Crooked Heart

by Cristina Sumners

  Holder’s eyebrows rose. Had the iceberg thawed?

  It had. The iceberg, in fact, was exhibiting marked symptoms of humanity. Patricia Clyde was actually unsure of herself. She confessed, as though she had taken some sort of liberty, that at noon she had called the office in San Francisco where Mrs. Stanley had a nine o’clock appointment. “She hadn’t arrived yet, and I left a message for her to call our office as soon as she came in. I said it was urgent,” said Ms. Clyde apologetically, as though nothing as melodramatic as urgency should be allowed to sully the hallowed dignity of Elton Kimbrough Interiors. There was a pause, during which Holder could have sworn he heard the woman swallow. “When I hadn’t heard anything by twelve forty-five,” she continued, “I called them again. Mrs. Stanley wasn’t there. She had not kept the appointment, and she had not phoned to break it or reschedule it.”

  Holder felt duty-bound to suggest that Mrs. Stanley might be running late, but he knew somehow that Ms. Clyde would say, “She’s never late,” and she did.

  “Mmmmmm,” said Holder profoundly.

  After a brief silence Patricia Clyde ventured, “I, ah, did something else, which perhaps I should just mention. It was very foolish of me,” she said, fortunately unable to see the look of disbelief this admission brought to Holder’s face, “but I suddenly thought that perhaps I’d better check to see if she had gotten to San Francisco at all. So I, ah, called the airline and, ah, said it was an emergency, and I needed to know if Mrs. Stanley had caught the three o’clock flight yesterday. I managed to get through to someone who knew something.”

  You would, Holder thought.

  “She said that the flight had been fully booked, with a waiting list, and she remembered quite definitely, she said, that they hadn’t been able to board any of the standbys because there were no—what they call no-shows. So Caro—Mrs. Stanley is in San Francisco, but I don’t know,” Ms. Clyde admitted bleakly, “where she is or why she’s behaving this way.”

  Holder made some reassuring noises at her, trying not to sound as if he were getting rid of her as fast as possible, which in fact he was. When he hung up, he leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. Was she telling the truth?

  He would bet on it. In the Kimbrough office Patricia Clyde had been unmistakably hostile; on the phone just now she was worried. A little frightened. So Carolyn Stanley was not keeping her appointments in San Francisco, and she had yet to tell anybody where she was staying. That this unusual behavior had nothing to do with what had happened to Grace Kimbrough, and was merely a coincidence, Holder refused to believe.

  He ran a tentative timetable over in his mind, and found it good. Now to get the S.F.P.D. working for him; best to do that through the District Attorney’s office in Trenton. No, before he called Trenton, he’d better confirm that Carolyn Stanley had indeed been on that plane.

  He reached for the phone, suddenly apostrophizing himself as a card-carrying idiot for not making this call sooner. Of course, the only thing remarkable that Carolyn had done prior to this morning was change her hotel reservation—a minor detail. But anything unexplained, no matter how minor it seemed, should have been looked into. He was slipping up. Just because he was so sure of Bill Stanley! No. That wasn’t it. He realized with an inward cringe that he had been largely ignoring Carolyn Stanley because he was unhealthily preoccupied with Grace Kimbrough.

  He swore comprehensively at himself until the airport police picked up their phone and rolled cooperatively into action for him. The airline was happy to verify that Mrs. Stanley had boarded the aircraft, stayed throughout the flight in the first-class cabin, and had spoken politely to the cabin crew as she disembarked in San Francisco. The hostesses, one of whom sounded mildly intelligent, had nothing interesting to contribute.

  Not so the young man who had waited on Mrs. Stanley at the check-in desk.

  “Yes, sir, positive. You see, my name is Stanly, too, except I spell mine without the E, so I mean, how could I forget?”

  “Can you describe her?”

  “Sure can. Ah, mid-forties, I’d say, brown hair, maybe black, pretty good-looking for a woman her age, I thought.”

  The faint trace of condescension in this last remark was not lost on Holder, who was mildly amused by it. “Did you notice anything in particular, anything unusual about her?”

