Nine
​ It was half past six and already dark by the time we pulled up outside George Allen’s house. We climbed out of the Jag and stood looking at the old, gabled, Victorian redbrick standing on the corner. It was narrow and tall against the dark sky, with large bow windows on the ground floor and the floor above.
​ We climbed the steps to the wooden porch and I rang the bell.
​ George Allen was not what I had expected. I am not sure what I had expected, but it wasn’t George Allen. On the phone he had sounded aggressively authoritative, like a man used to giving orders and being obeyed. The man who stood at the door was probably in his early sixties, a little stooped, dressed in a gray cardigan with sagging pockets and carpet slippers. A smell of pipe smoke followed him to the door.
​ But when he looked me in the eye I could see the same harshness I had detected in his voice. He said:
​ “Yes?”
​ “Mr. Allen? George Allen?”
​ “Yes.”
​ “I am Detective John Stone, this is my partner, Detective Dehan. We spoke on the phone...”
​ “I am aware we spoke on the phone, Detective. Come in.”
​ He stepped back and gestured to his left, toward an open door. Through it we came to a comfortable, old-fashioned drawing room. There was a fire burning in the grate. Leather armchairs and a sofa surrounded it at a comfortable distance, and there was no coffee table to bang your shins on. Instead there were lamp tables and occasional tables set beside the chairs and the sofa. The walls were papered in burgundy stripes, heavy bull’s-blood drapes hung over the windows and the floor was carpeted with large, red Persian rugs over bare boards.
​ Over on the far left, half the room stood in darkness around a dining table with six chairs, a heavy wooden credenza and drapes that I imagined concealed French doors onto a backyard.
​ He followed us in and closed the door behind him.
​ “I haven’t time to offer you coffee or tea. As I said, I have an appointment. I can offer you a drink. Please, sit.”
​ We told him we were fine and Dehan sat on the sofa. I lowered myself into a leather armchair and he stood beside the fire. He wasn’t going to make us comfortable.
​ He didn’t wait for me to ask him any questions. He went straight in.
​ “Margaret and I were divorced. She had custody of the children, Alex and Fiona. I should never have agreed, but you do what you think is best. One assumes the children will be better off with their mother, so I agreed to her having custody provided they could visit me on occasional weekends and during vacations.
​ “We’d been divorced for a year. I was still living in New York, not far from Margaret, in the Shorehaven area. The kids had come to me for the weekend. No doubt she was entertaining one of her gentlemen friends...”
​ Dehan cut in.
​ “That’s the first we’ve heard of that, Mr. Allen. Could you clarify that? It’s the sort of detail that can be crucial.”
​ He took a deep breath and pulled a pipe from his cardigan pocket. He turned it over in his fingers for a while, and when he spoke his voice was barely audible.
​ “This is very painful. The reason Margaret and I broke up was that she had been conducting...” He raised his eyes and looked slowly around the room, like he wasn’t sure where he’d left the rest of his sentence. “She had been conducting a number of affairs, mainly with men she knew only in passing.”
​ “Mainly…?”
​ “Entirely with men she knew only in passing.”
​ I scratched my head. “Did you mention this in the original investigation?”
​ He shook his head. “I’m afraid I didn’t, and I have been struggling with it since I spoke to you on the telephone. It isn’t only the pain of being betrayed by the person you most trusted and…”
​ He fixed his eyes on his pipe again and Dehan said, “Loved.”
​ “Yes, loved. There is also the humiliation. Bad enough if the affair is conducted with a man ten years younger than yourself. But when it is random men she has met at a playground with the children, or at the supermarket, it is too humiliating to endure. So when people asked me why we were separating, I lied and said we had simply grown apart and Margaret wanted to move on. I grew so accustomed to the lie, I suppose, that when the police asked me about Margaret I told them the same thing. I realized it would be a high-profile case, and I couldn’t face her promiscuity being dragged through the national media.”
​ I nodded. “I can understand that, but why the change of heart?”
