he was with him all the time.”

  “He’d lie? Sam?”

  She shook her head. “Never. But he truly believes he was with him, enough of the time to make any side trips for murder impossible. And frankly, so do I. And I can’t keep questioning him. He was really annoyed by my suspicions about his friend. He’ll clam up if I start acting like the Gestapo, asking for a minute-by-minute breakdown.”

  I would have to find a way around Sam. “Were they still fighting about money?”

  Beth searched for her credit card. “I don’t think so. I mean, Emmy was hard up and he was being a creep about it. He makes enough to be a whole lot less creepy. But I think she gave up the battle because her mother left money. Of course, she loaned it to her sister, to open that store, but when Helena paid her back, things wouldn’t have been that terrible.” The waiter took the gold card and the bill.

  That troubled me in several directions. It was likely that Emily would have had money issues for a long time, because I’d seen Helena’s store and didn’t have much hope for its making a profit—legally—in this lifetime. And that would mean ongoing divorce-money issues. Both Helena and the bland blond Mr. Pinstripe kept their ominous auras.

  “Beth, Helena’s business is pathetic. It’s a fake, whether or not she knows that. She’d never have been able to pay back the loan.”

  Beth half nodded. “She insists on acting as if she were a rich woman, somebody’s pampered wife. I know that. But she told Emmy she was going to be in the money again soon.”

  “I’m telling you, the store—”

  “Not the store. A prospect. A financially affluent prospect.”

  “A sugar daddy?”

  “Haven’t heard anybody use that expression for a long while.” Beth’s tone was neutral. The subject seemed exhausted and she changed it. “You didn’t eat a thing, poor baby, but your appetite will be back soon, because this foolishness between the two of you is going to work out, you’ll see. You two have too much going for you to let…to just… Well, you aren’t going to listen to your mother for the first time in your life, are you?”

  I’d never thought of it that way.

  “I promise you, it’ll work out.”

  She almost made me believe it.

  Outside, the night felt like silk chiffon on the skin. It was the variety of balmy spring evening that releases endorphins into the air, forcing everyone who breathes to fall in love. Trust me to make it the night I break up.

  Beth had parked a few blocks south, so we slowly walked down to Second Street, toward Market. Beth talked about her business, speculated as to how she’d manage family and work, about her partners, about what, perhaps, Ray Buttonwood had hoped to accomplish with his quiet thuggery the night before. I listened, happy for her, but mostly lost in my still impenetrable thoughts.

  We passed Christ Church’s iron-gated garden and graveyard, a place I like to sit in on fine days. One would think repeated exposure to such reminders of time’s passing, of mortality—even the church’s ghostly presences of congregants Washington and Franklin and the men who signed the Declaration of Independence and came here to pray would have given me perspective by now. One would be wrong.

  We reached Market with me still surveying all points for Mackenzie and perhaps Adam, listening, more or less, while Beth thought out loud about how she’d arrange her schedule. The light changed to green, we stepped off the curb, and I, still scanning, turned my head just enough to see a set of headlights and a sleek, dark car tearing down Second and turning right, sharply, at top speed. Directly at us.

  “No!” I screamed, grabbing and pulling her toward me. We fell together, landing in a heap of arms and legs half on and half off the curb as the car sped by, grazing Beth, who collapsed.

  A woman across the street screamed—in tune, it seemed, with the sound of brakes being forced to outperform themselves—“That car! Stop that car!” although I wondered how anybody could stop a car. “Get its plate number! Call an ambulance!” The woman standing next to her watched, gape-mouthed, until she realized the last bellowed instruction had been for her. She got the idea, digested it, nodded, and took a cellular phone out of her pocket just as something—the immovable object of physics lore, judging by the protests of ripped metal, the shrieking brakes, the boom and tinkle of falling glass—did stop the car.

  I lay there, my sister half on me. I thought perhaps Beth and I were dead or about to be. I couldn’t believe that the worst day of my life was going to be its last as well. I was sick of irony, and now was dying of it.

  I tried to right myself, get up on my feet. I could already feel my coccyx protest, and my knees felt wrongly engineered. I was all-over wobbly but alive. I looked at my sister, who was still crumpled. A dark stain was next to her calf, and I could see the cut where h
er khaki slacks had a gash in them. “Beth! Say something! Oh, my God—”

  Things had, impossibly, gotten worse. I lay back down and planned never to get up again.

