Death in Lovers' Lane

by Carolyn G. Hart

  I was almost finished, whipping through the headlines like a gambler shuffling cards when I found a feature by Maggie Winslow that ran in The Clarion a month ago. I felt that old flicker of ex

  citement that every reporter gets when there’s a nugget in all the grit.

  Maggie had interviewed Stuart Singletary after he was awarded a grant from the Thorndyke Foundation to edit a literary magazine showcasing faculty writings. Maggie had done an excellent job, capturing Singletary’s no doubt genuine enthusiasm for teaching and describing his well-regarded volume of poetry that had been published by the University Press, but, like a good reporter should, she’d also come up with the unusual and odd fact that provided a different perspective on her subject: Stuart Singletary had a black belt in karate and was an accomplished rock climber.

  So the nervous young professor who’d known Howard Rosen and Gail Voss was strong, athletic, and gutsy despite the reedy tenor voice and gaudy office.

  And he’d not bothered to mention to me his previous in-depth interview with Maggie.

  I would remember that.

  The apartment looked like a garage sale: clothes piled in chairs; rumpled blankets helter-skelter on the single bed; a car’s jumper cable jumbled in one corner with a pair of skis and a baseball bat; books stacked on the coffee table, the mantel, the window seat. Newspapers littered the floor. Unwashed dishes loaded the kitchen table, poked out of the sink. The air was close, stale, and tainted by a garbage pail that should have been emptied days ago.

  Eric March hadn’t shaved. That stubble of beard, dark against his pallor, made him look even younger. The muscles of his face were slack, his eyes red-rimmed and dull. He hunched in the corner

  of a worn sofa like a collapsed marionette, his long, thin arms wrapped around bent knees.

  It was cold in the apartment, but he wore only a wrinkled T-shirt and age-whitened jeans. He was barefoot.

  “…keep thinking the door’s going to open and she’ll be there, telling me to get with it, hurry, come on. Maggie was always in a hurry. And yet, it’s funny, every time I looked at her, it was like the world stood still.” A shudder rippled the length of his body. “Do you understand that?”

  Grief was devouring him. “Oh, yes, Eric. I understand,” I said softly.

  Most lives are spent like Plato’s shadows on the cave wall, ephemeral, unconnected, unconnecting, as vagrant and insubstantial as reflections in water.

  But when two minds and souls and bodies truly fuse, a reality like no other is created.

  Most people spend their lives seeking that kind of connection. Most never find it.

  I was glad for Eric and for Maggie. Even though his life was now bitterly barren, they had broken through the shadows to sunlight.

  His sorrow made him look even younger and more vulnerable than he was. But it surprised me a little that the so-cool, so-confident, so-sophisticated Maggie had fallen in love with a young man who still had the awkwardness of early manhood.

  “She was—so alive. So alive. And now…” His mouth twisted. “You think that woman killed Maggie?” He began to tremble. “If she did, I’ll kill her. I will. I’ll get her and I’ll take her neck in my hands”—he thrust out his hands, big hands, hands of a basketball player—“and I’ll squeeze and squeeze and—”

  “Eric!”

  Slowly his hands, those big, strong, grasping hands, fell into his lap.

  I said quietly, “It may not have been Rita Duffy.”

  His head jerked up. “Who else?”

  “Maggie was working on a series about those unsolved crimes. Did she say anything to you about that?” I shifted in my chair. I’d forgotten how students make do with furniture. A spring poked against my hip.

  Eric kneaded his fist against his prickly cheek. “She was excited.”

  I tensed. Maybe this was going to be the moment I learned something about Maggie’s thought processes, where she’d been with her research, where she was going.

  “Maggie told me she was having a blast working on the series. She said”—Eric’s eyes squinted in thought—“she said it made all the difference when you put everything in context, when you got the big picture.”

  Everything in context. The big picture.

  “That’s all she said?”

  “She said something about what a difference time made.”

  “Do you have any idea what she meant? Which crime she was talking about?”

  “No.” His voice was dull.

