Remember Me, Irene ik-4

by Jan Burke

  “Was he right?”

  I swallowed hard, pretended fascination with the road for a moment. “My father’s prediction wasn’t remarkable. Just about everyone who knew Lucas saw the same bright future. Lucas had won scholarships and awards, and he had obtained his bachelor’s summa cum laude. He was doing well in his graduate studies — had a gift for both teaching and research.”

  “What does he do for a living? Is he a professor at Las Piernas?”

  “I don’t know what he’s doing now,” I said, thinking that was at least partly true. “Like I said, I lost track of him. Lucas was gone from the college by the time I returned to Las Piernas. Later, when I was working at the Express, I ran into some complex studies that were far beyond my abilities. I called and asked for him, and was told that he was no longer with the department of sociology. I wasn’t surprised, really, because he had talked of going on for a doctorate at one of the big universities. He told me he wanted to try to get on the faculty at Las Piernas, but I just figured he found something elsewhere.”

  “You said he was a graduate assistant in sociology? Andre Selman’s department?”

  “Yes. Lucas was one of the researchers on one of Andre’s first well-known studies. In fact, I met Andre while sitting in Lucas’s office.”

  “You know, Andre really is a rat, but he knows some great people.” She was quiet, then added softly, “I met Ben through Andre.”

  Claire came earlier in Andre’s lineup than I did. As I recalled, she had one of the more short-lived encounters with him. I was an intern at the Express the year she married Ben; I remember the sensation caused by Claire’s courtship with him. Ben was widowed, had no children, and was her senior by a quarter of a century. They had now been married for over fifteen years, and all but the most vicious tongues had stopped wagging.

  I glanced back over at her. To my surprise, she looked like she was about to cry.

  “Claire? What’s wrong?”

  She bit her lower lip, hesitating. Claire and I weren’t close friends, partly because we moved in such different circles. I wasn’t sure she would confide in me.

  She took a deep breath and said, “I’m worried about Ben. He says he wants to retire.”

  “Why are you upset? You’ve been trying to get him to retire for at least five years now.”

  She waved a hand in dismissal. “And he hasn’t wanted to. So why now?”

  I made the turn on to the road that leads to Seaside Estates, one of Las Piernas’s upper-crust enclaves. The Seaside Country Club golf course was on our right, huge houses on our left. “What does Ben say about it?”

  “He says exactly what you said. ‘You’ve wanted me to retire, so I’m retiring.’”

  I laughed. “That’s a pretty good imitation of Ben’s voice.”

  She smiled a little. “Lots of time listening to him. I suppose I’d be happier about this retirement if he seemed happier about it.”

  “Most people have mixed feelings about retiring. Ben’s been at the Bank of Las Piernas for a long time — and in a very powerful position in the community. President of a bank that has helped businesses get started, financed much of the growth and development of the city.” I thought of the one person I knew who worked for the Bank of Las Piernas. “The people who work with Ben respect him. My friend Guy St. Germain speaks very highly of Ben as a boss.”

  “Guy is an exceptional employee.” She sighed. “Maybe I’m borrowing trouble. It will be great to have Ben all to myself. I don’t know why it bothers me.”

  I made a turn that brought me to a security gate. She handed a keycard to me. “You’ll have to guide me from here,” I said, as the gate rolled open.

  “Turn right, then keep heading uphill. Sorry to put you to so much trouble.”

  “It’s nothing.”

  “It’s not like Ben to leave me stranded somewhere,” she said, looking worried again.

  “You seem to think this is connected to his retirement. Could something else be troubling him?”

  She opened her mouth as if to reply, then closed it.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Nothing.” After a moment, she said, “I don’t know, maybe it is something else. I worry about his health. He hasn’t been sleeping well, or eating enough. I wake up in the middle of the night, and he’s over at the bedroom window, just staring out into the darkness. Or I’ll find him sitting up in the study at three or four in the morning.”

  “Does he give a reason for any of this?”

  “No. He just tells me that he didn’t mean to worry me. Says he’s getting old, and…”

  “And what?”

  She closed her eyes, leaned her head back against the seat. “Sometimes he’ll say, ‘You should marry a younger fellow next time.’”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “It hurts to hear him say that,” she said. “Makes me wonder if — oh! Turn at the next corner. You can only go right.”

  I made the turn. After a short distance, we were in front of another gate. She reached into her bag and pressed a remote control button that caused this gate to open, pushed it again once we were through. We drove down a dark, tree-lined lane that gave way to a long, curving driveway that sloped up to the mansion. There was a Jaguar in the driveway.

  “Looks like Ben is home,” I said.

  But she was concentrating on the house, a puzzled look on her face. “The lights are out.”

  It took me a moment to register what she was saying, because there were plenty of lights on — but then I realized that they were all exterior lights. The house itself was dark.

  “Maybe he’s gone to bed,” I said, but she was shaking her head.

  I barely noticed her denial, because at that moment, what I at first took to be a berserk, woolly bear came bounding toward the car. As it drew closer, it started barking, and I realized it was not ursine but canine — the biggest dog I have ever seen in my life.

