Acts of Murder

by L. R. Wright

  Eddie thought Mrs. O’Hara looked like a lumberjack. She wore a red and white plaid shirt under bibbed overalls, and hiking boots, and although her face was deeply lined her body was still thick and powerful. She wore her mostly gray hair pinned upon her head in a bun. Wisps had come loose, though, and she occasionally swiped at them, as if they were flies buzzing around her face.

  “I’m Staff Sergeant Alberg, Ma’am, with the RCMP in Sechelt. This is Sergeant Henderson. I wonder if we could have a word with you, please.”

  “What kind of a word?” Mrs. O’Hara had clasped the edge of the door and appeared to be leaning heavily against it.

  “It’s a routine inquiry, Ma’am. May we come in for a moment?” Alberg’s voice was smooth and mellow and held an implication of compassion.

  “I was just about to eat,” said Mrs. O’Hara.

  “I’m sorry to bother you,” said Alberg, “but we’ll just take a moment of your time.” He smiled at her, burying his hands in his pockets. “Really we will.”

  Reluctantly, she stepped back and pulled the door open, and Eddie followed Alberg inside.

  Mrs. O’Hara crossed the room to a large leather recliner and lowered herself into it. With her feet flat on the floor, she spread her hands on her thighs. She looked from one of them to the other. “You might as well sit down.”

  Alberg sat on a small sofa angled next to the Franklin stove. Eddie spotted a wooden chair in the kitchen area. “May I?” she asked Mrs. O’Hara, who shrugged. So Eddie picked it up, moved it closer to the stove, and sat down.

  “What do you want?” said Mrs. O’Hara to Alberg, with a glance at a large round watch she wore on her left wrist. “What do the police want with an old woman like me?”

  “We’re here at the request of Denise Dyakowski,” said Alberg. “She’s expressed concern about you.”

  Eddie watched Mrs. O’Hara with interest so intense that it felt positively prurient. The creases in the woman’s forehead deepened: she started to speak, then thought better of it, and snapped her mouth closed. A frown gathered on her face—Eddie could almost hear it rumbling beneath her skin, like thunder. Her eyes became smaller, withdrawing into protective pouches of flesh.

  Finally, “It is I,” she said, coldly, “who have expressed concern about Mrs. Dyakowski. Whose husband recently left her.” She made an obvious attempt to relax, draping loose hands over the arms of her chair and crossing her legs.

  “She says you threatened her husband,” said Alberg.

  “With what?” Mrs. O’Hara smiled and lifted her shoulders, almost apologetically.

  “I’m not sure,” said Alberg easily. He grinned. “She was a little vague.”

  Mrs. O’Hara shook her head as if in sympathy. She began to speak again, but changed her mind.

  Alberg waited, smiling.

  “Well,” said Mrs. O’Hara after a minute, “if that’s all?”

  Alberg looked over at Eddie. “Is that all, Sergeant?”

  Eddie felt like a stagehand, suddenly pushed out into the lights without benefit of script or makeup. She blinked furiously. “What do you think of Mr. Dyakowski?” she blurted.

  Mrs. O’Hara gave her a swift, harsh look and Eddie almost flinched—she had felt that look: the woman might as well have slapped her face.

  “I’m afraid,” said Mrs. O’Hara, slowly, with infinite regret, “that that man may not suffer the fate that he deserves.”

  They were plunged into silence. Nobody moved. Eddie didn’t dare even turn her head to look at Alberg. Her gaze remained fixed on Mrs. O’Hara, who was squinting intently into the distance in search of Ivan Dyakowski’s destiny.

  Chapter 23

  DENISE ARRIVED AT the school just before the last bell was to ring, and smiled hello at the receptionist in the office, whom she knew slightly—a young woman named Beth who, because of her red hair, green eyes, and freckles, had always reminded Denise of Anne of Green Gables.

  Beth looked at Denise with eyes larger than usual, and a face that was positively white. Oh god, Denise thought suddenly, and her chest emptied and became an echoey cavern. The whole school knows, she realized.

