by Pursuit
She sighed, then sobbed a little, so her breath came out shivery and choked. She said, “He paid for being tempted. I’m paying for being stupid.” She squinted. “He wasn’t bad. Nobody but me can really know that. He loved us. He would have stayed faithful—had been faithful for twelve years, before this. I told myself after it happened what a bastard he was, what a pig, what a rat. The truth is, he wasn’t.”
Prescott said, “I believe you. People make mistakes, and usually they get the chance to make up for them. If he had been given the chance, I’m sure he would have gotten over Donna Halsey pretty quickly, and your marriage would have been fine.”
As he spoke, she began to shake her head irritably. “I’ll show you something.” She got up and went to a kitchen drawer, and pulled out a piece of paper. She came back and handed it to him.
Prescott took it into his hand, and he could feel that the stiffness was already going out of the paper because she had held it in her hand so many times, folded and unfolded it. The letter was a memorandum of agreement between Vitaltrex Corporation and her husband to transfer his company for $20 million in cash and $14 million in Vitaltrex stock. The entire sum was to be paid to Wendy Cushner. “How did you get this?”
“I found it in his dresser a couple of days after he died. He never showed it to me.”
“Do you think he changed his mind?”
“He didn’t change his mind. He wouldn’t have changed his mind. The marriage was over.”
“How do you know?”
“The house. I got the new deed. It had been changed to be only in my name. At first I thought that somehow the county did that kind of thing the minute somebody died, and I just hadn’t heard of it before. But then the lawyer called to arrange the bank-account stuff to put the money from the sale of the company into my account, and he told me. After that I found this copy.” She took it and folded it up. “The lawyer finally admitted that he had been drawing up divorce papers, too. Bobby was going to give me everything and then get a divorce. That was how he was.”
Prescott said quietly, “I’m sorry I had to ask those questions. I had just figured out that with the Vitaltrex Corporation cleared of the murders, the next best suspect was, sooner or later, going to be you. Keep all the papers connected with the sale, and the house transfer, and make sure that the lawyer who arranged them is easy to reach, and you should be fine.”
“I’ll be . . . fine.” The words brought the tears that had been waiting, and she shook her head, but they kept coming. “I’m thirty-four years old, and my husband got killed on a date with another woman. A date. For the rest of my life, I’m going to have in the back of my mind that the only man I loved got killed because he couldn’t get laid at home. Not because he wasn’t interested in me anymore—because, God knows, he tried enough times—but because I was too tired, from making casseroles for church suppers or taking care of other women’s kids so their husbands could take them out, or something. And just to make things more comfortable, pretty soon everybody on the planet is going to know it.” She muttered, “Yeah, I’ll be just fine.”
“You said you knew Donna Halsey. Is there any chance that anybody was angry enough with her to hire a killer?”
Wendy Cushner shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know. You mean maybe another wife, like me?” She sighed. “She’s not my favorite person right now, but I didn’t think about her at all before. We were friends, sort of, in high school. She was one of those people that other girls don’t care much for but find it convenient to pretend they do. She was a cheerleader, and in the clubs most people couldn’t get into, and she had nicer clothes than the rest of us, and so on. That was a long time ago.”
“What happened after that?”
She shook her head in frustration. “I don’t know much. I heard about her once in a while. We went off to college. Both of us married soon after graduation. She sold real estate for her father’s company. Then I heard she sold stocks and bonds. Her marriage broke up.” She sat in silence for a few seconds, then said, “I hate her. She’s dead, and I hate her.”
“I don’t blame you,” Prescott said. “Right now, you probably don’t believe your feelings will change, but they will. It won’t ever feel good to think about her, but you’ll find that it happens less often.”
