It's a Crime

by Jacqueline Carey

  Will was a young man—very young, actually, maybe twenty—who’d materialized in the doorway behind Virginia. Skinny as a wire hanger, he had some of the same buoyant tension. Virginia recognized that springy cockiness from her own youth. Surely people must have been young between then and now, but she couldn’t think of any instances offhand.

  “Ginny!” said Pat. “I don’t believe I’ve mentioned Will to you yet!”

  His sandy hair was long and thin and straight. His lips and eyelashes were oddly dark, his blue eyes oddly light under a pair of gold wire-rim glasses. He had a bony jaw, a long nose, and restless shoulders.

  “Will is Lemuel’s son,” said Pat. “He’s staying with us for a while. I don’t know what I would have done without him. He’s been a great friend to Ruby. He understands a lot of the stuff she’s been going through. The pressure on kids these days is enormous.”

  This was Lemuel’s son? He looked too…pale. And he was wearing an old sport coat. How extraordinary that Pat hadn’t mentioned him before.

  “Ginny was my best friend in high school,” said Pat.

  “I don’t think I have a best friend,” said Will with a brief frown.

  “Pat must have told you how much we always admired your father’s books,” said Virginia.

  It was hard to separate Will’s wariness from his formality. “Yes,” he said. His slow, clipped drawl barely involved his mouth. “I can’t read them.”

  Virginia’s own books elbowed briefly to the front of her brain and then receded. When you live alone, you can’t exactly have a secret. Everything you do is a secret, in a sense, because no one else knows about it. But you’re not trying to hide anything, either. The closest thing in her life to the conventionally covert was her writing career. The marketing directors in New York and Boston who’d hired her for her copywriting skills did not know that she’d published stories or, later, books. At first it was disappointing to realize how little the world cared, but later she realized she got a kick from treating her whole mystery-writing career as, say, an extramarital affair.

  “Lemuel had a bad episode with his heart a couple of months ago,” said Pat cheerily. “That’s when Will and I met. He’d been living with his father for a while then. But Lemuel is better now, thank God. He’s making money as a guest host on the “Ahoy, Murder” mystery cruise. And Will is staying with us. He took some time off before college to help with expenses.”

  Pat was beaming at her expectantly, so Virginia said to Will, “You’re looking for a job?”

  Will pushed his hands together, sucked in some air, frowned, and shook his head. Then he exhaled noisily and poured out some Pellegrino water from a bottle on an oddly placed tile-topped table.

  Virginia wondered if he could have heard her.

  “He’s looking in the city,” said Pat. “In the meantime, I’ve asked him to help out with Ruby. Isn’t that wonderful?”

  “It’s Ruby who’s wonderful,” said Will promptly.

  “That’s so true,” said Pat, lowering her voice. “How do you think she’s doing?”

  “I admire her a great deal,” said Will. The conversation came to a temporary halt as he eased himself into the huge green couch next to Pat. His jeans were torn at one knee, and a tuft of threads hung from one side of the slit. The kneecap revealed was as intimate as bone.

  “My number one priority in all this has always been Ruby,” said Pat, beginning to wilt over the kneecap. “I’m sorry, I’m so tired, I’ve been driving all day, am I making any sense?”

  “Always,” said Will.

  “She’s the most fascinating child imaginable,” said Pat. “Constantly thinking of some fabulous new deviltry. Oh, God, I’m tired!”

  “Ruby is very idealistic,” said Will, his tone reproving.

  “Ruby follows Will around like a puppy dog,” said Pat. “It’s so adorable.”

  “I am her happy slave,” said Will. He was wearing cowboy boots, maybe even the same ones Virginia had dreamed about.

  “Where are you from?” asked Virginia suddenly.

  “Upstate New York.”

  “Ginny lives in Maine,” said Pat. “She’s here to help me give money to people who had LinkAge stock.”

  “That’s interesting,” said Will, the very blandness of his words and tone implying reserves of meaning. “I didn’t know you were giving away money.”

  “If our food doesn’t come soon, I’m going to have to go to bed, anyway,” said Pat. “Could you take care of it? You know where the money in the sideboard is.”

