Chez Cordelia (37 page)

“Well—” Sherman shrugged. I looked at Toscano, and he shrugged, too.

I compressed my lips in a firm line, and shook my head. “It's odd, I admit that. I see that it looks a little funny. But I don't know what to say. I didn't put him up to it. I haven't seen him. I don't know anything about it.” They'll go back to Danny in the mental hospital, I thought as I said this. They'll confront him with his name and the statement of his wife, and he'll tell them we were together not four months ago—a day or two before the murder, in fact. “She told me all about the place,” he'll say. “She was fired from there for shoplifting. She told me all about it.” I wondered how extensive his mental disturbance was. And how much would he hate me—for blowing his cover, for lying about our last meeting, on general principles …? Enough to say, “We planned it together, Delia and I”?

I sat looking at the detectives, shaking my head and saying, “I don't know anything about it. I heard about Malcolm's murder, a friend of mine saw it in the paper and told me. But I never connected it with Danny. There was no reason to.” I thought of something. “But it said brown hair in the paper. Danny has red hair—bright red hair!” I thought it would save me; they had the wrong man, there'd been a mistake.

“He seems to have dyed his hair,” Sherman said. I tried to imagine Danny pouring brown dye on his scraggly mop. And the beard? He must have shaved it off before the robbery. I would have liked to know, but of course I couldn't ask. “Dyed it brown,” Sherman went on, looking covertly amused. “It's grown out since he's been—ah—confined, of course. It certainly looks to be a very brilliant red.”

“It is. I mean, it always was. I see.” I paused and tried to look sincere and perplexed, with just a hint of impatience. “Well. I wish I could be more helpful.”

Sherman scratched his head. He seemed to have an endless repertoire of nervous habits. “I'm not so sure you can't, Miss Miller. Maybe you could tell us—ah—where you were on the day of the murder. That would be September four of last year. For our records. This is all routine.”

That's what they always said on TV—just routine—and two days later you found yourself hiring Perry Mason for your defense. “Well, I remember that I was at work when I heard about it. A friend of mine called and told me.”

They wanted Humphrey's name and address—Nina's, too, but I told them she was in Vienna, and they just nodded. Setbacks were part of the routine, too.

“And the day before that? That would have been a Friday—the third of September.”

“Well, I worked. I can't really remember. I'd have to think back.”

“You weren't … seeing anyone? A man? Maybe you had a date that night.”

Toscano held his pencil ready, waiting to note down the name of a boyfriend, but I said, “No,” glad I could be truthful, for once. “I might have gone to the movies with Nina, or over to Humphrey's with some of the people from the restaurant. I just don't remember.” I was damned if I'd tell them about the fair, but I had to tell them I'd been living with Juliet, because they asked me, and that opened another door of panic: they would interview Juliet, and she'd tell them I was fired for shoplifting. “My sister is ill, though,” I said. “She's home with my parents, undergoing treatment. You might have seen her there today?”

Sherman shook his head, and said he doubted if they'd have to bother her. “We'll check with this Mr. Ebbets at the restaurant. We may be getting in touch with you again.” He stood up, and so did Toscano, pocketing his notebook.

I saw them to the door. I had to hang on tight to the doorknob as we stood there, my knees were so weak. Would you believe we lingered there for another five minutes, talking about the weather? About Toscano's ski trip to Vermont? About the prospect of a New Year's Eve blizzard?

Before he left, Sherman said, “I should tell you that your husband's lawyer may latch on to you at some point. He'll be trying to prove insanity, of course, and he may want you as a witness.”

My knees got weaker, but I'd seen enough TV to know my rights. “I don't have to testify, though, do I? I don't have to tell him anything.”

“You can tell him to go away and leave you alone, if you want to, Miss Miller,” said Sherman. “And you don't even have to put it that politely.” Toscano snickered. “He can't force you to testify on behalf of his client.”

