by John J. Lamb
“I didn’t kill him!”
“Maybe, but you did lie to us. Was that to protect the real killer?”
Marie’s chin fell. “I didn’t know it was going to happen.”
I gently tapped the side of the chair with my cane. “Sit down, Marie. You and I both know you want the money, and for people like you, betrayal never tastes as bad as you think it will.”
Nineteen
Marie stood in the doorway, white-faced with anger. Based on everything I’d observed and what Linda Ingersoll had told me, Marie was an archetypal bully and Frank had been the classic wishy-washy enabler. Therefore, it wasn’t likely she was accustomed to direct confrontation and my aggressive stance was intended to exploit that potential weakness. But the longer she stood there, with an invisible comic-strip thought-bubble above her head that clearly said, “Pound it up your ass,” the more I worried that I’d miscalculated. She wasn’t under arrest, so we couldn’t stop her from leaving, yet I knew our only chance to get the truth was by surreptitiously bullying the bully, so I continued to look at her with an expression of bored contempt. Finally, Marie closed the office door and sat down stiffly in the chair.
I folded my arms. “Okay, let’s establish the ground rules right now. You lied to us during the first interview and you aren’t going to waste our time again. You’ll answer all my questions honestly and completely. If you get stupid and start to lie, the interview is over and you don’t get the money. Understood?”
“Are you enjoying this?”
“As a matter of fact, I am. Do you understand?”
“Yes.” Marie spat the word out and then noticed Ash. “Who is she?”
“That’s my wife, and she’s played a major role in helping us investigate your husband’s murder.” I perched myself on the edge of the desk so that she would have to look up at me. “And now that we’ve all been properly introduced, who killed Frank?”
She devoted almost three seconds to pondering the ethics of shivving a family member in the back before saying, “I don’t know for certain, but I think it was my brother, Sheldon.”
Not wanting her to know that I’d already spoken with Sheldon, I asked, “What’s his last name?”
“Shaw.”
“And where does he live?”
“On Old Forge Road in Furnace.”
“Do you know if he has a history of physical violence?”
“He’s never been arrested for anything like that…that I know of.”
Talk about damning with faint praise, I thought, while trying to look thoughtful. “And why do you think he did it?”
“I love Shel, but he has a hair-trigger temper and he was madder than a hornet at Frank.”
“Over?”
“On account of Frank leaving me for another woman. On Saturday morning, Frank told me he was moving out and wanted a divorce. He said he’d be back for his things after work.” Marie looked at the floor. “I was so hurt. I couldn’t understand what I’d done.”
“Hurt, or upset the gravy train was pulling out and you weren’t on board?”
“What the hell do you mean by that?”
I shrugged. “Just that Frank was working two jobs, while you played couch potato, shoveled down cookies, and let your house turn into the residential equivalent of a landfill. When he said adios, that was all going to change.”
“I’m not lazy. I told you that I suffer from severe chronic fatigue syndrome.”
“Yeah, but the strange thing about your illness is that it’s conveniently selective. You’re too fatigued to do housework, but you weren’t too tired to go to yard sales or rush over here to collect a life insurance check.”
Marie bristled. “Oh, so just because I wasn’t chained to a vacuum cleaner, that gave him the right to abandon me?”
“Abandon? It looks to me like you drove him out,” Tina interjected.
“That isn’t true. I loved him.”
I said, “Well, you’ve got a damn funny way of showing it. Why didn’t you tell us about Frank saying he was moving out, when we were there on Saturday afternoon?”
“Because…”
“You would have had to tell the rest of the story and implicate your brother, right?”
She looked up at me searching for some sign of empathy. “Yes.”
I kept my face stern. “That’s understandable and maybe even admirable, but we’ve got to have the entire truth now.”
“I know.”
“So, let’s begin with the other woman. Do you know who she was?”
She folded her arms. “No.”
The body language told me she was lying, so I made a game show buzzer sound and stood up. “You lose. I told you what would happen if you lied to me. What, did you think I was kidding?”
“But—”
Turning to Tina, I said, “Come on, let’s go.”
“All right, I knew about her!”
“Too late. Oh, and by the way, do you want to know how I know you’re lying? I talked to Sheldon just a little while ago.”
Marie looked panicked. “Please! Give me one more chance.”
“Why? So you can ask for another chance the next time I catch you lying?” I leaned close to her. “Here’s a major news alert: I’m not flexible and forgiving Frank. I’m Attila the freaking Hun. Maybe all the men in your life have been spineless wonders, but you’re not going to manipulate me like you did them. Try it again and the least of your concerns will be losing out on the money.”
“If you’ve already talked to Sheldon, why are you bothering me? Why didn’t you just put him in jail?” Marie grumbled.
“Because I don’t think he killed Frank and, just for the record, he was a hell of a lot more forthcoming than you are.” I settled back on to the desk again. “Tell me about the other woman.”
“Her name is Linda Ingersoll and she’s a professor at UVA. Frank started acting sneaky back in November, right after coming home from a conference at William and Mary. I assume that’s when he met her.”
“How do you know who she is?”
