“Sit down, girl,” Spitt commanded.
“Gee, Spitt, what a nice collection of dead heads.”
“Trophies.” He glared at me. “They’re called trophies.”
I sat down uneasily among the quick and the dead on a sofa that was upholstered in a tartan plaid fabric rough enough to sand wood. Curtains of a similar dark plaid hung at the four windows. There were a television, a poker table, and four chairs and a couple of beanbag chairs, probably for the grand-kids. The only hint of a feminine influence in all that aggressive masculinity was a little basket of pink fluff and crochet needles, tucked back into the corner of the seat of a brown leather armchair.
“Why do you want a prearrangement plan from me? I got people to handle that sort of thing, don’t do it myself much anymore.”
It was obvious that Spitt might be as free as a bird, but he was not as happy as a lark.
“You know more than they do,” I said. “It’s for my mother, Spitt, and you’re closer to her generation. I just think you’ll have a better idea of the right and proper thing for me to do for her.”
He plucked at his lower lip as he continued to regard me, but any suspicion seemed to have melted from his eyes. Instead, I sensed in him a certain gratified pleasure at my words. Bull’s-eye, I thought.
But half an hour later, when I opened my purse to pull out the cash, he shook his head and frowned at me again.
“What do you think I’m trying to do?” he said. “Pull a fast one on Uncle Sam? Hell, I’m in enough trouble over this murder business. You don’t have a check, do you? I’d sure as hell rather have a check.”
“No, I’m sorry.”
He took my cash then, but with evident reluctance.
“Get my wife to write you out a receipt before you leave,” he commanded, and I swore I would.
But when I walked to the front door, I found that all she had to offer me were doughnuts.
“Oh,” Mrs. Pittman said, her little mouth opening into a circle to match the word. “You’re not leaving so soon, are you, dear? I have coffee on and some nice, fresh doughnuts. Won’t you stay for a buttermilk doughnut?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Spitt asked me to ask you for a receipt for a cash payment I gave him, Mrs. Pittman.”
“A receipt?” She looked suddenly flustered. The hand that wasn’t holding the plate of pastries came up to her cheek. “Oh my, I wouldn’t know how to do that, dear.”
“It’s very simple, you just
“Oh, no.” She clung to her plate with both hands and shook her head back and forth. “I don’t know anything about business, why I know I’d get it all wrong, and Spitt would have a conniption fit, oh my dear, no, no.”
And that was that, except that she forced a buttermilk doughnut on me as I walked out the door. I thought about giving her a receipt for it, but I didn’t want to upset her.
33
“Friedman doesn’t do prearrangements,” Lewis told me a few minutes later over the phone, when I called him from my office. “Like some people don’t do windows, he doesn’t do prearrangements. He wanted to foist me off onto Russell Bissell, so I let him do it.”
“And what about Bissell, Lewis?”
“Men as good-looking as he is shouldn’t be allowed loose on the streets, that’s what. Do you have any idea what seeing him did to my ego, Cain? It’s still lying out there in my car, flattened, gasping for air, wouldn’t even come back into the office with me.”
“That must be a relief to everyone.”
“They ought to just pour cement over the guy and stick him up on a pedestal in a public square. For him, I might even consider a sex-change operation.”
“What about the prearrangement operation, Lewis?” I spoke in patient tones.
“He gave me a receipt for the cash.”
“Well, that sounds on the up-and-up.”
“Except . . .” He drew out the syllables.
“Except?”
“You know how some people make ones that look like sevens? He does that. I gave him a down payment of seventy-nine dollars, and he wrote out a receipt. And what I saw when I looked at it later was that the number could look like seventy-nine or . . .” Again, he drew out the word.
“Nineteen,” I said. My pulse quickened. “That’s very interesting, Lewis. What about the other prearrangement salespeople?”
“There are only two on staff right now, and they’re both part-timers. I didn’t even bother with them, Jenny, because one of them’s too new to be our man, and the other one has been on maternity leave all month.”
“That’s sweet of you to think that pregnant women don’t kill people, Lewis, but wouldn’t she be a perfect suspect, with all that time on her hands?”
“It’s her ninth month, and she’s expecting twins.”
“I see what you mean,” I said. “Well, I guess now we wait for them to turn in their contracts and cash to Francie Daniel. Then we’ll ask her to tell us if one of them turned in less cash than we doled out. Do you realize we might have our answer as soon as tomorrow, Lewis?”
“In the meantime?”
“I have one more appointment,” I told him. “I’m hoping to learn something more to support my hypothesis.”
“You know, there’s a certain cold-bloodedness about you, Cain,” Lewis said unexpectedly. “Maybe that’s what makes you so sexy. I mean, you’re all smiles, all kind of warm and sunny, you know? But there’s something calculating about you.”
I hung up soon after that, in order to make my last visit of the day. And so I wouldn’t have to think very much about his last statements. I preferred to think that the quality to which he referred was called intelligence, and that it was sometimes necessarily accompanied by a certain emotional detachment. That trait in Geof went a long way toward making him a good cop, but did it do either of us any good as people? I was over thirty, never married, childless. He was over thirty, twice married, childless. Could these facts be attributed to fate, good luck, bad luck, practicality, or . . .
