by Medora Sale
“What do you mean, closer to truth? You said—”
“No lies,” he interrupted. “Just a little editing. To start with,” he asked, pulling up a chair close to hers, “who is he?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” said Jane. “I really don’t. I swear I never saw him in my life before.”
“Well, I have. He’s the man who was in town looking for you. Someone told me they’d seen him wandering around Harmon’s place again today and so I figured I better come home and check. He’s the one you said must have been your boyfriend. I take it he wasn’t?”
“No—I just assumed from that description—I mean, who else would be chasing me down here?”
“Anyway, unless you’ve been bullshitting me all along, he couldn’t be, could he? Your boyfriend’s already been killed once.”
His voice was cold, controlled, with no hint of compassion or solidarity in it. Jane flinched, as if she had been stripped of her only warm covering. “How long had you been there?” asked Jane. “On the deck, listening?”
“How long had I been standing there? Not long. Long enough to see that knife kind of hovering around your belly button and not liking it much, so I just slipped around the curtains. I figured at the very least I could distract him—and besides, I’m probably better at hand to hand than he was. He didn’t seem to be very good at this sort of thing, you know. If you hadn’t been so panicked and worried about Lesley you probably would have extricated yourself from the situation without my help. He struck me as an enthusiastic amateur.” His expression was still frozen. “I thought your sister was just trying to hide under the table there and I figured I’d better get to him before he noticed her. But I wasn’t quick enough.”
“It never occurred to me for a second that she meant to kill him,” said Jane. “I don’t know what I thought she was trying to do, but—”
“She had to kill him,” said Amos, with great clarity. “She had no choice, in order to save herself when he went for her with his knife. The knife he brought with him, intending to use. The knife he dropped on the floor in the struggle and I picked up so I could cut you down.”
Jane stared at him, stupefied. “What are you talking about? He never even knew she was in the room.”
“Oh yes, he did,” said Amos firmly. “Because she screamed when she saw what was happening, remember? After all, she’s very nervous, especially after what happened to her in New York. He went for her and tripped and in the struggle she picked up a knife from the counter and stabbed him in the back. You saw it, I saw it, and poor Lesley—well—she’s too shocked by the whole terrible incident to recall any of it.”
“Your sister,” said the sad-faced deputy as he unwound Lesley’s fingers from the knife.
“Yes,” said Jane. “She’s been like this ever since it happened.”
“Shock, I expect,” he murmured, and handed the weapon carefully for bagging to the evidence technician who was working quietly around them.
“Funny-looking knife, though,” said the deputy.
Jane leaned over to look at it. “It’s a boning knife,” she said, trying not to sound startled. “You use them to cut the bones out of chicken breasts and things like that.”
“Ah,” said the sergeant in charge, who had been deep in whispered conversation with Amos. “So that’s where it came from. The kitchen.”
“I beg your pardon?”
He shook his head gravely. “A man who attacks a couple of women in a kitchen is asking for trouble. He shouldn’t be surprised if he gets a knife in his ribs. A kitchen knife, I mean.” And he turned back to his conversation with Amos.
The deputy waited patiently throughout the interruption. “I need to write down some particulars. Can we start with you, miss?” More engines roared down the road and into the driveway, interrupting him again.
“I’ll deal with these guys,” said the sergeant. “You get the rest.”
Amos had drifted across the room to gaze with apparent indifference at the lake and the clearing skies, but the taut muscles in his back and neck betrayed his intense concentration on the scene behind him. “I don’t know his name,” Jane was saying, “but he’s the man who killed my husband.” The word seemed to echo in the big room. Amos had asked for the truth, and now, by God, he was going to get it. All of it. “He said that Guy had stolen something valuable from him, and that he had tortured and killed him.”
“He actually said that?” asked the deputy. “He confessed to you that he had tortured and killed your husband?”
Jane paused to consider the question. “Maybe not in those actual words, but he certainly gave me that impression,” she said at last.
“Your impression,” said the deputy, clearly unimpressed. “Could you explain what gave you that impression?”
“Well—he said something about knowing how to force me to talk, and about it being the same thing that happened to Guy, or that he did to Guy. I know it doesn’t sound very clear, but I was scared and I didn’t know what he was talking about half the time. He also said,” she added, “that he knew I had what they were looking for. He didn’t say how he knew, but I assumed my husband had admitted it under torture. How else would he know that if he hadn’t been there?”
“Not exactly Mr. Nice Guy, your husband, was he?”
“He wasn’t very good at withstanding pain.” Jane took a deep breath and looked steadily at the deputy. “I would guess that the Toronto police have more information about who this man is, and about me and my husband.” She turned to read Amos’s face, but he had moved out of her line of sight. “I suggest that you call them,” she added bleakly. “They probably want to talk to me too.”
“So what it comes down to, then,” he said, sounding depressed, “is that your husband was killed and you took off with this property stolen from him, and you’ve been evading the authorities since then by moving in with Amos Cavanaugh here?” He looked at her with a touch of the contempt most people reserve for child molesters. “Feeding him some kind of line and using him as a cover to keep you out of trouble? Is there a warrant out on you? When I call Toronto, am I going to find out that they want you back there for his murder? And the corpse there on the floor, was he just trying to collect his half?”
