Cold Rain (32 page)

Roger stared at me, trying with his impressive IQ to comprehend what I was saying. I wasn’t sure he did until we heard a car pull into our driveway and start up the hill.

‘Sounds to me like a Mercury Marquis. That sound like a Merc to you?’

Roger blinked stupidly, but he finally got it.

‘Now who’s the dumb ass?’ I snarled.

Buddy Elder’s car idled in the circle in front of our house.

‘If she drives away before the cops show up, she’ll beat any indictment they throw at her. The thing to do is to get her inside the house and keep her here.

That way she can’t come up with some alibi. You get her involved in this and you can deal with the prosecutor. She drives off, you’re looking at death row for Johnna’s murder – with Denise as the state’s star witness.’

Roger’s eyes shifted nervously.

‘Of course, if you’re in love with the woman, the best thing you can do is tell her to run. Believe me, she will.’ I kicked up one shoulder. ‘At least one of you will be free to spend all that money.’

The car door slammed. I motioned to Molly to move back out of sight and pushed one of the chairs around a bit so I would have an unobstructed view to Roger as I retreated to cover. Roger started to stand up, but I told him, ‘Stay down, like you’re wounded, or I promise you will be.’

I listened for the sound of sirens, but the night was still silent. The door at the back porch screeched open and slammed shut.

‘Buddy?’ Denise called.

‘In here!’ Roger shouted. ‘Buddy’s been shot!’

We heard Denise running down the hallway. She burst into the room, eyes wide open in fright, her face bloodless. Seeing Buddy stretched out, his face broken apart, she ran to him and threw herself down over him with a shriek.

I went forward quickly, jerking her up by her coat.

She made no resistance when I threw her over the back of the chair and searched her roughly for a weapon. While I did, Denise screamed profanities at Roger with a nastiness that surprised me. What happened? What had he done to Buddy? Roger answered in the same spirit. They had been planning to kill him!

I told them both to shut up. When they ignored me, I tossed her to the floor and stepped toward Roger, offering the butt of the four-ten as a threat. Roger shut up, but he continued staring at his newly-wed wife incredulously, and I couldn’t resist.

‘You didn’t really believe she loved you?’

Roger didn’t answer me. He did turn, however, and watched Buddy and Molly working themselves toward a mutual climax on our television. It was, under the circumstances, an eloquent rebuttal.

I heard the first sirens and left the room, intending to snap on the floodlights so they could find Wade. I got as far as the front hall when I heard the report of a handgun. I was down before I registered that I had been shot. My back on fire, my brain struggling to understand what had just occurred, I heard two more shots from a handgun, followed by the unmistakable blast of the twelve-gauge.

I tried to crawl across the parquet floor toward the four-ten I had dropped when I fell, but Molly came to me. As she held me, I tried to speak, but I couldn’t.

Turning, I saw Denise Conway lying across Buddy Elder’s legs. The back of her head was broken apart, her peroxide blonde hair stained in blood. Roger Beery lay on his back, his arms and legs twitching oddly, blood on his face.

The front hallway lit up with whirling red and blue lights, the last thing I saw before I passed out.

I WAS CONSCIOUS AGAIN when they settled me into the ambulance, but not for long. Later, when I woke up, I looked at the hospital room, did not especially like what I saw, and went back to sleep.

At ten I was fully awake and in a different room.

Molly was in a chair close to my bed. From the number of magazines at her feet, I guessed she had been there quite a while. My voice cracked when I tried to speak.

I felt dizzy, but I did not pass out.

‘Wade?’

‘He got out of surgery a couple of hours after you did. It was bad, but he’s going to make it.’

‘What happened?’

‘Buddy had a revolver in his coat. Denise found it or knew it was there. After she shot you, she turned the gun on Roger. I don’t think she even knew I was in the room.’

‘They’re both dead?’

‘All three of them.’ After a moment she said to me, ‘I have the DVD, David.’

I closed my eyes, nodding, message received. When I woke up again Molly was gone. I talked to the nurse, then to the surgeon. That afternoon my mother showed up. She was the one who told me Molly wouldn’t be back. ‘She said to tell you she’s closing the house up.’

