Familiar Friend

by Cristina Sumners

  “Loreen? Tom Holder. I’m the Police—”

  “I remember you.”

  “Did that guy come in again this morning and rent another stretch limo?”

  “I came in late today, Chief Holder, because my mother was sick and I had to take her to the doctor. If I’d have seen that man I’d have called you right away. Let me talk to my people here. I’m gonna put you on hold a minute, O.K.?”

  She was back in less than three minutes. “Yes, sir, he was here. Stretch limo, same as before, and I have the license plate number.”

  Tom had used some of his time on hold to pull a small notebook and a pen from his pocket. He said, “Shoot.”

  Loreen gave him the number. “Listen,” she said, “I sure am sorry I didn’t know about this the minute it happened. I’d have called you right away.”

  “No problem, Ms. Sanchez. It’s plenty of time. We’ll get him. You’ve been a terrific help. Thanks.” He hung up.

  “Tom!” Suzy wailed. “What’s going on?”

  “I’m sorry, Suzy, I can’t tell you right now.” He patted her sympathetically on the shoulder. “I suggest you have a friend come over and keep you company. This might be a rough day for you. I promise you I’ll tell you everything I can as soon as I can.” He left the house over her continuing gabble of questions.

  Back in his own car he picked up the radio and put out an A.P.B. on the limo. “Don’t stop him, just follow him. Make sure he goes to Philadelphia and picks up somebody from a hotel. If he does anything else, then you can stop him.” He hung up and went to the other car to tell the officers there they were relieved from their vigil.

  He then drove to the station and tried to find something to occupy himself with until the report came from the lab in New York. When the phone rang he jumped, and grabbed it with a breathless “hello,” but it was only Sid Garvey.

  “The little packet of crystals you sent down on Saturday,” Sid said. “It was cyanide. It was in a little cubbyhole in the library that Jamie Newman shared with Valerie Powers?”

  “Yeah, that’s right. Called a study carrel. They’re kept locked.”

  “What fun. And you’ve called Valerie Powers in for questioning again?”

  “No.”

  “Oh. Any reason why not?”

  “I don’t like blondes.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  They hung up.

  The limo was reported to have driven to Philadelphia and parked in a hotel parking garage.

  Finally, at 9:47 precisely, came the call that Tom had been waiting for, and as he listened to the report he felt like the Psalmist who wrote, “My cup runneth over.” He hung up on the lab and consulted the chart before him, which was a class schedule. He walked out of his office, summoned two uniforms, drove to the University Spanish Department, and made an arrest. Back at the station he went back to his office, sat down, took a nervous breath, and called Kathryn.

  “Kathryn, I’ve made the arrest and I’m calling a press conference here at the station at eleven. I thought maybe you’d like to be here, if you don’t have a class?”

  “Oh, Tom, congratulations, and no, I don’t have a class. I take it the lab came through?”

  “In spades. Traces of hair and blood on the crowbar.”

  “Do you have to warn your buddy the District Attorney what’s about to hit him?”

  “Unfortunately, yes.”

  “Too bad. I’ll see you at eleven.” She hung up. Dear God, she thought. I think I’m going to be sick.

  At a few minutes to eleven she walked across the forecourt of City Hall. She had decided not to bring Kit. This was Tom’s moment of triumph; let him enjoy it without competition. A couple of reporters outside the building were doing live shoots into cameras already: “We are hearing reports that yet another arrest has been made in Harton’s double homicide…” “We’ll be going inside shortly to hear a statement from Police Chief Tom Holder…”

  It was crowded inside. Kathryn wondered, in a brief moment of panic, if someone was going to ask her for her press credentials and throw her out because she didn’t have any. But nobody challenged her.

  They were all milling around the large lobby. At 11:00 precisely, Tom opened the door in the glass wall that separated the police station from the lobby. He walked over to a bank of microphones under a glare of lights. He looked perfectly at ease, as though he did this sort of thing every day. Kathryn realized she felt intensely proud of him.

