by Paul Heald
She got her lime and squeezed it into her water. “Has Carolyn’s mother called again?”
“No, thank goodness.”
Melanie began her next question with her eyes on her coffee, but raised them slowly as she spoke. “Do you mind if I ask you a question about Carolyn? What do you think she did when she left your office on the night she died? You said on the phone that she was pretty upset.”
Jennifer contemplated the question, giving no sign that the subject matter troubled her overly much. “I think she probably went back to confront the Judge.”
“Did she say why she was so angry at him?”
“No.” She shook her head and sighed. “I wish I knew. It’s frustrating to realize that we’ll never know what really happened.”
“Yeah, you can sort of see why her mom is going so crazy.” She posed the most baffling questions in the mystery. “Why take the stairs? Why no shoes? How did she slip?”
Jennifer nodded. “The choice of the stairs is a mystery, but I’m not sure the slip is. She was always going around without her shoes and that marble is damn slippery.”
Melanie started to argue with her about bare feet and cold marble but held back. “I’ve never taken them myself.”
“I was working late one evening and went to get Coke in just my nylons—I landed flat on my ass.” Jennifer laughed at her carelessness. “I don’t have any trouble seeing Carolyn slipping.”
Melanie sipped her coffee and thought frantically. Jennifer didn’t seem like someone who was too lazy to put on her shoes to make a trip to the courthouse lounge. Given her prim appearance, Melanie had trouble imagining her ever venturing into a public space looking less than perfect. “That makes a lot of sense. So, she was wearing nylons?”
“Oh yes.”
The young lawyer offered a sad smile and shook her head.
“You’re sure?” Melanie wanted to be certain Jennifer was lying before she played hardball.
“Of course.” She still showed no signs of wariness. “Why do you ask?”
“Because I know for a fact that she wasn’t wearing hose that night.” Melanie looked Jennifer in the eye and held her gaze. “I’ve looked at the coroner’s inquest, which lists everything she was wearing when she died. It inventories everything from her contact lenses to her earrings and underwear. There’s no mention of any nylons.”
Jennifer did not immediately respond. She stared at Melanie, her mouth set in a tight line.
“And moreover,” Melanie added, “you know it too. I saw your name on the report. You checked it out and read it.”
Jennifer sat up straight in her chair and brushed a crumb off the top of her skirt as if she were brushing away her antagonist. “I think it’s time this interview was over.” She laced the word “interview” with momentous disdain and stood up to leave. She was two steps from the table when Melanie responded.
“Too bad. I was just going to ask if you knew anything about the merger of two soft drink companies.”
Jennifer stopped in her tracks and turned with some effort. Panic and anger were quickly mastered with a plastic smile.
“Why don’t you sit back down? You don’t have to go back quite yet, do you?”
“I may have a bit more time.” Jennifer looked at her watch and sat down. “I’ll give you five minutes.” She was now on full alert. No more choice clues would be slipping out unnoticed.
“I’d like you to tell me about the death of Carolyn Bastaigne.” Melanie spoke assertively, but she was glad they were in a public place. This hardened version of Jennifer Huffman did not look like someone she wanted to be alone with.
“Why should I do that?”
“Because if you don’t, I’ll tell the Justice Department about the little scheme you and Carolyn hatched to buy stock in soft drink companies before the appeals court reinstated the merger.” She watched to see if her guess hit home.
“Nice try.” Jennifer laughed. She had fully regained her composure. “Even if your fantasy were true, do you really think I’d buy stock in my own name?”
Melanie’s knowledge was limited by the Justice Department letter to the Judge. It had identified Carolyn but no one else. “Are you saying you had no idea that your best friend was committing securities fraud right under your nose?”
Jennifer laughed again and shook her head in disgust. “That little toad was hardly my best friend.”
Melanie knew immediately who had dreamed up the insider trading scheme and who had written the impressive memo on the merger to the Judge. Jennifer would have completely dominated a weak partner like Carolyn.
“Look,” the lawyer continued, “we seem to have gotten off on the wrong foot here, but I’ll satisfy your curiosity, if you want.
“Carolyn was a mess when she came into my office that night, just like I told you. She told me that the Judge had called the firm, so I asked her why. That was the first time that I heard about the stock scheme.” She spoke with evident pity for the poor misguided creature. “I tried to calm her down, but she was totally out of control. When she decided to go back to confront the Judge, I tried to convince her that was a horrible idea, but she insisted.” Jennifer radiated good–friend-trying-to-avert-disaster.
“I ran into the hall ahead of her and blocked her way back to the chambers. She got frustrated and ran in the opposite direction. There’s really nowhere to go except back into Judge Meyers’s office or down the stairs, so she yanked open the door and disappeared.”
Melanie knew where the story was going, but she saw no way to challenge Jennifer’s version of what happened. And she saw no advantage in showing her disbelief—she felt in her bones that Jennifer had killed Carolyn. Why else would she lie about the nylons? She had master-minded the plan, written Carolyn’s memo for her, and then killed her when the story threatened to get out. “So that’s what happened?”
“That’s it,” Jennifer concluded with a shrug of her shoulders. “I wasn’t about to chase her all over the building. I went back to my office and left shortly after that.”