  Seventeen

  She inhaled. I heard it.

  “You’re alive!” I nearly sobbed it out. “Oh, Bethie, you’re alive.”

  She started a nod, but cut it short with a wince. “Okay,” she gasped.

  “Can’t breathe?” I looked around wildly. The two women stared from across the street. “Get help!” I said. “Ambulance!” I thought maybe I’d already said it. Or maybe they’d already gotten it, but I couldn’t wait to find out. I tried to remember CPR, damned myself for not taking the refresher course, but thought I had some lifesaving techniques still up there.

  “Couldn’t!” Beth said in a harsh whisper. “Can now. Am. But my head hurts. And my leg—”

  Her leg looked bad, bending at not quite the correct angle. And bleeding. But she didn’t need to know that yet. “You’ll be fine,” I said. Until that moment I’d never quite known why people blurt that out, but now I know it’s a reflex. A gruff, gut-level request to the gods when there isn’t time for lengthy prayer sessions, pleadings, and offerings. “Thank God you’re alive,” I said. “I don’t have to go clean out your rice carton.”

  She almost smiled. “Noise,” she said.

  That there was and had been, nonstop, layers upon layers. The brake squeals, the car crash, shouts and screams, male and female, across the street and down and from windows above. The women telling us not to be nervous—so nervous themselves they repeated it endlessly, a tape on continuous play. And maybe me. Maybe a little bit of the noise was me. I’m not saying I was crying, or screaming—but maybe something. Now boil all that down and squeeze it into about three seconds’ worth and you’ll have it.

  I tried to reduce my share of the noise output and leaned closer to Beth.

  “Aspirin in my bag,” she said, trying once again to lift her head, and immediately giving up.

  “Don’t—don’t move,” I said, thinking spinal injury. “Don’t do anything. I’ll find it.” Were you supposed to pop aspirin before a doctor looked at you? Could it hurt?

  “Don’t be nervous—I called! I had my phone and I called 911!” the woman across the street shouted for the fifth time in a row. She acted as if she were on the other side of a raging river, hallooing us, unable to cross. “Stay calm. An ambulance will be here any minute. I called them on my cell phone.”

  I wanted to tell that woman, who was barely containing her hysteria, that I loved her, but Beth was so agitated, I had to pay what little attention I had left to her.

  “My bag,” Beth repeated. “Need my bag.”

  “Don’t worry!” the woman screamed across the street. “I called the police!”

  I looked up—my hip didn’t feel great, but it didn’t seem the time to mention it, only to stay still as long as I could—and saw nothing except that the reason the dark car had been stopped was that it had made another right, into a parked car halfway up the block. I looked more attentively, although clear vision was prevented by a parked off-road vehicle doing its dinosaur thing in center city Philadelphia. The least those damn things could do is get off the roads, as advertised.

  The good news was that it wasn’t going to be hard getting the dark car’s license plate. Literally. That car wasn’t going anywhere. Two men on the far side of the street ran toward it. They could have strolled. Backward. The dark car was wedged in at an angle that didn’t look forgiving. It was going to be difficult for the passengers to get out, let alone flee.

  “Are you sure you had your bag?” I asked, continuing in my acutely stupid mode of meaningless conversation. If there’s one accessory a woman knows she’s got with her, it’s her bag.

  Beth tried to push herself up.

  “What’s the matter with you?”

  “My head—”

  “No—I mean do not move! Haven’t you seen enough movies to know that?” But that always had to do with moving a victim, not yourself. Maybe if your own muscles were working enough to move, you should. Medical training via feature films didn’t answer everything, and since what I didn’t know could definitely hurt her, I tried to cover all bases by allowing nothing. “No aspirin, either. Thins the blood. The ambulance is coming. Don’t worry. Relax.” I had now broken all previous records for saying stupid things that didn’t make anything better.

  “My bag,” Beth repeated.

  I heard the whine of an approaching ambulance and the siren of a police car. People shouted from down where the dark car was stuck. People shouted back from our corner. My rescuer across the street repeated herself again and again: “Don’t be nervous! An ambulance is coming!” A man bellowed, “I was having a goddamn meal in the restaurant when he comes around, and look at my car!” I felt battered by the incoherence of the moment—message overload from sirens and shouts, movement of people around us, near and far, and then over us—and could not imagine how Beth must be feeling except worse. I bent over her and was interrupted by paramedics getting to her; by somebody shouting that somebody else had the guy and he maybe needed a doctor, too; by a policeman checking the scene, moving people back; by the paramedic examining my hand, scraped and slightly raw, to my surprise; and then by a voice. The voice. It cut through everything else—cut through in its own unique way, softly.

