Pattern of Wounds

by J. Bertrand

  “As a man of God, I have an obligation to cooperate with your investigation, but I’ll tell you this right now: you’ve got the wrong end of this thing. A man of my experience doesn’t get where he is in life without being a good judge of character, so I can say this with absolute certainty. Jason Young did not harm his wife.”

  “You can’t actually vouch for his whereabouts after you left here Saturday morning, is that correct? That would have been before noon.”

  “Before noon, that’s right. I’m not saying I was with him, Officer, just that I know him. Believe me, I have looked into that young man’s heart on many an occasion, and what I’ve found there is a great deal of confusion and a great deal of misery but a complete absence of guile.”

  Aguilar gives one of his impassive nods, which Blunt takes as encouragement.

  “There were problems in that marriage, I can tell you. When a couple is unequally yoked like that, strife is inevitable, and naturally I’ve been called upon to counsel many young people in that predicament. In Jason’s case, though, the difficulties were particularly acute on account of the girl’s background and temperament.”

  “How well did you know Simone Walker?” I ask.

  “I only met Simone Young,” he says, emphasizing the last name, “a handful of times, and spiritually speaking she was very closed off, very hostile. Although Jason had his heart set on reconciliation, if I can be perfectly frank with you, there didn’t seem much hope of that, short of a miracle. I counseled him to reconsider divorce, since in my view there were biblical grounds.” Seeing another of Aguilar’s nods, his voice raises an octave. “I’m not one of those old-fashioned Bible thumpers who believes there are no biblical grounds, Officer. Maybe that surprises you.”

  “What grounds are you talking about?” I ask.

  “There’s infidelity, there’s abandonment.” He ticks them off with his fingers. “I believe both criteria were met in this case.”

  “She was seeing someone else?” Templeton’s remarks about Dr. Hill spring to mind again. “You know that for a fact?”

  “I don’t know it,” he says. “But I did discern it.”

  “I see.”

  “When I spoke to Jason, he told me you already knew about the seduction. That’s what it was, a seduction. She thought she could lure him back into her power—and frankly, the boy was weak. Who wouldn’t be, under the circumstances? He believed what he wanted to until she made her mercenary motives too obvious for him to ignore.”

  “The woman you’re talking about is the victim of a vicious murder,” I say. “Isn’t there something in the Bible about not speaking ill of the dead?”

  “Is there?” he says. “I don’t think so. And I’m not speaking ill, Officer, I’m speaking the truth. That’s what you want, isn’t it? The truth is, Jason was struggling to put back together something that was already rent asunder, and that’s enough to drag any of us down. It is not, however, a motive for murder. He truly loved her.”

  “As far as you’re aware,” Aguilar says, “does Jason Young have a drinking problem? ’Cause when we picked him up at church yesterday morning, he looked like he’d spent the night with a bottle, if you know what I mean.”

  The question checks Blunt for a moment. He moves behind his heavy mahogany desk, behind the red leather chair, nervously fingering the line of brass tacks along the seat back.

  “Consuming alcohol is prohibited by his employment covenant.”

  “So you’re not aware—?”

  “Listen,” he says. “None of us is perfect. And while I do not condone such behavior, it’s not my place to interrogate the people who work for me about their practices outside these walls.”

  “So you have kind of a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy in place?”

  Blunt recoils at the term. “I wouldn’t say that at all. If Jason does partake, I’m not aware of it, and frankly, I would be surprised. But as I said, we are sinful by nature, meaning that when we are tempted, we sometimes succumb. I won’t get on a high horse and pretend otherwise.”

  “What about violence?” I ask. “Did Jason ever confide in you about any abuse in the relationship?”

  “There was some abuse in her past, I understand.”

  “I’m talking about now. Did he ever hit her?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  In the silence that follows, Aguilar signals with a tilt of the head. We’re getting nowhere and it’s pointless to continue. Blunt can’t give us anything but a character reference. I’m half tempted to mention the Silk Cut to him, but I can’t help feeling it would give the reverend more satisfaction than it would me.

