Crooked Heart

by Cristina Sumners

  “But I didn’t—I didn’t murder Carolyn! I didn’t mean to kill her. It was an accident.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “Yes. I was just—we were arguing.”

  “What about?”

  “Oh, nothing. Some misunderstanding.”

  “What, precisely, had she misunderstood?”

  “Well, if you must know,” said George, aggrieved, “she thought I’d made some mistakes on a couple of our accounts.”

  “I thought it might be that,” Kathryn commented. “How much did you steal?”

  “I didn’t steal anything! It was all a mistake, I’m telling you—”

  “Oh, don’t tell me. I’d much rather hear about this accident of yours.”

  “Oh, that. Well, we were arguing. She started on me at lunch. I don’t know how she found—I don’t know what got her started. I told her she had it all wrong, but the stupid cow wouldn’t believe me. She said she wanted me to refund—I mean pay her—sixty thousand dollars, or she was going to report me to the police. I ask you! So I told her to get stuffed and I left the restaurant. I started to go to the city, I had an appointment there, but then I thought—maybe I should try again, to get her to understand. So I turned around and drove home.” George rubbed a hand across his face. “When I got there I went through the gap in the hedge to their house, and she was just about to get in her car to go to the airport; she was supposed to be going to San Francisco. I didn’t want to have an argument there in the driveway, so we went into her house. She kept saying Grace was coming any minute to drive her to the airport, so she didn’t have time to listen.”

  Kathryn reflected that it had been prudent of Carolyn to let him know someone was coming. That should have kept her safe. But Carolyn had forgotten that George was a fool.

  George was continuing: “So we went in the kitchen and I was trying to explain, but she said she wasn’t going to listen to me, and she actually turned her back on me and started to empty the damn dishwasher. Just to ignore me, you know, and I wish she hadn’t done that, because that was what—well, it wouldn’t have happened if she hadn’t opened the dishwasher. Because she was going around the kitchen, putting the dishes away and not listening to me at all, and I was getting really piss—frustrated, you see. So at one point I shoved her, you know, just a little, to get her attention, just kind of—pushed her. Anyway, she lost her balance and fell over backward. She—she fell on this huge knife, it was in the dishwasher, in the cutlery rack, you know? Anyway, this knife—it was awful. She made the most awful noise, just lying there, across the dishwasher door. And the blood, my God. Anyway, I panicked. I ran away. I mean, you can understand that, can’t you?”

  “Yes. I understand it perfectly.”

  “It was pretty awful. And I was scared, of course. I thought people might think—well, you know.”

  “Yes, I know. People might think. You left her lying across the dishwasher door?”

  “Yes.”

  Then he must have hoped it would be taken for an accident—just as she herself had suggested to Tom Holder. But in the minutes between George’s exit and Grace’s entrance, the hinges of the dishwasher door had given way, and Carolyn’s body had rolled off. The knife handle, apparently, had brought the cutlery rack with it, while the pull of the cutlery rack had evidently loosened the knife, so that it fell free to become one item of the gory clutter on the floor. So the outlines of the “accident” were badly blurred by the time Grace and Bill had come upon the scene.

  “This knife,” Kathryn said. “It was the largest one from that set that hangs by the sink?”

  “Yes, yes, it was.”

  “How do you know?”

  There was a pause, and George Kimbrough’s pale face flushed crimson. “Well, I, uh, I looked, of course. Uh, leaned over to see what, uh, what . . .”

  “Yes, of course you did. And you recognized the knife?”

  “Yes, yes, I did.”

  “They’re Sabatier, aren’t they?”

  “What? Oh, I wouldn’t know. Grace bought them for Bill and Carolyn a few years ago. There was something special about them.”

  He hadn’t known, he still didn’t know, what that something special was. So he didn’t know that Carolyn would never have put one of those knives in the dishwasher.

  George had put it there. He had waited until her back was turned, taken the knife from its rack, stuck it point up in the cutlery rack, and maneuvered Carolyn into the right position. And then he had pushed her. Kathryn wondered if he had held her down on it, and began to feel sick again.

