“We got takeout from the deli for lunch, and I told everyone to make sure this place was cleaned,” she said, pulling her hair back and tucking it into a terry headband. “I know we’re imposing, but we don’t have to trash your home. I’m afraid our standards get to be pretty low when we’re traveling. Why, I’ve edited pieces on the destruction of the environment in a three-by-five-foot room holding two people and over fifty half-full, gummy, cigarette- and coffee-crusted Styrofoam cups.” She was heading for the door to the garage as she spoke. “What’s the matter? Did you forget something?” she turned and asked when it became apparent that Susan wasn’t following her.
“I …” Susan realized that Rebecca had changed into shorts and a T-shirt. There were running shoes on her feet.
“I don’t think I’ll need sweatpants. I usually run in shorts until it’s well below freezing,” Rebecca continued, apparently not recognizing Susan’s confusion. “We are going to the track, aren’t we?” she added impatiently, holding the door for her hostess.
Susan ignored her right knee as it gave a warning throb of pain. “Sure, I … I just wanted to get some tissues,” she added, yanking at a box in the corner of a cabinet.
“Good idea. I noticed yesterday that the cold weather was making your nose run.”
Susan smiled and followed Rebecca to her car. But Rebecca apparently had no intention of driving. “My car is fairly recognizable. I thought maybe we could take yours?”
Susan reminded herself that Rebecca could hardly have known that her husband was going to be murdered when she selected such distinctive vanity plates. Together they walked to Susan’s Maserati. She would drive slowly; it would give them a chance to talk.
“Did you hear that the first man murdered yesterday—the man found in the library—worked at your network?” She wasted no time before getting to the subject. “In the public relations department,” she added when Rebecca didn’t answer.
“Do the police know his name?”
“I suppose so. I haven’t spoken to Brett yet. This information came from someone else. All I know right now is that he had worked in the public relations department and then, about a year ago, he left and joined a private consulting firm. He worked on ‘This Morning, Every Morning’—at least that’s what I was told.”
“Mitch Waterfield.”
“What?”
“Mitchell Waterfield was his name,” Rebecca repeated quietly, obviously upset.
“You knew him?”
“Of course. He was at the network for years—long before I got there. He worked pretty much exclusively for ‘T.M.E.M.’ three or four years before he left.”
“So you knew him pretty well?” Susan glanced over at her passenger in time to see her shrug one shoulder. “There must be a lot of people working on that show,” she suggested.
“Oh, there are.” Rebecca’s response was more enthusiastic this time. “Producers, editors, gofers, cameramen, sound men, makeup men, unit managers … Maybe you’d like to come into the city and watch a show go on the air. I’m sure I could arrange something when this is all over.” She stopped and sighed. “If I have a job when this is all over.”
“Surely …” Susan began.
“There are no ‘surelys’ in television.”
“But you must have a contract!” Susan recalled an article in the Times that, while mainly reporting the immense sums on-the-air personalities were paid for what looked like only a few minutes of work, had mentioned contracts more than once.
“Oh, they’ll pay me for the next two years, four and a half months. My agent has seen to that. But I may not be able to get a job in any market larger than Sioux City when this is over.” She was silent a moment. “My first job was in a town smaller than that. My hair was done by the local hairdresser. My clothing provided by a locally owned department store. They both got full-screen credits. I looked like hell. I had to sneak into the station at night to cut my own demo tape. Otherwise I’d never have gotten out of there.”
“ ‘Demo tape?’ ”
“A sampling of my work. In this business you can sit tight and hope a plane crashes in your station parking lot or that someone assassinates a presidential candidate while he’s visiting your town, and then maybe, just maybe, the networks will arrive, and, while they’re doing body counts or interviewing the grieving widow, someone important will notice you and your work and give you a chance to move up. Or, you give up on fate, make a lot of demo tapes of your shows and send them out to whoever might look at them.”
“And that’s not easy?”
“It is now that half the people you know own air-quality video cameras, but years ago it wasn’t. There were no small privately owned cameras; everything had to be done in a studio with professional equipment. And it had to be done by professionals. I had a friend who worked the night shift running the old movies that used to be put on the air after the network signed off for the night. He used to run duplicates of my tape for me—on borrowed stock, of course.”
“And that’s how you made it to the network? I thought I had read that you came from Los Angeles?”
“Just the last stop along the way,” Rebecca explained. “Also Albuquerque, Denver, and Memphis.”
“You worked hard.” Even Susan heard her own words as an embarrassing understatement. She continued quickly. “And I don’t see why you should have to give up everything you worked for. After all, it certainly wasn’t your fault that someone murdered your husband—or anyone else who worked on your show,” she added, knowing that wasn’t true if Rebecca was the murderer. But if she was, Susan supposed, she would have a job anyway. If her agent was as good as she claimed, Rebecca Armstrong might end up the most highly paid prisoner in American history—at least for two years, four and a half months of her life sentence.
“Actually, there are probably going to be some people who will say that I had an affair with Mitch Waterfield.”
It was terrible timing. Susan had just steered her car into the parking area beside the track. “And did you?” she asked, putting her foot down slowly on the brake pedal.
