Death in Eden

by Paul Heald

  She turned her head away and tried to absorb the news. It seemed impossible that her husband would have to find another job and that they would soon be moving away from their home and friends. Her anger bubbled to the surface and she slapped the water, sending a spray into Max’s face. “Sorry! I’m just so pissed at him right now! I can’t believe he’s still out in California! How can he be so goddamn clueless?” She stared at him, a fellow member of the incomprehensible male tribe, hoping for some sort of explanation. He just shrugged his shoulders.

  “You look like you could use a drink.” He lifted himself out of the pool. “Nanci’s made a batch of killer Margaritas. You want me to get you one?”

  She gratefully accepted and made her way out of the pool while he fetched the drink. A pile of fluffy towels was stacked on a table next to some deck chairs, and she dried herself off. Wrapped in two fresh towels, she lay back in one of the recliners and sunk into the warm summer night. The Dalai Lama, she thought, could probably embrace uncertainty and find some sort of inner peace amidst the turmoil of a missing spouse and a sudden pregnancy, but she had never gotten the knack of suspending her connection to reality. It was the biggest difference between herself and Stanley. She was Type A, linear, focused, always working on a plan. He was intuitive and trusting of a future that he never quite took the time to map out. They had often teased each other about their differences, but the joke seemed a lot less amusing now.

  “Here you go,” Max handed her the Margarita and sat down next to her. “Just what the doctor ordered.”

  “Thanks.” She raised her glass to him and sipped the drink. She had always liked her husband’s good-looking department head, and the conversation ebbed and flowed pleasantly until Nanci called for him to help fix another batch of drinks. Angela declined the invitation to come inside and remained in the shadows, safe in the recliner, barely denting her drink but feeling increasingly relaxed and sated. Moments after she set her half-empty glass on the tiled deck, she slipped over the edge of consciousness and fell fast asleep to the chirping of grasshoppers and the quiet hum of the pool filtering system.

  “Wake up sleepyhead!” Angela awoke to find hands on her shoulders and Nanci’s smiling face inches away from hers. The strong smell of tequila on Nanci’s breath worked like smelling salts to rouse her. “Rise and shine!” The teetering hostess stepped back and pulled her colleague up out of the chair. Nanci was wearing a black bikini with long ties hanging down from her slim hips, and Angela wondered for the umpteenth time whether her friend’s breasts were real or not as she came to her feet and brushed against them. They were simply too full and perfect for someone with her delicate Asian frame. She could hardly blame Max for sidling up next to Nanci and putting his hand around her waist. He also seemed a little drunk.

  “You missed the whole party, darlin’! But you looked so peaceful out here that no one could bring themselves to bother you.”

  “What time is it?” Angela got up and put on her skirt. She felt her suit; it was completely dry.

  “A little after midnight,” Nanci giggled as Max’s hand slid from her waist to her hip. His pinky finger ran back and forth over the knot that was holding on her bikini bottom and finally tucked itself comfortably underneath it. “You really conked out. Do you want a ride home?”

  She thought about it for a moment. She did not feel like walking, but neither of her friends looked quite ready to drive. On the other hand, the ten blocks home were entirely residential and no one else was likely to be out. “Sure, thanks.” As Angela walked to the gate, Nanci put her arm around her and kissed her on the cheek.

  “Thank you so much for coming!”

  “All I did was have a drink and fall asleep! I didn’t even talk with the Millers.”

  “It’s okay,” the tipsy hostess explained. “My best friend in the world came to my party when she really didn’t want to and that’s awesome.” Nanci lurched against her and awesome came out a bit slurred.

  Max walked ahead and unlocked the doors of his luxury sedan with a flourish of his remote entry device. Nanci crawled in the back seat with Angela who immediately buckled herself in. Nanci ignored the seatbelts and scooted over next to her friend. She put her head on Angela’s shoulder and whispered in her ear, “Max is gonna get lucky tonight.” Angela suppressed a laugh as Max backed the car out of the driveway. Nanci lurched against her as the car went over a curb and giggled. “Very lucky!”

