Forty Thieves (17 page)

“Nobody sent us,” Ronnie said. “If we gave you the impression that we’re police officers, then we’ve—”

“No, don’t worry,” said Selena Stubbs, holding up her hand. “But we should be open with each other, or this is a waste of time. I’m sure you learned what you could about me, and I looked you up too, and made a few inquiries. It’s true—you’re not cops. You’re not exactly not cops, either. You have an agency. You do what you always did. Only you don’t have to take orders anymore. Isn’t that right?”

Sid said, “Nobody pays for something he’s already getting for free, so we tend to get hired to do things the cops aren’t doing. Your husband’s employer hired us to take a second look at his murder.”

“Ex-husband,” Selena Stubbs said. “And I agreed to meet you because otherwise you would try to reach me at home. I
have two kids—girls—aged six and eight. I wanted to spare them this kind of conversation.”

“We have no intention of upsetting anyone,” Ronnie said. “We just want to ask a few questions about your ex-husband, and try to understand what happened to him.”

“Now I’m shocked,” said Selena Stubbs. “Even you? Is there really any mystery about what happened to him? A black man shot execution style and his body stuffed into a sewer? Come on.”

“Some kind of racial motivation is a possibility, but we can’t make assumptions,” Sid said. “We’d like to find out who did it. If we knew more about Mr. Ballantine, maybe we could.”

“Okay. I’ll pretend the world is different than it is. Ask what you want.”

Sid said, “We’ve been piecing together the early stages of the police investigation. Detective Kapp, the officer who spoke to you at the time, died in an accident after a few months on the case. A very good detective named Miguel Fuentes has taken over. But nothing new has come up in months. And nobody seems to have been able to tell the police much about Mr. Ballantine.”

“Maybe that should tell you something,” said Selena.

“That’s why we thought we had better start over with you,” Sid said. “You would know the most.”

“All right. Ask.”

Ronnie said, “How did you meet?”

“In grad school at Berkeley. We both enrolled in the PhD program in chemistry,” Selena said. “The day the university got our applications we were destined to be thrown together constantly—two black chemistry grad students the same
age, et cetera. I’m sure you can imagine. You want to get along with everybody, but the minute you walk into the lab that first Monday, you see the person who looks like you, and he’s looking at you the same way.”

“You were attracted to him right away?” said Sid.

“Not at all. Seeing him there was a disappointment. Having him around seemed limiting, as though we had to be connected. It was more that way than usual, because we were the only black students in that class,” she said. “It wasn’t that I didn’t like him. Have you seen his picture?”

“Yes,” said Ronnie. “He was very handsome.”

“Yes, he was,” said Selena. “And he was very bright and very nice. At the time I resisted that information. He seemed too good. I had come straight from the University of Texas. I was in a new town where I knew nobody, and I wasn’t sure I trusted my own judgment. I kept thinking this must be what an arranged marriage would feel like. The other person is shoved right in your face, and there’s a little part of you that says, ‘Hold on. I didn’t get asked about this.’ So I was cordial, but I kept him at a distance. When other men asked me out, I dated them.”

“How did he react to that?” asked Ronnie. “Did it make him more interested?”

“I don’t think so. He went out with other people too. When we finally got together, it was unexpected. We had been colleagues for a while, and we enjoyed being together, but always with other friends. One afternoon all the other regulars were either busy or went home early, and by default, the evening turned into a date. After that it was always a date.”

“And when did you get married?” Ronnie asked.

“Just over two years into graduate school. We had both finished our course work, and passed the qualifying exams. We had already begun our own research for our doctoral dissertations. We knew we’d be working long hours in different labs for years, but we had more control over which hours those would be, so marriage started to make more sense.”

Sid said, “I assume the marriage seemed good at first?”

Selena Stubbs shrugged. “It was a good marriage. We were about as happy as you can be, given the nerves and the exhaustion, and the uncertainty. We were not only in competition with the other graduate students for the grades, the grants, the jobs, but we were in competition with each other, too. But we both got through that phase of it, still loving each other. We defended our dissertations in the spring of the fifth year, and graduated together in June.”

