“The husband found the body. Good thing the kid was in the car. The husband called us. Who did you say you were?” he asked, suddenly suspicious. He was obviously a rookie, probably just out of the academy, young enough to be more forthcoming with information than he should be, but tragedy takes precedence over training even with hard-core cops; I knew that from experience. The scowl that was now on his face told me “the Cop” was back in charge.
“Sorry, I didn't say. I'm Tamara Hayle, a private investigator.” I rummaged through my bag for a copy of my license. He gave it a quick perusal and handed it back.
“This area is closed,” he said, giving me no chance to argue.
Lucky for me, I spotted the burly form of my ex-boss Roscoe L. DeLorca, chief of the Belvington Heights Police Department, heading into the house. “By the way, is Chief DeLorca here yet?” I asked with feigned innocence.
“The Chief?” The glassy gaze of respect that fills a rookie's eyes when his boss's name is mentioned changed the officer's expression from that of tough cop to impressionable kid.
“Yeah, DeLorca and I have worked together in the past,” I said, casually linking the Chief's name to mine with an exaggerated nod of self-importance.
“I think he just walked inside.”
“I think it might be a good idea for you to let me talk to him,” I said with just enough threat to make the kid think I had some crime-scene authority.
“What did you say your name was again?” There was newfound respect in his voice.
“Tamara Hayle.”
He surveyed the area, which except for me and the Sampsons was empty.
“Okay, Ms. Hayle. Do you mind waiting here for a moment? I'll tell the Chief you're here.” He scurried into the house in search of DeLorca, and I turned my attention to Drew Sampson and his son.
Seeing the boy again and the strong resemblance he bore to his mother brought on a pang of sorrow. There is no end to grief when someone you love takes his own life. In a corner of your heart, you believe you could have done something to stop him no matter what people tell you. You try to recall your last words to him, your last gestures. If you're lucky enough to remember them, they haunt you; if you can't, that haunts you, too. DeeEss would never understand why his mother chose to leave him. He would never forgive her for doing it, and he would never forgive himself.
I wondered if Drew Sampson had any idea what his son would go through. Despite his feelings toward his wife, I prayed he would handle his son gently and the memory of his mother with tenderness. But knowing what I knew of Drew Sampson, I wasn't so sure. Even now, I thought I could detect the hint of a smirk on his lips. He had won. He had his son back and everything that threatened him, even the boy's mother, was gone. He could take this child now wherever his money would take him. As far away as was needed to enable them both to try to forget what had happened.
Why had she done it? Why had she given this man the last word?
“Well, Hayle. What brings you to this part of the woods?”
I turned to greet the bearish form of Roscoe A. DeLorca and a smile broke out on my face. My first impulse was to hug him, which was out of the question. His smile told me that the impulse was not mine alone. He grabbed my hand instead and gave it a hearty shake, then gave my shoulder an odd tap, similar to the greetings men bestow on each other at football games.
“I'm fine, Chief.”
‘And the boy?” It was not an idle question asked out of politeness.
The racism that had struck my son the day I quit the police force had wounded the Chief as well. For months afterward, he would call to check on Jamal, and up until very recently, there was always an envelope of money from “your mom's old boss” underneath our Christmas tree.
“He's fine, Chief. Thanks for asking.”
“How's the business going? I got a call from some muckety-muck firm over in Short Hills wants to hire you for a job. You start it yet?”
“Next Monday.”
“Good for you.” He gave me another shoulder punch, macho-style and heavier than the one before it, and nodded toward the rookie cop. “So the kid here says you had something to say to me about what happened here?” An officer approached with a batch of papers. He signed them then turned back to me.
“I had an appointment with Annette Sampson,” I said.
“What time was your appointment?”
“Right about now.”
“Well, you won't be keeping it.”
“I gathered that.”
