Perfect Sax

by Jerrilyn Farmer

  Her eyes were gleaming. Her voice was harsh.

  I kept quiet, trying not to obsess over the opening of the unblinking gun barrel as it stared at me.

  “I met him ten years ago when I was working at the Hollenbeck Division,” she said. “Chuck served his probationary period there, but he wanted more excitement, so he moved to the Seventy-seventh Street Division in South Central. Did you know any of this?”

  I shook my head.

  “Figures. You take up with a man and know absolutely nothing about him. What do you care, right?” Her eyes challenged me.

  “I do care,” I said, wondering if this was what she wanted to hear, trying not to piss her off any further.

  “Then you’ll be delighted to learn that Chuck was a favorite out there. He tried new things. I was so damned proud of him in those days. They would always pick Chuck first to work the dangerous undercover assignments. He did good work.”

  I had no idea how I was going to get out of the corner of this dusty sunroom alive. I had no choice but to keep Sherrie talking, and she clearly had a lot more she wanted to tell me.

  “Is this cop stuff boring you, honey?”

  I shook my head no. “What happened next?”

  “He worked the South Bureau Narcotics Task Force and was part of some amazing busts. In time, the department knew how much trust they could place in Chuck. He was given the ‘problem probationers’ ready to be fired for various things in their performance as cops. Chuck would turn these cops around and keep them from being fired. Do you have any idea what sort of man this is, Madeline, this man you have treated like crap?”

  Wait. Was Sherrie angry with me for getting involved with her husband or for treating him like crap? Hold on. “What about your career?” I asked, trying to get it just right. “You were a great cop.”

  “My own career with the PD was minor league. I always worked hard, but Chuck was the star in the family. He was on the gang task force until June 1998, when he was handpicked to be the senior officer in the Robbery Homicide Division. Do you understand what sort of man he is?”

  The level of hero worship combined with the intensity of her feelings were enough to frighten anyone. The unwavering gun barrel scared me even more. “Sherrie. Please, let me talk. When I first met Honnett, I had no idea he was still married.”

  She actually laughed at me. And why shouldn’t she? “You saying he lied to you, like some common scumbag? You’re talking about Lieutenant Charles W. Honnett of the Los Angeles Police Department,” she said. “This man doesn’t lie, kid. Do you actually think you’re going to sell that story? He doesn’t lie.”

  She was right. Technically, he hadn’t lied to me. He just never went into the details. And to be 100 percent fair, I had never asked for a detailed review of his previous relationships. I thought men hated to be quizzed. I had been trying to be a free spirit. For all the good it did me.

  “Sherrie, he said he had been married before. That was all. Married before. And this was a long time ago, at a time when the two of you were separated. How could I know? Then, later, when he told me more about you, about how he was getting back together with you, of course he and I split up. That was it. I know he loves you, Sherrie.”

  A tear fell from her eye. I was shocked I had gotten through. I kept talking. “There is no need for you to get into bigger trouble over a…a misunderstanding, really. No need for guns or any of this. Men sometimes make mistakes with women, no matter how good the guy might be. The important thing is that Honnett loves you and he went back to you when you needed him.”

  “Shut up,” she said. The gun never wavered in her hands. She had years of training on pistols, I realized. And this was, after all, her service gun.

  I thought of her other gun, the expensive .38 Honnett brought to me after I’d begged him for his help. He never told Sherrie, of course. Probably hoped she wouldn’t notice it missing. That was Honnett’s style of honesty. Never say too much. Never explain. Right.

  “He came back to you, Sherrie,” I said, trying to convince her she had nothing to fear from me.

  “Chuck never would have come back to me if I hadn’t told him about being sick. He said…” Her calm monotone became ragged and she sobbed once, then pulled it together. “He told me he’d met someone. He said you weren’t like us. You were different. Some sort of cook. Young and liberal and all of that. Kind of like some arty bohemian. I asked him if this new girl had any idea what kind of hero he was. And do you know what he told me? He said you didn’t pay much attention to what he did on the job.” She shook her head, remembering. “This great cop, but what do you care about any of that? It was all wrong. I worshiped that man, but he wanted you. I didn’t know what else to do. I had to get him to pay attention to me again, so I told him about the cancer.”