“And you never looked down the stairwell?”
“No. I always took the elevator. That’s why I went to look at the coroner’s report. I wanted to know if she died instantly.” She smiled sweetly. “I couldn’t abide the thought of her laying there and suffering because I hadn’t bothered to open the stairwell door to follow her.”
As Jennifer sat, composed and attentive, like a sleek, satisfied cat, Melanie finally discerned a motive for murder. What if Carolyn had threatened to reveal Jennifer’s role? What if she had not wanted to go down quietly and alone? Self-preservation was a powerful reason to kill, but Melanie made no accusation. Given the lack of hard evidence and the passage of time, her suspicions were never going to send Jennifer to jail. At the end of the day, the best strategy was not to further antagonize a dangerous person.
“I’m sorry that I made you relive that horrible night,” she offered in a conciliatory voice. “I’ve become a little obsessed with her death. I hope you don’t mind me prying.”
“Don’t worry about it.” Jennifer smiled. “And you’ve certainly done your homework. How did you discover Carolyn’s securities scam?”
“Just a lucky guess.” She was not about to reveal the contents of the Justice Department letter in Carolyn’s personnel file. “I read all of her bench memos, and the merger one stuck out like a sore thumb. It was really comprehensive. I asked myself why she should care so much about the result in the case and put two and two together.”
“That’s precious,” Jennifer replied. “And so typical of poor Carolyn: caught in a moment of competence.”
Jennifer accompanied her back to the firm for a final round of interviews before dinner, dropped her off at a partner’s office with a firm shake of the hand, and walked away without looking back.
* * *
Jennifer shut the door to her office and walked to her window. She looked down on the bustle of the city street below and smiled, confident tha
t the stuck-up young bitch from Georgia was satisfied with her story. It was mostly true, anyway; that was the beauty of it. She had not bought any soft drink stock, but her boyfriend in London had. And she had chased Carolyn down the hall and stopped her from going back to see the Judge. The stupid twit should have known better than to threaten to rat her out in some insane hope that the feds would go easier on her. And Carolyn had inexplicably fled to the stairwell. She had not tripped, however. No, she had stood defiant at the top of stairs, assuring Jennifer that her bright young career was over too. Too bad, Jennifer thought, that Ms. Melanie could not see the look on Carolyn’s face as she felt the hand on her chest propel her into space.
XXIX.
FORGIVENESS, EVEN IF …
On the evening of the King David performance, Arthur sat in a small downtown restaurant eating a bowl of seafood chowder and tugging on the collar of his rented tuxedo. As he slowly sipped each spoonful, he reviewed his score one more time, paying special attention to the places where he had circled a note in the accompaniment and penciled a line to his own note to prompt his memory of the proper pitch. Since Jefferson’s execution, only music had any power to divert his attention. He kept a small radio on in his office while he was working and made sure he had a fresh tape in his walkman the rest of the time. When he was home, he played the King David compact disc so incessantly that Maria knew several of the choruses by heart.
She had provided the only lighthearted moments of the week as she twirled about the living room in a dozen scarves from her dress-up drawer dramatically lip-synching the deep-voiced narrator of the story. Her expression was so stern and the contrast between her slight form and the booming bass voice so great that Arthur could not help but smile. When Maria exited amid a trail of silk and nylon, he felt the impulse to confess everything to Suzanne, to purge himself and recapture their carefree life together in the house. The ridiculous fantasy left him clutching his score against his racing heart, fighting the urge to curl up on the sofa in a tight ball.
As the downtown church bells chimed 6:00 p.m., he got up from his chair and headed across town to the college’s performing arts center. The sun was still visible over the western tail of the river, but its light penetrated with little force between the downtown buildings. Arthur walked through the lull that settled over Clarkeston around dusk, the time when municipal workers were gone but students and young couples had not yet come to the bars and restaurants. As he crossed the river, the quiet gray of the city gave way to the lamp-lit bustle of the Watson Music Hall. He climbed the steps at the back of the elegant brick building and emerged into the scurry of pre-concert activity backstage. He avoided everyone he recognized and ducked into the men’s bathroom where he splashed his face with water and waited for the call to line up with the other tenors.
When he followed the tuxedos and black dresses onto the risers, he saw the glare of the spotlights did not completely obscure the audience that filled the large auditorium. The chorus stood immediately above a small orchestra, about eye level with the people who sat in the middle of the main floor. He could see Phil, Suzanne, and Ms. Stillwater, but not Melanie. She was scheduled to fly into Atlanta from New York that afternoon and was not sure she could make it. The Judge had not planned on coming. He said he no longer went to concerts.
Although the room seated almost 1500 people, heavy tapestries and dark-stained hardwood floors lent it an intimate feel. The space was so acoustically alive that wall curtains were necessary for dampening the sound and keeping it from ricocheting too brightly around the room. The Atlanta Symphony Chamber Orchestra loved the vibrancy of the space so much that it routinely recorded there. When the house lights dimmed, Arthur could no longer make out the audience or the details of the auditorium’s architecture. From the opening strings of the overture, only director and music existed.
