A Grave Talent (18 page)

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"That's one angry young man," commented Kate a few minutes later.

"Isn't he though? Look, pull up at that wide spot. I need to think for a minute."

He got out and went to lean against a neat white fence. A single black cow lay ruminating, and watched him watch her. Kate joined them.

"What did Jameson tell you before I came in?" he asked.

She told him about the installation of the windows, Red Jameson's feelings about Andrew Lewis, what he had told her about the changes in his niece from December to April, the uncertainty he felt concerning her guilt.

"Yes, I heard from then on. Interesting about the missing picture, isn't it?"

"It wasn't in her studio, then?"

"It was not. Even more interesting is the fact that last November the Jamesons had a breakin. A few valuables missing, some money, and assorted odds and ends--including one of the photograph albums. Not the family one, but one in Vaun's room."

"You're saying that someone has made sure we have no pictures of Andrew Lewis?"

"Odd coincidence, isn't it?"

"Could be," she said doubtfully. "What made you go after Ned like you did?"

"I wanted to confirm a suspicion I got from talking with his mother. Ned was fourteen when Vaun took up with Lewis, remember, a boy proud of his new muscles, with a not unattractive young woman living close enough to be always there, but far enough away--both emotionally, and physically often away in her studio--to take away the taint of incest. She was never a sister, after all."

"Becky Jameson told you this?"

"Of course not. If she even thought of such a thing she'd clam up immediately. Just my cynical mind, putting two and two together and getting eight."

"And they had another confrontation, of some kind, last year."

"I wish someone had overheard it." He flipped his cigarette over the fence. "When we get to the school I want you to find yourself a nice quiet office and track down that farmers' co-op. We need to know if any of his trips coincided with the three dates or with the other night's attempt on Vaun."

"You sound decided, then, that it was not a suicide attempt."

"Oh, no. No proof, of course, but nobody who can fill a studio with what I saw yesterday could lie down in front of a fire with a bad novel and a Mickey Finn to commit suicide. It's wishy-washy and uncertain, which she is not. Besides, she'd never endanger her life's work by leaving a pot of beans on the fire. No, it wasn't suicide."

"Does Ned Jameson strike you as being clever enough to do all this elaborate business? And I just can't see a farmer with another job on the side having the time to plan it out and kidnap and murder three children and put their bodies so they'd point to her, and then find her when she's most vulnerable, just when she's cut off by the storm, and somehow get to her and stage a suicide--I'm sorry, Al, but the whole thing seems ridiculous. It would have to be the work of a totally fixated person who has all the time in the world and is within reach of her even when the road's out."

"One of her neighbors, in fact."

"But who?"

"That's why I want a picture of Andy Lewis."

"So you're not looking at Ned Jameson?" She tried not to sound petulant, but her back was hurting.

"Of course we're looking at him. We can't very well leave a loose end like that dangling, not with his attitude and motive."

"The fact that she turned him down nearly twenty years ago? That's a motive?"

"That, plus the fact that his father obviously worships her, and the fact that he got trapped into marriage two months after he graduated from high school by a woman who pretended to be pregnant but who has since proven to be infertile."

"Becky Jameson said that?"

"She said, and I quote, 'Yes, it's such a pity they've never had any children, though she had a miscarriage two months after they were married.' "

"Two plus two..."

"Sounds like eight to me. But I think the thing that galls Ned the most is the money. They live off Eva Vaughn. She keeps the roofs over their heads and the bank paid, and to know that and yet to accept each month's subsidy, from a woman who probably laughed at his overtures--well, it wouldn't be too surprising if he were to wish her dead and have her estate come to them."

"Assuming her will is written that way."

"It is. There was a copy of it in her desk."

"But you still see him as a loose end rather than a prime suspect."

"I do. Don't you? Yes. Why?"

"All the reasons I just gave you."

"And...?"

"And... personal reactions to the man, which I don't think are valid reasons."

"Why not? You have to be wary of personal reactions, but that doesn't mean ignore them."

