by John Case
‘I’m here because we have something in common,’ Lassiter began.
She raised an eyebrow.
Despite the cool response, he hurtled on, talking about how his sister and nephew had died in a manner remarkably similar to her sister and nephew. Roy occasionally spoke up while Lassiter went through the entire story – from the day he’d heard about Kathy’s death to that very morning. When he was done, the room pulsed with silence. And then she said, ‘I’m still not sure why you’re here, Mr. Lassiter.’
Roy Dunwold’s jaw dropped, and Lassiter glanced at him. He leaned closer to her. ‘I just thought . . . possibly,’ he began, ‘I mean if there’s anything in what I’ve told you that –’ He hesitated. ‘– that reminds you of something about your sister or nephew . . .’
‘My sister and her son were murdered in their sleep by a lunatic. He could have been your lunatic, I suppose, but what difference would that make?’
Lassiter stared. He didn’t know what to say. ‘You . . . you don’t want whoever did it found and punished?’
She blew out a plume of smoke, and shrugged. ‘He has to live with it,’ she said acidly. ‘Like O.J.’ She stood up. ‘I’m a Buddhist and I believe all this sort of thing works itself out in time. My sister and I – we weren’t close, as I’m sure someone will take pains to tell you. If I hadn’t been away in the Bahamas, I’m sure I would have been a suspect.’
‘Not likely,’ Roy interjected. ‘But, there was something about an inheritance.’
She glared at him. ‘I hardly need the money. I suppose I’ll put it in a trust and establish a literary prize in Matilda’s name. Now if you don’t mind’ – she glanced at her watch – ‘I have an appointment.’
But Lassiter was determined to get everything there was to get from Honor Henderson – if only so he didn’t need to see her again.
‘Why would you have been a suspect?’
‘My sister betrayed me. We lived here in perfect harmony for years. I painted, she wrote. We were quite happy – until she had this absurd idea to have a child.’
‘You disapproved.’
‘Of course I disapproved, and in the end I had to ask Matilda to find her own place. And a good thing! After he was born – Martin, the little boy – Tillie just gushed over him. All she talked about was nappies and nipple soreness and toys and making your own baby food. It was impossible to have an intelligent conversation with her.’ She stopped suddenly and flushed. ‘It’s over. I’ve done my grieving and I encourage you to do the same, Mr. Lassiter. Now if you don’t mind . . .’ She began to shoo them toward the door.
On their way out, Lassiter stopped and turned. ‘Do you know which fertility clinic she went to?’
A big sigh. ‘Oh Christ, I don’t remember. This was quite a quest, mind you. She went to the States; she went to Dubai, if you can believe it. She went to half a dozen of those places. She was always babbling about mucus thickness and ovulation cycles.’ Her face wrinkled up in distaste. ‘She was continually taking the temperature in her vagina – and then reporting it.’
‘Did she go to Italy?’ Lassiter asked. ‘Because the man who killed my sister was from Italy.’ He was standing in the doorway.
‘I don’t know. We weren’t getting along. Now, please. I have an appointment.’
The door slammed shut.
‘Right bitch, that one,’ Roy said. ‘She probably did kill them.’
Matilda Henderson’s best friend, Kara Baker, lived on the other side of the Thames, in South London. Roy bludgeoned his way through the heavy downtown traffic with the liberal use of his horn, and finally they were driving across Hammersmith Bridge. Roy’s car phone rang just as they got to the other side. He cursed it – ‘Bloody nag is what it is.’ Then he picked it up, listened for a while, and in a resigned voice said: ‘Oh, bugger all. All right then, call me there in an hour.’
One of Roy’s employees, hard on a case in Leeds, had run into a problem with the local police. He’d have to drop Lassiter off.
Barnes was a villagelike enclave complete with duck pond and cricket pitch. Kara Baker’s place was a substantial brick house with old boxwood hedges running the length of the boundaries and a pair of small stone lions – with red velvet ribbons tied around their necks – doing sentry duty on the stone pillars that flanked the walk.
