“You shouldn’t have touched her, Marjorie,” he said.
“What else was I supposed to do?”
He shrugged, then turned his attention back to Nina. “Nobody else around, I suppose?”
“A cat upstairs, I think. I didn’t wander off and go look. No sign of her husband, though, which is a little odd.”
“What’re you doin’ here, Marjorie?” Guy said, walking to the opposite side of Nina, looking her up and down.
I followed his every movement. “She was a friend of Calla’s. I met her at the library, and after the funeral she and her husband asked me to stop by for tea.”
Guy stopped and looked me straight in the eye. “That’s a long stretch away from Hank.”
“Doc’s gonna release him this evening. I had some time to mourn Calla. He wanted me to.” I was sure my tone narrowed.
“I wasn’t pryin’, Marjorie. Probably a good thing you stopped by, but I suppose her husband woulda found her when he got home.”
“I assumed he’d be here,” I said.
Guy didn’t react, just ran his eyes up from Nina’s feet to her head. “Pete’ll be here any time. We called for the ambulance. Looks like this time it’ll be a real suicide. Still can’t believe Herbert Frakes could have done such a thing to Miss Eltmore.”
My eyes had stayed on Nina’s feet. Or, more specifically, on her shoes. I was trying to make sense out of something I saw. “I wish you would have told me,” I said.
“Couldn’t, Marjorie; you know that.”
“I do.” Everything about Nina was perfect. Everything except her shoes. The heels of her shoes, really. Everything else—the toes, the soles—looked like they’d just come straight out of the box. But the heels were scuffed and marred. “But you had to have a reason to arrest him,” I continued.
Guy stopped his inspection, looked at me over his shoulder. “I suppose I can tell you now, since it’s no secret, or isn’t gonna be. We found Herbert’s watch in his room in the basement. It had blood on it. Same type of blood as Miss Eltmore’s, and there was no one that could vouch for his whereabouts. Said he’d been to the Wild Pony and was sleeping one off, if ya know what I mean.”
“He didn’t have an alibi? Maybe he got blood on the watch when he found Calla,” I said.
Guy shook his head. “No. He didn’t have any blood on him when we got there, and he wasn’t wearing the watch. He had no explanation for why there was blood on it. He said he’d misplaced it.”
I nodded. “That’s what he told me at Calla’s showing. He said he took it off every evening and put it in the same place, but it wasn’t there. He was befuddled.”
“He said that to you?”
“Why would I tell you otherwise?” I broke my gaze away from Nina’s shoes to glare at Guy. He was starting to annoy me. Or something was. I looked back at Nina’s shoes. “Why do you suppose her shoes are scuffed on the heels?”
“I don’t know.” Guy said. He looked at Nina, then at her shoes, then back at me. “Why would you ask that, Marjorie?”
“Seems out of place to me. I’ve been trying to think of a way I could scuff up the heels of my brand new shoes if I had them. I suppose if I rubbed them up against something long enough that would make a mark. Maybe even a mark on both shoes. But those shoes have no wear on them, just like everything else on . . .” I paused, connected her shoes to another piece of Nina’s pattern: The broken windshield and dent on the Cadillac. Something had happened there, and it hadn’t looked like it had been something Nina or Claude had done, but something someone had done to them. Like run into them—or smashed up their car on purpose.
Guy looked at me curiously. “What?”
“What if she was dragged here from somewhere, Guy? What if someone moved her?”
“You mean to make this look like a suicide just like Herbert made Miss Eltmore’s death look like?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying, Guy. Maybe this isn’t a suicide any more than Calla’s was. Maybe we just think we know what we’re looking at, just like that’s what you were supposed to think with Calla.”
“Then that might mean that Herbert didn’t do it.”
“Could be,” I said, “but this time, someone was in a hurry and they overlooked her shoes.” I took a deep breath and didn’t take another second to consider the implication of the idea that Herbert could be innocent. That wouldn’t have surprised me in the least. “I think you better talk to Claude Tutweiler as soon as you can, Guy,” I said, moving my doubt from one man to another. “He might know more about the deaths of both of these women than he should . . .”