"Well, all right. It's the way he looked at me. A few years ago I began to realize that every time I met a man who looked me over like I was a piece of prime breeding stock, and he the blue-ribbon bull, he would turn out to be the same kind of person--an empty-headed incompetent who was so taken with his own sense of magnificence that he couldn't see that the only prick he had was between his ears. If you'll pardon my French, as Red Jameson would say. Ned is just too stupid not only to pull this off but to see Vaun as any kind of a threat. In fact, I'd doubt he's very troubled by the money. You would be, but he very probably thinks it's his due."

"You got all that from a look?"

"From a lot of looks over the years, Al."

He started to laugh, and as before it changed him into someone she could begin to like a great deal.

"Casey, I think I'm going to like working with you," he chuckled, and as he moved to the car he reached out and slapped her shoulder with a large hand, and then his face collapsed at her reaction.

"Oh, God, I'm sorry, I forgot. Are you okay?"

It took her a minute to catch her breath.

"Oh, yeah," she finally gasped, "just great. I always stand around with watering eyes, gritting my teeth. Makes me look tough."

At the high school the final bell had just rung, and Kate steered toward the visitor's parking against a surge of yellow buses, overladen cars, and clusters of long-legged students with the bodies of adults and the clamor of second-graders. Nothing like a high school to make a person feel short, clumsy, staid, and totally conspicuous. It seemed to affect Hawkin the same way.

"I never feel so much a cop as when I come to a high school," he muttered.

"Flat feet and a truncheon," Kate agreed.

"Just the facts, ma'am." He raised his voice. "Pardon me, ladies, can you tell me where I'd find the principal's office?"

The answer came as multiple giggles and a flurry of vague waves as the collective of females fluttered away. At the next junction he directed the same question to a group of males, and got vague thumb gestures and deeper guffaws, and the same mass sideways movement. He was drawing breath for a third inquiry when Kate nudged him and pointed to a sign saying Office. They pushed slowly inside to the desk.

The harassed secretary gradually realized that Hawkin was not a student and turned her stubby nose and small eyes in their direction. Her piercing voice cut across the din and caused it to slip several notches as the student bodies took note of the nature of these two intruders.

"Are you Detective Hawking? Mr. Zawalski said that you and Officer Martini would be here and that he'd be back in ten minutes if you'd like to wait in his office."

The waters parted and the two of them moved meekly under the speculative eyes and the beginning of whispers into the inner sanctum marked Principal. A burst of voices was set off by the closing of the door, and Kate grinned at Hawkin.

"Well, Detective Hawking, what do you bet there's a scramble for lockers and many flushings of toilets in about two minutes?"

"Sorry for the janitor tomorrow when they're all backed up."

The office was large and cluttered, the lair of a proponent of hearty camaraderie and school spirit. Plaques and group photographs of bulky young men in shoulder pads, cheerful young men in baseball hats, and unnaturally tall young men in basketball shorts crowded every inch of wall space. Bookshelves held trophies, a dusty, much autographed football on a stand, a shelf and a half of multicolored and multisized yearbooks, and several generations of the school mascot, a bear. On the wall behind the door was a yellowed list of scholarship students, three years old. Three small photos of a women's basketball team huddled together in the corner.

Hawkin moved directly to the bookshelves, pulled out an old yearbook, and took it to the cluttered table. After flipping through it for a moment he opened it flat at the formal portraits of the senior class.

The third photograph was of Vaun. To her left smirked a pair of sun-bleached twins named Aaronson; to her right another blond face looked out, a chubby boy with the euphonic name of Alexander Alarzo. Framed by the blond, tan, smiling faces, Vaun's hair seemed immensely dark and her startling eyes were a luminous near-white on the page. The photographer had caught the hint of amusement in her still face, and she looked an exotic creature set down inexplicably amongst the oblivious natives. Down the page the pattern of black and white rectangles of near-adults was broken by a famous, or perhaps infamous, picture of Richard Nixon gesturing a V-for-victory sign. Beneath that picture it said, "Marie Cabrera," and under that, "Escaped our Camera."

An uncomfortable premonition stirred in Kate. Hawkin turned the page. Marcia Givens to Richard Larson. One more page, and again the presidential visage grinned up at them. "Andrew Lewis. Escaped our Camera."

"Damnation." Hawk slammed the book shut.

