Last to Know (23 page)

Diz hovered in the doorway, worried he might say the wrong thing. His mother looked up, saw him, and smiled.

“Your old favorite for supper,” she said. “Spaghetti Bolognese.” She heaved a great sigh. “Truthfully, it’s all I could think of, right at the moment. My mind seems to be on other things.”

“We could always do the burger joint.” Diz stuck his hands in his shorts pockets, staring worriedly at her as she stirred the sauce. “You know Bea is back. I saw her across the lake. She’s at the small house behind the wreck.”

“Pity it didn’t burn down too,” Rose said, astonishing Diz, who had never before heard his mother say anything nasty about anyone.

“Mom?” She glanced up again. “Like, well, I mean … is everything okay with Dad now?”

Rose stopped what she was doing. She put down her spoon and folded her arms, leaning back against the stove and regarding him with the new eyes of a mother who has just seen her son grow up quite a lot.

“I never thought I would need to say this, but your father acted like a fool. He got involved with bad people. It’s over with now, thank God, and we should say no more about it.”

“What about Jemima?” Diz was going to say “what about Jemima’s murder” but couldn’t quite bring himself to articulate that word.

“The homicide detectives are investigating that.” Rose looked closely at him. She walked over, put her arms round him in a bear hug. “Listen, kiddo,” she said gently, “your dad is okay. He did nothing wrong. Seriously wrong, I mean, and I don’t want you ever to think that. Okay?”

“Jemima was murdered, Mom. Even I heard that,” Diz said. “On the TV news,” he added.

“We didn’t know Jemima. Your father didn’t know Jemima. The poor young woman foolishly got herself involved in the investigations of the fire and Mrs. Havnel’s death.”

“Murder,” Diz corrected his mother, who heaved another great sigh.

“Look, Diz, Harry Jordan is in charge of the investigation, he and Detective Rossetti. I have complete faith in both of them. They are the best. Whatever happened, whatever the truth is, they will find out, and the person, or persons, responsible will be arrested.”

“Like Dad, you mean,” Diz persisted. “And Bea.”

Rose turned back to the stove, took up the spoon, and began stirring again. She tasted it on a finger, added a touch more salt. “I do not want to talk about her,” she said in the quiet voice Diz knew meant trouble. “Please do not mention her name to me again.”

Diz went and stood next to her. “Can I have a taste?”

“May I,” Rose corrected him again. That’s what mothers did, corrected, Diz thought, dipping a spoon into the bubbling red sauce and burning his mouth.

“It’s too hot,” Rose told him, too late.

“Thanks, Mom.” Diz wandered back out of the kitchen, en route to his room. “It’s great.”

It always was, Rose thought, wondering whether if she made a salad they would eat it. Nobody seemed much into food these days. Especially Wally.

Out on the porch Diz spotted his father in the small boat, rowing toward the house. He walked out onto the jetty, waiting for him.

“Hey, Dad,” he said, as Wally pulled alongside. “How about we go fishing.” He thought his father needed a little friendly company.

44

Harry said goodbye to Mal at the airport and was back on what Rossetti jokingly called terra-cotta, meaning terra firma, “home ground.”

“How come you always go away at the wrong moment?” he demanded, when Harry walked into the precinct. “Shit, man, what’s with Paris, anyway?”

Harry leveled a look at him that spoke volumes. “Go there,” he said. “Try it and see.” He appeared to think for a moment, then added, “Just take a woman with you, that’s all I have to say about that.”

“I heard the food’s not too great.” Rossetti grinned at him. He was glad to have him back. “Stuff’s goin’ on here,” he said. “Lacey Havnel, aka Carrie Murphy, was quite the dealer. Poor Divon was small stuff to her, simply the one who hand-delivered the shit. He’s still in custody, by the way. Still haven’t let him off the hook, for Jemima.”

“We don’t actually believe Divon did it?” Harry asked, surprised.

“Of course not. We’re just letting him think we believe he did it.” Rossetti grinned. “Keeps a guy on his toes, thinking he might be indicted for murder. Might put him in a frame of mind to tell all he knows about whatever he knows. To a good cop, of course,” he added. Smugly, Harry thought.

“What about Fairy Formentor?”

“Divon’s mom was definitely murdered by a person or persons unknown, as they say. No one ever arrested. Therefore no prosecution.”

