They met at Caffeine’s instead of the club, where the staff would be queued up to eavesdrop.
They ordered wine. When it was poured and everyone sipped, Caroline began. “Before we start, I have some news.”
“Caroline,” Dana said, “with all due respect, please shut up. This time, I’m in charge.”
Caroline pursed her puffed lips. “That’s fine, Dana. Then while you’re in charge, do me a favor and ask if anyone has any idea why a gun was in my water garden.”
“A gun?” Dana asked.
“A gun?” Bridget asked.
Lauren, however, remained mute.
“I was in the city yesterday. I arrived home to an entire squadron of police tramping through my landscaping, stringing yellow plastic tape from my weeping cherries to my Japanese maples. They drained the pond that Lauren’s son-in-law spent fifty-three thousand dollars digging up.” She leaned forward in her chair, placed her elbows on the table, and tented her fingers. “So, if anyone has any ideas, I’m listening.”
“Good grief,” Dana said.
“Good grief,” Bridget said.
“Was it the gun that killed Vincent?” Lauren asked.
Caroline shrugged. “Who knows. They aren’t telling me anything. They’re treating me like a suspect.”
“We’re all suspects,” Dana said. “Even more now that Kitty has been cleared thanks to the ballistics.”
“Don’t look at me,” Bridget said. “I was arranging for my chemotherapy. I doubt anyone can top that.”
“I didn’t kill him,” Lauren said. “By now you all know about my affair. When Vincent took up with Yolanda, I was angry and hurt. I would have loved some revenge, but I’m afraid of my own shadow, and all of you know that, too.” She was, of course, making oblique reference to the neck wattle she’d yet to have tightened.
“But you’re running away,” Dana said. When Dana had called about doing lunch, Lauren said she was packing for a trip to Nantucket.
“I’m running from Bob, not from Vincent.” Her voice fell to a low octave that implored no further details.
“Well, I know I didn’t kill him,” Dana said. “I had no need.”
“You have no secrets?” Caroline asked with a sad laugh. “Come, come, Dana, we all have secrets.”
Bridget pulled out the neckline of her scoop T and used it to fan off a hot flash.
“If I have secrets,” Dana said, “they do not involve Vincent. Or anyone in New Falls, for that matter.”
“Then what might they be?” Caroline asked.
“Oh, stop it,” Bridget interrupted. “Whatever they are, they can’t be as incriminating as knowing a hit man. Caroline, why don’t you tell us about that?”
Caroline fingered her glass as if it were Steuben. “Okay, if we’re going to be honest, you asked for it. A while back, I considered having Jack killed.”
The whole restaurant went quiet, or was it only their table?
“What’s the matter?” Caroline asked. “Are you going to tell me that not once in your married life none of you wished your husband was dead?”
Dana opened her mouth to say, “No!” but realized the others had fallen silent. She said a quick amends to Steven for letting them think she agreed.
“What did you do?” Bridget asked. “Look one up in the Yellow Pages?”
She fingered her glass again, ignored the remark. “Do any of you remember Mike Dawson, the pro?”
He’d been the good-looking golf pro who’d given them a few hopeless lessons then one day disappeared, the way golf pros often do.
“He’d been hitting on me, and I let him. But I told him the only way he’d have a chance was if Jack was out of the picture. I’d been kidding, well, mostly, but Mike gave me a name and phone number. I kept it because I figured someday…”
The steward uncorked a second bottle of wine. Caroline’s voice drifted away on its bouquet.
“I don’t believe you,” Lauren said.
Caroline laughed. “Well, it’s true. It’s also why Mike disappeared. After consideration, and reconsideration, I changed my mind. The thought of starting over alone, or worse, with someone else, simply seemed too tiring. But after that, Mike’s presence made me nervous. I decided his association with the underworld was inappropriate for New Falls. So I told Jack he’d propositioned me. The next day, Mike and his Big Berthas were gone.”
They mused, they sipped, they ordered salads niçoise. Then Dana said, “I thought you knew someone in jail.”
Caroline blanched. “In jail? Me?”
“You knew it was cold when Kitty was there.”
She smiled a smile that seemed to be private. Then she said, “Sorry. The only one I’ve ever known in the pokey was my dear mother. Every so often she’d wind up in the drunk tank and I’d bail her out. My father wouldn’t do it because he wanted her to stay there and learn a lesson. He figured that way she might get sober. He figured wrong.”
“Oh, Caroline,” Lauren said.
“Oy vey,” Bridget said.
“So you’re saying you didn’t kill Vincent,” Dana said.
“Scout’s honor,” Caroline replied. “Though I might as well tell you I had a good motive.”
Lauren’s lips puckered. “Why? What did my Vincent ever do to you?”
No one commented that he hadn’t been her Vincent.
“Well, for one thing, he was blackmailing me,” Caroline replied. “I’d already paid him two hundred thousand dollars and I knew he’d be back for more.”
Bridget gripped the enamel sink in the ladies’ room where she had fled after feigning nausea from the chemo, and who could argue? Apparently Dana could, because she blew through the door right behind Bridget and asked what was really going on.
“I’m sick,” Bridget said. “I don’t think I’m supposed to have wine.”
