Paper Doll (14 page)

Susan and I had a reservation in Williamstown at a place called The Orchards where they served home-baked pie, and we could have a fire in the bedroom. While I talked with the Tripp children, Susan would visit the Clark Museum.

We drove out on Route 2. Susan had a new car, one of those Japanese things she favored that were shaped like a parsnip, and mostly engine. This one was green. She let me drive, which was good. When she drove, I tended to squeeze my eyes tight shut in terror, which would cause me to miss most of the scenery that we had taken Route 2 to see in the first place.

I met Chip and Meredith Tripp in the bar of a restaurant called the River House, which, in the middle of the day, was nearly empty. Chip and I each had a beer. Meredith had a diet Coke. Chip was cooler than kiwi sorbet, with his baggy pants, and purple Williams warm-up jacket, his hat on backwards, and his green sunglasses hanging around his neck. Meredith was in a plaid skirt and black turtleneck and cowboy boots. As before, she had on too much makeup.

“I need to talk with you about your mother,” I said.

Chip glowered. Meredith looked carefully at the tabletop.

“What I will tell you can be confirmed in most of its particulars, by the police. So we shouldn’t waste a lot of time arguing about whether what I say is true.”

“So you say, Peeper.”

Peeper. I took a deep breath and began. “First of all, it is almost certain that your mother was not in fact Olivia Nelson.”

Meredith’s eyes refocused on the wall past my chair and got very wide.

Her brother said, “You’re full of shit.”

“Did either of you ever meet any of your mother’s family?”

“They’re dead, asshole,” Chip said. “How are we going to meet them?”

I inhaled again, slowly.

“I’ll take that as no,” I said and looked at Meredith. She nodded, her head down.

“Have you ever heard of anyone named Cheryl Anne Rankin?”

Chip just stared at me. Meredith shook her head.

“Do you know that your father is encountering financial difficulty?” I said.

“Like what?” Chip said.

“He’s broke,” I said.

“Bullshit,” Chip said.

I nodded slowly for a minute, and inhaled carefully again.

“Did you know that your mother was promiscuous?” I said.

“You son of a bitch,” Chip said. He stood up.

“On your feet,” he said. I didn’t move.

“Hard to hear,” I said. “I don’t blame you. But it has to be contemplated.”

“Are you gonna stand up, you yellow bastard, or am I going to have to drag you out of your chair?”

“Don’t touch me,” I said.

And Chip heard something in my voice. It made him hesitate.

I tried to keep my voice steady.

“I am going to find out how your mother died, and the only way I can is to keep going around and asking people questions. Often they don’t like it. I’m used to that. I do it anyway. Sometimes they get mad and want to fight me, like you.”

I paused and kept my eyes on his.

“That’s a mistake,” I said.

“You think so,” he said.

“You’re an amateur wrestler,” I said. “I’m a professional thug.”

Meredith put her hand on Chip’s arm, without looking at him.

“Come on, Chip,” she said. There was almost no affect in her voice.

“I’m not going to sit around and let him talk about her that way.”

“Please, Chip. Let him…” Her voice trailed away.

I waited. He glared at me for a moment, then slammed his chair in against the table. “Fuck you,” he said to me and turned and left.

Meredith and I were quiet. She made an embarrassed laugh, though there was nothing funny.

“Chippy’s so bogus, sometimes,” she said.

I waited. She laughed again, an extraneous laugh, something to punctuate the silence.

“You know about your mother?” I said.

“Dr. Faye says we all do and won’t admit it. Not about her being somebody else, but the other…”

I nodded.

“Daddy would be up in his room with the TV on,” Meredith said in her small flat voice. “Chip was at college. And she would come home; I could tell she’d been drinking. Her lipstick would be a little bit smeared, maybe, and her mouth would have that sort of red chapped look around it, the way it gets after people have been kissing. And I would say, `You’re having an affair.”‘

“And?”

“And she would say, `Don’t ask me that.‘ ”And I would say, `Don’t lie to me.“’

I leaned forward a little trying to hear her. She had her hands folded tightly in front of her on the tabletop and her eyes were fastened on them.

