“So the body was moved to St. Margaret’s because the killer for some reason or another needed for the body to be discovered that night rather than the following morning.”
“No.”
“No? I thought you just said—”
“That’s what I thought at first. And I was going crazy trying to figure out what kind of advantage it gave the killer to have the body discovered at ten-fifteen instead of the next morning. Then somebody poisoned Tracy Newman’s drink and it all got real clear. The murder of Mason Blaine was a blind. Somebody killed him and planted him there so she would find him. Then when she was at the party the following week, a party the killer knew she’d be at, together with everybody who had a motive for killing Blaine, he puts poison in her drink. Everybody’s supposed to think that she’s seen something in that driveway last Thursday night, and the killer is trying to shut her mouth before she remembers what it is. But I don’t buy that. Because it doesn’t explain why the body was moved in the first place, why it was moved to St. Margaret’s, and why there was a knife put in Blaine’s back when he was already dead. And there was another thing. There were tire tracks in the grass just off the driveway around where the body was lying, as if somebody drove around the body. I think what happened was this: The killer drives in the driveway with the body in the backseat of his car. He drives off the driveway to the side so that when he drags the body out of the car, it lands square in the middle of the drive where it’s most visible, not over on the side in the bushes where Tracy might miss it. Sure, he could have dragged it to the middle, but driving over to the side saves him a few seconds and when you’re moving dead bodies around you want to make a quick getaway. The point is, he wants her to see the body. It’s a plant.”
Kathryn had gone very, very cold. “You’re saying—” she began, but her mouth had gone dry and no sound came out. She took a sip of tea. Her hands trembled on her mug. “You’re saying that all of this is an elaborate plot to kill Tracy for her own sake? Nothing to do with Mason Blaine?”
“It’s the only theory that explains all the facts.”
Kathryn gulped down the rest of her tea. She remembered thinking at the party that the theory that Tracy had seen something in the St. Margaret’s driveway was ridiculous. “This is silly,” she said. “Why should I be more upset at the idea that someone wants to kill her for her own sake than that someone wants to kill her because of something to do with the murder of Mason Blaine? But I am.” She shook her head. “Never mind. Go on.”
“What I need you for,” Tom continued, “is to tell me more about her. Everything you can. Beginning with who might have a reason to kill her.”
“I can’t imagine!” Kathryn cried, in considerable distress. “She is the most harmless creature!”
“O.K. Let’s take it from the top. Enemies?”
“Nonsense. The very idea is absurd.”
“All right. Who benefits by her death?”
“I don’t know, Tom,” Kathryn said, irritated by the very idea. “I suppose I could ask her if she has a life insurance policy, but if she does, the beneficiary would most likely be Jamie. Certainly neither one of them has money.”
“Why don’t you just tell me about them in general? How long have you known Tracy?”
“I met her when she started coming to St. Margaret’s at the beginning of last year. That was just after she and Jamie got married. She’d just graduated from Vassar. They met senior year, introduced by friends; I gather it was a bit of a whirlwind romance. Marry in haste, as they say. As I have told you, I believe that Jamie treated her badly, although she never actually came out and told me so point blank. It’s just that I recognize the signs. She works as a secretary at Hutcheson Pollard, the insurance brokers, to help put Jamie through the Ph.D. program. He repaid her by having an affair with that platinum-headed slut Valerie Powers.”
“How about her, then? As a likely prospect?”
“What, Valerie? Kill Tracy? What for?”
“To get her husband.”
“Oh, no, much as I’d love for you to haul Valerie off in irons, the psychology is wrong. Valerie goes through a man a month. She certainly wouldn’t kill to get one. Oh, I don’t know, she might kill to get José, but he’s drop-dead gorgeous and an aristocrat and has more money than God. Jamie was merely very handsome and middle-class and an impoverished grad student. No way she’d kill for him.”
“O.K. I’ll take your word for it. Mostly because that’s the way she strikes me, too. Not enough passion for murder. Much too selfish.”
