Adjusted to Death

by Jaqueline Girdner

  When I had finished speaking, Sergeant Udel said only, “When did you first meet Mr. Caruso?” Had he even heard my five-minute defense? It was hard to tell.

  “I saw him at Maggie’s a few times, but I’ve only gotten to really know him since last Wednesday,” I answered.

  “The day of the murder?” he asked eagerly. There was an “ah-ha” in his voice as if I had just conceded an important point. He thrust his head forward to hear my reply.

  “Yes,” I confirmed nervously. Was he just trying to rattle me? I looked over at Inspector Parker for a clue. But his head was dutifully bent over his notebook.

  “Do you pick up men at murders often, Ms. Jasper?” Udel snapped. My mouth dropped open. What an offensive question! Was he purposely trying to provoke me? I decided to limit my answers to the fewest syllables possible from that point on.

  “No,” I answered.

  Sergeant Udel sat back in his chair and broke into high-pitched laughter. His laughter ended abruptly after a few moments, and he thrust his head forward again.

  “How well do you really know Mr. Caruso?” he asked. Now his voice was angry.

  It went on like that for another two hours. Udel asked every question about Wayne that Sergeant Feiffer had, plus a few more. Then he repeated them. And all accompanied by rapid mood swings that would have done any manic-depressive proud. I wasn’t sure whether his performance was part of an interrogation technique. If it wasn’t, I was afraid he was having a nervous breakdown. At the end of the interview he starting pressing me again about my fingerprints being on the murder weapon.

  “Are you sure that Mr. Caruso didn’t ask you to pick up that bar?” he asked again, for the third time. How long could this go on? At least sixteen hours, I answered myself.

  “Yes,” I answered. “Quite sure.”

  “He didn’t hand it to you?” Udel snapped. He had asked me this nearly a dozen times.

  “No.”

  “Okay,” he said abruptly. “You can go.”

  I sat in my chair, trying to figure out how to answer this last question. Only after he himself had left the room did I realize that his final words were not a question but a dismissal.

  Inspector Parker escorted me out of the interrogation room. At the door he gave me a weak, sad smile and thanked me for my cooperation. I was touched by his kindness. But maybe he just looked good to me after Sergeant Udel.

  - Twenty-Two -

  Wayne’s Jaguar was in the driveway when I got home. Wayne himself lay slumped in one of my peeling white porch chairs, his chin on his chest and his hands dangling over the sides. For a breath-stopping moment I thought he was dead, but as I ran up the stairs I could see his chest moving up and down rhythmically. He was only dead asleep.

  I bent over him and kissed his pitted forehead. My lips brushed a stray curl of his soft hair. Princess Charming awakening Sleeping Beauty. Or perhaps Sleeping Beast.

  His eyes opened and partially focused on my own. A sweet smile spread across his rough features.

  “Kate,” he murmured. The voice of a trusting child.

  I leaned over and kissed his lips. His lips returned my kiss for a few breaths. Then he sat up abruptly.

  “No,” he said, his voice an adult’s once more. “This isn’t what I came here for.”

  “What did you come here for?” I asked sharply. I pulled up a chair and plopped down next to him.

  “To slow you down.” he said, turning toward me. Then he corrected himself. “To slow us down. The police are sure I did it. They’re doing everything they can to prove it. I don’t want you to be tainted.”

  “I’m not going to be ‘tainted,’” I said impatiently.

  “But they keep asking me if you were part of it, if you helped me to murder Scott.” He shook his head in disbelief. “Suspect me, yes. But you?”

  “I can take care of myself.” I said. It was an effort to keep my tone even. He opened his mouth to argue but I kept talking. “Sergeant Udel interviewed me today. I don’t think he’s sure of anything, much less ready to arrest you.”

  “They believe they have enough evidence.” He turned his face from me.

  “What evidence?” I could feel my heart thumping now.

  “Same old stuff and some new. My fingerprints on the table Scott was lying on. I must have touched it when I said goodbye to him.” Wayne’s voice had gone dead again.

  “But of course you did. That’s not evidence.”

  “Payments from our business accounts to the institution where my mother lives,” he continued as if I hadn’t spoken. “Approved by Scott verbally, but not on paper. Employee benefit, paid directly. Not smart for a man with legal training, but I didn’t think.”