“I followed Frank one day when he said he was going to the UVA library to do some research. Instead, he went to a motel in Ruckersville. A woman showed up a little later and went into the room.” Marie looked at Tina. “I got the license plate of her car and had one of your deputies check it through the DMV for me.”
It was one of those intellectual long-expired-date-on-the-milk-carton moments. You know it’s going to smell awful, but you still open it and take a whiff. I said, “Accessing a law enforcement database for personal use is against the law. Why would a deputy do that for you?”
“Because we’re very close old friends.” Marie tried to sound innocently kittenish, but the statement came out as a smirk.
I glanced at Ash, who gave me a cross-eyed look of disgust.
Meanwhile, Tina was tight-jawed. “Which one of my deputies?”
Marie said, “Ron Mooney. Gee, I hope I haven’t gotten him into trouble.”
Clearing my throat, I said, “Getting back to Linda, the DMV paperwork would only have given her name and address. How did you find out she worked at UVA?”
Marie took a deep breath. “I, uh…Sheldon told you about the computer, didn’t he?”
“You mean the computer that you claimed was never in Frank’s office in the garage? As a matter of fact he did, and coincidentally, we’ve been holding it as evidence since Sunday morning.”
“How?”
“Sheldon took it to the trash transfer station and a witness saw him dump it.”
“What an idiot.”
“No, just environmentally conscious. What was it about the computer that told you Linda worked at UVA?”
Marie gave me a challenging look. “I installed surveillance software on his computer at home. It allowed me to read his emails and everything else he typed.”
“Whoa. That’s more than a little intrusive.”
“I had a right. He was being unfaithful to me.”
&nb
sp; “Maybe so, but you could have taken the direct approach and talked to him about the state of your marriage.”
“Why was it my responsibility? I was happy and he decided to have an affair with that slut. I had to protect myself.”
“So that if it did come down to divorce, you’d have some damaging material from the emails, right?”
She broke eye contact. “You don’t understand.”
“Fortunately, I don’t have to. Did you destroy the computer because you were afraid that Frank would discover that spyware?”
“No, he’d never have found it.”
“So why did you destroy the computer?”
“He was writing a book about the Civil War. Apparently it was good. He had a couple of hundred pages written and I knew that there was a publisher already interested.”
“Because you were eavesdropping on the email?”
Marie flared. “Hey, don’t sit in judgment of me. I wasn’t the only sneaky one. I wasn’t the one that had the affair or wrote to my sleazy girlfriend that I’d hold off on selling the book until I’d separated from ‘Jabba the Gut.’”
“For someone utterly convinced about how right you are, you seem mighty touchy. But hey, no more talk about flagrant invasions of privacy,” I said in an artificially cheery tone. “Back to the computer: You were going to tell me your reason for smashing it.”
“I was angry and hurt and there was no way in the world that I was going to let him profit from something that he’d worked on while we were married.”
“I think you want to believe that, but it doesn’t make any sense.”
“What do you mean?”
“Unfortunately, most people would rather read about Britney Spears forgetting to put on underpants than American history, so the publisher couldn’t have been offering much money for Frank’s manuscript.”
“It was four thousand dollars.”
“And you’d have been entitled to half of that. You aren’t stupid; you had to have known the manuscript would have been declared community property in a divorce agreement.”
“But you weren’t worried about the money,” Ash said meditatively. “You just wanted to hurt him.”
“What if I did?” Marie shot a glowering look at Ash. “He’d hurt me.”
I said, “And just so that we’re clear on this, you did know that the computer actually belonged to Massanutten County, right?”
I could tell Marie was calculating the odds on slipping a lie past me. Then she noticed I was grinning at her and she said, “I suppose.”
“Good girl. Just what did you use to smash it?”
“A piece of two-by-four.”
“And I imagine that’s how you injured your shoulder.”
“Yes.”
“Was your son aware of what you were doing?”
“No, he was still asleep in his room.”
“So, what did you do after you finished whacking the hell out of the computer?”
“I called Sheldon and told him what happened.”
“What time was that?”
“Sometime around nine.”
“And how did Sheldon react?”
“He was furious and said that he was going to go over to the museum and give Frank the beating of his life.” Although she was trying to sound distressed, there was an underlying trace of gleeful vindication in her voice. “He said that he wasn’t going to sit there and do nothing while I was being dishonored.”
“Knowing how much you loved Frank, did you say anything to dissuade your brother or otherwise prevent the assault?”
“Don’t you sneer at me. I loved my husband but I had no control over Sheldon.”
“Really?” I asked with a bitter chuckle. “Did you love him enough to call him and warn him that he had an ass-whipping inbound?”
“I called him.”
“Yeah, at ten-oh-three. That’s about an hour after you’d fired Sheldon up. Was that call to ask Frank how it felt to be in the same sort of pain you were?”
“If he got beat up, it wasn’t my fault.” Marie sounded slightly coy. “It’s not like I told Sheldon to go over and attack him.”
“Not directly, but you did a superb job of pushing his buttons to nudge him in that direction. What happened when you spoke to Frank?”