​ “I read about the girl on Watson Avenue. It made me realize that if I had been honest from the start, Miss Carter might not have been killed. If Margaret’s killer was among the men she picked up, you might have caught him.”
​ Dehan spoke softly. “It’s too late for Claire Carter, but it’s not too late for his next victim. You need to tell us everything you can remember.”
​ He turned from the fireplace and walked into the dining room. It was an oddly jerky walk, and his slippers scuffed the carpet as he went. He stood at the credenza and I heard the rattle of glass. When he came back it was with a generous measure of amber liquid I took to be whiskey. He resumed his position by the fire.
​ “We were married for twelve years. When I met her she was pretty, shapely, not overweight, graceful, happy, lively and huge fun. While I was going out with her there were always a dozen other men hanging around in the background, phoning her, texting her late at night. I am not a jealous man, but it began to get on my nerves and we had a couple of rows about it. She seemed to moderate her behavior...”
​ Dehan cleared her throat. “Excuse me, Mr. Allen, you said that there were men hanging around her, calling her and texting her. What was there in her behavior that she needed to moderate?”
​ He gave an ironic snort that bordered on the scornful.
​ “Let me ask you something, Detective. I can see from your ring that you’re married. Do men call you all the time and send you texts at midnight and one in the morning?”
​ “Mr. Allen, my personal life...”
​ “This is an answer to your question, Detective. Do they?”
​ “No.”
​ “Right, because men, even womanizers, rarely go where they are not invited. You are a very attractive woman, and I imagine that like most attractive people you get your share of men coming on to you. But I am also pretty sure that when that happens you cut it short and leave the man in question in no doubt about his chances of success. Margaret was not like that. She loved attention, and she loved male attention even more. More than that, she would deliberately put herself in situations where she would attract notice. Everything she did, from going shopping and taking the kids to the park, to going to the gym, invariably ended up with her somehow getting into conversation with one man or another.
​ “However, after we’d had our rows and I told her I did not think I could live like that, she did moderate her behavior and began to discourage unwelcome attention. Unwelcome for me, not for her.”
​ He sighed and took a pull at his drink.
​ “But it didn’t last. It couldn’t last. She was never sincere about changing, because she simply saw nothing wrong with it. To her it was simple, harmless fun. And perhaps there are some men who can see it that way. But I am a very private man, and honestly I resent intrusion into my family.” He gave a dry laugh. “If I had been the one constantly pursued by women and receiving mysterious text messages at one in the morning, I am quite sure it would have been a different matter altogether.
​ “As it was, what my demand did was to drive her into secret. She started staying longer at the park and the gym. I began to get home from work to find she was not back yet. Then she started leaving the kids with friends and picking them up when she was through with her encounters. Finally she started making excuses for going out at night.”
​ He paused, swirling his drink around in his glass.
​ “I hired a private detective and had him follow her for a week. In one week she saw four separate men.”
​ Dehan asked, “When you say, ‘saw’…?”
​ “When I say ‘saw’ I mean had sex with. She saw many more than that, and flirted with them and played games with them. But in that week she had two men visit her here, went to another man’s apartment and went clubbing with a fourth, with whom she stayed the night. That was a Friday, when she told me she was staying with Karen, a friend of hers.” He paused again and spoke into his glass. “During this time she had grown plump on self-indulgence.”
​ “Was the club she went to a place she frequented?”
​ “I believe she went there a few times.”
​ “Can you remember the name of the club?”
​ He looked mildly surprised. “I should be able to. It was what ended my marriage. It had one of those ‘bad boy’ names you associate with Mexico, Arizona… It’s like a drug...mescaline? Mescal...”
​ “The Mescal Club, in Mott Haven?”
​ “Yes, that’s the one.”
​ “She frequented it?”
​ “I wouldn’t go that far, but she went more than once.”
​ Dehan glanced at me and leaned forward with her elbows on her knees.
​ “I know this must be painful, Mr. Allen, and I apologize for having to bring this all back. But, did your private investigator tell you the names of any of the men she met with?”