CHAPTER 45
I think we both expected the next person to walk through the front door to be Pete McClandon, the coroner, but it wasn’t. Claude Tutweiler burst through the front door in a rush, a panicked look on his face, his overcoat soaked to the seams, and his once perfect hair an unexpected mess. He was pale, almost gaunt with fear, a far cry from the man I had sized up at the funeral.
“Where is she?” Claude demanded, coming to a stop as soon as he saw her, answering his own question. “Oh, dear God. It’s come to this.” He collapsed to his knees like he had been hit in the back of the head with an invisible baseball bat. A wail of grief so deep, so hurt, emitted from his mouth. The heartbreaking sound was distorted. His face was pressed hard against the Afghani carpet as he beat it with his fists. Thunder clapped overhead at the same time, so that it was difficult to tell the two sounds apart.
I was taken aback by Claude’s entrance and show of emotion. I felt bad for questioning whether it was all an act. My mind had already created a suspect index for Nina’s death, and there was only one entry on it: Claude Tutweiler. It was no index, and, witnessing Claude’s obvious pain, I felt guilty for even thinking such a thing.
“Sir,” Guy said, making his way to Claude. He put his hand on his shoulder. “Maybe you should come in and sit down. Get ahold of yourself. The ambulance is on the way.”
“She’s dead?” Claude said, looking up at Guy with tear-filled eyes.
Guy nodded. “Yes, I’m sorry to say.”
“Damn it.” Claude pounded his fists again. “It didn’t have to be this way.” He looked at me then, and said, “I’m sorry you had to see this. I was only going to be gone an hour or so. I should never have left.” He did nothing to stop the tears from dripping onto the ground.
I was speechless, which was a rarity. I didn’t know what to say. Instead, I shrugged, opened my purse, pulled out my handkerchief, and offered it to Claude.
“Dear God.” He took the white cotton square and dabbed his eyes, then sighed heavily.
I was about to close my purse, when I saw the letter I had taken from Calla’s desk. There hadn’t been time to tell Guy about it, nor had there been any time to consider what all of it meant, if anything. Now wasn’t the time, so I closed my purse.
We sat in the parlor, just out of view of Nina’s body. Pete McClandon had arrived and was doing his coroner’s job, whatever that entailed. He was waiting on Duke Parsons to show up before making any changes to the dining room or removing Nina from the house. Guy had told Pete about the marks on the shoes, about our suspicions.
“I dropped Nina off after we left the funeral home,” Claude said. “I had some papers at the office that needed some urgent attention. I was in a hurry. I didn’t even come in the house.” He was sitting in a double-arched settee that looked like it had been made in the last century. Probably French. The upholstery was yellow, and it looked like it had never been sat in.
I sat opposite Claude in a smoking chair. A clean ashtray sat next to it on a glass stand, with a calabash pipe and leather pouch of tobacco waiting to be enjoyed. Claude didn’t look interested in pleasure at the moment. He was distraught. Exactly as he should have been.
Guy stood at the door, a few feet from Claude, blocking the view into the rest of the house, with an occasional glance over his shoulder.
“Did anyone see you drop Nina off?”
Guy said, ignoring my presence in the room.
“I beg your pardon,” Claude answered. He suddenly looked like the college professor that I knew him to be. “Why would I be concerned about such a thing?”
“It’s just a question. I’m just curious if you can account for your time after you left the funeral home until you came home.”
Claude’s jaw tightened, and he shifted uncomfortably on the settee. “My wife just committed suicide, Officer. Don’t you have a sense of decency? Is there a note? Did she leave anything behind? I have questions. I shouldn’t be answering questions.”
He looked at me, and I tried not to show any emotion at all. There had been no note that I had seen. But I hadn’t looked for one, either. Honestly, I hoped there was one, that it would explain everything. I really hoped Nina Tutweiler had killed herself. What an awful thing to think.
