by Thomas Perry
Varney drove across the line into Pennsylvania, and a couple of miles beyond, before he realized that he had done it. Being in a new state made him much safer, but he refused to let himself be reassured. He was going to be smart this time. He would keep going into Ohio, and try to get as close to Cincinnati as he could before he slept.
He crossed the border before noon, and made Cleveland an hour later. He stopped there for a hamburger and some coffee, then got on Route 71 and drove south toward Columbus. It was over 140 miles away, but when he arrived, he stopped at a gas station, filled the tank, and bought some more coffee. Cincinnati was now just a bit over a hundred miles away.
It was evening before Varney reached the edge of Cincinnati. He was so tired he had begun to feel dizzy. He knew he needed to stop somewhere and sleep, but he had to take a look at the office building first, just to convince himself that it was still there. He drove through the streets, heading vaguely toward the river until he reached Colerain Avenue and let it take him to the center of the city.
He drove past the building slowly. The old two-story structure had been built in an era when it probably hadn’t seemed odd for a commercial building to have a peaked roof like a house, and there had been no compelling reason to build higher, at least in this part of town. But the place was better than it looked: the rooms inside had hardwood floors and big, solid doors, and the red-brick facade was dirty but intact. Varney could see nothing about the place or the streets around it that had changed since he’d last seen it.
He had been here only twice before, with Coleman. The first time, Coleman had warned him. “They’re going to be friendly, and easy to get along with, but don’t let yourself get too comfortable, and don’t mouth off to Mama.”
“Mama?”
“Yeah, and don’t call her that.” Coleman blew out a breath impatiently, in that way he had of signifying that everything he said was something any sensible person should already know but somehow Varney didn’t. “Her name is Tracy. She’s the one you have to pay attention to. She has three sons, Roger, Nick, and Marty, and they’re the ones who run the business. All she runs is them.”
“You mean they’re a bunch of Mama’s—”
“No, that ain’t what I mean,” Coleman interrupted. “Any one of them would cut you just for the fun of seeing you bleed and dance around, and that’s the problem. They can’t trust each other, don’t even seem to like each other much. They’re about a year or two apart in age, so I don’t even know which is older. They all had different fathers, and even God doesn’t know where they are or what became of any of them. The boys each know that the others won’t listen to them, but that they will listen to her. She’s what keeps them from turning on each other. Maybe they like her, or think she’s smart or something. Or maybe she’s just a convenience, so they can work together. I don’t know, and I don’t care.”
Varney had followed Coleman up the stairs and into the carpeted hallway. As he passed each door, he read the sign on it: CHOW IMPORTERS, LTD., RECTANGLE TRAVEL, PINEHILL REALTY SERVICES, CRESTVIEW WHOLESALE. Coleman did not stop until he reached the Crestview Wholesale door. Coleman knocked, then entered, and Varney went in with him.
The woman sitting behind the desk was peculiar. She had the hair, the makeup, and the body of a woman about thirty-five years old, but there was a wrinkling about the pale, almost transparent skin of her bare neck and hands that struck him. It was not so much a contradiction as a warning, like a slight puckering on a peach that told him the fruit had been offered for sale much, much longer than it was supposed to be.
“Sugar!” she shrieked. She got up, tottered around the desk on high heels, smiled, and kissed Coleman on the cheek. “I’m so sorry to make you come all the way here for your money, but Roger and Marty and Nicky can’t get away just now, with all the salespeople already on the road, and—”
“It’s okay,” said Coleman unconvincingly. “I don’t mind a bit.”
She smiled in a way that would have been—and maybe once had been—kittenish, but struck Varney as mentally deranged. “I knew you’d understand.” Then her eyes passed across Varney on their way somewhere else, and she stopped, brought them back, and looked him up and down. “You brought him?”
Coleman nodded, and to Varney it seemed a reluctant nod.
“This is him.” To Varney he said, “Say hello to Tracy.”
“Pleased to meet you,” Varney murmured.
Her eyes seemed to glow for an instant, then to fade again. “Oh, you’re just right,” she said. “A cop would run right over you without even stepping on the brakes because he didn’t notice you were there.” Then she half-turned and said in a stage whisper, “Besides, you’re cute.” She continued the turn and went to a filing cabinet across the room, unlocked it, pulled a thick envelope out of one of the files, and handed it to Coleman.
Tonight Varney could see lights on in the upper windows. He made a quick decision, stopped the car a block past the building, and walked back. He climbed the stairs and knocked on the door that said CRESTVIEW WHOLESALE, then entered. Tracy was sitting at the desk. When she looked up, she took a moment to focus on his face, then stood. “Sugar!” she squealed, and hurried toward him on her spike heels, her arms extended toward him for a hug.
20
Prescott sat in the window of his rented room and watched Wendy Cushner. He knew she was thirty-four, but she had the kind of face that might have been any age from twenty to forty, a small, unlined round face with light skin and a few freckles. She was wearing shorts that were neither revealing nor fashionable, a pair of sneakers with no socks, and a T-shirt that was too big for her.
