“Dwight wants you back over there,” said the deputy and drove me through the gathering dark, down the lane to where Beulah’s house blazed with lights.
Dwight was waiting for me in the den. They’d salvaged a few scraps from the fireplace, but the ashes had been stirred with a poker and there wasn’t much left to tell what had been destroyed. Maybe a handful of papers, Dwight thought. “And this. It fell behind the grate before it fully burned.”
The sheet was crumpled and charred, but enough remained to see the words Last Will and Testament of Beulah Ogburn Johnson and the opening paragraph about revoking all earlier wills.
“You were her lawyer,” said Dwight. “Why’d she burn her will?”
“I don’t know,” I answered, honestly puzzled. “Unless-”
“Unless what?”
“I’ll have to read my copy tomorrow, but there’s really not going to be much difference between what happens if she died intestate and-” I interrupted myself, remembering. “In fact, if J.C. dies, it’ll be exactly the same, Dwight. Sammy Junior and Donna Sue still split everything.”
“And if he lives?”
“If this were still a valid instrument,” I said, choosing my words carefully, “J.C. would have a lifetime right to this house and Beulah’s share of the farm income, with everything divided equally between bar two children when he died; without the will, he’s not legally entitled to stay the night.”
“They’d never turn him out.”
I didn’t respond and Dwight looked at me thoughtfully.
“But without the will, they could if they wanted to,” he said slowly.
Dwight Bryant’s six or eight years older than I, and he’s known me all my life, yet I don’t think he’d ever looked at me as carefully as he did that night in Beulah’s den, in front of that couch soaked in her brother’s blood. “And if he’d done something bad enough to make their mother shoot him and then go drown herself …”
“They could turn him out and not a single voice in the whole community would speak against it,” I finished for him.
Was that what Beulah wanted? Dead or alive, she was still my client. But I wondered: when she shot J.C. and burned her will, had she been of sound mind?
By next morning, people were beginning to say no. There was no sane reason for Beulah’s act, they said, so it must have been a sudden burst of insanity, and wasn’t there a great-aunt on her daddy’s side that’d been a little bit queer near the end?
J.C. regained consciousness, but he was no help.
“I was resting on the couch,” he said, “and I never heard a thing till I woke up hurting and you were there, Deb’rah.”
He was still weak, but fierce denial burned in his eyes when they told him that Beulah had shot him. “She never!”
“Her fingerprints are on your rifle,” said Dwight.
“She never!” He gazed belligerently from Donna Sue to Sammy Junior. “She never. Not her own brother. Where is she? You better not’ve jailed her, Dwight!”
He went into shock when they told him Beulah was dead. Great sobbing cries of protest racked his torn and broken body. It was pitiful to watch. Donna Sue petted and hugged him, but the nurse had to inject a sedative to calm him, and she asked us to leave.
I was due in court anyhow, and afterwards there was a luncheon speech at the Jaycees and a pig-picking that evening to raise funds for the children’s hospital. I fell into bed exhausted, but instead of sleeping, my mind began to replay everything that had happened Sunday, scene by scene. Suddenly there was a freeze-frame on the moment I discovered J.C.
Next morning I was standing beside his hospital bed before anyone else got there.
“What was it you forgot?” I asked him.
The old man stared at me blankly. “Huh?”
“When I found you, you said, ‘Deborah, I swear I plumb forgot.’ Forgot what, J.C.?”
His faded blue eyes shifted to the shiny get-well balloons tethered to the foot of his bed by colorful streamers.
“I don’t remember saying that,” he lied.
From the hospital, I drove down to the town commons and walked along the banks of our muddy river. It was another beautiful spring day, but I was harking back to Sunday morning, trying to think myself into Beulah’s mind.
You’re a sixty-six-year-old widow, I thought. You’re cooking Sunday dinner for your children and for the daughter of your dead friend. (She’s running for judge, Sue. Did you ever imagine it?) And there’s J.C. calling from the den about his insurance papers. So you turn off the vegetables and go upstairs and look in his drawer for the policies and you find-
What do you find that sends you back downstairs with a rifle in your hands and papers to burn? Why bother to burn anything after you’ve shot the person who loves you best in all the world?
