The Grilling Season (5 page)

Suz Craig took my place. But it could so very easily have been me.

T
he cat howled the two miles to Hadley Court. I pulled up in front of a three-story, white-brick-and-blue-gingerbread-trimmed Victorian-style mansion that was about as far from a mountain contemporary as it was from Mars. Marla’s Mercedes squealed around the corner as I eased to the curb. Behind her tinted windshield I could see she was talking excitedly on her car phone, which she quickly hung up when she spotted me. She threw open her door and came bustling toward the van.

Marla’s raspberry-colored sequined sweatsuit did not flatter her portly figure. In one hand she held a covered glass and in the other a paper bag. My dear friend always brought something that she thought would make you feel better. Usually the only thing I needed was to see her, and as usual, the sight of her rushing toward me, her rhinestone-studded sunglasses jiggling up and down on her concerned face, brought a wave of relief.

Wealthy by inheritance, talkative by nature, and pretty in an unconventional way, Marla had endured being married to John Richard for six years
less than I had. After John Richard’s first few rampages, Marla had also shown much more confidence than I had when it came to ridding oneself of a burdensome spouse. She’d shoved an attacking John Richard into a hanging plant and dislocated his shoulder. She’d then managed to cut the marital knot with great expertise. She and I had become fast friends when her divorce was final, proving that even the worst marital experiences can hold some redemption. Last summer she’d survived a heart attack. Earlier
this
summer, she’d survived a disastrous breakup with the one guy she’d been serious about since divorcing the Jerk. We had a history, the two of us. And I loved her dearly.

“Okay, tell me,” she began without preamble when I hopped out of the van to greet her, “are you okay? Probably not,” she added with an opulent, scarlet-lipsticked frown.

I fought off an unexpected wave of dizziness. “I don’t know. No. Probably not.”

“Let’s get back in your van, so people don’t come out and start asking a bunch of questions. Jeez, this town—I’ve already had two calls on my cellular.” Her brown eyes softened with sympathy and she proffered a plastic-wrapped crystal glass. For the first time, I noticed her hair was damp. “Look, Goldy, I brought you an iced latté. Well, actually half espresso and half cream dumped over ice. Very naughty, but oh so good.” She held up the brown bag in her other hand. “And here we have a whole bunch of meds that I just dumped out of my medicine cabinet. They’re mostly tranquilizers. Which do you want first?”

“Coffee and downers?” I asked incredulously. I
sagged against the van door. I wondered if any Furman County victim advocates carried lunch-bags full of prescription tranquilizers. Probably not.

“Come on, back in you go.” Marla hustled me into the van, where the air was even warmer than it was outside. But the interior of my vehicle was familiar and smelled faintly, even pleasantly, of cooked food. The cat was uncharacteristically quiet. I rolled down my window; Marla did the same.

“Just drink this,” she commanded, thrusting the glass into my hand. “Tom said to bring you—” Abruptly she stopped. She blinked. “One of my friends on Jacobean called. Suz is
dead?
Are they sure? Lynn Tollifer, you know her? She and her nosy teenage son, Luke, live across the street from Suz. Luke told Lynn that Suz’s body was in a ditch at the end of her driveway. Who found her? You?” I nodded and took a tiny sip of the chilly liquid. It tasted like melted ice cream. Marla clutched the top of her frizzy brown hair. “Suz dead! I don’t believe it, but I do believe it.”

“It should have been me. But he got Suz Craig instead.” My voice cracked. I sagged against the headrest. “Gosh, I’m feeling—” John Richard’s glare, his anger, haunted me. And I’d had such a strong feeling that he’d been acting, playing a part, but why? And what part? Why come over the morning after you’d had a fight with your girlfriend, bearing flowers, if you’d hurt her badly? If you’d killed her? But he hadn’t meant to hurt her badly. At least that’s what he always said. He probably hadn’t meant to kill her, either.

“Do you think he beat her up so badly she died?” Marla asked.

“Yes, I do. Suz had a black right eye. And bruises on her arms—” I choked.

“Mother of God.”

“I don’t know what to do.”

“Drink your coffee,” Marla ordered sharply. “We can talk about all this later. If you don’t look better in five minutes, I’m calling an ambulance for you and taking Arch home myself.”