And can you force me? I asked silently, wondering if it was true, that old murder-mystery cliché that a wife can't be made to testify against her husband. I didn't want to ask, so I said nothing, and when they were gone, wishing me a happy new year, I collapsed into a heap, right there on the bare floor by the front door. I wished Paul and Martha had left Vicky with me. I would have been immeasurably comforted if I could have put my arms around her neck and hugged her tight and taken heart from her doggy love.

It was fitting, I thought, that the Lambertis should be away and the house empty. I had never felt so alone. I didn't even long for Paul. I couldn't confide in Paul or in anyone, so what use would any human being on earth be to me?

It wasn't until I'd spent several hours feeling sorry for myself that I thought of Danny—Danny as a real person, that is, instead of an abstract force that could bring trouble on my head. I was eating my omelette (and it turned out, after all, pretty well) when I pictured, suddenly, the murder—the scene inside the hardware store: Malcolm confronting Danny, snarling something at him, Danny pulling the trigger (in panic? in rage?), and Malcolm crumpling to the floor. Or would there have been a struggle, a fight? Malcolm knocking the gun from Danny's hand and pinning him down, the gun just out of reach of his scrabbling fingers, and then the sudden overturn, the gun grasped, Malcolm lunging toward Danny, and Danny shooting—Malcolm clutching his chest and staggering, and …

I had no acquaintance with violence, only this TV stuff. My most fearsome memories were of my father's friend, Theodore Low, The Dentist Poet, smashing whiskey bottles. That, and scenes of Vietnam on the news. Danny, I thought, who couldn't kill in a war, had killed in a hardware store for petty cash. How like him to bungle the robbery, to lose his nerve and get caught. How like him to
fail:
I could say that, finally, of a boy who was once my hero, my dreamboat, my sweetheart. Now he was a Macbeth, who killed for gain and let himself get caught.

And then, almost immediately, I thought: I'm
glad
he failed. Who wouldn't lose their nerve after such an event—the taking of a life—except a hardened soul? A Malcolm Madox, for example. Sympathy for Danny overwhelmed me—my poor, weak Danny, who couldn't kill in cold blood without falling apart. He's a good boy, I insisted silently to the absent police: he was driven to it.

I would have called someone—my aunt, my mother, Miranda—but whom could I tell it to? That I had loved and married a murderer? And that the police might be coming for me any minute as an accomplice?

By the time the Lambertis got home next day, my self-pitying panic had calmed to a cold, sick dread—like a recurrence of flu. I had spent some agonized time wondering whether to tell Paul and Martha, and decided I'd better. Not the whole truth, of course; my life, I decided, would be forever clouded by that gap in the whole truth, but I couldn't help it. I had never wanted anything so passionately as I wanted to remain uninvolved in that murder.

“I think I should tell you that my husband is suspected of killing a man,” I said to them that evening after the kids were in bed. “He's locked up in a mental hospital. He was found at the scene of the crime with a gun in his hand. The police were here yesterday to question me.” I managed to keep my voice as unemotional as if I was reporting a visit from the dry-cleaner's van. “They'll probably be back,” I said. “There's a funny sort of coincidence involved.” And I explained that I had once worked at Madox Hardware.

Martha was startlingly sympathetic, but Paul didn't like it, I could tell—any of it, from the police at his house to my taste in husbands to the funny sort of coincidence.

“How upsetting for you, Cordelia, the day after Christmas,” Martha said with indignation. “They have a nerve, I think. Why do they have to drag you into this?”

“Well, it
is
odd,” I said uncomfortably. “That he would rob a place where I used to work. They wanted to know if I'd seen him. I suppose they thought he and I might be working together.”

“But that's disgusting!” said Martha. Her complete, automatic faith in my honesty touched me, it was so unexpected. I was glad I'd never gone farther than the threshold of her bedroom. “They should be able to take one look at you and see that you couldn't be involved in anything so horrible. Aren't they trained to read character?” She threw down the needlepoint canvas she'd been working on and drummed her fingers on the arm of the wing chair. “They are so
stupid!
” She sat shaking her head. It was the sordidness that bothered her, I realized: murder coming so close. She was rejecting it.

“Let me get this straight,” said Paul. “You knew this guy who was murdered?”

