by Devon, Gary;
“Well, anyway, that’s the way it was.” Again he looked over at her, then back at the road, swinging into a familiar curve. “But, I really don’t like all these questions. What’s past is past.” A line of sweat ran down his forehead and soaked his eyebrow. She knew she was brushing too close to a nerve.
Let the dead bury the dead, she thought. But it was no longer that simple. The dead had risen up and handed her a letter. “Darling,” she said, “if you’re too warm, why don’t you turn up the air conditioner?”
“Very funny,” he said, mocking her. He rubbed the sweat from his brow.
She waited, thinking her silence might draw a little more out of him, but he pulled into their driveway without further comment. Some inclination tugged at her to open her purse, show him Rachel’s letter and have it over with, but she had learned long ago never to ambush him; she knew how far she could push things and when to back off. He was her husband and Faith loved him; she wouldn’t risk damaging the one thing she guarded above all else—her marriage—certainly not for the sake of a letter, no matter how threatening it was. She knew she had come to the point where she had to accuse him directly or let it go, and the questions she wanted most to ask withered on her lips. She would have to think of something else. In the end, Faith changed the subject and in a more amenable voice said, “I don’t think the poor girl recognized me at all. God, it was hard. She seemed to remember you though.”
“Who knows?” he replied. Henry pressed the garage door opener. “You can’t imagine what she said to me. She said, ‘If I’d been there, they’d’ve killed me, too.’”
“Oh, I know. She’s so young.” Full of compassion, Faith put her hand lightly on Henry’s arm. “She must be frightened out of her mind; I would be. Henry, shouldn’t we try to do something more for her? What can we do? Do you think she’s going to stay here in town?”
“I have no idea.”
The Eldorado sank into the garage and he pushed the button to shut the door. They got out of the car with Faith still talking to him. “I suppose she’ll have to stay until the estate’s settled—with Mrs. Sanders. And she still has a year of school left. But won’t she need money to live on—to pay expenses? Henry, couldn’t we give her some money? Help her that way?”
“How much have we given already?”
“Thirty-five hundred, which pretty well covered the funeral, minus some incidentals.”
“Through Father Vasquez?”
“Yes, like you told me to do.”
Slater pinched the bridge of his nose, idly, then studied the floor. “If you wanted to drop a few hundred into an account for her, periodically, I’d have no objections as long as it’s kept confidential. You’ll have to check; Rachel’s account may be frozen in probate.”
“I hadn’t thought of that.”
“That’s right,” he said. “There’re a lot of things to keep in mind. Faith, if you do this, leave me out of it. I don’t want people camped on the doorstep, thinking I’m the goddamned public dole.” They were going in, now, through the door to the laundry room. “More than anything,” Slater continued, “what she’ll probably need is a summer job.”
“When she gets over this,” Faith said.
“That’s right.”
“But you can help with that, can’t you?”
“We’ll see. For you, we’ll move mountains.” As they went through the arched kitchen doorway, his arm came up around her shoulders momentarily, but when she turned to him, he let his arm drop. “What?” Faith asked.
“Nothing,” he answered, on his way to check the afternoon’s messages. “Where’s Luisa?”
His back was half-turned but Faith was sure he was smiling. “In her room, I suppose. Why?”
“Just wondering.”
Faith waited and when he didn’t go on, she asked, “Were you going to say something else?”
He shook his head and, after a moment, she went down the hall to the bedroom to change clothes. She was thinking, My God, he’s in a happy mood. And it wasn’t the damned taxes. Rachel wouldn’t write a letter like that because of some tax irregularity. Would she? No, something had happened. Something else had happened. But what the hell is it?
No cigarette had ever tasted so rich. Slater leaned against the refrigerator, smoking, leafing through the half dozen or so messages; he felt he could sleep for a month, so great was his relief. He was conscious of how totally isolated he was now, but things had always gone better when he was completely on his own. All his plans were proceeding beautifully.
