Friends till the End (5 page)

Pugnacious, thought Voelker. That was the word. Pugnacious. Difficult. Not to his wife, though; so far the
consensus was clear about that. She could tame him with just a look.

After him, Voelker had interviewed the two children. Richard was startlingly handsome, with his fair hair and chiseled features, but at the time Voelker saw him he was hollow-eyed from lack of sleep and his mouth was set in a frown. He slumped listlessly in his chair and said he hadn’t seen anything. He had gone to the party because he had nothing else to do and it was in his own home, wasn’t it? He had sat in the corner all evening. He had talked to his sister and his sister’s friend. He hadn’t seen any hocus-pocus with the drinks. He hadn’t seen
anything.
Could he go now?

His sister, Isabel, was different. She was subdued, still in shock, but in very good control of herself. She too had been up all the previous night, but her pale face was freshly washed and her hair was pulled back neatly with a blue velvet ribbon. She had sat upright, crossed her legs, lit a cigarette and answered all of Voelker’s questions coolly, almost indifferently.

Yes, she had helped with the drinks. She always did that. People expected it. She didn’t mind. Yes, she and Richard always got along fine with their stepmother. What did he mean? No, there was no trouble between them. Oh, well, Daddy was another matter.

Yes, thought Voelker. Walter Sloane was always another matter. Everyone he had seen so far had expressed amazement that Laura would be a victim of murder. Everyone had hinted that they would have been far less amazed had the corpse been that of her husband.

Isabel had shrugged. Well, Daddy was a difficult person.

Did he have enemies? Voelker wanted to know.

Well, yes, she said. He had a tendency to be a little—well, a little
abrasive.

Yes, thought Voelker. A little abrasive. It was a masterful understatement.

Isabel didn’t know anything in particular against her father’s friends. She had known them all her life and couldn’t say a bad word against them. She looked at him calmly and lit another cigarette.

Voelker gazed into those steely blue eyes and thought he could see a faint resemblance between Isabel Sloane and her father. They didn’t look alike, but the ice-blue eyes and the cold angles of the face were the same.

“How old are you, Miss Sloane?”

Isabel lifted her eyebrows at this. “I’m twenty-seven.”

“Do you have an apartment elsewhere, or do you live here?”

“I live here,” she said flatly.

“And what kind of work do you do?”

It turned out that Isabel did not work. She had never worked. She had come home when she graduated from college and had cooked and cleaned for her brother and father—and, for the last few years, his new wife—since then.

“I don’t mind,” she said. “I’d rather do what I’m doing than work. I’m not cut out for nine-to-five.”

“I see.”

Isabel looked at him steadily at that point and said that she had a lot of work to do now, as a matter of fact, and she hadn’t had any sleep last night. So if the interview was over …?

Yes, said Voelker. The interview was over.

“Please, Inspector,” said Heather Crandall, pushing the cup toward Detective Voelker. “Have another cup of my blackstrap molasses drink.”

“No, thank you, ma’am,” said Voelker, casting a frightened look at the oily black liquid. “It was very good, ma’am, thank you. And I’m not an inspector. Just a detective.”

“Oh yes, that’s English, isn’t it? Please, detective or lieutenant or whatever you are, have another cup. It’s awfully good for you.”

“No, thank you.”

“Blackstrap molasses,” said Heather reprovingly, “is an excellent source of calcium.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And iron.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

In an effort to regain control of the interview, Voelker shuffled his notes. He looked through them anxiously, then rose from the table.

“Thank you, Mrs. Crandall, Professor Crandall. I may need to speak to you again at a later date,” he said in his most formal manner. It was meant to head off any inclination that woman might have to make another one of those godawful drinks.

“Good-bye, Officer.”

“Good-bye.”

Harry closed the door behind the departing policeman and returned to the table. Heather was stirring her molasses drink idly with a spoon and smiling to herself.

“Awfully good,” she murmured, “or just plain awful?”

“What, darling?”

“Nothing. What did you think of that, Harry?”

Harry Crandall sat down and lit his pipe. He was a short, balding man who couldn’t think at all without his pipe. Heather had tried in vain for years and years to get him to stop. It was a hopeless task.

