The Puzzled Heart (22 page)

That evening, Reed and Kate were joined by Archie. Each had something to report. None of it was major, but all of it at least, as Reed noted, left them with the impression that they were getting somewhere. Reed had managed, as it turned out with only small effort, to learn that Dorothy Hedge had indeed come to Manhattan regularly—and, most significantly, on the day that Toni was attacked. Upon being corrected by Kate, Reed admitted that all he could accurately testify to was that Dorothy’s car had crossed the Henry Hudson Bridge on certain days and at certain hours. He also knew which toll lane she had entered, but that information, which he offered to Kate with a certain air of thoroughness, hardly signified. Kate stuck her tongue out at him.

Archie’s news, following Reed’s (which had followed Kate’s account of Bad Boy’s record and what Harriet had reported about Mama), was, if not riveting, certainly clarifying. He had obtained the result of police investigations in Toni’s office as well as in her home, a studio in the East Village. Neither place had yielded startling results, although Archie had been pleased to learn that Toni’s bank account had had a number of rather large deposits for which no source could be ascertained.

“Meaning?” Kate asked.

“Meaning that Toni or someone else made regular cash deposits into her account.”

“How did you find out?”

“Kate, my dear,” Archie said, as Reed had so often done, “your naïveté is charming. There is nothing in this age of computers anyone with a small degree of access and a knowledge of programs cannot discover. Anyway, the police found out at my suggestion, as it happened. Not that all this tells us much except that Toni was being paid for something neither she nor the payer wanted a record of. Also, and most important, the payments stopped after the attack.”

“I should think that would be obvious.”

“Perhaps to you.” Archie smiled. “Us more tedious types like to remember about coincidence and other contingencies, such as, for example, that Toni was collecting the amounts in person and couldn’t after the attacks, even if she was not attacked by the person who provided the money.”

“Unlikely,” Kate said.

“Perhaps.”

“Are you, therefore, combining all our discoveries, assuming that Dorothy Hedge attacked Toni?” Kate asked.

“It seems possible. Getting to her bank account was a little harder—”

“Really, Archie,” Kate said, “you make me wonder if there is any privacy left anywhere.”

“Save your wonder for better things. There is no privacy if anybody really wants to find out. The point,
Kate,” Archie said, “is that people like us lead such open lives that we need not worry about privacy. Although some underhanded people are surprisingly careless. I had a client whose wife was divorcing him. He had met his ladylove in a hotel and paid by credit card. That would not have mattered, since he paid the credit card bills, with which he troubled his wife only if her charges were lamentably out of line. In this case, however, he left the credit card at the hotel desk, and the assistant manager kindly telephoned his home to tell him. His wife was at home and took the call.”

“He sounds like a particularly stupid assistant manager,” Reed said. “I doubt he will go far.”

“The really stupid one was my client. Lust draws blood from the brain. But getting back to this case, let me report that no sums comparable to those paid into Toni’s account were withdrawn from Dorothy Hedge’s.”

“She might have kept a large stash of cash,” Kate said. “Although I did notice that someone who came to pick up a dog while I was there paid with a check, if that means anything.”

“Everything may mean something if we can only figure out what,” Reed noted gloomily.

“We do know,” Kate said to comfort him, “that Dorothy could have attacked Toni; that someone, probably not Dorothy, was paying Toni for something; that Dorothy lied to me; and that Mama and
Bad Boy are very nasty people indeed. Is there anything else?”

“Not much,” Reed said, in his pleasantest voice, “except who dreamed up the kidnapping scheme, why was Toni attacked, and who is behind the whole thing and why.”

“Don’t worry,” Archie said. “At least we can suggest that the Hedge woman had a motive, and a connection with a right-wing movement, which should let Harriet off from much more suspicion.”

“Did his wife divorce him?” Kate asked.

Archie looked blank.

“The chap with the abandoned credit card.”

“Oh, no. Finally she settled for a fair share of his stock options. They both figured out it was cheaper in the long run to stay together.”

“What frightful clients you have.”

“That’s why Reed could talk me into defending Harriet. All she was accused of was murder, and probably only manslaughter at that.”

Fifteen

T
HE
next afternoon Reed was sitting at home listening to Bach and trying to organize the notes for a talk he had agreed to give in the spring at a time when the spring had seemed very far away. His thoughts were interrupted by the ringing of the house phone. He had to go into the pantry to answer it, wondering what on earth it could be. The doorman informed him that a Ms. Furst would like to come up. “Send her up,” Reed said, and went to the door to wait for her.

“Well, Harriet, if you’ve come to see Kate she’s not here. Gone to see a man about a dog—well, a person about a dog is what she said. That was absolutely all the information I was offered. Have you given up using the telephone?”

“Sorry to bother you,” Harriet said. Reed invited her to sit down in the living room, but she declined the offer. “I wanted to see Kate’s face when I told her,” she explained. “I can’t think why she isn’t here.”

“Told her what?” Reed asked, “or am I not to hear it until she does?”

“Perhaps I will sit down after all,” Harriet said, taking a seat in the foyer and thus indicating her intention of not staying long. Reed remained standing, his posture displaying modified curiosity.

“I found the baseball bat,” Harriet said.

“The baseball bat?”

“Reed,” Harriet said, rising to her feet, “you know I admire Kate—as Jonson said of Shakespeare—‘this side idolatry’; but I find her habit of repeating what one says extremely trying and I do wish you wouldn’t also take it up.”

