A Bad Day for Mercy (24 page)

“Me? I can’t imagine why.”

“Really? You and Benton, being so close, and now this sudden … rift in your relationship—well, it adds to our concerns. We had hoped you would be able to help us locate him. As you can imagine, Natalya is as anxious to find him as you, since he will need to be signing some of the documents that my, uh, paralegal is preparing.” Stella made a mental note to tell Chrissy she’d been promoted again, in title at least. Though knowing the gal’s skill with the Internet, she could probably download her own paralegal license and get it recognized all over the state of Missouri.

“What sort of documents are those? Benton already told Natalya he’ll contest any divorce she tries to bring against him, and since you’re a lawyer and all, I guess you know what that means in the state of Wisconsin.”

Stella, who had spent many a long afternoon fantasizing about divorce back before she took decisive and unplanned action and became a widow, had never gotten as far as consulting an attorney or even looking up the laws. Without a college education or training or experience, she’d always believed that she would never be able to support herself. There was also the other little problem—that Ollie always told her he’d kill her if she ever tried to leave him.

So she was a little bit out of her element, but luckily Alana was warming to her subject. Her narrow face flushed with anger, and she took a break to chew at her nails, which Stella noticed for the first time were bitten past the quick. That, along with the calluses from all that viola playing, gave her hands an odd and creepy look.

“I don’t do divorce law,” Stella said. “And it’s been a long time since I took the bar. And I, uh, used to live in Kentucky, so I’m not as familiar—”

“Well, I’m sure you know if one person contests it, the other one has to prove adultery or abandonment or separation, or else it comes down to intolerability.” She blinked and spoke the next words in a rush, as though she’d memorized them: “‘The respondent has behaved in such a way that continuing the marriage would be intolerable.’ The most subjective law on the books, to my way of thinking. It comes down to how sympathetic a judge is to your story.”

“You sound like you’ve been down this path before,” Stella guessed. There had been no evidence of a Mr. Javetz, who she assumed was the other part of Alana’s clunky last name; the draped scarves and dusty potpourri smell seemed feminine to Stella.

“Enough to know.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

“I’m not. At least about the getting rid of him part. My ex was a bastard, even if it cost me a fortune in legal fees to make a judge see just how intolerable he could be. All I’m sorry about is that he’s never in one place long enough for my attorney to find him and make him send his maintenance checks.”

Aha. Here it was, the motivation Stella had suspected was there all along. “So … money is tight for you?”

“A musician’s salary, even augmented by teaching, is not enough to support a mortgage,” Alana said stiffly. “I would never have bought this place if I’d known Jeffers was going to take up with a flautist.”

“A … what?”

“Flute player.” Alana’s flush grew deeper. “Evidently you aren’t a fan of the symphony. If you were, you would already know the story, since Jeffers used to be the conductor of the Madison Symphony. Very well known, studied under Pierre Boulez—he even guest conducted in St. Louis…” For a moment her voice grew wistful, and the lines in her face softened.
Damn,
Stella realized—
she still loves her ex
. Then Alana’s expression turned bitter again. “Jeffers is all about the latest hot ticket. I am mortified to say that when we met he was married to an oboist with little talent. Of course he told me they’d never truly loved each other—which is probably what he told the horrid little tramp he ran off with last fall.”

“The … flautist.”

“Yes.”

Stella considered a moment, and examined Alana carefully, squinting, trying to see evidence of the “latest hot ticket” buried beneath the severe steel gray bangs, the deep-etched brackets around her mouth. It wasn’t that Alana was middle-aged—it was that her body language pretty much screamed “not one bit of fun to be found here—move along, all zesty souls.”

Still, Stella had learned surprising lessons in the outskirts of the counseling profession in which she practiced—the heart is a perplexing hunter, for damn sure. Maybe there was a day when this Jeffers Javetz, conductor of symphonies, looked upon Alana and thought to himself, “There, my man, is a tasty morsel.” It was only too bad for Alana that on a subsequent day he looked elsewhere, the curse of the man with a roving eye.

It was almost enough to spark Stella’s compassion.

