The Dead Cat Bounce

by Sarah Graves

  “Precisely. And I don’t care what George says,” Clarissa went on. “This wasn’t your normal stab wound, because he was a bleeder, he had chronic headaches and he ate aspirin for them like candy. And because there was that preliminary scalp wound. It fluoresced all over the place. The only reason he didn’t bleed at your house was, by then he didn’t have much blood pressure.”

  I must have looked skeptical. She shivered again, and some of the feistiness seemed to go out of her.

  “Okay, so maybe she’s a fast cleaner-upper, she didn’t think of chasing him, and it could have happened the way she says. It’s close enough so that her confession finishes her off. My point is, now that I’ve thought it over, I still don’t buy it.”

  She straightened. “Because look: I can swallow the part about panicking, leaving the scene for a minute, for one reason or another. After all, he was supposed to be dead already. Then she discovers he’s gone, mops up as fast as she can, changes clothes, and zooms out, making like it never happened. What I don’t get, on top of all that, is taking the ice pick away and then bringing it back, hours later.”

  “Fingerprints?”

  “Uh-uh. It came from her house, remember? There were plenty of innocent reasons for her prints to be all over the weapon.”

  “Which means?”

  “Which means something changed between the time of the murder and the time you caught her, later, in your storeroom. Something,” she repeated, “happened.”

  “What,” I asked reluctantly, “about George Valentine?”

  “That she was covering for him?” Clarissa made a dismissive face. “I wondered about that. So I asked her. She said he was up on a ladder the entire time, and if I didn’t believe it, I could ask Bobby Taylor.”

  Then she caught my expression. “Something funny?”

  “Not exactly.” The information hit my tired brain with a thud. Ellie had known all along that George’s whereabouts were accounted for.

  “Did you tell her you didn’t believe her?” I demanded. “Did you ask her why she’s doing all this?”

  “Yep. Whereupon she wouldn’t say another syllable.”

  Which pretty much assured me, if I’d had any doubts, that Clarissa really had been talking to Ellie, who could be as silent as her pirate forebears when she wanted to be.

  “Okay, back to square one,” I said. “Let’s say she knew she had to do something to be sure her confession would be taken seriously. She meant me to find her. She knew I’d hear her out there, moving on those creaky floorboards.”

  “And,” Clarissa agreed, “last time I looked, guilty people didn’t need to do that. Stand up and wave red flags.”

  “The blood evidence? On her clothes?”

  Clarissa shrugged. “Could have been planted, I suppose, maybe by someone who didn’t know she was going to confess. Or a simpler explanation: she brushed against it—at your place, or when she went home. Whoever cleaned up after the attack on him, they were in a hurry, didn’t get it all.”

  She finished her coffee, got up and poured herself some more. “I don’t have any great ideas about who did it, only who didn’t. But what we’re left with, I think, is somebody getting into the house, someone we haven’t thought of.”

  “Have you considered Nina Mcllwaine?” I went through the reasons why I still suspected Nina: her money motive, her marked lack of grief, and what Bobby Taylor had seen the morning of the murder, not to mention Can Man’s frightened comments.

  “And somebody definitely wants my interest discontinued,” I finished. “She could be the reason behind all the rotten stuff that’s been happening to me—the weird note, flat tires, the cotter pin on Bobby Taylor’s platform, even the fire at my house. And by the way, I wasn’t doing that stuff myself,” I added defensively.

  Clarissa’s nod was grudging. “Okay, so I was wrong about that, too. But it’s still the same problem: time. If what you are saying is right—and eyewitnesses have a way of misremembering things, even sober ones like Bobby Taylor—Nina wasn’t on the scene long enough, any more than Ellie was. Besides, why would Ellie confess for Nina?”

  Then she paused. “Although,” she said, “if Nina had help, it would be another story. Someone who might also help her perpetrate the crimes against you. Someone who’s always around, maybe, whose presence wouldn’t really be noticed.”

