Familiar Friend

by Cristina Sumners

  The Rector scribbled.

  “And I suppose we could lower those Board scores to 1525.”

  The Rector made a brief note.

  “And we’ll need to appoint a committee to look at applications.”

  The Rector raised an eyebrow.

  “For appearances’ sake.” Kathryn tried to keep a straight face, but failed.

  CHAPTER 11

  Tom Holder looked at the chart he had created and made a noise something like a growl.

  Suspect

  Motive

  Alibi

  Charles Caldwell

  Jealousy

  Wife

  Ellen Caldwell

  Lovers’ quarrel

  Husband

  Carlos Barreda

  Scholarship loss

  None

  Edward Drew

  Wants tenure

  None

  Caroline Drew

  Wants tenure for her husband

  None

  John MacDonald

  Wants to be dept. chairman

  Wife

  Valerie Powers

  Lover's quarrel

  Attempting to trace man she showed to Cletus Hall

  Unless an unexpected miracle occurred, his optimistic prognosis to the District Attorney was going to be way off the mark. There were just too damn many people who had reasonable motives and no alibis—or useless alibis, that is: their spouses.

  That morning, Saturday, they’d had a second go-round of interviews. As always, the second time through produced more information than the first. You wore people down, you got on their nerves, they started to talk. Carlos Barreda held a university scholarship that was awarded according to rules set down by the Spanish Department. It turned out that Mason Blaine was about to change the rules, and that under the new rules Carlos’s chances of getting his scholarship renewed would be slimmer. It was widely agreed in the Department that Blaine was doing it on purpose because he loathed Carlos Barreda.

  The other thing that was widely agreed was that either Ellen Caldwell was having an affair with Mason Blaine or that her husband Charles believed that she was. If he believed it, that was a good enough motive for him. And if she really was, that was a good enough motive for her. And they alibi’d each other, which was no alibi at all.

  These three were Tom’s favorites. The Caldwells because sex is always reason enough for murder, and the Barreda boy simply because he had confessed openly to hating Blaine and had so obviously meant it. Now that Tom knew Carlos had a motive, it smelled like a double-blind.

  Caroline Drew was supposed to have been at a meeting, but it turned out she hadn’t gone; she’d been “bored with those meetings and decided at the last minute just to take a drive.” Her husband Edward had been working at home. So had John MacDonald. But Tom had trouble taking the motives of the Drews and John MacDonald seriously; granted, Edward Drew might not get tenure under Blaine, but everybody agreed Edward was a rising star, a brilliant scholar and teacher, and Harton wasn’t the only university in the country. And John MacDonald was fifty-three, and had only five years to wait before inheriting the Department from Blaine; it was common knowledge the University wasn’t going to offer the chairmanship to anybody else when Blaine retired, because MacDonald was a scholar of international repute.

  Tom had equal trouble taking Valerie Powers seriously as a suspect. He couldn’t see a beauty like Valerie in a red rage with a man who’d dumped her; she’d be more likely to shrug her pretty shoulders and move on to her next conquest. Would her ego even permit her to accept that she’d been dumped? And besides, there was no clear consensus in the Department about who had dumped whom; a lot of people thought Valerie’s affair with Blaine had simply ended by mutual consent.

  Tom stared at his chart, banged the flat of his hand on it, and swore. Absolutely the only element of this case he had to be grateful for was that he hadn’t seen Louise since it started. Working past midnight, out of the house before six, his life had been blissfully Louise-free for almost three days. Amazing what a lift that was, not to have to endure that depressing drone of a voice at the breakfast table and in the evenings.

  But even the absence of his wife was not enough to keep him buoyant in the stubborn lack of progress in his case. Especially since he’d been right in what he’d predicted to the D.A.: every newspaper in the state was barking up his ass. He looked at his watch; it was five forty-five. He pulled open one of his desk drawers and extracted the St. Margaret’s Church Directory. While the phone rang he said a little prayer that she would be home. She was.