  “Don’t jump, Finn!” she called out. Apparently he heard her, or saw the censure on her face. He scrambled to a halt and plopped his rear down just outside the passenger door — close enough to her window to steam it with his breath. Sitting, he was nearly as tall as the car. He started whining. “He’s an Irish wolfhound,” she said, anticipating my question. “Back up, silly,” she said to him with affection. “I can’t get out.”

  His response was to lift a paw as big as a saucer and smack it against her window. When he set it down again, Claire drew in a sharp breath.

  There was blood on the window.

  4

  “HE ’S HURT!” Claire cried, but even as we hurriedly opened our car doors, I wondered how he had managed to lope across the lawn if he was badly injured.

  Finn wasn’t waiting for sympathy. He ran away from us, barking his deep-throated bark. We were both wearing heels, so we couldn’t follow very fast. He turned, came partway back, ran from us again.

  “Finn, stay!” Claire called. He seemed to consider this option for a moment, gave a big “woof” of dissent, and took off once again.

  I kicked off my shoes and closed some of the distance. He rounded the corner of the house and headed for the backyard.

  There weren’t any exterior lights here, so it was dark along that side of the house, causing me to slow a little. The ground was cold and uneven beneath my stockinged feet. I stumbled once, but didn’t fall, and glanced back to see Claire taking off her shoes.

  I wondered if we should change tactics. Maybe it wasn’t blood on his paws. Maybe he was just making mischief, playing a game of chase. He came back into view, his tousled fur backlighted as he stood in silhouette at the far corner of the house. The bark changed to a baying sound. I ran faster.

  A large patio came into view, and as I rounded the corner I saw a swimming pool; I stopped cold when I saw a series of crazy-eight patterns of red paw prints along its deck. The dog’s baying put me in motion again. He stood outside what appeared to be a cabana; it was small compared to the house, but I guessed
it to be about as large as my first apartment. It was white. One of a pair of French doors facing the pool was open. A light was on inside the building, spilling out through the open door. As I came closer, Finn quit baying and started watching me intently. It made me slow to a walk, then stop — about twenty feet away from him.

  I heard Claire coming up behind me. I reached out and motioned for her to wait next to me.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “Call the dog, Claire,” I said. “Just let me go in while you hold him.”

  For a moment I thought she would protest, but her face went pale as she looked down and noticed the bloody prints on the deck.

  “Come here, Finn,” she said in a shaky voice.

  He twisted his head to one side in canine concern, but stayed put.

  She took a deep breath and said in a commanding tone, “Finn!” He trotted over and sat prettily in front of her.

  “Check to see if his feet are hurt,” I said. “I’m going to take a look in the cabana.”

  I walked toward it before she could object.

  “Ben?” I called from the open door. There was no answer.

  I stepped inside and found myself in a small sitting room decorated in soft hues of rose and gray. A small white refrigerator hummed in one corner. To either side of the sitting room, there were changing rooms, two on each side; their open doors showed them to be empty. A short hallway led to another door, also open. Over the gray tiles which led to it, I saw a trail of bloody paw prints.

  “Ben?” I called again.

  Nothing but the hum of the refrigerator.

  With wide, awkward strides, as if stepping on stones across a stream, I crept along, careful to avoid the blood on the cold tiles.

  “Ben?” I said, a little louder.

  Nothing.

  But there was a smell, I realized, a smell that grew much stronger as I neared the door.

  My palms started sweating, my heart drumming. I wanted nothing so much as to turn around and run out of that hallway, out to where there might be sweet, cold air — big gulps of air — air that didn’t reek of blood.

  I braced my palms on either side of the doorjamb and made myself peer around the corner, look inside the room. It was a bathroom. The shower stall door had been pushed open. On the floor, lying half out of the shower stall, was a man, fully clothed. Ben Watterson. He held a gun. The back of his head was missing. It might have been in the big mess in the shower. I didn’t stick around to find out.

  As I came running out of the cabana, I saw Claire, staring at me.

  “Don’t go in there,” I said.

  She immediately let go of the dog and started to do what I just told her not to do. She had a wild look on her face. I grabbed on to her. “Claire, don’t—”

  The dog barked at me, scared me enough to make me let go of her. I don’t know if she heard me or if she heard the dog, but she didn’t move.

  Finn barked at me again.

  “What—?” She left it at that. I don’t think she wanted to ask the question. I might answer it.

  “Let’s go into the house,” I said.

  She looked at the cabana again, didn’t budge.

  “It’s Ben,” I said. “I’m sorry, Claire.”

  “No.”

  I waited.

  She just shook her head. “No. Not Ben. Not Ben. No, you’re wrong. It’s not Ben.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  She bit her lip, then said, “Let me see him. He might need help.”

  “Claire — it’s too late. I’m sorry.”

  “You weren’t in there very long. You don’t know that he’s — you don’t know! I want to see him.” She hurried toward the cabana.

  “No!” I shouted. “For Godsakes, Claire, don’t—”

  She stopped moving, turned toward me.

  “Please don’t,” I said. “Please, please don’t go in there.”

  She hesitated a moment longer, then came stumbling back to me.

  “We need to go into the house,” I said, trying hard to keep my voice steady. “We need to call the police.”

