Death at the Wheel (29 page)

"Hey, wait a minute!" he yelled. "You don't think... they don't think... but I didn't kill Jon. I told you. That was someone trying to kill me. I was supposed to drive first. Only I let Jon go instead... and then, when I saw that he'd taken my helmet... and he was already dying... I just saw my chance and I took it." He stared at us, dumbfounded. "You've got to believe me. Someone tampered with that car.... It must have been Julie's cretin brother. There was no way either one of them was going to let me have a divorce."

"Divorce?" I said.

"So I could marry Nan," he said. I looked around. Nan was nowhere to be seen.

"Listen, you miserable excuse for a human being," I said, "that business about people not letting you get a divorce. It's bullshit. We have no-fault divorce in Massachusetts. All you have to do is to be willing to fight about property, instead of just having your own way, or, as it appears you've planned to do here, just walking away and leaving all your responsibilities behind. And what about your cousin Jon? Did the feelings of the people who loved him really not matter at all?"

I might as well have spoken to my foot. Bass wasn't listening. He was fretting about my accusation that he might be responsible for anything that happened. "It wasn't me," he repeated. "None of it was me. I didn't do anything. Look, give me a break here. So I made a mistake about Jon. So I lied to the cops. That's not some big-deal crime or anything. I'd be willing to talk about that.... It was just the shock and confusion of the moment. I was in a bind there. I saw an opportunity and took it. There's nothing so bad about that."

"Cal," I said. He stopped babbling and looked at me hopefully. "Save it for the judge, okay? I wouldn't care if they put you in a roomful of rats and lost the key." Andre opened the door to a gaggle of Grantham cops and we went home to bed.

 

 

 

Chapter 22

 

"Are you thinking what I'm thinking?" I asked Andre over breakfast.

"That it's almost time for bed?" he said, grabbing the last slice of toast and slathering it with jam.

"That and something else."

"I ate the last piece of toast and didn't offer you any?"

"I'm used to that. Try again."

"That Bass didn't do it?"

"Yeah." I reached over and swept a bit of jam off his cheek. "But who then?"

"Who had the most to gain from Bass's death?"

"The most? Hard to say. Julie, of course, would have been comfortable financially and free to marry her lover. But he isn't free to marry her. And she loved her husband. Or had once loved him. And she cared about having a father for her kids. Her brother? He would have removed a threat to his beloved sister. Eliot Ramsay would have removed a threat to his reputation and had a convenient fall guy for those troublesome loan applications."

"What about your mother?" Andre suggested.

"My mother?" I considered for a minute. "Oh, I see. But I don't think so, Andre. She knows nothing about cars... the guys at the garage have to show her how to open the hood. She's never even put air in a tire." Andre has a thing about my mother. I admit it. But she started it. She was going to have a conniption if we decided to live together. Worse, she might finally have to stop referring to him as "Andy" or "that cop."

He reached over and put a hand over mine. "You're cold," he said. "What about the boyfriend, then?"

"Durren? I doubt it. He's such a wimp. Handshake like a dead fish. Cringes when I use unladylike language and he's always picking imaginary lint off his clothes. I can hardly see him sneaking down to Connecticut in the dead of night, much less crawling under a car and disabling it."

"He got the letters."

"Yes, and dropped one in the front yard."

"Stranger things have happened."

"Like this?" I said, standing up and slowly unbuttoning my shirt. I turned away from him and walked toward the bedroom, dropping clothes as I went. Andre came behind me, collecting them, muttering about always having to pick up after people.

Later, lying in the bed, he said, "Come live with me and be my love."

I sighed. "I may have to do that," I said. "I'm finding it increasingly hard to live without you."

"That's all I ask. That you'll think about it." He rubbed his stubbly face across my stomach.

"But what if we find out that it's all physical?"

He stopped rubbing and grinned up at me, his sexy eyebrows arching. "You mean, sex and food? You mean, what will we talk about on long winter evenings?"

"Mm-hm."

"I will read you Dickens and you will tell me all the gossip on the private school circuit. I will share all the nefarious doings of Maine's felonious residents and you will strum your lute and sing madrigals. I will braid you hair into a Medusan masterpiece and you can tenderly clip my toenails."

"Yuck!"

"Okay, I will tell you about my 'misspent youth' and you tell me about yours."

"But I didn't misspend my youth."

He twisted an imaginary mustache. "You're still young and there's no time like the present."

"We can speculate on the sex life of my brother Michael and his chronic Sonia."

"Or wonder why my sister can't seem to stop having children."

"Speaking of having children," I said, "something strange is happening to your body."

"Happens whenever I think about sex and I'm near you. And there's only one cure...."

I didn't bother to tell him there was more than one cure. I was happy to see things from his point of view for a change. Despite a healing wound on my thigh and residual scrapes and bruises from my encounter with Duncan Donahue, I felt great. We cured his problem in the good old-fashioned way and went back to sleep. And we slept and slept and slept.

Around two in the afternoon the phone woke us. I didn't want to answer it. It was such a perfect day anything would have been an intrusion, but Andre insisted. It was my mother and she was in an awful state. "Oh, Theadora, I don't know how this could have happened. I'm so upset. I hope you'll forgive me. Please say you'll forgive me!"

