Truly Married (23 page)

As she put the phone back in its cradle she noticed that her hands were shaking with elation. She didn’t know how this new information could be used, but she was sure it was important. Maybe even crucial!

Chapter Twelve

S
haron had only been seated in the restaurant a few minutes, when Ray arrived. A big grin lit his face when he spotted her. “Hey, it’s not every day a beautiful woman invites me to lunch,” he said cheerfully as he slid into the booth across the table from her. “Is it my boyish charm or my rugged good looks that makes me irresistible?”

Sharon laughed. “Both, but today it’s your super P.I. skills that seduce me.”

“You’ve come up with something important?” he said eagerly.

“Stumbled onto something is more accurate,” she said, then told him about her talk with the Vancleaves’ neighbor.

They were interrupted once when the waitress took their order, but by the time she brought their food Sharon had just finished recounting her undercover interview. “I have a feeling that this is really important, Ray,” she said, as the waitress placed the seafood salad in front of her and the hot-roast-beef sandwich with mashed potatoes and gravy before him.

He picked up his knife and fork and dug in. “I’m sure it is, but I don’t think we have a chance in hell of getting Mrs. Vancleave to admit that her husband abused her. If she wouldn’t do it to protect herself when he was alive, she’s not likely to do it now that he’s dead. I have contacts in the police department, though. I’ll see what I can find out, but it’ll have to wait till tomorrow. This trial probably won’t go to the jury until late this afternoon, and I can’t get away until it does.”

Some of Sharon’s elation dimmed. She’d expected him to be more excited. Surely the fact that Floyd was a wife beater as well as a womanizer made him a target of the wrath of numerous individuals.

“Maybe I could find out something if I had a talk with Helen,” she ventured.

“No, Sharon,” Ray said firmly. “Don’t do that. In the first place she probably wouldn’t talk to you, and in the second place, if there is something important here you could blow the whole thing. As soon as we finish eating I’ll call one of my buddies down at headquarters and ask him to dig into some of the files, but if no charges were ever filed against Vancleave it’s doubtful there would be a record.”

Sharon reluctantly agreed, but resolved to tell Fergus about it that evening when he called.

* * *

The call came at nine o’clock and Fergus sounded tired. “Everything’s pretty much on schedule here, but I resent every minute of the time I’m away from you. I feel I should be there, doing something....”

“I wish you were here, too,” she admitted. “I need your advice.”

“Advice about what?” he asked anxiously. “Has something happened? Are you being harassed?”

“No, nothing like that, but I did find out something today that I think is important.” She told him about her conversation with the Vancleaves’ next-door neighbor. “I didn’t even get the woman’s name,” she concluded. “I was too afraid she’d become suspicious and stop talking.”

“Her name’s not important,” he said offhandedly. “We can always get it later. You said Ray’s checked with the police?”

Her disappointment at his casual attitude was as painful as a blow. “Not personally—he’s been tied up in court all day—but he said he’d call a friend in the department and ask him to go through the files. Darn it, Fergus.” She couldn’t keep from voicing her frustration. “You don’t sound any more enthusiastic than Ray did. I thought you’d be happy—”

“I
am
happy, sweetheart,” he interrupted. “This gives us a whole new area to explore, but it doesn’t prove anything except that Vancleave was a real bastard, and we already knew that.”

“But what about his wife?” Sharon’s voice was strident with exasperation. “Doesn’t that give her a strong motive for killing him? She might not have known he was bedding every woman who’d have him, but she sure knew he was beating her up.”

“Sure it gave her a strong motive,” Fergus agreed, “and it gives us a more persuasive case for reasonable doubt that you did it, but don’t count on the prosecution or the jury to consider her a serious suspect. If she’d put up with the physical abuse without seeking protection and retribution, it’s not likely she’d kill him, either. Besides, she wasn’t at his office. You walked in without being announced, and she wasn’t there with him, was she?”

“No, he was alone,” Sharon admitted. “But that doesn’t mean she couldn’t have come in the back door after I walked out, the same as anyone else.”

“That’s true, and we’ll look into it, but you didn’t see her anywhere near the hotel when you left, did you?”