  Will nodded, but his mind was evidently stuck on the notion of charity. “I used to sponsor a kid in Nicaragua,” he said. “I got a couple of letters from him. I couldn’t understand them so I never wrote back. But I sent checks for a long time.”

  Virginia didn’t believe him for a second. But Pat laid her hand on his forearm and let it linger there. “I should have known!” she said. Evidently she had transferred her affection for Lemuel to him.

  A two-note door chime sounded, and she jumped up as if electrocuted. “Finally!” she cried.

  She was gone in a flash. Virginia stood up to follow her, expecting Will to do the same. Instead he untangled his sapling limbs and warily approached the little table, shifting his weight from foot to foot for a moment before pouring himself more water amid a pop and a hiss.

  “How old are you, Will?” asked Virginia.

  “Twenty,” he said stiffly.

  When she didn’t respond, he looked at her out of the corners of his eyes. “You’re not very much like Pat,” he said.

  “No,” said Virginia.

  “What was it like when you were twenty?” he asked.

  “I don’t remember,” she said.

  “Oh,” he said. “I didn’t mean—”

  Now they were both embarrassed. They seemed to carom off each other in their hurry to get out of the room.

  CHAPTER

  15

  When Virginia woke the next day, her thoughts as they surfaced were still so dark that she had to hit herself on the forehead with the heel of her hand to beat them back where they belonged. She couldn’t believe she was in Pat Foy’s house. The shift in the tectonic plates must have been enormous to have thrown the two of them together after all these years.

  Often in English mysteries a murderer has to be discovered amid a variety of guests in a large country house. The addition of Will Samuel to the Foy household suggested a similar assortment here. But the crime was not one discrete element of this establishment; it was not hiding; it encompassed the whole building. And here was Virginia Howley smack inside, where her ruin had been hatched.

  She was surprised to learn that she and Pat were going to visit a victim of Frank’s fraud that day. Pat’s plan had had a trumped-up air at the Dock. But they were on their way to Orange by noon. Frank’s former secretary had asked Pat to check on another former employee, Simone Massey, who used to be head of LGT food services.

  “I never dreamed you’d be working as a waitress,” Pat said to Virginia as she fooled with the car window. “Was that because of LinkAge?”

  “Sort of,” said Virginia.

  “Not that there’s anything wrong with being a waitress,” said Pat. “Look at Shoot the Piano Player.”

  “She dies at the end,” said Virginia.

  “Are you sure? I don’t think so,” said Pat, clearly lying. She closed up the window at last.

  Orange was only a few miles from Hart Ridge, but was the kind of decrepit, unglamorous small city that only the grittier of the police procedurals ventured into. Originally a suburb of Newark, Orange was now just another dilapidated part of the greater metropolitan patchwork, sliced up and stitched back together by a crisscrossing mesh of major thoroughfares. Simone’s street was in a pocket of two-story houses packed together behind chain-link fences. Gable-fronted, each house looked at first as if it were turned the wrong way. But all the glassed-in porches were clearly supposed to be facing forward, no matter how
high and awkward they were, or how overfull with tables and chairs and odd plastic containers. Simone’s house was one of the smallest, and it had not been painted any more recently than the others, but it possessed an exceptional alertness. Although the general desolation of winter had fallen upon it as it had upon the whole shabby street, nothing was broken at the Massey house, no step, no balustrade, no panel, no front light. The windows were clean. There was a welcome mat.

  Simone Massey stood maybe four foot eight. She appeared young to have already retired. She was broad and thick and strong-looking. Her skin was caramel-colored. Her hair, still black, was short and flat. When she offered to take Pat’s and Virginia’s coats, Pat accepted and Virginia did not. She grew hot in her padded jacket, but this struck her as more appropriate than Pat’s light and carefree appearance. Pat wore high-heeled black boots and a thick white ribbed turtleneck, and she carried a glossy black open-ended square of a purse with straps of a length Virginia had never seen before. The bag was meant to be carried over the shoulder, but snugly.

