“Our house.” I clenched my jaw and tried to remember this wasn’t a whole, three-dimensional person I was dealing with, but only a pathetic, cardboard caricature of a woman. Sherry hadn’t yet learned how to be a real and fully developed adult—she was stuck somewhere in bitter adolescence—and so she, unconsciously, played grownup roles: This was her reigning princess act and she was very good at it.
“Why would somebody do that?” she said coolly.
“Don’t you want to know what damage they did?” I said.
“Yes, tell me, I’d enjoy that.”
Mason and Geof exchanged startled glances that she didn’t see.
I told her.
She seemed to enjoy it.
“Well, I’m sure you’ll take care of everything, Jenny,” she said calmly at the end of my recital. “It’s half mine, of course, so I’ll expect half of the insurance money. You’ll see that I get it, won’t you, Sis?”
“It is not mine or yours, Sherry, not yet anyway. It seems somehow to have escaped your notice that Mother is not yet dead.”
“No?” She rose gracefully and smiled at Mason as she held out her arms for her coat and cap. He stumbled with them toward her. I hoped he tripped on them. She said, “Well, with any luck, by the time you get the claim filed and the insurance company settles this thing, she will be.”
Geof looked stunned.
“Mrs. Guthrie,” he said, “the vandalism at your parents’ house seems to have been an act of premeditated malice. Do you know anyone who hates your sister?”
“Hates Jenny?” Her lashes blinked once over the big blue guileless eyes. “How could anyone possibly hate my sister? She’s as nearly perfect as anyone I know, Detective Bushfield. Everyone loves Jenny; everyone has always loved Jenny.”
“And you?” he said softly. The silky down at the back of her neck should have prickled at his tone. “Do you love Jennifer?”
She smiled at him, the smile the Wicked Queen gave to Snow White along with the poisoned apple.
“She’s my sister,” Sherry said. “Of course, I love her.”
There was a moment of appreciative silence after she had swept regally from the office.
“My sister is a …”
“… knockout,” Mason said.
“… bitch,” Geof said. “A-Number-One, USDA Prime Cut, Grand Champion, certified bitch.”
“You,” I said, “are so perceptive.”
The day was beginning to intimidate me.
“I’d like to make a phone call, if that’s all right,” I said to Geof shortly after Sherry’s departure.
“Suspects are only allowed one call. Victims get two.” His smile was so gentle it left me awash in gratitude for the one intelligent, compassionate, loving, six-foot-two-inch thing about my day.
“Use my extension,” he added as he pushed Mason out the door with him. “My young friend and I have people to see and things to do. But please don’t leave without me, Jenny.”
I wasn’t likely to do that. I didn’t, in fact, particularly want to leave the security of the police station ever again. I thought I might just stay there forever and have my meals brought in.
I sat down in Geof’s swivel chair behind his immaculate desk and pushed the buttons on his phone.
“Hello?” said the party I called.
“Michael,” I said, then waited a beat for him to reply. When he didn’t, I said, “It’s Jenny.”
“The voice is familiar,” he said, “and I think I’ve heard the name somewhere before. Do you sell siding?”
“No, but we have a special today on full-color photographs of your entire family.”
“Actually, miss, you’ve called at a bad time. My entire family has just sat down to dinner.”
“We also take photographs of entire families eating dinner.”
“I get the picture.”
“We hope you will, for just $300, which includes two glossy eight-by-tens and one hundred wallet-sized photos of your dog or child, whichever you prefer. We’ll throw in a genuine plastic frame for free.”
“Let me tell you how I see the situation, miss, what did you say your name is?”
“Jenny.”
“The way I see the situation, Jenny, is that you wouldn’t call me unless you had something pretty important on your mind. Because you know the sound of your voice is a twist in the heart for me and…”
“Michael.”
“… and you are basically a kind and loving person who wouldn’t twist said heart unless she had a damned good reason to do so. Do you have a damned good reason, other than to ask me to wish you happy birthday, Jenny?”
