Crooked Heart

by Cristina Sumners

  There were doors, a corridor, an elevator, another corridor, more doors. At a couple of points Holder spoke to people. A tall, stooped man with acne scars attached himself to their little cavalcade, and Holder introduced him as Assistant District Attorney Somebody, Kathryn didn’t catch the name. At last they reached a bare, ugly room containing a rectangular table and six mismatched chairs. A pudgy young man rose from one of them, greeting Holder and the Assistant District Attorney with handshakes but looking past them at the two women. “This had better be good, guys. Sunday morning, for God’s sake.” But a smile played about his mouth, and behind his glasses his small eyes were alive with interest.

  Holder shook his hand and said guardedly that it was worth a try, anyway. “Kathryn, Mrs. Kimbrough, Harry Beeton—Bill Stanley’s lawyer.”

  Grace greeted him with nervous courtesy. Kathryn, who had heard from Tom how Bill Stanley had been going through lawyers, smiled at Harry Beeton and asked if he was number three.

  He grinned. “Number four, and the stubbornest of the lot. Looks like it’s about to pay off.”

  The door opened, and they all turned. A uniformed guard with a gun on his hip ushered into the room a shabby version of a man who had been a respectable citizen a week earlier. His clothes looked slept in; he was ill-shaven, and behind the lenses of his glasses there were dark shadows under his eyes. When he saw Grace, he stopped dead and his pale face turned a shade whiter. Beeton stepped over and took him by the elbow.

  “All right, Mr. Stanley,” he said in a voice that deftly combined kindness and sarcasm. “Just sit down right here. We got tired of asking you to talk, so for a change we’re just going to ask you to listen. You know Chief Holder. He’s brought Mrs. Kimbrough here and she’s going to make a statement.” At this, Bill looked across at Grace with something like alarm, and made half a gesture toward her, but stopped himself. Beeton continued smoothly. “All you have to do is listen to it. When it’s over you can talk if you want to, or you can go right back to your cell, or you can go into another room with me and we can talk alone. I strongly advise you to do the latter. The lady in the collar is a priest from St. Margaret’s Episcopal Church. She brought Mrs. Kimbrough back from California, and she’s here as a courtesy to Mrs. Kimbrough and Chief Holder. All right. Chief?”

  Everybody had sat down during this speech except Beeton, who sat once he had concluded it. He and his client were on one side of the table; Holder, Grace, and Kathryn sat on the other. The Assistant District Attorney leaned against the wall.

  Grace had glanced at Bill fleetingly, almost furtively, and after that had not looked at him again. She sat with her hands clasped on the table in front of her, her right thumb rubbing the base of her left thumb, studying this activity as though it absorbed her entire attention. Bill, showing no signs of wanting to speak, stared across the table at Grace. When Kathryn saw his face, she looked away; even Tom Holder found somewhere else to put his eyes. Only the lawyer, who had spent too many days trying to coax something out of this man, looked at him steadily and without apology.

  Holder didn’t think Grace was going to feel like making a statement, but he thought it only fair to ask. “Mrs. Kimbrough,” he said, “would you like to repeat what you said in my office?”

  Grace, who had had the wits to see this coming, did not look up. The small, nervous motion of her hands continued. She took a deep breath, then a deeper breath. Finally she said in a weak, desperate voice that would have stirred pity in a stone, “I don’t think I can.”

  Holder, considerably softer than stone, did not push her. Instead, he reached down to the battered briefcase he had brought with him and pulled a portable tape recorder out of it. He set it on the table, took a cassette out of his breast pocket, and inserted it in the machine. “All right, then, Mrs. Kimbrough, we won’t ask you to repeat it, we’ll just play this recording of it. All you have to do is verify that this is in fact the statement you made.” He punched a button, and a tinny version of Grace’s voice, stronger than the live voice that had spoken a few moments before but still more obedient than confident, spoke out: “It began at about one o’clock Monday afternoon, when I received a phone call from Carolyn. She was at her office . . .” The disembodied voice continued, with a rumble of interruption now and again, to tell the terrible story.

