‘By whom?’
‘Her own testimony.’
‘She went in the box?’
‘She did indeed. Our reporter thought she did pretty well.’
‘Is your reporter still around?’
She smiled and shook her head. ‘Sub-editing God’s in-house news sheet.’
‘Vera Wert,’ I said.
‘Married Edwards on June 28th, 1938. His family hated it.’
‘What family was there?’
She looked at her notepad. ‘A father who was not very well. Died in 1944. A sister.’ She looked at me. ‘You had to have known that Wanda Edwards was George Bennett Raymond’s sister . . .’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘And that when Vera was acquitted she tried to shoot her . . .’
‘The hell she did!’
‘She put a slug into the courtroom ceiling. All dealt with quietly afterwards. She never came to trial.’ Maude looked at her notes again. ‘The sister never married, as far as I know. Looked after her father, who was . . . seventy-six when he died.’
‘His wife?’
‘Died when George Bennett Raymond was born. The old man never remarried. I don’t know whether there is any additional information to be had about post-marital social life, but I don’t have any.’
‘I don’t think it’s important to me,’ I said.
‘O.K.,’ Maude said. ‘So George and Vera got married, without family blessing, but with family participation. They made a big splash, notable for the lack of celebration which pervaded the reception party.’
‘Vera Wert’s family?’
‘Not on the guest list,’ she said. ‘I don’t have anything about Vera before the murder except from our reports from the trial. Excuse me, I shouldn’t say “murder”. The “shooting”. And little after, because the young couple didn’t have much social life. The upper crust was not generous to wives with Mrs Edwards’ background.’
‘We’re talking late on in the depression,’ I said. ‘Was there much social life for them to be excluded from?’
Maude leaned back. ‘Oh, yes. There was a whole season of dances. If anything it was more active than when times were economically better. Young men couldn’t marry as early as they did before, and the dances were the main contact between expanded pools of unmarried young ladies and gentlemen. And the young marrieds were involved too.’
‘All right,’ I said. ‘They got married. They got snubbed. They stopped getting along. He became strange, or maybe just stranger. He suspected her of playing around.’
‘You said simple sentences . . .’
‘So, on April 2Ist, she shoots him. What is known about that night?’
‘Uncontested, that Edwards learned early in the evening that Mrs E. was pregnant. Family doctor stopped by. Vera was out, so he told Edwards. This led Edwards to be upset and he told his sister emphatically that it could not be his child.’
‘That sounds a bit rough.’
‘So did the sister’s testimony about Mrs Edwards, but it was made completely clear that she had resented her sister-in-law from the beginning and probably the prejudice undercut what she had to say.’
‘Mrs Edwards wasn’t there when her husband learned about the pregnancy? Don’t doctors tell the mother-to-be first?’
‘I suspect some of the niceties become blurred when you’re dealing with that kind of money.’ Maude consulted a notepad. ‘There was a houseboy who testified as to when Mrs Edwards got home. Just after ten.’
‘Where had she been?’
‘At a concert.’
‘With someone?’
‘Alone.’
I made a face.
Maude said, ‘A maid testified too, agreeing about the time of Mrs Edwards’ return, and saying that she seemed edgy, but not more than normal. Mrs Edwards testified that after she got home she and her husband had an argument about his jealousy. No one seems to have heard this. The bedrooms and the servants’ room were all a considerable distance from the conservatory.’
I nodded.
‘Mrs Edwards said that her husband began to beat her in his rage, and that she took her gun out to scare him. It didn’t. They fought, it went off twice.’
‘She carried a gun around?’
‘She said that she often did.’
‘Jesus,’ I said. ‘She just happened to have her gun handy. How did she pass that off?’
‘Must be the way she told it,’ Maude said.
‘And is that it?’
‘More or less. She called the police as soon as it happened. Nobody seems to have contested that there was no delay.’
‘A big question for me now, Maude,’ I said.
‘Yeah?’
‘What happened to her after the trial?’
‘Apart from acting as a target for her aggrieved sister-in-law?’
I nodded.
‘I don’t have anything,’ she said simply. ‘Either as Mrs Edwards, or as Daisy Wines. The only suggestion is in one of the last stories. When she got off, she was asked what she was planning to do. She said that she was going to go away for a while.’
‘And that’s it?’
‘That’s it.’
I said, ‘I want to locate her.’
‘Well, if she’s not in Indianapolis, that only leaves the rest of the world.’
‘I know who knows where she is. But they’re not telling.’
‘Oh?’
‘Her lawyers.’
‘Who are they?’
‘Barker, McKay and Gay.’
Maude nodded slowly. ‘I know old Ken Gay. I’ll try but I don’t think I can give you much hope.’
‘I suddenly feel terribly tired,’ I said.
‘Let me give you the rest of what I’ve got. Then you can go collapse somewhere else.’
‘O.K.’
‘Wanda Edwards. Still lives in the family home. You know where that is?’
‘I’ve been there,’ I said.
Maude raised her eyebrows. ‘I’m impressed, because she’s been virtually a recluse since 1940. All my information is negative. No club memberships. No charities.’
