The Devil in Gray (4 page)

“Eight o'clock,” she insisted, and walked off back toward the traffic department.

Decker stood alone for a moment, slowly massaging the muscles at the back of his neck. Rudisill came up to him and grinned. “Hi, Lieutenant. Everything okay?”

“Sure, why shouldn't it be?”

“Shifflett didn't look too happy.”

“Women are
always
happy, George. Especially when they're miserable.”

Jerry Maitland was propped up in bed with the left side of his face and both of his arms thickly bandaged, so that he looked like a snowman. His pupils were dilated and he still smelled of the operating theater. The redheaded nurse said, “Ten minutes and no more, please, Lieutenant.”

“You like Mexican food?” Decker asked her.

“I'm married.”

“Being married affects your taste buds?”

“Nine minutes,” the nurse said and closed the door behind her.

Decker approached the bed. Jerry stiffly turned his head to stare at him. Decker said nothing at first, but went over to the window and parted the slatted blinds with two fingers. Down below he could see the brightly lit sidewalks of Marshall Street, and the intersection with Fourteenth Street. After a while, he turned back and said, “How's tricks, Gerald?”

Jerry shook his head, but didn't say anything.

Decker drew up a chair and straddled it backward, shifting Jerry's plasma drip so that he could sit a little closer. “Is it Gerald or can I call you Jerry?”

“Jerry's okay,” Jerry mumbled.

“Jerry it is, then. My name's Decker. Don't know what my parents were doing, giving me a goddamn outré name like that. It was something to do with my great-great-grandfather. Fought in the army of northern Virginia, in the Civil War.”

Jerry tried to cough, but it obviously strained the stitches in his face, and he had to stifle it.

Decker said, “Hurts, huh?”

Jerry nodded. Decker nodded too, as if in sympathy. “You can have your lawyer present, you know that, don't you?”

“I don't need a lawyer. I haven't done anything.”

“You're sure about that? It might be in your own best interest.”

Jerry shook his head.

“Okay,” Decker said. Then, quite casually, “What did you do with the knife?”

“I was putting up wallpaper and I cut myself. I don't know how. I dropped the knife on the floor.”

“No, no. That's not the knife I mean, Jerry. That was a teensy weensy little craft knife. I'm talking about the
other
knife.”

“The other knife?”

“That's right. I'm talking about the great big two-foot-long mother that you used to cut off Alison's head.”

“You don't seriously believe that
I
killed her? How can you think—I
love
her. She's my wife. Why would
I
want to kill her?”

“Well, that's what I'm trying to find out, Jerry, and it would make it a whole lot less complicated if you told me what you did with the knife.”

“There
was
no knife. Don't you understand? There
was
no knife.”

“So what did you cut her head off with? A pair of nail scissors? Come on, Jerry, there was nobody else in the house but you and Alison, and Alison wasn't just decapitated—she suffered more than seventeen deeply penetrative stab wounds and serious lacerations. I've been listening to her 911 call. The operator asks her what's wrong and she keeps saying, ‘My husband.'”

Jerry's eyes filled up with tears. “She was calling because of me. I got cut first.”

“Oh yes, by whom exactly?”

“By whatever it was that killed Alison. I didn't touch her. I love her. We were going to have a baby girl.”

Decker was silent for a while. Then he reassuringly patted Jerry's arm. “All right, Jerry. You didn't touch her. But if you can tell me where the knife is, I can have the handle checked for fingerprints, and if it really wasn't you who did it, then we'll know for sure, won't we?”

“There
was
no knife. My arms got cut and then my face got cut, but I never saw a knife.”

“You were alone, though? There was nobody else there except you and Alison? Is that what you're telling me?”

Jerry nodded, miserably.

Decker sat in thought for a minute or two, his hand covering his mouth. Then he said, “Okay, supposing that's what happened. How do
you
explain it?”

“I don't know. There was blood all over the kitchen. I was sure that I was going to die. Then Alison went to answer the door to the paramedics and she suddenly …”

“Go on. Take your time.”

