The Case Has Altered

by Martha Grimes

  The courtroom went wild; Agatha and Theo Wrenn Browne looked as if they might need the ministrations of “Dr. Todd”; and even old Eustace-Hobson was clearly delighted. He banged his gavel (more for appearances than any real desire to call for order) and motioned for Bryce-Pink and Trueblood to approach. He said a few well-tuned words to them, and when they’d returned to their respective places, he announced the case against Miss Crisp was dismissed. “Ridiculous business!” he said, forgetting for the moment his office. “Waste of the taxpayers’ money! Shouldn’t be surprised if there were a countersuit, Mr. Bryce-Pink, your client getting sued for slander! Either that or collusion or both!” And he humphed and grumphed his way out of the room.

  Ada Crisp embraced Trueblood and did a little dance past the plaintiff’s table, gave Agatha a little wave, and fairly skipped up the aisle toward her bridge club.

  “Bloody brilliant!” said Melrose, clapping his arm across Trueblood’s shoulder. “This calls for a Cairo Flame!”

  40

  In the Case Has Altered, Jury asked Julie Rough for the telephone tucked beneath the bar and dragged it and its long cord over to a table isolated from the rest of them so he wouldn’t be overheard. Dutifully, he dialed Lincoln HQ. When Bannen came on the line, Jury said, speaking of Dorcas’s moodiness, “I think this is important: something significant happened to cause it.” Bannen was silent long enough to make Jury wonder if the connection had been broken. “Hello . . . you there?”

  Bannen said, “We know ‘something significant happened.’ She thought she was pregnant.”

  “Besides that, I mean. What shouldn’t she have listened to? What shouldn’t she have done?”

  “I’d say shouldn’t have dropped her knickers for him. It would account for the change, wouldn’t it, if he left her high and dry?”

  Jury had to admit that was the case, only . . . It was his turn to be silent as the door opened and the woman he had seen here before walked in and took a seat at the bar. Madeline Reese, Trevor’s sister and the person Dorcas had confided in. She looked so much like Dorcas that Jury wondered if their mutual lack of beauty might have created a strong enough bond between them to make Dorcas’s confiding in the aunt even more understandable. Jury said to Bannen, “I don’t get it, though. What we’ve been hearing all along is how unattractive Dorcas was. The mere fact of her ‘pregnancy’ surprised people. Who would find Dorcas attractive enough to go to bed with her?”

  “Sorry, but I never heard a pretty face was absolutely de rigueur for that.”

  “You’re right, except Dorcas simply wasn’t physically appealing. Could we assume, then, just for the sake of the argument, this man she’d been seeing wanted something, but it wasn’t her? Perhaps what he wanted was to keep her quiet.”

  “Why? The only man amongst the ones we’ve talked to who might conceivably suffer the consequences of this ‘pregnancy’ is Max Owen. Price certainly wouldn’t; he’d be let off because he’s ‘arty’ and everyone knows that type’s eccentric and believes in free love. And Major Parker’s a bachelor. Nor is he the type to put up with blackmail. And in the case of Dorcas, there’s nothing to blackmail him about. So she’s pregnant; so he’s the father; so what?”

  “That lad in Spalding?”

  “Not a chance. The way he and others who knew him told it, their relationship existed primarily in Dorcas’s mind.”

  Jury was silent, watching the solitary woman at the bar. The chaps at the end of it had greeted her, but no one had come to sit beside her. The door opened again, bringing the chill March air in with the old man who entered. “I’m missing something important. And I still think someone wanted her silence.”

  “He got that, didn’t he?” Bannen rang off.

  The old man was the one Jury had seen before in here. As he made his painful progress to the end of the bar, he put Jury in mind of a blasted tree. He sat down between Ian and Malcolm and laid his brier cane across the bar.

  Julie saw Jury coming back; she smiled and pulled down her jumper, smoothed her short skirt. Jury ordered a pint of Adman’s and told her to set up the three with whatever they were drinking. He was about to include Madeline Reese, but thought he’d better introduce himself first.

  Ian—or Malcolm—Jury wasn’t sure which was which, introduced the old man, whose name was Tomas. He said, “You be here ‘bout these murders, ain’t you?”

