by Lynn Kostoff
On the way to Anne’s, he passed Stanley Tedros’s place and saw a large moving van parked outside the front door.
He slowed, then found a spot to turn around, and pulled into the driveway.
Corrine Tedros stepped out of the house, holding a clipboard.
Ben sat for a moment behind the wheel, waiting for his better judgment to null and void the decision he was already following by lifting the door handle and stepping out of the car.
He reached back inside for the small notebook lying on the dash that he used for things-to-do and grocery lists.
He’d read the field notes on the interview with Corrine Tedros in the murder book and had noticed something. The time line in her statement was fuzzy. There was a clear sequence early in the afternoon but a gap during the period the coroner had established for the murder.
It was small and probably meant nothing.
But it had caught his attention and nagged, just as her reaction, the backward glance and then puzzlement and rage that had flashed across her features, had at the crime scene.
Corrine Tedros watched him approach. She wore a scooped-neck summer dress and a pair of thin-soled sandals, and her hair was loose, falling free and just past her shoulders. She was almost as tall as he was.
Two men came out the front door with a metal steamer trunk and loaded it in the truck.
Ben introduced himself to Corrine and asked if he could trouble her for a few minutes of her time. Her eyes were a light brown, instead of the blue a first impression would lead you to expect. When she shook back her hair, he saw clusters of interlocking opals studding her earlobes. Her mouth was a little wide for her face despite the definition from a set of high cheekbones. Ben thought she was more striking than beautiful.
“You’ll have to excuse the mess,” she said, after Ben had followed her into the kitchen. “We’re trying to sort through Stanley’s things and separate keepsakes from Salvation Army donations.” She drew them each a glass of ice water and suggested they sit out back where they’d be away from the movers.
They sat on a diagonal to each other in a pair of striped canvas sling chairs, Ben getting a view of Corrine’s long left thigh when she crossed her legs, a view that she made no effort to change by adjusting a hemline.
She took a sip of ice water, then cradled the glass in her lap. “What exactly is this about?” she asked. “I already talked to one of the other detectives from Homicide. I think his name was Hatch. Did something new turn up in the investigation?”
“I wish I could tell you yes,” Ben said, “but we’re still hitting walls wherever we turn. I’m going back and dotting a few i’s in the field notes for the report, that’s all. Routine stuff.”
He could ask a few innocuous questions and back off and forget the whole idea. Or he could nudge things a little and see where they went. Ben figured this was probably the only chance he’d get.
“On the day Mr. Tedros was killed,” he said, “you spent the early afternoon with a friend shopping and then catching a movie, right?”
“Yes. Terri Iles. We also stopped for some decaf and yogurt at the mall.”
“Before or after the movie?”
“Before,” Corrine said slowly.
“And afterwards?”
“I’m not following you, Officer Decovic.”
“After the movie, did you drop Ms. Iles off at home?”
“No. We went in separate cars. Terri had to pick up her daughter at a friend’s.”
“And you? What did you do after the movie?”
“I already told all this to Detective Hatch. Why are we going over it again?”
Ben assured her once more that it was all a matter of backtracking and fleshing out the initial notes for the official draft of the report. A routine job, tedious but necessary, that he implied had been dumped on him.
“Detective Hatch knows his stuff,” Ben said, “but you wouldn’t believe his handwriting. It’s pure scratch. On top of that, his notes are a slash-and-burn shorthand.”
Ben turned to an empty page in his notebook and went through the motions of pretending to decipher it. “Right here, for example,” he said. “Your husband’s name is written down, and there’s a couple check marks next to it and then something that looks like ‘bankers’ and that followed by what looks like ‘Clear’.”
Corrine Tedros told him her husband had been playing golf in a foursome with some representatives from Wachovia Bank.
Ben nodded and made some random marks in the notebook.
“Couple more things here,” he said, squinting at the page. “Did you go straight home after the movie?”
“No, I had some shopping to do.”