On cue, the door opened, and the flustered pink face looked in. The upturned little nose twitched.

"Would either of you like a cup of coffee?" She spoke in a more normal voice, the masses in the outer office having miraculously departed. (To their lockers? wondered Kate. Surely not all of them!)

"Not right now, thanks," said Hawkin. "Maybe later. We do need a telephone, though. Is there a direct outside line, one that doesn't have any other extensions?"

"Oh!" The pink face got pinker, and she sidled into the room and planted her solid backside against the closed door. She looked so like some television caricature of a blue-rinsed lady thrilled at the chance to assist a professional sleuth that Kate had to bite down a giggle. The secretary spoke in a whisper that could be heard in the hallway.

"Oh, yes, Mr. Zawalski has a private outside line, right in his phone. You just punch the last button, number nine, on the bottom, and he's the only one that has access to it. I mean, his phone is the only one. I mean, it's perfectly private."

She grew so pink during this speech that Kate began to worry that something internal was about to burst, and was relieved when Hawkin gravely thanked the woman and gently pushed her out the door, closing it firmly behind her.

"You go ahead," he said to Kate. "When Zawalski shows up I'll have him take me to see the art teacher and then head for the playing fields."

"I don't see a phone book."

"Start with Trujillo, then. I'll get you one."

Kate sat at the large desk and began punching numbers. She heard Hawkin's jovial voice calling, "Hey, beautiful--" before the door cut it off. She had barely finished giving the code of her billing number when he reappeared, laughing, giggles spilling through the door behind him, and tossed the thin book onto the desk. "So long, schweetheart." He sneered, and disappeared.

She shook her head. What an odd man was Alonzo Hawkin.

She met Hawkin on his way back to the office, walking with a man who looked more like a retired accountant than the force behind that massive display of homage to physical prowess. This little white crow of a man hopped along next to Hawkin (who looked, she realized, as if he had played football at one time) bobbing his head and flapping his hands energetically. His birdlike quality extended even to his handshake, feathery skin over frail bones, and he fluttered on to the office while Hawkin and Kate spoke quietly.

"Trujillo says there's no change, but she's stabilized enough that they're talking about taking her off the machines tomorrow. The lab results are in--it was chloral hydrate in the whiskey. Your classic Mickey Finn, plenty to put her to sleep after one drink, and she had two large ones, on a totally empty stomach. The stomach contents also show remnants of some kind of cold pills, which may have contributed to it. The doctor Trujillo talked to says the reaction was 'unexpectedly profound,' but not unheard of. Funny she didn't taste it."

"You ever had Laphroaig whiskey?"

"Isn't that what Tyler was drinking?"

"And Vaun Adams. It would mask the taste of pretty much anything. What else did you find?"

"I reached the co-op, but the woman who keeps track of their delivery schedule is off for the day, though the man I talked to thought she might stop in again at five. I didn't tell him what I wanted, only that it was urgent. Did you have any luck?"

"The art teacher is a sixty-two-year-old lady with thick black shoes and a white bun who remembers Vaun Adams well, tried to encourage her to paint more watercolors and still lifes, and thinks it's a pity Vaun never made a name for herself in the art world after she got out of prison, she seemed such a talented child. The coach is new, never heard of Andy Lewis. Zawalski's only been here twelve years. He's going to check Lewis's records to see who his teachers were."

In the office they found the principal fluttering, the pink-faced secretary giggling, and neither of them proceeding with any efficiency. Kate wondered in despair how long this was going to take. It involved a trip into the back room and a search through a cabinet, but eventually the secretary came up with the right year's microfiches clutched in her hands and led them all to the reader. Zawalski fussed with the various switches and knobs until Kate finally commandeered the chair, slipped the proper sheet under its glass plate, and whizzed the transcripts across the screen until she zeroed in on Lewis, Andrew C. No photograph in these transcripts. The grades listed were unexceptional: in addition to the required senior courses of English 4 (for which he had received the grade of C), History 3 (C), and a foreign language (Spanish, a B + ), he had taken wood shop (C + ), Art 1 (C - ), and a study hall. He had also been on the football team, but a search on the walls of Zawalski's office had already proven fruitless.