Say No to Murder, Page 2

  “Compounded by real grief, however.”

  “So do you want me to flash my badge at him?”

  “I don’t think that’s necessary.”

  “I don’t either, but I’ll run him through the computer just to see what comes up on him.” Then in a considerably less businesslike tone of voice, he said, “I’ve managed to manipulate the duty roster for this weekend, Jen, so I’ll be off tomorrow night. You want to take the boat out, or not?”

  “Oh yes.” I sighed in a manner that is commonly known as heartfelt. “Think of it, Geof. No phones, no beepers, no walkie-talkies, no Foundation, no crimes. Just you and me and the deep blue sea.”

  A hearty chuckle came through the phone.

  “Well eat lobster ’til the butter runs down our chins,” I continued, warming to my theme. “And we’ll drink wine and ride the waves. And we’ll have that talk, Geof, okay? We’ll talk all night if you want to.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “What?”

  “Talk all night.”

  “Oh.” I smiled at the phone.

  When I hung up that time, I felt sure I’d taken every reasonable precaution against the unreasonable rage of Ansen Reich. Now I could look forward to the groundbreaking the next day, and to our mini-vacation on Saturday night, in a relaxed frame of mind. There was nothing to worry about, nothing at all.

  chapter

  2

  “You see, Jennifer?” said my fellow committeeman, Webster Helms, when the groundbreaking ceremony went off without a hitch the next day. The mall architect’s hair was fiery under the noonday sun. “There was nothing to worry about after all, now was there?”

  He all but pinched my cheek and said, “There, there.”

  “No, Webster,” I said.

  Having settled that to his satisfaction, the thin little man wheeled briskly away from me to spread his smugness, like gooey jam, elsewhere among the committee. I muttered to his straight, retreating back, “May all your freckles connect.”

  Beside me on the old, rotting pier, Hardy Eberhardt chuckled. “If all Web’s freckles connect,” the black man said, “he’ll be able to qualify for minority contracts.”

  “Well, don’t you say it, too,” I said crossly. In my black linen summer suit I was sweating to an extent that is not recommended for the female who wishes to Dress for Success. “I’ve heard i told you so’ from every other member of the committee, including your wife.”

  “Would I suggest your mysterious threatening man was but a puff of smoke?” Hardy grinned. “Why, heavens no, Jenny, I’d never be so insufferable as to intimate a thing like that.”

  “Oh, go jump in the bay,” I suggested.

  “I’d love to.” He tugged at his starched shirt collar, then loosened his old school tie a quarter inch. We were killing time while the local news crews set up for group photos of the committee on the pier. Picturesque, I suppose. On three sides of us, the water of the bay winked invitingly; on the shore in front of us, Goose Shattuck’s trucks and cranes were Saturday-idle. The contractor himself could be heard causing some innocent victim to go stone deaf behind us. A motley crowd had gathered ashore to watch their civic leaders baste and burn. Or maybe they were relatives: only a mother would stand out in this heat to watch her child get his picture taken. “Lord,” said Hardy Eberhardt, “it’s hot as a church social in Georgia on the Fourth of July.”

  “I guess you’d know, Reverend.”

  “I guess you wouldn’t, Jennifer.” He smiled.

  I smiled back at the pastor of the First Church of the Risen Christ, this son of sharecroppers who was a graduate of the Yale School of Divinity. Tall, clean-featured and fortyish, Hardy was Port Frederick’s Jesse Jackson, with a cultivated dash of Arthur Ashe. It was a potent package. I said to the magnetic minister, “One of these days I might surprise you and show up in my Sunday best for one of your famous hellfire-’n-brimstones.”

  “You’d cause a sensation,” he said wryly. “We don’t have all that many brothers and sisters whose ancestors came over on the boat from Sweden.”

  “I’ll bet you don’t.” I laughed. “But you and Mary could recruit them if you set your minds to it.” It was Hardy and his wife, as leaders of the local black community, who had lobbied for construction jobs and a fair share of space in the new mall for minority businesses. They’d even pushed through the name, Liberty Harbor, to symbolize the transformation of this harbor, where slave ship once were built, into a site of economic opportunity for our citizens of every color. (This town not having been nicknamed “Poor Fred” for nothing!) “I do believe the two of you could sell sand to Sudan, so it should be no problem for you to convince a few Swedes that we originally descended from African tribes.”