Except Stella was here on a job. On behalf of Natalya and Chip.
They didn’t do it,
Stella reminded herself—at least, Chip didn’t, she was pretty sure … so she needed to find out who did, and Alana was her current best guess.

“So here you are, trying to hang on to your marriage, in danger of losing your home … and then your brother goes and stumbles into some good fortune, the fruits of all his hard inventin’ work—and you’re thinking, why, that ought to be carefully … protected. You took the responsible step and, and, uh, you did a little proactive estate planning, which was—”

“Stella.” When Alana finally got around to interrupting her, Stella was truly floundering and was almost grateful. “What are you talking about?”

“The, uh, the insurance policy.”

“
What
insurance policy?”

Stella weighed her options. “Look here, Alana,” she finally said, settling on a straightforward approach. She was a devoted fan of honesty, not so much due to any particular ethical leanings but because it made things a hell of a lot easier to remember, which was important when one was postmenopausal. “I know about the policy. In the event of your brother’s death, you stand to collect a tidy sum. I mean it might not be much by, you know,
Real Housewives
standards or whatever, but for a couple of gals like you and me, it could make a real difference. What’s half a mil after taxes in your bracket, anyway?”

Alana pursed up her lips and glowered, but she didn’t deny. “You’re coming after me for
that
? No wonder you’re taking on clients who can’t afford to pay you, Ms. Hardesty—if that’s what you think constitutes a case. There’s no law against insuring someone even if I did it, but you’ve got your facts all wrong. Benton did that—he bought that policy and came around here to give me a copy. I didn’t even want it. I tried to give it back. But he was just so … so
worked up
over her. Making me promise to take care of her if anything ever happened to him. He was worried that if he died before her residency was finalized, she’d never get the money.”

Stella thought about Natalya, younger than her years, all that glossy brown hair cascading around her shoulders, her soft come-hither voice, her eager ministrations, her constant dieting … she may have been a bit of a cream puff, but she was a fluffy and fresh cream puff. How much would that hurt, Stella wondered—the brother you adored, who always turned to you for help, for assistance navigating the troubling waters of this life, and then he goes and falls for a pretty little thing and forgets all about you.

“I did ask Benton for money,” Alana continued. “That much is true. I need it, since Jeffers hasn’t sent a payment in six months. Benton told me when I first started up with him—he said Jeffers was no good. He said—”

Alana broke off midsentence. Her face, angular and spare at best, scrunched up in a rictus of hurt feelings and fury. “He said people like us have to aim low. I tried to pretend I didn’t know what he was talking about, but I did. We come from a long line of ugly. Do you know people used to think our mom was our grandma? Our dad wasn’t anything to look at either; he baled hay from the age of sixteen until we buried him. We weren’t pretty—we knew that. We accepted that. I did, anyway … until…”

She trailed off, picking an object up off the sofa table and holding it absently in her hand. It was an old-fashioned metronome, the kind with the arm tucked behind a hook, ready to tick off the beats for whoever came to practice. Stella had a sudden vision of Alana in this room, practicing in the mornings, the long stretches between lunch and that first glass of cheap wine. Leaving for rehearsals with a hopeful slash of lipstick, wondering if there was still time to meet someone who would love her for who she was.

And watching her brother—no more finely made than she, no cleverer—bring home a beautiful woman. Yes, one from another country, one he had to purchase, but a gorgeous woman nonetheless. Had it felt like he was showing off a trophy? Like he was judging her somehow, the sibling who couldn’t even hold on to a man like Jeffers Javetz? Stella supposed she didn’t understand the social intricacies of second-tier American symphonies, but she had to guess that Jeffers was not quite the lothario that a younger and more romantic Alana had dreamed about when she put her viola away for the day.

“You’re saying that your brother took out this policy, with no input from you,” she summarized gently.

“That’s what I’m saying.” Alana folded her arms across her chest and waited, no stranger to the indelicate moment. “If I had to wait around for Benton to die on me, that wouldn’t do me much good. The foreclosure notices I’m getting aren’t going to wait.”

Exactly what Stella had been thinking, but she didn’t say that. Quick cash required a quick death, and Alana’s hatred of Natalya seemed to be sufficient that maybe she wouldn’t mind hanging a murder rap on her.

