Madeline Carter - 01 - Mad Money

by Linda L. Richards

  “Yes, but I… I did something about it.”

  I shot her a questioning glance.

  “I hired a private detective. To follow you.”

  “You did.” It was a statement. I hoped she didn’t notice. “Why?”

  “I didn’t fully believe what you told me: that you hadn’t seen Ernie in all that time.”

  “And you believe me now?”

  She smiled then. It wasn’t a big smile, but it touched her eyes. “To be honest, Madeline, I’m not completely sure. Just at some point between then and now it ceased to matter as much.”

  I thought about this for a while. Oddly, and at some level, it made sense.

  “Well, for what it’s worth, Arianna, I haven’t been in touch with him at all. I’ve had no reason to, for one thing. We travel in different circles. Also, it ended badly between us. Very badly.”

  “Tell me.”

  I thought about it for a minute, but it didn’t seem appropriate: it would amount to dumping on her now-apparently-deceased husband. Which seemed so not cool. I told her as much. Fewer words, same sentiment. “I don’t think this is the time, Arianna. Or the day. Sorry. But, trust me: there were no lines of communication left open between us. Anyway,” I added. A new thought. “It was all so very long ago. None of it matters anymore.” That’s what I said to Arianna. But I was thinking about Alex Montoya’s words and wondering if what I was saying now was entirely true. Maybe it all mattered. Very much.

  In any case, Arianna let it rest and we traveled in silence for a while longer.

  After a few miles more, I remembered: the posh accent, the rumpled housedress, the ambling overfed gait. “So how do you go about finding a private detective anyway? The recommendation of friends? What?”

  Arianna looked vaguely embarrassed at the question. “No. I… couldn’t think of anyone to ask,” she wrinkled her nose. “Too sordid. Too much fodder for the rumor mill. I loathe that sort of thing. I looked in the phone book until I found one I thought I could trust.”

  “What happens then? I really have no idea. A meeting: money exchanging hands.”

  “Well, I don’t know if there’s a usual way. I never felt the need for one before just a few days ago. But I hired her on the telephone and paid her the same way; by credit card.” Funny, I would never have thought that PIs were hired on the phone and paid that way as well. It made it sound like phone sex.

  “Didn’t you think that was chancy? I mean, how did you know you could depend on her?”

  Arianna shrugged. “It was a chancy idea, I guess. And it wasn’t like it was a lot of money. Just three hundred dollars for the day.”

  Three hundred? Rand had told me five. So the extra two-fifty had been practically another whole day for her. And then Arianna had told me about everything voluntarily. I seethed for about forty-five seconds, then gave it up. That PI looked hungry. That is, she looked like she was telling the truth when she said rich clients didn’t fall into her hands every day. She could probably use the money. I let it go with a sigh.

  “I paid the private investigator with one of Ernest’s credit cards,” her smile was slightly evil: as evil as I’d seen it yet anyway. I liked her for it. “I thought it was certainly an expense he should handle, even if he’s not around. Executive decision.”

  “So, what’d you find out?”

  “Things that should make me even more suspicious of you,” she said cautiously.

  “Like what?” I was genuinely surprised.

  “Well, like you were at the Langton sales office yesterday, for starters,” Arianna’s tone was even.

  I was embarrassed: I’d forgotten this bit. Or rather, I’d been so focused on Steve, I’d forgotten that he worked for Langton. “I can imagine how that might have looked. But it was an… unrelated matter.”

  I could feel Arianna looking at me closely for a minute and then, “She told me you met with someone. He walked back to your car with you and that you exchanged notes.”

  “Phone numbers,” I said remembering. “He’s someone I met at a Langton function I attended the day before you and I met for coffee. I can see how it must look to you.”

  “Well, the private investigator took pictures of the two of you,” she had? How creepy was that? “And yesterday afternoon she told me who he was: a minor sales employee, no obvious links to Ernie or you, so… it seems possible you’re telling the truth.”

  She said this so smugly, I bridled. “Oh, it seems possible, does it?”