  The Rice Village swarms with shoppers flitting back and forth across University Boulevard, forcing me to ride the brake as Aguilar eyes them with suspicion. Charlotte could spend a whole day weaving through the cluster of boutiques and restaurants, which have also played host to most every impromptu rendezvous in the course of our marriage. But my colleague’s downturned lip prevents me from letting on that I have a history with the shopper’s mecca.

  “Do these people not have jobs?” he asks.

  I answer with a noncommittal grunt.

  The seclusion of Dr. Hill’s house just a few blocks away is all the more surprising when you consider how many people are in close proximity. I can understand the location’s appeal—in the heart of everything, and yet strangely remote. Despite the reputation West U. has for maintaining its neighborhood feel while having long since been swallowed by the city, the canvass of surrounding houses turned up next to nothing. Not only did the neighbors claim not to have witnessed anything, half of them didn’t know who Dr. Joy Hill was or that a woman named Simone Walker lived in her house. The professor keeps to herself, apparently, and Simone followed the same example.

  “It never hurts to knock on doors again,” I say. “Assuming you’re up to it.”

  Aguilar answers with a shrug. “It wouldn’t hurt to take another look at the scene, either.”

  “Great minds think alike.”

  After pounding on the door for a few minutes and deciding no one’s home, I try to reach Dr. Hill on the three numbers I have for her—home, office, and cell—leaving the same message each time. Then we duck under the tape near the garage and effect an entrance by climbing the fence, which leaves an indentation in the professor’s shrubbery and a needlelike wood splinter in my palm. I linger too long over the injury, prompting Aguilar to ask if I’m planning to retire on disability.

  Again, I’m struck by how intimate and enclosed the yard feels. As distant as the surrounding block is from the bustling Rice Village, the backyard seems more distant still from the surrounding block. Apart from the tops of the neighboring houses, an upper floor window here and there, and a second floor veranda just visible over the back fence, the pool and its outbuildings give the impression of absolute privacy. It’s not hard to believe the neighbors saw nothing. From the street outside, a passerby would be oblivious to anything going on back here.

  I take a slow walk along the length of the pool, ending up at the far side, confirming yet again the uncanny resemblance of Saturday night’s scene with the photo from Nicole Fauk’s murder.

  Aguilar comes up alongside, hands in pockets. “You really aren’t letting go of the Fauk connection, are you?”

  “It fits with everything else. Simone’s death was meticulously planned, and part of that included the way the scene was arranged.”

  “Was there a chair at the bottom of the pool back then?”

  “No,” I say, “but the chair wasn’t visible from the angle of the photo. It didn’t matter.”

  He crouches down. “You have the old picture on you?”

  I do, tucked in my pocket along with the snap of Jason Young. I hand it over for examination, then make my way around to the pergola, checking the ground in daylight in case we missed some telltale sign before. Glancing back, I see Aguilar holding the photo in front of him, closing one eye and then the other like an optome
trist’s patient trying to bring the chart across the wall into focus.

  “Are the chairs over there exactly how they were before?”

  Glancing at the furniture underneath the pergola, I’m not exactly sure whether the crime scene techs moved them or not.

  “It looked like in the Fauk picture,” I say. “He edged them around just the same.”

  He nods and walks over, gazing down at the picture the whole time.

  “Here,” he says, handing it to me. “How many chairs?”

  “Three.”

  “And there’s four there now. But one was in the pool. You were wondering the other night why he threw one in, and you just answered your own question. From the angle of the photo, the chair in the water wouldn’t be visible. He wasn’t dragging her body in the chair or throwing it down there to wash it off. He just couldn’t think of an easy way to get rid of it.”

  “To match the picture.”

  The simplest explanation. And it never even dawned on me. I tuck the photo back into my pocket without meeting Aguilar’s gaze, embarrassed he had to walk me through the answer.

