Butterfly Sunday (28 page)

MONDAY, APRIL 24, 2000

5:55 P.M.

Blue’s right hand took the receiver away from Leona. Then he unplugged the phone.

“You’ve lost your mind.”

He handed her the typed page he’d been reading. It was from a file that the late sheriff Meeks had made of his investigation into Henri Churchill’s death, an interview with one of Henri Churchill’s employees.

“What’s the point?”

“There was a lot of speculation that it wasn’t an accident.”

Leona lost it. If Blue didn’t wake up, the county was going to fire and then prosecute him for obstruction of justice.

“For God’s sake! What difference does it make if Soames hung him on the courthouse lawn in front of a
thousand witnesses? I measured out that nasty powder and dumped it into Averill’s food and watched him eat it for three days in a row.” Then, mostly to make Blue calm down a little, she read the damned interview.

Sarah Robbins, now deceased, had been a childless young wife of twenty-seven when she became Henri Churchill’s nurse and caregiver. She had come back to work for Henri Churchill as a cook shortly after his first wife died and he began spending more time at the farm. She was seventy-six when the sheriff interviewed her. This was a week after Henri’s death. She had already quit her job.

According to Sarah, Henri was away on business more than half the time. Soames got bored and lonely. He had taken her all over the world during the early years of their marriage. Now he was drawing in the reins. Her spending had gotten out of control. He clipped her credit cards and to some extent her wings. He sold his big old house in Memphis and rented the apartments in New York and Paris.

“He really put her down on the farm,” Sarah had told Sheriff Meeks. Like a lot of rich men’s wives, Soames falsely presumed the confidence of her domestic helpers. Aside from Sarah, there was a younger married couple living on the place. The man worked full-time as a groundskeeper. His wife washed and ironed linens and took care of the dozen or so upstairs rooms. Soames made a big deal to Sarah that, in spite of the fact that they were white people, she held the dark woman in higher esteem. (Meeks had that circled in purple. That meant it corroborated something else, probably something about Soames’s background.)

Henri had told Sarah that Soames had invented her genteel background in order to seem a good match for him. Sarah was sketchy about the truth, but Henri’s investigators had disproved many of her claims. She hadn’t attended Smith College. Her grandmother wasn’t a Whitney. Her mother had never been an heiress; nor had she lost millions in a fraudulent art deal. Sarah ran on at some length.

Soames, according to Sarah, was dying to have a baby. She wasn’t naïve enough to think that would cure Henri’s wanderlust. She whined that she had accepted the fact that she had been chosen for a wife by medieval standards. Her bloodlines were more important to her husband than she was. She was his proper public
counterpart. Otherwise he was a man like all the rest. He couldn’t manage intimacy with a peer. He wanted to do his wallowing with some cloven platinum swine. No, she wanted a baby because she needed love. She deserved love. If Henri was going to imprison her there in his fortress, leaving her behind with the drawbridge raised, then why couldn’t he at least avail himself when she was ovulating? Soames wondered if it was deliberate.

Sarah knew it was deliberate. Soames had been very naïve to share secrets with the woman who had raised her husband. They were like mother and son. Henri often called Sarah’s house at night when he was away. She knew that he was seeing a woman from Atlanta. He had long since told her that Soames had cuckolded him while he was still blind with grief over his first wife. Soames was a gold-digging sociopath and a piranha in heat, according to Henri.

Sarah also knew how to reach Henri night or day. She was soaking up information from Soames like a deep-sea sponge. Sarah tipped off Henri that Soames had her sources and wiles. She said she had a cache of photographs and receipts. If Henri divorced her, she was prepared to convince the court that he was a philandering wife beater. She’d walk out of the courthouse with millions.

Henri was determined not to let that happen. He told Sarah he’d hire a hit man before he’d spend a dime on a divorce lawyer. Unless, of course, he caught his beloved spouse cheating on him. In that case, he’d get rid of her and she’d be lucky if she got a dime.

Henri had set a trap. Soames hadn’t expected him until the following morning. He had a hidden camera taping them. He waited until they were through. Then, according to what he told Sarah later that night, he strolled into the room and ordered Soames out. She got dressed without a word. She said she would give her address to Sarah, so that she could send her clothes. Henri nodded his assent. Soames wished him a Merry Christmas. Then she drove off with the preacher.

The name (Averill Sayres) was printed in tremulous black ballpoint on the margin.

Leona took a moment to absorb it. Or at least some of it. Soames and Averill had had an affair. So why all her trips to the cemetery to put fresh flower arrangements on Henri’s grave once or twice a week? If Henri Churchill hadn’t died … Then she remembered something. No, it was too obvious. She was mistaken.

“How long after all this was it before Henri Churchill died?”

Blue grinned at her just as if any of it was going to make a difference.

“About twelve hours.”

Leona didn’t want to get bogged down in what it had all meant in the past. She kept sifting it for some relevance to her current situation. Blue was acting like there was.

“What’s it give us, Blue?”

“Us? Nothing.”

Her heart went to her shoes. This was infuriating. Blue was spinning nonsense and she was buying into it. She had to knock him back to his senses. She hated him so much in that moment that she could hardly stand to look at him. He kept up his annoying grin. The longer he held on to his toothy Pepsodent smile, the more Leona was convinced of the recent and direct link between humans and apes.

“Blue, what the holy hell has you grinning like an idiot?”

“It gives us nothing, Leona; but it gives Soames a motive.”

