Dead Ball

by Judith Arnold

  What was she doing?

  Fighting for her life, she told herself, then decided that sounded a bit melodramatic. She was fighting for her name, though, her reputation, her job, her freedom. Maybe “life” wasn’t so melodramatic, after all.

  Okay, so she was fighting for her life, but what was she doing?

  She was planning to sneak into Patty’s house to find . . . something. Something that would prove Patty had been lying when she’d said she didn’t know Arthur was cheating on her. If Lainie could find some kind of evidence that Patty had lied about that, maybe it would become clear that Patty was lying about other things, as well. Suppose she’d hired Bray to investigate whether Arthur had been having an affair. She’d said she would kill Arthur if she ever learned he was cheating on her. And now he was dead, and Patty was not exactly behaving like a grief-stricken widow.

  Perhaps Lainie was wrong to want to cast suspicion on Patty, but it wasn’t fair that Patty was living freely and blissfully while that heavy shadow of suspicion darkened Lainie’s world.

  Lainie was fighting for her life. If she could save herself by dragging Patty down, she wasn’t above doing that. And maybe—just maybe—she could find something in Patty’s house that would enable her to fling the shadow of suspicion off her back and onto Patty’s.

  The front door swung open, and Patty stepped out onto the semicircular brick porch, her athletic bag slung over her shoulder. She shouted something into the house—Lainie could hear her voice but not the specific words. They didn’t matter. What mattered was that someone would be in the house after Patty left. Lainie needed someone inside to let her in. She had no intention of climbing through windows or dropping down chimneys, even if she was dressed like a middle-aged suburban lady’s version of a cat burglar.

  Patty shut the front door and jogged down the front walk to her Range Rover, which was sitting in the driveway, showing no permanent damage from its encounter with the violent environmentalists last week. She climbed in behind the wheel, revved the overpowered engine, and drove away.

  Lainie counted to ten, then sprinted around the corner and down the block to her car. Once behind the wheel, she counted to twenty—just in case Patty had forgotten something and returned home—and then drove slowly back to the Cavanagh house.

  No sign of Patty’s car. The clock on Lainie’s dashboard read five forty-three. If Patty came home now, she’d miss the caravan down to Natick, and she wasn’t likely to do that. Lainie was probably safe.

  She pulled into the driveway, shut off the engine, and pocketed her key. Inside the car, she couldn’t hear the sparrows screeching. All she heard was her own thumping pulse.

  You’re fighting for your life, she reminded herself. That truth gave her the courage to shove open her door and get out of the car. She felt a rhythmic twitching at the back of her throat, as if her heart had risen into her neck. She tried to time her breaths to that pulse so she wouldn’t hyperventilate and pass out on Patty’s front lawn.

  Hoping that a brave posture would give her a brave disposition, she squared her shoulders and strode up the walk to the front door. She pressed the doorbell and heard the symphonic chimes resonating through the house. A minute passed, and then Sean opened the door.

  Seeing her, he recoiled slightly.

  She smiled to put him at ease, and the smile helped to put her at ease, too. “Hi, Sean. Your mom asked me to pick up some paperwork for the soccer team. Can I come in?”

  “She already left,” he said hesitantly.

  Where was the sweet, anguished boy who’d skateboarded to her house, devoured her cookies, and told her she was the best teacher he’d ever had? This Sean gazed at her with obvious apprehension, as if he believed she had murdered his father.

  “I know she left,” she said. “I saw her up at the field. She’s traveling to the game in someone else’s car, and I’m meeting the team down in Natick. Can I come in?”

  “Um . . . I guess.” He stepped back into the vaulted foyer, giving her room to cross the threshold.

  One barrier down, a zillion to go. “So, how are you doing?” she asked.

  “Okay.”

  He clearly wasn’t in a chatty mood. She assured herself that his coldness toward her today meant nothing. “Do you know where she might have left those papers?”

  “For soccer?” He shrugged. “She keeps most of her papers in the office.”

  “Great.” Lainie prayed he was referring to an in-house office and not the headquarters of Cavanagh Homes. “Where’s her office?”

