Cold Feet (Five Star Mystery Series)

by Karen Pullen

  When I apologized for making her wait, she brushed it off. “I was early,” she said. “Glad to get out of the house.” Blobs of blush stood out like clown makeup on her yellowish, pale face.

  The waiter asked if we wanted drinks, and I ordered coffee. Delia hesitated. “Maybe a Diet Coke?”

  She told me she and Webster lived nearby. Her voice was shaky, and she cleared her throat repeatedly. “On a golf course. He plays every day. I play a little, otherwise I’d never see him.”

  We made small talk until the drinks arrived and we ordered our food—shrimp and pasta for me, grilled tilapia for her. The waiter left and I got straight to the point. “When I interviewed you last Saturday, you told me you nearly killed Justine once. Were you joking?”

  She grimaced. “I said that? I’ve got a big mouth, but I don’t even remember talking to you. I hit bottom at that wedding, Stella. Webster says I got dressed and sat down with him to wait for the ceremony—but all I remember is popping champagne bottles in the morning. The next thing I recall is being in the hospital. Webster took me there Saturday night.”

  “The hospital?”

  “I was puking blood, Stella. They kept me two days.” She didn’t say, but I guessed she had cirrhosis of the liver. Cirrhosis causes varicose veins in the esophagus. When the veins burst, the results aren’t fun. “I haven’t had a drink since. It’s very hard, but Webster is supportive. He’s dumped out all the booze in the house. And he’s paying attention to me. Last night we—” She wriggled in her chair. “You know. First time in months.” Her deadpan delivery made me smile even though it was Too Much Information.

  Our food arrived and I was ravenous. My shrimp still had their tails on, and I ate one right after another, setting the tails on the edge of the plate like trophies. I tried to slow down. Fern always complained that I ate like the runt from a large litter. “You met Justine previously, then,” I said, “before the last weekend.”

  Delia speared a bit of fish with her fork. “I wouldn’t say I met her.”

  I nodded encouragingly.

  “I’ll make it short. My husband had an affair with her.” She watched me closely, having pulled the pin and tossed this grenade at my image of Justine, the “angel.”

  I was so astonished I put my fork down. “When? Did Mike know about it?”

  “Five years ago, and I don’t know.”

  “What happened?”

  “My husband chases women. His brother chases women. Their father chased women. Dad probably still does, in his nursing home, wheeling after any cute lady with her own teeth. It’s the Scott nature. They cannot keep it in their pants. I don’t mean Web’s crude or aggressive. Just that he’s always looking. God, I need a drink. What if we get a bottle of wine, split it?”

  “Bad idea. So, the Scott nature?”

  “Five years ago, Web was the financial officer at a women’s hospital in Wilmington. Justine was hired as a nurse-midwife. She was stunning, everyone noticed her. Obviously I don’t know the details but what I wormed out of Webster was that he asked her out for a drink and before he knew it they were in bed, in her apartment.”

  “He told you this?” Now this was a different kind of marriage.

  “He had to tell me, because of what happened afterward. It lasted about a month and then she rejected him. Usually he just moves on to someone else but he couldn’t let go of her. He got a bit obsessive with phoning, sending flowers, following her around.When she saw him going through her trash, she reported him to the police and they arrested him.”

  “Was he convicted?”

  “No. Charges were dropped. But he lost his job. Well, they called it early retirement.”

  “You told me you nearly killed her.”

  Delia laughed. “I accosted her after he was fired, in the hospital parking lot one night. I nearly hit her—I swung and missed. I was sloshed of course.”

  “You blamed her.”

  “I forgot to tell you I’m stupid.” She closed her eyes and sipped at her water, her tasteless boring water.

  “What did you think, when Web learned his nephew was going to marry her?”

  “Excellent question. And what did she think, when she learned Web was Mike’s step-uncle? Very awkward. I had to call her. Web couldn’t, because of the court order. I made nice. I told her he’d had therapy, I’d had therapy, we’d all had therapy. He was medicated. He was sorry. He didn’t want to spoil her day. Maybe we shouldn’t come to the wedding.”

  “But you went. She was okay about it?”

