“Yeah, why? How would she even know Violet?” I was fascinated.
“Obviously, I can’t ask Nancy Sawtelle, because she’s dead. And I don’t really want to go ask Mrs. Bolton directly, because I don’t want to tip her off right away if there is some connection. And then there’s this calendar, which tracks somebody in society. So anyway, I have to find a way to get more information about Mrs. Bolton’s life. And I see from the society columns that she’s very good friends with a woman who owns an antiques store in Georgetown—a woman I’d briefly met when I was first canvassing the area.”
He paused and waited for my reaction. I felt like the wind had been knocked out of me when I realized what he was telling me.
“So that’s why you came back into the shop and chatted me up? That’s why you made me your confidential informant?” I said, putting a sarcastic emphasis on the words. “All this time you’ve just been using me to get to Violet?”
Gunner didn’t say a word.
I shook my head in disgust. “I don’t believe it…. I really thought you were my friend.”
“I am your friend.”
I was too stunned to move. I just sat there.
“Talk about being set up,” I said, after a time. “So you mean to tell me that all this stuff about Bob Poll was just a smokescreen to get to Violet? Is that what you’re saying?”
“No…. I think Bob Poll may well be involved in the Beltway Basher murders. But you’ve gotta separate them from Nancy Sawtelle. Sawtelle’s another story. Wardell’s not confessing to her, and I don’t think he did her.”
“Has he confessed to those other girls yet?”
“No. But I know he did them.” Gunner bowed his head.
“So who killed Nancy Sawtelle, Detective Gunner?” I asked defiantly.
“Don’t hate me, Reven. I’m just trying to do my job.”
“Of course you are!” I snapped.
“Bear with me, okay? After they caught Wardell, people figured these six murders had been solved. Case closed. I tried to tell them Sawtelle was different, but no dice. But I can’t get over the fact that this woman has these fancy little booklets in her apartment. And I still wanna know why she was so interested in Violet. So on my own, I take a little trip to Rhode Island, and pay a visit to your old school.”
I let out a guffaw. “You went up to Wheelock? Holy crow. This just gets better and better.”
“Your old headmaster, Mr. Trowbridge, is retired, but he lives nearby. Looked him up. Nice old guy. Remembers you very well. Said you were the star of the class.”
“That and a dime.” I shrugged.
“He also remembers Violet. Said he took a chance on her. I asked him what that meant, but he said he wasn’t at liberty to go into detail. He told me how you protected Violet and how you two were best friends. He said she was the target of a lot of bullying, and that you’d helped get her chief tormenter expelled.”
“He told you about Mary Lou Lindsay?”
“Oh, yeah. He’s very defensive about it, on account of her mother blaming the school for all Mary Lou’s problems in life.”
“Did he know she went to jail?”
“Yup. He didn’t want to talk about it. Frankly, he was a lot more focused on the fact that Violet was the biggest single donor to the school in its history.”
“I told you. She gave them two million bucks one year. Revenge is sweet, and it’s not fattening!”
“I told him about finding Passages in the apartment of my murder vic and asked him if he’d ever heard of a girl named Nancy Sawtelle. He said it didn’t ring a bell. But he arranged it so I could get a look at the old school records. Which I did. I made a list of all the girls in your class and the states they were from. Most of you gals were from New England—New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Vermont, Rhode Island.”
“The provinces! I was the only one from New York.”
“So are you aware that we fingerprint all the Jane Does we find and run them through CODIS and AFIS?”
“I know all about CODIS and AFIS from Violet. National DNA and fingerprint databases. They’re always running stuff through CODIS and AFIS on her crime shows.”
“When we ran Nancy Sawtelle’s prints through AFIS, we didn’t get any hits. No hits on CODIS either. But sometimes there are glitches—particularly if it’s an older crime. Sometimes prints stay in the state system. So just for the hell of it, I called in a few favors and had Nancy Sawtelle’s prints run through Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Vermont, and New Hampshire. We got a hit in Massachusetts.”
