by Stuart Woods
A shock sent him back through the door; he had stepped into loose snow on the doorstep. He walked out again, avoiding the pile; it hadn’t been there when he’d returned to the house earlier.
The wind blew again, and a handful of snow went down his neck. He danced around, pulling at the cord of his dressing gown, shaking the snow away. Then he looked up. A limb of a ponderosa pine extended over the kitchen door. The wind had blown off its load of snow and deposited it on the doorstep; that was the sound he had heard.
He walked quietly back through the house, still squirming from the cold dampness on his back and in his slippers. In the bathroom he dried himself with a towel, then crept back into bed with Jane. She accepted him as if he’d never left, came into his arms and rested her head in the hollow of his neck. The only sound he heard before falling asleep was a tiny groan of contentment from her.
The following morning, he put Jane, Sara, and a great many shopping bags into a taxi and sent them to Albuquerque Air-port. He watched the cab disappear down the road to Santa Fe. He had never felt more alone.
CHAPTER
35
Ed Eagle was up early the day after Christmas. He had breakfast, then got into the Bronco and drove into Santa Fe. The snow of Christmas Eve had frozen solid, and the streets were icy. Those drivers who had ventured out drove with exaggerated care, and so did Eagle.
He made his way to the east side, through the warren of streets with their adobe houses, some of them antiques, the others designed to seem antique. He found the little apartment house where Barbara Kennerly lived, parked the car, and walked through the archway toward the staircase that led up to her apartment.
As he approached the stairs, Barbara came down, wearing a heavy coat over a nightgown and snow boots.
“Well, good morning,” she said, surprised. She picked up a newspaper and brushed the snow off it.
“Good morning,” he replied. “I was in the neighborhood. Will you buy me a cup of coffee?”
“Sure.” She smiled. “But the place is a mess. Come on upstairs.”
He let her precede him up the steps, which had not been cleared of snow, and he looked closely at the tracks she made. The imprint of the soles was familiar.
She opened the door and waved him in. “You haven’t seen my place, have you?”
“No,” he said, stepping inside. He found himself in a small living room; he could see into the bedroom, only a few steps away, and a tiny kitchen was on the other side of the apartment. “I like it.” He sat down on the sofa.
“It suits me, for the time being,” she said, shrugging. “There’s enough room for one, and the furniture’s not too bad. I’m going to need some pictures, though; I’ve already started looking.” She busied herself in the kitchen and returned with two cups of coffee. “Listen, Ed, I’m sorry about leaving you on Christmas Eve, but I just felt like sleeping alone. Can you understand that?”
“It’s all right, Barbara. I’m accustomed to spending a lot of my time alone. I’ve made a point for a long time to spend Christmas Day by myself.”
“I hope I didn’t hurt your feelings.”
“You didn’t.” He changed the subject. “I like the boots. Where’d you find them?”
She held one up for inspection. “A Christmas present to myself. I got them at the Overland Sheepskin Company.”
He knew the place; he’d bought boots there himself. “I like fur boots,” he said. “Do they have them in men’s sizes?”
She laughed. “These are a man’s size nine,” she said. “I’ve got a big foot.”
He was stuck for something to say. “They look warm,” he managed.
“They are,” she said, kicking off the boots. “Just the thing for going out in the snow for the papers.”
“Yes.” A long silence.
“Ed, what brings you over here to see me so early in the morning?”
He shrugged. “The office is closed today. I just thought I’d drop by.”
“Come on, Ed,” she coaxed. “Something’s on your mind; why don’t you tell me about it?”
He couldn’t bring himself to question her as he had intended to, and he looked for another subject. “Barbara, I’ve wanted to talk with you about Wolf Willett’s trial.”
“Is he going to be tried?”
“I expect so, and his case has become more complicated with the death of Mark Shea. Did you know Mark?”
She shook her head. “I saw him at Santacafé a couple of times; he came in for lunch. I never actually met him, though. I heard about his murder on television last night. Have they caught anybody?”
She seemed innocent of any knowledge of Shea, Eagle thought. “Not that I’ve heard. You know that Wolf found him dying?”
“That was on the news.” She looked alarmed. “He’s not a suspect, I hope.”
Eagle shook his head. “No. I was out there, and I talked with the sheriff about it. At least we don’t have to worry about that one.”
“You’re worried about the trial, though?”
“Yes. Mark Shea would have been a principal witness for us. He had been Wolf’s psychiatrist, and he would have been good on the stand.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I wish there was something I could do to help.”
“There is.”
“What’s that?”
“I’d like you to testify about Julia. About her background, I mean, and…her character.”
Barbara was quiet as she thought about this. “Oh, I think I get the picture,” she said. “You want me to go into a courtroom and trash my sister in front of a jury in order to get your client off?”
“I want you to tell the truth about Julia; if that constitutes trashing her, then so be it.”
Barbara stood up and began pacing the room, sipping from her coffee cup. “You want me to stand up in public, reveal my own past, and help you make Julia the villain,” she said.
