Then we got a break. A witness came forward, said she’d seen the three of them together: the wives. Lindsay Middleton, a waitress and prelaw student at the University of North Carolina, had served them a late lunch at a restaurant on Franklin Street four months before the murder. She said she’d remembered Diana Lane as soon as she saw her picture on the news but didn’t think much of it until she happened upon photos of Julie Lane and Roberta Miles much later. It isn’t unusual for folks to come forward with so-called important information during a murder investigation, maybe they feel it’s their civic duty or maybe they’re just looking for their fifteen minutes of fame, but this witness appeared reliable. And here’s the kicker: The reservation was made under Julie Lane’s name.
Beautiful, lucky, sorry, gun, motive, liar, dumb ass, wives.
Our Sunday-morning drive to Research Triangle Park, named for the three cities that anchor it (Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill), took less than three hours. Like the weather that day, downtown Raleigh had the cold, gray look associated with most capital cities. Julie Lane lived with her twin boys in a WPA industrial brick building in one of those swanky revitalized neighborhoods on the city’s edges where units probably sold for more than a million dollars before the market crashed. We stood outside the security door and waited for an exiting tenant to provide us access.
A dog barked when we knocked on her door.
“Quiet, Frank,” a woman’s voice said. Light footsteps. A shadow across the peephole.
We flashed our badges. “Police, ma’am,” Mack said.
The turn of the deadbolt.
“Julie Lane?” I asked. “I’m Detective Kennedy and this is Detective Jones, whom I believe you’ve already met. We’d like to ask you a few questions about your husband’s murder.”
The second Mrs. Lane was both surprised and irritated to see us. I’d encountered similar welcoming expressions from Diana Lane. She didn’t appear to recognize Mack, which wouldn’t be too surprising if she had in fact been distraught that first time they met. From a distance, one might mistake the second Mrs. Lane for the first and vice versa. There was the hair and they were both tall and slim, yet while attractive, the second Mrs. Lane was neither sultry nor damaged. This was a woman in total control of herself and her surroundings.
She invited us inside. “Place, Frank,” she said to a golden retriever. He hobbled over to a dog bed in the living room. From his labored walk, white-haired face, and brittle frame, I could tell he wasn’t long for this world. Poor guy.
Julie Lane didn’t offer us so much as a glass of water or a seat. Obviously she wasn’t from the South. I was struck by the way she moved inside her clothing. Woman and garments shared an ease characteristic of someone who is completely comfortable with her body. An athlete? She wore strappy high-heeled black sandals that exposed delicate feet and carefully painted red toenails. I guessed she wasn’t planning to head outdoors anytime soon. The white turtleneck sweater she sported was neither too tight nor too loose. It casually accented the mounds of her breasts—a little too small for my taste but nonetheless worth notice. Her gray slacks hugged the curve of her ass so perfectly they appeared to have been cut from its mold. It hadn’t dawned on me that Oliver Lane was an ass man. The condo itself was small but open, and tastefully decorated—chic brown leather sofa, chrome-and-glass coffee and end tables, wood floors, bearskin rug, large modern paintings. A fire burned in the gas fireplace. Frank, and a kitschy grouping of Barbie dolls that took up one entire shelf of the bookcase surrounding the fireplace, appeared to be the only blemishes in the otherwise stark, orderly environment.
“What can I do for you, detectives?” she asked.
As Mack and I had agreed, he spoke up first. “We just have a few questions, ma’am.”
“Missus,” she said with a bite.
“Sorry, ma’am, uh, I mean Mrs. Lane,” Mack said. He reached into his coat pocket, pulled out his notebook and a folded-up computer printout of the Chapel Hill restaurant’s reservation list from the day in question. He took his time unfolding it and handed it to her.
“What’s this?” she asked.
“Do you recall being at this restaurant—let me see, here it is—do you recall being at 411 West Franklin?” Mack asked.
“No,” she said.
He pointed about halfway down the sheet. “That sure looks like your name to me.”
She squinted. “So?”
Mack didn’t respond right away. My signal to chime in with a relevant comment about the surroundings I’d been diligently checking out.
“Are these your boys, ma’am?” I pointed to the console table behind the sofa.
“Boys?” Cool, poised, indifferent.
“The picture,” I said. “Are these your sons? They look like twins. How old are they?”
Did she soften?
“Three and a half.”
I scanned the room as if looking for them. It was hard to imagine two young boys romping around in the sterile environment.
“They’re at play group with their nanny, Detective.” Said with more than a modicum of disdain.
“Handsome little guys,” I said. “They look like their father, don’t they?”
She glared.
“Nice family photo of the four of you,” I continued. “Though I didn’t recognize you at first. You used to be a brunette?” The photo was a larger version of one Julie Lane had given the Raleigh PD when she reported her husband missing, one of the same ones I’d shown Diana Lane when I broke the news of her husband’s other wife.
“I felt like a change,” she said.
“Where was it taken?”
“Saint Gabriel’s,” she said.
“Were you and your husband churchgoers?”
“I’m not sure what business that is of yours,” she said.
“Everything’s our business during a murder investigation, ma’am,” Mack said.