“No, but he was a very close friend. In TV land, there are lots of people who can’t accept any relationship without a prurient twist. Right before I met Jason, I had a hard time breaking up with a man I’d been with for years—Mitch helped me through that. So we spent a lot of time together, and since he wasn’t seeing anyone seriously, we didn’t worry about what sort of interpretation people put on the relationship.… I generally spend about five minutes warming up.”
“Huh?” Susan was startled by the change of topic.
“You know—stretching.” Rebecca got out of the car.
Susan followed. “I don’t do that enough,” she admitted. “I’ll follow your lead.” And we can continue to talk, she added silently.
Rebecca seemed to have the same thought. They walked briskly to the track as she continued her story. “I was, embarrassingly enough, in love with a married man for more years than I enjoy remembering. I suppose it was just the same old story.” She stopped by the fence surrounding the track, bent over, and clutched her ankles.
“He promised over and over to leave his wife and family, but he never did,” Susan suggested, trying to imitate Rebecca’s moves. Apparently Susan’s ankles were farther away—or maybe her arms were shorter?
Rebecca seemed surprised by Susan’s words. “Not at all. I was with him because he wouldn’t leave his wife and family. I didn’t want him to commit to me.”
“And Mitchell Waterfield helped you during the breakup?”
Rebecca touched her forehead to her knee before answering. “Oh, he helped during the relationship, too. It had to be hidden, of course.”
Susan considered out-of-the-way restaurants, back entrances to apartment buildings. She didn’t consider introducing her forehead to her legs. “So how did he help?”
“He made sure that my name and pictures were seen with the men I was publicly dating—there was a politician,
a successful businessman or two, and a writer. And that I got lots of interviews in places like Vanity Fair and Vogue, where I could talk about the virtues of playing the field before settling down to start a family, etc., etc. That truly is the same old stuff.” She stretched her arms over her head. “But people still want to read it. Ready to run?”
“Sure. But I’m going to take it slowly. I’ve been having some trouble with my right knee.”
“I’ll push the first three miles, then I’ll slow down, and we can chat for the last mile or so.” Rebecca punched a few buttons on her watch and took off.
Susan trotted behind. Way behind. She needed to think about something besides her poor aching legs. What had Kathleen said? Find out why Rebecca wanted to stay with the Henshaws, and she’d know a lot more about everything? She’d have to approach that subject when they were together again.
If she lived that long. There was an unoccupied bench by the side of the track. Susan couldn’t resist. She sat down and rubbed her knee. An injury was a legitimate excuse to rest, wasn’t it?
Not, apparently, to Rebecca. “Run through the pain,” she called out as she passed by.
Fortunately she ran so quickly that Susan didn’t have time to think of an appropriate answer. An appropriate civil answer; a number of less-than-polite responses did come to mind. But, she reminded herself, she had to find out more, had to take advantage of this opportunity. She got up and resumed her slow trot around the track.
“He must have been in town to see me,” Rebecca called out, passing Susan.
That was an inspiration. Susan tried to catch up with Rebecca, quickly realizing it was a hopeless cause. But there was, after all, more than one way to skin a cat. She slowed down to await the next time Rebecca “lapped” her.
“When …” She gasped for enough oxygen to speak. “When did he tell you he was coming to Hancock?” she managed to call out.
Incredibly Rebecca could run backward almost as well as forward. “He didn’t tell me. I had no idea. I was absolutely shocked when I saw him lying there on the floor.…”
Rebecca halted suddenly and put out a hand as if to steady herself on some nonexistent nearby object. Susan hurried to her side, afraid that she was feeling faint.
“You did see him!”
Rebecca didn’t answer.
“I wondered if you had seen him,” Susan continued. Then she realized that Rebecca had not only seen the body, but she had chosen not to help identify it. Susan stared at Rebecca Armstrong.
Rebecca grimaced. “I didn’t know what to do. When I saw him lying there … I just didn’t know what to do,” she repeated.
Susan returned to the bench without speaking. Rebecca followed close behind. When they were both seated, Susan wasted no time asking polite questions. “So what did happen yesterday morning? Do you know who killed Mitchell Waterfield?”
“No. I know I didn’t.” She answered the last question first.
“Did you discover his body?”
“No. At least I didn’t see him until after you screamed.… Maybe I should tell you everything from the beginning.”
“Why don’t you?”
“I was there to pick up my library card—and to try to explain tactfully to the man who runs the library …”
“Charles Grace?”
“Yes. I’d forgotten his name. Anyway, since we moved to town, Mr. Grace had left a half-dozen messages on our answering machine requesting that Jason and I might like the opportunity to get better acquainted with Hancock and its people and contribute to the community.…” She pulled a stray lock of hair behind her ear angrily. “If you know him, you must know how damn pedantic he can be. Anyway, he wanted us to get involved in some sort of fund-raising activity for the library.”
“And you were going to ‘tactfully’ turn him down?”
“At least put him off. Jason and I are … were … Look, I know celebrities can do a lot for charities, but if we did everything everyone asks, we’d have no life of our own. I recognize a responsibility to the community I live in, but Jason and I both wanted time to decide where to get involved. Where we could do the most good.”