  “How many Margaritas did you have?” Angela whispered and then repeated the question aloud to divert the salacious direction of the conversation.

  “I don’t know,” her friend giggled some more. “Just a couple.” Nanci had always been able to cut loose at parties, and Angela envied her lack of self-consciousness. She was acting a little silly, but why shouldn’t she have a good time? Why not make the most of a handsome man and have some fun? The car traveled the distance to Angela’s house without further incident, and when they arrived, Nanci asked if she could come in and use the bathroom. “I really gotta go,” she said urgently as she skipped past Angela at the front door. Max followed them halfway to the house and Angela waved him in.

  “Would you like a drink? Glass of wine, maybe?” They wandered into the living room and she wished that Nanci had not put in her head the image of her and Max romping in bed the rest of the night.

  “Sure.” He plopped down on the sofa with a sloppy grin.

  She went to the kitchen and discovered that the wine bottle in her refrigerator was nearly empty. After a brief search for the corkscrew, she opened a new bottle and pulled out two small cans of sparkling water for herself and her tipsy girlfriend. Any more alcohol for Nanci and she wouldn’t even remember her impending night with Max.

  When she returned to the living room, she discovered Nanci curled up next to her boyfriend, kissing him passionately. He was still wearing his loose fitting bathing trunks, and she could see the results of Nanci’s ministrations push against its fabric like a tent pole. She turned around, but Nanci’s voice froze her in her tracks.

  “Don’t go!” Before she could answer, Nanci was at her side, hugging her tightly around the waist. “Don’t you want to come over and have some fun?” She moved sidled behind her friend and kissed her on the neck, “I’m pretty sure he’s got plenty for both of us.” She glanced down at the evidence bearing up her daring claim.

  For a moment Angela wavered, struggling with an imagination that served up a spicy tableau on her king size bed. A faint why not echoed in her head as Nanci’s hands unwrapped her skirt. Then, a different set of images: Stanley giving in to the same temptation, in bed with two beautiful porn stars satisfying all his fantasies. With a sudden jolt, she understood what he had been dealing with in Los Angeles.

  “No,” she said firmly. “I don’t want this.” Max gave her a sour look, as if the ménage à trois had been promised as a sure thing. “Please go.”

  Nanci stepped back as her friend’s skirt dropped to the floor, and Angela quickly gathered it up, apologizing to her guests. “I’m sorry, but you guys really need to leave.” At that moment the spell was completely broken. Max looked ridiculous instead of handsome, and Nanci looked more like a sloppy drunk than a siren. When he got up muttering a curse, she begged them one last time to go and then fled to the hallway bathroom, locked the door, and leaned against it breathing heavily. Had life gotten so settled and boring that this sad scene had constituted temptation? She was surprised at herself—not a nice surprise—and for a moment understood how Stanley might face the perils of sedateness and lack of vocation. She had to go back to California.

  She decided to stay in the bathroom until they left, so when she heard the telephone ring, she didn’t move. It rang twice and then stopped, and few moments later, she heard the front door slam. She slumped forward with her hands on the sink. After reviving herself with several handfuls of cold water, she looked up into the mirror and two things came immediately to mind: I need to book a ticket tonight and, boy, is work g
oing to be awkward.

  XXIX.

  THE GREAT DIVIDE

  As Stanley and Janet drove away from the crime scene, the professor ran his fingers absentmindedly through his hair and then shouted an expletive. He cursed and held a glistening oily hand in front of him for the rest of the drive unwilling to slime the steering wheel or his clothes. “Is there any way we could stop by my room before going back to your car? I gotta get this shit out of my hair.” He cast a quick glance in the mirror. “Jesus, I look like a pimp from Happy Days.”

  He took a shower and then drove his companion to the hotel where the interview sessions had concluded that morning. After retrieving her car, they headed to a nearby steak house for dinner.

  During the meal, he watched Janet carefully and wondered whether she was as resourceful and balanced as she seemed on the surface, a clever woman whose character had survived a punishing business, or whether she was a legitimate suspect in the murder of Jade Delilah. Her role that afternoon pointed in the first direction, but whenever he admired her poise and self-control, he reminded himself of the obsessive and out-of-control emails she had sent to Don. Regardless of whom she really was, he wanted to keep her close, where he could keep both an eye on her and exploit her skills in the hunt for more information.

