Bad Business (14 page)

W
ilma Cooper was gardening in the vast backyard of her home in Lincoln.

“I always garden in the morning,” she had said without looking at me. “Summers are so short.”

I walked up the long curve of the driveway and across a brick patio bigger than my apartment and around to the back of the house where she had told me she'd be.

And there she was, in a halter top, an ankle-length blue denim sundress, a huge straw hat, big yellow gardening gloves, and battered brown sandals. She was, in fact, big. Tall, rawboned, angular, with weathered skin and a pinched face that made her look worried. The gray hair that showed under her hat looked permed.

She took off her gloves to shake hands with me, and looked off to the left over my right shoulder while she did so. There was iced tea in a big pitcher on a lacy
green metal table, with four lacy green metal chairs. Beside the tea was a small plate of Oreo cookies. We sat.

“I really don't see how I can be of help to you,” she said. “I know little of my husband's business affairs.”

“It was nice of you to make the iced tea,” I said.

“What? Oh. Yes. I mean, I . . . thank you.”

This was not a good sign. If she had trouble with
thanks for the iced tea,
how would she do with,
did your husband kill anybody?
I decided to be circumspect. She poured us each some iced tea.

“Terrible thing about Mr. Gavin,” I said.

I drank a little of my iced tea. It was made from a mix, I was pretty sure. Presweetened. Diet. She looked at hers. Then sort of obliquely at me, and smiled vaguely. At what?

“Yes,” she said after a while.

“Did you know him well?”

She thought about that for a little while. Far below us at the distant bottom of the backyard, a sprinkler went on by itself.

“Ah . . . Steve . . . was in our wedding.”

“Really?”

She nodded. There was nothing else to drink so I swilled in a bit more of the ersatz iced tea.

“So you've been friends for a long time,” I said.

She smiled again at nothing, and looked down the slope of her backyard.

“He was my husband's friend, really,” she said.

“You didn't socialize.”

“Oh . . . no . . . not really.”

I took a quiet breath.

“Did you know Trent Rowley?”

“Ah, yes.”

“Marlene Rowley?”

“She . . . she was . . . Trent's wife . . . I believe.”

“Bernie and Ellen Eisen?”

“He worked with my husband,” she said.

A full sentence. She was getting into the flow.

“But you didn't socialize,” I said.

She shook her head and giggled slightly. Then she stood suddenly. Or as suddenly as Big Wilma was as likely to do anything.

“Excuse me,” she said. “I have to do something in the house.”

Then she turned and walked away. I watched her go. Her movements were stiff, as if she were not used to them. Was she leaving me in the lurch, or would she be back? I decided to wait it out. After all, I had a whole pitcher of iced tea and a lovely platter of cookies. The circle at the far end of the sloping lawn made a fine spray full of small prismatic rainbows. A cardinal swooped past me, on his way someplace. Had it been something I said? I considered more tea and rejected the idea. It certainly wasn't my appearance. I had on my Ray-Bans, always a classic look. Extending the look, I was wearing a dark blue linen blazer with white buttons, a white silk tee shirt, a short-barreled Smith & Wesson revolver with a walnut handle in a black leather hip holster, pressed jeans, and black New Balance cross trainers with no socks. How could she bear to leave me?

She couldn't. She reappeared and walked briskly back across her patio toward me.

“Sorry,” she said with a smile, “something I forgot.”

“Sure,” I said.

She looked right at me. Her eyes were bright and wide. She sat down and drank some tea.

“So,” she said, “where were we?”

“You didn't socialize much with the Eisens.”

“No.”

“Lovely home,” I said.

“Thank you,” she said. “I was born here.”

She picked up an Oreo cookie and popped it in her mouth and chewed and swallowed.

“Really?” I said.

You get a workable response, you stick with it.

“Yes, I moved here with my husband after my mother died.”

“That's great,” I said. Mr. Enthusiasm. “Be an expensive house to buy now.”

“I could afford it,” she said.

“Mr. Cooper does very well,” I said.

“I could afford it without Mr. Cooper,” she said. “I have plenty of money of my own.”

“Family money,” I said, just to say something.

“Yes. In fact my husband's own wealth is actually family money too.”

“His family or yours?”

“The business in which my husband has been so successful was once known as Waltham Tool and Pipe. My father started it after the war. When I married my husband, Dad took him into the business, and when Dad retired he made my husband the chief executive officer.”

“I know it's indiscreet,” I said, “to ask. But who has the most money, you or Mr. Cooper.”

“Oh, God,” she said. “I could buy and sell him ten times over.”

She ate another Oreo.

“Did you ever meet a man named Darrin O'Mara?” I said.

“The sex man on the radio?”

“Yes.”

“God, no. Why do you ask? I would have little interest in anything he had to say.”

“He is apparently a friend of your husband's.”

“That's ridiculous,” Big Wilma said. “My husband would have no reason to spend time with someone like O'Mara.”

“He was apparently friends with the Eisens and the Rowleys too,” I said.

“I'm not surprised,” she said.

“Why?”

“Why am I not surprised?”

“Yeah.”

“It's the kind of repugnant claptrap with which women like that would become involved.”

“So you do know these women?” I said.

“I know what they're like,” Big Wilma said.

We talked until she had eaten all the Oreos and drunk most of the iced tea.

Finally she said, “I'm sorry to be rude, but I'm developing a dreadful headache, and I simply must lie down.”

“Lotta that going around,” I said. “Everybody I talk to.”

She smiled politely and I left. No loss. I wasn't learning anything. Driving back on Route 2, I speculated on what Big Wilma had ingested when she went inside. And whether what I saw afterward was Jekyll or Hyde.

T
he next morning when I went into my office Hawk was sitting in my chair with his feet up on my desk, drinking my Volvic water from the bottle, and reading a book called
The Teammates
, by David Halberstam.