“Wow,” said Ronnie. “You must have felt like the smartest people in the world that day.”

“I’m afraid not even the smartest in town. Everybody was smart, and in a university town, you’re never likely to be the smartest. But we were pretty pleased with ourselves.”

“You had a problem, though, right?” Sid said. “You both needed jobs in the same field at the same time.”

“It was more complicated than that. Our specialties were very different. James had studied complex compounds that affected the metabolisms of muscle cells. Pharmaceutical companies were after him, but he loved universities, and wanted to teach and continue his research in the academic world, so he applied for assistant professorships.”

“And you?” said Sid.

“That was what made things complicated.” She looked out the window at the giant oil company buildings bordering the
square. “My field was oil. My interest was in petrochemicals, and I’d published research on the molecular signifiers in upper strata that indicate the presence of oil below. Companies were flying recruiters to me as soon as my dissertation was filed.”

Ronnie and Sid had both noticed that Selena tended to keep her eyes on Ronnie, and to address her answers to her. Ronnie was capable of projecting a soft, motherly sympathy when she wanted to set a witness at ease. They exchanged a glance, and then Sid leaned back and turned his body slightly away from Selena Stubbs. Ronnie leaned toward her to look straight into her eyes.

“What happened?” Ronnie’s big blue eyes were wide with interest.

“He got job offers, and I got job offers. The difference was I was pregnant and he wasn’t. We decided it would be best to let him take his best offer, and move to Bloomington, Indiana, together. He would be a professor, and I would have the baby and keep my name out in the world by working a little bit as a consultant, mostly from home.”

“Did you resent that?” asked Ronnie.

“No. I wanted kids, and I loved them. We were happy for about five years, before it ended badly.”

“What went wrong?” Now Ronnie’s eyes were filled with concern.

“Just about everything,” said Selena. “First James got his official fifth-year notice that he was not going to be granted tenure.”

“I thought that was seven years,” said Ronnie

“Legally, if they let you teach for seven years, they’ve given you de facto tenure. So they make decisions early and give
notice. At the end of five years you get an evaluation. They tell you either that you’ll be getting tenure, or that while you’re teaching for your sixth year, you’d better also be looking for a job.”

“And that’s the notice James was given?”

“Yes. It was devastating, and not just to James. I had stepped out of the career track for five years. I had been satisfied that I’d done the right thing. I had two beautiful children to show for my decision. But if I was going to sacrifice my career, I at least wanted it to buy him the career he loved so much.”

“What did you do?” asked Ronnie.

“I did nothing for a few days, just kept my feelings to myself while he grieved. Then I sat him down and we talked about what to do next. Academic life was effectively closed to him once he had been denied tenure. So we made a list of companies for him to write for jobs. I helped. I wrote to contacts, friends, and colleagues all over the country. He got quite a few interviews.”

“Quite a few interviews doesn’t sound like good news,” Ronnie said. “It means he didn’t find a job right away.”

“Very perceptive,” said Selena. “The job search took most of his sixth year at Indiana. He would finish his last class of the week, pack up the papers for grading, and get on a plane to another city for an interview. He would be back the morning of his first class. He was tired all the time. When he finally got a good offer at Intercelleron in California, I was so relieved I could hardly contain myself. That lasted awhile.”

“Only awhile?” Now Ronnie’s expression was sad.

“We made a plan. In June he was to go out to California, start work at Intercelleron, and find a house. That way he
would have no lapse in paychecks, and start getting the bigger income the company was paying. I would stay in Indiana with the kids, sell the house we had in Bloomington, and then wrap up our affairs, pack up, and join him.”

“That’s a lot to do.”

“It was,” said Selena. “But people do it. The first problem was that our house didn’t sell. I listed it as soon as we knew we were leaving, but it was a buyer’s market. We had to put off everything—buying the new house, and moving out to join him. James was out there in Los Angeles working, and he found plenty of houses, but we needed to sell the old one to get the down payment for the new one. It dragged on, and then the summer was gone and fall started. I would go to the market and see people we knew from the university, and it would make me feel sick. I had promised myself I’d never see these people again, but there I was. ‘What’s James doing these days?’ It was awful.”

