“Angela was about twenty years older than Mary?”
“About. Angie was—thirty-one, I think. Thirty-two, perhaps. Very close, they were.” He was quiet for a moment, turning again to look out of the window. “This is really tough for her. Did you try the house?”
“I rang the number this morning. No answer.”
Anders frowned and chewed his lip. “Rosella—the housekeeper—is nearly always there.” He was running his thumb back and forth across his forehead, abstracted. “Mary’s probably just out . . . doing whatever Mary does. Mary’s quiet—no, that’s not right. ‘Silent’ is a better way of putting it.” Then he smiled. “I could be trying to get something out of her—just by way of ordinary conversation, and she can stand right there like a monument to the monosyllable. ‘Yes,’ ‘no,’ ‘yes,’ grunt. But on the other hand she’s highly imaginative. Or impressionable. Or both. Stuff spews out of her like volcanic rock.” Anders turned his clear gaze on Jury and said: “She thinks Angie was murdered.”
Jury was surprised. “What motive does she attribute to whoever—?”
“I told you. Mary’s not big on details.” Nils Anders turned his gaze to the window.
Jury felt it again. The suddenly charged atmosphere.
TWENTY-EIGHT
It was almost nostalgic in its way; it reminded Jury of any number of chemist’s shops he’d been in when he was a kid—the narrow aisles, the crowded shelves, the flannels and plastic shower caps hanging from pins at the corner of one shelf. Except, of course, they didn’t have soda fountains in chemist’s shops in Britain. Too bad, he thought, looking at the marble counter-top, the chrome shakers, the wooden stools that any kid would have loved to twirl on. There were a couple of kids there now, older ones, a boy and girl slurping up soft drinks. Behind the counter, a tall, skinny boy was reading a magazine called Flex. Muscular reading for one with no biceps, Jury thought.
Dolores Schell was in the rear, bent over a workspace, reading what he saw to be prescription blanks when he came up to her. “Miss Schell?”
Surprised, she raised her head. She was wearing horn-rimmed glasses, and not very fashionable ones. She was rather small, and thin and (what Jury thought of as) “nervy.” Her movements were abrupt, almost jittery. The most that could be said for Dolly Schell was that she was pleasant-looking. When he approached the counter she was filling an amber-colored vial with tiny white pills. At the sound of his voice, a few of the pills spilled onto the counter. Nervy, yes. Probably why she was thin.
“My name’s Richard Jury. We met—or nearly did—about an hour ago. I’m with Scotland Yard CID. I’d like to talk with you for a moment?”
“Is it about Angela?” He nodded. “Go ahead.” She was unscrewing a big jar of tablets, started funneling a portion into a smaller jar in front of her.
He smiled. “I was thinking we might sit down.”
She smiled too, again briefly. “Sorry, but I can’t stop right now—your name was—?”
“Jury. Superintendent, CID.” He flipped out the ID again. Somehow, he didn’t really think she needed to be reminded.
“I’m backed up with prescriptions and some of these people will be in for them.” Here she held up a small sheaf of white squares and waved them, in case he didn’t know what a prescription was.
“Okay. Do you mind talking while you work, then?”
“Not at all. Excuse me, though.”
Here she disappeared into the shelves of medicines, and through them he made her out hidden in part by the rows of bottles and jars, so that what he got was a view of bits and pieces—a square of white coat, a patch of brown hair, fingers with unpainted nails. The metal shelves ran horizontally, the bottles and jars stood vertically, so that what he saw was an oddly tense arrangement of squares and oblongs when he looked through them. His eye was caught by a row of cobalt blue, amber, and amethyst apothecary bottles of the sort one sometimes sees adorning a chemist’s window. Silently, he read off the names—tonic pills, castor oil, Ague Cure—as he watched Dolly Schell through the open spaces between them. She worked, unruffled by his presence, calmly and competently. Either Dolly Schell, he thought, was extremely good at hiding her feelings, or else the subject of her cousin Angela didn’t give rise to them.
She returned with several other bottles in her hands. Jury said: “You went to Wiltshire to identify your cousin.”
