Jack and the Beanstalk (Matthew Hope) (29 page)

“Well, we’re working it,” Hopper said.

“Three in a row, television’ll have a field day.”

“If they’re related,” Bloom said.

“Even if they’re not,” Bannister said.

“They’re brother and sister,” Hopper said. “Even if they
ain’t
related, they’re related.”

They all laughed again.

I had not realized that Hopper had such a superb sense of humor.

“Well, I want to take a look outside,” Bannister said. “Get me something that’ll stick, huh? This thing’s been dragging on too long.”

“From your lips to God’s ears,” Bloom said.

Veronica arrived about twenty minutes later. I was glad the ambulance had already taken Sunny’s body to the morgue. The Criminalistics Unit was still outside in the Porsche, vacuuming it, going over it for latents. The car she arrived in was a Cadillac Seville. The man behind the wheel got out, went around to the other side of the car, and then opened the door there for her. She was wearing color for the first time since I’d known her. Blue slacks, a blue blouse, blue sandals. Her exquisite face looked very pale against the blue. She came into the house, followed by the man, and Hopper went to her at once and said, “Ma’am, I’m sorry about this terrible tragedy.”

I had the feeling he had used those words many times before and was repeating them now by rote.

Veronica nodded.

The man with her looked to be in his late sixties, taller than either Bloom or I, wearing a sports jacket over dark slacks, an open-throat sports shirt, and loafers without socks. His eyes were a blue almost as pale as Veronica’s, and his white hair was streaked with strands of yellow that told me he’d been blond when he was younger. He was suntanned and lean, a man with a weathered outdoor look about him. I pegged him at once for a neighboring rancher whom she’d called for a lift here. He seemed entirely at ease in the presence of policemen.

“You made good time,” Bloom said.

“Ham’s a fast driver,” she said. “Excuse me,” she said, “this is Dr. Jeffries, my veterinarian.” Her eyes met mine for the first time since she’d entered the house. “He was good enough to drive me here.”

8

I
WAS
glad it was Bloom, and not Captain Hopper, who began questioning Veronica. In the gymnasium, Bloom had behaved like a thug; in my living room, he behaved like a gentleman. Hopper watched and listened as though he truly appreciated picking up some tips on how it was done up there in Nassau County in the wilds of New York, Bloom’s territory before he’d moved to Florida. Maybe there was yet hope for Captain Walter Hopper.

“Mrs. McKinney,” Bloom said, “there are some questions I’ve got to ask you, and I hope you’ll forgive me, but they have to be asked.”

“I just want you to find whoever killed her,” Veronica said.

“Yes, ma’am, that’s what we want, too,” Bloom said. “Now, ma’am, the last time I spoke to you, you said you hadn’t yet heard from your daughter—this must’ve been close to five o’clock this afternoon.”

“Yes, that’s right,” Veronica said.

“You didn’t hear from her
after
we had that telephone conversation, did you?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“She didn’t come back to the house—”

“No.”

“—and as far as you knew, she was still out there someplace.”

“Yes.”

“Mrs. McKinney, can you tell me how you spent the time between five o’clock, when we talked on the phone—”

“Why do you want to know that?” Jeffries asked.

His voice gave away his age. Before I heard him speak, I had to keep reminding myself that he was, in fact, seventy-five years old. But his voice lacked timbre and tone, and I noticed now—clued by the voice—that his neck was leathery and wrinkled and that the backs of his hands were covered with liver spots. Bloom turned to him in surprise, like a stand-up comic unexpectedly heckled from a nightclub floor.

“Sir?” he said.

“Sir,” Jeffries said, stressing the word, “why do you want Mrs. McKinney to account for her whereabouts?”

“Routine,” Bloom said with a slight shrug, falling back on the timeless police explanation. “Her daughter’s been killed, we naturally—”

“I see nothing routine about your question,” Jeffries said. “It would indicate to me that you consider Mrs. McKinney a suspect, and that, of course, is absurd.”

