Pomeroy was quiet for a minute. “You know, I don’t have all the answers.” He shifted his weight in the chair and crossed his arms across his plaid flannel shirt. “It seems to me,” he said thoughtfully, “that if you really want to know who would be wanting to get Korman out of the way, you ought to think of who would benefit from his being gone.”
“I’ve already thought of that.”
“In a will, it’s usually the next of kin who inherit.”
“You mean like my ex-husband?”
“Or his mother.”
I said, “Vonette would never have the guts to do the old guy in. Besides. I saw her at that reception. She was as drunk as a skunk.”
“She had a flask.”
“Aren’t you the observant one.”
“Korman was cheating on her.”
I said, “Why, you’re just a fount of information. With whom?”
“I shouldn’t be the one to say.”
“Do it anyway.”
He stopped talking and looked out the window, then he seemed to have an idea.
“Goldy. Didn’t you say you were out of honey?”
“Yeah, so?”
“Why don’t you come out to my place in the Wildlife Preserve and get some. Next week.” He stopped to think. “On Wednesday.”
“Why Wednesday?”
“You come on Wednesday. If the weather’s still warm, you’ll get answers to some of your questions.”
CHAPTER 17
With Pomeroy gone the room was temporarily quiet. Privacy in a hospital, like silence in a library, is what one expects but only rarely gets. I looked out the window, now filled with the gray light of dusk. Had Laura been involved with Pomeroy? What difference would that make, anyway? I shook my head, which felt as if it was filled with the somber light of painkiller. It was hard to make sense of the whole thing.
The note!
When I leaped out of bed my body buckled. Soreness climbed my legs. My arms felt and looked as if they’d been stretched on a rack. The pain pill had apparently only entered my head. I hobbled across the room, reached into my bag, and found the letter.
It was crumpled, leading to the conclusion that Arch had read it before stuffing it in his desk. The beige stationery crackled. Inside were perfect, looping, black letters, the writing of a teacher. It read:
Dear Arch,
Thanks for your latest idea, dungeon master! I do like the idea of being a troll. Does that mean I can cast spells? I can’t wait!
Unfortunately, we won’t be able to play this Saturday as we’d planned. I have something very important I have to do. In a way it’s like the thing you talked about in your last letter. Remember how you said most of the kids in sixth grade didn’t seem to care about Halloween anymore, how they called that and your role-playing and trivia games kids’ stuff? I remember how bad that made you feel. And now you don’t know what to do? I have something like that in my life, too. And Saturday I have to do something about it.
How about next weekend for our game? That’ll give me a whole week to get ready! Let me know on Monday, okay?
Hugs,
Ms. Smiley
But he had not let her know on Monday. Nor had he let me know that he’d had plans with Laura Smiley for Saturday, the day the deputy coroner had indicated she had died.
October the third was beginning to look quite complex.
There was a gnawing in my stomach not brought on by the van accident. I felt uncomfortable with, jealous and suspicious of, the relationship between Arch and Laura Smiley. She had been too close to him. And perhaps to the other student that Schulz had mentioned, the deceased Hollenbeck girl. These relationships smacked of impropriety, somehow. The note brought Arch into a world of adult problems, even if the reference was vague. This in turn might account for his inability to talk about the letter or to deal with Laura’s death in an appropriate way.
I looked at the piece of paper in my hand. On Saturday, October 3, something had gone wrong after Laura had walked into town to do something, and then returned by car. But what? This letter raised more questions than it answered.
Arch. I could imagine him cycling over to her house and ringing the bell. Hearing no answer, he would have come back home. But why had he mentioned none of this to me or to Investigator Schulz? What was he afraid of?
Maybe Laura Smiley hadn’t been all there in the upstairs department, after all. Maybe this desire to help students she liked had flipped her out. The problem was, whatever this drama was we were involved in, it wasn’t over.
“My little Goldy,” Vonette said after she walked in the next morning and gave me a smooch on the cheek. She smelled of Estée instead of gin: a good sign.