“Well, if you must know, I’m agnostic and so was Oliver. His firm made a substantial donation to the church that year; one of the partners is a member. The photo was part of the package.”
Mack flipped a page in his notebook and wrote something down; Mrs. Lane’s eyes drifted in his direction.
“Funny that you don’t recall being at the restaurant that day,” I said. “The waitress remembers you very clearly. Said she overheard the three of you talking about some woman in Boone who poisoned her husband. Thought it was an odd conversation.”
“Three?” An ever so slight falter in her voice.
“Yes,” Mack said. “She said you were there with Diana Lane and Roberta Miles.”
“She, who?”
“Your waitress that day,” Mack said. “I checked out that murder in Boone. Seems an eighty-three-year-old man named Ira Schwartz thought to have had a heart attack actually died from poison administered by his wife, Irma Schwartz. Under the circumstances, quite the interesting conversation the three of you were having, don’t you think?”
“The waitress is obviously mistaken,” Julie Lane said.
“The—waitress—is—obviously—mistaken,” Mack said as he wrote in his notebook. “So you know who Diana Lane and Roberta Miles are?” Mack asked.
“Of course I know who they are,” she said. “The police—you—informed me about them.”
“Well?” Mack asked.
“Well what, Detective?”
“Were you at the restaurant that day?”
“It’s possible,” she said. “I frequent that restaurant. I’m an architect. My firm has several clients in Chapel Hill. I’m sure if I was there—I’m not egotistic enough to believe I am the one and only Julie Lane who has eaten at 411 West Franklin—and if I was dining with two other women, they must have been clients. And we certainly weren’t talking about some woman who killed her husband with arsenic.”
Mack made a show of checking his notes. “What makes you think it was arsenic, ma’am?”
“I … I must have read it in the paper,” she said.
“I’m afraid that’s not good enough,” I said.
Julie Lane’s eyes shot in my direction. “What’s not good enough?”
“We have an eyewitness that puts you and your husband’s other two wives together before he was murdered. That would seem to indicate that you knew one another, and if you knew one another, then why didn’t any of you say so earlier?”
“I said that the women I was with must have been clients.”
“So you do recall being there,” Mack said.
“That’s not what I said.”
“You don’t happen to remember their names, do you?” I asked.
“Whose names?” The telltale stall.
“Your clients, ma’am.”
“It was months ago.”
“Surely a professional such as yourself keeps an appointment calendar,” Mack said.
Long, introspective pause.
“Well, you’re right. Normally I do, but my computer crashed a few weeks after Oliver died and I lost all my files.”
“Convenient,” Mack said.
I was tempted to laugh at Julie Lane’s expression. She looked like an angry cartoon character. I could almost see smoke coming out of her nose and ears.
“Well, Detective,” she said. “If you doubt me, then why don’t you check into it? I took my laptop to the Apple store at Crabtree Valley Mall when it happened—I’m sure their records will corroborate my story.” She cocked her head, smiled. “They downloaded what files they could, but weren’t able to save my calendar.”
“Shame, ma’am,” I said.
“We’ll check into it.” Mack paused, looked out the window. “We should be going. Looking a little ominous out there.”
“By the way,” I said as we were leaving, “you ever shot a gun, Mrs. Lane?”
“What?” There was no mistaking her surprise.
“A gun,” I repeated. “Have you ever held one in your hand and pulled the trigger?”
“No, Detective. Can’t say that I have.” The response was smug.
“We’ll be in touch.” I closed the door behind me.
On our way back to the car, Mack asked me what I thought.
“She isn’t as good of a liar as she thinks she is,” I said.
“Interesting that she knew about the poison being arsenic,” Mack said. “Where were you going with that gun question?”
“There was a picture on the bookshelf by those Barbie dolls of a younger her and an older man in hunting clothes. Guy was holding a rifle. I’d say her father.”
“Barbie dolls?” Mack said.
“You didn’t see them? There had to be a dozen or more, every one of them propped on a little wire stand. Pretty weird if you ask me.”
“I’ll say.”
“Hey, check into shooting ranges, will you?” I asked. “See if she frequents any. And while you’re at it, find out more about her childhood, especially anything that proves she knows how to handle a gun. There’s just something about that woman I don’t like. There wasn’t one bit of love in her voice when she talked to her dog.”
“Kind of hard to tell from one meeting.” Mack rooted for his seat belt. “About her relationship with the dog, I mean. Maybe she’s just a clean freak. Pretty snazzy place she lives in. What do you think, a million? Million five? And did you get a load of the furnishings? Wife and I looked at that very leather sofa at Restoration Hardware over in Norfolk. More than six grand. And the artwork? Do you think that was an actual Julian Schnabel?”
“I didn’t know you followed the art world,” I said.
Mack started the car and shot me one of his shit-eating grins. “I don’t have any idea who Julian Schnabel is. Just read the name on that painting with the broken plates all over it. Figured something that weird had to be done by a famous artist. Why else would anyone buy it?”
“Made a name for himself in the seventies,” I said. “These days his paintings can sell for a hundred grand or more.”
“Fuck, a hundred grand for a bunch of ceramic shards and paint? You’ve got to be kidding. Maybe I need to rethink Evan’s career choice.”
