by Sarah Graves
“Janet,” I said, leaning in even more confidentially, “what happened over there the other morning? I am,” I added in my best you-can-tell-me-about-it manner, “just dying to know.”
Janet paused. She so seldom had any good gossip to tell, it was really a sin to tempt her. I vowed inwardly to make a good Act of Contrition as soon as it was convenient.
Or possible; one of the requirements, I hear, is that you be sorry.
“Well, I shouldn’t say,” she began, then glanced around with elaborate preliminary caution.
No one was eavesdropping from among the racks of flannel jumpers, soft and comfortable as baby’s blankets, or from under the pile of toy stuffed seals, their black whiskers bristling and their shoe-button eyes gleaming bright, that one of the guild’s artisans had spent the whole previous winter creating out of the covering from an old Naugahyde recliner.
“But,” she added slowly, with a little frown, “if I don’t say, people will gossip anyway, only the gossip will be wrong.”
“That is so true,” I agreed, wanting to reach out and shake her. She was being so slow, it was as if she was trying to remember what happened instead of merely getting ready to tell it.
“I was upstairs with Hedda,” she began at last, but just then the bell over the shop door jingled as a local woman, Marion Waddell, floated in on a happy cloud, having married a fellow twenty years her junior, two weeks earlier.
Marion favored Janet and me with sweet, sympathetic glances as she bought herbal bath salts, a white voile nightdress luscious with lace and ribbon trim, and a box of note cards.
“Oh, I hate that woman,” Janet said when Marion had floated out again. “Her and her silly romance.”
I hated her, too; I’d had Janet right on the edge of talking, and Marion had knocked her off the track. “Come on. What have you got to be jealous about? Bobby Taylor isn’t chopped liver.”
Janet shrugged sullenly. “Patty’s right. He’s only after the family money. Not that he’s going to get any of it, now, but what else would he want with me?”
“You’re being much too hard on yourself,” I said. “Now tell me what happened the other morning.”
Sometimes a sharp, direct order will get people going; in her case, it worked perfectly. Janet Fox was like a dog who has been trained with a shock collar: so anxious to please that it negates any pleasure you may derive from its efforts.
“Well, I was upstairs,” she said. “I heard my father and Mr. White arguing in the study. We both heard it. Hedda and me, I mean.”
“Could you hear what they were arguing about?”
She shook her head. “No. Well, only a few words. It was about money. Mr. White wanted some and Dad didn’t want to give it to him.”
So far this agreed with what Alvin had said. “Was that all?”
“No.” She looked uncomfortable. “My dad said that Mr. White owed everything to him. Even …”
Janet’s voice dropped to a whisper. “Even his wife.”
“Really. What did he mean by that, do you suppose?”
“I don’t know.” She started at her bitten nails. “That’s all I heard.” For a moment the comfortable crackling of the fire in the woodstove was the only sound in the little shop.
“Dad wasn’t a nice man,” said Janet softly, and all at once I felt even sorrier for her. She was so passive and pliant that if I’d ordered her to stand on her head, she’d probably have tried.
“He thought it was funny, my wanting to find my mother,” she said, biting her lip. “Like it was some big, stupid joke I’d thought up to make myself ridiculous.”
She shrugged, her eyes glistening with sudden, resentful tears. “But it wasn’t a joke to me.”
“No,” I replied. “Of course it wasn’t. It must have been hard to put up with him, sometimes. How is that going for you, by the way? Looking for your mother?”
Once, the previous summer, I’d asked Ellie how she put up with Hedda. We’d been driving along the road to Gleeson’s Beach, in the sunshine after a brief spring shower, slowing as a grouse made its herky-jerky way out of the scrub trees, breathing in the sliced-apple smell of fresh chamomile mingled with the perfume of rain-slaked pavement.
“Hedda,” said Ellie, “is a grim, hateful person. She is an unnatural mother, she is never going to be anything else. I didn’t make her that way, and I can’t stop her being that way.”