And why destroy a will that would have provided that person with a dignified and independent old age? Was it because the bequest had been designated “To my beloved only brother who has always looked after me,” and on this beautiful Sunday morning J.C. has suddenly stopped being beloved and has instead become someone to hurt? Maybe even to kill?
Why, why, WHY?
I shook my head impatiently. What in God’s creation could J.C. have kept in that drawer that would send Beulah over the edge?
Totally baffled, I deliberately emptied my mind and sat down on one of the stone benches and looked up into a dogwood tree in full bloom. With the sun above them, the white blossoms glowed with a paschal translucence. Mother had always loved dogwoods.
Mother. Aunt Zell, Beulah,
A spring blossoming more than forty-five years ago.
I thought of dogwoods and spring love, and into my emptied mind floated a single what if-?
I didn’t force it. I just sat and watched while it grew from possibility to certainty, a certainty reinforced as I recalled something Mother had mentioned about shift work at the airfield.
It was such a monstrous certainty that I wanted to be dissuaded, so I went to my office and called Aunt Zell and asked her to think back to the war years.
“When you ail were in Goldsboro,” I said, “did you work days or nights?”
“Days, of course,” she answered promptly.
The weight started to roll off my chest.
“Leastways, we three girls did,” she added. “J.C. worked nights. Why?”
For a moment I thought the heaviness would smother me before I could stammer out a reason and hang up.
Sherry, my secretary, came in with some papers to sign, but I waved her away. “Bring me the phone book,” I told her, “and then leave me alone unless I buzz you.”
Astonishingly, it took only one call to Information to get the number I needed. He answered on the second ring and we talked for almost an hour. I told him I was a writer doing research on the old Army Air Forces technical schools.
He didn’t seem to think it odd when my questions got personal.
He sounded nice.
He sounded lonely.
“You look like hell,” Sherry observed when I passed through the office. “You been crying?”
“Anybody wants me, I’ll be at the hospital,” I said without breaking stride.
Donna Sue and Helen were sitting beside J.C.’s bed when I got there, and it took every ounce of courtroom training for me not to burst out with it. Instead I made sympathetic conversation like a perfect Southern lady, and when they broke down again about Beulah, I said, “You all need to get out in the spring sunshine for a few minutes. Go get something with ice in it and walk around the parking lot twice. I’ll keep J.C. company till you get back.”
J.C. closed his eyes as they left, but I let him have it with both barrels.
“You bastard!” I snarled. “You filthy bastard! I just got off the phone to Donald Farraday. He still fives in Norwood, Nebraska, J.C. Halfway between Omaha and Lincoln.”
The old man groaned and clenched his eyes tighter.
“He didn’t die. He wasn’t
even wounded. Except in the heart. By you.” So much anger roiled up inside me, I was almost spitting my words at him.
“He wrote her every chance he got till it finally sank in she was never going to answer. He thought she’d changed her mind, realized that she didn’t really love him. And every day Beulah must have been coming home, asking if she’d gotten any mail, and you only gave her Sam’s letters, you rotten, no-good-”
“Sam was homefolks,” J.C. burst out. “That other one, he’d have taken her way the hell away to Nebraska. She didn’t have any business in Nebraska! Sam loved her.”
“She didn’t love him,” I snapped.
“Sure, she did. Oh, it took her a bit to get over the other one, but she settled.”
“Only because she thought Farraday was dead! You had no right, you sneaking, sanctimonious Pharisee! You wrecked her whole life!”
“Her life wasn’t wrecked,” he argued. “She had Donna Sue and Sammy Junior and the farm and-”
“If it was such a star-spangled life,” I interrupted hotly, “why’d she take a gun to you the minute she knew what you’d done to her?”
The fight went out of him and he sank back into the pillow, sobbing now and holding himself where the bullet had passed through his right lung.
“Why in God’s name did you keep the letters? That’s what she found, wasn’t it?”
Still sobbing, J.C. nodded.