The air inside the van, despite the open windows, felt stifling. Marla slid toward me smelling of floral soap and powder. She’d obviously just jumped out of the shower when Tom called her, and I felt a fleeting sense of regret to have caused her trouble. Then the weight of the morning’s events smacked me like one of those Jersey-shore waves you’re not expecting, and I didn’t know whether I wanted the espresso or enough tranquilizers to put me out for a few days.

“Okay, Goldy, look at me,” Marla commanded sharply. “Keep drinking that coffee.” I took another sip and stared into her large, liquid brown eyes. “Still feeling light-headed?”

“I’m doing a little better,” I replied in a voice that didn’t even convince me.

“Your first problem is Arch. Think what—”

The sob that nearly choked me turned into another and then a whole barrage that wouldn’t quit. Marla hugged me and spoke soft words of no import. Still crying, I glanced up. Gail Rodine was staring out her front window. She probably wasn’t expecting to see two women, one with a Mercedes and one with a beat-up van, hugging each other while one sobbed effusively, out in front of her elaborate Victorian
cottage. On second thought, Gail Rodine probably was about to call the vice squad.

“I have to get my act together,” I croaked.

“Yeah, you do,” Marla replied hopefully. “What you need is some medication. Chill you out a little.” She thrust the brown bag into my hand and I peered tentatively at bottles of Librium and Valium, foil-encased capsule samples of God-only-knew-what, even a hypodermic. I carefully pulled out the needle, which was labeled Versed. From Med Wives 101, I knew this was a high-potency tranquilizer.

“Where on earth did you get all this?”

“Goldy, with the legion of doctors who are either treating me or going out with me, and an ex-husband who’s a doctor, you wonder that? Which one do you want?”

“None. I need to parent, cook, cater, and drive this van without benefit of altered states of consciousness. I won’t be able to perform any of those tasks if I’m floating inside a drug-induced cloud somewhere in the stratosphere.” And just as uncontrollably as the sobs had begun, they ended, and I giggled. Marla shrugged philosophically, dropped the needle back into the bag, and shoved the bag into my glove compartment. Then she started to laugh herself.

“Look, Goldy, I promised Tom I’d help and that’s what I’m going to do. Okay, here’s what you tell Arch. You say there’s been an incident and his father might be in trouble. Dear old Dad’s gone down to the sheriff’s department to talk to the folks there. Dear old Dad will be talking to his lawyer over the weekend. With school out, with no town paper until Wednesday, and with the Denver TV
stations covering their own murders, Arch won’t hear about the arrest except from the Jerk himself, maybe tomorrow.” Marla exhaled triumphantly.

“It’s going to be awful….”

“Yep,” she agreed matter-of-factly. Again she ran her bejeweled fingers through her tangled, damp hair. “But let me clue you in to something, kiddo. You are not responsible for the Jerk’s problems. He is. A hard lesson that took both of us a lot of years to learn, but there it is. Right?”

I stared out the window in sullen silence. Hard lesson, indeed.

“Okay now. Next step,” Marla breezed on, “who’s at home? Somebody to screen your calls? Be with Arch?”

“Macguire Perkins.”

“Oh, great. How’s he doing? Is the mono over, or almost over, or what?”

“He’s sleeping, as usual. Not eating. But he could be good for Arch. You know, be someone to talk to besides me about what’s happening.”

“Does Macguire do anything that would get Arch out of the house? You know, go out to the movies, whatever?”

“I suppose,” I murmured. What did Macguire do? Not much. Virtually nothing at all, to be honest. “He’s under doctor’s orders to get mild exercise. And for Macguire ‘mild’ means ‘with as little exertion as possible.’ I urge him to take a walk most days. Sometimes Arch goes along, and they make it as far as John Richard’s office.”

“Okay, you’ll have to get Arch to go out with Macguire for a stroll today. You want him out of the
house for a bit. You know your phone’s going to start ringing.”

I sighed. “You know you can’t make Arch do anything when he has his mind set on something else. Which he will have when he hears this news. Besides, Arch was supposed to go hiking with John Richard and spend the night with him while I worked the McCrackens’ Stanley Cup celebration party here in the club.”

“Good,” said Marla bluntly. I wondered confusedly why everything seemed good to her today. She cast an appraising eye at the Rodines’ house. Gail’s face was no longer in the window. “I’ll call Arch’s friend. What’s his name, Todd Druckman?” I nodded, and she went on. “I’ll ask Todd if Arch can go over and spend the night. That’ll get him out of your house. Can Macguire accompany you and help tonight? Is he contagious or anything?”

