Adjusted to Death

by Jaqueline Girdner

  I gripped the steering wheel tighter as I considered my own behavior. The face of death had apparently brought Devi and Valerie closer to God. Not me. I was horny. My face burned in memory of my attack on Wayne. Somehow, lust didn’t seem to me an acceptable response to murder. But something about Scott Younger’s lonely death had made my need for a lover compelling. Not only to make love, but to love and be loved. I shook off my thoughts in irritation. I told myself the mood would pass. Fat chance.

  Once home, I sat down to my cluttered desk and looked at my calendar to see what tasks were left to overflow my afternoon and evening hours. The last entry for the day read: “7:00 / Craig / dinner.” I stared at the entry with the growing realization that for the entire day I had forgotten to worry about my date with my estranged husband. A burst of energy flooded my body, tingling in my hands and brain. It lifted me out of my chair and carried me around the room in an exuberant jig.

  For the past two years of arguments, separation, reconciliation, moving out and in and out, tears, pain and anger, I had never failed to think of Craig at least once a day. But today, my mind had relegated our date to secondary status. I had learned to forget. I settled down to my inevitable pile of paperwork cheerfully, the taste of triumph sweet in my mouth.

  I hugged that triumph around me as a shield when Craig rang my doorbell two hours later. I opened the door and essayed a dispassionate survey of the man I had been married to for thirteen years. He was handsome, no doubt about it. His tall, well-proportioned body was perfectly dressed for success in a navy blue suit and red tie. The features framed by his razor-cut hair were regular: straight nose, large dark eyes, high cheekbones and sensual lips under a clipped mustache. As I looked at Craig’s mustache the memory of Wayne’s mustacheless kiss sparkled in my mind. I smiled.

  Craig smiled back. The smile lit up his face. Of course he assumed my smile was for him, I realized with a pang of guilt.

  “Hello, Kate. Short time, no see,” he said. “I thought we could go to Mushrooms.”

  “Sounds fine,” I replied.

  “You might want to change your clothes,” he suggested with a pointed look at my corduroys and sweat shirt.

  I bristled. Was he doing this on purpose? His insistence, and my refusal, to dress tastefully had incited our arguments for years. I had failed to make the transition to yuppie as gracefully as he had, and this incompatibility had plagued our relationship. I willed myself not to respond to this outdated bait, to transcend. Anger can be as entangling an emotion as love, and I wanted to sever my connections with Craig.

  I asked him to wait in the living room, and changed into my best outfit, a periwinkle-blue mohair sweater my mother had given me for Christmas, and charcoal-grey woolen pants. For the first time in years I felt free in my decision to wear my finest clothing. My sloppy outfits were no longer to be a weapon in my war with Craig. Maybe I would even buy a dress one of these days, or that gorgeous velvet jumpsuit I had seen at Nordstrom’s.

  Mushrooms was crowded when we arrived. I was glad that Craig had made reservations. Hordes of people waited in the lobby, their faces eerie in the restaurant’s unique illumination. Mushrooms had no windows. The only light came from scattered rosy shell-shaped light fixtures and a series of backlit fish tanks set randomly into the walls. The sound of whale music completed the illusion of being underwater. I had never figured out what, if anything, the decor had to do with mushrooms. But they did serve tasty mushroom-based dishes, many of which were vegetarian.

  Soon we were seated and had ordered the mushroom platter for two. Would Craig spend the evening in jokes and charming pleasantries or would he come to the point? He came to the point.

  “You were right all along. We can’t live together. We should get a divorce.” The words tumbled out of his mouth quickly. His eyes were on my face, hurt puppy-dog eyes, waiting to be whipped for a mess on the carpet. The eyes I had loved and looked into for years.

  Tears welled up. My throat felt raw. I couldn’t speak. I tried to call up my earlier feeling of triumph but it was gone. My body was frozen in misery.

  “You know I love you,” he continued, his eyes still on mine. “I can’t seem to stop loving you. But I can’t afford a grand passion. It gets me off track.”

  “Business.” I forced the word out of my sore throat.