  He blinked a bit as he was hit by a barrage of flashbulbs going off, but he gave no sign of being discomposed. “Good morning,” he said. “We are announcing a new development in the Mason Blaine homicide case. Because of new evidence, Lincoln Massey and Crystal Montoya have been released and all charges against them have been dropped.”

  He went on to announce the arrest of Patrick Cunningham for the murder of Mason Blaine, adding that Cunningham was suspected of the murder of James Newman but wasn’t being charged with it for lack of evidence. He called for questions. He was asked if the police theory was still that Mrs. Newman had been the intended victim at the Alberto Chacón party and her husband had died by mistake, and Tom said no. He said that the theory now (tactfully not saying, “I never thought that, that was only the idiot D.A.”) was that the murder of Mason Blaine had from the beginning been part of an elaborate plot to kill James Newman. He gave them the barest bones of it, and it threw them into a veritable feeding frenzy.

  Kathryn watched the reporters scribbling furiously in their notebooks, and Tom was all but blinded by a renewed battery of flashbulbs. The media instantly perceived that this story was going to be a sensation.

  When he finished they pressed him for more details about evidence, trial dates, and such, but when it became obvious that all the beans had been spilled that were going to get spilled, they stampeded for the exits to file their stories. Kathryn got out of the way to keep from getting trampled, and just managed to catch Tom before he got back inside the glass wall of the police station.

  “Oh, there you are!” he said, smiling with sudden pleasure. “I wasn’t sure you were here or not.”

  “Tom, I told you I would be here,” she chided. “You were very good. Very professional. Um, may I come in?”

  “Oh, yeah, yeah, come back to my office,” he said, torn between pride and self-consciousness, wondering what his subordinates would think.

  She refrained from conversation until he ushered her into his well-ordered domain. “You’re very neat,” she observed approvingly.

  “Helps me keep my thoughts straight.”

  “You certainly kept them straight on this case. I was nowhere.”

  “You were too close to the people in it.”

  “I guess that’s true. Damn it, Tom! I hate this. It’s breaking my heart. I have always been terribly fond of Patrick. I’ve always thought that when he smiled, all the leprechauns in Ireland got up and danced. I’ve always wished that Tracy would divorce Jamie and that she and Patrick would get together.” Tears were beginning to run down her cheeks.

  Tom, sitting behind his desk, would have given anything to be able to get up and walk around to her and brush them away. Instead he said simply, “I’m sorry.”

  Kathryn understood that he was sympathizing, not apologizing, so she said, “Thank you.” She got a tissue out of her purse and wiped away the tears.

  “And now,” she said grimly, “I have the unenviable task of going home and telling Tracy.”

  Tom looked at her with eyes full of what was unmistakably pity.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Kathryn, she knows.”

  “What do you mean, she knows?”

  “Think about it. When you went out to her on the porch, she was already saying she’d had too much to drink and she wasn’t going to have any more, even though, according to you, she looked quote, ‘perfectly sober,’ unquote.”

  Kathryn stared at him for a minute, then closed her eyes, conjuring the scene: Tracy, looking, as Tom s
aid, perfectly sober, saying she’d had enough, saying she wasn’t going to have any more, sounding oddly forced, a little awkward about it. Then Crystal showing up with the drink and handing it to her, and Tracy taking it, again awkwardly, standing there, holding it…

  “Oh!” Kathryn cried. “Oh, no!” Her eyes flew open and she looked at Tom. “He told her! He told her not to drink it! When he took the glass to get her a refill, he must have told her, ‘Whoever brings this back to you, and it won’t be me, for God’s sake don’t drink it whatever you do, say you’ve changed your mind, you’ve had enough.’”

  Tom nodded. “He had to have told her. Otherwise—”

  “Otherwise only a maniac would poison a cocktail meant for a woman he loved and leave it sitting around for ten minutes while he went upstairs and let anybody pick it up and take it to her. Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, goddamn.” Kathryn had wrapped her arms tightly around her waist and was rocking slightly in her chair. “She knew. She knew. He told her. He told her.”

