“Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all.”
—Derek Jacobi, Hamlet (PBS)
I TOLD SHIRLEY TO time our arrival for about quarter after eight. I figured it would ease our entry if Chief Cooper were there already, getting the old man curious. I didn’t mind if he got him irritated either. I didn’t care about much except getting the whole thing over with.
It had been a long couple of hours since Eve and I had left police headquarters. I told her what I was going to do, and she got angry. She said it was her duty to stop me, but she didn’t mean it. Or, rather, she meant it, but she wasn’t going to take any action on it. That was very nice of her, I thought. Still, I left her home and took a cab to Dan’s place.
I arranged things with Shirley, took a phone call from Harris, telling me that Marty Adelman had recognized Grant’s photograph as someone he’d seen talking to Roger Sparn, and, at the last minute, called Les Tilman and told him he might find it interesting to be at the Whitten house this evening.
That was it until Shirley came by. I found out an interesting thing—when you are looking ahead to what you already know will be the worst night of your life, time goes very slowly.
My plan worked. The guard (he was new since the murder) let us sail right past, with a murmur about the chief of police being there already and expecting us.
Les Tilman was just getting out of his car as we arrived. I introduced him to Shirley; they were pleased to meet each other face to face.
“Well, here I am,” he told me. “I don’t know what I said, I was talking so fast, but Mr. Whitten bought it. Now you tell me why I’m being taken away from my wife and my TV set.”
“You’ll hear it when everybody else does.”
Les shrugged, then worked the door knocker. A servant admitted us. Shirley sort of crouched down behind me—she didn’t want to get noticed and evicted. She figured she belonged there by virtue of her great curiosity.
The butler or whatever he was addressed himself exclusively to Les. Apparently, my status here was no secret below stairs. He also ignored Spot completely, which was rather tough, considering the dog had been born there. We were led into the parlor. The chief nodded a greeting. Brenda said hi. She was sitting in a chair, looking sick, holding on to her crutches for dear life. Grant was at the sideboard pouring something amber into a couple of glasses. He handed one to the old man.
I watched that with a certain amount of interest. The chief was playing it cagey, apparently, saving Grant’s face with Mr. Whitten, if only for the time being.
The chief kept giving me significant looks, as though he expected something from me, God knew what.
A. Lawrence Whitten took a long pull at his drink. “I would offer you some, but you are not a guest. Cooper has arranged this, and it’s easier to get it over with than to fight. I hope you’ll be brief.”
Not brief enough to suit me. “Yes, sir,” I said.
I tasted bile, swallowed to get rid of it. Then I cleared my throat. Come on, Cobb, I told myself savagely, spit it out.
That’s pretty much what I did. “I’m going back to New York tomorrow,” I said.
“Good riddance,” Grant said.
I looked at him. Grant was playing it deadpan. I wondered how much he knew about my part in his impending downfall. Or did he still think he could charm his way out of the downfall altogether? I dismissed it. Grant had nothing to do with my business tonight. Or so I thought.
“From your point of view, I deserve that,” I said. “And maybe from my point of view, too.” In a very real way, I knew this mess was my fault. “If I had this past week to live over, I’d do it far away from my old alma mater.”
“Get to the point Cobb,” Mr. Whitten said. I had a sudden flash of déjà vu to another meeting like this; another old man, another sad daughter.
But I shook that off, too. “Yes,” I said, “the point I have been running around this town, making a nuisance of myself, in an attempt to find new evidence to clear Dan Morris of murdering Debra Whitten. I thought I’d found some on Sunday afternoon, when an attempt was made on my life. But that turned out to be the result of another matter entirely.”
“I’m not surprised,” the old man muttered. I ignored him and took another peek at Grant. He was still playing it cool. To hell with him.
On with the show. I was getting to the hard part. I was supposed to be in control of things here, but the futility and the goddam stupid waste of it all was clogging my throat and making it hard to talk. I had to force the words past it. I’ll bet it made my voice sound very compelling. I was getting sick of it.
“I have come to the conclusion that there was no new evidence—”
Behind me, I heard Shirley gasp. It was the first uncool, unprofessional thing she’d ever done.
“—that the story was all there to read that night. That I’ve just been too stubborn and blind to see it.”
“Do you mean to say,” Chief Cooper said, “that you now think your friend killed Miss Whitten?”
I turned to meet his eyes. ‘Yes,” I said. “My friend killed Miss Whitten. It was a crime of passion, committed in anger on the spur of the moment. But the deception and lying since then have been deliberate. And let me tell you something. When someone who’s supposed to be your friend lets you run around making a goddam fool of yourself, it does something to you.”
“Excuse me,” a voice cut in. It was Les Tilman, who until now had been effacing himself in a corner of the room. “I’m no lawyer or anything,” the reporter went on, “but I know this town. If you go back to New York tomorrow, and leave Dan Morris in the lurch, you might as well be turning the key on him yourself.”