  “Yes, business. I can’t run my business and love someone like you at the same time. The cost of loving you is too high in emotional energy.”

  “Too much hassle, you mean.”

  The waiter delivered our salads, performed his ritual pepper offering and left. I forced a bite of romaine lettuce into my mouth and began to chew slowly. I wasn’t sure how I was going to get it down my throat.

  “Maybe there was too much hassle,” Craig said, without touching his salad. “Always having to plan my time, telling you when I’d be home. Entertaining you. It drained me.” I swallowed the bite of lettuce painfully. The remembered hurt of knowing he begrudged our time together came welling up. He looked down at his lap. “Suzanne lets me be. When I see her, I see her. No demands.”

  It took a while for the name “Suzanne” to slither into my consciousness. Who the hell was Suzanne? I had never heard of her. When I realized he was probably speaking of the “other woman” I felt adrenalin pumping into my body, banishing the tears and cauterizing the sore throat.

  “Suzanne?” I asked sharply. He flinched at my tone.

  “She’s an attorney, a woman I know. She can do the divorce.” His voice was high and defensive, his eyes now directed away from mine.

  “Are you trying to tell me she’s your lover?”

  He sighed. “Yes, I guess I am. I met her at the Marin Business Exchange. She’d just started working at a law firm in Novato. She’s on her way up now.”

  “A good recommendation for a lover,” I remarked snidely and instantly regretted my pettiness. I speared another piece of lettuce and chewed fiercely.

  “But for me, it is a good recommendation. She’s ambitious. She understands my goals. She’s not bound by conventional ideas about marriage.” Monogamy, another old argument.

  A new thought slithered into my consciousness alongside Suzanne’s name.

  “How long have you known this woman?” I asked. His red face gave me an estimate, if not the actual dates.

  “A year and a half,” he said.

  “Let me see if I have this right. You knew her before we split up the first time. Were you her lover then?” He shrugged his shoulders. “So we’ve had an open marriage for all this time and I didn’t even know it.” My anger was healing me. I could feel the strength in my limbs, the focus of my mind. Suddenly, I was ravenously hungry. “And when you begged to come back and live with me, told me there was no one like me, you were still seeing her.” I shoveled salad down my throat.

  “Kate, I was telling the truth. Suzanne is not you. I don’t love her like I love you. She and I get along. I like her. She likes me. The passionate kind of love I had for you didn’t cure our problems, it created them.”

  “Maybe we would have had a better chance if you had been honest with me.”

  He bent forward and looked at me. “I wouldn’t have had a chance with you at all if I had told you about Suzanne, would I?” It was my turn to shrug my shoulders. “I wanted that last chance. I didn’t make love to her while we were together this last time. I tried to make it work between you and me. I gave it my all. It just didn’t work.”

  I knew he was telling the truth. He usually did. And he really had tried. But I didn’t want to acknowledge all of that. I wanted a simple bad guy. I wanted the clarity of my anger back.

  “What does Suzanne look like?” I asked.

  “Why do you want to know?” he replied, focusing his large brown eyes on mine. Something he saw there must have frightened him. “Never mind,” he said, waving his hand. “You don’t need to answer that. She’s tall, with long blond hair.”

  Just as I had predicted to Maggie. I began to lau
gh, my tension dissipating as I did. I knew it would return, but for the time being I felt only release. Before Craig could ask me what was so funny, our waiter brought our mushroom platters. The stuffed mushrooms were great, the teriyaki and lemon mushrooms divine.

  Over the last of the food he mentioned that the police had asked him about me. Tension returned to my body.

  “They wanted to know if you knew Younger outside of Maggie’s. You didn’t, did you?” he asked.

  “No.” I considered telling him I had picked up the murder weapon but decided against it.

  “Good,” he said. “I called Maggie. She said you were sleuthing for her.

  “Maggie told everyone that, including everyone who might have murdered Younger. You know her better than me. What is wrong with that woman?”

  “Ask Eileen.”

  “Why Eileen?”

  “They’re lovers. Didn’t you know?”