  Hardy’s belly laugh was deep and infectious enough to attract attention. A photographer from the Port Frederick Times turned to snap us.

  “That’ll make a nice black-and-white glossy,” I said. But Hardy didn’t laugh this time.

  “Now I’ve done it.” His eyes narrowed. “Get your picture in the paper with me and you’ll get real threats, for sure.”

  “You’re kidding.” I peered more closely into those intense brown eyes. “You’re not kidding?”

  “People!” A few feet away, Mary Eberhardt clapped her hands twice. “They’re ready for us! Let’s get this show on the road!”

  “My wife,” Hardy said, a fond smile playing on his lips, “always wanted to be a cheerleader. I tell her that being a minister’s wife amounts to the same thing, but she is not convinced.”

  We ambled toward centerstage on the pier where the eight other members’ of our committee were gathering, prodded by gentle shoves from Mary Eberhardt. In her soft pink summer dress and her straw hat with pink ribbons, she looked less like a cheerleader than like Mary of nursery-rhyme fame, herding her lazy sheep. “Here, Webster,” she commanded. “Not there, Jenny, back here beside Goose.”

  “Yes, Mary,” I said.

  “Yes, dear.” Her husband smiled.

  In friendly confusion, the ten of us assumed stiff, false poses under the noonday sun, our backs to the bay, our faces toward the spectators. Behind them, low hills rose steeply to the highway from which we heard a barely perceptible hum. I watched idly as a green pickup truck turned from the highway onto the cul-de-sac that was a lover’s leap in my day. On this day, a couple of cars were already parked there, although probably for curiosity’s sake, not for romance. Through years of neglect, the waterfront had become too derelict, too smelly for romance. As I stood on the pier, gazing up into the sun, I mused dreamily that with the renovation, the old lover’s leap might once again become the spot where whole new generations of horny teenagers would come of age in the back seat of Chevys. Or was it Toyotas now?

  “You’d think I’d outgrow these damn things,” muttered the man on my left, snapping me out of my reverie. It was seventy-eight-year-old Jack Fenton, chairman of the ’board of First City Bank, which was a major lender to the project He was also a trustee of the Foundation, which made him one of my bosses. This day, his usual good humor seemed to be melting; even his seersucker suit drooped. He added to no one in particular, “I’m certainly old enough to know better.”

  Nobody answered him. We were too hot.

  As the tallest woman, I stood in back between Jack Fenton and Goose Shattuck, with the Reverend Hardy Eberhardt on the far side of Goose and Ted Sullivan, the realtor, on the other side of Jack. Up front, there was Mary Eberhardt; the little redheaded architect, Webster Helms; our mayor, Barbara Schneider; and Pierre and Brigitte Latour, aka Pete and Betty Tower to us locals. The Towers—or Latours—were building a French café beside the old lobster pound which lay between the hills and the bay. Our mayor stood where she always stands, on the far right side of things, directly opposite Hardy Eberhardt. When I saw their positions, I smiled to myself at the unconscious symbolism of it all.

  “Where’s your maniac, Jenny?” the mayor inquired sweetly, as we all put on
our civic smiles. Some of the others broke into laughter at Jenny’s paranoia. Adding insult to injury, the mayor looked cool and immaculate in polished cotton. She said, “Maybe you’ll be good enough to point him out to us, so we can duck his can of spray paint?”

  “May all your children be Democrats, Barbara,” I replied.

  “Bite your tongue!” the mayor said.

  Beside me, Goose boomed, “What maniac?”

  I pretended not to hear him, an act which I will admit requires some pretty heavy pretending. I still had no desire to besmirch Reich’s name with his employer, especially since Reich had come up clean in the police computer, the only record he had being a distinguished military one. So I let my attention be snagged by the sun as it glinted off the windshield of the green pickup truck on top of the hill Instead of stopping at lover’s leap to admire the view, it was coming on straight, giving a momentary impression that it would dive off the top of the hill into the filthy old lobster pound directly below. It didn’t, of course; it merely turned onto the temporary dirt road that served as a shortcut to the highway for the construction crews.