“Of course. So you went to the circulation desk … or to the tower office?”
“The circulation desk. The woman working there found my new library card and gave it to me. We talked for a few minutes. She told me how much she enjoyed ‘T.M.E.M.’ and I told her how happy we were that we had found a place like Hancock to live in. You know,” she ended vaguely.
Susan nodded. She didn’t and she did.
“And then you screamed,” Rebecca continued. “I turned and ran toward the sound. Half the people in the library did, too, of course. In fact, the librarian I was speaking with almost leapt over the circulation desk—and it’s certainly more than waist-high. When I got to the stacks, I was with about twenty other people, but I’m taller than most, and I could see through a gap in the shelves of books. In fact, I could look right into Mitch’s face.” She faltered for the first time since starting her story.
“You recognized him immediately?”
“Yes. I could see his face clearly from where I stood. Anyway, I could hardly believe it. I hadn’t seen Mitch for over a year—we invited him to the wedding, but he wrote that he was going to be on vacation or something that week—and here he was lying on the floor of our new local library with a knife in him. I had no idea what to do. Luckily, in the excitement, no one was paying attention to me, so I just backed away from that part of the building and took some time to think.”
“And?”
“And I decided to shut up, keep what I knew to myself, and see what happened. After all, all I really knew is who he was, and surely the police would find that out easily enough. I didn’t think I was doing anything wrong. But, of course, I just wasn’t thinking. I should have known that the police would discover Mitch’s connection with ‘T.M.E.M.’ almost as soon as they identified him. There was never any way I was going to stay completely uninvolved in his death.”
“Of course, you didn’t know that the same person was going to kill your husband.”
“No, of course not. I … I don’t think that I could have prevented that by telling the police I knew Mitch, do you?”
“I don’t see how.” Susan tried to reassure her.
“Actually, I didn’t get asked very much. The officer who questioned me is a big fan of the show. He did almost all the talking.”
Gushing, Susan suspected. “What did he ask?”
“Actually he asked if I knew anything about the murder, and, of course, I told him no—because I didn’t. Then he told me what he liked about ‘T.M.E.M.,’ and I thanked him and that was it! I didn’t actually lie.”
And you didn’t actually tell the truth. But Susan kept that thought, among others, to herself. “What did you do then?”
“Well, I hung around for as long as possible. I did want to know what was going on. After all, a friend of mine had been murdered. But the police were politely firm about everyone going on about their business, so I left.”
“And?”
“And I did some errands.” She shrugged. “You must know how it is when you move into a new house. There have been about a hundred errands each day. I went to that decorator’s shop down by the river to see if some pleated shades we’re having made had come in, and I went to a framers in the mall on the highway to check out matte colors. I went to Hancock Hardware to pick up paint chips, I dropped off some dry cleaning, and then I went home and changed to run.”
“And, of course, you didn’t see your husband at all.”
Rebecca frowned, then bit her lip. “I’ve been thinking about that. I parked behind the house and went in the back door. I left that way, too.”
Susan tried to remember the design of the Armstrongs’ driveway. “But you had to pass the front of the house, didn’t you?”
“Yes, of course.”
“And Jason wasn’t there? He wasn’t sitting on that bench that th
e trick or treaters found him on?”
“I don’t know,” Rebecca began slowly. “The porch has so much damn clutter that I’m not sure I’d have noticed if there had been a dead elephant lying across the threshold of the front door. I honestly can’t say for sure that he wasn’t there!”
Susan digested the information for a minute before asking another question. “Where was Jason supposed to be yesterday? Were you surprised to find that he was at home in the early afternoon?”
Apparently her question surprised Rebecca. “I have no idea. We don’t check up on each other. We both had a free day, and we were both doing what we needed to do.”
It didn’t sound like any newlyweds Susan had known, but Rebecca continued.
“We had reservations at the Four Seasons for dinner with some old friends. Jason eats breakfast but I don’t, so I left him a note reminding him of it when I left. He was still sleeping the last time I saw him.”
Both women were silent for a moment.
“I guess I should go to the police station and explain all this, shouldn’t I?”
“Probably,” Susan agreed.
“I need to tell everyone back at your house about it, too,” Rebecca added.
“Your public relations people don’t know the truth?” Susan was amazed.
“Of course not. Do you think I trust them?”
“But you told Mitch about your affair.”
“But Mitch was different. He was a friend,” Rebecca explained, getting up. “In television, it’s a real good idea not to mistake colleagues for friends.” She began to sprint around the track. “Aren’t you coming? I have three more miles to go,” she called over her shoulder, not interested in whether or not Susan responded.
Susan had no intention of running anymore today. She sat and watched and wondered about a person who would continue to exercise regularly despite the murders of her husband and her friend the previous day. Extremely self-disciplined? Extraordinarily self-possessed? Neurotically self-centered? A combination of all three or something else entirely? For some reason, Susan couldn’t even begin to make any judgment about Rebecca’s character. Of course, she hadn’t known her very long, but still, in the past, Susan had found that tragedy is usually very revealing. But Rebecca never seemed to drop her public persona.
All Hallows Evil Page 14
