The Pocket Wife

by Susan Crawford

  He tugs his jacket over his head and runs to the neighbor’s house across the street. At first there’s no answer, and then a woman comes to the door. She’s small and pretty and clearly wary of his presence there on her front porch.

  “Christine Reich?”

  “Yes?” She doesn’t open the screen, and who could blame her after what’s happened practically in her front yard? He shows her his ID, his badge, tells her he knows that the men questioned her the night of Celia’s death, that he’d just like to ask a couple follow-up questions.

  “All right,” she says, but she doesn’t sound too sure. Neither does she invite him in. Water drizzles through the cracks of her overhang and streams down Jack’s collar. “Like I told the officer before,” she says, “I was out of town that week. I wasn’t home when my neighbor was . . . was so brutally— I wasn’t home.”

  “Right. Got it.” Jack glances down at his notes. “This isn’t about that night in particular. Did you ever see anyone coming and going from the Steinhausers’?”

  She gives him a funny look. “Of course.”

  “During the day, I meant.”

  “Sure.”

  “Who?”

  She shifts her weight onto one leg and juts out her hip, crosses her arms over her chest. “The boys’ friends, the neighbor down the street—Dana, I think, is her name—two or three other women—friends of Celia’s, I guess. They’d pull up in their cars.”

  “How about lately? Any unusual visitors?”

  She starts to open her mouth, and then she snaps it back shut like a turtle, standing there in her green slacks, her little green print tank top. Jack waits. He taps his pen on the memo pad, doesn’t say a word.

  “There was someone else.”

  “Yeah? Who was that?” He keeps his eyes on the pad like he’s only half listening, the little dance he does with skittish witnesses—makes them think it’s their idea to spill the beans, not his.

  “I guess it’s been a few weeks now, but there was this guy. He used to come over in the afternoon—lunchtime, maybe—and take off after a couple hours.”

  “His car?”

  “He never drove. He was on foot. I always knew when he was walking up to her front door, because her dog would bark.”

  Jack feels sick. On foot. Kyle would be on foot. “Could you describe him?”

  Christine shrugs. “No. Not really. I wasn’t all that interested.”

  “Was it a kid? One of her students?”

  “No,” she says, and Jack is so relieved he could rip through the screen and hug her. “I don’t think so. From the back anyway, he looked like a grown man. Medium height, medium everything, pretty much. Usually wore a hat—more of a cap, a beret.” Somewhere behind her a baby wails. “If you’ll excuse me,” she says, and Jack nods.

  “Thanks,” he says, with a little more enthusiasm than he’s meant to, and she snaps the heavy front door shut and clicks the locks in place before he’s even turned around.

  He walks up the block, passing Lon Nguyen’s house to knock on Wanda Needles’s door. Both Lon and Dana mentioned her being outside the afternoon Celia died, but he strikes out there. Wanda just that morning started a new job, a teenage baby-sitter tells him through the screen door, and he leaves his card, asks her to have Wanda call him.

  By the time he makes it back across the street, the rain has nearly stopped. The air smells clean and wet and heavy with the scent of flowers, like too much perfume. Water slides down from the leaves and from the Steinhausers’ roof, running into puddles next to the front steps, soaking into their flooded lawn. Steam floats up from the street, enfolding Ashby Lane.

  He flips his key ring toward the car just as the rabbit flies past and stops several feet away at the edge of the sidewalk, only it isn’t a rabbit. It’s a cat, he can see, now that it’s finally still and the rain no longer blurs its features. It’s a kitten. He squats on one knee, and the tiny creature runs to him, climbs into his lap, clings there with its needle claws. He reaches down to pet the spotted head, and the kitten moves back, quickly, biting his hand. “What a little scrapper,” Jack says. “Where’d you come from anyway?” He figures it’s a stray that Celia was feeding, maybe she and some of the other neighbors. There was no mention of a kitten in the reports, only the dog. On impulse Jack picks up the biting cat and sticks it in his car. He turns the key, and his back tires catch in the gravel at the side of Ashby Lane. The kitten presses its nose against the glass of the backseat window, its front paws on the padded insides of the door, its large ears aimed at the front seat, where a blues song oozes from the radio.

