LAUREN REGARDED ME as if I were one long bad news report. The look of suspicion had given way to tears that gleamed in her eyes but did not fall. We sat on the living room couch, straining the silence to its limit. Finally, to be doing something, I said I would make tea.
It had come back to me that the person who had tried to take my head off had been wearing latex gloves, so fingerprints were doubtful. Still, I touched as little as I had to. Moving about, I noted changes—new dishware, furniture rearranged. But it was not all new; the ceramic-handled copper kettle sat on the stove, a wedding gift, a ghost. I half-filled it and set it on a burner. Back in the living room I did not sit again. Lauren had a cigarette burning, which she smoked halfway down in edgy little dabs before crushing it out in a clamshell ashtray.
“The police will be here any minute,” I said. “They won’t bother you tonight if you don’t want, but they’ll need to look around. I asked St. Onge not to make it a circus.”
Lauren nodded. She seemed collected now, though it was probably numbness.
“Is there any way this makes sense?” I pried gently.
“No.”
“Had Joel gotten any threats?”
Same answer.
“Was he involved with anything or anyone that might make enemies?”
She closed her eyes a moment and sighed with fraying patience. “No, Alex.”
I took out the Eagle-Trib column I had swiped from Castle’s desk. “What about this?”
Her eyes flicked over it with only a remote flare of interest. “I knew about that. I told Joel the jade ring was part of the collection and ought to be kept with the rest.”
“You never got any jade?”
“I got a ruby.” She put her hand out and looked at it as if the ring and the finger it was on belonged to someone else.
“Did you ever see his jade collection?”
“I thought you said there wasn’t going to be any bother tonight.”
I wandered over to the picture window and opened the drapes partway and peered out. No squad car yet. Behind me, from the couch, Lauren sighed. “Yes, I’ve seen the jade.”
I turned.
“He kept the collection at home, for now. You were probably wondering that,” she said. “He hoped to acquire one last piece to complete a group. Some kind of dragon.”
“Who had that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Was it the same person who sold him the jade he had?”
“I couldn’t say.”
“Do you know who the original seller was?”
“Look, Joel handled business affairs by himself. It’s the way he was. He took responsibility for things, Alex.”
The ghost in the kitchen began to whistle.
My nerves wanted chamomile tea, something to soothe them, to cut the adrenaline and put me out of the fray; but I knew the evening was not over yet. I brewed the high-test in two cups with Far Side cartoons on them and brought them back to the living room. The police made their well-oiled arrival a minute later: a gray sedan and a squad car, St. Onge and a pair of uniforms. As the patrolmen checked the yard and the forced front door, St. Onge sat with us. Declining tea, he lit a cigarette for Lauren and one for himself. They had always liked each other back when the three of us and Ed’s wife, Leona, would get together for dinner and bridge. Lauren said she didn’t mind talking, so he took her over some of the same ground we had already covered. When he got to Castle, he asked his questions tactfully, for which I was grateful.
“What about you?” St. Onge said to me. “What can you add?”
I filled him in from the time I had left Castle’s to almost braining Lauren with the toilet tank cover. I debated giving him the newspaper clipping, but Lauren had not brought it up, so I didn’t. He already had notes on the jade and the fancy wristwatch as possible motive for Castle’s death; he didn’t need gossip too—or my scattershot guesswork that whoever had killed Castle might have seen the clipping and made the link to Lauren and come after her too, thinking she had jade.
I walked St. Onge through the events there at the house, and we finished up in the kitchen, where I’d been hit.
“Nothing else you remember seeing?” he said.
“Stars mostly. I think he was Asian.”
“Based on a foggy glance in a dark room.” He shook his head.
When he went out to see how his troops were doing, I sat in the living room with Lauren. She was sunk back deep in the cushions now. In the clamshell on the coffee table, her cigarette grew ash. She was seeing through the furniture and walls.
One of the oil paintings was off-kilter, I noticed. There were a pair of them that went with the abstracts in my office, and they took me back to the little apartment on Varnum Avenue where Lauren and I had lived just after we got married. One day I found half a dozen paintings stacked on the sidewalk with the trash. When you have bare walls and a thin wallet, you take something like that as a sign. In time I learned that our neighbor was an impoverished young painter named Montejo. He would reuse canvas until it was layered so thick with paint it would not take another coat. The rejects—which were most of them then—wound up on our walls by way of the trash pile. The first time I invited him in and showed him, he scowled and said something in Portuguese about someone’s mother, but I think he was secretly pleased. He donated some additional paintings before he moved away. I had not heard of him since, but if someone came in one day, recognized the brushstrokes, and said Montejos were selling like hotdogs in SoHo, I was ready. Okay, their outlines and colors were too sharp, the perspective skewed, but I still liked the paintings. They had energy and promise. They took me back to those times on Varnum Avenue. I straightened the one on the wall. Lauren did not seem to notice.
“Want me to stick around?” I said.
She was slow answering, drugged by whatever chemical the body produces to help it cope. “I’m going to call Nancy and Rod and stay with them tonight.”
“I can take you over,” I said.
“Or maybe I’ll go to a hotel.”
“You sure you don’t want—”
“Positive.” She stared at me. “Okay?”
Castle was not the cause of what happened between us. A catalyst maybe, but the change had been in me and in her. It was real, and if I’d known it a day, I’d known it for months. I just had not been able to admit it. Now, a one-word sentence had shown me. Signatures on paper were only a formality. “Okay,” I said.
I found St. Onge in the driveway, talking on the sedan’s radio. He had folded his jacket and hung it over the open car door. Neighbors were watching through parted curtains, but no one had ventured over. Ed slung the mike.
“Hot town,” he said, “summer in the city.”
I looked at him.
“There are impressions in the grass in back where someone took off on foot. Probably had wheels down the block. I’ll have a cruising patrol keep an eye peeled. We’ll canvass the neighbors in the A.M., see if anyone saw something.”
“A small white car maybe, white wheel covers?” I shook my head. “The guy who was here had on gloves, which says he was careful. You should still tell Andover to print Castle’s place. They’ll find mine, but that was afterwards. And someone ought to check the woods beside his house. If that was the pool gate I heard, the killer could have parked at the Sheraton and come and gone through the woods.”
“You writing a text on investigative practice?”
“No.”
Ed nodded tiredly. “You could’ve called the locals directly. That’s going to raise questions.”
It was his way of asking again what I had been doing at Castle’s in the first place. I stayed dumb. He said he would talk to a sergeant he knew on the Andover force. We listened to crickets and the garble of the sedan’s two-way for a moment, then he took his coat off the door and tossed it onto the front seat. “I’m going to keep a patrolman here awhile.”
“Lauren may stay with friends tonight.”
He angled his head toward the lighted windows of the living room. “Any chance you two patching things up?”
I noticed for the first time that the drapes were different, brighter. “That’s history,” I said. “Like a lot of things about this city.”
I drove back downtown and cruised by the darkened DSS office, just to assure myself that Ada was long gone. I had forgotten to call her as I had said I would. It was after ten when I got home. Maybe not too late on a Friday night …
“Mea culpa,” I said when she answered.
“I guess I was just last on a list of things to do,” she said in a tone I couldn’t read.
“The evening got hectic. I’m sorry.”
“Uh-huh.”
“You were sleeping?”
“Not anymore. In fact, I’m thinking about going out to meet someone. There’s a good jazz group at the Hilton. Interested?”
“I’d be a lousy third person,” I said.
“Who said anything about three?”