Point No Point (4 page)

His answer jolted her at first, but then it made sense. So it was Anne’s gun, possibly kept in the bedside table drawer in case of an intruder. “Let’s get you out of here. I need to make a couple calls.”

“There’s a phone in the kitchen,” Chet said as he followed her out of the room. Rich walked right next to him.

Claire called in to the dispatcher and asked that whoever was on hand be sent out to the Baldwin house. Then she turned her attention back to Chet. “I’m going to be asking you some questions now and I’m going to be asking them as a deputy sheriff. You understand.”

He lifted up his head slowly as if it weighed almost too much for his neck to carry. “Yes, Claire, I do.”

She had to stop herself from moving in on him and giving him a consoling hug. Sorrow radiated off of him in waves. “These questions might seem scary, but that’s just what I have to do. Try to answer them as best you can. Do you understand?”

“Claire,” Rich started to say, but she shot him a dirty look.

“Do you understand, Chet?” she asked again.

Rich said slowly and clearly, barely controlling his anger. “Give the guy a break, Claire. His wife is dead. He’s in shock. Let’s get him something to drink.”

“This is not a social visit. What happened here tonight?” Claire asked Chet, wishing somehow that she could get Rich out of this house. She tried to send him a thought dagger or two, but his ESP seemed not to be working, or he was totally ignoring her. He moved in closer to Chet as if to protect his friend from Claire’s questions. “How did the gun go off?”

Chet bowed his head and shook it back and forth.

Rich put an arm on his friend’s shoulder and said, “Let’s all go and sit down. Chet will tell us what happened here. He didn’t do anything to his wife, for god’s sake, he’s on the county board.”

“What does that have to do with anything?” Claire asked.

“You know what I’m trying to say, Claire. He’s a good person,” Rich said.

Claire felt like another person had stepped into her body. A very angry woman was taking over. “Rich, you need to back off. It’s my job to ask Chet whatever I need to in order to understand what took place in this room. For god’s sake, a dead woman is lying on the bed. Now, you either shut up or get out of here. But Chet needs to answer some questions right now.”

Rich grabbed Chet’s arm and turned the dazed man so he was no longer facing toward Claire. He spoke quietly. “Chet, you don’t need to say anything right now. Take your time.”

“I don’t mind answering some questions. Claire’s got a right to know. It’s her job,” Chet said. He turned back toward Claire.

“What happened tonight?” Claire asked.

“We had a fight,” Chet started, then sagged more. “You know, we never fought. In all our ten years together. I mean, maybe over the laundry or something stupid, but this was a real fight. All my fault.”

“What were you fighting about?”

Chet shook his head, didn’t answer.

“Did the gun go off during this fight?” Claire asked.

“No, not then.”

“When?”

Chet lifted his head again as if he were coming up for air. “Well, I went for a walk after the fight. I needed to get out of here. It must have happened sometime after I left and before I got back.”

“How long were you gone?”

“About an hour or so, I’d guess.”

“Can anyone confirm that you went for a walk?” Claire asked. “Did you see anyone?”

“Just Bentley.”

Claire felt hopeful.

Then he added, “Anne’s dog.”

A
my parked her squad car behind Claire’s. She sat for a moment and drank the dregs of her coffee. It was after two in the morning. All she wanted to do was lean her head forward onto the steering wheel, close her eyes, and go away. Just her luck that Claire’s call had caught her as she was finishing up with the medical examiner. Another minute or two and she would have been out the door, on her way home to a beer, an hour of late-night TV, and some much needed sleep.

But Claire had said there had been a shooting and they needed to secure the premises and call in reinforcements. It wasn’t a drill they went through very often and Amy would rather not miss it.

Pepin County had been very quiet since the meth bust they had a year or so ago. Just the usual toilet-paperings, drunk drivers, dead deer, and motorcycle accidents. In the two years since Amy had joined the department, motorcycle accidents had increased in the county by fifty percent.

