The Perfect Suspect

by Margaret Coel

  “I’m not at liberty to divulge that type of information,” the first woman said.

  The other woman stepped closer. “This about Mr. Mathews?” “Edith, I don’t think this is a good idea.” The woman in the doorway glanced over her shoulder, then started to push the door shut.

  “No, wait.” Edith muscled her way into the doorway. “What do you know about his murder?” she said, craning forward. She had dark eyes with gray pupils that looked cloudy and unfocused.

  In an instant, Catherine understood who she was. “You’re his housekeeper. You found his body,” she said. “How terrible that must have been for you.”

  Edith opened the door. “You can come in for a minute.”

  “I can’t take the responsibility,” the first woman said. She had a worried, nervous look about her. Her hands twitched at her sides.

  “Stop worrying, Mary. I’ll take the responsibility.” Edith motioned Catherine inside and into a great room that extended into a kitchen at the rear of the house. Catherine could sense the nervousness in the gray-haired woman hovering behind them.

  “Mr. Mathews was always good to me,” Edith said. She positioned herself in front of a table and dabbed a tissue under her nose. She was probably in her fifties, fit and attractive, despite the redness that rimmed her eyes and the tousled look of her hair, as if she had been raking it with her fingers. “Whoever killed him deserves the death penalty. What do you know?”

  “Mrs. Kramer will be here any minute,” Mary said. She had moved to the window and was peering outside. “She won’t be happy you let in a reporter.”

  “He shouldn’t have died like that. He was a good man. He took care of people like us.” Edith nodded toward the woman at the window. “We don’t have much. We’re not educated and smart like he was. He was always generous. Gave me nice bonuses at Christmas. Gave you a little extra, too,” she said, directing the comment toward Mary. “He didn’t forget where he came from, people just like us. He would’ve been a great governor ’cause he would’ve remembered the little people.” She blew her nose, blinked several times and looked straight at Catherine. “Those detectives, they’re chasing their tails, asking stupid questions. What did I see? Who came to visit Mr. Mathews last night? How would I know? I was home in my own bed with my husband. You ask me, they need to look hard at people that hated Mr. Mathews and didn’t want him to be governor. I guess they got their own way, ’cause he’s not gonna be governor now. Please tell me what you know.” She looked as if she might burst into tears, and Catherine suspected she had been crying since this morning and had probably turned to her friend, the woman who worked next door.

  Catherine took a moment, considering how much to divulge. She decided to take a chance. “We believe there may have been a witness,” she said.

  “What?” Edith’s head snapped backward. She stared at Catherine out of wide, round eyes. “Somebody saw Mr. Mathews get shot?”

  “We don’t know for certain,” Catherine said. “We’re looking into the possibility. What about the neighbors? Does anyone walk a dog at night? Anyone ever come home late at night?”

  Mary let out a strangled laugh. “Not in this neighborhood.”

  “Perhaps you can tell me if Mr. Mathews was accustomed to visitors late at night.”

  “You gotta leave now.” Mary took a step toward Catherine. “Mrs. Kramer’s meeting ended thirty minutes ago. She’ll come straight home. I’ll lose my job if she finds a reporter here. The Kramers don’t want nothing to do with this.”

  Edith swung away and stared out into the entry. Her expression hardened, as if her muscles had turned to stone. She looked back at Catherine. “You’re just like the detectives. Asking stupid questions to ruin the reputation of a fine, upstanding man. I won’t be party to it.”

  “That’s not my intention,” Catherine said, trying for a conciliatory tone that would let the woman know she only wanted Mathews’s killer brought to justice. “Someone may have been outside when Mathews was killed. There were rumors he was sometimes unfaithful. If that’s true, some woman may have been on the way to the house.”

  “She killed him.”

  “Who?” Catherine said. She was thinking of what the caller had said: if the police find out I was there, they’ll think I killed him.