“The investigators still have their work to do,” Guy said.
“The investigators?”
“Yes, Pete and Duke, once he gets here. It’s been eventful, as you can figure it would be. I don’t mean any disrespect, Mr. Tutweiler. Just asking questions, that’s all.”
“Professor. It’s Professor Tutweiler.”
I shifted uncomfortably in my chair. The division between academia and the rest of the world always felt like a splinter that was stuck too deep to pull out with your fingers.
“Sorry about that, Professor,” Guy said. “I didn’t mean nothin’ by it.”
“I know you didn’t.” Claude stared at Guy for a long second, then nodded. “I suppose Mrs. Henrikson across the street might’ve seen me drop off Nina. She’s the one that called my office and said there was someone at the house and that the police were here. We’ve had some trouble recently. Everybody on the street is looking out for each other.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“First, someone slashed the tires on Nina’s car. Once we got that fixed, they broke the windshield and dented the fender, either with a baseball bat or a sledgehammer. We have two cats, and one of them has run off, but Nina was convinced that someone did something to it. It’s been one thing after another.”
“Did you report this to the local police?” Guy was completely focused on Claude now.
I had seen the damage done to Nina’s Cadillac, used it to give me confidence about the patterns I was seeing, so I knew he was telling the truth, at least about the damage—although maybe not how it had happened. I was surprised when Claude buried his face in his palms and shook his head.
“You had all of these things happen and you didn’t report them?” Guy demanded. He was confused and perplexed.
“No, we didn’t call the police.”
“Why? Did you know who was doing them?”
“I don’t know,” Claude Tutweiler looked up. “Maybe. I think so. Yes, I think so.”
CHAPTER 46
More sirens. More footsteps into the house. But Guy had not changed his position guarding the entrance—or exit, depending on how you looked at it—to the parlor. I felt trapped, like a grasshopper stuck inside a Mason jar. I wanted to leave, to jump away from the Tutweilers’ as quick as I could. I’d had enough death in my life, and I wanted no more. And Hank was waiting for me. But I couldn’t excuse myself, or find it in myself to flee. Not yet.
“You have to understand, officer, our lives are different. Were different,” Claude said.
“You can call me Guy.” He shifted his weight as he spoke. As he did, his unsnapped holster rubbed up against the door jamb. Guy was calm, unflappable. His height and uniform gave him all the authority he needed.
Claude looked at him, sizing him up like they were playing a game. It was obvious to us all that this was more than just a little afternoon chat.
“Nina was raised out East,” Claude continued. “Her childhood was lonely. Lonelier than I suppose any of us can image. Her parents were well-off, had an apartment in New York City and a summer house in Maine. She rarely saw either one of them. Nina spent most of her time at one all-girls boarding school or another, here and abroad. Literature, and more specifically, Shakespeare, became her great escape, her great passion. It was our bond.”
Claude Tutweiler had a mesmerizing voice, skilled after so many years of lecturing college students, I assumed. Before I knew it, I was hanging on every word, and I easily understood how a young Nina could have become smitten with him. He oozed charm, polish, and a worldly knowledge that I could only begin to comprehend.
Claude reached inside his blazer and took out a narrow pack of cigarettes from the breast pocket of his blue-striped Oxford shirt, which was unbuttoned at the top and without a tie. “Do you mind, Officer?” he asked Guy.
Guy flinched and shook his head. “Go ahead.”
Claude proceeded to light the cigarette, a Dunhill, a sophisticated Canadian brand that I rarely saw anyone in my own circles smoke. He took a deep draw and exhaled before he began to talk again, all the while ignoring what was happening in the dining room. There were murmurs of voices, scuffling of feet, the occasional flash from a camera, all mixed with the unrelenting rainstorm that was pounding down outside.
