I smiled to myself. I'd counted on Rebecca Donovan not knowing squat about cops and private investigators, and the rules, hostilities, and occasional respect that mark our relationship. If she knew anything about law enforcement, she'd have known that most cops consider it beneath them to take a tip from a private investigator, and although Pis are law-abiding citizens, our first responsibility is always to our client. We work the same streets as the police, but from different directions. Most folks, though, would rather talk to a private investigator than a cop, particularly if the PI is a woman.
I wasn't so lucky with my next call.
“Who are you, how did you get my private number, and what do you want?” Drew Sampson had a squeak of a voice, the kind that might make a person laugh out loud if she didn't watch herself. I didn't remember him sounding like this in high school, but that had been a long time ago. He'd been such a handsome kid, nobody would have noticed it anyway.
“Good morning, Mr. Sampson. I'm a private investigator. Tamara Hayle of Hayle Investigative Services. I'd like to ask you a few questions, if I could.”
‘About what?”
“I'm looking into the death of a woman. If you have a moment, I think you may be able to clear things up for me.”
“Why the hell are you calling me? And I'm asking you again, how did you get this number?”
“I got your number from Mrs. Clayton Donovan,” I said, guessing correctly that the mention of Rebecca Donovan's name wrapped in her dead husband's mantle would win me a few minutes. He paused for a moment, which gave me time to throw in somebody else. “I also spoke recently with Larry Walton, and he said that it might be helpful for me to speak to you. Larry was extremely helpful, and he was certain that you'd be able to give me a bit of your time.”
I hoped the double whammy of Rebecca Donovan and Larry Walton would do the trick; it almost did.
“So this woman is Celia Jones, I assume?”
“Yes. Celia Jones and her son, Cecil.”
“I guess Larry told you about the grief that bitch and her little bastard caused me and my family, didn't he?”
‘Actually he just said I should talk to you,” I said, recalling the adage about never telling everything you know. “If possible, I'd like to make an appointment to—”
“To what?”
“Well, to talk about your relationship with Celia Jones.”
“That little whore got just what she deserved as far as I'm concerned and the same thing goes for her kid. I hope they both burn in hell.”
That took me back a beat, but I quickly recovered. ‘Are the police aware of your feelings?” I asked in what I hoped was an appropriately threatening voice.
“Look, lady, you can tell the police, the Devil, or God himself what I said about that woman. I don't give a damn. As a matter of fact, I talked to the cops about her because of my wife's involvement with her—and I'll tell you what I told them: I was with a friend the day Celia Jones was murdered. It was New Year's Eve, and since we'd both had a lousy year, we thought we'd bring in the new year together. We got stinking drunk and both passed out on my couch. I didn't get up until three the next day. Now leave me the hell alone.” He slammed down the phone so hard I could almost feel it. I placed the receiver back into the cradle, wondering what his wife had to say. I wasn't disappointed.
Annette Sampson made no bones about her eagerness to talk about her husband, Celia Jones, and what had happened between the three of them. We agreed to meet the next day, which was a Tuesday, at “high noon,” as she said with a charming chuckle that indicated “high” was the operative word, which was fine with me. In vino veri-tas as they say. There is truth in wine. I was sure that Annette could give me the name of her husband's friend. He hadn't mentioned gender, and if he'd had something going on the side, I was sure she'd be more than willing to talk about it.
I was feeling pretty good by the end of the day. I'd jotted down verbatim what Rebecca, Drew, and Annette had said in my “redlocket” file, placing a star next to Drew Sampson's name. I was sure the cops hadn't pressed him hard. Their questions had probably been routine, and I doubted if they'd even bothered to check out his alibi. Drew Sampson was a big man in Newark. They wouldn't touch him unless they had him dead to rights. If they'd grilled anybody about Celia's death, it had probably been dumb, no-pot-to-piss-in Brent Liston.
But if they did have a case against Sampson, they wouldn't hesitate to bring him down, and I might be able to help them with that. My advantage over the police was that I knew Celia Jones. I had her journal and knew what had been written in it. I would also have conducted face-to-face interviews with two women who looked like me, and I knew from experience they'd be more honest with me than they'd be with cops.
I couldn't make an arrest if I found out something important, but I could make it damn easy for the police to make one. I had a good contact in Griffin, and if push came to shove, there was always De-Lorca, my old boss from Belvington Heights. With a bit more digging, I might find out some crucial tidbit about the murder of Celia or her boy that had been overlooked, and the police would take the next step. Maybe then I'd be able to get a good night's sleep.
I've never seen anything like it. To shoot a woman right through her privates.
When it came to Celia's murder, I was sure that Old Man Morgan had called it right. Those bullets, shot at close range, had made a definite statement.
Fucking her was a very small part of our relationship.
How many other men—and women—could say the same?
I pulled out Celia's journal and looked again for something I might have missed, even though I was sure that her little red book had told me all it was going to tell. I called Aaron Dawson's number again, but it was disconnected. That would be one question Annette Sampson might be able to answer for me: Who the hell was Aaron Daw-son?
