Racing the Devil (18 page)

Corey giggled and squirmed in his arms. “Oh, Daddy. It’s me!”

He tilted back her chin and scrutinized her features. “I suppose it’s possible there’s a girl in there somewhere. I’ll tell you what. Why don’t you go get yourself a bath and put on clean clothes, and we’ll make popcorn before bed.”

Her forehead puckered. “What about my Popsicle?”

“You can have a half of one before your bath. But no coming in while Mr. Callahan and I are talking. And no listening around the corners.” He gave her another kiss. “Okay, sweetheart. Go on.”

I waited to laugh until she’d padded up the stairs.

“I’m sorry,” Carrington said. “I guess I spoil her.”

“I spoil mine too,” I said. “A son.”

A little of the tension lifted, and he gestured toward the living room. “Have a seat. What can I get you to drink?”

“Whatever you’re having.”

He came back a few moments later with two Cokes over ice and sat down on the sofa. I had chosen an overstuffed chair that sat kitty-corner to the couch.

“You wanted to talk to me about Amy,” he said, and suddenly the tension was back, so thick you could almost taste it between your teeth.

I nodded. “You know about the rumors that you and Amy were . . . involved.”

He studied his drink. “Amy and I were friends.”

“You didn’t have a sexual relationship with her?”

His fingers tightened on the arm of the sofa. “We did. For about a month. Then the stress got to be too much.”

“What stress was that?”

He laughed, more nerves than humor. “You’ve obviously never had an affair.”

“Humor me.”

“The girls, for one thing. If Cal found out about us and she lost custody.”

“The girls.” I tapped at Ian’s mustache. “I understand Katrina wasn’t hers. That there was tension between them.”

“Amy had a hard time bonding. Not just with Katrina. With anybody.”

“That have anything to do with why she ended the affair?”

He didn’t meet my gaze. “Maybe. She had intimacy issues.”

“And it didn’t bother you? That she stopped sleeping with you?”

“I had mixed feelings. She was married, after all.”

“But you kept seeing her anyway.”

“She was thinking of leaving him. I could wait.”

“Mr. Carrington,” I said, “was Amy in love with you?”

He swirled the ice in his glass for a long time. “I believe she was,” he said, finally. “She said she was. I was certainly in love with her.”

“And this other man? This Jared McKean?”

“She wasn’t sleeping with him.”

“You’re sure of that.”

“If she were going to cheat on Calvin, it would have been with me. Does that sound arrogant?”

“Not really.”

“She had her issues, Mr. Callahan, but she had a good heart. Maybe this guy told her he was in trouble and she was trying to help. Maybe she’d been trying to help him out for a long time and he killed her when she wouldn’t give him more. But she wasn’t having an affair with him.”

“Her sister said she was.”

He looked like he’d just been gut-punched. I felt like a heel for saying it, but it needed to be said.

“She was mistaken,” he said at last, his voice weak.

“You don’t sound so sure.”

“She may have said she was
seeing
him. Like
going to see him
. Not sleeping with him. No.”

“But her marriage was troubled. Do you know how long she and Calvin had been having problems?”

“From the beginning. She was pregnant when they married, and he . . .”

“He what?”

“He held it against her. Like she was the only one in the bedroom. She was seventeen. He was twenty-four. So whose fault do you think it was?”

“But he married her.”

“For what it was worth. He cheated on her from the very beginning.”

“She cheated too. With you.”

He looked away. Blinked. “I know. But it was years later, and she ended it. I’m not saying it was okay for her but not for him. And I’m not saying Calvin’s a bad man. But he was bad for Amy.”

“You said Amy had issues. What were they?”

He squeezed his eyelids together and took a deep breath. When he looked at me again, his eyes were wet. “Intimacy issues, like I said. Trust issues. Guilt issues. You name it. She couldn’t believe I loved her, because she didn’t believe she was worth loving.”

“Any idea where she got that notion?”