  “I am, yes.”

  Tomas leaned uncomfortably close. “Interfered with, was they?”

  “We don’t think so.” Jury smiled.

  “It’s usual, cases like that. Some pervert, like.” He tapped his head. “Got sex on the brain.”

  “Speaking o’ sex,” said Ian, lowering his voice, “there’s the perfect bird fer ya, Tomas.” He winked at Jury, gestured with his head toward Madeline Reese.

  Tomas squinted. “Who’d that be?”

  “Down there.”

  “I can’t see ’er, man.”

  “Well, get yer bleedin’ glasses on.”

  Tomas fumbled a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles out of his jacket pocket and looped them behind his ears. “Ah, fer God’s sake, it’s that Reese woman. Better wifout me glasses.” He took them off again.

  Malcolm nudged old Tomas with his shoulder. “Go on, Tomas, you know you want to.”

  “Shut yer yob, Mac. You’d ’ave t’be blind. Stop takin’ the piss outta me.”

  Madeline Reese looked tired; for her, Jury imagined, it was a chronic condition. Tired of exciting nothing more in men than foolishness or ridicule. He picked up his own glass and moved down the bar.

  She appeared genuinely surprised when Jury sat on the stool beside her and offered to buy her another drink. Her looks did not improve upon closer inspection. Her straight brown hair was parted in the center and held back by her ears. Her light brown eyes were damp, the color of wet sand. A shandy, she said she wanted. He hadn’t heard anyone order that in years. Like her dress, Maddy was out of date, a relic from an earlier time. There were some women the past clung to like a patina of dust.

  Was Madeline what Dorcas would have grown up to be? The butt of jokes, the mock-solicitousness of men who could only look at her without her glasses. As Julie Rough set down the fresh drinks, Jury expressed his sympathy, told her he was sorry about her niece, and explained his position—that he wasn’t part of the official investigation; he was trying to help out a friend. When Maddy discovered that the “friend” was the woman whose trial had been so thoroughly covered in the local newspaper, she said she was “thrilled.” Here was information, first hand. She said she could hardly believe it’d happen to someone like “our Dorcas.” Jury liked that proprietorial way of speaking, the same way the mother had. Maddy had read all the newspapers and was glad that this Kennington woman had got off. Jury took this as an indication of a warm and generous nature, since it left the murder of her niece unsolved. He said so. Unused to compliments, she blushed.

  Her fear was that there was a serial killer out there somewhere, and Jury tried to assure her that this wasn’t true. That the murders weren’t random, that they were quite purposeful. She still wasn’t sure police could eliminate a serial killer. Maddy seemed to hold that belief rather dear. Probably it made the whole thing that much more exciting. People were strange.

  He noticed as they talked that her voice was especially pleasant. Like her brother Trevor’s, her voice had that lilting Irish cadence that faltered only when coming up against her local accent. Despite her plain appearance, Maddy’s voice might even have been seductive. Hadn’t the father, or Vi, the sister, said that Dorcas’s voice was so pleasant, it was she they elected to do a lot of the reading? Dorcas’s voice was “easy on the ears.”

  Yes, Madeline agreed with her other niece, Violet. That Dorcas’s mood had changed dramatically just a short while before she’d been murdered. “I make out,” Maddy said, “somebody’d let her down, hard.” She tapped the ash from her cigarette into a metal tray. “Hard,” she said again. Jury thought sh
e knew all about being let down hard.

  He was about to comment on this, when he remembered that Madeline sometimes worked for Major Parker. Jury asked her how long she had been doing this.

  “Years, on a regular basis. And also help out if he’s giving one of his dinners. He’s a grand cook, did anyone tell you?”

  “Everyone’s told me.” Jury laughed.

  “That’s nice, I think, a man like him being such a grand cook. Most men, they wouldn’t be caught dead. Imagine that lot there—” She nodded toward Malcolm and Ian and old Tomas. “—just picture them talking about cassoulets and soufflés. Makes me laugh, to think it. Major Parker now, the way I work it out is he’s comfortable with himself.”

  Jury thought of Zel, what she’d told him. “Have you ever seen Dorcas there?”