  “Let’s figure out an agenda for tomorrow,” he suggested over a mammoth t-bone. “Given what we saw this afternoon, I’d like to track down Geary and see if he has any comment on the death of his main alibi.” He mashed down his baked potato with a fork and covered it with butter, salt, and pepper. “Do you know why I asked Lauren whether Mary was right or left-handed?” He mimicked the death pose of the young meth addict. “She was lying as if she had been shooting into her left arm. I’ll bet right-handed people usually inject into their left arms. If she were left-handed, like Lauren said, I’m wondering why she didn’t use the other arm.”

  “Maybe she alternated arms?”

  “Maybe,” he shrugged.

  “Or maybe someone else injected her?” She took a sip of wine. “I’ve seen it more than once, I’m sorry to say.”

  “That crossed my mind too. Given Lauren’s story about Mary’s stash of free meth from Chance Geary, you might be on to something.” He cut a thick piece of steak. It was a nice metaphor for the investigation, something juicy from which to take a satisfying bite and have a thoughtful chew.

  “I’ve got a question,” she asked as she finished her flank steak salad. “When you went into Mary’s bedroom, did you see any of the meth that she bragged to Lauren about? I mean, there weren’t too many places to hide stuff in that shithole.”

  He thought for a moment. “Uh, uh. Maybe it was under the bed?”

  “The bed was flat on the floor.”

  He nodded. “That’s a good question for McCaffrey tomorrow, whether the cops found any more drugs there.” The detective had made it clear that he wanted to see both of them bright and early to talk about the discovery of Mary Modriani. “Someone could have taken the stash, I suppose; even Lauren.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Or maybe a greedy prick like Chance Geary came back to claim it.” He wiped a drab of grease from his chin. “We’ll talk to him tomorrow and try out that Wilhoit address in Belle Meade.”

  As Stanley drove back to his hotel, he decided to call his wife. At this point, even a fight was better than no contact at all. In fact, an argument would show that she still cared. In ten years of marriage, they had never spent such a long time apart, and he found himself cataloging the things about her that he missed: her eyes, her fierce intelligence, her sense of humor, the soft cascade of her hair. He slid over into the slow lane, reached over to his cell phone and speed-dialed his home number, but there was no response. Was she screening his calls? He tried her cell phone, still no answer.

  As he drove, he turned on the radio and rolled down the window. The night air was cool and the music filled him with the sort of melancholy that’s familiar to teenagers but gets halved every year after age twenty. Old pop lyrics held deep meanings and when the Thompson Twins started belting out Hold Me Now, he fell back to the days in college when he had no clue what he wanted to do but didn’t care, back to the early days with Angela when he watched her sleeping form for hours, unable to believe she was really there next to him. Once again, he was filled with a sense of risk and uncertainty, and once again, improbably, he was not paralyzed but filled with a strange sense of anticipation and desire. His career was in tatters, his wife was unwilling to speak to him, he was cruising around the streets of Los Angeles fighting the deep thunder of rap music with eighties one-hit-wonders, yet the yearning fit him like a spandex unitard.

  When he got back to his room, he brushed his teeth and called Angela unsuccessfully again, this time from the hotel land line. Determined not to give up, he found a movie on the television and called every half hour on the theory that he would either irritate her into picking up or send a message of devotion through sheer repetition. As the movie was ending, he called home one last time and finally got a voice on the other end of the line. A man’s voice. He hung up immediately and looked at his watch. It was just after midnight in Illinois. He stared at the phone, his heart sinking. What the hell was Max Kurland doing in his house?

