“You were the last person to see him alive.”
“Are you threatening me again?”
“Just stating an obvious fact, Mrs. Thomas. Everyone at the museum, at the Jackson Pollock event, saw you run out of the room. And everyone there also saw your husband run after you. And no one—and I mean no one—has heard from your husband since. And I know that because I’ve interviewed every one of them… except you.” Nunn let that sink in. “Right now, you’ve got a chance to talk to me unofficially. How long that’ll last…” He shrugged.
Rosemary swallowed hard. “How do you know Tony?”
“We go way back. It’s complicated.” He took the handle of her suitcase. “Where’s your car?”
She grabbed her suitcase back from him. “This—this is none of your business.”
“Last chance, Mrs. Thomas. Official or unofficial?”
Rosemary didn’t speak for a moment. Then, finally, she said, “There’s a coffee shop about five minutes away—ten blocks to the north. I’ll meet you there.”
The woman had been described to Nunn as mousy and meek, but from his first impression he’d have to say she was anything but. Still, he felt it was an act, a bruised woman acting tough. And she was good-looking, not exactly a knockout, but her sad blue eyes were beautiful, and she had a dynamite figure he hadn’t missed, and a tan courtesy of her sojourn in Mexico. He liked that she looked him squarely in the face when she talked to him, her eyes trying not to betray her vulnerability.
She was nothing like the suspects he was used to dealing with.
Olsen, what did you get me into?
She arrived five minutes after he did and slid into the red Nauga-hyde bench seat opposite. She hid her face behind a plastic menu.
Nunn studied the list of food items. Typical coffee shop fare. The place was staffed with hairnetted waitresses in white, fluffy skirts and white aprons. He said, “What can I get you?”
“Peace and quiet.”
Nunn laughed.
She put the menu down. “I’m not hungry and the greasy smell is making me ill. Just get your questions over with—please.”
“Hey, you picked the place, not me.”
“I’m noted for picking losers.” Rosemary tried to smile but her eyes filled with tears. After a moment she said, “I’m usually not a bitch. Christopher was the nasty one. Now that he’s gone, I suppose I’ve discovered the wicked side of myself.”
“Now that he’s gone?”
“Gone as in gone from my life, not gone for good.” Rosemary dried her eyes on a paper napkin. “See, this is precisely why I didn’t want to talk to you. I say one thing and you’ve warped it into an accusation.”
“Look, Mrs. Thomas, I don’t know what happened to your husband, but if something did happen, this little interview is only going to be a dress rehearsal. So in reality, I’m doing you a favor.”
Rosemary stiffened again. “Am I supposed to be thankful?”
“You can continue with your snide comments or we can work together to figure out what’s happened to your husband.”
“You see, here is where we differ. I don’t care. Christopher stepped out of my life that awful night and I’m glad.” She straightened her shoulders to emphasize what she’d said.
“So what happened that awful night?”
“You’re the one with the facts. You tell me.”
“You stormed out of the gallery and Christopher followed you. People heard you argue, slinging accusations at one another.”
Rosemary said, “I told him he was pathetic, and he told me I was frigid. But what really infuriated me was his calling me an albatross around his neck. As if I was a liability. It was my money and my devotion to his career that made him what he was.”
“That must have really angered you.”
“I already said that.” She paused. “So now you’re playing shrink?”
Nunn smiled as a waitress came over to take their order. Rosemary surprised him by ordering a hamburger with all the fixings, a double order of french fries, and a Coke. He ordered coffee, black.
“What happened after you argued?”
“I went home, Detective. I don’t know what Christopher did—and I don’t care.”
Nunn gave her a chance to add to her story. When she didn’t speak, he said, “Aren’t you leaving something out?”
“Yes. I forgot to tell you that I absolutely loathe the bastard!”
Nunn dropped his voice. “Mrs. Thomas, I told you. I’ve talked to people. All sorts of people. I know you went home—eventually.” He leaned back in the booth and saw the panic in her eyes. “I spoke to the guards. You two weren’t very discreet. They heard the both of you arguing.” He leaned forward and dropped his voice to a whisper. “Why don’t you get it off your chest? Tell me about it.”
Rosemary stared at a worn spot on the Formica tabletop. “There’s nothing to tell.”
“You did go back to the museum.”
“I went back to my office to get some peace and quiet. I was…” Her eyes watered again. “I was so ashamed of my behavior.”
Nunn nodded sympathetically. In the back of his mind, he was cursing himself for not bringing her into the station house, for not formally Mirandizing her. But now that she was talking, he didn’t want to interrupt.
“I couldn’t believe how low I had sunk.” She looked up at Nunn. “Why should I care if we divorced? We hadn’t been a real couple in ages. I was angry, I was spiteful, I was sick. After arguing outside the event, I knew that if I didn’t leave, I’d do something I really regretted. So I got in my car and drove away from him. I couldn’t possibly go home—not in my condition—so I turned around.”
“And went back to the museum, to your office?”
She nodded. “But Christopher, being Christopher, couldn’t leave it alone. He had to torture me. He had to make sure that he had the last word.”
“He followed you.”
