Joel Goldman - Motion to Kill

“I don’t mean to pry, but there are some questions I need to ask you.”

“You won’t offend me. I’m past that.”

“Why didn’t you and Richard have children?”

She sighed and looked over his shoulder, through the window, and back to another time.

“We tried. I got pregnant twice and lost both babies with miscarriages. The doctors said I shouldn’t try again. Richard said it wasn’t my fault, but he never forgave me. That’s when he started cheating and I started pretending not to notice.”

“Had Richard been married previously?”

“No. What are you getting at?”

“Richard fathered a child back in the late sixties by a woman named Meredith Phillips. I’ve seen the results of the paternity test.”

The last of the color drained from her cheeks. Mason saw the ache for her own babies in her moist eyes.

“I didn’t know,” she said softly.

Mason believed her. If she’d been a client, he would have stopped and come back another day. But he didn’t know if there would be another day, so he pressed on.

“You knew that Richard was HIV positive?”

“Yes.”

“Did you discuss that with him?”

“He told me and said he’d take care of it, like it was a problem for a client.”

“Weren’t you concerned about being exposed?”

“We quit having sex years ago.” She hesitated and then added, “Richard didn’t want me, but I needed to be wanted. You don’t always find that where you think you will.”

“Did Richard tell anybody else that he was HIV positive?”

“I don’t know. We never spoke of it again.”

“Did you tell anyone?”

“Diane dropped some papers off a few days after he told me. I must have looked like a wreck because she asked me if something was wrong and I just started bawling like a baby-about everything. I made her promise not to repeat anything.”

“Was Richard treating himself for the virus, maybe injecting medications?”

She nodded her head with a dry, humorless laugh. “He said he didn’t trust the doctors and that he’d found a source for a drug the FDA hadn’t approved but was supposed to be a miracle cure. I told him he could live a normal life for years and begged him not to try black-market drugs.”

“But he did anyway?”

“At least he thought so, but he was being taken. It was nothing but saline solution. The police found a vial of it when they searched the house.”

“Do you know who he was getting it from?”

“I have no idea.”

Mason thanked her for her time and she walked him to the door. This time, as they passed Sullivan’s study, he noticed the computer on his desk.

“By the way, did Richard do much work on his computer?”

This time, her laugh held genuine amusement. “Are you kidding? He had to have that damn PC and every other new gadget that came out, but he never learned to use it. The man couldn’t type if his life depended on it.”

The doorbell rang just as Mason turned the knob. It was Diane Farrell. A new Diane, she had makeup on, her hair was washed and styled, and she was wearing a lively blue-and-yellow floral-print dress.

“Diane, darling! You look marvelous.” Pamela said. “Diane just turned thirty-something. We don’t keep an exact count. I gave her a day of beauty and a new dress. Doesn’t she look fantastic? Happy birthday, dear.”

“And many more,” Mason added as he walked out.

Mason sat in his car in Pamela’s driveway, studying the names on the page he had ripped from the Rogersville, Kansas, phone book. There were ten ending in Phillips: Anson, C.J., Donald, Harry, Keenan, Martin, Missey, Opal, Vernon, and Wyatt. It was ten o’clock. He could make Rogersville by eleven.

The addresses were a crisscross of numbered streets and dead presidents. Anson lived at 227 Jefferson and Wyatt at 1634 Roosevelt. The others were evenly distributed between Republicans and Democrats. Once he figured out where the party lines were, he figured he could find them easily enough.

On his way, he called Blues. “I’m headed to Rogersville to find Meredith Phillips. I need you to track down Angela’s autopsy results.”

“You think I’m running a bar and you’ve got a tab?”

“We’ll settle up when this is over. I’ll call you if I find Meredith.”

Most small towns are laid out with Main and First as the north-south and east-west dividers. If you can count and tell your right from your left, you can’t get lost. Rogersville was no different except that the presidents weren’t in chronological order. Fillmore and Hoover were back-to-back. Maybe the city fathers just had a wry sense of humor.

Anson Phillips’s house was the third from the corner, west side of the street, on a block lined with heavy-limbed oaks leaning over the center of the street in a green canopy. Well-tended lawns, one-car garages, and sturdy wooden front stoops spoke to the longevity of the neighborhood.

Mason parked in the driveway behind a late-model white Buick, a car the size of Brazil. His TR6 looked like a mutant exhaust pipe protruding from its tail end.

Anson was as round a man as Mason had ever seen. He filled the width of the glider on his porch, work boots not quite touching the ground. His head perched like a paperweight on his shoulders, with no visible support from his neck. Eyes, nose, mouth, and ears melted into a pie-pan face. He was a denim-wrapped doughboy given too long to rise. Mason bet he hadn’t seen his feet in years.

“Morning,” Mason called out from the driveway. “You Mr. Phillips?”

“What you want, boy?”

No one had called Mason a boy in years. He liked this guy already.

“Help. I’m looking for a woman named Meredith Phillips. Last I knew, she lived in Rogersville. You’re the first Phillips in the book.”

“What d’ya want with her?”

“I’m a lawyer from Kansas City. She may have a child who’s inherited some money.”

“Don’t know her. Might try Vernon Phillips. That family’s been around here a long time.”

No one was home at Vernon’s, so Mason spent the next hour running down the rest of the Phillips clan. Only a few were home and none of them as helpful as Anson. He decided to try Vernon again.

This time there was a car in the driveway, a lime green, road-worn Chevy with a Baby on Board sign hung in the rear window. It was littered with Happy Meal bags, two car seats, and a scattering of diapers and baby wipes.

A chorus of bleating kids sang their demands from the other side of the screen door. A loose-jointed girl no more than twenty, her right hip jutting out to hold the rheumy-eyed infant glued to her side, answered Mason’s knocks.

Stringy maize-colored hair hung over her narrow forehead as she examined him with defeated, washed-out eyes ringed by dark circles. She ran her tongue over chapped lips, while another toddler clung to her T-shirt, dragging it off one bony shoulder. The sour stench of soiled diapers followed them to the door.

“I’m looking for Vernon Phillips. Is this his house?”

“Yeah,” she said, pushing the older child behind her and tugging her shirt back over her exposed dull gray bra strap.

“May I speak to him, please?”

“He don’t live here no more. I’m renting from him.”

“Do you know where I can find him?”

She disappeared for a minute and returned with a scrap of paper on which she’d written an address, 1860 Lincoln.

“Do you know Mr. Phillips?”

“Sure, known him all my life. We moved in across the street when I was five.”

“Did he have children?”

“A girl, Meredith.”

“She’s the one I really need to talk to. Do you know where she lives?”