“You are an excellent judge of character, Tom Holder. For that you get another cup of tea.”
So they had more tea and discussed possibilities, but Kathryn was unable to offer Tom any ideas on who might have a good reason for doing away with Tracy. In the end he went away unsatisfied, although Kathryn promised she would broach the topic with Tracy herself.
Now isn’t that, Kathryn thought, going to be a jolly conversation?
Nick Silverman was in Tom’s office at 8:30 the next morning, and as District Attorneys do not normally keep those sorts of hours, Tom knew all too well that despite Silverman’s wide, oleaginous smile, the man had not come in friendship.
“’Morning, Tom. Dropped in to see how things were going. Any news of Louise?”
“Not yet.”
“Oh, that’s rough. You must be worried sick. Has she, uh, ever, uh, wandered off before?”
“No.”
The glare that went with this monosyllable would have daunted a lesser man, but Trenton’s District Attorney was possessed of a legendary insensitivity, and it bounced off him without making a dent. He pulled out the chair facing Tom’s and seated himself as if he’d been invited, throwing out a few sentences of insincere comfort along the lines of: “I’m sure she’s all right,” and “They’re bound to find her in no time,” before he settled down to the topic that really interested him.
“O.K., then, Tom, bring me up to speed on our homicides. You need to catch this guy before he kills anybody else, you know! But at least this second one should give you a lot more to go on, surely the guy showed his hand, right? Christ, he did it right in the middle of a party!”
So Tom explained to the District Attorney his theory about the murder of Mason Blaine being a blind for the murder of Tracy Newman. He included all the details he had given Kathryn the previous evening.
When he was finished Nick Silverman looked at him in disbelief and said, “You’re kidding, right?”
“Of course I’m not kidding.”
“You’re going to drop Mason Blaine for some little secretary nobody’s ever heard of?”
There was a four-second pause while Tom digested the fact that the D.A. was actually going to let the newsworthiness of the victim dictate his view of the case. “Well, Nick,” Tom said, frantically trying to think of an answer that would be both humble and persuasive, when what he really wanted to say was, “You stupid glory hog.” “It’s a matter of accounting for the facts,” he produced in a neutral tone of voice. He was rather pleased with this answer, but Silverman immediately pounced upon the weakness in his new case.
“But you admit yourself that you’ve traded a victim that half the town wants to kill for a victim that nobody wants to kill. Do you call that progress? I don’t.”
“I didn’t say I’d solved the case, Nick. I just said I think I’ve figured out something basic about it, namely, who the intended victim was in the first place. Because if we’ve got that wrong, nothing else is going to go right, is it?”
“Tom, you’ve got this completely backasswards, and as your superior I am ordering you to investigate this case as the murder of Mason Blaine, with the assumption that the attempted murder of the Newman woman, and the accidental murder of her husband, was because she saw something in the grounds of that church last Thursday night that she’s forgotten or didn’t realize the significance of at the time. I suggest you get her to see a hypnotist.”
Tom Holde
r was famous for keeping his temper, and having lost it spectacularly in this case already with his Rector, of all people, he was not about to lose it with a superior. He drew a very deep breath. “Nick,” he said, “you don’t mean that. You can’t tell me how to investigate my own homicide unless you relieve me of duty, you know that. Now, if it’ll settle your mind, I’ll ask the Newman girl if she’d be willing to be hypnotized and we’ll see what comes of it, but I’ll tell you in advance that nothing will, because the killer was long gone before she got there, and why? Because he knew exactly when she was going to get there, that’s why! He knew she was coming, Nick! I tell you, he knew she was coming—”
But the D.A. was on his feet and heading for the door. “My office will let you know about the hypnotist,” he snapped, and was gone.
Tom got up and shut with a bang the door that Silverman had left open behind him. He then cursed soundly. He was scarcely back in his chair again when the phone rang.
