The Dead Cat Bounce

by Sarah Graves

  And this, I have to report, did cheer me more than somewhat: ordinary life, going on in its ordinary way, a perception that doughnuts and coffee did nothing to dull. So that by the time the kennel lady came by to get Monday and take away her for a holiday—I might have to stay at the Whites’ house myself, but there was no way I was going to put Monday through it—I felt better.

  Monday frisked with excitement at the prospect of an outing. She was fully recovered now, rowdying around, begging for biscuits and flashing her pink-tongued, irrepressible grin, and I sent her off feeling happy that she at least would have a good time. Eastport’s kennel, located on three fenced acres overlooking the cove at Kendall’s Head, is the canine equivalent of Club Med. But when she was gone, discouragement washed over me again.

  If Ellie were here, she would be moving around the house with crisp efficiency: vetoing my overnight-bag decisions, criticizing my toiletry choices, and generally leavening her assistance with dry, downeast commentary on everything from the weather to the organization (or lack thereof) of my underwear drawer.

  I missed her dreadfully, and when I reached the Whites’ house it was clear that Alvin missed her, too. He looked worn and haggard, his hand trembling as he let me in.

  I pressed past him and he closed the door hurriedly as if against a rush of reporters, unaware, apparently, that they no longer swarmed outside. Too bad, I thought, that they hadn’t been around to get film of Nina, sputtering in a mud puddle.

  Shaking his head in dismay, Alvin turned the dead-bolt. “Thank you for coming, Jacobia,” he said.

  “Who’s that?” Hedda demanded from upstairs. “Who’s there?” she cried in a voice that sounded dangerously on the edge of hysteria, and I saw Alvin flinch as her cane thumped insistently on the floor above.

  “In fine form,” I observed, putting my things down.

  “Oh, yes.” He managed a smile, his voice a thready quaver. “She’s vigorous. As always.”

  He shuffled away from me into the parlor. I had never seen him shuffle before, nor his shoulders slump beneath the rumpled pullover that he wore in place of his usual crisp shirting. He seemed on the edge of exhaustion, which puzzled me—Janet Fox had been here for at least part of the day—as did the reek of burnt vegetables emanating from the kitchen. But a quick glance through the pantry told the tale:

  In the kitchen, the sink was heaped with unwashed pots and plates, the stove crusted in spilled food, and the trash bin overflowing. Opened cans, frozen pizza wrappings, and an emptied bourbon bottle littered the counter. Janet’s duties, it seemed, consisted of helping Hedda ingest junk food and booze.

  “Nurse!” Hedda yelled from upstairs. “Help, murder, police!”

  “I’m so sorry,” Alvin said, appearing behind me.

  “Alvin, has Janet been giving Hedda drugs?” Of course she had; she’d said so in the craft shop, but this sounded much more serious than half a Valium tablet.

  Alvin’s eyes filled with tears. “I don’t know what to do. Hedda was all right until a little while ago. Well,” he amended, “she was drunk. But now she’s—”

  “Help! They’re killing me!”

  Alvin began to weep. “I’m so ashamed. I don’t want anyone to see …”

  He sobbed helplessly. “We’re too old for this, Jacobia. And without Ellie to help us, we’re just falling apart.”

  I had seen it before in elderly clients: they were fine until some big stress came along, but when it did, it ate up more than their financial reserves. An accident, an illness, or some other change in their routine suddenly gobbled up the last of their energy. Still, the change in Alvin was shocking.

  “Alvin, believe me, this isn’t your fault. Now, I want you to find all the prescription bottles you can, and bring them to me.”

  “Whenever I start to clean up,” he went on, not hearing me, “Hedda needs something, but then I can’t seem to do the right thing for her, either. It’s awful, realizing you can’t take care of yourself anymore. And I’m so worried about Ellie.”

  He was past being able to help me, or anyone. “Okay, Alvin,” I said. “You go sit down. Everything is going to be okay.”

  I thought about calling an ambulance, getting Hedda out of the house and into the hospital in Calais for the night, if only to get Alvin some rest. But that would only upset Alvin further.