I imagined him as a younger man, and I could easily see how he had once swept Veronica off her feet. She seemed, in fact, to respond even now to his spirited defense—a slight nod of her head, a flaring of the pale blue eyes. I felt slightly jealous.

“Ask your questions,” Hopper said to Bloom. “And I suggest you answer them, Mrs. McKinney.”

“Then
I
suggest she be read her rights,” Jeffries said.

“This is a field investigation,” Hopper said impatiently. “She’s not in custody, Miranda-Escobedo doesn’t apply.”

“You are nonetheless, by implication—”

“We are nonetheless only trying to ask a few questions,” Hopper said. “Tell her she isn’t in jeopardy, will you, Mr. Hope?”

“I think you ought to answer their questions,” I said.

Jeffries looked at me as though discovering a new enemy in the camp. I suddenly wondered how much Veronica had told him about us.

“What is it you want to know?” she asked Bloom.

What he wanted to know was where she’d been and what she’d done between five o’clock this afternoon and nine or thereabouts, when he’d called again to inform her about her daughter. It seemed to me that she accounted for her time believably and with remarkable restraint; however Bloom and Hopper hoped to disguise it, they were nonetheless trying to find out whether she’d had the opportunity to murder her own daughter. She told them that she’d taken the Jeep out to Mosquito Jam Hammock a little after Bloom’s first call, to check out a cow her hand said might be coming down with something. The hand would verify that she was with him until almost six o’clock. She had gone back to the house then, written out a shopping list, and taken the Jeep to the new mall near the interstate highway, where she’d done her grocery marketing for the week. The supermarket manager would remember her because she’d had to go to his office to get a check okayed. That was a rule at the market; any check over a hundred dollars had to be okayed by the manager. She supposed she had got back to the house shortly after seven. Rafe, the ranch manager, had stopped by at around seven-thirty to ask if he could use the Jeep. She’d made no plans to leave the house tonight, and she told him that would be fine. She remembered mentioning that it was low on gas, and that he should fill the tank before leaving the ranch. The hand came by a little
later to ask if he could use the pickup; his wife had been listening to one of Calusa’s buy-and-sell call-in radio shows, and a woman had a used porch swing for sale and she wanted to go take a look at it and carry it home with them if it looked all right. Veronica had given him permission to take the pickup. This must have been sometime close to eight o’clock. She was certain that both Rafe and the hand could confirm that she had been there in her own living room between seven-thirty and eight o’clock.

She had mixed herself a martini then, and had gone into the kitchen to prepare dinner, sipping at the drink while she heated some stew left over from the night before. She had already eaten and was clearing away the dishes when Bloom called her from here. That must have been a little after nine. She had phoned both Yellow Cab and Blue Cab, the only two taxi companies in Calusa, but both of them had told her it’d be at least a half hour before they could send anyone out there to get her. She had then called Dr. Jeffries to ask if
he
might be able to drive her here.

That was how she’d spent her time between five o’clock this afternoon and now.

“And you didn’t see your daughter at any time today, is that right?” Bloom asked.

“I haven’t seen my daughter since Monday,” Veronica said, and suddenly burst into tears. I was sure she was thinking she would
never
see her again. Except in a coffin.

Bloom and Hopper stood by awkwardly. Jeffries put his arm around her and consoled her. This was where I lived, but I suddenly felt as if I had no right to be here.

“Well,” Hopper said, “we’ll get out of your way soon as possible.” He seemed suddenly embarrassed. “Boys shouldn’t be too much longer. We’ll need you to come by the morgue to make a positive identification, but that can wait till—”

“I’ll identify the body,” Jeffries said.

“We usually prefer next of—”

“I’ve known Sunny from the day she was born,” he said. “You can at
least
spare Mrs. McKinney the ordeal of—”

“I’m sure that’ll be all right,” Bloom said gently. “Do you know where Good Samaritan is?”

“I know it.”

“Will tomorrow morning at nine be too early?”

