Sabrina Johnson was spectacular this night in a black turban, high heels, a gold chain-mail necklace, dangling gold earrings, and a short black dress as tight as a mummy’s wrapping. As poor as the Gleasons were, Sabrina surely would have seen them in her office at the social welfare agency. Tommy Nichol, in a suede sport coat the color of raspberry sherbet, was standing close enough to touch hands with a plain-faced young man in a lemon suit. Had Tommy counseled Mr. Gleason? There was Kathy Ingram, looking surprisingly sexy in an emerald dress with a plunging décolletage. My big, blond brother-in-law was bending toward her. Another death, another statistic for the Ingrams. Henry, looking rather distinguished in a blue suit, was gazing up at me through a cloud of cigar smoke. Smithy Leigh was a surprise in a dress. The display of her legs, from hem to shoes, looked odd, as if they belonged to someone else and she’d only borrowed them for the evening. She’d be distraught when she heard about the Gleasons. Near her there was an attractive red-haired woman I’d never seen before, standing beside an equally attractive middle-aged man. Friends of my sister’s, I guessed, who’d wonder at the pall I was about to cast over this evening. There were other, older friends as well. And I felt the absence of Gail and Willie Henderson, who would not arrive.
With an effort, I smiled down at my friends.
“Well, she’s here,” my sister announced sourly, then turned to glitter falsely at me. “You’d better have fun, Jenny. Do you realize this is the last party you’ll ever attend as a single woman?”
Holding her side like Napoleon, she fled to the kitchen.
I nearly stumbled after her. Until she said it, I hadn’t thought of the quickly passing days in that way: my last party, my last week at work as a single woman, soon my last meal, last joke, last emotion. Maybe I should have been commemorating these moments, counting them down. like a diver before she springs into deep water. Seven days, six, five, four ... I recalled a man who, once he became elderly, began to call each new purchase his last. “See these?” he’d demand of anybody who’d look. “They’re the last pair of shoes I’ll ever have to buy.” And then, when he was dying he said, “Buy me the giant size of laundry detergent, it ought to about do me.
I took from the maid my last glass of champagne as a single woman and descended the stairs to be the bearer of bad tidings.
I joined the group that included Henry Ingram, Smithy Leigh, Sabrina, Tommy and his friend, and the middle-aged couple I didn’t know. Sabrina moved over to let me in, but she didn’t look at me. My entrance into the party seemed to have interrupted Henry in mid-tirade, which he resumed at once, seeming oblivious now to my presence.
“There is no such thing as a reformed batterer.” He pointed his cigar at the attractive red-haired woman. “These men have violent natures, as basic to them as the color of their skin.”
“They’re not all black, Doctor,” Sabrina snapped.
“I did not imply they were.”
“Henry?” I said.
“We reform some of them,” Tommy Nichol asserted, but he sounded nervous, as if he was intimidated by the doctor, or was afraid of looking foolish in front of his lemon-suited friend. There didn’t seem to be any need for him to worry on that account—the friend was gazing at him adoringly, like a political wife.
“That must be true,” the red-haired woman argued with some spunk. “Why—” she had an accent that made her vowels twang like guitar strings—“I myself know a woman whose husband beat her up, but then he stopped, and now they get along just fine.” The thought didn’t seem to please her, however, because she blinked, frowned, and pressed her lips together.
“Anecdotal,” Henry said dismissively.
“Tommy?” I said.
“Tommy,” Sabrina interrupted, “how do you manage to counsel heterosexual men about their relationships with women?”
She had said it straightforwardly, and although the red-haired woman looked shocked and embarrassed, neither Tommy nor his friend seemed to take offense.
“Because it’s not about sex,” Tommy answered. “It’s about power.”
“Sabrina?” I said.
“I don’t know.” She looked depressed and sounded discouraged. “Henry may be right about the futility of trying to change people.”
During the conversation, my sister had butted her way in beside me, and now she interrupted Sabrina. “If this isn’t the most dreary conversation! I don’t even want to think about such things, much less talk about them at a party, for heaven’s sake. Anyway, it certainly never happens to anybody I know.”