For a fraction of a second, I expected her to confess to killing Calvin Bass, that is, Jon Bass, just as Andre had suggested, but not for long. "I've gone and invited everyone else and suddenly I realized that in all the confusion of this past week... all these awful things happening with Julie... that I forgot to invite you."

"Invite me where? Invite me when? Ouch!" Andre had chosen that moment to peel off the bandage. "No. Mom. I'm okay. Just an old bullet wound. What invitation?" Her squawk could have been heard across the parking lot. Andre grinned diabolically and went to get surgical supplies.

"Relax. I was joking. What invitation?" I listened to a garble of explanation and apology and my spirits began to sink.

"And Sonia's whole family. I've only met her parents, but this time her brother and his wife and her sister and her husband and their children, and her aunt, and of course your Aunt Rita and Uncle Henry, and so I don't know how... you know I'm not disorganized... but somehow, when I was straightening up my desk, there was your invitation, buried under some things. I'd totally forgotten to mail it."

There was a caterwauling sound from the other room as my smoke alarm went off. "Damn," I said. "I'm sorry, Mom, I've got to go. The smoke detector's gone mad. I'll call—"

"Wait, Thea," she wailed. "Don't go yet. The dinner. It's tonight! Six-thirty, because of the children. Don't be late. Bring some of that great bluefish pate you make. I promised Sonia. And darling, this is an engagement party, so do dress accordingly."

I hung up the phone, using all my self-control to keep from slamming it, and stormed into the living room. Andre, looking even better than Jim Palmer in his briefs, was standing on a chair, holding a candle under the smoke detector. "You are a fiend!" I said, trying to knock over the chair. "Stop that. I cause any more trouble and I'm going to get run out of this place on a rail."

He waved his hands to disperse the smoke, hopped down, and set the candle on the counter. "Got you off the phone, didn't it?"

"What am I going to do with you?"

Ignoring my question, he waggled a box of Band-Aids in my face. "Dr. Lemieux will see you now."

"I hate doctors. You know that. And besides, I'm annoyed with you."

He disappeared into the bedroom, reappearing in the doorway a minute later with his white handkerchief on his head, folded into a little white cap. "Nurse Lemieux will see you now." The white cap, white briefs, and foolishly happy smile were too much for me. I went into Nurse Lemieux's office and shut the door and when we came out, we were both wearing foolishly happy smiles and it was time for a very late lunch.

Andre made grilled cheese and tuna sandwiches while I dug through the freezer for a piece of smoked bluefish. You can buy bluefish pate in fancy stores for lots of money, or you can do it the Kozak way: dump a chunk of smoked bluefish into the food processor. Dump in a package of cream cheese. Add a tablespoon or two of lemon juice. Bottled horseradish to taste. A bit of salt and pepper. If it seems too thick, thin it with cream. And voila! A two-minute culinary masterpiece. Delicious served with slices of English cucumber. You want to get really fancy, score the cucumber with a fork before you slice it.

After lunch we showered and did dishes and then it was time for Andre to leave. I'm not the clingy type, but I had a hard time letting him go. It wasn't any easier for him. "I'm sick of saying good-bye to you," he said.

"I told you I would consider your suggestion." He gave me the kind of kiss that usually means we delay his departure another hour. "Now don't start that," I said, pushing him away.

"Just something to remember me by."

"I couldn't get the memory of Nurse Lemieux out of my head in a thousand years."

I watched him get in the car and back out, thinking about the white briefs and the white cap and his broad chest and furred stomach and warm and gentle fingers and I was lonely before the car was out of sight.

I went inside and opened my closet and thought about what to wear. What was an appropriate outfit for a dinner that made me want to throw up? I had a little time before I had to start thinking about that. I pulled on jeans and a jacket and went to walk on the beach.

I skipped rocks and found a few shells, and then I lay down on a sheltered patch of warm sand and watched sea gulls wheeling in the sky overhead, shrieking their raucous cries. There wasn't a cloud to mar the clear, wide blue. I dozed in the sun's soothing warmth, but not for long. Being still, in mind or body, is not in my nature. With Andre and all his absurd distractions gone, the complex questions of the day before came flowing back. It wasn't my problem any more. I'd done my bit. I'd found other suspects, questions, possibilities, scenarios, and shared them with myriad police. If Bass's story was true, Julie might not be off the hook, but at least the cops had enough information to consider other suspects. Maybe her lawyer could make enough out of that to get her out on bail.

Tonight I could fill my mother in. Now, since the police couldn't be counted on to do it, I'd better get in touch with Julie's lawyer and, while I was at it, with Durren, because he seemed so worried.

Julie's lawyer was shocked, surprised, and more than a bit confused. I would be, too, if I suddenly found myself defending somebody who was accused of murdering a man who wasn't dead. He wanted to ask me a lot of questions. I told him to contact the police instead. I felt like I'd been wearing a heavy pack and now it was getting lighter and lighter, until I felt like I was floating. When I left my message on Durren's answering machine, I was so light I almost grazed the ceiling.

 

 

 

Chapter 23

 

If I were a pessimist, I'd say life has it in for me. Instead, I'll just say that when I came out of the shower, the phone rang and fate whacked me with a big wet codfish, full in the face. Maybe it was a whole bucket of fish. The fish came from Andre, calling me from the road. I thought it was just romance, that he was calling because he missed me and he couldn't wait until he got home to say so. But no.