“Yes. I did.”
“I understand Angela Hope has a sister. Why didn’t she go?”
“Because she’s only thirteen. And Angela was Mary’s only family. I don’t know; it seemed pretty awful to have her go over there for that reason.” She shrugged slightly. “I offered to go in her stead.”
“You and Angela were close?”
Dolly Schell was measuring liquid into a small plastic container. “No. We weren’t. We didn’t see one another much. I don’t think she liked me, to tell the truth.” Her tone was sad, as she tapped the white tablets into a small envelope.
“Was Angela Hope one of your customers?”
Dolly looked up at him then, with an ironical smile. “Only in extremis. Angela believed more in herbs and the hand of God.” She went back between the shelves to return the jar. “I don’t think she ever walked into a doctor’s office around here.”
“And when was she?” Jury raised his voice slightly to reach her.
“Was she what?”
“In extremis.”
“Oh . . . I didn’t mean that literally.”
“Figuratively, then?”
Dolly was back again, this time with a smaller jar of pinkish pills, tiny ones. Now she wound a roll of blank labels into an Underwood that looked old enough to be an antique. She pecked information onto a label. “Angela got migraine headaches that simply wouldn’t respond to goldenseal and sassafras root.” Here, she looked around with a guilty little smile. “I gave Angela some Tylenol 3, a prescription drug, of course. You going to run me in?”
Jury smiled. “Haven’t the authority. You told Detective Inspector Rush she’d had rheumatic fever as a child.”
Dolly nodded. “Yes, that’s right. I don’t think it was severe, but something like that can cause trouble later in life.” She pulled the completed label from the typewriter. “Fortunately, she didn’t often get migraine headaches. You know how they are. Can make you quite sick.”
Jury thought of the medical examiner’s findings, the vomit at the site of the death. Migraine, he knew, could be awful, could be blinding. But he doubted very much it could have catapulted Angela Hope into that deep, dark stone well.
Dolly stuck the label on an amber vial and slipped that into one of the small white envelopes on which she had already made some jottings. Then she picked up a container of a rather startling pink liquid that Jury thought might fit Wiggins’s plans to medicate the universe. “What is it you want to know, exactly? I’m not sure I understand why you’re here, asking questions.”
The tone was free of antagonism, merely matter-of-fact. Jury answered, “A divisional commander thinks your cousin’s death might be related to another death he’s investigating.”
“Nobody said anything to me about a related death.” She was looking at him hard.
“When you spoke to the Wiltshire police—Inspector Rush, wasn’t it?—there was no indication that the other women’s deaths were tied to Angela Hope. Or that the circumstances were suspicious. We’re still not sure that this is the case.”
“Other women? You mean, there’s more than one?” Her eyes were large as she held the bottle of viscous pink stuff in midair.
“Possibly.”
“God.” She set the container on the table and nervously wiped her palms down her white jacket. “God,” she said again.
Jury told her what he could and Dolly Schell forgot all about her jars and vials as he did so. “But that’s—” she searched for words—“that’s rather unbelievable. And why are you searching over here, in New Mexico, rather than there, where it happened?”
She returned to her medications, picking up the bottle of pink stuff, setting it down again. “Aren’t you reaching a conclusion . . . ?” She paused and shook her head, again searching for words. “Aren’t you looking possibly at the wrong side of the coin? How do you know it’s not the other way around? Someone in your country meant to do away with one or both of these women and Angela got in the way?”
Dolly Schell was no fool, he thought. “You’re right; that’s certainly possible.”
Jury watched her for a moment in silence, watched her dexterous movements, hoping she’d get to the end of her prescriptions, for he was finding the eight-by-eight enclosure a good venue for claustrophobia. Wiggins would have loved it. Paradise, really, sealed up with all of these nostrums, anodynes, potions—which was, Jury suddenly realized, the way in which the sergeant must have construed whatever was in the jars and bottles. Not mundane “pills” and “syrups” but substances with properties verging on the magical.
“What are you smiling about?” Dolly was screwing a lid back on the huge jar.
“Was I? I was thinking of a colleague of mine. He’d love this place. Your little room here.”