In spite of everything, I felt a thrill of anticipation.
Henry Ingram removed the cigar from his mouth.
I held my breath, waiting for him to let her have it.
“Statistically . . .” Kathy Ingram moved in quickly from the fringe of the group. Henry popped the cigar back in. Kathy covered her cleavage with one hand, and said, “It’s true that battering shows up less frequently in affluent, white homes, but statistics can be misleading, can’t they, dear?”
“Kathy?” I tried again.
“How lovely you look, Jenny. I was just going to tell your sister that women who have the money usually seek private counseling and medical care, so their cases don’t show up in public records.” Quiet, demure Kathy could sound surprisingly authoritative when she wanted to; it was at moments like this that I was reminded that she wasn’t just Henry’s handmaiden, but a scientist in her own right. She was saying to Sherry, “It’s the women who can’t afford that luxury who end up on the welfare rolls and police records, and that’s how most people get into the statistics.” She smiled sympathetically at my sister. “When you cracked your ribs, for instance, Mrs. Guthrie, you probably went to your personal physician for care. But if you were poor, you might have gone to a public hospital where Medicaid would pay the bill. And then you’d be in somebody’s statistics.”
Sherry had been holding her side again, but now she dropped her arm carefully. “I hardly think you can compare my little accident with—”
“Oh,” Kathy looked embarrassed, “I didn’t mean to imply—”
I always seemed to have a hell of a time getting this crowd’s attention, but I couldn’t just stand there any longer while they argued.
“Listen to me,” I demanded.
They turned surprised faces in my direction.
“I have to tell you why Geof isn’t here. There’s been another domestic homicide.” My gaze slid to Smithy. “It was Mrs. Gleason—I’m sorry I don’t remember her first name-but it looks as if she killed her husband tonight.”
“Oh, no!” Tommy said and he grabbed his friend’s hand.
Kathy Ingram looked as if she might cry, while her husband puffed furiously on his cigar. Sabrina’s strong shoulders drooped, adding to her depressed, if beautiful, appearance. But Smithy surprised me by taking it more calmly than anyone else. She only said, “Lanny?” in a mild tone, and looked more resigned than anguished. The redheaded woman and her husband took the opportunity to slink off toward the bar, where they were joined by my brother-in-law.
“Well, I give up,” my sister declared, and stalked back to the kitchen.
15
THE PARTY DIDN’T LAST LONG AFTER THAT.
“I’m afraid this sort of thing may be contagious,” Kathy Ingram said to me in her soft, gentle voice as she was leaving with Henry. “Just as teenage suicides seem to be.”
“Katherine is correct,” Henry said, as he helped her on with her coat. He sounded even more pessimistic than usual. “One wife reads in the newspaper that another wife has killed a husband. That plants a seed in the second wife’s subconscious, the seed grows into an idea that becomes an impulse that blooms into homicide.” I smiled at him, a little bemused by his flight into metaphor, but he was frowning around his cigar. “In other words, murder becomes an option she had not seriously considered before. It is especially appealing when the first wife gets away with it.”
“Eleanor Hanks,” Kathy said sa
dly.
“Precisely.”
Tommy Nichol leaned over to kiss me good-night, and blushed doing it. “Maybe SAFE can stop the contagion,” he suggested, “before it spreads any further.”
“Let’s hope.” I shook hands with his lemon-suited friend.
“Nobody’s SAFE,” Sabrina murmured. “Good night, Jenny.
Henry Ingram held the front door open for her. “You women ought to be grateful to these wives for ridding the earth of these pestilential men.”
“Oh, Henry,” his wife said softly.
The others filed out, offering their good-byes and best wishes to me.
My wedding shower, with its explosive guest list, had merely bombed, rather than setting off sparks of any consequence. Or so I thought, as I wandered back into the living room and headed straight for the bar.
“A Manhattan up,” I said to the barman, and he obliged.