None of the messages required an immediate reply. He slipped them into his jacket pocket and entered the living room. With the mounting pressure of these last few weeks, he had forgotten how much he liked this vast quiet room. Now it was too quiet: it needed music, lusty and convivial, no matter how inappropriate—but there would be plenty of time for that.
Slater ran his fingers over the old mahogany pieces, breathed in the orderly scents of furniture wax and polish, lemon and almond. Clean as a whisker, he thought. It’s over, thank God. Done. The days of numbing urgency were behind him. At the bookcase that framed the fireplace, he pushed the spine of David Copperfield. Hydraulics whirred, the shelves parted and the bar rose to his fingertips.
Whistling through his teeth, he took down two plump tumblers, filled them with ice from the ice maker and, although he would have preferred straight whiskey himself, he mixed two faultless manhattans. He could still see the strands of her tawny hair catching the sun; he remembered the black begging centers of her eyes. Slater stood there, in a moment beyond life and death, giving himself up to the all-consuming wish to be with her. It’s over, he thought, and it’s working. But he had other things to attend to now.
Taking up the two drinks, he went down the hall, mulling over what it was Faith had been trying to get at in the car—but it couldn’t be anything. Why should she doubt him? It hardly mattered any more. There were other places he wanted to be, a girl he longed to see, but he was married and he knew he had to stay married for his own reasons and ambitions. Why look for trouble where there wasn’t any? Faith was always disagreeable when he had been inattentive to her. All she required was some preventative maintenance, a little fence mending.
Going into the bedroom, he swung the door shut with his elbow. He found Faith where he knew she would be, in her dressing room, in her black slip. “This is for you,” he said, handing her one of the manhattans, “for always sticking with me.” He smiled at her.
“But that’s”—she was caught off guard—“darling, that’s what I’m here for.” Faith took the squat glass, and a fretful, knowing look came into her eyes. “Are you sure you’re all right?”
Yes, he was all right now. He belonged, at last, to a world he had created.
With his fingers, he took down the thin, black strap of her slip and kissed her bare shoulder, moving in toward the side of her throat until his cheek had tenderly lifted her hair. When he whispered against her skin, telling her what he wanted her to do, the dimness of the dressing room filled her eyes and the world seemed faraway. There was only the touch of her husband and she reached up for him.
Her body still strummed with long, deep waves—turning slow as honey. Her mouth hung open in a slack and perfect oval, drawing in the heavy summer air that surrounded their bed like a tent. Faith loved the feel of him, his weight crushed upon her. The closeness. The enduring, the abiding. Her hands were limp but she wanted to hold him and she ran her fingers over his back, feeling the hard articulation of his muscles, gently stroking the short, clipped hair at the nape of his neck. She clung to him. My darling.
Over his shoulder, Faith saw the stars off the back balcony, soft and infinite, and a moon like a tiny horn had risen. So lovely. Why did I have to get that letter? If only I hadn’t gotten that letter. Oh, if only I could give it back, unopened.
11
On Sunday morning, Burris Reeves stood leaning against his cruiser outside the Holy Redeemer Presbyterian Church,
waiting to take his son home from Sunday school. A few people that he knew greeted him and went inside to await the nine o’clock service. Lagging behind them was an elderly woman, smartly dressed, who climbed the stone steps, but halfway up, he watched her stop, slowly turn and come back down the steps toward him. “Excuse me,” she said. “You’re the chief of police, aren’t you?”
“Yes, I’m Burris Reeves,” he said.
“My name’s Marjorie Sanders,” the woman said, clearly uncomfortable in his company. She looked at the sidewalk for a moment, either with great uncertainty or as a means of collecting herself; then she raised her head. “I’d like to talk to you for a few minutes, if I could.”
Marjorie Sanders was slightly stoop-shouldered, and her face was patterned with wrinkles, but her alert brown eyes were like a doe’s, honest and skittish. “I was afraid to say anything at first, I’ll admit it,” she said, “but something has been on my mind day and night. I know this isn’t the right place to do this but—there’s something I have to speak to you about, Mr. Reeves.”
