Last to Know (18 page)

Clinging on to his mother’s hand, Diz said, “My dad did nothing. He only went to visit that Havnel woman that one time when I saw him.”

Harry saw Rose give him a quick sideways “keep your mouth shut” glare. He would not interrogate a child but Diz had just confirmed what he had blurted out earlier; that Wally knew Lacey Havnel, or Bea Havnel, or both, and that Diz had seen him rowing back from their house right before it exploded into flames.

The fact that Wally certainly knew Lacey Havnel and was seen on the lake when her house exploded, and that he was found standing over Jemima Forester’s body, seemed not to have penetrated this family’s armor. They believed in Wally. It was that simple.

“Don’t worry,” he said to Rose. “I’m not going to ask Diz anything, though he will be interviewed by a member of child protective services later, as well as a child therapist. We don’t want any harm to come to him, emotionally. He might think he is responsible,” he added, quietly, so that Diz could not hear him.

The two daughters stood in back of their mother. The elder son, Roman, was next to her. Always the observer, Rossetti would have said.

“I think we need to call my dad’s attorney,” Roman said. Harry nodded, of course.

Meanwhile Wally had been taken off to an interrogation room and there was no doubt in Harry’s mind he was going to end up in jail. For how long, he didn’t know. That would depend on Wally’s story, and any evidence they could produce, and on a clever attorney. He thought it ironic that the man who wrote novels about evil should end up being involved in evil. Perhaps it was true that the apple did not fall far from the tree—a writer of killers turning into a killer. The question was why.

It did not take long to find out. Wally was no match for Bea in the quiet confidence department. He seemed, to Harry, to be a broken man.

He sat in the same place Bea had, behind the same table, ignoring Rossetti’s coffee, his handsome face haggard. Even his tan seemed bleached-out, toned down, unreal. Had Wally Osborne been living out one of his own stories? Had he wanted to kill Jemima for the pure thrill he got when he wrote those books? It was unheard of, but Harry knew from experience there was always a first for everything.

“What explanation can you give for Jemima Forester being at Evening Lake?” Harry started out.

Wally looked at him, bewildered. “I don’t even know who she is.”

“I might remind you, sir,” Rossetti said, “she no longer is. She was.”

Wally shook his head. “I’m sorry.”

“Her throat was cut,” Harry added, glancing at the video screen to make sure it was taping. Wally looked dumbly back at him.

“Lacey Havnel, who you knew, was also stabbed.”

Wally shook his head. “It was the fire.”

Harry said, “The fire burned her. The knife killed her first.”

Wally stared down at his hands.

“How did you know Lacey Havnel?” Rossetti asked this one and Wally turned his head to look at him.

“She was a neighbor,” he said. “She’d come to live on the lake, like us … my family I mean. I didn’t really know her.”

Harry’s eyes met Rossetti’s. This time his gut instinct told him Wally was lying. It did not tell him why, though.

“Were you having an affair with Lacey?” Rossetti asked, casually, looking Wally in the eye. “Y’know, man-to-man, these things happen, you both living on the lake and like that … proximity is always a big factor in sexual affairs.”

“I didn’t know the woman.”

“Then why were you at her house? Why were you seen rowing back from there that night, right before the explosion?”

“I wasn’t rowing from there. I was tired, worried about my writing, I just went out for a row around the lake. I often do when things get tough, stressful. Things were wrong between me and my wife, there wasn’t anyone else. It was all my fault,” he said, looking directly at Harry.

There was a knock on the door and a uniformed cop told them Mr. Osborne’s attorney was there. Behind him, Harry saw Roman, still watching, still waiting. Was it only concern for his dad? Or was he watching out for himself, and maybe for Bea?

When he came into the room Harry told him they were holding Wally on suspicion of two murders. Wally was going to jail and there was nothing his attorney, or his family, could do about it. Right now.

34

Unhappiness made Mal cry. Boredom made her want her job back. She had given it all up—and for what? To look at paintings in the Museé d’Orsay? Lovely paintings but she was in no mind to take them in, absorb them into her soul, so to speak. She was alone again. She had drunk a glass of champagne last night in the café with the charming Frenchman who had helped her dry her tears, but she’d refused his offer of dinner and … And what? She wasn’t in the mood for romance, a flirt, sex. She wanted that from Harry and he wasn’t giving it to her because he was up to his neck in the lake with Lacey Havnel and the twenty-one-year-old beautiful blond daughter.