“I don’t hate her for wanting him. I hate her because she was smarter than I was. She saw that I was throwing something away that was a hundred times more important than anything I was keeping, so she twitched her butt a couple of times and picked it up, just like that. For a few days after he died, I thought maybe the word had leaked out that he had sold the company and was going to have big money. It hadn’t. It was just a lie I wanted to believe. All that really happened was that she was a lot smarter than I was. She had been married to a guy named Carter Rowland when we were twenty-two. He was an older guy. He had money. In those days, Bobby and I didn’t, and neither did anybody else our age, so it was just another thing to make everybody jealous of Donna. A few years ago, I heard she was divorced, and had come out of it with a lot of the money. Some people said most of it.”
“Where did the money come from?” asked Prescott.
“I don’t know anything, really,” she said. “People talk, and if they know somebody took a drink, all of a sudden he was drunk. Rowland is in the jewelry business, so I suppose he sold somebody something that wasn’t worth what he said. Personally, I can’t tell a diamond from a piece of glass, and I know that a lot of people who think they can are fooling themselves. It’s not important. She had been married to a man who wasn’t nice to her. She saw that I had a perfectly good one, a wonderful, sweet, hard-working man, and I wasn’t smart enough to keep him.”
“If she had it to do over again, she’d leave him alone,” Prescott reminded her. “Being there with him got her killed.”
“Don’t you see?” Wendy said. “Donna wasn’t the cause of this. She wanted what everybody wants. She was just the one who was in that place at the time. The one who would do things differently is me. He didn’t want anything different from what I wanted myself. I just thought all those other things I was doing were more important—no, more urgent, that they had to be done first. And second hardly ever came. Now that I look back, I can’t even remember what all those things that seemed so important were. I’m positive that nobody remembers I was the one who did them, and if I hadn’t, nobody would miss them. Donna wasn’t important. If it hadn’t been her it would have been somebody else. She was pretty and available, but so are lots of other women. If I hadn’t put him off and pushed him away, it wouldn’t have mattered what she was, because he wouldn’t have noticed.”
Prescott glanced at his watch and stood up. “Wendy, I’m sorry I had to bother you again with this, and I appreciate your telling me the truth. I’ll try to make sure you never see me again.” He went to the door, and let himself out.
21
The sign above the building had tiny white lights arranged in elaborate italic script, so the letters sparkled: Rowland’s Fine Jewelry. The painted motto underneath said, “Make her happy as a bride . . . all over again. The anniversary diamond collection by Rowland Limited.”
Along the front was a row of small, square windows like openings into miniature worlds, one where velvet necks were strung with diamond necklaces and velvet hands wore diamond rings, another where posts wore expensive watches, and one where red, blue, and green stones that had tumbled from a treasure chest served as a background for gold chains. But the fourth and fifth were the ones that caught Prescott’s attention. The small engraved signs behind the two glass panes said ESTATE JEWELRY.
Estate jewelry was trade jargon for anything that was secondhand. Most jewelry stores had some of it. But this merchandise was unusual. There was a yellow diamond bracelet with stones that started at chips and went all the way up to two carats. There was a ring in a brand-new setting that had an emerald the size of a dime. People who owned jewelry like that might sell it, but when they did, th
ey probably didn’t come to Louisville, Kentucky, to sell it to Rowland’s. They would have a better market in New York or San Francisco. And most certainly, they didn’t melt down antique settings and put big stones in new ones. It was a fairly common thing to do if the merchandise had been stolen.
Prescott was beginning to feel a sharpening of his interest in Mr. Rowland. The estate jewelry was too good, and there was too much of it for a city this size. Prescott began to entertain the idea that some of it was stolen. If so, these pieces could not have been stolen in the town where he was offering them for sale. It was too risky. That meant Rowland was dealing with some larger group that was capable of buying them in one town and distributing them in places where they wouldn’t be recognized.
