The house was strangely quiet. No dishes clattering, no vacuum cleaner humming, no floorboards creaking.
“Shari! Hey, sweets!”
Silence. Duane limped to the stairs and climbed them as quickly as his bad hip permitted. Shari was not in the kitchen, the living room or the bathroom.
“Shari? Sweets?”
She was not in the bedroom, either. Nor were her clothes in the closet, nor her little glass bottles of lotions and potions on the dresser. Duane hustled to the side door and flung it open. The Durango was gone.
Shari was gone.
Duane wandered down the gravel driveway, his head oscillating, his mouth agape. No Durango, no Shari, but here was something that set off an alarm in his beer-soaked brain. A black sedan and a police car were parked next to the outbuilding.
“Holy shit,” said Duane. He ran for the pickup truck.
MATT STOKER APPROACHED the visiting booth with a relaxed swagger. He stopped to chat with the police guard as if they were old friends, then entered the booth and sat straddling the chair back. His tinted glasses were dark from the harsh fluorescent lights.
“How’s the food in this joint?” he asked Arthur.
“I don’t know,” said Arthur. “I haven’t eaten.”
“What did the DA think of the tape?” said Karen.
“She was impressed, but not as apologetic as I’d hoped.” Matt ran his fingers through the dark, wavy hair that brought Mel Gibson to mind. “The DA got Judge Huff on the horn. She agreed to issue a warrant to search the Billick place. Lopopolo’s probably out there by now.”
“What are they looking for?” said Arthur, with blunted affect.
“Same stuff they looked for at your place and didn’t find, is my guess,” said Matt. “Duane is now the prime suspect. Shari’s deposition explains how Duane could have accessed Lorraine’s medical records in order to remove her drug allergy sheet.”
Karen chimed in. “Shari’s deposition also gives you an alibi, if you buy the poisoned chocolate theory.”
“Which the DA does,” said Matt. “I gave her Bonnie Bach’s name and number. When the DA talks to Bonnie, she’ll be convinced it was the chocolates. Then Shari’s testimony together with the order form from Mercury Messenger and the register from the Sleepy Time Motel puts Arthur in the clear.”
“Shari’s deposition also explains,” said Karen, “how Shari herself could have tampered with Lorraine’s medical records.”
Arthur started and blanched a shade paler. Apparently he had not considered the possibility that Shari might have been in on poisoning Lorraine. He was considering it now, though, and it plainly shook him. If Shari were involved, Arthur would feel even more culpable than if Duane acted alone. Arthur muttered, “I am peppered, I warrant.” Karen had no idea what he meant.
“The cops and the DA aren’t looking at Shari Billick as a suspect,” said Matt, “because of Duane’s deposition. He tried to lie about Shari giving him an alibi, and he admitted to knowing a lot about how to cause food poisoning. In fact, it’s in the county courthouse records that he tried to use that knowledge in the past to defraud a frozen food company. Also, he revealed both emotional and financial motives for poisoning Lorraine. Best of all, he’s a perfect defendant—a drunk who looks, walks and talks like your stereotypical sleaze. Shari, on the other hand, is a prosecutor’s nightmare. Couple of men on the jury and it’s all over.”
The guard stuck his head in the door and told Matt he had a phone call. Matt shook a fist and said, “This is it.” He dashed down the hall toward the intake desk.
Arthur stared without seeing through the glass walls of the booth until Matt was out of sight. Then his eyes moved gradually to Karen. “This is what?” he asked.
To Karen it seemed that Arthur’s mind was in slow motion. He was either so deeply depressed or so distracted by the guilt he would feel if the Billicks had murdered Lorraine that he was not catching on.
“Matt Stoker thinks they’re about to arrest Duane Billick,” said Karen.
Arthur’s brow furrowed. “I hope they don’t put him in my cellblock.”
My God, thought Karen. He really is out of it. What are they doing to him in this place? “Arthur,” said Karen with a bit of a laugh, “they won’t hold both of you. If Duane is charged, you’ll be released.”