  I reached out and put my hand on top of his. He kept his eyes away from me and went on.

  “And finally, Renee’s big contribution. Scott once told her he was waiting for me to put him out of his misery. As if they needed another motive.”

  This was Renee’s damaging information! I felt a burden of doubt slide off my chest. “That’s all?” I asked. “That can’t be enough to convict you. You know the law. Don’t you have to be found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt?”

  “Technically, yes. Gary Lee keeps saying the same thing.” A trace of a smile touched Wayne’s mouth. “Lucky to have him as my attorney. You would like him. You’re both optimists.”

  “So, he thinks your chances are good?” I asked. The trace of smile disappeared entirely.

  “He thinks it depends on the D.A. Mill Valley cops would arrest me today. The County Sheriffs’ Department thinks I did it too. Only the D.A. is undecided. Not that he doesn’t think I’m guilty. He’s just not sure if he’s got a good enough chance of conviction. But there’s always my face.” He turned to me. I saw the dense low brows hiding his eyes, the huge cauliflower nose, the scarred and pitted skin.

  “What do you mean, your face?”

  “The face of a murderer. Doesn’t even have to be mentioned. Jurors will take one look at me and make up their minds.”

  “No! That’s not true. All you have to do is speak up and people will know your real nature.” I realized I had raised my voice. It helped to warm my sudden chill.

  “Maybe they will,” he accommodated me. His smile was sad and tired. “But that’s not what I came here to talk about anyway. Got sidetracked. You shouldn’t be involved with me, not until this is resolved. Can’t do you any good.” He turned his face away from me again.

  “Wayne,” I said as steadily as possible. “I am involved. I can’t uninvolve myself.”

  “But—” he began.

  “‘But’ nothing. I’ll decide my own risks. And I choose to be involved with you.” I had his attention. He was now facing me, his eyes intense beneath his brows.

  “Kate, I’m serious,” he tried.

  “I know you are. So am I.” He opened his mouth again but I wouldn’t let him talk. “Come into the house,” I said, pulling him up out of his seat. “I’ll tell you about my investigations.”

  A new look of concern gripped his face. But I opened the front door and walked inside before he had time to get protective. His sigh as he followed told me that he was giving up on trying to warn me off, at least temporarily.

  Once in the house I brewed orange-cinnamon tea and then told him about Ted and Bonnie, Valerie’s brother, Eileen’s parents, my exploration of the upper floors of the chiropractor’s building, and my misguided meeting with Renee’s son. When he laughed over the Snoopy incident, even choking on his tea when I described my struggles to get the stuffed dog onto the back seat, I knew I had won him back over. The sound of his laughter was an auditory massage, loosening the tense muscles of my neck and shoulders.

  Then I gave him a brief summary of the Reagans’ morning visit. Wayne’s original spurt of anxiety gave way to relief once I got to the part where the tall Reagan relented. After that, we discussed murder suspects for over an hour but came to no conclusions, except frustration.

&nbs
p; “Maybe we need to look at this in a new way,” he said after a while. He was thinking, his eyes hidden by his heavy brows. “You’ve dug up everything you can on motives and backgrounds. Nothing there. How about the day of the murder itself? Can you reconstruct the crime?”

  “You mean go down to Maggie’s and walk through it?” I asked. It sounded interesting.

  “No!” he said, far too loudly. Then he lowered his voice. “Don’t need to. We can do it on paper.” Was this a trick to keep me safely indoors? Even if it was, I realized it was still worth a shot.

  I got a yard-long pad of graph paper that I used for designing and laid it on the living room rug, along with some pencils and erasers. Together, we sketched out the floorplan at Maggie’s, complete with desks, chairs and therapeutic tables. I had been in all of the rooms at one time or another. And what I couldn’t visualize, Wayne could. It was amazing what we could remember between the two of us. Maybe the shock of Scott’s death had engraved the rooms and fixtures on our memories.

  Located on one side of the central hallway were the waiting room, the business office, storage area and bathroom. On the other side, three therapy rooms and the X-ray chamber. The treatment room that Scott had been murdered in was across from the bathroom. All the rooms had connecting doors except for that bathroom.