  George, watching her face nervously, repeated, “It was an accident.”

  “Sure,” said Kathryn in a tight voice. If all he was trying to cover up was an accident, he would not have killed Tita. She said: “You were going to tell me about your conversation with Tita.”

  “Oh. Well, the kid was talking at me over the back fence about Bill and the body, and then all of a sudden she says she saw me, too, that day, when I was talking to Carolyn. Mrs. Stanley, she called her. ‘You went in the house together and you came out alone,’ she said. Well, of course you can see what that did to me. I panicked, like I said. I told her I’d show her something interesting having to do with the murder if she came in the house.” Kimbrough said this in the manner of someone offering plausible excuses for forgetting a lunch date.

  “So she went into your house and you killed her.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “You didn’t?”

  “No, I just put her in the basement. I didn’t want to kill her.”

  “You put her in the basement?” Kathryn repeated, beginning to be puzzled.

  “Yes, I was waiting for Grace to come back from wherever the hell she ran off to, I thought she’d help me. But Grace hasn’t come back,” he complained, “and now the police are saying Bill killed her, which is ridiculous, why should he?”

  Kathryn struggled for speech, and found it. “How was Grace supposed to help you?”

  “She could stay in the house and say I’d gone somewhere on a business trip, and I could take the kid to Mexico. I couldn’t very well leave town while the cops were saying Grace had been murdered, it would have looked suspicious.”

  “Mexico?”

  “Yeah. I figured I could maybe drug her or something, get her across the border, maybe just put her in the backseat and say she was asleep. Then I would take her somewhere and leave her where somebody would find her. Like a church or something,” said George piously, “where they’d take care of her.”

  Kathryn realized that in thinking George didn’t have the brains God gave geese, she had been overly generous. “They would call her parents,” she pointed out.

  “I figured some small town, maybe, where they wouldn’t speak English—”

  “How far do you think you have to drive into Mexico to find a town small enough that nobody speaks enough English to understand ‘telephone’ and ‘New Jersey’ and a string of numbers?”

  “Well,” said George uncomfortably, “I didn’t have it all worked out, like I told you, I just panicked, and put her in the basement. But Grace hasn’t come home yet, and here are the police saying Bill’s hidden Grace’s body, which can’t be right because it had to be Carolyn’s body, and why should he kill Grace anyway?”

  It was the second time he had asked, and Kathryn, who had no pity for him whatsoever, decided to tell him. “Men have frequently been known to kill their lovers.”

  George started. “Grace and Bill? Lovers? That’s ridiculous! That stupid policeman said so, too. I don’t know where people get such stupid ideas.”

  “What’s stupid about it?”

  “Grace and Bill? Hah! He’s thirty pounds overweight and blind as a bat. And he’s two inches shorter than she is.”

  Kathryn regarded George with real awe, and wondered if it was possible to feel infinite contempt for someone. She pulled the conversation back to the point. “At any rate, you were waiting for Grace to come home and sh
e didn’t.”

  “That’s right. And then this morning I got a phone call. Somebody from the police station”—George continued, unaware that Kathryn had turned to stone, and could hardly hear him for the humming in her ears—“they were kind of vague, but I got the idea somebody was on the way over, so I thought there wasn’t any more time to lose, and I’d better get rid of the kid fast.” He looked for some acknowledgment to this, but all he got was stony silence. “I didn’t have anything to put her to sleep with,” he went on lamely, “so I had—I had to knock her out, but I didn’t want to hurt her. I tried not to hit her too hard.” Silence. “I had to leave her tied up, but I was really careful, the way I carried her.”

  The humming in Kathryn’s ears abruptly ceased. “You mean she’s alive?”

  George was exasperated. “Of course she’s alive!”

  “You didn’t kill her?”

  “For Christ’s sake,” George cried, “aren’t you listening? I’ve told you a dozen times I didn’t kill her!”

  “I thought you meant—when you—” Kathryn gaped at George, then at the Mercedes. “She’s in the trunk?”

  “I told you she was in the trunk.”