“Sorry. What baseball bat?”

“The one that probably killed Toni, of course. I thought you had been paying attention to this case, Reed.”

“So I have. But the baseball bat was only a supposition, an impulsive guess. Where did you find it and why do you think …?”

“I found it in the room occupied by Bad Boy when he stays with Mama. She and I have become buddies, both of us supporting, as we do, the National Rifle Association, the bombing of abortion clinics, the death penalty, and the abolition of compassion as a government policy competing with growth. She
left me alone to consult with someone at the door and I poked around in my usual fashion. The bat was in the closet of his room and had clearly been washed, but I suspect a crime laboratory could make it speak nonetheless.”

“Did you take it away?”

“I could hardly do that. I thought you might get the police or someone else to get a warrant or whatever it is you do when you think there is evidence. I think there is evidence that Bad Boy hit Toni over the head with the bat. Surely it’s worth investigating.”

“Surely it is,” Reed said. “But it seems strange. I can’t see Toni turning her back on a young man she didn’t know. That’s why I was so sure the assailant was a woman.”

“That is a problem, I admit. Perhaps Dorothy Hedge wielded the bat. A warrant would still be a good idea.”

“Are you sure Mama doesn’t suspect you spotted it?”

“Absolutely. We are meeting tomorrow with a group of sympathetic students to fight against the Brady bill and encourage the government to do away with welfare as we know it, which seems to mean no more food stamps. I can hardly wait. Mama is very pleased to have an ally of her own sex and age; older women have sadly disappointed her on the whole.”

Harriet moved toward the door, which Reed opened for her. “I’ll tell Kate as soon as she returns or calls in,” he said. “You really are quite wonderful, Harriet, in your own particular way.” He kissed her cheek
and promised to see about the warrant as soon as possible.

“If possible, before I have to go and take part in a public protest against welfare,” Harriet urged as she stepped into the elevator.

Kate, meanwhile, was on her way upstate, having had to wait on a line to pay cash since she did not possess an E-ZPass; she had purchased a token for her return trip, but fervently hoped that she would not again need to pass this way. She had spent her morning in endless conversations with members of the American Kennel Association, sounding to her own ears like a nutcase, but apparently she was a usual enough questioner to dog breeders. Her object had been to locate Marjorie, whose last name she did not know, let alone her address. Her first thought had been to ask Dorothy Hedge, pretending innocence about Hedge’s true allegiances, but Hedge would no doubt have warned Marjorie. Even if Hedge did not warn Marjorie, she would herself begin to worry about Kate’s intentions, clearly a result to be avoided.

And so Kate had got hold of a list of dog breeders in the area from the AKA—this alone had taken time—and had then called those in upstate New York, asking for the name of a woman who bred Saint Bernards. Eventually she had narrowed down her inquiries to two possibilities, one of whom turned out to be abandoning the breed and thus hadn’t had a litter in several years. The other was Marjorie’s Kennels, toward
which Kate was now heading, having, however, given Marjorie no warning of her imminent arrival. True, some eager AKA type might tell Marjorie someone had been inquiring about a Saint Bernard breeder, but surely there were legitimate enough inquiries of this sort. Kate, of course, planned simply, upon emerging from her car, to say that she had been overcome with a need to see Banny. After that, well, Kate had left without telling Reed where she was going because he would have asked what she intended to accomplish and in fact she hadn’t a clue.

It did occur to her for one moment that she might be in danger, but Kate comforted herself with the fact that if someone, whoever that someone was, had wanted to kill her instead of kidnapping Reed, they could easily have done so already. Having reassured herself as she drove along the Taconic Parkway with such spurious arguments as these, she was feeling quite composed when she swung the car into Marjorie’s driveway.

Kate had, of course, expected to be accosted by Marjorie and asked sharply who she was and what she wanted. But by the time she reached the end of a rather long driveway, Kate had spotted only some kennels and a young woman who was cleaning them out. The young woman, being hailed, told Kate that the owner of the kennels could be found in the house, pointing toward it in a rather vague way.

Kate parked the car in an area marked
PARKING
and
began to walk toward the house. But before she had gone far she looked up to find herself facing a woman with a gun, a rather long gun bent in the middle, as Kate put it to herself; she knew next to nothing about guns, but had the impression that handguns were most dangerous, and that everyone who lived in the country kept a shotgun about the place for protection. Kate had, in fact, picked up this piece of information, if it was information, from country neighbors in her childhood who lived in the country all year-round, and who used to tell Kate that their houses were never robbed because everyone knew that the owners kept guns.

The woman with the gun stood there, waiting for Kate to come closer. It did not for a moment occur to Kate that the woman might shoot her. The idea never even crossed her mind, as she later assured Reed. When the two women were a few feet apart, Kate stared for a moment and said: “Muriel.”

“My name is Marjorie now, Kate Fansler.” And the woman straightened the gun, snapping its parts together, and then held it facing down. “Come for Banny? Judith”—the woman called out to the young woman still cleaning the kennels—“bring Banny, will you?”

They stood there, like figures who, having been posed, were waiting to be photographed, until Judith returned with what was clearly, to Kate’s amazement, a large, loping Saint Bernard, who rushed up to Kate, then over to Marjorie, then back to Kate. I
couldn’t possibly lift her now, Kate thought. She crouched on the ground and put her arms around the dog, who licked her face. Then Kate stood up.