Something Wicked (29 page)

Drunk. More than drunk. Drunk and
dying.

“How did she ingest the Valium?” Annie asked crisply.

“It was in the dregs of her last drink. And only her prints are on the glass, the decanter, and the plastic prescription bottle.”

With a pang Annie remembered the despair in Carla’s eyes. “Do you think it was suicide—or did someone else drop the pills in her drink?”

“Two murderers? Hell, I’d say anything’s possible in this case.”

Annie worked it out. “Okay, let’s think two murderers for a minute. Murderer A arrives, sees she’s blotto, finds her Valium, dumps it in her drink, watches while she finishes the whiskey, then departs. Murderer B arrives, finds her passed out, whips out Max’s belt, and strangles her.” Once again Annie recalled Carla’s last evening, the tears, the despair.
“No, Chief. Not two murderers. Suicide and one murderer.” She shivered. “Our killer is just a tad too efficient. Carla would have saved him some trouble. Damn whoever it was.” Her voice shook with anger.

“Steady, Annie.”

“If you’d seen Carla that night … Oh, Chief, she was so terribly unhappy. I don’t suppose she left a note?” But Annie wasn’t hopeful. Carla had been
so
drunk.

He was silent a shade too long.

“Chief?”

“No-o-o. Look, Annie, don’t tell
anybody,
but there were some scrawls on the pad by her telephone. Looks like she’d talked to somebody. It doesn’t make any sense, a bunch of X’s and ‘no’ written over and over in capital letters—and Max’s name.”

Annie felt like she’d been kicked in the chest. Another link to Max.

Saulter continued gruffly, “Now, Posey thinks Carla saw something that linked Max to Shane’s murder but she couldn’t believe it and she wanted to talk to him before she went to the cops. He says maybe she was in love with Max and kept quiet to protect him, then decided she couldn’t stick it out.”

“That’s the silliest damn thing I ever heard!”

Saulter began gingerly, “You don’t suppose she—” He paused, tried again. “Could she have fallen for Max, one of those one-sided things? I mean, I know he isn’t interested in anybody but you….”

“Carla wasn’t in love with Max.” She spoke with such absolute certainty that it almost surprised her. Because, after all, why shouldn’t everyone—including Carla—be in love with Max? He was fun and handsome and sexy and—She swerved back to the point. “Nope. And, Chief, I’m not saying it because I think it helps Max. I’m saying it because it’s so. I’ve got antenna out to the wall as far as Max is concerned. I can calibrate another woman’s interest in him to the millimeter. It’s not that I’m jealous, nothing like that, but I always know when the signals are flying—and Carla didn’t emit a beep in his direction. He might as well have been a horseshoe or a weeping willow for all the interest she exhibited. And besides, when I went to her place yesterday, she said she’d had a lover and she was so bitter, so unstrung. It sure wasn’t Max.”

“Well, she wrote down Max’s name, that’s all I can tell you,” Saulter said gloomily. He didn’t have to add that Posey would use it to his advantage. “And there’s the belt.” The chief’s voice sank another notch. “No doubt but that it’s Max’s. Has his initials on the back. He bought it last year at some place in New York City called Ferragamo or something like that. His fingerprints are all over it. He says it was hanging in his closet, claims whoever planted the gun must have nosed around and taken it. Posey gives that the horselaugh.”

“Chief, nobody in his right mind would use his own belt with initials and
fingerprints
on it to commit a murder!”

Saulter cleared his throat. “Posey says it happens all the time. Course, a good trial lawyer can make some time with the jury, I’d think.”

Annie flopped down in the wicker chair by the phone. “Oh, God!”

“Yeah. And,” and the momentary surge of vigor in his voice fled, “it sure doesn’t help that Carla called Posey and Max overheard it and she got murdered that night.”

“What time do they think she was killed?”

“The M.E. estimates time of death between six and ten last night. Course, we know she was alive ’til eight-ten. That’s when she called Posey. Max claims when he got back to the island he went directly to your place and waited for you. But who’s to prove it? Posey said he had plenty of time to kill her and get back before you arrived.”

Posey. Posey. Posey. His every effort was venomously directed at finding evidence against Max—and all the while the truth was out there somewhere, but if they didn’t start looking for it, time and obfuscation would bury it as deeply as in Patricia Moyes’s
Johnny Under Ground—and
she couldn’t wait twenty years for the mystery to be unraveled.