  “Sometimes you can’t see the forest—”

  “Thanks,” I say. “That makes me feel a lot better.”

  “The point is, maybe there’s something to this Fauk angle, after all.”

  Instead of retracing our route, we slip out through the garage. Aguilar heads toward Brompton to canvass while I take the doors on Wakeforest, using the notes from the patrol officers who did the work Saturday night to prioritize houses where we found no one home. Signs spiked into half the yards remind me of the impending mayoral runoff election. A cleaning woman answers my first knock, resulting in an oblique conversation in pidgin Spanish to the effect that, no, she’d seen nothing and knew nothing. At the home behind Dr. Hill’s, a plump and cheerful housewife named Kim Bayard invites me inside and tells me how shocked she was to hear of the crime. Just when I start to get excited, though, and think she has information for me, Mrs. Bayard explains she heard about the murder late last night when she got back from a weekend in Colorado.

  “Maybe your husband witnessed something?”

  She smiles. “He’s in Nigeria. Consulting for an oil company. But you know who you should talk to? Emmet Mainz. He knows everything that goes on around here. He’s a sweet old man, and I’m sure he’d be happy to help.”

  Emmet Mainz turns out to be a wealthy widower in his late sixties. From the housewife’s description I’d expected an elderly busybody, but Emmet is nothing of the sort. He leads me across glossy parquet floors, graceful in a sweater and loose wool trousers, into a room he refers to as the conservatory. The corridor outside is decorated with a series of double frames, each containing a typewritten letter on one side and a newspaper clipping on the other.

  “My letters to the editor,” he says with a smile. “Now that I’m at leisure, I have to do something to keep busy, so I fire off these letters. Whenever one of them is published, it goes up on the wall. You’d be surprised how satisfying it can be.”

  I scan the letters quickly. Most of them seem to be factual corrections or quibbles with the opinions expressed in book reviews. Once I’ve had a look, Emmet guides me into the conservatory, resuming his seat at a black piano, shuffling through the jumble of sheet music on the stand. He knows everything that goes on, he says, thanks to the fact that he sits on just about every neighborhood committee in existence and regularly hosts musical evenings.

  “All I can tell you about that poor girl is that she had no ear for music,” Emmet says. “Joy brought her over once, sometime during the summer, and she banged out one of the worst performances of ‘Chopsticks’ I’ve ever heard in my life—and that’s saying something.”

  To prove his point, he pounds a few discordant measures on the keyboard, smiling wickedly at the conclusion, eyes alight with mischief.

  “You never met her husband?” I ask. “Or observed anyone visiting the house.”

  His fingers move over the keys again, wringing out a few elegiac notes with the slightest pressure, letting them hang on the air. Gray light pours through the drawn curtains, etching faint shadows across the floor.

  “What you must think of me,” he says, “asking questions like that. I’m not a peeping Tom. I’m afraid I can’t help you. I wouldn’t even have remembered her name if it hadn’t been in the paper.”

  I thank him for his time and turn to go.

  “Now, if you’d asked about Joy’s husband, I could have told you a thing or two. The girl he ran off with, she lived with them. I used to call her the au pair, but that was just my little joke. They didn’t have children, you see.”

  “Dr. Hill’s husband left her for a girl who lived in their house?”

  His fingers dance lightly over the keys. “The Polish girl . . . Agnieszka. Now she was a beauty and very musical. A former student of Joy’s, too.”

  “And Mr. Hill married her?”

  “Oh, no.” He laughs at the thought. “She was only having her fun. He did marry another girl eventually, but no, Agnieszka dropped him, I’m afraid. She doesn’t visit anymore, but I know she used to work in a dress shop in the Village. She’s the sort of girl you’d want standing around in a dress shop, though she did more than stand around. Her dream was to be a designer.”

  “Does she have a last name?”

  Emmet nods. “And it’s full of consonants, too, but if you’re asking whether I remember it, again, I’m afraid I can’t help you. Ask Joy, though, she’ll know.”