  “It was a very uncomfortable conversation for both of us. I asked her if Mike knew she’d slept with Web and she got a little pissy and said of course not. She said we were welcome, she hadn’t told Mike about the incident—that’s what she called it—and as far as she was concerned, all was forgiven. She wanted the family to be there.”

  “And Web—was he over her?”

  She shrugged. “He still wanted her, like I want a double Rob Roy on the rocks. But he knew better.”

  “Did he know she was transsexual?”

  “What did you say?” She pressed the sweaty water glass against her chest.

  “Justine was transsexual, Delia. Did your husband know?”

  “You mean she was a man?” She snickered. “Oh my God, Web will die.”

  “She had the surgery, apparently quite successfully.”

  “She sure fooled Web. Did Mike know? Who knew?”

  “Good question. I’m trying to find out.”

  The waiter offered dessert. I asked for more coffee. Delia had a twinkle in her eye, probably the first twinkle in a long time. I hated to spoil her mood. “Do you think it’s possible your husband killed Justine?”

  She thought a while. “No one knows him like I do, and I say—no, it’s not possible. He’s a gentle man, really. He understands why she called the police. I held a grievance longer than he did.”

  “Really?”

  “What the hell, maybe I killed her! Like I said, that day has vanished from my memory. Can I be guilty, if I don’t remember?” She smiled broadly, though her eyes seemed full of fear.

  I didn’t answer. It was a good question.

  It was amusing to watch Webster Scott struggle with his visceral reaction to me. He sat across from me in a coffee shop booth, and I could almost read his mind. On the one hand, I was police investigating a homicide, he’d previously been arrested for stalking the victim, and he’d been in the B&B at the time she was murdered. That made him a potential suspect. Normal reaction—shrivel, retract, hide. On the other hand I was a young woman, and according to Delia that was enough to inflame his libido. He didn’t know whether to stare at my chest or clasp his balls.

  He tried to cover his dilemma with a shiny smile and small talk. “Your first time in Myrtle?” he asked. “Where you from, anyhow?”

  “Mr. Scott—”

  “Call me Web, everyone does.” He pressed his leg against mine under the table.

  I didn’t move. “What are you doing?”

  His smile dimmed and he pulled away. “Sorry, dear.”

  “Delia told me about your relationship with Justine Bradley.”

  Was that a wink? Or a squinty wince? He picked up his decaf latte and took a sip. “It was all a misunderstanding. She and I had a friendship for a while, then she said some ugly and untrue things to me.” He went on, about the calls she didn’t return and the restraining order that was so offensive—he being a professional man, not a criminal—and the unpleasant incident involving police.

  What I heard was a man who wasn’t facing reality. Obfuscation and denial were probably second nature to him in any discussion with a woman. No wonder Delia drank. Nonetheless, I tried. “Justine wouldn’t have called the police unless she was afraid.Your behavior must have alarmed her.”

  “I wanted to make things right. She wouldn’t listen.”

  “Were you in touch with her after you were fired?”

  “I wasn’t fired. I decided to retire,
a well-deserved retirement after a long career.”

  “Just answer the question.”

  “No, I wasn’t in touch with her. We moved to Southport and she moved to Chapel Hill. I was delighted to hear my nephew Mike was going to marry her. Delia talked with Justine and smoothed everything over. Delia’s a wonderful woman, just wonderful.”

  “Were you jealous of Mike? You wanted Justine, didn’t you?”

  Web shook his head. “Don’t be silly. It was over.”

  His story was essentially consistent with his wife’s, not that consistency meant anything. He wasn’t helping me solve the murder case. I told him I’d be in touch and left a tip. Delia could break the news about Justine’s gender change. Then he’d have another reason to clasp his balls.

  Justine’s brother and I walked along a row of evergreens in his plant nursery. Underneath a fashionable stubble, Daniel Bradley’s face was red, like a perpetual sunburn. He was stocky with firm, not flabby, fat. The only resemblance to Justine I could see was in his eyes—big, long-lashed hazel eyes. One day some scientist will patent the gene for those eyes and make a fortune.