She looked at me. I remember she had tied her red hair back with a purple plaid ribbon, and the effect was jauntily harlequin.
“She is never going to love me,” Ellie said. “She is never even going to like me.”
We’d rounded the last curve, past the ball field that a bunch of the local men had carved out of an abandoned pasture. A skinny old fellow was hauling a brace of chains across the infield. After that the road went to rutted dirt, opening onto a sandy spit over a tide pond where the wreck of a dory sagged against an abandoned pier.
“And the day I figured that out,” Ellie had said, “was the day I became able to deal with Hedda.”
Ellie had come to an agreement with herself about her mother, but Janet Fox hadn’t ever gotten that far with her father, and now she wouldn’t. I thought it would make Janet’s search for her birth mother more urgent, but Janet surprised me.
“I’ve decided to forget about that,” she answered, busying herself with a needless tidying of the counter. Her gaze darted up to meet mine in a flash of hostility; that and something else, but I wasn’t sure what, only that I’d touched a nerve.
“Anyway, a little while later I heard Ellie down there, with my father,” Janet said, resuming her normal plaintive tone. “I’d gone down the back stairs to the kitchen, because Hedda wanted a drink. But Ellie and my father were together in the pantry where the liquor is, so I stopped.”
“What were they saying?”
“I don’t know.” Janet looked anxious and angry. “Ellie sounded upset, but he was laughing. He would always do that, laugh when you were mad at him. Like you were such a fool to disagree with him, you know, because he would always get his way in the end.”
She paused, her lips tightening as she remembered this.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “If you could hear their tone of voice, why couldn’t you hear what they were saying? You weren’t very far away, were you?”
“No, I was only on the back stairs, where it turns. But one of them”—she frowned, concentrating on getting this part right—“was chopping ice. I heard the ice pick going into a bunch of ice cubes from the bottom of the ice maker. The sound it makes, a sort of chunk, and then ice cubes rattling.”
Damn. This was bad for Ellie. “So then what did you do?”
“I had to go back upstairs and tell Hedda she would have to wait.”
Making Hedda wait was like shaking nitroglycerine. “That couldn’t have been too pleasant.”
Janet looked up, surprised. “Oh, no,” she said. “It was no trouble. If you just explain things to Hedda, she goes along pretty well.”
In other words, Hedda had already been too plastered to make much fuss. “So what happened when you did go down to get Hedda her drink? And when did you?”
Something was wrong, a muddle in the sequence of events, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.
“Well,” Janet said, “it was a while. Maybe half an hour. I’d been doing Hedda’s makeup with her, and her hair, to distract her. Somebody came to the door and Mr. White answered, so I knew Elliewas gone or she would have done it. After that I went down and got the drink, and took it back upstairs,”
“Nobody was in the pantry by then. Nothing seemed unusual.”
“No. Well,” she corrected herself, “the pantry floor had been mopped, and the trash bag was tied. That’s all.”
“Janet, did you see Nina anywhere around that morning? In the house? On her way in or out?” Anything, I meant, to lend credence to the idea that Nina Mcllwaine could have murdered her husband.
Janet
looked at me, blank-eyed. “No. I was upstairs with Hedda most of the time. I told you.”
“Right, of course you did. Did you tell that to the police investigator, about the mopped floor, and the trash bag?”
None of this was going the way I’d wanted.
“Yes,” Janet Fox replied, “I did. Why, is it important?”
The last time anybody asked me that, it was a widow—not, fortunately, my client—whose just-deceased husband had over a period of twenty years been secretly borrowing against his life insurance. The policy, which other than the nickels and dimes of his Social Security benefit was to have been her sole support, was by the time of his death about as valuable as used Kleenex.
“Is it,” the recent widow had asked, “important?”
I didn’t answer that time, either.
29
After that, things just got steadily worse:
When I got home, there was another pile of gravel bags near my driveway—those Bileo doors, I reminded myself again—and the woman I’d seen getting out of her car in front of Bob Arnold’s office was waiting on my doorstep. She was an investigator from the Maine State District Attorney’s office; her name was Clarissa Dow, and it was her job—she didn’t say this, but I knew—to gather the information that would become the state’s case against Ellie White.
