“But what’s ‘in the way’? What’s this all about?”
Mrs. Murphy opened one eye and said, “Love or money.”
* * *
23
Sunday dawned frosty but clear. The day’s high might reach into the low fifties but not much more. Harry loved Sundays. She could work from sunup to sundown without interruption. Today she was planning to strip stalls, put down lime, and then cover and bank the sides with wood shavings. Physical labor limbered up her mind. Out in the stable she popped a soothing tape into the boom box and proceeded to fill up the wheelbarrow. The manure spreader was pulled up under a small earthen bank. That way Harry could roll the wheelbarrow to the top of the bank and tip the contents over into the wagon. She and her father had built the ramp in the late sixties. Harry was twelve. She worked so hard and with so much enthusiasm that as a reward her father bought her a pair of fitted chaps. The ramp had lasted these many years and so did the memory of the chaps.
Both of Harry’s parents thought that idle hands did the Devil’s work. True to her roots, Harry couldn’t sit still. She was happiest when working and found it a cure for most ills. After her divorce she couldn’t sleep much, so she would work sometimes sixteen or eighteen hours a day. The farm reflected this intensity. So did Harry. Her weight dropped to 110, too low for a woman of five foot six. Finally, Susan and Mrs. Hogendobber tricked her into going to the doctor. Hayden McIntire, forewarned, slammed shut his office door as they dragged her through it. A shot of B12 and a severe tongue-lashing convinced her that she’d better eat more. He also prescribed a mild sedative so she could sleep. She took it for a week and then threw it out. Harry hated drugs of any sort but her body accepted sleep and food again, so whatever Hayden did worked.
Each year with the repetition of the seasons, the cycle of planting, weeding, harvesting, and winter repairs, it was brought home to Harry that life was finite. Perhaps LIFE in capital letters wasn’t finite but her life was. There would be a beginning, a middle, and an end. She wasn’t quite at the middle yet, but she endured hints that she wasn’t fifteen either. Injuries took longer to heal. Actually, she enjoyed more energy than she’d had as a teenager but what had changed the most was her mind. She’d lived just long enough to be seeing events and human personality types for the second and third time. She wasn’t easily impressed or fooled. Most movies bored her to death, for that reason as well. She’d seen versions of those plots long before. They enthralled a new generation of fifteen-year-olds but there wasn’t anything for her. What enthralled Harry was a job well done, laughter with her friends, a quiet ride on one of the horses. She’d withdrawn from the social whirl after her divorce—no great loss, but she was shocked to find out how little a single woman was valued. A single man was a plus. A single woman, a liability. The married women, Susan excepted, feared you.
Although Fair lacked money he didn’t lack prestige in his field and Harry had been dragged along to banquets, boring dinners at the homes of thoroughbred breeders, and even more boring dinners at Saratoga. It was the same old parade of excellent facelifts, good bourbon, and tired stories. She was glad to be out of it. BoomBoom could have it all. BoomBoom could have Fair too. Harry didn’t know why she’d gotten so mad at Fair the other day. She didn’t love him anymore but she liked him. How could you not like a man you’ve known since you were in grade school and liked at first sight? The sheer folly of his attachment to BoomBoom irritated her though. If he found a sensible woman like Susan she’d be relieved. BoomBoom would suck up so much of his energy and money that eventually his work would suffer. He’d spent years building his practice. BoomBoom could wreck it in one circle of the seasons if he didn’t wake up.
The sweet smell of pine shavings caressed her senses. For an instant Harry picked up the wall-phone receiver. She was going to call Fair and tell him what she really thought. Then she hung it up. How could she? He wouldn’t listen. No one ever does in that situation. They wake up when they can.
She spread fresh shavings in the stalls.
Mrs. Murphy checked out the hayloft. Simon, sound asleep, never heard her tiptoe around him. He’d dragged up an old T-shirt of Harry’s and then hollowed out part of a hay bale. He was curled up in the hollow on the shirt. She then walked over to the south side of the loft. The snake was hibernating. Nothing would wake her up until spring. Overhead the owl also slept. Satisfied that everything was as it should be, Mrs. Murphy climbed back down the ladder.