“We had a whirlwind romance. Met and married within a month. My parents were upset at first, until Nina won them over, of course. But her parents were glad to be rid of her, it seemed. Cold fish if I ever met any. I wondered how they ever produced a child, and I wasn’t the least bit surprised when Nina told me she didn’t want any children of her own. I was fine with that, since I was focused on my career, had high aspirations of my own that wouldn’t allow for the normal sense of domesticity, but I suppose it would have changed things if we had had a child. Or it may have made our life worse. Who knows?” Claude shrugged and drew on the Dunhill again, looking wistfully at the ceiling, like it held all of the answers he had ever sought. “We were vagabonds, bouncing from one college to another, with me searching for the ever-elusive tenured position and the opportunity to publish. Which is how we ended up here, in this loneliest of the lonely places. Sorry,” he said, looking directly at me.
I didn’t know what to say. I understood what he meant, but I was accustomed to the emptiness of the prairie. Craved it, actually. But I was raised in it, and I supposed that made things different for me. I couldn’t imagine what North Dakota must be like for two world travelers.
Guy broke the brief moment of silence. “How does this have anything to do with the troubles you’ve had recently, Mr. Tutweiler?” He wasn’t pushing, just interjecting, reminding the man that he was a policeman and this was an unusual circumstance. There had been no inference from Guy that he thought the suicide might have been staged, just like Calla’s had been, or that he, Claude, was a possible suspect. We both knew more than Claude did—or we assumed so. Hoped so, really.
“Our lives are complicated, Officer,” Claude answered with a heavy sigh. “I’m not sure you would understand.”
“Try me,” Guy said.
A thunderclap erupted overhead, and it startled both Claude and I. Guy didn’t move. He was staring straight at Claude, certain, I am sure, that he would miss something. A tell of some kind, a clue that he was lying, or that he was telling the truth; I wasn’t sure which.
“I suppose it was all bound to come out sooner or later,” Claude said. He looked at me with a concerned look on his face. “This may be uncomfortable for you.”
I looked past him, at the door, feeling even more trapped, even more of a pull to return to Hank. “I don’t want you to be uncomfortable,” I said.
Claude forced a smile and tapped the ash off his cigarette. I was afraid he had forgotten about it. “Too late for that. This nightmare refuses to end,” he said. “Nina and I have been married a long, long time and been through our ups and downs like any married couple, but her sense of isolation grew, especially after we moved here. But before that, really, almost from the start, she had an untouchable place in her heart that I couldn’t access. We drank, we socialized, did all of the expected things that came wi
th the academic life. She grew restless and disappeared into her books. I thought, mostly, that’s where she went. I had my own path to navigate. And I grew restless, too, got bored, needed some excitement. The weight of her loneliness was oppressive. I had a couple of affairs. Flings, really. I don’t expect you to understand, and certainly I am fair game for judgment, but after a while Nina found out, or I told her, and it just became an accepted, if unmentioned, way of our life. She was loath to get a divorce. She had nowhere to go, you see.” Claude looked up at Guy, who was hanging on every word just like I was. “It won’t take much digging, even by the worst detective, to find out that I was cheating on my wife, Officer, and that I had just recently ended another sordid relationship. I can assure you that’s not why she killed herself. I was open with her about my life, and she was open with me about hers. Well, as open as Nina could be.”
Guy didn’t react in any way at all. His face was flat of emotion. He had always been a good listener. I liked that about him.
It was like a light went off in Guy’s head at about the same time it did mine.
“Oh, so you think it was this person who smashed the windshield and took the cat?” Guy said. “They were angry because you ended things with ’em?”
“I have thought so all along,” Claude said. “But I couldn’t prove anything, and neither could Nina. She had the same suspicions. It wasn’t the first time a gal had taken the breakup poorly. The younger girls don’t have the experience to handle such things. Heartbreak is hard for them, even though I try my best to let them down easy. If Nina ever had any complaint that she voiced openly, it was that my taste ran toward the doe-eyed first years who always thought I was more than I was. Desire is a powerful drug, Officer.” Claude took a final draw on the Dunhill and ground it out in the ashtray.
See Also Deception Page 20