He smiled to himself. It was oddly moving all the same, this respect she attached to speaking to an officer of the law. “Mrs. Sanders, we can talk here, if you want to,” he answered. “Or you can come down to the station tomorrow.”
“No, I’d better do it now,” she said. “This is a private matter. I don’t want anyone else to hear me.” Stepping up closer to his side, her voice hardly rising above a whisper, she began. She had talked to Rachel Buchanan the night before she was murdered, and Rachel had been terribly upset. “I’ve never heard her so upset. I asked her if I could come out but she said not to.” Mrs. Sanders recalled wondering at the time if it had something to do with Sheila and she had pointedly asked Rachel if that was the case, but her friend had answered that it wasn’t.
With his head bent toward her while she spoke, the police chief nodded now and then as if to say that he knew what it was like to lose a dear friend. He noticed that a faint nervous twitch, like a tiny buried heartbeat, was emerging in the wrinkled flesh above her left eye.
“Then she said something I’ll never forget.” Mrs. Sanders leaned toward him confidentially. “Mr. Reeves, she said, ‘I’ve made a bargain with the devil!’ It was such an odd thing for her to say. What can you make of that?”
“You tell me, Mrs. Sanders,” Reeves replied. “What do you make of it?”
“Oh, but, sir, you didn’t know Rachel, did you?” she said. “She never shared personal matters. Never. I never once heard her talk, you know, the way most women talk about their ups and downs—not in forty years. That’s the thing that struck me right away. For her to say that, something awful must have been happening to her. Mr. Reeves, there was some kind of trouble going on, you could hear it in her voice.”
“Are you sure you might not’ve imagined—”
“Yes, I’m absolutely certain. I’m telling you exactly what she said.” Marjorie Sanders looked him square in the eye for the first time. “I want to help,” she announced. Reeves could see that she was beginning to choke up. “Do you think my coming forward will help at all?”
“Of course. Everything helps,” Reeves told her. “Mrs. Sanders, Rachel was your friend. Do you have any idea what this might’ve been about?”
“No. I’ve racked my brain but I don’t know.” She started to back away. “I really should go now,” she said, “if you’ll excuse me. We’re about to get started. I’m in the choir, you see.”
Reeves nodded and thanked her.
A pair of older women about her age came hurriedly across the street and she went to join them. Reeves stood looking after her. The church bells started to chime the hour and he went around the cruiser to his door, hardly conscious of the expensive cars lining the street, the sleek Alfa Romeos, the Bentleys. That’s right, Reeves thought, feeling his jaw muscles tighten. That makes sense. That’s the kind of thing I’ve been waiting for. Wasn’t it all just too damned slick, too damned pat! He watched Mrs. Sanders as she went up the stone steps. A bargain with the devil. That’s just the kind of thing.
What Marjorie Sanders had told him had its own logic; it seemed right and, to Reeves, it had the reverberation of truth. Now it’s up to me, he kept thinking. I’m going to find out who killed that Buchanan woman or know the reason why. You can damned well bank on that.
Coming out through the gold-tipped iron gates, the children swarmed over the sidewalks. “Rusty!” he called, “over here!” while the bells rang to a shuddering silence. Like a murmur through the open church windows, the choir had taken up the first stanza of “Old Rugged Cross.” Reeves tousled his son’s hair and started the cruiser. It was time to go on about his business—an inch at a time.
Behind City Hall, the parking lot was all but deserted. Seeing that Reeves’s cruiser wasn’t there, Slater drove out to the house on Klamath Drive; he caught the police chief as he was backing out of his drive. “Burris,” he said, “let’s get a cup of coffee. I need to know what you’re doing about these convicts.”
“I’m on my way out to the Buchanan house now. Why don’t you ride along?”
Rachel’s house! “You mean to the murder scene?”
“Yeah, something’s been on my mind. I’ve got to go back out there again.”
Slater was staring at the police chief as if spellbound. Come on, he thought, get a grip on yourself. “How long will you be?”
“Fifteen, twenty minutes. You can leave your car here; nobody’ll bother it.”
