Foursome (17 page)

Mrs. Epps herself was quite elderly and short but rigidly straight, with chiseled features, snowy hair in a pageboy cut, and a pair of tinted eyeglasses on a silver chain around her neck. She wore one-inch white heels, white stockings, and a string of pearls and matching earrings over a blue dress that copied the combined decor perfectly. I found myself trying mentally to arrange her on the furniture and floor so that she would disappear into it.

“The dimness of the rest of the house is awkward, but the sunshine from the windows wreaks havoc with the upholstery of the better pieces, I’m afraid. I also find that, as I get on, the natural light out here is preferable to the artificial in there.”

Her tone carried all the emotion of an elevator that gives you automated instructions. She didn’t quite smile and didn’t quite frown and didn’t seem quite human.

Epps said, “Would you care to sit down?”

“Yes, thank you.”

She moved to the settee, leaving me a choice of couch or chair, with couch distanced a little more comfortably for talking. I took it, sinking only an inch into the cushion before feeling the iron underneath me. Epps sat as straight as she’d stood, feet flat on the tiles, knees together like a girl at her first cotillion, waiting to be asked to dance.

I said, “You’ve guessed I’ve come on behalf of Steven Shea.”

“There’s hardly anyone else left, is there?”

Still the elevator voice. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. “You don’t seem too upset about losing your neighbors.”

“Mr. … Cuddy, wasn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Mr. Cuddy, I am eighty-six years old. I have buried two husbands, one whom I loved deeply and another who cared for me beautifully. What remains of my circle of contemporaries I’m forced to visit inconveniently by taxi as they babble incontinently in nursing homes and worse. Such experiences give one a sense of balance that is difficult to disrupt.”

I found myself disconcerted again. “I wonder if you could tell me what you can about your neighbors?”

Epps blinked. “Have you no more sense of direction than that for your question?”

“You lived near them, I didn’t.”

“Very well. Feel free to redirect me at any time, then. My second husband—Mr. Epps, naturally—and I committed to purchase this house while it was still under construction. Mr. Epps’s deteriorating mobility required a residence all on one floor. This was suitable, and it was, after all,
Calem
, if you take my meaning.”

“A dignified, well-managed town.”

“Precisely. No taverns, no ‘T-stops’ for bus, subway, or train. A protected, livable environment.”

“Go on.”

“Well, shortly after Mr. Epps and I moved in, construction began across the way.” She motioned with her hand like a conductor silencing the string section. “The house seemed suitable, and the Vandemeers perfectly appropriate, if a bit immature to mix with.”

“And then?”

“Mr. Cuddy, I suggested you might wish to redirect me. There is no need to prompt me.”

“Sorry.”

“Nor is there a need to mollify me. I doubt you can insult me, and I’ve little regard for your opinion of me.”

This time I just nodded.

Unnecessarily, Epps smoothed her dress over her thighs. “Your Mr. Shea and Sandra commissioned their home shortly thereafter. I’m sure it met with the zoning and building codes meticulously, because the most nitpicking Boston conveyancer I could find assured me it did. It was, however—and, as you can see, remains—an eyesore, an abomination.”

Mrs. Epps’s voice rose just a fraction before resuming its electronic tone. “Unfortunately, by then Mr. Epps was quite immobile, and he dearly loved this ranch. Accordingly, I persevered, adding this room to give us a place of peace and a view of serenity not possible from virtually every other part of the house. After he died, I considered moving, but realized I, too, wished to stay. When those you love pass on, you often wish to move. When those who loved you pass on, you often wish to stay.”

I thought about Beth and her hillside in Southie.

“Mr. Cuddy?”

“I know what you mean, Mrs. Epps. I take it, then, you didn’t get along too well with Shea and Newberg?”

“On the contrary. Perfectly polite, considerate neighbors, after their fashion. Upon our first snow here, your Mr. Shea even offered to shovel our walk, not realizing that of course we’d simply have our landscaper under contract for such eventualities. Sandra I rarely saw.”

“Why was that?”

“Until relatively recently—perhaps a year ago—she was employed in downtown Boston, some sort of insurance post, I believe. Often not home until relatively late.”

I thought about Epps spotting me before I’d rung her doorbell. “And Steven Shea?”

