As a Favor (16 page)

“They must have meant another night.”

“No, they didn’t. Come on, Fern, why did you say you were with Donn?”

She opened her mouth to protest, but she must have seen the futility of it, for she let it shut, and sat staring over my head. She ran her teeth over her lower lip, biting hard enough to leave the skin red.

“Fern?”

She said nothing.

“Were you protecting Donn? Did you think he might have been with Anne?”

“No. No. Donn is just friends with Anne.”

“That’s not what I’ve heard.”

Her head started to shake; the loose chin quivered.

“Look, Fern, you know Donn comes on to women, don’t you? Where it counts, you know. Don’t waste energy pretending.”

Her hand went for the peanuts. She looked at it as it poised over the container. Then she picked up the jar and flung it to the floor. “How can he?” she screamed. “I’ve given him everything. I take care of him; I love him; he’s my life! How can he do this?”

Her face was deep red. Tears hung precariously at the corners of her eyes. In her hands she knotted the crimson cloth of her caftan.

On the floor between us the peanut jar, unbroken, rocked back and forth, mocking Fern.

I asked, “Do you think he was sleeping with Anne?”

“I don’t know. Anne, the girl at the gallery, the girl at the paint store, any flighty little blonde with…with…”

“With what?”

“With a skinny little body, like yours!”

The tears rolled freely. She raised an arm to wipe them, stared at the hanging fat, and dropped the arm to her side.

“Fern,” I said softly, “it’s better to face the truth, even when it seems unbearable.” It had taken a divorce to teach me that. “Crying it out would be best, but I have to find a murderer. I don’t have time to let you cry. Pull yourself together.”

Fern looked up, shocked. Among counselors, and Fern Day had made it clear she so considered herself, cutting off tears was unheard of.

Allowing an edge to my voice, I said, “You can’t think of yourself now.” When she didn’t respond, I softened my voice. “I need your help.”

The tears continued to roll, but she steadied her body and looked through them at me.

“Why did you think that Donn might be at Anne’s that night?”

Fern stared unmoving, then the words poured out. “Anne left the party early. She said she had to stop at the store. I couldn’t be sure it wasn’t a ruse. I had to know. Don’t you see, I couldn’t have Donn sleeping with a woman who worked with me. I couldn’t have her leering at me, mocking me, thinking of me as a patsy, fat, middle-aged patsy who provides the bread for her lover.”

I said gently, “What did you do?”

“I went there. I went to Anne Spaulding’s.”

“When?”

“Right after I left Alec’s.”

“Did you go into Anne’s apartment?”

“Oh, no. I wouldn’t do that. I didn’t… didn’t want to burst in.”

“What did you do?”

“I parked across the street. There was a big tree. It cut out the light. My car was dark. I sat and watched.”

“And? Try to put yourself back there.”

Fern nodded obediently. I realized this was a technique with which a counselor probably was familiar.

“I sat there in the silence. No, wait, it wasn’t silent. There was this terrible racket coming from the apartment above Anne’s. I thought maybe the tenant was remodeling.”

I suppressed a smile.

“Then Anne’s door opened. Nat Smith came out. He wasn’t in a hurry. He just strolled down the steps, got into his car.”

My breath caught. He had been there. He had dropped the pewter pen. And what else had he done?

“And?” I prompted. The word sounded like a croak, but Fern didn’t seem to notice.

“I watched Nat. He sat in the car for a few minutes. His car was in front of mine, farther from the apartment building. He sat there. I watched him. I wondered what had gone on in there. And then his car pulled away.”

Forcing myself to concentrate on Fern’s actions, to ask questions in sequence instead of speculating about Nat, I said, “And then what next?”

“When I looked back I could see the outlines of two figures in Anne’s window.”

“Two figures? You saw Nat leave. Did you see someone go in?”

“No.”

“So the other person was inside all the time, then?”

“Yes. No. Wait. I don’t know. I watched Nat Smith as he left Anne’s. I watched him sit in the car. I watched just him. It was a few minutes, like I said. Someone could have come to Anne’s door and I wouldn’t have seen him. I don’t know.”

“Okay. The two outlines in Anne’s window, describe them. Take your time.”