  “Oh, yeah, yeah, I did. It was really funny, I mean, I would have remembered it even if her name wasn’t Stanley.”

  “What was really funny?” Holder asked, struggling not to hope for too much.

  “Well, she didn’t have any luggage.”

  “Didn’t have any luggage?”

  “Yeah, no luggage. She had a six-day round-trip to San Francisco, and I asked her how many bags she was checking and she said she wasn’t checking anything, and I was surprised, I mean, I thought she meant she had carry-on, and she didn’t look like the type, you know?”

  “No, I don’t know. What type?”

  “Well, lots of people have carry-on for a weekend trip, but for a whole week, usually the only people who do carry-on are businessmen. Commuter types, you know, who fly a lot. Or students with backpacks maybe. And this lady, well, I mean, she didn’t look like she was used to schlepping her own bags, you know?”

  “No, I’m sure she’s not. So she carried her bags on the plane?”

  “No, sir. It was like, that’s what I thought when she said she wasn’t checking anything, but then I said, could I give her some I.D. tags for her carry-on, and she didn’t have any. She just took her ticket and walked off, I mean, I thought it was really weird.”

  Holder thought it was really weird, too, and he thought about it for the rest of the day without being able to come up with a satisfactory theory to account for it.

  v

  The sergeant at the desk had been surprisingly sympathetic, and having nothing better to do had entered into the spirit of things with enthusiasm. Jim Robinson had left the police station with a sigh of relief and a typed document in his pocket. This he had immediately taken home to give to his daughter for her signature, thus convincing her that she was being taken seriously. The serenity that fell on Tita upon signing this document had been, her father judged, well worth the over-long lunch break and the embarrassment. He and Tita’s mother had conferred and assured themselves that they had done the right thing.

  And that would probably have been the end of the matter, but for the workings of a mischievous Providence, which decreed, first, that Jim Robinson’s quaint notion of honesty should extend to mailing the signed statement back to the police station; second, that the United States Postal Service should effect a crosstown delivery in less than twenty-four hours; and third, that Sergeant Fischer should be scheduled for his annual physical that Wednesday morning, and thus be away from the station when the mail was delivered.

  CHAPTER 12

  i

  The envelope was marked “Attn: Sgt. Fischer,” but as Fischer was not in, and the envelope showed no signs of containing anything confidential, it was opened in due course by the department clerk.

  Due course came screeching to a halt as the clerk read the statement of Ms. Elizabeth Robinson. He goggled. He gulped. He started to call Sergeant Martin. He stopped. He rose, walked down the hall, knocked at a door, entered when commanded to do so, and without a word laid envelope and contents in front of Chief Holder.

  There were two pieces of paper: a small sheet of bone-colored notepaper with a brief handwritten message, paper-clipped to a sheet of plain bond, eight and a half by eleven, whose contents had been word-processed and printed.

  The note said simply “Sgt. Fischer— Many thanks for your kind assistance.” It was signed by a James Robinson.

  Holder read the attached statement twice, in rising incredulity, his eyebrows first ascending halfway to his hairline—or to where his hairline had been two decades before—then lowering and gathering into a knot over his nose.

  “Get Fischer,” he demanded of the clerk who hovered unc
ertainly by the door.

  “He’s over at the medical center, sir, it’s his day for the physical—”

  “Get ’im on the phone.”

  It was said of the Chief that he never lost his temper, and he never shouted at subordinates, but the tone of his voice made it unnecessary for him to add any instructions to hurry. The clerk hopped to it.

  The crisp voice at the other end of the line explained to Chief Holder that Sergeant Fischer was in X ray, in much the same manner that a Buckingham Palace official might inform a caller, with implacable regret, that the Queen was in Scotland.

  Holder remarked conversationally that he didn’t much care if Sergeant Fischer was buck naked with pins sticking in him. “I want him on this phone. And,” he added without heat, “I want him now.”

  Sergeant Fischer was produced.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Fischer, I am holding a statement dated yesterday, apparently prepared by you, signed by Elizabeth Dawes Robinson of Four twenty-nine Dickens Street.”