“I forgot they were still there. I never opened them, and she didn’t either. She said she couldn’t bear to. She just put them in the grate and put a match to them and she was crying. I tried to explain about how I’d done what was best for her, and all at once she had the rifle in her hands and she said she’d never forgive me, and then I reckon she shot me.”
He reached out a bony hand and grasped mine. “You won’t tell anyone, will you?”
I jerked my hand away as if it’d suddenly touched filth.
“Please, Deb’rah?”
“Donald Farraday has a daughter almost the same age as Donna Sue,” I said. “Know what he named her, J.C. ? He named her Beulah.”
Dwight Bryant was waiting when I got back from court that afternoon and he followed me into my office.
“I hear you visited J.C. twice today.” “
So?” I slid off my high heels. They were wickedly expensive and matched the power red of my linen suit, I waggled my stockinged toes at him, but he didn’t smile.
“Judge not,” he said sternly,
“Is that with an N or a K?” I parried.
“Sherry tells me you never give clients the original of their will.”
“Never’s a long time, and Sherry may not know as much about my business as she thinks she does.”
“But it was a copy that Beulah burned, wasn’t it?”
“I’m prepared to go to court and swear it was the original if I have to. It won’t be necessary though. J.C. won’t contest it.”
Dwight stared at me a long level moment. “Why’re you doing this to him?”
I matched his stare with one about twenty degrees colder. “Not me, Dwight. Beulah.”
“He swears he doesn’t know why she shot him, but you know, don’t you?”
I shrugged.
He hauled himself to his feet, angry and frustrated. “If you do this, Deborah, J.C.’ll have to spend the rest of his life depending on Donna Sue and Sammy Junior’s good will. You don’t have the right. Nobody elected you judge yet.”
“Yes, they did,” I said, thinking of the summer I was eighteen and how Mother had told me all her secrets so that if I ever needed her eyewitness testimony I’d have it.
And Deborah was a judge in the land.
Damn straight.
A former journalist, SHELLEY SINGER is the author of the popular Jake Samson/Rosie Vicente mysteries. The latter sleuth is almost certainly the only carpenter detective in the history of the genre. They have starred in such excellent novels as Free Draw, Full House, Spit in the Ocean, Samson’s Deal, and Suicide King. Ms, Singer lives in the San Francisco Bay Area,
A MAN’S HOME
Shelley Singer
The woman spoke slowly in a deep voice edged with tears; the message she left on the office answering machine was concise. She needed help. Her husband had been murdered. Would I please call her?
The name, Wittles, sounded familiar, I glanced through that morning’s San Francisco Chronicle and Oakland Tribune and found brief follow-up stories in both. Of course. Alan Wittles. The Berkeley attorney who’d been shot to death in his living room a couple of nights before. Signs of a break-in, the papers said. I had to wonder-didn’t the dead man’s wife have anything better to do with her money than pay a private investigator for a job the police were already doing?
Still, I dialed the number she’d left on the tape. While the phone rang, I thumbed quickly through the phone book to verify that the number actually belonged to her and not to some stray lunatic who’d seen her name in the paper. The call was legitimate; I found Alan and Julia Wittles in the book, at the right number and at a very right address.
She answered with her name, as though she were an upscale clothing store.
“This is Barrett Lake,” I told her. “I’m returning your call to Broz Investigations. How can we help you?”
“Oh, yes. Thank you for calling back quickly. But I’d rather talk to Mr. Broz himself.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Broz isn’t available. He’s left me in charge.” Very impressive. I didn’t tell her I was an apprentice, working out my term under Tito’s license. She hesitated for a good ten seconds.
“You’re a woman.”
“Yes. I am.” I was a little surprised that a proper Berkeley matron would be caught dead expressing what sounded like unfeminist thoughts, but she redeemed herself.
“All right. Good. That might be even better. I’d like you to come over right away so we can talk. So you can get started and clear this all up.”
Not so fast, I told myself. “Perhaps first you could tell me a bit more about what you want me to do for you.”
She sighed and spoke in her slow, soft way. “My husband was shot to death here. At home. Three nights ago.”
“Yes. I know. I’m sorry. But aren’t the police working on the case?”