“And Divon was never a suspect.”

“Jeez, Harry, he was a kid…”

“It’s been known.”

Rossetti said, “The question is why was Jemima killed?”

“My guess, and yours, is Jemima saw something, or someone she shouldn’t have. Wrong place, wrong time, for her. Fact is, Rossetti, we have no conclusive forensic evidence, which means we have to pursue the intangible.”

“There you go,” Rossetti sighed. “What’s intangible?”

“Intangible, as you well know, means nothing we can see or touch. In fact it means, my good buddy, we have not a fuckin’ clue.”

“I can only agree with that.” Rossetti put his feet up on Harry’s desk, took the emery board from his pocket, and began on his nails. It helped him think.

Harry said, “What happened to the wig?”

Rossetti looked up, raised his brows. “Bea’s wig? Never turned up.”

“Did we drag the lake?”

“Evening Lake? You gotta be kidding. Know how many square blocks that thing would cover?”

Harry did.

Rossetti took his feet off the desk, sat back, arms folded. “Oh, something I forgot to tell you.” He waited for Harry to ask “what?” Harry waited too.

Rossetti gave in first. “So it’s like this. Forensics found prints on the knife.”

Harry said, “I’ll bet they’re Rose Osborne’s.”

“Not only that, her son Roman’s. Now the boy probably used it to cut an apple, maybe, but I’d have bet good odds Wally was not the chef in that family. So why are
his
prints also on the knife found sticking out of a woman’s eye?”

“Oh, fuck,” Harry said, thinking of Rose.

“Catching on,” Rossetti added. “Of course Rose’s prints were on the knife too, I mean that would be expected, it was her kitchen.”

“His kitchen too. A man might cut an onion to go on his burger, a tomato for his ham sandwich…”

“A throat for his fun.”

Silenced, Harry gave up trying to defend Rose’s husband.

“The question, though,” Rossetti said, “is why. We know, despite his books about murder and weirdos, Wally is not a psycho. He’s not a man who might simply kill for pleasure. And he’s up to his eyes in pricey lawyers all protesting his innocence.”

“Which I happen to believe,” Harry said.

Rossetti said, “There’s probably a dozen or more folks out there who might have been happy to see Lacey Havnel dead. She was dealing pretty big-time, cocaine and heroin. Cartels don’t like it when you cheat on them.”

“You think that’s what it was?”

Rossetti shrugged. “If you stayed away from Paris and spent more time at your desk like I do, you would have figured that out for yourself. As well as asking yourself who the fuck else would want Lacey Havnel dead? Her daughter, maybe?”

Harry frowned at Rossetti. “You off on that tack again?”

“Mom had nine hundred thou stashed in the bank. In a checking account! Plus the house on the lake, and Lord knows what else in safe deposits that we haven’t found yet, and maybe never will.”

Harry was silent, thinking, Rossetti guessed, about Bea.

Harry said, “Rose Osborne came to see me, she told me Bea had gone to her house to beg her forgiveness. Bea asked to be taken back into the family. ‘The family I never had’ was how Rose said she put it.”

Rossetti stopped fooling with the emery board. He sat up. “And?”

Harry shrugged. “In effect, Rose told her to get lost.”

“How about that! I thought soft-hearted Rose would have fallen for the ‘poor little me’ spiel and taken her back ‘into the bosom of,’ so to speak.”

“Meanwhile, what about Wally’s prints on that knife?”

Rossetti shrugged. “And the son’s. It’s normal enough not to count as forensic evidence. We can go nowhere on that. Anyhow, why are you asking?”

“Wally’s behavior is too erratic to be dismissed. Drugs can get a hold of your mind, especially meth. It can change a person. We’d better keep an eye on him.”

“But he’s right there, living at home, with his wife. The lovely Rose.”

“Right,” Harry said, feeling the twinge of danger as he said it. “The lovely Rose.”

45

There was a knock on Harry’s door. Usually it was kept open but today he needed to be alone, to think. Something was troubling him, something he’d heard, seen perhaps, and couldn’t quite put his finger on. He called to come in and a uniformed cop put his head around the door.

“The Forester family is here, sir, they’d like to see you.”

Harry was surprised. The Foresters were a nice middle-class couple, he a bit country-club in golf shirt and loafers; she in a St. John pants suit with big clip-on gold earrings and low heels; nothing like their exotic daughter, Jemima.