I was convinced that whoever killed Celia killed her son, too, for something he knew about his mother's murder but didn't realize he knew. What scared me, though, was if the murderer knew that Cecil had talked to me, then maybe our conversation had contributed to his death.
At the thought of that, my fears about the man in the black coat came back strong; they started in my belly and worked themselves clear up to my heart, and when the phone rang, I almost jumped out of my chair.
“Tamara, this is Larry Walton. I wanted to apologize to you about the way I left you yesterday. I asked you to brunch and I should at least have had the decency to walk you back to your car.” He ran his words together in one long sentence, which got my guard up.
“No harm done.”
“Listen, I, uh, wanted to clarify something. I mentioned that I was down south visiting my daughter, right? Well, uh, I may have made a mistake. I was out with a friend on New Year's Eve and into the next day, when Celia was killed.”
‘And that friend was Drew Sampson.” It hadn't taken Sampson long to call in his chips.
“Drew didn't do anything to Celia. You have to believe that.”
“Because he was with you, right?” I didn't hide my disbelief.
“Listen, I just wanted to let you know what the deal is, okay? I'm sorry, Tamara,” he said as if he meant it.
“Right, thanks for calling, Larry,” I said, trying hard to make my voice sound neutral.
An alibi was an alibi, and, for whatever reason, he was willing to give one to Sampson. Despite the tension between us, I liked Larry Walton, and it saddened me to see him compromise himself like this. If it was a compromise. I called the number he'd given me in North Carolina to check his story, but got an answering machine. I hung up without leaving a message. Since I wasn't a cop, what was I going to say? His ex-wife would probably think I was some jealous hoochie trying to get the goods on her ex-husband's whereabouts on New Year's Eve. Drew Sampson and Larry Walton were each other's alibi, and that was that. But in my book that made them both look suspicious.
A B C D
I had to laugh at myself when I imagined the res
ponse any cop worth his badge would give me if I trotted out Celia's scribbles and tried to tie them to one of these men. They'd laugh me clear out of the squad room. I closed her book and put it back in my safe.
Larry aka Chessman, Drew, Clayton Donovan, Annette, they were all respectable, responsible members of this community. Celia and her son were the outsiders, the uninvited guests who had disrupted everyone's lives.
I typed a few more notes into “redlocket,” recording my impressions of the conversations I'd had with Donovan, the two Sampsons, and the alibi Larry Walton gave Drew Sampson. I turned off the computer, emptied my teacup, locked my office, and headed downstairs, glancing into the Beauty Biscuit, hoping Wyvetta was working late. I could do with some friendly talk and a shot of bourbon. But Wyvetta had gone, so I started toward the parking lot, my mind on what I was going to fix for dinner and whether or not Jamal had finished his homework.
I felt the bastard's hand on my shoulder even before he grabbed it good. Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted his woman, dressed all in black, watching us from that broken-down midnight blue car I'd seen so long ago.
Had it been a woman in that long black coat?
“You killed Celia, didn't you? I know you did it, and I'm going to prove it,” I shouted out because I couldn't think of another damn thing to say, and figured this would be as good as anything else. That was another thing I learned early on: All a woman has in a situation like this is her nerve, and all she can do is go for broke. Liston tightened his grip on my arm so hard I thought he would break it.
‘And you killed Cecil, too, didn't you? You stupid son of a bitch, you killed your own son!” I screamed, my voice shrill with outrage, like / was the one who had hold of his arm.
I figured the bastard would do one of two things: He'd either kill me on the spot or let me go. To my surprise, he didn't do either. He started to cry, which shocked the hell out of me.
“I didn't do nothing to hurt that boy,” he wailed. “I loved that boy. I didn't do nothing to hurt him!”
It could have been guilt or it could have been grief. Or it could have been fear because I'd figured it out. I stood there with my mouth hanging open, not sure what I was going to do next, but then realized I was free. As his woman climbed out of the car, I backed away, keeping my eyes on both of them, like you do on a junkyard dog whose sight is fixed on your leg. I was trembling hard when I got into my car, and I shook like a mold of my grandma's grape Jell-O all the way home.
CHAPTER NINE
My confrontation with Liston had left me tense, and I was still uneasy the next morning, so I allowed myself some self-prescribed luxury. After I'd gotten Jamal off to school, I soaked for twenty minutes in a tub filled with bubbles, read a few chapters of a mystery, then made myself pancakes for breakfast. I took my good time getting to Annette Sampson's house. By the time I got there, it was “high noon,” and the midday sun was pouring through the diamond-paned windows of her living room.
Her house, which was located on a narrow street in Belving-ton Heights, was modest, to put it kindly. When I was a cop in the Heights, I'd been surprised to learn that the town had unfashionable areas. For a kid growing up in the Hayes Homes in Newark, Belving-ton Heights represented the “height” of good taste and high living, offering the best of everything—best schools, best people, best homes. It never occurred to me that these highly paid people had poorly paid servants to do their bidding, and that the “help” were usually black and lived in these small, cramped houses.
Annette Sampson's house needed some serious work. A coat of Benjamin Moore would have done it some good, and three coats would have done it better. The front porch sagged, and birds had built a nest in a corner of the roof. The lawn, if you could call it that, was mostly dirt, and winter had turned last summer's effort at a garden into mud. My place in East Orange, with all its faults, was in better shape. But location is everything in real estate, and if this house were put on the market it would have brought in big bucks. If it had been perched on certain streets in Newark, she couldn't have given it away.