“And her eyes would get teary and she would shake her head. And she’d say, `Oh, Mere, you’re so young.‘ And she would shake her head and cry without, you know, boo-hooing, just talking with the tears running down her face, and she’d say something about `life is probably a lie,’ and then she’d put her arms around me and hug me and pat my hair and cry some more.”

“Hard on you.”

“When I came to school,” she said, “I was having trouble, you know, adjusting. And I talked with Jane Burgess, my advisor, and she got me an appointment with Dr. Faye.”

“He’s a psychiatrist?”

“Yes.” The word was almost nonexistent, squeezed out in the smallest of voices. Her Barbie doll face, devoid of character lines, showed no sign of the adult struggle she was waging. It remained placid, hidden behind the affectless makeup.

“Know anything about money?” I said.

“Sometimes they’d fight. She said if he couldn’t get money, she would. She knew where to get some.”

“What did he say?”

“Nothing. He’d just go upstairs and turn on the television.”

“What would she say?”

“She’d go out.”

“You don’t know what her plan was? For money?”

“She always just said she knew where to get it.”

“How long did you live like this?”

“I don’t know. All the time, I guess. Dr. Faye says I didn’t buy the family myth.”

I put a hand out and patted her folded fists. She got very rigid when I did that, but she didn’t pull away.

“Stick with Dr. Faye,” I said. “I’ll work on the other stuff.”

Susan and I were in the dining room at The Orchards, Susan wearing tight black pants and a plaid jacket, her eyes clear, her makeup perfect.

“There’s a beard burn on your chin,” I said.

“Perhaps if you were to shave more carefully,” Susan said.

“You didn’t give me time,” I said. “Besides, there are many people who would consider it a badge of honor.”

“Name two,” Susan said.

“Don’t be so literal,” I said.

There were fresh rolls in the bread basket, and the waitress had promised to find me a piece of pie for breakfast. We were at a window by the terrace and the sun washed in across our linen tablecloth. I drank some coffee.

“It is a lot better,” I said, “to be you and me than to be most people.”

Susan smiled.

“Yes, it is,” she said. “Especially better than being one of the Tripps.”

“What I don’t get is the girl, Meredith. How did she escape it? She’s very odd. She’s obviously in trouble. Most of the time she’s barely there at all. But she’s the one that will look at it, that doesn’t buy the family myth.”

“There’s too much you don’t know,” Susan said.

“I may have that printed on my business cards,” I said.

The waitress appeared with a wedge of blackberry pie, and a piece of cheddar cheese beside it.

“My father used to have mince pie for breakfast,” the waitress said, “almost every Sunday morning.”

“And sired beautiful daughters,” I said.

The waitress smiled and poured me some more coffee, and gave Susan a new pot of hot water, and went off. Susan watched me eat the pie. She was having All Bran for breakfast, and a cup of hot water with lemon.

“What will you do,” Susan said, “now that you’re fired?”

“I’ll probably go back down to Alton,” I said. “And ask around some more.”

“Will it be dangerous?”

“Probably not,” I said. “Most of the cat is out of the bag, by now. There’s not much reason to try and run me off.”

“You think Alton is where you’ll find out?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know where else to look.”

“I didn’t much like that deal,” she said. “But you’ve been a cop. Do a lot of stuff you don’t much like.”

“Why I’m no longer a cop,” I said.

She shrugged.

“You know who put us on you in the first place?”

I nodded.

“Senator Robert Stratton,” I said.

“From Massachusetts?”

“That’s the one,” I said. “At least I never voted for him.”

“What was his problem?” she said.

“I’m investigating a murder,” I said. “Stratton was sleeping with the victim.”

“Afraid you’d turn up his name?”

“Yeah.”

“So what,” she said. “That’s mostly what they do in the Senate, isn’t it? They get laid?”

“He wants to be President,” I said.

“Sure,” she said. “Give him a fancier place to get laid in.”

“Who put the tail on me?” I said.