“One was Anne. I could tell by the way she moved. The other…the other was a man. He wasn’t much bigger than Anne. He had long hair, long gray hair. His suit was brown, old. It didn’t fit.”

“You saw that through the curtain?”

“Oh, no. I just saw shadows then. But the man came out I saw him as he came out.”

“Tell me about it.”

“He was very angry. He slammed the door. His hands were in fists. Then he went upstairs. That was before the black woman came down the driveway.”

“Wait. Slow down. The man came out of Anne’s and…”

“He started down the steps. Then he spun around and went back to Anne’s door. But he didn’t knock. He just stood looking at it. Then he went upstairs.”

I wrote quickly to get it all down. “Have you seen him before or since?”

Fern’s eyes tightened, as if trying to hold the picture of the man. “I don’t know. I can’t be sure. He seems familiar, but a lot of people look alike in Berkeley.”

It was true, but it wouldn’t matter. Despite Fern’s observation, there couldn’t be too many gray-haired men with baggy brown suits who were followers of Sri Fallon. “What about the black woman? Did she come out of the upstairs apartment?”

“No. She came down the driveway.”

“Down the driveway from where? From Anne’s back door? From the path that leads to the next street?”

“I don’t know. She was just in the driveway when I saw her.”

“What did she look like?”

“She had a big Afro. She was in the shadows. All I could really see was her hair.”

“Did the man see her?”

“Oh, no. He’d gone upstairs.”

“Do you think they were together?”

Her head shook slowly: Her eyes remained glazed. “I didn’t see her inside.”

“Could she have been in there without you seeing her?”

“I guess. But just Anne and the man were arguing. They must have been ignoring the black woman if she was there.”

What about Nat when he had been in the apartment—had he ignored them both? Or had Anne seen Nat, the old man, and then the black woman sequentially, like customers at the butcher’s? I asked, “What did the black woman do when she left?”

“She walked down College, south toward the intersection, at Ashby.”

“Fern, how much time elasped after the man came out of the front door and the woman left?”

Her eyes focused; she looked down, directing her attention somewhere left of my knees. “Maybe five minutes. No longer.”

“And then what happened, after the woman left?”

“I watched the window for a moment or two. Nothing was going on. Then I realized how late it was—it was ten o’clock. I had told Donn I’d be home by nine. I didn’t want to explain where I was, so I hurried home. I hoped he wouldn’t notice.” She paused. “He didn’t.”

“Is there anything else you remember?”

Her body sagged. It looked like a pile of crimson rags. “No, that’s all.”

“And then you came straight home?”

“Yes.”

“Did you see anyone?”

“No. I didn’t see anyone. I came home and went to bed.”

Looking at her, I wondered if she could have made it all up. The scene she described didn’t make any sense—Nat, the gray-haired man, and the black woman, hanging around Anne’s apartment.

It was easier to believe that Fern had driven to Anne’s, walked in and beaten her with the lamp—a crime of passion, with the clothes torn and discarded deliberately to make it look like a sex killing.

I sighed. It was going to take some legwork—and some luck—to find out.

Using the kitchen phone, I called Sri Fallon and told him I knew the devotee he had mentioned. He was the gray-haired, brown-suited man Fallon had been attempting to calm in the welfare office, Ermentine Brown’s “old dude” who’d threatened to go right to Anne’s apartment, the alcoholic who blamed Anne for his friend Tad’s overdose.

“He’s Quentin Delehanty, isn’t he?” I asked.

Fallon wasted no time trying to deny it. He merely reminded me of my promise to treat Delehanty fairly.

D
URING THE DAY TELEGRAPH
Avenue is jammed with people: street artists like Ermentine Brown sitting behind their displays of feather necklaces, tie-dyed T-shirts, stained-glass panels; students and former students wandering along fingering the merchandise; street people hanging out in coffee houses or squatting along the walls watching time pass. The sidewalks are overflowing then. Now at nearly midnight the Avenue had an eerie yellow glow from the streetlights bouncing off the bare macadam, and small groups of regulars made their way slowly down the empty sidewalks.

I parked the car in a red zone outside Quentin Delehanty’s hotel and made my way past the empty lobby. Even now music came from all directions. The songs smashed into one another, grating as they separated, only to come back at each other. It was lucky for Delehanty that he drank.