“They are.” Did I have a point, her tone of voice was asking.
“Well, we don’t like to compete with the Berkeley police. They have resources-”
“Oh, they never catch anyone. They’re busy. They have too much to do. Please, just come over here and talk to me about it. I know you can help me.”
Ridiculous, I thought. If anyone could find a homicidal burglar, it would be the police. But she sounded so desperate, and so unhappy.
I glanced at the work sheet on Tito’s desk. According to him, I didn’t have anything to do that day-nothing, really, to be in charge of-except stick around in case something showed up.
And here was a poor, sad woman in obvious distress, certainly needing someone’s help. Wasn’t that the whole point? Besides making a living? Even Tito the semipractical admitted he had thought I was a natural for the investigating business the first time he came to my apartment and saw the suit of armor in the entry.
He enjoys my romantic delusions, and I enjoy the ones he says he doesn’t have.
I told Julia Wittles I was on my way.
The house was about $750,000 worth of stucco and Spanish tile in the upper Elmwood section, one of Berkeley’s best. I noticed a man sitting in a car parked across the street, an ordinary-looking car with a long radio aerial. Were the police with her now? I headed for the door, up a terra-cotta walk flanked by two large palm trees. When I pressed the bell button, I heard a chord sound somewhere deep inside; the door opened almost immediately.
The woman and I appraised each other. We were about the same height, five seven or so, the same age-early forties-and the same build, a bit on the thin side. But her coloring was much lighter. My French and Chippewa ancestors are more dominant genetica
lly than the Minnesota Swedes, but all her material came from northern Europe. She had pale blond hair, long and fine, pale blue eyes, and pale skin. She also had a limp handshake, but I thought that had more to do with environment than heredity.
The day was hot; the house was cool. The entry hall, two stories high with a sweep of staircase leading to a gallery, was bright and airy, but in the living room the windows were heavily curtained. The only light came from the far end of the room, a good thirty feet away, where a young man dressed in T-shirt and jeans, standing in the bright sun of the patio, was working on the open French doors. From inside the dark room I watched him turn away and walk a couple of paces through the sunlight to a toolbox lying on the patio stones.
“This is the room where it happened,” she said. “Make yourself comfortable, I’ll get us some iced tea.” She disappeared through a swinging door. I glanced around in the dimness-nice fireplace, hardwood floor. As for the furnishings, though, my mother would have said they were “different.” A tactful condemnation. Except for a couple of overstuffed couches that looked like relatives of the Pillsbury Doughboy, the furniture was flimsy-looking and looked as though it had been painted gaudily by children.
My possible client returned with two glasses and two coasters on a tray and placed the tray on the red-white-and-green coffee table between the couches,
“This is a very lovely house, architecturally,” I said.
She smiled, a radiant smile of white teeth against pale lips. An ivory woman.
“Thank you, Would you like to see more of it?” She was eager, happy. To refuse would have been almost cruel. Clearly she wanted to postpone talking about what had happened to her husband.
She led me first to the dining room, a large, light expanse furnished with a gigantic table, eight chairs, a sideboard, and two smaller cupboards. The table was a simple rectangle, soft edged, carved from hard, reddish wood. The chairs were more free form, with blob-shaped solid wood backs. The sideboard matched the table. I had seen furniture like this once before, at a gallery show of handmade pieces. Each of the chairs, I knew, cost several hundred dollars. The prices of the table and sideboard I did not even want to think about. The two smaller cupboards looked like some of the pieces I had seen in the living room. Here, in the bright uncurtained dining room, I recognized the style. There are a couple of shops in the Bay Area that specialize in amazingly expensive Southwest-style handmade furniture. Some of it is charming, bright, and whimsical, even if it doesn’t seem to stand quite right on its legs. But some of it goes beyond artistic whimsy to artist’s joke, and the two small cupboards in Julia Wittles’s dining room fit into that last category. They were particularly rickety versions of that genre, or school, or whatever they were calling it. Both were covered with crude shapes painted in bitingly sharp primary colors. One of them had little tin cutouts of coyotes, or maybe wolves, tacked to the wood above the open shelves.
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