Motion for Murder (16 page)

I was troweling butter onto my slice of toast when Missy's voice came over the intercom informing me of a phone call. I picked up the kitchen extension.

"What did you find?" Hilary. It was only nine-fifteen, and she sounded like she'd been skinning secretaries alive for hours already.

"Nothing," I said.

A moment of silence. "Did you look?"

"Yes." I could feel the weight of Paige's curiosity. Nothing I could do about that; I was trapped.

"Damn it," Hilary said, more to herself than to me. "She's smarter than she looks."

I wish I could've said the same for myself. Hard to believe I'd been suckered in because Hilary could cry on cue. But at least the deed was done. "Sorry things didn't turn out better," I said. "Wish I could've done more."

"You can," she said. My lips clamped shut. I had the feeling I was skidding off into a dark and dangerous place. "Come to my home at lunchtime, and we'll talk about it."

"I don't eat lunch," I said. I didn't have the stomach for breakfast either, at the moment. I put down my toast.

"Maybe you should start," Hilary said. "You could use a few pounds."

I gritted my teeth. "I only get a half hour for lunch."

"Not today," she said. "Howard can talk to me if he has a problem. I'll tell him you were bringing me some of Dougie's things. There must be some piece of crap lying around there that belonged to him."

Once I worked my way past her sentimentality, I thought of Dougie's vitamins but dismissed that idea almost immediately. They would mean nothing to Hilary and they certainly weren't reason enough to take an hour for lunch. That meant I'd have to ask Missy where she'd put Dougie's things, and that wasn't something I wanted to do. "Listen," I said, "I don't think I'm the right person for this."

"Make it around twelve-thirty," she said. "I'm in Kings Walk. Do you know it?"

Only by rumor. The Kings Walk development was an oasis surrounded on all sides by golf courses. Driving past, the only building you could catch a glimpse of was the clubhouse, and even then only if the cloud of exclusivity parted.

She gave me the street address. "Don't be late," she said. "I'll let the guardhouse know you're coming."

Oh, the guardhouse. Good. I hung up the phone feeling weak.

Paige was staring at me with toast crumbs on her lips. "What was that all about?"

I shook my head. "Nothing." I reached for my toast and it was gone. Just as well. I didn't think I could get it down anyway. I knew I wouldn't be able to eat any lunch. The way I was feeling, I might never eat again. Which was really the worst part of all this.

My first mistake had been falling for Hilary's crocodile tears. My second was assuming that an invitation to lunch included food. There wasn't so much as a piece of cheese laid out in her kitchen. I don't think a cockroach could have survived there. No crumbs, no dust, no smudges on the floor, white on white, with stainless steel appliances to complete the surgical suite look of it. I shivered passing through it.

I'd brought Dougie's trial bag with me, a battered black case with DJH engraved in gold lettering near the clasp, and she tossed it into the mudroom off the kitchen without looking at it. She didn't offer me anything to drink, either, which was somewhat more of a problem, since a barrel of wine might have taken the edge off. Of her. She seemed deeply agitated, and I wondered if it had something to do with me or with the stack of mail piled on the kitchen counter. I'd assumed money wasn't one of her problems, but you never knew.

The twins were nowhere in sight. Probably off sharpening their teeth on some innocent schoolboy.

Hilary got us settled in the family room, a room large enough to have end zones, and then she got to the point. "You have to get into Melissa's home. If there's nothing at the office, she's hiding it there." She narrowed her eyes at me. "Assuming you actually did look."

"Oh, I looked," I said. And I wasn't looking again. In Missy's desk, her home, or anywhere else. Hilary could hire people to do her dirty work from now on. "Has it occurred to you she didn't kill your husband?" I noticed a photo of Dougie in a silver frame on the mantle. He looked very young and very happy. I squinted at it. And very thin.

"No." Hilary snatched a pack of cigarettes off the side table, lit one with a silver lighter, and blew a stream of blue-gray smoke toward the ceiling. She watched it curl upward while I waited in the relentless trajectory of Dougie's smile. I'd never known him to be that thin; he'd been a gym rat when I'd started working for the firm. This was almost like seeing him in another life. A happier life. Bachelorhood.

Hilary noticed my distraction. "Isn't that a good picture of my Doug?" She unfolded herself and vamped over to the fireplace with the cigarette bobbing between two fingers. A second later she was pressing the photograph into my hands. "He was still in law school when this was taken. He never wanted to be a lawyer, you know."

I didn't know, but I couldn't see how it mattered anymore.