“No, he’s not contagious. But I can assure you he won’t have the energy for it.” I stared glumly out the window. “How can you talk about all this now?”

“Uh. Let’s see. ‘Cuz your husband the cop asked me to take care of you?”

I touched her forearm and she tilted her head questioningly. “Is this really happening?” I asked my best friend. “Did John Richard finally kill someone?”

She didn’t answer, because at that moment we both heard a very faint voice calling, “Mom?”

Arch had come out onto the Rodines’ porch. At fourteen, he was still much shorter than his peers, with tousled brown hair and a generally scruffy appearance. He had changed into khaki cutoffs and a T-shirt printed with the Biocess logo. Biocess was
the product of a drug company for which John Richard had been doing endorsements lately. Unfortunately, the only things Arch or I ever got out of John Richard’s high-paying endorsements were ugly T-shirts and pens that leaked all over the place. Arch’s tortoiseshell glasses winked as he shielded his eyes against the sun and frowned at Marla’s and my cars in the street.

“We’ll be up to get you in a minute, Arch!” Marla called. “You don’t need to come out yet!”

Without replying, Arch turned on his heel and retreated into the house.

“So do you think he did it?” I pressed, not able to let it go. “Do you think John Richard Korman actually, finally, went over the edge and killed someone?”

“Of course I do,” Marla replied evenly. “With ten or twelve drinks in him and something to set him off? No question. You said yourself you saw the bruise marks. And the Jerk had something big to set him off, take my word for it.”

“What? I mean, besides some money problems.”

“He didn’t have anything
besides
money problems, Goldy. He and ACHMO are being sued by the McCrackens, and even with malpractice insurance, he’s going to have costs. I heard the malpractice people hired an attorney, ACHMO had to hire several attorneys, and John Richard had to hire his own separate attorney. You know how much preparation these trials are going to take. My guess is the financial mess of his lawsuit is eating him alive.” She said it smugly. I wasn’t the only one who wanted John
Richard to suffer. “Look, you haven’t had any child support for months, right?”

“Three, to be exact.”

Marla raised her eyebrows in mock astonishment. Of course she’d heard me complain about John Richard slacking off in this department numerous times. She went on. “You were so eager to get out of that marriage that you took a one-time financial settlement and minimal child support. Now every time you need something for Arch, like, say, tuition money, you have to go back and negotiate, or should I say
beg.
Right?” I nodded dully and glanced up at the porch. Arch was nowhere in sight. Marla wagged a finger at me to make sure I was paying attention. “My lawyer went for a part of the practice. Ten percent of the gross income per annum. Not that I needed it, but I figured the best way to punish the Jerk was in his pocketbook. If you—”

I interrupted impatiently. “Marla, a woman is dead. Where is this going?”

“To the bank, honey. Back in the good old pre-managed care days, I got sixty to eighty thou a year, a reliable ten percent of six to eight hundred thousand of the Jerk’s gyn and baby-delivery practice. But things began to change. With more and more of his patients signing up with HMOs instead of half of them being insured and half paying out of pocket, his income started to decline. He supplemented it with endorsing that designer antibiotic for pregnant women with infections. What’s the name of it?”

“Biocess,” I supplied.

“Right. Another fifty thou a year there, of which I got a paltry five. Plus he began to work in the hospitals on the weekends, but you know how
he hates to have his social life tied up, even if working a weekend shift brought him in another sixty thou a year. All this was getting exhausting for the poor fellow.”

“Marla—”

“Wait. Then he got bought out by the Astute-Care Health Maintenance Organization, aka ACHMO, which sounds like a sneeze more than an HMO, but—” She shrugged. “We don’t need to be reminded of
that
little transaction, which also brought into our lives the now-dead-as-a-doorknob Ms. Craig.”

Poor Suz. An ache pierced my chest.

“Goldy, these days, if you want to have a baby in Aspen Meadow, or if you want to have the Jerk as your gynecologist, you or your husband or your significant other has to belong to ACHMO, yes? I mean, God only knows why any sane woman would insist on having John Richard as her doctor. But he does have his supporters, I suppose. How strong that support might be depends on your willingness to pony up with the cost of ACHMO membership.”