Karen saw a glimmer of relief in Arthur’s dull eyes and a loosening of his facial muscles. “Really,” he said, sitting straighter. He appeared to be making a sudden recovery from a blow to the head.
Matt rushed up to the booth and flung open the door. “They must have hit pay dirt out at the Billick place. The DA won’t give me any details yet, but Duane Billick has been arrested! Arthur, is there anybody here you want to say good-bye to?”
Arthur rose slowly, his eyes moving back and forth from Matt Stoker to Karen, his mouth trying to form words. He seemed to be afraid to react too positively to the good news, as if it would be snatched away from him if he tried to grab hold of it. “You mean . . .”
“You’re going home, Arthur,” said Matthew. “A little red tape and you’re outta here.”
Arthur stood motionless, his face brightening by the moment, his eyes welling up. His lower lip wriggled like a night crawler, and he seemed to hold his breath for a moment. Then he blurted, “Thank you” and hugged Matt Stoker to his chest like a life preserver. Matt smiled without a trace of embarrassment, in spite of the stares and lewd gestures from the holding cell. When Arthur eventually composed himself, he seemed to recover his usual bearing and tone of voice. He pumped his lawyer’s hand vigorously.
“Matthew, I’ve been an attorney in this town for over thirty years. This may be the finest piece of lawyering I’ve ever seen. I don’t know how I’ll ever repay you.”
“You will,” said Matt, “when you get my bill.”
Arthur guffawed like some crony at a country club smoker had just told a good one. Karen enjoyed the sound of his laughter.
JAKE GREETED KAREN in the foyer of their house and helped her into the nearest chair. The windows in the living room were open, but the place felt dank from the daylong drizzle.
“The studio’s done,” announced Jake. “I’m almost finished scoring the suite. I’ll move the drums down from the attic over the weekend. The demo will be mixed, mastered and cut within a couple of weeks.”
“Cool,” said Karen. “How’s my snookum-wookums?”
“Not cool. He pooped in the bathtub and cried for two hours. How was your day?”
Karen told Jake about the depositions of Shari and Duane Billick and the felicitous outcome of Arthur’s case.
“I guess you were right about the Mattster,” said Jake, sounding chagrined but obliging. “Sounds like he’s quite the righteous dude.”
In light of the events in Matt’s car that morning, Karen thought “righteous” was a poor choice of words. She searched for a way to bring up the episode in the county park. It would not be easy. How could she be honest about Matt’s advances without causing unnecessary pain? Before she could start her exposition, Jake changed the subject.
“How did the visit to your dad’s doctor go?”
Karen shook her head. “Waste of time. Dr. Ulam turned out to be a pusher in a lab coat. But my dad drove me around to interviews at Mercury Messenger and the Sleepy Time Motel. He helped a lot and we had fun.”
Jake lifted his eyebrows. “Fun? With Gene? No arguments?”
“Just one,” allowed Karen. “About legalizing marijuana for medicinal use. Suffice it to say my dad’s view is the polar opposite of yours. I’m sure you think recreational use of marijuana should be permitted.”
“No,” said Jake. “I think it should be compulsory.”
Karen gave him a wry look. “Hmm. Still, I bet that if my dad actually started receiving chemotherapy, he might change his mind about medical use of marijuana.”
“Sure,” said Jake. “Remember how fast Reagan flipped on gun control after he got shot?”
; Karen’s stomach growled, reminding her that she had not eaten since breakfast. They moved to the kitchen and shared a tureen of microwaved chowder with sourdough rolls. The kitchen was badly in need of redecorating, its worn linoleum and faded wallpaper a rebuke to Karen’s homemaking skills. The countertop was Formica with little boomerangs on it that Karen called “egregious” and Jake called “vintage.” As Karen tore apart a roll and dipped it into the chowder, she could feel Jake’s gaze on her face. Damn. He always seemed to know when something was eating at her, often before she knew it herself. One of the downsides of living with a sensitive man. It was hard to hide.
“So,” said Jake, lazily stirring his chowder, “Matt gave you a ride in his Jaguar.”