“Did I leave the door unlocked?” I said.

“No.”

“At least you brought your own book,” I said.

I checked my answering machine, which displayed no messages. I got a bottle of Volvic water from the office refrigerator, and sat down in the client chair. Hawk flapped his page and closed the book and put it down on the desk.

“Me 'n' Cecile went and took the weekend seminar with Darrin O'Mara,” Hawk said. “Now we feelin' sorry for you and Susan.”

“Because we're hung up on monogamy.”

“Exactly,” Hawk said. “Darrin say we got to, ah, I believe he say, throw off our shackles, and experience our libidos unstructured and unconstricted.”

“Wow,” I said.

“Tha's what I thought,” Hawk said.

He was deep into his
feet-do-yo'-duty
accent, which meant he was deeply scornful of his subject.

“Darrin say . . . he always encourage us to call hisself Darrin . . . Darrin say that if you fully unfettered your id, and experience passion without regard to convention or previous condition of servitude . . .”

“He didn't say previous condition of servitude,” I said.

Hawk grinned.

“I jess throwed that in,” Hawk said. “If you do that, Darrin say, then you still feel love and passion for one person more than any other, that be how you know you in love.”

“And I been walking around all this time thinking I loved Susan without really knowing.”

“Maybe you learned it,” Hawk said, “when we out chasing her around out west.”

“I already knew it,” I said. “That's why we were chasing.”

“Oh yeah,” Hawk said. “I got to check back with Darrin on that. I think he pretty sure you just think you in love and don't really know.”

“So, say you buy into this,” I said. “You supposed to go out and chase down enough people to test the theory, or does he have a placement service?”

“He say we explore this with the other members of the class. I be swamped, a course. And Cecile say she be
sort of uncomfortable starting out, so to speak, with the folks in the seminar, and was there any other way. And he say, he can also help us meet other people.”

“How exciting,” I said. “O'Mara tell you, or Cecile, what he could arrange for her?”

“There be a party,” Hawk said. “Friday night. Invitation only.”

“You be there?”

“Cecile will,” Hawk said.

“You didn't make the cut, huh?”

“They 'fraid of the competition,” Hawk said.

“And what if Cecile is swept up in it all, and arranges to dash off with some guy to Quincy or Nyack?”

“She be free to follow her passion,” Hawk said.

“And the guy?”

“He be dead.”

I
was drinking coffee with Belson in his car parked in the lot of a Dunkin' Donuts near Fresh Pond Circle. There was a box of donuts on the console between us. The windows were down to catch the breeze from the parkway, and through the windshield we could look at the industrial fencing in front of us. Belson selected a Boston cream donut and took a careful bite. He swallowed and wiped a little of the cream filling off the corner of his mouth.

“You wouldn't want to eat one of these things on a date,” Belson said.

“Frank,” I said, “when's the last time you had a date.”

“Me and the wife went over to Carson Beach and took a walk last Sunday.”

“And did you eat a Boston cream?”

“ 'Course not.”

I selected a dainty plain donut.

“What's the forensic scoop on the late Gavin?” I said.

“Nine millimeter through the top of his mouth and out the back of his head. Angle consistent with a self-inflicted wound,” Belson said.

“Powder residue?”

“Hands and around his mouth,” Belson said.

“Anything on the suicide note?”

“Nope. Just a note on the computer screen. Nothing to tell us yea or nay.”

“Dead long?”

“Around six hours before we got there.”

“So around what, nine
A
.
M
.?”

“Around then.”

“Who found him?”

“Cleaning lady, comes two afternoons a week. Let herself in, she thinks around two, found him like that.”

“How long's it take that patching goop to dry through?”

“Eight hours,” Belson said.

“That slug a nine, too?”

“Yeah. Matches the one that killed Gavin.”

Belson had finished his Boston cream and was now selecting a strawberry-frosted donut with multicolored sprinkles on it.

“You're going to eat that?” I said.

“Sure.”

“You got no taste in donuts, Frank.”

“I must have,” Frank said. “I'm a cop.”

I drank some coffee.

“So it all works out nice as a suicide.”

“Except for the second slug,” Belson said.

He had a bite of the strawberry-frosted donut. I looked away.

“Except for that,” I said.

“You thought about that?” Belson said.

“I have.”

“You got a theory?”

“I have.”

“You want to share it with me,” Belson said, “or are you just in it for the donuts?”

“I'm thinking that somebody could have shot him in the mouth the way he was shot, and then put his hand on the gun and put the gun next to his face, and fired that bullet into the wall.”

Belson nodded.

“Which would mean,” Belson said, “that he had to move the bookcase first.”

“Yep,” I said, “which would also mean that he had to bring the patching plaster with him.”

“Which would also mean that he planned this thing out pretty carefully,” Belson said.

“And it might mean that he knew his way around the apartment.”

“He did put that slug into the wall behind the fireplace, which meant it wouldn't go through.”

“And,” I said, “if he did all this, so as to get powder residue, he was probably not uninformed in these matters.”

“Sort of the way me and Quirk been thinking,” Belson said.

“Either of you talked with Healy?”

“Quirk,” Belson said. “Staties don't have a clue.”

“How's Quirk treating the thing?”

“Publicly we're wrapping up loose ends on a probable suicide. Internally we're thinking murder.”

“And maybe it's related to the murder of Trent Rowley?”

“Yeah,” Belson said. “We're thinking that it might be.”

“And maybe it's connected to Kinergy,” I said.

“Sure,” Belson said. “And maybe it ain't.”

“That covers most of the possibilities,” I said.

Belson took another frosted donut from the box.

“What kind is that?” I said.

“Maple frosted,” he said. “With strawberry sprinkles.”

“Good Jesus,” I said.