  But knows what? she asked herself frantically, as she approached the counter—because what else could she do, turn and run? She certainly wasn’t going to turn and run.

  “I’ve got something for Ivan,” she said to Beth. She glanced behind her. “I’ll wait here,” she said, smiling, hoping to project an aura of confidence and composure.

  Beth didn’t even try to speak. She gave Denise a tremulous smile, ducked her head, and aimed her full and complete concentration at the computer screen in front of her.

  They couldn’t know about her hitting Ivan on the head and—and—and about everything that then transpired, Denise told herself. Ivan wouldn’t humiliate himself by letting that story get around. So what they knew, what Beth must know, what caused her to get all pale and flustered, is that he was having an affair.

  Denise suddenly felt as if she weighed five hundred pounds. She seriously wondered if it was possible to lift herself from this bench, and move away from the office, down the hall, out of the building and into her car: she didn’t know if she had the strength to do this.

  She sat there with her purse in her lap, the note to Ivan inside the purse, her face burning. Of course it would be somebody he taught with—this was not a surprise, not really, she scolded herself. She just hadn’t thought about it when she decided to come here. She just hadn’t considered all the ramifications of showing up in person, to warn him about Mrs. O’Hara. It had been her original intention, after all, to deliver the note while school was in session. She knew this would have been the civilized way to proceed. But Mrs. O’Hara’s pronouncement had changed everything.

  But why hadn’t she acknowledged the presence in the school of his lover? Why hadn’t she considered the possibility of running into her?

  Probably because if she had, she wouldn’t have come.

  Denise rearranged herself on the bench, waiting. And then the bell rang to signal the end of classes.

  She was a wreck, sitting there, sweaty and jumpy; at risk of bursting into tears at any second. She changed her mind several times, then changed it back, and she was wallowing in one of these troughs of indecision when Ivan strode into the office, mercifully alone.

  Denise immediately stood up. Ivan saw her and stopped dead, causing a child to run into him from behind.

  “Ivan,” said Denise, faintly. “Let’s go outside.” She brushed past him. He didn’t move to follow. “Please, Ivan—don’t embarrass me. Believe me, this is nothing for you to feel reluctant about. Just for Christ’s sake come outside with me.” Her face must be bright red, she thought: she could feel the blood beating there. Her voice was shaking, with humiliation, maybe, or frustration. “Come on, come on,” she urged, and moved quickly through the doorway. If he came, fine. If he didn’t—screw him, she thought, furious.

  Outside, she stood in the middle of the lawn, waiting, looking up at the gray sky, grateful that the rain had stopped. At last, Ivan emerged slowly from the school, his hands in his pants pockets. Denise experienced a slight shock, looking at him: he had changed, somehow. Or she had. He approached her, but stopped when he was still several feet away. Denise opened her bag. Ivan took a step backward.

  “Oh for heaven’s sake,” said Denise impatiently. She thrust the envelope toward him. “Here. Take it.” She flapped it in the air. “Take the damn thing.” He took it from her. Denise watched as he opened it and read the brief note inside. He nodded.

  Denise regarded him with an interest that was almost theoretical. Maybe the son of a bitch does deserve to die, she thought. Maybe she shouldn’t have gone to the cops. Maybe she should let Ivan take his chances with Mrs. O’Hara. Yes. After all, she had confided in Mr. Alberg. If Mrs. O’Hara really was a threat, the police would surely take care of it.

  They regarded one another warily, she and Ivan, until finally Denise said, “We have thi
ngs to work out. The house. The furniture.”

  “I’ll call you,” said Ivan. “Or my lawyer will.”

  It seemed a long time since she had last heard his voice. She couldn’t remember if he’d cried out when she had hit him; she didn’t think so: she thought he’d toppled to the floor in utter silence.

  She would have to get a lawyer, too, Denise realized.

  She laughed and turned away, heading for her car. Lawyers. Divorce. Who’d have thought it?

  ***

  “I remembered something in there, Staff,” said Eddie, on the way back to Sechelt, “that made my skin prickle.”

  “Oh yeah?” Alberg’s skin had been prickling the whole time they were there. He had felt suffocated by the tiny, opaque windows, the low ceiling, and the massive presence of the potbellied stove.

