Marriage Is Murder

by Nancy Pickard

  “Not to our club,” she snapped, and I found myself smiling at the phone. “Lars wants to come, too, so that means we’ll have to include the men. We might as well, anyway, I mean you’re not exactly some innocent young virgin.

  “You make it sound like human sacrifice, Sherry.”

  “Oh, you’re so naive.” Her sigh was that of the experienced married woman. “What do you think marriage is, Sis? I’ll tell you what it is—some man wraps love around your eyes like a blindfold, he binds your hands with sex, then he leads you to the altar to sacrifice your brains to his ambition and your abilities to his convenience. You don’t think he’s going to cook after you marry him, do you?”

  “You went willingly enough when you married Lars.”

  “Lars is different.” That was true, Lars Guthrie was different—any man who could live with Sherry for ten years was either tough as granite, pliable as plastic, or dumb as a post. “What I’m saying, Jenny, is this shower can’t be one of those giggly girlish things where you play those stupid games like how many other words can you make out of the word ‘divorce.’ You’re too old; that would be absurd. I suppose we’ll have it catered, maybe a seafood buffet, God knows you haven’t given me enough notice to fix anything myself. And I think we’ll open the bar instead of doing some insipid punch. Do you want gifts? If we don’t say, and we invite the men, you’re likely to get some pretty raunchy . . .”

  “No gifts. No party.”

  That stopped her for one second.

  “This isn’t for you, Jenny.” My sister had a small, straight, perfect nose down which she viewed the world’s population of lesser mortals. She was talking down it now. “These parties are never for the bride, they’re for the married friends of the bride who want to push you into that great sticky vat of marriage in which they’re already mired.

  “Sherry, you’re so articulate.”

  “Thank you.”

  “But you have so little to say.”

  “As I started to say, it would be unkind of you to deny us that pleasure! So don’t get the idea I’m doing any of this for you. Or for that former juvenile delinquent you’re marrying. I won’t say you could have had anyone, Jenny, but you might have managed a stockbroker or even a lawyer. How do you think I’ll feel having to introduce my brother-in-law the cop?”

  “Safer,” I said. “My friends don’t want a party, either.”

  “If you don’t send me a list of your friends, I’ll invite my own. God knows, I’d rather,”

  “There’s a lot to be said for being an only child.”

  “I need that list ASAP,” Sherry Cain Guthrie informed me crisply and hung up.

  I drew toward me a pad and pencil and thought a moment.

  So she wanted a list. Okay, I’d give her a list.

  Smiling malignantly to myself, I made my first entry: “Detective and Mrs. Willie J. Henderson.” I thought next of an irascible professor, Henry Ingram, and his wife, Kathy, who was thirty years younger than he. A couple of other cops. And maybe Smithy Leigh would be so shocked to receive an invitation that she’d accept it. And I knew a beautiful black social worker named Sabrina Johnson and a gay psychologist named Tommy Nichol who’d get a kick out of observing the tribal rituals of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant heterosexual suburbanites.

  Within a few minutes, my little sister had her guest list, all right, and not a socially acceptable name among them. As I looked it over, cackling in an unseemly manner, I realized that, among the twenty-five guests, I’d included a veritable panel of experts on the subject of domestic violence: one director of a home for battered women, one psychologist who counseled perpetrators, one social worker, a couple of social scientists who specialized in the subject, and several cops. The list wasn’t much of a coincidence, either, since my Foundation work often took me into the world of social services.

  A panel of experts. On domestic violence.

  “I don’t expect you to fix it,” Geof had said.

  But as the director of a charitable foundation, and by nature, I was an incorrigible “fixer.” The Foundation. God knows, the Port Frederick Civic Foundation liked to fix and build and save things. It liked to fix broken budgets, save historical landmarks, build theaters and hospital wings. It liked to provide hot lunches for the elderly, shoes for the ballet, trumpets for the band, counseling for pregnant women. So why not a coalition of community advisers to investigate the causes of domestic violence in this town?