Ben glanced up from the page. “But you’d already been shopping with Ms. Iles, correct?”
“Not that kind of shopping, Officer Decovic,” she said. “I went to Walgreens on Harper Street.”
“Did you take Queensland or Armstrong?”
“Why does that matter?”
“Helps clarify the time sequence, that’s all,” Ben said. “If you’d been on Queensland, you must have gotten held up, what with the traffic jammed because of the wreck. Two cars and a tractor trailer. Right where Queensland intersects with Old Market. A real mess. Tied everything up for close to an hour.”
“Oh, that’s what it was,” Corrine said, tilting her head and shaking back her hair. “I never got close enough to see what caused the hold-up. First chance, I got off Queensland and on Armstrong and then took Everest to Harper.”
“And then you went straight home?”
Corrine nodded. “I took a short nap and a long bath. My husband and I had dinner plans that evening.”
“You wouldn’t by any chance still have the receipt? From Walgreens, I mean.” Ben busied himself with turning a page and flipping it back, then looked up and said, “The receipt would have the date and time and store number on it.
“It seems to me we’ve gone beyond dotting an i here, Officer,” Corrine said, setting the glass next to the chair and standing up. “Where are you trying to take this?”
He looked past Corrine and down the yard toward the boathouse. He took his time answering. The grass was still trampled where they’d found Stanley’s body.
“I’m trying to clarify your whereabouts during the time of the murder so that we’ll have a clean timeline for all the principals. It goes in the report,” he said. “A bureaucratic formality.”
A patch of red had risen at the base of Corrine’s throat. “You made it sound as if I was a suspect.”
Ben propped the notebook on his knee and built a tic-tac-toe game at the bottom of the page, letting her statement ride.
He closed the notebook just as Corrine Tedros stepped over and stood in front of him, blocking his way out of the chair and forcing him to lean back and crane his neck to make eye contact.
“For your information, Officer,” she began, “I did not save the receipt from Walgreens. I stopped to buy some tampons. Since they are items I am not likely to return, I did not see any reason to save the receipt for the purchase.”
The patch of red at the base of Corrine Tedros’s neck deepened. “I came home with the tampons,” she continued, “and I inserted one in my vagina. I was cramping and had a headache. I took a nap and a long bath. To my knowledge, no one saw me do either.”
Ben slowly lowered his head. Just as she’d intended, he was left looking at Corrine Tedros’s pelvis.
“After my bath, I got ready for dinner. My husband came home from his golf game. While he was changing for dinner, he got the call from Nick Renisopolos, Stanley’s friend, who told us what happened. My husband and I drove directly to the house.”
Corrine folded her arms across her chest. “Is that enough for your timeline, Officer? Or does having a menstrual period and getting ready to go out to dinner with my husband still qualify me as a suspect?” She stepped back and away, waiting while Ben unfolded himself from the sling chair and got to his feet.
He slipped the notebook and pen in his shirt pocket. “I never said that, Ms. Tedros. You did.”
She picked up the clipboard that had been lying next to her chair. “Are we done, then?”
Ben nodded, taking his glass of ice water and following her into the kitchen, noticing the small differences in her posture and swing of her hips, nothing languid or sexy there now, everything tightened down by her indignation and, Ben hoped, a little bit of doubt and concern that she might have overplayed things.
A couple nudges, that’s all it had been. Ben taking the temperature of a longshot hunch.
In the living room, one of the movers was in the process of boxing an old turntable and stereo system, but Corrine stepped in front of him and said, “Not that.”
“Sorry,” he said. “Your husband put it on the list of Keepers.” He turned and carried it to the corner of the living room and dropped it with the Salvation Army items.
“You might want to reconsider,” Ben said. “That turntable and system, they’re probably a collector’s item now. Or will be soon. Like manual typewriters.”
“I don’t like old things,” Corrine Tedros said. She walked Ben to the door.
“Thank you again for your time,” Ben said, “and I apologize for upsetting you. That wasn’t my intention.”
