by Kate Wilhelm
“I don’t think he noticed at all,” Constance said. “In the next interview with him, she was professional, removed, objective. I don’t think he realized that, either.”
Jenna nodded. “She was a really good interviewer, and it would have been important for her to try to find out why he hadn’t written anything since that first novel appeared.” She drew in a breath, then said in a rush, “That idiot turned it into a ‘pity me, I’ve been hurt come-on,’ and the seduction started all over.” She shuddered.
“There’s something else you need to know,” Constance said. She told Jenna about Stuart’s meeting Eve outside the supermarket. “We suspect that Earl Marshall will have a different version of that encounter.”
Jenna looked out at the lake and nodded. “I know he will. He seems to see himself as a real Lothario, irresistible, on a white horse.” Abruptly she reached into her handbag on the floor by her chair. She withdrew Eve’s journal and opened it at the end. “I didn’t know what this meant, and still don’t know what some of it means, but look. There are those names J Joyce, E Pound, and so on. Then her question, Who is he? And the last line that she crossed out.” She showed the page to Constance. “She was asking about him, wasn’t she? ‘Who is he?’”
“It seems likely,” Constance said. “Those other names, Joyce, Pound, the rest. I think I know who they are.” She told Jenna what she had told Charlie—gifted, talented men who had shown reprehensible behavior, had led execrable personal lives.
“Reprehensible behavior,” Jenna repeated. “That’s what she meant. She said she had to talk over something with me, something important. It was about him. I know it was about him. And I was at work,” she said. “I wasn’t there for her.” She ducked her head and was silent for a moment. “Earlier, she wrote in her journal that she didn’t know what to do. That’s what she wanted to talk about. We always talked over big decisions, made important plans together.” Her voice broke as she said this and she became silent.
She closed the journal and returned it to her purse, and, without looking at Constance, she asked in a harsh voice, “Did he murder her?”
Constance reached across the table and put her hand on Jenna’s arm. Its rigidity signaled her anguish or her anger. It was hard to tell which was uppermost at the moment. “We don’t know who killed your sister,” Constance said. “We’re trying to find out, but you must not even hint that you suspect him or anyone else.”
Jenna took another sip of wine, then silently picked up the tapes and tape recorder and put them in her handbag. She stood, looked out at the lake for a moment. “I think I should go now. I need to walk a little and it’s not far.”
“May I walk with you, at least part of the way?”
Jenna shrugged. “If you’d like.”
They took the wine and glasses inside, Constance wrote a note to Charlie, and they walked out together.
#
He knew she wasn’t there the minute he entered their room. He was well aware that it was strange, even weird that he always knew if she was there or not. He didn’t question his awareness, didn’t call her name or look in the bathroom, or do anything else to confirm that she was not there. He knew. He looked at her note, poured himself a drink, bourbon with water that barely discolored it, then stood on the balcony considering their next move, waiting for Constance to return.
When he heard the key in the lock, he met her at the door, held her close with his face in her hair, until she laughed and drew back. “You sniff me like a dog getting reacquainted with another dog.”
“Can’t be too careful,” he said, taking her by the arm. “Change of game plans. Let’s talk.”
His drink was virtually untouched. She retrieved a wineglass and the bottle, and they sat on the balcony and talked.
“Paley’s a wreck, thinking seriously of cutting and running,” he said morosely. “The family’s in panic mode. Stuart’s like a bomb survivor. Tricia wants to go home and put it all behind her. I’m sure both Ted and Lawrence think it’s time to give us the old heave-ho.” He lifted his glass. “Cheers.”
Shadows merged into darkness over the water as they sat talking until finally Charlie pulled himself up. “We’ll find a place to eat, something quick and probably not very good, and not in town. It’s going to be crowded again with another musical event on the schedule. A cappella school choir.”
#
At eight thirty they drove into the driveway at the Bainbridge house. Charlie carried the bag from the home improvement store. When he turned off the security system and used his key, the door swung open to reveal a very large man standing there with his hand in his jacket pocket.
“I’ll be damned,” Charlie said. “Deke Hanson!”
“Hey, Lieutenant,” the man said, grinning. “I heard you were on this, but I thought it must be some other guy. How you doing? Come on it.” He was six four and weighed at least three hundred pounds. His face was baby smooth and round, his hair was lank, a little too long, and almost colorless, as if blond hair had been fading over many years, had not turned white yet, but had lost most pigmentation. His grin was infectious, involving his whole face.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Charlie asked, then turned to Constance to say, “Last I saw him, he was in a uniform.”
“They kept giving me a hard time about my weight,” Hanson said. “You know how it goes. Lose forty pounds in the next six months, or out. Didn’t work. You know what happened? I got out and began dropping pounds. Down to three hundred four now, and still going down. I’m aiming for a nice trim two fifty. This is better. No paperwork to speak of. Watch some television, read a book, get to bed at my usual time. Not bad.”
Charlie introduced Constance and Hanson pumped her hand vigorously.
