“Why are you worried about Mrs. Blair?” I asked, after a glance at my watch. It was ten minutes till eight. James Blair didn’t seem like the type who would enjoy waiting, for me or anyone.
“I’m worried because Teresa’s missing. You must know that, if you’re looking for her. She’s dropped completely out of sight, without a word to anyone. I’m certain something is terribly wrong. Now with you here I’m more certain than ever.”
I ignored the implied question. “How long’s she been gone, as far as you know?”
“Four days.”
“She probably just went home to see her mother,” I said, to check the reaction.
“No,” Kathryn Martin objected. “You don’t understand. She would have told me, if that’s all it was. I know she would.” The words were vehement.
“What’s her husband say about it?”
“Nothing. He won’t discuss it at all. Not with me. Of course, he’s never talked to me about anything. Or to anyone else I’ve ever seen.”
“Does he admit his wife is missing?”
“No. Not to me, at least.”
“Is that peculiar? His silence?”
“Everything about James Blair is peculiar. He’s got the emotions of a squid, for one thing. Sometimes I think the only things he cares about are his rock garden and his judo chop.”
“What’s that mean?”
Kathryn Martin swiped at a lock that had strayed across her forehead, then sighed and shook her head. She looked as forlorn as an orphan. “I don’t know what it means,” she said absently. “I don’t know what anything means anymore. Once I thought I knew all the rules, all the ways to play the game. Now I find I don’t know any of them.”
“Maybe it’s a different game.”
She shrugged listlessly. “Maybe you’re right. I just wish someone would tell me which one it is. And who’s keeping score.”
“I’m not sure they keep score anymore,” I said. “How does Wayne fit into all this?”
She looked at me for the first time in a long while. “What do you know about Wayne?”
I held up a hand. “Nothing. Absolutely nothing. I swear.”
“Well, it was about Wayne in the beginning—my hysteria, I mean—but it’s not about him anymore. It’s about Teresa. I miss her. I need her. Are you going to find her? Is that for real?”
“That’s for real.”
“I can pay you to look for her. I have some money.”
“It’s not necessary,” I told her. “I already have a client.”
“Who?”
“Confidential.”
“I’ll bet it’s James. Trying a bluff,” she added after a moment.
“What kind of bluff?”
Kathryn Martin clasped her head with her hands, shutting out the world in general and me in particular. “Forget it,” she said wearily. “Just don’t tell James I talked to you.”
“Why not?”
She didn’t say anything.
“You seem afraid of him,” I said, as casual as I could be.
“I guess I am afraid. Of what he might do.”
“To you or to Teresa?”
“Both.”
I took a deep breath and held it. I didn’t want her to be right, didn’t want the search for Teresa Blair to become something other than it had appeared to be that morning in Tolson’s office. “What makes you think he’d do anything to either of you?” I asked.
She shook her head, her eyes shifting widely. “All I know is James Blair has no use for me and never has had. And once when he caught a neighborhood boy letting air out of his tires, he broke the boy’s arm. Teresa told me he paid ten thousand dollars to keep the parents from suing him.” She stood and pointed to the window. “Look over there. That house is a fortress. No one goes in there, absolutely no one. There are rooms in that house that are locked and even Teresa doesn’t have a key. I’ve only been over there once, and Teresa was nervous the whole time. It’s the only time I’ve ever seen her frightened. So, it may be crazy, but I don’t want James Blair to know I’m involved in this, whatever it is.”
I stood and walked to the window and looked over toward the Blair house. As far as I could tell it was unoccupied. A squirrel climbed to the top of the fence and ran along it, sure and swift. “What’s the bottom line, Mrs. Martin?” I said, still facing the window. “Do you think James Blair killed his wife? Is that it?”
“I tell you I don’t know.” She fidgeted, making little noises behind me. “Yes.”
“What?”
“YES! That’s really what it amounts to and I’ve been afraid to admit it. I’m afraid James Blair has done something to Teresa. I’m afraid he’s murdered her.”