He stood by the door to welcome them, shook their hands, pulled out chairs, sat opposite, looking expectantly at them.

Mrs. Forester, in the black pantsuit and a white shirt of enviable crispness, with her gold earrings in place, managed to smile at him. Harry caught a glimpse of Jemima in her smile.

Mr. Forester opened the dialogue. “We need to know exactly what’s going on,” he said, though not in a demanding tone.

“You see, we’ll never be able to sleep until we know who killed our daughter.” Mrs. Forester kept her tone low too, but Harry could see she was fighting for self-control. The woman wanted to weep, as she had probably wept ever since her daughter’s murder; you had only to look into her eyes, the same pale eyes as Jemima’s, to see how swollen they were, see the look of helplessness that meant, Harry knew from experience, that Mrs. Forester felt she had failed in her duty as a mother, failed to protect her daughter. It was obvious the father felt the same. Murder rendered families helpless, ineffectual, feeling they should have been there, done more, saved her. The Foresters were living every parent’s nightmare and wanted someone in the dock and a judge sentencing him to life, or death, for what he’d done to their child. Harry did not blame them but right now he had no answers.

“We’ve come to you for news on the investigation,” Mr. Forester said.

Harry told him they were following up on leads, mentioning, as delicately as he could, that they had “the weapon”—he refrained from saying “the knife”—and explained again about questioning Wally and Bea, which of course they already knew. What they wanted was reassurance; they wanted to know the cops were still on the job, that their daughter had not become simply another statistic, another unsolved killing.

“She’s my daughter,” Mrs. Forester reminded Harry. Unclipping the latch on her black patent leather handbag she took out a photograph and passed it over to him. “This is a good likeness. I thought you might be able to use it, you know, in the papers, on TV, see if anyone comes forward who saw her that night. I think it captures Jemima perfectly, if you see what I mean.”

She was right; Harry remembered Jemima looking exactly like that the night they’d had drinks together in Blake’s, even the black leather jacket slung around her shoulders was the same, and the mischievous grin that lit up her eyes.

“Of course, you are right,” he said. “That’s Jemima.”

“Was,” the father reminded him, sounding angry. “That was our Jemima until some bastard decided to take her from us. And what are we supposed to do now? Sit around and wait while you guys ‘pursue your investigations’? Isn’t that how you’d describe what you do, Detective?”

It was never easy dealing with the distraught family, Harry knew it never would be; he also knew that he would be doing this again with some other family, some other time. For a split second he wondered again about his work; where he was at; whether he should quit. Experiences like this took an emotional toll, especially where he had known the victim.

“Sir,” he began, though he was still searching his mind for exactly what to say, how to calm the father, comfort the mother. “I’m asking you to trust me. I am personally tracking down what happened here, I personally am determined to find out why this happened, and I promise to do everything I can to apprehend the perpetrator.”

Jemima’s dad gave a derisive snort. “Apprehend? Perpetrator? Sounds like cop-talk to me.”

“You are right. Cop shorthand you might call it, Mr. Forester, but what it means is we are on the trail of your daughter’s killer and we are determined to get the person who did it and put that person in jail and then on trial to suffer the judicial consequences.”

Forester leaned his elbows on the table, he put his head in his hands and said, “And I voted against the death penalty.”

His wife patted him gently on the back. “Don’t go there. His fate will not be in your hands. Right now it’s in Detective Jordan’s.” She looked at Harry with swollen, red-rimmed eyes. “I’m sorry we bothered you, it was really, in a way, I suppose, simply to reassure ourselves something was being done about Jemima, and to tell you that now the body has been released, her funeral will take place on Friday, at noon. Of course, there’s no need for you to attend,” she added. “I just wanted you to know that Jemima was finally being taken care of.”

Harry nodded his thanks and told them he would be there. They shook hands and he went to the door with them and watched them walk away. Was it his imagination, or did they look smaller, more stooped than when they came in? As though, he thought, they had lost their spirit along with their daughter.

*   *   *

Of course it rained Friday. Hard, slanting rain that hit viciously under umbrellas and filled the plastic sheeting in the coffin-size hole with muddy water. Harry thought it was a terrible way to say goodbye to a young woman filled with sparkle and life and the promise of a future.