The Payback Man (22 page)

Eleanor pushed Steve and his father into the conference room and shut the door. So much for “men do not cry.” She’d seen the Colonel’s face, watched the tears spill.

She motioned to Mrs. Peterson and whispered to Alva Jean, “Would you try to keep everyone away from the conference room for a few minutes?”

“You okay? Who was that man, anyway?”

“Steve’s father. I put them in the conference room so they could have a little privacy.”

“Rick won’t like it. Steve’s supposed to be here working, not seeing visitors.”

“He’ll make up the time. Alva Jean, those two haven’t seen each other in three years. I’ve got enough rules at the farm. I don’t need a bunch more here.”

“Sure. Okay.” Alva Jean picked up the phone.

“Sorry I was short with you, Alva Jean,” Eleanor said. “I guess I’m just tired.”

“Sure.”

Eleanor sighed and went to find Rick to tell him what was happening and that Leslie Vickers would meet Steve on Friday, if he agreed. It was, after all, Rick’s clinic. She was his employee.

“I don’t want to get dragged into any court cases,” Rick said. “Don’t they have places at the farm where prisoners meet with their lawyers?”

“This would be more private. And I promise the clinic won’t be dragged into anything.”

“Well, all right. But don’t make a habit of it. Steve’s doing a great job and so is Big, but I’m still not totally convinced this work-release thing is good.”

“Thanks, Rick.” She’d left Big watching the young stallion who’d had his sesamoid operated on. He was in
one of the totally padded recovery stalls, but he was the sort of horse who might come out of the anesthetic fighting and ruin Mac Thorn’s superb arthroscopic surgery.

“He’s standing up, Doc,” Big said. “He’s kind of weaving, but he’s got weight on all four legs.”

“Good. I’ll take over for a while. Thanks, Big.”

She longed to listen in on Steve’s conversation with his father. Would they managed to make amends, or wind up even more estranged than before?

She couldn’t believe Steve would even consider killing Neil Waters. Not after what had happened between them. She thought their lovemaking had meant something to him.

Was it strong enough to stop him from throwing away his life?

She said she’d fought death once and lost. Fate had given her a second chance. This time she must not lose. She was not battling for Neil’s life, but for Steve’s soul.

She knew now she loved him. She couldn’t lose again. Not this man. And not this way.

J
UST BEFORE TEN-THIRTY
on Friday morning, Leslie Vickers arrived at Creature Comfort in a black limousine.

The man who came to the clinic with him wore a brown suit that had seen better days several years and twenty pounds ago. Vickers carried a neat leather briefcase. The other man carried a beat-up brown briefcase that looked as though it probably held his lunch.

“Damn,” Steve whispered as the man struggled to remove his bulk from the back seat of the limousine. “Schockley. What the hell is Vickers doing bringing him?”

Vickers shook Steve’s hand warmly as though they were old business acquaintances who hadn’t collaborated in a while. He pointedly ignored Steve’s prison jeans and work shirt. “You remember Charlie Schockley?”

Their eyes met. Neither offered a hand.

“Charlie’s retired from the force. He works for me now.” Vickers slapped Schockley on the shoulder. “Side of the angels for a change, eh, Schockley?”

“Mostly the side of the devil, but it pays the bills.”

Eleanor had commandeered the Creature Comfort conference room for their meeting. Steve didn’t invite her to sit in, and she didn’t attempt to invite herself. Thank God she had plenty to do.

She and Jack Renfro worked side by side as Eleanor trimmed away the extra fold of skin from beneath the eyes of a six-week-old Arabian foal. The foal had been born
with entropion, a condition in which the eyelashes grew in rather than out and continually scratched the foal’s eye.

“Must feel like somebody’s poking you in the eye with a sharp stick,” Jack said as he handed Eleanor a pad of gauze.

“Good thing we caught it early,” Eleanor said as she drew the final tiny suture tight. “That ought to do it. The stitches should dissolve in a couple of weeks. Keep him on pain medication. I don’t want him scraping those stitches, but I don’t want to completely blindfold him, either. One eye, maybe, but not both. For a colt this young…well, let’s hope we don’t have to.”

“I gave the mare a shot, too, just so she wouldn’t holler her head off at her son while we were working on him.”

“Good. Can you walk him back to her on your own? I can always get Big—”

“Since when does Jack Renfro need help with a foal? Besides, great glump of a man is outside in the back with that sorry excuse for a dog he’s taken up with.”

“The little female with the torn ear?”

“And a sorrier specimen I’ve never seen. What’s going to happen when we have to turn her over to the animal-control people?” Jack looked fierce, so fierce that Eleanor knew he was worried about what the separation would do both to Big and the little dog.

“I honestly don’t know. Big should be paroled in six months or so. Maybe we can provide her a temporary home until he can take her.”

Jack raised his eyes. “This place is becoming a haven for stray dogs. First there’s that Nasdaq, Mark Scott’s little scrap of fur, and now this one.”

