Crooked Heart

by Cristina Sumners

  When he had looked at the cleaned kitchen, body and blood gone, white tile floor again spotless, he had had a sudden nightmarish thought that he had lost his mind. It had never happened at all, he had imagined the whole thing. He must be cracking up.

  The worst thing was that he had no one to talk to, no one he could trust, no one who would understand. He had never realized how much you could miss your wife. That was the thing about wives, you took them for granted. They were always there. But not now. Now she was gone.

  ii

  What had she done? What had she said? Too much, probably. It had seemed harmless enough. Why not talk to that nice cop, whatever had happened to Mrs. Kimbrough, it could have nothing to do with Bill, after all. Not dear Bill. Never.

  But the cop had come back and this time he wasn’t nice. Dragging poor Bill away like that, when anyone could see he wasn’t well. Why he had come to work at all, she could not understand.

  It did not occur to Vickie—naturally—that Bill Stanley had come to work to escape his house, with its ghosts in kitchen and basement. Not that it did him any good, because the Chief of Police had come for him and taken him right back there. Bill had tried to just give the man his keys and tell him to go ahead, but the cop had insisted he had to be there.

  “Regulations,” Holder had lied. Actually, the C.S.I. team would have preferred to have the house to themselves, but the Chief had maintained it would be more nerve-racking for the suspect to be forced to witness the search, and he intended, if necessary, to rack every nerve in Bill Stanley’s body.

  He needed a confession. No matter what they found in the house, they’d have trouble making a homicide charge stick if they didn’t have a body; if Stanley had been even halfway efficient or imaginative about hiding it, they might look for a year and not find it.

  The Chief of Police and his prime suspect had been sitting on the sofa in the Stanley living room for about thirty minutes. The search in that room had been completed. The D.A.’s squad had been over every inch of it; they were rapid, thorough, and utterly cold-blooded. They put Tom Holder in mind of a plague of locusts.

  Tom flicked a glance at Officer Rocko Pursley, sitting patiently across the room in one of the fragile-looking chairs. Apparently that admirable young man had not breathed a word at the station about his Chief’s verbal seduction of Glamorous Gloria on Monday night. This being Thursday afternoon, that made almost three days of heroic restraint, so Tom had rewarded Pursley by bringing him along for the arrest. Not that it looked like much of a reward at that point. The suspect, instead of providing any excitement, was giving a good imitation of taking a nap.

  Bill Stanley had leaned his head back against the sofa cushions and closed his eyes. Holder wondered if it might be bad policy to let him withdraw from what was going on, and decided to shake his tree with a couple of questions. “Mr. Stanley,” he said, “you know we’ve been unable to get through to your wife in San Francisco.”

  Stanley made a sound in his throat.

  “We’ve established that she caught her plane all right, but there was something kind of odd about it; maybe you can explain it to me. The guy at the check-in desk said she didn’t check any luggage, and she didn’t carry any, either, which seemed pretty strange, since she was going to be gone for most of a week. Do you know anything about that?”

  Stanley had opened his eyes and turned to him. His face was expressionless. He met Holder’s gaze without apparent difficulty for several seconds, then said, “I’m sorry, could you please say that again?”

  Holder obliged him.

  There was another silence, longer than the first; finally Holder asked, “Doesn’t your wife usually take a suitcase or something with her when she leaves town for a week?”

  Stanley covered his eyes with his hand for a moment, then dropped the hand and looked at Holder once more. “I’m sorry,” he said again. “I’m sure you understand that this is—is difficult.”

  Holder made a listening noise.

  Bill swallowed, and took an audible breath. “Sunday night,” he said, “Carolyn packed two bags, a small suitcase and a hanging bag. That is, she put a few things in the hanging bag, in the compartments, I mean, she always leaves the dresses till the last minute. Anyway, they were both there in the bedroom when I left for work Monday morning.”

  “And were they still there when you came home from work with the flu that afternoon?” Holder asked with a microscopic touch of irony on the word flu.

  Stanley stared at him blankly and stammered, “I, uh, I don’t know. I mean, I didn’t notice. Uh, you know I fell asleep here.” He indicated the sofa they were sitting on.