“I grew up here. The house belonged to my father,” Annette Sampson told me as we settled down on her couch, a yellow plastic number that would be hot as hell in the summer. The glass coffee table was chipped, and a leg on one of the chairs was missing. Old newspapers and magazines were strewn around the room like nobody gave a damn. It was hard to imagine this messy place housed the elegant woman in the stunning silk suit I'd seen at Morgan's on Saturday.
“My father was chauffeur/handyman for a rich pharmacist, who owned a string of drugstores, which is probably why I ended up marrying a pharmacist,” she continued. “I know I need to put some money into this house, but money is something I don't have at this point. But it belongs to me. It's all mine, and that sure feels good.” Her emphasis on “mine” clearly summed up her relationship with her husband.
She made a pitcher of Bloody Marys and poured the mixture into two remarkably pretty crystal glasses. Crackers and cheese were carelessly arranged on a matching platter, and I suspected the hastily thrown together snack was an excuse to serve the drinks. I took a sip of mine, which was heavy on the vodka, then held the glass up to examine it.
My family hadn't gone in much for fancy glassware. My father usually drank his liquor out of a mayonnaise jar, and the rest of us used whatever cheap, mismatched things my mother picked up from the sales table at the A&P. I didn't grow up seeing a lot of good crystal.
“I have only two of these beautiful glasses left,” Annette said, noticing my interest. “My mother gave them to me as a wedding present. They're Steuben. Tres expensive. I had six once, but I threw two at my ex-husband in a rage. Celia broke one, and I dropped the fourth on the way to the kitchen last week. These are the only two I have left. I never use them when I'm alone, I only use them when I have company, which is rare these days. When I'm alone, I drink out of a plain old, ugly water glass.”
‘A water glass?” I didn't hide my surprise, and she laughed at my response.
“These dainty little things don't hold enough booze if I want to get seriously drunk. But I like things to match when somebody visits me. I need to have order, and matching glasses and dishes keep me from feeling like my life has dissolved into chaos.”
“I know what you mean,” I said as if I did. Truth was, my life stayed in chaos, and all the matching glasses in the world wouldn't straighten it out. As a matter of fact, nothing in my kitchen matched. Not glasses, dishes, spoons, or forks, and I was too busy and broke to give a damn one way or the other.
“So you threw one at your husband? That's something I always wanted to do to my ex,” I said. But if I'd aimed something at De-Wayne Curtis it would have been a damn sight deadlier than a glass.
‘Actually he's not my ex yet. Despite everything that has happened between us, we haven't begun divorce proceedings.”
“Is there any chance of reconciliation?”
Her answer was in the look she shot me as well as in her laughter, and I found myself laughing with her. Suddenly, I could see what Celia might have seen in her. She had a mischievous, seductive edge that broke through her tight middle-class veneer as subtly as the black lace teddy peeking from her white Gap blouse.
“So Celia broke one of your glasses, too?” I veered back to the reason for my visit. “How did that happen?”
“She didn't throw it at me, if that's what you're asking. Celia wasn't the type to throw things. I'm the type to throw things.”
I took a nibble of cheese and a sip of my drink. She poured herself another one and raised it in a toast.
“To Celia,” she said.
“To Celia.”
She finished it off and dabbed her lips with one of the linen cocktail napkins on the tray. They, too, must have been left over from her former life.
“I've had enough,” she said, which surprised me since she'd just pegged herself as a drunk, and I knew from life with father that drunks never got enough. She went into the k
itchen, filled a glass with ice water, came back, and set it next to the one that had contained her drink. “I've been drinking too much these days,” she confided as if we'd been friends for years.
“Then you'd better toss out those water glasses and get yourself some juice glasses instead,” I suggested.
“You're probably right,” she said with a good-natured smile.
“Maybe you're still grieving the loss of Celia,” I offered, and she nodded that it was the truth.
“I know I have to stop drinking and get back to living, but it's harder than it sounds.” She looked disconcerted for a moment, and I took the lull in our conversation to glance at the key words I'd scribbled in my notebook: Celia Jones, Drew Sampson, Rebecca Donovan, Aaron Dawson.
I rarely take notes during an interview. I have a good memory and if I've written down key words, I can always recall what was said. I decided to start with “Celia” and work my way down the list. I closed my book and dropped my pen back into my bag, as if the interview were over and we were just two women sitting around talking about nothing.
“You're right about Celia,” I said. “She wasn't the type to throw things, even in high school.”
She looked surprised. “So you knew Celia, too. I thought that you were simply involved with her case on a professional level.”
“No, Celia and I were best friends in high school. We were inseparable.”
“Funny, she never mentioned you, and she told me almost everything about her life.” She was suspicious, and I remembered what Larry had said about how possessive she'd been.
“We grew apart over the years, but I still cared about her. I was very distressed to hear that she'd been murdered, particularly in the way it was done.” I watched her closely, but there was no indication of feeling, not even grief.
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