“There’s no warrant on me that I know of. And I think if you check on when I was here, and when my husband died, you’ll find that’s why.” She looked down at the floor, and saw a foot in a gray running shoe right behind her. Amos must have been leaning against the wall where he could see her questioner, out of view. Avoiding her. “I wasn’t evading the authorities, I was evading my husband. I was afraid of him. He was a very violent man.”
“Who couldn’t stand pain.”
“Only his own. He didn’t mind other people’s pain. But I’m sure the Toronto police will tell you that. It was pretty common knowledge.”
The deputy walked slowly back to the damaged window. “The doctor’ll be here soon to look at your sister,” he said, fingering a piece of broken glass. “He’ll probably recommend that she go into a hospital for observation. We’ll need you down at the station sometime to sign statements. Sorry about this, Amos,” he said and patted him on the shoulder.
“There’s nothing to be sorry about,” said Amos coolly. “Are you going to take him away?” he asked. “Or just leave him there on my floor?”
“They’ll be here in a minute,” said the deputy. “You got some place to stay?” he asked, turning to Jane.
“We’ll stay here, if you don’t mind,” said Amos. “The place needs a lot of cleaning up and we’re in the middle of cooking dinner. You know where to find us. And if you really want to know who that lump of shit on the floor was, you might ask Richard Harmon. They seem to have been pals. I saw him in Harmon’s store the other day, and he was asking about Miss Sinclair—trying to find out where she was staying. And Harmon sure as hell must know why
this thing was so anxious to speak to her. Alone.”
“Where did she get that knife?” asked Amos as soon as the last of the intruders had left the boathouse, taking a heavily sedated Lesley with them.
“Not from here,” said Jane. “I’d have noticed a boning knife. Maybe she brought it with her,” she added, trying to sound casual.
“Brought it with her? In case she ran into a roast with a bone in it somewhere on her travels? Come on, Jane.”
“Just a minute.” She walked over to the bed and drew a dark gray suitcase out from under it. It was unfastened. She lifted the lid, took Lesley’s leather tool kit out of a side compartment, and held it up for Amos to look at.
He raised a startled eyebrow.
Along with the screwdrivers and pliers was a black leather sheath. Tooled. She pulled it out and showed it to Amos.
“You wouldn’t put a kitchen knife in that,” he said. “That’s a sheath for a hunting knife. A fancy one.”
“You’re right. It wouldn’t fit at all, would it? But she was searching through her suitcase for something. I saw her.” Jane started lifting up neatly stacked piles of clothing. “There it is,” she said and pulled out a thin, broad, long black box—the kind silver spoons and the like come in. It too was unfastened.
“What’s in it?”
She held it open for him to look. It was a case, containing four shaped forms lined in velvet. They held a butcher’s steel, a French chef’s knife, and a carving knife. One hollow form, precisely the configuration of a good quality boning knife, was empty. “My God. It’s Dad’s knives,” said Jane. “He lost them three or four years ago. He was positive that his last sous-chef had walked off with them and he was furious about it. Lesley must have been carrying them around with her for years.”
“Waiting,” said Amos.
Jane clasped her hands around her arms to keep them from trembling. “Yes. Waiting.”
Chapter 13
Sanders sat stony-faced on the wrong side of the broad desk of authority. Six o’clock Friday afternoon was not a propitious time to be hauled over to headquarters by a sudden phone call, and behind a well-cultivated mask of impassivity he was flipping through his mental checklist of alternate careers.
So that when the judgment came, it was totally unexpected. “You’re off the hook,” said his superior abruptly, clutching a report in his hand. “For the time being at least. This just came in. From the States. Beaumont’s wife—”
“His wife?”
The chief looked down to check the material in front of him. “Yes. She seems to go by the name of Jane Sinclair. We have a file on her,” he added impatiently. “Don’t we? Anyway, she was the subject of assault with a weapon, it seems. And, according to her, the person who assaulted her claimed to have murdered Beaumont.”
“Not according to him?”
“Slight problem there. Which is why this is all hanging in the air for the moment. Apparently in the middle of the assault against the Sinclair woman another female came into the room. He attacked her—”
“Who was this other female?”
“Her sister. Name of Lesley Sinclair. The sister grabbed a knife from the kitchen counter to protect herself and in the struggle he got stabbed. Fatally. Self-defense. And don’t look at me like that. They’re perfectly happy with it down in New York, say they have a good witness who arrived during the attack, it’s probably true, and besides that, the woman is a basket case, mentally, and so there’s no profit in wasting the money to prosecute her. Or, at least, that’s their preliminary thinking on it.”
“So who in hell is he?”
“No positive ID. But a witness who knew him in Skaneateles has identified him as Dean Smithson. His mother is on her way down to have a look. And that ties in very nicely with what we’ve been digging up, doesn’t it? He seemed to have been engaged in looking for some stolen property. I gather that the person who killed Beaumont was also looking for lost property. Ed Dubinsky agrees that it fits with what he knows. Or you know.” In spite of the tone of voice, it was a question.