  “Well, they’re not there now, are they? Flu or not, you would surely have noticed yesterday, or today, if they were still there?”

  “Um, I guess so, I mean, I might . . .” He was patently unsure.

  “Tell you what, Mr. Stanley, why don’t we go upstairs and look?”

  The suggestion did not appear to alarm Stanley, who rose unsteadily to his feet, murmuring, “Sure.”

  On the stairs Holder hung back, giving his suspect plenty of room to hang on to the banister, which he did, as if it were life and reason. Upstairs they turned left down a carpeted hallway and entered a large bedroom that overlooked the backyard. The first thing Holder noticed was twin beds. One was neatly made up, with a cover of lavishly flowered chintz; the other had been slept in at least once and left unmade.

  Stanley stood in the doorway, looking around vaguely. “They were—I think they were on her bed,” he said with an ineffective gesture.

  Holder pretended to look at the room while covertly studying Bill Stanley. What he had really wanted was to see how Bill stood up to a visit to his bedroom; if it were the scene of the crime, or even the scene of his last tryst with Grace, surely it would rattle him. But Bill Stanley wasn’t rattled. He remained in the semi-daze he had been in when they were sitting on the sofa, his face still sickly pale but not apparently traumatized by the bedroom or anything in it.

  Holder shrugged and led the way back downstairs and across the front hall toward the living room. Down at the end of the hall the kitchen door opened, and a man stepped out and said, “Chief? Could you come in here, please?”

  Holder, ever courteous, turned to Stanley to say, “Excuse me,” but the words never got out of his mouth. There on Bill Stanley’s face was the expression Holder had looked for in vain in the bedroom: It was the expression of a man who is looking undefended into the face of disaster. Holder took him by the arm and led him to the sofa and instructed him to sit down; Bill sat like an obedient child.

  When Tom walked into the kitchen he saw immediately that the open dishwasher was the center of interest. He was puzzled until one of them stepped back to give him a better view. Then he saw the knife.

  It was in the cutlery rack of the dishwasher, the long, triangular blade pointing upward over a black wooden handle with brass rivets. It seemed huge, but what made it remarkable was that the metal blade was as black as the handle, and flecked with rust.

  Sid Garvey, who was in charge, said, “Something funny about this. That knife is one of this set here—” He waved a stubby pencil at a magnetic knife rack hanging on the wall nearby. Stuck to the magnetic strip were all the big knife’s younger brothers, three of them, in graduated sizes. But their blades were mottled gray, not black.

  “You see the difference in the blades,” Sid was continuing. “Now, obviously, they’re not stainless steel because they don’t shine. My guess is these guys up on the rack here look the way they’re supposed to, though why anybody would want a knife that looks like that, I don’t know; anyway, the gray blades, I think, are normal. Now, the handles are wood, you see, and if you got some kind of special knife with a wooden handle, you don’t put it in the dishwasher, right? But this one got put in the dishwasher and maybe that’s what made the blade go all black. What do you think?”

  “I think,” said Harton’s Chief of Police with a flicker o
f satisfaction, “that if you’re cleaning up after a murder, you don’t get too fussy about how you clean the knife.”

  “Little Tommy Holder, go to the head of the class.” (Sid played poker with Tom and could get away with a lot.)

  “Is there any blood left on it?” Tom asked, too eager for hard evidence to bandy insults with Garvey.

  Sid shook his head. “Nothing I’ve got on me works on hemoglobin that’s been cooked.”

  “Will you be able to get anything back at the lab?”

  “Watch me,” said Sid, and started giving orders to his team. One he dispatched upstairs with the command “Brush hunt,” which meant, Find a hair follicle for DNA comparison. Two others were deputed to remove and pack up everything in the dishwasher that was removable, including the pieces of broken plate down in the bottom, the drain, and the rubber lining around the door. “And when you’re done there, let’s see what we can get from the floor.”

  “Good.” Holder nodded. “Anything else?”

  “Christ, we give you the weapon, whaddaya want?”

  “The body,” Tom sighed, and went back to the living room.