  “It’s possible that all he told her in advance was not to drink it. She might not have known what he was going to do. He might have said something like, ‘Just trust me, I’ll explain later.’”

  “It’s still accomplice after the fact. That’s the term, isn’t it? You’ll notice she hasn’t come forward and told you about it.”

  Tom was silent.

  “Are you going to charge her with something?”

  “Kathryn, I can’t even charge him on this murder, remember? I certainly haven’t got anything I can charge her with. The suspicion that somebody whispered something in her ear when nobody was watching? Forget it. I can’t do anything. The question is, what are you going to do? She’s your friend and she’s living in your house.”

  “I’m going to go home and tell her to g-get the hell out,” Kathryn replied, and burst into sobs.

  After a minute of watching her cry, Tom couldn’t stand it anymore. He got up, walked around his desk, stood behind Kathryn’s chair, and rested his hands on her shoulders and gripped them firmly. She turned her head and laid her damp left cheek against his hand. After a moment he lifted his right hand and rested it gently on her hair, hoping desperately that this wasn’t too much. But a miracle occurred. After about thirty seconds she stopped crying, blew her nose in a discreet and ladylike fashion, dropped the tissue in her lap, reached up and took his hand from her head, and kissed it. “Thank you, Tom,” she whispered. “You are such a good friend.”

  “I was afraid,” he confessed, “that we weren’t going to be able to be friends anymore.”

  Kathryn, who had been fearing precisely the same thing, said, “Nonsense. Our friendship is much too valuable to allow anything to get in the way of it. Agreed?”

  “Agreed.”

  She gave his hand a squeeze, dropped it, and made to rise from her chair. He stepped back reluctantly; it had been both heaven and torture to be that close to her, but there was no doubt that it was pure torture to move away.

  “I’ll walk you out,” he said, but the phone rang. Joel Norton’s limo had hit the city limits and appeared to be heading for Tom’s neighborhood.

  “Sorry, cancel that. I have to go to my house with a welcoming committee for Louise and Joel Norton.”

  “Oh, Tom, that’s excellent! More congratulations! By the way, dare we hope that this snafu on the part of the D.A. means that the idiot asshole is going to lose his job?”

  “Kathryn, I am shocked by your unchristian attitude!”

  “No, you’re not, you are filled with little warm fuzzies inside because your friend loves you.” And she went to give him a swift kiss on the cheek. But it was one of those times when the people concerned are unsure which cheek they are supposed to be kissing, and move back and forth, and Kathryn was approaching too fast to draw back. They wound up kissing on the lips.

  “Sorry!” Kathryn laughed.

  “You’re apologizing? Do it again!”

  “I’d love to, but I don’t think Kit would approve.” With a smile and a wave she made good her escape.

  CHAPTER 26

  Tom stood with his heart thudding and his eyes shut, running his tongue over his lips and trying to preserve the moment in his memory forever, certain it would never happen again. He would have been extremely gratified to know that Kathryn was walking across the lobby of City Hall with butterflies playing leapfrog and turning cartwheels in her stomach and her knees feeling uncomfortably wobbly.

  “This is ridiculous. It’s only because you know he’s in love with you,” she told herself, conveniently forgetting that she’d had the same reaction when he’d kissed her on the cheek three days previously when she’d had no idea how he felt about her. She turned her mind resolutely to the unpleasant task ahead of her, and the butterflies died instantly.

  Tom pulled himself together with difficulty, arranged for backup, got into his car, and drove home. On the way he checked with the people who were following Joel Norton; yes, Norton was still headed for Tom’s house.

  Tom was there waiting for him. He was on the phone to the team tailing the limo, so he was at the window when it pulled up. The driver got out and circled the car, but before he could reach his passenger, the back door opened and she got out by herself and started up the walk. Tom went over to the front door and opened it.

  “Hello, Louise. Welcome home. Mind telling me where you’ve been?”

  She walked into the house without looking at him and asked in a querulous monotone, “Is there anything to eat?”