The woman who answered the door couldn’t have been less like Honor Henderson – nor could her house have been more different from the achromatic flat in Chelsea. Kara Baker was somewhere in her late thirties and deeply, elementally beautiful, with a tousled mane of curly red hair, bright blue eyes, and a body so curvaceous that a teenaged boy might have drawn it.
Her house was exuberantly and eclectically furnished, antique furniture effortlessly sharing the space with more modern pieces. Old Oriental rugs on the polished floors; art everywhere and of every era. Ropes of greenery – losing their needles – were draped over the mantel, spiraled up the columns in the living room, twisted around the banisters of the double staircases.
It was fairly messy, papers and magazines, books and cups and plates, hats and gloves, scattered around. A red hot water bottle reclined in an easy chair, a bag of potato chips rested on the piano stool.
She apologized for the mess, stopping to kick off her heels, and padded ahead of him in stockinged feet toward the kitchen. ‘Cup of coffee?’
Lassiter followed her into the kitchen, a huge old room with a row of French doors along one wall. He sat at an old farm table while she made coffee.
‘You’ve been to see Honor, then?’ Kara Baker said.
‘She wasn’t helpful.’
‘Poor Honny,’ she said with a sigh. ‘She acts so hardhearted, but actually she’s quite paralyzed with grief. I’m rather worried about her.’
Lassiter hesitated. ‘Could have fooled me.’
‘Oh I know; she can be such a beast. But take it from me, Tils – Matilda – was the only person in the world she cared about. And Martin.’
He tilted his head, as if he hadn’t heard her right. ‘That’s not what she told me.’
A timer went off. Kara was making coffee in a French press and she pushed down on the plunger, gradually and expertly. ‘Nonsense,’ she said, rummaging around for some cups. ‘That’s what I mean about being worried about her. You saw her place, you saw how controlled she is, how compulsive. Wait – I’ll show you a drawing of hers.’ She set the coffee tray on the table – two chipped mugs, an alabaster sugar bowl, and a carton of cream. Kara went to the far wall and returned with a large framed pen-and-ink sketch of Piccadilly Circus. She propped it on a chair and they both looked at it.
‘You see,’ she said. ‘Just about the most tight-assed drawing you’ll ever behold.’ She flung her hands out toward it. ‘This – this is what Honny is like.’
It was a wonderful big drawing, its composition brilliant, its painterly line engaging, its angled, aerial perspective intriguing. But it was so meticulous and detailed that it reminded Lassiter of the sort of thing that Third World children went blind completing.
‘I see what you mean.’
Kara stirred her coffee with her finger and then sucked it. ‘Honor – she’s in what the shrinks call ‘denial’ – only this time she’s not denying the murders happened, or that Tils and Martin are dead – she’s denying she gives a fig. She doesn’t care and therefore the fact that they’re dead doesn’t matter.’ She took a sip of coffee and moaned with pleasure.
The coffee was very, very good, and Kara Baker was very appealing. Lassiter felt oddly immune to that appeal – and it bothered him because this was a woman he would ordinarily desire. As it was, his attraction to her was almost intellectual – not physical. He found that disturbing.
‘Ummmmmm,’ she said, holding her coffee mug with both hands. She looked up at him and raised her eyebrows, clearly waiting for him to speak.
‘Honor said she kicked Matilda out – because of the child,’ Lassiter said. ‘She said they’d been estranged ev
er since her sister got pregnant.’
‘Twad-dle,’ Kara said. ‘Honor was thrilled at the thought of a baby. She did hours and hours of research on the latest techniques, the success rates of various clinics, grilled half the O.B./Gyns on Harley Street to ask advice. She ran interference for Tils, made all the setting-up calls, monitored her fertility drugs, her diet. All that stuff.’
He shook his head. ‘This doesn’t sound like the woman I saw.’
‘Look – you needn’t take my word for it – you can check.’ She leaned toward him. ‘Tils had it in her will that Honor was to be Martin’s guardian if anything happened to her. As for moving out – that was Tilsie’s idea. She couldn’t imagine Honor being able to work with a baby ’round the place. But they were looking for a country place to share, for the weekends. And then –’
Abruptly, she broke off, and her eyes filled up with tears. She snuffled and rubbed at her eyes. ‘I’m sorry. I still do miss Tils so much. We were friends forever, from babyhood – and we’d planned to be old ladies together as well. You know, wear outrageous hats and swan around Provence or Tuscany or –’
But then she began to lose control, and really weep. She put her hand over her face, stood up and hurried from the room – ‘Excuse me. Sorry. I’ll be back.’
