Sweet and Deadly aka Dead Dog

by Charlaine Harris

  Why had she not heard the screams Leila said she had given?

  Because if Leila was shut in the bedroom, I wouldn’t.

  Why had she gone over to the house?

  I heard the buzzer, he was calling me. I was too late. I heard a rustle in the grass, before the buzzer went off.

  Why hadn’t she called the police?

  I thought it was a bird. I guess now it was-whoever…

  She was grateful for Randall and his mother, but she had gone where Randall could not reach her. She knew he was there, she felt his warmth and knew he was supporting her. She knew Angel was smoothing the way with cups of coffee and her mere presence, for Angel Gerrard, with her erect figure and carefully tended white hair, was a strong and influential woman and an impressive ally.

  Catherine desperately wanted to reach out to them, to talk to them, to touch Randall’s broad hand, but she could not. She looked at them from the corner of her eye. When they looked at her, she turned away: for suspicion hung around her like the heavy summer air.

  She saw it in the eyes of the police, she saw it in the way Leila’s parents carefully ignored her.

  She heard one of the deputies ask Leila if the clothing Catherine was wearing now was the same she had worn when Leila saw her kneeling by Tom’s body. She saw the deputy look at the blood dried on her knees, and at the smears on her hand.

  No one would look directly at her face.

  People might accept that she had happened to find one body, but not two, Catherine saw.

  Not that she had been first on the scene two times.

  Not that she had reported two murders. In three days.

  The bruise forming on Leila’s face, where Catherine had hit her, was examined by suspicious eyes. Leila had included the blow in her recital, and she had been quite graphic in describing how she was knocked to the wall by the force of Catherine’s open hand.

  Catherine saw very clearly that her frame was being reassessed with regard to its strength.

  In a sideways glance, Catherine saw Angel Gerrard’s back get stiffer and stiffer during Leila’s account. A gleam entered Angel’s alert brown eyes.

  “I wonder how soon you can fire that girl?” Angel said very quietly to Randall, when the room was momentarily emptied of all but the three of them.

  “I won’t wait too long,” Randall said grimly. There was a rough edge to his voice that Catherine had never heard before.

  “Of course she was in bed with the boy,” Angel said briskly. She looked at Catherine for confirmation.

  For the first time, Catherine met Angel’s eyes directly. She nodded.

  “I thought so,” Angel said. “She’s a pretty thing, but she has the brains of a gourd. I wonder that she manages to file things correctly.”

  “She doesn’t,” Randall said.

  “Catherine,” Angel said sharply.

  Catherine kept her face averted.

  “Look at me, girl,” Angel said more sharply.

  Catherine did, and felt as if she had gotten a shot of amphetamine.

  “Did you hit that girl?”

  “Yes,” Catherine replied.

  “Good. Now wipe that guilt off your face. None of us thinks you had anything to do with this.”

  Randall’s arm tightened around her shoulders, and he gave her a little shake, as if to jog her circulation back into action.

  She began to feel warm. The sluggishness of strain and fear were slowly draining away.

  Sheriff Galton came in the back door. He looked haggard, years older. He seemed so ill that Catherine was on the verge of urging him to see a doctor, when she realized how ludicrous that would sound.

  The sheriff dropped into a chair and looked at her wearily.

  “Did Tom tell you that he knew anything about Leona Gaites’s murder?”

  “You know how he was,” she answered. “He made big noises about digging into it and finding out something that you-all didn’t know. But I don’t think it came to anything?”

  “You sure? He said nothing to you about finding something?”

  “Not to me.”

  “Well,” Galton muttered, passing a huge hand over his face, “there’s that marijuana in his house. Maybe something to do with that.”

  Why didn’t I remember to take that with me? Catherine thought. Then she remembered that Tom had bought the dope from James Galton Junior. She exchanged a quick look with Randall and hunched deeper in the sofa. Angel caught the exchanged glance, and rose to go to the kitchen to replenish the coffeepot.

  “You know anything about that marijuana?” Galton asked her.

  Now she was in a corner.

  “I don’t think Tom’s death has anything to do with that,” she said.

  “Am I going to have to search your house, too?”

  “I saw it in his house when I went there Sunday,” she said. “He told me he had bought it locally. That’s all I know.”

  The sheriff might not be admitting to himself what his son was doing, but Catherine could see that he knew. When he heard the word locally, he ran his hand over his face again.

  “Where’s Tom’s car?” he asked abruptly.

  “In the shop; Don’s,” she said.

  “It would look like Tom wasn’t home,” Randall observed.

  Catherine turned and looked at him. Sheriff Galton nodded slowly.

  “Especially with the lights off, just the one light on in the living room,” Galton thought out loud. “Maybe this was just breaking and entering that turned into something else when Tom came out of the bedroom unexpectedly.”

  But his voice held no conviction.

  “I overheard that the wounds are similar to Leona’s,” Randall said expressionlessly. “Is that true?”

  “Yes,” said the sheriff. “Very similar. But then, in any homicide by beating with a blunt instrument, they would be.”