  “Oh, my God!” Fischer was instantly apoplectic. “I didn’t know he was going to bring that back to the station! Listen, sir, ignore it. I mean, it’s just a joke; well, no, not a joke really, you know I wouldn’t make a joke like that, I mean, it was just to humor the kid. And the guy, too, I mean, her father. It was him that came to the station. This Elizabeth kid, she’s only ten years old, and she’s been sick. She dreamed all that stuff. Her father, he’s just, like, trying to humor her, and he—”

  “If he thinks she dreamed it, why did he report it?”

  “Because he’s crazy,” said Sergeant Fischer bitterly.

  “How crazy?”

  “Well, not really crazy, I mean—”

  “Why don’t you get back here and tell me what you mean.”

  “Well, uh, sure, yessir, they’ll be through with the X rays in just a minute and then I’ll be right back.”

  Chief Holder, with the utmost courtesy, made a suggestion regarding the disposition of the medical center’s X rays, and further suggested that Sergeant Fischer move his anatomy back to the station without further ado. “I want to hear every little word,” Holder said, “of your conversation with this James Robinson.”

  “But, sir, I keep telling you, the kid’s sick, she’s got a hundred and three degrees, nobody thinks she really saw anything, she was just—”

  “Fischer,” his chief interrupted with the patience one uses in addressing the mentally challenged, “what would you say is the biggest thing we’re working on right now?”

  Fischer changed gears with an all but audible grind. “Uh, well, this Kimbrough woman.”

  “And the Kimbrough woman lives where?”

  The sergeant, mystified but game, dredged up the address out of Monday’s mental notes. “Uh, Four twenty-two Austen Road.”

  “And where was she last seen?”

  “Entering the residence of Mr. and Mrs. William Stanley at Four twenty Austen Road,” Fischer recited.

  “And what part of town is Austen Road in?”

  “Uh, Canterbury Park.”

  “And this kid who’s sick lives on Dickens Street, and what part of town is that in?”

  Fischer whispered, “Oh, shit.”

  While he was waiting for Fischer to return to the station, Holder put in a call to the Township Development Office; could they send over somebody with a plat map of Canterbury Park, showing the house numbers on the lots? They could.

  He wondered if he’d been too hard on Fischer. Would he himself have caught it if it hadn’t been for “Austen is a Dickens of a writer, Dickens is an Austen-something writer”? Now, that was something to talk to Kathryn about! He was about to wrap up a homicide that was fancy enough for TV, and right in the middle of it was something he could reasonably label as a clue he got from Kathryn. He felt a little thrill of anticipation, and was instantly ashamed of himself.

  Sorry, Grace, he thought. He noticed for the first time what the dead woman’s name was. Well, that was where forgiveness came from, wasn’t it? From God’s grace. So maybe she wouldn’t mind that he would use her death in ways that were pleasant to him. After all, she was already dead, had been dead probably since Monday afternoon, forty-odd hours now. There was nothing he could do about that except gather evidence against the man who had killed her. It pleased him to imagine that she approved his actions, and that she felt, as he had, a kinship of spirit between them based on common misery.

  She had found an escape from her misery, and it had proved fatal. Would she mind, he suddenly wondered, that it was the man she had loved who would suffer for this crime rather than the man she had stopped loving, the man who so clearly loved nobody but himself? Had she forgiven Bill Stanley, who must have killed her in a lover’s passion? And if so, would she forgive the husband who had driven her into Bill Stanley’s arms?

  How much grace could they expect of Grace?

  ii

  Young Ms. Robinson, meanwhile, was like the character in P. G. Wodehouse, who, if not precisely disgruntled, was nevertheless very far from gruntled. It was most annoying being cooped up for so long.

  She had come home from school the previous Thursday puffy-eyed and listless; her mother had taken her temperature and promptly put her to bed, bribing her to stay there with several musty volumes of Nancy Drew. These Mrs. Robinson had hastily dug out of an attic storage box full of her own childhood memories, and Tita, recently graduated from Oz, had found a new passion.