“For what?”

“For shooting Averill Sayres at close range through the skull.”

“What motive?”

“He was both her accomplice and witness.”

Blue handed her another page from Sheriff Meeks’s interview with Sarah.

Sarah claimed that she had come to the house early on Christmas morning and given Henri his breakfast. He was dressed for hunting. He said he was going out to shoot quail. Sarah washed up. The house was immaculate. Henri was planning to catch an early afternoon plane from Memphis to Atlanta. He would be at his fiancée’s house in Atlanta in plenty of time for a six-thirty dinner. He had a four-and-a-half-carat diamond solitaire engagement ring in his pocket, and he showed it to Sarah that morning. Sarah left before eight o’clock and drove fifty miles to spend the day and night with her sister’s family in Tupelo.

Soames had called for an ambulance at 11:10 A.M. It
arrived at 11:35. A county highway patrol unit delivered two deputies to the scene five minutes later. The two men later reported that they had walked in on a typical Christmas morning scene. There were open presents to and from Soames and Henri under the tree. She had a ham in the oven. Two plates and the remains of a giant holiday breakfast sat on the kitchen table. The dining room table was laid with all the best things in the house. They were expecting a dozen dinner guests.

Leona handed the page back to Blue.

“Soames didn’t have time to kill him, rig up a suicide and do all that stuff inside the house to make it look like she and Henri were celebrating Christmas together.”

“Averill helped her.”

“I’d put money on it.”

“Why wasn’t this thing investigated?”

Blue showed her a two-foot stack of documents. The thing was investigated. The coroner’s report indicated doubt that the bullet hole was caused by a .22 gauge rifle. It seemed a bit too small. He also indicated some doubt as to whether the weapon had been fired at the close range Soames’s story indicated. The damaged area seemed a little too clean. Yet the coroner’s conclusion was that Henri Churchill’s death was an accidental, self-inflicted bullet wound.

“How?”

Blue shrugged with impatience. He was even more aware of the gathering threat outside of his office door than Leona was. He also knew that the tiny thread of hope he was attempting to ravel could well break off in his hand. The results of his brash attempt to strong-arm the system could very likely mean going to prison.

Yet he understood the tragic nature of justice. Once
Leona was charged with murder, the wheels would begin their inevitable process. The law would take precedence without regard to mitigating factors. People were quick to insist that truth was never absolute. Sometimes the truth was a pair of incompatible facts, neither of which would stand alone. Yet their laws made no such allowances. Right and wrong were pure, absolute, immutable and all-powerful.

Why did people expect so much from the criminal justice system? Most had no idea how it worked nor much interest in finding out, for that matter. They wanted justice, law and order for a ludicrous little bit of their tax dollars. The pay was insulting. The risks and the hours involved were inhuman. Who did they think it attracted?

It attracted two kinds of people. He was an example of one. He wasn’t college material. He had three babies and a dead-end job on an assembly line. It was one on a tiny list of opportunities for a man like him to acquire health insurance and some kind of retirement plan. Did people really believe a man wanted to spend his best years hauling in wife beaters and pulling dead kids out of wrecks, ninety-nine percent of whom would have walked away if they’d either buckled their frigging seat belts or left the beer alone?

The other kind of people law enforcement attracted were the ones he called “the nowheres.” They were criminals who hid behind the system. They served and protected their own interests. They were bullies who extorted favors from business owners and protected drug dealers for a cut of the profits. If you weren’t that kind when you started, the odds were fifty-fifty you’d burn out and cross the line at some point.

There wasn’t a law on the books that couldn’t be
broken with impunity. All it took was concerted indifference to the lives of others. Blue had a sixth sense about people, an intuition for character. The majority of people he arrested and interrogated were salvageable. They had gotten themselves balled up in situations. A lot of them would eventually serve time. When they lied in an effort to save their own skin, it was obvious. They had an underlying sense of decency that betrayed them.

Not Soames Churchill. Soames was a rare and dangerous beast of prey in the guise of a lost and lonely widow. Soames had an innate lack of interest in others. She could feign kindness and generosity. She could play the awkward, self-deprecating fool. She could play those things so well that people dropped their guard. She could seem anything to anyone when it helped her accomplish her agenda. She could endear or seduce or make love to, even marry, a man and then shoot him in the sunshine on Christmas Day while he begged for his life. She could do that and then walk back inside the house and sit down to an enormous breakfast.

“You mean she bribed the coroner?”

“Or slept with him or paid some goon to scare his wife.”

“Maybe he figured he had nothing but guesses and hearsay.”

“Or two more stiffs in the cooler and his dinner waiting.”

“What about Henri Churchill’s lady friend in Atlanta?”

“Sarah claimed she didn’t even know her name.”

“But she knew how to reach Henri at all times!”

Blue smiled with irony. Did Leona really think Sarah would say anything that would tarnish Henri Churchill?

“Even if it meant Soames got away with his murder?”

“His reputation meant more to Sarah.”

“But she could have corroborated Sarah’s story.”

Leona was too earthy to give much credence to appearances. Other people’s opinions were the worst reason for keeping secrets. While it was true that she had taken a fatal turn up Whitsunday Hill for appearances’ sake, she had done it in a moment of blindness and pain. She felt at the time she owed it to her mother’s memory. Yet even then she had bowed to respectability by the hardest. If she had learned anything from her sojourn in the wilderness, she had learned the tragic price of appearances.