  “She might be sensitive about that subject.”

  “Not her,” he says. “I think you’ll find that Joy was relieved more than anything else. I know what it’s like to be trapped in a loveless marriage. For my wife and I, though, there were the children to consider. I’m sure Joy would have divorced him ages ago if she hadn’t been so consumed with work. She’s a very driven woman, but sometimes it’s the driven ones who are most complacent.”

  “It sounds like you’re fond of her.”

  “Does it?” He smiles and plays me another enigmatic tune. “The human situation has always fascinated me, which I suppose is just a fancy way of saying I like people, and the best sort of people in terms of entertainment value are the characters, the eccentrics. You must run into all sorts of eccentrics in your profession.”

  “Not just the criminals, either.”

  “You might just be one yourself—an eccentric, I mean, not a criminal. I don’t imagine normal policemen dress that way.”

  “My wife’s father was the eccentric in this case,” I say, skimming my hand over the brown check jacket. “He was an attorney in Austin who had all his clothes made for him in England and shipped over. When he’d had too many gimlets, he used to tell me he could make my career by revealing where all the bodies in Texas politics were buried.”

  He gives me the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth, the first thing since “Chopsticks” I’ve recognized.

  “That sounds like Lyndon Pellier,” he says. “Did you marry Charlotte or Ann?”

  My stunned expression draws a melodious laugh. “Don’t be so surprised. After all, I do know a lot of people around here. I should have realized. He always was a snazzy dresser. So which girl was it?”

  “Charlotte.”

  He wags a finger at me. “The pretty one. I should’ve guessed.”

  For the next ten minutes he regales me with stories of Lyndon Pellier, each punctuated by a tune on the piano, by which time I’m convinced that while he got the name right, he has confused the man. Either that or Charlotte has concealed from me some of the family’s juiciest gossip. Strangely enough, it’s hard to make excuses and leave when a chance personal connection like this crops up. My ringing phone eventually extricates me.

  “I’m looking at the forensics report from your scene,” Bascombe says. “You want the summary, or are you coming back in?”

  “Hold on just a second.”

  I make my apologies to Emmet and head for the side
walk. He follows me out, waving as I walk down the street.

  “Sorry about that. Go ahead.”

  “You’ve got nothing on the prints. Some belong to your victim, some belong to Dr. Hill, and there’s another set that doesn’t match anything in the system. We do have Young’s prints on file, by the way. He was arrested on a misdemeanor battery in 2004 after a brawl outside a nightclub. Pled no contest and did community service. That would have been before he married your victim in ’07.”

  “Thanks, I did the math.” I fill him in on the story the Silk Cut manager gave us, which suggests a pattern. “Anything else?”

  “We’ve got her cell phone records, so you can start working your way through. Just skimming through them I can see some recurring numbers.” He shuffles papers on the other end of the line. “And how about you, March? You got anything for me?”

  Now that I have Aguilar’s confirmation on the photo from the Fauk scene, I’m half tempted to bring the subject up. But I decide to wait on that one for fear of setting him off again. “There is one thing.” I repeat the story Emmet Mainz told me about Joy Hill’s husband running off with a former student who lived in the house. “I have reason to believe she’s in much better financial shape than she let on—meaning she didn’t need a tenant for the money—and there’s also this: apparently she was named in some kind of sexual harassment suit a while back. I don’t have the details, but I’m thinking I should follow up.”

  “A female student?” he asks. “March, I can’t see a woman doing this. I doubt she’d even have the strength.”

  “Maybe not. But if she’s lying to us, I should at least check it out.”

  “That’s your call. My advice would be to tread softly, though. If your new theory is that the professor butchered this woman in some kind of lesbian breakup, you might want to keep it low-key. I’m thinking specifically of the captain.”

  “What does Hedges care? He’s barely tuned in on this one.”

  Bascombe sighs over the line. “I’m glad I can’t reach out and touch you right now, or next they’d be puttin’ a charge on me.”