  “Mandy! Sweet Je—Mandy! You all right? Jesus!” All this said as he ran from the far corner toward me.

  I couldn’t turn and greet him because the paramedic was checking my eyes, but he told me I was fine just as Mackenzie reached me, barked at the cop that he was one, too, bent down, and took me gingerly in his arms. His blue eyes had a film of moisture over them. “I thought I saw that red jacket from down the street—all the commotion—I thought you were—” And then he paused, took several deep breaths in a row, nodded, and smiled his relief.

  I wondered when he’d remember that he was furious with me. I certainly wasn’t going to remind him.

  “We’ll be taking your sister in for some patching and observation,” the emergency worker said. “She’ll be fine. Bruised up, but fine. You probably want to come in and be checked out, too. Just to be sure.”

  “I’ll phone her husband.”

  It was the paramedic’s turn to nod.

  “You want my phone?” The woman who’d been across the street and made the call was now standing about two feet from me. “I have my phone right here. That’s how I called the—”

  I smiled and shook my head. “I’ll call him later. Soon. From home. And thanks. You saved the day.”

  She balanced her weight on one foot, then the other, searching for a new role in this drama. “I saw that car,” she said abruptly. “I saw what happened, and let me tell you—you’re lucky to be alive! It was going like a maniac! One second later and everybody would have been dead.”

  I didn’t find her patter cheering. The cop, however, was intrigued. “You’re a witness?” he said.

  First she nodded enthusiastically, waved her girlfriend over, and said, “We both are.” Her friend shook her head. “Didn’t actually see anything,” she said. “Don’t want to get involved.”

  And then the phone lady reconsidered and half shrugged. “Now that you mention it… My memory stinks. Everybody says so. Plus it happened so fast. Scared me to death, it did.”

  I decided they could find their moral centers without my assistance or interference.

  “My bag,” Beth said. “My bag!” Her voice was getting stronger. A good sign.

  A second patrolman walked toward us and heard Beth. “She mean pocketbook? Maybe brown with a twisted gold lock?”

  “Curved,” Beth said. “The clasp curves.”

  “To be honest, I’d call it more like twisted now,” the cop said.

  “It’s my favorite bag,” Beth said, and I was surprised to see large tears dribble toward her ears as she lay on her back on the stretcher. I reminded myself again about
her having bumped her head. I was going to insist on scans if she was going to carry on about pocketbooks when she’d nearby been killed.

  “It died in place of you,” I said. “Sacrificed itself. Jumped in front of the car to save you. Think of it that way.”

  “My bag,” Beth repeated, but softly this time.

  “I’m sure it was, but now it’s evidence, ma’am. It apparently hooked onto the bumper and was dragged down the street.”

  Beth groaned.

  “You in pain? New pain?” the paramedic who was settling her on the gurney asked.

  “My bag!” she said. “Everything’s in it.”

  “I know,” the patrolman said. “Won’t be able to put a new face on for a while.”

  “No, I mean my list of contacts for my business.”

  Mackenzie glanced over at me, one eyebrow raised. Business? he silently mouthed.

  “Her new business. She’s minding her own business.” In my exhausted, relieved, fatigued state, I thought that was the funniest thing I’d ever heard, let alone said. I sat on the curb, quietly laughing to myself, frightening the hell out of everyone else.

  “All my phone numbers,” she continued. “My keys, my wallet—all my ID. My date book—how will I know when anything—”

  “Dragged, not run over, is what I was told,” the patrolman said. “Contents are probably fine. We’ll inventory them, and I’m sure you can have your lipstick back. Doesn’t seem evidence of much that we’d need at the station.”

  I stopped laughing. “Her lipstick?” I said. “She’s starting a business and all you can think of is—”

  Mackenzie gently touched my forearm. “Forgive him. He knows not what he fails to think about,” he whispered.

  I hoped his whispered confidence signified that we’d jumped the chasm and were on the other side. The same side. That we’d never look back, either, because it was come-home-all-is-forgiven time. I was truly tired of being angry with him or about him or because of him. It had been interesting to try that on for a while, but it got old quickly, and I hoped I hadn’t realized too late how poorly it fit.