Тимоти Уилльямз - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 126, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 769 & 770, September/October 2005

Deciding that he’d learned everything he was likely to from this bunch, Auburn thanked them and started back toward his car.

“Sir!” The call was peremptory, almost insolent. Auburn turned to see the young man with the paint stains on his fatigues stalking him under the trees. “Talk to you a minute, sir?”

“Sure.”

The man drew closer, looking back over his shoulder to see whether he was observed by the others. “I just thought I ought to let you know why you couldn’t get Patty on the phone before.”

Auburn eyed him expectantly. Again he was struck by the other’s military bearing, which was probably accentuated by the camouflage fatigues.

“She was right here. She only left about a half-hour before you got here.”

“Mulreedy’s wife was here? At the cookout?”

“Yes, sir. She pals around with some of the other girls. She comes around sometimes even though she and Roger are busted up.”

“Do you know if Welbeck told her her husband was dead?”

“Yes, sir, he did.”

At least, thought Auburn, I’ve been spared that chore. But his relief didn’t distract him from wondering what hidden agenda had prompted this musclebound mug to tell him that Patty Mulreedy had been enjoying herself at the cookout while her estranged husband was getting himself killed on the Interstate.

“Did she go home from here?” he asked.

“Her folks’s home, sure. She came out with one of the guys and his wife, and they took her back.”

“How upset was she?”

“She took it pretty rough.”

“Had they been trying to work things out, do you think, or were they getting a divorce?”

“Neither one. She wouldn’t talk divorce but she couldn’t stand living in the same house with him.”

“Did he beat her up?”

“That I wouldn’t know.” Auburn’s informant fell silent, as if he had suddenly decided he’d said too much, or maybe that the exchange was degenerating into a gossip session.

“What’s your name, sir?”

“Greg Wamblitt.”

After Auburn reached his car, he took the time to record the registration numbers of the two motorcycles and five private cars in the parking area, also noting which car had a National Rifle Association logo on its rear window and which one had a bumper sticker reading “The Devil Is My Godfather.”

From the Welbeck farm, Auburn drove straight to the home of Patty Mulreedy’s parents, the Dermotts. Since it was almost on his way back to town, he decided not to call first. The house was a modest two-story brick in an old but still respectable residential district.

The man who came to the door might have been wearing that hard, dour face because his son-in-law had just been killed, but Auburn suspected he had looked exactly the same way for about the past twenty years. He bent awkwardly at hips and knees to view Auburn’s identification through his bifocals, then conducted him without a word into a family room, where his wife was administering what comfort she could to their daughter.

Roger Mulreedy’s widow was curled up in a corner of the couch where she’d probably cried over many a broken heart before. She wasn’t looking her best tonight, what with red eyes, smeared mascara, and peeling sunburn on her nose. On Auburn’s arrival she pulled herself together and took him to a screened back porch where it was nearly dark and where they could talk privately.

She vanished into the shadows of an overstuffed chair, while Auburn sat in a wicker rocker that squeaked at the slightest movement. He expressed his sympathy and his regret that he needed to bother her at such a time.

“It’s all right,” she said in a hushed contralto. “If you hadn’t come to me I would probably have come to you.”

“About your husband’s death?”

“Yes. Are you calling it an accident?”

“That seems the likeliest possibility. But the investigation has just started. Do you think maybe it wasn’t an accident?”

She was silent for a few moments, and when she finally spoke she seemed to be picking her words carefully. “I don’t have any way of knowing that. After I heard the police were looking for me, I called headquarters downtown, but they wouldn’t tell me much because I wasn’t calling from home and I couldn’t prove who I was.”

As nearly as Auburn could judge in the semidarkness, this woman was genuinely grieving. He gave her a brief outline of what had happened on the Interstate, without mentioning the pockmarked cycle or the arrest of Gavin Hoopes.

“I think you ought to know about something that happened a few weeks ago,” she said. “Something that couldn’t have been an accident. Somebody tried to kill Roger.”

“Can you tell me about that?”

“I’ll tell you what I know. He was installing an air-conditioning system. He cut the power and locked it off, but somebody turned it back on again. He only found out by accident that the power was on again, when a tool touched two wires and threw a spark. It was a high-voltage line. If it had been his hand, he could have gone up in smoke right then and there.”

“When did you say this happened?”

“Between three and four weeks ago.”

“And where was he working at the time?”

“It’s a big remodeling project up in Wilmot. They’re turning an old canning factory into a skating rink.”

“Why couldn’t it have been an accident?”

“It just couldn’t. You don’t unlock a high-voltage circuit breaker until you know who locked it off and why.”

“Did he have any idea who did it? Who else had a key?”

“They use combination locks. Nobody but the person who locked off the power to work on the circuit is supposed to know the combination.”

“Was this reported to the authorities?”

“I don’t think Roger told anybody but me.”

“I understand you and he were separated.”

“Not legally. We just decided to give each other some more space, so I moved back here.” A long silence followed, during which Auburn could hear dogs barking, neighbors dragging trash cans out to the curb, children playing boisterously in an alley, somebody tuning up a car that needed a new muffler worse than a tune-up.

“He could be awfully difficult,” she said at length. “Bull-headed, unreasonable. There’s a broadloom floor mat about ten feet long in our back hall. It seems logical to me that it ought to run straight down the middle of the hall, parallel to the two side walls. But Roger thought it should lie at an angle, closer to the outside door at one end, and closer to the kitchen door at the other. So every time he walked through the hall, he’d move that rug off center.”

And, thought Auburn, every time you walked through the hall, you’d move it back straight. It takes two to keep a conflict smoldering, whether it’s an all-out war or a petty marital squabble. Maybe it was hearing such tales of discord and strife year in and year out that had thus far kept Auburn single.

The list of grievances went on. “He made me get contact lenses,” she said, “because he didn’t like the way I looked in glasses. And then he made me pay for them. But that was all right. I was making more money than he was.” Just as, moments earlier, he could feel her pain in the dark, he now sensed something different — a smug conviction of superiority to the dead man.

“What kind of work do you do?”

“I’m a speech therapist. And I also teach.”

“I understand you were out at the Welbeck farm this evening when I called.”

“I didn’t know it was you that called.” She paused only briefly and then went on, apparently feeling that Auburn expected some kind of explanation. “I went with Ginny Caruso and her husband. They live just a couple of blocks from here.”