An Occasional Hell Read online

  DeWalt said, “Trooper Abbott would like to ask you a few questions, Elizabeth. You’re under no obligation to talk if you don’t feel up to it.”

  “I’m okay,” she said.

  Abbott proceeded to ask the same questions DeWalt had asked just a half hour earlier. She gave the same answers.

  “What about the dogs?” Abbott asked. “Did you hear them barking last night?”

  “Not that I remember,” she said.

  “They would bark though, wouldn’t they? If somebody came sneaking around the house at night?”

  “I imagine they would, yes. They bark at deer, and rabbits. Sometimes I think they bark at each other. But whether they did or didn’t last night, I didn’t hear anything.”

  “You must have been unconscious,” Abbott said. “I understand you took a Valium.”

  DeWalt said, “The dogs didn’t bark when you arrived, officer. So maybe there wasn’t any barking to be heard last night either.”

  From where he stood he could see Abbott’s neck stiffen, and he had a fair idea of what Abbott was about to say to him. But Elizabeth Catanzaro spoke first.

  “I probably was unconscious,” she said. Both men looked at her. “I also had, I don’t know, maybe half a bottle of wine.”

  DeWalt felt a flush of anger then, not because she had withheld this information from him earlier but because of the stupidity of mixing drugs and alcohol, guilt turned to self-destructiveness. It angered him because she was too smart for that, too responsible.

  But so what, DeWalt; what’s it to you? Since when did you become a crusader? Don’t pretend you wouldn’t like to engage in a little of the same.

  “Anyway,” Elizabeth said, “not that I see why all this matters so much, but they’re bird dogs, they’re trained not to bark.”

  Abbott smiled. “Not at birds, in any case.” He held his smile a few moments longer, until she looked away. DeWalt had never seen the trooper in action before and he wished he didn’t have to now. That condescending smile was too familiar, he knew the effect of it too well. Sometimes the things you like least about a person are the ways they remind you of yourself.

  Abbott said, “Trooper Brown and I will take another stroll around the outside here before we go. Maybe we can spot a footprint or something.” He held out his hand to DeWalt. “Thanks for your help, Ernie. I’ll be in contact.”

  As they shook hands it occurred to DeWalt that this was the first time he and his friend had touched. It felt like a gesture of some kind.

  Soon Brown and Abbott disappeared around the corner of the house. Elizabeth said, “I guess I can’t sit here in shock all day. I’d better go disinfect that sink.”

  “You get dressed,” DeWalt told her. “I’ll take care of it.”

  “You don’t have to do that.”

  “I like doing housework. I was a maid in a former life.”

  She stood then and came close to him and took both his hands, holding them against her body just below her breasts. His knuckles could feel the plastic bag through his shirt.

  “I’m glad you’re around,” she told him, and squeezed his fingers. He felt his breath catch in his chest, felt it snag on something sharp. In response he merely nodded. He wondered if his smile looked like Abbott’s.

  After she had gone upstairs he went into the kitchen. He found a bottle of bleach under the sink and poured half the contents over the stainless steel basin. The fumes stung his eyes and burned his lungs. He stepped to the back door, stuck his head outside and cleared his lungs. Then, holding his breath, he returned and rinsed the sink clean.

  He filled the sink with hot soapy water, opened the drain and turned on the garbage disposal. He repeated this a second time. As he was washing his hands with dishwashing detergent he glanced out the window and saw Abbott standing there in the yard, looking in at him. Abbott motioned for DeWalt to come outside; he waited in precisely the same spot until DeWalt joined him.

  “Where is she?” Abbott asked, his voice low.

  “Upstairs, getting dressed.”

  Abbott lifted his gaze to the upstairs windows.

  “What’s up?” DeWalt asked.

  Abbott turned his back to the house. For chrissakes, DeWalt thought, do you think she’s going to read your lips?

  “I had a thought,” Abbott said.

  “Didn’t hurt yourself, did you?” DeWalt regretted it the moment he said it.

  “You want to hear this or not?”