  “Alvin, I want you to stay right there in that chair.”

  “‘Don’t you move,’” he quoted, with the heartbreaking ghost of an Alvinish smile, “‘a goddamned inch.’”

  I wanted to ask him why Mcllwaine had paid him all that money. I wanted to grab him and shake him, make him tell me the whole truth. But he looked so fragile and careworn, I just didn’t have the heart to, and besides, there was nothing I could do about it now, anyway.

  Tomorrow, I thought. Tomorrow morning will be time enough.

  That’s what I thought.

  Alvin’s smile vanished, and when he spoke next I couldn’t be sure if he was quoting or merely reporting.

  “I tell you, Jacobia,” he said, “my day’s just been one long fizzle from beginning to end.”

  Mine, too.

  43

  “Pearl-handled revolver,” Hedda muttered.

  It was almost midnight, and outside Hedda’s window, the fog billowed up from the waterfront in thickening waves, urged along by the foghorns in the murky night.

  “I don’t see why any of this is necessary,” Hedda slurred.

  “Because you weren’t feeling well. Some of the pills you took reacted badly together, and the bourbon didn’t help any, either.”

  Hedda’s sour expression, as I adjusted her pillow and pulled the shade behind her head, snowed her opinion of that diagnosis.

  “Janet gave me the pills. Janet lets me drink.” She glanced hopefully at her water glass, which she had kept emptying all evening and I had continued refilling.

  I’d called her doctor in Machias, who suggested that I watch her carefully, and wash some of the pills out of her system with plenty of fluids. If her condition changed, he said, I should call him and he would come up right away, but so far his suggestions seemed to be working: Hedda was less crazy. Meanwhile from various caches around the house I’d collected enough little orange bottles to stock a pharmacy, for drugs prescribed for Janet by a variety of physicians in Chicago and New York.

  “Janet,” I said, “is a fool.”

  She was also something of a con artist, it seemed. I’d have bet money that all those doctors in Chicago were not aware of one another. Janet’s trips hadn’t only been to find her lost birth mother. They were also, apparently, to feed a narcotics habit. No wonder she was so flat and affectless; Janet was chronically sedated.

  Hedda’s eyes, bright and birdlike, glittered with dislike, but her pupils had shrunk to their normal size and her speech was not as slurred as it had been. I’d put Alvin to bed on the sofa in the downstairs parlor, giving him half of one of the sedatives Janet dispensed as liberally as Halloween candies.

  “I’m going …” Hedda began, lurching up determinedly.

  I stood over her. “You’re going nowhere except maybe to the bathroom and back.”

  Fortunately, she could do that on her own, although by the third or fourth trip I’d given in and started helping her get her legs back up onto the bed, pulling the blanket up over the scars that crisscrossed her ankles and climbed up her lower legs. Even after thirty years, there was no mistaking the devastation that long-ago attack had wreaked upon her, the marks sharp and ugly as old barbed wire.

  I thought again about what Jemmy had told me: that Mcllwaine was behind the attack.

  “Bastards,” she spat when she saw me looking at the scars. “Ruined my life.” Snatching the blanket, yanking it over herself, she’d winced at the pain in her arthritic hands, her fingers so swollen and misshapen with the disease that she could barely hold her water glass.

  “Damn it, I need something,” she’d complained.

  “I kno
w, Hedda.” Her usual arthritis medicine, a mixture of aspirin and codeine, was in my pocket. “But I can’t give you any pills until I’m sure the mess of stuff Janet gave you has gotten out of your system.”

  By that point, I really did feel sorry for her. One side effect of Janet’s unorthodox medication scheme was that Hedda had been relatively pain-free for a couple of days. But her doctor had warned me against putting anything on top of the mixture she already had on board. He would come if I needed him, he’d repeated, but he expected that Hedda would probably sleep it off.

  “And if I have to tie you into that bed to make sure that’s what happens, that’s what I’ll do,” I assured her sternly.