She was filling a small wading pool with water from a hose, her eyes turned down at the blue vinyl bottom of the pool as though she saw something in the water, or maybe just looked for it there because it wasn’t anywhere else. She didn’t look like a woman who had been left with thirty-four million dollars. She looked like a woman who had just been left.
She and Prescott had a secret that the rest of the people in the world she inhabited did not seem to suspect. She turned off the hose and disappeared into the back door of the low, rambling brick ranch house. A few minutes later, she came out again holding a girl of about four by the hand, and carrying a boy in her left arm who must have been about one. They both had light purple bathing suits—the girl’s with a ruffled skirt around the hips, and Prescott could see that the smaller one’s rear end was padded with a diaper and plastic pants. Wendy held the little boy over the pool, bending at the hips as women did, so the baby could touch his toes in the cool water. The baby started to laugh and began to run in place, only his toes brushing the surface, until his mother lowered him into the water and he spent a moment feeling the cold creep into his suit. His big sister unceremoniously stepped in and sat down with a splash.
As they played, Prescott noted the appearance of brightly colored plastic objects from a small tub by the pool: boats, ducks, a whale, a bucket. Wendy retreated a bit after a few minutes and sat on the back steps, where Prescott could watch her watching her children.
He had been here for two weeks observing her to determine whether she had paid to have her husband shot through the forehead. At first he had been surprised when he had not detected any sign that the Louisville police were doing the same, but he had welcomed the freedom it gave him in his work. He had already eliminated a few of the signs he had been searching for.
Prescott had seen no indication that she had taken a lover. He had followed her whenever she went out, and found himself not at hotels or restaurants or houses but at a wilting succession of supermarket parking lots, a nursery school where she took the older kid three mornings a week, and a couple of shopping malls where she made relatively brief visits to stores that sold children’s clothes and toys.
He had watched her house at night with an infrared scope and listened with an X-phone, an electronic device about the size of a deck of cards that he had plugged into an unused phone jack i
n her bedroom. Whenever it heard anyone come up the stairs near the room, it silently dialed Prescott’s telephone number.
When he lifted his receiver, he could hear everything happening within thirty-five feet of Wendy Cushner’s bed. He had learned that she went to sleep at ten and was up at five-thirty with the boy, followed at about six-thirty by the older girl. The only visitors were women about her own age, usually with children in tow, her in-laws, a woman who looked as though she might be a younger sister, and an older woman who had to be her mother, Mrs. Hayes.
Prescott had seen no sign that she had yet taken any notice that she was a rich woman. She had a cleaning woman who came in two days a week to wash floors and windows. When he had understood the schedule, he had searched harder for the lover. A woman with thirty-four million could afford a lot of help, but a woman with any calculation at all would know that she could not hide the existence of a man from another woman who cleaned her house each day. Prescott devoted another week to watching, and found no lover.
Prescott tired of watching Wendy Cushner at about the same time that the children got tired of the water. When she scooped them out, one at a time, wrapped them in towels, and took them in, it was a relief to him.
Prescott had examined Wendy Cushner’s credit reports, searched the Louisville and Jefferson County records for any criminal or civil decisions involving Wendy Hayes, and looked for any close relative who might ever have been involved in any court proceeding. He had checked the archives of the Louisville Courier-Journal for the high school graduation announcements printed in the spring of her senior year, and found the names of others who had graduated in the same class. He had tracked down a few and called them, pretending to be a reporter. The ones who would talk at all seemed to be primarily interested in making sure no one had said anything negative about her.
On the first Sunday Prescott was in town, he went to the Methodist church where Robert Cushner’s funeral had been held, but Wendy Cushner was not there. He went again the next Sunday, and saw her father-in-law, the man who had hired him. Prescott had sat in the back where Cushner would not see him, then made sure that as soon as Dr. Stevenson, the minister, had pronounced the benediction, he was on his way out the door.
Prescott kept up his observation and widened his research for three more days. Then one day he waited until midmorning, when the older child was in nursery school and the younger was in the back bedroom for a nap. He walked around the block to the front of her house, and knocked on her door.
She opened it only a few inches, with a bit of the trepidation that a woman alone often displayed when a strange man came to the door. “Hi, can I help you?”
“I’m Roy Prescott,” he said. “I’m the man your father-in-law hired to find the killer.”
She looked at him with a mixture of alarm and exasperation, but she let him in. Wendy Cushner was not an especially neat housekeeper, and she was not apologetic about it. The living room had a few of the kids’ toys in unlikely places. She simply picked up a doll from the couch, told him to sit where it had been, set it on the coffee table, and sat down across from him. Close up, she looked tired and sad and worn.
He patiently lulled her by asking the questions he knew that she would have already been asked. They were about the enemies her husband might have had, the strangers she might have noticed near the house in the days before the crime, the worries her husband might have mentioned to her. She answered that nothing had come to her attention. He asked about the possibility that a business competitor might have ordered her husband’s death. She answered the question truthfully: she didn’t believe that could have happened. He had already sold his business before he was killed.
