Somebody Else's Music(118)
“She also is extremely unlikely to have a gun,” Gregor said. “I suppose it’s possible, and I could always check the New York gun registry, but the fact is that I’ve been watching her for days. I’ve seen her do all kinds of things, I’ve seen her empty her handbag on a table, and there’s been no sign of a gun, no sign of ammunition, and no talk from anybody around her—Liz Toliver, for instance—to indicate that Maris ever even had a gun in the city. Of course, if I had to pick one person who might decide to stab instead of to shoot even if she had a gun, Ms. Coleman would be that person. The one thing she’s very, very good about is knowing what she’s capable of when she’s drunk, and she’s nearly always drunk.”
“I wouldn’t call it drunk,” Kyle said. “I’d call it not exactly sober.”
“Call it what you will. That linoleum cutter was most likely the best weapon available, better than a knife, for instance, because it’s sharper.”
“Do you know where the linoleum cutter came from?” Kyle asked.
“I’m about ninety-nine percent sure. We’ll have to check. It won’t matter, though, the fingerprints will be clear enough and a good lab analysis ought to get a lot more.”
“Do you intend to tell me where it came from?” Kyle asked. “Are you going to let me in on this? And if you think you know where it came from, why haven’t we gone there and checked it out?”
“For the same reason you didn’t search Mr. Kennedy’s house back there. Because we didn’t have a warrant. Eventually, you’re going to have to get a number of warrants and search a number of places—if I were you, I’d search that house, too, on general principles—but at the moment it would just waste a lot of time, and there’s no hurry. It doesn’t matter where it came from much now that we have it. The trick is to get all our ducks in place so that nobody can claim we’ve got a case shot full of holes. I’m mixing metaphors. Bennis would kill me.”
“Look,” Kyle Borden said, “do you know who killed Chris Inglerod and attacked Emma Kenyon Bligh?”
“Yes.”
“And it was the same person in both cases?”
“Oh, yes.”
“And the same person killed Michael Houseman?”
“No,” Gregor said, “but the same person was responsible for all three deaths. That’s not quite the same thing.”
“It’ll be enough if I’ve got the person locked up for the death of Chris Inglerod. Was the death of Chris Inglerod a mistake, too? Is this woman—and I assume you’re talking about a woman—”
“Right.”
“Was this woman going around slashing people just because she wanted to slash Betsy and Betsy was never available? Because I’m going to have a hard time selling that to the town prosecutor, and he’d never be able to sell it to a jury.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Gregor said. “It’s nothing that odd. Just let’s go see Peggy Smith Kennedy, and then let’s hunt down Maris Coleman and insist she sit still for a talk for once. And when we do find her, let’s make sure she can’t go anywhere.”
FOUR
1
In the end, it was Liz who drove Bennis Hannaford’s tangerine-orange Mercedes. It was easier not to have to give directions every other minute. You could drive on automatic pilot if you knew where you were going, and Liz did know where she was going. She could have driven these streets every day for the last thirty years instead of not seeing them in all that time. She could have walked this landscape. She remembered things it made no sense to remember, like where old Mrs. Gorton lived and how to get there. Old Mrs. Gorton had been her fifth-grade teacher. Then there were other things. When they were all seven years old and in second grade, Chris Inglerod had started coming to school in black velvet hair bands. Soon they all had black velvet hair bands, even Liz herself, and some people, like Belinda, had started to claim that they wore them even to bed. When they were all eight and in third grade, the fashion was sleepover parties and Polaroid photographs. Girls who had sleepover parties took Polaroids and brought the photographs in on the Monday after the weekend for show and tell. For eight months straight, all Liz had wanted in the world was to have a single Polaroid photograph of herself at a sleepover party, any sleepover party, anywhere. When they were all ten and in Mrs. Gorton’s class, Liz had gone from the first of October until the last week of school sitting by herself at lunch with nobody on either side of her and nobody to talk to, because—well—because. By then they had begun to be explicit about how much they didn’t want to have her anywhere around. That year was the year that Harry Spedergelb planted the maple tree in his front yard. Driving by it now, it seemed to dwarf the small lot and the small house that was on it, and to menace the other houses on the street, one of which was Chris Inglerod’s mother’s house, except that Chris Inglerod’s mother no longer lived there. Harry Spedergelb had died of lung cancer in 1974. Liz’s mother had sent her the news while she was at graduate school. Liz never knew why. Mrs. Gorton had died of blood poisoning in 1986. She was ninety-two years old, and the picture in the Hollman Home News made her look even more like the Wicked Witch of the West than she did in person. Liz’s mother had sent her that article, too, or rather that copy of the Home News, the way she’d sent a copy of the Home News every week for eleven years, on the assumption that Liz would eventually get homesick enough to want to come for a visit. Liz had not come to visit. For a while, everything in the Home News had seemed to be an obituary. Dave Grieg and Tom Bellson both dead together in a car crash. Jimmy Strand, Nelson Harvey, and Tim Stall all dead in Vietnam. Cathy Conway dead in the crash of a prop plane outside Omaha, Nebraska.