Gunner reached inside his pocket and took out a picture. He handed it to me. It was a grainy old black-and-white mug shot of a woman holding up a card with numbers on it. I gasped when I saw it. I knew that face—that mean, sullen, bullying face with eyes like smoke.
“Recognize her?” he asked me.
“Mary Lou Lindsay,” I said.
“That’s right. That’s her mug shot, taken in 1987.”
I stared at it for a long time. Mary Lou looked so young in that picture, just like she looked when we were in school together. It struck me that she looked so young because I was now so much older.
I looked at Gunner, uncomprehending. “But who’s Nancy Sawtelle?”
“That’s Nancy Sawtelle.”
“No, no, this is Mary Lou Lindsay,” I corrected him. “Believe me, I’d know Mary Lou anywhere.”
“Yeah. And that is also Nancy Sawtelle,” Gunner said. “Mary Lou Lindsay changed her name several times when she got outta prison. You can understand how she might not have wanted people to know she’d been a guest of the government.”
“Wait! Are you telling me that Nancy Sawtelle—Miss Montrose—and Mary Lou Lindsay are the same person? Are you sure?”
“No doubt.”
“But you showed me a picture of Miss Montrose when you first came into the shop. Her driver’s license. That woman didn’t look anything like Mary Lou.”
“You just went to a reunion. Did you recognize everybody who walked in the door? Mary Lou was a fat young girl. So she lost weight. Dyed her hair. Probably had plastic surgery. It ain’t that hard to look unrecognizable after twenty-five years.”
Stunned doesn’t begin to cover what I was. I leapt up from my seat.
“Wait’ll I tell Violet! This is absolutely amazing! Oh, my God! Her old nemesis! Violet’s gonna die!”
Gunner was looking at me a little quizzically at that point. He cocked his head to one side. “You still don’t get it, do you?”
“What—that Mary Lou Lindsay wound up murdered? I get it. Trust me! We got it back then. She was a rotten egg. You have no idea. It comes as no great shock that someone might want to kill her.”
Gunner cleared his throat. His tone was slightly patronizing. “Sit down, will you?”
I sat down obediently and looked at Gunner, making an earnest effort to concentrate.
“Listen carefully to me, Reven,” he began. “Mary Lou Lindsay shows up in town. Let’s say she knows your friend Violet isn’t who she says she is. Maybe she even knows what Violet was up to all those years she claimed she was doing all this other shit. And maybe what she was up to wasn’t so good…. Lemme ask you something. If Grant Bolton found out his wife lied about her past, think he’d have a problem with that?”
“A problem? Are you kidding? Did you see what happened after that article about Cynthia? He left her flat after wrecking his life for her. He just dumped her because of one article. Grant’s more terrified of public opinion than a politician. He’s a complete coward.”
“In other words, you think he would have a problem?”
“If he found out Violet wasn’t who she said she was…? The mother of his only son and heir to the bank…? He’d go totally ballistic! I don’t even want to think about what he’d do. I don’t even know how I’m going to deal with it.” I stared at him. “Gunner, you realize we can’t tell a soul about this. Violet’s life would be ruined if people found out. It has to
be kept a secret. Please don’t tell anyone.”
Gunner was shaking his head in dour amusement. “You’re just not getting it, are you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Nancy Sawtelle’s calendar…What if X wasn’t a Mr.? What if X was a Mrs.?”
“Huh?”
“Guess who else was at all those society events, along with your pal Bob Poll?” When I didn’t answer, he said, “See, I think Nancy Sawtelle, aka Mary Lou Lindsay, was tracking your pal Violet.”
“No…. It’s a coincidence.”
“Coincidence? And the hundred thousand dollars in Sawtelle’s safety deposit box? That’s a helluva lot of money for an ex-con, out-of-work waitress.”
“I don’t like where you’re going with this.”