The room grew warm and shrank around the words.
3
The indictment had been a long time coming, but its utterance left Kathryn Martin gratefully purged, suddenly blithe. To me the charge was juvenile, ridiculous, as credible as a kid’s tale about the old man in the big house at the top of the hill. But I’d keep it in mind.
“Am I terrible to say such a thing?” she asked artfully, not feeling terrible at all.
“Only if you’re wrong,” I said. “Have you any evidence at all that Mrs. Blair has been killed?”
She thrust out her chin and shook her head. “Not legal evidence. No.”
“Then what?”
She shrugged. “Nothing you’d understand.”
“Have you any evidence at all that James Blair wanted his wife dead?”
“No.”
“Were they having marital troubles?”
“No, nothing specific. But I wouldn’t call it a happy marriage.”
“What you’d call it isn’t relevant, Mrs. Martin. What did Mrs. Blair call it?”
“She didn’t. She didn’t talk about her marriage, one way or another. But she couldn’t have been happy with him,” she added stubbornly.
“Come on, Mrs. Martin. What are we doing? Playing head games? Developing TV pilots? What? Do you plan to go to the police with the idea that James Blair killed his wife?”
“No. They’d laugh at me. Like you’re doing.”
“I’m not laughing. Murder dries up my sense of humor.”
Whatever she saw on my face caused her to leave her chair and come to the window and stand beside me and grip my hand in both of hers. Her fingers were cold and thin, as dry as road dust. “You just don’t understand,” she said. “I’ll admit I don’t know for sure that James did anything to Teresa. I shouldn’t have said what I did. But I’m absolutely certain something terrible has happened to her.”
“What makes you so sure?”
She dropped my hand and began to pace. The carpet bent without sound. “I’m going through a divorce. It’s been a very difficult time for me. I’ve been almost crazy, and I mean that literally. Teresa Blair, God bless her, has held my hand through all of it. She’s come over for coffee every morning for the past six months, just to listen to my little tales of woe. I don’t think I would be here without Teresa. I really don’t,” she mused softly. “Well, anyhow, last week I had this meeting scheduled with my lawyer. I’d discussed it all with Teresa beforehand. The lawyer wanted me to sign some sort of property settlement agreement he’d drawn up, and Teresa didn’t think I should do it, not right away. So she and I were going to get together the next morning, like always, and talk over what the lawyer had to say. Teresa was worried about, what was it? Fraudulent concealment of assets, I think she called it.”
Teresa Blair had passed on some useful information to her friend. I wondered where she had gotten it in the first place.
“But you see, the next morning Teresa didn’t come over. She didn’t call, didn’t leave a note, nothing. I know she would have told me if something came up. I know it.”
“People skip appointments all the time, Mrs. Martin. It doesn’t mean they’re the victim of a forcible felony.”
Kathryn Martin made fists and planted them on her hips. “You’re just li
ke every man I’ve ever met. I’m sure you make decisions all the time based on nothing more than a hunch—everything from horse bets to business deals—but when a woman does the same thing all of a sudden it’s a silly, female way to behave. It makes me sick.”
She pricked me with her eyes. She was right in what she said, but I didn’t stop to think about it.
“Do you do divorce work, Mr. Tanner?”
“No, I don’t,” I told her. “Not anymore.”
“I guess to make you understand why I said that about Teresa I’m going to have to go into my marital situation,” she said evenly. “I suppose you find domestic disturbances distasteful; I’m sure they bore you to death.”
“Actually, I always found them pretty compelling and pretty awful. It was the clients who always seemed bored by it all.”
“Well, I certainly don’t view my divorce as boring. I’ve been frantic for months. I’m from the Midwest. Ohio. My father’s a judge. There’s never been a divorce in our family. Never. My parents were not supportive at all when I told them, I suppose because I couldn’t, or at least wouldn’t, talk about the sordid details. For the first time in my life I refused to let them counsel me about a major decision. They were so insulted they immediately assumed I was the cause of the breakup. My mother calls every Sunday, asks if I’ve let Wayne come back, and hangs up when I tell her I haven’t.”