  I didn’t know, and Maggie had never told me. How could the open and honest Maggie have harbored a secret like that? Probably in the same way that the open and honest Craig could have hidden a year and a half affair. But was Maggie’s secret “the” secret, the motive for Younger’s murder somehow? Is that why she had kept it from me?

  “Why did she tell you? Why not me?” I asked Craig angrily. His face reddened.

  “I asked her for a date,” he finally said.

  “Before, during or after myself and/or Suzanne?” I snapped.

  He didn’t answer. I can’t say as I blamed him. It was a complicated question.

  He dropped me off at my door after dinner. I didn’t ask him in. When I closed the door I realized something was missing. It was the cord that had tied me to my husband for thirteen years. His revelations had severed it finally. I was free.

  -Ten-

  Freedom had its advantages, but sleeping well was not among them. Not for me that night. I lay writhing under the covers in my dropseat pajamas, C.C. clawing happily next to me. My brain was stubbornly awake. It had been taken hostage by a mad projectionist who showed movies of the last three days’ events over and over, with and without sound tracks.

  I wanted a new reel. I trudged into the living room to look for a book, but found instead the manila envelopes that Wayne had given me the night before, still sitting on the pinball machine where I had left them. I emptied each of the envelopes onto the machine’s glass top, until there was a stack of fourteen stories, all typed neatly on white bond paper. Then I bent my head closer and caught a whiff of Wayne’s scent.

  I took the stack back to my cold bed and dived into the stories, hoping for some light entertainment. The first one chronicled the last years of a self-made millionaire, friendless except for his servants, to whom he could never allow himself to be a friend. The second told the tale of a man so shy that he visited prostitutes, not for his own satisfaction, but to learn to make love properly. The third story was about a boy raised by a mad but magical mother. The boy loved her without reservation, endlessly fought the other kids who called her crazy, and won a university scholarship. The day he left for college, his mother drove her car off a cliff.

  I put down the stack of stories in shock. My pulse was racing. Wayne’s stories were as articulate as his speech was brusque. But these were not entertaining stories. They were desperate.

  Still, a sense of recognition compelled me to pick up the stack again. As I read on, I noticed that the writing was touched with humor and a fondness for even the worst of the stories’ characters. By the time I read the eleventh story, I was struck by the bravery of some of these people, and the humanity of all of them. By the fourteenth I saw the faint strand of hope that lay beneath the despair, tying the stories together. I drifted off to sleep, now haunted by both fact and fiction.

  The sound of rain drumming on the skylights woke me in the morning. I pulled my pillow over my head, longing for the sweetness of slumber, but it was too late. My mind was up and racing. The storm-darkened Saturday invited me to do all the work I had put off for the last three days. I showered to Vivaldi, the hot water and music infusing me with energy and good intentions.

  By eight o’clock, I was seated at my desk, with all the lights in the room turned on to ward off the gloom of foul weather. I tore through orders, accounts and government forms, listening to the rain on the roof and the wind rattling my doors and windows, secure in the inevitability of my paperwork. When the telephone rang, I answered reluctantly.

  “I assume you are awake, alive and well,” said a familiar voice on the other end of the line. “No poison in your dinner, no convenient accident on the way from your warehouse?”

  “Felix?” I guessed.

  “Speaking,” he confirmed. “I got your letter.”

  “Oh, no,” I said, remembering the note I had sent him in my spasm of paranoia before going out with Wayne. C.C. chose this moment to burst through her cat-door, a wet and angry black-and-white ball of fur, who denounced me loudly for allowing the downpour.

  “Oh, yes! How was the date? Somehow, dinner and the warehouse sounds less than romantic to me.” His sarcasm was as strident as C.C.’s howls.

  “Forget the letter,” I said.

  “Like you forgot to tell me about your date with the cop’s best bet for murderer?”

  “What do you mean, their best bet?” I asked, suddenly alert. C.C. leapt for my lap, muddy paws outstretched.

  “Not so fast. Why didn’t you tell me?” The tone of his voice brought his hurt face into my imagination. “Here I am, busting my hump for a good story, and you go out with the mysterious man behind the scenes and don’t bother to tell me. Me, who has brewed you all those cups of tea, and made your best friend a happy woman.”

