Somebody Else's Music (23 page)

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Authors: Jane Haddam

BOOK: Somebody Else's Music
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Her name was Christine Allison Inglerod Barr. Liz Toliver recognized her on sight, in that short moment before Gregor realized she'd come up behind him. He'd just had time to push her away and into the arms of Jimmy Card when she vomited, a thick bulk of tan and pink spraying over the front of the man's $2,000 sports jacket. For a moment, everything was totally insane—there was Liz, and Jimmy Card, and Mark, all of whom he knew, but there was also another woman, not the nurse, not the mother, a woman with good jewelry smelling just faintly of alcohol. Gregor's primary thought was of the integrity of the crime scene. He kept trying to herd the whole group back toward the house and as far away from the body as possible. Jimmy Card didn't look as if he'd noticed that he'd been thrown up on. The woman with the jewelry was smoking a cigarette. Cigarettes were a disaster at crime scenes. Around them, dark was falling very fast. It had to be seven o'clock. Only Mark DeAvecca and the woman with the jewelry seemed to be keeping their heads, and Gregor thought the woman with the jewelry might have other reasons for staying calm.
“It's Chris,” Liz Toliver kept saying. “I can't believe it. It's Chris.”
“What the hell do you think you're doing?” Jimmy Card said. “How could this possibly have happened? I thought you were the great detective.”
“Want me to call the police?” Mark said.
“As fast as you can,” Gregor said. “Where's your brother?”
“With the bitch nurse and Grandma. Who's a bitch, too. Did I tell you that?”
“Call the police now. Swear like a college student later. Don't let your brother out here to see this.”
“Right.” Mark turned on his heel and headed back to the house, with the faintly contemptuous air adolescents have when they know they're behaving more like an adult than any of the adults.
Gregor turned his attention back to the group, now in the middle of the lawn, Liz and Jimmy huddled together, the woman with the jewelry just about to light another cigarette.
“Did you drop your cigarette butt on the lawn?” Gregor asked her.
“Oh, for Christ's sake,” Jimmy said. “Who cares if she smokes at a time like this? I'd smoke if I still did it.”
Gregor tried to explain, patiently: the nature of forensics; the importance at crime scenes of even small things like cigarette butts and stray hairs. Liz and Jimmy looked at him as if he had to be insane. The woman with the jewelry went on smoking.
“Go back to the house,” Gregor said finally. “Just go back to the house and sit still until the police get here. You're not doing any good where you are.”
“You have to wonder why she didn't come to the door and ring the bell,” the woman with the jewelry said.
“Oh, for Christ's sake,” Jimmy Card said again.
Liz backed away from him. The vomit on his sports coat had rubbed off onto her sweater. They had been holding themselves against each other without thinking. She blinked at the mess and shook her head. For the first time since Gregor met her, she looked as old as she was supposed to be.
“It wasn't a stupid question,” she said carefully. “Maris
is right. You do have to wonder why she didn't come to the door and ring the bell.”
“She didn't do it because she was out here getting … getting …” Jimmy gave up.
“It doesn't make any sense that she was out here,” Liz insisted. “Why would she be off by the side of the drive? And how did she get here? There's not—”
“There is,” the woman with the jewelry said.
Maris
, Gregor told himself. “Her car's down by the third bay. It's hard to see because it's dark. But it's her car. I recognize it.”
They all looked toward the other end of the driveway. There were, Gregor realized, several cars now in the parking area—his own, Liz Toliver's Mercedes, a red Jaguar he assumed must belong to Jimmy Card, and the dark car Maris had pointed to, a Volvo station wagon, the sort of car that in most places belonged to doctors' wives. Maris took a long drag on her cigarette and blew a stream of smoke into the air.
“You've got to
assume
she came here to talk to Betsy,” Maris said. “So why didn't she just come up and ring the bell? It's just across there. She wasn't very far.”
“Whyever would she want to talk to me?” Liz said. “She never did talk to me much when we were growing up. Why would she come here?”
“You were here all by yourself for an hour before any of the rest of us got here,” Maris said. “You must have seen her. You must have at least seen the car.”
“What the
hell
do you think you're doing?” Jimmy said.
Maris's drag on the cigarette this time was very long, so long it seemed an illusion. “What I'm
doing
,” she said, overprecisely, “is injecting a little reality into these proceedings. In another hour, or less, there are going to be hundreds of people here, only some of them from the legitimate news agencies. Some of the others are going to be shilling for the
Enquirer
and the
Star
. And let me tell you what this is going to look like to them. The last time Betsy spent any time in this town, Michael Houseman got murdered.
Now that she's come back, Chris Inglerod has been murdered—”
“You came back,” Jimmy said. “You're back just as much as she is.”
“But not for the first time,” Maris shot at him. “I've been back dozens of times before. I've been here to visit my parents. I've been here to visit friends. It's Betsy who took off and never wanted to set foot in this place again. Which is odd in and of itself, if you think about it. Who does that? Everybody comes home from college on vacations.”
“You,” Jimmy Card said, “are such an unbelievable, unmitigated bitch.”
“Don't look at me. I'm not the one who's going to say this stuff. I'm not even the one who's going to think it. But everybody else will. And Betsy knows why Chris would be coming here. Chris was going to invite her to something, a party. I told Betsy all about it at lunch—”
“No,” Liz said. “What you said was—”
“And there's the simple fact that all this stuff is happening right in Betsy's garage,” Maris said, triumphant. “Swear your head off, it won't matter. This will be in every supermarket tabloid by the end of the week and there's not a damned thing you can do about it.”