Prescott took that in and kept asking other questions, always sympathetically. After a time he left. The next day, he came again, and asked more questions. He came several times, always speaking gently and patiently, always careful to tell her things that he knew, so she would come to feel that they were sharing information. On the first day, he’d told her what the local police had told Millikan, and what Millikan had seen in the restaurant. On another day, he’d told her about his conversations with the killer, and what they had made him believe about the man. After a few days, he was sure he had convinced her he liked her and felt sorry for her. He left her alone for a couple of days, and kept her under even closer surveillance. Then he was ready for his final visit.
He waited until they were settled in the living room, then said, “I’m afraid that this time I’ve got a hard question. The police will eventually get to it, so we might as well do it now. It’s about Donna Halsey.”
He paused, and watched her face grow still and rigid, then begin to waver and get a rubbery look around the mouth. Her eyes were wet, not weeping, but watering as though she had been hit in the face. She said, “You know about Donna Halsey?”
He said, “I figured it out a couple of weeks ago. How long have you known?”
“I never did know. I thought . . . I didn’t think he would do that.”
Prescott said, “You mean you found out after he was dead?”
She nodded. “He said he was working that night. It was something about trying to get the bugs out of a program to get it ready for production so he could introduce it in some computer show. The show was going to be in—like—January. He lied. He knew that by January the company would already have belonged to somebody else for months. He already hadn’t owned it for a week.”
“You didn’t know he’d sold the company,” Prescott said.
“No,” she said. “He didn’t think I was even listening to what he said about staying late that night. It was just a bunch of words, plausible because they were words he had used a lot. But it’s amazing, isn’t it? I remembered exactly what he said.”
“Did you know the marriage was in trouble?”
“No.” Then she shivered, as though she were shaking off something that had clung to her, like dirt. “That’s not true. We argued a lot . . . not always out loud. He wasn’t happy with the way things were.”
Prescott was silent, not even pretending to understand. He just waited, and she spoke again.
“I didn’t get it,” she said. “I mean, I understood the words he was saying, but I didn’t understand that he meant them, exactly as he said them. I thought he was just complaining, whining for attention, like the kids do. What he was doing was something more. Sometimes I think it was his fault for letting it go, saying something and then not saying anything again for a month or two, so that I didn’t take it seriously enough. Sometimes I think if he hadn’t mentioned anything—just kept his mouth shut—then in time everything would have been okay by itself. I was busy from dawn to dusk with the kids, and cooking and shopping and the stuff that you have to do just to be a family. I was tired, and half the time I was frantic.”
She stopped and looked at Prescott with the purest expression of sadness and regret he had seen in years. “He didn’t threaten me, or say, ‘If you don’t start paying attention to me, I’ll find somebody who will, beginning next Thursday.’ See, in life it would be a lot better if there were big signs that popped up at important times and said, ‘Hey! Drop everything and handle this. You’re fighting for your life now!’ There isn’t anything like that. Everything comes at you at once, and you do your best, and then you find out you picked the wrong thing.” She was crying now. “I did that. I kept this house as neat as a pin. I took wonderful care of the children. I did everything, volunteered for everything at the school, the church, helped friends and relatives. I cooked nice meals, I . . .” She seemed to hear her own voice and not want to go on.
Prescott prompted her. “Did you ever meet Donna Halsey?”
“I knew Donna Halsey as well as he did. As soon as I learned she was one of the ones who got killed, I said, ‘Who was she with?’ She would never, in a million years, have gone into that restaurant by herself. The police were positive she was with that man Gary Finch, but I didn’t believe it. There was only one
person there that she could have been with.” She sobbed. “Even my mother knew it.”
“Your mother?”
“She had warned me, at least two years ago. She got the feeling one day that things weren’t quite the same between me and Bobby. It was something she saw in his face one night when he was talking to me. She sat me down the next day and said, ‘It’s none of my business, but is everything okay?’ I told her she was right: it was none of her business. But she wouldn’t give up. She was sitting right where you are. She looked around, not in my eyes, and said, ‘You’re a good housekeeper. You’re a better mother than I was. You’re a terrific cook. But I’m going to say one thing because you’re also the best daughter in the world and I love you. In the history of the world, no man ever left his wife because some other woman was a better cook, or was more eager about setting the food on the table, or arranging it more attractively on the plate. The way to a man’s heart is not through his stomach, it’s a bit south of there.’ Then she stood up and left. You have to know my mother. She’d never said anything like that in her life. I saw her blush in church one time when the minister read some passage about somebody’s loins. But as soon as Bobby was dead, and the paper printed the names of the other people who had been in the restaurant, she knew. She has never said anything about warning me, just come and tried to help me and be sympathetic. But what she said will always be there between us, just lying there. She was right, and I didn’t take it to heart.”
“I’m sorry you ever had to find out,” said Prescott. “It serves no purpose. But I’ve got to say that you’re being too hard on yourself. You have nothing to blame yourself for. You weren’t the one who did this. He was.”
She sighed, then sobbed a little, so her breath came out shivery and choked. She said, “He paid for being tempted. I’m paying for being stupid.” She squinted. “He wasn’t bad. Nobody but me can really know that. He loved us. He would have stayed faithful—had been faithful for twelve years, before this. I told myself after it happened what a bastard he was, what a pig, what a rat. The truth is, he wasn’t.”
