Death in a Funhouse Mirror (23 page)

"How do you know that?"

"That's what the police said."

"You still haven't answered. Why Cliff?"

"Because he hated her. Had for a long time. And because he couldn't get a divorce. Not easily, anyway. She would have fought him tooth and nail, resisting any threat to her comfortable lifestyle and her position. Can you imagine the insult to her ego if her husband divorced her for another man? A beautiful woman like Helene? She'd asked him to stop seeing Rowan, you know. And she had a terror of being poor. She was very poor as a child. Did I ever tell you that? A divorce would have been a nasty, protracted affair, and Cliff doesn't like conflict. Easier to kill her. I'm not saying he did it himself. There are people out there who will kill for drug money, or just for fun. Just consider it, won't you, Thea? You remember how things used to be. But they'd changed."

I shook my head. "But there are so many other possibilities. A stranger. An angry patient. The husband of one of those abused women. A jealous colleague. If all it takes is someone who was angry with Helene, anyone could be a suspect, even you."

"But he knew her habits," she insisted. "Whoever killed her knew her routine."

She was peeling the cucumber, and the peeler slipped and gouged a piece out of her finger. She shook it angrily, spattering blood on the counter. "I'll never be a cook," she said, wrapping a paper towel around it. "I'm just not good around sharp things. Always cutting myself. I never make a meal without a sacrifice."

"I'm sorry," I said, "that was my fault. I should know better than to argue with someone while she's peeling. I'll get you a Band-Aid."

There weren't any in the bathroom, but I knew that Eve sometimes kept some loose in her desk, so I looked there. Rummaging through the drawer I found a stack of catalogues, most of them for lingerie, a few for the outdoorsy clothes she liked, and some for fishing, camping and hunting which I assumed reflected her new interest in outdoor sports. I pulled them out to look underneath. No Band-Aids, only a poem she'd been working on.

Back in our early twenties, in those days of late adolescent angst, Eve had worked out a lot of her problems through poetry, and some of it had been quite good. This one wasn't, though. It was just bleak and depressing. She'd written:

 

Into the warm heart of trust

Creeps the cold black head of despair.

Ruthless, taking what it will, at will

Heartless, leaving cold heart hollowed, Hopeless.

 

Into the nest of nurtured joy

Creeps the pale white hand of greed.

Merciless, solely satisfying self,

Pitiless, leaving crushed heart hollowed,

Hapless.

 

I was staring at it, the Band-Aid forgotten, wondering what tragedy she hadn't shared with me that had led to such a sad poem, when Eve came looking for me. She rushed across the room, snatched the poem out of my hand, and stuffed it back in the drawer.

"That's none of your business," she said. "What are you doing in my room?"

"Looking for a Band-Aid."

"Going through my drawers."

"Just looking for a Band-Aid," I said. "There were none in the bathroom, and you used to keep them in your desk."

She just stared at me coldly and walked away. "Dinner's ready," she said over her shoulder.

Our earlier camaraderie had vanished. We ate in an uncompanionable silence, whatever rapprochement we'd achieved lost in disagreement. There were three of us, as Waldemar had deigned to leave his headphones long enough to eat. The food was good, but I had no appetite for it. Finally Eve broke the silence. "I don't understand you anymore, Thea," she said. "You say you're my friend, yet you won't help me when I need it. It seems like you're more loyal to my father than you are to me. And then I find you snooping through my things."

Her crazy accusation was the last straw. I'd run out of patience with Eve, with her persistence, her mood swings and her total self-absorption. "I wasn't snooping through your things, Eve. Why would I? I already explained that. I don't care whether you believe me or not." I didn't like having this conversation in front of Waldemar but he seemed oblivious. Maybe he was tuned into the music zone even when he didn't have headphones on.

She poured more wine into our glasses and sat staring glumly at me. "I'm sorry. I overreacted, that's all. You know how it is when someone you loved is dead, Thea, I know you do. My feelings are just all over the place." She sounded genuinely contrite.