“Dean Smithson,” said Sanders, shaking his head. “It makes sense in a way.”
“And the stolen property?”
“It’s somewhere in the reports. An antique map. Or so they say.”
“Valuable ?”
“Until someone finds it and has it looked at by an expert, we won’t know, will we? My gut tells me it’s a fake, but that isn’t worth much. Anyway, I would guess that Guy Beaumont got his hands on it in England, which is where it surfaced a few months ago. Smithson must have felt it belonged to him, and when he caught up with Beaumont, tied him up and held him upside down in Miss Jeffries’s bathtub trying to get him to cough it up. When it turned out Beaumont couldn’t breathe under water, he dumped him on Miss Jeffries’s floor and searched her apartment for the map.”
“Why Miss Jeffries’s floor? Why bring you into it?”
“I don’t think they wanted to bring me into it at all. I don’t suppose they even realized that I was part of the package. Beaumont still had a key to her apartment on him from the old days. He dropped in to see her when he got to Toronto and everyone seems to have figured that he’d stashed the map with her. But I don’t think that Beaumont had. He was hellishly anxious to lay his hands on his girlfriend—”
“His girlfriend? For chrissake, who’s she?”
“—his wife. It’s all the same person, the Sinclair woman,” said Sanders impatiently, “and I don’t think he was just feeling lonely without her. The way I figure it, she grabbed the map when she left Beaumont, meaning to sell it, and eventually she ran head first into Smithson, who was still looking for it.”
“The way you figure it? How much of this is speculation?”
“It’s pure speculation. Eighty percent of it is pure speculation.”
“Jane called me,” said Harriet. She walked over to her desk and began to sort out a pile of five by seven cards as she said it, carefully avoiding his eyes. His early warning systems registered impending disaster. “She apologized and tried to explain. She was very upset, and so—”
“For chrissake, Harriet, you didn’t, did you?”
“I did. If I leave now, I can get to the hotel before midnight,” she said. “I knew you wouldn’t want—”
“This is beginning to feel like the road to work,” grumbled Sanders.
“You didn’t have to come,” said Harriet, clicking on her turn indicators and changing lanes.
“Don’t speed,” was his response. “We can’t afford to lose the sleeping time while we explain ourselves to state troopers. And that’s not really true—I did have to come. I have to interview your mythical former assistant. For the record. I just wouldn’t have chosen this particular time to travel down to do it.”
“She’s not mythical. A bit elusive, I guess, but not mythical.”
“Are you always going to be like this?” asked John as he drifted past two mile-long trucks.
“Like what?” asked Harriet sleepily.
“Loyal, helpful, generous to those in distress—at my expense?”
“Certainly not. I’m quite prepared to lay down life and limb for you, too, and drag everyone I know into helping. Actually, I’ve always considered myself to be rather nasty and thoughtless as far as others were concerned. I just have trouble saying no.”
“I’ve noticed that,” was his ambiguous reply.
“Later,” said Harriet. “This is our exit coming up.”
But it wasn’t until the next morning, after breakfast, that Harriet finally called Jane. In spite of her precipitate exit from the city, and the ardent desire she had professed the night before to seek out her old assistant, and to offer her all the help and comfort in her power, Harriet was reluctant to move. She had a premonition that the interview was going to degenerate into something more serious, and this sunny June morning
seemed made for better things than accusations and recriminations and gruesome explanations. She wanted to take a camera down to the lake and capture the ducks, or to walk along Genesee Street and get shots of some of the magnificent old houses; instead, she copied down the precise directions to the boathouse and went across the street to the park to stare at the lake and wait for John.
He didn’t even have to reach for the photograph they had given him. That waxy face with its permanent bad-tempered scowl could only be Marco Smithson’s son. “Yeah. That’s him,” John said to the deputy who had driven him from Skaneateles to Syracuse and had taken him into the morgue. Before the words were out of his mouth, he had turned and headed for the door. “Can’t stand those places,” he said to the sheriff, who was waiting out in the corridor for him. “I don’t know how the guys who work in there all the time survive it. Too goddamn cold and shiny. But as far as I know, you’ve got the right name on his tag. He’s ours.” He looked up and down the hall. “Has his mother been down to have a look yet?”
“Not yet. She’s flying up this morning. Should be here soon.”
It was as if a simple mention of her existence could conjure her up. At that moment, a blond whirlwind in neatly pressed beige pants and a cream-coloured silk shirt pulled into the parking lot in a rental car and jumped out, putting an end to their conversation. Sanders nodded in her direction, and the morgue attendant came out to usher her with due solemnity through the freshly painted doors. She too was out almost as quickly as she came in, looking slightly paler, but unchanged in expression.
“Mrs. Smithson?” asked the sheriff. “Was that—”
“That was Dean,” she said, her voice controlled and steady. “My son. I told the man in there. I have to sign some forms now, so if you would excuse me—”