I crawled back into bed with my laptop. A year earlier, Max had implored me to get a wireless router, even though I’m a cheapskate at heart and couldn’t stomach the expense of what seemed, at the time, to be a useless purchase. I usually sit at my desk when I do work, so why I had to be mobile with my laptop confounded me. Tonight, I thanked her, because I could get back under the covers, look up every fact I wanted about Carter Wilmott, and not have to sit in the steaming heat of the guest bedroom where I kept my desktop. I opened the computer and turned it on, listening to Trixie’s noisy exhalations as I waited for it to warm up. I was searching the Internet for Carter facts before she had snored four times.
I started by reading the latest entries on the blog. Wilmott had a cadre of regular posters: HappyVillager201; Old Timer; Coffee Lover; BadgeGal; the prolific Wonder Woman. And the intellectual FancyPantz who could quote sections of the village building code with alarming accuracy and ease. That was someone I wanted to meet. He also had his fair share of detractors, led by RepubVoter and his sidekick, MuchAdo. These two were vociferous in their rants about Wilmott’s political leanings, and being as the village was in the hands of a Democratic majority at the moment, they were none too happy about anything. Conversely, posters such as Crazee About Cats, Straight A, and Law School Val were completely in love with him and his unabashed support of the village mayor and trustees. It was like an online Dodge City, with a post by Wilmott, and then a multitude of comments, some referencing earlier comments on a post or even comments on earlier posts; these people clearly had a history.
I scrolled through various posts and accessed the archive, where I read more of Wilmott’s reporting about various members of the town. It was fairly sleazy and one-sided, and while he obviously thought of himself as a purveyor of truth in a town of dishonest officials, he was quite plaintive and biased in his reporting. There were no photos of Carter except for those that accompanied his restaurant reviews, reviews that I hadn’t read prior to tonight’s online reconnaissance mission. I read the reviews dispassionately; this was a guy who clearly had a high opinion of himself and his culinary expertise. Then, I got to a post about my favorite restaurant, Sadie’s, and my unbiased opinion of him turned definitely sour. Sadie’s was the first place that Crawford had taken me and I had warm feelings toward it. To read that Wilmott had called it “a dive—at best” got my hackles up and I must have let out a little sound because Trixie picked her head up from the floor and growled at me in agreement. He continued: “… the ambiance is poor, the service even worse, and the food abysmal. The only good thing I can say is that I got drunk on the rotgut house wine but only because the owner bought me a carafe in the hopes of getting a good review.” I hadn’t realized that Wilmott was also a restaurant reviewer, but he took on every restaurant and eating establishment in town.
Even delis.
I clicked on the link that was titled “Tony’s—I’d Rather Eat a Can of Worms Than His Chicken Salad”—a most unoriginal title written by a guy with a limited knowledge of adjectives. Again, we returned to “abysmal,” “poor,” and “worst.” The commenters who weighed in below the post were split between outrage—“Tony’s is a village institution”—to complete agreement with Wilmott’s assessement. Me? I loved Tony’s, but since Tony loved me, in the romantic sense, I didn’t go there very often anymore. Add in the crazy, jealous wife he had recently acquired and I was staying away for good. But he didn’t deserve to be lambasted on this hack’s Web site, that was certain. Tony was a kind man with a good heart, and a wife I was pretty sure had created the torture technique we had all come to know as “waterboarding.” She was that mean. And she didn’t like me.
But Tony’s chicken salad was the best. I knew that for sure.
There was a picture of Wilmott standing outside of Tony’s; he was making a face that conveyed his disdain for the place. In his hand was a wrapped sub—chicken salad, I presumed—which he was in the process of pitching into a garbage can. I looked closely at the picture. Although he was dressed similarly to how he had been dressed that morning in his oxford shirt and khakis, they were clearly one or two sizes larger than the ones he had been wearing when I saw him. He was a husky and robust man in the picture, not the thin, almost frail-looking guy that I had met and watched die. I wondered if his wife had put him on a diet, because no man would want to go from the way he had looked in the picture to a ninety-eight-pound weakling. From the looks of things, he should have eaten that sub. He had obviously been wasting away.
