Toni L.P. Kelner - Laura Fleming 04 - Country Comes to Town

by Toni L. P. Kelner

  “Is there anybody else you’d like to talk to?” Thaddeous asked.

  “To tell you the truth, what I’d really like is to get out of here.”

  “Let’s do it.”

  I nodded at Colleen from across the room and she half-waved in return. Then we found a phone to call for a cab.

  Maybe I should have forced myself to stay longer, but I hadn’t been able to help Philip when he was alive, and I sure couldn’t help him now.

  Chapter 9

  I could tell on the way home that Thaddeous had something to say, but the idea of talking with a taxi driver listening bothered him. So I wasn’t surprised when as soon as we got back to my apartment, he asked, “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine.”

  He didn’t say anything for a few minutes, just let me look at the day’s mail and check the phone machine for messages.

  “You want something to drink?” I asked. “Sure.”

  “Coke or iced tea?”

  “Coke would be fine.”

  I got him a glass and poured myself some tea. Then we sat down on the couch and I reached for the remote control. “Shall we see what’s on TV?”

  “Are you sure you don’t want to talk?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “The hell you are! Laurie Anne, I know I’m not Richard, but I am here and I can listen pretty good, even if I can’t come up with something from Shakespeare to say. Now, if you don’t want to talk, that’s all right, but don’t tell me that you’re fine when I can see that you’re not.”

  “You sure are Aunt Nora’s son, aren’t you?” She had always been able to pull my troubles right out of me.

  He didn’t say anything, just waited me out.

  “Okay, I’m feeling pretty down about Philip, but I don’t want to spoil your vacation.”

  “How many times have you spoiled your trips back home when somebody needed help?”

  “True,” I admitted. In fact, I’d have been offended if anybody in my family had hidden trouble from me, and I owed it to Thaddeous to treat him the same way as I would want to be treated. “I talked to Richard about it last night, and I know it’s nuts, but I still feel guilty about Philip. If I had let him stay here, he’d still be alive.”

  “I don’t know about that,” he said. “Like as not I’d have killed him myself. Or at least thrown him out.”

  “Thaddeous!”

  “Laurie Anne, you’re a smart woman about most things, but sometimes you trust people too much. This character shows up at your door after he’s broken up with his wife, knowing that your husband is out of town. You can’t tell me that he didn’t have something on his mind.”

  “I didn’t think about that,” I had to admit. I had been more worried about keeping Philip out of my life than out of my bed.

  “Of course you didn’t—you’re a good person. It doesn’t sound to me like this Philip was.”

  “He wasn’t all bad,” I said. “I know all I’ve talked about are the bad parts, but there was some good in him.” I tried to come up with an example. “I think there was. Lord, Thaddeous, I’d hate to think that I was a complete fool for dating him.”

  “I know you were never any kind of a fool, but I have to say that he doesn’t sound like much of a much. So why did you go out with him?”

  I thought about it. “I think I must have been halfway in love with him the first time I met him. I’d only been up here a few weeks, and I hadn’t made a whole lot of friends, so I was eating alone in the cafeteria. Again. Philip sat down at the next table, and I saw his sweatshirt. It had a computer joke on it, and I said something about it.”

  “A computer joke?”

  “Just the kind of in-joke you see at MIT. It said:

  C:DOS

  C:DOS:RUN

  RUN:DOS:RUN

  RUN:RUN:RUN”

  Thaddeous looked blank.

  “Don’t worry—only a computer geek would get it. Which is what I was, so I laughed. Then we started talking, and he moved over next to me, and we talked some more, and before I knew it, I had missed half of my next class.”

  “What did you talk about?”

  “Everything. Computers, and Cambridge, and MIT, and where we were from. Philip seemed so sophisticated compared to the other people I knew.”

  “Compared to folks in Byerly, you mean.”

  “I suppose. He had seen so much more of the world, and I couldn’t believe that he’d be interested in me.”

  “Laurie Anne, that doesn’t sound like you.”

  “It wasn’t me, not really, and it certainly isn’t me now. You’ve got to remember how it was then. In Byerly, everybody knew me. I was the smart one, the one who got the best grades and the highest test scores and all that. And I was different from anybody else, because I knew about computers. Up here, I was just another face in the crowd. Lots of people at MIT had better grades and test scores than I did, and from much bigger schools than Byerly High School. They knew more about computers, too. Nobody knew my family, and nobody knew me, and nobody cared. Until I met Philip, and he introduced me to the group. All of a sudden I had lots of friends.”

  “Those folks I met tonight?”

  I nodded. “They all seemed to think a lot of Philip and kind of followed him around. I felt so lucky to be his girlfriend. Of course, I realized later on that he picked out folks who were misfits, just so he could be their leader. Like he picked me.”

  “You weren’t a misfit.”

  “I sure thought I was. I talked funny and I dressed funny—talk about country come to town.” He started to object, but I went on. “Except when I was with the group, and with Philip. He had this way of making me feel intelligent and attractive and unique and all kinds of good things.” I remembered the first time we’d made love. I’d been so inexperienced, and he’d been so sweet to me. But I didn’t want to talk to Thaddeous about that.