She sucked on the cigarette and turned her head to the side to blow out the smoke. "His mother never thought he was smart enough to be a lawyer. She wanted him to work in insurance." Her lip curled in disdain. "Imagine that. My Doug, selling insurance. It's a good thing for him he met me." Another suck, another blow before she lowered her eyes to the picture. "That was during spring break in Cancun. Have you ever been to Cancun?"

I shook my head. I'd never been to college, either. And I'd certainly never live in Kings Walk. As far as I could see, this visit was nothing more than a painful demonstration of my own failings.

"He proposed during that trip." Hilary wrenched the photo out of my hands, kissed the fingertips holding the cigarette, and pressed them gently to the glass. Ashes wafted onto Dougie's face. "Let me show you something," she said.

I didn't want to see anything Hilary had to show me. I didn't want to be sitting in her house, in Dougie's house, and I didn't want to feel like an accomplice in her vendetta against Missy. But she was coming at me with a photo album in her hands and a strange small smile on her face. "He loved his photographs," she said, running blood-red nails lightly across the gold-filigreed cover of the album. "He was quite sentimental. Did you know that about my Doug?"

I shook my head.

She thrust the album onto my lap. "Go on, open it."

God knows, I didn't want to open it, but I did it anyway. There was Dougie, standing outside the front gate of a small white Cape Cod, his smile wide and proud.

"Our first house," Hilary said. "Can you believe that?"

"It was cute," I said.

"It was a mouse hole," she said. "It was all we could afford." She crushed out her cigarette and pointed with her chin. "Go on."

I went on to see Dougie smiling from the driver's seat of a succession of cars: an old Nova, a Honda Accord, an Infiniti, a Mercedes; Dougie smiling from the front walk of a succession of houses: the Cape Cod, a Colonial, the current contemporary ice palace. Dougie on vacation, at the office, in the courtroom. Must have bribed a court officer for that one. Interestingly, there were no photos of Dougie in the gym.

By the time I got to the back cover, Hilary was sniffling. "It's hard to believe that's all gone now," she said, taking the album from me to drop it on the coffee table. "That he's gone." She tore a tissue from the box on the side table and blotted in the vicinity of her eyes without actually touching anything. "I feel so alone."

"I'm sure you've got plenty of friends," I said, although I wasn't sure at all. In fact, I suspected I was being recruited for the job. "And you've got your kids," I added.

"Did he ever tell you how we met?" she asked.

I glanced at my watch. "I, um, should really
"

"I was going to sue him." She lit up another cigarette but didn't smoke it. "I was shopping on Madison Way. Do you know it?"

Hardly. Madison Way was as tony as Kings Walk. Walmart was more my speed. On sale days.

She sniffed. "I suppose you don't, on your salary. Anyway, I was crossing the street carrying my shopping bags and my Gucci purse, and he bumped me with his car." She smiled faintly. Or maybe she grimaced. "He couldn't do enough for me after that. He proposed six months later. Against his mother's wishes, of course."

Dougie's mother must have had a crystal ball.

"He was such a romantic." She sighed and rolled her eyes up to the ceiling, remembering. "Flowers every week. On Sunday nights, he cooked me dinner. He bought me jewelry."

The practice probably came in handy when he began hitting on clients. I wondered when that had been. Hilary was painting a picture of wedded bliss unseen since Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. And look how that had turned out.

"He was a scrawny child," she was saying. "The kind of boy who gets picked last in gym class. You know the type?"

Know it? I
was
the type. This was hitting below the belt. As if I wasn't feeling inadequate enough, now I was being forced to remember the inglorious days of my childhood. I took another look at my watch and uncrossed my legs. "Look, Hilary, I have to
"

"That's why he worked out so much," she said. "To compensate. To overcompensate, really. He didn't have a girlfriend all through high school, you know. Then he became a lawyer, and women threw themselves at him." She looked at the balled-up tissue in her hand with surprise, as if she hadn't known it was there. She put it down on top of the photo album on the coffee table. "And he caught them," she added with a touch of bitterness. "Every single one of them."

I was about to suggest that some women would throw themselves at a wallet lying on the street when I heard the distinct click of a door closing. I stiffened. "What's that?"

She blinked. "What's what?"

"That noise. I heard a noise." I turned to look at the French doors leading to the back deck. "Did someone come in?"

"I can't imagine," she said, although what she couldn't imagine, she didn't say.

Now I heard something else. The gentle creak of floorboards. The hairs on my neck began to prickle, and I stood up fast. "Thanks for the
" I was going to say food, or drink, but I'd had neither. "
memories," I finished lamely. "I have to get back to work now."