“So?” I said “Doesn’t he deserve to have the key turned on him?”
Brenda Whitten spoke for the first time. Her voice was barely a whisper. “Matt,” she said helplessly. “No—”
I turned on her. “Why not?” She shook her head, starting to cry. It occurred to me I’d spent a good part of the week making this kid cry. I knelt in front of her and cradled a limp hand in my freshly bandaged ones. Spot came over to lend moral support. “Come on, Junebug,” I said softly. “Tell me, please. Why not?”
It went on that way for some seconds. Once, Mr. Whitten was about to command me to stop. I didn’t dare look away from Brenda’s face, but I found out later the chief had shut the old man up.
“Brenda, please. You’re my friend, aren’t you? Dan’s friend?”
I heard Les Tilman say, “His friend. Holy Christ. His friend.”
“Brenda, tell me. You weren’t going to let Dan go to prison, were you?”
She just shook her head some more, and said, “I can’t!”
“All right, baby, all right. You didn’t mean to kill her, I know that. But what happened?”
“She laughed at me!” She practically screamed it. “She was always laughing at me. She was so beautiful and healthy—and she made such a big deal of her lousy skin condition!”
Inside, I was shouting derision at myself. The body hadn’t cooled off yet, and there was Spot, licking Debbie’s face. For a long time. Yet earlier in the week he’d taken one lick and started to choke, put off by the medicated makeup. I’d forgotten all about it until Spot licked lighter fluid off Eve’s face in the woods.
Probably because I’d wanted to forget it. Because I liked Brenda. But there was no getting around it. Dogs don’t lie. Spot was licking that face because there was no makeup on it, period. But Debbie was very fastidious about her makeup. No one saw her without it, except for the immediate family and her lover.
Not Dan. He’d complained to me that very afternoon about it. So if Dan walked Debbie back to the house, and argued with her and killed her, when had she taken off her makeup? The police theory had to be wrong.
So who’d been in the house with Debbie? Dan, then Brenda, then me. And she was dead when I got there. Grant had been on the grounds, but nobody’s evidence could put him in the house. And Brenda, who had no reason to protect him as far as I could see, definitely put him out.
Besides, Grant was excluded for another reason, a reason that almost made me want to laugh. Grant couldn’t have delivered that flesh-crushing blow, that awesome display of strength that killed Debbie. And it just so happened Brenda could.
“Why did she laugh at you?” I asked the killer in my gentlest voice.
“I—I was just trying to talk sense to her. To make her see how foolish she was to want Grant when Dan loved her so much. She treated Dan so badly. When I walked in the house, I saw the broken banister—I knew she must have done something awful to him. She told me to mind my own business, but this was my business. It was!”
“We believe you, Junebug,” I said.
That seemed to soothe her. She didn’t look at her father or at anyone but me. Her Friend. Spot made a sympathetic noise in his throat.
“It was my business because—because I knew something about Grant.”
Grant again. I risked breaking eye contact with Brenda to get a look at him. He wasn’t quite so cool.
But he was trying. “This child,” he said, “is obviously in a lot of distress.”
“Just like you were!” Brenda yelled. It was an explosion of pure loathing. “The night of the engagement party. When you were drunk and I felt sorry for you and you told me how pretty I was and how nice I was, nicer—nicer than Debbie. And how the leg didn’t matter to you.”
The look of disgust left her face when she looked back at me.
“I told Debbie all of this, Matt. I tried to make her see. I told her how he took me in the back seat and made lo—no, how he stuck it in me! There was no love in it. There’s never love in it. I’ve found that out since. Not for me, anyway. I was crying, and he was making me swear not to tell anyone.”
I did a little subtraction. Brenda had been fourteen years old at the time. I carefully avoided looking at Grant Sewall because if I had laid eyes on him, nothing would have been able to keep me from killing him.
“And when I told Debbie she laughed. She—she called me a liar. Then she said, Grant would never get that drunk, and she laughed at me some more, and I got so mad I just hit her, I just swung my crutch like a baseball bat and hit her and she fell, and I started to scream—”
Somebody else started to scream. Her father, a rasping cry of anger from a communicator who’d run out of words. He was going for Grant, and it would have been interesting to see what he did when he got there, but of course Chief Cooper wrapped him up before he could.
Brenda was sobbing. She reached out to me, to me, for Jesus’s sweet sake, the way she had in Dan’s apartment. I put my arms around her as she buried her face against my shoulder as if to hide from the world and everything in it.
I was looking at Grant. Everyone was looking at Grant. Chief Cooper had a look of disgust on his face, as if he’d suddenly found himself in a room with a million maggots.
He was the one who spoke first “Christ, Sewall,” he said. “You’re no goddam good at all, are you?”
Grant said nothing. He just swallowed and fixed his tie and wiped some sweat from his handsome forehead.
Brenda held me tighter, and cried as if she would never stop.