The red-haired woman was sitting on a stool, between her husband and Lars.
“It’s a shame,” she said to me.
I nodded, thinking she meant the murder, and sipped.
“Your engagement party, and all,” she continued, in a sympathetic, oozing voice. My sister, having evidently ascertained that all my “strange” friends were gone, came out of the kitchen and joined us at the bar. She had a dark drink in her hand and the dark look of a martyred saint on her face. Her friend moved over to make room for Sherry, smiled sympathetically at her, then said more crisply to me, as if reminding me to look on the bright side of things, “But I guess that’s the price a woman pays for marrying a doctor.
“Doctor?”
I glanced at my sister, who seemed suddenly to find an interesting ice cube in her drink, and whose cheeks were turning an attractive rosy color. Lars rolled his eyes, winked at me, and walked quietly away.
“Still, there’s nothing worse than a party down the tubes,” Sherry’s friend commiserated. I placed her accent in Arkansas or maybe Texas.
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “There’s smallpox.”
Again, she seemed not to have heard me, a trait she also shared with her friend, my sister. “Well, I know, don’t I, dear?” She turned to her husband. Then she turned back to say confidingly, “I have some of the girls over every now and then for a little party, you know? A little cards, a little gossip? I’ve tried to get your sister to play, but you know tennis is the only game she’ll play! I mean, she’d fit right in—one of them’s a banker’s wife, and there’s a professor’s wife.” She glanced at Sherry, said archly, “Remind me to tell you that story,” and took a quick drink from her glass. Once refueled, she chattered on. “And there’s another gal who’s divorced from a lawyer, and then sometimes, we have this gal whose husband owns three grocery stores. Well, last week, I had everything fixed up so nicely for them, and do you know, none of them bothered to show up! I mean, they all had excuses and everything, but still! Believe me, Jenny, I know just how your sister’s feeling right now.” Quickly, she added, “And you, too, of course.”
The man patted her shoulder understandingly.
I was staring at her, and the silence was getting awkward. “I’m sorry,” I lied, for lack of an intelligent reply, “but I don’t think we were introduced.”
“Perry Miller,” he said robustly, and stuck out his hand to me. I took it and he pumped as if I’d just joined the Elks. “And this is my wife, Elizabeth. Honey . . .” He drew himself up as people do when they’re about to pretend they hate to leave. He spouted the practiced lines at which long-married couples excel: “I think we’d better be going, don’t you, Lizbeth? Baby-sitters, you know.” He smiled with awful sincerity at me. “So nice to meet you, Jenny, and we’re real sorry about this friend of yours who, uh, died. But we wish you all the best in your new lives together, you and the good doctor.”
Miller. Port Frederick was still in many ways a small town, where you were always running into people who knew people who knew the people you knew. Lizbeth Miller.
“He’s not a doctor,” I said flatly. “He’s a cop.”
The redhead sucked in her breath, then tried to cover that startled, dismayed reaction by smiling busily and pulling her husband away from us.
“So nice to meet you,” she chirped, her voice rising an octave, as my sister’s had done earlier. In a voice that now cracked with brittle sarcasm, she said, “Thanks so much. Sherry! Talk to you later! Bye-bye now!”
But there was no mistaking the fact that she had just blown her friend’s alibi all to hell. And all because my sister was too proud to admit to her friends that her future brother-in-law was a cop.
“You had to tell them,” Sherry said bitterly, misinterpreting her friend’s malice.
I debated telling her the truth, but opted for saying, “It seemed only fair.”
She shrugged, turned away, and abandoned me once again for the wary, consoling comfort of her kitchen. I glanced out the nearest window, at the three-quarter moon.
“Tails you lose, Eleanor,” I murmured.
“I beg your pardon?” said the bartender.
“I’m sorry, too,” I told him, and walked off with my drink to find a phone.