  “It’s probably just some kind of fluke,” said Eddie.

  “Probably,” said Alberg. He thought the sky was becoming brighter. If this continued, and the evening were even partly clear, he wanted to do something romantic and—and auspicious—with Cassandra. Somehow he had to make clear to her the power of his dream, and then persuade her to share it. “Tell me anyway,” he said.

  Eddie turned in the passenger seat and addressed his profile. “I remember Andrew Maine telling me that he’d tried to talk to people about his wife’s abortion.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “His manager at work. Some friend on the bowling team.” She faced front again for a minute. “He was looking for somebody who’d help him accept it. Christ. The poor clod.”

  “Uh huh. But he didn’t really want to accept it, did he?”

  “Yeah, I think he did, Staff. Anyway.” She turned back to him.

  “I’m sure he mentioned trying to talk to someone about it while there was a vacuum cleaner going. And I was wondering, who cleans the menswear store?”

  “Could have been his Mom,” said Alberg, “cleaning her house.” But he knew it hadn’t been.

  “Yeah,” said Eddie, watching him.

  He lived for these moments, Alberg realized. For the instant in which things toppled willy-nilly into place. The moment when a jumble of meaningless bits and pieces hurled themselves into the air, then with exquisite grace assembled themselves in front of him—not as a complete, intact whole, but as a skeleton, a neat, defining framework within which only one answer could be possible.

  He pulled the Oldsmobile to the side of the road. These moments could be equally satisfying when effected by someone other than himself; he knew this. He just hadn’t known that his new sergeant could do it.

  “I’ll be damned,” he said to Eddie.

  She hardly dared to breathe. Her hands clutched each other in her lap. She wanted to laugh out loud, Alberg could see it in her face. But she just stared at him, intently, waiting.

  “It could be that Mrs. O’Hara has a pretty interesting client list.”

  “But, Staff—if we’re right—why?”

  Alberg checked the rearview mirror, the side mirror, and pulled out onto the highway. “Let’s ask Ivan Dyakowski why. He’s a teacher, right? What time is it—is school out yet?”

  “Yeah, it is.”

  “Okay. Let’s go talk to him.”

  ***

  Mrs. O’Hara remained calm after the police left, even though she knew that a life-changing event had occurred: she felt the weight of it in her body. It was like when she had realized for the first time that she would die at sixty-five.

  The police officers hadn’t said anything remotely threatening, of course. But for Mrs. O’Hara, simply their arrival at her door had been enough. She knew that their curiosity wouldn’t dissipate. She had always known that if ever they looked at her, and wondered, they would quickly find the connections. She had never seriously worried about this, because she had been confident that no actual evidence of what she had done existed. But this had been true only of the first ones, which had been meticulously and intelligently planned.

  What had she been thinking of, forsaking prudence as she had, with the last three? Perhaps she’d been more weary than she knew, for longer than she knew.

  As she sat in her big chair, looking at her big strong hands sprawled on her thighs, Mrs. O’Hara felt a loneliness that made her dizzy. She had counted on retirement to put an end to her loneliness but now realized that retired or not, she would never escape the judgmental, condemnatory aspects of her own nature: the better she got to know someone—anyone—the more of his or her corruption Mrs. O’Hara saw. And this was unlikely to change just because she would no longer be in a position to wield punishment.

  Mrs. O’Hara sat there for a long time, letting the ramifications of her new situation soak into her bones. After a while she realized that despite the gravity of this situation she was actually calmer, more tranquil, more determined and confident than she had been in a long time.

  For the first time, she could act without giving the slightest consideration to detection or her own escape. These things were irrelevant now.

  ***

  The door was opened by a woman with dark hair: this was all Eddie could determine at first, because the woman opened it only slightly. She might have been a one-eyed woman, for all Eddie knew, and this thought led to speculations about whether Susan Atkinson might have been born with only one eye, or had lost one to illness or an accident, and about how she explained her one-eyedness to her students, who were young enough to be terrified by the mildest of abnormalities. Eddie didn’t know why her mind flew off on tangents like this but she had learned to accept them, hoping only to keep under control the unseemly hilarity they sometimes wanted to produce.