I SAW KIP DALTON only after I had refused to talk to anyone else. I told him I had put together most of the pieces of the puzzle before Roger drove out to the farm, but not all of it.

Kip smiled at me. ‘Anything you can give me will help, professor.’

‘Buddy and Denise killed Walt and Barbara for the inheritance, but they needed to get rid of their new partner to get the money.’

‘What did Johnna Masterson have to do with anything?’

I shook my head. ‘Sport mostly, though it got blood on Roger’s hands, which gave them a degree of control. I expect Buddy showed Roger how they could frame me for her murder and do whatever they wanted to her. That would have appealed to Roger, I think.’

‘Well… they did.’ Kip’s face twitched as he said this, and I knew it was worse for Johnna than I could imagine.

‘The night they came out to the farm, they said they were going to let us go if we cooperated.’

Dalton nodded. He understood how killers use false promises to control their victims.

‘I think Buddy had convinced Roger they were going to terrorize us for a while and then stage another murder-suicide. Another bad marriage that ended badly. Truth was Buddy planned to kill Roger so Denise could inherit Roger’s money. Given my history with Roger and Denise, the sheriff would not have been inclined to look any farther than the evidence right in front of him: Roger shows up at the farm and all three of us go down with gunshot wounds. No one would even think to ask Buddy Elder about an alibi.’

‘According to your wife it would have worked if your neighbour hadn’t stumbled into the middle of things.’

‘When Buddy went out to take care of Wade, I had a chance to convince Roger he was the patsy unless he was man enough to make the first move.’

‘You must have talked fast.’

‘Have you tested the gun Denise used on Roger and me?’

Dalton nodded. ‘It’s the same gun that killed Johnna Masterson.’

‘You know that night, I couldn’t understand why Buddy took the gun with birdshot and let Roger grab the twelve-gauge. I figured he overlooked the difference in the guns, but I should have been known better. Buddy hadn’t overlooked anything from the start. That was no different. The weapon he intended to use on Roger was the handgun they had used to kill Johnna. Once he eliminated Roger with it he could turn the birdshot on Molly and me, and no problem at all if he had to shoot us a few times before it took. The sloppier the work the more convincing the scene. The point was to make it look like we had a gun battle using
our
guns, as if Roger showed up to talk, and things got out of hand.

‘That .38 is yours?’

I shook my head. ‘Buddy told me one time it’s cold.

I expect it is, but once you matched it to the Masterson homicide and found my prints on it, you would have believed it was mine.’

‘Closing out our investigation of that case as well,’

Dalton muttered.

‘At that point Buddy’s only problem would have been controlling Denise Conway, who suddenly had five million all to herself, but somehow I don’t think that would have been a problem.’

‘I started doing some background on Mr Elder after you passed that polygraph, Professor. On paper he looked just fine, but when I called down to Louisiana I found out Denise Conway was his half-sister. They had the same mother, grew up together in the same house.

‘According to the mother Denise got married about three years ago. Husband had some money. Eight months later, poor soul killed himself.’

‘Police reopening that case?’

‘I recommended they take another look at it. I’ll tell you something else,’ Dalton added with a sly grin.

‘Your friend Mr Elder was plenty smart. He went to college just like his transcripts say, but their mother tells me Denise was the one in the family who tested off the charts. According to her, that girl was a genuine prodigy.’

‘Denise was behind the whole thing?’

‘Appears to be the case.’

GAIL ETHERIDGE DROPPED by one morning before I could get around much. She wanted to know if I intended to bring suit against the Beery estate. She wasn’t drumming up business, just curious, I expect, but I suggested she find our neighbour before some shark got hold of him and have a little talk with him.

If anyone deserved the mother lode, I said, it was Billy Wade. Gail said she would look in on him after she left me. ‘Be sure you do,’ I said, handing her a twenty,

‘and give him this for me if you will.’

Gail waved the bill at me. ‘What’s this for?’

‘He’ll know.’

Pocketing the twenty she told me, ‘I wanted to come by and apologize for not believing you, David.’