He rattled the ice in his glass. “Where does anybody get that notion? From her family, I assume. Or maybe she got it from Cal. He wasn’t exactly Mr. Warmth. In fact, when I heard Amy had been . . .” He stopped, choked on the words. “That she was . . . gone . . . I thought he’d done it.”

“And yet, you didn’t think he was a bad man.”

“Amy said he wasn’t. She said he tried to be a good man. He just couldn’t keep . . .” He gave an embarrassed laugh. “He couldn’t keep his pecker in his pants.”

“Ben, I have to ask you this. Where were you on the night Amy was killed?”

He took a deep breath and calmed himself. “I took Corey out for pizza, then we rented
The Lion King
and came back home. She went to bed at nine, and I stayed up and read until eleven. Why?” Every muscle in his face tensed. “You don’t think I killed her?”

“McKean said he didn’t do it.”

“Well.” He shook his head, bewildered. “Of course. What
would
he say? But they said on Channel 3 the cops have DNA, and DNA doesn’t lie.”

I decided not to educate him on the time it took to get back DNA results. “Don’t you think Amy would have told you if she was trying to ‘help’ this man? The police say she’d been seeing him for months.”

Ben studied his cola intently. “I would have thought so,” he said quietly. “But I guess I was wrong.”

I returned to something he’d said earlier. “Mr. Carrington, you said Amy had guilt issues.”

“That’s right.” His nod was wary.

“What did she have to feel guilty about?”

He picked at a loose thread in the upholstery of the sofa. “She wouldn’t go into details.”

“But she told you something.”

He looked away, the little net of lines around his eyes tensing. “There were sexual issues. She wouldn’t talk about it, but I wondered if maybe she hadn’t been raped.”

“Calvin?”

He didn’t look surprised, so I figured he’d thought about it. “I don’t think so. She didn’t talk about him that way.”

“And she never said who?”

“Like I said, she never even said that’s what happened. It’s just a feeling I had.”

“She was in love with you, but she never talked about it.”

He looked away. “Seems like lots of things she never talked about.”

A
T SEVEN FORTY-FIVE
Monday morning, I parked half a block from the three-story brick house where G. Mathis lived. There was a royal blue Ford Escort ZX2 in the driveway. I hoped it was hers.

At eight twenty-two, she came out of the house wearing a cranberry skirt cut modestly below the knee and a white blouse with lace at the neck. In one hand, she carried what looked like a black leather Bible, and in the other was a turquoise vinyl case that might have held her lunch. Her purse was slung over one shoulder. Very demure. Nothing like the wildcat who had greeted Hartwell at the door.

I followed her down West End, onto Twenty-First Avenue North, and to a little shop shaped like a log cabin.
Angel Food Cafe
, the sign out front read.
Christian Books and Gifts. Coffee. Sandwiches. Desserts
.

I drove past the shop, bought a Coke at a McDonald’s on West End, then tooled back down Elliston Place and back to Twenty-First, where I parked across the street and three buildings down from the Angel Food Cafe.

I waited until ten, when most of the breakfast-and-coffee people had gone, then girded up my loins and went inside. (I have no idea what that means. Prepared myself, I think it means, maybe for a kick in the balls). There were two customers inside, a chunky woman who looked to be in her mid-fifties, and a pretty young woman about eight months pregnant. While I waited for them to finish up their Danishes and coffee, I browsed through the racks of contemporary Christian music, inspirational literature, stickpins, jewelry, and knickknacks bearing images of every kind of angel imaginable.

G. Mathis glanced up from the magazine she was reading behind the counter. “May I help you?”

I looked at her nametag.
Glenda
, it said.

“No, thanks. Just looking.”

At ten fifteen, the older woman left with an Amy Grant CD and a cranberry muffin. At ten twenty-six, the young woman paid for a tape of Christian lullabies and a baby quilt with Precious Moments angels stamped all over it. When it was just me and G. Mathis, I picked up a small gold angel pin and sauntered to the counter, as if to pay.

Her smile was cheerful, practiced. “Will that be all, sir?”

I smiled back. “Not quite. Glenda Mathis, isn’t it?”

Her forehead furrowed. “How do you know my last name?”