Or maybe Tony’s wife, Lucia, had been poisoning him. I wouldn’t put it past her.
One of the most recent, and as it turned out, last entries was about the DPW and, specifically, George Miller. I could see why Miller might have a problem with Wilmott after he was described as having a “bulbous nose—one that could only belong to a full-blown alcoholic” and a “less than stellar record on environmentally sound methods of waste disposal.” Wilmott also took issue with Miller’s wife, saying that she was the most flagrant scofflaw in town when it came to recycling or lack thereof. Pictures taken of an unsuspecting Ginny Miller were posted on the blog in various stages of scofflawness. In the photos, she was shown throwing beer cans into the regular garbage and shoving plastic shopping bags down into the sewer grate at the side of her house. Besides getting joy from posting extremely unflattering photos of the rather hefty Mrs. Miller, what purpose did dragging her into this serve? I had already decided that Carter Wilmott was a jaded, cynical, angry man with too much time on his hands. But last time I checked, besides being not good for the environment, you could still throw beer cans into the garbage and put anything you wanted down the sewer with the only punishment being a stern talking-to from the head of the DPW or a passing cop. And if you’re married to the guy who runs the garbage removal in town, you can basically do whatever you want.
But now at least I had an idea of what had precipitated the fight that morning. I think if Wilmott had posted shots of me lugging out the garbage in spandex leggings and a too tight Syracuse University T-shirt, like he had of Mrs. Miller, I would have beaten the crap out of him myself.
Before turning in for the night, I found something on the blog that piqued my interest: Lydia Wilmott’s advice column. Having met Lydia earlier and watched her identify the remains of her husband calmly and coolly, I was drawn to her column to see what might be in there that would give me insight into a woman who was extremely composed in the face of death. I read a couple of the “Ask Lydia” columns that appeared under the masthead. Lydia, it turned out, answered questions from the community on everything from getting your grout clean, to Botox, to setting up a book club, to marriage. It was the marriage postings that were of most interest to me, because from the sound of it, Lydia and Carter’s marriage was like Jean and Billy Graham’s crossed with Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee. Solid, holy, steamy, and full of great sex. Lucky Lydia. A sampling to a poster with doubts about his or her upcoming nuptials: “The first time Carter kissed me, it was like the ground moved. My loins trembled. And that, ColdFeet, is what it should be like. No doubts. If you don’t feel overwhelming love for this person you’ll be marrying—if you wouldn’t DIE for this person—or them for you—don’t get married.” I groaned. That was way too much information. Especially for a town blog that focused on the irregular holiday schedule of the garbage department and the not-green ways of the DPW head’s wife.
I, for one, had no idea where my loins were and if they trembled. I would have to ask Crawford. I bet he knew. He knows stuff like that.
But I had to admit that it wasn’t bad advice, except for the dying part. Lydia was extremely descriptive about her love, but she was right about her counsel to ColdFeet. Where had Lydia Wilmott been when I was in the process of marrying Ray Stark, the man with the golden penis? Had I had the luxury of posting anonymously to a blog lo all those years ago and gotten Lydia’s sage advice, I might have avoided nine years of heartache and humiliation.
One more
thing crossed my mind, and although I was starting to feel the effects of the NyQuil, or was slowly dying from a NyQuil overdose, I searched for “bomb-making.” After getting hits for about three million pages on how to make a bomb—and I’m exaggerating only slightly—I concluded that one wouldn’t necessarily have to be a munitions expert to create a car bomb that one could attach to a car engine. It wouldn’t hurt, though. I’m the kind of person who gives up on preparing a dish if I don’t recognize an ingredient listed early in the recipe; same would be true for making a bomb. While it looked like most of the things you would need to create said bomb would be found in the hardware store, some wouldn’t. And that’s where I’d be out of the bomb-making business.