  “No,” she said, but let me put an arm around her shoulders.

  She leaned against me, and let me guide her away from the cabana. She just stared at me when I asked for the key to the house. I finally took her purse from her, found the keys, then tried a couple until I found one that would unlock the back door, which led into the kitchen. She stood nearby, petting the dog. “Good boy, Finn,” she said, at least half a dozen times.

  As I opened the door and fumbled for a light switch, the air was suddenly pierced with an obnoxious whooping noise, quickly followed by horns and bells.

  “You set off the alarm,” she said dully, and pushed past me to enter a code on a keypad. Blessed silence returned.

  She turned on the kitchen lights and went to a wall phone, pushed an auto-dial button, and said, “This is Mrs. Watterson, that was a false alarm.” She gave them a code word, then hung up.

  “Do you need to use the phone?” she asked, as if she hadn’t just missed a perfect opportunity to contact the police.

  “Yes,” I said, and dialed Robbery-Homicide.

  “FRANK’S NOT HERE,” Detective Jake Matsuda said when I identified myself. “He got called out on a case.”

  “This is about something else, Jake.” Aware that Claire was listening to every word I said, I tried to give him as much information as I could without being cruel to her. He told me he would send someone right out.

  “You want me to page Frank?” he asked.

  “Yes, thanks. Could you let him know that it may be a while before I’m home?”

  As I hung up, I noticed that Claire had started shaking. Her face was colorless.

  “Sit down,” I said, afraid that she might faint. She took a seat at the kitchen table, and Finn immediately sprawled out at her feet, head between his paws. “Can I get you something?” I asked her.

  She looked out toward the backyard. “It might not be Ben,” she said.

  “How about a glass of water?” I went to get it without waiting for an answer.

  I’ll confess that I thought about calling the paper — a reporter’s impulse when the town’s leading banker kills himself. Already, I was wondering what had led Ben to pull the trigger. But looking at Claire as she took the glass of water, I couldn’t bring myself to make the call.

  “Why?” she said.

  “What?”

  “I heard what you told the police. Why would Ben want to kill himself?”

  “I don’t know, Claire. I was just wondering about that myself.”

  “Everyone will wonder, won’t they?”

  “Yes.”

  Once again, she stared toward the backyard. She reached for the glass of water but knocked it over, breaking the glass. “Now look what I’ve done,” she said, and started crying.

  I FELT A LITTLE UNEASY with the detectives who had drawn this case. I didn’t have any problem with David Cardenas. But Frank had once knocked Cardenas’s partner, Bob Thompson, flat on his rump. Why? For making a remark about me. Not the kind of thing that will make a guy sign your dance card at the Policemen’s Ball.

  Things seemed to be going okay at first. Cardenas took my statement while Thompson talked to Claire in the living room. I told Cardenas about the dog, and he had me show him the car window, and from there, to retrace most of my steps as I told him what had happened. He didn’t force me to go inside the cabana again; a photographer and other technicians were at work in there. When they first arrived, Claire had been forced to calm Finn, who grew upset as other strangers came near the cabana. A uniformed officer was petting and cooing to him now, as a technician took a sample of hair from the dog’s paw.

  “The dog stayed outside, with Mrs. Watterson, when you went in to look?” Cardenas asked me.

  “Yes.”

  “About where was she standing then?”

  I showed him. “About here.”

  “Was there a reaso
n you asked her to wait?”

  I shrugged.

  He waited.

  “I’m not sure I thought about it at the time. There was blood, the lights were out everywhere else, and Ben hadn’t come to the hotel to pick her up, as planned. He hadn’t answered the phone when she called. Given all of that, by the time we were standing here, I had a bad feeling about what might be in the cabana.”

  “Did you open the door to the cabana, Mrs. Harriman?”

  “No, it was already open.”

  “There are two doors. Were they both open?”

  “No, just one. The one on the right.”

  “As we face the cabana, the one on our right?”

  “Yes.”

  “All the way open?”

  “No, but nearly wide open.”

  “Did you reach out as you approached it?”

  “No.”

  “Touch the doorknob?”

  “No…”

  The questions went on. Cardenas was good at his job. He helped me to concentrate on remembering a sequence of events and details that my mind was already trying to lock away from me. As we finished at the cabana, he paused to ask the technicians to check out the blood on the car window, then continued to go over the details of our entry into the house.

  He thanked me for my help, asked me to wait in the kitchen, went into the living room for a few minutes. When he came back he said, “I think Mrs. Watterson would like to talk to you for a moment.”

  I nodded and went into the living room.

  Somewhere along the line, Claire must have gathered her wits; she told me that she had called her sister, Alana, and told Thompson that she’d wait until Alana arrived before she’d answer any other questions. Then she explained that Alana was an attorney. Thompson apparently took that in stride.

  Claire asked me to wait with her until her sister arrived. I sat next to her on the couch. It seemed to me that she was more herself; perhaps not completely cool and self-possessed, but getting there. Her face was swollen from crying, her eyes red and puffy, but there was defiance there. It occurred to me that somehow, Thompson had made her angry.

  He was sitting in a chair, swinging his foot back and forth, watching her.