Mal was strolling down the crowded rue de Buci. It was market day but she was indifferent to the fragrant displays of cheeses, the polished piles of fruits, the colorful baskets of flowers, and the bright-eyed silvery fishes. Mal’s thoughts were firmly on the Havnels. She got the feeling Harry was getting nowhere fast in his investigation, stalled, she’d bet, by the innocence of the girl he felt needed his protection. And maybe she did, but, woman-to-woman, Mal needed to find out a bit more about the Havnel family.

Mal might have left her job in a huff but her office still functioned, as did her assistant, Lulu, who was always at the end of a phone and always on the job.

Lulu answered immediately. “I knew you’d be calling,” she said. “You just can’t keep away, can you?”

“Not without a man to wrap myself around, I can’t,” Mal agreed, then proceeded to give Lulu a quick breakdown of her and Harry’s current situation, or lack of it.

“I mean, what’s wrong with me, Lulu?” She glanced critically at her reflection in a shop window: black pencil skirt, high suede boots, winter-white jacket, and a new blue cashmere scarf tied exactly the way the French tied theirs; there was definitely an art to French scarf-tying. Her earrings were small gold hoops, the dark glasses hiding her swollen eyes were Dior, her perfume Hermès. “I mean, I’m the kind of girl a guy can take anywhere.”

“Yeah,” Lulu said, practical as ever. “Except this man doesn’t want to. Not right now anyway. So, what else is up?”

“I want you to check on someone. Name of Lacey Havnel. Also her twenty-one-year-old daughter, name of Beatrice. They were involved in a fire at Evening Lake.”

“Harry’s Evening Lake?” Lulu asked, surprised.

“The very same. He saw their house burn down with the mother in it, rescued the beautiful blond young daughter from the waves, and has not been seen by me since. I’m just curious about the girl, Lulu, you know how it is.”

“I do,” Lulu agreed. Men were men and women were women and jealousy usually reared its head at some point in that game.

“Anyway,” Mal said briskly, “supposedly they’re from Florida, Miami area … leads one to wonder how they could afford a big house that just burned down. One might question the insurance on it, for instance, and exactly where they got the money to buy it in the first place.”

“Mafia?” Lulu asked.

“Drugs?” Mal answered, thinking either might be true. “Oh, and if, just by chance, Harry calls and asks, tell him nothing.”

“Will do,” Lulu said, ready to get to work.

Satisfied, Mal rang off. She would go and sit in the movies, watch a French film in un-understandable French, just to torture herself in her aloneness; after that she would drown her sorrows in some more champagne. Or maybe she would just drive out into that lovely countryside where they didn’t issue so many parking tickets, and no dogs lifted their legs on your tires, and the coffee was just as good anyway. Actually, she was getting to like France.

It wasn’t until much later that she heard from Lulu of the murder of Jemima Forester, and Wally Osborne’s arrest.

35

For once, Harry was at home, in his apartment in the converted brownstone with its stainless-steel-equipped chef’s kitchen, barely used now except for the micro because he never had the time; the bathroom with its oversized shower with five jets and plain white subway tiles; the living room with its dark wood floors and the ebony baby grand in the bow window and the faded antique silk rug that Squeeze, as a puppy, had chewed at the corners; the plain leather chesterfield and the red leather wing chair, set next to the original marble fireplace, where a damp log currently burned in a desultory fashion, and where a bottle of Jim Beam stood on the chrome side table next to that red leather chair, next to Harry’s hand, so he might replenish his glass without the effort of getting up and going to the bar counter to fetch it. Because tonight Harry was drinking.

It was not the first time Harry had seen a murdered woman. But it was the first time it was a woman he knew. Gutsy, feisty, daredevil Jemima Puddleduck was no more, and Harry was remembering her wild red hair, her ruby-red mouth, her joy of life. His heart was not broken; it was a lump inside his chest, a meaningless organ because the life he was leading was meaningless.

He had been thinking of quitting the force, thinking of coming to terms with a new life, considering seriously settling down with Mal, the love of his life. But not for this reason. Not because he could stomach it no longer.