  “What can you tell me about my brother’s death?” He looked anxious. “I haven’t heard anything.”

  His brother’s death. He was the first person I’d met who thought of Justine as male. I held out my hand to the feathery leaves of an arborvitae. I couldn’t tell him much, because what little we had—the gopher poison in the barn, the list of people with faint motives—needed to stay under wraps until we had sufficient evidence to make an arrest. “Still working on it,” I said.

  “I didn’t know he was going to be married. I wish he’d told me. Er, she’d told me. I can never get it right. To me, Johnny was always my little brother.”

  “Was it hard to adjust to his gender change?”

  He frowned. “Hard to adjust? I thought he was incredibly brave. It was a surprise when he told me he was going to take it that far, with the hormones and surgeries.”

  “And your parents? Were they supportive?”

  “Mom died before Johnny had the surgery. Dad still doesn’t get it. My parents divorced when Johnny was about twelve, and Dad was pretty hard on him, to toughen him up. Being older, I tried to protect the kid. You know how it goes, just your typical dysfunctional American family.” He twisted his mouth into a half-smile. “Johnny had the surgery when he was twenty, after Mom died and left us each some money. He started with breast implants and hormones. Then the sex change. He had some other cosmetic work done. I’m not sure about all of it. I haven’t heard from him for several years.”

  “Was the sex change before nursing school?” I asked. We’d reached the end of the evergreens, and moved into an herb section. I picked out a rosemary plant for Fern and fondled its sweet piney needles.

  “During and after. Dr. Binkley could give you more information.” He gave me the phone number of Justine’s surgeon.

  “One last question.” I showed him the charm bracelet. “It was in her room, but it’s not hers. Do you recognize these girls?”

  He studied the tiny picture intently. “They look familiar but I couldn’t tell you who they are. Maybe friends of his? I was so much older that I didn’t know his friends very well.”

  “Why weren’t you invited to the wedding, do you think?”

  He shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine.”

  Justine had been a woman for seven years, yet her brother still referred to her as “him” and “Johnny.” My guess—she was terrified at the thought of Daniel meeting her fiancé and his parents, who didn’t know she’d started life as a boy, and, it seemed, were unlikely to ever find out. Until she died.

  I had one last appointment, in a brick medical building in downtown Wilmington, with a sex-change doctor.

  Dr. Frieda Binkley was quite possibly the cutest doctor I’d ever met, a middle-aged version of the child Shirley Temple, with blond curls and creamy fair skin, in a blue dress that matched her eyes. I didn’t expect cute. I didn’t know what to expect, actually. A female surgeon who specializes in turning men into women? That would make her the ultimate horror-movie character—a castrator. Was she gender-switched herself? I wondered aloud, and asked her why she chose her specialty.

  “I was born female,” she said. “No gender issues here. I went into general surgery, and for ten years I removed gall bladders and tidied up after gunshot wounds.Then I did a plastic surgery fellowship, and joined a practice with expertise in sex-reassignment surgery. SRS, we call it. Male-to-female, femaleto-male. The techniques have been developing and improving for forty years. It’s a fascinating field.”

  I looked around her office for examples, but saw only pictures of kids, horses, and kids on horses. “I don’t know anything about it. Would you tell me?”

  “It takes a long time, at least two years. The patient starts with hormones to feminize the body. There’s a year of psychological counseling and evaluation. Then surgery converts the male to female. Other surgeries such as facial recontouring and breast augmentation are sometimes performed. Electrolysis, to remove facial hair, or back hair if necessary. It’s different for everyone.”

  “It’s hard to imagine such an extreme commitment.”

  “Because you are comfortable in your skin, yes. But about one in five hundred boys is not. A few of them learn enough, and have the resources, to change. In the US today? The estimate is over thirty thousand people have had SRS. Many more attempt to be accepted by society as female, with hormone treatments and cross-dressing. The chances are high you know someone passing as female who was born male.”

  “Really? It’s that common?”

  “Gender dysmorphia is roughly as common as cerebral palsy, or blindness, or cleft palate. Those conditions receive insurance coverage, research, and public support. The transsexual? Ignorance. Their lives are lonely. Many teenagers end up on the streets looking for acceptance. There are places in every city where they come out at night.”