“I hope she wasn't trying to give you some kind of a message.” It was a typical DeLorca stab at black humor, and I rolled my eyes as he chuckled at his own sickjoke. Cops did that sometimes to lighten the sting of tragedy. Make a joke out of it; don't let it get you down. God knew, I'd done my share of it. Funny thing was, it never worked.
“So why don't you tell me—” He stopped suddenly as he noticed the approach of a young reporter from the local paper. “Come on—” he said, taking my arm and ushering me into the house. “Don't forget, this is a crime scene. Don't touch nothing.”
“I was trained by the best,” I said, and was rewarded with a grin.
I was overcome by sadness as I entered the small gloomy living room. At some point before she died, Annette had kicked off her shoes by the couch, and they lay where she'd left them. One of her fancy glasses with the remnant of what looked like a Bloody Mary was on the coffee table in front of the couch where we'd sat on Tuesday. An uncapped empty bottle of vodka stood beside it. The beautiful pitcher she'd poured our drinks from stood next to that, and that too showed the traces of tomato juice. Although it had stopped raining, the sun wasn't out yet, and the white walls looked gray and dreary. I noticed that the drawing of Celia was missing. I wondered when she had moved it.
“Where was the body found?” I asked DeLorca.
He nodded toward the bedroom. “Her husband found her. They were estranged, but when she didn't answer the door, he took the kid's key and entered the house. The kid had been staying with him for the last few days, and he came by to pick up his kid's clothes. The kid was in the car, thank God. The coroner is in there now. Was she a friend of yours?”
“She's connected to a case I was working on. How did she die?”
DeLorca nodded toward the liquor bottle on the table. “It's pretty obvious. Suicide.” He shot me a concerned glance because he knew about my brother, then added, “Probably accidental. Alcohol and pills. A la Marilyn Monroe and every other sad-ass lady trying to bury her sorrow in booze. Her husband said he filled a prescription for Seco-nals for her a while ago. She probably got drunk, and when the alcohol wasn't doing the trick, took beaucoup pills. There's a half-empty bottle of reds in the medicine cabinet. So she got drunk, took the pills, lost track of how many she took, went to bed, didn't wake up. Death by alcohol and barbiturates. Common as hell.”
“So is that your theory or Drew Sampson's?”
“The husband? Besides the obvious, what does he have to do with any of this?”
“Do you know anything about Drew Sampson?”
“Yeah, he owns Sampson's Drugs, what else?” he asked irritably.
“Well, he did own Sampson's Drugs, but he sold it. Do you know the history of the Sampsons?”
“Like what?” His tone reflected puzzlement and annoyance.
I leaned toward him, speaking confidentially. ‘Annette Sampson, the victim, left him for Celia Jones, a woman who lived in Newark and who was murdered in January. Drew Sampson hated Celia Jones with a passion. He told me so on several occasions.”
“So?”
“So, I'm thinking that maybe—”
“Before you go any further, Hayle, exactly how do you fit into this?”
“I was hired by Celia Jones's teenage son to find out who killed his mother. Celia Jones, Annette Sampson's former lover, was killed by multiple gunshot wounds on New Year's Day, and as I said, I've heard some very troubling comments from Drew Sampson regarding both his wife and her la
te girlfriend, and I'm wondering—”
DeLorca's expression made me stop midsentence. The twist of his lips suggested I'd just entered that territory of crackpot incredibility usually reserved for people who claim they've been abducted by aliens. But for the sake of our shared history, he gave me the benefit of a doubt.
“So, Hayle, you're saying that you think that Drew Sampson, who's sitting out on the front porch there grieving with his teenage son, maybe he had something to do with his alcoholic wife's accidental suicide because he sells sleeping pills in his store and he was mad at her for becoming a lesbian, right?”
“Well, I meant that maybe he'd had something to do with—”
‘And furthermore, maybe you're suggesting that perhaps he shot Celia Jones, his wife's lover, too. And I understand from the guys in Newark, and, yes, we do pay attention to unsolved murders in Newark, that said Celia Jones was a hot little number who swung both ways and could have been offed by half a dozen people. Right?”