  A clear mental picture of Sadie Peltier popped into my head. But that was ridiculous; she was a child, and however monstrous a little terror she might be, I couldn’t see her cleaning up a mess of blood, or anyway not without shouting at the top of her lungs about it, all over the neighborhood.

  Clarissa turned her head, stretching the kinks out of her neck, and looked out the window, which was dark and beaded with rain.

  “Listen,” she said, getting up, “I’ve got to move, clear my head, or I’m going to crash out, and I can’t afford to. I get behind the wheel of a car the way I’m feeling, I’ll be roadkill.”

  She pulled on her slicker. “Don’t suppose you feel like going for a walk?”

  I did, actually. A couple of hours with Hedda had made me feel trapped and smothered; I’d have welcomed the fresh air. But I didn’t want to leave the Whites alone.

  Just then, though, Arnold’s squad car pulled into the drive. He made his way up the back steps and beamed at Clarissa as he came into the kitchen.

  “Thought I’d find you here. Just leaving?”

  She pulled on her slicker. “Trying to talk Jacobia into taking a stroll with me, help me get my second wind. But she’s duty bound.”

  Arnold shrugged, eyeing the coffee pot. “I’ll stick around. I doubt the old folks’ll wake up, and if any calls come in—” he indicated the radio on his belt—“I’ll swing downtown, let you know to come back. How’s that?”

  “Perfect.” I grabbed my jacket.

  44

  There isn’t much real silence left in the world, but some of it is in Eastport at night. The snow was all melted and our feet crunched softly in the sand that the trucks had spread during the storm as we headed down Key Street toward the water, past the old Victorian houses looking ghostly and untenanted in the brackish mist.

  “Not,” Clarissa observed, “a lot of late-night action.”

  I smiled at the thought, remembering Manhattan at this hour. “No. If you needed a cop right now—and you wouldn’t—ordinarily, you’d have to get one out of bed.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know if I could get used to it. Even in Portland, there’s more …”

  “People,” I finished for her. “That’s the difference. More people, more chances mathematically for more of them to be doing more things, at more hours of the day and night. Interacting.”

  She laughed quietly. “That’s a nice term for it. Shooting and stabbing and robbing and fighting.”

  “We’ve got some of that. Guys around here pretty much stick to fists, though. Statistically, I’ll bet we’ve got one of the lowest real crime rates in the country.”

  “Right,” Clarissa agreed wryly. “Except for the recent binge of arson and murder you’ve been having …”

  “That,” I replied a bit defensively, “is a statistical aberration.”

  She laughed as we turned onto Water Street, toward the dock. “You look at everything like that?” she asked. “In terms of numbers?”

  From out on the water, the foghorns hooted steadily. “Hadn’t thought of it that way, but yeah, I guess I do,” I said. “That and money. I’ve always been interested in money, on account of growing up not having any. You might say it focused my attention.”

  “Uh-huh.” She walked in silence for a while. Her stride was calm and unhurried, not rushed in the anxious way that the eerie silence of Eastport at night can make some people. A truly deserted, motionless late-night street scene is a thing to behold; you keep waiting for the flicker of movement in the corner of your eye, and when it doesn’t come you can start imagining it.

  We crossed to the seawall, and
the paved walk along-side it. She was looking for a way to ask, and finally I decided to make it easy for her.

  “My dad was Jake Tiptree, Jr.,” I told her simply. “He went to prison when I was three, for blowing up a town-house with eleven of his friends in it. All underground social activists, like him. I don’t think he actually made the mistake with the explosives,” I added, “but he was the one who survived, so he was the one who got to go to jail.”

  Clarissa nodded, looking down into the boat basin where all the fishing boats bobbed gently on the incoming tide. “I figured there had to be a connection. It’s an unusual name. What happened to you after that?”

  Just about anyone with a degree in law enforcement knows my mother was also in that townhouse, and Clarissa was no exception.

  “I went to live with an aunt and uncle, in Tennessee. My uncle was an explosives guy, too, for a mining company. Interest in loud noises ran in the family, I guess. Unfortunately, he was also a big drinker.”