  A little idea began to trickle through Catherine’s tired mind. But when she tried to focus on the tenuous thought, it dissolved. I should have let it alone, she thought. If I had let it alone, it would have formed.

  “Drink,” said Angel firmly, putting a full cup on the coffee table in front of Catherine.

  She looked up at the older woman, amazed that Angel could be immaculate at such an hour. Then her eyes filled with tears of gratitude that Angel had come to support her. Catherine shook her head angrily. I’m getting maudlin, she thought. She bent forward to pick up her coffee and to hide her face.

  “Whoever did this would have been covered with blood,” Galton said, out of nowhere.

  He looked at Catherine. Her eyes met his over the rim of her cup.

  “I would not describe Catherine as exactly covered with blood,” Randall said with a dangerous gentleness. She felt his body tensing.

  “No,” said the sheriff quietly. “I see that.”

  “Randall, do you have the Mascalco boy’s home phone number? His parents’ number, I mean?” Angel asked in the silence that had fallen.

  “Oh. Oh God.” He thought. “Yes, it’s sure to be in the file at the office. He was living with them when he applied for the job. I’ll have to go down and get it.”

  “You can give it to me,” rumbled Galton.

  “I’ll call them,” Randall said tightly.

  “Then I don’t envy you,” said the sheriff. “I ought to do that myself.”

  “He was my employee,” Randall replied.

  “Okay, if you’re sure. Tell them to call my office. I guess there’s nothing more we can do here tonight. We’ve asked people for blocks around all the questions we can think of. No one saw a suspicious car, or any car except Leila’s. No one heard anything, saw anyone. Well, come to the station tomorrow morning and make your statement, Catherine.”

  “Oh yes, I know the routine,” she said flatly.

  Maybe by then I’ll have another dead body to report, she told herself. Gosh, maybe someone will be dead on my lawn when I go out to the car tomorrow morning. That way, I could knock off two
statements at once. People should hire me as a divining rod, to find bodies.

  She realized she had to get some grip on herself, or she wouldn’t be able to do anything the next day. Or for weeks. The black hole into which she had fallen when her parents died was waiting for her. An indescribable abyss of depression confronted her. She had only to take one more step and she would fall in.

  The fear began to grip her. But fear would hurry her toward the hole faster than anything, if she let it overwhelm her. She wanted to lean against Randall with more than her body, but she knew from her experience during the weeks after her parents’ death that this was something she had to fight through alone.

  But Randall was there. When she came through, she would have a tenuous something at the other end. She hadn’t had that before, and she had made it then. She would make it again. This time, if she won decisively, it might never happen again, she thought.

  The police were gone. Angel was gone, after telling Randall without a twitch of an eyebrow that he would be staying with Catherine that night.

  Only Randall and Catherine were left in the house, and it seemed empty with just two inhabitants, after the coming and going it had seen that evening.

  In the house out back, there was fingerprinting dust, bloodstains, and silence. The blood, Tom’s blood, would be dry now, and brown. Catherine could feel the presence of that house at her back. She wondered what she would do with it, the old house that had seen so many uses in its long life. Who would want it now?

  Randall had gone to get the Mascalcos’ telephone number after a long, quiet, tense discussion with Catherine. He had not wanted to wake the Mascalcos with the news that their son was dead. He had wanted to wait until morning. Catherine had only thought they had a right to know as soon as possible. It couldn’t be withheld from them, she had argued. They would bitterly resent being called in the morning and learning their son had been dead for twelve hours.

  Catherine had not learned of the death of her parents until she had gone back to her new apartment from her new job. She remembered the guilt she had felt at having been happily engaged in something else while their corpses were in a little funeral home in Arkansas. She remembered her anger that others had known the news, more important to her than to anyone in the world, hours before she was told.

  Randall had yielded to her argument. She could hear his voice in the kitchen now.

  But she realized, as she huddled in her corner of the couch, that she should have said nothing to Randall, nothing at all. He, not Catherine, was the one who had volunteered to break the news. She should have left it up to him, since he had taken on the sickening responsibility.

  She listened to the murmur of his voice and felt furious at her own interference. Her capacity for anger with herself was far greater than her capacity for anger with anyone else.

  When Randall returned to the den, his face was gray with strain. He removed his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. When he finally spoke, it was not about the conversation that had just taken place.

  “Catherine, take off those goddamned clothes,” he said.

  She gaped at him.

  Then she understood. She rose without a word. In the bathroom she yanked off the bloodstained jeans and jammed them into the garbage can. She looked down at herself and saw that the blood had soaked through her clothes and dried on her skin. She stepped into the shower and soaped and rinsed, then repeated, until her hands and legs were white again and chafed with scrubbing.

  Tom’s blood, down the drain. Four people, down the drain. Gone. Snuffed out like dogs hit by careless cars, because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time; because they weren’t aware of the danger until it was too late.

  Randall would hire a new reporter. He would doubtless start looking the next day.

  Jerry Selforth was prescribing antibiotics and setting broken arms, just as Dr. Linton had done for years. He had a nurse who managed his office just as well as Leona would have. And Molly Perkins held the coffees for the bridge club every bit as well as Rachel Linton had.