‘I have no club memberships or charities either,’ I said. It didn’t merit a response. ‘Normal Bates?’
‘Private eyes don’t leave much of a mark,’ Maude said.
Chapter Fourteen
Before I left Maude, I talked to her about further inquiries I wanted her to make for me. She was impressed. The bill I was running up was bigger than for all the work she’d done for me in the past put together. She was so impressed that she didn’t even ask for the cash due so far.
We talked about where to concentrate her efforts next. We agreed on getting a copy of the trial record and on going through the newspaper files looking for leads to where Mrs Edwards had gone when she left Indianapolis. Maybe identifying someone who didn’t snub her during her short married life. Maude also agreed to try to locate Vera Wert’s family in Logansport and to have a go at prising open the address files at Barker, McKay and Gay.
All but the last were things I would perfectly well do for myself, but time would be saved.
And I suddenly had a mass of other things churning around in my mind.
Miller’s house not far north of Fall Creek was closer to the centre of town than those of most married lieutenants of police in Indianapolis.
It was about a quarter to nine when I pulled up outside. A light was on illuminating a vinyl hand in the front window. The hand is a symbol of a self-help programme in which carefully screened households make themselves available as safe houses for children who run into trouble on their way to or from school. It’s a pragmatic and constructive programme, the need for which is its own comment on life in our city.
I rang the bell. It was so long before there was any reaction that I thought the house was safe from me. But the porch light finally came on and it was Miller who peered at me through a window panel which bordered the jamb.
He opened the door and said,
‘What are you doing here?’ It was not very welcoming, but I suspected that the lack of grace was a carry-over from whatever was going on inside the house when I interrupted.
‘I’d like a few minutes of your time,’ I said.
He considered this, and said, ‘Wait out there.’
He closed the door and turned out the porch light.
I went back to the street and stood by my van.
After five minutes, which seemed like an hour in a neighbourhood that wasn’t safe for children in daylight. Miller came out. ‘We’re going to Chicken Delight. O.K.?’
‘Sure.’
We got into my van.
When I pulled away from the kerb, I said, ‘You’ll have to navigate.’
‘Oh,’ he said distractedly. ‘Yeah. Left up here.’
We rode quietly for a few minutes. Then he said, ‘Hey, where are you going?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You should have taken that last right.’
Silently I made a U-turn.
‘Left at the lights. You’ll see it after a couple of blocks.’
We continued in silence. I parked in the Chicken Delight lot. We went inside.
‘Let’s have a cup of coffee,’ Miller said. ‘Then get some stuff for Janie before we head back. I’ll say there were long lines.’
‘I arrived at a bad time?’
‘They’re all bad times,’ he said. ‘Nothing special.’
His attention seemed elsewhere. I asked, ‘How was your lunch with Wendy Winslow?’
He looked away. He took a breath. He looked back at me. He said, ‘I’m in love.’
We took our coffees to a table in a corner far from the doors.
‘Tell me I’m crazy,’ he said, ‘but I haven’t been able to get her out of my mind all afternoon, all evening.’
‘You’re crazy,’ I said, but without conviction. Feelings are far enough between in this life that they shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand. After consideration, maybe, but not out of hand. ‘Are you crazy?’
‘I think I must be. All of a sudden I’m thinking about leaving home. Quitting my job.’
I didn’t quite know what to ask.
I didn’t need to. ‘She’s so understanding,’ he said. ‘That’s what gets to me. With Janie everything I say is a battle because she isn’t listening to the words, she’s hearing stuff behind the words that I don’t even think I’m saying.’
‘So, are you going to be a television star?’
‘I’m going to test for it,’ he said. ‘But if that doesn’t work out, Wendy’s sure there’ll be a place for me in the production department. Getting the stories together.’
I looked at him. ‘The money?’
He shrugged.
We sipped coffee. He looked dazed. I thought about the number of years he had in on the police force and what pension he would draw on them if he quit now.
I watched him gazing through the window into the depths of space. Time heals wounds, wounds heels, and also takes the shine off silver and love. He was a full-growed man. It wasn’t my job, or my pleasure, to rein in his resurgent passions.
I said, ‘I hope you remember who introduced you.’
‘What? Oh, yeah. I’m grateful.’
‘Grateful enough to arrange an autopsy?’
‘What?’
‘An old woman died this afternoon. She wasn’t sick, just old. But nobody besides me seems very bothered about why she died. Maybe it’s because she was sitting on some information I wanted, but I’d like to be sure of the cause of death.’
Miller frowned.
I said, ‘It’s easy enough to ask for an autopsy if death is unexpected, isn’t it?’
‘Yeah.’
‘So, will you do it?’
He shrugged again. ‘O.K.’
I gave him Ella Murchison’s name and the number of Biarritz House. I wrote ‘unexpected death’ on the slip of paper, so that he didn’t forget it.
‘Al, what are you suggesting here?’
‘I’m suggesting a woman died and we don’t know why,’
‘Oh,’ he said.
‘I’ve also got a new name for you to put through your computers.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Vera Wert.’