  I remembered that for a millisecond, stopped deliberately, as I always did. “I left there when I was sixteen, headed for the big city, and that’s where I stayed until about a year ago.”

  The memory of the Port Authority bus terminal flew into my mind—the noise, the smell, my fear, the cruising hustlers on the lookout for girls like me—and I banished it forcefully.

  “I did,” I added with considerable understatement, “a lot of things to stay alive. But finally I got into City College, got some loans and a part-time job in the accounts department at St. Vincent’s Hospital, and everything just went on from there.”

  “Everything including a couple of years as money advisor for the crookedest, most corrupt bastards the world has ever known.”

  I glanced sideways at her. “You do get your homework done, don’t you? I pursued some opportunities, yeah. Is that what you got me out here to talk about?”

  She shook her head as we started out onto the dock. “Curious, that’s all. Wondering if there’s some connection I don’t see.”

  Then I got it. “Like maybe one of my old customers hired me to get rid of Mcllwaine?” I chuckled in spite of myself.

  “What’s so funny? People like that don’t usually let their employees retire.”

  “Right.” The dock stretched ahead of us, a wide grey ribbon leading out into an endless expanse of black.

  “And the employees don’t usually know as much as I know, about as many as I know it about, while being as squeaky-clean as I am. There’s no law,” I added, “against giving financial advice to crooks, and I made sure never to have any material knowledge.”

  That I could testify about, I meant, and she understood. I’d made it a condition of my employment, right from the start, and I had been good enough to be able to demand it. Otherwise, I would still be working for the guys with the smiles on their faces and the larceny in their hearts.

  Larceny and worse. We came to the end of the dock. There’s no rail to keep you from going over, just a low barrier to forestall vehicle mishaps. When Clarissa walked right up to the edge and peered into the watery dark, I knew she had made her decision about me.

  “So why’d you leave?” she asked, gazing at an isolated light twinkling mistily across the bay, by the fish pens near Campobello. “You must have been clearing a world-class fortune.”

  “All that darkness,” I said, not meaning the water. “And one little light. It was here and I grabbed for it, that’s all.”

  She nodded, her face washed pale in the glow of the dock lamps. “And that’s why you’re going the distance for Ellie White? Because you’ve got yours, and you don’t really think you deserve it?”

  I thought about it a second. “Yeah. You could put it that way. But she does deserve it. An ordinary, happy life—Ellie’s one of the good guys. So if she gets shafted and I don’t, it’ll be too … uneven. Besides, she’s my friend and I promised. Or does that sound corny?”

  Clarissa laughed. “Nope. Antiquated, maybe. Out of touch, and hopelessly idealistic. But no. It doesn’t sound corny to me.”

  The rain had stopped. We turned and started walking back. “I can’t shake the idea that somehow she’s directing all this. Ellie, I mean. That she got herself locked up on purpose, so I’d be on my own. To do—”

  “Whatever you end up doing. Like a test. Funny, that was my feeling when I talked to her.”

  “Right. But it’s more than that. Like I’m supposed to do it because she can’t. So,” I went on, “to make sure I would, she made sure she couldn’t. If you follow me.”

  “Sort of.” Back on Water Street, Clarissa turned to the left and right, taking it all in: the silent storefronts and brick chimneys, columned posts and ornate cornices, the boats floating peacefully on the glittering black water under the dock lamps.

  Her car was parked in front of Arnold’s office, “I gotta go,” she said. “I’m supposed to be in Caribou in the morning. We’ll see if I make it there, but really, I just came over to apologize.”

  She made a wry face. “I came into this town with an attitude, and got my butt kicked. Poetic justice.”

  I walked her to the car. “Listen, do you know why the case is going to the Federal side? If it is, I mean. If you didn’t just say that to scare me. Maybe you’re a better actress than I think.”

  “Yeah. Well. Big mouth on my part. You made me pretty mad.”

  I was kidding her a little, but she took it seriously, and she didn’t like remembering her slip.

  “But what the hell, you earned it by sticking up for her,” she went on, “and I’m too disgusted to care. You know the guy staying with Mcllwaine’s wife? Real smooth, but he looks like a guerrilla terrorist?”