  Other dun-colored dogs were running through the fields, coupling with bitches to ensure more dun-colored dogs.

  That was the way life went on. The thought might even be comforting, after a few years. Many years. More years than I will live, she thought.

  She sprayed herself with perfume, thinking the smell of Tom’s death was still on her, and went out to join Randall.

  He seemed to have recovered from the worst of his conversation with the Mascalcos. But for the first time, Catherine was fully conscious that he was twelve years older than she was. He had gotten out his pipe and was puffing away, looking more than ever like a muscular, misplaced professor.

  “Can you sleep now?”

  She shook her head.

  “Neither can I. Let’s go over it, if you can stand that.”

  She waited. She owed him this, for having urged him to call the Mascalcos.

  “Leona. No-your parents. The first ones.”

  A fire ignited in her tired body. He accepted her conviction. He agreed.

  “Your mother. Your father. His nurse. A reporter who said he was going to pry into their murders. This started with your folks. Glenn or Rachel, as the primary target?”

  “I think…my father.”

  “I agree. Something he knew as a doctor.”

  “Not necessarily,” she said. “He was a friend to half the county, and he inspired confidences.”

  “Granted.” Randall knocked his pipe out in an ashtray. “Do you think Leona could have killed your parents? Could she have been a murderer? How did she feel about your father?”

  “Before she was a blackmailer and an abortionist, she was a good nurse for my father for thirty-odd years,” Catherine replied. “There was never anything between them, but I think Leona loved my father. I can see that now…Maybe I knew it all along.”

  “Do you think she could have killed him, knowing she couldn’t ever have him?”

  “I don’t think so. I think she was used to the companionship she had with him every day at the office. She would have been his nurse until he retired, and that was years away. And she lost her income when he died: Leona loved money, too. Last point, but not least, I don’t think she knew how to tamper with a car.”

  “That’s disposed of, then.” Randall had tidied that argument away. Catherine realized that in his own way he was working off the grief and horror of Tom’s death.

  “So,” he muttered, “we assume that Leona didn’t kill your parents. Do we take for granted, then, that Glenn, Rachel, and Leona were killed by the same person, for the same reason?”

  Sure, why not? Catherine thought crazily. She nodded.

  “Okay. That would point to something they all knew. Considering the six-month lapse between murders, it would seem that for six months Leona kept silent about something she knew, while the murderer paid her blackmail money. Something Leona discovered after your father was killed, maybe when she got the office wound up…Or maybe she realized the significance of an event or a conversation later. Something your father knew in his professional life; or something told to him in the office, as a friend.”

  Catherine mulled that over.

  “I didn’t express that well. Too many ‘somethings’ and ‘maybes’…But do you agree?” Randall prodded.

  Finally Catherine nodded. “Leona was always at the office when my father was there,” she said slowly. “Even when someone buzzed him late at night”-she shuddered-“he would call her to come in before he even went over there. So she would have heard everything he heard, unless the conversation took place after he sent her from the room, while he talked with a patient after an examination. He would do that so she could prepare for the next patient, or pull files on whoever was in the waiting room. And all the files were accessible to her.” Catherine stopped to think. “But with something like this, Randall, I can’t imagine…We’re presuming a critical conversation, a very personal and important co
nversation. Father would have sent Leona from the room. I know. He always knew when people were embarrassed or self-conscious about what they had, or suspected they had. His consultations with them were always private.”

  “Couldn’t she have listened at the door?”

  “It would have been hard. There were always other patients around, and the office maid, and the receptionist.”

  “Okay-difficult, but not impossible. However she did it, she found out. And Tom must have found out the same thing. You know what a gung-ho investigative reporter he thought he was. He wanted to solve this case before the police did. He told me so himself, Monday, while you were in Production.”

  Again the little thought moved at the back of Catherine’s mind, and again she tried to catch hold of it too soon. It melted away.

  “I don’t know,” she said uncertainly.

  Randall looked at her questioningly.

  “I would swear that during the past twenty-four hours he was thinking more about the breakup with his fiancée, and getting Leila to bed, than he was about Leona’s murder,” Catherine said. She gripped the embroidered pillow and added, “He was just a boy. He was younger than I am.”

  Randall touched her cheek. They sat in silence for a few minutes.

  Then he said, “Just one more thing. If Leona knew who killed your father, do you think she would have kept quiet about it?”

  “If she believed the person she was blackmailing was his murderer-she may not have known that, come to think of it-she might have figured, ‘Dead is dead. What good can this bring me?’ Even if she loved him. Or she might have thought she was getting some kind of vengeance by blackmailing the murderer.”

  Then Catherine added, “I realize now that I never knew Leona, never understood her. At all.”

  Randall stirred and looked at her. “You should be in bed,” he said. “Are you going to be able to sleep?”

  She nodded.

  “I’ll sleep in here,” he said, thumping the couch.

  “No.”

  “Catherine,” he said gently, “this isn’t the right time.”

  “I know that,” she said irritably. “But you can sleep in my bed without being overcome by passion, surely, tired as we both are? Or you can have the other bed, in my old room.”