  I said, “Philip really seemed to be going somewhere. He had all these plans for his future, programming and making money and having a great big house in Cambridge that he could fix up.”

  “His future? What about yours?”

  “Sometimes he included me, but sometimes I wasn’t sure. And we did break up a few times.”

  “Because of him and other women?”

  “No. I didn’t find out about that until later. We’d break up because he’d decide we were getting too serious and he wasn’t ready for it, or because I was too dependent on him. Once I broke up with him because he was rude to a friend of mine, and when I called him about it, he hung up on me.”

  “Good for you!”

  “Yeah, but I’d fall for him all over again. First I’d be miserable for a while, but try not to show it. Then he’d come back and tell me what a horrible person he was and how he didn’t deserve me, and I’d take him back.” I hated to admit the next part, even to Thaddeous. “I was always so grateful he came back.”

  “Laurie Anne,” he said sadly.

  “I know, I was stupid.”

  “Hey, I don’t have any room to talk. I’ve made a fool of myself more than once.”

  “Anyway, we dated during my freshman and sophomore years, but during my junior year I finally got over him. I had other friends by then, and I was tired of the way he’d build me up, then cut me down again. We broke up for the last time not long after I met Richard. Then I started dating Richard, and you know how that ended up.”

  “Happily ever after.”

  “You bet,” I said, smiling at the thought of my husband. “When I was little, I had had all these fairy-tale ideas about love and romance, but when I met Philip, I decided those ideas were childish. With Richard, I realized that the fairy tales were right all along. I know that sounds pretty silly.”

  “Not to me it doesn’t. I just hope I find a fairy-tale princess of my own.”

  “You will.” I thought about suggesting Michelle for the job, but decided that it wasn’t a good time. “You’d think that after all he did to me, I’d be glad that
he’s gone. Or at least not care. But he did teach me a lot, if not always the best way. There are probably worse people I could have hooked up with.” That was damning him with faint praise. “And he did introduce me to Richard—they met at a play.” Of course, Philip had never dreamed that Richard and I would hit it off as well as we had, but he had done us a favor nonetheless. “So I guess I’m just doomed to feeling guilty over him dying the way he did, even though it wasn’t my fault.”

  “Well, that’s fine as far as it goes, and I’m sure glad you realize that it’s not your fault. But I want to know what you’re going to do about it.”

  “About what?”

  “About feeling guilty.”

  “Do you think I need therapy?” I said, surprised that he would suggest it. Folks in Byerly were usually leery of psychologists.

  “What I think is that you need to find out what happened to Philip. That police detective seemed to think something was fishy about his death, and I don’t know but what I do, too. If he had money in his pocket, why didn’t he go stay at a hotel or the YMCA? And why did he go off drinking and then come back here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I can see him having himself a few beers and deciding he was God’s gift to women. Some men are like that. But if he decided to come see you again, why did he go down that alley instead of knocking at your front door?”

  “That’s a good question. They’re all good questions.”

  “Then I think you ought to see about finding out some answers, and maybe that guilt will go away.”

  It was tempting, but I had to say, “I don’t think it would work.”

  “Why not? You’ve found out answers to questions like that back in Byerly.”

  “But this isn’t Byerly. I can’t call Detective Salvatore like I do Junior, and I can’t go see Aunt Nora or Aunt Maggie to find out what they know about people. Boston is a whole lot bigger than Byerly—I don’t even know how much bigger it is. And that’s not counting Cambridge or any of the other towns around here. We’re talking millions of people.”

  “But how many of those people did Philip know?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Did he know everybody in Boston?”

  “Of course not,” I said.

  “So you wouldn’t have to worry about everybody in town, just the people he knew. Like his family, and his wife, and those folks at the visitation tonight.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “I’ve heard that the police always look at the people a murder victim knew, and purt-near all of the time, that’s where they find the killer.”

  “If he was murdered,” I said. “Salvatore didn’t say that he was.”

  “He didn’t say that he wasn’t, either.”

  I drank some more tea. Thaddeous was right about Salvatore. It was clear that he thought something was up, and if an experienced Boston police detective had questions, chances were, he had good reason. If his experience and my instincts said the same thing, maybe I should listen. “I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to ask a few questions.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Philip’s family is all the way in Worcester, and I don’t think he saw much of them, so I’ll hold off on them. And I don’t know Colleen well enough to call her out of the blue. Besides which, like you said, the police always start with the family, so the Dennises and Colleen are where Salvatore is most likely to look. And he’s going to be better at working out their alibis and tracking down life insurance policies, and so forth.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “But what he won’t be as good at is getting to know Philip the way I did. Or rather, the way his friends did. Those folks at SSI, no matter how badly they’d been getting along, saw Philip more than his family did and probably more than Colleen did. And I can talk to them in ways no police detective can.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “It wouldn’t hurt to talk to Jessie and see what’s going on over there.”

  “Uh huh.”

  I looked at him and saw his expression. “Aren’t you full of yourself?”

  He just grinned.