I had read enough. I was just about to turn off the computer when the phone rang. And when the phone rings at two o’clock in the morning, it can only be one person.
The music was loud and thumping and I had to strain to hear Max, who sounded as if she were inside an amp. “Hi, Max!” I shouted, even though I was sure she could hear me.
“Hear you have a black eye!” she hollered back into the phone. “How did that happen?” To someone in the club, she yelled, “Ketel One! Up! With three olives!”
“I didn’t know you drank martinis,” I said.
“I don’t. Queen does.”
“Queen who?”
“Queen Martinez.”
As usual, we were off topic the minute we had gotten on one. Was it worth it to ask who Queen Martinez was? Or why Max was with this person in a club on a Saturday night? Probably not, so I returned to the subject of my black eye. I could only assume that Queen was a Hooters waitress. “So, my black eye …”
“Yeah! I’m coming over tomorrow to see it,” she said and promptly hung up. I rolled over on my side and grabbed a pen and paper next to my bed and wrote, “Find out who Queen Martinez is. Max coming over on Sunday.” I knew that when I woke up in the morning, I would have forgotten all about this phone call and to ask about the identity of this royal friend of Max’s.
Trixie was now wide awake and standing next to the bed. Rather than give her a complimentary middle-of-the-night walk, I pulled my comforter aside and patted the bed next to me. “Come on in,” I said. She wasn’t Crawford, but she would have to do.
Five
I was right. I had no recollection of my phone call with Max until I looked at the paper next to my bed that said “Queen Martinez.” And then it all came back to me. I looked at the clock and saw that it was almost nine; I had no idea what time Max was coming over, but figured it wouldn’t be before noon. I had a little time to get provisions for her, her caveman husband, and Crawford, who always showed up around two on Sundays.
While I was showering, I reviewed the previous day’s unpleasantness. A year or so ago, I had found my ex-husband’s dead body, but I hadn’t seen him die. I decided that watching Carter Wilmott die was much more unpleasant. To see someone have life, and then lose it, was completely disconcerting, and I cried a little bit while the hot water beat down on my face. For about the hundredth time, I wondered how Crawford did what he did for a living. Although he didn’t see people die, he certainly examined his share of dead bodies. Besides being gross, it had to take its toll on you emotionally. How could it not? I wondered if that was why Fred, Max’s husband and Crawford’s partner, was as distant and crabby as he always seemed or if his personality was just a congenital birth defect. I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt.
Definitely a birth defect.
One of my birth defects, discovered later in my life than most, was that I had become extremely nosy. I knew when it had started—right after I had almost been accused of murder—but it was something that I thought would go away with some introspection and self-reflection. Alas, it was still present and it revealed itself to be quite chronic. So, it was when I was sitting on my bed, drying my hair in a nice fluffy towel, that I realized that I needed to pay my respects to Mrs. Wilmott. After all, I had been there when her husband died. It was only polite.
Truth was, I wanted to know what it looked like when a presumably happily married woman, or so proclaimed Lydia Wilmott in her blog postings on Carter’s site, lost a husband. She had looked extremely composed yesterday when she had come to Beans, Beans to identify the body, but her eyes had been covered with sunglasses so I wasn’t sure if they were red-rimmed from crying. Maybe she had been in shock. Or maybe her blog posts covered a more serious problem, which was that while she was crazy about him, he wasn’t crazy about her. But after seeing both of them for the first time yesterday, it wasn’t hard to tell that he had gotten quite a good deal. The lady was a looker and Carter … not so much. If I were Carter—and right now, I was very glad that I wasn’t—I would have been thrilled to be married to such a gorgeous woman.
I took a circuitous route to the Wilmotts’, driving through town to take a gander at the spot where this whole mess began. Beans, Beans was closed up tight, but Greg had a sign on the door indicating that he would be open for business the next morning. There was still some yellow crime scene tape flapping in the wind, particularly around the area where the car had blown up. I shuddered when I thought about the damage that the explosion could have wrought and thanked God that nobody had been killed.