  “You idiot!” Kathryn shrieked, waving the gun at him. “Get her out! now!”

  George fell out of Kathryn’s car and scrambled over to his own. He pulled the keys out of the ignition and fumbled them into the lock of the trunk while Kathryn stood over him with the gun, shouting at him to hurry up. The trunk popped open and Tita blinked dazedly up at them. She was gagged with what appeared to be a long sock, and bound hand and foot with thin cord.

  Kathryn, tears of relief running down her cheeks, reached a reassuring hand down to grip the girl’s shoulder, saying, “Tita, hon, it’s all right. You’re safe now. It’s me, remember me? Kathryn. I’m with the police.” To George she snapped in an entirely different tone, “Untie her.”

  “Oh, sure, of course,” mumbled George, unclipping a tiny silver pocket knife from the key chain. He started to open the knife.

  “Stop!” Kathryn ordered. “Lay it down next to her.” George did so. “Now step back, way back, twenty feet.” George obliged. Kathryn laid the gun down on the floor of the trunk, picked up the knife, opened it, and cut the gag and the cords.

  Tita began to weep. “My head hurts,” she complained, clutching it. “He hit me.”

  “I know he did,” Kathryn said, stroking her hair. “But he’s not going to do it again. The police are going to arrest him.”

  “I want to get out,” Tita announced, trying to sit up.

  “I’m not sure that’s a good idea, honey. It might be better for you to lie down for a while.”

  “I’ve been lying down,” Tita rejoined unanswerably, “and I want to get out.”

  “O.K., then. I’ll help you. Can you stand up? Careful, don’t bump your head. Here, I’ll lift you out.” As she set Tita on her feet, she saw two police cars pull up alongside her Audi.

  She caught her breath. She glanced down at the gun, lying where she had left it on the floor of the trunk. Her handbag was in her car. There was no way she could get to it without the gun being seen. Four members of Harton’s Finest were emerging from the patrol cars. She didn’t think the gun would fit in the pocket of her raincoat. It would show. Dear God, she thought. One of the cops was Tom Holder. All four of them were moving eagerly toward her. She closed the trunk, pulled the keys out of the lock, called, “George! Catch!” and tossed them at him.

  He was startled, of course; he threw out a tardy hand, missed them, picked them up off the ground, and pocketed them. He looked nervously at the police, but the three in uniform, following their Chief’s lead, had eyes only for the woman in the priest’s collar and the little girl.

  “My God, Kathryn!” Tom exulted. “You’ve got her! Is she all right?”

  Tita had wrapped her arms around Kathryn’s waist and buried her face in the folds of her raincoat, crying softly. Kathryn had an arm around the child’s shoulders and with her other hand stroked the ginger-colored hair. “She’s fine,” she told Tom in an unsteady voice, then corrected herself: “Well, not quite; she’s got a headache and ought to be checked for concussion. But it beats the alternatives.”

  “You ain’t kiddin’.”

  The sound of an engine starting made them turn around. George was in Kathryn’s car.

  “Get him!” Holder barked, and the uniforms sprinted to obey, but before they could reach the car, George had pulled away in a storm of kicked-up gravel. The two officers who had arrived in the front car leapt back into it and roared after him. The policewoman who had driven Tom Holder looked at her Chief, who was saying under his breath the sort of words that used to be called unprintable. “No, you stay with me,” he said. “Call the station and have them call the Robinsons, tell them their daughter’s alive and O.K. and we’re bringing her home, but they’ll need to take her to the hospital emergency room just to be sure she hasn’t got a concussion.”

  The woman nodded and trotted back to her vehicle. Holder turned to Kathryn and gestured politely toward the police car. “Climb aboard.”

  “Come on, Tita,” she said. “Let’s take you home.” She led the child past Holder, who was kneeling to examine the ruins of George’s left front tire.

  “What happened here?” he asked.

  Kathryn’s heart contracted. She said woodenly, “He had a flat.”

  “How lucky can ya get?” Holder remarked.