  “Smile!” a photographer commanded, fatuously.

  “Move closer together!” yelled another one.

  “No!” we yelled back, the committee being for once in unison.

  Cameras began to whir and click.

  In the unrelenting heat, I began to feel queasy. Thinking it might refresh me, I glanced down at the water through the cracks in the floor of the old pier. Immediately, I was mesmerized by the waves that licked the wood beneath our feet. So lost in a stupor was I that I barely heard Mary Eberhardt’s small, sharp voice.

  “Isn’t he coming kind of fast?” was all she said.

  I looked up, in that odd moment of frozen silence, to see the green pickup hurtling at high speed down the steep construction path, straight toward the very pier on which we stood.

  “Oh, my God,” the mayor exclaimed.

  “Run!” Ted Sullivan yelled. Then, “Run! Run!”

  “Where?” we screamed.

  Indeed, there was nowhere to run, our sole route of escape being right in the path of the truck. Already, the spectators on the shore had scattered, screaming, as the truck roared through them. Now they stared in horrified fascination at their civic leaders as we stood like bowling pins at the end of a long, rickety, wooden alley.

  “Oh!” Betty Tower screamed.

  The truck was so close by now that we could hear its tires strike rocks and sand. Then they hit the wood on the edge of the pier with a terrible splintering sound, I stared directly into the cab of the truck and saw clearly a giant of a man. His eyes were wide, his mouth an open scream, Ms hands fastened fanatically on the wheel.

  “Jump!” I screamed, in concert with several others. “Jump! Now!”

  I dived headfirst off the left side of the pier, while camera crews and committee members leaped like a tossed salad into the water on either side.

  When I surfaced, I was gagging on oily, lukewarm seawater. In my linen suit, I treaded water with my committee members and the members of the press. We could only watch helplessly, horror-stricken, as Ansen Reich sped off the end of the pier into seventy-five feet of saltwater.

  chapter

  3

  I saw Detective Geoffrey Bushfield a little earlier than planned that Saturday. He arrived at the harbor, accompanied by a screaming fleet of police cars and firetrucks. Soon, an ambulance was parked on the construction path down which Reich had rushed to his death. For all the good the ambulance could do, they might as well have sent a taxi.

  Soon, too, I was arguing with the detective, who was beginning to look as if he’d like to send me home in a taxi.

  “But Geof,” I entreated, “you once told me that you catch more criminals by the application of common sense than by the application of criminology. So don’t give me this baloney about regulations.”

  He observed me dryly, in more ways than one, from a safe distance.

  As I squeezed a hank of my hair, like a towel, with both hands, I said, “I want to go with you when you tell Reich’s wife. Your common sense ought to tell you that’s a good idea.”

  He sighed, so that his broad shoulders moved within the confines of his well-tailored jacket.

  “I seem to be testifying against myself,” he said irritably, “Look, if I’m going to break the rules, at least give me some justification for the benefit of my so-called superiors.” I knew I’d won the argument then, which was no surprise since the man had been breaking one rule or another most of his life.

  “I’m the one who knows why he did it,” I pointed out in a reasonable tone of voice. I picked up my shoes from the ground and let the remaining water trickle out the heels. “And I was an eyewitness to his death, so I can give his wife a firsthand account if she wants it.”

  “You were not an eyewitness to his death,” Geof said, in the same tone of voice in which people say, “Will you please not crack your knuckles?” “You were an eyewitness only to his coming down the pier toward you. Nobody but the fishies actually saw him die.”

  “Fishies?”

  He started to laugh first, followed quickly by me.

  “Geof,” I said then, in a softer tone, “I really want to go. It’s important to me. I feel responsible for . . .”

  “Talk about baloney,” he interrupted, and shook a long finger at me. “I know you, Jennifer Cain, and if there’s a load of guilt to haul, you’ll pack it up and carry it away on your shoulders, even if it doesn’t belong to you . . .”

  “Geof!”

  His young partner, Ailey Mason, trotted up. He was panting in the heat.

  “Geof,” he said, “the divers have found the truck.”

  “How soon before they pull him out?”

  “Soon.”