  “Miss Atkinson?” said Alberg, holding up his badge.

  Eddie, wearing the uniform, decided that a display of her badge would be redundant.

  “Yes? What do you want?”

  “I understand that we can find Ivan Dyakowski here. We need to talk to him.”

  Susan Atkinson peered through the crack at them, apparently considering this. “Who told you he might be here?”

  “The school principal,” said Alberg patiently.

  A murmur was heard from within the apartment. Susan Atkinson stepped back and the door was pulled all the way open.

  “Hi, Ivan,” said Alberg genially.

  “Why do you want to talk to me, Karl?” Ivan Dyakowski looked at them grimly, holding on to the door handle, barring entrance to the apartment. “Does this have something to do with Denise?”

  “In a manner of speaking,” said Alberg. He lowered his voice. “I really think you ought to let us in.”

  Ivan hesitated, then stepped back, and they entered Susan Atkinson’s apartment.

  Which Eddie scrutinized enviously. It was tidy, but not oppressively so. Things matched—the sofa and chair in the living room, for example—or else they definitely didn’t: the dining room table and chairs were painted in bright colors, harmoniously jumbled—the blue chair had a bright red seat, the yellow one had purple rungs. Beneath them all lay a straw mat, and framed posters of art shows hung on the walls.

  “You might as well sit down,” said Ivan, as Susan hovered near the entrance to the kitchen. Eddie figured she was probably trying to decide whether she ought to offer them coffee. Ivan glanced at her, probably wondering the same thing. “Oh—sorry. This is my friend, Susan Atkinson.” He moved closer to her. “I’m staying with her for the moment. I—I’ve left Denise. We’ve split up.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” said Alberg cheerfully, sitting on the sofa.

  Eddie took the matching chair.

  “So, uh—what brings you here?” asked Ivan cautiously.

  “Your wife’s worried about you,” said Alberg. He sat back and rested his arm along the back of the sofa. “She thinks you might be in danger.”

  Ivan gave an explosive snort of laughter and put his arm around Susan. “Yeah, well, she ought to know.”

  Alberg gave him a smile. “How do you mean?”

  �
�Never mind.” Ivan let go of Susan and stepped toward Alberg. “I’ve got no intention of getting into the sordid details of my marriage with you, Karl.” He hesitated, then made a halfhearted gesture. “I’m sure you understand.” He sat on an ottoman. Susan was standing behind it, glancing from time to time into the kitchen.

  Alberg looked over at Eddie, who said, “Do you know a woman named O’Hara, Mr. Dyakowski?”

  Ivan looked at her blankly. “O’Hara? No. I don’t think so.”

  “She’s your cleaning woman. Well—your wife’s, now, I guess.”

  Ivan shook his head. “I know we had one. I might have encountered her once or twice, I guess. Don’t remember anything about her. Why?” He turned to Susan. “Could you rub my neck, hon?” She moved closer and placed her hands on his shoulders. Ivan turned to Alberg. “I’m—I’ve been through a lot, these last few days.”

  “Yeah, you’ve had a whack on your head, there, I guess,” said Alberg sympathetically. “What happened?”

  “Oh, it was—a kind of an accident,” said Ivan vaguely, his face coloring. Susan massaged his neck, expressionless. “I’m fine now. Nearly fine.”

  “Your wife seems to think Mrs. O’Hara has it in for you,” said Eddie, referring to her notebook. “Do you have any idea why?”

  He gave her a look of utter amazement. “In for me? What the hell does that mean?”

  “Well, Ivan,” said Alberg gravely, “it means that Denise thinks Mrs. O’Hara might want to kill you.”

  Astonishment was scrawled all over Ivan Dyakowski’s face. “The cleaning woman? I don’t even know her! I wouldn’t know her if I bumped into her on the street!”

  Susan stopped her massage and stepped back, clasping her hands in front of her.

  Eddie looked uneasily at Alberg, who was studying Ivan as if he were a laboratory animal.