  “Well, if I’ve got to play detective again, I need my sleep. So you can get your own bed ready tonight. And stop grinning.” Despite my saying that, he was still grinning like the cat who ate the canary when I left the room.

  Chapter 10

  I called Jessie the next day, but with the funeral that afternoon, she was too busy to have lunch with me. Instead, we agreed to meet the day after.

  I thought about going to the funeral myself but decided against it. First off, I had a meeting I didn’t want to miss, and second, I felt like my decision to look into Philip’s death was going to be a better farewell than attending a funeral service. Third, it was awfully cold that day, with a harsh wind, and I just couldn’t stand the idea of standing by a grave, shivering.

  Thaddeous spent the day wandering around Boston, cold or no cold. He went to the Boston Tea Party ship to toss tea into the harbor, and to the Computer Museum. Though he didn’t actually admit it, I think he went into the Children’s Museum, too, which is right next to the Computer Museum and has plenty in it for adults to look at. Then he met me at the office.

  I wasn’t a bit surprised when Michelle let it be known that she had nothing to eat at home and no plans. She didn’t know that I’d heard her turning down dinner with her mother. Thaddeous didn’t seem to mind. When Michelle said she was up for Italian food, we let her pick a place in the North End. Thaddeous got his first taste of cannoli, and while he said he preferred Aunt Daphine’s apple pie to the ricotta cheese-filled pastry, he didn’t leave a crumb on his plate.

  It was still early after we ate, so we went to rent a video to watch at my house. I found it interesting that Michelle thought every movie Thaddeous suggested sounded wonderful, and she hadn’t seen any of them that he hadn’t … even those I knew she had.

  The next day Jessie and I met for lunch about halfway between our two offices. I waited until the waitress took our orders before saying, “All right, Jessie, what’s going on? Inez and Vinnie at each other’s throats, Neal back in town, Philip and Colleen broken up, and now this. It hasn’t been that long since I talked to you.”

  Jessie shook her head, her short, red curls shaking with her. “It’s been a nightmare, Laura. I’ve been meaning to call you just to have someone to talk to, but I haven’t had a chance.”

  “Then talk to me. When did Neal come back?” I thought it might be better to start with something less drastic than what had happened to Philip.

  “Isn’t it great to have him around again?”

  “How did y’all find him? I thought that even you had lost track of him.” Jessie had always been the group’s source for phone numbers, addresses, and such.

  “He’d been living in California, but Vincent found him over the Internet. Then we brought him here for an interview and offered him the job, and he went back just long enough to get his things.”

  “I’m surprised he was available, as good as he is.”

  Jessie lowered her voice. “He’s had a hard time getting jobs because of what happened when he left MIT.”

  “You mean, not getting his doctorate? But he still had his bachelor’s degree. And didn’t he get a master’s?”

  “It wasn’t the degree. It was other problems. He had a nervous breakdown after he got back to California.”

  “You’re kidding. That poor guy.” I thought about how young and fragile he’d seemed in college. “He seems fine now.”

  “Being back with the group is just what he needs.”

  That I found hard to believe. “So what’s going on with Inez and Vinnie?”

  “Same old, same old. It all goes back to when they broke up.”

  “That was years ago.” Of course, the two of them had been pretty serious even before I’d started dating Philip, and their relationship had kept going after graduation and the founding of SSI. I had always thought they were perfect example of opposites
attracting. Vinnie was such a WASP, while Inez was almost a stereotype of the fiery Latin woman. The only thing they had seemed to have in common was their fascination with computers, but that and the way their personalities complemented each other had seemed to be enough. “Did they really quit dating because of his family?”

  Jessie shrugged. “Vincent would never talk about it, but that’s what Inez said.”

  At the time, Jessie had told me that Vinnie’s family, wealthy folks from Wellesley, hadn’t minded their son playing house with Inez, but when he’d started talking about marriage, they’d started talking about disinheriting him. I had met his parents and brothers at graduation and immediately recognized them as the kind of people my Aunt Maggie would have called “highfalutin.” Muriel, the wife he ended up with, was blond, blue-eyed, and just as highfalutin.

  I said, “It was a tacky thing for him to do, but he’s been married to Muriel for nigh onto four years now.”

  “I don’t think Inez has ever forgiven him. You remember how she was at the wedding.”

  Richard and I had been there, but I hadn’t expected Inez to show up. She did, wearing the shortest, tightest red dress I had ever seen. More heads turned when she walked down the aisle than when the bride did. Her escort, no doubt selected for his smoldering bedroom eyes, hadn’t left her side the entire time. Shoot, she was nearly in his lap during the ceremony, and their dancing at the wedding had been enough to make me blush.

  Jessie said, “Inez and Vinnie kept it pretty businesslike before the wedding, but afterward, it got real nasty around the office. They had always clashed over product design, just because they had such different ideas. Now every meeting was a battle—the two of them going after one another while the rest of us tried to stay out of the line of fire.”

  There was a short interruption when the waitress brought Jessie’s chefs salad and my club sandwich. Then I said, “I can’t believe they still act like that.”