“He couldn’t leave it alone,” she said, a bit breathless.
“He came to your office?”
“My first mistake was thinking that we could actually have a civil conversation.”
“He was mad.”
“He was irate.” She sighed. “My head had cleared … somewhat. I replayed that horrid scene in my head and decided that, above all, I wasn’t going to stoop to his childish level of hurling barbs and insults. Our marriage was over and the sooner I accepted it, the happier I would be.” She studied Nunn’s face. “One of the reasons I went to Mexico. It was time to be good to myself. To discover the old Rosemary—the one who probably attracted Christopher in the first place.”
“What happened when he followed you into your office?”
“We argued. I threw things. He threw things. It was loud and embarrassing. One of the guards came in to investigate. At that point, I was so flustered, I just picked up my purse and left.”
She locked on his eyes. He now noticed flecks of silver amid the blue, like diamond dust. They were beautiful.
“That was the last time I saw him.” She almost smiled. “And what an image it was—his beet-red, sweaty face… his snarled mouth… his shaking hands. He looked like a… gargoyle.” A sad laugh. “I’ve carried that image with me. Every time I think about the upcoming divorce and I get scared, I just picture that face. It calms me down.” She bit her lower lip. “And he was alive when I left him, Detective. Alive.”
That might have been true, but Nunn had already caught her in a lie. Although the guard had gone in to investigate, he never said anything about her leaving. As a matter of fact, the guard distinctly remembered Rosemary smiling, telling him that they just had a little marital tiff. But Nunn didn’t want to confront her—not yet.
Nunn looked at the woman sitting across from him. “I need a favor from you.” Rosemary looked up but didn’t speak. “I need you to come down to the station house and give a statement. It’ll clear up everything and then I won’t have to bother you again.”
“Why sho
uld I do that?”
“But why wouldn’t you want to do that?” Nunn asked. “Clear up this business and your name.”
“I never realized that my name was sullied.”
“It’s just a simple statement.”
“Once you put things in writing, it’s never simple.”
Nunn could see that she wasn’t going to fold that easily. “Hey, you walked out of your office, so technically the guard was the last man to see Christopher alive.”
“Exactly,” Rosemary told him. “So talk to him.”
Her hamburger came. Rosemary picked up a french fry but then let it fall on her plate. “I don’t know why I ordered this.” She pushed her plate aside. Her eyes darkened and she stood up. “I’m leaving.”
Nunn dropped a twenty on the table and followed her outside. “Mrs. Thomas—wait!”
But she didn’t stop. When she got to her car, she couldn’t unlock the door. Her hands were shaking too hard. Tears streamed down her cheeks. She dropped her keys and buried her face in her hands. “Please… just go away.”
Nunn tried to make his voice as soothing as he could. “I can go away, Mrs. Thomas. But what happened… is not going to go away. It’s never going to go away until we find your husband.”
“So go look for him and stop bothering me!”
She was sobbing by this point. Nunn picked up her car keys and placed them in his pocket. “You’re way too upset to drive.”
Her hands slowly peeled from her face. “Please, please leave me alone.”
Nunn placed his hand on her shoulder. “Make it easy on yourself. Let me take you down to the station house so you can get all of this off your chest.”
“I told you everything.”
“I know you did,” Nunn said calmly. “You were very forthright. And that’s good. All I need from you is a written statement of what you told me. That’s it. Simple.”
“Nothing in life is simple,” she said, her face suddenly older.
“Look, once I get a statement from you, I get Tony off my back, I get my superiors off my back, and that’s that.”
“I may be the jilted wife but I’m not a moron, Detective.”
“I can see that. But it doesn’t have to be complicated.” Nunn’s brain was obsessing on a single thought: how to get her voluntarily into the interview room. “Look, forget about the statement, don’t write anything down. You come down to the station house and we’ll talk. That’s all. Just you and me. We’ll talk. What do you say?”
Rosemary dried her tears on her shirtsleeve and took a deep breath.
Nunn waited for a response, but when she said nothing he gently took her elbow and guided her to his waiting car.
Diary of Jon Nunn
ANDREW F. GULLI
Once she stepped into the interview room, that look in her eyes seemed to tell me how it was going to go.
Rosemary gave her statement. Unlike our talk in the coffee shop, her voice now shook. She second-guessed and contradicted herself even more than she had earlier. But any cop will tell you the innocent are never consistent; it’s the ones who look you in the eye without blinking, say their piece as if they’re reading from a script, they’re the ones you have to watch out for.
I couldn’t help liking her. She was nothing like the suspects I’d dealt with before. At times I wanted to help her along, help clarify things, but it was useless. The wheels were turning in one direction and I had to be an unwilling participant. God—yeah, God should bless those suckers who go against the tide and get crushed—I never did back then and look where I’m at now.
After she finished giving her statement, she got up from the gray institutional chair and smoothed out her skirt. She didn’t belong in that dingy office. I drove her back to the coffee shop so that she could get her car and gave her the line about calling me if anything came up.
She called three days later asking if there were any leads. I used that as an excuse to see her. I told myself I was just doing police work… and I was.