  I began to look up some phone numbers.

  The rest of the day passed quickly. The illusion of solving problems will do that, every time.

  6

  SATURDAY NIGHT, AND NO PLACE TO GO.

  With Geof working on the Hanks homicide that night, it looked as if it was going to be me, the refrigerator, and the telephone. After living with him for so long, I was used to it Or should have been. But if I was so used to it, why was I making two trips every half hour to raid the refrigerator, starting with celery stalks at five-thirty and working my way up to Sara Lee banana cake by eight?

  At eight-five, I put my fork down.

  “No offense, Sara, but as sublimation, you suck.”

  I walked my plate to the sink and washed the remains of beige cake and yellow icing down the disposal. Then I returned to my other date, the telephone.

  “Gail?” I said, when Willie’s wife answered on the third ring. “It’s Jenny Cain. I’m just sitting here by myself gaining weight, and I wondered if you and the kids could stand some company tonight?” There was a pause before she coughed, then said with no perceptible enthusiasm, “That would be fine, Jenny. Come on over.”

  “If you’re busy . . .”

  “No, I’d like you to meet the kids.”

  “I’d like that, too. I’ll leave soon.”

  “Fine,” she said, and hung up.

  I spoke to the dial tone: “Sara Lee loves me.”

  If Gail wasn’t in any hurry for company, I wouldn’t rush over there. Maybe I’d stop by the station to see Geof. Maybe I’d call her from there and offer to pick up a pizza in order to buy myself a warmer welcome on a lonely Saturday night. And maybe this would turn out to be a good time to spring my idea of the coalition on Geof.

  The Port Frederick police station looks as if it ought to be a fire station. It’s an old, deep, narrow red brick building with a front door like the mouth of a cave, four stories, and a police garage in the basement. The detectives are housed at the top in a plain gray warren of offices on which the taxpayers do not waste money on curtains or pictures on the walls. The decor runs to gray metal desks, green metal swivel chairs, beige metal file cabinets, old typewriters, new telephones, bare wooden floors, fluorescent lights, and dirty white walls. Geof often called it, not entirely ironically, his little piece of paradise. Walking into it on that Saturday night, I could not imagine it without him.

  “Jenny?” The man himself stepped out of his cubicle of an office with file folders in his hands, and suddenly the room was handsomely decorated. If I had been a suspect, I would have volunteered to cooperate in any way he suggested. “Damn, if I’d known you were coming up, I’d have asked you to pick up a pizza.”

  “Pizza?” Across the room, three cops looked up.

  “No.” I smiled at them. “Sorry.”

  “Come on in.” Geof stepped aside to let me pass through into his office where Willie Henderson sat hunched over Geof’s desk, perusing computer printouts. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

  “What kind of pizza?” Willie asked, without looking up.

  “It’s only a rumor,” I said. “What’s new, Willie?”

  “Dick Hanks was shot with a .38,” he said in the flat tone of a man talking to himself. I slid quietly into an empty chair, and listened. “And it just happens the college issued a .38 to him when he took the security job, and it just happens that gun is missing from the house. We found two slugs. He was shot once in the chest and once in the face.”

  “That’s pretty accurate,” I
observed.

  “Yeah, if we find out she’s been practicing at some gun range, she can kiss self-defense good-bye. She used a pillow to muffle the noise. She says she doesn’t know where the gun is now.” He snorted. “Right. Like I don’t know where my car’s parked.” The lines in his high forehead deepened when he frowned. “We had two, maybe three, cases in Boston where there was a D.H., and we never found the gun. We knew the wife did it. Knew it, goddamn we knew it, but we never could prove it. Sometimes they just get away with it. Jesus, it pisses me off” when that happens. I’m gonna be pissed if it happens this time.”

  “What about powder traces, Willie?”

  Inwardly, I smiled: living with a cop had given me some pretty strange conversational gambits.

  “Gloves, probably, and she tossed them, too.”

  “Gloves? That would imply premeditation, wouldn’t it?”

  “The whole thing implies premeditation. Her denial implies it.