“Besides,” she continued as if listening in on Stella’s frame of mind, “if anyone would be happy if my brother died, it would be Natalya.”

“I thought the way the law worked she had to be married the full two years…”

“Yeah, sure, long as INS can find her. If she scoots out of town and passes that two-year mark in another state somewhere, then she can marry her new fancy man and
he
can be her ticket to stay. In case you haven’t heard, they’re kind of booked these days with all the hoopla at the borders—I don’t suppose they have a whole lot of extra agents to be sending on errands out of state to bring back wandering housewives.”

“Huh,” Stella said.

Natalya was certainly not stupid, and she’d already proved she was calm under fire. Not too many women could have gotten through the dismembering interlude without a whit of evident distress. Could she have really planned such an elaborate scheme? If so, she could be planning to run right now.

Wait, wait,
Stella cautioned herself; she was getting too far ahead.

“I think that’s a pretty wacky scenario you’re spinning. I know your brother and Natalya didn’t get along so well, but suggesting that she’d kill him and run off and hide out with her new man, well, that all sounds a little too Bonnie and Clyde–like for the woman I know.”

“Maybe you don’t know her as well as you think,” Alana said darkly. “You haven’t seen how she can be when she wants something.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Oh, she’s as sly as a snake, that one. They had a justice of the peace wedding, but Benton bought her this whole getup, dress and veil and slutty shoes and the whole nine yards—but even that wasn’t enough for her. I offered to have a dinner here after, it was me and Benton’s friend Topher that were the witnesses, but I guess Little Miss Have-Her-Way had a talk with my dopey brother, because next thing you know, she’s dragging us all to this horrible Russian dinner club where I can’t understand a single thing anyone says and they’re all singing and carrying on—and these are people she has
never met before
and she’s ordering shots for the entire place. All on my brother’s dime, mind you. And the food—I mean, I didn’t know what half that stuff was, and neither did Topher, and here we are starving and we can’t even get a basket of rolls. But she’s got Benton wrapped around her finger and—oh, and what about the ring? Oh yes. The
ring
.”

If she rolled her eyes with any more vigor, Stella feared they were going to spring free of her head. “What about the ring?” Stella asked gently.

“For the ceremony they just had simple gold bands.
Tasteful
.” By way of illustration, Alana held up her own boney, misshapen hand, and Stella saw that sure enough, it was decorated only by a plain narrow gold ring. “But a few months ago, after they sold off the patent, there she is, dragging Benton to the jewelry store to trade up. And that thing he bought her—simply the tackiest ring you could imagine. More of a
dinner ring
than a wedding ring, the sort of piece one would wear to a cocktail party,
maybe,
if one’s taste went that way, but
never
for everyday.”

Alana looked like she was just about to go into convulsions at the horror of it all, but Stella, whose own engagement ring had been a simple little solitaire that she took great pleasure in throwing into the brackish waters of Nickel Pond not long after Ollie was buried, wasn’t sure she understood the distinction. “What do you mean?”

“Oh, it was so over-the-top—it was a heart-shaped ruby literally surrounded with a million tiny diamonds. The thing was just knuckle-to-knuckle, enormous.”

“Ahh.” Stella thought it sounded kind of pretty. “So you’re saying Natalya picked this thing out and browbeat your brother into buying it for her? With the proceeds from the sale? Or are you suggesting she encouraged him to sell the patent in order to buy it, or…”

“I wasn’t there,” Alana sniffed, “but I’m simply pointing out that’s a woman with ravenous tastes, a woman who will never be satisfied. She takes a man for everything he’s worth and then—only then—does she move on to the next one.”

Stella thought about the fact that Chip wasn’t exactly, financially speaking, much of a trade-up, but she didn’t see the advantage to pointing that out to Alana, who’d seen the couple’s humble abode already and presumably could have come to the same conclusion.

“This has been fun and all,” Stella said, snorting back a sneeze, the result of all that loose dust and tea leaves. She was anxious to leave the place, and not just because it threatened to send her into a wheezing fit. The energy around Alana was gloomy and angry—but could she be a killer?