The Winter Widow

by Charlene Weir

  TUESDAY morning. This is it, lady. Knock ’em dead. Oh boy. She stood a long time in the shower, trying to sluice away doubts and feelings of inadequacy under the gush of hot water. It was important to keep moving. Action impeded reflection. Action would keep her from visualizing the lift of the rifle, the tightening of a finger on the trigger.

  She slipped on a gray wool skirt and white cashmere sweater and tied a blue-and-gray scarf around her throat. As she shrugged on a navy jacket, she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror. Oh my God. Dress for success. All I need is a briefcase.

  Spurning her little brown Fiat, she clambered into Daniel’s pickup and pointed it toward the police station. Felt like driving a truck. Ha ha. Little nervous, are we? The sun shone in a cloudless blue sky and the temperature was much warmer today. She had to admit Hampstead was a pretty little town: wide clean streets with large trees that arched overhead, mixture of houses, old and new, brick and wood frame, all settled cozily into gentle hills. And space between the houses. This must be what’s meant by wide open spaces.

  Stop it, compose yourself.

  At the police department, a square red-brick building next to city hall, she trundled into the parking lot. She’d been sworn in yesterday and met the officers, most of whose names she couldn’t remember.

  Okay, Chief, you can do it. So what if you have no idea what a police chief does. How hard can it be? Just smile at everybody. Even as a kid she’d been able to hide uncertainties beneath a cape of confident control. In her rookie days, she’d perfected the skill, snugging the cape up tighter in defense against sneers from superiors and ridicule from peers.

  She was going to need it now.

  The entry was framed in a strip of cement with octagonal lantern-type light fixtures on either side; two cement steps led up to the recessed door. She braced herself and went in, then felt as if she’d shoved a wall that turned out to be a curtain.

  Different. Of course, different. None of the dirt and noise, clutter and chaotic activity she was used to. Neat, quiet and clean. Even the pale-green walls were clean. It didn’t smell the same either; no essence of stale cigarette smoke, disinfectant, hopelessness and unwashed humanity that permeated big-city police departments. It smelled of Hazel’s flowery perfume.

  Hazel was the dispatcher, a stocky woman in her late forties with short auburn hair. She beamed with a welcoming smile, tinged with a little maternal worry. According to Daniel, she looked out for everybody with concerned clucks and fusses. Her desk sheltered under a thicket of spider plants, the offshoots of which she treated like puppies, agonizing over finding good homes.

  Susan said good morning and asked that Parkhurst be told she wanted to see him. With a firm tread and an expression of what she hoped was steely-eyed command, she got through the area clustered with desks, nodding to two uniformed officers, and opened the door to Daniel’s office.

  She closed it behind her, briskly slipped off her jacket and threw it over the coatrack, and sat in Daniel’s chair, at Daniel’s desk, and picked up Daniel’s pen. So far, so good. While waiting for Parkhurst, she glanced through the stack of reports she’d spent a good part of yesterday reading.

  On Thursday Daniel had been in his office catching up on paperwork and laboring over the budget, a chore he hated and groused about. Nothing unusual happened; Hampstead appeared to be crime-free until two o’clock when a man named Harve Green filed a complaint against Sophie Niemen for stealing his cat. Daniel went out to see her.

  Sophie the cat lady, nutty about cats, collected strays and kidnaped pets she felt were mistreated. (“Damn Sophie and her damn cats. I spend half my life chasing around for irate pet owners.”) At three, he returned, fuming because he’d been unable to find Sophie. He told Hazel he was going home for a time and would be in later.

  Susan was painting the kitchen ceiling when he arrived about three-ten, straight from the department. There wasn’t time for him to have gone anywhere else.

  He was home for less than an hour, and during that time he’d received three phone calls: one from his sister, Helen; one brief call from someone as yet unidentified; and one from Hazel. Hazel reported that a man identifying himself as Otto Guthman claimed to have evidence of cattle rustling. Daniel was wanted immediately.

  A few minutes before four, Daniel left for Guthman’s. Susan had just gotten back to the kitchen when Lucille Guthman came by looking for Daniel. An hour or so after Lucille left, Daniel was killed in her father’s pasture.

