She speeds across the bridge, slick with intermittent rain. Behind her a car honks, a light, quick tap of the horn, a reminder to keep moving—a suggestion, nothing more. She glances into her rearview mirror at the tailgating car, far too close on the slick bridge. Light rushes down from a streetlamp, illuminating a small, round white face behind the windshield. In the dank and wobbly light, it’s barely discernible, but for Dana, her feet planted on the threshold between brilliance and madness, the face is clear and luminescent, unmistakably the face in Celia’s phone.
It’s over in a moment; the car behind her disappears in traffic, but she finds she no longer wants to go into the city. She turns around, but she can’t bring herself to go home. Not just yet. She’ll drive around until she gets her bearings, until she slows herself down. The snoring husband she no longer trusts, the house that fills her with foreboding, another night to pace and ramble as the sun claws its way up from the ground, lighting the sky with a bright, unwelcome day—these things are bad enough without Celia strapped across the backs of Dana’s eyelids, dying on a bamboo floor, her blood like flames licking out from the splayed, crimped ends of her hair.
CHAPTER 4
It isn’t the murder on Ashby Lane that has Jack Moss staring at the blank wall across from his desk in Paterson. The drama from the night before, the violence in a middle-class New Jersey suburb, is not particularly jarring to a veteran detective who cut his teeth in Manhattan.
It is the departure of his wife that makes him slump, listless, in his swivel chair, his eyes riveted to the ugly mint green of the station wall, to the black marks around the window. He’s had no sleep. His thoughts slog through his brain, sifting through suspects in the Steinhauser killing. The husband? A rejected lover? An angry boss? No signs of forced entry, so she might have known her killer. There was an unlocked window on the side of the house, no footprints on account of gravel under the window. He picks up a pen and scribbles down his thoughts, but they are perfunctory and lackluster on the white page.
It was after eleven when he got home. Ann was still there, but only because it would have taken all the joy out of her departure if she’d left him while he crouched in the Steinhausers’ living room with his evidence bag. If she’d pulled her little red Honda onto the highway as he sped toward home, her leaving would have lost its bite. Instead she’d struggled out to her car with several fairly random items, he’d thought at the time—an overnight bag and a few books, a small reading light that fastened to a headboard, her UNICEF coffee mug with ethnically diverse children holding hands around the rim.
“Where’re you going?” he’d called to her, but she’d only stepped up her trek to the car, hadn’t even turned around—a small blond lemming with her sights on the cliff.
Celia Steinhauser’s being clubbed with a vase in her foyer wasn’t something he had planned to ruin his anniversary, although he had put himself on the case. He knew the name. Steinhauser. Same as Kyle’s GED teacher. He’d phoned his wife as he sped toward the victim’s house and then called her again from the Steinhausers’ front porch. Finally he’d called her from the lobby outside the emergency room at the hospital, where the dead woman’s husband informed him, sobbing, that the vase was something they’d bought together at an art show, that Celia thought its unusually heavy weight was a good thing at the time—their dog wouldn’t bang into a table and send it crashing to the floor—and that, on top of everything else, the dog went missing after Celia was attacked. Jack had patted the man on the back and slipped through the automatic doors into the swampy heat of the parking lot. “Sorry, sweetheart!” he’d nearly shouted into Ann’s voice mail, as sirens clotted the air and screamed toward the ER. “I’m on my way.”
At the time he hadn’t realized why she didn’t answer either her cell or the house phone in the kitchen, but after she’d left, when he walked inside and saw the cake from the French bakery, the scripted “Happy Anniversary” in purple buttercream, when it was, in essence, hours too late, he knew. He also knew that her anger had been building for a long time. He’s never really understood the milkiness of women; he doesn’t want to. He thinks it might be worse, the way they take a sharp, hard thing and stretch it into smoke and wisps of summer nights—ghosts that curl around the bedpost and lie in wait outside the kitchen door. Men, Jack thinks, deal with things head-on, and then they dust themselves off and blunder through their lives.