It seemed like Dorothy Henderson kept her eye on him throughout the concert. She certainly watched him during the tenor section’s most difficult and exposed section. She had challenged them in practice to sing quietly, yet with enough support and movement in their voices to carry the whisper of their words all the way to the back of the hall. The beatific smile on her face and a nearly imperceptible nod conveyed that they had produced precisely the sound she wanted. But it mattered little whether she had looked at him, or the men next to him, for they sang with the same voice. The endless hours of warm-up and exercises had created a sound of such unity that individual voices within the chorus were not discernible. At no point in his life had he ever felt so completely a part of something. Not only did his voice merge with those around him, but his senses expanded so that he heard with the ears of the group and saw with its eyes.
They had not sung the piece for an audience before, and Arthur was amazed by the change it wrought in the music. Rehearsals had been aesthetic events, and at times even ecstatic ones, but they had not been acts of love. As he sang, he felt a bond that extended from Dorothy to his friends, to those in the audience whom he had never met, to the composer of the music, and to the author of all music. And the chasm that divided him jolted slightly narrower. She had warned them during warm-ups that performing was about relationship, that they could not hold themselves apart and still sing well. The music did not heal him, but sometime during the performance he began to yearn for reconciliation, with the people he loved, and with the various parts of himself scattered around Iowa, Clarkeston, and the acrid bowels of the prison in Starkeville, Florida.
When the concert ended, the applause was lengthy and deafening. The chorus waited through three curtain calls before they began to file off. They left the bleachers row by row through a small teak door on the right side of the stage. Dorothy waited just past the exit, shaking the singers hands as they walked by. Arthur shuffled quietly in the reception line until she put out her hand. He ignored it and surprised her with a quick embrace.
“Thank you,” he whispered intensely in her ear, and before she could respond, he let her go and walked quickly past the crowd gathering for punch and cookies in the Green Room.
He spoke to no one, content to listen to the music echoing in his head as he pushed through the back exit from the performance hall. He walked slowly to his car, still parked by the restaurant where he had eaten, and savored the light breeze as he looked back at the crowd exiting the Watson Center. He slid exhausted behind the wheel of the aging hatchback and piloted it resolutely away from town and out to Melanie’s apartment complex.
The absence of her car indicated she was not home, so he parked as closely as possible to the sidewalk leading to her unit and waited for her to come back. When she arrived several hours later, delayed by Atlanta traffic, she found Arthur asleep, head against the driver’s side window, a thin thread of spittle connecting the corner of his mouth to his left shoulder. In response to her tap on the window, he jerked awake and gave a brief uncomprehending stare. When he realized where he was, he cleared his head with a shake and followed her to the second floor landing and through her door.
* * *
Suzanne and Ms. Stillwater waited for Arthur in the lobby of the Watson Center for forty-five minutes while the crowd slowly spilled out the doors of the auditorium and eventually trickled away to nothing.
“You know,” the smartly dressed older woman concluded reluctantly, “I don’t believe he’s going to make an appearance.”
“I think you’re right.” Suzanne took one last look at the lobby before she turned and walked down the steps.
“He has been kind of erratic lately.” Ms. Stillwater gave Suzanne an inquiring look, but got no reward for her digging.
“He’s got a lot on his mind,” Suzanne replied as they found her car in the parking lot. “Well, what should we do?”
“About Arthur? I have no clue about him,” she replied. “But I don’t see why that should keep us from getting some ice cream.”
After indulging in a double-dip of Rocky Road at the campus town Baskin Robbins, Suzanne stopped by the
video store on the way home to find a movie for Maria that would neither warp her young daughter, nor bore herself to tears. She gambled on a new feature-length cartoon, and they passed a quiet evening watching television and reading stories.
The little girl woke up from a nightmare in the early hours, and Suzanne comforted her with gentle questions about the creature in her dream. She laughed fearlessly at her daughter’s description of the beast and knew everything was all right when Maria asked for a glass of water, only to fall back asleep before her mother could bring it back to her.
When Suzanne passed the stairwell on her way back to the kitchen, she ignored her best instincts and crept quietly up to visit Arthur. As her eyes adjusted to the play of moonlight and streetlight on Arthur’s bed, she realized that he wasn’t there and given the late hour was unlikely to return. She flicked on the lights to cauterize the tears forming in her eyes and slumped down in the worn plaid chair next to his bed. All of a sudden, she felt very tired and old. She did not know for sure that Arthur doing something reprehensible, but her cluelessness to his whereabouts highlighted their separateness, garishly evident in the empty mystery of his bed. The pathetic image of herself as anguished lover released an anger that had been growing inside her for a week.
She did not rage against Arthur. He had behaved no differently, and maybe better in some ways, than the typical man. She was angry with herself—angry for falling in love with someone so clearly destined to leave, angry for relying on a knowledge of her own body’s rhythms to avoid pregnancy, and above all, angry with the grotesque joke growing unbidden in her womb. In her disgust, she found the will to make hard decisions. Suzanne stood up abruptly, switched off his light, and left the room without looking back. Certain of what she wanted to do with both Arthur and his child, she crawled back in bed but never found the oblivion of sleep.