The gentleman nodded. “No way to solve a problem.” He brightened. “I am glad you are here. What can I do for you?”
“I’d like to buy Rick a carton of Dunhills. What would be better, the blue pack, which are mild, or the red, regular?”
“For him, the red. For you, the mild. Have you ever tried the menthol? Clears the sinus.”
“No. I tell myself I don’t smoke, but I am forever cadging cigarettes off the boss. I owe him a carton.”
He bent over, pulled a carton from under the counter.
“Would you mind if I stepped into the humidor? I love the smell.”
“Go right ahead.” He sprinted out from behind the counter and slid open the glass door. Immediately the place filled with competing, rich aromas.
She stepped inside, looking at all the pretty cigar boxes. After a few huge inhales, she stepped out.
“Thank you.”
“Many ladies smoke cigars.”
“I don’t think I’m up to it.” She smiled.
“Mrs. Steinhauser was in here this morning with Mr. Lattimore. She bought her usual carton of cigarettes. He bought a box of Tito’s. Most people don’t know the brand. It’s not extremely expensive. She bought six Montecristo Petit Edmundos, a very nice cigar. She said she smokes cigars when no one except for Mr. Lattimore is looking.” He smiled like the Cheshire cat.
Neither one needed to comment on their friendship, which may well have tipped over into an affair.
Cooper knew Folly’s husband was jealous. However, he hadn’t stepped in to end the friendship, so maybe it was just that.
“Well, why don’t you select a very mild cigar for me and I will try it tonight?”
He came back with a fat, long Montecristo. “Don’t worry about the size. The longer, the smoother the draw. Just try it, and don’t try to smoke all of it. A few pleasant notes.” He smiled while he rang up the bill, throwing in a large box of cigar matches. “From me to you.” He handed her a blue pack of Dunhills. “You will enjoy them.”
“I know I will. Thank you.”
“You always use a match to light your cigarette, no?”
She nodded. “Yes.”
“Good.” His hand swept over the case in the middle of the room. “Expensive, very pretty to hold in the hand, but the tobacco remembers the butane. A match, yes, always use a match. And don’t tell, because I need to sell those lighters.” He laughed.
He was right, too. The oily note of butane could slightly taint the tobacco. Purists always used matches.
She walked out like a kid from the candy store who was given a swirled cherry sucker. She knew that smoking was bad for your health. She truly believed everyone would be better off without it, but in her job she could be dead in a minute. Right now. An alarm could go off in a car in the parking lot or a store. She’d answer the call and the perp could blow her away. The thought of her mortality stayed close. So why not take a nicotine hit? She told herself she wasn’t really a smoker. She only bummed a cigarette a day from Rick.
She opened the car, put the brown paper bag in the passenger seat, and fired the motor. He’d be thrilled with his carton of exquisite cigarettes.
As Cooper drove back to the station, Harry was leaning over a paddock fence with Paul de Silva, looking at the Mineshaft colt, now nine months old. Big Mim produced good results in everything she did. She’d bred her broodmares to a variety of good sires, most of them middle range in price. The Mineshaft colt was anything but middle range, the stud fee being one hundred thousand dollars.
Big Mim had been smart to take her best mare, the one with the best cross, to Mineshaft when she did, because the sire’s fee was bound to rise. The top end of the Thoroughbred market was very healthy. The middle and the low end had begun to sag, reflecting economic fear, punishing gas prices, and taxes that would most assuredly rise. The situation in the Mideast hardly engendered economic confidence, either.
“What’s she going to do?” Harry admired the dark-bay fellow.
“I think she’s going to keep him.”
“Really?” This was news.
“Says she hasn’t run a horse on the flat in decades.” Paul loved the horses, but Tazio’s situation had dampened his usual high spirits.
“Heard anything?”
“Ned sees her every day. Even when he’s in Richmond. I went down Sunday.”
“How did she look?”
“Beautiful.” A flash of the courtier returned. “Tired. Worried.”
“I thought I’d go down Friday.”