“I wasn't anywhere near her. She just collapsed. She kind of spun around, and—fell onto the floor and—her
head
—”

He turned his face away, rhythmically beating his bandaged arm against the blankets. All that he was capable of uttering were high, strangulated sobs.

“Okay,” Decker said, after a while. “Let's leave it at that for now.”

He stood up and placed the chair back against the wall. He had no doubt at all that Jerry had murdered his wife, simply because there was no other rational explanation. But there was little point in trying to question him until he came out of shock. Decker had seen it so many times before: mothers who couldn't admit that they had smothered their babies, husbands who genuinely believed that somebody else had shot their wives, even when they were standing over the body with a discharged revolver in their hand. Disassociation, they called it.

He left the room. A uniformed officer was sitting outside reading the sports pages. He put his paper down and started to stand up but Decker said, “That's okay, Greeley. Got any hot tips for Colonial Downs?”

“Mr. Invisible in the 3:45, twenty-five to one.”

“Mr. Invisible, huh?” He glanced back at Jerry Maitland lying bandaged up in bed.
There was no knife. There was nobody there
.

He walked down to the nurses' station.

“That was quick,” she remarked.

“I'm known for it. You're sure about that dinner invitation? I know a place where they do the world's most aphrodisiac tamales.”

“I'm sorry, Lieutenant. I went to a palmist recently, and she made it quite clear that my future doesn't include Mexican meals with law enforcement officers.”

“That's because she was predicting the wrong line. She was predicting your
head
line instead of your
heart
line.”

“No, she wasn't. She was predicting your cheesy pickup line.”

CHAPTER FOUR

Decker drove back to the Maitland house. Hicks was standing under a battery of floodlights outside with three uniformed officers and two more detectives from Customer Service Zone Central, John Banks and Newton Fry. The television trucks were still there, as well as scores of milling spectators. The evening was sticky and warm and smelled of live oaks and traffic fumes.

Decker ducked under the
POLICE LINE
tape. “So … no weapon yet?”

Hicks wiped a white smudge of plaster dust from the end of his nose. “I just don't get it. We've pretty much demolished the whole house and I'm damned if I can understand how Maitland got rid of it.”

“I still think there must have been a third person present,” Banks said. He was short and squat with a chest like a pit bull terrier. “I know Maitland insists that there wasn't, but what kind of mental state was he in? Or maybe he's covering for somebody.”

Hicks shook his head. “We didn't find any footprints or handprints, apart from Mr. and Mrs. Maitland's. If there
was
a third person, how the hell did he or she get out of the house without leaving any tracks?”

“Maybe they got out before the blood started spraying around too much. Two-foot-long knives don't just disappear into thin air, do they?”

Decker checked his watch. It was 7:46 already and he was supposed to be meeting Mayzie at 8:00. “Look,” he said, “let's call it a night and get back on to it in the morning. We need to question Maitland again before we can take this any further, and right now he's not exactly compos mentis.”

He was just about to leave when a uniformed officer came up to him and said, “Excuse me, Lieutenant. There's a lady here wants to talk to you.”

“Oh yes?”

“Says she was walking past here just after two o'clock this afternoon. Says her daughter saw somebody coming out of the house.”

“Really?” Decker frowned shortsightedly at the crowd. “Bring her over, would you?”

The officer lifted the tapes and ushered over a middle-aged woman in a green flowery dress. She had fraying gray hair that even a dozen frantically crisscrossed bobby pins had failed to secure in a bun. She was accompanied by a plump teenage girl with Down's syndrome. The girl was dressed in a tight beige cardigan and a brown pleated skirt and she clung to her mother's arm.

“Hi,” Decker said. “My name's Lieutenant Martin. My officer tells me that your daughter may have witnessed somebody coming out of this house this afternoon.”

The woman gave an enthusiastic nod. “We didn't think anything about it until we saw it on the news, did we, Sandra?”