  She shot me a glance. “It does. I don’t know why you’re sounding so offended, Madeline. I did what I felt I had to do under the circumstances. What I do or think shouldn’t make any difference to you in the long term. It won’t affect anything. I did it for me.”

  I still didn’t like it, but I tried to put myself in her shoes — and since that actually involved imagining myself married to Ernie, it was hard — and figured that, had it been me, I would possibly have done the same thing. Scratch that: the way things were going, it was more likely I would have done the following myself.

  “And the private investigator said she lost you on the freeway near Redlands. But it seemed to me from her description of where she lost track of you, that you were very possibly headed to the same place I was supposed to go yesterday. That camp.”

  “The camp you went to, but didn’t get out of your car?”

  She nodded.

  “Which,” I added, “put us on the road at about the same time yesterday.”

  She sensed where I was going and rushed in ahead of me. “Yes, but I didn’t know any of that — any of the things about where you’d been — until yesterday evening. And then… then the sheriff called me this morning and told me about Ernie.”

  “But then, with all of that evidence, why on Earth did you let me drive you down here with you? With the stuff you’ve told me — about what I was doing, where I was going — I think I would have at least partly thought I did it.” I stopped to consider this jumble of words, then kept going: I could see she knew what I meant. “Weren’t you at least a bit afraid of me? I would have been.”

  “Madeline, if it were just facts, I guess I would have been. But I know you didn’t kill Ernie,” she spread her hand in front of her face, “I know it like I have five fingers, and I’ve never thought about explaining that, either.” Then she really surprised me, “No, Madeline: you and I are going to San Bernardino together to make sure the son of a bitch is dead. And he’s not, is he? You don’t think so any more than I do. But we’ll play this out.”

  She sat back in the deep leather seat, as though this last admission had exhausted her. For a while, I thought about things to ask her: questions and theories and beliefs, but I left it alone and retreated into my own thoughts and interpretations about what she’d said. We traveled the rest of the way to San Bernardino in companionable silence. What she’d said had proven once and for all that, regardless of our differences, we were sisters under the skin.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  It’s possible there’s a reason that morgues must always be located in the nether regions of the buildings that house them. If so, I don’t know what it is. We followed a sheriff into the bowels of the San Bernardino Hospital, beginning our downward journey in an elevator that smelled of sterilized clean masking the odors of illness and despair, then trekking down mostly empty corridors where the sounds of our shoes seemed impossibly loud in the stillness. Every step we took seemed to carry us further from life and sunlight and air. The deeper into the Earth we penetrated, the more I could feel it closing in above me. After a while, I had to remind myself to breathe.

  Arianna had been given directions to the hospital and, when we got there, I offered to wait in the car, but she asked me to come in with her. Actually, she insisted. “We’re going to see this thing through, Madeline. You and I. Someone is dead in there, and I have a terrible feeling it’s not Ernie,” which was a cryptic enough statement that I chewed on it for a few seconds before I followed her out of
the car.

  The sheriff, a nice 50-something man with a quiet and serious demeanor, was waiting for us. I hadn’t seen him before, so, thankfully, he took no notice of me. Since Arianna and I are similar in build and coloring anyway, he probably assumed I was her sister or some other relative.

  “I have to warn you,” he said when we’d completed our underworld journey and stood outside the morgue’s viewing area, “this might be upsetting for you. The body is in… imperfect condition. I wouldn’t put you through this if it weren’t absolutely necessary but, as it is, Mr. Billings is not recognizable to the casual eye.”

  Arianna and I exchanged a glance. What could that mean? I think we both imagined horrors beyond the most horrible. What we imagined, however, didn’t even come close.

  The body was wheeled, covered, into a small viewing area. A window separated us from the corpse, but it was close, anyway. Too close. I could hear Arianna’s sharp intake of breath when an orderly moved the sheet away. I put a hand on her elbow in what I hoped was a comforting way, bracing myself to catch her should she fall.