“Set bail.”
“I heard.” Harry folded her hands as she leaned over the top rail.
“Two hundred fifty thousand dollars. For a woman who has never even had a parking ticket.”
“Murder One.” Harry looked down at her boots. “I’m sorry, Paul. We’ll find a way. You know we’re all trying.”
The cats, Tucker, and Brinkley watched the Mineshaft foal and the others, too.
“I want Mommy.” Brinkley’s soft brown eyes filled with tears.
“Be strong. She needs you to be strong,” Tucker advised. “We’re here to help.”
“I miss her so much. Paul is a nice man, but I miss her scent, her voice. I love her. She loves me. She is my best friend.”
“We know how you feel,” Pewter commiserated.
For a moment, Mrs. Murphy and Tucker remained silent, for Pewter rarely admitted how much she loved Harry. She pretended to be aloof.
“Brinkley, did your mom ever say anything about Carla? Not how much trouble she was, but if she’d seen her, say, with another man?”
“No. She said that she thought Carla and Mike McElvoy would kill each other if she didn’t kill them first. She didn’t mean that. It was a figure of speech.”
“Can you think of anyone who hated your mom? Hated her enough to set her up?”
“No. Even Carla wouldn’t have done that. Carla needed Mom, even if she did treat her ugly.” The lab’s gorgeous coat appeared almost white in the afternoon sun.
“True.” Mrs. Murphy stretched. “And Tazio needed Carla. It was an important commission. She couldn’t afford to get a reputation that might turn other people away.”
“They’d only have to know Carla to know the truth of that.” Brinkley’s neck fur ruffled in indignation.
“People have to live here for a while to know those things. New people listen. Actually, even people who aren’t new listen. A gossip campaign does damage,” Mrs. Murphy sagely noted. “Humans are prone to it.”
“Remember the Republican primary in South Carolina in 2000?” Tucker followed these things with Harry as they both watched the TV or read the paper. “They saw that Karl Rove started a whispering campaign about John McCain having an affair with a woman of color. You’d think no one would believe it. Did. Carla’s gossip could have hurt Tazio if Tazio had really set her off.”
“Mother didn’t kill her, no matter what.” Brinkley was adamant.
“Who’s growling?” Harry turned from the fence.
Paul did, as well. “Brinkley, be nice.”
“I am.” Brinkley lay down, putting his head on his paws.
“He’s so sad, poor fellow,” Paul remarked. “I’m not much help. I feel…I can’t even describe how I feel.”
Mrs. Murphy rubbed against Brinkley. “Anything else, anything at all?”
“No. Mother said that Carla was an emotionally unrestrained person. She considered it irresponsible. After Dr. Wylde was shot, Carla called to cancel her meeting with Mom and Mike, and when Mom put down the phone she said Carla was behaving like an idiot, that you would have thought Dr. Wylde was her lover, the way she was sobbing.”
Mrs. Murphy stopped mid-rub. She said nothing, but a tiny piece of this wretched puzzle had fallen into place.
25
There’s an old carny trick, successful over the centuries in rural America. A barker called people to the sideshows. He extolled the beauty and weirdness of the bearded lady, the enormous b
ulk of the fat man, the frightening aspect of the reptile boy, each in their separate tents. Other human oddities filled a row of tents.
When the crowds became large enough, before the tickets were sold, the barker would helpfully tell the crowd—mostly men, since genteel ladies would be too repelled to attend—to protect their money from pickpockets.
Human nature: the men would reach for their wallet to make sure it was still there. They’d pat a breast pocket if wearing a seersucker coat or their hip pocket if in jeans or overalls. Since the pickpockets worked with the barker, giving him a contested percent—he knew they underreported their take—they were in the crowd. Pickpockets noted who patted what, and the rest was easy as pie.
Mike patted his pocket, so to speak, after checking over Little Mim and Blair’s plans. He had been uncharacteristically mild, mindful that she was the vice mayor of Crozet.
