Crooked Heart

by Cristina Sumners

  Tom looked at her for a moment. “You know, you’re really good about not telling on people.” Kathryn attempted to look blank, and failed. Tom continued. “You didn’t tell me, in Trenton, that Carolyn and Miss Iceberg were lovers, and you’re not telling me now that Grace cleared out of the Mark Hopkins at five a.m. to get away from some man she’d gone to bed with.”

  Kathryn gawked at him. “Now, how in hell do you know all that?”

  “Even a dumb cop can read between the lines.”

  “Really? I don’t know any dumb cops.” She said it pointedly.

  Tom hid his face in his scotch glass in an attempt to cover up how deeply pleased he was by this remark.

  They then settled the matter that was secretly troubling Kathryn more than any other.

  “Trenton tells me there was a gun in the trunk of George’s car.”

  Kathryn’s heart skipped a beat.

  “Grace swears it doesn’t belong to them.”

  A pause ensued while the Reverend Dr. Koerney utterly failed to find anything to say.

  Tom continued as smoothly as though speechlessness from Kathryn were normal behavior. “It’s an old Smith & Wesson .38 revolver, one shot fired. If it had been used in a crime, it would now be police property, but nobody’s figured out where and when George could have used it. It’s not registered in the state of New Jersey, but registration is voluntary for a gun that old, so it doesn’t look like there’s anything illegal that we could prove about it.”

  Kathryn was a fervent supporter of gun control, and she had always meant to register the .38 but had somehow never gotten around to it. She suspected this omission had less to do with indolence than with the sure and certain knowledge that Uncle Jesse would roll over in his dusty South Texas grave if she did anything as knee-jerk liberal with his gun as to go and register it with the dang police.

  Tom was rolling scotch around in his mouth and trying to decide which he was enjoying more, the single malt on his own tongue or the paralysis on Kathryn’s. He swallowed appreciatively. “So I was thinking. You told me you used to shoot rats in the barn on your uncle’s ranch. Were you any good at it?”

  Kathryn cleared her throat and managed to produce one syllable: “Yes.”

  “Well, then, you should have a gun of your own. Maybe you’d like this one,” he suggested. “They tell me it’s a nice old piece. Why don’t I talk to Grace? I’ll tell her the thing must have been George’s and he just never told her about it. She won’t want it, and she owes you a favor. I bet if I tell her you’d like to have it, she’ll give it to you.”

  “Tom—”

  “Of course you know you can’t just carry it around any old where, you’re only allowed to take it to and from a firing range, and you have to put it in the trunk when you do.”

  “Tom—”

  “I’ll talk to Grace and let you know.”

  She gave him a long look which he met with a seraphic smile. “Thank you,” she said.

  They next settled the question of George’s guilt—and of Kathryn’s.

  “No, Tom,” she said emphatically, “I was not a real help. I went barging in where I shouldn’t have, and I damn near got that child killed.”

  “Listen, Kathryn. If you hadn’t done anything, anything at all, except go help me with that talk with Tita, she would still have climbed that fence yesterday and talked to George and wound up in his basement.”

  “But she didn’t wind up in the trunk of his car until I made that stupid phone call.”

  “Yeah, but he would have killed her eventually. He had to kill her.”

  “What I don’t understand is why he didn’t kill her in the first place.”

  “My guess is that he was squeamish. Notice the way he killed Carolyn. He didn’t pick up a knife and stab her, he put the knife down and then pushed her down on it.”

  “He was trying to make it look like an accident.”

  “I think making it look like an accident was a second thought, and the real reason was that it takes less guts to push somebody than to stab somebody.”

  Kathryn pondered what she knew of George, and agreed. She added, “You don’t believe that Mexico business, do you?”

  “I think he thought about that, because he would’ve liked to have thought of something else instead of killing Tita, but he must have known it was a dumb idea.”

  “Not as dumb as thinking Grace would help him when she came home.”

  “Oh, yeah, Grace coming home, that’s another thing I owe you.”

  “No, Tom, I refuse to take credit here. I was completely out of my depth, I was playing ego games when I should have left everything to the professionals, and any way you slice it,” she said, determined in her self-deprecation, “nothing but a miraculous stroke of luck, or Providence, or whatever, stands between me and being guilty of Tita Robinson’s death.”

  “Crap,” said Tom succinctly. “If Tita had died, there would have been one person absolutely responsible: George Kimbrough. And if there’s any guilt left over, you can spread it all over Bill and Grace. For God’s sake, Kathryn, look what they did! They found a murder, and what did they do? They covered it up. What they should have done was pick up a phone and dial 911. If they’d done that, we’d have talked to Patricia Clyde within an hour, and found out about George and the money, and George would have been in a cell on Monday night instead of calling to tell us his wife was missing.”