“Maybe I can take her home with me in the meantime. I think the men on my team would enjoy having her around. That is, if Big can teach her not to bark at the cows.”

“Doesn’t bark, that one. Doesn’t listen to anybody but him.”

“I’ll figure something out. We are not turning her over to animal control, whatever happens. Watch that foal—he’s still kind of groggy.”

Jack sniffed and walked off with the foal securely in hand.

Eleanor walked down the hall past the conference room. Not a sound could be heard through the door. Margot Hazard, Rick’s wife, had insisted that every room in the clinic be soundproofed so that clients would not have to listen to the howls and barks of animals in adjoining examining rooms.

That was fine, but for once Eleanor would have liked to listen at the door.
Please God,
she prayed,
let Vickers and that fat detective convince him he can get a new trial so he won’t do something stupid.

S
TEVE TRIED TO HOLD HIS TONGUE
and his temper while Leslie Vickers recapped the evidence that had convicted him. His eyes kept straying to Charlie Schockley, who seemed bored by the whole process.

Schockley had arrested Steve in the first place. Why he should change his mind now, Steve couldn’t imagine. Except that Vickers was now paying him—probably a good deal more than the city police department ever had.

Finally he couldn’t take it any longer. He turned to Schockley, cutting off Vickers in midflow.

“You still think I’m guilty? And if not, what changed your mind?”

Schockley leaned back and templed his fingers together over his paunch. The bottom button of his rumpled shirt had come undone, so that a triangle of hairy stomach bulged out over his trousers. “Wondered when we’d get around to me.” He glanced at Vickers. Steve saw him nod.

Schockley took a deep breath and leaned forward so that the edge of the conference table made an indentation in his flesh. “It’s like this. I was a cop for thirty years and a homicide cop for twenty of that thirty. In all that time, you
know how many genuine murder mysteries I worked on? I’m talking the kind of case where you can’t figure out who did it in the first thirty seconds. Exactly three.” He held up three fingers. “When I arrested you, I didn’t think your wife’s killing was one of them.”

“You thought I was guilty.”

“My partner and I, the district attorney, everybody was certain. Maybe on some of those fancy television mysteries people get framed for murder, but it doesn’t happen in real life. In real life, if you see a guy standing over the dead body of his wife, the chances are a thousand to one that he did it. And higher than a billion to one that somebody else did it and made it look like he did.” He shrugged and looked away. “So maybe we didn’t look hard enough, but, hey, I’ll bet there were times you even wondered whether you’d done it yourself in a blackout.”

Steve started.

Schockley grinned. “Even
I
would have under the circumstances. I was a witness at your trial, so I couldn’t be in court for anything except my own testimony. I never heard this Waters guy on the stand. When Vickers told me he thought you’d been framed, I told him he was crazy—stuff like that doesn’t happen. Now I think he may be right.”

“Lot of good that does.”

“You’d be surprised,” Vickers said. “Steve, did you ever read the police reports? Look at the crime-scene photos?”

“No.” He shivered. “You didn’t want me to, as I recall.”

“Well, I want you to now.” He gestured to Schockley, who opened his beat-up briefcase and pulled out a thick manila folder that was dirty and smudged around the edges.

“Here,” Schockley said, and spun the folder across the desk to Steve.

He sat with his hand on it, unwilling to open it. “Are there pictures of…is
she
in there?”

“Yeah. Is that a problem for you?” Schockley, always the cop, asked the question as though Steve were still very much a suspect. In Schockley’s mind, perhaps he was.

“Of course it is, dammit.”

“Do it, anyway,” Vickers said. “There are pictures of the room, the kitchen with its drawer pulled out, the empty space where your knife was—even the murder weapon itself after the coroner removed it. There are only a few of your wife. You must do this. If there is anything, anything at all that seems out of place, anything that you remember that you didn’t four years ago just after it happened, say so.”

The next hour was purgatory for Steve. His palms were so sweaty that his fingers slipped on the edges of the photographs. Some of them were in color—the most horrific ones—but many were simple black-and-white shots composed for accuracy and not for style. He felt as though he was back in that interrogation room when he’d first begun to suspect the police thought he had killed Chelsea.

He had already been convicted once. Nothing worse could happen to him now. And yet he felt wave after wave of guilt. He should have awoken during the night, he should have heard the intruder, he should have come downstairs earlier in the morning, he should have, he should have…

After the first time through the files, Schockley led him back through the crime step-by-step using the pictures as a way to jog his memory.

Steve’s head throbbed. He dug the heel of his hand into his right eye and looked for the fifth or sixth time at the picture of the knife that had taken Chelsea’s life. This photo had been taken after the coroner had processed the weapon. There were no longer any telltale dark splotches on the long thin blade. A boning blade, the dealer in Mannheim had told him and Neil when they bought the sets.