Left in the kitchen, Lassiter thought about the interview with Kara Baker. They were stuck talking about the relationship between the Henderson sisters. He had to bring the discussion around to what he wanted to ask. Why she thought anybody would murder her friend. Suspects, gossip. Tell her his own story – about Kathy and Brandon. See if she noted any similarities.
He cleared away the coffee cups, rinsed them and set them in the drainer. He went toward the refrigerator, to put the carton of cream away.
The refrigerator was enormous – especially for England, where small appliances were the norm. Its surface was entirely covered – two or three levels deep, with papers. It was a virtual museum – of sketches, snapshots, invitations, newspaper clips, recipes, postcards, aging and curled Post-it notes, scraps with telephone numbers but no names, traffic tickets, a child’s painting.
The door stuck when he pulled on it, and somehow he knocked against a magnet and a clump of papers fell to the floor. He picked them up and began trying to get them to stick on the refrigerator door – anywhere – when he saw the postcard.
He stared at it, rooted to the floor. He’d received the same postcard from Kathy years before. It was a photo within a photo: the background was of an Italian hill-town, seen from a distance, its jumble of buildings perched on a rocky mount, surrounded by a medieval wall. The photo within the photo was a monocular blowup, depicting the pretty little hotel that had commissioned the card. ‘Pensione Aquila,’ it read.
He still recalled the back of the postcard that he’d received, and his mixed feelings at reading it. Not reading, but looking, because it was a sketch, one of Kathy’s stupid puns. A series of four panels showing a plain door, and a hand knocking on it. From left to right the knocking hand was in a different position. In the first panel the fist rapped at the bottom of the door. In the middle panels, it ascended. In the right panel the fist rapped the top of the door. He got it, all right: Knocked up. Kathy had signed with the old sideways A of the Alliance.
Before the trip to Italy, he’d wanted Kathy to give it up. The baby chase. By then, she’d spent almost sixty thousand dollars and three years pursuing motherhood. It was wearing her out, both physically and emotionally. She seemed increasingly fragile. The thought of her going to some obscure clinic outside the country had worried him – although he’d checked up on the place and found it had an excellent reputation.
After he’d gotten the postcard, he worried that Kathy’s happiness would end with yet another disappointment. This had happened once before, when her first pregnancy – implanted at a clinic in North Carolina – ended in a miscarriage. Kathy was devastated, almost inconsolable. He hadn’t wanted that to happen again.
When Kara Baker came back through the kitchen, he was reading the back of the postcard from her refrigerator:
Dear K –
Beautiful here and so peaceful. Fields and fields of sunflowers, heavy heads droopy. Keep your fingers crossed.
Love – Tils
‘Ah –’ Kara Baker started, and then closed her mouth in an odd expression, as if she couldn’t believe his bad manners. Her mouth smiled thinly but her eyes were cold. ‘You know – I really think you’d better go.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. He held the postcard up like a courtroom exhibit. ‘I know. I’m reading your mail. I – I was putting away the cream and I knocked some papers off, and this postcard –’
She had changed into sweat pants and an old shaggy sweater. She’d been crying hard. Her eyes were red and her face was mottled. She took the postcard from him, read the back, and then flipped it over. She pushed her front teeth down on her lower lip and then took a shuddery breath.
‘This is the town. Where the clinic was. Where Tils got pregnant with Martin. That’s why I saved it.’
‘Montecastello di Peglia.’
She didn’t seem to have heard him. ‘Actually, I went there to kind of hold her hand. It was beautiful – a perfect little town in Umbria.’ Another breath. ‘And she was so . . . happy. I’d brought a terrific bottle of champagne, but of course I’d forgotten – she wouldn’t even have a sip. So we took a taxi and poured the whole thing out on the lawn outside the clinic.’
‘How much did Roy tell you?’ he asked.