Part of Prescott’s resistance to the idea that Wendy Cushner had hired the killer to get rid of her newly rich husband had been that he couldn’t find a reasonable way that she could have found her way to a killer. She had apparently spent all her time taking care of her kids and doing volunteer work. She had no lovers, no male relatives who had been involved in illegal activities, no old boyfriends who might have been able to introduce her to a killer for old times’ sake. When a middle-class woman decided to hire a killer, she couldn’t just look in the yellow pages. In Prescott’s experience, such a woman always needed the help of a go-between. Usually it was a man who had a reason to take a risk for her and knew somebody who claimed to know a man who was in the business of putting holes in people so the blood would run out. Half the time, the go-between managed to offer an envelope full of cash to an undercover cop, and everybody got to see himself on a grainy videotape in a courtroom.
Watching Wendy Cushner had not changed Prescott’s opinion. She had done nothing that would indicate guilt. The most important thing she had not done was pay attention to the money. People who were willing to kill for money were sometimes smart enough to convey innocence, but they were seldom good enough to convincingly feign indifference to money. The reason they killed for money was that they respected it. They thought that having money made them important, attractive, clever, worthy. When they had the money, they showed it in small ways, subtle changes in posture or tone. Wendy Cushner did not betray any interest in the money, and she certainly did not imagine that it added anything to her list of accomplishments.
She had declared herself a failure at the part of life that she had made her specialty: being Mrs. Cushner. To her the money was a bitter irony, and maybe even an insult. Before his death, her husband had been planning to toss all of it to her as the price of getting free of her.
Wendy Cushner had not hired the killer. She had not known enough about her husband’s activities to be jealous, and the money had not been a reason to kill him. She was not the sort of person who could have found her way to the man who had committed the murders in the restaurant. But Carter Rowland was beginning to look as though he might know some people who could have provided an introduction. Prescott considered how to go about learning more about him.
He began with the legal papers. The papers filed in divorces were in the public records, and Prescott subscribed to Internet services that provided them. He went to a big copying store that offered the use of computers, entered a cubicle, called up one of his services, and got a copy of Donna Halsey Rowland v. Carter Wilson Rowland. He requested copies of any other civil matters that involved Carter Rowland or Rowland’s Fine Jewelry, and finally, any criminal proceedings in which Rowland had been named as defendant or co-defendant.
There had been no criminal proceedings. The civil suits were all ones in which Rowland was the plaintiff. As Prescott studied the filings, he wondered whether Rowland had sued everyone he had ever dealt with. He had sued the man who owned the building next to his for renting the space to a secondhand clothing business that was “inconsistent with oral agreements to maintain a high standard of commerce and clientele.” He had sued a woman who lived in his neighborhood for putting a satellite dish on her roof that interfered with his view; another neighbor for “inducing stress and a threat to his health by causing loud music to be played.” He had filed a defamation-of-character suit against a customer who had complained about a cracked emerald that had been repaired with a chemical bond.
Prescott went through all of the cases and found that there had never been significant sums of money involved. Rowland was simply a man who must have been pissed off most of the time. He was vengeful, and he was accustomed to paying large amounts of money to law firms so they would carry out his revenge.
Prescott began to pay closer attention to Rowland’s lawyer. Maybe he was the go-between. In the course of their work, lawyers sometimes formed cordial relationships with people they wouldn’t invite home to dinner and an evening with their wives. But he discovered that Rowland switched lawyers constantly. Two of the lawsuits were against lawyers. They had represented him in cases he had lost, and he had sued them for malpractice.
Prescott had saved the divorce papers for last. He made a copy he could take with him, and went back to the second-floor room he had rented on the street behind Wendy Cushner’s. Donna Halsey Rowland had been represented by a partner in her brother’s law firm. She had requested spousal support of fifteen thousand a month, a one-third interest in Rowland’s Fine Jewelry, half the money Rowland had put into retirement accounts, a new Mercedes convertible that was registered in her husband’s name, and the house.