“Who else would have known about these knives?” Schockley asked.

“Neil and his wife, Posey, of course. The housecleaning team. Any of our friends who happened to be there when one of us used it.” He leaned his head back and closed his eyes against the pain. The light felt like a nail being driven through his forehead. “It’s a miracle we still had it after a year. Chelsea hated to cook, and she was notorious for losing things or breaking them.”

He stopped speaking and opened his eyes. “Give me that photo again, Schockley—the one of the knife.”

“Sure.”

He stared at it. “Is there another shot, maybe from another angle?”

Schockley glanced at Vickers.

“About six of them. Here.” Schockley tossed them over. Both he and Vickers kept silent, barely breathing, while Steve went over the photos.

Finally he dropped them on the table and looked up at Vickers. “It’s not my knife.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I said, it’s not the knife from my kitchen. It’s not my knife.”

“Sure it is,” Schockley said. “Neil Waters identified it at the trial. It’s in the transcript. He recognized it because the two of you bought the sets in Germany at the same time. He swore you kept it in your kitchen drawer.”

Steve shook his head. “I told you Chelsea hated to cook and broke things. About three months before she was killed, we had the kitchen painted. It didn’t need it, of course, but Chelsea said it was too dark. She fought with the paint people for about a month, getting sample after sample of paint for the woodwork. She made them mix a dozen samples before she picked one.” He shrugged.

“Neil was with us at one point, and he and I both said it was white. Just white. Looked white to us. Chelsea said it was special, with just a hint of mauve or puce or some
silly color. Then the painters painted the window over the sink shut. Chelsea was furious. We didn’t open the windows often because of the air-conditioning, but when Chelsea burned something—and she often did—she’d open the windows to try to clear out the smoke the exhaust fan couldn’t handle before it set the smoke alarms off. She was furious when she found out about that window. She said she’d had to use a knife to pry it open. The boning knife from that set. She’d made a tiny nick in the blade doing it, and she’d gotten paint on the blade and the handle. She cleaned it, but there were still bits of that paint stuck between the blade and the hilt. This isn’t my knife.”

“Then it has to be Neil’s,” Vickers said with wonder. “He took the knife from his set with him to your house. He couldn’t take the chance that Chelsea would hear him opening your kitchen drawer and come to investigate. Killing her would have been much more difficult if she’d gotten up or turned to look at him. For one thing, she’d have screamed. Even drugged, you might have responded to a scream. No, the less noise he made in your house the better. After he killed her, all he had to do was take your knife home with him to replace the one from his set.”

“I wonder if he’s still got it?” Schockley asked. “He’d be crazy to keep it.”

“Why? He wouldn’t realize it was incriminating.” Vickers sounded excited. “Certainly not as incriminating as if it suddenly disappeared.” He rubbed his well-manicured hands together and asked Steve, “You say the paint was special? We could prove it came from your kitchen?”

“I don’t know who bought the house when I sold it. They may have repainted.”

“Maybe not. In any case, the paint store would have a record of the formula. You do remember which paint store, don’t you?”

“Some decorator—Décor Fashion Colors, I think.”

“I know them well. Overpriced. My wife insists on us
ing them. We’ve got to get into the Waters house and get that knife.” Vickers turned to Schockley. “Can you do that?”

“Probably. We can check for the nick and do a color analysis on the paint if it’s still there.”

“There’s something else we need to find. The real clincher. The jewelry that was stolen, Steve. You remember it?”

“How could I forget? Chelsea was wearing the heirloom diamond ring she inherited from her mother. It was an old emerald cut. At least six carats. I thought it looked like an ice cube, but she loved it. She had on the pearls I gave her for our anniversary. Big and matched. Expensive. And a diamond bracelet—not a tennis bracelet, wider than that. Set in platinum. The insurance company said they were worth about fifty thousand dollars all together.”

“They’ve never turned up, you know.”

“How would I know?”

“Neil Waters is greedy,” Vickers said. “A poor man who attained wealth early and married a rich wife. I don’t think he could bring himself to throw fifty thousand dollars’ worth of jewelry into the Mississippi River, which is what he should have done the first moment he could get free from the investigation. No, if I read our Mr. Waters correctly, he’d want those gems where he could see them occasionally. Eventually perhaps have them reset or recut.

“I doubt he’d keep them in a safety-deposit box. If anything were to happen to him, the box would be opened in the presence of the IRS. He wouldn’t want his wife to know he’d killed her sister, not even after he’s dead. No, I think he’ll have them somewhere around that house. Someplace he could have stashed them fast when he came back from killing Chelsea. He couldn’t be certain that the police wouldn’t search his house, so the obvious hiding places are out. Well, Schockley, you think you can find those jewels?”

“If they’re there, I’ll find ’em.”

“If you do,” Steve asked, “can the knife and the jewels be admitted into evidence? Can’t Neil say they were obtained without a search warrant?”