He shrugged and became lost to my ‘real’ world again. I didn’t have enough belief that mine was more real than his to fight it. I added the new name to the slip of paper.
I stopped at my lady’s house on my way home.
I had thought to talk. Of Normal Bates. Of Daisy Wines/Vera Wert/Mrs Edwards. Of Mrs Murchison.
But when we got settled with a quiet drink I was happy to rest from the day’s events and speculations and listen to her day and keep a little company.
I went home, before midnight.
As soon as I got in I made a hot, milky drink and trundled off to bed. I sipped it in the dark and was tired and slept.
I heard the rumblings and tinklings first in my dreams. They brought me to a mazy half-consciousness and I thought maybe I was dreaming a piano.
But it was too tuneless, too explosive, too shattering.
I realised the tinkling part was the breaking of glass.
Then it stopped for a moment and I was gulled into self-doubt. Maybe it had all been a dream.
But the voices were real. And the booming and the smashing began again.
I jumped out of bed and ran naked to the back door.
The noise, when I took a step into the yard, was deafening. The aural equivalent of passing from darkness into bright light: my ears were blinded.
I stood for nightmare moments, unmoving.
Then I stepped back inside the doorway and turned on the floodlights.
Two men, dressed black from head to toe, straightened like disturbed rabbits. Each carried a rifle. Each stood by a bay of broken glass.
‘Stop it!’ I screamed. I hardly recognised my own voice, pitched high, and thin, and frightened.
But in response they looked at me, and then at each other. Simultaneously they broke into easy jogs and headed towards the side of the property where a high wire fence separated the yard from the street.
I made to chase them, thinking that I would snare them in a chain-link net.
But when I turned the corner of the building I saw both men dip through a neat rectangular hole which had been cut in the fence.
I got to the hole in time to hear a car speeding away. I didn’t even see the tail lights.
I walked back to look at the storage bays. I didn’t get close because I was barefoot but I was plenty close enough to cast my shadow on the whitecaps of broken glass reflecting the floodlights on the blacktop. I couldn’t think why anyone would shoot up a stock of plate glass.
I walked back into the office and called the police.
I got my bathrobe and slippers and sat, waiting and trying to relax.
A patrolman arrived about fifteen minutes later, at about three-thirty.
We walked around the yard.
‘What a fucking mess,’ he said. ‘Sheer fucking vandalism.’
The spread of the destruction in the broken glass made me sure that the rifles the two men had carried were broad pattern shotguns.
Albert Connah arrived at about the same time as the sector sergeant, a little before four. I heard the cars pull up and I went out to find them both looking at the hole in the wire fence.
Albert looked shocked and pale, the sergeant wiry and alert.
‘I suppose you are Samson,’ the sergeant said as I approached.
‘That’s right.’
‘Some watchman. They must have been cutting this for fifteen minutes.’
‘I’m a pretty heavy sleeper,’ I said.
He seemed not to like that and he scowled. ‘Wait inside, Samson,’ he said. ‘While Mr Connah and I have a look at the damage.’
When Glass Albert and the sergeant came in I was sitting at my desk with a can of beer.
The sergeant, whose name
was Wisman, was offended. ‘You’re taking this pretty calmly.’
‘I don’t see much to be gained by rolling on the floor and pounding my fists.’
He seemed not to like that either. Then he looked at me as if struggling with a memory. ‘Were you on TV the other day?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Christ,’ he said.
There is no pleasing some people.
Wisman asked, ‘Do you know the people who did this?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘Were they friends of yours? Is that why they were able to do all that damage before you decided to poke your nose out of doors?’
This time I offended Wisman by saying nothing.
‘I asked you a question, buster,’ Wisman said. He moved close to where I was sitting. It was a threat.
‘No, you didn’t,’ I said. ‘What you did was to make an unfounded accusation in question form.’
I don’t think he liked that either, but I was saved farther savaging when the patrolman who had surveyed the wreckage with me entered from the yard. He tracked fragments of glass in over the floor and he said, ‘I found a couple of the fucking shot casings.’
He passed them to Wisman who glanced at them. He turned to Glass Albert who had stood unaccustomedly mute through the proceedings and passed the casings to him.
‘What about it, Mr Connah?’ Wisman said. ‘You have this kind of enemy? What’s life in the glass business like?’
Albert said shakily, ‘I try not to step on people’s toes.’
‘Is there any point in somebody doing this? Is there advantage to anybody? Does it do you any harm? Does it help somebody else?’
Albert thought. He shook his head. ‘I don’t see any point at all.’
Wisman turned back to me. ‘Well?’
‘Well what?’
‘Could the shoot-up out back be somebody trying to cause trouble for you?’
I shrugged. ‘Nobody comes to mind,’ I said.
Wisman returned to Albert Connah. ‘I don’t like this guy’s attitude, Mr Connah. I don’t know whether it’s just that he’s done a lousy job of looking after your glass and isn’t sorry about it or whether it’s something else. If I was you, I’d fire him for sure.’
‘I’ll think about it,’ Albert said.
‘You do that. Meantime, I’ll file a report and if anybody gets any ideas why this happened, you call in tomorrow.’
Out of Time Page 10