  That sounded like a Catch-22 to me.

  “What do you think happened, Willie?”

  “I think she was plannin’ to off him and just waiting for the right time to do it. I think she went to the card party, all right, and when she saw that none of the other ladies showed up, she saw her chance. I think she cooked up her alibi with her pal Lizbeth, and then she left early and went home and shot him. Then she disposed of the gun and the gloves, and then she worked herself up into a nice believable hysteria, and then she called us.” I wondered if this conversation meant acceptance. Or, maybe crime was the one thing that got Willie talking. “It wasn’t a burglary. And we haven’t found anybody but her who had a reason to want to kill him. He’s dead, and she’s it.”

  “You don’t have much sympathy for her.”

  “Like I said, she ain’t the one who’s dead.”

  He looked past me, out into the squad room where Geof was standing. Willie jerked his head in Geof’s direction. “If he’s been a cop so long, how come he’s never made rank?”

  “He’s never wanted to sit behind a desk. They’ve offered promotions, Willie, but he’s always turned them down.”

  “Weird,” Willie grunted, and returned to his printouts.

  I shrugged, though he didn’t see me. “It makes sense to him.” Or, at least it used to, I thought. I let Willie work in silence while I brooded over that for a few minutes. Finally, I said, “Willie, I’m going to your house when I leave here.”

  He frowned at me over his shoulder. “What for?”

  I shrugged again. “Something to do.”

  Geof stepped back into the office, looking like a man who could have used a week of sleep, and I forgot about calling Gail.

  “We got the pictures back.” He dumped a file folder in front of Willie, who picked it up and moved it off his printouts. Geof walked over to me, leaned down, placed his hands on the chair arms on either side of me, and started to kiss me.

  “Hey,” Willie said. “Stop that.”

  Geof finished the kiss and rubbed his forehead against mine. “Lucky Jenny. Another thrilling Saturday night in the life of a cop’s wife.”

  “I’m not a wife yet.”

  He smiled tiredly. “Is that a threat?”

  “Not on your life, buster, I’ll see you at the church, if not sooner. Oh, God, it has to be sooner—Sherry wants to throw a party for us next Saturday night. I’m sorry, but I guess we’ll have to—”

  “That’s nice,” he said, standing up straight again.

  “Nice? You think that’s nice?”

  “Sure.” He grabbed the folder Willie had pushed aside and began to shuffle through the large photographs it contained. He glanced at me. “I’m glad, I think it’s great. These are the Hanks crime scene. You want to see?”

  “No,” I said firmly. But then, thinking he was pretty great, too, to put up so cheerfully with my family, I reached for the crime scene photographs. I had the curiosity, all right, but not the stomach for it. Still, I forced myself, as if it were some kind of yogic exercise in self-discipline, to stare at the pictures of Dick Hanks’s body, and of the bedroom where he’d been shot, and of Eleanor Hanks’s bloody clothes lying in a heap on the bathroom floor. She must have changed before the cops arrived. There was something to be said for the old days, I thought when crime photographs were, of necessity, in black and white. These were all too vividly colored—the red on her short knit skirt had soaked through to her bikini panties, there was red covering her deep-V jersey top, and it had splattered onto her high heels and hose. It might have looked sexy on the cover of a pulp magazine, but I felt my stomach contract.

  Geof noticed that I was staring into space.

  “What do you think?”

  I told him, then added, “In addition, I’ve brought you something better than pizza.”

  “Thanks.” He took the photographs from me and smiled in a distracted way. “But you already heard Willie say they don’t allow that in the office, Jenny.”

  “Geof.” I cleared my throat and hoped I wouldn’t have to clear my foot out of it, as well. “I spent a good deal of this afternoon talking to experts in the field of domestic violence.”

  He shifted his gaze from the photos to me.

  “And I’ve been thinking,” I continued, “that the Foundation might bring all of you together as a coalition of experts to figure out solutions to the problem.”

