I won’t say the spell was restored by my little speech. In fact, we were restless at the table after that, conversation was fitful. I knew that pretty soon people would begin looking at their watches and talking about the long drive home. But we were considerate with each other. There were small displays of affection, warm smiles, plans for future reunions.
We all kept our ears half tuned to the living room; after a long silence, we heard the astonishing sound of Juliet’s laugh. I got up and peeked in, at the risk of alienating my sister, but she didn’t notice. She was looking at Mr. Oliver. He was cracking walnuts for her, and she was giggling and eating them from his hand.
I reported this in a discreet whisper to my mother, and a low murmur was passed around the table: “Juliet’s eating nuts.” It restored a little more of the spell, and by the time everyone stood up and asked for their coats, there was an easier feeling among us.
“It was a lovely, lovely meal,” said my mother.
“A wonderful dinner, Cordelia,” my father echoed.
When Juliet came up to me and apologized, I hugged her out of real affection for her poor bony self. She seemed to flinch at the contact—something hurt, the strength of either my squeeze or my affection—but she forced herself to squeeze back, and we leaned on each other in a sisterly way—I half drunk, she genuinely needing support. Then she went slowly down the path on Mr. Oliver’s arm.
The rest of us hugged, kissed, called good-bye. I would have begged them to stay, but I wanted to keep my dignity, and my edge of victory over Juliet. I’d exposed myself enough. I was half ashamed of these calculations, especially because I really would have liked for some of them to linger on, but it was late, and I don’t suppose I could have persuaded them. I went outside shivering, and saw them off in the blue December night, and when I returned to the house it still seemed, not unpleasantly, full of their complicated presences.
The next morning, I had a slight hangover and a bad case of loneliness. The Lambertis would be gone another two days. There had been snow during the night, and the house was spookily quiet under its blanket. I shoveled the paths, but when I finished that I was without duties, without occupation. It began to snow again, hard. I tried to settle down with a murder mystery—Martha had a collection of them on a bookshelf in the TV room—but I couldn’t concentrate. What I needed was a good gossip, the hashing over of yesterday’s dinner—Juliet’s behavior and my behavior—with a sympathetic soul.
Calling Nina in New York would have been perfect, but Nina was unavailable. I had had a disturbing Christmas card from her. The card itself was all in German (“Fröhliche Weihnachten”), and it was postmarked Vienna, where Nina and Archie were living. The eminent piano teacher in New York had rejected Archie as a student. “She said he’s got an immense talent,” Nina wrote, “but he’d gone too far in the wrong direction on his own and with mediocre teachers, and she didn’t have the guts to take him on.” The teacher had, however, recommended him to a conservatory in Vienna she was connected with. Nina and Archie had flown there for his audition, he’d been accepted, and they had stayed. They’d found an apartment, and Archie was working hard.
The thing that bothered me about Nina’s note, besides the fact that she was thousands of miles away, was its cheerfulness. “Vienna is all cafés and pastry shops and beautiful music,” she wrote. “Of course, I had to turn down the Voice job, after all, but I’m sure to find something here, once I learn German.”
I pictured her there, with her Brenda Starr hair pinned up, eating pastry and getting fatter, putting all her energies into wangling good breaks for Archie, Nina, whose business was words, in a place where all the words were closed to her. It would take years, I imagined, for anyone—except possibly my mother and Juliet—to become good enough at a new language to write it for a living.
There had been a time when I’d envied Nina’s single-minded passion for Archie. Now, looking at her German Christmas card, with its saccharine nativity scene and its incomprehensible greeting, I was disgusted by it.
So, Ninaless, friendless, locked in by the blizzard, bored, still unsettled by the Christmas dinner with my family, I wandered around the house. I straightened the kids’ rooms. Megan had taken with her to her grandmother’s the beautiful-princess hand puppet I gave her for Christmas, but the Cookie Monster I’d given Ian was shoved under his bed. For the first time, it saddened me that Ian disliked me so thoroughly. I wondered if he sensed I was a threat to the stability of his life—a very different kind of monster from the furry fellows on Sesame Street.