It was nearly five o’clock when I left for John and Muriel Rudolph’s home on Brooklyn Terrace.
The eldest child opened the door of the mock-Tudor condominium with the early annuals blooming out front. She was a thin girl with pale skin and light brown hair, and she was wearing a green-and-white striped dress that looked too old and too small for her. Her mom’s, I suspected.
I introduced myself, vaguely, as someone who was investigating her parents’ deaths. I was awfully sorry to intrude, I said—sincerely—but I wondered if I might ask her a couple of important questions.
“I guess so. I’m Angie,” she said, with an air of being upfront about things. I guessed her to be fifteen, although her blue eyes, if taken out of context, could have passed for those of an older woman. She ran thin fingers through her clean bangs, then tucked a strand of loose light brown hair behind an ear. “Would you like to come in, Mrs. Cain?”
“Hello, Angie. Please call me Jenny.”
She held the front door open for me and stood courteously aside to let me enter. As I stepped into the little front hallway, there was an awful crashing sound from the floor above us, followed by a high-pitched scream and a couple of dull thuds. It startled me so that my head jerked, my mouth fell open, and I reached out with one hand to steady myself by touching the wall. The only other time I had been in this house, I had witnessed the aftermath of a murder; for a moment, I was afraid someone else was being killed.
Angie reacted by pursing her lips.
“Excuse me,” she said in a high but steady voice. She walked to the bottom of the stairs that led to the second floor and placed her left hand on the bannister. “Jimmy!” she yelled up with such unexpected force that I jumped again. “Andy! If you don’t settle down this instant, I’ll make you eat the noodles without any spaghetti sauce on them!”
From just over my head, I heard a child say, “Yuk.”
Another small voice yelled back, “I’ll put the spaghetti up your
nose!” But that was followed by a squeal and giggles, and then a chant of, “Spaghetti up your nose, spaghetti up your nose!” The noise diminished to a dull rumble that fell approximately in the decibel range of a moving roller coaster. It seemed to satisfy their sister, though, and I thought at least we would be able to talk above it.
“Won’t you come into the living room?” she asked.
I followed her into that room which her mother had maintained so neatly, and sat down on one end of the sofa. Angie disappeared into the kitchen for a few minutes. When she returned, it was with two cups, two saucers, two spoons, two white paper napkins, and a package of Oreo cookies. She placed them on the coffee table, then disappeared again. This time, she came back with a pot of coffee on a brown plastic tray, along with a large jar of Cremora, a box of sugar cubes, four pink packets of artificial sweetener, and a round plastic dinner plate.
“Oh, Angie,” I said, “you don’t have to . . .”
She smiled graciously at me, as her mother might have done, and began to lay out the Oreo cookies in two circles on the dinner plate, making a smaller circle inside a larger one, with a single cookie in the center. The edges of the cookies rested on each other like dominos. When she finished, she wiped her hands together, then sat down a couple of cushions away from me on the sofa. Angie crossed her ankles and folded her hands in her green-and-white-striped lap.
It was those cookies, displayed so carefully in a child’s imitation of the perfect hostess, that got me. A painful lump of sadness lodged in my throat, like a lozenge that wouldn’t dissolve.
“Thank you, Angie.” I coughed in an effort to clear my throat of the lozenge and my voice of pity, only to feel a prickling of tears behind my eyes. Quickly, pretending busyness to cover my dismay, I broke the outer circle of dominos by taking an Oreo. Then I placed a napkin on my lap and began to munch the cookie.
She ran her fingers through her bangs again and tucked another strand of hair behind her ear before asking: “Will you have some coffee, Jenny?” At my helpless nod, she began to pour and to chatter as she must have thought a good hostess should: “Aunt Janie’s living with us now, but she’s at work till five-thirty. I get the boys’ suppers and see they get started on their homework and all, and try to keep them from absolutely, you know, tearing the house down!” She smiled at me, inviting me to join this motherly amusement of hers.
I tried. “I’m sure you’re wonderful with them, Angie.”
“Well, they’re certainly a handful,” she said, just as her mother must have done many times. She passed me a cup of coffee, and a wave of it splashed over the edge onto the saucer. She flushed and jumped up from the sofa. “Oh, I’m so sorry. I’ll get something . . . .”
“No problem.” I emptied the liquid in the saucer back into the cup and began to sip the coffee. “It’s excellent.”
Slowly, she sank back onto the cushion.
“You said there was something I could help you with, about Mom’s . . . about Mom’s . . .”
Her lips formed the letter m to begin the word murder, but the rest of the word refused to come out, and then she couldn’t even get out the word Mom’s. She began a dreadful, helpless humming on the single letter. The expression in her eyes grew frantic, frightened. I scooted closer to her on the sofa and grabbed one of her hands from out of her lap and held it tight. With my free hand, I began to stroke her shoulder, in small circles like the Oreos. And then I began to talk in as plain and practical a voice as I could manage, no sugar, no syrup.