  At the point where Grace got to the discovery of the corpse, Kathryn risked a glance at Bill Stanley and found his face no longer an embarrassment of bleak despair. He was staring at Grace with what looked like surprise, and the beginning of a suspicion of hope. As Grace’s voice dully recited the tally of gory debris on the floor, the hope grew stronger, and then broke into ungovernable relief. Tears welled in his eyes and rolled down his cheeks. They continued to fall all during Grace’s description of her flight to California, and they were still falling when the voice trailed off into silence and Holder leaned forward to push the stop button on the machine.

  Bill Stanley sniffed inelegantly, gulped, and said, “Grace.”

  The movement of her hands stopped. She raised her head and looked at him.

  He burst into giggling sobs. “Grace, Grace, oh, Grace!” he cried, flinging himself forward across the table and reaching toward her. “Oh, Grace!”

  She regarded him with astonishment, and drew back slightly so that he could not reach her. But she continued to stare at him, and something like faint hope appeared in her eyes.

  Tom Holder looked from one of them to the other, and finally past Grace to Kathryn, with an expression that clearly asked if she could figure out what was happening. Kathryn made a face that just as clearly responded “Don’t look at me,” but then the light dawned on both of them at once.

  Tom said, “He thought—”

  Kathryn said, “That she did it.”

  Grace gaped at Kathryn, then turned back to Bill and gaped at him.

  “Grace, listen to me,” Bill said, still reaching urgently toward her. “She called me—”

  “Hold it right there, fella,” Harry Beeton interrupted, reaching across Bill and trying to tug him back. “Let’s go have a little chat first, you and me.”

  But Bill pushed his attorney away and reached again across the table, imploring Grace to listen to him; Beeton grabbed him again and loudly besought him to shut the hell up; meanwhile, Holder bellowed at Stanley a reminder of his rights and simultaneously turned the cassette over, switched the machine to “record,” and shoved the corner of it that was the microphone in Stanley’s direction; Harry Beeton instantly stopped shouting at Bill and lunged for the tape recorder, yelling, “You can’t do that!” and shut it off at the same time that Grace finally found her voice enough to stammer Bill’s name with a question mark after it, so it was quite noisy for about thirty seconds.

  Stanley finally turned to Beeton and yelled, “Oh, for Christ’s sake, shut up, I’m not about to confess to murder or anything!” and Beeton flung up his hands and cried, “All right, all right, so talk if you want to.”

  “Grace,” said Bill into the sudden stillness, “she called me at the office; she didn’t say she’d talked to you, but it must have been about the same time, about one o’clock. She said she thought she should let me know she wouldn’t be staying at the Mark Hopkins”—Stanley made no sign that he remembered pretending to Holder that the change of hotel was a surprise to him—“because she said she didn’t want to be bothered. She wouldn’t explain what she meant, said she’d tell me when she got back, but she did say the same thing she said to you—about having a horrible row, and not wanting to talk about it over the phone, but it was terrible when someone you loved and trusted betrayed you. So of course I thought that was just her way of telling me—that she knew—she knew”—here he grimaced, as if in apology, glancing quickly at his all-too-public audience for this utterance—“about us. So I—I couldn’t stand the suspense, I had to know before she left, I couldn’t wait a whole week. So I went home. I thought I could just catch her there before she left. When I pulled in the dri
veway, her car was still there. The door was open, like you said. I ran into the house—the back door was open, I thought she must have just gone back in for a second to do something she forgot—and I went in and got to the kitchen and—and—there you were! And—I didn’t know why you were there, I mean, she hadn’t told me she’d asked you to come over to drive her . . .” He faltered and stopped, and his eyes were begging for forgiveness.

  What was happening on Grace’s face was more complicated. During Bill’s story, hope had struggled with anger and disbelief. Toward the end, hope appeared to be winning, but just as Bill stopped speaking, she was struck by a thought as obviously as if someone had slapped her in the face. And what the thought produced was a slow blush that crept across her cheeks and down her neck, coupled with a look of such dismay that in any other circumstances it would have been comic. She uttered a tiny, choked cry and buried her face in her hands.