“I’ll be there,” Jeffries said.

“Sorry to have bothered you,” Hopper said, as if the police were here not to investigate a murder but instead to answer a complaint about someone playing the radio too loudly. “Better see how they’re doing out there,” he said to Bloom, and they both went out to the driveway, where the technicians were still working on the car.

The police entourage did not leave until almost midnight. The house and the street seemed inordinately silent now that they were gone. Veronica sat in one of the imitation Barcelona chairs, facing the blank screen of the television set. Jeffries hovered about her, waiting for a signal that she was ready to go.

“You’d better tell him,” she said abruptly.

“Veronica...”

“Tell him,” she said.

Jeffries sighed heavily. “I’d like a drink,” he said. “Do you have any bourbon? Little water in it?”

I brought him a bourbon and water. I brought Veronica the gin and tonic she asked for. I poured myself a snifter of cognac. Jeffries sipped at his drink. On the street outside, I heard the sound of an automobile, and wondered if the police were coming back. They had roped off the area around my house. They had put up
CARDBOARD CRIME
scene signs. I wondered what Mrs. Martindale was thinking in her house next door. I wondered what she’d have to say to me in the morning. I wondered what Jeffries had to say
to me
now
, but he just sat there, sipping silently at his drink. The sound of the automobile engine faded. It had not been the police, after all, unless they were simply cruising the area.

“If
you
won’t tell him...” Veronica said.

Jeffries took a long swallow of bourbon. He sighed again. “Sunny...,” he said, and hesitated. “Sunny was staying with me.”

“What do you mean?”

“At my house,” he said.

“Since when?”

“Tuesday.”

“She’s been at your house since
Tuesday
?”

“Yes. She left tonight. At six-thirty.”

I turned to Veronica. “Did you know this?”

“Not until tonight. Ham told me on the way here.”

“But you knew it when Bloom was questioning you.”

“Yes.”

“And you chose not to reveal it?”

“That’s what we decided, Ham and I.”

“That’s what you
decided
? Your daughter’s dead, the police are searching...”

“
Our
daughter,” Jeffries said.

“What?”

“
Our
daughter, Mr. Hope. Veronica’s and mine.”

So now I listened.

Now I listened to what I
should
have heard the first time around: Veronica alone on the ranch one starry night, her husband off in Tampa or Tallahassee or Denver or wherever the hell, Dr. Hamilton Jeffries there to minister to a sick cow and to minister to the lonely Mrs. McKinney as well. Their affair had
started in September and ended in February, a short season, easy come, easy go, at least for Jeffries, who unilaterally decided that what they were doing was immoral, and dangerous as well. What Jeffries hadn’t known, and what Veronica hadn’t told him, was that she was already carrying his child. Empirical evidence (
Sunny was an August baby, full of rain
) later proved that she was just entering her fourth month of pregnancy on the February night when Jeffries decided to take his cautious moral stand. The baby, as Veronica later calculated it, had been conceived sometime in November, when their romance was at the height of its passion, a love child for sure, Hamilton Jeffries’s bastard daughter by any reasonable surmise, since Drew McKinney was in Dallas for most of that month and chose not to entertain his wife on the few occasions when he was home.

“If I’d known, of course,” Jeffries said now, “it might have been different.”

His words lacked conviction, but I made no comment. What was done was done, all water over the dam and under the bridge, and Jeffries was certainly not the first, nor would he be the last, of the red-hot lovers who abandoned pregnant married women, knowingly or otherwise.
I settled down—isn’t that the expression one uses?—and became a faithful wife and mother, not necessarily in that order.
Living proof of her fidelity had been her second child, undeniably Drew’s—
same dark hair and dark eyes, a spitting image
—her husband’s waning interest apparently rekindled by the birth of a daughter he accepted unquestioningly as his own. Jack was born three years later, at the end of June, which meant that Drew McKinney’s passion had reflowered in October sometime; the lady seemed to have a penchant for getting pregnant in the late fall.