  “Dorcas? No. What business would she have there?”

  “I was told that Dorcas visited Major Parker more than once.”

  “Dorcas did? Whatever—” Then she laughed. “Oh, no, you’re not saying you think Major Parker—? Look, he’d never have anything to do with a scrap of a girl like our Dorcas. If you’re thinking he’s the one . . . no, never. Dorcas was never one to attract the men. I ought to know, for we look so much alike. Looked,” she corrected herself, sadly.

  There was no self-pity in her voice; nevertheless, Jury felt sorry for her. “ ‘Attraction’ covers many likes and levels. Then you think Dorcas’s reputation as an easy conquest was exaggerated?”

  Maddy shook free another cigarette. “I don’t know. I do know she went with boys when she was still a schoolgirl.”

  “ ‘Dorcas is willin’ ’?”

  She nodded. “Probably the only thing those kids came away with in all of their schooling. That line, I mean. And even then they can’t remember who wrote it.” She bent her cigarette over the match Jury held for her, inhaled deeply, exhaled a ribbon of smoke.

  For Jury, the smell of the languidly drifting smoke was utterly seductive. He tracked its gossamer trail up to the ceiling, where it dispersed. He remembered how, on the roof of that hotel in Santa Fe, he had wanted to crawl into the arms of those lovely women who held martinis in one hand and cigarettes in the other. It wasn’t sex he was after, it was smokes. Jury wondered if any scientific study had ever been done of the relationship between smoking and sex. “How much of it’s sexual?”

  “Dorcas’s behavior?”

  “No. Smoking.” He imagined he looked as abashed as a little kid. Here were two murders committed and his mind was on cigarettes. “Trying to stop.”

  She looked at him sympathetically and blew the smoke away from him. “It’s hard; I’ve tried.” She thought for a bit, then said, “Maybe she was helping out. Dorcas, I mean.”

  Jury remembered what Zel had said about that. “It’s not likely, is it, Dorcas would be helping out as sous chef. And the cleaning, well, you’re still doing that, aren’t you?”

  “Once a week. All he needs, really. He’s a very tidy man. And a lot of the house is closed off, so it’s not as big a job as it seems. And, anyway, if Major Parker decided he needed more help, he’d’ve had me doing the searching out.”

  “You have no idea why she might have gone there?”

  Maddy shook her head. “Whoever told you that, anyway?”

  Jury did not want to say it was Zel. Although he believed in what she’d said and seen, others might dismiss information coming from an imaginative little girl. “Did you know Verna Dunn?”

  “No. Except to see; I mean I know what she looked like. Way I heard it, she wasn’t very nice.”

  Jury shook his head.

  Maddy said, “Did you think your friend would get off?”

  Again, Jury nodded. “Her barrister and solicitor are very good.”

  “What I wonder is, why couldn’t it’ve been two different people—the killers I mean. It would make more sense.”

  “Why do you think so?”

  “Because I just can’t see a person with reason to kill them both. Like, I can imagine Dorcas going to this man and telling him she’s preggers. And if he says no, he won’t marry her, her getting shirty about it and saying to him she’ll tell the world. If he’s married, he wouldn’t want that. Even if he’s not, but he has kind of a social position, well, he might want to, you know, get rid of her. Awful as that all is, I can imagine it.”

  “I can too.”

  41

  There’s nothing at all sinister in it, Superintendent,” said Parker. “Dorcas was a terrible cook. So for a few weeks there I was trying to teach her some basics. All right, I should have told this to that Inspector Bannen, about her coming here, but I simply couldn’t see why. It was all so innocent.”

  “I’m sure it was,” said Jury, taking another sip of what was arguably the best cup of coffee ever made. “The trouble is, what has the appearance of being irrelevant to a case often is quite important.”

  “How was my teaching her a few basic things about cooking relevant to her death?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Parker returned the pipe to his mouth and kept his eyes on Jury.

  “The point is, why? Why would Dorcas want to learn how to cook?”

  “She didn’t tell me,” said Parker. “Just said it meant a lot to her. She couldn’t even follow a recipe in a cookery book. Oddly enough, I never asked her the question, you know? I expect I assume everyone wants to cook, or would do, if he knew any better.”