  Sean motioned with his head for her to follow him. An in-house office; another of those zillion barriers crossed.

  He wore baggy shorts and a T-shirt with the name of a punk band Lainie had heard of, though she hadn’t been exposed to its music, which was probably a blessing. His feet were bare and large. Like a Great Dane puppy, he hadn’t quite grown into his paws yet.

  They walked down a hall, which was floored in marble, adorned with wainscoting, and lit by elaborate crystal wall sconces. Sean pushed open a door into a dark book-lined room. “This is the office,” he said.

  “Thanks.” Lainie entered the room and wished she knew what she was looking for. With its dark cherry paneling, crown dentil molding, built-in shelves and file cabinets, a patterned Persian rug, and, at its center, an imposing cherry desk and a massive leather chair, the room looked like the sort of place where stern fathers from the fifties might lecture their misbehaving children. The desk was adorned with all the power clichés: green-shaded banker’s lamp, gold-plated pen protruding from a polished onyx pen stand, leather-trimmed blotter. Papers lay scattered across it. No computer was in evidence, probably because computers weren’t available in designs that would match such august décor.

  Feigning confidence, she crossed to the desk and shot Sean a grin. His response was a much more diffident smile that didn’t reach his eyes. He hovered in the doorway, looking uneasy.

  “You want to get back to your computer game?” she asked. Patty had said Sean played computer games every evening.

  “Um . . .”

  “Really. I don’t mind, Sean. I’ll find the papers and show myself out.”

  “Um. Okay,” he said, then turned and shuffled away. She heard his footsteps as he wandered down the hall and up the stairs and let out a breath.

  Papers. What papers? What did she need to find?

  The papers strewn across the blotter appeared to be mostly business documents, with a PTO notice about an upcoming bake sale mixed in. Several documents carried the Cavanagh Homes letterhead, others the name of a lawyer. Lainie grabbed a square of paper from a notepad beside the pen stand and jotted down the lawyer’s name, just in case.

  She tugged at the desk drawer. Locked. Damn.

  Where would Patty keep the key to her desk? In her pocket? Who carried a desk key on her person? It wasn’t the sort of thing a person would add to her key ring, next to the house and car keys. Most people stashed their desk keys not far from their desks.

  Lainie groped along the underside of the desk’s center drawer but felt nothing. She knelt down and checked underneath the chair. Nothing. She moved to the shelves and pulled down a couple of luxurious leather-bound volumes, hoping one might be a fake. No such luck. Their bindings were embossed with The Complete Works of Charles Dickens and inside those bindings were the dense texts of Hard Times, Great Expectations, and Bleak House.

  She slid the books back into place and circled the office with her gaze. She would bet this room had at one time been Arthur’s domain; it was so stereotypically masculine. Yet it contained a few feminine touches: a vase filled with freshly cut daffodils, a letter opener with a delicately carved ivory handle, and, propped on the window seat, a Raggedy Ann doll in a dress almost as pretty as the one Margaret had bought Lainie last week for Henry’s birthday party. Although s
he hadn’t known him well, Lainie was willing to bet the rag doll was Patty’s, not Arthur’s.

  She moved to the file cabinets and pulled on the drawers. Locked. All of them.

  Double damn.

  She moved silently around the room, aware of the ticking minutes and the equally nerve-wracking ticking of her heart. She lifted one of the brocade cushions covering the window seat and found only a wooden shelf under it. She lifted the blotter and found only the polished surface of the desk. She paced to the bookshelves again, to the chair, to the file cabinets.

  There, next to the crystal vase holding the daffodils, she discovered a manicure case. Leave it to Patty to keep first aid for her nails handy, even in her office. The case was a tile-like leather, probably alligator skin. Only the best for Patty’s pretty nails.

  Lainie unzipped the case and opened it: scissor, file, buffer, cuticle clipper . . . and a key.

  Holding her breath, she carried the key over to the desk and inserted it into the lock in the center drawer. It slid in. It twisted. The drawer rolled open.