  Since the murder occurred outside the city limits, the county sheriff’s department held jurisdiction, and technically Sheriff Holmes was handling the investigation. She wondered about him, whether he was a good man. Hector Holmes. Okay. At least he was acting in conjunction with the Hampstead police—something to be thankful for.

  In theory, all law enforcement agencies working the same case were supposed to cooperate with each other. In her experience, it didn’t always work that way. Competition, personality conflicts, even petty jealousies often kept pertinent information from being released. According to George Halpern, Daniel’s senior officer, that wasn’t a problem here. The sheriff had a large county, a manpower shortage, too much to handle, and was glad to have Hampstead PD investigating.

  Parkhurst didn’t exactly snap to and hustle in. She was reaching for the phone when the door opened. He stood there, face expressionless, dark eyes hard, hands loose at his sides, feet planted wide apart, like Marshal Dillon come to check out the saloon.

  Oh shit. He was going to give her trouble. She should have expected it. She’d known some like him—arrogant pricks who resented working with women, who stubbornly believed she got her job through affirmative action and her advancements through sleeping with the right people.

  She gestured, palm up, toward the chair at the side of the desk. He pulled it out a few feet and sat, a maneuver that forced her to change the angle of her own chair to see him comfortably.

  Parkhurst, my friend, this isn’t a debate. The decision, management level, is already in and you’re stuck with me. She rose, moved to the end of the desk, rested her rear against it and looked down at him. His sharp gaze touched her with amused acknowledgment. Well. A sense of humor? Maybe there was more here than met the eye.

  Daniel had liked him, described him as extremely intelligent and self-contained, and a good cop. Parkhurst had originally been with the Kansas City force. Several years ago, his younger sister, apparently the one person in all the world whom he loved, had been killed two days before her seventeenth birthday. She’d attended an evening class and on her way back to her car was abducted by adolescents, raped and strangled. Daniel never said whether Parkhurst had been asked to leave Kansas City because of a tendency to cuff suspects around, especially teenage suspects, or whether he’d resigned to avoid being asked.

  “Tell me everything you’ve got,” she said.

  Parkhurst regarded her coldly. “You shouldn’t be here.”

  “Any particular reason?”

  “You ought to know, big-city cop. You’re too close to it. Emotions have a way of wiping out judgment.”

  She could almost hear him thinking: And besides, you’re stupid, you don’t know what you’re doing and you’ll be in the way.

  She nodded, not in agreement, but in acceptance of his right to an opinion. He could believe whatever he damn well pleased, as long as he gave her what she wanted.

  “It’s all in there.” He nodded at the reports on the desk. “Unless you left out something that happened when Dan was home.”

  She felt her face grow warm. He wanted to make love to his wife, but if you think I’m going to tell you about it, you’re crazy. Anyway, it never happened: The phone kept interrupting. Who made that second call?

  Parkhurst smiled maliciously at her discomfort.

  “It’s all in here,” she said dryly, tapping the reports.

  He raised an eyebrow and she felt her poise start to slip. “New leads?”

  “So far, zip.”


  She didn’t believe him. She didn’t exactly know why, but a bell had gone off in her mind. She’d learned to pay attention when her cop’s instincts were roused.

  “What did you find at the crime scene?” She shifted and crossed her feet at the ankles.

  “Dan on his back in a pool of blood.”

  She saw it, just as Parkhurst intended, a vivid picture of Daniel—She jerked her thoughts up short and managed to keep her face impassive, the weeping woman buried deep inside.

  “Bullet came from a northwesterly direction. Severed the spinal column. Death was instantaneous.”

  She lit a cigarette, gratified to note her hands were steady.

  “Indications the body had been moved around some after death. Reasons unknown—go through his pockets, maybe. Gun was in the holster, no shots fired.”

  Pushing herself away from the desk, she moved around it to sit in the chair. “Guthman denied making that phone call.” She’d tried to see Guthman early yesterday evening after she’d examined the site where Daniel was shot, but he was in Kansas City and not expected back until late today. “You believe him?”

