Nothing but Gossip (26 page)

“I was at the home with my grandmother,” Tiffany spoke quickly to Dwight.

“I know. Wade just didn’t think we’d ever follow it so far,” I said. “You hid in Alma’s dressing room and shot her, Wade. And then you tried to kill Elias because you were afraid he’d found out about the sabotage on the car.”

Wade leaned against the police cruiser and watched his toe move a pebble.

“Don’t you want to get a lawyer or something, man?” I heard Jerry ask him.

“What the hell difference will it make?” Wade said.

“You’re entitled,” I said. “We can stop anytime you like.”

Wade didn’t answer.

I continued. “Today it all became completely clear when I walked into your study. Last Sunday, when Alma took me on a tour of the house, all the TV screens in your study were on ESPN. I never made the connection that they were also hooked up to the security system, that each screen was attached to a camera somewhere in your house or on your property.”

“So?” Wade might have been down, but he was not out, at least as far as he was concerned.

“I realized you knew I was standing outside the door the whole time, and you tailored your conversation with Jim. You’d probably intended to shoot him right on the spot, right then, but I forced you to change your plan.”

Wade nodded. I could tell he was thinking.

“What I don’t understand, Wade, is why. Why didn’t you just get a divorce? Why did you go to all this trouble with the Russians and, my God, trying to kill my brother and Mercedes and me? Why?”

“Because I didn’t think anyone would believe me.”

“What do you mean, believe you?”

“I know this sounds crazy, but the truth is, I did kill Alma out of self-defense, and then it seemed like if I did just one other thing, everything else would be covered up and it would all go away.”

“What do you mean, self-defense?”

His eyes darted around the crowd. “This is hard for me to talk about. It’s embarrassing.”

“Try,” I said, maybe a little sarcastically.

“Alma used to beat me up.” Wade said this so quietly we could scarcely hear him.

“Excuse me,” I shouted. “I can’t hear you.”

Wade looked at me and he hated my guts, but I didn’t give a damn because he was a one-man, fumbling, out-of-control crime wave. I didn’t care if he was a great guy everybody loved, he’d murdered his wife, shot my brother, and given me the biggest headache I’d ever had in my life. I had a lump on the back of my head the size of a baseball.

“All the black eyes and broken ribs, they weren’t from bar fights. They were from Alma.”

“Hey, man,” Jerry said. “You don’t have to tell all this stuff.”

“No. I want to. See this scar on my neck? The one I said I got from Vietnam? The truth is, Alma threw boiling water on me one time. Another time she picked me up and threw me across the room like a sack of flour. Okay”—Wade drew in his breath—“I could take all that. I’d learned to live with it. But a month or so ago, I started getting sick, and I realized Alma was poisoning me, and somehow she still is. I’m just getting sicker and sicker, and I don’t know what’s causing it. But I swear to God, it’s something she’s done to my food or water or something.”

“Well, for goodness’ sake,” my mother said. “Why didn’t you just go to a doctor?”

“Mother,” I said. “Stay out of this.”

“I did, but they couldn’t find anything wrong with me. Said it was just flu. I’ll tell you another thing: Whatever weird African juice she’s using on me, she used the same thing on her parents.”

Whoa. “Alma poisoned her parents?”

“That’s what I said.”

Jack and I exchanged glances.

“But why’d you have to go and shoot Elias?” I asked. “That was completely uncalled-for.”

“Because it was the perfect final setup for McGee. He was there. I had his gun. I didn’t try to kill Elias; I just wanted to injure him. And then, when they arrested McGee, it was perfect, but then the idiots let him escape.”

Jack’s face visibly reddened.

“I don’t think Chief Lewis cottons much to being called an idiot,” I said.

“Sorry,” Wade mumbled.

“What did you do to Mercedes this morning, you little peckerheaded pipsqueak?” Duke broke from the crowd and thundered into Wade’s face. He’d balled his big hand into a fist. “What did she ever do to you except be your friend? Always rushing up there to hold your hand.”

“Well, she was holding your hand plenty, too,” Wade gave a little back. He might have been sick as a dog, but he was not going gently into anybody’s good night. Not by a long shot. He was a tough little bastard.

“That’s none of your damn business.” Duke drew back and would have knocked all Wade’s teeth down his throat if Jack hadn’t grabbed his arm.