I stopped at the door of the room where Paul and Martha slept, and looked in: four-poster hung with old crocheting, twin highboys, a worn and valuable Oriental carpet. I had done this many times—just peeked. I had never crossed the threshold. The beautiful room was enemy territory, full of hidden dangers. Even to stand there and look into it was bad for my morale—it looked so completely impregnable.
That bedroom fortress was bad enough. For the sake of my peace of mind, I shouldn’t have looked through the Lambertis’ pile of Christmas cards (kept in a basket on the coffee table), wondering who Al and Nan were, and David Lawrence who wrote, “Thanx again to you both—hope I can do the same for you sometime,” and the Northrup family, and Aunt Loretta and Uncle Pete … But I did look through them, season’s greetings from the long chain of relatives and friends and clients and acquaintances coiled up on the side of Paul’s marriage—and, on the other side, me. They haunted me all day, those ghostly well-wishers, who, when they heard Paul and Martha were getting a divorce, would cry, “The Lambertis! Why, they’re such an ideal couple!”
For lunch, I polished off the plate of food Juliet had scorned the day before. I hadn’t the heart to cook. But even straight from the refrigerator, the food was delicious, and that proof of my powers cheered me up. For dinner, I planned, I would make a perfect omelette—something I’d been practicing.
I was watching an old movie on TV (The Spanish Main, with Maureen O’Hara, who reminded me of Nina) when my mother called. I expected a little gossip, a few more compliments on the previous day’s dinner, but she said, without preamble, “Cordelia, the police are on their way up to see you.”
I gripped the receiver with both hands and dropped into a chair. My knees were actually weak, and I felt, briefly, faint. The police. This was what I had been dreading all these months since I left Madox Hardware: the footsteps on the stairs, the knock at the door, the flashing of the badge, and the accusations.
“Cordelia?”
“What do they want to see me about?” I managed to ask. To me, I sounded sick and stunned, as if I’d just been punched in the stomach, but my mother didn’t seem to notice.
“It’s the murder of that Madox boy, where you used to work. Someone broke in and robbed the store last summer and shot him, and they’ve caught someone but they can’t identify him; apparently, he won’t cooperate at all. They’ve been investigating this for months, and now they’re questioning all former employees. I don’t know, it sounds vaguely incompetent to me, I should think the FBI has all kinds of methods these local police ought to know about. When Horatio was researching this sort of thing for his books it seemed to be a fairly simple matter, just identifying someone. After all, they have the man right there.”
As she talked, I began to relax. It wasn’t me they wanted. It wasn’t the trivet, or Mr. Madox’s revenge, that was leading them to my door. And yet I wondered: wasn’t it, really? What if they’d told my mother this story to spare her? What if they had a warrant with them for my arrest?
I didn’t really believe this, but it worried itself into my brain while I waited, looking out the window at the colorless view. It had stopped snowing, but the road was still unplowed and looked slippery. Would they drive all the way up here in this weather to put a few routine questions to a former employee? I tried to think. Who knew about my shoplifting, besides Mr. Madox and me? Malcolm, but he was dead. Juliet and Alan. Alan was gone, in New York with
his play, but Juliet … had Juliet talked to the police? I almost called my mother back to ask, but I saw how odd it would look and stopped myself. I could only hope Juliet, so sunk into herself, had forgotten the circumstances of my flight to her and Alan in New Haven. Mr. Madox, though—I imagined him nursing his grudge, being distracted from it by the death of his son, then returning to it, getting comfort out of it, mulling it over, and going to the phone, his knotty old hands shaking with rage as he dialed the police …
About three o’clock, a car pulled up. I had expected the flashing blue light, but there was none, and the two men who came up the path wore topcoats over suits. They could have been insurance agents, or a team of doctors making a house call. They introduced themselves as Detective Sherman and Detective Toscano. Sherman had light hair and sideburns, Toscano dark hair and a moustache. They smiled at me and called me “Miss Miller,” and said they were sorry to bother me. Keeping very calm, I asked them to sit down, and they perched side by side on the edge of the sofa, keeping their coats on. When Sherman reached into his inside pocket, I thought it was for handcuffs, but what he took out was a large photograph. He handed it to me and said, “Have you ever seen this man?”