  “I heard you’ve been sick.”

  She shook her head. “You heard wrong.”

  “You don’t have cancer?”

  With one hand she pulled off the red wig she had been wearing, keeping the other hand, the one holding the Beretta 9mm, steady on me. Beneath the thick shag wig, her own brown hair was pinned up under a net.

  “We’d been living apart for over a year. He kept drifting farther away. I had to tell Chuck something. So I bought a wig and told him I’d been going through chemo.”

  This woman was so seriously nuts.

  “That’s when he paid attention. He realized we needed to work out our troubles,” she said. “ ‘Cause he thought I was dying. Not because he wanted me.”

  I stared at her.

  “It was no good, you see? You had ruined him by then. He wasn’t mine anymore. Nothing I tried made any difference. He asked the therapist we were seeing how long she felt I would need his support. She told me that one night after a session. I knew he would be leaving me any day to go back to you.”

  “I’m sorry. I swear I never knew.”

  “So you can see why I’d want to check you out.”

  “You started following me.”

  “Chuck told me you were a party girl and came home late at night. I knew about your Grand Wagoneer and I got your address on Whitley off of your driver’s license. I went to your house one night. I watched you come home. That first time I saw you I had such pain. Like fire. You were so young. You were so young and thin and vibrant—that’s the right word. I hadn’t expected that. And I watched you go into the house and turn on some lights.”

  “When was this?” Some creepy strange woman had been stalking me. I had felt it. I had known it. But I had always managed to push it out of my thoughts. It was creepier by far to hear about it from the point of view of the stalker.

  “A week ago Saturday night. Or I should really say early Sunday morning.”

  And it all clicked into place. This jealous/crazy woman had been staking out my house on the night Sara Jackson had returned my Jeep Grand Wagoneer. Sherrie Honnett had not known what I looked like then. She mistook Sara for me.

  “You’ll Never Go to Heaven”

  It was Sara,” I said, my voice dead.

  “I thought it was you. So young. So pretty. She let herself into the house by the kitchen door. She left the door ajar and I entered behind her. She was already walking up the stairs when I entered the kitchen.”

  I was shocked. Why had Sara Jackson gone up to my room? I had never figured that out.

  “She was standing in your bedroom, opening drawers, playing with your jewelry box.”

  I was astonished. “My what?”

  “She was holding up a pair of emerald earrings. Now, why would I imagine that that young woman fooling with your earrings was anyone else but you?”

  “Sara was ripping me off?” Of course she was. Alone in my house, she had to investigate to see if there was anything around worth stealing. From what I knew now about Sara Jackson’s character, I should never have given her the combination to my back-door lock. But at that time I was careless, trusting. A fool.

  “When I realized I’d kille
d the wrong person, I had to think it over,” Sherrie said. “The girl was going through your pathetic little jewelry box. When you think about it, you owe me some thanks. I shot a burglar in the middle of the act. If only I had known, I might have spun the story correctly at the time. I’d be wearing a medal today.”

  “You shot her.”

  “With the Lady Smith, as a matter of fact.” I remembered the revolver that was currently loaded and resting at the bottom of my shoulder bag. Sherrie was smiling, recalling that night with a chillingly inappropriate, matter-of-fact calmness. “It was an odd scene now that I recall it. I told her to leave my husband alone. I told her I had cancer. I told her she could fall in love with any man in the world and he would fall in love with her back.”

  Oh my God. What had Sara Jackson, the sometime prostitute, made of this bizarre woman begging her to leave her man alone?

  “She laughed at me, Miss Madeline Bean,” Sherrie said calmly. “The little bitch told me that it was cold old women like me who made her work easy. She said I deserved to lose my man. She showed not one single ounce of remorse, do you understand?”

  I nodded, getting the picture.