  Their relationship was changing, and DeWalt could think of no remedy for it. He hoped it was nothing more than a situational change: the change a rubber band undergoes when subjected to stress. If it is not pulled too far it will snap back into place. So DeWalt moved a step closer to the trooper, he faced the woods, he let up on the tension.

  “Sorry,” he said. “What’s your idea?”

  Abbott nodded to himself a couple of times, thinking it out. “No sign of forced entry,” he said. “No footprints in the flowerbed. Whoever was here last night went straight to the backdoor. No pussyfooting around.”

  He smiled, proud of himself.

  “Ha ha,” DeWalt said.

  “So let’s say that Jeri Gillen did have a key. How she got it, we don’t know. But she had one.”

  “Okay.”

  “And say too, she’s not dead. She saw whoever it was shot Catanzaro, but she herself managed to get away. For the sake of argument, all right?”

  “I’m still with you,” DeWalt said.

  “So where would she go? She’s naked, right? Doesn’t even have any shoes. Scared shitless probably.”

  “I imagine so.”

  “Somehow, some way, she gets in touch with her husband. Breaks into a house maybe, and uses the telephone. Or flags down a car, hitches a ride, and—”

  “Buck naked?”

  “Would you stop to pick up a naked girl? A naked girl built like Jeri Gillen?”

  “Is my mother in the car with me?”

  “So Jeri’s out along the highway somewhere. She stays out of sight until she spots a car with a lone male occupant. That’s you. It’s Saturday morning and you’re on your way to the bakery to buy your fat wife a bag of doughnuts. She’s sitting at home watching cartoons and picking her toenails. This is what you have to go home too. Suddenly there’s a naked girl standing in the middle of the road and waving her arms for you to stop. Are you going to stop or not?”

  “I’m going to stop and have a heart attack.”

  Abbott chuckled, then shook his head. “This is getting too elaborate. I’m not writing a novel here, this is just a scenario. And the scenario is this. Somehow she gets away from the murderer. Somehow she gets in touch with Rodney, who comes to her rescue.”

  “Rodney Gillen is not the murderer?”

  “This is an entirely different scenario, okay? Scenario B, let’s call it. And in this scenario, right, Rodney didn’t kill him. But Jeri knows who did. In fact, she has, in a drawer back home, a key to the murderer’s house.”

  DeWalt, smiling at the ground, slowly shook his head.

  “Now wait,” said Abbott. “Just consider it, okay?”

  “You shouldn’t even be talking like this to me, Larry. You’re talking about my client here.”

  “I’m not talking to you, I’m talking to myself. And here’s what I’m saying. Jeri knows that the murderer is not going to let an eye witness go walking around town as if nothing happened. So she and Rodney go back to their apartment, grab the key and a few other things, and go into hiding. After a couple of days they decide to send a message to the murderer. The message is, Forget what you’re thinking, lady, or next time it will be your ass in the disposal.”

  “Why leave a message at all? Why not just walk upstairs and plug her?”

  “For one thing, maybe they don’t have a weapon.”

  “Rodney has a .22 pistol.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “The boys in the band. They’ve all got them.”

  “Okay, so he
’s got a popgun. But this woman they’re dealing with is something else. Jeri saw her put a musket to her old man’s forehead. I doubt that they want to get too close to her.”

  “It’s appropriate that you’re calling this scenario B,” DeWalt said. “B for Bullshit.”

  “Even someone in your position, Ernie, has to try to maintain objectivity. You’ve got to consider all the possibilities.”

  DeWalt almost said, Don’t lecture me, squirt. But that would have been going too far. And he was not the contentious type anymore. He was too tired to slug it out. Jesus, why did an argument always make him want to lie down and go to sleep?

  “So you’re saying that Elizabeth telephoned Rodney, but not to enlighten him, as she claims, but to what? For what reason?”

  “To implicate him,” Abbott said. “To get him to go to the scene of the crime, maybe leave some evidence. Also, the telephone call shifts the blame off her.”

  DeWalt asked, “Did she kill her husband before or after she called Rodney?”

  “That’s hard to pinpoint, but the coroner’s report suggests that it was after.”

