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 conversation. 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.”
“Even as tired as we are,” he said, “I think I’d better take the other bed.”
12
W HEN SHE GOT up the next morning he was gone.
He had pulled the bed together, she found, when she peeped shyly into her old room. She was disappointed but a little relieved. She would have liked to see his head on the pillow, but her soul craved the solitude of her coffemaking and reading at the table.
That might be a problem later, she thought hopefully.
He had left a note in the kitchen, propped against a full coffeepot. Bless him, she thought, peering at his spiky scrawl.
“Don’t come in to work,” Catherine read. “I looked in at you this morning and had to overcome a mighty temptation, but you need sleep more than anything else at this point.” She smiled.
She saw through the steam of her first cup of coffee that it was nine o’clock. She had to go to the sheriff ’s office to make her statement, but she was going to take her time. She needed to collect herself before facing Sheriff Galton.
Of course she would go in to work after that. She knew Randall would be run ragged if she didn’t show up. No reporters, no one to answer the phone, since Leila undoubtedly w
ould not come in. And that telephone would be ringing off the wall.
Yes, she would go to work.
After she had had some coffee and a few cigarettes, she realized there was no use trying to make anything normal of the morning. How deeply I’m embedded in my little rut, she thought. A friend of mine died last night, while I was watching, and I try to drink my X number of cups of coffee, smoke X number of cigarettes, and stick to my piddling little routine.
She got dressed and drove over to the little brick building in front of the jail.
It was like her arrival there Saturday morning. To her horror, she began shaking as she pulled onto the concrete apron in front of the swinging door. She knew what she would see, and she saw it. There was Mary Jane Cory, typing, her unrealistic hair sprayed into an elaborate structure of swirls.
But the pattern was broken, after all, when the black deputy, Eakins, came out of the sheriff ’s office and approached her.
“Miss Linton,” he said reluctantly, his voice hardly more than a mumble. Catherine turned to face him and waited cautiously.
“My mother wants to see you.” Before Catherine could say anything, before she could tell him she didn’t have any time that day, he went on. “She wants to see you awful bad. She’s been on at me about it for two days now.”
“What is it about?” She guiltily remembered the note in the can of brownies.
“She won’t tell me. You know how stubborn and…old-fashioned she is.”
“Old-fashioned” must mean “Uncle Tom,” Catherine decided. Yes, Betty was. It made Catherine as uncomfortable as it made her son.
I just can’t cope with Betty’s “Miss Catherine’s” this morning, she thought desperately. She was about to say no, when Percy Eakins gave her a pleading look it obviously hurt him to give. His pride was aching like arthritis on a rainy day, Catherine realized.
“I’ll go after I make my statement,” she said.
Then Mary Jane looked up from her typing, and Catherine became caught up in the mills of the law.
Catherine’s statement was longer and a little tricky this time (since she was concealing something, though it seemed a harmless thing to conceal), and she had time to notice that Mary Jane was no longer sympathetic. She was, if possible, even more briskly professional than usual. Her eyes on Catherine’s face were cold and speculative.
Catherine realized for the first time that this might be the pattern for the rest of her life, unless the murderer was caught. There was not enough evidence to arrest her: there was only the coincidence of two dead people turning up in Catherine Linton’s immediate vicinity. The sheriff knew she couldn’t have physically accomplished the murders, she thought. But that would make little difference in Lowfield talk.
She was so depressed when she left the sheriff ’s office that she figured going to see Betty Eakins couldn’t make her feel worse.
The black part of Lowfield was as close to a ghetto as a tiny town could get. Some of the streets were unpaved, and the children ran and played in them, only reluctantly moving aside for cars to pass. Some of the houses were clean, neatly kept, and sound; but most of them leaned and staggered, barely able to contain the life that spilled out of them.
Betty’s house was at a stage in between. It was still upright, but it was beginning to slide. The paint was peeling, and the yard was growing wild.
There were no sidewalks, of course, and the street, paved perhaps twenty years ago, was narrow. Catherine pulled as close to the house as she dared, and hoped no other car would want to pass while she was inside.
Children gathered on the other side of the street to watch her get out of the car. They ranged in age from three to ten, Catherine estimated, and their clothing was in various stages of disrepair, ranging from neat-but-dusty to out-and-out rags. They were barefoot, smiling, and shy. She gave them a tentative smile. The shyest covered their mouths with their hands, but let their returning grins shine through.
She pushed through the burgeoning sunflowers in the yard and knocked on the doorsill. The wooden door was open. The screen door was almost off its hinges.
“Who that?” came a creaky query from the darkness of the house’s back rooms. The shades had been drawn against the heat.
“Catherine,” she called.
“Miss Catherine!”