  “Whoever came last night.” Edith’s shoulders crumbled, and she dipped her head into her hands and started sobbing. “One of his women,” she said, the words muffled and tear filled. “I don’t know who they were. I’ve never seen them. They’d still be there in the mornings when I got to work, but they’d leave real fast. Duck out the door under their scarves so I wouldn’t see their faces.”

  “I told you, you should’ve just told the detectives,” Mary said. She held out her arm and stared at her watch, as if it were ticking off the last minutes of her life. “Let them interview his mistresses.”

  “How could I do that?” Edith shouted. “How could I betray him like that? Nobody would see his good side, the kind of man he really was. People would just see a cheater. I couldn’t do that.” She swiveled toward Catherine. “You can’t print this. It’s what you call privileged information, off the record or something.”

  “You want Mr. Mathews’s killer caught, don’t you?” Catherine said, still the conciliatory voice. “It’s possible one of the women killed him. Or maybe one of the women he was involved with saw the killer. Is there anything else you remember, anything you know that could help me locate these women?”

  “Oh, God,” Mary said. She was doing a nervous jig in front of the window. “She’s home. Go out the back door.” She lunged for Catherine and started pulling her toward the kitchen. “We’ve got to get her out of here,” she said, pleading with Edith.

  “What’s going on?” Carol Kramer stood in the entry. She slammed the front door behind her and came into the great room. “I see we have another visit from the press,” she said, approaching Catherine. She looked crisp and businesslike, unlike the wrinkled, disconcerted woman this morning. “We’ve already told you everything we know.” Turning to her housekeeper, she said, “You had no right to let her in.”

  “I let her inside,” Edith said. “I swear to you, Mrs. Kramer, I didn’t say anything that might embarrass you or Mr. Kramer.”

  “I stopped by on the chance you may have remembered something else from last night,” Catherine said. “Someone walking on the sidewalk, a strange car in the neighborhood? We’re trying to investigate rumors of a possible witness and determine if they have any credibility.”

  For a moment, the woman kept her lips together in a thin, tight line. Then she said, “My husband and I did our civic duty by calling the police when Edith arrived at our house. We did not hear any disturbances from the Mathews’s house, and we don’t know anything. We barely knew David and Sydney Mathews, although . . .” she hesitated. “I’m very sorry for Sydney. She seems to be a perfectly nice woman. But we can’t be involved with this sordid business. We don’t deserve to be drawn into a murder investigation for being good citizens.”

  “It may be unavoidable,” Catherine said. “Your 911 call is part of the official record, available to the public.”

  “Oh, I get it.” Carol Kramer threw up both hands, tossed her head back and laughed at the ceiling. “How foolish of me. We’re in negotiations, do I have it right? You’ll keep our names out of the paper if I remember seeing something or someone last night. Well, what shall I tell you? What will make you go away and be quiet.”

  Catherine could feel her muscles tense. She had interviewed sources like Carol Kramer before, arrogant, self-centered, rich and powerful. It wouldn’t surprise her if the Kramers were friends with the Journal’s publisher, who could call Marjorie and demand that Catherine be fired. Her ex-husband had come from a family like the Kramers, and she had spent six years watching them use their power, connections and money to ruin reputations and people and casually walk away afterward and dine by candlelight at the club, violins playing softly in the corn
er.

  “There is no deal,” she said.

  Carol Kramer lifted one eyebrow in surprise. They were used to getting their own way, women like her. Dealing the cards, making the rules. Catherine knew that when the article appeared in the Journal naming Carol and Lee Kramer as the neighbors who had reported the gunshots, she would get a call to Marjorie’s office. “I’m investigating rumors connected to Mathews’s murder, and I intend to continue my investigation. I’m sorry you can’t help.”

  “I’ve seen something,” Edith said, stepping closer.

  “Stay out of this.” Carol Kramer swung an arm at the older woman, as if she had wanted to push her back, make her disappear.

  “I don’t work for you,” Edith said.

  “You’ll never work for anybody in this town if you don’t shut up.”