  It wasn’t the time to mention that Barbara was perfectly capable of finding happiness without his presence. She was, after all, soaking up sunshine on a beach somewhere in Maui at this very moment, probably with very little thought of Felix shivering in rainy California. Or of me, for that matter.

  “All right, Felix, I’m sorry. But we didn’t talk about the murder. Wayne didn’t tell me anything important.”

  There was silence on the other end of the line. C.C. rolled in my lap to dry herself off. It was time to catch some flies with honey.

  “All of us who were there the day of the murder went to a meeting yesterday at Maggie’s,” I said. “Would you like to hear about it?”

  “When? What did you meet for?” he said, his voice quickening, all hurt erased from its tone.

  “In a minute. First, tell me what you meant by Wayne being the cop’s best bet?” My heart beat a little faster waiting for his answer.

  “My source says they’ve narrowed the field of their investigation to Wayne Caruso.”

  “Why?” The word came out in a yelp.

  “Don’t get uptight, Kate. I’m just answering your question, okay. A, he inherits. B, he was the only one who really knew Younger well. Apparently Younger wasn’t even that tight with Renee Mickle. And C, it turns out Caruso managed all of Younger’s affairs and investments. Bet you didn’t know that. Younger hadn’t touched anything for years. So they’re looking real hard at Caruso for embezzlement, or at least mismanagement.

  “Look at all the possible motives for God’s sake! Shit, this guy could have had any number of reasons for killing the man. And no one else has a trace of a motive.”

  “All right, even granting that he had motive,” I said, injecting unfelt reasonableness into my voice, “why would he have killed Younger at Maggie’s?”

  “Answer that yourself. Look at all the suspects. If Younger had been killed at home, there would have only been one suspect: Wayne Caruso. This way, there are nine.”

  “Felix, if you talked with him, you’d know he didn’t do it. I know he didn’t.” My words compensated for the five percent doubt that still lingered in my mind as I remembered Wayne’s angry stance the day before.

  “Fine, I’d love to talk to him,” Felix replied. “Get me an interview.”
<
br />   “What?”

  “You heard me. You said I’d know if I talked to him. So get me an interview. I’ll make him a hero in the local paper. ‘Quiet man swept into nightmare of suspicion,’ that kind of thing. It might help sway public opinion.”

  “I’ll talk to him,” I promised.

  “And now,” he said, his voice thick like a vampire’s lusting for new blood, “tell me about your meeting.”

  Twenty minutes later I hung up the telephone. C.C.’s fur was dry and fluffy again, and Felix had sucked all the relevant information from my brain. I was left with a sodden, furred lap and innumerable questions.

  I stared through the window into the branches swaying in the dark storm and asked myself what the motive was for Scott Younger’s murder. I hadn’t really asked myself that question before. I had only considered who was capable of such an act of violence, and foolishly concluded that no one was. Money was a good motive. The police were right about that. But how about revenge, or jealousy, or lunacy? Or motives I couldn’t even conceive of?

  Valerie had certainly seemed angry that day. And what about Renee? Was she actually a woman scorned, with the fury to match? Then there was Devi. Devi had known Scott Younger. Maybe he had done her some irreparable harm. Made her pregnant? That was an interesting thought. What if Tanya was Scott’s illegitimate child? But that still didn’t add up to a murder motive. I shook my head in frustration. Valerie was an unmarried mother. Scott could just as well have fathered her kid. Or Renee’s for that matter.

  My pulse speeded up. What if one of Renee’s kids was Scott’s? That would certainly explain why he was so interested in her. Maybe her ready-made family was more than just convenient. Unfortunately, that still didn’t make a murder motive. I told myself how angry Renee’s husband would have been if he had found out. But Renee was already divorced. I slumped back in my chair, considering the possibility of other guilty secrets. That brought Maggie to mind. I didn’t think lesbianism was a secret to kill over, not in mellow Marin. But maybe it was. A conspiracy between Maggie and Eileen? My imagination took flight.