“He’s the best,” he said earnestly. “Good to know he didn’t hang it all up when he got out. Just the best.”
“I know,” she said, equally earnest.
“They told me you had the run of the place and just to keep out of your way,” Hanson said. “You want any help with anything?”
“Nope,” Charlie said. “We’ll just mosey around and wait for Paley to get home. What time does he usually make it back?”
“Nine thirty, ten. Depends on when he goes out. Tonight was about eight, never leaves until the others are gone for the night. You want me, I’ll be watching TV.”
After he closed the door and reset the security system, they left him in the television room and went on to Paley’s office.
Inside, with the door closed, Charlie removed another pair of the latex gloves from his shopping bag and picked up one of the open books on the desk, examined it, put it down, then did it again with the other one. This time he motioned to Constance to have a look. A large deep rectangle had been neatly cut out, the missing pieces replaced with a package wrapped in plain paper and taped shut. When closed, the book appeared normal, pages appeared intact, and if added to the other stacked books in the box, it would not have drawn a second look. Charlie untaped the wrapped package and counted out fifty cashier’s checks for one hundred thousand dollars each.
Constance opened another plastic bag as Charlie retaped the package. He dropped it in the bag she was holding and she put it in her handbag. He put the mutilated book in another plastic bag and stowed it in the shopping bag.
“Done,” he said. “Poor bastard.” He pulled off the gloves and stuffed them into his pocket. He went to the box that now had five books in it, removed one and put it on the desk, opened with a legal pad on it as a place marker.
“You want to take the good chair while we wait?” he asked Constance, who shook her head.
“I think now’s a good time to look at some of those files,” she said.
They went to the library and unlocked the file cabinet. Charlie looked through a number of files, referring to notes she had wr
itten as he scanned them. He jotted a few notes of his own. It didn’t take him very long. He replaced the chain, locked it again, and said, “Done. Back to Paley’s den.”
“I don’t think he’ll be very late,” she said. “This must have been agonizing for him.” Inside the office again she chose a straight chair and put her handbag on the table at her side.
“I’m afraid it’s going to get worse for him before it gets better,” he said. “I did all the talking before. What did Jenna have to say about the tapes?”
They were still talking about Jenna and Eve Parish when Paley arrived a few minutes before ten. He stepped into the room and came to a stop when he saw them. His gaze flashed toward his desk, back to Charlie. “What are you doing here? What do you want now?” Stiffly he crossed the room and took his chair behind the desk.
“It’s over, Paley,” Charlie said. “I have the pages you cut out and threw away in the garbage, I have the checks, and I have the book you mutilated. They’re all covered with your fingerprints.”
Paley turned a ghastly shade of gray and seemed to shrink. If he had been standing, he would have fallen over. He made a convulsive motion toward the book on his desk, then jerked his hand back as if he had touched a live wire, and his face went curiously blank as he withdrew to a distant unreachable place.
“Relax,” Charlie said. “Take a deep breath and just listen. You don’t have to say a thing yet. It was clear from the start that either you or Jesperson had them. If they’d been stashed away, the Slocum guys would have found them and they didn’t, so one of you, or maybe both together, had already taken them.” He kept his tone easy and conversational, waiting for Paley to come back from wherever he had gone.
“I also knew that if Jesperson had them, they were out of here all the way and no one would ever know where. I gambled that it was you alone. New razor blades confirmed it. A guy who uses an electric razor doesn’t need razor blades. It must have been hard, feeling them against your body all day, leaving them in the file cabinet when you had to go out for dinner. You had to wait until the family cleared out and you had to go or it would have raised too many suspicions, wouldn’t it? So I took away your hiding place and locked it up. That was clever of you, quick thinking to hide them in one of your books, stacking them up so they could be counted on your way out when this fiasco finally ended. You gambled that no one would open them again, since you had insisted that they be examined when the files were. That was a good move, too. Actually you were quite clever about the whole business.”
A little color had come back to Paley’s face. When Charlie paused, Paley said tonelessly, “They came to me and said someone had to do this for the company. They knew I was planning to leave, to take a trip, but they thought old Paley would not turn them down. Good old loyal Paley. Forty-one years. Give him a few extra dollars in his severance pay, that’s good enough. He can take a trip later, or never. It didn’t matter.”
He drew in a long shuddering breath. “What are you going to do?”
“I was brought in to find the checks. I found them. I don’t have to tell anyone where I found them. We’re playing this out for a few more days, exactly as we’ve been doing. You’ll play your part, work on your research, and I’ll do what I’ve been doing. At the proper time, I’ll hand them over to you in the presence of the family. You’ll certify the amount, make a record of it, and get escorted back to your law firm and turn them over. You’ll collect your severance pay and take your trip. You don’t need five million dollars to spend a month or two in Europe.”