  “Look in the refrigerator,” he replied. He had lost interest in her. The limo driver resumed his place behind the wheel, but another passenger had gotten out of the back and was strolling up the walk. When Joel Norton got to the bottom of the front porch steps, he looked up at Tom and said insolently, “I’ve brought your wife back to you.”

  “So I see. Why don’t you come in and tell me about it?”

  Norton didn’t hesitate. That informed Tom immediately that the man hadn’t been paid; this was personal.

  Like Louise, Norton walked past Tom without looking at him. He went into the modest living room, surveyed it with a curling lip, and sat down without being invited. Tom sat opposite him.

  “She’s really very stupid, you know,” Norton began. “It was easy. I told her I was recruiting contestants for a reality television show called Runaway. All you had to do was be willing to walk away from your home leaving everything—family, friends, clothes, belongings, everything—without a word to anyone. You would be taken away in a stretch limo to live in a luxury hotel in Philadelphia and would be provided with everything you needed. You would be paid a thousand dollars a day for every day you could hold out before you broke down and asked to be taken home. She fell for it.”

  She would, Tom thought. And she wouldn’t care about my feelings. “Why Philadelphia?”

  “Cheaper than New York.”

  If I could fetch enough distance from this, Tom thought, that would be funny. “And the purpose of this was?”

  “To make you suffer, of course.”

  “Well, you succeeded. I got in a lot of trouble. People suspected me of killing her. For a couple of days I was suspended from my job. If it wasn’t for a lucky break, I might not have got it back. I hope you’re going to tell me why you wanted to make me suffer?”

  “Yes, you bastard. Because you’re having an affair with my wife.”

  Tom goggled at him.

  Norton went on. “Having seen your wife, I don’t blame you, but what my wife sees in you I’m damned if I can understand. I’m not a conceited man, or at least I never thought I was, but I can’t figure this out. You’ve let yourself go to hell physically, you’re not an educated man; I know, because I had you checked out—”

  Tom interrupted this litany of criticism, which was not bothering him a bit because it was beside the point; he had finally recovered from his shock sufficiently to respond. “I am not having an affair with your wife!”

  “Oh, don’t
bother to deny it! I know you are!”

  “On what evidence?” asked Tom, the cop.

  Norton was ready for this question. “I knew she was having an affair when I became aware she was getting love letters. Sometimes they came on Saturday, you see. Blue envelopes. She told unconvincing lies about them and she burned them. And she’s out during the day and sometimes during the evening when I don’t expect her to be and she always says it’s vestry business. Suzy is a very unoriginal liar. When she kept saying it was vestry business, I knew it had to be somebody on the St. Margaret’s vestry. Then one day there was a huge bunch of red roses and she said she’d sent them to herself but she looked very nervous, she kept fidgeting with them. While she was cooking supper I found out why. She’d lost the card among the greenery. I found it. It said, ‘To my darling Suzy from your loving Tom.’ I got out the church directory. You’re the only Tom on the vestry.”

  “Norton, you bastard, I am not having an affair with your wife. The only time I ever see your wife is in church or in vestry meetings. Your detective work seems to be accurate up to a point. I’d say your wife is having an affair. But it sure as hell ain’t with me. Suzy is a nice lady. I like her. But,” Tom said, contrasting in his mind’s eye that somewhat insipid blonde with the live wire of a brunette who haunted his dreams, “she is absolutely not my type.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Wait a minute.” Tom got up and went to the kitchen, where Louise was sitting at the table eating a sandwich and drinking a glass of milk. She ignored him and he ignored her. He began opening and closing drawers. “I know they’re in here somewhere—there they are.”

  He went back into the living room with a pair of handcuffs.

  “What the hell!” Norton exclaimed. “You can’t arrest me! I haven’t broken any laws!”

  “The hell I can’t!” Tom snarled, yanking Norton to his feet, spinning him around, and slapping the cuffs on him with an efficiency born of years of practice. “You’d be surprised what we can do with ‘breach of the peace.’ Do you realize how many hours of police time you’ve wasted? And how many dollars of taxpayers’ money? You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say may be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney…” And he frog-marched Norton out of the house as he recited to him the rest of his Miranda rights.