The Senator's Wife (33 page)

“So why question
you?
”

“I told you, I found the body. At least that’s what they said. They kept asking me about it, over and over. I think—they think Lewis was murdered. They think—maybe—
I
did it.”

“
What?
”

“That was the—impression I got.”

“They couldn’t think that!”

The route to the side door took them right past Marsden. He turned away from the men he was talking to, his arms folding over his chest as he watched them approach. He wore a dark business suit with a solid dark tie and, like Ronnie, he was pale, with red-rimmed eyes. As they drew nearer, his face contorted. He moved toward them.

Here’s trouble
, Tom thought, and tried to warn Marsden off with a hard-eyed stare.

It didn’t work.

“So you fell for the bitch, eh, Tom?” Marsden’s voice was low as he came up to them, but his expression as he looked at Ronnie screamed hatred.

“
What did you say?
” It took Tom a second or two to register that he really had heard what he thought he had. Then anger, fierce and hot, shot through his veins. Beside him he felt Ronnie shrink closer. Her eyes were huge and shadowed as they fixed on Marsden’s face.

“Goddamn, Tom, I don’t blame
you
for it, we was hopin’ to get somethin’ on her so Daddy could divorce her and we
did
, but when he told her, she done
killed
him over it. That little whore done killed Daddy, Tom!”

Tom decked him. One punch, and Marsden reeled backward, hit the wall, bounced, and fell to the polished marble floor. Even as a collective gasp rose from onlookers, who could not possibly have heard the conversation but certainly couldn’t have missed the aftermath, even as state troopers and politicos and seemingly half the people in the room ran toward them, Tom dropped to one knee beside Marsden. Grabbing him by the tie, he jerked his head clear of the ground.

Marsden’s red-rimmed eyes were still a little dazed from the blow, but Tom was too angry to care. He stuck his face right in Marsden’s and growled, “Don’t you ever,
ever
, talk
to
her or
about
her that way again, you hear? Or I’ll—”

“Tom! Tom!” Kenny grabbed his arm, pulling him up and away from Marsden’s supine form. His voice was a hiss. “Tom, you’re gonna get yourself arrested!”

Other hands were pulling him back by that time. He was hustled away by a company of men, and Marsden was helped to his feet.

“Just a little altercation between old friends,” Tom said to the state boy who held one of his arms. The trooper looked skeptical, but at a nod from one of the other troopers who knew him Tom was let go. Straightening his tie, disdaining to so much as glance in Marsden’s direction, he walked over to where Ronnie was huddled with Thea and said briefly, “Let’s go.”

He, Ronnie, Kenny and Thea walked out into the still-bright evening through a side door that opened onto an obscure parking lot—and were met by a rear
guard of reporters. Cameras flashed in their faces. Questions were hurled their way.

“It’s her! It’s her! Mrs. Honneker!”

As the shout went up, the media types who’d been in front came running around the side of the building, dragging paraphernalia ranging from shoulder-held cameras to boom mikes.

Staring at them for a furious, incredulous instant, Tom realized he now knew what a fox felt like when the hunt was after it in full cry.

Ronnie instinctively turned into his shoulder, Tom wrapped an arm around her, and with Kenny and Thea ranged on either side of them they bolted for Kenny’s car, which was parked at an expired meter half a block down the street. They were chased, and photographed, and pelted with questions until they were safely inside the locked car and it was peeling rubber up the street.

The scene at Sedgely was almost as bad. Knowing better than to try to get through the front gates, Kenny drove around to the rear tradesman’s entrance.

Only a few reporters were stationed there, but those few swarmed the car in full force when they realized that Ronnie was in the backseat. Cringing from the flashes, she hid her face in her hands. Tom pulled her against his chest, shielding her from the photographers with his coat and arms as Kenny explained to the state troopers on duty that they had Mrs. Honneker in the car.

They were admitted, the gates closed behind them, and the reporters were left to wait some more.

Ronnie continued to rest against his chest as they drove up the winding drive. Kenny glanced at them in
the rearview mirror more than once, and Thea, turning to say something to one of them, took a good look and seemed to change her mind.