I let Clarissa in while the cameras crowded around her and the reporters shouted questions, but she wasn’t listening to them and neither did I. I sat her down in the kitchen, where in order to convey my feelings for the nature of her task, I created a pile of fish innards. From the look on her face, you would think she had never seen a pollack being gutted before.
She got the when-and-where details squared away first off: what time Ellie had arrived on the fatal morning, and when I found Mcllwaine, and what time Ellie left. She covered Ellie’s second appearance and the ice pick, and the way Ellie had phrased her confession, too.
Overall, I got the impression that Clarissa was fairly bored by the whole sordid story, and that as far as she was concerned, Ellie was merely a murderous nobody whom Clarissa would like to put away as swiftly and efficiently as possible.
Which naturally got my dander up.
“Mrs. Tiptree, how long have you known Miss White?”
“Just over a year.” I finished with the scraper, and picked up the filleting knife.
Clarissa looked at me as if expecting more of an answer.
I didn’t give her one.
“And do you know her parents?” she asked, a bit more crisply.
“Yes,” I replied, and cut off the pollack’s head. A carving knife is more appropriate for this task, but in the mood I was in, one sharp implement was plenty.
Nina, Janet Fox had assured me once more, had not been in the Whites’ house the morning Mcllwaine died, or anyway Janet had not seen Nina there. In fact, Janet hadn’t seen anything useful, other than the mopped floor and trash bag—the remains, obviously, of the cleanup after Mcllwaine’s murder.
“Mrs. Tiptree,” Clarissa said after a pause—possibly she was upset at my lack of enthusiasm for her goal, which was to help convict Ellie—“you do realize that this is a criminal investigation.”
“The victim,” I pointed out, gesturing with the bloody knife, “turned up in my storeroom.”
Clarissa was thirtyish, with dark, curly hair and just enough carefully applied makeup to avoid looking mannish. Her nails were short ovals coated fastidiously with clear polish, and her eyes were the merciless blue of icebergs.
“Ellie,” I added, “didn’t do it.”
Clarissa looked down at her hands, and when she looked up again the icebergs had splinters in them.
“Would you say you know Miss White fairly well?”
“Yes. Yes, I suppose I would.”
There was another long pause, during which she apparently expected me to say more. Instead I slid the filleting knife down the pollack’s spinal column. It was a tricky job and I concentrated on it, aiming the knifepoint carefully.
Clarissa sighed heavily. “Mrs. Tiptree, we’re getting nowhere. I’m trying to get a sense of your relationship with Miss White.”
“Friend. Ellie is my friend.”
“I see.” Clarissa wrote this down in her notebook. Then pointedly, “And what kind of person is Miss White, in your opinion? As I already mentioned, she has confessed to murder.”
“Yes, I know that,” I replied. “I heard her say it. But—”
Clarissa’s expression reminded me of a securities salesman I’d known, back in the bad old days, who used to read newspaper obituaries looking for “triple crowns”: recent widows who might be expected soon to receive large lump-sum distributions, with no adult children to stand in the way of a killing.
For the securities salesman, that is. “I don’t believe Ellie White murdered anyone,” I repeated. “She isn’t capable of it, and if you’d take the time to talk with her yourself, you’d know that, instead of sitting here writing her up like she’s some sort of law-school assignment.”
Clarissa closed her notebook with the calm precision of a person who is deliberately not losing her temper, even though you are being as dumb as a box of rocks.
She didn’t quite roll her eyes, but she might as well have. “Mrs. Tiptree, the forensic team has already fluoresced blood from the floor and woodwork of the pantry in the Whites’ house, indicating that the crime most likely occurred there; we expect to find blood in the sink trap, and on a towel we recovered, which we believe was used to clean up Mr. Mcllwaine’s blood.”