  We could see that the corpse had been severely and curiously burned. It looked as though his head, legs and arms had been cooked: that simple. Roasted like a Sunday chicken. There was no hair and not a lot of skin left on his head and we could see where the flesh on his cheek had, literally, been cooked away. The same was true for his hands and arms, legs and feet. They were purplish, blistered and completely unrecognizable.

  I knew it was ridiculous, but right then I would have sworn that, along with the dead chemical smell always found in hospital-type places, I could taste charcoal in the air, right through the glass between us. It was like a campfire, but without the pleasant connotations. I shuddered.

  Where the body wasn’t burned, it was ruined. And it was difficult to tell what was fire damage and what had come from other sources. There appeared to be wounds across the neck, chest and torso. Bullets. I saw again the glint of silver in Paul’s hand the day before. I averted my head for a moment. Closed my eyes, wishing I was anywhere but here.

  “Mrs. Billings, is it him?” The sheriff’s voice was quiet but insistent.

  “I… I believe so. It’s difficult to tell.”

  I looked at her closely, looking for some sign. I could see it wasn’t Ernie, but no one was asking me, so I kept my mouth shut. What I saw while I watched her, though, was a transformation. She went from looking like the suitably subdued new widow to… what? I couldn’t tell, but I saw her sort of blanch, saw her pallor heightened and I caught a throb begin at the base of her throat.

  I followed her glance: she seemed to be looking very carefully at the corpse’s left thigh. And there, in a spot miraculously saved from ruination, I saw it too. A mole, vaguely heart-shaped and about the size of my own thumbnail. Not a mole I recognized. Not Ernie, if there’d been any doubt. But then why this new layer of despair? And why wasn’t she saying anything?

  “Mrs. Billings, I can imagine this is difficult for you, but if you could give me a positive identification, one way of the other, it would be very helpful to us here.”

  She hesitated a minute, obviously fighting for control and, perhaps, for guidance. And then, “It’s… it’s him. I’m quite sure.”

  As the three of us made our way back to the surface, I asked the sheriff what had happened to Ernie. I hardly recognized my own voice as I spoke.

  The sheriff looked at Arianna before answering. She nodded and the sheriff replied in a gentle voice. “We found him in a burned-out lodge at an abandoned YMCA camp about a hundred miles from here. There will be an autopsy… sorry Mrs. Billings,” Arianna nodded an acknowledgment at his consideration. “But, as you’ll have observed, there is some question about the cause of death. He’s badly burned, but death appears to have been from gunshot wounds. And we had a witness report from someone who says they saw a person shot at that location yesterday.”

  “How did you know it was him?” I heard myself asking.

  “His wallet was on him, all his ID: driver’s license, credit cards,” he shot a cautious glance at Arianna, saw she was holding up and continued. “When we ran his name, we found a match in missing persons and it all seemed to fit pretty well. All we had to do then was bring Mrs. Billings in for a positive ID.”

  “But there’ll be DNA testing, right?” Arianna asked, her voice weak. Not surprisingly so, all things considered. But I wondered.

  He replaced his hat while answering. A studied gesture, as though weighing how to answer. “Wouldn’t think so, really. We don’t do that as a matter of course, not down here. Not when there’s no question about the victim’s identity. And everything here seems to add up pretty much.”

  “Parts of him,” I observed cautiously, “seem more seriously burned than others.”

  The sheriff hesitated, noted Arianna watching him intently for an answer, “There’ll be an investigation so, really, I don’t know how much I should say.”

  We’d reached the hospital’s admitting area. We were not far from sunshine. But, for the moment, we stood in the wretched recycled hospital air, the pale green walls giving Arianna’s face a ghostly glow. She was visibly fighting tears. “Please sir,” she said plaintively — and if I hadn’t suspected how much acting was involved, my heart would have gone out to her, “you have some idea. And it would… it would be soothing to me to know.”