  Stanley once more was leaning back with his eyes closed, and Tom wished he could do something creative like wave the knife in front of him, but he knew better than to screw around like that. So he sat in silence.

  About twenty minutes after boredom had well and truly set in, another of the Trenton squad stepped into the room and indicated with a jerk of her head that Holder was wanted in the back hall. When they got there, Sid Garvey gave Tom a sour look and said, “No body, O.K.? But this”—his plastic-gloved hand held up a woman’s handbag—“was in a box of Christmas ornaments in the basement. What a dumbass.”

  The bag was of some rough brown fabric with bits of leather trim. Garvey put the bag down on a narrow hall table and picked up a plastic bag containing a leather billfold. “This was in it,” he announced, holding it up in front of Tom. The wallet had been put into the plastic bag unfolded; Tom saw some slots with credit cards peeking out of them, and a leather-framed window of clear plastic displaying a driver’s license.

  It was Grace Kimbrough’s.

  “Well, that about takes care of it, doesn’t it?” said Tom.

  Careful to touch only the fabric of the handbag, he took it from Sid and went back to the living room. “Mr. Stanley,” he said. The man did not stir. “Look at this, Mr. Stanley.”

  Stanley opened his eyes and looked at the handbag. There was hardly a flicker of surprise.

  “Can you identify this?”

  No response.

  “Come on, man, speak up. Whose is this?”

  Bill was silent six seconds, then replied in a hoarse whisper, “Grace’s.”

  “That’s right. Would you like to tell us how it got into a box of Christmas decorations in your basement?”

  Bill again closed his eyes.

  “Would you like to tell us why you hid her handbag in the basement and took her body somewhere else?”

  No response.

  “Would you like to call your lawyer?”

  No response.

  Holder sighed. “O.K., you’re under arrest. You have the right to remain silent. You have the right—“As Tom went through the Miranda rights, Bill Stanley slowly opened his eyes and stared at Holder with his first visible surprise. At the end of the little speech, Stanley giggled. Then he broke into great heaves of hysterical laughter, clutching his sides as if in pain.

  “What in hell?” Holder muttered, and then to Pursley, “Cuff him.”

  Being handcuffed seemed to sober Stanley somewhat; he stopped shaking with laughter and turned his face away, refusing to look Holder in the eye.

  Sid Garvey, who had come up behind Holder, said, “What’s so funny about getting Mirandized?”

  “You got me,” Holder replied, annoyed with himself for not understanding what had just happened.

  He was still annoyed at four o’clock that afternoon, when Bill Stanley was locked up in Trenton and refusing—God only knew why—to summon a lawyer, and the call from San Francisco came in.

  The police there reported first, in some dudgeon, that they had been misinformed, that the woman they’d asked about in three dozen other hotels had checked into the Mark Hopkins—carrying a small Hartmann suitcase in mint condition—on Monday night, about an hour after Holder had supposedly ascertained that she wasn’t expected there. The second part of the report was less satisfactory. Carolyn Stanley had checked out of the hotel at five-thirty on Tuesday morning, since which time the San Francisco police could discover neither hide nor hair of her.

  CHAPTER 19

  So the Chief of Police, who had blithely expected to be brushing up the crumbs by the end of the day, was left instead with the uncomfortable conviction that he didn’t know what the hell was happening. He decided he needed beer and sympathy, and after a brief struggle with his conscience decided to see whether these commodities were to be had at Kathryn Koerney’s house. They were.

  This time he was entertained in the kitchen, and the silver was nowhere in sight. (Kathryn engineered this by the simple expedient of not telling Mrs. Warburton he was coming.) She waved her dispirited guest toward a chair at the breakfast table and informed him he looked like he could use a drink. He admitted that a beer would be welcome, and Kathryn, letting her fresh-brewed tea grow cold in the pot, fetched two beers and two plain glass tumblers. Sitting down opposite him, she looked him over with more curiosity than sympathy.

  “Last I saw you,” she said, “you were dashing off to get a search warrant, and fire-breathing dragons had nothing on you. I take it you’ve hit a snag.”