  Inside was pretty much what most people stored in the center drawers of their desks: pens, a ruler, a sheet of stamps. But unlocking the center drawer released the side drawers. Lainie yanked open one on the right—several folders labeled “zoning reports” and “surveys” and “appraisals.” She shoved that drawer shut and opened the one below it. More folders filled with Cavanagh Homes documents.

  She closed it and moved to the left side of the desk. The top drawer contained newsletters from some professional association and several small bottles of nail polish in a variety of shades. Lainie closed it and opened the bottom drawer on the left. It was full of legal envelopes, white with green borders. She started to thumb through them.

  Somewhere in the house a phone rang. She heard footsteps clomping down the circular stairs. Faster, faster, she muttered under her breath as she searched the envelopes. A mustard-yellow one came into view, with the return address: Jackson Bray Investigations.

  She yanked it out of the drawer, kicked the drawer to close it, and relocked the desk. Just as she dropped the key back into Patty’s manicure case, Sean appeared in the doorway.

  “Found it,” she said brightly, waving the envelope and then tucking it under her arm to hide the return address. Did he even know what Jackson Bray Investigations was? She’d just as soon not find out.

  “Great,” he said. She wondered whether the phone call had come, God forbid, from his mother. He didn’t mention the call, so neither did Lainie.

  “I’ve got to run,” she said, quite possibly the truest words she’d ever spoken. “Thanks, Sean.” She eased past him and headed down the hall toward the front door. “Are you sure you’re doing all right?”

  “Yeah.” He trailed her, making no effort to catch up.

  “Come see me if you need anything,” she shouted over her shoulder before charging through the foyer and out of the house.

  She dived into her car, cranked the engine, and zoomed away. A block from Patty’s house, she thought to slide the envelope onto the floor so it would be less visible. She was breathing harder than she had after her longest, most arduous jogs, and sweat leaked from her hairline down her cheeks. Her palms were slick with sweat, too, making the steering wheel slippery.

  She’d left her fingerprints all over Patty’s office, she acknowledged. But she couldn’t have rummaged through the room in a pair of gloves. If Sean had seen that, he would have freaked out.

  He’d seemed kind of freaked out by Lainie even in her gloveless state. She supposed he was entitled to be withdrawn and jittery. His father, with whom he hadn’t had a great relationship, had been killed. His favorite teacher had been arrested in connection with the murder. His mother was acting unnaturally normal, under the circumstances. It was enough to freak out any normal fourteen-year-old.

  Enough to freak out Lainie, too. She was still gulping for air when she skidded onto her driveway, punched the remote button to open the garage door, and careened into the garage. She pushed the button again to close the door before getting out of her car. Once the door had slid into place behind her, she sat in the gloomy silence for a long moment. Nobody sprang toward her from behind the bags of grass seed; nobody crawled out from under Karen’s car brandishing handcuffs. She had actually stolen something of Patty’s, and ten minutes had passed without her having been caught.

  With a shaky sigh, she got out of her car and went into the house, clutching the envelope. She noticed the light on in the den but heard no TV noises. Peeking into the room, she saw Karen in a pair of plaid flannel bottoms and a pink T-shirt, seated cross-legged on a chair at the computer. “Hi, Mom,” she said without looking up.

  If not for Lainie, would Karen have been with Big Brad tonight? Probably, but Lainie wasn’t going to apologize for causing their split. As Karen had said, his lack of testicular endowment wasn’t Lainie’s fault.

  “If you’re emailing Randy, say hi for me,” Lainie called to her in a deceptively calm tone.

  “I’m doing a job search,” Karen said, twisting in her chair and raising one leg so she could rest her chin on her knee. “I’m looking to see what’s out there. I’m also going to polish my resume. And no, I’m not interested in the job with Citicorp that Jew Grandma keeps talking about. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life working with money.”

  “Money’s nice,” Lainie commented.

  Karen smiled. “I’m thinking about teaching. There are programs where I could substitute-teach while I work on my master’s. Or I could teach at a private school. They don’t require the master’s, and I’ve got a degree in classics. I bet prep schools would love that.”

  “Are you sure you want to be a teacher? I could list all the drawbacks.” Having to chat with blabbermouths like Nancy Van Doerr, for instance. Having to go on leave thanks to the cowardice of jackasses like Frank Bruno.