  “What did Mr. Mathews ever do to you?” Edith said. Out of the corner of her eye, Catherine could see Mary folding into herself, becoming smaller. There was an air of expectancy in the way she cocked her head to the right, as if she heard best out of that ear and didn’t want to miss what may come next. The electrical current flowing between Edith and Carol Kramer was so strong that Catherine wouldn’t have been surprised it if had started crackling. An image floated in her mind: Carol Kramer, scarf draped over her head, making a hasty retreat from David Mathews’s bedroom.

  “You impertinent woman!” Carol Kramer said. “Leave this house immediately, and take your reporter friend with you.”

  Edith didn’t move. “Sometimes when I got to work in the mornings, I seen a black BMW parked down the street a ways, on the other side. I knew it didn’t belong there.”

  “This is ridiculous.” Carol Kramer was digging into the bag slung over one arm. She extracted a cell phone and flipped it open. “Either you both leave now, or I’ll call security and have you thrown out.”

  Catherine pivoted about, walked through the room and across the entry. She let herself out through the glass-striped door and kept going until she was in the street next to her convertible. She waited as Edith hurried down the sidewalk, chest heaving, arms swinging. “Can I give you a lift,” she said.

  The woman shook her head. “I got my car in back. What I told you about the BMW’s not going to hurt Mr. Mathews’s reputation, will it? You won’t put any of it into the newspaper?”

  “I can’t promise that,” Catherine said. “I don’t know if it’s important. But I will promise that, whatever happens, I will write about David Mathews’s kind, generous side.”

  10

  Catherine drove south on Colorado Boulevard, the voice of Diana Krall floating over the hum of the engine. The bumper-to-bumper rush hour traffic ground to a jerky stop at a red light. Odors of exhaust and dry, hot dust wafted across the convertible. She liked driving with the top down, the elusive sense of freedom that came with the wind in her hair. In the distance, the mountains glowed gold and magenta, as if they were lit from within. Clouds billowed across the sky, and a jet out of DIA laid a long, straight contrail. The traffic started forward, and she made it all the way to the intersection before she had to stomp on the brake again, keeping an eye on the rearview mirror to make sure the red SUV managed to stop behind her.

  She couldn’t get the voice on the phone out of her head. The anonymous caller, the witness on the sidewalk in front of Mathews’s house, had heard the gunshots, seen a woman walk out of the house and hesitate for an instant in the light over the front door. That woman was Detective Beckman. A crank call? It was always possible, and yet Catherine had heard the cold, abject fear in the caller’s voice. Every instinct she had honed as a reporter over the last ten years told her the caller was telling the truth.

  And there was the black BMW that Mathews’s housekeeper had occasionally seen parked in the neighborhood when she’d arrived for work in the mornings. A scenario was starting to come together, the story line playing itself out. The woman with the BMW could have been on her way to Mathews’s house for a prearranged midnight rendezvous when she heard the gunshots and saw the murderer. She had retreated, not wanting to get involved. Then she had seen Detective Beckman on TV and realized who it was she had seen. Still, she might have remained uninvolved, except for the fear that the murderer had seen her and that, sooner or later, a police detective could discover her identity. Then she would become the suspect, maybe even be charged with murder, especially when the detective found out that she often visited Mathews in the middle of the night and might have a motive to kill him. So she had called the Journal in a desperate attempt to save herself.

  The traffic inched forward. Six more blocks, another couple of redlight stops, and Catherine swung into the parking strip abutting a multistoried blond brick building. Three men in light-colored slacks and pastel shirts, jackets slung over their shoulders, came through the double-glass front doors and broke into different directions as they headed into the lot. One thing was certain, Catherine was thinking. Detective Beckman had to find a way to charge someone else with the murder and close the case.

  She left the convertible in a spot that one of the men had just vacated and hurried across the hot asphalt. The air was still in the afternoon heat. Bits of paper and clumps of grass lay limp and dry alongside the curb that marked the boundary between the lot and the sidewalk.