She shook her head. She was sitting with her feet on the desk, crossed at the ankle. It showed a long, smooth thigh line. She had on light-gray slacks over black boots, and a flowered blouse with big sleeves. Her holstered gun, some sort of 9mm, lay on the desk beside her purse. Everybody had nines now.

“You grow up here in Alton?” I said.

“Yes.”

“You know Olivia Nelson?”

“Jumper Jack’s girl,” Felicia said.

“Yes. Tell me about her.”

“What’s to tell. Rich kid, about ten years older than me. Father’s a town legend, hell, maybe a county legend. Big house, racehorses, good schools, servants, hunting dogs, bourbon and branch water.”

“What happened to her?”

Felicia grinned.

“Town scandal,” she said. “Went in the Peace Corps. Married some African prince with tribal scars on his face. Jumper never got over it.”

“How about her mother?” I said.

“Her mother?”

“Yeah, everyone talks about Jumper Jack. I never hear anything about her mother.”

“She had one,” Felicia said.

“Good to know,” I said.

“Sort of genteel, I guess you’d say. Sort of elegant woman who didn’t like the muddy dogs in her house, and hated it that a lot of the time her husband would have horse shit on his boots at supper.”

“That’s genteel,” I said.

“Yeah, it’s hard to describe. But she was always like someone who thought she should have been living in Paris, reading whoever they read in Paris.”

“Proust,” I said.

“Sure.”

“What happened to her?” I said.

“Committed suicide.”

“When?”

“I investigated it. Lemme see, nineteen… and eighty-seven, late in the year. Almost Christmas. I remember we were working overtime on the sucker just before the holidays.”

“1987,” I said.

“Yeah. That mean something to you?”

“Year the market crashed,” I said. “October 1987.”

“You think she killed herself ‘cause the stock market crashed?”

I shook my head.

“Doesn’t sound the type,” I said. “Know why she did it?”

“No. Went in her room, took enough sleeping pills to do the trick, and drank white wine until they worked. Didn’t leave a note, but there was no reason to think that it wasn’t what it looked like.”

She got up and got two cups of coffee from the automatic maker on the file cabinet. She added some Cremora and sugar, asked me what I took, and put some of the same in mine. Then she brought the cups back to her desk and handed me one. The gray slacks fit very smoothly when she walked.

“How about Cheryl Anne Rankin?” I said.

“Your Lieutenant, what’s his name?”

“Quirk.”

“Yeah, your Lieutenant Quirk asked around about her. I don’t remember her.”

“He talk with you?”

“Nope. Sheriff said we was to stay away from him. Nobody would much talk with him.”

“How come you’re talking to me?”

“Sheriff didn’t say nothing about you. Probably didn’t think you’d have the balls to come back.”

“There was a picture on the wall of the track kitchen,” I said. “Looked like Olivia Nelson. Woman who worked there said it was Cheryl Anne Rankin, and she was her mother. Now the picture’s gone, and the woman’s gone.”

“Don’t know much about that,” Felicia said. “People work at the track kitchen come and go. They get paid by the hour, no real job record, nobody keeps track. If you can fry stuff in grease, you’re hired.”

“If you were trying to find out things in this town, who would you go to?”

“About this Cheryl Anne?”

“About anything, Cheryl Anne, Olivia, Jack, his wife, Bob Stratton, anything. The only thing I know for sure down here is that you get your hair done in Batesburg.”

“And it looks great,” she said.

“And it looks great.”

We both drank a little of the coffee, which was brutally bad.

“Friend of mine said I might talk to the household help,” I said. “They’re in all the houses, all the offices. They’re cleaning up just outside of all the doors, and they tell each other.”

Felicia took another drink of the wretched coffee and made a face.

“I’ve tried,” she said. “No point to it, they wouldn’t tell me anything, just like they won’t tell you. They’ll listen politely and say `yassah‘ and nod and smile and tell you nothing.”

“I’m used to it,” I said. “All races, creeds, and colors refuse to tell me stuff.”

“And when they do, it’s a lie,” she said.

“That especially,” I said.