  “Well,” he ran his fingers through his hair, “I don’t know how soothing it will be but,” grieving widows were obviously not his specialty, “right now we suspect that some of the burns you saw in there — particularly on the hands, feet and face — were done intentionally, before the fire, to obscure his identity. Maybe whoever did it hoped we’d take the body to be a drifter or a hiker and not think it was Mr. Billings at all. Since the… since Mr. Billings was a victim of kidnapping, we think the perpetrators probably wanted people to think he was still alive so that they could get their money. I guess they didn’t count on our witness. And, because of that witness, our men got to the scene in time to put the blaze out before it did more damage to… to your husband’s… remains.”

  I was ready to tell the sheriff who I was — that I was the witness — and mention Paul’s involvement, as well, but Arianna started speaking rapidly — maniacally? — before I had a chance.

  “Sheriff, thank you for your time,” she said. “I think you’ll understand that I have a need to get out of doors right now,” she was already in motion. “You know how to contact me should you have further questions.” He let us go more quickly and easily than I would have imagined. I figured that the thought of a beautiful widow blowing her cookies on the cold linoleum floor made him more tractable than he might have been. We were outside in minutes.

  The sunlight on our heads felt like tonic. It also felt impossible after the cold, metallic sterility of the morgue, a sterility that had been offset only by that sickly sweet burnt wood smell I still thought I’d imagined, though I was no longer completely sure. Now sun, newly watered grass and, from somewhere nearby, flowers. What had gone before might have been a dream.

  The hospital was part of a large civic complex. We walked for a bit, each full of our own thoughts, until we came to a bench surrounded by green grass and flowers. Arianna indicated she’d like to sit, and we did.

  “That’s not Ernie,” I said without preamble.

  She shook her head, no. But it was a sad, resigned no. Her husband was not dead. She had not told the police. And she looked more upset than when we’d arrived. “How did you know?” she asked.

  “That guy is circumcised. Ernie isn’t… well, wasn’t.”

  “I noticed that too.”

  “Why didn’t you say anything?”

  “I’m… I’m not sure, Madeline. I nearly did. But then… then I realized something else. Something that showed me how much bigger all of this is than I’d thought.” She looked at me intently, as though willing me to understand. “There’s more here than you see, Madeline. More here t
han I do, as well. And I keep thinking that, if we just let it play out, maybe it will go away.”

  “You don’t really think that.”

  She nodded. “I do.”

  I suddenly understood something. “That wasn’t Ernie in there, but I get the feeling you knew who it was.”

  Her reaction surprised me. I had expected denial, or maybe a cornered shiftiness around the issue. What she did, though, was put her head in her hands and sob. And not delicate little Wellesley sobs, either, but gut-wrenching silent wails that came from some deeply hurt place. I was mystified, but you couldn’t see her and not know she wasn’t acting anymore: this was real. She was, in her careful way, completely devastated. I looked around. There was no one within earshot and anyone watching from a distance — like the sheriff, say — would be seeing an understandably distraught widow who had just been forced to view the charred remains of her beloved husband.

  “His name was Marcus,” she whispered it like a prayer. Like a benediction. “Marcus Hayles.”

  I thought of her reaction to the mole on the thigh. “You knew him well.”

  Arianna nodded through sobs. “Very well. And now I think — I have to think — that nothing was as it seemed.” She looked directly into my eyes, it was almost a plea. “You see, Ernest didn’t know about Marcus. There was no way he could have known. And yet…” she indicated the building we’d come from, lying peaceful and white in the sunshine, giving no hints about what we’d seen inside. Marcus Hayles. Arianna’s lover, because what else could all of this mean?

  “But if he didn’t know, then how…?”

  “That’s just it! And when I think about it now, it was all too perfect. Even the way I met Marcus, the way… the way we came together.”

  “Tell me Arianna.” And yes, I wanted to know. But I felt part of me had to know, as well.

  “When I was coming out here, to California to meet Ernest, I met Marcus on the plane. He made me laugh, Madeline. He made me laugh the way Ernest had when I first met him. He even looked a bit like Ernest: the same coloring, the same height and build,” her voice broke, perhaps thinking of what both of those things might mean.