​ His voice came bitter and twisted. “The ones she screwed that week, yes, but there were many more the week before, and in subsequent weeks. You would need volumes to hold them all.”
​ “Do you have his report?”
​ He nodded. “When I made the decision to tell you about her adventures, I imagined you would want to see it. I have it here.”
​ He walked to a small writing desk by the window, opened the flap and pulled out a manila file which he brought over and handed to me. I leafed through it quickly. There were typewritten pages and a number of large, glossy photographs.
​ “Mr. Allen, where were you on Friday, the 3rd April, 2015. The day your wife was killed?”
​ He raised an eyebrow at me. “Seriously? After all this time, you’re going to try and pin it on me?”
​ I shook my head. “No, not at all. I’d just like to hear the details from you.”
​ He sighed. “As I told the investigating detective at the time, I had taken the children to Broadway to see Bright Star , at the Cort Theatre. I collected the tickets at the box office with my credit card and I paid for dinner afterwards at Carmine’s, also with my credit card. Your Detective Alvarez checked all this.”
​ “And how about the day before yesterday, Mr. Allen? Where were you at noon?”
​ “In a meeting with my boss and six other area sales managers. It lasted from eleven AM until one, when we went to lunch. The company is SuperWare. We produce software for supermarkets. The company is based here in Rochester and I am the regional head of sales. If you are going to check on my alibi, I would be grateful if you would do it discretely. It’s not the kind of thing that does wonders for your reputation. I am three years from retirement, and I’d like to get there with my reputation intact.”
​ I nodded. “Sure, I understand. I think that’s all, Mr. Allen. Obviously, if you think of anything, or remember anything, please do let us know. We don’t know where or when this killer is going to strike again. Or indeed if he is going to strike again. I’ll be honest with you. We need all the help we can get.”
​ He shook his head. “I have given you all the help I can give you, Detectives. I was on the periphery of Margaret’s life, and we were divorced by the time she died. She was practically a stranger to me by then.”
​ We left him shortly after that. It was cold and our breath billowed into condensation as we approached the car. I checked my watch. It was approaching seven PM. Dehan read my thoughts and said, “We’ll get home at midnight.”
​ We climbed in the car and slammed the doors. It was as cold and damp inside as it was outside. I pulled my phone from my pocket, did a quick search and called the Hyatt Regency. I booked a double room and smiled at Dehan.
​ “The hell with it,” I told her. “‘Not sure if I am pregnant’ is good enough for me.”
​ It was a short drive over the bridge to South Avenue and the Hyatt, on the corner of Main Street. We checked in, showered and dressed in the same clothes we’d arrived in, and strolled down to the dining room, where we ordered smoked salmon and sirloin steak, with a bottle of sparkling water, and two tonic waters while we waited.
​ When the waitress had gone Dehan reached across the table and held my hand. She said, “You don’t have to do this. You can have a martini, and order some wine...”
​ I shook my head. “Wrong. I do need to do it. We do this together.”
​ “It might be a false alarm. It’s just two weeks overdue.”
​ “So we’ll do the false alarm together.”
​ She flopped back in her chair and her cheeks colored.
​ “Did I ever tell you exactly when I fell in love with you?”
​ “Wow, buy a guy a drink!”
​ “You didn’t even know me. I was a rookie at the station. I walked in and you were balling some guy out for a sloppy investigation, right there in the middle of the detectives’ room. I had never been in love. But right then I knew I would never love any other man. Can you believe that?”
​ I squeezed her hand. “Unfortunately there is no answer I can give to that question that doesn’t make me sound like an asshole.”
​ “Some uniform dork came up to me and told me to steer clear of you because you were a royal pain in the ass. He said that, a royal pain in the ass, and did I want to get a drink later. I told him to go to the gym.”
​ I raised an eyebrow. “The gym?”
​ “That’s what he said. I told him he had a better chance of pulling a muscle than he had of ever pulling me.” I laughed while she smiled. “See?” she said, “We were made for each other.”