  “And to shut the smug bitch up, I told her to sit on the bed. She ignored me and turned back to the jewelry case. So I had to take my gun out and tell her again.”

  I was about to be sick.

  “And that wasn’t smart, I know,” Sherrie said, sounding almost apologetic. “Chuck would be angry. And I didn’t want him to be angry, even though he had just that very day broken my heart into a million pieces. He said he loved you. In our therapy session on Saturday afternoon. He said he needed to be honest with me.”

  My head couldn’t take in everything she said. Like this last bit. Honnett had never used the word love with me. Ever. So there I was, for months holding a grudge against this man for his betrayal. I had convinced myself that I had read him wrong, that he had never really cared about me. While for months, Honnett was painfully extricating himself from his entanglement with a sad and sick wife, telling her he loved me before he would ever say those words to me.

  “So I had to make a decision.” Sherrie picked up the story, enjoying my captive attention. “Chuck would never understand why I had gone over to your house to meet you, Madeline Bean. He’d be angry with me for going inside. I had to think very quickly, but there was no way I could get out of it. And all the time, this girl that I thought was you kept berating me. She had a filthy gutter mouth. No God in her at all. She kept swearing at me. I was holding the gun on her and she didn’t care. She kept calling me disgusting names.”

  I shook my head, unable to imagine Sara’s foolish toughness.

  “I was horrified,” Sherrie whispered, “horrified to see whom my Chuck had given his heart to. Madeline Bean was a stupid, foulmouthed whore,” Sherrie said, still in that eerie casual tone of voice like she was talking about a recipe. “And I had to shoot her to shut her up.”

  I swallowed down my sudden feeling of nausea.

  “And it gets better,” Sherrie said. “The irony. You’ll like this part. When I was leaving your house, I realized I had been observed. I almost peed in my pants when I spotted him out there in the dark. At one-thirty in the morning, when no one should have been anywhere near your house. Some nasty old man was hiding in the bushes. Probably some Peeping Tom, but that pervert picked the wrong night to peep. When I came out of the house, he ran away like a scared squirrel.”

  “Who was it?”

  “Some man who lived up on the next street. I had to track him to his house,” she said, remembering back. “I’m sure he heard the gunshots. It was dark, but he may have seen me. I couldn’t take the chance.”

  Albert Grasso must have come down to my house early Sunday A.M., perhaps looking for a way to get his briefcase papers back. And during his late-night prowling, he’d had the bad fortune to witness Sherrie’s spur-of-the-moment burst of terrorism. Grasso fled, but not before Sherrie was able to discover where to find him. She must have come after him later and killed him, just to cover her tracks.

  “You are the one to blame for all of this,” Sherrie said adamantly. “You backed me into a corner, and when you wouldn’t listen to reason, I had to kill you.”

  “Sherrie. That wasn’t me, remember? I would have listened to you. But you were talking to some twisted hooker who was in my room to steal my things. It was Sara Jackson who taunted you, not me.”

  “Shut up! That’s not what this is all about. I don’t care about myself. Not at all. I am just a vessel for justice, which is exactly as it should be. I prayed to God for years over my marriage. I asked God for babies, but He didn’t have that blessing for me. I was confused about that, I’ll admit it. I was lost for a little while. But I prayed and I found God again. God didn’t see fit to give me children, but he does have a job for me, Madeline Bean, and I’m doing it the best I know how.”

  This was not going to end well. She had a job to do. I wanted to scream.

  How had Honnett managed to put up with her for so long? Or did her mind unravel so slowly that her quirks and moods might go unrecognized as they shrank further from the bounds of sane behavior? Perhaps Sherrie had the gift of hiding her inner turmoil from her husband, her mental illness progressing to a state where she had nothing left but vengeance and fury, without Honnett seeing into the depths of her despair.

  “I know what I have to do,” she continued. “I have to leave this earth. I have taken two lives, and although they were hateful lives, I can’t stay. I know I have broken the law. So I’m not crazy. But then there’s Chuck. Do you think he could forgive me?”

