Эд Макбейн - Beauty and the Beast

“Do we need a fire?” she asked, handing me one of the snifters. “It’s a little chilly, isn’t it? Would you mind making one? I’m an idiot when it comes to fires.”

I tore two sheets of newspaper into narrow strips and placed them under the grate. I put a small bundle of kindling onto the grate, and placed two logs on top of it. I struck a match and held it to the paper. The kindling caught, the logs — a fat pine and an oak — began crackling at once.

“Thank you,” she said.

“So,” I said, and rose from where I was crouched, and pulled the fire screen across the hearth, and then sat again, facing her.

“I want to apologize for my behavior last week,” she said.

“That’s okay,” I said.

“It’s just... you were raking over the past, and right then I preferred forgetting it. Is the cognac all right?”

“Fine,” I said. “Miss Reynolds, why’d you want to see me?”

“Because I’m scared.”

“Of what?”

“These murders...”

“Yes?”

“They frighten me.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m a woman living alone, and—”

“That’s not why you called me, though, is it?”

“No.”

“If you wanted protection or reassurance, you’d have called the police, isn’t that true?”

“Yes.”

“So why am I here, Miss Reynolds?”

“All right, I knew Andrew, all right?”

“Andrew Owen, do you mean?”

“Yes. And now his wife, his ex -wife, has been killed, and maybe it’s connected somehow to me—”

She cut herself short.

“Michelle?” I said.

“Michelle, yes.”

“Then you knew Michelle, too, is that right?”

“Yes, I knew her.”

“Why don’t we start at the beginning?” I said.

“That was more than a year ago,” she said, and sighed.

“When, exactly?”

“Well, it was August when Jerry got shot—”

“Jerry?”

“Tolliver. Gerald, actually. And this is December already... today’s the first, isn’t it?”

“The second already,” I said, and looked at my watch.

“So that would make it... August, September, October, November,” ticking off the months on her fingers, “that’s four full months, this would’ve been sixteen months ago.”

The name suddenly rang a bell.

“Is Jerry Tolliver the man who got shot by a cop—”

“Killed, actually. Yes, he’s the one. He owned a carpet-cleaning place on the South Trail. He was on his way to his sister’s funeral when a police officer...”

“Okay,” I said, nodding. “What about him? Did you know him , too?”

“No.”

“Then what—”

“Well, I was coming to that. Some of the people on the committee knew him — or had known him, actually — but not me. I joined the committee only because it seemed so unfair. A man gets murdered and they just let the police officer go free ? That’s why I joined it. Because I thought we could do something about it.”

“What committee is that, Miss Reynolds?”

The committee, as she explained it, was a relatively small group of blacks and whites who believed justice had been circumvented, if not aborted, in the Jerry Tolliver case. It was started by a black woman married to a white doctor out on Fatback Key, and at first it consisted only of herself and a handful of whites like her husband, most of them residents of Fatback, but then it expanded to include two or three dozen people from all over Calusa and elsewhere in Florida, whites and blacks both, some of them well-to-do, some of them poor as dirt. The first meeting Kitty attended was out on Fatback — this was maybe a week after the committee was formed — and that was where she’d met Michelle and George Harper.

“Because what this doctor and his wife were trying to do,” Kitty said, “was get some other mixed couples like themselves on the committee. There aren’t too many of those in Calusa, I guess you know.”

“I wouldn’t think so.”

“Well, take it from me,” Kitty said. “All told, by the time the committee got off the ground — well, it never did get off the ground, actually, that cop’s still out there free as a bird. But what I’m saying, the only mixed couples she came up with — the doctor’s wife, I forget her name just now — were herself and her husband, and Michelle and George, and a couple from Venice, which isn’t Calusa at all. The rest of the people weren’t married — I mean, there were blacks married to blacks and whites married to whites but no other salt-and-pepper couples, do you know?”

I suddenly thought of the painting of the salt and pepper shakers hanging over Sally Owen’s water bed. I said nothing.

“The committee broke up three weeks after the first meeting. Meetings day and night, but you know this town, you never can get anything done in this town. Everybody went back home to cry in his beer. Fatback lady and her rich doctor husband — I remember her name now, it was Naomi Morris — went back to growing orchids, rest of us went back to doing our own things. Except...”

She hesitated.

“Yes?” I said.

“Well, some of us got to know each other pretty well during all those committee meetings. So we kept seeing each other socially.”

“Were Andrew and Sally Owen at any of those meetings?”

“Well, yes, they were on the committee.”

“Is that where you met Andrew? At one of the meetings?”

“Yes,” she said. Her voice was very low. She sipped at the cognac. In the fireplace, one of the logs suddenly crackled and spit. Out on the bay, I heard the distant sound of a speedboat.

“And, you know,” she said, “I was a divorced woman with a successful boutique on the Circle, but there wasn’t much else to my life just then, which is maybe why I joined the committee to begin with, to feel that I was doing something meaningful , you know, something important . Divorce is rough,” she said.

“Yes, I know.”

“You’ve been the route, huh?”

“I’ve been the route.”

“Well,” she said, and sighed again. “Andrew was attentive to me, Andrew was attractive, Andrew and I... well, you know.”

“When was this?”

“September last year? October? The fall sometime.”

“And Sally found out.”

“I guess.”

“You guess?”

“Well, yes, she found out.”

“And immediately sued for divorce.”

“Well, yes.”

“Well, she did , didn’t she?”

“Yes, she did.”

“Why were you so reluctant to tell me this the last time we talked?”

“Well, it was personal.”

“It’s still personal, isn’t it?”

“Yes, but Sally wasn’t dead then.”

“Michelle was .”

“I hadn’t been involved with Michelle’s husband.”

“Are you saying you think Sally’s death—”

“No, no.”

“...had something to do with your involvement with her husband?”

“No, of course not.”

“Then how has her death changed anything? You didn’t want to discuss any of this a week ago, but now you seem...”

“It just started me thinking, that’s all. First Michelle, then Sally, almost as if all the women in the oar—”

She cut herself short. She had a habit of cutting herself short. She had interrupted herself earlier when she’d been about to say the name “Michelle,” and now she had just said the word oar and then closed her mouth on it as effectively as a shark on a fisherman’s paddle.

I looked at her.

She lowered her eyes and said, “It’s just that, well, in a social group like ours, after the committee broke up, I mean, it wasn’t considered... well, you weren’t supposed to fall in love the way Andrew and I did, to make waves the way we did.”