Dianna’s line was busy.
I went out into the night. There were no gigantic automobiles waiting to mow me down. There was just the night and the spit of rain and the rhythm of traffic in the city. I followed the rhythm, picked it up and tried to get lost in it, tried to wipe out the persistent image of Meredith Berens in the morgue and the equally persistent image of Alexander Wayne threatening me, ordering me to “call off” the police. As if I had that kind of authority. Or any other kind. Could Wayne really think I carried that much weight with OPD? Not a chance. I’ll admit I’m a pretty impressive kind of guy, but even so—not a chance. So why the visit from Wayne? Under his anger, I now decided, there had been a distinct undercurrent of—what? Panic? Desperation? Nobody likes having the cops pry into his affairs, and even priests, Scout leaders, and members of the ASPCA are apt to grow nervous when it happens. But worry is one thing, panic something else again.
Having the cops nosing around had made Alexander Wayne panicky, all right. Panicky enough to try to scare me—or kill me—to get me out of an investigation he didn’t know I was probably already out of? Maybe. Panicky enough to want to buy off my client, or former client? Definitely. Panicky enough to waste his breath telling me to call off the cops? Obviously.
Why all the fuss? Because Wayne was afraid the cops might just be able to find something to pin on his sonny-boy.
Or because he was afraid they might find something else.
The car ended up in front of Dianna Castelli’s house.
Every light in the place was burning, and it was still early, so I didn’t feel bad about dropping in. Given my reason, or excuse, for being there, even Miss Manners would forgive me for not phoning ahead.
She answered the bell almost immediately. She wore a floppy purple-and-yellow sweatshirt with the sleeves pushed back, tight black pants like Laura always wore on The Dick Van Dyke Show, and a frazzled expression. “There you are,” she said by way of greeting. “Do you know anything about VCRs?”
A little confused, I followed her into the living room, a smallish square space at the front of the house. Lots of woodwork, old and faded wallpaper, fat-slatted, out-of-style venetian blinds, and a large cardboard box, its paper and plastic and Styrofoam innards spread out on the rug amidst a tangle of cables. “Just that I don’t understand the VCR mentality,” I said. “There’s so much junk on TV, I can’t find more than a couple hours a week worth watching. What would you want to tape any of it for?”
She fixed me with a look. “There’s a lot of junk in bookstores, too. You think people should give up reading?”
“You bite your tongue,” I said with fervor.
She laughed. “I think of this as a time-management device. I can watch what I want to when I want to, not when some network nitwit thinks I ought to. All the good movies are on after midnight. And by the time I get done zapping the commercials, I can watch an hour show in about forty-five minutes.”
“And you in advertising,” I chided.
“Public relations. What’s that got to do with anything?” She knelt on the oval rug in front of a wall unit that held the TV set. Her slightly spiky hair was a little more relaxed by evening, I noticed, and if her figure was a shade too ample for the tight slacks, she at least had the panache to carry it off. She was engrossed with the mess in front of her. “I got this thing today to replace my old clunker, which went to that big electronics store in the sky. The book says this cable”—she held up a length of black coaxial cable—“goes from the wall to the VCR. Then this cable goes from the VCR to the TV. But I have a cable converter. So this cable should go to the converter box, and this one from the box to the TV set. Right?”
“Uh …” I said, and invited myself to sit down. “Aren’t you even a little curious about why I’m here?”
“Because of my message, and because I’ve been tying up the phone all night.” She bent at the waist, leaning on her arms crossed on her thighs, and stuck her nose into the instruction book. “But when I do that,” she said to the book, “I don’t get any signal on the VCR, just the set.”
“What message?”
She didn’t look up. “On your machine.”
I had been first too shaken, then too distracted, to even look at the answering machine when I got back to Decatur Street.
I said, “I haven’t gotten my messages yet. Why don’t you just hook this machine up the same way you had the old one hooked up?”
Dianna shook her spike-topped head, still fixed on the book. “The old one wasn’t cable-ready. The cable went from the wall to the converter to the VCR to the TV, and I couldn’t watch one channel while I taped another. Now I can. Or at least I should be able to. Why is it these directions are always written by Japanese high school students?”
“The average Japanese high school student knows more English than the average American student knows Japanese.”
“That’s supposed to make me feel better?” She looked at me. “Well, if you never got my message, then what are you doing here. Not that I mind the company …”
I got down on the floor next to her and looked at the instructions. “Then you haven’t heard …” I said ineffectually.
Dianna sat back on her haunches, the video recorder forgotten, and looked at me for a long moment. “Oh, my God,” she breathed.
“I’m afraid so,” I said. “The police found her this afternoon.” I gave her the story. By the time I was through she was crying gently into her left hand, her face turned away from me.
The world probably is full of people who know just what to say or do in situations like this. I’m not one of them. I sat there mutely for too long a time, flipping aimlessly through the instructions for the video recorder. Finally I wised up enough to lean forward and put my arms around Dianna. She responded by wrapping her arms around me and letting out a new series of sobs and gulps. Then she finished with that and sat back on her heels and wiped her face with her fingers. I offered my handkerchief and she laughed wetly.
