Martha Grimes - The Black Cat

She stopped the progress of the glass to her mouth and recrossed her legs. The slippers were outsized, as big as Ping-Pong paddles.

“What’s to tell, may I ask?”

“Well, she lived here for upwards of six months with you, off and on. Both of you worked for Valentine’s. You must have known her a little better than you seemed to last time I was here? You knew she wanted to marry Bobby Devlin.”

This made her look at anything else in the room but Jury. Her gaze drifted.

Jury’s silence made her look at him. Finally, he said, “I’ve met him, talked to him, of course, as police are always suspicious of family and lovers. He’s a nice guy, was really in love with Stacy, only he knew her as Mariah Cox, village librarian.”

Her eyes glittered, metallic. “She didn’t love him.”

“Why do you say that? She was going to marry him; at least that’s what she told her aunt.”

She shook her head in a wide arc, side to side, eyes tightly shut, as Jury had seen children do, denying whatever they wanted to shut out. “She didn’t love him. She loved me.” Her hands clapped against her chest.

The point, its awful implications thrown to the winds, had to be made. It had to be known, whatever betrayal Stacy Storm was intent on committing, that she, Rosie, had the final claim on Stacy and that Mariah Cox was a masquerade, a persona Stacy had invented to throw everybody off the scent.

“Who cooked the idea up, Rose? Was it you or Chris Cummins?”

Rose sat back, turning her glass in her hands. For a long time, she was silent.

She was not stupid. Jury knew she was assessing the situation, wondering. How much had Chris told Jury? Would it be a better tack to deny knowing her? Or to blame it on her?

Her legs were thrust straight out, toes slanting inward. He wished it weren’t Rosie; he tried to form some scenario in his mind that would let it not be her.

“Chris Cummins,” she said, blaming it on her. “She’s clever. I’m not. She wanted her husband to keep away from this woman.”

“How did Chris know about her?”

Rose shrugged and lit a cigarette. “I don’t know. But she said they’d been seeing each other-him and this Kate Banks-for a long time. This woman was someone both of them had known before, when they all were young. She told me her plan.”

“How did you two come to know each other?”

“Chance. I was in Amersham several weeks ago. I stopped off for a drink at the White Harts bar. She was sitting at a table by herself, reading a paper. One of the rags, you know, and I just sat down on the other side of the table, and the newspaper stretched out with its juicy sideshow murders. Not that I’d’ve taken a blind bit of notice, not of the paper or her or much else, because I was in a right sweat over Stacy. Stacy’d started talking about this fellow and that she might be leaving me. I couldn’t believe it. Her talking about getting married. To a man. Talking about it like we’d never meant a thing to each other. I just grabbed my keys and got out and ran to my car and drove. Drove around London, then out of it.”

“That was taking a chance, wasn’t it, that someone would remember? Chris Cummins was in a wheelchair.”

“Crutches. She got around pretty good on crutches. Only she didn’t use them, she said, in Chesham. She didn’t want people to know.”

“How did she get to Amersham?”

“Bloke she knew, someone that could keep his mouth shut. It was like a game with her, you know. What she could get away with. Even murder.”

“Still, crutches would have called attention to her, to both of you.” But it hadn’t called attention to them because no one had inquired at the White Hart in Amersham if anyone there had seen… what?

Rose said, “We thought it was worth the chance. You don’t know what it’s like to be so-to want somebody dead before you’d see her with someone else.”

“No, I suppose I don’t. How did you know Kate Banks would be where she was that night?”

“I followed her, didn’t I? All Chris knew was Kate used to live in Crouch End, so I called up the King’s Road place and told ‘em I was a messenger service and I was given the wrong street address in Crouch End. I just chose a street there at random to make it sound more believable, and this stupid cow gave me the right address. She shouldn’t’ve done.” Her expression told him she wished he’d comment on the artfulness of her plan.

And he did. “Couldn’t have done it better myself, Rosie.” He waited a moment so that she could be pleased with herself, then asked, “What did Deirdre Small have to do with all this?”

Rose was biting the skin around her thumbnail. “Nothing, really, except she knew about it.”

Jury tried not to look shocked. She had said it so casually, as if it were hardly worth spending time on. “How? How did Deirdre know?”

“I told her.” She stopped chewing on her thumb. “It was her gun. I didn’t know how to get hold of one, and I remembered Deirdre’d told me about this gun she’d got at a pawnshop somewhere. North London, I think it was. She carried it for protection, even though it was illegal. Deirdre”-Rose picked up her warm drink-“was a friend of mine.”

A friend of mine. And look what the friendship bought her.

“And she wondered what you wanted the gun for-”

“I said to take care of somebody. That was stupid; I should’ve made up something. Chris wasn’t happy about that. It was Chris told me what to do. See, Deirdre had told me about her date with this creepy guy, at least I thought he was, and meeting him at St. Paul’s. So I went along there a little before nine. And she was there. I waited for the bells and then shot. That was smart, wasn’t it?” Again, her self-satisfied smile seemed to want him to note her artfulness.

“It was,” said Jury, feeling forlorn.

“And I left the gun. I thought it would be traced back to Dee, and since it was the same gun that killed Kate, well, police would think DeeDee Small had done it. Killed Kate and then shot herself. That wasn’t bad thinking, was it?”

“No. Very clever. Except the site of the bullet wound made it difficult for her to have turned the gun on herself.” The plan had backfired, he didn’t say, in more ways than one.

“Oh.” She sighed. “I wanted to go to Chesham, you know, make up some excuse to see the boyfriend, just to see what sort of person Stacy preferred to me. But, of course, I had to stay right away from Chesham and Chris.” She frowned and asked, as if it were strange, as if she’d only just thought of it, “How’d you know it was me?”

“Shoes.”

Her frown deepened as she looked down at her big slippers, as if they might be the ones that shopped her.

All of them, really, he thought. All of that fascination with Jimmy Choo and Louboutin and Manolo Blahnik. “Red soles.”

Rosie seemed amazed that this copper would know Louboutin. “You mean the ones I was wearing on our date?”

Our date. Rosie seemed to retreat further and further from the world of a grown-up here and now into a past of dates and furry slippers. It must be difficult for her to integrate the persona of the sultry woman in Cigar. She was, he thought sadly, crumbling right before his eyes.

“It was your comment about Manolo Blahnik, remember? Did I think you rushed out in your Manolos and shot Kate Banks? The only person who could have told you about that supposed heel mark is Chris Cummins. She’s the only person besides the police who knew.”

“That wasn’t very smart of me.” Again, she was studying her feet.

“How did you two communicate?”

“With those toss-away mobile things.” She looked up at him then, as if he might not know. “You can’t trace calls on them.”