It was Danny, of course, and as I took it and looked at it, everything became clear. Danny had robbed the store and killed Malcolm Madox. I felt sick and faint all over again; it was another punch in the stomach. Danny, I thought, you idiot, you stupid jerk.
“He’s my husband,” I said. “Danny Frontenac.”
The two looked at each other, just briefly, with flickers of surprise, and then they concentrated on me. “We’ve been holding this man up at Connecticut Valley for almost four months,” Sherman said, while Toscano took out a notebook and a Bic pen. “He’s refused to cooperate, won’t identify himself, won’t talk at all, even though it’s been explained to him over and over that it’s to his advantage to tell us who he is. And now—” He spread out his hands on his knees and sighed. “You tell us he’s your husband and his name is Danny Frontenac.”
“Would you mind spelling that last name?” Toscano asked.
I spelled it for him, and said, “He’s my estranged husband.”
Sherman sat back again and crossed his legs. He probably didn’t realize it, but he was smiling, and so was Toscano. “And when did you see him last, Miss Miller? Or should I say Mrs. Frontenec?”
“Miss Miller,” I said, and frowned, pretending to think about it. They waited patiently while I worked out my position. I saw immediately that it was dangerous. Danny had robbed the store I was fired from. If I said I had seen him back at the beginning of September—it was just before the murder, I was pretty sure, that I’d run into him at the fair—if I admitted that, it would look like collaboration. And if I lied about it and they found out—if Danny told them he’d been with me …
I felt sicker and sicker, but I had to say something. “I’m trying to recall the exact date,” I said, smiling wanly. “It was in October, year before last. What’s that? Fifteen months ago? I can’t remember what the date was.”
“The date doesn’t matter, Miss Miller,” said Sherman. Toscano wrote in his notebook, scribbling without looking. His eyes were on me. Sherman asked, “You haven’t seen him in fifteen months?”
“No. He walked out on me. Just left, without a word.” I would dazzle them with my sorrows. “I never knew why. I have no idea where he went. I have no desire to see him again.”
They asked for more details: where Danny had worked, who his parents were, how long we’d been married. I gave them the address of George and Claire in Florida and told them about Danny’s job at the shirt factory.
“Would you say your husband was …” Sherman screwed up his face as if trying to find an inoffensive word. “An unstable individual, Miss Miller?” he finished.
I remembered Danny when I saw him last, not fifteen months ago but last fall. I remembered his scraggly beard, and how he smelled, and his torn sweatshirt, and the look of a wild horse in his eyes. But I couldn’t tell them that. “Oh, no,” I said. “Until he up and left me, he was completely stable. Mr. Average.”
Toscano turned over a page, and Sherman cleared his throat and pulled at his tie. “Okay. Good. Now. About you. I should tell you that this all looks, kind of, a little funny. Okay? I mean, you used to work at this hardware store—”
“I know,” I said quickly, to get it over. “It looks like I might have put him up to it. Is that right?”
“Well—” Sherman shrugged. I looked at Toscano, and he shrugged, too.
I compressed my lips in a firm line, and shook my head. “It’s odd, I admit that. I see that it looks a little funny. But I don’t know what to say. I didn’t put him up to it. I haven’t seen him. I don’t know anything about it.” They’ll go back to Danny in the mental hospital, I thought as I said this. They’ll confront him with his name and the statement of his wife, and he’ll tell them we were together not four months ago—a day or two before the murder, in fact. “She told me all about the place,” he’ll say. “She was fired from there for shoplifting. She told me all about it.” I wondered how extensive his mental disturbance was. And how much would he hate me—for blowing his cover, for lying about our last meeting, on general principles …? Enough to say, “We planned it together, Delia and I”?
I sat looking at the detectives, shaking my head and saying, “I don’t know anything about it. I heard about Malcolm’s murder, a friend of mine saw it in the paper and told me. But I never connected it with Danny. There was no reason to.” I thought of something. “But it said brown hair in the paper. Danny has red hair—bright red hair!” I thought it would save me; they had the wrong man, there’d been a mistake.