“Would you, given the chance, wish me a happy birthday?”
“Happy birthday, my love,” he said softly. Then, in a firmer voice: “Scratch that. Happy birthday, somebody else’s love.”
I took a deep, trembly breath.
“I shouldn’t have called you,” I said.
“First, tell me why you did; then we’ll decide if it was the right thing to do.”
“Michael, somebody broke into my parents’ home. They’ve ruined almost everything. Mom’s crystal and china, our clothes and the furniture. They broke the stereo and the records. They smashed the TV, they…”
“Jesus! Who, why?” he exclaimed. “My God, Swede, is there anything I can do to help you?”
“I don’t know.” Suddenly I was confused about my motives for calling him. “I thought there was, that’s why I called you, but now I’m not sure what I thought you could do.”
“Maybe just hold your hand,” he said.
“Maybe,” I whispered. “Yes, I guess so.”
“Consider it held.”
“I don’t suppose this is fair, is it?”
“Neither was the son of a bitch who smashed your house.”
“Are you moving, Michael?”
“Yep.”
“Soon?”
“Yep.”
“You’re not going to tell me more?”
“I don’t think so, no.”
“You don’t want me to be tempted to write to you, and thereby raise your hopes,” I humbly suggested.
“That’s pretty much it.” He sounded sure of himself, older, more mature. “If I’m going, I’m going clean.”
“Do you think,” I said very, very hesitantly, “that I could take you out for a farewell dinner?”
“No.” Then as if to ease the abruptness: “Thank you, Swede, but I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“Well.” I felt suddenly bereft and I wondered if it was a temporary or a permanent bereft. “Well, I guess we’ll see if I miss you.”
He managed to laugh.
“Oh, Jen, I do love you,” he said. “And yes, I guess we’ll see.”
We said goodbye and hung up.
Calling him was a stupid and cruel thing to have done, I told myself. And I shouldn’t have wondered out loud if I would miss him. In the core of me, I knew I wouldn’t—at least, not in the way he wanted to be missed.
Geof opened his office door and stuck his head in.
“We’re sending out for hamburgers, Jenny. Want me to order something for you?”
“You’re it,” I said.
“I’m what?’
“You’re what I would order’ right now if I could order anything I wanted in this world.”
He leaned against the door frame as if he’d lost his strength. “How do you want that fixed?” he said in a low voice that turned my wrists to water. “Mayo, mustard, all the trimmings?”
“No,” I said, “just bare. Do you deliver?”
“I don’t know,” he said, “do I?”
“You certainly do.”
We smiled at each other.
Chapter 27
Whoever had thrown the tantrum at my parents’ house had somehow missed my pet—the little home computer. At my suggestion, Geof had it lugged over to his house that night. When we walked in, late, it was set up on the floor beside the empty hot tub
in the living room.
“Hello, Fido,” I said and gave its molded plastic top a fond pat. “I’m going to feed you tonight and then we’ll see if you’ll do tricks for us.”
We could have used the police computer, but we’d have had to file time requests in quadruplicate, and this was to be only an informal effort, anyway, just to see if by any luck we came up with something new. So it was a lot simpler and more direct to use Fido.
I plugged him in and sat cross-legged on the floor in front of him. Geof set a glass of iced orange juice beside my left hand. He sat on the bare floor too, his back against the tub and his own glass of juice nearby.
“Why is there an empty hot tub in your living room?” I had to ask, having meant to ask from the first night.
“This is as far as we got when some friends helped me haul it up from the rec room in the basement,” he said. “I wish it were full and hot and we could get in it right now.”
“You and me both, pal.”
“You’re sure you’re not too tired, Jenny?” He reached out a long arm so that the hand attached to it could massage the back of my neck.
“That’s wonderful,” I groaned. “Please stop, or I will fall asleep.” I turned Fido on, inserted the disc I needed and tapped the keys. My body was exhausted, but my brain was perking on pure adrenaline; I could stay up all night if my body didn’t fall apart.