  “But she was excited?”

  “Yeah. And God, she was so beautiful when she talked about what she was writing. That’s how she always was about writing. Her eyes would light up—” He broke off, stared down at his hands, his face tight with misery.

  Misery and grief. But Wednesday night he’d slammed away from his desk, his face reddening with anger.

  “Eric, why did you leave the newsroom Wednesday night?”

  He was quiet for so long I thought he wasn’t going to answer.

  But finally, his voice deep and tight and thin, he said, “I was going to find Maggie. I went by her place. She wasn’t there. Then I went to her class. I waited, but she didn’t come. I didn’t know where the hell she was. I looked everywhere. I drove all over town.”

  He buried his face in his hands, then slowly raised his head. “If she was screwing that bastard—everybody knows how he gets the girls. Shit, Kitty Brewster’s been fucking him since she started work on The Clarion. You think she’d get the police beat any other way? She’s got the brains of a gerbil, and she writes like English is a second language.”

  I shook my head. “Maggie had all the brains and talent and ability in the world. Why would she play Duffy’s game?”

  He rubbed the back of his hand roughly against his face. “She’d gone out with him a couple of times. Just drinks, she said. She promised me. But Duffy’s wife seemed to know. And I was going to—” He drew in a ragged breath, shuddered.

  “What were you going to do, Eric?”

  “I was crazy. I was so mad—and now…now Maggie’s dead and cold and gone forever.” He buried his face in his hands—those big strong hands—and began to sob.

  I left him then. I knew two things. Eric March loved Maggie. He might have loved her enough to kill her.

  seven

  HIS room had a smell, too. Of sweat and never-washed trash cans and the embedded smoke from a thousand cigarettes. The bleak brown walls needed a paint job. A water leak had left an irregular, grainy stain on the north wall. The gray cement floors had been sloppily mopped, and there was a long sticky streak where some drink had spilled. Pebbled glass covered the windows, so the light had a milky hue like tears on porcelain cheeks. There might be a world out there, but you’d never know it from here.

  Rita Duffy looked dumpy in the jail-issued orange coverall. Her thick blond hair still sprigged in an untidy mass. Her splotchy face still bore no makeup. But her pale blue eyes were no longer dazed. Instead, they glittered with fear.

  “I’m scared. I’m scared to death.” Her high voice trembled. “They think I killed that girl. I didn’t do it. For God’s sake, I didn’t do it. And nobody will listen to me.”

  “I’ll listen, Rita. Tell me about Wednesday. Tell me what happened.” I scooted forward a little in my blue plastic chair.

  Rita sat on the other side of a plain wooden table,

  92

  its oak veneer scarred by cigarette burns and rings from sweaty pop cans.

  “Wednesday…” One hand fingered the big metal zipper of her coverall. “I went out to the cemetery. I took a pumpkin, a great big one with a toothy grin.”

  A jack-o’-lantern?

  “Carla would be fourteen now. Maybe she wouldn’t even care that much about Halloween. But she loved it so much and we always had to keep our pumpkin on the porch all the way to Thanksgiving.” A sweet smile curved Rita’s pudgy lips, made them look lovely and loving. “November was her favorite month. I took leaves, pretty red and gold ones l
ike she used to bring inside to me, running so fast to show me.” Rita lifted her hands, cupped them, stretched them out toward me; then, reluctantly, as the memory in her mind dissolved, her hands fell apart, sank to the scarred table. “She was only eight that last summer. She got sick July fifth. She woke up with a sore throat. I thought maybe we’d let her stay up too late, that she’d gotten too excited over the fireworks.”

  She shook her head. Suddenly, she squeezed her eyes shut, fighting the tears.

  “I’m sorry, Rita. I know.”

  Her eyes opened. Tears brimmed. She made no effort to wipe them away. It was as if she’d cried so much for so long that tears were as natural as breathing.

  “You know.” Her gaze was as open and direct as a child’s. “You do know, don’t you?”

  I knew. I told her about Bobby.