Karen nearly gagged on her roll. How could he know? It took her a moment to deduce that Jake was talking about the ride home, not the one out to the Billicks’ that morning. He must have seen her get out of the Jag at the curb. She realized she must be feeling guilty that she had not yet gotten around to telling Jake about Matthew’s overture. Time to face the music.
“Yeah, uh,” she said. “Even though I didn’t want to accept a ride from him. Not after what happened this morning.”
Jake didn’t ask the obvious question. He just looked at her. She had not done anything wrong. Why was this so hard? Why did she have a leaden ache in the pit of her stomach that felt like a harbinger of marital crisis? Maybe she didn’t feel entirely blameless. Maybe she knew deep down that Matthew’s advance was neither entirely unanticipated nor entirely unwelcome. Is that what Jake would think?
“Matthew drove me to Duane Billick’s house this morning. I wanted to see if Duane had a black SUV.”
“Sweetheart,” said Jake, with a rare edge of agitation in his voice, “didn’t I say don’t go spying on Duane Billick?”
“You said alone,” Karen quickly rejoined. And since when do you tell me what I can’t do? she thought. But she did not give voice to the thought.
Jake was silent for a moment. “Yes, you’re right, I said ‘alone’. Besides, since when do I tell you what you can’t do? So, was there a black SUV at the Billicks’?”
“Yes.” Karen fiddled with a lock of her hair. Her stomach knotted. “Then Matthew stopped the car at a county park.” She twisted her uninjured toe on the floor as if putting out a cigarette.
“He hit on you.”
Karen tried, without success, not to act flustered. “He tried to kiss me, but I stopped him. I told him I would tell you everything that happened.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing happened.”
Jake sat still for what seemed like a very long time, alternately flushing and turning pale, while working his jaw muscles. His thumb punched through the sourdough roll. Pieces of crust flew across the table and landed in Karen’s chowder. Finally, he took a deep breath and said, “Matthew has good taste in music. It’s no surprise that he also has excellent taste in women.”
“Are you angry?”
“Anger,” said Jake, “is the wind that blows out the lamp of the mind. Anger is vengeance exacted upon oneself for the mistakes of others.”
This seemed too easy. Karen was skeptical. “So you take no vengeance upon yourself. What about vengeance upon others?”
Jake lowered his eyelids, set the shattered roll down, and placed his hands in gassho position. “Siddhartha Gautama taught that tolerance and understanding are the highest virtues. He said that if we see into the inner spirit, we can extend compassion and forgiveness to all. The essence of Right Action is to abstain from harming all sentient beings.”
“What if Matthew had gotten to first base?”
“I’d have punched his fucking lights out.”
Karen knew this was no idle boast. During years of gigs in blues venues, many of them disreputable dives, Jake had learned a wide array of martial arts maneuvers. Once, at such a nightspot, two tattooed hombres who were pawing Karen at the bar had ignored Jake’s repeated warnings to back off. When they came to in the parking lot, neither was quite sure how he got there.
“I’m glad,” said Karen, “that your appreciation of the wisdom of the Buddha gives you such peace of mind.”
Jake reached across the table and slid his huge hand under Karen’s hair to the nape of her neck. “Any peace of mind I have comes from my appreciation of you.” He rotated in his chair, opened the door of the refrigerator and produced a bottle of Spanish cava and two champagne flutes. “Now, if you’re done recounting your day at work, what say we go upstairs and celebrate our fidelity.”
After Karen climaxed, she laughed and then she cried. Both for the same reason.
CHAPTER
26
She had never before been in the ballroom of the Jefferson Country Club. It was an impressive room, with a grand view of manicured fairways dotted with kidney-shaped bunkers. Elaborate murals hand-painted with cadmium pigments and gold leaf covered the walls. A crystal chandelier roughly the size of her living room was suspended from the forty-foot ceiling like a giant seine poised to snare inattentive gentry.
It was a hot Saturday afternoon, and Karen was glad to be off her crutches for Arthur’s celebration. Her toe was now dressed with a simple Band-Aid, which allowed her to wear open-toed sandals that looked much better with her pink silk dress than the lumpy white sock she had retired to the garbage.
