Caught Red-Handed (8 page)

“If you wouldn't mind, I'd appreciate it,” I said, and pulled off the freeway. “I'm a little shaky.”

“I understand,” he said. “You've held up really well so far, all things considered.”

I stopped the car and turned to look at him. “No, I haven't. I just try not to make a public production out of it. It would seem to—I don't know, cheapen his memory.”

He didn't say anything, just traded places with me, and we got back on the freeway. I positioned myself on the seat so that I could look at Chance without being too obvious. “Do you know Mrs. Devereaux?” Russo asked.

“I met her for the first time at David's funeral,” I said, looking back at Chance, who wore an angry expression.

“At least the two of you will both benefit nicely from Emery & Walden's employee life insurance program.”

“We would have, but not now. I haven't had a chance to get the details, but David told me that Mr. Emery was changing to a less expensive insurance, one that wouldn't pay as much. But we've been in fairly good financial shape anyway, with no children and two incomes.”

“The insurance hasn't changed yet,” he said.

“What?”

He glanced over at me. “It doesn't change until the end of the month.”

“I didn't know.”

“The interesting thing is, the current insurance not only pays higher than the new one, it also covers death for any reason.”

“You mean, including suicide?”

“Including suicide.”

Chance was clenching his fists.

“It wasn't suicide,” I said, and both Chance and John Russo looked at me at once.

“What's your interest in Devereaux?”

“I told you. David was concerned about him. He knew Chance Devereaux didn't ignore the complaints about the tank. Devereaux felt bad about what happened, but he didn't blame himself. He was a practicing Catholic. He wouldn't have committed suicide.”

“How do you know about his being Catholic?”

I looked away. “David and I are Catholics. You know that from being at the funeral today if you didn't know it before. David must have mentioned that Devereaux was Catholic, too.”

He was silent for a while, and I thought he might not believe me. I was right. But I didn't know how right until he spoke up again.

“I don't think you're being honest with me,” he said. “I kept hoping you'd just tell me. I'm a cop, Dr. Blackburn. I've seen all kinds of things. It wouldn't have surprised me.”

I didn't understand his harsh tone, nor did I believe for a moment that the police were accustomed to having people say they had received information from ghosts. Not sane people. I gave him directions to the turnoff for the cabin, then asked, “Just exactly what did you mean by that last remark?”

He sighed. “I meant that a woman answering your description was seen keeping a regular weekly appointment with Mr. Devereaux. We got a tip from a clerk at the St. George Hotel. Said you registered as Mr. & Mrs. Devereaux, but he had been in the business long enough to know hanky-panky when he saw it. You were having an affair with Chance Devereaux, weren't you?”

I couldn't help but look back at Chance. He was shaking his head, pointing to his ring finger again, then at me. “Mr. Devereaux and I were each married,” I said.

Chance shook his head while I heard John Russo say, “To other people, yes. But you wouldn't be the first married people on earth to look for greener pastures. Every Wednesday. What broke it off, Dr. Blackburn?”

His words, combined with Chance's gestures, brought it home to me. “Oh my God. My husband and your wife.”

“Leave my wife out of this!” John Russo said angrily.

“No, no, that's not what I meant,” I said, a numbness coming over me. I gave a questioning look at Chance, who nodded, then pointed at me and made the signs for ‘See no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil.' His flippancy angered me, but I understood what he meant. I had avoided learning the details of David's infidelity, shut myself off from it. Now both Chance and I might pay for it.

I looked back at Russo. I took a deep breath. “That wasn't me and it wasn't Chance Devereaux, either. That was Louise Devereaux and my husband. Six months ago, David told me he was having an affair. He told me he met the woman every Wednesday night at the St. George Hotel. I taught a class that night. You can check that with the college. I never knew who it was. But Chance Devereaux and my husband look something alike, and Louise Devereaux and I both have blond hair and blue eyes. They must have used her name. I imagine if you look a little further, you'll find that, like me, Chance Devereaux had some standing appointment on Wednesday nights, some business or other engagement that allowed his wife to meet my husband without causing Mr. Devereaux to be suspicious.”

Chance nodded in painful agreement, and made his “sorry” gesture again, as if feeling guilty for his earlier routine. The discovery of the details of the affair was too much for me. It was as if I were back in time, once again experiencing that moment when David admitted to the affair. The hurt and anger and humiliation started all over again, and now the police were privy to the whole awful business. I started crying again, wishing to God I could have kept my composure.

“I'm sorry,” John said.

“That doesn't help a damn bit,” I answered, and kept crying.