  “So she calls Rodney—not even knowing, by the way, what, if anything, he might do—then she hurries down to the inlet, blows her husband away, lets Jeri run bare-assed out to the highway to flag down a car, then comes home again, waits an appropriate amount of time, and calls the police to say she’s worried that Rodney might have done something drastic. Sure,” DeWalt said, “that sounds logical. It probably happens everyday.”

  “Well, I can see there’s no use discussing these things with you, Ernie.”

  “What’s to discuss? The way you see it, Elizabeth either hired Rodney to do it, or else she did it herself and tried to make it look as if Rodney did it.”

  “The murderer’s choice of weapon is more than coincidence. Fuck, man, open your eyes.”

  “There is absolutely no evidence that the weapon in question belonged to the deceased.”

  Abbott stared at the horizon and chewed on the inside of his cheek. “The only reason I got myself assigned to this thing was as a favor to you, Ernie.”

  “I know that,” DeWalt said, eyes fixed on the field of corn. “And maybe you’re right. Maybe I’m not keeping an open mind about this.”

  “On the other hand, you are getting paid to look out for your client’s interests.”

  “That only goes so far,” DeWalt said. Then, fifteen seconds later, “Fuck.”

  Abbott turned slowly to look at him. He was smiling now. “That better not have been a proposition.”

  He held his smile a moment longer, then glanced once at the upstairs window. As he walked away he lightly jabbed his fist against DeWalt’s chest. “You watch yourself, my friend.”

  DeWalt waited a few minutes after the police car had pulled away; he then returned to the house. Elizabeth was busy in the kitchen now, chopping celery for a bowl of tuna fish. She wore jeans and a yellow knit shirt, blue cotton socks but no shoes. She had washed her face but had not put on any make-up, and her face looked pale, her smile thin and uncertain. Her hair was wet close to the scalp and he could see other streaks of dampness too where she had drawn a wet comb through her hair. She seemed to him so vulnerable and so small, a homeless animal, unloved and underfed, a cat in the rain.

  “Sit down,” she said as he stood at the threshold. “I’ll have some sandwiches ready in a couple of minutes.”

  “I can’t stay,” he said.

  “Just for lunch?”

  “I have an appointment. I’m sorry.”

  She looked at the shredded fish. “I was hoping you wouldn’t leave right away.”

  Her hand, holding the chopping knife, rested on the edge of the table. A splash of sunlight lay upon her hand, quivering. A finch of sunlight, small golden bird, breathless, too long in the air. A moment later she looked up at him and her hand flicked, a nervous twitch, and the startled lightbird flew.

  “How about if I come back for dinner,” he said. “Around six.”

  “That would be good.”

  “Nobody’s going to bother you in broad daylight, I promise.”

  “I know. I know that, and yet.…”

  The way she looked at him, he had one of two choices, one of two directions to go.

  He broke eye contact and looked at the back door. “I’m going to stop at the hardware store and pick up a couple of safety locks,” he told her.

  “I’d feel safer with a whole new set of deadbolts. I’ll call into town and have somebody come out.”

  “Good idea. A security system wouldn’t hurt either, as long as you can afford it. It might take a week or so to get something like that installed, though.”

  She smiled now. “This isn’t the city, Ernie. I know who to call. I can have him here within the hour.”

  Probably an old boyfriend, thought DeWalt. Or at least a man enamored of her. A hardworking dirt-under-the-fingernails kind of guy. A guy who adores his wife and kids but who can always find an excuse to dawdle in the presence of a woman like Elizabeth Catanzaro, feeling a certain ineffable grace in her company, a gentility, a delicacy he can never achieve in his own life.

  But at least there would be somebody with her until DeWalt could return. DeWalt nodded, then asked, “Did Alex ever complain about having lost a house key?”

  “Not that I remember. Why?”

  He did not answer.

  “You think it was Rodney here last night, don’t you? That he has a key he got from Jeri?”

  “The thing is, I can’t imagine Alex ever giving her a key.”

  “He wouldn’t,” she said. “He would never have let her come here.”

  “So she must have stolen it from him. Maybe when they drove into town one day for lunch, while he was in the supermarket, she took the car keys and went into another store to have a copy made. Assuming that he kept his house key on the same keyring.”