“No, well, I—”
‘And you got all this from her teenage son, I assume.” He turned back to sign some papers.
“No, actually, her teenage son is dead,” I said painfully.
He smirked, and the young cop who had brought me shifted uncomfortably. “Communicating with the dead these days?”
DeLorca was closer than he knew.
“Her son was stabbed shortly after he hired me.”
“Hayle, what's going on? You see people and they turn up dead? Maybe I should take back that recommendation I gave you last week in the interest of public safety.” His glance and the sneer on his lips told me that he was only half joking. “Your theories are duly noted. Start your new job next week, go home, and leave this alone,” he said, essentially repeating what Griffin had told me yesterday afternoon.
But I wasn't yet ready to leave. “Listen, Chief. Drew Sampson was the first person here at the scene of the crime.”
‘Accidental suicide.”
“He could have tampered with the evidence. Maybe had a drink with her, mixed the pills with the alcohol. Maybe found a way—”
Without answering or acknowledging me, DeLorca turned to sign another batch of papers. Fearing that I might end up on the sidewalks of Belvington Heights, I decided to leave it alone. I wandered out of his view into the hall next to the bedroom where Annette Sampson's body lay. The medical examiner spotted me hovering around the doorway and, assuming that I was still on the force, gave me a respectful nod. Moving as if I was part of the group of technicians milling around the scene, I cautiously went into the bathroom to see what I could see.
The only thing of note was a large bottle of orange blossom bath oil near the tub. But even that pointed to DeLorca's theory of accidental death. Maybe she had taken a warm bath to relax herself, had a couple of drinks, then taken the pills.
“Hey, Chief. Better get in here!” somebody shouted from the bedroom. I stepped back into the shadows behind a photographer as DeLorca pushed past me.
“Oh, shit!” somebody said, and I moved in to get a better view. Annette Sampson's body had been moved from the bed to a gurney; her yellow silk nightgown trailed on the ground. They had covered her with a sheet, and I was thankful for that. I didn't know the woman well, but I wanted to remember her as I'd last seen her on Tuesday— alive.
Officers and technicians were gathered around her empty bed. Several others, including me and the reporter who had weaseled his way into the house, formed a small group outside the room trying to hear what the big discovery was; we weren't disappointed.
“Well, that does it. That does it.” DeLorca dramatically threw his hands in the air. “Somebody bag this stuff up.”
A photographer, who I recognized from my years on the force, came into the room with a Polaroid and began to snap photos. From where I stood, I glimpsed a gun being dropped into an evidence bag.
“I thought it was pills and booze,” said the reporter who stood next to me. He had a fresh schoolboy's face, and an overeager manner that suggested this was his first big story. “Hey, Johnson, can you tell me what happened here?” he asked the young cop who seemed to be about the same age. “For the old days,” he added, suggesting that they had known each other before.
The officer looked doubtful. “Man, you're not even supposed to be in here.” He glanced around self-consciously.
“I'll owe you big-time, and you know I always pay,” the reporter added with a wink. “Was it pills and alcohol like they said?”
The rookie cop glanced around again. “Yeah, but they found a gun and some kind of drawing under her pillow, that's all.”
“So when was the time of death?”
“I don't know, man!”
“Take a guess.”
He hesitated. “I think somebody said yesterday morning. But I don't know.”
DeLorca, followed by other officers, came bustling out of the room, and the young cop stood to attention.
“Is Tamara Hayle still here?” DeLorca asked him.
I sank into the wall as I edged my way toward the door. He spotted me anyway.
“Hayle! Get over here for a minute!”
I took a deep breath before I obeyed his order.
“You said something earlier about Annette Sampson being involved with Celia somebody or other, right?”
“Yes. Celia Jones.” The tone of his voice worried me.
“Is this Celia Jones?” DeLorca handed me a Polaroid of the drawing that Annette had made of Celia.
“Yes, it is.”
“You said she was murdered, right? Shot to death?”