All these old geezers were trying for a second teenage-hood by buying the Harleys they couldn’t afford when they were seventeen. Some of them weren’t living to talk about it. They had discovered how fun it was to drive along the shore of Lake Pepin

and through the bluffs of Pepin County, disturbing the locals with their loud tailpipes, scaring the livestock, and not always being able to avoid either the wildlife or each other. Bad things happened to people when they flew off bikes at high speeds, or even low. Things she wished she hadn’t seen: limbs severed, skin torn away to bone, head trauma so bad that the skull appeared to have the fragility of an eggshell.

Amy stepped out of the car and threw that last bitter sip of coffee onto the ground, then tossed her mug back onto the seat of her car. The air was still warm and very humid, making it feel like she was in a sauna. She could smell some flower blooming, but didn’t know enough to identify the cloyingly sweet smell. The lights in the house were on.

All Claire had said was there had been a shooting and a woman was dead, her husband near hysterical. Amy wondered what she would find inside.

* * *

Rich watched in dismay as Claire gave Amy the job of babysitting Chet. As if she didn’t even trust him to take care of his friend. She left the three of them sitting at the kitchen table: chunky, blond Amy who was valiantly trying to stay awake; Chet, who would sit silently for a while and then talk non-stop as if he could scramble back in time if he worked hard enough; and Rich, who was wondering what the hell was going on with Claire.

Rich had never seen her like this before. She was acting as if he was infringing on her territory, and she was being mean about it. The meanness was the part that concerned him.

More deputies entered the house, some of them sticking their heads into the kitchen and giving the nod to him and Amy. Bill Peterson came in and rubbed Amy’s shoulders for a second. At first, Rich was surprised, then he remembered that Claire had told him that the two deputies were seeing each other socially. No one said anything to Chet even though a few of the deputies knew him.

Suddenly Chet started talking, launching into the middle of a conversation. “Did I ever tell you about the first time I saw Anne?”

Rich knew the story well, the tale of a dance where Chet had met Anne, but he shook his head because he knew Chet needed to tell this, needed to have Anne alive for a moment again.

“I didn’t usually go to those things, those square dances. You know me, Rich. I’m not that kind of a guy. Dancing reminds me of someone having an epileptic fit. So it was weird that I would go to this dance. I think I was just killing time. But I went and I stood against the wall and I watched all these people promenading around the room in these crazy outfits, women in turquoise skirts all puffed out like upside-down petunias. And most of them knew exactly what they were doing, like precision dancing, do-se-doing when they were supposed to, alamanding left and the whole nine yards.”

Chet stopped talking and his tongue strayed out to his dry lips and Rich knew he was back there, could smell the sweat off the swirling dancers.

“Anyways, then I saw her. She was wearing a pair of jeans and some kind of shirt. She didn’t know when to do-se-do or

promenade, but as she got swinging and her blond hair was flying, she was just having so much fun—she was having the time of her life.” He paused again. “I knew I wanted in.”

Rich nodded.

Chet continued, “We got married three months later. You remember. I think I surprised myself, I surprised everyone. Confirmed bachelor. That was awful fast, but I knew that she was the one. You know how you know.”

Amy lifted her chin up from the cup of her hands. “How do you know?”

“When they make you want to live more than you ever have before. Besides, she was a hell of a cook.” Chet’s eyes filled up. “She made Reuben sandwiches last night with potato salad. She knows how much I like her potato salad.”

Rich thought about the meal he had made for the birthday party earlier that evening. He couldn’t believe that was only a few hours ago. He wondered if Claire had appreciated it; if she appreciated what he did for her anymore. It seemed like she took him for granted and then she yelled at him when he wanted to help out his old friend.

“Chet, you want me to stay here tonight?”

Chet shook his head. “No need for that, Rich. It won’t matter. I don’t really care what happens any more. I deserve it all.”

Rich couldn’t believe he heard Chet say that. Even though he was afraid to hear the answer, he couldn’t help but asking, “What d’you mean?”

“What more can they do to me? I lost the love of my life. My beautiful Anne. Not much else matters.”

“Chet, you’ve got to take care of yourself. You might think

about calling a lawyer before you talk to Claire. This is serious.”

Claire stepped into the room, but didn’t look at Rich.

He hoped she hadn’t heard what he had just said to Chet. She would claim he was interfering again. All he was doing was being a friend to Chet.