I picked up my wine, starting to relax, when she hit me with another zinger. "But I'm not wrong about my father...."

"What did you mean when you said you were afraid he'd come after you next?"

She smiled triumphantly and jumped up. "I'll show you." She led me to the back door, which opened into a little hallway behind the kitchen, pulled the door open, and showed me a series of marks along the jamb which had dented the paint, in some places leaving splintery edges of raw wood. "Someone tried to break in yesterday," she said, "and I found this on the stairs." She held out a brown plastic pill container with no label, twisted off the top, and shook out some pills. "I've been having trouble sleeping, and Cliff gave me some pills to take which look a lot like these, only these are three times as strong. I came home from work yesterday afternoon with a headache. I was sleeping when I heard noises and came back here to investigate. When I opened the door, I saw a man running down the stairs. I ran down to the street and saw a man getting into a car just like my father's. Now you see why I think he's after me?"

"You're sure you saw your father?"

"It might have been Rowan. It was dark on the stairs, and he was pretty far down the street."

"What kind of car does your father drive?"

"A gray Saab 9000."

So did a hundred other people in Cambridge. She couldn't identify the man on the stairs or the guy getting into the car. "Maybe it was just a burglar, Eve."

"Then how do you explain these?" she said, waving the pills.

"Maybe the burglar was a druggie."

"You just don't want to believe me."

"What time did this all take place?" I asked.

"Midafternoon. You know. Around four or four-thirty."

"Then it wasn't your father."

"How do you know?"

"Because I was with him in his office yesterday at four."

"Then maybe it was Rowan."

"Nope. He was at Bartlett Hill, too."

"Maybe it was later, then," she said, "I don't really remember. Not that any of this matters, since you won't help me anyway. Maybe after something happens to me, then you'll believe me. I'm sure Helene never expected anything to happen to her, either." She shook her head angrily and returned to the table.

In our absence, Waldemar had finished his dinner and gone back to his headphones. I wondered what Eve saw in him. He hadn't uttered a word or even looked at me, so there was no way I could form an impression of him.

Eve sat across from me, scowling as she pushed little bits of food around on her plate. Neither of us had eaten much. "Are we having fun yet?" she said. I didn't answer. "Look, this isn't what I had in mind at all. Now I'm mad at you and you're mad at me, when I was hoping to have a pleasant dinner. I didn't mean for things to turn out like this. Honest. I mean, you're practically my only friend. Can we backtrack or something? Start over? Please? All I want you to do is talk to a few people; it's not so much to ask. Just talk to Lenora and Mrs. Coffey and Norah. Listen to what they have to say, think about what I've told you about my parents, about Cliff and Rowan, and see if you're still so sure my father is an innocent lamb."

She ate a teeny bit of lettuce. "You're wondering about me and Waldemar, aren't you? Thinking he's not my type? He's big, but he's very peaceful. Sorta like your Andre, maybe. I had my fill of intense guys with Padraig."

She was trying hard now to be nice and patch things up, but I wasn't interested in a girlish chat about her new boyfriend and the way things stood, I couldn't chat about Andre. I was trying to be patient because of her recent trauma, but it wasn't working. When we were younger, I hadn't minded; now, I found her mood changes and her demands tiresome. Nothing she had said moved me any closer to thinking that Cliff was a murderer, or to understanding why she thought he was. Nor did I have any idea how to convince her that he wasn't.

Common sense told me to walk away from the whole mess but she seemed so pitiful and sad that I couldn't do it, so in the name of friendship I compromised. "I'll do this much for you," I said, "I'll talk to some people, the ones who've been calling. I'll keep an open mind, I'll listen to what they say, and I'll report back to you. But that's as far as I go. I won't snoop around at Bartlett Hill. I have to establish an honest working relationship with those people, and I can't do that if I have a secret agenda."

She smiled and clapped her hands together gleefully. "I knew I could count on you, Thea..." she began.