By then we had reached the cabin. Although it hadn't snowed since Thursday, there was still plenty of it on the ground and the roof of the cabin. The snow was dirty by then. What must have been a pristine blanket two days before was now sullied and rumpled. The snowplows had been by, building up large drifts along the way. We parked on the roadside; the entrance to the drive was blocked by the snowdrift. Any other weekend, David would have cleared the drive while I went to work putting away groceries and building a fire . . . who'll clear the driveway, now, David? I guessed it would be me.

Russo held off getting out of the car. He reached over and took my hand. “I truly am sorry, Anna. I feel like an ass. I should have checked it out. I only got the information from the clerk today, and not ten minutes later, you were calling, asking about Devereaux. I jumped to a conclusion, and I had no right to do that. I did a lousy job of asking you about it anyway. I wouldn't blame you if you wanted to scratch my eyes out.”

I couldn't answer.

“Please forgive me.”

“It seems like men have been asking me to do that a lot lately,” I said.

He let go of my hand and waited.

I managed to pull myself together, somehow. “I'm sorry, John. I'm having a perfectly horrible day and I can't seem to keep my balance. Just when I feel as if I'm steady on my feet, something knocks them out from under me. You're not to blame for it.”

“I don't know about that, but like I said, I'm sorry. Feel up to going inside and looking for those documents?”

“Why not? What more could go wrong today?”

We got out of the car and started up the drive. John donned David's coat, which was only a little too big for him. As we walked, I was fascinated by the fact that Chance, who walked next to me with a comforting arm around my shoulder, left no footprints. I was musing over the fact that his touch was as warm as any living person's, when suddenly John stopped me from walking any farther. “Hold it. It snowed up here Thursday, right?”

“Right,” I said. “David and I were looking forward to—never mind, that doesn't do any good.”

Chance gave my shoulder a little squeeze, as if to help me find my courage. Russo watched me for a moment, then asked, “Had you made any arrangements with anyone to come up here? Any other guests or a caretaker?”

“No, no one.”

I followed his gaze to where two pairs of footprints entered and left the cabin. Whoever had been to the cabin had cut across the woods, as if to avoid being seen.

“Would you mind staying here for a moment?”

I shook my head.

“Why don't you give me the key to the front door? I'll just make sure it's safe.”

He walked to the cabin, careful not to disturb the prints. It gave me an opportunity to talk to Chance.

“You knew someone was here, didn't you?”

Yes. He made the gesture for his wife.

“Louise and who else?”

He seemed stumped by this question, but then pantomimed filing his nails.

“Emery?”

He actually smiled, the first time I had seen him smile.

“I don't think Russo believes you killed yourself.”

He patted me on the back.

“No, I think he doubted it before I said anything.”

He patted me again.

“Well, thanks. Did they find what they were looking for when they came here?”

He shook his head, smiling again, then suddenly laid a finger to his lips. I turned to see Russo coming out of the cabin. He was upset.

“Someone has been here and ransacked the place. I called the sheriff; they'll be out as soon as they can, but it may be a little while. I don't know if you'll want to go in there. They did a very thorough job of it, and I doubt they missed anything.”

“I have a feeling they did,” I said. “I'll be okay. Let's take a look.”

“Try not to touch anything if you can help it.”

After everything else I had been through that day, seeing the cabin a complete wreck was only mildly unsettling. Russo was right; no piece of furniture was left in place, every drawer had been pulled out and dumped on the floor, pictures had been removed from their frames. I almost reached out and touched one of David and me, but Russo stopped me.

“You'll be able to fix it after they dust for prints,” he said.

“I know who did this,” I said. “Louise Devereaux and Winslow Emery.”

“How do you know?”

“First, who else has any reason to search this cabin? Secondly, I'll bet those footprints are those of a man and a woman. I can't tell you the other reason.”

“Your husband's ghost tipped you off?”

“Something like that.” I thought of David, having an affair with someone who was vicious enough to place a gun in her husband's mouth and pull the trigger. It dawned on me then that she might have killed David as well. I shuddered. “Poor David.”

“Maybe you'd trust me more if I told you something.” He paused. “I don't tell many people about this.” Even Chance seemed curious.

“It's about my wife, Susan,” Russo said. “I told you she died. I didn't tell you how.”

I waited. He walked over to the empty fireplace and stared down into its charred hearth. “She was killed. Shot to death, like your husband. Only she was in another man's arms when it happened. His wife caught on to what was happening before I did. She was waiting for them, I guess. Killed them both, then turned the gun on herself.”