He drove back to Woolen Mills, where he and Noddy owned a well-kept wooden house. Noddy, being queen of that house, suffered few changes to her way of doing things. Mike had his shed for the lawn mower, gun repair, and tools, and a separate office near the tool room. He could live in there, since he’d tricked it out, put in R-19 insulation, added windows. His small desk held a new computer. A small propane fireplace rested along one wall, and in winter it heated the twelve-by-fourteen-foot office area more than enough. He’d also insulated the floor. First, he’d put down a vapor barrier, then the wooden support slats—two-by-fours, running parallel—and stuffed that with insulation. Next he’d put down a good hardwood floor, having been given some nice oak overflow from a construction site. Under his desk he had a trapdoor concealed by a hard rubber floor covering, so he could roll around on his desk chair without marking up the beautiful stained and waxed oak.
He told Noddy he couldn’t stand sitting at a desk in the house when she roared through with the vacuum cleaner, ordering him to lift his feet.
He opened his office door and looked out the windows to see if anyone was around, which they weren’t. He pulled the shades just in case. Noddy wouldn’t come home from work for another hour, given the traffic. Still, one couldn’t be too careful.
He walked into the tool part of the shed, came back with an old towel, put it on the floor, and rolled the chair onto the towel. Mike was as fussy as Noddy. Then he pulled the mat away. Down on his hands and knees, he slipped his forefinger through the recessed brass half ring, which was painted black, and lifted the trapdoor. He stepped down into the small area, not four feet by six feet, which was low but he could stand. Shelves lined the four walls, but only one side of the shelves was filled. He pulled out a key, squatted down, and opened a metal strongbox on the bottom shelf. He counted the cash: sixty-two thousand dollars collected over the years. He examined the jewelry, much of it very valuable. Someday way off in the future he would take the jewelry up to New York and fence it, if he could bear to part with it. Mike appreciated beauty. He shut the small heavy metal door, listening for the sweet click of the automatic lock.
His knees creaked when he stood up. Colored wooden boxes lined the next shelf. He opened one box to gaze at the lace panties within, each one snatched from a conquest—most not terribly willing—over his years as inspector. Smiling broadly, he picked up an emerald-green pair and slipped his hand through a leg opening to gaze at the fine handiwork on the lace. Made by hand, the lace testified that these select undies belonged to a woman of taste and money. Penny Lattimore, in fact. He folded the panties, putting them back in the box.
He loved his victories. He loved the power over women. Hurting a woman wasn’t his goal. Mike wasn’t a mean man, simply a weak and screwed-up man. He liked making them pay. From some he just took jewelry and money. Others, sex. Still others, both. You never knew in this world, and cash was hard to procure. As for the jewelry, he thought of the ears, necks, wrists, and fingers on which they had sparkled. The panties—now, there lay a prize. Oh, he had to wear them down to get those panties off, but he’d learned over the years that most women had secrets, secrets they wanted kept from their husbands, even a child out of wedlock. He’d learned to read the signs: not much communication with their husbands, obsession with their looks. Being unfulfilled, their energies were directed elsewhere, and sometimes he could catch their nervousness when the subject of sex out of wedlock came up. He made sure it filtered into early conversations with a woman; usually he disguised it as a joke. Finding something wrong in the building code occurred after patient research of the lady of the house.
Noddy bragged to friends how hard Mike worked, how dedicated he was to his job. Little did she know.
26
Claustrophobia gripped Benita Wylde. Not the suffocating kind, where a person becomes terrified in an elevator, but the soft claustrophobia of staying in the house. She needed to get out and do something.
She’d been to the office only once since Will was shot, and that seemed like it had been years ago during the day, seconds ago during the night. Time confused her. Somehow it seemed absurd, marking time. Everything seemed absurd and empty without Will, but she forced herself to not lose those threads that bind a life. Bills will come in and must be paid. Keep on keeping on.
Margaret Westlake sat at the front desk area, which had a sliding-glass window. She looked up from a schedule book, where she had written the names of doctors filling in for Will until a permanent solution could be found.