“I can protect your identity; you can testify as Hannah Schlemmer, and I can ask the judge to exclude the public and the press during your testimony. Nobody need find out your new name.”
“I don’t believe that for a minute,” she said. “It’s bound to come out—I could lose my job, and worst of all, lose the anonymity I’ve found in Santa Fe.”
“I’ll do everything I can to prevent that happening.”
“What really gets me is that I thought you and I were forming some sort of relationship. Did I dream that, or am I just your Saturday night fuck?”
Eagle stood up and took her by the shoulders. “No, you didn’t dream it; you and I have come to mean something to each other. That doesn’t have anything to do with the trial.”
“You’re willing to expose me in Santa Fe to protect your client,” she said bitterly. “A man who may have murdered my sister.”
“The only thing Wolf ever did to your sister was take her out of the criminal life she had always led and give her respectability and everything she could ever have dreamed of having. He didn’t know he was being lied to, of course. I believe Wolf Willett is innocent of any involvement in Julia’s death; I think she may be a great deal less innocent. Who’s the real victim here?”
“But Julia can’t defend herself.”
“Could she defend herself if she were here?” Eagle demanded. “Could she justify deceiving the man she married? Did she have innocent reasons for forcing a sleaze like Grafton on him?”
Barbara looked surprised. “What do you mean?”
“Julia talked Wolf into meeting Grafton and helping him with some screenplay he had written—about a prison break—that’s amusing, isn’t it?”
“Jimmy was in L.A.?”
“Yes, and I think he went out there to blackmail Julia, who was eminently blackmailable.”
“Jesus, that creep. How could I ever have gotten involved with him?”
“That’s a good question. I’ve always believed you were an essentially innocent person who was duped by a con man, and I’d like to go on thinking that. B
ut you have to face the fact that your relationship with Grafton is probably what launched the whole series of events that ended in Julia’s murder. I don’t know how, exactly, and I may never know, but you are the connection between Grafton and Julia and Wolf, and whatever brought them together in Wolf’s house that night led directly from that.”
“So now you’re blaming me for all this, is that it?”
“I’ve already told you that I regard you as innocent, but surely you can see how the consequences of your…your stupidity in falling for Grafton have been disastrous for everybody involved.”
Barbara sat down and began to cry.
Eagle, who did not know how to deal with a weeping woman, sat down opposite her and waited uncomfortably for it to pass. His instinct was to sweep her into his arms, but he resisted that.
Finally Barbara composed herself. “You’re right,” she said. “I thought when I got out of prison it was over, but it isn’t. I’ve got to go on paying, haven’t I?”
Eagle put a hand on her cheek. “It will be over soon, I promise you.”
“You can make that happen? You can make it end?”
“I think I can bring all this to a conclusion eventually, and I want to do it without either you or Wolf getting hurt. You have to understand that New Mexico has the death penalty, and as a decent human being, you have to do what you can to see that an innocent man doesn’t face that.”
“But you don’t know if he’s innocent,” she said. “You told me yourself that he doesn’t remember anything. Not remembering isn’t the same as being innocent.”
“Barbara, I’ve represented a lot of people charged with murder over the past twenty-five years—some of them guilty, some of them innocent—and I think I’ve come to know the difference.”
“All right.” She snuffled, dabbing her nose with a Kleenex. “I’ll do it.”
“Thank you. And I’ll do everything I can to see that no one connects Hannah Schlemmer with Barbara Kennerly.” He leaned over and kissed her.
She looked at her watch. “Oh, God, I’ll be late for work.”
Eagle stood up, and she followed him to the door.
“Will you be all right?” he asked.
“Of course I will,” she said. “I just have to face the reality that my past isn’t going away.”
“When this is over,” Eagle said, “you can lead your life without any fear of that. The last link with the past will be broken.”
She kissed him lightly. “I wish I could believe you,” she said.
Eagle walked carefully down the icy steps. He stopped and looked back at her.
“Ed,” she called.
“Yes?”
“If I had refused to testify, you’d have subpoenaed me, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes,” he said, “I would have. I’m glad you didn’t make it necessary.”
She nodded. “I’m glad, too.”
“Dinner tonight?”
“Sure.”
“I’ll call you later, and we’ll figure out when and where.”
She waved and stepped back into the apartment.
Eagle crunched through the snow to his car. As he was about to get into it, he looked up and saw Barbara’s Cherokee parked a couple of spaces away. He walked over to the rear of the car and looked at the snow behind it. One set of tracks led to the rear tires. Goodyears.
Barbara Kennerly had come home after the snow had stopped.
CHAPTER
36
For a week, Wolf hardly left the house. He tried to stay busy, making and taking frequent calls from Hal Berger about progress on the new film—if he should ever be free to shoot it. He began laying out the film scene by scene, drawing storyboards and making lists of actors for roles.
He refused all comment on Mark Shea’s death, referring callers to Ed Eagle. He heard through Eagle that some friends of Mark’s were arranging a memorial service, but no one called him about it.
