Charlaine Harris - Dead Over Heels

The car by which I parked at the police station/small claims court/county sheriff’s office/jail (known locally as “Spacolec” for Sperling County Law.Enforcement Complex) seemed very familiar, and after a second I recognized Angel’s car, the one Jack Burns had ticketed. Then I recalled Angel telling me she was going to the funeral because they’d worked out together; the two stories seemed mutually exclusive.

I mulled it over for a minute as I trudged through the hot parking lot to the glass double doors leading into Spacolec.

It was still making no sense when I saw Arthur Smith waiting for me right in front of the wall-to-wall admissions desk. Arthur had changed little in the three years he’d been married to Lynn. Marriage had not put a gut on him or lined his face; fatherhood hadn’t grayed his tightly curled hair, though it was such a pale blond that the gray, when it did appear, would be enviably hard to detect.

Perhaps he’d changed in the way he held himself, his basic attitude; he seemed tougher, angrier, more impatient, and that was so apparent that I wondered I hadn’t noticed it before.

Arthur, who’d been chatting with the duty officer, turned at the hissing sound of the pneumatic doors. He looked at me, and his face changed.

I felt acutely uncomfortable. I was unused to being the object of unrequited desire. Now, Angel (whom I now saw coming toward me out of the set of swinging wooden doors to the left of the reception desk) must have encountered panting men from adolescence onward. I would have to ask her how it made her feel. Right now she looked washed out, and her stride did not have its usual assurance.

“Are you okay?” I asked anxiously.

She nodded, but not as if she meant it. “I’m just going to go home and lie down,” she said. “I don’t think I’ve ever been this tired in my life. And I’m hungry. Really, really hungry.”

“Need help?”

“Nah. Shelby’ll be home in an hour.” She hadn’t spoken to Arthur directly, but her next words were aimed at him. “If you’re not home by then, I’ll call Bubba.”

Bubba Sewell was my lawyer.

“See you later,” I said, and she was out the glass doors and into the parking lot. I watched her reach her car, unlock it, stretch her arms up and rotate her shoulders to relax, each movement economical and controlled despite her weariness.

“Come this way, Roe,” Arthur said, snapping me back to the unwelcome present. He was holding open the wooden doors, nodding at the woman in uniform on duty at the desk behind bullet-proof glass, gesturing me forward. As I went through the doors, he put his hand on my back to steer me, a controlling gesture I particularly dislike. I don’t much care for being touched casually. I stiffened a little, but put up with it.

When I realized I was only tolerating his touching me because he had once been my lover, I stepped away a little quicker, leaving his hand behind, and his arm dropped to his side.

Arthur waved a hand at his own little cubicle to usher me in. He indicated the only other chair besides the one behind the desk, and murmured something about being back in a minute. Then he vanished, leaving me nothing to do but examine his “office.” It was a bit like being at a car dealership where each salesman has to usher you into a little area partitioned off at neck level, and there present you with pages of scrawled figures. I could tell Arthur worked there; there was a picture of little Lorna, though none of Lynn. But there wasn’t clutter, there wasn’t even much office material on the desk: no Rolodex, no blotter, no stapler. There were stacked in and out trays, and a chipped Christmas coffee mug holding some pens and pencils. That was it. I’d exhausted the possibilities of Arthur’s office.

Then I observed that though the partition walls were made of beige metal and padded with what looked like carpet, each panel contained a Plexiglas window. I could see down the row of similar cubicles. Lynn was two squares away, bent over some paperwork on her desk. She looked up as I was still gazing curiously in her direction. She gave me an unreadable stare and then looked down at her desk pointedly.

From being mildly uneasy at being here, I escalated instantly into very uncomfortable. Had I been brought here as some ploy in Lynn and Arthur’s marital wars?

Arthur reappeared just as I was thinking of leaving. He was holding two unmatched mugs of coffee, one with cream and sugar and one black. He put the black in front of me. “I remembered that was the way you like it,” he said.

I could read nothing in his tone. I thanked him and tried a sip. It was awful. I put it down carefully.

“Why am I here, Arthur?”

“Because you had a very public quarrel with Beverly Rillington yesterday. Because she was attacked and her purse stolen last night. When I heard Mrs. Youngblood had been present during the quarrel, I called her in too. Faron Henske just finished questioning her.”

So that’s why a robbery detective was handling the case. They were treating the attack on Beverly as a robbery gone berserk. “Why couldn’t you just ask me about it at my house, or over the phone, or at the library?”

“Because this was the best place,” he said, very male tough policeman.

I raised my eyebrows slightly. I pushed my gold glasses back up on my nose. “Then ask your questions.”

So we went through the miserable scene at the library again; the rising rage of Beverly, the arrival of Angel, Angel’s exchange with Beverly, the gradual defusing of the crisis.

“Did you think Beverly was physically threatening you?” Arthur asked quietly. He was sitting back in his chair, his gaze locked on me in a way I’d once considered flattering and exciting.

“I had a second of worry.”

“Weren’t you glad your bodyguard was there to handle it for you?”

I could feel my eyes fly open even wider, my shoulders stiffen.

Arthur looked pleased to get such a response. “Did you think we wouldn’t figure it out, Roe? Back when the Julius family turned up, we checked out your friends the Youngbloods. Shelby Youngblood and your husband have quite a history together, don’t they?”

“Martin and Shelby have been friends since Vietnam.”

“Involved in some murky doings after that, weren’t they?”

“What are you getting at, Arthur? You know Martin was out of town last night. Are you implying that one of the Youngbloods attacked Beverly Rillington because she gave me a few bad moments in the library?”

“There are telephones in Chicago.” Arthur had been leaning negligently back in his chair. Now he abandoned the relaxed pose and leaned forward, his hard eyes still fixed on me.

“So you’re saying that my husband was so upset that I had a few words with Beverly-in front of many witnesses-that he told the Youngbloods to beat her up.”

“I didn’t say that. But it seems pretty coincidental that after a decade of giving people grief, Beverly Rillington gets beaten within an inch of her life just after a quarrel with you and your bodyguard.” He gave the last two words a twist that was distinctly unpleasant. I began to think that Arthur had gone off the deep end of the pool without checking to see if there was any water.

“You’re certainly not suggesting that I did it,” I said reasonably, though I felt anything but reasonable. “I think Beverly has a few inches and pounds on me.”

“No,” Arthur said, never letting up on the stare. “No, not you. But someone who cares for you.”

I started to say, “What about someone who cares for Angel?” Because it seemed to me that Angel had been insulted publicly too, and if the theory that the incident in the library had sparked this attack held any water, Angel could be the inspiration for the beating far more feasibly than I. No one ever forgot Angel.