When she received the invitation to the country club, Karen was surprised that the Winslows and Fairfaxes would throw a victory party so soon after Lorraine’s funeral. But when she read the story in the local newspaper about the arrest of Duane Billick, she understood why Arthur’s in-laws would waste no time in demonstrating their wholehearted support for Arthur.
In Chicago, the Tribune had run a file photo of Harold Fairfax next to a brief report on the arrest in the suspected murder of his daughter, Lorraine. The piece said little about Duane Billick and nothing at all about the case against him. It included a short biography of the victim’s father that had appeared in the Trib many times.
The article in the Jefferson Courant, however, ran almost two full pages and went into detail about the evidence in the case. Deputy District Attorney Nancy Kazanski figured that Duane Billick would be represented by a public defender who would be too busy and too disinterested to bother changing the location of the trial because of publicity unfavorable to the defendant. This gave Kazanski the opportunity to leak enough information to the press to ensure that most of the potential jurors in the case would commence their duty with little doubt that Duane was the culprit. According to the Courant, the search of Duane’s outbuilding had turned up, among other things, lab equipment suitable for culturing bacteria and a typewriter used to type the note found in Lorraine’s hospital room after her death. The note had been delivered to the room with a box of chocolates believed to have been intentionally contaminated, leading to the victim’s death. The police had also found a unique Medic Alert bracelet, from which a valuable gemstone had been pried. Police were questioning the proprietors of pawn shops in the region in an attempt to locate the missing jewel.
The story made it obvious that Harold Fairfax had committed a grievous injustice in leaping to the conclusion that his son-in-law was guilty of his wife’s death. The freezing of Arthur’s assets, which had kept him in the hoosegow for two days, was now an embarrassing faux pas that threatened to create a rift in the family. Lorraine’s siblings and their spouses had rallied to fete Arthur in hopes that an immediate peace offering might repair the damage before it became permanent.
More than half the partygoers were from Lorraine’s side— Fairfaxes and their friends and business associates. Having made the journey from Winnetka, Lake Forest and their Gold Coast penthouses to the boondocks of Jefferson, they seemed as a group to feel that the Jefferson Country Club was okay, if you like slumming. Karen noted that the Chicago folk were, almost to a person, attired more fashionably, more flashily and more casually than the Jeffersonians in their somber business suits and wing t
ips. It was an amusing irony that Jake, who didn’t own a suit or a dinner jacket and was wearing his slick silk gig outfit, appeared to fit right in with the haute monde of the Second City.
For his part, Arthur was affable and gracious, although he still seemed a bit shaky. He stood in the middle of the room, drink in hand, greeting a string of well-wishers as if he had just won an election. Karen commented to Jake that Arthur seemed to be in astonishingly good spirits, considering that his wife’s funeral was held only a week earlier and his father-in-law had just tried to destroy him.
“But think,” said Jake, “where he was at three days ago. As Winston Churchill once said, ‘There is nothing so exhilarating as to be shot at to no avail.’ The cat should party down.”
Amy drew almost as much attention from Lorraine’s family as Arthur. She appeared to have spent the entire morning in a beauty salon, and a good one at that. Her makeup was flawless and not an acne spot bloomed. She wore a black outfit that slimmed her plump body. Moving blithely about the room like an experienced hostess, she stopped to chat with Karen, kissing her on both cheeks and offering a warm, courteous apology for behaving so rudely when Karen had appeared at the house.
But something wasn’t right. After Amy flitted away, Karen asked Jake if he thought the young girl might be on drugs.
“Oh, yeah,” said Jake. “Ecstasy, and plenty of it.”
“How can you tell?” said Karen.
“The clenched jaw muscles.”
A number of hospital employees, doctors and board members were in attendance, including the board chairman and his wife, who had been ready to slit Arthur’s throat a few days before. Karen noticed Anne Delaney off in a corner with her back to the room, talking on a cell phone. Anne gave Karen a “hold on” index finger in response to Karen’s shoulder tap.
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