“Chief? One of your neighbors, a Mrs. Carter. She says her mother saw your wife on Sunday.”
“Well, hot damn. Put her on.” Finally something going right for a change.
“Bev?”
“Tom? Is that you? Listen, I’ve just had a conversation with my mother. She tells me that some policemen came by yesterday asking about Louise, saying she was missing. Is that right?”
“That’s right.”
“Oh, how terrible! I’m so sorry!”
“Thanks, Bev. But your mother says she saw her on Sunday?”
“Yes. But when the police came around asking about it yesterday, Mama told me she wouldn’t tell them anything because she said it was none of their business. At ninety-four you get a little eccentric, I guess, but honestly, Tom, you’d think that after all these years she’d remember that you’re a policeman. She seems to remember everything else. Anyway, I asked her about it and she said she was watching a movie on television and she looked up and saw a stretch limo pull up to your house, and after a minute Louise came out of the front door and down the walk and got into it and it drove away.”
“A stretch limo?”
Bev Carter fully understood his incredulity. “That’s what Mama said.”
CHAPTER 17
Tom felt like eight kinds of a fool. Still, it was the only lead he’d gotten, so what choice did he have?
He was sitting in Bev Carter’s living room opposite the formidable Dorabella Mason.
“I don’t mind telling you, Mr. Holder,” she was saying. “She’s your wife. It’s your business. It wasn’t any of their business. I wasn’t about to talk to them.”
“I appreciate that, Mrs. Mason. That’s very nice of you. Now can you tell me about it? This was on Sunday? You’re sure it was Sunday?”
“Of course I’m sure. There’s nothing wrong with my brain, young man. It was the day that Beverly works at the hospital for the Candy Stripers, which is the sort of thing that young people ought to do.” (Dorabella’s youngest daughter, Beverly, was sixty-three.) “That’s the way I reared her, to be thoughtful of other people, and I’m proud of her. I was thinking of that, how proud of her I was, because I was watching a movie on television in which some young people were behaving disgracefully and I was very grateful that my Beverly didn’t behave like one of them.”
Tom’s ears pricked up. “You wouldn’t happen to remember the name of the movie, would you?”
“I keep telling you that there’s nothing the matter with my brain but I can see that you don’t believe me,” Mrs. Mason remarked disdainfully. “The movie was called The Apartment and it starred Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, and Fred MacMurray. If you’ll check the papers you’ll find it was showing on Sunday.”
I’ll just bet we will, thought Tom, suppressing a sudden urge to kiss the venerable dame. “Yes, Mrs. Mason. So you were watching The Apartment. Then what happened?”
“As you can see, the television is there.” She gestured. “I sit in this chair here to watch it. That means that if anything really unusual happens outside, it catches my eye. And in this neighborhood even a Cadillac would be unusual. We just don’t have limousines around here, do we? And this wasn’t an ordinary limousine, this was what they call a stretch limo, one of the extra-long ones. You see, I keep up with the times, I know what you call them because I watch television.”
Tom went back to the station with his head in a whirl. He had never talked to a witness who seemed less crazy or more sure of herself than Dorabella Mason. But the idea of Louise running away from home in a stretch limo was the closest thing to pure lunacy he’d ever heard in his life. Well, perhaps she’d finally gone completely around the bend, ordered the car for herself, and ridden away. He’d better check the credit cards. All he’d checked so far (without success) were taxis and public transportation; although Louise’s name was on both the cards, she had never in the history of their marriage used either one of them.
Since he was both the principal cardholder and a policeman, his inquiries were processed instantly. Louise had not hired a limousine—or a car of any kind—on either of their cards. And who on God’s green earth would hire a limousine for her? It was preposterous. And yet Dorabella Mason had been utterly believable.
But still—
Tom punched a button on his intercom.
“Yessir?”
“Purze, have somebody get a paper from Sunday and check to see that the movie, The Apartment, was showing on television that afternoon around one o’clock.”