  Hedda gave me a glare that could have curdled milk, then settled back at last in defeat, her eyelids lowering slowly like heavy crepe draperies. Gradually her harsh breathing subsided into the regular rhythms of sleep, and after a while I knew that it was safe to leave her.

  From the top of the hall stairs I could hear Alvin snoring softly, too, the sound reassuring because I had felt nervous over giving him the sedative. But it seemed to have done no harm, and with the two old people at last safely out for the count, I went to the kitchen and put on a pot of coffee, and turned my attention to the dishes.

  I had cleared away the trash, scrubbed out the crusted pots, and gotten the plates and silver stowed into the dishwasher when a tap came on the back door. My first thought was that it was some lingering reporter, but when I turned the back porch light on and peered cautiously out, it was Clarissa Dow.

  I opened the door. By now it was misting steadily, the sort of thin, penetrating rain that seems to come at you from all directions. She stood there in a too-large yellow slicker, soaked shoes, and no hat, her sodden hair plastered to the sides of her face. But from her expression I could see that the weather had nothing to do with the sea-change that had come over Clarissa.

  “Can I come in?”

  I stepped aside. Her stockings were mud-spattered. She’d gotten a pair of green rubber chukkas from somewhere, and at the ends of her slender legs they looked as big as duck feet.

  “So,” she said, glancing around the Whites’ kitchen, “how do you make sure you’ve got all the bones out of those fish you were cleaning yesterday, anyway?”

  I held my hand out for her slicker and her shoulder bag, and hung them on a hook. “The test is, you cook the fish and eat it. If you choke, then you missed one.”

  She laughed, shivering. “Figures. Not a lot of leeway for beginners around here, is there?” She ran a cold-reddened hand through her dripping hair.

  “Do you want a towel?”

  A pause. “Yeah. Thanks, I do. And some of that coffee, if it isn’t too much trouble.”

  I tossed her a towel from the linen cabinet in the back hall, then poured her a cup. “So. I guess Arnold must have told you I was going to be here. To what do I owe the honor?”

  She let out a big breath. “To me screwing up,” she said. “And to you being so stand-up about it.”

  The surprise must have showed on my face.

  “Hey, what can I say, you were right to be stubborn. I saw Ellie White again, today, and if she’s a killer then I am Imelda Marcos. And her story …”

  She sighed again. “It doesn’t work.”

  “The cleanup factor.” That was the sequence-of-events thing that had kept bothering me—when had Ellie had time to clean up after the murder?—but in the craziness of the day it had fallen to the bottom of my bag of assorted miseries.

  “Right.” She finished rubbing the water out of her hair and pushed the damp strands away from her face.

  “Everything else worked so well: great motive, all the blood evidence, her confession. And everybody else in the house can say where they were, what they were doing, vouch for one another.”

  “Even Alvin? Not that I think it’s him, but…”

  Alvin had only told me he was in his office at the critical time, not that anyone could swear that he was.

  “We got the phone records this afternoon,” Clarissa said. “He was on the phone with his insurance company, trying to cash in an old policy. They record calls from customers, and he’s so deaf on the phone, the call took a long time.”

  “So what’s the problem?” I asked. “Ellie’s the one who’s in custody, and if you don’t think she did it…”

  “The problem,” she replied tiredly, “is that number one, it’s not my call. The judge in district court decided not to accept her guilty plea.”

  Toby Alderman had probably tried to call me with that news, but with the power at my house gone out, my answering machine was incommunicado, too.

  “So now the whole thing goes to superior court. Or,” she added, “ordinarily that’s what’s supposed to happen. But it’s the attorney general who decides who gets prosecuted, not me.”

  “But don’t they take your recommendations? I mean, isn’t that what they send you out here for? And if you don’t believe in her confession—”

  “Right again. Usually. But I’m being reassigned. Tomorrow, I go up north to investigate some guy who poured gasoline on a house trailer and lit it.”

  She shook her head. “God, why did I become a lawyer?”

  “Dog catcher jobs all taken?”