  For a moment, we were two mothers sharing grief, sharing joy.

  “…she giggled a lot. You know how little girls…”

  “…he and his dad would order snails for hors d’oeuvres and they’d split them, Bobby taking the head and Richard…”

  “…loved to play Monopoly. She always picked the little iron for her…”

  “…even when he was really little, he’d pretend to write stories, carrying his paper and pencil…”

  The dingy room receded and each of us flowered for a magical moment in a world that would never exist again.

  That excursion made the real world both better and worse when we returned to it.

  Better because love remembered is a balm for pain.

  Worse because both Rita and I knew how much Wednesday meant to her.

  The light seeped out of her face, leaving it heavy and sullen.

  “I could have killed him.” Now Rita’s voice was heavy, too. “This time, this time, I think I would have. I had a gun with me this time.”

  My hands rested on my slacks. I could feel the thick ridges of the corduroy. That was real, but so was the anger pulsing in this room.

  “A gun?”

  “His gun.” Rita’s smile was sour. “Don’t you love it, how men want to have guns around?”

  Not Richard, I thought quickly. And not Jimmy.

  “Big bad Dennis.” Her voice oozed sarcasm. “Tough guy. Stud. Ready to screw any slut who’d give him five minutes. And I’d had it, had it up to here.” Her hand jerked up to touch her chin. “I wasn’t going to let him get away with it. Not again.

  And not that day. Not that day of all days.”

  “You got Dennis’s gun—”

  She nodded wearily.

  “—and where did you go?”

  “Her apartment. I got the address from the campus directory. The bitch’s apartment.” Rita’s eyes blazed. “If I’d caught them there, I would have shot him. I would have. But nobody came to the door. I banged and banged. Some neighbors came out and then the manager. I asked her why she had a whore living there. She told me she was going to call the police. I told her to go to hell. I kept banging on the door, but she said the bitch wasn’t there, that she was at school.”

  “Is that why you came to the campus?”

  “I knew he was supposed to be at work. Sure, I’ve heard that one before. But I thought maybe he was still at the newsroom and she was there with him.” Sudden awareness flickered in her eyes. “You were there, weren’t you?”

  I nodded. “I didn’t see a gun.”

  “It was in my purse.” Her expression curved into cunning. “I was saving the gun for him. That would have got me in a lot of trouble, waving a gun around. But the bastard wasn’t there. Just you and some of the kids. So I thought maybe he was in his office with that girl. But nobody was in his office. I wonder how many of them he’s screwed in there?”

  “The offices have windows that look out on the newsroom.” My voice was mild.

  “If nobody’s around, so what?” Her heavy shoulders shrugged. “Hell, he’d like that. Make it more fun.”

  I’d never heard the word fun sound uglier.

  “Okay, Dennis wasn’t there. Where did you go then?” I looked at her and felt unutterably sad.

  Rita had stormed out of the newsroom around half past six. Early evening, that was when Lieutenant Urschel said Maggie was strangled. So this was the time that mattered.

  Rita didn’t hesitate. Her tone was unchanged, aching with resentment, surly with frustration. “I went down to the parking lot. His car wasn’t there. So I got into my car. I drove around. God, I don’t know where. Everywhere. By the motels first. But I didn’t see his car anywhere. I went back to her apartment, looked over the parking lot. But Dennis’s car wasn’t there either. Then I went to the Green Owl. He loves the Green Owl. It lets him pretend he’s young.”

  “When you were in the parking lot—by the JSchool—did you see anyone?”

  She pushed back a sagging swirl of hair. “It was dark. I didn’t notice.”

  “Did you see Maggie’s car?”

  “I don’t know her car.”

  “Are you saying you didn’t find Dennis or Maggie at any time during the evening?”

  “No. I don’t know where they were. I couldn’t find them.” Her face crinkled in thought. “But,” she said slowly, wearily, “I guess Dennis wasn’t with her after all.”

  “Why not?”

  Her eyes flared wide. “Somebody killed her! So Dennis couldn’t have been with her.”