  Virginia also declined Simone’s offer of tea, but she began to suspect that this was a mistake as she watched the older woman retrieve cups and tea bags in a routinely homey manner, waiting for the kettle to boil. Hospitality for Simone was clearly the norm. She may not have seemed poor to herself, despite the difficult neighborhood and despite whatever LinkAge had done to her. The three women sat at an old-fashioned cabriole-legged table covered with a pure white eyelet cotton tablecloth—and a thick sheet of clear vinyl.

  “I was sorry to hear about your husband’s troubles,” said Simone. “He was a very friendly man. Some people get so important they can’t see past the ends of their noses, and Mister Foy wasn’t like that. He always had a nice hello, how are you, how is your grandson.”

  Pat was pleased. And somewhere deep inside Virginia was, too. She was glad that Frank had been courteous to this decent and dignified woman. But maybe mere pleasantness of manner shouldn’t excuse so much. It seemed unfair to the more socially awkward people who hadn’t stolen a dime—Virginia, for instance.

  “Frank can’t bear to have his old colleagues suffer because of something he was part of,” said Pat, spooning sugar into her tea. “And it seems that you lost an unusually large amount.”

  “I saved more than those whiz kids?” said Simone, surprised.

  “Some of them,” said Pat, smiling. “But I don’t count them. They were part of the problem.”

  “I see,” said Simone, stirring her tea. “You ever hear of Fripp College?”

  Pat frowned in concentration, but shook her head.

  “When I was younger I was not a saving type of person,” said Simone. “My daughter felt neglected. That’s probably why she got into drugs. I don’t know where she is now, and I don’t want to know.” She ignored Pat’s cries of sympathy. “Luster’s father…” She dismissed him with a little dip of her hand. “Doesn’t matter what happened to him. My grandson came to live with me, and I switched jobs so I could be there when he came home from school. I started out serving at LGT. Once you were finished with lunch your day was pretty much over. The cafeteria stays open later now, but back then it closed up at three. I was a lot better grandmother than I was a mother. Maybe I was better with boys. All I ever wanted was to make my grandson feel loved and secure. Sometimes even now that he’s grown when he’s sleeping I will go in and kiss his forehead.”

  “I know what you mean!” cried Pat. “I used to watch my daughters breathe when they were asleep.”

  “I don’t need anything for myself,” said Simone. “I have Social Security. I’m healthy. And if I get sick, well, I’ve already had my day. But Luster is very, very smart. When he first made the honor roll back in the fourth grade, I told him if he made it every year after that, I would send him to college. It wasn’t easy, but he did it. The kids in the high school here fight all the time. It is not a good school. One Spanish boy teased him so dirty Luster finally had to hit him in the mouth. But he did it off school property.”

  Pat nodded as if this made all the difference in the world, and who knows, maybe it did.

  “Luster has never given any trouble. He was in the National Honor Society last year. He was on the debating team, and one of his teachers, a white man, said he had never heard anyone who could speak so well. He said he was better than any politician on TV. He told him he could be a senator someday.

  “Luster! Come here and talk to the ladies.”

  The boy on the stairs seemed especially tall because you saw his feet first and then a long unwinding of the rest of him. His feet were too big for the steps, too fast and irrepressible. Even on the thin blurred carpeting of the stairs the rapid scuffing sounded joyful. He was dressed like anyone—running shoes, jeans, sweatshirt. As soon as he entered the room and extended his hand, though, you could feel the flash of his charm. He was the baby. Beloved, he still sported tenderness. He smiled, and you believed in something again.

  “Luster wanted to know why he had to go to such a bad high school, and I told him, life isn’t fair.”

  As Simone spoke, Virginia was looking directly into Luster’s face, and she could see the animation drain out of it.

  “Isn’t that true?” asked Simone.

  “Yes, Mier,” said the boy, automatically using what must have been a term of affection and respect, but his tone was inert.

  “These ladies want to know about the 401(k),” she said.

  Luster looked at the floor while Virginia murmured something vaguely negative, pressing her thumbnail deeply into her thigh.