But as I got deeper into the case, in the days and weeks that followed, I realized that I liked being around her even if her story didn’t add up.
I’ll never forget that day—bright and sunny—the kind of day when even as a cop you felt nothing bad could happen.
Sarah and I woke up at the same time. “Something bothering you?” she asked. After ten years of marriage, she could tell by how I stirred when I was sleeping if I was struggling with something.
“No, just this museum case.” I stretched out my arms. “No body or blood yet, but when he does turn up… he won’t look pretty.”
Sarah was surprised. I hardly ever talked about my cases and rarely expressed my opinions. I’d always prided myself on keeping my cool-cop distance. But something about the Thomas case had gotten to me. Sarah could see it had become personal even though I denied it.
“You sure you’re not going to find this guy on the Riviera with a case of convenient amnesia?” she asked, getting out of bed.
“I don’t think he’s coming back alive.”
“His wife must have done it.” Sarah was never the judgmental type, so I was surprised. I watched her as she walked over to the window and pulled open the curtains.
“What makes you think that?” I sat up in bed.
She turned around to face me “The plain wife, married to the dashing, philandering husband who married her for her money and status, decides she’s had enough one day and kills him.”
“How do you know all that about him?”
She smiled. “You’ve only told me all that a million times.” She walked back to the bed, got in, and snuggled up next to me. “This is your chance to shine, Jon. Our dreams may come true if a high-profile case you’re working on goes to court. You can retire, write a book—the whole world will be yours.”
I wished she had said something else.
On my way back home from work that day, I stopped at Rosemary’s house. I wanted to see her, though I couldn’t tell you why, or what I was planning to say. Part of me wanted her to crumble completely, admit everything, and that would be it. But I knew that if and when she did, I’d feel dirtied up by the whole thing. Even if she did kill him, I’d hate the part I’d played in bringing about her demise.
The maid showed me in, and as I was walking into that palatial living room of hers, I heard a man’s voice: “It was only a matter of time before the big boys got him…”
It was some guy with long hair, a scraggly beard, and dark, intense eyes. He was sitting on the sofa, scotch in hand, very much at home. Rosemary turned, studying my face, looking for a sign that might betray why I was there. I didn’t have much to say, so she smiled and said, “I’d like you to meet Hank Zacharius.”
I had heard of Zacharius, the investigative reporter. He’d been a thorn in the side of the SFPD ever since he’d uncovered some kind of corruption involving higher-ups at the department.
“Jon Nunn,” I said. He stared at me as if trying to assess what I was all about, then gave me a loose handshake, kissed Rosemary’s cheek, and left.
I looked around the place—living room big enough to fit my apartment four times, the marble this and marble that, the cut-glass chandeliers, expensive art on the walls, the swimming pool I glimpsed through the French doors—the kind of place that would make Sarah happy. Although the woman to whom all this belonged was anything but. She sat back down on the couch after Zacharius left and was looking up at me, almost questioningly. Her face had grown thinner since our first meeting, and her eyes seemed to have grown larger, prettier.
“Who are the big boys, Rosemary?”
“Oh, you know Hank Zacharius, he’s into that stuff… he has his theories.” She paused. “So why are you here? Is there any news?”
“No, nothing.” I suddenly felt awkward at being there. “I guess I just wanted to check up on you….”
Her face reddened. “I’ve told you all I know, Detective.”
I walked over to the window and look
ed down at the tree-lined valley. I thought of Christopher Thomas standing where I now stood. Nothing was enough for him, the money, the wife, the power—some people’s appetites could never be satisfied. What a bastard. I wouldn’t blame her if she did kill him. Something in me stirred, the big boys… Zacharius and his clichés…
I walked back to the sofa and sat down across from her. “Rosemary, you need to level with me.”
“I have leveled with you.” She looked steadily into my eyes.
“You have to tell me whatever you know about your husband’s shady dealings.”
She wouldn’t budge. “You really need to leave right now; my lawyer told me that I shouldn’t even be talking to you.”
“Look, it’s probably only going to get worse after this. You’re the main suspect in his disappearance. The chance of him turning up alive is zero. You have to give me some information that’ll point the police in another direction—take the spotlight away from you. This is no time to be worrying about protecting the family name.”
She sighed. “I guess there were rumors about forgeries, about drugs. He knew about the rumors. He thought they were funny. I never took any of them seriously.”
The sky had started to darken. “What was Zacharius—?”
Rosemary looked up behind me. I turned. The maid had come in; behind her were two guys I recognized from the department—Grygera and Swanson.
“What is it?” I asked. For some reason, I had thought they’d come to talk to me, but, no, it was Rosemary they were looking at. I turned to her. I’ll never forget the look in her eyes.
Grygera said, “Rosemary Thomas, I have a warrant for your arrest.”
7
JONATHAN SANTLOFER
Joseph Arthur Kroege hated the summer. Not just the heat, but the attitude it seemed to foster, the total lack of professionalism among his museum employees. As if the warm weather were not only an excuse to play, but justification to drop all responsibility. Each year he knew half his staff would be vacationing at one European shoreline or another, although he didn’t know which and didn’t care.
No Rest for the Dead Page 8