“Wine runs through your French veins,” Dana said. “Besides, I might believe you except I saw your jaw drop when Caroline mentioned blackmail.”
Just then the door opened again, and in came Lauren followed by Caroline.
“Are you all right, Bridget?” Lauren asked while Caroline took a seat on the stiff brocade sofa parked in front of a gilt-framed mirror.
“I’m terrific,” Bridget said. “Trés terrific.”
“You don’t have to be sarcastic,” Lauren said.
“I have cancer,” she replied. “I have a right to get sick. Or sarcastic.”
None of them challenged that.
Then Bridget said she was sorry. “It’s not the cancer,” she confessed. “The son of a beetch Vincent was blackmailing me, too.”
Lauren’s hands flew to her ears. “Stop it! Stop saying bad things about him!”
Dana’s eyes flicked from Caroline to Bridget, back to Caroline again. “Why would he blackmail either of you?”
There was a fat, pregnant pause. Who would go first?
Eenie.
Meenie.
Miney.
Bridget wound up being Mo.
“Merde,” she said, just as someone flushed, exited a stall, washed her hands too quickly, and departed the ladies’ room. Bridget shrugged as if secrets no longer mattered. “Vincent found out I’d been married before. He learned I had a son who drowned in the marshes. He knew I never told Randall.”
It grew quiet again.
“You had a son?” Lauren whispered. “But you didn’t tell Randall?”
Bridget lowered her voice. “It would have upset him because I’d never been truthful. When I first met him, Randall thought I was a virgin. He is so Catholic, even back then. Randall is a good man, but sometimes he is naïve.”
“How much did you pay Vincent?” Caroline asked.
“Same as you. Two hundred thousand.”
Caroline stood up and said, “I need more wine.”
They reassembled their postures, their napkins, their platitudinal smiles.
Then Bridget said, “So Vincent blackmailed us both, Caroline. I have revealed my deepest, most painful secret. What did Vincent learn about you? Was it motive enough for you to kill him? Because believe it or not, I did not.”
In their absence, the salads had arrived. Caroline picked up her fork now, tined bits of olives as if they were delicate diamonds, plinked them one by one onto her bread and butter plate. “Perhaps none of you know this, but I am a lesbian.”
If someone had dropped a proverbial pin, it would have echoed from New Falls to New Delhi to New Guinea then back to New York.
“Excuse me?” Dana asked as another piece of black fruit dotted the white china plate.
Caroline sighed. “So shoot me, I’m gay. Don’t worry, though. I never eyed any of you in the locker room. In fact, I’ve only really had one female lover.”
No one spoke; no one could.
Then Bridget said, “Well, I guess that tops my cancer. So Vincent found out you liked women and you paid him to be quiet.”
“He found out because he had a private investigator doing his dirty work. Not an investigator, really. More like a greedy attorney.”
“Paul Tobin?” Dana said, as some pieces fell together.
“When Kitty was arrested that lowlife called me,” Caroline continued. “He said he needed a big case, and that he wanted hers.”
“Or he would take over blackmailing you where Vincent had left off?” Bridget said.
“Worse. He’d tell the world the rest. That not only am I a lesbian, but that my lover was Vincent’s daughter.”
Vincent’s daughter?
Vincent’s daughter?
“Elise?” asked Dana, Bridget, Lauren, all at the same time.
Caroline nodded. “I sold my mother’s sapphires to keep them quiet.”
“And now a gun shows up mysteriously in your water garden,” Dana said.
“A gun that, chances are, is connected to Vincent’s death,” Bridget added.
Lauren jumped up, flung her napkin on the salad niçoise.
“I’m tired of you! I’m tired of all of you! You are turning my Vincent into some sort of…of…”
“Rogue?” Caroline asked, then said, “Sorry, my dear. But I believe your Vincent did that to himself.”
Tears jumped from Lauren’s eyes, landing on the napkin that had landed on the salad.
Dana stood up and took Lauren’s arm. “Please, honey, sit down. No one’s trying to trash Vincent. We’re just telling the truth.”
“But I can’t believe it…”
“Can’t,” Caroline said. “Won’t.”
“Caroline, please shut up,” Dana said for the second time during the lunch. She turned back to Lauren. “We don’t always know people the way that we think. It happens to all of us, Lauren.”
“You don’t understand,” Lauren wept. “I gave him two hundred thousand dollars, too. But I thought he loved me…” Then she looked at Dana. “Did he blackmail you, too?”
Before Dana could answer, Bridget said, “Ha. Dana has no secrets,” and, well, except for her father, that was pretty much true.
“So,” Dana said, wondering what Sam was going to say about all this, “the bottom line is, Vincent blackmailed all three of you, but you say you didn’t kill him.”
“Not me.”
“Not I.”
“Not moi.”
“And there’s a gun now that’s no doubt connected.”
“No doubt.”
“No doubt.”
“No doubt.”
“Okay,” Dana said, folding her hands in her lap. “Then I have a question, and please don’t get angry. If none of us did it, what about our husbands? Is it possible one of them found out about the blackmail…that one of them is Vincent’s killer…and that he threw the gun in the water garden on a whim?”