  “Mister Howard at the company, that is, the LGT personnel advisor, showed me how it was better to save through the 401(k) than at the bank because you didn’t pay taxes on the money you put in. He bought company stock for me, which I was proud to have. I couldn’t take any money out until I was sixty-five, but that was okay. I knew I wasn’t going to want to touch it for ten years, not until Luster turned eighteen. All the time I got statements saying how much money was in there. At the end it was a whole lot. One day I put the paper on the refrigerator just to look at, but then I took it down because I didn’t want to excite envy.”

  “Your grandson was planning to attend Fripp College?” asked Pat.

  “No,” said Simone, recoiling before politeness, or maybe a simple dogged hope, stopped her. “He was accepted to a real college.”

  “Oh,” said Pat. She sensed that she’d gone wrong somewhere, but she’d never known much about schools.

  “He was going to go to Villanova University.”

  “How nice,” said Pat.

  “It was a shock to me when the stock fell apart. At first I thought only the earnings in the 401(k) were gone. I was disappointed, because I had been counting on them for Luster’s college. But I had saved plenty to put in the plan. And he was bound to get a scholarship. There was one given by a real estate man for three thousand dollars that his teacher recommended him for. And we could have taken out more loans. Then I learned that all the money was gone, not just the earnings, you know, the extra that it made, but everything—all the money that I had saved over the years. I wasn’t even going to get a pension. College was out of the question. It was very hard for me, because I had promised him.”

  Simone seemed to be talking more to Luster at this point, although she wasn’t looking at him or directing her attention toward him in any way, and he must have already heard this explanation dozens of times. She had to have tried to add up her zeroes in every different way possible, just as Virginia had, to make sure that all there was in the end was another zero.

  “Then he got some mail from Fripp College. There was a photo in it of three nice-looking kids, one boy and two girls. Black kids with nice neat clothes. The boy reminded me of Luster a little.” Except maybe not the Luster sitting before them. His face had contracted.

  “I drove over there and spoke to the admissions officer, and he explained about all the jobs graduates were eligible for. Good jobs. In
banking. And legal administration.”

  Virginia wondered what “legal administration” could refer to. Nothing real, of course.

  “So I sold the car and told Luster I had enough to send him to Fripp. Now he tells me that the people there are the same ones he was trying to escape from at Orange High, but I say, that can’t be true. Someone is paying for those courses. They have to want to learn.”

  “The government pays,” he said unexpectedly, his lip curling.

  “And what’s wrong with that?” cried Simone, suddenly old. “Haven’t I paid plenty to the government?”

  But Luster had sunk back into silence, his chin dropping toward his chest.

  “Isn’t it good to learn data processing?” she said.

  “You can never learn too much!” said Pat with exaggerated enthusiasm. “I didn’t realize this when I was young. I thought my ninth-grade biology teacher was so boring I could scream. But that’s when I first heard about Darwin, and now I get such a kick out of recommending the stately Darwin tulips to my meanest clients. My biology teacher loved talking about the survival of the fittest. I can still hear her saying it over and over in that squeaky voice of hers, ‘survival of the fittest, survival of the fittest,’ though she was so sick all the time that it was amazing she survived to the end of the year. Do you remember Mrs. Stutz, Ginny?”

  Virginia was speechless. Did Pat have any idea of what she was saying?

  “I guess your friend doesn’t feel like talking,” said Simone.

  “That’s okay,” said Pat. “I’ve always talked enough for two.”

  Simone chuckled a little as Pat proffered a check. It was, grotesquely, one of those customized types that pop up as a sales pitch among other perfectly reasonable-looking checks. It was printed with the image of a skier on a slope.

  “What’s that?” asked Simone. Virginia, quite frankly, wondered the same.

  “To help with your losses,” said Pat.

  Virginia’s eyes were drawn to Luster. The struggle between his loyalty to his grandmother and his need to distance himself from her gullibility was terrible to see. Pat’s babble must have sent him over the edge. He carefully lowered his head into his hands as if it were precious china and then spoke to no one in particular. “She has almost nothing left,” he said slowly. “Why did she waste it on Fripp?”