“My pipe and I,” he would say menacingly, “are as one.”

“Oh, Harry. It’s
so
bad for you. Your lungs …”

“I don’t inhale it.”

“Freud,” Heather would say solemnly, “died of throat cancer. Freud smoked a pipe.”

“Freud was one of the greatest geniuses of the twentieth century. Freud smoked a pipe.”

“Oh,
Harry.
”

“Or was it cigars Freud smoked?” mused her husband.

Heather would shrug. She was not interested. This was the kind of detail that Harry prided himself on knowing, but no one else cared about.

“The point is, Harry,” she would say firmly, “he
smoked.
”

Now her husband, ignoring her mute look of protest,
lit the tobacco and puffed. The pipe went out. He lit it again and puffed vigorously. Heather watched disapprovingly. Harry loved this little ritual. He maintained that the look of pained dismay she gave him every time improved the flavor.

“What do you think, Harry?” she repeated.

“I think that policeman is wondering why we don’t seem more broken up over this.”

Heather stirred the blackstrap molasses vigorously. “We didn’t know Laura that well,” she pointed out. “Just the past couple of years or so. While you’ve known Walter—?”

“Nearly thirty years.”

“It’s a tragedy, of course. A real tragedy. I sent flowers to the house and I’m going over there tomorrow with Ruth.”

“That’s nice.”

Little Harry came in, pulled out a chair and sat down. The chair groaned audibly but did not give way.

Little Harry was Heather and Harry Crandall’s eldest son. He was seventeen years old and well over six feet Heather didn’t know how much he weighed these days, but it was a steadily increasing number that always seemed to be evenly divisible by ten. Little Harry was not fat. He was a solid mass of muscle. He was the high school football coach’s favorite human being. His full name was Harold A. Crandall, Jr., but he had been called Little Harry for so long that the name had ceased to have any meaning and had become a sort of tag. He had passed his father’s height and weight around age twelve and continued to sprout upward. It was a wonder to all their friends that on a diet of vegetables, rice, tofu and miso soup, Little Harry grew as he did.

“She must be doing something right,” Freda had said grudgingly. “Just
look
at that kid.”

Ruth Abrams was in awe of him. Her own son, Jonathan, was ten years older than Little Harry (Heather was the youngest of their group and her children were a fall generation behind everyone else’s), but he was a little runt who weighed in at five foot ten, a hundred and fifty
pounds. Jonathan claimed he made up for this by intellectual power—he had based his life and self-respect on this theory—but Ruth was still overwhelmed by the prodigious size of Heather’s offspring.

“It’s like Melvin’s favorite story,” she would say. Melvin was her five-year-old grandson. “Little Harry is like Jack and the Beanstalk
all in one.
”

Now Little Harry grinned at his parents. “Where’s the chow?”

“Dinner’s not ready yet,” said Heather.

Little Harry looked distressed. He put his hand on his stomach.

“But I’m
hungry.
”

“Eat this,” said Heather, with the patience born of long experience.

Little Harry took the carrot she handed him, rose, and wandered out of the room. Heather watched him go with pride in her eyes

“Our son,” she often said, “is living proof that athletes can thrive on a meatless diet.”

Heather was a strict vegetarian. She was anti-meat, anti-flesh foods, anti-sugar. She believed in the regenerative powers of whole foods, fresh dairy products and carob powder.

“Harry,” she said now, “do you think you should have told that detective about how you fight with Walter?”

Her husband puffed away complacently.

“Don’t be silly, Heather. I have nothing to hide. He asked me about my relationship with Sloane, and so I told him. I’m his first wife’s cousin. So what? Sloane is a self-satisfied, egotistical bastard. I don’t know why I’ve stayed friends with him all these years.”

Because you love to argue with him, Heather longed to say, but she stopped herself. Harry would not enjoy that piece of self-knowledge. The two men loved to bicker over the stupidest things. And sometimes the fights got really acrimonious. There was that argument two weeks ago at the tennis party—Heather had thought they would come to blows. Just lucky that the policeman hadn’t asked about
that.

Charlie, her ten-year-old, came into the kitchen.

“Mom. I’m hungry.”