‘I didn’t have much of a track record,’ I said. ‘From your perspective it must have looked like pure self-destruction.’

‘Well, you can be an unbelievably stubborn man sometimes.’

‘No hard feelings, Gail.’

‘How are things going at school?’

‘They offered me three years’ salary if I’d just go away.’ Gail nodded at this with a vague look of satisfaction. She had probably calculated something like this and knew, too, as I did, that if I pushed I could get a lot more out of them and even keep my job. ‘I told them to go to hell. I said I’d go away for nothing.’

Gail’s satisfied smile curdled. ‘I take it you’re representing yourself?’

I laughed. ‘What gave me away?’

She appeared to want to give me some advice, but as I wasn’t paying for it she restrained herself admirably and changed the subject. ‘Molly’s going through with the divorce, I understand?’

My laughter caught in my throat. ‘Looks that way.’

‘I thought you two had worked things out.’

‘I was in trouble, Gail. Molly wouldn’t leave me until she got me out of it. That’s just the way she is.’

‘You’re a fool to let a woman like that get away.’

‘Molly’s not the most forgiving woman in the world.’

‘I guess I’m missing something.’

I didn’t answer her. Gail could think what she wanted.

I SPENT A WEEK IN FLORIDA once I was up and moving around a little. Molly and Doc were already doing business together. She had a broken down house, a genuine catastrophe, she was living in and a second under contract that she intended to patch up for the snowbirds. She seemed happy to be starting over, a bit uncomfortable with me around but too polite to say so.

Lucy was doing well in school, working three nights a week giving private lessons on Ahab to rich kids and training a couple of wild-ass quarter horses fresh off the racetrack for the owner of the stable. We had a talk one evening on a horseback ride about the lie Lucy had told me, the affair that never was. Her idea, she confessed.

It might well have been Lucy’s creation, or Lucy might have imagined it was, but we both knew her mother, if not in fact instigating it, had gone along with it. I didn’t care to point this out because Molly wasn’t really the one to blame. It was my fault.

‘Do you have any idea,’ I asked, ‘what your mother went through those first couple of years after you were born, Lucy?’

Jezebel skittered because she felt Lucy’s body stiffen.

We were walking suddenly on forbidden ground.

‘I can imagine,’ she said carefully.

‘You’re way ahead of me then.’

‘She never told you?’

‘She never told me, and I never asked.’

Lucy considered this for a long time without offering a comment.

‘I don’t know who was more afraid of the truth, Lucy, your mother or me. I guess I was always afraid if I heard about how she got through it, I wouldn’t be able to love her in quite the same way. I think she understood that or started believing it herself. We walked around your mother’s finest moment, the choice to give you life, and ended up turning it into something she thought she should be ashamed of.’

Lucy blinked.

‘What your mother did, coming off the streets and making a life for the two of you, not one girl in a thousand could have accomplished, and I made her think she had to keep it to herself.’

‘I don’t understand why she wants a divorce!’

‘You remember when I told you that silence is the biggest lie of all?’ Lucy nodded. ‘Well, our lies caught up with us, kid.’

I MET ROBERT THE REALTOR, who wasn’t an entirely offensive character. He and Molly were intimate. I could tell by the way he shook hands with me.

I had imagined something else for Molly and me when I got down to see her, but it wasn’t going to happen. A week into it and I knew the only thing Molly wanted was for me to take off. There were no words to erase our history together, and for a time it seemed there weren’t even words to talk about it. The night before I left we had dinner together in Naples.

Afterwards we walked along the beach. I think in the dark with the wind around us to carry our words off to sea we could finally speak about things that mattered.

She said she was sorry she had put Lucy into the middle of things. She should never have done that. She was the one who had left the farm for a drive with Buddy the night Johnna Masterson disappeared.

‘It was my fault,’ I answered. ‘I should have said something. Instead, I just pretended to believe you both.’

‘When did you know?’

I laughed and looked out at the dark mass of ocean.

‘I knew from the start, Molly. I knew it from the moment Lucy told me she met Buddy at a frat party.

The kid is a terrible liar. It’s one of the things I love about her.’