“Tucker,” she called.
“What?” Tucker lounged around in the tack room.
“Want to go for a walk?”
“Where?”
“Foxden pastures off Yellow Mountain Road.”
“Why there?”
“Paddy gave me an idea the other day and this is the first time I’ve had a chance to look in the daylight.”
“Okay.” Tucker stood up, shook herself, and then trotted out into the brisk air with her companion.
Mrs. Murphy told Tucker Paddy’s idea about someone parking off Yellow Mountain Road on the old logging road and carrying the body parts to the cemetery in a plastic bag or something.
Once in the pastures Tucker put her nose down. Too much rain and too much time had elapsed. She smelled field mice, deer, fox, lots of wild turkeys, raccoons, and even the faint scent of bobcat.
While Tucker kept her nose to the ground Mrs. Murphy cast her sharp eyes around for a glint of metal, a piece of flesh, but there was nothing, nothing at all.
“Find anything?”
“No, too late.” Tucker lifted her head. “How else could the body get to the cemetery? If the murderer didn’t walk through these pastures, then he or she had to go right down Blair’s driveway in front of God and Blair, anyway. Paddy’s right. He came through here. Unless it’s Blair.”
Mrs. Murphy jerked her head around to view her friend full in the face. “You don’t think that, do you?”
“I hope not. Who knows?”
The cat fluffed out her fur and then let it settle down. She headed for home. “You know what I think?”
“No.”
“I think tomorrow at work will be impossible. Lardguts will go on and on and on about the head in the pumpkin. She got her name and her picture in the paper. God help us.” Mrs. Murphy laughed.
* * *
24
“. . . and the maggots had a field day, I can tell you that.” Pewter perched on the hood of Harry’s truck, parked behind the post office.
Mrs. Murphy, seated next to her, listened to the un-ending paean of self-praise. Tucker sat on the ground.
“I heard you ran into the squashes,” Tucker called up.
“Of course I did, nitwit. I didn’t want to injure the evidence,” Pewter bragged. “Boy, you should have heard people scream once they realized it was real. A few even puked. Now I watched everyone—everyone—from my vantage point. Mrs. Hogendobber was horrified but has a cast-iron stomach. Poor Danny, was he grossed out! Susan and Ned rushed up to him but he wanted to go to his friends instead. That age, you know. Oh, Big Marilyn, she wasn’t grossed out at all. She was outraged. I thought she’d flip her lid after the corpse in the boathouse but no, she was mad, bullshit mad, I tell you. Fitz stood there with his mouth hanging open. Little Marilyn hollered that she recognized the face, what there was of it. Harry didn’t move a muscle. Stood there like a stone taking it all in. You know how she gets when things are awful. Real quiet and still. Oh, BoomBoom dropped, tits into the sand, and Blair keeled over too. What a night. I knew something was wrong with that pumpkin. I sat next to it. It takes humans so long to see the obvious.” Pewter sighed a superior sigh.
“You were a teeny weeny bit disgusted.” Mrs. Murphy flicked her tail.
Pewter turned her head. She puffed out her chest, refusing to be baited by her dearest friend, who was also a source of torment. “Certainly not.”
A door closed in the near distance. The animals turned, observing Mrs. Hogendobber striding up the alleyway. As she drew
near the animals she opened her mouth to speak to them but closed it again. She felt vaguely foolish carrying on a conversation with animals. This didn’t prevent her from talking to herself, however. She smiled at the creatures and walked into the post office.
“Why’d Harry bring the truck?” Pewter asked.
“Wore herself out yesterday,” Tucker replied.
Mrs. Murphy licked the side of her right front paw and rubbed it over her ears. “Pewter, do you have any theories about this?”
“Yeah, we got a real nut case on the loose.”
“I don’t think so.” Mrs. Murphy washed the other paw.
“What makes you so smart?” Pewter snapped.