  When the Friday visit to Dr. Collins, whom Tita liked because she was pretty and funny, resulted in the sentence of a full week in bed, Tita had at first resigned herself happily to her incarceration.

  Comfortably tucked up in bed, or in the old armchair in her attic, she had devoured The Sign of the Twisted Candles and was halfway through The Secret of the Old Clock. The problem arose when she became, inevitably, fired with the spirit of emulation. How could you detect anything if your mother wouldn’t let you go outside?

  Her mother, understanding Tita’s frustration, had on Saturday presented her with a very official and adult-looking spiral notebook and a new pen. The idea was that she should observe what she could out of her window, and write it down. “Even quite small facts can be important,” explained the inspired Mrs. Robinson. “If you write them down, with the times they happen, then even though you can’t solve a mystery right now, at least you’ll have had some good practice for later, when you get well.”

  Tita Robinson, who never failed to focus the full fury of her attention on whatever project was at hand, had no objection to practice. She was soon regretting, however, that the largest trees along the back fence were evergreens; if they had lost their leaves like the other trees, she would be able to see more. Still, there were patches of lawn, and fence, and neighbors’ houses, that showed through spaces between the branches. On Saturday she was able to record on page one of the notebook the comings and goings of Mephistopheles, the neighborhood’s largest cat, and she had noted which of the Henson children had played in their backyard. Sunday afternoon there had been more cats and more Hensons, and every now and then Tita was able to make a note on the movements of some temporarily visible adult.

  Unfortunately none of these movements looked the least bit suspicious. Everything was normal and boring—until Monday night. Monday night had not been boring.

  On Tuesday morning her mother had taken her to see the doctor again. Tita was shocked to discover that Dr. Collins could be as dumb as her parents. Since her parents weren’t usually dumb, it was all very strange and frustrating.

  Her parents, meanwhile, were worried. They were obliged to pretend to take Tita’s story seriously, since the child became dangerously excited when anyone attempted to convince her she had imagined or dreamed the whole thing. The Robinsons hoped that when her fever subsided, she would be able to face the truth more equably. Meanwhile, they were going to have to figure out what to tell her when she asked what the police were doing about what she’d reported. It wo
uldn’t have been a problem, except for that Robinson eccentricity that held that you shouldn’t lie to your children.

  They need not have fretted. To Tita’s early-Wednesday-morning inquiry her mother returned a perfectly honest “I don’t know.” Before Tita got around to asking again, her mother knew more than she wanted to.

  “What do you mean, you need to talk to my daughter?”

  The hostility fairly crackled down the wire. It did not surprise Tom Holder; he would have been more surprised by its absence, and he knew that its source was fear. “Now, Mrs. Robinson, I don’t want you to get the wrong idea about this, and there’s no reason to get upset, but the statement we’ve got here from your daughter, that’s something we need to look into.”

  Mrs. Robinson, stunned, said hurriedly that it was just a dream or something, and the child was ill, and surely her husband had explained all that?

  “Yes, ma’am, he did. But, you see, there’s a—well, problem we’re working on now that, uh, concerns that area right around where you live. It’s not a homicide, I can tell you that.” That was at least technically true; officially at this point it was still just a report of a missing person. “But there are certain things, certain facts, we need to know about. Now, your daughter may not have seen what she thought she saw, but it looks like she did see something. If we can figure out what that something was, well, that’ll give us some information we need to have. So I need to talk to her as soon as possible. I’d like to come over now, if that’s all right with you.”

  “But she’s sick! She gets terribly excited when this is brought up, and we can’t allow her to make herself more sick than she already is. Can’t you—you’ll have to wait a few days, till her fever’s gone down.”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am, we can’t wait.” There was an unfriendly silence at the Robinson end of the line. Holder persisted. “I really am sorry, and I understand how you feel. Believe me, I’ll be extra careful. A witness that’s only ten years old, and is sick, I know that’s a special case. I’m coming myself, I wouldn’t trust this to anybody else.”