“It must have been.”

“He would fly home to see us every two or three weeks, but while he was there he wasn’t much use in selling the house. He liked visiting with the kids, but they were small, and they were getting a little too used to his being away all the time. So was he. When he was there, it was like he was babysitting. One weekend was particularly bad, and when he left, I made a new plan. Over the next week, I packed everything up and had it moved to a storage facility so the house could be scrubbed and painted and put on the market empty. The kids and I got on a plane and flew out to join Daddy at his apartment.” She paused and shook her head slowly, and Ronnie and Sid could tell it was an involuntary response to a bad memory.

The Abels waited. They had each interrogated thousands of people. They both recognized that they had reached a delicate moment. If they pressed too hard, she might decide to resist and say nothing more specific or personal. But she had told most of this incident, and she would be feeling the need to get the rest out. After a minute she started again.

“We went to the apartment he had rented, but he wasn’t there. It was already late, and I didn’t want to call another cab to take us to a hotel, so I went to the manager’s apartment and asked her to let me in. I had my ID, and no burglar brings a four-year-old and a two-year-old. So we got in. He didn’t come home that night. He came in at seven a.m. to shower and dress for work. He was in a big hurry, and said he’d been at a get-together for a retiring colleague and had too much to drink, so he’d stayed overnight instead of driving. It was true and it wasn’t. He had been drinking. I could smell it. But the party was between him and one woman, who wasn’t nearly old enough to retire. When I looked at him I knew it.”

“I’m sorry,” Ronnie said.

“He had changed. I think what happened was that he had the nice beaten out of him. He had sacrificed all his life to become a certain kind of man, but it didn’t work. He was fired—not from a job, but from a life. Right after he heard he wasn’t going to get tenure I watched him secretly for signs that he was going to commit suicide. I needn’t have bothered. The man I had married wasn’t there anymore. The new James was different.”

“How was he different?” asked Ronnie.

“He had decided that his whole life had been a mistake. The way to live was to deny himself nothing. He didn’t just
make some drunken slipup or get tempted when he was lonely. He had at least four other regular women. He was spending a lot of money on them, but mostly on himself. New clothes, new car, new friends. When I watched him, I realized he had lost interest in the kids. He went through the motions, but he really didn’t want to spend any time around them.”

“What about you?” Ronnie asked. “Was he still interested in saving the relationship?”

“By then there was nothing much to save. I put up with the new James for about three months, and then filed for divorce, took the kids, and came here to Houston to start looking for a job. He didn’t try to stop me, and didn’t try to bring me back afterward. When I had to fly to Los Angeles over the next few months for meetings with the lawyers and trial dates, we barely spoke. The lawyers did most of it.”

“And after that?” asked Ronnie. “What about more recently?”

“I’ve been working here for about four years. James visited the kids a few times during the first year, but after each visit the kids were less interested in the next one, and so was James. After that there were some excuses, and then even the excuses stopped. When the Los Angeles police told me he had died, I hadn’t seen him in three years. All I could say was, ‘Too bad.’”

Ronnie placed her hand on Selena’s, and Selena didn’t pull away. She sat staring at the carpet for a moment, then seemed to straighten and looked at Ronnie again.

“But I did mean what I said—too bad. James had started living a different way. He was out very late at night, sometimes alone, and sometimes not. He ran into the sort of
people you meet that way, and one or more of them killed him.” Selena Stubbs stood up. “I wish you luck in your investigation. Now I’d better get back to my office.”

“Thank you for your help,” said Ronnie. “I know talking about this is painful. But just one last question. Do you happen to know the names of any of the women he was seeing?”

“Yes,” she said. “Thanks for thinking of that. I made a list of the names and addresses for you, and I would have been disappointed later if I hadn’t remembered to give it to you.” She reached into her purse and took out a plain sheet of white paper from a computer printer with a dozen lines of print and handed it to Ronnie. “Maybe one of them knows more than I do.”