I said, “Thanks for coming, Vonette. Another meal of hospital food and I would have taken over the kitchen by force. Patty Sue know you’re here?”
“Oh yes,” Vonette replied as she checked her creamy orange lipstick and curly same-hue-of-orange hair in my bathroom mirror. “Got that arm set and everything. She’s going to be great. Six weeks she’ll be out of that thing, good as new, able to help you with the catering.”
“Cleaning, Vonette,” I corrected, “until we or the police figure out what happened to Fritz.”
Vonette sauntered out of the bathroom. “Let’s not get into that again. Gives me a headache just thinking about it.”
“Tell me,” I said while gingerly pulling my slip over my head, “since I’m still mulling that funeral over in my mind. Did you get to know Laura Smiley well when she was your vacation nanny?”
Vonette sat down in the room’s only chair, brought out a pack of Kools, and inserted one in the newly lipsticked mouth. So much for the hospital’s No Smoking policy.
“Yes and no,” she said. She paused to light and inhale. “Anyway, I can loan you a car. That old station wagon of ours. Used to use it to pull the boat down to Lake Powell. Before the engine gave out. Boat engine, that is. I don’t know about the wagon, probably been a year or more since it’s been started, might need a jump.”
“Do you know if Laura Smiley had any enemies?”
She laughed quietly and took a deep drag. “More enemy talk.”
“Do you know someone who just plain didn’t like her?”
She said, “Well, there again, yes and no.” She raised one thin penciled eyebrow at me. “I did know her for a long time, though. I mean not that we were close. Nothing like that. You know.”
Dressed by then, I sat down on the bed. “No,” I said, “I don’t.”
“Well,” said Vonette. “Well, well.” She stood up. The cigarette drooped from her mouth. “I’ll tell you all about it sometime.”
“According to Fritz,” I said, “John Richard would inherit the practice if he died. Doesn’t that bother you?”
Her eyes narrowed. “You sure?”
“No.”
“Well, I don’t really know either, I guess. I thought if something happened to old Fritz, like he had a heart attack while he was doing an abortion, God punishing him, y’know…” She raised her eyebrows at me.
“Vonette!”
“Well? That’s still a hot issue in the church, after all.”
“It’s too bad they worry about that more than they do adultery,” I said evenly.
“Now, now,” she said. “Don’t start in on John Richard. Let’s not get into that again, please. I’m beginning to feel a headache coming on. Anyway.” She crushed the cigarette underneath one of her open-toed sandals. So much for hospital hygiene. “You know his daddy isn’t much better. I try not to think about that. Although,” she said as she felt around in her purse, “I have to admit, sometimes I’ve thought about killing the old lech myself.”
“Really.”
“Yeah.” She eyed me sadly. “But you know I don’t mean that. What the hell, I’ve made it this long, I can take it, right?” She gave me a confused look. “Oh yeah, the practice. I thought in that kind of situation, it was split between John Richard and me. I mean the A
ccounts Receivable. I don’t know what happens to the equipment and the patients. Who’d want to kill him to get his patients?”
I had been putting on my makeup; I paused to look at her.
“You mean, the good ones are all gone?”
She sighed. “Well, you always lose a few. You know babies die sometimes before they’re born. The patients blame Fritz. Now and then they sue, if they can stand all that agony.”
“Anybody sue lately? That you know of?”
“Nope.” She looked around the room. “My head hurts. S’pose they’d give me something here?”
“What are you taking for your headaches now, Vonette?”
She said, “Demerol.”
“Demerol? With your orange juice?”
“Don’t laugh, Goldy. You don’t know how bad the pain is. I have to have injections when I just can’t stand it.”
“Sorry. I know how much you’ve suffered.”
In truth I did not know the extent of her suffering. But I was determined to find out.
The hospital wouldn’t give Vonette any oral meds, as they called them, so she contented herself with something out of a prescription bottle that she fished from her voluminous purse.