“Amy, could you go back and help Speedo with the photos? Just make sure he takes shots from all angles. And then if you would watch the body until it gets moved to the morgue. Then head home. I know you’re working way past your shift. I’m going to take Chet back to the department with me.”

Chet bent his head over.

Claire turned to Rich, “Before you say anything, I’m taking him in because I need to talk to him and find out what happened here. He can’t stay here, obviously. Won’t hurt him to stay in the jail overnight. He can talk to whoever he wants in the morning. I’ll make sure of that.”

Rich decided not to argue with her.

Chet looked up at Rich. “Could you feed Bentley and see that the horses get let out to pasture in the morning?”

“Sure, Chet.”

“Can’t let anything happen to Bentley. Anne loved that damn dog almost as much as she loved me.”

* * *

A deep, dark moonless night was all around them as Claire headed away from the river and up Highway 25 toward Durand. Good thing she knew this road so well. It was lightly lit by the squad car headlights, one of which seemed to be turned a little

high and slanted off to the right, catching the edge of the corn fields. She kept her eyes sharp for animals running across the road. Deer were the biggest problem. They could total a car, but she even hated to hit raccoons or possums.

Chet sat next to her in the squad car—she had seen no reason to put him in the back, even though it was procedure—and stared straight ahead as they drove through the night down Highway 25. On the best of days, Chet wasn’t chatty, and tonight he wasn’t saying a word. Claire wasn’t sure what to make of his silence. She wanted to give him beyond the benefit of a doubt, but it was hard given what she had seen at his house.

As much as she hated to admit it, she was betting that Chet had killed his wife, but—knowing too how in love they had been, having seen them together for many years and never having witnessed a mean word between them—she hadn’t a clue as to why. But at the moment he was the only suspect. And, from her long years of working homicide, she knew that people were most often killed by family, by their loved ones.

At the moment, she just wanted to get him to the jail, do a gunpowder residue test on his hands to document that he had held the gun, and put him to bed. She had to remember to ask the medical examiner to do a similar test on Anne. Maybe, when they got the results of these two tests, it would be clear what happened.

It was nearly three o’clock in the morning and Claire was starting to seriously fade, feeling a tiredness that no caffeine could alleviate. She was afraid she was in no shape to drive home. She might just sleep at the jail herself—there was a bunk that sheriff’s personnel could use.

Most people were killed at night. It made sense—most murders involved drinking—but the older she got the harder it was for her to work so late. It didn’t appear that either Chet or Anne had been drinking, although she knew they enjoyed a bottle of beer and a glass of wine as much as the next person. Even though Chet said they had argued, there had been no signs of struggle anywhere in the house.

From her many long years of seeing such crime scenes, Claire was convinced that Anne had been killed by someone else’s hand, probably her husband’s, and that she had not suicided. Two concrete facts steered her thinking in that direction: First, there had been no suicide note. Claire had looked hard—under the pillows, in the bedside tables, in Chet’s office and even in the kitchen before they left the house—maybe one would turn up but she doubted it. Such notes weren’t usually hidden.

The second fact was that Anne hadn’t died in the bed. She had died, probably standing up, in the middle of the living room. Claire had found a large blood stain on the oriental rug. It had been hard to see at first because of the matching dark red color of much of the intricate pattern of the wool rug, but Claire had taken a Kleenex and pressed it into the fabric and it pulled out a smear of fresh red liquid, most certainly blood. Then there was the hole in the middle of the forehead, most suicides shot themselves in the temple.

Women who killed themselves almost always left a note trying to explain their actions—weren’t women always trying to explain themselves?—and usually killed themselves lying down in bed, not standing in the middle of the living room.

All this lessened the possibility that Anne had killed herself. And if someone else killed her, Chet was the only suspect.

Then there was Chet’s behavior. She had seen enough killers when she worked in Minneapolis to know how some of them reacted in the aftermath of a murder they had committed. They were capable of a disassembling, grieving the death as if they had had nothing to do with it. In many cases their sorrow was real. Appalled at what they had done, wishing they could undo it, they were not acting when they cried and mourned their victim’s passing. But, like Chet, they rarely offered a good explanation for what had happened.