  “Now, for the people,” I said. I got out some Scrabble tiles and found a letter for each person’s first initial. We agreed on a Y for Tanya, since both Ted and Tanya began with T.

  I put S, W, V, and T into position in the chairs they had sat in when I had walked through the door that day, and the R for Renee behind the desk. I was just walking my K through the door when I noticed Wayne covertly eyeing his watch. It was past one o’clock.

  “Do you need to go?” I asked.

  “Work,” he said. Guiltily, I remembered he managed several businesses, and that I purported to manage one myself. “Should take care of a few things.”

  “I’ll only let you go if you promise to come back tonight,” I said softly.

  He hesitated, then chuckled and shook his head as he stood up. “Okay. Seems you can talk me into anything. You’ve almost convinced me I’ll come out of this a free man.” There were circles under his eyes, but his mouth held a crooked smile. I smiled back.

  He stretched his arms out to me. When I stood, he held me tight for a moment and then picked me up off the floor in a sudden swoop. My feet dangled, bringing back memories of being sleepily carried in my father’s arms. I closed my eyes, nuzzled his now accessible warm neck, smelled his herbal scent and thought decidedly un-daughterly thoughts.

  He set me back down gently, his hands still on my waist, and looked at me intensely from underneath his brows for a moment. Then he turned and moved quickly out the front door.

  The sound of the door closing brought with it a surge of fear. Was this the last time I would see him? I resisted an urge to chase after him, and returned to my floor plan.

  I put my K on a chair. I thought for a moment. Then I brought in the D and Y. I was about to put them into position, when I remembered that Valerie had changed her seat while Scott and Devi were talking. And then what? When exactly did Eileen arrive? And Maggie?

  I lay down on the rug, my eyes closed, to better conjure up the scene. And fell asleep mid-conjure.

  In a dream I was walking down the block, across the street from the chiropractic building, when I saw a large crowd gathered in front of Nellie’s “vintage clothing” store. I recognized my favorite uncle in the crowd. Everyone was looking in the direction of Maggie’s office. My uncle pointed. I followed the direction of his finger and saw that the whole building was now made of glass. I could see a dentist drilling some teeth in a huge gaping mouth. Blood spurted from the mouth, splattering the glass walls. “No, the bottom floor,” my uncle whispered. I lowered my eyes and saw a flurry of movement there. Maggie, Eileen, Renee and all the patients were moving from chair to chair in a circle. In the middle of the circle of chairs lay Scott Younger’s bludgeoned body. Musical chairs, I thought. And then the chairs began to ring.

  The persistence of the ringing grew until I opened my eyes. Damn. The doorbell. As I got up off the living room rug I wondered what I would have seen if I had stayed in the dream. Did my unconscious know who the murderer was? Or was it telling me that someone from across the street had seen something? I opened the front door.

  Ann Rivera was standing on my doorstep. She was wearing a crisp linen suit and a look of curiosity on her friendly brown face. I had forgotten that she was going to visit. There went my time for investigation, or work, for that matter. However, she was a big improvement on the Reagans.

  “What time is it?” I asked. I was still groggy.

  “Four o’clock. I got off early.” She walked into the hallway and gave me a quick squeeze and then a sharp look. “Were you asleep?”

  “It’s a long story,” I said, groaning hopelessly. I had lost more than two hours of worktime to my nap.

  “Well, let’s go out for an early dinner and you can tell it to me,” she suggested.

  My stomach growled in assent. I hadn’t eaten since the two slices of wheat toast that morning. My mouth opened to second the motion, but then I remembered Wayne.

  “I’ve… I’ve got a date,” I said. I felt suddenly embarrassed.

  “Craig?” she asked. She cocked her head questioningly.

  “No, Wayne,” I said. I avoided her inquiring eyes. “Look, I’ll make us a snack.”

  I turned to walk into the kitchen.

  “Wayne who?” asked Ann, following me. “What’s going on with you? Why are you acting so guilty?”

  “Wayne Caruso,” I answered. I found some sesame rice crackers in my goodies basket and ripped the package open with my teeth. I dumped them into a bowl and put them on the kitchen table. Then I opened a jar of pickles and set it next to the crackers. When I looked up, Ann’s brown eyes were on me, searching for answers.