  His cell phone buzzes on the seat, and Jack reaches over to grab it. Rob.

  “Hey,” Rob says, “Jack. What do you know? That guy—that Peter guy—he phoned in this morning about his wife.” His voice is patchy with static.

  “Oh, yeah? What’d he say?”

  “That she took off. He just wanted to let you know—us know—on account of the case, I guess.”

  “When?”

  “Last night.”

  “Good for her,” Jack says. “Unless he’s got her buried in the backyard.”

  “The husband’s a lawyer, right?”

  “Right. She leave a note?”

  “Yeah. But it was strange, according to him. Part of a poem. It didn’t sound like her at all, he said,” and for a second Jack feels a shiver, like an unwelcome premonition, up his spine.

  “He bring it in? The husband? Did he bring it down to the station?”

  “Uh-uh. I had him read it to me, though. I wrote it down, if I can find . . . Yeah. Here it is. ‘Is it perfume from a dress that makes me so digress?’”

  “Weird,” Jack says. “Listen. Thanks for the update. I’m headed in now,” but he stops for a moment, sits in the Crown Vic, even though the rain has stopped and the sun is popping out from the clouds. It didn’t sound like her at all, the husband said, and Jack can’t help remembering how oddly Dana acted in his office—funny, but jumpy as hell. Familiar, although he can’t put his finger on just why.

  He’s heard neighbors describing suspects in murder investigations the same way Peter just described his wife—There was something off; he wasn’t himself, or She was so sweet, and then all of a sudden, she was like a different person. He’s heard statements like these far too often to take lightly what Dana’s husband said, even if he is a total jerk. Is he trying to frame her, or has Dana gone off the rails, and if so, where the hell is she?

  CHAPTER 22

  On her second morning at the hotel, Dana encounters Ronald on the busy street outside. He’s dressed in a business-casual outfit, a tie but no jacket, and he’s heading down the street.

  “Ronald!” Dana darts after him. Her heel catches in a grate in the sidewalk.

  “Dana?”

  “Yes. We keep running into each other.”

  “Well.” Ronald stops. “I don’t know if I’d say that.”

  “No,” she says, “I guess not.”

  “What are you doing here?” Ronald looks confused. He runs his hand through his hair in what might have been a suave, rock-band gesture but instead leaves him with a deer-in-the-headlights look. His overgelled hair stands stiff and upright, like a small wall.

  “I’m staying here. I’m at the St. Giles. Room 316. They’re fumigating our house.”

  “No kidding! I’m staying there, too.” Ronald falls into step beside her. “I can’t use my house until they’ve done everything they need to do with it. But it’s fine. I told Detective Ross to take all the time he needs. I have no desire to go back there. Ever. ‘Take all the time in the world,’ I told him. ‘I never want to see the place again’—my wife’s blood splattered all over the floor, that stupid overpriced vase smashed into smither—”

  “Right. So what is ‘everything,’ exactly?”

  Ronald shrugs. “Beats me,” he says. “But they’ve still got that damn tape up.”

  Dana looks at him.

  “The crime tape? Th
e yellow plastic stuff all over our hedges? Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed. All the time we . . . well, I really. Celia wasn’t all that good a gardener, truth be told—the work, the time, the energy . . .” He sighs. “All for naught.”

  “Naught, really. You did have that ‘Best Yard’ sign up for quite a—”

  “A month. Yes. Last May.”

  “Do you want to join me?” Dana stops in front of a little tea shop. “Cup of coffee?”

  Ronald glances at his watch. “Maybe a quick one.”

  “Were you on your way to work?”

  “Yes,” he says. “Thank God for work. It takes my mind off Celia.”

  He tugs at the door, and small bells jingle. Dana minces inside. Her foot hurts from the lopsided heel; it puts her at an odd angle. Inside, the lights are far too bright; their auras vibrate and move in spirals around them. “So many halos,” she says, “so little time.”