We drove up 38th Avenue in silence. Patty Sue was hushed with what I hoped was contrition. Vonette wasn’t talking because she was deep in thought or pain or both. I was quiet because I was trying to figure out what Vonette was thinking.
“Gee, you guys,” Patty Sue said thinly into the silence, “my hospital breakfast was awful.”
“Mine was better than the other meal I had there,” I said truthfully.
“You girls want to stop and get a bite to eat?” asked Vonette. “My treat. I could use something myself, anyway.”
“Goldy,” Patty Sue said in a husky voice, “are you mad?”
I said, “What? With no business? No car? No money? Me, mad? Yes. Mad as in angry. Heading toward deranged.”
“Now, girls,” came Vonette’s soothing voice, “let’s not get all upset. We’ll have a little brunch. Couple plates of huevos rancheros and you’ll both be doing a lot better.”
She signaled to turn right. Her Fleetwood, which maneuvered like a road-bound yacht, glided into the parking lot of a Mexican restaurant built in the shape of a sombrero.
Vonette invited me to join her in a margarita, but I opted for a fruit smoothie. Patty Sue ordered a Coke. She asked the waitress if it was true that the Mexicans had chocolate sauce on their eggs and if so, could she? The waitress gave Vonette a questioning look.
“Oh, sweetie pie,” Vonette assured her, “don’t you worry about my girls here. Just bring the three of us your huevos and we’ll be fine. Oh yes, and make that a pitcher of margaritas. Okay?”
Fine and dandy. It was clear I would be taking the helm of the Fleetwood after lunch. Which reminded me.
I said, “Where is the station wagon you’re loaning me, Vonette?”
The pitcher of margaritas had materialized in front of us along with Patty Sue’s Coke, my smoothie, and a single salted glass.
“Now remember,” Vonette said as she poured and then took a long swig. “We haven’t used it as our family car for a long time. We bought it a few years after we moved here.”
“Moved here?” I asked. Information might come after Vonette’s first drink but before her fourth. I said, “You know, John Richard never talked to me about his life before Colorado. About how you and Fritz met, what your early life was like in Illinois.”
My ex-mother-in-law pondered the crust of orange lipstick she had left on her margarita glass.
I said, “Please tell me.”
Finally Vonette said, “Oh, well.”
She began slowly. “We used to work together,” she said. “I was Fritz’s secretary. Sometimes he’d take me out in the country to help with a delivery. We became very close, but it was all proper, I wanted it that way, being a divorcee and all.”
“What?” I said.
“Oh yeah,” she said, “I’d been married before, right out of high school in Corpus. My first husband was in the navy. Then I got pregnant, had my baby, and the navy moved us to Norfolk, where Joe was from anyway. You know, in Virginia. There Joe got involved with first one call girl, then another. Then he left for good. I was awfully young, just twenty when Joe moved out.” She sighed. “So when I met Fritz I’d been on my own for a while anyway, trying to make do for myself and my little baby girl.” She sloshed a large measure of the green stuff into her orange-and-salt-lined glass. “Just breaks my heart the way people don’t care about marriage these days. Or those days either. Anyway, there were hundreds of navy wives looking for clerical work in Norfolk, so off I went with a girlfriend and my three-year-old little daughter to Carolton, Illinois, because my friend had kin there.” She paused for a few swallows. “We had some tough times, let me tell you, living in first one and then another trailer court, men always thinking I was available, as if I was … loose.”
I said, “So how did the doctor fit in?”
“Oh, he was so nice to me when I was looking for work,” Vonette gushed. “Treated me so nicely. It was my first regular job. Then after I had worked for him for six years, well, his wife died of cancer. A few months later he asked me to marry him and it took me about two seconds to say ‘You bet.’ ”
“Colorado is a long way from Illinois,” I mused.