“None of that means Ellie did it. We don’t lock our doors in Eastport; anyone could have walked in and killed him.”
She shook her head at me, frustrated and losing her patience. This, I could see her thinking, was what happened when you tried dealing with the locals in these remote, isolated little towns. They just didn’t get it. “Traces of blood are also present on clothes belonging to Ellie White. She had access to the purported weapon, which on early examination matches the wound, and she had a motive, the details of which we are in the process of uncovering. Finally,” she saved her best shot for last, “Miss White says she did it.”
Clarissa took a deep breath. “Now, in light of all this, are you suggesting that I go out and canvass the neighborhood, looking for some stranger who just happened to be around, wandered into the Whites’ house, and killed Mr. Mcllwaine for no reason? When I have evidence against someone with a motive, who’s confessed?”
“No, I’m just suggesting you dig deeper than you apparently intend to. Threnody Mcllwaine was a wealthy and powerful man with rumored links to organized crime. Plenty of people could have wanted him dead.” Including, I added silently, his wife.
But Clarissa didn’t want to consider alternatives. For one thing, if she did, that contaminated crime scene would become an issue, which it wasn’t, now.
“None of whom are saying they did it, or walking around with their clothing smeared with his blood,” she said firmly. “Your feelings aside, Mrs. Tiptree, there is nothing here to suggest any suspect other than Miss White. And I must say, I don’t understand your uncooperative attitude.”
I smacked the knife down. “My attitude, Miss Dow, is that you intend to make career points by helping to convict Ellie, put another notch in your investigator’s belt, maybe get a promotion out of it. Fine. Do that if you want to. But I don’t have to help you without a subpoena, and I’m not. Got it?”
It was the mention of a promotion, I think, that corked it, the comment hitting a little too close to home.
She rose abruptly and snapped her briefcase shut. “I can see you and I don’t have anything to talk about. Maybe you’ll be less hostile when you’re testifying to a grand jury.”
Her comment confused me, but I didn’t let that stop me. I followed her to the door. “Oh, so you’re not sure you can get an indictment? And here I thought your case was already so airtight.”
She spun around at me. “A grand jury is s
tandard procedure for a crime of this type. I have no doubt an indictment will be returned.”
There was a tiny spot of something on her lapel; chowder, I realized with spiteful pleasure.
“You think you can protect your friend,” she said witheringly. “You think you can get away with not talking to me. But you won’t when you’re sitting in Federal court to testify. For,” she added tightly, “the prosecution.”
Then she stopped, realizing what she’d said, glancing sharply at me to see if I’d caught it.
I kept my game face on despite feeling I’d been sucker-punched.
“Prosecution,” I repeated slowly, making sure that I sounded aghast at the idea. “Why, I couldn’t possibly do that.”
Clarissa’s blue eyes narrowed in satisfaction and relief.
“Oh, you will,” she promised unpleasantly. “You should have thought about it before you made an enemy out of me.”
But I hadn’t. She’d already been one. After she left, I went back into the kitchen, thinking about what she’d said.
The plan was obvious, now that she’d made her slip: Clean the case up, make sure it’s all shipshape. Then hand it over to the Federal government, which must already have indicated its interest. Otherwise how could Clarissa already have known that Ellie was headed for a Federal court? That’s what she’d meant by her talk of grand juries and indictments.
Jemmy’s information, plus my experience in nurse-maiding the ill-gotten gains of a whole thieves’ gallery of nervous clients, gave me a theory about why, and it was a theory that chilled my blood.
Mcllwaine’s mob-relatedness—and I had no reason to doubt Jemmy on this—could make him a potential witness for an organized-crime probe, one of which always seemed to be going on. He might have had good reasons for cooperating with such an investigation, the strongest—at least according to many of my ex-clients—being the promise of his own immunity.
I got on the phone to Toby Alderman. “Hey, Toby, did you see any guys who didn’t belong there sniffing around Ellie’s case? Having mysterious conferences in the judge’s chambers, or hanging out in the municipal building, anything like that?”