  I indicated that I did.

  “He’s what they call the focus of some covert inquiries.”

  The light bulb went on. “So I was right about him.”

  “Yeah, if you thought he was a slime toad. My understanding is that the FBI agreed to let some indiscretions of Mcllwaine’s go by, if he would help them out with information about this fellow.”

  She frowned. “Past six months, Mcllwaine was having second thoughts about cooperating, turned out maybe he wasn’t so helpful as they hoped. Unfortunately for Ellie, though, they had him sworn, and he’s been useful to them on a lot of other things over the years—”

  Chalk up another check-mark in the “right” column for me; too bad it wasn’t doing Ellie any good—

  “So now not only have the Feds got their undies in a twist,” Clarissa went on, “but they’re in a position to do something about it, pay back-wise.”

  “Bottom line, their witness got himself murdered.”

  “Yeah, don’t you just hate it when that happens?”

  It explained a lot of things: why Mcllwaine could tip Alvin on stocks without tripping SEC alarms, how Alvin could take three big money gifts from Mcllwaine without any IRS curiosity being stimulated … all rewards, probably, for Mcllwaine’s cooperation.

  “Any idea why Mcllwaine was backing down?”

  She nodded. “Uh-huh. My source—and you do not want to let on I told you this—says Mcllwaine found out about six months ago he had a brain tumor, or something, that it was going to kill him. I guess prosecution didn’t look so scary, next to that.”

  That aneurysm my ex-husband had talked about: Mcllwaine had welshed on his deal with the government at about the same time as he’d engineered the stock deal that ruined Alvin White—and at about the same time he must have found out he didn’t have long to live. Bottom line: in his way, he had been getting his affairs in order, and that included screwing Alvin.

  “Ellie’s dad has been part of some insider stock trading,” I told Clarissa, “that involved Mcllwaine. But it started a long time ago. Could the government have been giving Mcllwaine immunity for that long? Thirty years?”

  “Oh, hell, yes,” Clarissa replied. “Mcllwaine’s been playing both sides of the fence for so long, he ought to have an office in the Federal Building.
How do you think he’s gotten away with so much? Labor unions, restraint of trade, monopolies … law enforcement loved him, and they treated him good in the getting-away-with-stuff department.”

  “Damn,” I said. “So they’re not going to let any kinks in the timeline discourage them when it comes to prosecuting Ellie.”

  “You kidding? If they need to, they’ll get thirty experts to swear that an hour takes ninety minutes, or that she could have been in two places at once. They’ll make that case fly, one way or another, just to make an example of her. You don’t,” she added, “want people thinking they can knock off the government’s favorite blabbermouths.”

  Yeah, because for one thing it would discourage other people from becoming blabbermouths: no future in it. “And even if they knew it was Nina …”

  “Yeah. Don’t want to upset the applecart with the target in it. Darn,” she added, frowning at the car door, “I left my bag up at the house. Get in, I’ll drive you back.”

  We didn’t talk on the short ride to Key Street. I had the sense that Clarissa was mulling something.

  “An island,” she said finally as we pulled in front of the Whites’ house. “Miles from anywhere.”

  Arnold waved as he pulled away in the squad car; apparently he had just gotten a call and had been setting out to find us.

  “Yeah,” I said quietly as Clarissa and I got out into the kind of silence that makes you whisper in spite of yourself. “It’s great. If you like that sort of thing.”

  Inside, she glanced wistfully around, stalling as if she wanted to stay. Her eye lit on the portrait of the unknown woman; on a whim I’d brought it along with me from my house, along with Sam’s baby book and rattle. In the Whites’ place, I’d wanted the security of my own things, talismans against the pure meanness Hedda seemed to radiate twenty-four hours a day, and I’d propped the portrait on the counter to puzzle at while I scrubbed pots.

  “Who’s that?” Clarissa wanted to know, squinting at it.

  “Oh, just another mystery. A private obsession of mine, no connection with this mess. I’m trying to find out who she is, or was. But I probably never will.”