Corrine Tedros hesitated a moment before nodding. “I apologize too. My husband took his uncle’s death very hard. It’s left everything a little tense. We both want some closure.”
“That’s understandable,” Ben said.
Corrine stepped back and rested her free hand on the doorknob. “If you’ll excuse me,” she said, “I really do have to finish up here.”
Ben walked back to his car. He was feeling the old jolt he’d gotten when working Homicide, and he liked it, that express-line adrenaline rush accompanying a hunch that had kicked something loose.
It wasn’t much, but it was there.
First off, Corrine Tedros had given a perfectly plausible version of her afternoon on the day in question. Even her reaction near the end of the interview was perfectly understandable, easily chalked up to the explanation Corrine herself had provided. Ben had investigated enough homicides to know that a person’s reaction to death and being questioned about it were often one of the least reliable roads to a suspect. In the face of grief or guilt, anything was possible.
No, what interested Ben was why in the midst of explaining what she’d done when she left the theatre and Terri Illes, Corrine Tedros had felt the need to lie, and to lie very convincingly, about the detour she’d had to take to avoid the tie-up in traffic, especially since Ben had made up the incident, and there’d never been an accident or traffic jam in the first place.
TWENTY-SEVEN
IT WAS LIKE SOME CRUEL, ludicrous joke, some last last laugh, Corrine Tedros having left the meat counter with two heavy sirloins and moved on to the produce department—where she ran into a simulated cloudburst on the store’s sound system that warned her and any nearby shoppers that the fresh fruits and vegetables were about to be sprayed, the nozzles opening in a fine steady mist—a facsimile of the rain that April and the sky outside the store withheld, and Corrine Tedros had yet to stop and select a wine to go with the steaks and had yet to turn the corner at the end of the aisle for the gourmet coffee where she would run into the punchline still some five minutes away, Corrine at that point still caught up in the moment, the power that came from the knowledge she could put anything in her cart—and as much of anything in the cart that she wanted and no one could stop her because she had the means to pay for it; the flashpoint between desire and the object of that desire the blink of a nerve ending, and it was because of those moments and for those moments that Corrine Tedros always made it a point to shop for groceries when she was hungry.
She trusted to one truth, one that others went to any lengths to avoid, and that was, at bottom, everyone thought with his stomach, because when you stripped everything else away, there was only hunger, and that’s all there ever had been and all that would ever be, an immense hunger, and you lived your life by and in the truth of teeth and digestive juices, and you never made the mistake of forgetting or trying to ignore the hunger because the hunger never forgot you, so Corrine had picked up a good bottle of red wine to go with the steaks and a loaf of French bread, and then she moved down the aisle holding the gourmet coffee and turned left.
And ran into Stanley Tedros.
Stanley was wearing his trademark brown suit and pork pie hat cocked at a jaunty angle. He stood with a wide smile and his arms outstretched, a can of Julep in his right hand.
Corrine wasn’t superstitious.
As a child, yes.
Corrine had worked hard to board up that door, to seal off any access to the false comfort of magic or prayer when she was afraid.
Cardboard, she told herself, that’s all she was looking at, a cardboard placard of Stanley Tedros, a promotional gimmick for pedaling soft drinks, nothing more than that: an image, not Stanley himself.
She told herself to move on because if she didn’t, she’d start thinking about Betsy Jo Horvath. Betsy was someone she wanted to forget. Corrine couldn’t move though and stood there with her hands clenching the handle of the grocery cart, and it was as if Stanley were blocking her way, and then suddenly she was crying, and she couldn’t stop, and people had begun to notice, but she couldn’t stop crying or make herself move, not even when the store manager appeared and launched into a long, profuse apology, an oversight he kept calling it, a simple mistake, and he was sorry because he had fully intended to have the placard removed after Stanley’s funeral, but then he’d gotten sidetracked by having to oversee the in-store inventory, and it had slipped his mind, and he was genuinely sorry.