Late Sunday night, I woke up to the pleasant sensation of having my shoulders gently massaged. Without opening my eyes, I rolled over to snuggle up against Geof—who had not been home since before the party on Saturday—but as I did so, a strong odor, a mixture of alcohol, cigarettes, and sweat, woke me completely. He smelled like a drunk tank. Surprised, I rolled away from him and looked up to find myself staring into his tired brown eyes.
“You were right,” he said. “Eleanor Hanks lied.”
“No,” I said with regret, “that makes you right.”
“Well, you had that photo pegged—those clothes were a little too sexy for a bridge party with the girls. She didn’t go to the card party, she hardly ever went to the card parties. They were usually only an excuse at which her friends connived so she could see her boyfriend. He’s married. That’s why she didn’t use him as an alibi.”
“Can she use him as an alibi?”
He looked puzzled and frustrated. “I think maybe she can.”
“You know,” I said, “I’d been wondering why they needed five women to play a game that only takes four people. Didn’t her husband wonder about the sexy clothes?”
“He didn’t see her, Jenny. She didn’t go home as she said she did, although she did run those errands, so that’s why that sounded so plausible. She admits she always took her ‘dating’ outfits to work with her and changed clothes at her lover’s house. She didn’t change before she went home because Dick was always passed out long before she got there.”
“Or maybe she wanted to be caught?”
“And maybe this time, he did catch her.”
“But you said her alibi holds, didn’t you?”
“So far,” he admitted. “Although her lover might be lying, too. He says she was with him from seven to nearly midnight, and they have witnesses, because another couple—also married, but not to each other—was with them the whole time.” Geof emitted a sound that, if he hadn’t been so tired, might have been a laugh. “We had to be incredibly discreet about these interviews. You’ve never seen witnesses so loath to testify, but they swear they will if it means the difference between her freedom or conviction.”
We were silent for a few moments. I was thinking, ruefully, how little of my fantasy had matched reality—except for the central fact that Dick Hanks probably had been an abuser.
“Geof, there was another thing that Lizbeth Miller said at the party.” I concentrated on trying to remember it. “She said she had a friend whose husband used to beat her, but that he stopped and now they got along fine. I think she was talking about the Hankses. Then she looked unhappy, and I think she remembered they couldn’t get along fine now, because he was dead.”
“Having a lover doesn’t sound like ‘fine’ to me.”
“No.” We subsided into silence again. “So,
you’re more or less back to the beginning on the Hanks case, but at least you’ve got the Gleason murder wrapped up.”
His expression of puzzlement and frustration increased.
“We can’t find the murder weapon, Jenny . . . the gun . . . and now she claims she was too drunk to know what she was doing. She admits she might have liked to kill him, but she’s not sure she did! And the awful part is, I believe her, I mean, I believe she honestly doesn’t know. I sure as hell wonder how she managed to think clearly enough to hide the gun so well, as drunk as she was. She says she passed out in the afternoon, and the next thing she knew, it was night, and he was lying dead in the living room.”
He lay down beside me, groaning, with his clothes still on, and closed his eyes. The drunken smell of Lanny Gleason—and what it meant—filled the air between us. This was the first time he had ever brought the physical residue of his work to bed with him; it was the clearest statement yet of how tired and discouraged he felt. The depth of his growing depression scared me. When I was sure he was asleep, I slid out of bed and went downstairs to fix myself some coffee and to watch the sun complete its rising.
16
ON MONDAY I WOKE UP IN A DELIRIUM OF REALIZATION that I was getting married in six days. I hadn’t picked up my wedding dress, I hadn’t checked on our reservations at the restaurant where my father wanted to take everybody for dinner after the ceremony, I hadn’t picked up the airline tickets, I still hadn’t bought any shoes to go with the dress, and what about flowers for Geof’s lapel? My father and his wife would arrive on Thursday night, and Geof’s parents and brothers the next morning. Because of the homicides, Geof was unavailable to run his share of the errands. And I had to go to my own job—which was not quite as urgent as murder—every day until Wedding Eve because I was taking all of my vacation after the ceremony. Frantically, still in bed, I ran my hands through my hair, which reminded me of something else I had to do.
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