  * * *

  Ellen McCaffrey sat at her desk studying a fax sent by the state pathologist in Sacramento. She rubbed her neck with her left hand and contemplated transferring to a jurisdiction where she did not have to routinely pass along bad news to her ex-husband. The detective, clinging to Don Johansson’s guilt like a rabid pit bull, would not be thrilled to hear that the hair caught on Jade Delilah’s ring belonged to Janet Stephens. Stuart had bragged about sowing discord in the defense camp by revealing that the actress had sent desperate email messages to the suspect in the weeks before the murder. Her ex-husband did not seem to take very seriously the possibility that the woman might actually be involved. He would have to rethink his position once he read the report. And one thing was certain: he did not like rethinking his positions.

  His mood would only get crankier when he read the preliminary report on the death of Mary Modriani. The initial toxicology screen from the hospital showed a shocking level of methamphetamine in the system of the painfully slim young girl. Her blood also contained high levels of a depressant found most commonly in over-the-counter sleeping pills. Most meth deaths were not true overdoses, but were caused by the victim’s anaphylactic reaction to the toxic mix of impurities found in a drug usually cooked up by amateurs in make-shift labs. Other deaths involved human bodies worn to a complete and fatal exhaustion by long-term abuse. Mary’s case fit neither scenario. She had injected a lethal dose containing five times as much crystal meth as she had probably wanted, unless she had planned to commit suicide.

  This was curious. Mary’s right arm bore the track marks of an experienced user, someone unlikely to make an error of that magnitude. Her suspicions deepened when she looked at the picture taken at the scene. The body had been sprawled out on the bed on her left side, her spike and spoon lying on the floor underneath her limp left hand. Yet, the vast majority of injection scars were on her right arm. Probably a strong lefthander, Mary had almost never used her right hand to give herself a fix in her left arm. After years of dealing with heroin overdoses, she knew what this meant: someone else had wielded the syringe. Addicts often became ambidextrous over time, but they still preferred to use their dominant hands. Therefore, when their friends injected for them, it was inevitably in the lesser-used veins of the dominate arm. Had someone else given her the fatal dose? Had she crashed from days of speeding with the help of some sleeping pills and then been shown the way to her maker by a third party?

  Ellen did not have to determine responsibility for the death, just its proximate cause. Legal questions, thank god, were for coroners and juries. Unfortunately, the job of conveying her findings and suspicions to her ex-husband fell on her shoulders alone. Before she picked up the phone, she forced herse
lf to remember some of the good times they had spent together during twenty-five years of marriage. She would not let his present bitterness mar the memory of the years when she had felt her prettiest and most alive. She fed the papers into the fax machine with a sigh and then dialed his number to give him the news.

  * * *

  Janet and Stanley had been summoned to McCaffrey’s office to discuss the death of Mary Modriani. So far, their meetings with him had been in random interrogation rooms or public spaces. The actress had little interest in seeing the detective’s inner sanctum. She stood in the hallway outside of his office waiting for her partner to arrive for the morning meeting, not at all tempted to knock on the door and begin her day with a private interview. The detective reminded her of her elementary school principal, a hawk-faced sadist who would call her into the office and silently stare at her until she confessed to drawing boobs on little Mary’s t-shirt or playing doctor with Jimmy in the shrubs. Stanley’s presence next to her would deflect the homicide cop’s soul-searching gaze. Unfortunately, when she saw her partner walking down the hall, he looked in no shape to defend anyone. Hair uncombed, shirt wrinkled and only half tucked in, eyes bloodshot, he shuffled down the hall like a homeless bum.

  “What happened to you?” She walked over and pushed the tail end of his shirt down the back of his pants. “You look like you’ve been on a bender.”

  “Just a little insomnia,” he mumbled. “That’s all.”

  “Well, be on your toes. McCaffrey was pretty pissy yesterday.”

  “I’ll be okay.” He pushed past her and pounded on the detective’s door.

  A snarl bade them enter, and she followed him into the brightly lit room. McCaffrey’s work space was a jumble of battered filing cabinets and cardboard boxes covered with stacks of paper, some of them yellow and crumbling. The man himself sat behind a chipped, wooden desk eating a Danish and sipping muddy-looking coffee. “Sit down.” He motioned to a pair of chairs separated by a tower of files that until recently had probably perched upon them. “Why don’t you two tell me what you saw yesterday?”