  “Scott’s ex-bodyguard,” I explained briefly. I pulled a container of tofu “no-egg” salad out of the refrigerator and added it to the food on the table. “The police think he murdered Scott.” I went back to the refrigerator for carrots.

  “Stop with the food!” shouted Ann. She put her hand on the refrigerator door, blocking my move to open it. “Do you believe he murdered Scott?”

  “No!” I answered automatically. Then I looked into her concerned eyes and remembered she was a friend. “At least mostly I don’t think so,” I amended honestly. “But I have this niggle of doubt.”

  “Tell me about Wayne,” she said, and took her hand away from the refrigerator door.

  So I did, at length. While I cut up carrots I told her how I had come to know Wayne. I found myself smiling as I described his shy wooing, brusque speech, and self-deprecation. But the smile was short-lived as I sat down at the kitchen table and recounted the details I knew about Wayne’s relationship with Scott, the evidence against him and his night of questioning. Ann crunched pickles and nodded sympathetically as I spoke. I spread some “no-egg” on a cracker and related what Wayne had told me about his crazy mother. I stuffed the cracker in my mouth and chewed thoughtfully before I went on.

  “He scares me sometimes,” I finally admitted.

  “How?” Ann asked.

  “I guess it’s physical. He’s a big man, very strong and he is… Damn it, he is ugly. If I didn’t know him and I saw him, walking alone on a dark night, I would cross the street to avoid him. He’s just scary-looking,” I finished defensively. I wanted to cry, knowing Wayne was absolutely correct about how he’d look to a jury.

  “But you do know him,” Ann prompted.

  “You’re right,” I said. “All I have to do is look into his eyes, or hear him speak, and I recognize the gentleness in him. And I know he would be incapable of hurting anyone intentionally, much less murdering someone.”

  “So?”

  “But the police think he killed Scott. What if they’re right? How can I lo
ve a murderer?”

  “Listen,” said Ann, tapping a carrot stick on the table for emphasis. “I know you. You have good judgment. If you really think he’s dangerous, stay away. But if you don’t think Wayne is a murderer, trust that. Trust your own judgment.”

  I thought about what she had said, while we chomped our way through carrots, pickles and crackers. Then I realized that, at gut level, I didn’t believe Wayne was dangerous. I really knew he wasn’t a murderer. But I still wasn’t comfortable. There was still something wrong, nagging me from my unconscious. Suddenly I had it.

  “But even if he’s not a murderer, is he a sicko?” I felt a huge sense of relief, putting this underlying fear into words. I breathed out tension.

  “What do you mean?” Ann asked.

  “All those years taking care of Scott and defending him. Isn’t that sick?”

  “Listen,” Ann answered, with a flash of passion in her brown eyes. “I work in a mental hospital and see truly sick people all day long. Wayne sounds neurotic, but who isn’t? He’s probably just a caretaker.”

  “A caretaker?”

  “He spent his childhood taking care of a sick mother. Emotionally, it’s what he knows how to do. Then this sick man shows up in his life, so he takes care of him until he’s not needed anymore. But with you he’ll be okay. You won’t abuse his love like his mother did or Scott did. He’ll bloom with you.” She smiled across the table at me, her teeth white against her tan skin. “Really,” she assured me.

  I felt a warm glow suffuse my body. Was she right? I returned her smile and thought, This is what friendship is about. I walked around the table and hugged her, crushing her linen suit. She hugged me back for a moment, then let me go.

  “You’re okay,” she said. “Now, let me tell you about my problems for a while.”

  And she did. It was five-thirty by the time she left.

  I rushed to the phone to call Jest Gifts. Judy was just leaving. I said I still wasn’t feeling well, but I was keeping up with my paperwork. It wasn’t entirely a lie, I told myself. She grunted in answer and told me that the temporary help had broken most of the last case of faw-law-law mugs. Somehow, I didn’t really care. I assured her that, illness or no illness, I would get the paychecks to everyone on time. That seemed to satisfy her. I hung up while I could. The phone rang immediately after I set it down.