  As twilight fell and Mrs. Warburton tactfully made herself scarce, Tom sat in Kathryn’s comfortable living room and sipped Earl Grey from an oversized mug. The first time he’d come to Kathryn’s to ask advice it had also been late afternoon, and he had been served tea formally by Mrs. Warburton in a dazzle of Victorian silver. He had learned later that this had been entirely the housekeeper’s idea, who had sprung it on a surprised and embarrassed Kathryn, who thought it was completely over the top for a casual call. But Mrs. Warburton, shrewder than her employer on some matters, had known that the policeman, nervous about having invited himself, needed to be treated like an honored guest.

  That was ancient history now. Now they were comfortable together; if he wanted coffee (or beer, for that matter) he asked for it; Kathryn no longer felt she had to abandon whatever she was drinking to keep him company. And she had introduced him to Earl Grey and he had liked it; that made him feel sophisticated. Another thing that made him feel sophisticated was that he was beginning to appreciate that the way her house was furnished, which he had at first thought was so plain and ordinary, was anything but.

  When Kathryn had first moved to Harton and joined St. Margaret’s as a voluntary part-time member of the staff, everybody in the parish had known within five minutes that she was rich as Croesus because she had bought one of the pre-Revolutionary houses on Alexander Street and had it decorated by Elton Kimbrough Interiors. So when Tom had first gone to see her, he’d expected the inside of her house to look like the lavish homes of the other wealthy people he had visited from time to time, sometimes as Harton’s Chief of Police on business, and—rarely—as a guest of a wealthy parishioner at St. Margaret’s.

  He’d been amazed to find himself in an ordinary-looking living room with mismatched furniture in which nothing at all looked impressive. In fact, the overall feeling was simply one of comfort. It was a room you wanted to settle down and spend time in.

  But now he’d spent more time in it, and he had considered the unpainted sideboard with the knotholes, and he had run his hands over the fabrics on the sofa and the big chair, and he had studied the rug, he’d decided that there was probably enough money in the furnishings of that room to pay off the mortgage on his house.

  He didn’t grudge her the money. Tom didn’t grudge anybody their money. He had learned at a fairly young age not to value it.

  He had still been a humble flatfoot on the Harton force when he and his partner Frank had been the first to respond to a call to a mansion on Library Place at nine o’clock one night. An armed robber, at that unheard-of early hour, had broken in and held a gun to the head of the terrified wife while demanding that her husband produce the cash and jewelry. When Tom and Frank arrived, the robber had gone and the couple were screaming obscenities at each other. Each blamed the other for not having turned on the burglar alarm earlier, and were deaf to Tom’s assurances that most people didn’t turn their alarms on until they went to bed and a robbery at that hour was most unusual. The wife actually blamed the husband for giving in to the burglar’s demands, and the husband’s response to that was such that Tom and Frank had to step in and physically separate the couple and order them to sit down on sofas on opposite sides of their enormous living room. The distance did not prevent them from continuing to shout the most eye-popping terms at each other while the two policemen labored to take their statements.

  If that experien
ce had not been enough to determine forever Tom’s attitude toward money and happiness, Providence had kindly sent him another lesson not two months later. Again he and Frank were on patrol, but this time the call was later, shortly before eleven, and it couldn’t have been farther, economically speaking, from Library Place.

  It was on Dawkins Street, in the old black neighborhood. There was a coincidental parallel, in that the man who had broken in to the shabby little house had held a knife to the wife’s throat while demanding cash and other valuables from the husband. The pair had had little to offer him—some money, their watches (which were not expensive), their radio, and the only two items they really regretted: their wedding rings.

  The couple sat together on their sofa with their arms around each other and tears running quietly down their faces. “We don’t expect you to catch him,” they said. “We can’t give you a description because he wore a mask. Just some stupid hophead lookin’ to support his habit, he was high as a kite. We only called you because that’s what you’re supposed to do, something like this happens. The important thing is, we’re all right.”