He and Jane talked every day—sometimes about the new film, sometimes about the editing jobs she was doing on commercials and industrial films. She had given her agent notice, and he had arranged for her to sign with the agent at the Creative Artists Agency, who would henceforth handle her career. He assured her that she wouldn’t be doing commercials much longer.
He asked Hal Berger to find some charity to give Julia’s clothes and personal belongings to, and to have her jewelry appraised for a possible sale. He had reached a point where he wanted any vestige of Julia gone.
On New Year’s Eve, he had a call late in the afternoon from Hal.
“Wolf, I’m at your house in Bel Air, and I’m afraid things aren’t right here. There are some big problems.”
“What sort of problems, Hal?”
“Let me start at the beginning. You remember that when you and Julia were married, she insisted on taking over the household accounts. I had been paying the household bills from the office, but she wanted to do it.”
“Yes, Julia seemed to want to run as much of my life as possible, outside the office, anyway.”
“Well, since her death, your housekeeper, Bridget, has been forwarding the mail from the house about once a week, and I’ve been paying the bills from the office.”
“That’s what I asked you to do, Hal.”
“I hadn’t received any mail from Bridget for a couple of weeks, and also, I wanted to get an idea of what things of Julia’s you might want to give away, so I came over here. No one was answering the phone.”
“What’s happened there?”
“The house is a mess, for starters. It obviously hasn’t been cleaned in weeks—probably not since you were here. The place reeks of booze, and there are a lot of dirty glasses scattered around. Bridget was nowhere to be found, so I went upstairs to check on Julia’s things, and I found the maid passed out, drunk, on the bed in the master bedroom, wearing a dress of Julia’s. She’s up there now. What do you want me to do about it?”
A wave of anger ran through Wolf; he should have gotten rid of that woman a long time ago, he thought. “Fire her, Hal. Give her a month’s pay so she won’t have anything to bitch about, and get her out of the house today.”
“Consider it done, Wolf; I never liked her, anyway, I have to admit.”
“Neither did I. Julia hired her; I had nothing to do with it.”
“That’s not the only problem, though. There’s worse to come.”
“What else?”
“Bridget had apparently gone through Julia’s dressing room looking for something—my guess is the jewelry—and she had ransacked Julia’s desk, too. There were a lot of bank statements and other documents, and I gathered them up.”
“Her jewelry is in the safe in the study; you’ve got the combination. You may as well take everything to the office,” Wolf said. “I suppose we had better go ahead and wind up Julia’s estate and close her bank account.”
“Sure, I’ll do that, but I found something else among the papers.”
“What, Hal?”
“Are you sitting down?”
“Yes.”
“Wolf, I found some correspondence with your stockbroker. Did Julia have anything to do with your investments?”
“Yes, she had an interest in the market. She read the Wall Street Journal every day, and occasionally she would buy or sell something. I gave the broker a power of attorney so she could do that, but she always checked with me first. I believe she even made me some money.”
“Maybe so, Wolf, but it’s gone now.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean Julia sold everything less than a week before she died.”
Wolf sat down. “Everything?” he asked weakly.
“Everything—the stocks, T-bills, those bonds you bought a couple of years ago, and your Keogh and 401K retirement plans. The total value was a little over three million six hundred thousand dollars.”
“What did she do with the money?” Wolf asked, trying to grasp what Hal was saying.
“It w
ent into her bank account first, then she wire-transferred the whole amount, plus about thirty thousand dollars, to a bank in the Cayman Islands.”
“Three million six?” Wolf asked, beginning to get a grip on what had happened to him.
“That’s right,” Hal said. “And that’s not all. Just over a million of that was from the two retirement accounts; that means you’re going to have to pay tax on that amount come April 15th—that’ll be, say, three hundred and fifty thousand, plus a ten percent penalty for cashing in a retirement account before you’re sixty-five. Your total loss is looking like about four million dollars, plus tax on whatever profit might have been made on the other stocks.”
Wolf was breathing deeply, trying to keep a grip on himself.
“Wolf, I’m sorry. I know what a blow it must be, but I had no oversight of any of this, so I had no idea it was happening.”
“Of course not, Hal; it’s not your fault.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Jesus, what can I do, Hal? The money’s out of the country, and Julia’s dead. Is there any way I can get it back?”
“I don’t know. There’s an account number for the Cayman bank on the wire-transfer receipt; I guess we can start there, but the Caymans have a very secretive banking system.”
“Christ, there must be something we can do.”
“Wolf, I know this idea won’t appeal to you, but I think we ought to call the police.”
“You’re right; that doesn’t appeal to me.”
“I think you have to do it to protect yourself. It could be that some of the insurance you have might cover at least some of this; I don’t know that, but I can check. The first thing the insurance company would want is the police in on this.”
“Hal, I don’t know how that would affect my current position in Santa Fe. I want to talk to my lawyer before we do anything.”
“All right, what do you want me to do here?”