He went on. “Two women who hated each other since they were kids are in the same town. One knows something about the other that could ruin her life. She blackmails her, and then she winds up dead. You tell me.”
“Wait…you don’t think…you don’t seriously think that Violet killed Mary Lou?”
Gunner didn’t answer. He shrugged, then folded his arms and nodded as if it were obvious, as if it had taken me all this time to figure out something that was so plainly in front of my nose.
I narrowed my eyes and glared at him. “Whoa! No! You can’t seriously think that.”
“I do think it. I just can’t prove it.”
I shook my head over. “No, no, no…I can’t believe it. I refuse to believe it,” I said, as if that would somehow make it untrue.
“Why? Makes sense to me.”
“So let me get this straight. You think that Mary Lou somehow found out about Violet’s past, and that she came here to blackmail her. Is that right?”
“That’s about the size of it. You said it yourself. What was your pal Violet really doing all those years she was pretending to be someone else? My hunch? Mary Lou found out something really juicy about her, and this was her chance to get even.”
“Like what?”
Gunner shrugged. “Hell, take your pick of juicy things. Maybe Violet was married before. Maybe she has a kid. Maybe she was a hooker. Maybe she killed that old lady. Maybe she has a record. But from what you tell me, just the fact of her lying about everything would have been enough.”
“So Mary Lou just shows up one day, calls Violet, and starts to blackmail her? I can’t believe Violet wouldn’t have told me.”
“Then she would have had to tell you about her past, wouldn’t she?”
Gunner had a point. If what he said was true, Violet had lied to me and everyone else for years.
“Mary Lou knew the truth about Violet, and she threatened to expose it. Violet wasn’t gonna let that happen,” he said.
“But you don’t have any proof.”
“But I got one hell of a motive. And this is Violet’s neighborhood.”
I stared at Gunner in stunned disbelief, trying to digest all this.
“You once told me you don’t recognize evil if it looks like you,” I said at last. “Violet looks like me, doesn’t she? Maybe not physically, but we’re a lot alike.”
“Kinda. Except you’re not a killer.”
I wasn’t a killer, no. But was Violet? Maybe. Now that I knew she’d lied to me about her whole life, I thought her capable of almost anything. I wondered, was it possible that Violet, the serial killer buff, was so attracted to the breed because she might be a killer herself? Could I imagine her murdering Mary Lou if Mary Lou had threatened to expose her past to Grant?
Let me put it this way: It wasn’t out of the question.
I thought back to that night at the Symphony Ball when Violet and I sat together, joking about who in that glamorous audience might be a serial killer. Now I realized there was real malevolence behind her mischievous laugh, knowing she’d pulled the wool over my eyes yet again. Because that night, Violet might have already killed Mary Lou. She was certainly first on the scene the next day. And then that time in the park when she took me to see the crime scene, and I’d sensed evil in that place. I thought it was just the echo of a terrible act of violence. But maybe it was the fact that I was standing right next to the killer herself.
Gunner said, “You think you could get her to confess?”
I chuckled grimly. “She’s lied to me up, down, and sideways for twenty freaking years. Now all of a sudden you think she’s gonna confess to murder? You’re nuts.”
“She might. If you tell her what you know about her. Tell her you found out she lied about her background. Threaten to expose her unless she tells you the truth. Promise her you won’t tell anybody. Say you just want to know because you two are best friends.”
I let out an inadvertent guffaw. The notion that I’d ever considered Violet my best friend was just too hilarious. But Gunner was so intense, I played it out, just to humor him.
“And when she asks me how I found out all this? What am I going to tell her—that you told me? Because if she thinks the police know, she’s certainly not going to confess.”
“Don’t say I told you. Tell her you’ve known all along, and that you’ve been protecting her. But now you need to know the truth.”
“Why now, all of a sudden?”
Gunner pulled out a photograph of our freshman class at Wheelock. There I was, out front and shining like a daffodil among the weeds. Mary Lou stood scowling three rows behind me. We were all identified by name on the bottom of the photo.