  “House, office, garage, everything.”

  “It wouldn’t have been all that difficult for her to get a duplicate made without his knowledge.”

  “But why would she want a key to our house?”

  “I’m just speculating here, okay? But from what I understand, she used drugs fairly regularly. Grass, cocaine, et cetera, et cetera.”

  “My god.”

  “There’s no chance that, you know, Alex—”

  “Never!” she said. “He wouldn’t even take an aspirin when he had a headache. No, it’s impossible. He wouldn’t even let anybody smoke a cigarette in the house.”

  “All of which would seem to suggest that Alex didn’t know about Jeri’s habit.”

  “He couldn’t have. I mean,” she shook her head. Her eyes were shimmering. “He wouldn’t have had anything to do with her.”

  “Then … let’s say this. Let’s say Jeri knows how Alex feels about drugs, which puts her in a rather tenuous position. Or maybe he’s been showing signs of getting bored with her. Obviously he has no intention of leaving you and the kids. As you said, he was not a stupid man.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “If Jeri has any brains at all, she knows that the relationship is doomed. She’s thinking of ways to benefit from him even after he dumps her. She surely knows that he’s a collector. Being curious, she’s probably come by to look at the house a couple of times, just to see the kind of place where he lives. By her standards, he’s a wealthy man.”

  “She stole his key so she could rob us,” Elizabeth said.

  “Cocaine’s an expensive habit.”

  “So … she couldn’t have really loved him.”

  DeWalt did not think it wise to volunteer a confirmation.

  “Was she just using him, Ernie? Taking an infatuated older man for all she could get?”

  He waited too long to answer. “Alex would surely have sensed it if she was.”

  “But that’s not what you believe, is it?”

  It was one thing for a woman to discover that her husband had been unfaithful, had soug
ht to de-annuate himself between the legs of a beautiful younger woman. A wife could then blame not herself but the years, the erosion of passion, the slow dissolution of desire. But to be told that her husband, an intelligent man, a man she respects, has been played for a fool—it would take a certain kind of woman to glean pleasure from such knowledge. Elizabeth Catanzaro was not that kind of woman.

  DeWalt told her, “I think a girl like Jeri Gillen couldn’t help but to be very nearly in awe of a man like Alex.”

  She looked at him with eyes narrowed and mouth frowning. He could almost see the seed of suspicion taking root in her mind. She would mull it over for a while, would worry it from every angle, but eventually she would uproot the suspicion and be done with it. She would not allow her husband to be further reduced in her memory. She would not allow their history to be rewritten.

  “Is she still alive, Ernie?”

  “Trooper Abbott thinks she might be. I have my doubts.”

  “But if it wasn’t her last night … if it was, who? Her husband? What was the point? In fact whoever it was, what was the point?”

  “That’s what we’re trying to figure out.”

  He drove home trying to figure it out and trying to understand his need to do so. He had gotten involved and was involved now for untenable reasons. He was more emotionally involved than intellectually, and the emotions washed over him like hot and cold running water, fever and chill, tenderness and rage.

  A man does not go into this line of work, he told himself, unless he has a taste for violence. He might see himself as a humanitarian out to do the world some good but he is not above achieving that good by violent means.

  But exactly what kind of work do you mean, DeWalt, by this line of work? Investigative work? Writing? Teaching? Self-flagellation?

  The work of living in a violent world, yes.

  He wished he liked weapons more. He wished he had retained his old fondness for guns. But the last gun he held had left a bad taste in his mouth. Sometimes he would remember it in his dreams and wake up gagging, wanting to vomit. He wished there were something just as loud and quick but more tasteful. The noise was important. There had to be enough noise to deaden all hearing. A concussion grenade maybe. Except that a grenade was not as certain as a .44 fired through the roof of your mouth. Unless maybe you put the grenade in your mouth. That should cut down on the margin of error. But the time delay, those seven seconds or whatever it was after pulling the pin, those few seconds could be disastrous. No, a grenade had noise and relative certainty but it wasn’t quick. Not quick enough. Nothing was. And nothing that had not already happened ever would be.