Kenny drove around to the front, saw the sheer number of cars that were there before them, and shook his head.

“Why don’t I let you off at the front door, Ronnie?” he asked over his shoulder. “That way you won’t have to walk so far.”

“That’s a good idea,” Ronnie said, in something that was fairly close to a normal voice. But her fingers closed over the front of Tom’s shirt as though she feared to let go.

“We’re all going in,” Tom said briskly, uncurling her fingers from his shirtfront. With a quick glance to make sure Kenny and Thea’s attention was elsewhere, he raised them unobtrusively to his lips. She smiled at him. It was a tremulous smile, but still a smile. “You can let Ronnie and Thea and me off at the front door, Kenny, and then park and join us.”

“Sure thing,” Kenny said with an unnatural degree of heartiness and another of those quick glances through the rearview mirror.

There was a huge black wreath on the door, Tom saw as they walked up the front steps, his hand decorously on Ronnie’s elbow. Even as they reached it, the door opened and an elderly couple stood framed in the entrance.

“You tell Dorothy that Sam and I were here, now, Selma, you hear?” the elderly woman said over her shoulder as she and the old gentleman with her stepped through the doorway.

“I will do that, Mrs. Cherry,” Selma said, coming
into view behind them. Her gaze swept past them to Ronnie, Tom, and Thea, who had just reached the porch, and she said something to someone behind her.

Upon seeing Ronnie, Mrs. Cherry and her companion stopped at the top of the steps to express their condolences. Ronnie replied politely, and then they were inside the house.

A hushed air lay over everything, as though the house itself knew that its master was dead. Even the light from the huge crystal chandelier seemed dim.

Ronnie stopped just inside the door, staring up at the wide, curving stairway before her as though it were Mount Everest. Then she looked at Tom.

“Will you be here tomorrow?” she asked.

Tom nodded. She bowed her head, then turned away from him and started walking up the stairs, her body slender and fragile-looking in her black dress.

She looked so alone. It was all he could do not to go after her, to tuck her into bed and see that she got supper and was taken care of in general. His hands clenched at his sides from doing battle with the impulse.

Leaving Ronnie to the tender mercies of Sedgely was kind of like leaving Daniel to the tender mercies of the lion’s den, he thought savagely.

But he could not go with her, and he could not take her away. Not yet. Where before she had been the Senator’s wife, now she was his widow. For a few more days.

Then, maybe, they could begin again.

“Go up with her, would you, Thea?” he asked, turning away. “Just to see that she gets settled in.”

“Sure, Tom.” The look Thea gave him told him
that, over the last hour or so, she had made a pretty fair deduction about the state of his feelings toward Ronnie. She hurried up the stairs in Ronnie’s wake.

Selma was standing near the door.

“Mrs. Lewis hasn’t had anything to eat since coffee this morning,” Tom said to the housekeeper. “You take her up some supper, Selma, would you please?”

Selma nodded. Her eyes were bloodshot, with puffy circles around them as though she had been crying. Tom remembered that she had worked at Sedgely for over thirty years.

She would grieve for His Honor too. Hell, they all would, even he, as crazy and mixed up as that sounded.

“I will,” Selma said. Then she lowered her voice. “The police are still going over the Senator’s office. They’ve been asking questions about you. When I told them you were here, they asked me to ask you if you would come see them for a minute.”

Tom frowned, then nodded and headed toward the east wing, his stomach tightening. He had a good idea of why the police might want to talk to him, though he prayed he was wrong.

If Marsden suspected he’d been sleeping with Ronnie, the police would have heard it first thing.

It turned out to be worse, much worse, than he had thought. The detective in charge was Alex Smitt, whom Tom knew slightly. Alex greeted him with a penetrating look, a quick handshake, and nary a smile.

“I’ve got something to show you,” Alex said, and ushered him into a room almost directly opposite His Honor’s office, the open doorway of which was barred
with yellow crime-scene tape, making it off limits to everyone but the police.

A card table had been set up in the center of the room. On the vinyl top was a stack of photographs. With a gesture Alex indicated to Tom that he should look at them.

Tom did, and felt his blood freeze.