“No, but—”

“You’d almost certainly have run into her, since you were going to the hotel parking building and she would have been coming from it. There’s no place else to park around there. Besides, unless she went there specifically to kill him, there was no reason for her to go in the back, when she could walk into his office through the reception area anytime she wanted to. Receptionists don’t keep their boss’s wives waiting.”

“What makes you so sure she didn’t go there to kill him?”

“I’m not sure,” Fergus explained, “but it seems unlikely. If she left home with the intention of killing him it would mean that she’d planned to do it, but she didn’t bring a weapon. He was stabbed with the letter opener from his desk.

“Also, it’s unlikely that she’d go to his office, a very public place, to do the deed, when it could so easily have been accomplished at home or in a more private area.”

He hesitated a moment. “As I remember it she had a good alibi,” he continued. “When the police went to her house that day to notify her of her husband’s death they found her sick in bed. I mean violently ill, not just the sniffles or a headache. They called her doctor and he examined her. He said it was a type of intestinal flu that was going around, and gave her a prescription for medication.”

Sharon was reluctantly forced to admit that Fergus and Ray were right, Helen Vancleave had nothing to do with her husband’s murder. But if it wasn’t her, then who?

Fergus must have sensed her disappointment, because his voice coming over the phone was soft and compassionate. “I’m sorry, my darling. I hate to have to deflate your balloon, but I don’t want you to get your hopes up too high, only to have them come crashing down again. I’d much prefer to be there with you, but there’s a lot I can do on the phone. I’ll keep in close touch with Ray, and I want you to call me anytime you have a question or feel the need to talk. Okay?”

Sharon sighed. “Okay. I guess it was unreasonable of me to think that all we’d have to do was ask a few questions and the guilty person would be revealed. I remember when you and I were married you’d sometimes get exasperated and tell me to grow up and start thinking like an adult. Obviously I still haven’t gotten the knack of it.”

She heard him groan at the other end of the line.

“Sharon, sweetheart, that’s not at all what I’m saying. I can’t imagine why I ever thought I wanted to change you. I loved you then and I love you now, and I can’t bear the thought of you being hurt any more than is necessary by this messy business.”

They talked for a few more minutes, but when they hung up she still couldn’t shake the feeling that this new turn of events was vitally important. Granted, she was a rank amateur, whereas Fergus and Ray were trained to sort out important facts, but she had a gut feeling that she was on the right track, and she wasn’t going to give up.

Early the next morning, which was Friday, Ray phoned. “Just wanted to let you know that my contact at the police department couldn’t find any record of Floyd Vancleave’s being questioned on suspicion of spousal abuse, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t. The jury’s out on my trial now, so I’m going over there and see what I can turn up.”

Sharon’s excitement started to build again. “That’s great, Ray. I want to go with you.”

Ray hesitated. “Oh, I don’t think that’s such a good idea,” he said thoughtfully. “Fergus wouldn’t want you poking around the station.”

She wasn’t going to be put off so easily. “Would it compromise my case?”

“Well, no,” he admitted, “but it’s a pretty rough place, and you know how protective Fergus is—”

“Fergus Lachlan is my lawyer, not my husband,” she interrupted impatiently. “He has no business being protective of me. Now, are you going to stop by and pick me up, or do I have to drive down on my own?”

Ray chuckled. “Okay, babe, if you’re not scared of him, neither am I. If you’re determined to go along I’ll pick you up. Half an hour all right?”

Sharon agreed that it was, and was dressed in jeans, a pullover shirt and sneakers when he arrived.

At the station Ray was greeted by good-natured slaps on the back and banter. He introduced Sharon and explained what they were after, but none of the officers could remember being called out to a disturbance at the Vancleaves’ address.

“That’s a pretty high-toned neighborhood,” one of them explained. “Those people seldom call the police with a complaint about spousal abuse. They call their psychiatrist, instead, and we never hear about it.”

“But these complaints were turned in by a neighbor,” Ray explained. “She said she was afraid the husband was going to kill his wife in one of his rages.”

“The call would have been handled by this precinct,” another officer commented, “but police officers do get shifted around some. Why don’t you go to headquarters and find out which of our officers have retired or been reassigned in the past five years or so? It could be that one of them will remember.”