Without even glancing at the bottle on the table, he reached out blindly and refilled his glass. A couple of ice cubes would have been good but he couldn’t make the effort to get up and get them. Tonight, booze was meant to numb him, take away his feelings, remove his despair in the knowledge that he had probably been the cause of Jemima’s death. If it were not for him, Jemima would not have been involved in the Havnel mystery. She would never have gone to the lake house. Though why she had done so was also a mystery. He remembered Jemima saying she had a bad case of curiosity. “Nosiness” Harry had called it. He recalled that she’d overheard him say to Rossetti he would meet him and they would go to the lake. He had no doubt Jemima had followed. In fact, she had gotten there first, because Harry had to make a detour to the precinct to collect Rossetti. It was Jemima’s small silver Honda he’d noticed parked to one side, and Jemima’s pearls—the ones he remembered gleaming on her slender alabaster neck—that lay scattered, like the trail of crumbs in the woods in that fairy tale, that lay on the ground around her bled-out body.

As he poured another glass the dog nudged urgently at his knee, wanting his attention. Harry patted him absently. His thoughts turned to Mal, to Paris, where she had run after their fallout. What if he had just gotten on that plane? Gone to meet her? Would any of this have happened? Would any of it have happened if he had kept his promise to himself to quit the force, to turn his life around, to give himself and the love of his life the time together they needed if they were to remain together?

Regret is a terrible emotion; it erodes the soul with its “what if’s” and “might have been’s” and “if only’s.” The truth was there was only the present, and currently Harry had had enough of that.

He lifted his hand and glanced at his watch. Unlike his gift to Rossetti, his was plain, serviceable, inexpensive. He was not a man who needed that pricey kind of glamour, not a hot guy on the loose, like Rossetti, who he’d bet right now was in some club doing his best to forget the earlier events, dancing with some cute chick who would definitely fancy him and with whom he might end up spending the night. Lucky Rossetti, to find forgetfulness, even temporarily.

Jemima’s face floated in front of Harry’s closed eyes: her flame-red bangs shaggy over her pale blue eyes; her eagerness to grasp at life and become a detective when she had no knowledge of what she was doing; her ruby mouth and pale skin, her aliveness, for God’s sake.

Harry checked his watch again. It was exactly five minutes later than the last time he’d checked. It was probably midday in Paris. Where Mal was. Alone. Or last time they’d spoken she had been alone. Anything might have happened since then.

The love of his life was a very attractive, sometimes he would say even a beautiful, woman. On her “good days” was how Mal qualified being beautiful—when her hair was just right and she’d slept properly and wasn’t made up for the TV cameras. How she hated that makeup, she so preferred bare skin and lip gloss and her special perfume, Hermès 24 Faubourg, which Harry believed only Mal wore because nobody else seemed ever to have heard of it, and the name of which, Mal had explained, was in fact the address of Hermès in Paris. Its soft spiciness hung like her own aura around her, leaving a hint behind when she left a room.

Harry not only knew Mal’s perfume, he knew the very scent of her skin, of her womanliness, the texture of her, the supple smoothness, her gold-painted toenails and her pink fingernails, her laugh that began like a silly little-girl snort in her nose and which always embarrassed her. He knew the sound of her TV voice, the different sound of her voice on the phone, the sexy sound of her when they made love. He knew, he decided, everything about Mal. Except exactly where she was right now and whether she would even talk to him again.

He looked at his cell phone, lying right there next to the bottle of Jim Beam and the half-filled glass—one of the glasses Mal had bought him as a gift because she said his supermarket ones were undrinkable from. “When you’re having the good stuff, that is,” she’d added with a wicked smile. Of course Harry’s wineglasses were Riedel because he would never pour a good wine into a thick glass, when the fragility of the glass against your lips enhanced the flavors and pleasure of the wine … What was he thinking! Fuckin’ call her, find her, talk to her, tell her you are dying here alone, tell her you can’t go on …

He picked up the phone, pressed speed-dial, heard it ringing, once, twice, three—

“What now?” Mal answered, sounding aloof.

“I can’t go on,” Harry said simply. “I’m quitting. Somebody I knew, a young woman, was murdered tonight and I was the one that found her. I might be responsible. She was young, Mal, she was so alive, so eager for her future. I almost think she must have been the way you were at her age, wanting to be like you, a TV detective. And now she’s dead and I’m supposed to find who killed her. Rose Osborne’s husband is a suspect, the blond girl is a suspect. I can’t do it, Mal. I’m guilty.”