“She called me last night and said if I didn’t turn myself in, she’d call the police. I panicked. I didn’t mean for all this to happen. Shit, I practically killed myself this morning, jumping off her balcony.”

Jack stepped forward. “Party’s over.”

Lieutenant Evan put his hand on Wade’s head and shoved him into the squad.

“Don’t worry, buddy, we’ll get you a good lawyer,” Jerry told him. “We’ll get you off. Hey,” he said, conveniently forgetting the four attempted homicides, “you said yourself, it was self-defense.”

Jack closed the door slowly and started around the
car. He stopped long enough to look at me over the tops of his dark glasses and whisper in my ear. “You’d better clean up if you’re going to get married,” he said. “You look like hell.”

“You’re welcome.” I smiled.

Mr. and Mrs. Elias Caulfield Bennett III
request the honour of your presence at the marriage of their daughter
Lilly McLaughlin
to
Mr. Richard Welland Jerome, Jr.
Saturday, the twelfth of September
at five o’clock
Circle B Ranch
Bennett’s Fort, Wyoming

A
re you sure you want to do this?”

“I’m sure.”

“You really do?”

“Yes.” Richard was sounding exasperated. “I really, really do.”

“Okay,” I said. I was skeptical. “But this can be pretty tough going. I don’t want you going all hysterical on me or anything. Or fainting.”

“Lilly.”

But there was no going back.

“Too late now. Here we are.” I pulled over behind the cemetery director’s gray jeep.

It was a very quiet, late-summer morning at the Wind River Cemetery. Little breeze and full of bird-song. The lush green lawns unrolled peacefully around us, and the marble and cement monuments appeared to float on the light morning mist.

“Glad you could make it,” Jack Lewis said. He held a Styrofoam cup of coffee. “We’ve been waiting to start
till you arrived. Morning, Richard.” They shook hands. “Not too late for you to bail out.”

“Believe me,” Richard said. “I’ve seen worse things than this.”

“I mean getting married.”

The Rutherford family did not have a private marble mausoleum with everyone tucked safely behind padlocked, cast-iron gates, but instead they were buried on a hilltop with spectacular vistas. Their grassy plots lay in the protective shadow of a statue I assumed to portray Bradford Rutherford’s father, the original oil baron who’d bought the handful of leases from the government after Teapot Dome and turned them into what was now the country’s most notorious independent. The larger-than-life-size bronze sculpture was of a roughneck leaning against what appeared to be the bottom of an oil derrick. His legs were crossed at the ankles, his arms folded over his chest. His head drooped, and his eyes were closed, his face shaded by a beaten-up cowboy hat. His jeans were baggy, shirt loose, and the bandanna around his neck looked flat with dirt and sweat. Remington’s unmistakable scrawl ran along the base like sharp blades of grass.

Below, thin lines of yellow string ran out from plot markers and formed a grid across the grave sites where the sod had already been removed. The thick rolls were stacked like firewood against the statue’s four-foot-tall bronze base.

After welcoming each one of us and saying that there was no shame in feeling uncomfortable or queasy and not to be embarrassed to return to our cars because exhumation was a grueling, and often unsettling, process, Mr. Hastings, the ageless cemetery director, gave an almost imperceptible nod to the head grounds-keeper. At once, the big yellow backhoe revved up and
its custom-made, grave-width shovel tore into the hard earth as though it were flour.

We remained a fairly solemn group as the backhoe dug. Mr. Hastings had loaded a large steel canister of hot coffee and a big box of glazed doughnuts into the back of his wagon, so we all—Hastings, Lewis, Richard, me, the medical examiner Kim Leavy, and two morticians—sipped the coffee, scarfed the doughnuts, and watched.

“You eat many more of those,” Jack said, “and you’ll be getting married in a gunnysack.”

Everyone laughed but me.

“Why don’t you just shut up for a change?” I said.

“She seems a little touchy, today, Richard.”

“Tell me about it.”

I walked over to the far edge of the plot and looked out at the city. I was depressed. This was not how I wanted to begin my wedding day, exhuming the bodies of my parents’ friends and neighbors to see if they’d been murdered. This case had been so unsatisfying—so many people with so much money, more than any of them could ever need in ten lifetimes, and yet it had not been enough. The thought that Alma had murdered her parents, poisoned them to share in the control of Rutherford Oil, made me sick to my stomach.