  “I’m sure that list would be a mile long.” Karen’s smile widened. “But I’ve never known anyone as happy with her job as you are. Not even Dad loved lawyering the way you love teaching.” She shrugged and swiveled back to the computer desk. “Anyway, it’s worth a try.”

  If body parts could be geographical locations, Lainie’s eyes were Seattle. They filled with moisture, the way they seemed to pretty much every day, and only frantic battling of her eyelids kept the tears from spilling out. “Good luck,” she said to Karen’s back. “If you want to talk more about this, just say the word.” She was so moved by Karen’s faith in her, she almost forgot about the envelope tucked under her elbow.

  Tearing herself from the doorway, she crossed the kitchen and headed up the stairs to her bedroom. After closing the door, she climbed onto her bed and set the envelope in her lap. And stared at it.

  “Open it,” she whispered.

  Her fingers trembled as she unbent the tabs on the clasp holding the flap shut. She reminded herself that she might wind up gravely disappointed. The envelope might contain nothing but a bill for services rendered. Slowly, tamping down her expectations, she lifted the flap reached inside and pulled out photos.

  Twenty grainy eight-by-ten photographs of Arthur Cavanagh and the blond woman.

  The pictures hadn’t been taken on the last night of Arthur’s life, because Arthur and the woman had on different clothes than what Lainie had seen them in at Olde Towne Olé. The woman wore a form-fitting V-neck, about as unsubtle as a woman of her proportions could be without going topless. She also wore a short, tight skirt. Her legs were so thin, Lainie had to conclude that modern medical science had contributed significantly to the size of her breasts. No one could have such a big bosom and so little body fat on the rest of her, at least not without surgical help.

  In the photos, Arthur looked like Arthur—big body, big head of silver hair, flat cheeks, small nose. He had on a pricey-looking leather blazer and sl
im-cut jeans, and he was smiling in nearly every photo.

  Several pictures showed Arthur’s dark green Jaguar, seen from the rear. She could make out the silhouette of Arthur’s head and the blonde’s, seated side by side in the car. One shot appeared to be taken on Main Street, another on Liberty Road. One, taken from a greater distance, was taken about a block away from the entry to Emerson Village Estates.

  Another photo showed the happy couple standing outside the half-built house inside Emerson Village. She wondered where Bray or his photographer could have been hiding when he’d taken that picture. The lots were defoliated, no handy shrubberies to hunker down behind. But the photo was clear enough—the blonde leaning into Arthur, her fingertips touching his chin.

  That picture must have been taken days before Arthur was killed, because insulation covered only one outer wall of the building. By the time Lainie had seen the building, the afternoon after his body had been found, most of the house had been covered in insulation.

  So he’d taken the blonde to his construction site. Showing off? Or establishing a romantic hideaway? Maybe Arthur had thought his girlfriend would get turned on by that clean pine scent Stavik had talked about.

  A couple of other photos were taken outside a pseudo-Colonial condominium complex that Lainie didn’t recognize. Arthur’s Jaguar again, and Arthur and the woman walking to one of the doors. Another photo of Arthur alone, coming down the path to his car.

  Lainie flipped through the photos a second time, then slid them back into the envelope and fastened the clasp. Patty knew. She knew all along that Arthur was fooling around.

  This woman might have been the last person to see Arthur alive, other than his murderer. This woman might have been his murderer. Why weren’t the police harassing her? Maybe they were. Maybe she and Lainie would wind up being cellmates, the blond woman in the pen for murder, and Lainie for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Apparently, the Rockford Police seemed to think that was a crime. Did the police know this woman had been with Arthur the night before he was killed? Lainie had told Detective Knapp, but he’d seemed so ridiculously skeptical, she didn’t know if he’d believed her. But with these photos, she’d convince them. She’d show him these photos and explain that the blond woman had truly been in the wrong place—Arthur’s presence—at the wrong time, just hours before he was killed. If Lainie couldn’t deflect suspicion from herself to Patty, she could deflect suspicion from herself to Blondie.