Эд Макбейн - Beauty and the Beast

The only surprise at Sally Owen’s funeral was the appearance of her former husband, Andrew Owen. He arrived late, holding an umbrella over his head, catching the last of the minister’s words just before the coffin was lowered into the ground. He kept watching the descending coffin. As the mourners began to disperse, he stood looking into the open grave. Bloom was standing some distance off, talking to a uniformed police captain. The cops assigned to the job — I guessed there were three dozen in all — stood like specters in the rain, black rain slickers glistening wet, eyes roaming the rain-soaked perimeter of the cemetery, hands hovering close to the protruding butts of their revolvers. I suddenly wished Harper would not be foolish enough to show up here today. I walked to where Owen was still staring into the open grave, the umbrella over his bent head.

“How are you?” I said.

He looked up, turned to face me. “Hell of a thing,” he said.

“I’m surprised to see you here.”

“We were married once,” he said. “I loved her once,” he said, and shrugged, and then sighed and began walking up toward where the cars were parked in a muddy open space at the top of the grassy rise. The rain kept pouring down. Let it come down, I thought. First Murderer, Macbeth , act III, scene 3. I had played Macduff in our college production during my sophomore year at Northwestern. The critic for the school newspaper wrote of my performance, “Lay off , Macduff! Out , damned Hope!” Our umbrellas, Owen’s and mine, nudged each other like spies exchanging secrets.

“Any idea who might have done it?” I asked.

“No.”

“Do you think it was George Harper?”

“Not a chance. He may be stupid, but he’s not crazy.”

“Have the police questioned you?”

“Naturally. Ex-husband? Bitter divorce? Sure.”

“And?”

“From what they asked about where I was at what time, I figured they already knew she’d been killed sometime between two and four o’clock in the afternoon. Well, I was at the store all day Monday, from eight in the morning till I closed at seven o’clock. Monday’s my busiest day — well, Mondays and Saturdays, actually. By Monday, all the alkies have guzzled down their weekend stash, they come flocking by the store in droves , man. Cops didn’t get to me till almost midnight. By then, I’d already seen on television that the body was found at seven o’clock, that’s when the lady next door — Jennie Pierce, I know her, nice lady — went over to bring Sally a pie dish or something. I told the cops that at seven o’clock I was just locking up my store, and I had only a million and a half witnesses who’d swear on a case of Chivas Regal that I was in that store all day long, right behind the counter where I was supposed to be. The cops thanked me for my time, this was now one o’clock in the morning, and went on their way. ‘Keep your nose clean,’ they told me. Keep my nose clean. I’ve been an honest businessman in this town for the past ten years, ever since I got back from Nam, never even got a parking ticket in this fucking town, but they tell me to keep my nose clean. All they forgot to add was ‘nigger.’ ”

He had stopped at his car now, a blue Pontiac wagon, and was fishing in his pocket for his keys. Bloom and the police captain, still in deep conversation, were trudging up the slope toward the parking lot.

“I spoke to Kitty Reynolds last night,” I said.

Owen looked up from where he was inserting his key into the door lock. “Oh?” he said.

“Yes.” I paused. Then I said, “Are you still seeing her?”

“Nope.”

“How come?”

“Things end, man, people drift.”

“When did it end?”

“Almost before it began. Minute Sally sued for divorce, it began to pall. All our old friends, you know, people we used to be with all the time... well, they just stopped seeing us. Gets kind of lonely out there if you don’t have any friends.”

“Harper, too?”

“What?”

“Did he stop seeing you?”

“No, not George. But he didn’t know—”

Owen cut himself short. Maybe it was contagious. Maybe when you spend enough time in bed with another person, you pick up her habits. Kitty Reynolds was an expert at interrupting her own sentences. Owen had just now swallowed the tail end of whatever he’d been about to say, and was busying himself with the door lock again.

“Didn’t know what?” I asked.

“Don’t know what you mean, man.”

“You were about to say...”

“I was about to say good-bye, Mr. Hope.”

“Just one second, okay?”

He had unlocked the door and opened it. He closed it again when he noticed that the front seat was getting rained on.

“What is it?” he said, and sighed.

“The first time we talked, you had trouble remembering Lloyd Davis.”

“So?”

“Kitty Reynolds says she met him at your house.”

“She did, huh?”

“At one of the meetings there.”

“Really? What meetings?”

“She told me a woman out on Fatback Key formed a committee—”

“Oh, yeah, that bullshit committee.”

“To do something about the Jerry Tolliver case.”

“Yeah, uh-huh.”

“And that she’d met you — and Lloyd Davis — at one of those meetings. At your house.”

“Then I guess she must be right, huh?”

“And yet you had trouble remembering him.”

“People came and went all the time at those meetings,” Owen said, and shrugged.

“I was at your house yesterday,” I said.

“Yeah?”

“Was that front page on your bedroom wall while you were still married to Sally?”

“What front page?”

“On the Tolliver killing.”

“Oh. Yeah, I guess so.”

“How about the paintings?”

“Sally’s paintings? Yeah, she used to hang them all over the house.”

“Ever see a painting of a white woman and a black man in embrace?”

“Who remembers? She was painting all the time.”

“Any idea how that particular painting ended up in George Harper’s garage?”

“No idea at all.”

“You don’t remember Sally giving it to him, do you? Or selling it to him?”

“Sally didn’t get along with George, I already told you that.”

“Would she have given the painting to Michelle ?”

“She handed them out all over the place.”

“She did? To whom?”

“Anybody who’d take them. You saw the paintings, you know how lousy they were.”

“Who’d she hand them out to?”

“I told you. Anybody. Everybody. I have to go, Mr. Hope. I’ve lost half a day already, I have to go open the store.”

“One last question,” I said.

“Okay, but—”

“What is it that Harper didn’t know? What is it that Harper found out?”

“That’s two questions. And I don’t know the answers to either one of them.”

He furled his umbrella, threw it over the back of the seat, and got in behind the wheel. I watched as he slipped his key into the ignition and started the car, and then I stepped back as he pulled off into the rain. Bloom was just behind me, peering out from under his umbrella as the car negotiated the turn at the top of the hill and drove out of sight around it.

“Who was that?” he asked.

“Andrew Owen,” I said.

“Clean as a whistle,” Bloom said. “Alibi a mile long.” He peered at me through the falling rain. “What happened to your face, Matthew?”

“Ran into a door last night.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, when I got up to pee.”

“You ought to be more careful,” Bloom said.

The last shuttle from Calusa to Miami left at 2:50 P.M. and arrived there at 4:20. It was a little windy on the east coast, but the sun was shining, and the cab driver who drove me to Mrs. Harper’s house kept turning over his shoulder to look at my umbrella as though it were a broadsword clutched in the fist of a medieval knight. Mrs. Harper was bent over a bed of gardenias in her front yard when the taxi pulled up to the curb. She looked up as I got out of the taxi, and continued watching me as I paid the driver and started up the front walk. A tangle of weeds was in her left hand; in her right hand she held a trowel.