Pursley had gotten some odd requests from his Chief before but it would be safe to say that this was the oddest. It spoke volumes for his loyalty that it did not cross his mind for so much as a second that the Chief had lost his marbles. “Yessir,” he responded enthusiastically, and set forth on the task himself.
Tom’s telephone rang. It was Trenton, calling to inform him that an appointment had been arranged for Mrs. Newman to see Dr. Rosenthal at 10:30 that morning at his office in Lawrenceville. Herewith was Dr. Rosenthal’s address.
Silverman’s not letting any grass grow under his feet, Tom reflected. He began to feel uneasy. Aside from forcing through this hypnosis nonsense, was there anything else Silverman could actually do? Aside, that is, from dropping in and smiling that nasty smile and making a goddamn nuisance of himself, is there anything he can actually do to me?
Tom began to get worried, which was unusual for him. Normally he didn’t worry about his cases, he just ferreted away at them until he got them solved. And he certainly didn’t worry about his own position. Now he was actually beginning to feel a bit threatened. He wondered if he ought to pray about it.
Up to this point his private petitionary prayers had always been restricted to his spiritual needs: God, make me more loving, help me to be patient, things like that. But he remembered Kathryn telling the adult Sunday school class at St. Margaret’s that in the Lord’s Prayer, when Jesus said, “Give us this day our daily bread,” he was indicating to us that we ought to ask for everything we needed, not just for spiritual things.
O.K., then, Tom thought, here goes. Dear God, help me to solve this case before that jackass Silverman mucks it up for me. And help me to find Louise before she gets herself into trouble or gets hurt. Not because I love her, Lord, I’m not going to try to pretend, here, you know I don’t love her any more than she loves me. But it’s my duty. And besides, I don’t want her to get hurt. Amen. Oh, and thanks.
He had just concluded this new venture in personal spirituality when there was a knock on the door. It was Pursley, looking triumphant. “This was still in the lounge from the weekend,” he said, waving a newspaper magazine with a colored cover. “It’s got the listings for the whole week. Here’s Sunday. And here,” he announced with immense satisfaction and pointing to the listing, “is The Apartment.”
“Well done, Purze. Thanks.”
But the Chief looked more troubled than grateful, so Purze went away in turn more puzzled than gratified.
Tom called Kathryn’s house t
o notify Tracy of her appointment, and Tracy promptly called Kathryn on her cell phone to beg for her company. “I could use some moral support. I’m terrified.”
Kathryn, however, had a lecture on medieval church history to give and couldn’t shake loose. “Tracy, I promise you, Tom is a sweetie pie, he’s a darling. Ask him to hold your hand. You’ll be fine.”
Tracy, unable to avail herself of this advice, was driven to Lawrenceville by the slightly formal Chief of Police, who despite calling her Tracy because they’d gone to church together for a little over a year, didn’t offer the kind of emotional support she wanted because she didn’t ask for it. Tracy underwent hypnosis, remembered absolutely nothing useful, and was driven back to Harton.
Tom shook hands with her on Kathryn’s front doorstep. “Thanks, Tracy. I appreciate that that was difficult for you, and I’m sorry it didn’t produce any results. Now, are you working on that list for me?”
“Yes. I’m trying, but honestly, I can’t think of anybody…”
“Tracy, your husband is dead. Somebody is trying to kill you. We’re working on who could have poisoned your drink at that party, but the flat truth of the matter is that there are simply too many people who could have done it, so that angle isn’t getting us anywhere. You’ve got to help us.”
Tracy looked so small and frightened that Tom felt like a brute. He deposited her with Mrs. Warburton and departed. The squad car, of course, was back at the curb.
Back at the station he reviewed reports on stretch limos. At least they were rare beasts, so there weren’t too many of them to track down.
There was a firm in town, Deluxe Transport, that owned one, but they were able to prove without difficulty that at the crucial time theirs had been cruising out to J.F.K. to pick up somebody with more money than was good for him.
Familiar Friend Page 16