The girl covered her face with her hand so that only her milky blue eyes looked out. “Sandra can be very shy sometimes,” the woman explained.

Decker said, “What time did you see this person exactly?”

“Just past two o'clock. I come to collect Sandra from her art class at two and we always walk back this way.”

“Can you describe him?”

“Well, no.
I
didn't see him. Only Sandra did. She tugged my sleeve and said, ‘Look at that man, Mom, don't you think he's so scary?'”

Decker frowned. “Sandra saw him but you didn't? How come?”

“Not
didn't
, Lieutenant.
Couldn't
.”

“Exuse me, Mrs.—”

“Plummer, Eunice Plummer. And it's Ms.”

“Okay, I'm sorry, Ms. Plummer. I don't think I'm quite following you here. Sandra said, ‘Look at that scary man,' but you couldn't see him?”

“I can't always see the people that Sandra sees. I don't have her gift.”

Decker thought,
Oh, shit. Another psychic
. He thought they ought to make it illegal for impressionable people to see movies like
The Others
and
The Sixth Sense
.

He took off his glasses and wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. “Does Sandra see people very frequently, Ms. Plummer? I mean, people that you can't see?”

“Not often, no. She saw a preacher once, outside St. John's Church, in the graveyard. And then she saw a black woman in a funny hat, by Mason's Hall.”

“I see. Has she talked to her doctor about this?”

Eunice Plummer looked puzzled. “Why should she talk to her doctor about it?”

“Well … it must be some kind of a symptom, right?”

“I'm sorry, Lieutenant. A symptom of what, exactly?”

Decker tried to put it diplomatically. “Seeing things, you know, having hallucinations …”

“Lieutenant, Sandra doesn't have hallucinations. She sees people that others can't, that's all. It's a facility, not a deficiency. It's like dogs hearing very high notes that are way beyond the range of the human ear. Not that I would ever compare Sandra to a dog.”

“Of course. Well—I'd just like to thank you and Sandra for being so public-spirited.”

“Don't you want to know what he looked like?”

“I'm sorry?”

“The
man
,” Eunice Plummer insisted. “Don't you want to know what he looked like?”

“I, ah … I don't really think that a description is going to be necessary at this stage. Thanks all the same.”

Sandra slowly lowered the hand that had been covering her face. Her cheeks were flushed and there was a large thumbprint on her glasses. “He was dressed all in
gray
,” she blurted out.

Decker didn't know what to say, but Eunice Plummer coaxed her. “Go on, Sandra, tell Lieutenant Martin exactly what the man was wearing.”

“He wore a gray hat like a
howboy
hat and a gray
hoat
with wings on. And he had a big black beard.”

“I see,” Decker said, with a tight, embarrassed smile. “That's very helpful, Sandra.”

“And he had boots.”

“Boots, terrific.”

“Aren't you going to write this down?” Eunice Plummer asked. “She saw him, you know. She saw him as plain as day.”

“Oh, sure,” Decker said. He took out his notebook and a ballpoint pen that he had liberated from the Berkeley Hotel. While Eunice Plummer watched him, he jotted down
Gray. Hat. Coat. Wings?? Boots
.

“Big black beard,” she added.

“Big black beard,” Decker acknowledged.

“And a sword,” Sandra put in.

Decker looked up. “
Sword?
”

“He had a sword. He wasn't
carrying
it. It was hanging down.” She indicated with a little hand play that it had been suspended from his belt.

Decker closed his notebook. Sandra was staring at him and her expression was so fierce and unblinking that he almost believed her.

“When you first saw this man, where was he?” he asked.

Sandra pointed to the porch. “He walked through the door.”

“So the door was actually open?”

She vigorously shook her head.

“Sandra—how did he walk through the door if it wasn't open?”

“He walked
through
the door,” she repeated. She pronounced it, emphatically,
harooo
.

“All right … he walked through the door and then what?”

“He went down the steps and then he went that way.” She pointed westward, toward North Twenty-sixth Street.