“We made so many plans,” Paley said in a low despairing voice. “Every day Dora had a new place, a new castle or museum or something for us to think about. Like kids planning a trip to Disneyland or something. Then she got sick and a year later she was gone. Seven years ago.” He sounded hopeless, and was no longer looking at Charlie but past him, at something only he could see. “I just kept working. No point in doing anything else, so I just kept working. Last year I started thinking about it again and told them I would resign at the end of August. I gave them three months’ notice, bought tickets, Eurail pass, reservations, and they said someone had to do this for the company and good old Paley wouldn’t let them down.”
He turned an agonized gaze from someplace else. “What are you going to tell Jesperson about… all this?”
“Not a damn thing,” Charlie said. “That mutilated book is between you and your firm. Will they even miss it? When this is all over, one day I’ll use it for kindling, but until then I’ll keep it safe.” He stood and gestured to Constance. “Just keep doing exactly what you’ve been doing until I call for a meeting and wrap this up.”
Paley shook his head. “I can’t,” he whispered. “It’s got to end. I’m going mad.”
At the door Charlie paused and said, “You can and you will. I told you the deal. Do it my way or spend the rest of your life in a cell. Paley, don’t screw things up any more than they are now. I didn’t want to do it this way, but things happened that made it necessary. Let’s not rock the boat from here on out.”
They walked through the hall, waved to Deke Hanson and waited for him to come turn off the security. When they reached the car, Constance got in behind the wheel. “Pamela?”
“Pamela,” Charlie said.
There was more traffic than usual on the state road that night. “The concert must be over, people heading for whatever they’re calling home this weekend,” Charlie said. Another car was turning in at Motel 6, went on down the line of parked cars and stopped. Constance parked in the first vacant spot she saw and they walked back to Pamela’s room.
There were lights on, and Pamela’s car was outside her door, but she didn’t answer to Charlie’s knock. He knocked again, and then tried the knob. The door opened and he stepped inside and came to a stop.
Pamela was on the floor with a pool of blood under her head, blood on her face. He cursed under his breath and turned to Constance. His eyes had gone flat black the way they sometimes did, and his face was set in hard lines. Someone had rocked the boat.
16
WHEN HE SPOKE HIS VOICE WAS LIKE A STRANGER’S, the voice he had used for many years as a homicide investigator, flat and crisp. “Don’t come in. Go back to the car and wait inside. Give me five minutes, then call Chief Engleman.” He pulled the chief’s card from his pocket and handed it to her. “After him, call Tricia and let her know Pamela’s been killed. Tell her to call the others.”
She brought her gaze from Pamela’s body to him, nodded, and walked back to the car. He took another step into the room, closed the door without latching it, and retrieved the gloves from his pocket and put them on. Moving swiftly he moved to the side of Pamela’s body and examined the blood for a moment. It was congealing around the edges of the pool at her head. He walked on to the bathroom and glanced inside. Back in the bedroom he looked around for Pamela’s purse, found it in a heap of bedding and looked through it, pulled out a notebook and made a note of two telephone numbers, returned it to the purse. Without moving, he made a rapid examination of the room. Dingy, small and cramped, a worn, hard-surface carpeting that didn’t show footprints, a few clothes heaped on a chair, telephone with a notepad. A bottle of bourbon on the bureau, two glasses. He went to the notepad and held it under the table lamp, tilted it, and made another note of numbers indented on the top sheet. The numbers had not all been written hard enough to leave a mark. A cell phone was on the table and he quickly scanned the numbers in her address book, made another few notes. There was little else to see in the room, and he went to the door and looked at the lock. It had to be locked from the inside after closing the door, and with a key from outside. He removed and pocketed the gloves and stood leaning against the wall by the door and brooded.
He was still standing there when Chief Engleman arrived ten minutes later. He heard him approach and opened the door with his foot. Englem
an did what Charlie had done. He stepped into the room and came to a stop.
“Jesus Christ!” he muttered. “Why the hell didn’t you call the sheriff? Why me?”
“Didn’t have his number, Chief, had yours. Did you call him yet?”
“Christ yes! He’s on the way. What’s the story? Have you touched anything?”
“Nope. The doorknob, nothing else. She invited us and we came. Never did find out what was on her mind. She’s been dead at least an hour, maybe a little longer, looks like.”
“Where’s your wife?”
“I told her to lock herself in the car and wait for me after calling you. She never came in here.” He shrugged. “Let me tell you, and then I want to go back to the bed-and-breakfast and go to bed. We were up at the Bainbridge house talking to the attorney, Mr. Paley. Paley and the night watchman will vouch for that. We came straight over here to see what was on Pamela’s mind, and we found her like this. I moved in close enough to make sure she was dead, and I looked in the bathroom, just in case someone was hanging around. Constance called you immediately and I’ve been waiting to tell our story. Now I want to go to bed.”
“You know you have to wait for the sheriff,” Engleman said, his gaze on Pamela’s body. “Who is she?”
“Pamela Bainbridge, married to William Bainbridge, who is bedridden in Orlando, Florida. His son is Stuart Bainbridge, her stepson, and he’s camping out at the state park.”