  “You’re still his wife, Sherrie,” I answered carefully. “There’s always hope.”

  She shook her head sadly. “No. He’s too good. He’d have to send me away. But I had one more task to perform before I go to God. I had to look after my dear husband. I had to find the real Madeline Bean and decide if you were honorable enough for this man.”

  “But, Sherrie, Chuck and I broke it off months ago. We haven’t even kept in touch.”

  Sherrie ignored me. Her voice held utter contempt. “And I discovered your true moral character.”

  I thought about the night she was standing out on Dexter Wyatt’s deck in the moonlight, looking in. “But, Sherrie,” I said, worried. “Chuck and I were not even seeing each other then. We were over.”

  “Didn’t take you long, did it? You were already catting around with another man. No better than that insulting hooker I killed in your bed. You never loved Chuck like he deserves. And he loves you, don’t you see?”

  I stared at the barrel of the Beretta. “You’re going to kill me because I’m…” How could I say it so she’d wake up? “Because I’m not a good-enough person. Why don’t you just tell Honnett. Tell him.”

  “I noticed my favorite gun was missing the other day, and I can tell you, it worried me. It worried me greatly. Did you know that pistol had been a gift to me from Chuck on our first wedding anniversary? I love that gun.”

  Oh God.

  “And as it happens, that thirty-eight can be tied to those two shootings, can’t it? I couldn’t very well have this weapon traced to the killings. I just came here to retrieve my own property. So where is it?”

  “It’s in the trunk of my car.” I wanted to get out of this empty house. I wanted to be outdoors.

  “You’re lying.”

  Something else occurred to me. The other night I told Honnett the stalker woman drove a Honda Accord with a missing front plate. He had to have known right then it was Sherrie who had been following me. He’d gone kind of quiet and I’d put it off to his mooning over the wreck of our relationship. But no. He had more to worry him that night. He had to have noticed Sherrie’s ever-more-disturbing behavior, realized she was unstable, and then discovered she had been acting out against me, but he never mentioned a word of it to me.

  “Where’s the gun?” Sherrie shouted at me.

  “In my car. If I wa
s lying, I’d have said I don’t have your gun anymore.”

  “Well, we’ll see. Get up now, missy,” Sherrie said, gesturing with the barrel of the black 9mm semiautomatic. “Up with you. I want you to sit over on this bed here.” There was an old paint-splattered daybed over in the corner of the sunroom that the guys used as a platform to paint the high moldings.

  She was going to shoot me here in Wesley’s empty estate, just as she had shot Sara. Just the same, on the bed.

  “Stand up!” she yelled.

  There was a tap at the front door. We both heard it.

  “Don’t make a sound,” she said, walking up to me and putting the barrel of the gun up to my neck as I got to my feet.

  The tapping at the door continued. We heard a heavily accented man’s voice call, “Miss Maddie?”

  “Who is that?” Sherrie whispered in my ear. She held me by the back of my waistband, still keeping the gun on my neck.

  “I think it’s Rolando,” I answered. “He works here on the property.”

  “Miss Maddie, I need the garage opener.”

  “Rolando has the key to this house,” I lied to Sherrie. “If I don’t answer the door, he’s going to let himself in.”

  Her breathing became more rapid. “Don’t screw this up,” she said to me, holding me by the waistband of my khaki shorts and pushing toward the door. “Just tell him through the door that he should go home. No work today.”

  “He won’t believe me,” I said. “He works for—”

  Sherrie struck me on the side of my head with the gun. I almost dropped from the sudden crash of black light and pain. “Tell him to go or I’ll kill two people today.”

  “Rolando,” I said through the door.

  “Miss Maddie? I need to put some things in the garage.”

  “Not today, Rolando.”

  “¿Que?”

  “He doesn’t understand a lot of English,” I explained to Sherrie, worried she was going to shoot both of us for my freaking inability to remember one word I learned in high school Spanish.

  “Tell him to go,” she insisted.