“Oh, I don’t know. NFL quarterbacks don’t do so bad.”
“It’s a damn shame that restaurant didn’t have a surveillance camera. Think we have enough to bring them in?”
“One eyewitness? No. We’ve got to find some physical evidence, something that puts the second Mrs. Lane or Ms. Miles inside the beach house. By the way, did you find out anything more about Oliver Lane’s financial situation?”
“Just like we thought, guy’s a ghost. No bank accounts. No paper trail of any sort.”
“It just doesn’t add up,” I said. “That guy has shady written all over him. I’m betting he had a separate bank account or stash of money somewhere. They didn’t happen to find an extra key to, say, a safe-deposit box, when they were searching his homes and offices, did they? Or bank statements for a secret account.”
“No, and they did a pretty thorough job.”
“Did you search his car?”
“We checked it out at the beach house that day, but we didn’t tear it apart or anything. There was nothing on his computers either.”
I tried to settle in for our ride back to the island, but I was too agitated to relax. I kept trying to find a new word for my banner, something that summed up our visit to Raleigh, that indicated we’d made progress in the case, or that at least pointed in Julie Lane’s direction, but the truth was, having a penchant for cleanliness, clean design, fine art, and Barbie dolls, and a generally uptight and bitchy attitude, didn’t make her a killer.
Picasso
I think it was a Monday in December. Monday because that was Mama’s Junior League volunteer day, and December because I remember it was long enough after the Thanksgiving break for Ryan Anderson to have stayed home sick for a few days, actually sick, not play sick like me. And just like when Mr. Dork was out of the room or we had a substitute teacher, the kids had taken advantage of Ryan’s absence to spew all their pent-up insults at me. “Your mother is a murderer” was one of their favorites, along with “murderer’s kid” and “your mom’s going to jail,” all very original and therefore not too scary or anything, but I was still pretty upset about Daddy dying, and murder or not, I was more emotional than usual and therefore at risk for victim behavior, which the Taking Charge of Your Life book says is about as damaging to self-actualization and the development of personal power as one drop of alcohol is to an alcoholic, so I’d decided that staying home for a while, at least until Ryan returned to school, was the smartest course of action. I resorted to my usual trick. I covered my face with a really hot rag for several minutes, immediately thereafter made a point of finding Mama and telling her I didn’t feel well, and when she felt my forehead, she got all concerned and said, “You’re burning up Picasso,” to which I responded with the most sickly and pitiful “My belly hurts” possible, and she went off to look for the thermometer, which was safely hidden under my pillow, and finally after not finding it, she pronounced me too sick for school and told me she’d check in with me throughout the day. Somewhere during the whole Daddy dying mess, Mama had completely forgotten her worry over me staying home alone.
I would’ve played sick that day regardless, but the fact that Mama had Junior League was a bonus. That way I didn’t have to act pitiful all day long. I could watch TV and chow down on Cheetos and Coke, read my dictionaries, build on my word journal, or just stare out the window and manifest snow (we hardly ever get snow in North Carolina). The possibilities were endless.
About ten minutes into my channel surfing, I thought I saw Detective Kennedy’s car drive by. But since he didn’t drive into our driveway, I figured it was just somebody with a similar car. After a while, I saw Detective Kennedy knock on Mrs. Jesswein’s door, which she opened, and then he went inside. He came back out. Then he walked on over and knocked on Mr. Buttons’s door, and then Mr. Purdy’s door, and then the door of that new couple that had just moved
into the house right across from the Presbyterian Church where Mrs. Cutshaw, bless her soul, used to live. The Price Is Right came on sometime during all this, but I turned it off; I hate that show. I mean who can guess all those prices right, what with the economy fluctuating so often, and, seriously, how could every store in their viewing area sell stuff for the exact same price, so for those reasons, and because I’ve personally checked them out, I know for a fact that some of those “right” prices are just plain wrong. One time I even wrote to the show at their recommended address and told them they’d quoted incorrect prices for certain products, which of course I detailed, but they didn’t respond, which is no big surprise I guess. Nobody likes to be wrong.
Since I hadn’t seen Detective Kennedy for a while, I figured he’d left, so I decided to do some random-closing-my-eyes-and-pointing-my-finger-at-any-old-page word searches.
The first word I zeroed in on was hypogynous (having floral parts, such as sepals, petals, and stamens, borne on the receptacle beneath the ovary). After I’d slowly printed it and its definition out in my word journal, I tried using it a few times in sentences, which turned out to be a great success, so I decided I especially liked that word because I could use it in everyday speech.
The next word my finger landed on was mojo (a magic charm or spell, sometimes an amulet worn on a necklace or kept in a small flannel bag by adherents of hoodoo or magic). I remember thinking that was one of the coolest words ever and I was definitely getting myself one of those amulets since even better than being able to say the word, I could wear the amulet every single day. As far as I knew there wasn’t any dress code about necklaces at my school, and if by chance there was some small print somewhere disallowing mojo amulets, I could just button up my shirt all the way to hide it, and, this is the best part, then I could cast unlimited spells on the All That Girls.
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