  He looked at me as if I’d suggested a manned space flight to the sun. “I already know the solutions to domestic violence, Jenny, and there are only two of them: death and divorce.”

  Without looking up, Willie laughed.

  “You don’t believe that,” I suggested.

  “What do you think I’ve been trying to tell you?”

  I stood and feigned nonchalance. “Well, at two o’clock on Monday afternoon, there will be social workers, a couple of research scientists, and a psychologist in my office to discuss the problem of domestic violence in Port Frederick, Massachusetts. It would be nice to have representatives of the police there, as well, but that’s up to you.”

  I smiled at him, and affected what is known as a breezy exit.

  When I was halfway to the outer door, he yelled across the squad room: “I’d rather have pepperoni!”

  Across the room, a cop looked up and said, “Pizza?”

  I stood on the front porch of the Hendersons’ rented house, cradling a sausage pizza, and rang the bell with my elbow.

  Nobody answered by the fifth ring.

  I had tried to call her from the pizza place, but her phone had been continually busy. She must have gotten tired of waiting for me, I thought, and taken her kids somewhere. This was a fine way to start a friendship.

  “I’m sorry,” I said to the closed front door.

  I looked around for a note, but she hadn’t left one, so I took a pen from my purse and scribbled an apology on the warm box. Then I placed the pizza in front of the door, thinking she could warm it up and have it for lunch the next day. I hoped the kids wouldn’t step on it in the dark.

  After that, I went home and finished off the Sara Lee banana cake.

  Geof slid into bed after I was asleep.

  “Mmm?” I said, waking.

  He pulled me over to him so that my head rested in the hollow of his shoulder.

  “I might as well have stayed home.”

  “No case?”

  “No confession, no weapon, no witness. And no other suspects, either. God, I wish that baby could talk.”

  I slapped his chest lightly with my fingers. “No, you don’t.”

  “From the police point of view, I do.”

  “Any point of view that would have a child be a witness to his mother killing his father sounds pretty limited to me.”

  “I’ve been telling you I need a new point of view.”

  “If you quit, what will you do instead?”

  “Hell, I don’t know. Become a private investigator. And then I’d get to handle dirty domestic cases, which is exactly what I need, righ
t? Night watchman? Security guard? Law school?”

  “You hated school.”

  He laughed shortly. “Right. So maybe I’ll call my family’s bluff and join the firm.”

  “You’d have to move.”

  This time his sigh took my hand even farther into the air, then down again. “Right, and your job’s here. Well, what do you think I ought to do, Jenny?”

  “For the short-term, how about this?” I raised my head and kissed the warm hollow where it had lain. Then I strung a rosary of kisses along his collarbone, moved up behind his ear, over to his temple, down to his mouth. But within a few minutes it became clear that he wasn’t going to be able to follow through on that suggestion, either.

  “I’m sorry,” he repeated.

  I settled back down into the hollow of his shoulder.

  “Don’t worry about it, honey. You’re tired, that’s all.”

  He hugged me closer to him, but then released me as if that small action had expended all his energy.

  “Yes,” he said too quietly. “I am.”

  The next day, when Geof had returned to the station, I called the minister at the local nondenominational church to explain that we wouldn’t be coming in for the usual premarital counseling.

  “You can’t find the time?” There was a note of polite disbelief in his resonant preacher’s voice.

  “I can,” I explained. “He can’t.”

  “It often happens that men are reluctant to commit the time to discussing matters of the heart,” he said, sounding both angry and sad about it.

  “No, that’s not it.”

  “Marriage itself takes time, you know.”

  He was trying to be helpful and cautionary, but it only succeeded in making me feel annoyed and defensive. We’d agreed to a church wedding only as a sentimental gesture to please our families.

  “I promise he’ll show up at the church,” I said.

  “I hate to say it, but sometimes, when they’re reluctant to begin with, it’s better if they don’t.”

  “This is not one of those times.”

  “Well, of course, I don’t really know either of you.” He managed to sound both appeasing and accusing. By the time we hung up, I was having serious doubts. About sentimental gestures.