  I looked at her curiously. Dennis was a major slime in his wife’s eyes. But not a killer! “Dennis could have killed her. He wasn’t in his office. He

  says he was driving around.” I deliberately made my voice skeptical.

  “Dennis didn’t strangle that girl. Not Dennis.” She was sitting up straight, staring at me with outrage in her eyes. “Why would he?”

  “I don’t know, Rita. What if Dennis came on to Maggie, what if he wouldn’t let it drop, what if she threatened to bring a grievance against him? These days the University wouldn’t ignore that kind of charge.”

  Swiftly, emphatically, she shook her head. “No, you’ve got Dennis all wrong. He only went after the ones who wanted to play. He never leaned on anybody.”

  “How can you know that?”

  “I know Dennis,” she said simply.

  “Maybe it was different this time.” I didn’t want to hurt Rita, but how could she be certain? And she didn’t know Maggie.

  Could I be sure I knew Maggie?

  I thought back to our last meeting: Maggie, so young and vital, good-looking, smart, quick, utterly confident.

  Not the kind of woman to provide sexual favors for professors.

  She didn’t need to.

  And also, quite frankly, not the kind of woman to tarnish her tough-gal image by whining about a crude-mouthed city editor.

  Maggie wouldn’t see that kind of confrontation as a plus in getting a job. The news business is still run, for the most part, by middle-aged white men. Maggie knew that, and nobody could ever call Maggie naive.

  “None of it makes sense,” I said irritably, thinking aloud. “I can’t see Maggie having an affair with Dennis. Quite frankly, she didn’t need to. And Dennis may have thought he was a coed’s delight, but to Maggie he would have just been an old man on the make. Eric March was crazy about her. She told Eric she loved him. She was a senior, a top senior. Dennis couldn’t have done anything, good or bad, that could have made a difference to her status on The Clarion. And to give him credit, I don’t think he ever tried to sabotage a girl if she said no.”

  I suppose all along, ever since Rita had burst into the newsroom Wednesday night, I’d felt that the equation didn’t compute. Dennis and Maggie?

  Dennis had denied it, fervently.

  But Dennis had admitted having an occasional drink with Maggie.

  “Did Dennis use your car sometimes?” I asked Rita abruptly.

  It was a question out of left field, but she was too upset to notice or wonder.

  She nodded incuriously.

  “But he had his car Wed
nesday night?”

  Again, that indifferent nod.

  Having a drink with a student and sleeping with one were two different matters. I doubted if it could ever be proved one way or the other.

  Dennis denied an affair.

  But Dennis would have to deny it, either to protect Rita or himself. Certainly he’d lie if he’d killed Maggie because she rejected him.

  “Rita, what made you think Dennis was out with Maggie Wednesday night? Did you find a note, overhear—”

  “The phone call. It was the phone call.”

  Now, finally, something concrete.

  “Did you hear Dennis talking to Maggie?” I wanted to know if Rita had heard just his side of the conversation or if she’d picked up an extension. It could make a huge difference.

  “Oh, no, no. Not Dennis.” Those faded blue eyes stared past me. “I was looking at my scrapbooks. We went to Disneyland that last May. Carla loved it. There’s a picture of her with Mickey…Then the phone rang. I almost didn’t answer. But I thought it might be Dennis.” She looked at me with bleak, misery-laden eyes. “I was holding the scrapbook and there was Carla laughing and so happy and I picked up the phone and this voice began to whisper, this breathy ugly whisper, and it said Dennis was going to fuck this girl and if I hurried I’d catch them. It said they were at her apartment or maybe in his office. Then the line went dead. It was hideous.”

  “Did you recognize the voice?”

  She looked forbearing at my stupidity. She spoke very, very clearly. “It was a whisper. That’s all. Just a whisper.”

  “A man? A woman?”

  “I don’t know.” She gave an impatient shrug.

  “The voice specifically mentioned Maggie?”

  “Yes. Maggie Winslow.” Rita enunciated every syllable.

  “Do you have any idea who the caller was?”