  “All right. I’ll wait to get official confirmation that he’s dead before I leave for his house.”

  “Before we leave,” I corrected him sweetly.

  Mason glanced at Geof, then at me. His eyes traveled from my hair, which lay in strings on my shoulders, down my sodden suit to which unnamable green things clung, to my stockinged feet.

  “What did you use for bait, Geof?” he said.

  “Mason!” Geof growled, so that the young policeman took off running again, back toward the pier to watch the salvage operation.

  “Sorry, Jenny.”

  But I was smiling, for once having found Ailey Mason amusing. I did, after all, look like something Jacques Cousteau had not only dredged up, but would most likely throw back. I was grateful to Mason for leavening this sad afternoon with a moment of malicious wit. But when I thought once again of the widow who waited, unknowing, my smile disappeared.

  “So when do we leave, Geof?” I said quietly.

  Behind his sunglasses, his brown eyes looked at something grim, over my head. Suddenly, I heard shouts and splashing.

  “Now,” the detective said.

  The house was a basic ranch, a style that is more indigenous to the Midwest than to our eastern, coast, and out of place among the Cape Cods that lined the block. Because it stretched out longer on its lot than they did, it looked larger than its peers. As had its owner. It had an air of good repair and new paint, as if Reich had applied his construction skills at home. The house was yellow, of a shade too far-gone into mustard for beauty; the window-frames, shutters and front door were brown. Not, I suspected, a popular house with the neighbors.

  “Ready?” Geof removed the key from the ignition of the police sedan. He looked at me as I tried to repair myself in the broken shard of mirror on the back side of the sun visor. I looked like a drowned rat that had dried, then applied lipstick and mascara. He said, “Are you sure you want to do this, Jenny? There’s no guarantee that she will like you any better than he did, you know. If you think he was nuts, you may find she sets a whole new standard of hysteria.”

  “That happens?”

  He shot me a look that said he knew I was stalling.r />
  “Of course it happens,” he said patiently, “especially if they didn’t get along. Show me a wife who hates her husband when he’s alive, and I’ll show you wailing and gnashing of teeth when he dies.”

  “Maybe she loved him.”

  “Then it will be worse, in a different way. Those are the ones I hate, the ones where you’re bringing real pain, and they try to be so brave so you won’t feel bad about it. Jesus!” He stuffed the keys in his coat pocket. “And don’t forget it was her son, too.”

  “I haven’t forgotten, Geof.”

  “Yeah.” He shook his head, then looked out the window away from me. “What an incredibly stupid thing for me to say. I’m sorry, Jen. I don’t know what the hell’s wrong with me today, I’m as irritable as a crab with an itch.”

  “It’s the weather,” I said charitably. “Besides, just so long as one of us is always right.”

  Still looking out the window, he grinned.

  I shot a last glance at the mirror, gave it up as a lost cause, and flipped up the visor. By one of those mutual silent accords into which we often fell, Geof and I opened our respective doors and got out of the car, meeting on the curb in front of the Reich house. Side by side, we walked reluctantly up the cement step to the ugly brown door. Most of the neighbors’ steps and walks were handlaid stones.

  “You introduce me, all right?” I said. I was nervous. “I’ll chime in with my story whenever it seems appropriate.”

  “Right.” He glanced down at me. “You have, I’ve noticed, a highly developed sense of the appropriate moment.”

  “Good breeding,” I said shakily, “shows.”

  He spanned the back of my neck with his hard right hand and squeezed, briefly, gently. With his other hand, he rang the doorbell.

  “Yes?” said the woman who answered the door. She was Hera to Reich’s Zeus, a thick, handsome pole of a woman who could obviously hurl thunderbolts of her own. “Yes, what is it?”

  “Are you Annie Reich, Mrs. Ansen Reich?” Geof asked. As a rookie, he’d told the wrong woman her husband was dead. It was the man’s aunt, or something, whose real husband was in intensive care somewhere with a coronary. By the time things got straight, the aunt had fainted, the real wife had threatened to murder Geof, and his captain had wondered loudly and profanely if G. Bushfield was really cut out for police work. Since then, he always checked to see if the person to whom he was giving the news was the person to whom the news belonged.