He gets up from his desk and stretches. All night he tossed and turned, and now he’s dying for a cigarette even though he hasn’t smoked in years. He walks into the break room and tries not to look at the half-empty box of doughnuts on the table in the middle of the room. “Hey, Rob,” he says, and his partner nods, gesturing toward his mouth and then the open doughnut box.
“How’s the case coming along?” he says. “The woman on Ashby Lane?”
Jack pours himself a cup of coffee from the machine, muddy and tasteless. “Night shift left a report on my desk. Said somebody might’ve been at the crime scene last night after we left.”
“Who?”
“No idea. The patrolman said there was a light inside the house, but the place was locked up tight as a drum. No forced entry. Said it was possible it was headlights coming through a window from the street behind.”
“Huh. Murderer returning to the scene of the crime?”
“Could be. Anything on the missing girl?”
“They found her car not far from where she worked, stripped, with some blood on the front seat. I got two calls from Lenora at the prosecutor’s office,” Rob tells him. “Lenora the Luscious.” He rolls his eyes. “She wants an update on both cases.”
“Already? Crap!” The first assistant prosecutor has been even more of a pain than usual lately, her spike heels inches from whatever case they’re on. Jack gulps down the coffee and nearly gags. His stomach is a huge knot, between Ann leaving and his eating only crusts of burned things he found in the oven in the middle of the night—the charred remains of potatoes and roasted brussels sprouts.
Probably the missing teenage girl is with her boyfriend in the city, which is usually how these things turn out, but he’s hardly an authority when it comes to kids. His one remaining son is living with a girl named Maryanne in a place even felons avoid if they have a choice. Rosie’s Rooms, not far from Jack’s office. Jack hasn’t met the girlfriend and quite possibly he never will. He hears just scraps of things from Margie, who is totally unreliable as a witness—or anything else, for that matter. If he interviewed his ex-wife on a case, he’d toss out most of what she said. Still, Margie’s all he’s got now, the only connection to their son. And if it’s true what she told him when she dropped the ball with her AA program a few months back, he might soon have a grandchild. Sometimes he believes this, but usually he doesn’t, since it wouldn’t be the first time Margie’s lied about a pregnancy. She told him she was pregnant a few weeks after she threw Jack out. She wasn’t. It was just one of the cards she played.
He holds his pencil between the first and second fingers of his right hand, exactly the way he held a cigarette for twenty-seven years. Margie told him in a more lucid call, in which she was much vaguer about Maryanne’s pregnancy, that Kyle’s almost finished with his free prep courses. He’s ready for the GED, which she gratefully attributed to his teacher’s ability to get through to him. Ms. Steinhauser. Not exactly a common name, which is why Jack jumped on the case. His own inability to reach his son is a constant torment, a constant reminder that he wasn’t there for either of his boys through all the years that led up to Joey’s dying in Afghanistan, to the day he ran over a roadside bomb on some random, unremembered mission. And Jack wasn’t there for Margie when their son’s death knocked her off the wagon so suddenly and with such force that she, too, might have died if Kyle hadn’t come home from school in time to find her unconscious and barely breathing. He dropped out right after that, in his junior year, two months to the day after his brother’s death. Jack doesn’t blame him. He blames hi
mself.
He sits with his office door ajar, listening to conversation in the break room. Lenora, he decides as a slightly lilting voice drifts up the hall. He frowns. The star assistant prosecutor is an iron fist in a silk glove, as Rob has pointed out more than once, his eyes sparking at the mere mention of her name. She knows her way around the precinct—burrowed in like a little tick from the time she first hired on, earning a reputation for moving through her cases and sometimes theirs with the savvy and precision of a twenty-year veteran. She’s pretty, but she’s not exactly warm and fuzzy. He yawns. She looks young enough to be his daughter, but probably she isn’t. Jack knows from Ann’s arsenal of creams and lotions, and from the hefty charges she’s run up on credit cards, that money really can buy youth. At least women think so. Lenora is cool. Impenetrable. She makes him think of the desserts in the tearoom where his mother dragged him once on a nightmare visit to see his aunt and her two giggly daughters, reminds him of the small porcelain princess tops stuck in skirt-shaped scoops of vanilla ice cream.