Surprised to see his widow, she jumped out of her chair and gave Benita a big hug.
“I came by to see how you girls are doing; you’ve all been so good to come by the house every day.”
Hearing Benita’s voice, Sophie Denham came out of an examining room, and Kylie Kraft came up the hallway, folders in hand.
After exchanging kisses and some tears, Benita said to the three women, “I thought perhaps I could help with outstanding accounts. I know all of Will’s patients were devoted to him, but his passing might encourage a few to delay their payment. So I thought I’d go over those accounts if you have them separated out. If not, I can separate them out. I have a rough idea of the system.”
Margaret replied, “You and I are on the same wavelength. I’ve been working on it.”
Benita looked at Kylie and said, “Since there is more time, you might go over the codes. I know the insurance companies send updated discs, if I remember what Will said. Used to make him mad every time they’d jack up a procedural cost…well, anyway.” She paused because she didn’t want to cry again. “Things can get confusing. You might just check from the last updated disc forward to make sure nothing has been misbilled. Is that a real word?”
“Is now.” Sophie, glad she was a nurse, had no patience for the bookkeeping aspect of medicine.
Kylie replied, “I’m not the coder. I’m trying to learn it, though.”
“Ah, well, you do what you’re doing, then,” Benita replied. Margaret punched buttons on the computer, then handed Benita the two sheets that printed out.
“Mmm.” Benita was surprised at some of the names. “Carla Paulson.” She shook her head. “Two hundred one dollars and twenty-nine cents. Margaret, I think best not to bill second notice. I have some idea of what Jurgen is going through.”
“That marriage wasn’t quite what yours was, Benita.”
“I’d heard that.” Benita noted that Carla’s bill was a simple checkup as well as a mammogram. “Why is the mammogram on our bill?” She touched her forehead. “Forgot. That machine cost more than our house, but it’s about paid for itself, hasn’t it?”
“People don’t want to go to the hospital or even hospital adjuncts. Here they’re with their personal physician, trusting him and Sophie. It’s faster, more pleasant. He can read the mammogram right in front of them. If something needs to be done, it can be scheduled right then and there. You know Dr. Wylde never dallied if he thought there was any possibility of—how did he always put it—‘ugly cells.’” Margaret felt a knot in her voice. “He knew just how to put things so a woman felt confiden
t no matter what.”
“He was a sensitive man.” Benita put her hand over Margaret’s. “We’ll get through this. And I will make a decision about this office within a month. You all don’t have to worry about anything.”
“I know.” Margaret cast her eyes down, then up, and looked out the glass partition. “If we stay here, if another doctor buys the practice, we’ll work with him, but it will never be the same. Dr. Wylde kept us laughing the whole day. He was the only doctor I know who could tell a woman she had breast cancer or cervical cancer and make her laugh. Very few women left here in tears, and you know how adamant he was about counseling if a woman was going to get a termination.”
“Yes, I do.”
Will did not discuss his patients’ illnesses with his wife, as he was scrupulous about all things pertaining to confidentiality, but they talked about everything else.
Laughter had drawn her to Will in the first place. Both of them came from working-class families, very good families; both were working their way through college with the help of scholarships. Will wasn’t the handsomest man, but he was the funniest, kindest man she had ever met. Benita, being beautiful, had college boys running out of every frat house on campus when she’d walk by. But Will won her.
After they completed undergraduate school, she worked to put him through med school. He never once cheated on her, even if he was inclined, because he remembered the sacrifices, her staying up with him when he needed coffee or extra help to study. This struggle brought them so close to each other. It also made Harvey Tillach’s accusation all the more unpalatable. They accepted each other’s foibles—her blind passion for golf, his irritating habit of thinking he could fix either of the cars if something went wrong. Mostly, they laughed. When the children came, all four of them would be laughing.
She tried to remember the laughter.
“Do you want me to send out a second notice?” Margaret returned to the list.
The Purrfect Murder Page 18