  “Well, yes, I suppose, but at least they were trying to protect each other. There was some love in it.”

  “Love? They were trying to protect each other because they’d been boinking each other. Pardon me, I’m not an expert on these things, but the last time I looked, that was called adultery, right? If they really loved each other and their marriages were really hopeless, why weren’t they honest about it? Why didn’t they just divorce George and Carolyn and marry each other?”

  Kathryn had to admit to herself that she hadn’t thought of that. Nevertheless, at any other time she might have argued further, but she had had an exhausting weekend.

  “Besides,” Tom started again, then paused. Could he say it? Would she be angry? Maybe. No. Yes. To hell with it. “Besides, if you’re claiming all the blame for yourself, when it’s other people’s fault as much or even more, isn’t that the sin of pride?” (He had been paying attention when Kathryn had covered precisely this point a year ago in an adult Sunday school session on sin.)

  Kathryn felt as if she had been hit with a wet towel. Oh, God. It was true. Tom was right. Ego again. Her insatiable, terrible ego. After a long and horrid day, it was too much: She burst into tears.

  Tom was aghast. “Oh, no!” he cried. “Kat, don’t! I didn’t mean it, I’m so stupid—” He reached a hand toward her, but stopped.

  “No, you’re not stupid, you’re right,” she hiccuped through her sobs. “You’re right. I am eaten up with pride.”

  Tom sat paralyzed. Like Grace, looking helplessly at Bill across the chasm created by her own guilt, Tom sat glued to his chair, longing to go to her, put his arms around her and comfort her, but unable to do so. If he had been nothing but an honest friend, he could have done it. But he had looked upon her—in the biblical phrase—to lust after her; he had committed adultery in his heart. So he sat across from her, miserable, while she wept.

  Finally she excused herself and left the room.

  Tom had been taught by his upbringing, by his job, and by his years of stoically endured suffering at home, not to cry. So he sat with his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands and mentally kicked himself.

  He was doing such a ferocious job of this that he did not hear her come back into the room, so was surprised by a light touch on his shoulder as she walked past his chair.

  “Sorry about that,” she said quietly, taking her place again on the sofa. “It’s been a long day.”

  “I’m so sorry—” he began, but she held up a hand.

  “Hush. Not your fault. It’s just that occasionally I
despair of ever overcoming my . . . my flaws.”

  You and me both, he thought. He started to say “Nobody’s perfect,” but it was so lame. He searched for a phrase, and surprised himself by remembering one from the New Testament. He said, “ ‘We have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.’ ”

  It was perfect. She even smiled—a little. “How true,” she replied, sniffing only slightly.

  She had washed her face, but she was still red around the eyes. He had never seen her look less pretty or more desirable. He ached to touch her, but contented himself with smiling at her.

  “Besides,” she continued, “nobody’s called me Kat since my father died. It was nice.”

  So he reminded her of her father. Great.

  She fetched a huge sigh and performed an elongated stretch, like a cat. “Tom,” she said. “It’s Sunday.”

  “And?”

  “I haven’t been to church.”

  “Neither have I.”

  “I’m a traveling Eucharist, you know. I can make my own.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I propose to amble up to the church, break into the sacristy, get a chalice and paten and wafer and wine, and offer a Eucharist in thanksgiving for the life of Tita Robinson and for the repose of the soul of Carolyn Stanley.”

  Tom pondered this a minute and found it good. “I’m with you,” he said. “But shouldn’t we include George’s soul?”

  Kathryn regarded him without enthusiasm. “You have from here to there to talk me into it.”

  It was a dark Sunday afternoon in November. The killer of Carolyn Stanley lay on a slab in the morgue in Trenton. His two accomplices after the fact lay exhausted in their separate beds, he in the jail cell from which his lawyer would shortly free him, she in a guest room in the house of a friend, trying to come to terms with what she’d lost.

  But the two most urgently aware of their sins were the policeman and the priest who were walking toward the church in a wet dusk, pretending to argue about praying for the soul of a killer. They walked side by side but were careful not to touch each other. A fine mist fell on them, soft as a blessing.

  CROOKED HEART

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  Copyright © 2002 by Cristina J. Sumners.

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  library of congress cataloging-in-publication data

  Sumners, Cristina.

  Crooked heart / Cristina Sumners.

  p. cm.

  1. Police—New Jersey—Fiction. 2. Police Chiefs—Fiction. 3. Women clergy—Fiction. 4. New

  Jersey—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3619.U46 C76 2002 2002025589

  813´.6 21

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