I tapped and six words appeared: “WHO WHAT WHEN WHERE WHY HOW.”
Behind me, Geof laughed and said, “Why do I get the feeling you’re always one step ahead of me?”
“That’s why your legs are longer,” I said, “to compensate.”
“Okay if I dictate?”
“Fire away, Mr. Executive, sir.”
“We’ll put some names under WHO …”
“They being the people who knew of the Big Five?”
“Right.”
I tapped them in as he dictated them: Jennifer Cain, Derek Jones, Faye Basil, Marvin Lastelic, Edwin Ottilini, Jack Fenton, Pete Falwell, Roy Leland, Michael Laurence.
We paused over the name of the fifth Foundation trustee. Geof said, “He’s the one who drove us to the church, isn’t he?”
“Um hm.”
“He looked intelligent; I therefore assume he’s in love with you.”
“Um.” I kept my eyes straight ahead on the glowing screen and my fingers resting lightly on the keys.
“You haven’t seen much of him lately, I would guess,” Geof said casually. “How’s he taking it?”
“He’s leaving town.” Then I added quickly, “But not because of me, because his father’s come back to take over the family business and Michael is splitting to go out on his own.”
“Where’s he going?”
“I don’t know exactly,” I said to the keyboard. “Someplace in Colorado, I think.”
“When’s he leaving?”
“I don’t know that either.” I picked up my glass of juice, took a sip and turned to smile at him. “Who, what, when, where, why and how? I called Michael today, from your office, to tell him about my parents’ house. He was shocked. He was concerned.”
Geof seemed to take the information in, like a computer, and consider it. I waited for his next question, which was: “Okay, now please add to our list the names of the directors of the charities you serve, if you have reason to believe they know of the Big Five.”
I tapped in Simon’s name and Allison Parker’s and five others, even adding Dr. Ian Priestly. Then we added the names of the immediate family members of the victims—Marvalene and Franklin Culverson, and Moshe’s only son who lived in town, and Mr. Charles Withers Hatch and the three Hatchlings.
“Surely we can eliminate Minnie’s husband,” I said. “He’s an invalid, after all. And I wouldn’t think we’d need to bother with the relatives who live out of town.”
“I agree. Does Ginger Culverson know of the list?”
“I wouldn’t think so, unless Simon has told her.”
“They’re friends?”
“I introduced them about a week ago and they seemed to hit it off. I don’t know if either of them has followed up on that meeting. I’ll find out.”
I stared at our lengthening list of names.
“Good grief, Geof, that’s twenty-three names counting me!” It made me more tired just to look at the length of the list. “And I’ll bet there are others who know of the Big Five.”
“Twenty-three’s not so many,” said the only experienced cop in the room. “We can trace the movements of twenty-three people fairly easily, knock on wood. In fact, we’ve already done a lot of it this week. All it takes is time and patient policemen. And women. We won’t concern ourselves with the secondary possibilities yet; I have a gut feeling the name we want is among those twenty-three.”
I gazed at those names of twenty-three people I knew. While it was true that I didn’t necessarily like each of them, I hated the thought that one of them might be a murderer.
“Jennifer,” Geof said, “what about your sister?”
I almost spilled my juice on the computer.
“Oh, Geof!”
“Did she know about the Big Five?”
Reluctantly, I said, “Yes. About four months ago, I asked for a meeting with her in Mr. Ottilini’s office—neutral ground—to discuss our trusts and wills. She was curious about my leaving so much money to The Foundation. I did a little pious preaching about the good I hoped it would do. I’m sure I mentioned the Big Five, heaven knows why, maybe I hoped she’d like to be the Big Sixth.”
“So,” he said gently, “we have twenty-four names.”
I let out a whoosh of breath through my mouth and tapped in the name Sherry Cain Guthrie. Suddenly I felt a great deal more weary. My back hurt. My head hurt. My heart hurt.
“You sure you want to continue?” Geof asked.