  He took a long swallow and set his glass down. “I don’t know what I’ve hit.” In tones of undisguised frustration, he began to tell her everything that had happened since their interview with Tita Robinson. He was looking for consolation, not assistance, but he got lucky. It happened at the very end of his story, when Kathryn got confused.

  “Wait wait wait!” she laughed. “I had these people straight last time but I’ve lost it.” She started to draw diagrams on the table with her fingers. “Grace is married to George. Was married to George. Grace was having an affair with Bill, who lives next door. Bill’s wife is the cousin and business partner of Grace’s husband. Bill has killed Grace, and his wife is God knows where in California. Yes?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Ye gods.”

  Tom grinned. “Cozy, ain’t it?”

  “Cozy? It’s positively incestuous. How do you tell the players without a program?”

  “Well, I’ve got a program, sort of,” he admitted, putting his beer down and reaching toward the adjacent chair for the now-familiar vinyl folder. He dug through it for a few seconds, and produced a snapshot. “I asked George for a recent picture of his wife, and he gave me this. That’s all four of them.”

  The photograph had been taken at a party; the two couples were holding cocktails and looking appropriately jovial. They were of that indescribable age that is too old to be called young but young enough to make the designation “middle-aged” seem premature. The women were both brunettes, but there all similarities ended. One was tiny, a voluptuous elf who had poured herself into a dress that invited admiration of her most obvious attributes; the tall one was what used to be called statuesque, and had draped a lot of chiffon over her elegant bones.

  The men, too, were strikingly different. One was striking, period. Very tall, youthfully trim, generous waves of unreceding hair, handsome face, handsome grin, handsome suit. The other lacked both the height and the hair of his friend, and if he had ever had a youthful figure, he had lost it; glasses sat on the pointed nose of a pleasant, innocuous face; he looked like a nearsighted mouse.

  “That’s Bill Stanley,” said Tom, pointing at the figure that loomed largest in his current concern. “He did the murder, and this is his wife, Carolyn, who’s in California but God knows where. This is Grace Kimbrough, who’s been killed
by Bill, who is her next-door neighbor and lover, and this is George, Grace’s husband, who reported her missing.”

  Kathryn’s jaw sagged. “Oh!” she cried. “Carolyn! You didn’t tell me her name was Carolyn! Stanley! Stanley, oh, my God, Stanley, of course her name is Stanley!” Kathryn was rocking back and forth in her chair, her hands clutching her head. “And her husband’s name is Bill! And she’s in business with George! Oh, oh, stupid, I’m so stupid!”

  “You know these people?”

  “Know them? They did this house! They’re decorators, Tom. Elton Kimbrough Interiors. If you’d told me Bill’s wife was named Carolyn!”

  Tom stared at her briefly while something inside him did somersaults. He was vindicated. It was Divine Providence, not his own embarrassing fantasies, that had decreed he should involve Kathryn in this thing. She actually knew the people. That was bound to be useful. Most of the guilt he had been feeling about this covert flirtation was instantly transformed into gratitude for the benignity of God. He dragged his happy mind back to the point and said, “Great! Just how well do you know them?”

  Kathryn sat back in her chair, ordered her thoughts, and began to tell stories.

  CHAPTER 20

  It was June of the previous year. It was only eleven in the morning, so the sun was merely enthusiastic and had yet to become really offensive. But no amount of time in her native Texas had taught Kathryn to enjoy heat, and as she walked up Alexander Street she was grateful for the huge pools of shade created by the old maple trees.

  In fact, she was grateful for quite a lot at that point. She had just spent forty-five minutes going over the deceptively plain-looking white clapboard house whose keys had been handed to her at the mortgage company’s office at ten. She had pondered each bare room, trying to imagine it filled with comfort and color, so she would have some ideas—however vague—to convey to the decorator. In all this activity she was concentrating hard on the pleasure and excitement she felt and the gratitude those feelings induced, chiefly to drown out the small puritan voice of panic that bat-squeaked from the back of her brain, “Are you out of your mind? Who do you think you are, Rockefeller?—spending that kind of money on a house! And are you sure this is appropriate for a priest?”