  This utterly mystified everyone in the room, from Bill Stanley to the Assistant D.A., but after a moment Kathryn uttered a soft “Ah!” of understanding. Grace’s escape in San Francisco had included a man; some sort of repudiation of Bill, Kathryn guessed, because at that point Grace believed Bill had murdered Carolyn. Bill was a scoundrel, therefore she had betrayed him. And now it turned out that he was innocent of everything except an attempt to protect her.

  She’s ruined it, Kathryn thought. Now she can’t go back to him. He did all this for her, and now she can’t go back to him.

  “Grace? Grace, what’s—” Bill had been about to say “What’s wrong?” but so many things were so spectacularly wrong that the question seemed absurd. People had begun to turn from Grace and look back at him expectantly. He couldn’t think of anything constructive to do other than to continue to explain to her what had happened, so, somewhat hesitantly, he did so. “Um, later,” he said, “later, when they came around asking about where you were”—he stopped and swallowed audibly—“I had put her in the basement by then; I was going to pretend she’d gone to California after all. I was hoping they’d look for her out there. I was an idiot. I forgot the car. The car would still be there. I didn’t think of it until you”—he nodded at Tom Holder—“asked me if I drove her to the airport. I suddenly realized the car must still be in the driveway. But it wasn’t,” he said to Grace, “because you had taken it. I figured that out finally, after they’d left.”

  Holder was rising, and indicating by a jerk of his head to Kathryn that she should accompany him out of the room. He held the door for her, followed her, and shut the door. “Well, what do you think?” he demanded.

  “Of Bill?”

  “Yeah. Do you believe him?”

  “Believe him? For heaven’s sake, Tom, you heard him. If that’s acting”—Kathryn shook her head—“I resign. I’ll burn my collar and take up computer programming.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I was afraid of, but I wanted your opinion, too.”

  “Tom, I know you’ve lost your prime suspect, but do you actually need a suspect?”

  “Hmm?”

  “I mean, isn’t there just a snowflake’s chance in hell that Carolyn died accidentally? She goes back into the house for something—maybe just to wait for Grace—and she’s in the kitchen and she slips on a wet spot on the floor and falls backward onto the dishwasher door, which has a ten-inch carving knife sticking out of the cutlery rack. She falls off the dishwasher door, taking the cutlery rack and everything in it with her, and winds up on the floor in a pool of blood and kitchen utensils. Straightforward accidental death, only Bill Stanley louses it up by moving her body. Which reminds me, aren’t you going to ask him where he put it?”

  “Right now I don’t give a damn where he put it, and Carolyn Stanley did not die accidentally.”

  “Oh, what a dunce I am! I forgot that that knife wouldn’t be in the dishwasher.”

  “It’s not just that.” Holder wiped his face with his hands, and sighed. He looked old and weary. “I didn’t tell you,” he said. “I didn’t tell you because I wanted you to listen to that in there and I wanted you to have a clear head for it.”

  “Didn’t tell me what?”

  “It’s the kid, Tita Robinson. She’s missing. She’s been gone since about noon yesterday.”

  CHAPTER 32

  Kathryn stood with her hand over her mouth, as though to hold back her own horror, her eyes asking questions she didn’t dare put into words.

  “She was just about well,” Holder said. “Her mother let her get dressed and go outside for five minutes. She didn’t come back. None of her friends or playmates had seen her, none of the neighbors. Her parents called all the obvious people, then reported it to us right away; they didn’t waste time sitting and waiting. They think it has something to do with this killing, with her giving evidence. They don’t believe it’s a coincidence. I don’t blame them. I don’t believe it, either.”

  A cold wire had tightened around Kathryn’s heart. She leaned against the wall for support. “But her evidence was against Bill Stanley, and surely he’s been here, locked up?”

  “Exactly.”