  The husband looked at his wife and kissed her on her forehead. “You’re all right.”

  The wife said to the well-meaning white men in her living room, “And he never even saw our precious babies, sleeping in their beds. They never saw him. So they never even had call to be scared. God blessed us this night.”

  Tom and Frank walked out of the house shaking their heads in wonder, and Tom had spent every minute of his spare time for the next three weeks harassing every fence in North Jersey and New York City until he found the wedding rings. As they were only nine karat and had been fenced for fifty cents, the sale wasn’t precisely memorable to the fence and Tom almost missed it, but God smiles upon the pure of heart. The hophead was caught and convicted on the evidence of the fence and Tom got his first promotion, but nothing matched the satisfaction of driving back to Dawkins Street after the trial and returning those rings.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Washington—” he had begun.

  But no. It was to be Sherri and Joe and he was to come in and sit down and have a beer. By the time Tom had polished off his second beer and met both children and the dog, any racial awkwardness had pretty much relaxed and everybody was feeling more or less like human beings together. Then Sherri asked Tom if he had any children himself.

  He had wondered a thousand times since why he had told Sherri and Joe Washington the full and honest story, when he had never told any of his buddies on the force, never told any of his friends at St. Margaret’s. Was it because they were black, and belonged to a different world? So somehow it was easier to say it to them? And of course the secret would be safe with them; even if they decided to tell anybody, it wouldn’t be anybody he knew.

  Or was it because they had what he so desperately wanted, they were so rich where he was so achingly poor? And something craven in him wanted them to know it?

  “No,” he’d said. “We don’t have any kids. My wife Louise and I, we kind of met at the senior prom. We were both students here at Harton High School. My prom date got sick at the last minute and so did hers, and some friends of ours fixed it up for us to go together. Afterwards we went to one of the parties and got stinking drunk, and how I drove home and got there alive I don’t know because I really don’t remember anything after about two A.M. Obviously I got Louise home in one piece because she started calling me, wanting to go out again, but I was going out with the girl I’d originally had the prom date with. Then three months later Louise calls to tell me she’s pregnant and it happened on prom night when we were drunk, it can’t be anybody else, she says, because she hasn’t been with anybody else. Now, I can’t even remember doing the deed, but if she’s pregnant she’s pregnant and obviously I have to do the right thing by her so I break up with my girlfriend and I marry Louise. And the months go by and there’s no baby.”

  Joe and Sherri stared at Tom, openmouthed.

  Tom nodded. “I came home from work one day, she told me she’d been to the doctor and he’d told her she’d had a hysterical pregnancy. That’s when—”

  Sherri interrupted, “I know what that is. It’s when you think you’re pregnant, but you’re not. But Tom, how do you know she wasn’t just plain lyin’ to you? After all, the girl wanted you, she was callin’ you.”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never known. She just said, ‘Sorry, Tom. Guess it’s too late to go back now, isn’t it? We’ll just have to make the best of it.’”

  “Did you think about getting a divorce?” Joe asked.

  “Yeah, but I couldn’t face it.”

  “Why not?”

  “We got married in my church because Louise didn’t have one of her own. I grew up in St. Margaret’s. I was baptized there, I was confirmed there, then I got married there…”

  The Washingtons nodded. “Yeah, man,” said Joe. “I can see that would be tough to go back on.”

  “But Tom,” Sherri cut in, getting back to the original subject. “That doesn’t explain why you don’t have any kids now.”

  “Oh, that’s what you call the last laugh,” Tom replied bitterly. “Three years ago when Louise and I decided it was time for us to start a family for real, we couldn’t do it. After two years of trying we both got checked out. Surprise, surprise. Louise can’t have children. There has never been any chance in her entire life, before or after that damn prom, that she could have gotten pregnant, by me or anybody else.”