I held up a hand to stop her. "One more thing. You have to agree to listen to what I have to say and keep an open mind, too. Agreed?"

"Of course," she said, though, knowing her as I did, I was sure she hadn't paid any attention to my conditions. "I'm very grateful."

I went home feeling like I'd made a complete mess of things. Why hadn't I just said no? It didn't help that my answering machine was blinking like a crazed traffic light and most of the calls proved to be from people Eve had sicced on me. Lenora Stern, with something she'd forgotten to tell me. The neighbor, Martha Coffey, calling to see if I'd gotten her message. Norah McCarty, who grudgingly surrendered her name and nothing more. Coffey was the only one I called back.

"I saw you with Eve at the funeral, didn't I?" she said. "You're the tall girl with the long hair?"

"I am." No sense in telling her I wasn't a girl. I didn't want to alienate her before I even heard what she had to say.

"It's a terrible tragedy, what's happened to that family. When Eve came to see me and asked me to talk to you, I didn't know what to say. She seemed to assume that I agreed with her theory that Clifford was the killer, and I don't, Ms. Kozak, I truly don't. I decided not to argue with her—Eve's such a sensitive girl—and just talk to you instead. Since you're a detective, surely you'll be able to sort things out. And that's just what I told the policeman when he was asking me questions. That I'd tell everything I know to you, and you can decide what to do with it. I'd just feel more comfortable talking to a woman, you can understand that. Come to lunch tomorrow. Twelve would be good. It's the house across the street. Directly across the street."

After she hung up, I realized the only words I'd said in the entire conversation, once I'd identified myself, were "I am."

What I am, I thought, is tired. Weary. Exhausted. Sick of weird people and their weird problems. I was awfully tempted to rouse my friend Jack and tell him my troubles, but I didn't, and I was asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow. Not even the grumbling of my stomach, gnawing on its meager bit of sauerkraut, disturbed me.

 

 

 

Chapter 14

 

I'd expected trouble sleeping. I had a lot on my mind after the crazy ups and downs of the day, starting with my very successful meeting with Robert Hillyer and ending with my very unsuccessful meeting with Eve. I wasn't surprised by the mercurial swings in her moods. She'd always been prone to them, and I knew she was deeply disturbed by her mother's death. What surprised me was how unsympathetic I was becoming. I'd always been very patient with Eve, maybe because the relationship had been a two-way street and I was getting something back from her. Now all I seemed to be getting from her was demands and hostility. Her reaction when I looked in her desk for Band-Aids was just plain nuts. Maybe Waldemar was a snoop and I'd accidentally trespassed into a sensitive area. When we'd lived together she'd never been so suspicious and territorial.

Irritated, I turned over and buried my head in the pillow. Eve had disrupted enough of my nights. I didn't need her sorry figure lingering in my brain and making me feel guilty. I willed her out of my head and out of my house, and this time, my mind obeyed, leaving me alone in the big bed. Too alone. The other half of the bed seemed very empty and none of the messages on the machine had been from Andre. I'd been secretly hoping he'd call and say he'd changed his mind. It could happen. The guy was a cop, and pretty stubborn sometimes—he'd once been described to me as that guy with the poker up his ass and the bristly hair—but he was also reasonable, and honest, and he could be astonishingly romantic.

Like last Valentine's Day. A cold, drizzly, miserable Thursday. I'd left work early because I had a rotten cold, one of those colds where my head felt like it was packed with sawdust, I'd blown my nose until it was scrubbed raw, coughed until my ribs felt broken and my chest ached, and every time I bent over I felt like the top of my head was going to come off. I'd crept home through the snarl of traffic, taken a shower and changed into my softest old sweats, and then discovered that the only cold remedy I had left in the house was one teaspoon of cough syrup. No decongestant, nothing for the aches and pains of flu or the incredible pain in my head. And not a single tea bag or even a can of soup. Too sick to drag myself out again, I was curled up on the couch, wallowing in self-pity and dully watching the talking heads on the screen deliver what passed for news, when the doorbell rang.