Mrs. Martin had resolved to tell me her story, and although I didn’t particularly want to hear it, at least not right then, I didn’t tell her that. Instead, I leaned back against the wall and tried to look trustworthy and receptive. I’m pretty good at it, I guess; people tell me all kinds of things. Listening. It’s what I do in lieu of charitable contributions. “Tell me about Wayne,” I said, giving her a nudge.
“Wayne. Well, Wayne is a good man, or at least he was when I married him. He is, or was, an insurance executive, a church elder, scoutmaster, Little League coach, all those things husbands are supposed to be, or so I was taught. But all that ended a year ago. Since then he’s gone completely crazy. He turned forty in September. Mid-life crisis, isn’t that what they’re calling it nowadays? Whatever it was, Wayne’s personality changed totally in a period of six months.”
“How?”
“Well, to put it bluntly, Wayne was born again.”
I guess I laughed.
“It’s not funny,” Kathryn Martin declared. “Believe me. Although it’s good you laughed. I never could, not until it was too late. They take advantage of that, of course. They prey on your guilt, on your reluctance to call someone who quotes Bible verses and goes to church six days a week a jerk. A nut. A devil.”
“Is that what Wayne became? A devil?”
She considered my question more seriously than I’d expected. “If a devil is someone who spends all his time judging others and finding them wanting, and condemning them for their imperfections, then that’s exactly what Wayne became. It was terrible. He began with himself. No booze, no swearing, no books or movies that weren’t properly ‘religious.’ Then he went after me. Change my hair, my clothes, my friends. Church five nights a week. Discussions. Prayers every ten minutes. It was inconvenient, and maddening, and utterly boring and stupid, but I suppose I could have taken it if he hadn’t started in on David. He wanted our son to be Jesus, just the way he wanted me to be the Virgin Mary. And we weren’t. And we didn’t want to be. And the more we resisted, the more people he brought in to help us see the light.” Kathryn Martin fought back a tear.
“What kind of people?”
“Fanatics. Men with eyes that never closed. Women with hands that were always clasped. People with tolerance and rectitude oozing from every pore, but of course it wasn’t tolerance or rectitude at all.”
“What was it?”
“Hate, more than anything. To those people God was their bully, their bodyguard. His only duty was to strike down all those who disagreed, explicitly or implicitly, with their ideas. Their prayers weren’t requests for forgiveness but instructions to the Lord, lists of the people who did and who most definitely did not deserve his benevolence. My own friends were driven out. Whores and blasphemers, Wayne called them.” Kathryn Martin sniffled, then pulled out a Kleenex from her pants pocket and blew her nose. “I have a pin in my jewel box,” she went on. “A little round pin that I got in the sixth grade. You know what it’s for?”
“What?”
“For going to church a hundred Sundays without a miss. And now look at me.”
She closed her eyes and pressed her hand to her forehead, her memory a narcotic and addictive. I wanted to help her, but the subject was too complex.
“He sent me to see other men, you know,” she said slowly, almost inaudibly. “They were supposed to counsel me, to get me on God’s team. What they mostly did was pat my knee and put their arms around me and spout nonsense about the evils of humanism. That’s the dirty word, believe it or not. One of them suggested I express my rebirth by casting off my garments, as he called them. When I refused, he slapped me and sent me home to Wayne.”
She stopped talking. The sound of the slap seemed to briefly inhabit the room. “When Wayne began talking about sending Davy off to some ‘Christian’ school in South Carolina, I threw him out. Bag and baggage. I cried for three days, but I didn’t give in. Davy still cries, and it breaks my heart, but I won’t give in. And Teresa Blair was here every morning, through all of it. Up until last Friday. Then nothing. Do you understand now why I think something terrible has happened? She gave me a whole new life. Now I want to help her, in any way I can. Will you find her for me?”