I thought of the devastation at my mother’s house. I thought of how Minnie looked when they carried her off in the ambulance. I nodded and gulped the last dregs of the juice; it was crisp and fruity like an afternoon in the sun in June, and it cleansed my palate of the bitter aftertaste of the day.
“Carry on,” I said.
“Okay, now for WHAT.” I could hear the strain of exhaustion in Geof’s voice. “This one’s easy—in each case, the murder weapon was an overdose of Soronal.”
“The hypertension medicine that Arnie took.”
“Right.”
“Was it all from his prescription? I mean the drugs that killed Moshe and Mrs. Hatch and the one that was used on Minnie?”
“Maybe, but it’s hard to say.”
“It is? Why?”
“Well, you remember we found two pill bottles on Culverson—one of them was empty, but the other still had a few capsules in it. Unfortunately, we have no way of knowing how many of those pills he took legitimately in the days before he died. So we don’t know if the killer doped Culverson and then stole some extra pills, or if he’s been using some other prescription since then.”
“Some other prescription? Whose?”
“You make it sound so simple,” Geof laughed. “Whose? Well, for starters, think of all the Type A, hard driving, nervous people you know. Any of them could be candidates for migraines or hypertension and that means any of them might take Soronal.”
“Oh,” I said, chastened. “That describes half the people on our suspect list, doesn’t it?”
“It certainly does,” he agreed wearily. “And even if they don’t take Soronal, they probably know people who do since those are common ailments and that’s a popular drug. It’d be easy to get access to it.”
“Why did he have two bottles of pills on him?”
“Because he’d had his prescription refilled that afternoon after he left Ottilini’s office.”
“Where’d he go after that?”
“First to the country club, where the waiter says he ate alone and only picked at his food. Then it looks as if he went directly to the museum.”
“W
ell.” I tapped my front teeth with a fingernail. “I suppose any one of the twenty-four of us could have met him at the Martha Paul that night, if we could have got past the guard.”
“Maybe,” Geof said cautiously.
“But if you can’t prove he went anyplace else and you can’t prove any of the rest of us met him at the museum, then things don’t look too good for Simon.”
“They shouldn’t, no, especially since he admits he was there at the museum that night and that he met with Culverson. On the surface, that looks bad. And he was also at the cocktail party the night Cohen died, so he might have been the one who doped the old man. But we checked Simon out—he has two alibis that even I have to believe, one for the attack on Minnie and one for the attack on your home.”
I was surprised. “You know when that happened?” I said. “You didn’t tell me.”
“I forgot.” He was apologetic. “It was last night. The mailman says your door was not open and the glass was not broken when he delivered the mail yesterday. And a neighbor stopped by your house in the early evening yesterday to say hello and there was no sign of entry then, either. And it doesn’t make sense that whoever broke in would do it in broad daylight today, so that leaves last night. On top of all of which is the fact that you haven’t shoveled your walk.”
“Huh?” I said brightly.
“It has snowed twice since yesterday,” he explained. “The first time, it started after the postman made his rounds on your block. It snowed about an inch total. The second time, it started to snow about four-thirty this morning and accumulated another inch. Well, there are two inches of snow in the postman’s footprints, but only about half that is those other slurred prints. So we know your visitor arrived between the end of the first snowfall yesterday and the start of the second one this morning.”
“Well,” I said, “that assuages my guilt for not having shoveled my walks.”
“Your neighbors,” he smiled, “might not agree.”
“About Simon,” I said quickly, “I know he has an alibi for the attack on Minnie, because that’s the day he was in New York with us. There wasn’t time for him to …”
“Sure there was,” Geof said. “Simon could have called her from New York just as easily as someone else could have called her from here. And he had a good hour and a half from the time our plane landed to the time we arrived at the church. Unfortunately, the museum guard swears that Simon arrived at the museum straight from the airport, that he went to his office and stayed sequestered there all evening. In fact, that’s where I located him.”
Generous Death Page 18