Slater hadn’t counted on being drawn back to the scene of the crime so soon or so directly, but now that he had confronted Reeves, he couldn’t think of a graceful way to bow out of it. Completely aware of the risk he was taking, Slater left his car parked at the curb and got into the cruiser. Once they were moving, Reeves said, “So you want to know where we are with this Buchanan thing?”
“I can’t ad lib it with the press much longer. I’ve got to give them some straight answers.”
Reeves chuckled. “Christ, Henry, if I had answers, I’d’ve called you.” He fished a toothpick from his shirt pocket and started to chew it. “All I’ve got is questions.”
Immediately, Slater was conscious of a needling uneasiness, an anxious feeling of trouble. His throat was dry. He swallowed and coughed into his fist, but he couldn’t shake the way he felt.
“You knew Rachel Buchanan fairly well, didn’t you, Henry?”
“I suppose. Probably as well as most people. Why?”
Reeves shrugged. He maneuvered the toothpick into the corner of his mouth and chewed it, the end twitching. “The picture I get of her is of a reserved woman, tight with her money, conservative, not given to sharing intimacies. Would you say that’s an accurate depiction?”
“Some people might say that,” Slater told him, feeling a trickle of sweat break under his arm. “It’s one side of the coin. On the other side, she was more generous.”
“Yeah,” Reeves said. “We’re all like that, I guess. What I meant was: I don’t see her as a gossipy woman. Do you remember her talking much about herself—you know, about her ups and downs?”
“No, not really. Rachel wasn’t like that.”
“That’s what I thought. That’s what I wanted to hear you say.”
It hummed on the air like a pronouncement of death. But I didn’t say anything. My God, it was nothing at all. So why did Slater feel as though he had just made the most irretrievable blunder?
The traffic that morning was thin and scattered and they drove through it smoothly. In short order, Reeves swung onto the on ramp and they were headed south on the interstate. “I wanted to have this thing neat,” the big policeman was saying, “with no loose ends. I wanted it bad. Maybe you think that laying this murder off on those convicts was the obvious thing to do—but, Henry, it wasn’t. It was easy.”
All the time that Reeves was talking, his hands were moving: he kept taking the toothpick out of his mouth and putting it back, he flipped on the turn signal, he adjusted t
he rearview mirror. And Slater thought, What’s the matter, Burris? Nervous about something? But he, also, cautioned himself not to read too much into it.
“It seemed right, at first,” Reeves said. “I bought it—the whole nine yards. So did you. We even got up in front of people and told them how much we believed it.”
Don’t let on, Slater thought. Say whatever he expects you to say, act the way he wants you act. Slater raised his eyes and wondered if there was any color left in his face. He said, “So what’re you telling me?”
“You’re no dummy. You know what I’m saying.”
“No, I don’t think so.”
They swooped down the Canyon Valley exit and turned left through the underpass, following the meandering country lane. We’re going too fast, Slater kept thinking—we’re getting there too fast. He could feel himself rushing headlong toward the one place he ought not go.
Reeves said, “Henry, goddamnit, it wasn’t the convicts.”
You can’t know what really happened, Burris. You can’t! You just can’t. Slater stared at him. There’s no way. “Now, wait a minute. Hold on for just one damned minute, Burris. Four days ago, you told me this thing was cut and dried.”
“Four days ago, I thought it was.”
“You’ve got to be kidding. What changed your mind?”
Reeves bit the toothpick and just looked at him.
“You’ve found something.”
Reeves returned his attention to the curving road. “Not a thing,” he said. “I don’t have a damned thing.” He was slowing down, putting on his brakes; he pulled up sideways at the end of the Buchanan driveway and cut the engine.
We’re here. God help me, we’re here.
“Then how can you say—”
“Henry, this is the slickest murder I’ve ever seen, I have to say. Before I came here, I worked homicides all up and down this coast, and I’ve never seen a slicker one. We combed this place, I mean we combed it and I swear to you, there’s not a shred of concrete evidence out here—not a single fingerprint, not a hair. I’ll take that back—we did find half a shoe print, man’s size eleven, which we made a cast of. But that’s it; that’s how slick it is.”