“I’ll find her,” I said. What I didn’t say was that I was working for James Blair and for the El Gordo District Attorney, not for her, and that finding Teresa Blair might not necessarily be in Teresa’s best interest or her friend Kathryn Martin’s, either. If Tony Fluto hadn’t put a scare into Mrs. Blair, the thought must have crossed his mind more than once. I had one of those hunches Mrs. Martin had mentioned, and my hunch was that in finding Teresa Blair I wouldn’t be doing anyone but Ray Tolson any favors.
“Tell me everything you know about Teresa Blair,” I said.
Kathryn Martin’s expression darkened. “That’s another thing. I spent all day yesterday thinking back over our conversations, and I just now realized that we spent virtually our entire time together talking about me and my problems. I know almost nothing about her.”
“Surely there’s something.”
“Well, she has a job. She works afternoons in a boutique in El Gordo called Bathsheba’s. In fact, she owns part of it. She plays tennis at the El Gordo Racquet Club. That’s where she goes after she holds my hand in the mornings. She reads a lot. She’s absolutely wonderful with children—she has Davy in the palm of her hand. She’s very independent, very intelligent, very beautiful, and totally unshockable. Wayne at his worst didn’t even faze her.”
“Has she always lived in El Gordo?”
“I don’t know.”
“Anything at all peculiar about her marriage?”
Kathryn Martin shook her head. “She almost never mentioned her husband or their life together. They seldom went out. Every time I asked Teresa if she wanted to go to a movie or something she was always free to go. Like I said, she just never talked about it. I realize now that might have been because I was so busy talking about mine.”
“Do you have a picture of her?”
“Yes. Not a very good one, though.”
She went into the kitchen and pulled something off the bulletin board beside the telephone and came back and handed me a square of newsprint. The picture was under the heading “New Business in El Gordo.” The paper was the El Gordo Democrat. The date was June 1979. The man in the picture was Elliott Farnsworth, the woman Teresa Blair. The paper said they were the co-owners of Bathsheba’s. The man was tall and daintily elegant, the woman darkly sensual. She seemed slightly amused by the proceedings. The picture quality was such that if I knew Teresa Blair was in a
room with me I could pick her out of the crowd, but if I didn’t know that for certain, then I couldn’t.
“How about her friends?” I asked.
“She certainly acted as though I was the only one she had. There must have been others, of course. I’m sure the Racquet Club people would know.”
“Other men?”
“No.”
“Sure?”
“Virtually. She just didn’t seem interested.”
“Where’s she from originally?”
She paused. “I don’t know. I haven’t the vaguest idea. That’s strange, isn’t it?”
“Parents?”
“Dead. At least she never mentioned them.”
“Siblings?”
“No.”
“Haunts?”
She shrugged.
“Enemies?”
“I can’t believe there were any.”
“Children?”
“No.”
“College?”
“No. At least I don’t think so.”
“Anything else? Anything at all?”
She shook her head again. “It seems silly, but I can’t think of a thing. She dressed beautifully, of course, what with the boutique. She was athletic. She was a truly liberated woman without going on about it, if you know what I mean. But she had no particular interests as far as I know. Except me, I guess is what I mean.”
“Why haven’t you gone to the police?”
I slipped the question in fast, hoping that while she fumbled for an answer she would tell me something useful. But she had an answer ready: “Teresa wouldn’t like it.”
“Why not?”
“She just wouldn’t.”
“Did she tell you that?”
“No, it’s just something I know. She didn’t trust the police. She didn’t trust anyone.”
I walked into the kitchen and put my empty coffee mug on the counter next to the sink. The remains of Davy’s peanut butter sandwich lay on the counter, too, oozing jelly as thick as sludge. I went back to Mrs. Martin. “What happened the last time you saw Mrs. Blair?” I asked her.
“Let’s see. She came over about eight thirty in the morning.”
“What day?”
“Last Thursday.”
Death Bed Page 30