He looks up as Lenora and Rob approach the doorway. Their voices drift in from the hall and hang in air stale and humid from the ancient, crappy air conditioner. Lenora’s voice is surprisingly slow, contrasting the quick tap-taps of her designer heels. It has a slight trace of long-abandoned southern roots. Alabama, he thinks he remembers Rob telling him. Or Arkansas.
“I’ll get back to you when I hear from the parents,” Rob tells her, and her answer is eclipsed by the sudden gasping sound of the A/C in its death throes.
“Morning, Jack.” She pokes her head in, points her airbrushed face, her perfect nose, toward a stack of papers on his desk. “Rob has his hands full with the missing-teen case. He tells me you’re working the homicide, the Steinhauser murder, on your own for now.”
Jack nods. “I’m good.”
“You sure? The media’s going nuts on this one. Attractive woman. Hero to the downtrodden, teacher of the underprivileged. A regular Mother Teresa. I’m already starting to get pressure down at the office. They want it cleared up quick—like yesterday.” She snaps her fingers. The faint smell of flowers sticks in the damp air. “I really need your help.”
“I’m on it.” Jack nods again, hopes he doesn’t look as lousy as he feels. He clears his throat. “Got some interviews lined up this morning,” he tells her, and she smiles. Her teeth are crazy white. He thinks again of the ice-cream princesses.
“Rob,” she says. “Don’t let this missing-teen case turn into another headliner,” and she waves a little wave and takes off down the hall. Jack can’t help himself; he follows her with his eyes.
When she’s left—when the clicking of her heels grows faint and disappears, Rob abandons his post in the doorway and sits down finally at his desk. “She is really . . .”
“Yeah,” Jack says. “She is really. You look like a fawn.”
“I think she might like me.” Rob’s eyes are still a little glazed, his mouth half open. He is seriously starstruck.
“Just might.” Jack drags himself to his feet. “Close your mouth, will ya,” he says, and then he walks out to the break room, grabs another cup of muddy coffee, pins his hopes on the caffeine.
He swivels his chair over to the reports on the Steinhauser case. The husband is due in soon. Ronald. They met briefly at the hospital, and then there were the phone calls back and forth about the family dog that had gone missing after the murder. He senses that Ronald’s hiding something, but the question is never whether people are hiding something, it’s whether what they’re hiding is what he needs to solve the case, especially a murder case, which this clearly is. He knows he has to be on his toes, but he feels as if he’s moving through a fog; the day is thick like honey. He walks over to the men’s room and splashes cold water on his face. When he gets back to his desk, Ronald is already there.
“Mr. Steinhauser,” he says, and Ronald clears his throat, sticks out a shaky little hand. “Good to see you again,” Jack says. “Thanks for coming in.”
“Sure,” Ronald says, and Jack is surprised by the strength of his grip.
“Follow me,” Jack says, and together they tromp down the hall to the interrogation room. “Have a seat.” He reaches out, pulls a chair over closer, sits down as Ronald sags onto the chair on the other side of the table.
Jack picks up his pen. “So.” He thumbs through the police report, looks at the places where he’s penciled in an R. “You ever find the dog?”
“No,” Ronald says. “But I’ll go back tonight and search the neighborhood.” He leans forward over the table.
“You got home at eight-thirty last night. That right, Ronald?”
“Yes.” Ronald nearly whispers. He’s leaning in so close that Jack can smell his breath, still pungent with last night’s scotch; it wafts out in small, rancid puffs.
“Was that normal for you, getting home so late?”
“No. There was an accident. A rear-end collision. It was like dominoes, all the cars. This young woman, this texter, was . . . um, texting. ”
“What time do you generally get home?”
“It varies,” Ronald says. “Usually between six and six-thirty.”
“Did you phone your wife to tell her you’d be late?”
“No.”
“Why not?” Jack leans back in his seat, waving the pen like a small baton in the air over his ear.