I knocked on his door. There was no answer. I knocked, pounded and then tried the door only to find it locked. The man in the next room stuck his head out and, seeing me, withdrew it quickly. I followed him and, with a minimum of pressure, found out that he’d seen Delehanty go out at nine.

Leaving the hotel, I walked the half block to the Avenue. In the daytime the street is congested with cars slowing to turn, with drivers stopping abruptly to chat with pedestrian friends. No one uses Telegraph for a thoroughfare. Even now, when a driver could cruise the street unhindered, no one thought of it. And with the yellow glow of the streetlights and the abandoned street, the empty Avenue looked like a sepia-toned photograph.

I walked quickly toward campus, checking in the few coffee houses that were still open, looking in doorways, peering down alleyways. Finding nothing, I hurriedly surveyed the far side of the street, walking at almost a jog. But it was clear that Quentin Delehanty was nowhere on the Avenue. He was probably at some friend’s place, drinking. He could be wandering home soon. He could be there for the night. After all, he had few demands on his time.

Disgusted at the waste of an hour, I climbed back into the car and cruised slowly up the Avenue, mostly for form’s sake; I didn’t really expect to see Delehanty.

I’d imagined by now Delehanty would have told me what had occurred in Anne’s apartment Monday night. He was there; Anne was there; the black woman was there; and Nat.

Nat! I stepped sharply on the gas and headed for Nat’s house across town in north Berkeley. Normally it would be a twenty-minute drive; this late, I’d make it in little more than ten.

Nat hated to be woken up. Too bad. If he’d been honest in the beginning he could have slept undisturbed. If he had a decent conscience,
it
would be keeping him awake. I pulled the wheel sharply as I rounded the corner to the house. The tires squealed. Was I taking on the role of conscience for the entire block?

A bit sheepishly I got out of the car. It was a pleasant street of stucco houses, inhabited by small families. Most windows were dark now. But at Nat’s the light was on. I knocked and in a minute the door opened. Nat’s hair hung disheveled as it had in the library, and behind him, beyond the darkened living room, I could see his dissertation, notes, and reference books spread all across the dining room table. The house looked the same—a small four-room square, living room and dining room on the south side, bedroom and kitchen on the north. I hadn’t been here in six months, but as I stepped inside, those months disappeared, and with them all the objectivity I’d worked to attain.

“You lied to me. You were in Anne’s apartment Monday night. What happened there?”

“What?”

“Fern Day saw you leave.”

“So she was the one in the car. She must have been spying on Anne. Jesus Christ!”

From the kitchen came the smell of frying eggs. Omelets in the middle of all-nighters had been one of Nat’s specialties. He must have noted the smell now, for he started toward the kitchen.

Was Nat’s defensive reaction a clumsy attempt to cover guilt? Or was this just Nat’s reaction to me?

Following, I said, “What happened in Anne’s apartment Monday night? What did the old man do? And the black woman?”

Nat looked at me, incredulous. “There was no man or woman there. Just Anne and me.”

“Fern saw the man.”

“I don’t care what Fern Day may think she saw, or may have seen later. God knows how long Fern Day would sit outside Anne’s, spying. Boy, that’s just like her—voyeurism. But when I was inside, there was no one but Anne and me. And, Jill, I was only there ten minutes, fifteen at the outside. We talked. I left. Anne was fine.”

“I’m assuming you’re telling the truth now. This will all be cross-checked.”

He spun around. “Is that why you had that oaf out badgering Owen? You’re prying into my life, aren’t you?”

I had forgotten Nat’s detestation of Howard. They’d met only twice, and then briefly, but when things deteriorated between us, Howard had come to symbolize the police department in Nat’s mind and all the hostility he hadn’t focused on me he’d aimed at Howard.

“You left me no choice. You lied.”

Nat moved closer and glared down. “I won’t have my friends hounded by the police. And I won’t have you checking up on me.”

“You asked me to investigate this as a favor, and then you lied. Nat, you are a suspect.”

“No, Jill, Anne was fine when I left her. You’re just angry because I didn’t tell you every move I made.”

I knew that tone and the multitude of references inherent in that statement. I was too familiar with this tack—the problem, according to Nat, was not his dishonesty; the problem was my anger. I pushed the memories from my mind. “Why didn’t you tell me you were there?”