“The same, only I would say more so. His original job was something to do with computers. More recently with the—is it the ‘aerospace’ industry?”

“So I’m told.”

“Yes. Frequent travel, long meetings. I’m sure that’s what sparked it.”

“‘It’?”

Epps blinked again. “The affair.”

My stomach played ping-pong with the farmhand’s breakfast. “Shea was having an affair?”

“No, no. Are inferences completely beyond you, Mr. Cuddy?”

“I’ve usually hoped otherwise.”

“Yes. Yes, it is always reassuring to hope. In any case, as I told our police, the affair was between Dr. Vandemeer and Sandra.”

Just what I needed to hear. “How do you know?”

Epps blinked for the third time. “If by your question you’re implying that I’d seen them
in flagrante delicto
, the implication is incorrect. If by your question you’re wondering if I have inescapable proof, the answer is yes. The doctor would often come home in the middle of the morning or afternoon, when his wife, Vivian, was predictably out shopping—I believe they call them ‘malls’?”

“Yes.”

“Well, Vivian was rarely home for lunch, but the doctor often was. I would see him park his car in his own driveway, then go into his house only to exit the back door and dart between the houses to his neighbor’s back door. When your Mr. Shea was out of town on business, but Sandra was out of work and at home.”

I noticed Mrs. Epps referred to males, even her own husband, by title and last name, but women by their first names. “Often enough to be suspicious?”

“Often enough to be conclusive.”

“It seems awfully risky.”

“I’ve no reason to believe either adulterer was diseased in any way, traditional or modern.”

I felt myself blushing and fought it. “No. No, what I meant was … fooling around in their own houses, with a neighbor across the way.”

“Perhaps. And perhaps also it appeared the most innocent. Instead of two neighbors caught by a mutual acquaintance exiting a motel inexplicably, they were simply two neighbors at home—at her home—for an hour or two during different days in alternating weeks.”

“You don’t think that Vivian Vandemeer knew, then?”

“If I were she, I would have known. Or guessed.”

“What about the Vandemeers’ son?”

The woman’s lips curled. “Nicky at least occasionally attends school. Also, on those days when he came home early, he may not have been in any condition to notice his father’s car unusually in his own driveway.”

I thought about the driving-under conviction. “By ‘in no condition’ …”

“I mean soused. Pickled, potted. And whatever expression appropriately describes being incapacitated by illicit drugs. The boy is a—junker?”

“Junkie, maybe?”

“And his paramour as well.”

“His girlfriend?”

“She hardly looks like a girl, Mr. Cuddy. She drives a rather elaborate car and wears rather alluring clothes and the amount of makeup you would have seen in Old Scollay Square if you’d been twenty years older and a visiting sailor.”

“Have you met her?”

“I trust you’re joking.”

“Have you seen her often?”

“Daily, since the killings. Before that, frequently. During some weeks, it was very nearly a carnival across the way, with Dr. Vandemeer arriving only to leave his house to visit Sandra, and the son arriving with his par—
girl
-friend—and disappearing into his parents’ house, seemingly oblivious to the fact that his father might catch him doing heaven knows what with her or bottles or needles.”

I shook my head, to clear it a little. “Do you think that Nicky knew about his father and Sandra Newberg, then?”

“I simply couldn’t say.”

I looked at her.

Mrs. Epps returned the look. “Isn’t there another question you should have for me?”

“Steven?”

“Precisely. Do I think your Mr. Shea knew about the affair? I simply couldn’t say there, either. But that, it seems, is the best question you could have asked.”

Mrs. Epps treated me to a smile, probably her first in quite a while.

Outside Mrs. Epps’s front door, I looked over to my client’s “abomination,” fingering his keys in my pocket. Then I walked to the Vandemeer house instead.

Up close, the grass didn’t look any lower or the flowers more alive. The rest of the place was in perfect condition, as though an obsessive caretaker had crossed every “t” and dotted every “i.” The front door was a broad six-panel in what looked like cherry with a brass mail slot centered two feet off the sill. I rang the bell, got nothing, and rang again. I waited thirty seconds, then pushed in the mail slot, stooping to put my ear to the opening. Still nothing. Straightening up, I really stood on the buzzer, then pounded on one of the door panels, which made a noise like the natives calling Kong to the sacrificial altar. Zip all around.

