Stephen White - Warning Signs

He nodded as though he knew exactly what Lucy had revealed to me. But I knew he didn't know. Lucy would never tell Sam what she'd told me on Flagstaff Mountain.

Never.

With the fat edge of his hand, Sam scraped muffin crumbs into a little pile in front of him and then pressed them into a tiny orb that he tossed into his mouth. He said, "Even though I really shouldn't be here, I can't sit and wait around for this investigation to go on any longer. I don't ever want to know what the lab says about the stain on the sheet, you know? Not today, not tomorrow." He began to break apart another muffin. "Remember a cop named Manes? Brian Manes?"

I shook my head.

"Couple of years back, he was accused of coercing women to have sex with him on traffic stops?"

"I remember now."

"He went to my church. Has a kid Simon's age. He coached the kids' soccer team. His wife is a sweetheart. And, until the first woman filed a complaint against him, he had a perfect record as a cop."

I sensed where he was going. "Sometimes you just can't see what's going on below the surface with people, can you?"

"I could never figure out why, what was going on in his head, how he could risk so much for so little."

Were we talking about Brian Manes or were we talking about Lucy? I decided Sam didn't really want me to know for sure. "Sometimes people don't even recognize what they're doing, let alone why they're doing it."

"That's what keeps you in business? The fact that people fuck up their lives and don't have a clue what the hell they were doing or why the hell they were doing it?"

"What do they say, Sam? Denial's not a river in Egypt."

Sam adjusted his ample weight on the chair. He didn't move any of the crumbled muffin pieces toward his mouth. "Anyway, I don't want to know how the stain on the sheet got there. Not a bit. And I don't really want anybody else to know, either." He forced his chin forward. "I suspect there's a good possibility that it wouldn't be good news for Lucy. All in all, I'd rather not confront that possibility."

Sam was wrapping himself in his denial as though he were bundling up in a parka to go out in a blizzard. I wondered if the gesture was intended to be an ironic charade on his part. I said, "I can understand that, Sam. But remember, Brian Manes abused his office. If Lucy screwed anything up, it was only her personal life."

"That's what I tell myself, too, that everybody has dirty laundry." He smiled at the inadvertent allusion. "But there's something else," he said. "Something that doesn't really have to do with my deep level of disappointment in my fellow man. I've had trouble with the whole laundry thing right from the beginning. Not the sheet with the stain on it so much. That wakes me up in the middle of the night, sure, but that's not what I mean. I mean the laundry that was already in the dryer. You may remember that the first officer in the house heard the dryer running when she went in. I asked Lucy about it. She says that Royal was as likely to do a load of laundry as he was to change the oil on the space shuttle. So I wondered who it was who put that load in the dryer."

"It wasn't Lucy?"

"She says not."

The intercom erupted across the room, Susan's voice emerging from the speaker. I found the sound irritating, like the grainy feeling in my sinuses when I'm warding off a sneeze.

She said, "Crystal, I'm awake. I'm ready anytime."

To me, Sam whispered, "Crystal says that despite how it appears, Susan's strong enough to do laundry. So I'm doing a little experiment. You know me, I like to be empirical."

I wondered how Sam was planning on tricking Susan into doing a load of whites. But I didn't say anything. Sam had asked for an hour or two. I had time.

A minute later, after the plumbing announced the flush of a toilet, Susan repeated her entreaty to Crystal, her voice a decibel or two higher.

Sam asked me if I wanted more coffee.

I didn't.

Susan's patience was diminishing. When she called for Crystal again, she sounded closer. She seemed to be screaming down from the top of the stairs, apparently suspicious that the problem she was experiencing might be with the intercom and not with her health aide.

She finished her little tirade with, "I can smell the coffee down there, Crystal, damn it."

Sam raised his index finger to his lips to keep me silent. Seconds later we could hear Susan fumbling with the switch that, had Sam not disabled it, would have called the seat of the lift from the bottom of the stairs to the top. Susan cursed at the machinery when it didn't budge.

Sam raised his eyebrows in mock surprise and mouthed, "Such language."

We listened to two or three minutes of shuffling and huffing and puffing and cursing and mumbling before Susan muttered, "Who left this thing on the stairs?" More profanity, then a final, "Crystal, did you turn this off? Crystal! Where are you, woman?"

A few seconds later, Susan Peterson walked into the kitchen looking like she'd spent the last eight hours sleeping with the devil. Her pajamas were creased. Her hair was a mess, her face was devoid of makeup, and her eyes had the glaze of someone with a narcotic hangover. She supported herself with one hand on a cane that was carved to resemble a stack of tiny turtles.

In the other hand she held the large oval ceramic that had been on the stairs. She held it up easily, naturally, as though she were about to waggle it at Crystal and demand to know what it had been doing on the stairs.

Her mouth hung open when she saw us sitting at the kitchen table.

The silence in the room was stunning.

Susan's eyes darted from Sam to me and then back to Sam before they came to rest on the heavy piece of pottery that she was holding in her hand. Finally, she said, "Oh."

Sam said, "Crystal will be back in a bit. She had an errand to run. I see you made it down the stairs all right. I wondered how you'd manage with the lift not working. It seems I needn't have worried; you managed just fine."

Susan shook her head, as though she were disagreeing with something Sam had said. Or perhaps she was trying to clear her thoughts. The gesture caused me to have an uncomfortable association to Lucy.

Sam went on. "Crystal said your arms are stronger than your legs. The way you're holding that heavy piece of pottery, it looks like she was right. But apparently your legs are strong enough to get down the stairs."

"And… what's your point?" Susan asked defiantly, but I could tell that her heart wasn't really in her protest.

Sam placed his hands palm-down on the smooth surface of the table. He said, "Why don't you go get dressed, Susan? I'd like you to come with me over to Thirty-third Street."

Her voice cracked as she asked, "Why?"

He paused, inhaling a thin stream of air through pursed lips, tasting his words the way my friend Peter used to taste wine before he pronounced it palatable. "I think you killed your husband. The detectives who are investigating his murder will have some questions for you." He somehow managed to make the declaration sound mundane.

His words reeled me back to a recollection of my recent afternoon visit up Flagstaff Mountain with Lucy. I thought of her almost intractable denial about her strange ménage à trois, and about the way she was able to wall off her hostility toward her mother. And then I realized that perhaps she wasn't alone-that my own denial of the events that had taken place in this house had been as impenetrable as blackout curtains.

I wasn't in denial that Susan might have killed Royal-at some suburb of my awareness I'd been entertaining that possibility for a while. No, my denial had been about Susan Peterson's ultimate expression of hostility. As I sat watching Sam's production I was finally beginning to accept the obvious: From the moment she descended the stairs to kill her husband, Susan had been setting up her own daughter to take the fall .