“John—”

“Let me finish. I hated Susan for it at first. But I missed her, too. And I hated missing her. Then I started blaming myself. Homicide detective gets called out in the middle of the night all the time, doesn't make for much of a home life.

“Anyway, one night, she came back. Her ghost, I suppose. You think I'm crazy?”

“Not at all,” I said.

“Well, I don't scare easy, but that scared the living hell out me. She asked me to forgive her.”

“She could talk?”

“Yes, can't your husband talk?”

“It's not my husband, John.” I turned to Chance. “Can I tell him?”

Chance nodded.

“He's here, now?” Russo asked, startled.

“Yes, he's here. It's Chance Devereaux. He started visiting me the night before the funeral. He wants to be buried in a Catholic cemetery, but as a suicide, they wouldn't allow it.”

“He told you it wasn't suicide?”

“Yes. He can't talk; I think it has something to do with the way he died. But he isn't so hard to understand once you get used to it. He made it clear that Louise drugged his drink, then shot him while he slept.”

“We've suspected something like that,” John said. “He had enough barbiturates in his system to make it seem unlikely that he would have shot himself; but it was right on the borderline, nothing solid enough to convict. Still, I wondered why he would take sleeping pills if he planned on shooting himself that same night. What would the point be? Between that and the insurance, she wasn't completely in the clear.”

I watched Chance walk over to the fireplace. John followed my gaze.

“He walked over here?” he asked, taking a step back.

“Yes. He wants us to look inside it, under the metal plate in the hearth. The one over the hole where you clean out the ashes.”

Russo got down on all fours and lifted the plate. I wasn't too surprised when he pulled out a sheaf of papers. Chance touched me on the shoulder, then disappeared.

The papers proved that Chance
had warned Emery about the tank eight months before the disaster. One of Emery's fingerprints had been left at the cabin, on the door to a storage shed. Facing prosecution in the deaths of the workers as well, Emery later broke down and confessed to helping Louise kill David, and told police that Louise had killed Chance. He had been having an affair with Louise Devereaux for the past six months. They met on Wednesdays. They were both convicted of murder.

I saw Chance one other
time; when I signed the forms saying I would pay to have his body moved to the Catholic cemetery. He met me near his old grave, and hugged me. He was still warm.

John Russo and I married
a year later. When the going gets rough, we tell each other ghost stories.

WHITE TRASH

T
he woman dressed in black ninja garb moved stealthily across the street, armed with a spray bottle of a popular herbicide purchased at her local hardware store. In the dim light of the streetlamp, she set the spray mechanism to “stream” and went to work. Quickly she moved the bottle in a graceful, sweeping motion. She left as furtively as she had arrived.

Three weeks later, much to the horror of the jerks who lived across the street, a rather obscene directive appeared on their lawn, spelled out in dead grass letters. Alas for these evil neighbors, the Suburban Avenger had succeeded once again
 . . .

I looked up from my bowl of cornflakes and glanced across the street, wondering—just wondering, mind you—if I could get away with it.

In every nearly perfect suburban neighborhood, there is the family that makes it “nearly” instead of “perfect.” In ours, it was the Nabbits. You could find the Nabbit house without a street number. I would sometimes use its distinctive features to guide other people to my own home. “We live across the street from the house with the pick-up truck parked on the lawn,” I'd say. Or, “Look for the old mattress propped up against the side of the garage, then pull into the driveway directly opposite the box springs.”

Sarah Cummings, who owned the pristine property to the right of the Nabbits, had warned us about these troublemakers from the day we moved into the neighborhood. “I call them the ‘Dag Nabbits,'” she said. “Nola Nabbit is a tramp. You watch. If Napolean's army had been as big as the one that has marched through Nola's bedroom doors, they'd be speaking French in Moscow today. Daisy, the little girl, is okay. But the kid! He's a mess.”

The kid was Ricky. Ricky Nabbit, I soon learned, was a frequent guest of the California Youth Authority. He had a seasonal habit of breaking into houses, shoplifting, and other purely selfish acts.

“As long as it's baseball season,” Sarah told me, “We won't have any trouble. He's a baseball nut. But every winter”—here, Sarah shivered—“he robs somebody.”

When Sarah heard that I would be working out of my home, she was elated. “Maybe you can help keep an eye on things,” she said. Specifically, she meant Ricky Nabbit.

We had moved into our home in the spring of the year when Ricky turned fourteen. I would watch him walk home from baseball practice at the nearby park. Skinny, clean-cut, and looking smartly athletic in his uniform, he wore a glove so often, I had visions of him eating with the mitt on his left hand.