“Nothing. He hung up on me.”
“And you assumed he’d done that because it was hard for him to talk with broken teeth and that he’d put two and two together and come up with you having sent Sheldon over there.”
“I don’t know what he was thinking.”
“Right. This may come as a disappointment, but he hadn’t been beaten up. He just didn’t want to talk to you. Fortunately for Sheldon, he didn’t get the opportunity to thump Frank. Did you know that?”
“No. I haven’t heard from Sheldon since Saturday.”
“Do you know why he’s been incommunicado?”
“No. I thought maybe he’d accidentally killed Frank and was hiding out.”
“No, it’s probably because he thinks you might have killed Frank.”
“What?”
“He didn’t say it directly. In fact, he refused to roll on you. But, just like us, he knew you went someplace by yourself on Saturday morning. And I imagine he wonders if it was the museum.”
“This is getting crazy. I told you I didn’t go there.”
“That’s right. You told us that you’d gone to yard sales in Elkton.” I pulled the classified section from the newspaper and held it out for her. “There’s a listing of all the yard sales in Elkton. Would you please take a look and tell us which ones you went to?”
Marie looked away from the newspaper and began tapping her foot.
“All you have to do is pick one of those addresses out. We’ll go over there with your driver’s license picture, they’ll say, ‘Oh yeah, she was here and bought the old Village People LPs,’ and you’re in the clear.”
I moved the classified section another couple of inches closer to her face and Marie suddenly slapped it from my hand. “All right, goddamn it, I didn’t go to garage sales.”
“Oh dear! That means you don’t have an alibi witness for your husband’s murder.” Then, I sang to the tune that signaled the end of the original Mickey Mouse Club TV show: “Now it’s time to say good-bye to all that blood money.”
Marie gave me a venomous look, huffed, and said nothing.
“Sorry, that was unnecessary, but fun.” I leaned closer to Marie, daring her to slap my face as she had the newspaper. Suddenly, I knew exactly where she’d been and I knew it was time to nail her inside the coffin. I continued, “I’ll bet I know where you were and if I’m right, you have a decision to make. Keeping your mouth shut about where you were means the insurance company will deny your claim. But if you cop to the malicious mischief, you’ve got a rock-solid alibi and it’s payday, right?”
Marie’s lips were compressed and white with anger, yet she still said nothing. Meanwhile, Ash looked a little perplexed. With everything else we’d discussed about what had happened in Charlottesville and later, on the mountain, I’d forgotten to mention that Linda’s car had been vandalized on Saturday morning.
After another couple of seconds of silence, I said, “Come on, Marie, you went to Linda Ingersoll’s house in Charlottesville, didn’t you? You had her address.”
Finally, she nodded and said through gritted teeth, “I gave that little slut a taste of the misery she’s given me.”
“Go on.”
She slapped her thigh. “You already know what I did, so why are you making me say it?”
“Because you’re playing passive-aggressive word games—phrasing things so that you can deny them later. What precisely did you do?”
“Fine. I poured acid all over the hood of her PT Cruiser and I’m not the least bit sorry. Are you happy, now?”
“Ecstatic, because that proves you couldn’t have been at the museum when Frank was murdered. You’ve chosen wisely, Grasshopper.” I stood up, ju
st in case she changed her mind about slapping me after what I had to say next. “But I wouldn’t spend that insurance money too fast.”
“Why?”
“Well, when we’re finished with this murder investigation, I’d be betting that Sheriff Barron is going to charge you with felony vandalism for destroying the computer, as well as with providing false information to the cops.”
We both looked at Tina, who flashed a cold smile and nodded.
I continued, “Then the Charlottesville police are going to charge you with another count of felony vandalism. Add up all your lawyer’s fees, penalties, and the financial restitution you’ll have to pay to Massanutten County and Linda Ingersoll, and by the time it’s all played out, I doubt you’ll have enough money left over to buy a package of chocolate-covered Oreos.”
Twenty
Marie stalked from the office and slammed the door.
Tina said, “How did you know she vandalized Linda Ingersoll’s car with acid?”
“Linda told me about the damage, but it wasn’t until a minute ago that I connected that event with Marie being away from home. Sorry, but between being threatened with guns and baseball bats, I forgot,” I said. “The weird thing is that Merrit’s wife and lover have mutually supporting alibis.”
“And she doesn’t seem to miss him. All she cares about is the insurance money.” Ash was still looking at the door.
“And herself. But Merrit deserves some of the blame too. He helped create that cookie monster by rewarding her dysfunctional behavior.”
Tina’s jaw tightened. “Speaking of rewards, once we’re finished with this investigation, I’ll have to start another one on Deputy Mooney.”
“What will you do if you find out he misused the computer system?” Ash asked.
“Fire him and file felony charges.”
“Good for you,” I said.
Tina glanced at her watch. “It’s pushing five now. Give me ten minutes to brief the county legal counsel and then we’ll head over and talk to Holly Reuss.”
“Oh yeah, I can hardly wait for that,” Ash said with unsavory relish as she interlaced her fingers and pushed her palms outward.