After my side trip, I arrived at the Wilmotts’ considerable Colonial, high on a hill, with a panoramic view of the Hudson River, and was let in by someone I later came to find out was Lydia’s sister, Elaine, who didn’t offer an introduction. The house was a beehive of activity; it seemed that every member of Lydia’s extended family had come to be with her during her time of mourning; they seemed to be scattered throughout the immense house, and I could hear conversations going on all around me in muffled tones.
After what I had read on the blog and from what I could gather from being in the house, there were two children but they were college aged and presumably away at school, somewhere I’d be in the next few days. Pictures of them—a boy and a girl—dotted every wall and flat surface that I could see from my vantage point in the foyer. I wondered where they were and how long it would take them to get back. I stood awkwardly in the doorway explaining to the sister that I was a fellow villager and that I had been present when Carter had died. I wanted to pay my respects. But I must have been a sight, the giant bruised eye and all.
Elaine, as she grudgingly offered after I asked, was a dour-looking middle-aged woman with a sparse sprinkling of mousy brown hair atop her head, clad completely in blue cotton sweats that did nothing to accentuate any good aspects of the doughy body beneath. She regarded me with suspicion for a few minutes and rightfully so: outside their beautiful house on their very quiet street was a news van from our local Westchester station, News47 Westchester, and a reporter just dying to get inside the house. Apparently, a man dying as precipitously as Carter was a story of major interest to the county residents.
As soon as Elaine was convinced of my good intentions, she ushered me into the house and back to the kitchen, where a grief-stricken Lydia Wilmott stood, washing a large glass pitcher at the sink. From where she stood, Lydia had a full view of the river, stretching out beyond the treetops in her backyard, but she clearly didn’t notice it at that moment. I wondered if she ever did. I knew that if I lived there, I would stare at it every day, the beauty of the river being something I never tired of. The house was tastefully decorated in period 1920s furnishings and light fixtures and would be exactly the kind of house I would love to live in, if I had three million dollars lying around. Lydia continued washing the pitcher, avoiding my gaze, her eyes fixated on the water rushing out of the faucet and down into the drain. Elaine explained to her who I was and why I had come.
“Are you feeling better?” I asked, thinking that she had hit the ground pretty hard when she had fainted the day before.
“I’m fine,” she said. “Thank you for asking.”
“I am very, very sorry about your husband’s passing,” I said, moving the potted plant that I had
brought closer to the counter where she stood. I placed the condolence card underneath the plant. “You can read that later,” I said unnecessarily.
Elaine, who was close in age to Lydia but not as attractive, lurked around the corner of the kitchen, either trying to eavesdrop or make sure her sister was holding up, considering who I was and my relation to her husband. Lydia didn’t speak but continued to wash the pitcher, which was already clean by my estimation. I took in her pale complexion, beautifully coiffed auburn hair, and in particular, the impressive diamond tennis bracelet dangling from one delicate wrist. She was dressed casually in jeans and a white oxford but I could tell both articles of clothing were very expensive. They didn’t have the look and feel of my similar attire, both items purchased at T.J. Maxx. It was a few uncomfortable minutes before she spoke. I thought that maybe I had made a mistake by coming here.
“Tell me,” she said, finally finishing up the pitcher and putting it on a stainless-steel dish drainer. “Did he suffer much?” It was at that point that I heard her throat hitch and saw tears fill her eyes. She grabbed a Williams-Sonoma dish towel and pressed it to her face. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Elaine lurch forward but Lydia held up a hand. “Elaine, please excuse us.”
Elaine looked none too happy about Lydia’s request but she also looked like she had been taking orders from Lydia for years. Like the little mousy woman that she was, she scurried away and took refuge in another room, where I could hear a muted conversation begin.
“I’m sorry,” Lydia said after taking the towel away from her face. “She worries about me.” She wiped the counter unnecessarily with the towel; the granite gleamed in the morning sun. “She’s my older sister so she’s used to taking care of me.” She let out a sigh. “Right now? I’d just like to be left alone.”
Third Degree Page 4