And Wade. Poor Wade. That’s how I’d begun to think of him as Elias improved and my headache lessened. An abused husband. Completely trapped, or at least imagining he was, desperate to protect himself. Why didn’t you just go to the police? I’d asked him. Because he couldn’t afford the publicity. And no doctor could find anything wrong with him—just kept telling him he had the flu.

Had there been a conspiracy between Wade and Mercedes and Duke? They all said no. I wasn’t so sure.
Did it matter? Yes, but nothing would come of it. Paul Decker would get Wade off on an insanity plea and installed in a suite at St. Mary’s Psychiatric Hospital before the fall roundup was over.

Jack materialized next to me.

“How’s Gilhooly?” I asked, interested in discussing something other than the size of my hips in front of a bunch of strangers.

“Okay, I guess. They’ve got him over at Christ and St. Luke’s under observation, waiting for the test results on the toxins. Jim Dixon refuses to press charges, and Decker will probably have Wade at St. Mary’s by the end of the day. I wonder if it’ll turn out to be true? That that babe murdered her parents.”

“I wouldn’t exactly call Alma a ‘babe.’ But I think it’ll turn out to be true.” I kicked the dirt with the pointed toe of my boot. “I guess Mr. and Mrs. Rutherford should consider themselves lucky she didn’t shoot ’em, and stuff ’em, and hang ’em over her fireplace.”

The backhoe’s forked bucket hit something solid, and the sound made chills run up my spine. We all watched in silence as the grave diggers jumped down into the open grave and went to work, clearing away the dirt and digging around the edges of the vault so the heavy chains could be fitted into the notches. Their shovels grated deafeningly on the cement, and it seemed impossible for me to believe that, just hours before at our rehearsal dinner, Richard, lean and elegant in his black tie, had sung “You’re the Top” to me as his toast. I looked over at him leaning against the car, and I could tell he was thinking the same thing. Or would have been if he hadn’t been talking on the phone.

The men tossed their shovels up onto the piles of dirt and heaved themselves out of the grave. The backhoe’s engine screamed again as it jerked the chains taut and
wrenched the heavy vault from the earth where it had lain for two years, not long, but long enough to insinuate itself, take up a strong position. It did not come willingly, but after a couple of minutes the large gray box swung through the air and settled gently on the grass. The men, now sweating, went to work with their sledgehammers.

“The Rutherfords went top of the line,” Mr. Hastings said wryly. “Sealed vaults. Most you can pop the top with a crowbar. These things use the kind of glue the Navy uses to glue its ships back together. So we’ve got to bust them apart.”

Watching the process of exhumation, not the first I’d seen, reconfirmed for me that cremation was the only way to go. This was hot, hard, big-muscle work. Nothing spiritual about it.

After a while, the big box took on the abused, pitted appearance of cement bridge supports on interstate highways in New England—the kinds of bridges I’m always sure are about to collapse on top of, or underneath, me—and finally it surrendered to the blows, crumbling and cracking, splitting to reveal the dull bronze casket.

The morticians stepped forward.

“These guys give me the willies,” Hastings said behind his hand, as one of the gray-suited gentlemen crouched down and unscrewed the glass identification tube in the casket’s lower-right-hand side. “Talk about a whole different breed of human being. I don’t know how they do it. You wouldn’t believe how much money they make. Practically mint the stuff.”

The man stood up and ceremoniously unrolled the tiny paper scroll. “Bradford Rutherford the Third,” he announced in a loud, formal voice, as though he were presenting him for dinner and dancing at the Court of
St. James. He then returned the paper to the tube and the tube to its spot, secured a face mask over his nose, tugged on a pair of industrial-weight yellow rubber gloves, fitted a crank handle into a small opening in the lower-left-hand side, and went to work. The top gave way with a sticky hiss. I didn’t look as they removed Mr. Rutherford’s remains to a body bag and placed him gently in the back of the Cadillac hearse.

The process was repeated for his wife, Mrs. Rutherford, the great big Dane. Again, I didn’t look to see if she was still big or not.

“You’d better get home and put your face in a bowl of ice,” Jack said. “I don’t want to drive all the way the hell out to your damn ranch to watch some bride with a potato for a face stagger down the aisle.”