Ronald shrugs. “I don’t know why. She— Celia. My wife taught class sometimes in the evenings. I lose track of when. Lost track.”
“So you thought she might be at work?”
“I guess so. I didn’t actually stop to figure out if it was her work night or not.”
“Why’s that?” Something’s definitely off. If Jack were two hours late getting home, he wouldn’t even think about whether Ann was at the house or not; he’d just speed-dial her and leave a message if she didn’t answer. He feels almost smug for a second, and then he remembers Ann taking off in the Honda, half the contents of their bedroom crammed into the backseat.
“Why’s what, Detective?”
“Why didn’t you stop to figure out if she’d be home or not?”
“I don’t know.”
“Hazard a guess,” Jack says, and he flips the pen around again, twirling it.
“She would have been pissed,” Ronald says.
“Seems like she would’ve been more pissed when you didn’t call her. I know my wife would hit the roof if I came strolling in two hours late without calling.”
Ronald shrugs.
“You two having problems?”
“Well,” Ronald says, “I guess. Nothing major.”
“Another guy?”
Ronald looks down at his shoes. “Not that I know of,” he says, but he is clearly lying. He fidgets with his fingers, folds them in his lap.
“Your wife have any enemies you know of?”
“No,” Ronald says. “Everybody liked Celia. Her students, the neighbors, everybody.”
“How about you? You like your wife?”
“Of course. I loved my wife, Detective. Always have.”
“Women are funny,” Jack says, and he leans over his paperwork like he’s reading it. “Mysteries.”
“I’m not sure what you—”
“Were you aware that Celia—sorry. Were you aware that Mrs. Steinhauser withdrew five thousand dollars from the bank three days before she died?”
“No. She— We—”
“Had a joint account?”
“Yes.”
“Well, apparently she had another one. A savings. Her name only. Same bank.”
“I didn’t know,” Ronald says, and Jack believes him.
“Was she planning on going somewhere?”
“No. Not that I knew of. Not that she told me about.”
“That kind of cash—maybe she was going on a little vacation? Putting money down on an apartment?”
Ronald clears his throat. His foot taps against the chair leg, his shiny black shoe.
> “Any pressing credit-card debt? Overdue bills, that sort of thing?”
Ronald squints, screws up his face like he’s pondering this. “We did. Yes. We had a large credit-card balance on one of our cards, on the . . . Anyway, we’d talked—well, mostly Celia talked—at length about paying it off, or paying it down at least.”
“Any particular rush on that, Ronald?”
“No. Well, yes. We wanted to do some traveling in the fall.”
“That right?”
“She was a—you know this already—she was a teacher. A lot of her students were from South America, Central America. She spoke a little Spanish. We thought about going to Guatemala, Costa Rica—someplace like that.”
“So you wanted to start out with a clean slate.”
Ronald chuckles. “Well, cleaner slate.”
Jack smiles, leans back in his seat. “So you can rack up the debt all over again.”
“Right. Part of the marriage vows—till debt do us part.”
Jack laughs. He leans in again over the table and scratches his head with the pencil. “Thing is, Ronald. Wouldn’t she—Mrs. Steinhauser—wouldn’t she just write a check for that?”
Ronald stops smiling.
Jack looks at his watch. One of the neighbors is due in three minutes. A Lon Nguyen. He gets up, watching Ronald rise to his feet and stand there in his shiny shoes.
“Thanks for coming in, Mr. Steinhauser. Ronald.” He holds out his hand. Ronald shakes it for the second time that morning, but this time his grip is limp and sticky.
“I’m at the St. Giles Hotel, over by— You’ll let me know,” Ronald says, “if anything . . . if you turn up anything.”
Jack looks at him. “Depends on what it is.” He hands Ronald his card, tells him to call if he thinks of something that might be helpful. “Oh,” he says when Ronald’s stepped into the hall. “You go back inside your house last night, Ronald?”
“No. Went straight from the hospital to the hotel. Drank myself into a stupor, to be honest.”
The Pocket Wife Page 3