  He had never, in all the years since, told that sorry tale to anyone else: only to that young black couple who were wealthy in the only thing that counted, and the only thing Tom desperately coveted.

  He wondered sometimes if he would eventually tell Kathryn. Sometimes he thought that the only reason he didn’t tell her was that he was pretty sure she would respond by telling him he ought to get a divorce. And he didn’t want to hear that just yet, because he was beginning to suspect after thirty-two years of marriage that what was keeping him married was not virtue but cowardice. Besides, what good would divorce do him? It might rid him of the woman he didn’t want, but he knew that no power on earth was going to get him the woman he wanted.

  The woman he wanted was as always dispensing tea, sympathy, and intelligent feedback.

  “It’s the church driveway that’s bugging you, isn’t it?” she asked him now.

  “Put it this way. Question number one: Why was Blaine’s body moved at all? Question number two: Assuming there was some reason for moving him, was there some reason for moving him to the St. Margaret’s driveway rather than somewhere else?”

  “How are you doing on the answers?”

  “I have no idea what the answer to question number one is, but I’m pretty sure I’m ready to answer question number two.”

  “Bravo! And?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes, there was a specific reason to dump Mason Blaine in St. Margaret’s? For heaven’s sake, why?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “You aggravating man!” she cried in astonishment. “Why the hell not?”

  “I’m sorry, Kathryn, but you are a civilian. There’s a limit to what I can discuss with you.”

  Kathryn’s mouth hung open in surprise, but after a few seconds she managed to shut it.

  “I’m sorry,” Tom repeated, looking acutely uncomfortable.

  “Nonsense,” Kathryn said. “You have nothing to apologize for. Naturally there are things you can’t discuss with me. It’s just that—before—”

  Tom nodded his understanding. “On the Grace Kimbrough thing, and then of course when we were in England, we could say anything we wanted to. I know. But this is different. I can’t tell you why. It just is.”

  “O.K. It’s different. There’s some kind of St. Margaret’s connection you can’t talk to me about. So let me drop a malicious idea on you. You told me you were checking out Mason Blaine’s women. Crystal Montoya is tall, blond, drop-dead gorgeous, fluent in Spanish, and frank
ly not a very nice person. That makes her Mason Blaine’s type, don’t you think? And she admits to knowing him, although she says it’s only slightly.”

  Tom sat up a bit straighter in his chair. “Now, that is an idea that had not crossed my mind,” he admitted, “and it does put together the church and Blaine and women. Thanks. I’ll put somebody onto Crystal, very quietly. I’m not about to waltz up to her and ask her for an alibi. After all, unless she did it, we’ve all got to live with her for the next umpteen years.”

  “More’s the pity.”

  “Yeah. But you know who I need more than women? I need the men behind the women. Do you know who’s dated Crystal, who would be jealous on account of Crystal?”

  “That I can’t tell you.”

  They both sipped tea for a minute in silence. Then Kathryn volunteered, “Tom, I might do a bit of spying for you. Don’t know if it would do any good, but I could tell you how the usual suspects are behaving themselves. Who’s bitching at whom, who’s standing by whom, whatever. The Spanish Department is having a party next Wednesday night and absolutely everybody you’re interested in will be there. I can get myself invited as the date of Jamie Newman’s best friend.”

  “The Chairman of the Department has just been murdered and they’re having a party?”

  “They’ve got to. They have no choice. Alberto Chacón, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, is giving a lecture at the University that evening; it’s been scheduled for a year. The party in Chacón’s honor, which is to take place after the lecture, was originally going to be held in Mason Blaine’s house, but for obvious reasons it’s now been shifted to the MacDonalds’ house. You don’t let a Nobel Laureate sit around his hotel room unentertained just because your department chairman has snuffed it. Shall I get myself invited?”

  “Go for it,” said Tom enthusiastically. “At this point I’ll take any help I can get.”

  Kathryn picked up her cell phone and began a search for Patrick Cunningham.