Prescott turned to the papers filed by Rowland’s lawyer. First, Rowland had wanted to reconcile, and had asked for more time. Then Rowland had claimed his annual income was $110,000, so that Donna’s support request was $70,000 more than he made. He claimed the retirement money had all been deposited before their marriage, and that her spending habits had made further contributions impossible. He said the Mercedes was owned by his corporation, and submitted the pink slip he had signed over to himself as president to prove it. He claimed the house was encumbered with loans that she had co-signed, which had been used to benefit the company. Transferring it would bankrupt them both. Right up until the final decree, Rowland had been requesting more time, supposedly to reconcile.
Prescott studied the disposition of the case. Donna Halsey seemed to have been slapped down a bit, but Prescott could see that it was an illusion. She had done better in court than she had done during the marriage. She had gotten six thousand a month, which was certainly more than she had expected, the Mercedes, a third of the business. She’d also gotten something Prescott had never seen in one of these settlements: half of the growth in the balances of all savings, retirement, and investment accounts that had taken place during the marriage. He went to the table at the back of the settlement and looked at the figures. The accounts had nearly tripled during that period. He looked at the last attachment; she had also filed a petition for restoration of her maiden name.
Prescott went back to the civil suits Rowland had filed. He liked everything he saw in the papers. All of the rhetoric was legal jargon intended to make the complaint appear to conform to some statute or echo a judge’s precedent-setting decision, but the substance of the papers was not. Rowland was a man who took offense easily and held a grudge, sometimes for years while his cases made their way to court. His demands were of a special sort, too. He was generally interested not in monetary reparations, but in inflicting maximum damage to an enemy. He wanted his adversary assessed a big fine, or wanted his business license revoked, or wanted him to be forced to tear down an addition and rebuild it.
Prescott went back to the divorce papers and read them once again. The tone of Rowland’s strategy was different, a long series of futile attempts to delay an inevitable outcome. The whole agreement at the end must have seemed to Rowland like onerous terms of surrender. Donna Halsey had, almost incidentally, included a permanent restraining order. As part of the settlement, Rowland was supposed to communicate only by having his attorneys speak with her attorneys. He was to refrain from calling or writing to her or speaking to her. The terms didn’t
sound to Prescott like anything Rowland would agree to, but in the end, he had signed the papers.
There was no question what had happened. Rowland had made claims about his financial status that were false, and produced as evidence papers such as tax returns. Donna and her lawyers had found evidence that he was lying, and had blackmailed him into accepting the terms she really wanted. Rowland’s emotions must have been an unsettling combination. He had included in his responses a repeated request for reconciliation, and even in the last filings before the settlement had wanted the judge to delay the final decree for another six months so he could win her back. He had been wooing her through the end of the fight.
Prescott was beginning to feel sure now. He could not have taken a single piece of the information he had found and convinced anyone that Rowland had hired the killer, but Prescott believed he had. Rowland had paid and kept silent, just as he had in his other disputes, waiting for his time to come. All along, he had planned to get even. No, Prescott decided. It might not have been as simple as that. He had not only hated her. He had loved her or, anyway, had wanted to keep her. Maybe the first intermediary he had hired after the lawyers had been a detective, or at least an informant: a person who had not been included in the court’s order to stay clear of her. He’d had her watched, probably since the separation.
When he had learned that she was going to bed with Cushner, he had gone about hiring a different kind of intermediary, one who could carry out his secret desires without ever being seen, whose approach would not be noticed. Rowland had needed one whose feelings about Donna Halsey were not an ambiguous stew of hatred and love and desire and anger and remorse and self-interest. He’d needed somebody with no discernible emotions at all, someone who would simply kill her and go away.
22
Varney awoke and lay still for a moment, staring up at the old, irregular plaster ceiling. It had taken him an hour the first night to determine that the texture of it was intentional, and not just the work of some plasterer in the old days who’d had no idea what he was doing. It was supposed to have all those raised places and lower ones, to show it was handmade. It must have been a style sometime in the 1920s, just like the weird tarnished golden light fixture in the center that held one weak bulb behind a whitish half globe, and the lights on the walls that looked like candles with pointed bulbs.