Charlie was a thin whining child who wore glasses and threatened to take after his father. He loved to lecture his friends and boss them around. He was a normal height for his age, but next to his older brother’s prodigious growth he looked practically stunted. He lived in Little Harry’s oversized shadow; it covered him like a huge blanket.

“Can I have something before dinner?”

“What do you want?” asked Heather, fearing the answer.

“Candy,” said Charlie promptly.

“You can have a carrot.”

“Oh, all
right.
”

With Charlie safely out of the way, Heather said, “But darling, who in the world would want to poison Laura? Everyone at that party last night was friends with her. Everyone
liked
her, for God’s sake.”

“We don’t know that,” her husband said, his mild blue eyes meeting hers. “We don’t know that. There may have been—Secret Grudges.”

He said it very self-importantly, in capital letters.

Heather pondered this. Secret grudges? But
who
? Of course she knew there were some bad feelings and resentments—there were bound to be, among any group of friends. But what was Harry saying? Did he know something she didn’t?

She lifted herself gracefully out of the chair and set about preparing dinner. Heather was tall and willowy, with long brown hair parted in the middle and a pale intelligent face. She was in her early forties, nearly two decades younger than her husband and his group of friends, and some of them thought she was flaky because of her preoccupation with the proper kinds of food. She wasn’t, of course. No, she wasn’t. The only one who recognized that was Ruth, poor muddleheaded old Ruth, so eager to copy what Heather did. And yet, mused Heather, Ruth was the only one who had befriended her in the beginning, when she was a 23-year-old graduate student who
had suddenly married her own advisor. Professor Harry Crandall had been a middle-aged man reeling from his third divorce, and Heather, who always knew exactly what she wanted when she saw it, had carefully and competently reeled him in. She could still remember the cookies Ruth had baked for her—those awful cookies, little gooey messes or dried-up rocks—and the pathetic little cakes Ruth had brought by when they were just becoming friends, At the time, Harry’s favorite cousin had been married to Walter Sloane, and Sloane and Sam Abrams were in business together, so the three couples had formed a group.

“But, darling—” Heather was saying, chopping broccoli into little florets, when their youngest son came into the room. He looked up at his mother with round blue eyes.

“Mommy?”

“Yes, sweetheart?”

“I’m hungry.”

“Applesauce?”

He thought this over carefully.

“Okay,”

She took out a little bowl and spooned some of her homemade applesauce (no refined sugar, no artificial ingredients) into it. Linus took it and sat down under the table at his father’s feet. He took the little plastic spoon she gave him and began to eat greedily.

She glanced down at him lovingly. Her baby! Linus was only five years old, but already he promised to be another Little Harry. He was big for his age and strong, and he ate
everything,
absolutely everything. They had named him after Linus Pauling, one of Harry’s idols. “The greatest chemist of his time,” Harry said. “One of the greatest scientists of his generation.”

Heather hadn’t really liked the name, but she hadn’t wanted to disagree too violently. After all, Linus could always change it or take a nickname when he got older.

Now Linus sat under the table and gobbled his applesauce while Heather continued with her train of thought.

“So you think someone had a secret grudge against the Sloanes?” she asked.

“Well, what do you think?”

“Ye-e-es,” said Heather slowly. “Yes. I don’t know.”

“Against Laura … or against Walter.”

Heather nodded. “Yes. Walter.” They exchanged meaningful glances. “He’s so difficult,” she continued. “Of course I’ve always liked him because of how wonderful he is with Linus, but …”

“He’s a difficult man. Impossible, in fact.”

“Yes. I suppose people are jealous of his money.”

Her husband tamped down his pipe. “That’s true. He was never wealthy before he married Laura. Wuff-Wuff Dog Chow; that stuff is worth a fortune, an absolute fortune. Walter never made much with his business.”

“Look at how Ruth and Sam live.”

“Scrimping and saving,” said her husband. “Scrimping and saving.”

“While all the while Walter lives in luxury.” Heather fell silent. She took an onion and neatly peeled and sliced it.

Secret grudges? Was that one of them?

At the next house Detective Voelker visited, a white Victorian with blue trim, the door was opened by a large man who stared at him in a suspicious manner.