Mrs. Murphy let that go by. “If a human being has the time to think about a murder he can often make it look like an accident or natural death. If one of them kills in the heat of passion it’s a bullet wound or a knife wound. Right?”
“Right,” Tucker echoed, while Pewter’s eyes narrowed to slits.
“Murphy, we all know that.”
“Then we know it was a hurry-up job and it wasn’t passion. Someone in Crozet was surprised by the dead person.”
“A nasty surprise.” Tucker followed her friend’s thinking. “But who? And what could be so terrible about the victim that he should have had to die for it?”
“When we know that, we’ll know everything,” the cat said in a low voice.
* * *
25
The coroner’s conclusions, neatly typed, rested on Rick Shaw’s desk. The deceased was a white male in his early thirties. Identity remained unknown but what was known was that this fellow, who should have been in the prime of life, was suffering from malnutrition and liver damage. Larry Johnson, meticulous in the performance of his duties, added in his bold vertical handwriting that while alcohol abuse might have contributed to the liver damage, the organ could have been diseased for reasons other than alcohol abuse. Then, too, certain medications taken over many years could also have caused liver damage.
Cooper charged into the office. She tossed more paperwork onto the sheriff’s desk. “More reports from Saturday night.”
Rick grunted and shoved them aside. “You haven’t said anything about the coroner’s report.”
“Died of a blow to the head. A child can kill someone with a blow to the head if it’s done right. We’re still in the dark.”
“What about a revenge motive?”
She was tired of kicking around ideas. Dead ends frustrated her. The fax machine hummed. She walked over to it almost absentmindedly. “Boss, come over here.”
Rick joined her and watched as the pages slowly rolled out of the machine. It was Blair Bainbridge’s record.
He had been a suspect in the murder of his lover, an actress. However, he wasn’t a suspect for long. The killer, an obsessed fan, was picked up by the police and confessed. The eerie thing was that the beautiful woman’s corpse had been dismembered.
“Shit,” was Cynthia’s response.
“Let’s go,” was Rick’s.
* * *
26
Heavy work gloves protected his hands as Blair righted tombstones, replaced the sod, and rolled it flat. The trees, now barren, surrounded the little cemetery like mournful sentinels. He stopped his labors when he saw the squad car roll down the driveway. He swung open the iron gate and headed down the hill to meet them.
A cool breeze eased off Yellow Mountain. Blair asked Rick Shaw and Cynthia Cooper inside. A couple of orange crates doubled as chairs.
“You know, there are wonderful auctions this time of year,” Coop volunteered. “Check in the classifieds. I furnished my house, thanks to those auctions.”
“I’ll check it out.”
Rick noticed that Blair was growing a thin military moustache. “Another modeling job coming up?”
“How’d you guess?” Blair smiled.
Rick rubbed under his nose. “Well, I’ll get to the point. This isn’t a social call, as I’m sure you’ve surmised. Your records indicate an actress with whom you were involved was brutally murdered and dismembered. What do you have to say?”
Blair blanched. “It was horrible. I thought when the police caught the murderer I’d feel some comfort. Well, I guess I did, in that I knew he wouldn’t kill anyone else, but it didn’t fill the . . . void.”
“Is there anyone in Crozet or Charlottesville who might know of this incident?”
“Not that I know of. I mean, a few people recognized my face from magazines but no one knows me here. Guess that doesn’t look so good for me, huh?”
“Let’s just say you’re an unknown factor.” Rick shifted his weight. The orange crate wasn’t comfortable.
“I didn’t kill anybody. I think I could kill in self-defense or to protect someone I love, but other than that, I don’t think I could do it.”
“What one person defines as self-defense another might define as murder.” Cynthia watched Blair’s handsome features.
“I am willing to cooperate with you in any way. And I’ve refused to talk to the press. They’ll only muck it up.”
“Why don’t you tell me what happened in New York?” Rick’s voice was steady, unemotional.