  “As drag queens and prostitutes?”

  “A few end up that way. Most lead quiet and desperate lives. They’re ministers and pilots and insurance salesmen. They marry and have kids.”

  I needed only one more answer from Dr. Binkley. “How authentic are the results? Would the woman be able to ‘pass,’ even in intimate situations?”

  She smiled. “Yes, absolutely. There’s considerable difference among women, you know, and the average male doesn’t know enough to question what’s normal. She will look like other women, she will feel and react like other women. Male-to-female is easier in that regard. Going the other way—well, it’s not so easy to replicate nature.”

  She sat back and her smile faded. “It’s rewarding work, life-altering. The patients are profoundly grateful. These are people who have known they were the wrong sex since they were aware of gender, around the age of three. Adolescence is particularly difficult, when hormones start to masculinize the body. These women suffered terribly then, as their bodies and faces became more and more male. In fact, these days, many of my patients are teenagers. The reassignment is very successful when the patient is young.”

  “Like Justine was. Or John.”

  “Yes. I would call her case a success. She was only twenty. Even before the surgery she was beautiful. Not all of them are beautiful on the outside like she was. Afterward, she was a whole person. I am so sorry to know that she’s dead.” Dr. Binkley spoke softly as she closed Justine’s file.

  It was a hundred fifty miles back to Verwood, nearly all of it on I-40, through a sandy flat landscape of scrub brush and loblolly pine, monotonous and trance-inducing, except for the sporadically hesitating engine of my state-owned car. The car would slow and I’d jerk into a small panic because usually there was an eighteen-wheeler on my tail doing eighty and they aren’t the most wide-awake drivers.

  Two hours of driving would give me plenty of time to think, though my life as a drug agent offered only worries—about Fern, Jax, my own sorry skin. I liked An
selmo. He was married.

  His wife was probably a supermodel with wealthy parents, someone trendy and sexually inventive, who wrote brilliant novels or ran her own hedge fund. I’d have to admire him from the sidelines, be content that we could work together. At least I could try to impress him with my investigative talent. Justine’s murder was certainly fertile territory for the application of such talent, with plenty of puzzle pieces to push around.

  Opportunity? The poison had been in the barn located on the inn property. Blue, Liesle, and Wyatt knew where the keys were and had access to the barn. But just about anyone staying in the inn could have unearthed the key. Or walked in, when the barn was already opened.

  The means? The poison had been added to Justine’s tea, and she drank it a few minutes before one. You don’t make tea and let it sit for an hour; you drink it within minutes. So who had been in her room? Ingrid, of course, helping with her hair. Kate admitted to going in after Ingrid, to get advice about her makeup. Mike said someone knocked at Justine’s door just as he was getting off the phone with her. Who was that person? Tricia or Scoop Scott? Tricia had talked about grandchildren on Kate’s video of the rehearsal dinner. So it seemed she didn’t know about Justine’s gender change before the wedding. I could swear, though, what I told them yesterday wasn’t a surprise. They were so quick to deny, so annoyed I was bringing it up to them. Stonewalling.

  The Embers had sued the birthing center where Alice had been born, and where Justine had worked. Had Justine been involved in the lawsuit, or even in Alice’s birth? Had Evan gathered up enough energy to poison Justine as retribution? I’d find out more on Monday, when I talked with the director of the birthing center.

  Mike had insisted he didn’t know about Justine’s gender change. He seemed genuinely sad that Justine was gone, but he, more so than anyone else, had the most at stake in a marriage. And his uncle Webster? Web was fired for stalking Justine and hadn’t been able to find another job. Did he harbor an angry resentment?

  Going by the “facts,” sparse as they were, Webster was perhaps my number-one candidate, just because stalkers don’t easily get over their obsessions, and often do murder them. His wife hadn’t made it to the breakfast table to police his interactions with Justine. Perhaps they’d had an exchange that sparked his anger. He could have been the visitor to her room after Mike’s call. He was, after all, staying in the room next to hers.