  “I haven’t found anything that suggests otherwise.”

  She was aware that he hadn’t answered her question. “Who made that call? Why? Was it simply a ruse to get Daniel out there? Did it have anything to do with cattle rustling?”

  “There have been some reports, but Otto claims no losses, no indications attempts were made.”

  “Motives? Who had a motive? If cattle theft wasn’t involved, why was he killed?”

  Parkhurst sat like a sphinx.

  “You know something you’re not telling me,” she said. “I want to hear it.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Which part didn’t you understand?”

  He stared at her, apparently finding it hard to open his mouth; his teeth seemed locked together.

  “Prejudices have a way of wiping out judgments,” she said sweetly.

  His look sent a chill through her. A muscle ticced in his jaw. “Before Dan went home, he said he needed to talk to me when he got back.”

  “About what?”

  “He said it could wait. Just something a little puzzling, might be nothing.”

  “Well?” she said. “Thoughts. Guesses. Hunches.”

  Parkhurst was silent so long, she thought he wasn’t going to respond. “I don’t know. He saw something, heard something, something happened. I don’t know. The only thing I do know, there was no report of any crime in that hour he was out looking for Sophie. Nothing even unusual or peculiar.”

  Hazel stuck her head through the doorway hesitantly, as though testing the climate and prepared to duck if conditions were unfavorable. She gave Susan a soft look of encouragement and said to Parkhurst, “Sorry to interrupt, but we got a call from the mayor. He’d like you to fill him in on any new developments.”

  Parkhurst nodded curtly and rose, then looked at Susan. “Unless you’d rather?”

  She shook her head, doubting Bakover wanted filling in; more likely, he wanted to underline his authority and rub in a little salt. She hoped the mayor knew what he was doing; Parkhurst was probably a dangerous man to cross. He inclined his head in a brief little bit of servile mockery and left.

  She crushed out the cigarette. When Daniel returned from his unsuccessful trip to find Sophie, something was troubling or puzzling him. What? What the hell could it be? Could he have seen something on the way to Sophie’s? At her place? Whatever it was, it hadn’t been urgent. He told Parkhurst it could wait.

  Sophie Niemen.

  That second phone call. They had been in bed when it came and Daniel was short. “He did, did he?… No more … No … Better be the last.” Then his voice had gotten soft with threat. “I won’t put up with it any more.”

  Better be the last. The last cat kidnaped? Was it Sophie who made that second call?

  Susan pawed through the reports stacked in her in basket. Vehicle damaged by rocks thrown from an open field. Obscene phone call on an answering machine. Flower bed vandalized. Petty theft. Green, Harve Green. Here it was. The cat had been returned or had found its way home on its own.

  She was reaching for her jacket to go find Sophie when the phone rang.

  “They’re waiting for you at the hardware store,” Hazel said.

  “Hardware store.”

  “They’re taking down the old sign.”

  “Old sign.”

  “Didn’t Ben tell you?”

  “No, he didn’t. Why are they waiting for me?”

  “Well, it’s kind of special. It’s the oldest sign in town and they’re taking it down to put up a new one. Arrangements were all set up for—uh, Dan to be there.”

  “I see. Would you get George and tell him to take care of it.”

  “Well … uh, you might want to go. Public relations, starting out on the right foot, you know? The photographer will be there and Lucille Guthman to write it up for the Herald. She wants to interview you.”

  Susan replaced the receiver. God help us, a new sign at the hardware store. The mayor was right: Small towns were different. She slipped on her jacket, thinking she had some interviewing of her own she wanted to do with Lucille.

  * * *

  A SQUAD car blocked each end of the street, and a large crowd was gathered around Perley’s Hardware. After the cold weather, the temperature seemed almost balmy at forty degrees, and the winter sun felt warm. People laughed and chatted with each other and called out joking remarks to the slight gray-haired man—Mr. Perley, she assumed—standing in the middle of the street, holding a small gong in one hand and a hammer in the other. The work crew lounged against the front of the store, waiting for him to strike gong with hammer as the signal to begin. He was waiting for the reporter.