  “Hmm.” Ronald appears not to have heard her. He scans a blackboard tacked up over the counter.

  “I can see the writing on the wall,” Dana quips, but again Ronald seems not to hear.

  “Coffee, please,” he says to no one in particular. He turns to Dana. “Two coffees?”

  “Sure.” She nods. “Thanks. But decaf for me.”

  “D’ja get that?” Ronald says to the air, and Dana wanders off toward a small table near the door. The light glares from the ceiling, making the place mats dance, making the menus glimmer. When she sits, she sees there is a man behind the counter, bent over, picking out pastries, bagging doughnuts and sweet rolls, which he hands over the counter to a woman in a pencil skirt, and Dana feels a little better, knowing that Ronald gave their order to an actual entity. The chair rocks beneath her, and the doorman from the hotel comes in. Or is that him? Everyone looks familiar, and she wonders if she remembers them from the hotel, if they’ve all come here for breakfast.

  Moving into the hotel has proved not to be the panacea for sleep she’d hoped it would be. Clearly, it was only Ronald’s room that soothed her—his messy bed, the newspapers strewn on tabletops, the shaving paraphernalia scattered across the bathroom counters—the ambience of Ronald, or so she’d thought. Now she isn’t sure. She roots around in her purse for her dark glasses and puts them on. The lights retreat a little, still teeming but less brightly. The sparkles on the place mats dim.

  “Here we are.” Ronald slides into a chair and deposits their coffees on the table between them. “This one’s the decaf,” he says. “There’s a D on your—”

  “Thanks. Here,” she says, reaching for her bag. Let me pay for mine.”

  “Don’t be silly. I’m happy for the company.”

  Dana nods. “How are you doing?”

  “Okay, I guess,” he says. “How ’bout you?”

  Dana shrugs. “You’re the one who just lost a spouse.” Spouse, she thinks, what an odd word. She wonders why she chose it and if she herself has also lost a spouse. If the two of them together were spice. Or possibly, all things considered, spicy.

  Ronald squints back at the blackboard as if he’s missed something. “I’d lost her anyway. She was leaving me. Not exciting enough for her, I guess.”

  Dana’s mind sparks off in different directions. She wonders if Peter and the Tart tie each other up. She thinks of borrowing a set of handcuffs from Detective Moss and fastening Peter to the bedpost. Or maybe the toilet. The toilet and his cell phone. With great effort she pulls herself back to the conversation. Beneath her elbows the place mat glitters like Oz.

  “How did you know Celia was leaving you?” she says, a bit more bluntly than she’d intended. Unfiltered words spill out all on their own these days.

  “She said so.”

  “Why?”

  “There was someone else,” Ronald says. “There was another man.”

  “So she was planning to . . . what? Take off with this guy?” It must have been Peter, Dana thinks. It had to be Peter. Her heart pounds. “People say they’re leaving all the time. It doesn’t mean they will.”

  “Apparently she’d been to the bank,” Ronald says. “That detective—Ross, is it?—told me she’d made a withdrawal from an account I didn’t even know she had. It wasn’t enough to move to California or anything, but it was enough for a couple months’ rent somewhere.”

  “Moss?”

  “Yeah. That’s right. Detective Moss.”

  “So what happened to the money?”

  Ronald shrugs. “Who knows?”

  “So when did she tell you she was leaving you for this other guy?”

  Ronald looks down into his coffee cup as if he were reading tea leaves. “A few days before she died. Where’s Peter?”

  “Peter isn’t here. He’s at home. In the yard or something. Supervising the . . . um, the fumigation.”

  She finishes off her decaf. The room is spinning, a haze of color and light—voices hum around them. The sounds in the coffee shop are deafening, and Ronald, when she glances up, looks exactly like the doorman back at the hotel. His nose is red and inflated like a balloon, like Ronald McDonald’s. “To be honest,” she says, “I left him home on purpose. Actually, we aren’t fumigating the house. In fact, he’s probably at work right now. I had to leave. I wanted to kill him, so I left.”