She looked at him sharply. ‘Roy who?’ And then she remembered. ‘Ah, yes. Your colleague.’
‘Did he tell you why I’m here?’
She pushed a hand through her hair and frowned. ‘Something about your sister,’ she said. ‘Your sister and her baby.’ She looked up at him, confused. ‘Some possible connection . . . to Tils.’
‘The reason I read the postcard –’
‘Oh, never mind,’ she said. ‘It’s all right.’
‘You don’t understand. My sister sent me the same postcard.’
‘. . .’
‘It’s where my sister became pregnant. After years of trying – that’s where it happened.’
‘Just like Tils.’ She swallowed. ‘The Clinica Baresi.’ Her eyes widened and she cocked her head. ‘And you think – what? I can’t imagine.’
He shook his head. ‘I don’t know what I think. But it’s strange, isn’t it? Matilda never mentioned anybody named Grimaldi, did she? Franco Grimaldi?’
Kara shook her head. ‘No.’
He asked if he could make a telephone call. She looked at him strangely, then shrugged and waved toward the French doors. ‘I think I’ll have a bath,’ she said.
He waved at her and watched her go out through the door. It took him more than ten minutes, but he finally got through to Prague. Then he waited again for Detective Janacek to come to the phone.
‘Ne?’ Janacek said.
‘Franz. It’s Joe Lassiter – Jim Riordan’s friend?’
‘Of course,’ he said stiffly. ‘Happy New Year.’
Lassiter filled him in on what he’d discovered. ‘I have this one question for Jiri Reiner,’ he said. ‘Did his wife go to a fertility clinic to get pregnant? And if so, where? I want to know if it was the Clinica Baresi in Italy.’ He explained why.
‘I put it to Pan Reiner,’ Janacek said. ‘You call back?’
‘You bet.’
‘Wait. You stay? I’m calling him on another telephone.’
‘Absolutely.’
Lassiter sat with the telephone receiver in his hand for several minutes, turning the possibilities over and over in his mind. If Jiri Reiner’s wife had conceived a child at the Clinica Baresi, the pattern would be undeniable: someone was tracking down children conceived there and exterminating them, one by one. A massacre of innocents. But why? He was in the midst of constructing a mental list, one improbable explanation after another, when he heard the thin squawk of Jana
cek’s voice and yanked the receiver up to his ear.
‘Hel-lo?’ Janacek said. ‘Pan Lassiter?’
He realized he was holding his breath. ‘Yeah.’
‘Jiri – he’s not answering me this at first – he’s saying, “Why you are asking this?”’
‘Okay . . . so –’
‘I’m saying, “Jiri . . . your family is murdered. Answer me this question.” And he’s . . .? He’s saying all this about . . . he’s feeling bad . . . as a man. Finally he says why he feels bad. It’s because his wife not get pregnant just from him. She gets pregnant from a doctor. I have to insist, eh? “What doctor? Where?” I don’t trust him, so I don’t tell him the name you give me. He can just say yes or no and not mean it. Finally he tells me: Clinica Baresi in Italy.’
Lassiter took a deep breath. ‘Wow,’ he said. ‘I’m, ah . . . I don’t quite believe it.’
‘You go there?’ Janacek asked. ‘The clinic?’
‘It’s my next stop,’ Lassiter said.
They spoke a little longer, and Lassiter promised to keep the Czech informed. As he hung up, Kara Baker came back into the kitchen, looking polished and clean in a white terry-cloth robe. She touched his arm and gave him a look that told him she was naked under the robe.
He was surprised to find himself shaking his head, and his indifference puzzled him. She was really quite spectacular, but rather than reaching out to her, he told her what he’d learned from Janacek and thanked her for the coffee and the help. Then he stood up to go.
‘I can’t tell you how helpful this has been. It might have been months –’
‘I daresay,’ she said, in a voice as neutral as sand.
Lassiter looked at her and sighed. ‘Gotta go,’ he said. And went.
25
LASSITER STOOD AT the window of his hotel room, nursing a glass of Laphroaig as he watched the rain gust through the courtyard below. The weather had a rhythm of its own, coming at the windowpanes in waves, as if the night were breathing, in . . . out . . . in . . . out.