Corrine heard the words, but they didn’t register.
For a brief moment, she thought she saw Ben Decovic out of uniform and standing at the back of the crowd watching her. When she wiped her eyes and checked a second time, he was gone.
The manager wouldn’t stop apologizing, and Corrine couldn’t stop crying, and the crowd of onlookers kept growing.
A stockboy appeared and picked up Stanley.
Stanley’s head peered over the stockboy’s shoulder as he headed toward two doors at the rear of the store, but it was not Stanley’s eyes that spooked her, not his eyes that left her insides feeling as if they’d suddenly been torn loose and caused her to involuntarily raise one hand and touch the hair on the back of her head twice, a gesture from her childhood, like the practice of putting a pebble on her bedroom windowsill, all the childish attempts to conjure up a magic potent enough to meet what the dark or an empty house held.
It was not the eyes.
No.
It was the smile.
A cardboard smile with its own truth.
The manager and the others were looking at her, not the smile, so they missed what it held.
Corrine didn’t.
The smile told her she’d been wrong about one thing:
Maybe even more than the living, the dead were forever hungry too.
TWENTY-EIGHT
AFTERNOON BUMPED INTO EVENING, and the sky began to leak its light into the cloudbanks that had amassed to the east over the Atlantic. The pine trees and live oaks in Anne Carson’s backyard were coated in half shadows, and the wind carried its unseasonable warmth like a low-grade fever.
Ben Decovic stood at the counter below the kitchen windows and made a tuna fish sandwich. He cut the toast on a diagonal and set the finished sandwich on a white plate and bracketed it with two dill pickles. Then he poured a tall glass of ginger ale and dropped in ice cubes. He put everything on a tray and then shook out Jack Carson’s evening meds. He carried the tray into the living room where Jack sat and watched television with the volume off.
Ben set the tray next to Jack. The screen was filled with a black and white shot of a sky swollen with hundreds of descending paratroopers. Ben wasn’t sure if it was footage from a histor
ical documentary or an early-fifties war movie.
“It was the right thing,” Jack said, looking over at Ben.
“What was?”
“Coming back home, Raymond,” Jack said. “You should never have left like you did. You have a wife and child, and they need you. I can’t carry all the weight myself. It’s not right.”
Ben quietly explained that he wasn’t Raymond.
“Thank you for the sandwich,” Jack said. “You remembered to fix it exactly the way I like it.” He went back to watching the television screen and the descending paratroopers. “They look like uprooted mushrooms,” he said between bites.
Ben’s cell phone rang. He walked back into the kitchen to answer it.
“We’re going to be later than expected,” Anne said. “They’re running behind schedule with the conferences.” She paused, then added, “Things ok with Dad?”
“Everything’s under control,” Ben said. “You take care of things there.”
“This is not going to be pleasant,” Anne said. “There are a lot of hurt feelings.”
Ben assured her that things were ok and said they’d order a couple pizzas when Paige and she got home.
From what Ben gathered, Paige had managed to add a couple bonus features to the standard parent-teacher conference package.
Not surprisingly, there were no problems with academics. Paige was consistently working far beyond grade level in all her classes, Math and Language Arts in particular, but everywhere else, she’d garnered Public Enemy status for her behavior and attitude. Students, teachers, and parents alike had complained about her. She verbally bullied and mocked her peers and worked guerilla warfare on her teachers, alternately playing to and undermining their classroom authority. The principal had insisted the guidance counselor, a Mr. Deane, be present and a part of this evening’s conference with the aggrieved teachers.
Anne wanted to blame all the behavioral problems on the hormonal turmoil stemming from the fact that Paige had just had her first period a month ago. It was a plausible explanation, but Ben still had his doubts. Anne was convinced that Paige had no inkling of Ben’s late-night arrivals and early-morning departures from Anne’s bed, but he’d felt on more than one occasion the weight of Paige’s assessing gaze and thought Anne was overoptimistic about how much Paige actually missed.