“Oh? Doesn’t strike me as awfully lovable.”
“You’re not a hypochondriac, Miss Schell.”
She had recovered enough to laugh. “Everybody’s a hypochondriac. And call me Dolly, will you?” The jars were back on their shelves, the vials secure in their white packages. She looked around, satisfied. “Well, that’s done. I can get Billy to watch the store for a while. He’s only reading his muscle-building magazines, anyway.” She went off towards the soda fountain, spoke to the lanky youth, and was back. “If you’d like, there’s a coffee bar next door.”
Now Jury laughed. “In this town, there’s always a coffee bar next door.”
• • •
IN THE NUTMEGY, cinnamony environs of next door’s coffee-cum-book-shop, they sat on benches overwrought with flower-patterned pillows. Dolly ordered latte; Jury had plain strong coffee.
“They just can’t leave it alone, can they?” said Jury, nodding as a tray of varying cups of froth was carried by. Dolly looked at him in question. “This.” He raised his cup of plain coffee.
She laughed. “It’s not just Santa Fe. Cappuccino and latte are a national plague these days. Well, an international one, maybe. You have espresso bars. I was in one in Salisbury. So there.”
He shook his head. “You were in a bar in Salisbury. A bar bar. Where the landlord laid on an espresso machine.”
“Okay, you win. Anyway, Salisbury’s beautiful.”
“Yes. The cathedral, did you go there?” She nodded. “I’m sorry about the circumstances.”
She lowered her head, “Yes.”
“You said you and Angela weren’t close.”
She raised it. “Shall I tell you the truth?”
“I’d prefer it to lies.” He smiled.
Dolly leaned back against the many-colored cushions and sighed. “I said Angela didn’t like me very much. That may or may not be so. But I do know that I didn’t care for Angela all that much.”
“Oh? Why not?” Jury thought he could see why. It would be difficult for a woman as plain, as nondescript as Dolly Schell to care for someone as pretty as Angela Hope. And probably as talented, artistically, as Angela Hope.
She shook her head, studied her cup, a hint of a smile raising the corners of her mouth. As if she were chiding herself. “I guess I was jealous. I resented the way luck just seemed to walk in her door.” Dolly sighed. “Let me tell you a little of my—of our—history, okay?” Jury nodded and sat back. “I’ve lived all of my life here in Santa Fe. Or Albuquerque. My dad had this drugstore and I guess I just followed along. I was the only child. I suppose I’m not terribly adventurous and I’m used to a small town. But Angela and Mary’s parents—I have a hard time calling them ‘aunt’ and ‘uncle’ because I scarcely knew them and hardly ever saw them, so I can’t think of them as ‘family’—anyway, they were absolutely the most confirmed New Yorkers. I don’t think they ever got west of the Hudson. All of their travelling was the other way—Europe, Antigua, Kyoto, Turkey, places I’ve only read about. Both of them were physically beautiful. I mean really. The movie-star looks you see wandering around this town. My Aunt Sylva—that’s what we called her—was my dad’s younger sister, but you’d never know it to see them together. Sylvestra Dark Schell was her name. ‘Dark’ was my grandmother’s maiden name but she was nothing like my gran, I can tell you. Sylva would have liked this place now; Hollywood all over it. But then, she hated the Southwest; she loathed New Mexico, called it Hicksville. So she went east and ended up in Manhattan and married Martin Hope. My father’s dead; he died four years ago, cancer. And you know, I guess, the Hopes were killed when their jet—private jet—crashed into some mountain in some tiny country with an unpronounceable name.” She fingered her cold coffee cup. “I sound cold-blooded. But I never knew them, you see. They’d probably like Santa Fe now; it’s been discovered; it’s raised the notion of chic to a frenzy. Thirty years or so ago it was a pretty sleepy place. Parts of it still are, don’t misunderstand. It’s not all lipstick and sequins. But it’s too—publicly gorgeous, if you know what I mean. It’s such a scene.”