  Ronald snickers, reaches for the English muffin.

  “I’m serious.”

  “What? About killing your husband?” Ronald lets out a light little guffaw. “That’s why we have gun laws,” he says. “We’d all be dead if we had guns handy during hormonal upsurges or—”

  “No,” Dana says. “I mean I really wanted Peter dead. I felt as if I could murder him. Have you ever felt that way, Ronald? Like you could kill someone?”

  Ronald stops laughing. He looks at her across the table, and Dana feels the madness clawing its way out, spilling through her eyes. Please, she thinks, please please please, although even she isn’t sure quite what she wants.

  Ronald clears his throat, surprises her. “Yes,” he says.

  “Well, have you?”

  “What? Killed anyone?”

  “Yes.”

  Ronald laughs. “Damn,” he says. “You had me going for a minute there.”

  “Because sometimes I think I might have.”

  Ronald stares at her.

  “I mean, sometimes things happen so quickly—all these lights and noises.” She hears her voice all around her but at the same time far away, like a TV or a radio playing somewhere in the distance, caught up in the air. An echo. “It’s as if,” she says, “everything is so incredibly real that it isn’t real at all.” She stops. Ronald looks scared. He fumbles with his wallet, taking out a couple of bills for the tip. Dana wonders if she’s misjudged him, if Ronald is an innocent in all this. A victim. She’ll reach out to him, tell him what she knows, put his mind at ease. “Listen.” Her head buzzes, and the ceiling lights flash bright and hot. “I think this ‘other guy’ of Celia’s might have been Peter. Celia had a picture she’d taken of him with a woman, with his secretary, actually. They were leaning over toward each other in a restaurant. It was in her cell. Celia’s cell.”

  “Yeah?” Ronald looks down at the two bills on the table, studies them as if he’s never seen actual currency before.

  “Did you see it?”

  “Not that I— No. Not that I recall.”

  “You said you thought you’d seen him somewhere before. Remember? At the brunch? You said you thought you’d—”

  “Right. I did say that. It was probably on the street, though. I mean, we are neighbors.”

  “And then that day at the Root Seller, you kept . . . you know, you kept looking around for Peter, trying to get a look at him. Because of the picture, right? In the fucking—”

  “He wasn’t there that day, though. He wasn’t with you, you said. How could I be looking around for someone who wasn’t even there?”

  “You were going through my purse!” Her voice is suddenly loud in the rumble of conversations aro
und them. Everyone stops talking or drinking coffee or eating muffins to stare at this woman shrieking in the middle of a humdrum weekday morning. “Why? What were you looking for, Ronald?”

  “Nothing,” he says in a very calm voice, as if he’s talking to a toddler about to run into the street. “I told you. I was zipping up your purse.”

  “I know what you told me, Ronald. But what were you really doing? What were you looking for? A picture of Peter?” Dana can feel her heart pounding. She can feel her whole face go hot and red. She feels a sudden rage lurch through her—for Ronald, for Peter, for Celia, dead as she may be. She feels totally crazy. Out of control. “A picture of your dead wife’s lover? Help me out here!”

  “I can’t, Dana. Jeez. Find a shrink, will you?”

  “Just tell me the truth! You’re telling me everything’s in there that was in there?”

  “In the phone?”

  Dana nods.

  “Sure. I guess. Unless we have a grainy-photo thief.” Ronald manages a tiny, strangled-sounding laugh. “Look,” he says, “I’ll check again. Promise. I’ll check when I get back in tonight, and if I see it—if I see anything at all, I’ll ring your room. Three-sixteen, right?”

  “Right.” The lights blink bright and blaze down on them, melting the butter, melting her brain. The paisley curtain at the window vibrates and swarms with flowers. People are beginning to go back to their food, to their conversations, but Dana’s voice still hangs in the air. Her anger buzzes around the room like a swarm of bees. She jumps up from the table and bolts through the front door.