“Chief, are you trying to find out more about Carla? What she did yesterday? Who she might have talked to?”

“I wish I could. So far as we can discover, she went straight home from that session at the high school and started drinking. She didn’t eat any lunch. She just sat there and drank all day, and—if we’re right in figuring suicide—laced her last drink with Valium.”

“Dear God, why? What happened to her to make her do it? If we can find, that out, we may discover her murderer.”

“You aren’t thinking it might be separate from Shane’s killing?” he asked slowly.

“I don’t know. I don’t know anything. But we have to find out why she was so upset.”

“Posey says it was because of Max.”

“No. I was there, and I know it wasn’t because of Max. Oh, if only Posey would listen!” She sighed. “Poor Carla. She must have been so terribly unhappy. And then to be killed in such a dreadful way.” She swallowed. “Have you notified her family?”

“Yeah. But nobody seems to give much of a damn. We got in touch with a sister in Atlanta. Well, she was shaken up, like you’d expect. When she kind of settled down, I told her it would be Monday before we could release the body and where should we send it? So she got quiet and thought for a minute, then told me she’d call back. Okay, so about an hour later, she calls and this is the deal: They don’t want the body. Told me to arrange a closed service here and have her buried in the Island Hills Cemetery. No expense spared or anything, but nobody will be coming, and the stone’s just to say Carla Morris Fontaine, and her birth date and death date.”

“They
don’t want her? Who’s they?” Poor, poor Carla.

“Yeah, I got that. Her parents are alive. Mr. and Mrs. C. T. Fontaine. I got the address and everything, but the sister told me not to call them, they wouldn’t talk to me. Said they didn’t recognize Carla as their daughter.”

“Oh, Chief.”

“Yeah. Tough.”

“What’s the sister’s name?”

He hesitated.

“Chief, please. I keep remembering her, how aloof and formal she was. She didn’t try to be friends, you know. But she must have been so hungry for people to know. That’s why she was in the players. She was a wonderful carpenter, did you know that? She could make or fix anything. But who was she? Why was she all alone? What had happened to her before she came here? Chief, I have to find out.”

He sighed. “I’ll probably end up in jail right alongside Max. I will for sure if Posey ever finds out I’m feeding stuff
to you.” He took a deep breath. “But I honest-to-God don’t think Max could ever kill anybody, not in cold blood. Now, I’m not so sure about you, Annie, but I’d bet on old Max. So,” and now his tone was brisk, a to-hell-with-Posey tone, “the sister’s name is Mrs. Whitfield Cherry.” And he gave Annie the address and phone number in Atlanta.

“The Cherry residence.” The voice was soft, Southern, and female.

“May I speak to Mrs. Whitfield Cherry, please?”

“May I ask who is calling?”

Annie hesitated. Her own name would mean nothing to Carla’s sister, and, at this time, Mrs. Cherry would be loath to talk to strangers. “Please tell her that a good friend of her sister Carla needs urgently to speak to her.” If that weren’t quite true, she did hope to help track down Carla’s murderer—and perhaps that could count as friendship delayed.

“Just a moment, please.”

As she waited, Annie glanced around her living room, at her softball trophy atop the nearest bookcase, and she thought of all the good beer and fun players she’d known. And there was a snapshot of Ingrid among the many tacked to her bulletin board. Such a good friend, with her understated comments and staunch support. Her friends, many of them older, in the Altar Guild at St. Mary’s. The friends she’d made in the Broward’s Rock Merchants Association. Her tennis chums at the Island Hills Country Club. So many friends. And there, in the center of the board, smiling at her with a glint of devilment and his incomparable air of insouciance was Max, the best friend of all. Poor, poor Carla.

“Hello.” The voice was clipped—and angry.

Annie was startled, but she began her spiel. “Hello. I’m Annie Laurance. I live on Broward’s Rock and—”

“I don’t know what you think you can gain from calling, but I want to make it very clear that we aren’t going to give you any money at all. And if you try to bring some kind of palimony suit, we’ll fight it every step of the way—and we have plenty of money to do it.”

Annie had expected distress, perhaps a voice numb with grief, but not anger. “I don’t—” she began.

The receiver slammed into the cradle.