I turned away from the door and used my hand as a visor to look in the living-room picture window. No lights on, screen of a fifty-one-inch television blank.

Making my way to the garage, I tried to lift the doors. No go and no windows to see through. I moved around the side of the house. Through a window I could make out one car in the three stalls, a two-door sport version of the foreign line Hub Vandemeer carried. Continuing to the back of the house, I saw a nice patio with empty lounge chairs, a putting green centered in the yard.

From the yard, I cut over to the Shea/Newberg house the way Mrs. Epps described Hale Vandemeer doing it, keeping my eye on her house. If she had been at a front window, she could have seen me walking for twenty or thirty feet of distance before the edge of one of Shea’s wings would block her view.

Coming around to my client’s brown, flat front door, I took out the key and let myself into a boxy, two-story entry hall. Stopping, I breathed in musty air and listened. The drone of a refrigerator, the “ching” of an electronic clock, the wheezing of some air-blowing machinery courtesy of a grilled baseboard duct. There was a tapestry suspended from the upper story of the entry hall’s back wall. It showed Steven Shea’s face smiling from a Renaissance Italian costume of tights, jacket, and blowsy hat, my client hanging ten while surfing down a high wave. I shook my head, this time not to clear it.

The living room was clean, airy, and awful. The sit-down furniture was rattan, upholstered in faux leopard skins, the theme of the room being a suburban furniture store’s vision of
Out of Africa
. The rattan ottomans were shaped like camp stools, the rug a zebra hide fraying at the hooves. Tribal masks, spears, and shields served as wall decorations. I was surprised to see no trophy heads mounted on wooden crests. Compared to this place, the house in Maine was an exercise in understatement.

The sense of taste was unrelieved in the dining room’s Ming Dynasty motif. A paper lantern for chandelier, a black, lacquered locker for china hutch. Snarling bronze dragons guarded a lowboy silver cabinet, intricately painted vases on top of it. More black lacquer for table and chairs, the flocked wallpaper red and gold.

The kitchen was Scandinavian, I think, with butcher block counters, fancy cutlery, and copper pots and pans. Occupying one wall was an ancient, iron oven that looked as if it wasn’t sure that the adage “any old port in a storm” had been good advice to follow. Everything was still spotless, though, with one exception.

The pizza box in the sink.

I walked over to it, the cardboard starting to stink from both the two pieces of pepperoni and anchovy pizza still on it and the moldering from some standing water at the bottom of the basin itself. I found the trash basket under the sink, but it was clean, a fresh yellow plastic bag carefully tucked around its edges.

Crossing the room, I opened the refrigerator. Plenty of food and drink in it. Almost stuffed, in fact, but for a gap on the wire shelf in front of a six-pack of Michelob cans. The gap was just the right size for a second six-pack.

I found myself listening for movement overhead.

Taking the other exit from the kitchen, I circled around the downstairs, coming next to a huge den done up in red Chippendale leather like a nineteenth-century men’s smoking club. I found the staircase to the second floor, taking the steps slowly, staying off the oriental runner at the center and using the edges to minimize the squeaking of the boards. At the top of the stairs, I waited for a count of ten, then twenty. I didn’t hear anything.

Staying to the edge of the upstairs corridor, I checked each of the rooms. The three bedrooms and two baths were empty, but comparatively normal. Just simple guest rooms in pastels of green, yellow, and blue, all with linen and comforters arranged just so, the baths in complementary colors.

The master bedroom was another matter. Tufted black chairs and massive black bureaus sitting on lush black carpet, a large black television screen and black VCR in turn sitting on the lowest bureau. The black drapes and black walls contrasted with the white door to a white-tiled bathroom. Then black again for the ceiling over a king-sized, black bed with black sheets and black comforter. Black threads of varying lengths, with white beads on their ends, descended from the ceiling. The beads twinkled and swayed in the air currents, like stars in the heavens doing a hula dance.

Unlike the other bedrooms, the comforter was uneven on the mattress. I walked to the bed and pulled down the comforter and top sheet. The mattress undulated below me. A water bed. There was a darker oval near the center of the bottom sheet. I touched it. The sheet was satin, the oval still damp, as though someone had made love there earlier that morning.