“Show her this. Tell her I just gave it to you, and that I’m on a trail, but I don’t really know what’s going on. Tell her you’ve figured out that Miss Montrose was her old nemesis, Mary Lou. Tell her this is your theory, and that you need to know so you can protect her and for your own personal satisfaction.”
My own personal satisfaction…
I had to admit there was a kind of delicious justice in convincing Violet that I’d pulled the wool over her eyes all this time, rather than the other way around. How satisfying it would be to make her think I was the puppet mistress—who had always been in control—rather than the first-class, number-one stooge she obviously took me for.
“Okay. So she confesses,” I said. “Then what? It’s just my word against hers.”
He shook his head. “No. It’ll be her word against hers.”
“How do you figure that?”
“You’re going to get it on tape.”
He pulled a tiny black tape recorder out of his pocket and played back the last few seconds of our conversation so I could see how effective the little machine was. He handed it to me. I took it reluctantly and stared at it as I thought for a long moment.
“What if she just decides to kill me?” I said, flicking my eyes onto his.
“Don’t worry. You’ll be protected. I’ll be right there with you,” Gunner assured me.
“Like she’s really going to confess with you standing there? I don’t think so.”
“She won’t see me.”
Gunner got up from the bench and walked over to the grille door of the crypt. He removed the broken padlock and undid the chain. He opened the door and pointed at the interior.
“I’ll be in there,” he said.
I peered into the dark, dank mausoleum. The heavy smell of earth and mossy stone mingled with a subtle, putrid smell I didn’t even want to think about. A narrow corridor separated the stacked tombs from the walls of the little house of death. Gunner was right. It was a perfect place to hide.
“You just get her down here and start her talking,” Gunner said, as if it were the simplest thing in the world.
I told him I’d have to think about it.
“Okay. You call me when you’re ready,” he said. “And don’t you go doing this by yourself. I believe your pal is very capable of hurting you if she feels threatened. Give me your word on this now.”
I nodded.
It was closing time. Before we moved on, Gunner peered into the mausoleum one more time. He closed the gate and rewrapped the chain
through the grille, then rigged the padlock to make it look secure. We walked up the hill in the deepening afternoon light. I put the tape recorder in my pocket.
“You ever have a really close friend who you thought you knew but you really didn’t know at all?” I asked him.
“I don’t have any friends,” he said.
Chapter 42
I saw Violet a couple of times the next week, once at Amano, a festive china shop on Wisconsin, and once at John Rosselli, Inc., an antiques shop a few doors down the block from me. I chatted with her both times like nothing was the matter, but I viewed her in a jaundiced light. She even looked different to me, like a talking doll. There was something unreal about her now. If she sensed my discomfort, she didn’t let on.
I was giving a big cocktail party at the shop in honor of Quentin Partridge, a talented local decorator and an old pal of mine, who had just come out with Inside Washington, a coffee table book documenting the houses of prominent people living in and around the city. Polo had photocopied my address book and sent out invitations a long time ago. Naturally, Violet and Grant were invited. Though they’d accepted, Violet called me up the day of the party and begged me to forgive her for not stopping by, but she and Grant were going to a private black-tie dinner for the popular former French ambassador Jean-David Levitte and his wife, Marie-Cécile, who were visiting town. Grant didn’t want to go to two events in one night, so Violet begged off. I was relieved they weren’t coming.
My party for Quentin went on much later than I expected. By the time I got home, it was dark. I was hunting for my key in the shopping-size handbag I carry with me, stuffed with things I can’t do without in case of a terrorist attack, when I heard a low, gravelly voice say, “Hey, there.”
Startled, I glanced up and saw Bob Poll, with an eely streak of lamplight shining like a scar across his face. He was wearing a sweat suit—very unlike Bob.
“Jesus! You scared me!” I cried. “What are you doing here?”
“Sorry I couldn’t get to your party.”
“I didn’t even know you’d been invited.”
Mortal Friends Page 31
