A Novel Death (26 page)

Margaret's arm was crooked around my neck, her forearm pressing hard into my throat. "You told them I was here! This was a trap, wasn't it? I was supposed to confess while they waited outside. You're probably wearing a wire."

With each accusation, she squeezed my neck harder. With my breath cut off, I couldn't even answer. Frantically I tried to wrench my head away. I started kicking backward, hitting her legs.

"Police! Open up, Ms. Weller. If you don't we'll break it down."

"Try it! I have Delhi Laine and a knife. If you try to break in, I'll slit her throat."

She was moving us backward. I tried to stay limp and resist, but black spots were swimming in front of my eyes. My body felt lighter and lighter.

"Ms. Laine, are you in there?"

In desperation I started kicking forward, my foot hitting against the door. She had lied to them. If they didn't break in, I would die.

In answer, something heavier banged against the wood.

Then I was free, dropping backward onto the tiles. Behind me I heard the rustle of plastic, the metal creak of a sliding door. Arching my head painfully back, I saw Margaret slip sideways through it. Not even a door, more just an opening, a place for fishermen to stash their catch.

At that moment the wooden door cracked open and pieces hit the floor. Marselli's partner, the bruiser who hated me, tripped on my legs and landed on me heavily. Damn these motel bathrooms, I thought. Then my eyes closed.

I felt myself being lifted, half-dragged, and then finally pushed with no gentleness onto a bed.

When I opened my eyes, my throat was on fire.

Marselli and a young East Hampton officer were standing just inside the door, the younger officer's face pressed against a walkie-talkie. He must have been checking with the cop in the cruiser, because he turned to Frank to report, "Nobody's left the area"

"Silver Volvo sedan, 2005, plate 509 SID," Frank snapped at the young man. "Make sure no one leaves on foot either. We're taking care of the road."

He relayed the message, and then looked unhappy.

"What?"

"He wants to know if you're looking for a woman in white."

Marselli glared in my direction.

I nodded, unable to even whisper.

"Uh-he says someone ran into the water a few minutes ago."

Frank Marselli's face would have frightened a samurai. But he was off, racing out the door.

I pushed myself up from the bed, not sure if I had the strength to stand. My body ached in a multitude of places, but I limped to the door.

"She ran down the beach and dove right in," the young cop told me plaintively. Both being in trouble with Marselli made us allies in some odd way.

I pressed my hand against my throat to keep it from hurting when I spoke. "Did she start swimming? Or go under?"

"He didn't say. Joe? You see her after?" He listened, and turned to me. "She got out just past the breakers, and started swimming east." Then, realizing what he knew, he ran down to the beach to tell Frank Marselli.

The response crew arrived in a few minutes, setting up equipment rapidly as if they did it every day. Their circle of lights in the sand glowed like a bonfire. But when the searchlights began playing over the water, porch lights snapped on too and people crept out of their rooms. I sank down on the cold sand and prayed, though I didn't know what to ask for or who to ask. Margaret would have killed me, I knew. I'd felt it in the fury of her arm crushing my throat.

She was desperate. Ironically, even if she had done nothing wrong in the bookstore, she would face charges for almost killing me. And there would be extradition back to California. If she survived.

The lower part of my flowered dress was soaked from when I had rushed into the water, just before the response crew arrived. I thought I had seen the white curve of an arm. Plunging through the foam, I reached it-a broken piece of white Styrofoam float. The feeling of groping through water looking for something human was unbearable, pulling me like a tide into the past. I dropped the white plastic at the shoreline and turned my back on the water.

At the sound of a motor, I finally turned back and saw two Coast Guard boats trawling the ocean just east of us. Probably other officers were patrolling the beaches, in case she tried to reach land and hide. But Long Island's south shore was all beach. It would take thousands of watchers to cover it all.

There was time then to think about all the wrong assumptions I had made about Margaret. Falling for her calm, at times prim, bookseller persona, I had endowed her with power and knowledge that she didn't really possess. If I hadn't been so intent on making her a role model, a cultured woman with a beautiful successful shop, I might have paid more attention to the clues. All those worthless books in the basement; she must have bought them in the beginning when she didn't know any better. The books in her glass casesbooks with some value, but mostly dogs. From her constant complaints about money, even from Derek's comments, I should have guessed that the bookshop was a beautiful facade, but close to collapse.

And our friendship? But I stubbornly refused to trash that. She was the one who had first encouraged me to sell books, made me believe that I could do it.

Something damp touched my shoulder. I screamed, whirling around, and saw Frank Marselli. "You-you come with me"

He held my elbow as we plodded through the sand, as if I were going to break free. People stared at us from a dozen open doors.

I did not want to go back inside Margaret's room, but Frank Marselli opened the door and pushed me in. The tobacco smoke was fainter; perversely that made me sad, as if Margaret were already fading out of life.

Get over it, Delhi. She tried to kill you.

He switched on the overhead light, then gestured at me. "You have other clothes in your car?"

I looked where he was looking. My flowered black dress was crinkled and sandy, soaked and ruined. I lifted it off my legs again, and then let it fall back. "No."

He looked toward Margaret's open suitcase, but did not tell me to put on anything from there. I wouldn't have anyway.

Finally I sat down at the white plastic table again. He loomed over me, and then perched on the edge of the bed just where Margaret had sat, our knees almost touching. My stomach turned over.

We stared at each other.

"I hope you have a good attorney, Ms. Laine."

I tried to feel indignant or frightened or remorseful, the way I was trying to feel angry with Margaret. But I wasn't feeling much of anything at all. I stared at my ruined dress.