“He seems to have dyed his hair,” Sherman said. I tried to imagine Danny pouring brown dye on his scraggly mop. And the beard? He must have shaved it off before the robbery. I would have liked to know, but of course I couldn’t ask. “Dyed it brown,” Sherman went on, looking covertly amused. “It’s grown out since he’s been—ah—confined, of course. It certainly looks to be a very brilliant red.”
“It is. I mean, it always was. I see.” I paused and tried to look sincere and perplexed, with just a hint of impatience. “Well. I wish I could be more helpful.”
Sherman scratched his head. He seemed to have an endless repertoire of nervous habits. “I’m not so sure you can’t, Miss Miller. Maybe you could tell us—ah—where you were on the day of the murder. That would be September four of last year. For our records. This is all routine.”
That’s what they always said on TV—just routine—and two days later you found yourself hiring Perry Mason for your defense. “Well, I remember that I was at work when I heard about it. A friend of mine called and told me.”
They wanted Humphrey’s name and address—Nina’s, too, but I told them she was in Vienna, and they just nodded. Setbacks were part of the routine, too.
“And the day before that? That would have been a Friday—the third of September.”
“Well, I worked. I can’t really remember. I’d have to think back.”
“You weren’t … seeing anyone? A man? Maybe you had a date that night.”
Toscano held his pencil ready, waiting to note down the name of a boyfriend, but I said, “No,” glad I could be truthful, for once. “I might have gone to the movies with Nina, or over to Humphrey’s with some of the people from the restaurant. I just don’t remember.” I was damned if I’d tell them about the fair, but I had to tell them I’d been living with Juliet, because they asked me, and that opened another door of panic: they would interview Juliet, and she’d tell them I was fired for shoplifting. “My sister is ill, though,” I said. “She’s home with my parents, undergoing treatment. You might have seen her there today?”
Sherman shook his head, and said he doubted if they’d have to bother her. “We’ll check with this Mr. Ebbets at the restaurant. We may be getting in touch with you again.” He stood up, and so did Toscano, pocketing hi
s notebook.
I saw them to the door. I had to hang on tight to the doorknob as we stood there, my knees were so weak. Would you believe we lingered there for another five minutes, talking about the weather? About Toscano’s ski trip to Vermont? About the prospect of a New Year’s Eve blizzard?
Before he left, Sherman said, “I should tell you that your husband’s lawyer may latch on to you at some point. He’ll be trying to prove insanity, of course, and he may want you as a witness.”
My knees got weaker, but I’d seen enough TV to know my rights. “I don’t have to testify, though, do I? I don’t have to tell him anything.”
“You can tell him to go away and leave you alone, if you want to, Miss Miller,” said Sherman. “And you don’t even have to put it that politely.” Toscano snickered. “He can’t force you to testify on behalf of his client.”
And can you force me? I asked silently, wondering if it was true, that old murder-mystery cliché that a wife can’t be made to testify against her husband. I didn’t want to ask, so I said nothing, and when they were gone, wishing me a happy new year, I collapsed into a heap, right there on the bare floor by the front door. I wished Paul and Martha had left Vicky with me. I would have been immeasurably comforted if I could have put my arms around her neck and hugged her tight and taken heart from her doggy love.
It was fitting, I thought, that the Lambertis should be away and the house empty. I had never felt so alone. I didn’t even long for Paul. I couldn’t confide in Paul or in anyone, so what use would any human being on earth be to me?
It wasn’t until I’d spent several hours feeling sorry for myself that I thought of Danny—Danny as a real person, that is, instead of an abstract force that could bring trouble on my head. I was eating my omelette (and it turned out, after all, pretty well) when I pictured, suddenly, the murder—the scene inside the hardware store: Malcolm confronting Danny, snarling something at him, Danny pulling the trigger (in panic? in rage?), and Malcolm crumpling to the floor. Or would there have been a struggle, a fight? Malcolm knocking the gun from Danny’s hand and pinning him down, the gun just out of reach of his scrabbling fingers, and then the sudden overturn, the gun grasped, Malcolm lunging toward Danny, and Danny shooting—Malcolm clutching his chest and staggering, and …
Chez Cordelia Page 28