“Vaguely. I used to work for his father.”

“But you never mentioned this place to your husband?”

“I haven't even seen him in over a year!” You know that, I said to myself. He was looking at me as if he knew nothing, as if I was a stranger.

Paul picked up his pipe and began to fill it, something he normally did only for book business—it gave him confidence, he said. I didn't know what to make of his lighting it now. “It is an incredible coincidence,” he said slowly, sucking in smoke.

“I can't help that,” I said. The thought glanced against my mind:
sometimes you have to tell lies on behalf of the truth
, and recoiled from it. It sounded like Watergate talk, or something Malcolm Madox would say. Was that what I'd come to? “He walked out on me a year ago October. I haven't seen him since, and I don't want to. I don't know what else to say.”

Martha slapped the chair arm suddenly with the flat of her hand. “I don't see that it's such a coincidence,” she said. “This hardware store is in Hoskins, didn't you say? That's not that far from your home town—Danny's home town—is it, Cordelia? It's the same general area, isn't it? It's natural he should stick to familiar territory. They'll probably find other robberies down there that he was responsible for. Or he could even have been watching you, Cordelia. He could have spied on you and on the store. The man's irrational, obviously. Who knows what he's capable of?”

I tried to make my mind work as if it were ignorant of the truth. Were Martha's ideas plausible? Yes—marginally—I decided, and stored them away for the police.

We talked it over a little longer, until the lies I had to keep telling ganged up on me and gave me a splitting headache. I kept wanting to confess, and I feared that if I was ever put on the witness stand I would blurt out everything. The trivet, the back room with Malcolm Madox, the marital wrongs Danny had accused me of, my affair with Paul—it would all come rushing out, no one would be able to shut me up, they'd carry me out shouting and raving, confessing to everything, anything …

“I guess I'll go to bed,” I said. I looked pleadingly at Paul, but he gazed intently into his pipe.

“Have some hot milk, Cordelia,” Martha said in her maternal voice—the one she doled out so sparingly to the kids—and she shook her head again in disgust. “The stupidity of these people! And on the day after Christmas.”

The same two detectives came back two days later—silent Toscano, nervous Sherman. I felt I knew them intimately. I noticed Toscano had on a new tie, though Sherman's seemed to be the same as before. They gave me, in a nice way, a thorough grilling, right out of the movies. But, strangely, as they questioned me, I became a little more confident. Miraculously, no one—not Danny, or Juliet—had told about my shoplifting, and my being fired for it. If anyone had, the police wouldn't be putting me through it so pleasantly.

I had to give them a complete account of my movements since Danny left: where I'd lived, where I'd worked, who my friends were, where I hung out. I did so gladly—there wasn't much to tell, and none of it could connect me with Danny. No one but Nina knew I had seen him at the fair in New Haven, and Nina was in Vienna.

As they were leaving, I asked them a question that had been bothering me all these months. “How's Mr. Madox? Does he still have the store, or …?” I didn't know how to express what I feared—that he had lapsed into depression or madness or senility after Malcolm's death. “Is he all right?”

Sherman said, “The old man passed away, a month or so after the murder. Heart attack. The store was bought by one of the big chains, I forget which one. They're remodeling it now, I believe. Gonna have a spring opening. But the old man was just wiped out by the murder.”

It was that statement, I think, that made me break down later that night. I thought about it all afternoon—harmless old Mr. Madox, dead of grief—and, if you followed his death back, around all the corners of the maze, there I was at the beginning, with a trivet in my hand. By evening, I all of a sudden couldn't stand the weight of it any more, and I began to cry, right in the middle of telling Megan her story. It was a story about a beautiful princess cast away to a snowy wasteland. After many struggles, she carves herself a snow house out of a huge drift and settles down there, eating snow ice cream flavored with the delicious red berries that grow outside her front door. I was trying to decide whether a seal would befriend her there, or a penguin, or a lost husky from a dog-sled team, when I felt the tears begin to come. I couldn't stop them. I sat on the edge of Megan's bed and sank my head down on my knees and wept—mostly for Mr. Madox but partly for me.