“Yes. On New Year's Day. Somebody killed her with a .22 caliber weapon.”
“Looks like Annette Sampson's suicide may not have been accidental after all,” he said, his face grim.
“What do you mean?”
His expression said that he wasn't sure if he should share it, but then he went ahead and did it anyway.
“Looks like the case you're working on for your dead client is solved. We just found a .22 under Annette Sampson's pillow along with this drawing you just identified. I'll bet my badge it was the gun that killed Celia Jones.
“Guilt finally got to her. It always does in the end, so she took the easy way out. Some booze, some pills, got the drawing and the gun and put them under her pillow and said her good-byes. Surprised she didn't use the gun that killed Celia Jones on herself. That's usually what they do, but who can understand the mind of a killer?” He shook his head sadly. “So I guess that poor kid's mother was not only a suicide but a murderer, too. Let's call it a day, guys,” he said to nobody in particular. “Hayle, I'll give you a call if I need anything further,” he added as he headed out the door.
Stunned, and not sure what to say or do, I stood where I was in the middle of the hallway. The fact that I'd been formally acknowledged by the Chief as being indirectly involved in the investigation, bought me some extra time on the scene, and I wandered into the living room as the investigators finished gathering their information. Overcome by a strange mixture of frustration and sorrow, I tried to recall my last conversation with Annette Sampson, trying to remember if there had been any hint at all that she'd murdered Celia Jones. She had spoken just a few words in anger.
Celia was a stupid cunt when it came to men, Annette had said, but that had been in reference to Celia's not using condoms and to the fact that she'd gotten pregnant.
Yet Celia Jones hadn't been pregnant. Why had she lied to Annette. Or had Annette simply lied to me?
Even in our brief conversation, I had detected a certain vulnerability in Annette Sampson, in her sympathy for the losses suffered by her friend Rebecca Donovan, in the love she obviously had for her son. Was I wrong about who she really was?
In that late-night call, she'd said she was afraid for the life of her son, afraid that the Lord was punishing her for Celia. Was that her confession that she'd murdered my friend, and that she was awaiting the Lord's judgment? I'd assumed the emotion I heard
in her voice was fear, but perhaps guilt was what I heard, overwhelming guilt. Had she decided to punish herself?
Yet it troubled me that I had sat across from this woman, drinking with her, and not seen beneath her seeming warmth to the coldness that must have been there, that could make her aim a gun and shoot it into Celia's womb.
I shook my head, shaking away my questions, acknowledging to myself that I would never know the answer. The sun was shining almost as brightly now as it had been that afternoon. I glanced again at the chair where she'd sat, recalling our conversation as we drank from her pretty crystal glasses.
And her words came back to me.
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.
Only one of the fancy ones had been on the coffee table. Could its twin have been broken since Tuesday? Had she changed her drinking ritual for this one last drink?
“Come on, ma'am. Move it,” the young cop snapped.
I swayed to the left as if I were going to faint.
‘Are you okay?” There was concern in his voice.
“This has been a shock to me, such a shock!” I said in the high-pitched hysterical tone I pull out to alarm chauvinistic men. “I knew these two women, Officer. I knew these two women! They were friends of mine.” I swayed again, and he grabbed my arm to steady me. “If I could just have a glass of water, a glass of water, please!” I pulled out Jamal's best “begging” set of eyes. They never worked on me, but they might on the cop.
“I don't know—” He glanced in DeLorca's direction. I swayed dramatically to the right.
“I don't think the kitchen sink is part of the crime scene,” I whispered, giving his arm a maternal pat. “You stay here on the scene. I can get it myself.”
“Okay, ma'am, but make it quick.”
With a slow, unsteady gait, I made my way into the kitchen and turned on the tap. Then, careful not to make a sound, I opened the cupboard where Annette had stored her glasses. The glass I was looking for, the match to the one on the coffee table, wasn't on the high shelf where it belonged but rather on the first shelf, next to the everyday glasses.
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