“You don’t want to do that,” she snuffled. “I’ll get a Kleenex.”
She did, and when she returned ten minutes later it was with a dry, fresh-scrubbed face and a glass in each hand. She gave me one and I tasted it. Scotch.
“I don’t know about you,” she said, seating herself, “but I need one. If you don’t want yours, I’ll drink it too.”
I got up off the floor and sat on a low-backed sofa under the front window. “I’ll drink it,” I said. “By the way, your converter box has to be tuned to channel four if you’re going to watch a tape, not channel three, because three’s in use ’round these parts.” I put the instruction booklet on a lamp table to my left.
She attempted a laugh, which emerged as a hiccup. “Da-dammit,” she gulped. “E-every time I c-cry …”
It’s hard not to laugh at someone who has the hiccups. I didn’t even try. Soon we were both laughing, although Dianna’s was still a little damp. It was the slightly guilty, slightly nervous, slightly relieved laughter of people who are still alive when Death has come near. God knows, there was nothing to laugh about. Unless just being alive is reason enough.
“Ah, G-God,” Dianna breathed helplessly when she was through. “Jeez, it was only a w-week ago that Meredith was discussing w-wedding plans with me. Now—Poor, poor Meredith.” She shook her head and dabbed at her eyes with the crumpled tissue in her hand.
“Let’s talk about those wedding plans,” I said.
She snuffled another laugh, wiping tears from her cheeks with the heel of her hand. “I told Meredith, I’m not the one to ask about marriage.”
“Been through the wringer, have we?”
“Hasn’t everyone?” She exercised the Kleenex some more. Women can get more mileage out of a tissue … Me, I get about half of a good honk into one and it disintegrates. “Oh, I haven’t been married,” she said, stressing the word as if it were something distasteful. “But I came real close a couple of years ago.”
“What happened? A
s if it’s any of my business.”
Dianna smiled sadly. “I guess I’m just too independent. He—this guy I was living with—he was offered a teaching job at Drake, in Des Moines. A good position, the kind of job he’d been hoping for. He wanted me to move there with him and marry him. But I was finally getting the agency on its feet after a few real lean years and—well, like I said, I’m just too independent. I couldn’t give up my freedom. What about you? Have you ever been married?”
“Have been and am, on paper at least. My wife and I are sort of separated.” Explaining the true nature of our on-and-off marriage was too complicated, and I wasn’t altogether sure I understood it myself. “But it’s funny. As … unorthodox, and sometimes downright shitty, as my marriage has been, I’ve never viewed it as encroaching on my freedom or independence.”
She shrugged. “When you’re married and your husband gets transferred to the middle of Iowa, you go. You’re not married, you don’t go. Or at least you don’t have to go. You have a choice.”
“You always have a choice. I mean, in a way I’ve chosen to be apart from my wife—in that, in order to be with her, I have to follow a lifestyle that is distasteful to me. Neither of my options was especially attractive, but I had a choice and I made it. Life’s full of hard decisions, and choices between lesser evils. With or without marriage.”
She pursed her lips and cocked her head and gave every indication of wanting to appear to be giving my comments due consideration without actually wanting to consider them at all. “Be that as it may,” she said diplomatically, “the fact remains that I’m no expert on weddings or marriages or anything else except maybe the PR business, and I told Meredith as much. Nicely, of course. You don’t want to rain on someone’s parade when they’re as excited as Meredith w-was …”
Again with the Kleenex.
I said, “About those impending nuptials …”
“But I thought you thought Meredith … Oh, I get it. You think maybe instead of Meredith making up the engagement, Thomas Wayne made up a story about Meredith making up their engagement, don’t you?”
“As usual,” I said, “I’m not at all sure I know what you just said. What do you think?”
She sighed. “My brain’s been buzzing ever since you first told me about it. It’s hard, you know what I mean.” She used the Kleenex again. “On the one hand, while Meredith was kind of a different kid, a little mixed-up, maybe, and not as mature or savvy or what-have-you as a kid her age should have been—blame her mom—I can’t make myself believe she was so crazy that she could just go and invent a whole engagement and delude herself into, you know, believing it. I know she was pretty crazy about Thomas, and I could understand someone kind of, you know, inflating a relationship in her own mind. But not Meredith. Not like that. But on the other hand, I know Thomas pretty well, too, and I can’t believe that he would make it up. Still …”
I waited a decent interval. “Still …” I finally prompted.
“Well …” she said, clearly reluctant to commit to what she had begun to say. “It’s so far-fetched …” She stood and wandered over to the shelving unit against the east wall. It was one of those standard “entertainment centers” you can buy just about anywhere. Room enough for a nineteen-inch television set and a VCR and a compact stereo, plus the necessary records, tapes, and discs to feed the hardware, plus a few books and some photos and the other general dust-collectors you’d expect to find. Dianna flipped on the television set and tuned the cable box to channel four, then shoved a tape into the VCR sitting on the floor, wires and cables running to and from its back like entrails. After a moment the commercial on the tube flipped once and vanished, replaced by the image from the video recorder, “electronically reproduced,” as they say at the end of the newscasts.