  Meanwhile, two miles down the road, at a curve that was sharper than it looked, George had wrapped Kathryn’s car around a substantial tree. The pursuing patrol car screeched to a halt; the two policemen jumped out and ran to assess the condition of their recaptured suspect. They peered into the steaming wreckage and promptly wished they hadn’t.

  CHAPTER 37

  Tom Holder had polished off two roast beef sandwiches and perhaps a bit too much of a very remarkable scotch. It was Kathryn’s—trust her to have a bottle of something he’d never heard of and could not pronounce—and she had kept up with him, shot for shot. They were sitting in her living room at dusk, tying up loose ends.

  They had settled the question of Patricia Clyde’s guilty knowledge.

  “She’s the one who found out George had been fiddling with the books,” Kathryn said.

  Kathryn had had a long, tear-stained session with Patricia earlier in the afternoon. The police had dropped her at home, and she had borrowed Mrs. Warburton’s car to pay, she had said, a pastoral call. Somebody had to tell Patricia about Carolyn.

  In turn, Patricia had told her how she’d suspected George for months, finally proved it to her satisfaction, and told Carolyn that fateful Monday morning. Carolyn, disliking scenes, chose to drop the bomb on George over a civilized lunch at Leboeuf’s. He couldn’t shout at her there.

  “But according to Patricia, George’s reaction, even in the middle of Leboeuf’s, frightened Carolyn. She came back to the office and collected the evidence to take it with her to San Francisco, because it occurred to her that otherwise it wouldn’t be there when she got back. She had Patricia cancel her hotel reservation because she didn’t want George to know where she was.”

  “And Miss Iceberg knew all about this and didn’t tell me. I could wring her neck.”

  “Well, don’t be too hard on Patricia. She thought she didn’t have the right to tell you about George’s embezzling, that was for Carolyn to tell you when she got back from California, and why should she tell you, anyway, since Bill killing Grace didn’t have anything to do with George cooking the books?”

  “Oh, speaking of books—I brought you a souvenir.” He dug in his vinyl zipper folder, pulled out a sheet of paper, and handed it to Kathryn.

  “All right!” she said, producing a tired grin. “I may frame it.” It was a photocopy of the “Attic” page of Tita’s notebook. A series of entries in the middle of the page read as follows:

  1:12 p.m. Mrs. S. comes out of the house carrying two suitcases. Sou
nds of argument from Mrs. S. and somebody else. (Behind trees) Mrs. S. and Mr. K. go in the back door.

  1:18 p.m. Mr. K. comes out alone. He is in a hurry.

  1:24 p.m. Mr. S. goes in the back door.

  1:27 p.m. Mrs. K. comes out the back door.

  “When I think,” said Kathryn, “that this was just sitting around! How can you say I’ve been anything but a dithering incompetent all along? After all, you gave me this to read, and I didn’t.”

  “Oh, come on, Kathryn! You can’t blame yourself for that. I didn’t really expect you to read it. I gave it to you as a kind of joke.” It gave me an excuse to come over here. The words were in his mind, but he kept them from his tongue. It would be too explicit. She would shut up on him like a clam, and things would never be easy between them again.

  They had settled the question of Bill Stanley’s future.

  “Oh, community service, probably. Worst thing that will happen to him is embarrassment.”

  “Given the scope of the embarrassment in question, I’m inclined to think that’s not a minor consideration. Where did he put Carolyn’s body?”

  “In the canal near the golf course.”

  Kathryn studied her scotch. “That will make messy work for some of your people,” she said.

  “Yes,” Holder replied briefly, studying his own scotch.

  “I know what I meant to ask you,” he said, changing the subject. “What was going on with Grace back there in Trenton when she blushed?”

  The fact that Grace had fallen into bed with (apparently) the first man she’d run into in San Francisco was, like Kathryn’s intuition about Carolyn’s sex life, something she had gleaned in confidence. So she said, “I can’t tell you. It was nothing remotely criminal. It had to do,” she said, picking her words carefully, “with how she chose to escape from the supposition that Bill had killed Carolyn, presumably over her, over Grace.”