Did she consider herself “behind” it, Jury wondered, like an unappreciated stagehand switching sets and working pulleys? Few jobs he could imagine were more “behind-the-scenes” than that of a chemist. A job that isolated you, yet one that was very exacting. He knew his local landlord at the Angel, but not his local chemist (allowing, of course, that the former got significantly more business from him than the latter). Sergeant Wiggins was the only person he could think of who’d know his chemist if he met him on the street. It was doctors who got the credit. Did Dolly Schell feel herself underappreciated in what obviously struck her as an overappreciated “scene”?
Jury said, “An American Mecca, it must be now. Go on with your story.”
“Well, Sylvestra escaped to the East and married Martin Hope. He was a rich builder, of what I’m not sure. Houses, high-rises, I don’t know. They were killed seven years ago when Angela was twenty-five and Mary was six. Angela’s a lot older than Mary, but they get—got—on really well. Which surprises me because they’re so different. Mary is practical and down-to-earth as an old no-nonsense lady. Stubborn like one, too. Since they hadn’t any family back east, Angela decided to come out here. When she was young, when she was a child, she visited us several times. When Martin and Aunt Sylva went off on one of their spectacular trips and didn’t want to be saddled with a kid, I guess. I didn’t like her then, either.” And in the petulant but still beguiling gesture of a teenager, Dolly flipped her straight brown hair back from her neck.
Jury smiled. He liked her directness. “Did your father and mother like Angela?” When her face flushed and her mouth tightened, he thought he must have touched a nerve.
“My mother died when I was a baby, when I was barely one year old. As to my father: yes, he liked her. It was very hard not to like Angela. See, she was exactly like her parents—charming in her helplessness. I hate these helpless types, mostly because I don’t think they really are, they’re just too lazy to develop a backbone, so they lean on other people’s backs. Look, she was twenty-six when she decided to come here. With all of her money and all of her contacts, she still had to have someone to lean on, someone to look after her. So she picked Dad.”
“And did he?” Jury meant the question to be volatile.
Dolly dipped her head, said she wanted more coffee, was silent for a few moments as Jury beckoned the waitress over. “Yes.” She went on in a flat voice. “Angela had a way of making people want to take care of her.”
“That must have been—pretty difficult for you.” He sensed how inadequate the words were.
“Then he died.” She looked away, into the dark aisles of the other room that housed the books.
Jury w
ondered if, in some part of her mind, she saw a connection between these two things—the coming-on-the-scene of Cousin Angela and the death of her father—some irrational cause-and-effect. He supposed that as a child, especially as the only child of a widower, she had been the center of her father’s life.
She continued: “Angela liked to think of herself as one of these New Age people. You know—crystals, vortexes, channeling. Nonmaterialistic, spiritual. Easier to think of yourself as disdaining material goods when you’ve got them, or have the money to get them, isn’t it? Easier to turn down a Mercedes if you’re driving a Jag.”
Jury smiled. “Yes, I expect so. And Angela had the material goods?”
“Oh, she certainly did. A pretty big inheritance is my guess. Martin Hope wasn’t poor.”
“And who does the money go to? Her sister?”
“Probably.”
“What about you?”
Dolly frowned a little, reflecting on this as if the idea really appeared to be new to her. “It’s possible. But she’d have to have made a will, and people like Angela often don’t. Can’t be bothered, or something.” She shrugged.
“Careless of practical matters, was she?”
Dolly nodded. “Or pretending to be.”
He smiled. “Odd thing to say. Why would she bother pretending to be impractical?”
“If you wanted to impress somebody of your otherworldliness and poetical nature.”
Dr. Anders, for instance, thought Jury, though Dolly Schell was way off base if she thought dreamy impracticality would get very far with Nils Anders. “Anyone in particular she might have been wanting to impress?”
Dolly blushed, and her eyes, behind the big-rimmed glasses, darted about as if they wanted to flutter away. “Well, no. Nobody in particular.”
Jury didn’t want to press the point of Dolly’s attachment to Nils Anders. “So Angela and her sister lived by themselves . . . where, exactly? I know it’s outside Santa Fe. I’d like to talk to Mary.”
“Ha! Lots of luck.” Dolly sipped her fresh cup of latte.
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