They were pictures of him, and Ronnie, and him and Ronnie together. Lots of pictures. Some were downright erotic. All were damning.

The two of them kissing in the Yellow Dog. The two of them kissing behind his apartment. The two of them kissing in the parking lot of the Robbins Inn. Another one of them going into a room there, hand in hand. Him in his tux and her in her panties as he carried her out of the swimming pool on the night of the party. A full dozen of the two of them in the act of making love that same night on the gym mat in the pool house. Obviously someone had been taking pictures through the patio door.

Tom winced inwardly, then looked up to meet Alex’s steady gaze.

“Would you agree that it’s fair to say that you and Mrs. Honneker were having an affair?”

Though the truth was evident, right there on the card table in living color in a way no one but a blind man could mistake, Tom wasn’t stupid enough to answer that.

“Talk to my lawyer,” he said crisply, and, turning on his heel, walked out the door.

Chapter
39

September 13th

“T
HE FIRST THING FOR YOU
to do is stay away from her.” From behind his desk, Dan Osborn pointed his pen at Tom, his expression admonitory. “I mean it, Tom. You stay away from her.”

It was Saturday morning. Ronnie knew that Osborn usually spent Saturday morning on the golf course. Today, however, he was in his office, taking her on as a client. He was the best criminal-defense lawyer in Jackson.

It seemed impossible to believe that she needed a criminal-defense lawyer, but Tom assured her that she did, and Osborn seemed to agree with him.

“There’s no reason for Tom to stay away from me,” she said. She was seated in a big burgundy leather wing chair, one of a pair pulled up in front of Osborn’s massive oak desk. Dressed in a dark gray suit, white shirt, and navy tie, Tom stood with his back to the big window that overlooked the new capitol building. Ronnie glanced at him briefly before returning her attention to the lawyer. “I did not kill my husband, Mr. Osborn.”

Osborn swiveled to face her. Gray-haired, in perhaps his midsixties, he was a rumpled, grumpy-looking bulldog of a man. Ronnie had met him on a few occasions previously, most recently at Lewis’s party. Tom he knew well. His gaze moved over her now, taking in her sedately styled hair, which was pulled back from her face and secured at her nape with a black satin bow, and her trim-fitting black pants suit and her crossed legs and high heels. The conclusion he reached after completing this appraisal was not apparent in his expression.

“Mrs. Honneker, if I didn’t believe that, I would not have agreed to represent you. However, being innocent of a crime and proving that you are innocent of a crime are two entirely different matters. Since Tom called me on your behalf last night, I have been in touch with some people I know in the DA’s office and the police department, and they feel they have quite a substantial case against you already. You found the body; your fingerprints are on the murder weapon; there is a lapse of some twenty-five minutes between the time the limo driver says he dropped you off at Sedgely and the time when you started screaming for help; you were having an affair with Tom here, of which they have photographic proof; according to his son, Marsden, Senator Honneker was planning to ask you for a divorce because of that affair;
and
there was a signed prenuptial agreement in place preventing you from collecting more than a pittance in case of divorce. Your share of the estate upon his death is, however, substantial. There you have method, motive, and opportunity. I’ve seen people convicted on a lot less.”

“She didn’t kill him, Dan,” Tom said. His hands
rested on the marble windowsill; his fingers curled around the edge. One leg was bent, with his foot flat against the wall.

“You, my friend, having been in California at the time, have no way of knowing that for certain. There is no witness that I am aware of who can provide Mrs. Honneker with an alibi.” He looked at Ronnie. “Is there?”

She shook her head, and then smiled faintly. “Davis.”

If she appeared to be having trouble taking this whole thing seriously, Ronnie thought, it was because she was. It seemed ludicrous that anyone could think that
she
had murdered Lewis. She was even having trouble accepting that he was dead.
Murdered
. Ronnie kept getting the feeling she was caught up in some kind of surreal dream. This could not really be happening.

“The dog,” Tom answered Osborn’s unspoken query. He straightened. “Who took the pictures?”

Ronnie hadn’t seen them. From Tom’s brief—very brief—description, she preferred to keep it that way.