Blair ran his hands through his hair. “You know, Sheriff, I’d like to forget that. I came here to forget that. Can you imagine what it was like to see that head pulled out of a pumpkin?”
The sheriff softened. “Not pretty for any of us.”
Blair took a deep breath. “I knew Robin Mangione from a shoot we did for Baker and Reeves, the big New York department store. I guess that was three years ago. One thing led to another and, well, we stopped dating other people and got involved. Our work schedules often took us out of town but whenever we were in New York we were together.”
“You didn’t live together?” Rick asked.
“No. It’s a little different in New York than here. In a place like this people get married. In New York, people can be as good as married and yet live in separate apartments for their entire lives. Maybe because of the millions of people, one needs a sense of privacy, of separate space, more than you do here. Anyway, living together wasn’t a goal.”
“What about her goals?” Cooper was suspicious about this living-apart stuff.
“She was more independent than I was, truthfully. Anyway, Robin inspired devotion from men. She could stop traffic. Fame, any kind of fame really, brings good and bad. The flotsam and jetsam of fame is how I think of it, and Robin was sometimes hassled by male admirers. Usually a sharp word from her, or if need be from me, took care of the problem. Except for the guy who killed her.”
“Know anything about him?” Rick asked.
“What you know, except that I watched him at the trial. He’s short, balding, one of those men you could pass on the street and never notice. He sent letters. He called. She changed her number. He’d wait for her outside the theater. I got in the habit of picking her up because he was such a nuisance. He began to threaten. We told the police. With predictable results.” Rick dropped his gaze for a moment while Blair continued: “And one day when I was out of town on a shoot he broke the locks and got into her apartment. She was alone. The rest you know.”
Indeed they did. Stanley Richards, the crazed fan, panicked after he killed Robin. Disposing of a body in New York City would try the imagination of a far more intelligent man than Stanley. So he put her in the bathtub, cut her throat and wrists and ankles, and tried to drain most of the blood out of the body. Then he dismembered her with the help of a meat cleaver. He fed pieces of the body to the disposal but it jammed up on the bone. Finally, desperate, he spent the rest of the night hauling out little bits of body and dumping her east, west, north, and south. The head he saved for the Sheep Meadow, in the middle of Central Park, where in exhaustion he put it down on the grass. A dawn jogger saw him and reported him as soon as he found a cop.
Neither Rick nor Cynthia felt the need to rehash those details.
“Don’t you
find it curious that—”
“Curious?!” Blair erupted, cutting off Rick. “It’s sick!”
“Do you have any enemies?” Cynthia inquired.
Blair lapsed into silence. “My agent, occasionally.”
“What’s his name?” Rick had a pencil and pad out.
“Her name. Gwendolyn Blackwell. She’s not my enemy but she broods if I don’t take every job that comes down the pike. That woman would work me into an early grave if I let her.”
“That’s it? No irate husbands? No jilted ladies? No jealous competitor?”
“Sheriff, modeling isn’t as glamorous as you might suppose.”
“I thought all you guys were gay,” Rick blurted out.
“Fifty-fifty, I’d say.” Blair had heard this so many times it didn’t rock his boat.
“Is there anyone you can think of—the wildest connection doesn’t matter—anyone who would know enough to duplicate what happened to Robin?”
Blair cast his deep eyes on Cynthia. It made her heart flutter. “Not one person. I really do think this is a grim coincidence.”
Rick and Cynthia left as baffled as they were when they arrived. They’d keep an eye on Blair, but then they’d keep an eye on everyone.
* * *
27
The western half of Albemarle County would soon feel the blade of the bulldozer. The great state of Virginia and its Department of Highways, a little fiefdom, decided to create a bypass through much of the best land in the county. Businesses would be obliterated, pastures uprooted, property values crunched, and dreams strangled. The western bypass, as it came to be known, had the distinction of being outmoded before it was even begun. That and the fact that it imperiled the watershed meant little to the highway department. They wanted the western bypass and they were going to have it no matter who they displaced and no matter how they scarred the environment.
Rest In Pieces Page 10