Ray and Sharon thanked them all for their help and headed for central. It took some persuasion, but they finally got the names they wanted. There were only four, three men and a woman. Two of them had retired, and the other two had been reassigned. They took the names, addresses and phone numbers and, after picking up sandwiches at a deli for lunch, went to Ray’s office to make their calls.

The first two they contacted were unable to help, but on the third try they connected. Officer Kathryn Underwood remembered the Vancleaves because it had frustrated her so when the woman had refused to press charges.

“Usually in marital disputes the two parties are furious with each other,” she said. “They both yell and swear and each blames the other, so that you can’t tell which one started it. In those cases we’re relieved when they don’t press charges, but the Vancleave complaint was nothing like that.”

Her voice turned hard. “That arrogant son of a bitch had given his wife a black eye, a split lip and God only knows how much more damage that didn’t show unless she could be examined without her clothes on. She winced every time she was touched, and you could see she was afraid of him, but she wouldn’t admit it. Instead, she stuck to her story that she’d fallen down the stairs. I really hated to leave her there with him, but there was nothing we could do when she wouldn’t cooperate.”

Officer Underwood agreed to testify if she was needed, and Sharon was jubilant. Grabbing Ray, she gave him a big hug, and he laughed and swung her around, but when they calmed down he warned her again that this evidence alone didn’t prove anything, since Mrs. Vancleave had refused to admit that she’d been abused.

“I agree,” Sharon said, “but I’m going over to the Vancleaves’ home first thing in the morning and speak to her—”

“No, Sharon, don’t do that!” Ray warned. “At least not until you talk it over with Fergus. There are legal ramifications that you can’t possibly be aware of.”

“But all I want to do is speak to her,” Sharon insisted. “There can’t be anything wrong with that.”

“The hell there can’t,” Ray insisted. “Use your head, woman. You’ve got one of the best defense attorneys in the country, and he’s taken your case at great professional and financial sacrifice. For heaven’s sake, let him defend you. Don’t try to second-guess him and make it just that much harder.”

Sharon felt thoroughly chastised. He was right, of course. Fergus had dropped everything and come running when he’d heard she was in trouble. He’d stayed with her and neglected all his important, high-paying cases, even though he knew she couldn’t possibly pay his usual fee. The very least she could do was take his advice and not go running off half-cocked on her own.

She dropped into one of Ray’s office chairs and sighed. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I guess I let my enthusiasm get out of hand. I’ll talk to Fergus tonight and tell him what I want to do, but don’t forget, I’m trained in the art of getting along with people and mediating disputes. It’s part of my job at the hotel.”

“I know,” he said, “and I understand you’re very good at your job, but you’ve been charged with murder. You’re not a lawyer—you’re not even a paralegal—so let Fergus handle this. Promise?”

He was so intense that she couldn’t help but smile. “I promise,” she said, and meant it.

* * *

Fergus’s call came while Sharon and Anna were eating dinner, and Sharon excused herself to take it in her bedroom. She started to tell him about finding an officer to corroborate the Vancleaves’ neighbor’s story, but he interrupted. “I know all about it, honey. I just talked to Ray. He says you’re determined to talk to Helen Vancleave.”

Sharon was surprised and even a little disappointed. She’d wanted to tell him. “Yes. She knows me,” Sharon said, trying not to let her disappointment sound in her voice. “Not well, but at least I’m not a stranger or, worse yet, a police officer. I’m sure she could give us important information.”

“I’m sure she could, too,” he agreed, “but don’t forget, you’re the woman accused of killing her husband. She won’t even let you in the door, let alone talk to you. Don’t even try it, Sharon. You’ll scare her off and we’ll never get any cooperation from her.”

“I’m not inexperienced at this type of thing, Fergus,” she snapped, now more irritated than disappointed. “Don’t forget, I minored in psychology in college, and I mediate personnel disputes all the time at work.”

“I know, and I respect your ability,” he said in what she recognized as his best conciliatory manner, “but you can’t ignore the fact that in this case
you
are the problem. She undoubtedly believes that you stabbed her husband in the heart.”