“Yes, you can help,” I said. “You can help in a way that probably nobody else can, Angie. Just as you’re helping to take care of your brothers and to keep this house so nice and clean, and to feed the boys and make sure they’re warm and safe, and get them off to school. It’s a huge responsibility, I know, and it’s very difficult . . .”
I just talked, not even sure what I was saying, but eventually I got around to this: “What I need to know, Angie . . . I realize it’s a funny question, but it’s important . . . is what your mother thought of your dad’s funeral service. Was the coffin the one she expected, did they sing the right songs, were there the correct number of limousines, that sort of thing. I just wondered if she said anything about it to you.”
She had stopped the dreadful humming and her rigid hands and shoulders had began to relax. When she spoke it was in a nearly normal voice.
“Gosh, no! She was really upset, because after the service she realized it hadn’t been what she and Dad had wanted at all! See, when Dad died, she told the funeral home to take care of everything, and then she was so mad when they didn’t do it right. Like, she and Dad wanted this coffin that’s called the ‘Majesty,’ and instead they got something a lot less pretty. And they’d wanted . . .”
“They had bought a prearrangement plan?”
“Yeah! That’s what Mom called it! And, see, they’d said they wanted . . .”
I let her go on to describe to me the differences between the funeral John Rudolph thought he bought and the one he got.
“Was she going to complain about it, Angie?”
“Oh sure! She was so mad she was going to tell some newspaper reporter even, and show him the contract and all.”
“Contract? Do you still have that contract, Angie?”
When she got up, saying she was going to look for it among her father’s papers, I knew she wouldn’t find it. There had been no prearrangement papers in the estate-planning file folder that I had leafed through the morning of Muriel Rudolph’s murder, no sign of any materials like the ones Russell had given me to keep the night we had dinner together. My best guess was that she had taken the file out that morning to show the prearrangement contract to Lewis. Her murderer had recognized its incriminating import—would probably have searched for it if it hadn’t been so easy to find—and had stolen it.
That is why the murderer had come to visit her that morning, because of her words the night before: “It was wrong, Stan, it was all wrong!”
It was her husband’s funeral she had been referring to, not Sylvia’s sex life, and that’s what worried the killer. If Muriel complained, the record would be checked, and then probably other records, until the house came tumbling down.
And why the list of names on her napkin?
Judging from the other words she had written—party and bitch—she probably had been thinking about her husband’s lover that morning, and maybe she was making bitter guesses about Sylvia’s other lovers. Maybe she was going to show that list to Lewis, as well as complain about the funeral. Or maybe if I checked I would find it was only a list of her husband’s pallbearers.
When Angie returned to the living room empty-handed, I had a last question for her: “Do you know who sold that prearrangement policy to your parents?”
“No, gee, I’m sorry, I don’t know.”
Just before I left, the boys came down the stairs. The younger one was walking on the heels of the older one, who was yelling at him to “stop it right now! Angie, make him stop it right now!”
They were handsome little redheaded fellows, maybe five and seven years old, who ignored me completely. There were dark circles under their eyes, and there were tired, whiny notes in their voices. They were too thin, like their sister.
“Angie,” I said, drawing her attention away from the boys. She was standing straight and ladylike once more, so I didn’t try to touch her again. “I have a good friend who’s a cop. Maybe some Saturday, the boys would like to ride around with him in the police car.”
“Oh boy!” the youngest child exclaimed. There was a desperately eager expression in the blue eyes he raised to me. I wanted to grab him and to hug him tightly until the desperation eased away. I wanted to embrace them all, but I was a stranger who would only repel and frighten little boys.
Feeling angry and helpless, I left.
I worried all the way home about whether she would fix a green salad to go with their spaghetti. And what about milk? Did they drink enough milk
? But sometimes dark circles under the eyes are a sign of milk allergy . . . could they be allergic to milk products? I had better tell Angie to check it out with their doctor.
They have dark circles under their eyes because they are grieving and not sleeping, I reminded myself as I pulled into Geof’s driveway. And they have aunts and uncles and cousins. They are orphans, but they are not alone; they have family who will take care of them, and it is none of my business.
Since Geof wouldn’t be home from the station until very late, I had my spinach salad, cherry pie, and white wine supper alone. After considering how few calories there are in spinach, I added a dollop of vanilla ice cream to the pie. While I ate, I looked up milk allergy in a health dictionary, but only because I was curious, that’s all.
It took me a long time to get to sleep that night, possibly because of the ice cream, but more likely because I was anxious about what sort of report I would get from Francie the next day. My dreams that night were restless, foggy ones, but I finally slept deeply and was barely aware of Geof’s kiss on my cheek when he slid into bed beside me.
34
I was acutely aware of his presence, however, when he walked into the kitchen the next morning. I looked over my shoulder and saw that he was fully dressed in a business suit but still yawning. I opted for a flippant greeting, to cover my sudden attack of nervousness.
“Hey, sailor . . . cuppa coffee for a kiss?”
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