I saw Detective Geoffrey Bushfield a little earlier than planned that Saturday. He arrived at the harbor, accompanied by a screaming fleet of police cars and firetrucks. Soon, an ambulance was parked on the construction path down which Reich had rushed to his death. For all the good the ambulance could do, they might as well have sent a taxi.
Soon, too, I was arguing with the detective, who was beginning to look as if he’d like to send me home in a taxi.
“But Geof,” I entreated, “you once told me that you catch more criminals by the application of common sense than by the application of criminology. So don’t give me this baloney about regulations.”
He observed me dryly, in more ways than one, from a safe distance.
As I squeezed a hank of my hair, like a towel, with both hands, I said, “I want to go with you when you tell Reich’s wife. Your common sense ought to tell you that’s a good idea.”
He sighed, so that his broad shoulders moved within the confines of his well-tailored jacket.
“I seem to be testifying against myself,” he said irritably, “Look, if I’m going to break the rules, at least give me some justification for the benefit of my so-called superiors.” I knew I’d won the argument then, which was no surprise since the man had been breaking one rule or another most of his life.
“I’m the one who knows why he did it,” I pointed out in a reasonable tone of voice. I picked up my shoes from the ground and let the remaining water trickle out the heels. “And I was an eyewitness to his death, so I can give his wife a firsthand account if she wants it.”
“You were not an eyewitness to his death,” Geof said, in the same tone of voice in which people say, “Will you please not crack your knuckles?” “You were an eyewitness only to his coming down the pier toward you. Nobody but the fishies actually saw him die.”
“Fishies?”
He started to laugh first, followed quickly by me.
“Geof,” I said then, in a softer tone, “I really want to go. It’s important to me. I feel responsible for . . .”
“Talk about baloney,” he interrupted, and shook a long finger at me. “I know you, Jennifer Cain, and if there’s a load of guilt to haul, you’ll pack it up and carry it away on your shoulders, even if it doesn’t belong to you . . .”
“Geof!”
His young partner, Ailey Mason, trotted up. He was panting in the heat.
“Geof,” he said, “the divers have found the truck.”
“How soon before they pull him out?”
“Soon.”
“All right. I’ll wait to get official confirmation that he’s dead before I leave for his house.”
“Before we leave,” I corrected him sweetly.
Mason glanced at Geof, then at me. His eyes traveled from my hair, which lay in strings on my shoulders, down my sodden suit to which unnamable green things clung, to my stockinged feet.
“What did you use for bait, Geof?” he said.
“Mason!” Geof growled, so that the young policeman took off running again, back toward the pier to watch the salvage operation.
“Sorry, Jenny.”
But I was smiling, for once having found Ailey Mason amusing. I did, after all, look like something Jacques Cousteau had not only dredged up, but would most likely throw back. I was grateful to Mason for leavening this sad afternoon with a moment of malicious wit. But when I thought once again of the widow who waited, unknowing, my smile disappeared.
“So when do we leave, Geof?” I said quietly.
Behind his sunglasses, his brown eyes looked at something grim, over my head. Suddenly, I heard shouts and splashing.
“Now,” the detective said.
The house was a basic ranch, a style that is more indigenous to the Midwest than to our eastern, coast, and out of place among the Cape Cods that lined the block. Because it stretched out longer on its lot than they did, it looked larger than its peers. As had its owner. It had an air of good repair and new paint, as if Reich had applied his construction skills at home. The house was yellow, of a shade too far-gone into mustard for beauty; the window-frames, shutters and front door were brown. Not, I suspected, a popular house with the neighbors.
“Ready?” Geof removed the key from the ignition of the police sedan. He looked at me as I tried to repair myself in the broken shard of mirror on the back side of the sun visor. I looked like a drowned rat that had dried, then applied lipstick and mascara. He said, “Are you sure you want to do this, Jenny? There’s no guarantee that she will like you any better than he did, you know. If you think he was nuts, you may find she sets a whole new standard of hysteria.”
“That happens?”
He shot me a look that said he knew I was stalling.
“Of course it happens,” he said patiently, “especially if they didn’t get along. Show me a wife who hates her husband when he’s alive, and I’ll show you wailing and gnashing of teeth when he dies.”
“Maybe she loved him.”
“Then it will be worse, in a different way. Those are the ones I hate, the ones where you’re bringing real pain, and they try to be so brave so you won’t feel bad about it. Jesus!” He stuffed the keys in his coat pocket. “And don’t forget it was her son, too.”
“I haven’t forgotten, Geof.”
“Yeah.” He shook his head, then looked out the window away from me. “What an incredibly stupid thing for me to say. I’m sorry, Jen. I don’t know what the hell’s wrong with me today, I’m as irritable as a crab with an itch.”
“It’s the weather,” I said charitably. “Besides, just so long as one of us is always right.”
Still looking out the window, he grinned.
I shot a last glance at the mirror, gave it up as a lost cause, and flipped up the visor. By one of those mutual silent accords into which we often fell, Geof and I opened our respective doors and got out of the car, meeting on the curb in front of the Reich house. Side by side, we walked reluctantly up the cement step to the ugly brown door. Most of the neighbors’ steps and walks were handlaid stones.
“You introduce me, all right?” I said. I was nervous. “I’ll chime in with my story whenever it seems appropriate.”
“Right.” He glanced down at me. “You have, I’ve noticed, a highly developed sense of the appropriate moment.”
“Good breeding,” I said shakily, “shows.”
He spanned the back of my neck with his hard right hand and squeezed, briefly, gently. With his other hand, he rang the doorbell.
“Yes?” said the woman who answered the door. She was Hera to Reich’s Zeus, a thick, handsome pole of a woman who could obviously hurl thunderbolts of her own. “Yes, what is it?”
“Are you Annie Reich, Mrs. Ansen Reich?” Geof asked. As a rookie, he’d told the wrong woman her husband was dead. It was the man’s aunt, or something, whose real husband was in intensive care somewhere with a coronary. By the time things got straight, the aunt had fainted, the real wife had threatened to murder Geof, and his captain had wondered loudly and profanely if G. Bushfield was really cut out for police work. Since then, he always checked to see if the person to whom he was giving the news was the person to whom the news belonged.
This woman nodded affirmatively.
Annie and Ansen, I thought then; names for a cute little couple with button noses, not these Germanic giants.
“Mrs. Reich,” Geof was saying sadly, “I’m Geof Bushfield with the Port Frederick police department.” He opened his wallet to prove it. She glanced at his ID. When she looked up again, the expression in her navy blue eyes had changed. “And this is, uh, Ms. Jennifer Cain.” Perhaps he thought it best to let her think, for the moment, that I was also a cop. “Could we come in, Mrs. Reich?”
“No,” she said, but not unpleasantly. Just firm. And who among us could have moved this woman if she chose not to budge? “Tell me.”
“It’s your husband.” Geof looked her full in the face. “He drove his truck into a crowd of spectators at the ground-breaking ceremonies at Liberty Harbor this afternoon. No one else was hurt, but your husband’s truck went off the end of the pier into the bay. He’s dead. I’m sorry.”
She looked at me for the first time, as if I might fill in some sort of blank.
“He was distraught over the death of your son, Mrs. Reich,” I said, trying not to stammer. “That’s why it happened, that’s why he did it. He was crazy with grief.”
The steady, navy blue eyes traveled back to Geof, then returned to me. “Ansen, crazy with grief?” said the Widow Reich. “Don’t make me laugh.”