“Glenda Mathis.” I rattled off her address.

She picked up the phone, knuckles white, nails filed short and coated with clear polish. “I’m calling the police.”

“Sure.” I nodded pleasantly. “No problem. I bet they’d be real interested to know about your affair with Calvin Hartwell.”

“Oh.” Her voice was weak, her skin suddenly chalky beneath her makeup. “Oh, dear.”

She laid the phone back in its cradle and slumped onto a tall, three-legged stool behind the counter. Her mouth opened, closed, opened again.

“Who are you?” she managed. “How do you . . .”

“I have an interest in finding Amy Hartwell’s murderer,” I said.

“The police have Amy’s murderer. They took him into custody a week ago yesterday.”

“He didn’t do it,” I said. “I know this for a fact. What’s more, the police are also finding evidence to that effect.”

“I don’t understand. I thought . . . Cal said they had DNA. Fingerprints. He said they had an ironclad case.”

I shrugged. “Unsinkable. Like the Titanic.”

She nibbled at a fingernail. Squinted across the counter at me. Then she paled as recognition crept across her face. “Oh. Sweet Jesus,” she moaned. She slid off the stool and backed away until her backside bumped into the wall.

“Don’t be an ass,” I said. “If I meant to hurt you, I’d have come to your house.”

She shook her hands, as if you could shake off fear as easily as water. “What do you want?”

“How long have you been sleeping with Cal Hartwell?”

“I don’t see what—” she started. Then she must have realized what a predicament she was in. She heaved a deep sigh and frowned, counting silently on her fingers. “About four months. Give or take.”

“And you met—how?”

“At church.” She lowered her eyes. They were brown with a reddish cast, like Coca-Cola in the sunlight. It was easy to see what Hartwell saw in her.

“You knew Amy too?”

“Not well.”

“How’d the affair start?” I hoped by firing questions at her, I could keep her off guard and answering me.

“I . . . We were at a church supper. Amy was over at the buffet table talking to some other ladies, and Cal and I got to talking. He said his wife was getting so independent that pretty soon she wouldn’t need him anymore. He laughed when he said it, but I could see how hurt he was. And we just . . . started talking. That was all it was at first. We’d meet for lunch, or dinner sometimes, and we’d talk.”

“And then?”

“Then one day, I told him I had always wanted to build a big house in the country. I could see it in my head, but I didn’t know how to make it work. And he said he was an architect, and he could make the plans for me. So he came over to my house one evening after work, and one thing led to another, and . . .” She made a rolling motion with her hand. “He was very unhappy.”

“Because his wife was working.”

“No. Because she was no kind of wife at all. He’d come home, and dinner wouldn’t be made. She’d heat up leftovers, or make boxed macaroni and cheese, or even order out for pizza. Sometimes she’d bring home fast food. Calvin put a stop to that. He said he wanted good meals on the table for those children, and if she didn’t fix them, he was going to divorce her, and he’d see that he got custody. He could, you know. And I’d have been happy to take care of them.”

I tried to keep my tone neutral. “You discussed this? His divorcing her and marrying you? You two taking the girls?”

“It was never just a cheap affair.” Her chin lifted. “He loves me. And I love him. I would be a much better wife than she was. And a better mother.”

“You’d quit your job here, I suppose.”

“If Calvin asked me to.”

“He asked Amy to.”

“It wasn’t the
job,”
she said. “It was the way she started putting everything before him and the girls. And she was cheating on him.”

“So was he,” I pointed out. “Cheating.”

The look she gave me would have shattered nails. “She started it,” she said. Then her gaze slid away again, and she sighed. “Oh, I know it wasn’t right. We should have waited. But there he was, so unhappy. And there she was, rubbing his nose in her new liber-ated-ness. It was a sick family, anyway.”

“How so?”

“First, Amy gets herself pregnant and snatches Cal from her sister. And then the sister turns around and tempts him right back to
her
bed. Sick. No wonder he wanted out. And there we were, falling in love and knowing we were perfect for each other. It was like God had given us to each other.”