  “And Grace was in California.”

  “Right,” Tom said. “So it has to be George.”

  “Does George fit?”

  “Sure he fits.” Tom began ticking off points on his fingers. “He lives in that neighborhood, he’s been home since Wednesday afternoon, Carolyn started talking about that ‘hell of a row’ just after she’d had lunch with him, the row was with somebody she loved and trusted, she said, and that could be George, and if he was in business with her, he probably had the opportunity to betray her somehow. Right?”

  “Yes, that all makes sense.”

  “So now we get another search warrant,” Tom concluded.

  She would have to say it. She hated it, she hated herself, but she had to say it. “Tom. Patricia Clyde is someone she loved and trusted, and she probably keeps the books for Elton Kimbrough. And the first evidence we have of Carolyn being upset is when she was back at the office with Patricia. Of course, Patricia doesn’t live in Canterbury Park—no, I take that back, I don’t know where she lives.”

  Tom stared. “You think Patricia Clyde killed Carolyn?”

  “No, I’m with you, I think George did it. But going only on what we know and ignoring my personal prejudice, you can’t leave Patricia out.”

  Tom considered her agitation and diagnosed it correctly. “You know something you’re not telling me.”

  She couldn’t tell him. Any insight she had had been triggered by her conversation with Grace in the Denver airport. Grace had obviously spoken in the belief that the conversation was private and would stay that way, and to a priest that was sacred. Kathryn would have considered violating that trust only to save a life.

  And no life was at stake here; it was already lost. Tita had disappeared almost twenty-four hours ago, and unlike Grace, she was not going to turn up alive and well in California. Kathryn fixed her attention on a crack in the plaster on the opposite wall, and said, as though she were very tired, “No, Tom, I don’t know anything. My ignorance is frightening.”

  There was a silence of a few seconds before he replied, “You know, that was pretty good. I think most people would’ve believed it.”

  She looked up at him, and to her utter astonishment he leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. “So I’ll get two search warrants,” he said.

  Her surprise at his reaction was interrupted by the sudden remembrance of what the first search warrant had revealed, and a wave of nausea ran through her. She looked up and down the corridor, but there was nowhere to sit down.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “Yes. No, of course I’m not all right.” She waved him away. “Go get your search warrants.”

  He looked at her intently for a minute, then turned away and started down the hall. But after five steps he turned and came back. “Listen, Kathryn, if it hadn’t been for you, I wouldn’t have this much.” He patted her on the shoulder. �
�That was good work.”

  She nodded her acknowledgment of this, not trusting herself to speak. Tom patted her shoulder again and strode off down the corridor. Kathryn stood there, battling against a trembling lip and gathering tears, and losing. A woman walking down the corridor glanced at her curiously, and walked on. Kathryn realized she was standing around in a public building somehow connected to law enforcement, wearing her clericals, and crying. She dug in the pocket of her overcoat, found her scarf, and with shaking hands wound it twice around her neck, covering all traces of the white collar.

  It occurred to her that she had come with Tom, that he had gone God only knew where, and she had no way to get home. Grace was in the same boat. Kathryn looked at the closed door and clenched her teeth. She found her handkerchief, wiped her eyes, blew her nose, straightened her face and her spine, and went back into the room where Bill was informing his impatient attorney that he wasn’t going to go anywhere or talk to anyone until Grace spoke to him.

  At the moment that seemed most unlikely, as Grace still had her hands over her face and was shaking her head slowly, but when Kathryn called her name, she was surprised into looking up. “Grace—I’m taking a taxi back to Harton, do you want a ride?”

  The way Grace said “yes,” it was clear that she considered this offer an answer to a prayer, but before she reached the door, Bill was crying out in real anguish, begging her to stay.

  Kathryn was motivated partly by pastoral concerns and partly by her urgent desire to be alone with her emotions; she didn’t really want company on the taxi ride home. She blocked Grace’s exit from the room and spoke quietly in her ear. “Do you think you should leave him like this? Don’t you owe him something?”