Sometimes I would see Ricky sitting on the front porch, oiling his glove, while from inside the house, I heard his mother and her boyfriend shouting obscenities at one another at the top of their lungs. Even with the doors and windows closed, we could hear them. This was especially true during the months when Clyde Who Parks on the Front Lawn reigned over the household.

Clyde was, perhaps, no worse than his predecessors. No more a loudmouth lowlife than Bellamy the Belcher (whose wide-ranging eructative skills included saying the word “breast” as he burped) or Horace the Hornblower (who honked his car horn at all hours, as a mere introduction to rolling down his window and hollering “Nola! Get your ass out here!”). These were not their real names, of course, but my husband and I used this system to refer to them when lamenting our luck.

Nola stayed with Clyde for most of the season, but broke up with him just before the World Series with a world-class drunken brawl in the middle of the street. Nola got a shiner, Clyde got the boot.

Our doorbell rang a few days later, and when I looked out through the peephole, I was surprised to see Daisy standing on our front porch. She had long blond hair and beautiful green eyes, but was shy and slightly overweight. She was carrying a big cardboard box full of canisters of candy.

She stammered out a good afternoon and asked if I would buy some candy for her church school fundraiser.

“Church school?” I asked.

She turned a deep red, and stepped back. If she had been a turtle, I would have been looking at nothing but a shell. I waited, tried to smile my encouragement. She swallowed hard and then explained that she attended a private school operated by a church. The church she named was a conservative Christian sect.

Even though her church school was part of a denomination other than our own, I bought a canister, telling myself that I was doing my bit for ecumenism and good neighborly relations.

I was leaving the house some hours later and saw her returning home, still carrying her box, looking weary and somewhat dejected. I noticed that the box was still nearly full.

“Daisy!” I called.

You would think I had fired a shot over her head. She halted, shrank back, and nearly dropped the box. As I crossed the street toward her, her eyes grew wide.

I stopped a few feet away from her. Out of striking distance. She relaxed a little. “I just remembered,” I said, “that I need some gifts for some clients. The candy would be perfect. Could I buy more?”

She looked at me in complete puzzlement.

“Perhaps those ones you have with you have been spoken for?”

She shook her head. “N-n-no,” she said, finally coming out of her daze. “No, ma'am, they aren't.”

I bought the rest of the box, and took it home. She thanked me politely and stared after me as I crossed the street. By the time I had set the candy inside my foyer and returned to my car, she had disappeared inside her house.

“What the hell are you doing buying all this candy?” my husband asked that night. “I thought you were trying to lose weight.”

“You're so gallant,” I said. “Now, by my count, there's a missing canister. Are you going to share any of it?”

He grinned and went to retrieve his pirated treasure, then unwrapped the foil covering on a chocolate morsel and hand-fed it to me. “Mmmm,” I said.

“I agree,” he said. “But are we converting to a new religion?”

I explained what had happened with Daisy.

“You,” he said, “are too easy.”

“Gallant again.”

A week later, Ricky came
by and asked if he could wash our car. “Sure,” I said, and paid him a dollar more than he'd asked, on the theory that honestly earned money might start to appeal to him. He washed our car every weekend until the rains started in November.

He was always charming and polite. My husband agreed that we were better off making a friend of this kid than an enemy. Sarah Cummings told me I'd live to regret my kindness.

With the November rains, the Nabbit's lawn grew taller; fast-food containers littered their front yard. Their dog, a mangy Basset hound that smelled as if it had never been bathed, continued to use the neighbors' lawns as his outhouse. (If American factories had the output that dog did, we'd be the most productive country in the world.) Nola stayed up late and laughed louder than the music she played. When she left for work, the hound bayed all day.

The Suburban Avenger knew it was an old trick. She placed the paper bag filled with gathered dog droppings on the front porch, lit it on fire, rang the doorbell, and ran. With glee, she watched Nola Nabbit stomp the fire out. You can use old tricks on some dogs, the Avenger mused
 . . .

The Cummingses put up a low wrought-iron fence and planted Italian cypress on the side that bordered the Nabbits. The Fredericks, on the other side, did the same, but planted rose bushes. The Cummingses called the police whenever the music was played after ten o'clock. Nola started turning the radio off exactly at ten, and shouting “Good night, you old bitch!” toward the Cummings' house.