“What about you?” Jimmy said. “How did you get here? You don't have a car.”
“Nancy Quayde dropped me off when she got finished with school. Betsy was already here when we got here. Ask Nancy. Ask Betsy.”
“I didn't realize it was Nancy in the car,” Liz said.
“She didn't want to come in.” Maris looked up over her head. The night was dark enough now so that they should be able to see stars in the sky, but somebody—probably Mark—had turned out the security lights over the garage and the back porch door, and they couldn't see anything but blackness. “You just don't get it,” Maris said. “She wasn't locked in an outhouse this time. She wasn't beating herself bloody just because of a few stupid garden snakes. She was right here right now and nobody else was.”
“Geoff was,” Liz said softly. “My mother was.”
“Geoff is a child. Your mother is worse than a child. You'd have had a shot in hell if the nurse had been here, but she didn't get back until after I did. Give it up. And then go back in the house and get clean. You're both disgusting.”
Maris turned her back on them and strode across the lawn toward the back door to the house, wobbling a little on city heels. For a while they all watched her go, even Gregor.
“She never came to the door,” Liz said finally. “I hadn't seen her in years. I hadn't even thought about seeing her.” She looked down at the vomit smeared across the front of her sweater and on her arms. The sweater had short sleeves. She rubbed her hands against the sides of her slacks to clean them off and then rubbed her face, hard, as if she would never be able to rub it enough to wake herself up. “Well,” she said finally.
“You need to fire her,” Jimmy Card said finally. “You need to do more than that. You need to get her out of your life. I mean, what the hell, Liz, if you don't want to marry me, you don't want to marry me, but there's no point in letting that woman go on screwing you over. You're not doing yourself or anybody else any good.”
“She's just—miserable, that's all,” Liz said. “She's just upset.”
“She just tried to pin a murder on you. And not one that's thirty years old, either.”
Somewhere in the distance, there was the sound of sirens, more than one, meaning that Kyle Borden had taken Mark DeAvecca's call seriously. They all looked up and blinked, as if they'd been awakened from a light sleep. Liz put her hand on the mess on Jimmy Card's sports jacket and shook her head.
“Maybe we should go inside and clean up,” she said.
“Clean up but leave the clothes intact,” Gregor told her. “Take them off, drop them in a plastic bag, put them aside for forensics. Take a shower and do what you have to do
to make yourself feel better. A shot of brandy probably wouldn't hurt.”
“Jesus,” Jimmy said. “You really are going to treat Liz as if she—”
“No,” Liz said. “He's going to treat everybody as a suspect. So will the police. That's, what, standard operating procedure.”
“You also have to worry about a process of elimination,” Gregor said. “If any of … that … has dropped on the ground, the forensics people may pick it up. It would be necessary to eliminate it. We could do that if we had samples of the—”
“Jesus,” Jimmy said again.
Mark DeAvecca came out of the house and walked across the lawn to them. “What did you guys do to Maris? She's smirking.”
“Jesus
Christ
,” Jimmy Card said.
“It's just
Maris
,” Liz said. “It's just the way she is. She panics and she acts like an idiot. She doesn't mean anything by it.”
“I think you'd better get cleaned up,” Gregor said again, more firmly this time. “Get cleaned up. Have a brandy. Wait until the police want to talk to you. And don't let anybody leave the house. No matter how much you might want to.”
“Meaning we're stuck with the bitch of the Western world for the foreseeable future,” Mark said cheerfully.
“You go back in the house, too,” Gregor told him. “The police will be here any minute, and you don't want to be in the way.”
“Yes, I do,” Mark said.
“Go.”
Mark shrugged. Liz backed up a little and looked in the direction of the body. Gregor didn't think she could possibly have seen much, and she didn't linger to see if she could get a better look. She took Jimmy Card's hand and smiled at Gregor, faintly.
“Well,” she said, “I guess we'll go back in the house
and get cleaned up. Mark, you come with us.”
“Just a second,” Mark said.
Liz and Jimmy looked at each other, and then walked off, slowly. Mark stood silently until they were out of hearing range, his boy's face shading in and out of adulthood in the dark and the artificial light. Gregor thought that when he hit twenty Mark was going to be a positive menace to female virtue.
“So,” Mark said. “I take it Maris has decided that Mom killed this—person. And she's told you all about it.”
“Something like that.”
“Well,” Mark said, “if she tries to tell you Mom was here alone with Geoff and Grandma, she's wrong. I was here, the whole time. I got back from the library at quarter after three. This woman Mom used to know gave me a lift. You might want to ask her about it.”
“Do you remember her name?”
“Emma Bligh. I remember because she reminded me of Captain Bligh. Marlon Brando, you know, in that ancient movie. Except it wasn't Marlon Brando who was Bligh, it was some English guy. She had this other woman with her—Belinda something. Belinda had a daughter.”
“Oh?”
“Forget it. IQ in negative numbers, from what I could tell from what she was saying. What Belinda was saying, I mean.
Belinda's
IQ was in negative numbers, if you want to know the truth, and Emma Bligh wasn't much better. Is everybody in this town stupid? Belinda works in the library, by the way. I saw her there. She doesn't know anything about books.”
“I know it isn't legal,” Gregor said, “but you might want to take a swig of that brandy yourself. You're shaking.”
“Yeah,” Mark said. “I just—I just want to know what's going on with my mom, you know. I just don't get it. I mean, I've been hearing about these people all my life. They intimidate her, they really do, and I know that she always feels as if she doesn't deserve her own life. The more successful she gets, the more guilty she gets, and I
can't figure it out. Now I've met these people and they're stupid, they're shallow, and if they're not that, they're Maris, who's some kind of frigging sociopath. What's the point here? Why does she care so much?”

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