"Did I or did I not tell you not to come out here? Why would you disobey an order?"

"I didn't know it was an order." My voice was still raspy. "You just said I should go home."

He gave his hand an impatient wave. "But you didn't. Instead you put yourself in the position of being a hostage and totally screwed up what should have been a routine arrest. Now God knows where she is!"

I bowed my head. "I'm really sorry. She said she had to see me. I didn't think-"

"No, you didn't think. That's the trouble. Nobody thinks."

We sat silently for a moment. Then he sighed and took out his small black notebook and a pen. One of his knees started jiggling, almost bumping mine. I could smell wintergreen, but I didn't know if it was coming from him or somewhere in the room. "Did she tell you anything helpful?"

"No. She just denied everything. I mean, she admitted it was supposed to look like a robbery. But she wouldn't tell me who else was involved, the person who put her by the ladder or carried Amil into the basement."

"She did. She probably didn't mean to hit her head that hard."

"But she couldn't have hit herself. That angle, that's what the doctors said"

"I know what the doctors said. But people have ingenious ways of doing things to themselves. The doctors"-he lit up the word with scorn-"the doctors also thought that some deep trauma was keeping her from consciousness. Until she put on her roommate's clothes and walked right out of that nursing home. I think she was faking it all along."

I didn't argue with him. But I had seen Margaret's crumpled body and I didn't think you could fake that pallor, that kind of inertness. "But who put the shirt under her head?"

"She did. If you're lying on the floor waiting to be discovered, you want to make yourself comfortable."

It made sense. Putting my hands to my head, I pressed hard; my temples were pulsing, blurring my thoughts. "But she couldn't have carried Amil down by herself. She just wasn't that strong."

"Oh no? People do amazing things when the need arises," he said mildly. "Or, she may have dragged him."

"So why wasn't there any blood on the floor? I was there before anyone else and didn't see any." But a memory flashed across my mind: Margaret on the floor with paper towels, frantically sopping up coffee, terrified that the finish would be marred.

"Ms. Laine?"

I came back.

"I need you to tell me about Ms. Weller's relationship with Mr. Singh. And I want the truth."

He was going to be disappointed. "He worked for her." Yet even as I said it I remembered her flirtatious tone as she raised the latte in Amil's direction before she saw me. "She thought he was attractive-everyone did-but she wasn't interested in him that way."

"Why not?"

"For one thing, there was a huge age difference. Almost thirty years!"

He shrugged. "They spent long hours together. You never heard of young men preying on older women? Port Lewis must be a very sheltered place."

"Of course I have!" But it just did not ring true.

"You said yourself he had a way with women" He looked at the acoustical ceiling, thinking out loud. "He works for her, he charms her, they get involved. After a while he gets tired of her. Old story. But she won't leave him alone and maybe he threatens sexual harassment. It worked once. So she becomes infuriated and shoves him against the marble fireplace. If that doesn't kill him, she finishes him off with a bookend. And then she has to cover up what happened"

"A bookend? She hit him with a bookend?" I was veering toward hysteria.

He narrowed his eyes in disgust at me. "You use what you have. Six-pound cast iron. The Thinker. It had been wiped clean of prints."

I was feeling like Alice down the rabbit hole. Of course I knew which bookend he meant. It was kept on a shelf in the front room. "But why would she wipe her own prints off? You'd expect her prints to be on it."

"Maybe she panicked. She probably used it to hit her own head and wiped it so we'd think someone else had done it. Unfortunately she and Mr. Singh are both type 0, so we're still doing tests."

She hit herself so hard she was unconscious, and then somehow replaced the bookend on the shelf. I knew it hadn't been in the room with the ladder when she was found. Pressing my hands against my damp skirt, I shut my eyes.

"And we have an eyewitness. If he can be believed," he added cynically, as if to himself.

I brought my hand to my face. "Someone saw her attack him?"

"Someone who puts them in the shop together Friday night. Alone."

Russell Patterson. "And you believe him?"

"You're really gunning for this guy, aren't you?"

"Well, Margaret and Amil weren't having an affair." As he himself would say, there was no footprint. There are a hundred ways people betray themselves: a shared reference, eyes quickly meeting, studiedly casual touches. Watching Colin in action had taught me all of them. Like a radio, even though it had been temporarily snapped off now, I would forever be tuned to that frequency. I had picked up no waves between Margaret and Amil. "You're assuming that you can't put any man and any woman together for any length of time without something happening. Why do men always think that?"

He started to answer, but I plowed on. "Because that's what men are always thinking about. You're saying that if you and I worked together, we'd end up in bed. Just because we're a man and a woman."

I had meant to point up the absurdity of his belief, but the moment I said it I felt embarrassed. My inner cynic laughed: Why don't you just invite him home?

He seemed close to smiling in that surreal light. "Ms. Laine, I wouldn't put myself in that position with you. I'm a cop. I value my job. And the time I get with my kids."

"Good. That's good."

"But ordinary people ..." He flicked his hand to assert what he felt about the rest of the world.

I did not get to hear any more of his philosophy because Marselli's partner, Reilly, opened the door and pushed in. "They've covered the whole area," he said tightly.

"They didn't find her?" I asked.

He turned away, his hamlike fist balled, as if to keep himself from attacking me.

"And?" prodded Marselli.

"Nada. They did a full sweep. If she's out there, she's fish food."

"Oh, God" I huddled in on myself, cold as the deep black ocean.

"Nothing on the beaches?" Marselli asked.

"Inconclusive. They found some prints in wet sand on West Beach coming out of the water. But hell-this is summer on Long Island."