  “Not Dorcas Reese, not from what I’ve heard.”

  Parker sat silently smoking his pipe. There were times when Jury thought everyone else in the world smoked except him. “I see what you mean,” said Parker.

  They had talked about the trial. Parker observed that all of them, himself, the Owens, felt great relief when the case was dismissed. They all liked Jenny Kennington so much. He had never believed she was guilty, nor had Max or Grace. The prosecution had a weak case to begin with, Parker said.

  “I see what you mean about her. Dorcas wouldn’t be wanting to learn anything unless she had some unstated agenda.” He removed the pipe from his mouth, looked thoughtfully at the bowl. “You know, I went to one of those cordon bleu cooking schools years ago. Most of the students were men, just two or three women. All except one of them wanted to be chefs. Two of the women took the course because they knew nothing about cooking and were getting married.” He looked doubtful when he said, “Perhaps Dorcas—?”

  “Yes. How often did she come here?”

  “One or two afternoons a week. Five or six weeks, I’d say.”

  “Right up to the time of her death?”

  “No.” Parker rubbed at his temple with the stem of his pipe. “She missed a couple of times. Actually, I was surprised. She was so determined. Nor did she call—” He shrugged. “I expect it’d been a week, perhaps ten days since her last lesson.”

  “I’ve been talking to the Reeses, including the aunt, Madeline. She didn’t know Dorcas had been visiting you.”

  “Maddy, ah. She wouldn’t have known, no. Dorcas came on days when she wasn’t here. Coincidence, perhaps; or perhaps Dorcas wanted her cooking lessons kept a deep secret.”

  “More than her supposed pregnancy? She told her aunt about that. And you. Why?”

  “I’ve no idea.” Parker shook his head. “All right, I should certainly have told that Chief Inspector Bannen. But I imagine you can see why I didn’t. As you say, why would she have told me, unless—?” He left the question unfinished. “Dorcas was pretty much a lightweight in the brains department,” Parker went on. “Scatty, couldn’t keep her mind on the hollandaise. She always had her eye on the finished product—a mousse, a soufflé—but couldn’t manage the steps involved in getting it. That picture-perfect cassoulet or pear confit à la Parker.” He looked sheepish. “Sorry, I do tend to get a little precious about cooking.”

  Jury smiled. “Sounds good.” He turned his head. “Smells good, too. What are you making?”

  “A ragout. Lamb. You should join
me. ‘Us,’ I should say. Zel’s coming to do the dessert. Are you sure you can’t stay for dinner?” It was the third time Parker had asked him, done so with a near-childlike tenacity.

  “I wish I could, but something is going on in my mind, some glimmer of an answer that might get lost in the middle of a ragout. Assuming, of course, you’re as good as they say you are.”

  Parker laughed. “Probably I am.”

  Jury’s look at Parker was speculative. “Could Dorcas have said anything at all that might have seemed—again, irrelevant, but indeed might not be?”

  “Well, you can’t put it that way, old boy.” Parker laughed. “If it seemed irrelevant, I wouldn’t know, would I?”

  “No, of course not. Just tell me anything she said you wondered about.” Jury leaned forward. “The thing is, if we knew who this man is, we just might know who killed her. I keep thinking of what she said: ‘I shouldn’t have listened. I ought not to have done it.’ Listened to whom? Done what? Was she talking about her pregnancy? Suppose she told the man she was pregnant—”

  “But she wasn’t.”

  “That makes no difference, as long as she thought she was. The so-called father would have believed her, finally. Dorcas would have convinced him if he’d had any doubt. She was determined.”

  “And finding out, he’d have got rid of her?” Parker rubbed at his temple again with the pipe. “That just doesn’t strike me as much of a motive. Not these days, not when everything is so accepted. Hardly any kind of behavior fazes us anymore. Unmarried mothers would hardly qualify. I don’t know why Dorcas chose me as her confidant in all of this. But then I didn’t know why she’d ask me to make a cook of her, either. I hope you believe me; I had no relationship at all with Dorcas; I have no idea why she told me she was pregnant. She blurted it out one day. She was quite upset.”