So, there was a story there all right. But how was she going to get it?

Annie riffled through the computer printout, and reread the brief section on Carla:

Palimony. Images floated in her mind, none of them savory. Wasn’t that when a party to a sexual liaison tried to get money or proceeds from an estate on the basis of a long-term relationship not recognized by law?

Mrs. Whitfield Cherry had broad-jumped to a conclusion. The conclusion was wrong, but suddenly Carla’s life, her loneliness, her aloofness, began to make some sense.

Annie made several more calls, before she tracked down Mrs. Harriet MacKenzie.

“Mrs. MacKenzie, I understand you were the headmistress at St. Agnes in the seventies.”

“Yes.” The voice was cultured, cheerful, and friendly. “What can I do for you?”

“Have you heard of the murder of Carla Fontaine?”

The pause was prolonged. “Yes. What a tragedy for the Fontaines. Are you a friend of Carla’s?”

This time, Annie decided to avoid any possibility of a misunderstanding. “My fiancé and I knew Carla through the community theater here on Broward’s Rock—and that’s why I’m calling you. The police have arrested Max, that’s my fiancé, but I know the evidence against him has been manufactured. And I wanted to talk to you about Carla. I think it’s very important to find out everything I can about her past.”

“I doubt if I can be very helpful. I knew Carla as a teaching colleague and not very well at that because of the difference in our ages.” The desire to end this conversation was very apparent in the brisk finality of the statement.

“Tell me, Mrs. MacKenzie, is St. Agnes on the quarter or semester system?”

“The semester.”

“And how does the spring semester run? From January to May?” Annie waited tensely.

“Why, yes.” She was puzzled, but unsuspecting.

“Will you tell me why Carla quit teaching in midsemester?”

This time Annie knew she’d rung the bell. The silence was absolute.

“Please, Mrs. MacKenzie. I promise I won’t spread this information around, but I think it is relevant to what happened here.”

“How can it be?” The woman’s voice was troubled. “This was an incident that happened years ago. What could it have to do with Carla’s death?”

“Carla was involved with someone here—and I think you can tell me whether her lover was a man—or a woman.”

The seconds ticked by, then Harriet MacKenzie sighed. “I hate talking about it. Miss Laurance, do you promise you won’t repeat it unless absolutely necessary—and I
don’t
intend to give you the name of the student.”

“So Carla was involved with a student?”

Another weary sigh. “Yes. A very outstanding girl. And, of course, her family was wild, absolutely wild, when they found out. But do you know, Miss Laurance, I always suspected that the girl made the advances, then told some of her friends simply out of malice, and that it was Carla who was victimized. This girl went on to marry several times, and I’ve heard rumors of other entanglements. I always felt she took advantage of Carla, not the other way around. But, of course, Carla was older; she should have known better. I had no choice but to ask her to leave.”

“And Carla’s family?”

“Carla’s family.” The former headmistress’s tone was noncommittal, then she said quietly, “It’s hard not to be judgmental, Miss Laurance. And, of course, it’s always so easy to see the other person’s faults. But I’ve always felt that Carla’s parents were so self-righteous, so obsessed with appearances, and so terribly cold. They felt that she had disgraced them, because the story went the rounds, you know.
Everyone knew.” A small laugh. “Of course, not literally everyone, but everyone who mattered to the Fontaines.”

“So Carla left town, came here, and opened her gallery. Did they never have anything more to do with her?”

“I don’t know about that. I think Carla had income from a trust fund. I never heard of her being back in Atlanta, but I can’t tell you for certain.” Mrs. MacKenzie hesitated, then said, “You won’t tell them I told you, I hope.”

“No. I don’t see any reason to talk to them.”

The retired headmistress heard the disdain in her voice. “It is a tragedy for everyone, Miss Laurance. And perhaps you are wrong, perhaps none of this has anything to do with her death.”

“To the contrary, Mrs. MacKenzie, I’m afraid it has everything to do with it.”

Carla was distraught because her lover had betrayed her. Did this mean she was upset because a woman she loved had been involved with Shane, and that she had murdered him and expected Carla to maintain silence? That would be enough to destroy Carla’s faith in her lover, wouldn’t it? So Carla put Valium in her whiskey, but her lover—the murderer—didn’t know that and came to kill Carla.