“Yes, well.” Vonette took out her mirror to do a little damage control on the lipstick. “Let me tell you, being a doctor’s wife is not all it’s cracked up to be.” She thought. “We got married in a little chapel and then started to try, no matter what, to be a family. After I had John Richard I thought everything would settle down but it didn’t.” She stopped to look out the restaurant window. “My daughter, she, well, she had some problems in school. Not too bad at first, but things got so much worse when she got to be a teenager. John Richard was just about ten then, and I guess I wasn’t paying as much attention to her as I should have. She had started out liking Fritz, but their relationship … sort of got bad, if you know what I mean.”
Patty Sue excused herself to go to the bathroom. Vonette let out a very long breath.
“My daughter … got involved with a fast sort of gang. She had gone through a lot, and she was only seventeen.” Another swallow. “Then one night, she drank too much. The kids dared her, is what came out afterwards. She drank a whole bottle of Southern Comfort, then keeled over dead. Seventeen years old, and everything to live for. It was just awful.”
I reached out and held Vonette’s hand.
I said, “I’m sorry.”
“Yes, well,” she said, “you wanted to hear this story and now you’re hearing it. Just let me finish, maybe it’ll do me good to talk.” She gripped my hand. “Anyhow,” she went on, “that’s when I started getting my headaches real bad. Life wasn’t good for Fritz then either; he was, well, he couldn’t really practice, so we decided to make a clean break of things and move out here.”
“Couldn’t really practice?” I said. “Why? From grief?”
“Oh, no,” said Vonette. She ran her finger over the orange lipstick on her glass.
“Couldn’t practice,” I prompted.
Vonette signaled the waitress for another pitcher of margaritas. She touched her fiery hair and began to talk slowly again. “It was such a mess.” She sighed. “You keep asking why we left Illinois, Goldy. I’ll tell you, but the beginning of it goes back even farther, to when my daughter was sixteen. It’s awful, so please, don’t go around talking about it.”
I nodded, although I certainly didn’t like the idea of keeping whatever bad news was coming to myself.
“We had to leave,” Vonette said in a voice just above a whisper.
The huevos arrived; we ignored them.
After the waitress left I said, “Had to.”
“Yes.” She drained her glass. “The year before my daughter died, a couple of Fritz’s patients reported him to some state board. Not only that,
but there was a trial coming up. That’s when Laura Smiley first got involved. Oh, hell.” Another sigh. “My daughter… said they’d had relations.”
“Who had?” I asked.
“Fritz and my daughter,” she said, just above a whisper. “She was sixteen.”
“What?” said Patty Sue as she returned to the table.
Vonette’s voice turned fierce. “I thought about divorcing Fritz then, when John Richard was nine. But he kept saying how much he needed me, and I already felt so guilty about my daughter. Well, I just couldn’t leave my son without a father. I felt so confused, and then my daughter began to run with that fast gang and to drink a lot—I thought, you know, to forget—and then she passed away. I was having these terrific headaches, and Fritz was so helpful with that pain. He was so eager to make amends. It was real tragic. He said he could get certified in another state with no problem, so a month after my daughter’s funeral, we came out here.”
We were all silent for a moment.
I said, “What was the trial going to be about?”
Vonette shrugged her shoulders. “It doesn’t matter, does it? He helps so many women with their babies, and with their problems. I don’t like to think about the bad.” She nodded benevolently in Patty Sue’s direction. “He does seem to be such a good man that usually I just don’t know what to think, so I don’t. You know.”
She gave me a helpless look.
She pressed on, “I don’t want to know. It gives me too much of a headache, having a lot of hate inside me.” She stopped talking, then started again. “Sometimes I think, Vonette, just leave. I hate staying. But then, I don’t know.”
Patty Sue and I looked at each other. Her bottom lip was trembling.
The new pitcher of margaritas arrived. Vonette gave the waitress a grateful look.
Vonette said, “I don’t want to burden you girls with this.” She picked up her fork and leaned over her plate.
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