  Susan stood across the street in front of the bank and collected curious glances, as if she were some exotic animal in a zoo. Several people spoke to her, most with an affable “Good morning,” but some conveyed disapproval. “Never had a lady police chief before.” “Surely do look young.” “Big responsibility. Sure you know what you’re doing?”

  She smiled: polite, confident. Public relations. The photographer, a rangy kid with brown shaggy hair, swiveled through the crowd, snapping pictures.

  “Where’s Lucille?” she asked him.

  “Haven’t seen her.” He snapped Susan’s picture and slid away.

  Restlessness drifted over the crowd and the jokes to Mr. Perley got louder.

  A short man with an air of self-importance came out of the bank and strode purposefully over to her. “Morning,” he said.

  She nodded. She’d met him at Daniel’s funeral and remembered he was the bank president, but couldn’t remember his name.

  “We’re all right sorry about Dan,” he said sympathetically. “And we know just how hard it is for you.”

  He paused and she nodded again. Up yours, pal.

  “But we’re all just a mite surprised at Martin for appointing you chief.”

  Who’s “we”? Everybody, no doubt. For the first time, she appreciated what it might cost the mayor to have given her the job. She gave Mr. Important Bank President the brave smile of the newly bereaved. “There’s no need to apologize. I’m only too glad to step in and help you out. Daniel would have wanted it.”

  She smiled sweetly and left him frowning after her, uncertain whether he had been insulted or misunderstood.

  Public relations. Ho boy. She wasn’t going to worm information from these people if she made it so clear she didn’t like any of them.

  “Perley!” someone shouted. “You gonna wait all day?”

  “The sign’s gonna be old before you ever get it up there.”

  “What are you waitin’ for?”

  “Can’t start till the reporter gets here,” Perley shouted back.

  Where the hell was she?

  “Hey, Floyd,” a man behind her said. “Lucille was asking about you the other day. Got her locked
up at your place, do you? One way to keep a woman.” He chuckled at his own wit.

  Susan turned around.

  “Naw.” The large man in a red-plaid shirt grinned. “Wouldn’t want to keep her. Always sticking her nose in.” When he noticed Susan looking at him the grin disappeared. He was a solid square man, about thirty, with bushy red hair and muttonchop whiskers around a weak chin, brawny shoulders and heavily muscled arms.

  “Floyd?” she asked.

  An instant of assessment flickered behind his reddish-brown eyes and then he grinned again. “Yep.”

  “What’s your last name?”

  “Kimmell.”

  Beneath all that muscle, she thought, lurks the soul of a bully. “You know Lucille?”

  “Everybody knows her.” He cracked his knuckles.

  “Where is she?”

  “That’s what everybody’s wonderin’. Me, I don’t mind. As long as the boss is out there”—he nodded at Mr. Perley in the middle of the street—“no work needs doin’.”

  “Floyd,” one of the work crew called. “Get on the phone and see what’s holding her up.”

  “Sure thing,” Floyd called back. “Excuse me, ma’am,” he said to Susan and tromped to the hardware store. Before he’d turned away, she’d caught the expression on his face, a smirk familiar to any cop: the look of a man who thinks he’s getting away with something.

  A loud crash and the screeching crunch of metal suddenly silenced the crowd. Then a babble of shouting rose. The crowd surged into the street and as a solid mass swept toward the corner.

  She pushed into the throng of shrieking, yelling people and seized the arm of a kid running past. “What happened?”

  “Pigs!” he screamed.

  Well, you little creep. She elbowed her way through to the front of the crowd, then stopped dead.

  Holy shit.

  Pigs. Eight large white pigs trotted in a group along the center of the street, making anticipatory little grunts like a group of tourists. They were huge, mean and ugly, and looked able to demolish anything in their path. Hooves clacking, they milled around as though deciding where to go first.

  At the corner, an old truck with stake sides and steam rising from the hood sat half on the curb, straddling a bent stop sign. One uniformed cop was talking with the driver; another was scratching his head.