  She grinned wryly. “Thanks. Anyway, the problem is this: I told my boss what I thought, that I made a mistake. It’s not so rare, you know, that confessions turn out to be unreliable. They are almost as unreliable as eyewitnesses, who almost always turn out to have it wrong.”

  She looked down at her coffee. “So I told him I thought this was one of those times, that I thought later on we were going to get nailed through the foot, if we let her plead on this. There’s something wrong with it.”

  “Really. And how did that go over?” By now, I thought I could guess.

  “That,” Clarissa replied, confirming my suspicion, “is how I got sent to Aroostook County, where I hear the gene pool contains approximately three working chromosomes.”

  I felt my hackles rise reflexively. “Hey. That’s not a very nice thing to say about people. You don’t know anything about what they’re like, up there, so why don’t you take your snotty attitude and go back to where you—”

  “Sorry.” She held one hand up in a please-stop gesture.

  I stopped, but I wasn’t finished, and I let her know it with the look on my face. For all I knew, she might not even be telling the truth. Maybe this was just some kind of trick to get useful information out of me.

  “Sorry, sorry,” she repeated. “I’m such an idiot. I didn’t even mean that. Bad habits die hard, I guess. And stupid habits. Ignorant ones.” She frowned, chastising herself.

  I backed off a little; at least she’d apologized. But after my ex-husband’s comments about my friends and neighbors, I was feeling sensitive.

  “Arnold’s been taking me out to every clam shack and lobster house between here and Camden,” she went on, “but I guess fish isn’t really brain food. Or maybe,” she finished, “it’s too late for me. I’ve been in the big city too long.”

  She fiddled with her coffee spoon. “He says there might still be hope for me, but maybe he’s too nice a guy to tell me the truth.”

  Then it hit me, what she’d said and the look on Arnold’s face when he’d talked about her, earlier. “Arnold’s been taking you out?”

  “Yeah,” she admitted sheepishly. “Working on me. Trying to soften me up.”

  “So?” I squinted in mock-assessment at her and she laughed reluctantly.

  “I guess it worked a little bit. He’s the one got me to go see Ellie again, talk to her. That’s when I figured out that for the time frame to work, she’d have definitely needed help, and there wasn’t any. Earlier, I’d thought I could finesse it, but…”

  She suppressed a damp shiver, and drank hot coffee. “That’s the part she got wrong, see. She’s specific about the time she got to your house, and it agrees with what you said.”

  “She k
new what I would tell you.”

  “Right. She couldn’t lie about that. We also know what time Mcllwaine’s wife dropped him off here; she and Alvin White agreed independently on that. And we know what time it was when you found him. All together, that time frame covers about an hour, between when he arrived and when you found him dead.”

  “Sounds like a pretty big window of opportunity, to me.”

  “But it’s not, because she didn’t have all that time. He had to be killed between the time he got there, and the time you found him at your place, right? But,” she went on without waiting for an answer, “within that time frame, it turns out there are only about five minutes during which Mcllwaine was in the Whites’ house and Ellie wasn’t in yours.”

  “Well. That is a little better. Two problems, though.”

  I sat across from her. “George Valentine says wounds don’t bleed much until the weapon comes out. So maybe there wasn’t very much cleanup to do.”

  I thought a moment. “And second, what if your times are off? Five minutes one way, five minutes another, now we’ve got ten or fifteen minutes total.”

  “Whose side are you on?” She grinned briefly. “But yeah, that is exactly the way I’d have started tearing the thing apart.”

  She warmed her hands around the coffee mug. “So okay, let’s do that. Give her fifteen minutes. To kill him, lose him—and by the way, if you’d done it, wouldn’t you have followed him if he got away?—clean up, change clothes, and get over to your house, cool as a cucumber.”

  “She did,” I agreed, “seem perfectly calm and normal until I found him. Even then … And no, I wouldn’t have let him wander off.”

  Jemmy Wechsler’s comment on that part came back to me; for an instant I wondered where Jemmy was now. “Because what if he didn’t die? Then he could say who did it.”