“I’ll be damned,” she mumbled, half to herself. “You were right.”
“Occasionally it’ll happen,” I said.
She turned and smiled sadly, then powered down the VCR and tuned the TV to one of the music channels. The volume was turned all the way down, as it had been all along. A very pretty young man with long blond hair and rouged lips appeared to be screaming over the top of an electric guitar that looked like a scimitar. There was a lot of colored smoke. Without sound, it was all pretty comical.
I said, “I read somewhere that these music-video channels are loaded with sex and violence. So I spent an entire evening glued to one once and didn’t see much of either.”
“People are good at finding what they want to find where they want to find it,” Dianna said, returning to her chair, an old-looking wingback shoved into a corner beneath a wall-mounted swing-out reading lamp. She sat with one leg folded beneath her, the other foot dangling a few inches above the floor. She took a breath and straightened her back. “After you were at the agency this morning, I got to thinking. About Thomas, I mean. I still think that your … theory or conjecture or what-have-you is all wet, but I was reminded of something. It took me awhile to check it out. When I did, that’s when I left word for you to call me.”
I nodded.
“I remember hearing something years ago. About Thomas. Now, this is just, you know, hearsay, and I don’t want it getting back to Thomas that you heard it from me, because I don’t know whether—”
“For cryin’ out loud, Dianna …”
“All right, all right.” She took a breath and let it go, then took a drink, just a sip, a nervous action. “All right,” she repeated. “I sort of remembered something this afternoon, and I had to call a couple of people, a couple of people who know Thomas, to see whether I remembered right. What I remembered was someone a long time ago saying that the reason Thomas never got married, and never gets really serious with a woman, is that he had a girlfriend or a fiancée or whatever a long time ago and she got killed.”
I said nothing, but what I was thinking must have been written all over my face in twenty-two-point type.
“I know,” Dianna said hastily. “It’s too horrible to think about. I mean, it can’t be. But …”
“It’s a helluva coincidence,” I said gently.
“Coincidences happen,” she said after a while.
“That’s the trouble with them.” I sipped some liquor and thought for a moment. Was this what Alexander Wayne didn’t want the cops—or me, or anyone else—to discover? “Do you have any details?” I asked Dianna.
She shook her head. “Like I said, I had just about forgotten all about it. But when you were at the office today … Well, you know how it is when you sort of remember something but not quite? It’s on the tip of your mind, but you don’t know if it’s real or a part of a dream you had once or if you’re remembering it right at all? That’s how this was. That’s why I didn’t say anything then, or until I could talk with a couple of friends.”
“And how did you go about this? You didn’t say, ‘Hey, do you remember anything about Thomas Wayne having a girlfriend who got killed?’ Killed how, by the way?”
“Car accident, I guess. And, no, I’m a little more discreet than that. I made up a story about having had a conversation with another friend. I said the talk came around to car wrecks—I had sort of remembered that Thomas’s girlfriend was killed in a crash—and that this friend and I remembered, you know, the basic story, but that we couldn’t think who got killed.”
It was a pretty good way of going about it, and I said so. Too many people in too many instances, whether accidentally or on purpose, taint responses by the way they phrase their questions. It’s the When-Did-You-Stop-Beating-Your-Wife Syndrome. “Do you remember something about Thomas Wayne having a girlfriend who got killed a few years ago?” is likely to produce a positive response, even if the respondent doesn’t really remember it. Nobody likes to appear uninformed.
I said, “Did either of your friends recall the story in greater detail?”
“No, not really. One of them said she thought it had been a high school sweetheart. But she wasn’t really sure. Both of them pre
tty much remembered it the same way I did—just one of those stories you hear about people, you know? No real details, no real source. Just a notch or two above a rumor. Later you can’t even remember where you heard it or who you heard it from. That’s how it is with me, at least, and both of these women I talked to.”
“A high school sweetheart. Did the accident occur when Thomas was in high school?”
“Search me.”
“That would be … what, twenty years ago, twenty-one …” I mused. “Was Thomas involved in this accident? As a driver, a passenger, a witness?”
Dianna shrugged. “You already know everything I know. What, you think Thomas killed this girl back then and then repeated the act twenty years later? Sort of a long time between murders, wouldn’t you say?”
“A long time between two deaths—the first may not have been murder—that have Thomas Wayne as a common denominator. I would like to know more about the high school sweetheart. It would be interesting to see if there were similarities between her and Meredith.”
“Similarities? Like what?”
“Like, did the high school sweetheart expect to marry Thomas Wayne?”
Dianna whistled out a long breath and took a drink and said, “Jesus, Nebraska, doesn’t it ever worry you that you think that way?”
“It worries me more that other people think that way, and some of them act on it. Do you know Thomas’s father very well?”
“Alexander?” She frowned. “Not very. I’ve met him is all. Why?—Oh, Christ, Nebraska, you don’t think Alexander had anything to do with Meredith’s … with Meredith, do you? He’s an old man, for Pete’s sake.”
“For whoever’s sake, he’s not that old—I doubt he’s sixty-five yet—and it looks to me like he’s in pretty good shape.”
Things Invisible (A Nebraska Mystery Book 4) Page 16