Betty’s halting steps approached. Catherine could see her emerging from the kitchen. Betty must have been close to seventy-five. She was thin, bent, and gnarled. She was putting in her teeth as she walked, and was dressed in a formidably clean green and white housedress and white apron.
Catherine had never seen Betty without an apron on.
“Come on in! Come on in!” A chicken ran across the yard, and Betty made an automatic flapping gesture in its direction.
Catherine stepped into the room and looked around her for a place to sit. There was a sack of snap beans and a bowl half-full of prepared ones by a chair, so Catherine chose the sofa, which was covered by an old chenille bedspread, and lowered herself gingerly.
“You seen my boy this morning? He done told you I wanted to talk with you?”
“Yes, he did,” Catherine said. “Thanks for the brownies. They were great. How are you feeling?”
“Getting old, getting old. My bones is hurting. But I reckon I’ll live a while longer, make a few more batches of brownies.”
Betty took up the sack of beans, then put it down when she remembered she had company.
“No, go on,” Catherine said hastily.
Slowly Betty’s hands returned to their work. Her head bent over the bowl. All Catherine could see was white hair braided and pinned in circles.
“Reckon I got to tell you something,” Betty murmured. “You in trouble now…Reckon I got to speak up. I ain’t told nobody, didn’t want any trouble. But you my little girl. You in some kind of mess. I hear people talking.”
The two women sat quietly. Catherine couldn’t think of anything to say, and Betty was thinking about what to say next.
“That boy that got killed last night, was he your beau?”
“No,” she said.
Betty looked up at her, relieved. “You got a beau?”
“Yes. Randall Gerrard,” Catherine said firmly.
“Gerrard. I know Sadie who works for them. His daddy run the paper?”
“He’s dead now. Randall runs it.”
“The Gerrards got money? Is he good to you?”
“Yes.”
“You know his mamma? She like you?”
“I think so.”
“I went to your mamma and daddy’s wedding. Your daddy,” Betty said slowly. “He asked me to come. He said, ‘You got to be there, Betty. It wouldn’t be right without you.’”
Betty was building up to something, rambling around the corners of what she really wanted to say. Suddenly Catherine was curious.
“They’ve been dead about six months now,” Betty said thoughtfully. “Nobody asked me any questions then. I was glad. Percy, he was trying to get on working for the sheriff. Little Betty ran off to Detroit about then. Left me her kids to look after. I had the woes of Job, seemed like. So when your folks died, I just didn’t think about something I should’ve spoken up about. But then, no sheriff come asking me questions. That would’ve brought it to my mind. I would’ve spoken up. But—I just had too many other things worrying me.”
Betty’s fingers were moving steadily, breaking off the ends of the beans, then snapping them into pieces. Catherine watched the bowl fill up.
“But you in trouble now,” Betty muttered. Her fingers stilled as she reached a decision. She looked up into Catherine’s white face.
“You got a little sun on you for once, didn’t you?” Betty observed. She cleared her throat. “Well, it was this way. I never did like Miss Leona. I know”—Betty lifted a dark hand to forestall an admonition Catherine would never dream of giving—“it ain’t up to me to like or not like. God made us all, we all got a place. But I didn’t like her. I saw she d
idn’t care for you or your mamma. So I watched her close, when she was in you-all’s house. And even after I quit working for your mother, you know, I went and cleaned your daddy’s office when the woman who worked for him got sick—or drunk, most often,” Betty said severely. She frowned over the erring maid for a moment.
“Here I am wandering,” she resumed. “Well. About three days before your folks got taken, I was over to your daddy’s office late in the afternoon. That Callie, she had been on a long one, but you don’t care about that: it ain’t the point of all this.”
Catherine reached up to wipe the sweat from her forehead, and found that her hand was shaking.
“Your daddy and some man was in the examination room.” Betty’s eyes met Catherine’s.
Catherine nodded jerkily.
“They was talking. They was raising their voices. I knew something was wrong. I never heard raised voices in your daddy’s office before. It was late. Wasn’t no one there but me and Miss Leona.” Betty’s face went wry with dislike. She heaved a heavy breath and went on.
“I was mopping the second examination room. My door was open, but the door to the other room, where your daddy and the man was, ’course it was closed. I could hear voices, but not what they were saying.
“I seen Miss Leona come along the hall, you know how quiet she moved in them white shoes. She passed by the door of my room. I wasn’t making no noise; I don’t think she knew I was there. She was ’spose to be gone. I heard your daddy tell her to go on home, he had seen everybody. But then I heard her messing ’round in the medicine room, and I guess she heard the other man come in and was so nosy she had to find out who it was. She didn’t like nothing going on at that office that she didn’t know all about. For that matter, she didn’t like your daddy doing nothing if she didn’t know what it was and why.” And Betty shot Catherine a significant look with her yellowed eyes.
Sweet and Deadly Page 14