  Campaign headquarters could be closed by now, she was thinking. Permanently closed, with the candidate dead. She had intended to get here earlier this afternoon, but the day had collapsed in on itself. Everything demanded more time than she had expected: reviewing six months of articles on David Mathews, writing an article for the Journal’s website and another for tomorrow’s paper, both rehashing old stuff. David Mathews, business entrepreneur, president of Mathews Properties, Republican candidate for governor, selected at the state convention by acclimation—no prospective candidates had come close to the votes he gathered. He had sailed through the primaries and into the weeks before the general election with strong support from the party and the public. Everyone loved David Mathews.

  And someone had to know the identity of the woman in the BMW.

  Catherine let herself into a narrow entry that spilled down a corridor on the right and up a flight of stairs on the left. Attorneys, insurance and real estate firms occupied offices behind the closed doors. Cold blasts of air blew out of the ceiling vents. Campaign headquarters took up the far end of the second floor. Catherine passed two doors that she knew led into a back office where volunteers sat at telephones and called and cajoled donors. She rapped on the next door and peered through the long window that flanked it. The office looked as if a hurricane had blown through. Upended, empty cardboard boxes, crumbled pieces of paper, plastic containers strewn over the floor and across the desks. Drawers hung open, chairs pushed haphazardly around the stacks of newspapers and magazines that littered the green carpeting. Hung at an angle on the far wall was a campaign poster with large, black type—Take Back Our State—above a smiling David Mathews. The honest blue eyes, gleaming silver hair, and frank, open smile, all meant to convey the message: trust me.

  There was no one in sight, and yet Catherine could sense the faintest movements somewhere beyond the doors that opened off the room. She knocked again, louder this time. The sound reverberated along the corridor. A tall man with bushy gray hair and thick eyebrows shadowing his eyes, dressed in a blue tee shirt and khaki slacks, came through one of the doors. He stared at the window, locked eyes with Catherine, then looked away. She could see the hesitation melt into acceptance in the way he ran a hand across his mouth. Finally he moved sideways. The door juddered open.

  “No comment.” Don Cannon, the campaign manager, held the door ajar.

  “No comment?” Catherine stepped past him into the room. The stuffy smell of discarded things and futility filled the air. She had visited campaign headquarters on numerous occasions, looking for a quote, an explanation, the behind-the-scenes story that might reveal the real candidate. Usually she got to see Cannon, while other reporters we
re directed to Larry Elders, official press liaison. She suspected that her coverage of Mathews’s business troubles had relegated her to a higher status, as if Cannon wanted to make sure she didn’t stumble onto the truth.

  “Your candidate was murdered,” she said, “and you have no comment?”

  Cannon closed the door, pulled a chair over and dropped down. “This isn’t a good time.” He waved a fleshy hand at the furniture that most likely awaited a moving van. “Cops were here this afternoon, asking a lot of inane questions. Armed with a search warrant. Pretty much cleared the place out.”

  “Detective Beckman?”

  “And Martinez. Who do I think pulled the trigger? Who wanted David dead? Had he received any threats? Suspicious telephone calls, e-mails? Any altercations? Enemies? He was a politician; what do they think?” He jabbed a finger at the notebook Catherine had pulled from her bag. “That’s off the record, by the way.”

  Catherine tapped her pen against the notepad. “Was David expecting anyone last night?”

  “You sound like the cops. How would I know?”

  “You were close to him. You managed his campaign. You were on the way to the capitol with him as chief of staff or some other appointed position, right? He confided in you.”

  Cannon didn’t say anything, and Catherine went on: “It’s possible someone besides the killer was at the house.”

  “What are you talking about? The cops didn’t say anything about somebody else being there.”

  “I’m conducting my own investigation,” Catherine said. “Did you send one of the women from the campaign over to the house to drop off documents or speak with Mathews about something important? Anyone at all?”

  “Oh, man!” Cannon leaned back and ran a hand across his forehead, as if he could wipe away the implications. “Was David having an affair with someone on the campaign staff? No, he was not.”