Around Thanksgiving, Mrs. Ogden, a seventy-year-old woman who lived next door to us, asked me to keep an eye on her house while she paid an overnight visit to her granddaughter. When she returned, she discovered that her home had been burgled; her jewelry, her stereo, a small television set and her secret stash of cash were gone. I felt guilty, even though Mrs. Ogden didn't blame me in the least. “You have to sleep sometime, honey,” she said. “I wasn't hiring you as a guard. Who knows? Maybe I'll get some of it back. I etched my driver's license number on the stereo and TV.”

As it turned out, the thief was caught trying to fence Mrs. Ogden's stereo and later arrested, tried, and convicted. The thief was Ricky Nabbit.

I didn't hear much about him for a couple of years. Sarah told me that he didn't get much of a sentence, partly because his father, who lived in a trailer park about five hundred miles north of us, had agreed to let Ricky live with him for a time.

About the time Ricky left, Nola got a new boyfriend. Doug seemed to be as rough a fellow as most of the others, but soon we all noticed a change. No loud fights or partying sounds late at night. The yard was cleaned up. The place still wasn't painted, the hound continued to leave its calling cards, and Nola drank less but still swore like a sailor. Still, on the whole, things seemed to improve. We couldn't even come up with a nickname for Doug.

“It's been fairly quiet,” the neighbors would say to one another. They always looked at the Nabbit house when they said it.

Then Ricky came home.

He was over sixteen by that summer, and much taller. He had filled out, become stronger. He seemed less lively than he had been at fourteen, and there was a surliness in his expression that had not been there before.

At night, we began to hear Nola shouting. Doug left a week later. Daisy seemed quieter and paler. Of her, we only saw a girl carrying books to and from the house. And, as I did every year, I bought a case of her candy. I was getting better at giving it away before my husband and I ate more than a single can of it.

Ricky's friends started coming over to the Nabbit house to play ball. Ricky had been kicked out of the baseball league some time before (for stealing more than bases from the opposing team), but his love of the game remained. He practiced on the front lawn.

“Hey, batter, batter,” I would hear them chant, day in, day out. They played with a light plastic ball, shouted “I got it,” “Foul ball,” and “No way am I out,” “Steeee—riiiiike!” as well as certain other remarks that would have cost a Boy Scout his good sportsmanship badge. Ricky was not a Boy Scout.

The shouting and the noise was annoying, yet we saw no reason to lodge a complaint. They were just kids, after all. And as long as he was playing baseball, Ricky could be seen by his nervous neighbors, none of whom had welcomed him back.

Ricky ignored all of us. He became industrious enough to mount a light on the garage roof, illuminating his small playing field for night games of catch. That this light also illuminated our bedroom was not something Ricky was thinking about. Ricky, we had discovered, didn't think about other people, except as a means to an end.

The Suburban Avenger had been waiting for this night. The Nabbits' car had been parked in front of her house, doors unlocked. She secured the frozen anchovy under the seat springs, driver's side. She might not be present when the discovery was made, still she would know that revenge had been, well, reeked
 . . .

It was a sunny Saturday afternoon in September when the hardball hit the bedroom window, shattering it. I was in another room, and rushed in to see large shards of glass on my husband's pillow, splinters of glass everywhere else. If the game of catch had taken place a few hours earlier, or later . . . I ran outside.

Two boys, Ricky and a kid he called Ted, stared up at the broken window. Although no one else played baseball anywhere near my home, I suspect they would have run away without owning up to the damage. But to Ricky's great misfortune, Sarah had been in her front yard when the baseball was thrown.

Nola came out of her house, too, ready to defend her chick against Sarah—until she saw the window.

“It's Ted's fault,” Ricky said immediately. “He was supposed to catch it.”

I reached down and picked up the ball, which had been prevented from going though the window by the screen.

“Hardball?” Nola shrieked. “What got into you, Ricky? Playing with a goddamned hardball!”

Ricky had no answer.

Looking nervously between Sarah and me, she grabbed on to her son's elbow and said, “This is going to come out of the money you earned at the swap meet, Ricky.” I groaned inwardly, wondering which of my neighbors' stolen goods might be sold to pay for my window. “I think you owe this lady an apology,” Nola went on. I got a grudging “Sorry,” from Ricky and Ted.

She eyed the window. “I think I've got a piece of glass that might fit,” she said. “Ricky can fix it.”

“No thanks,” I said, envisioning Ricky with an opportunity to case my house for a future burglary. “I'd rather have a professional glass company do it.”

The glass company charged forty-five dollars to fix the window. That left us with the clean-up. I did that myself. I told Ricky he could pay me back in five dollar increments over nine weeks. He smiled and said that would be fine.