Reilly 09 - Presumption of Death (22 page)

George had always provided. He might be stingy, but he hadn’t ever asked her to work outside the home. His legs were really bothering him these days, and he had to stay in bed a lot. Thank goodness he could play his guitar even in bed. He got more pleasure out of that old hollow-body than most men get from their wives. He was playing it in the bedroom right now, working on a new song.

“Grandpa’s up!”

“You stay right here, Callie.”

George sang from the bedroom,

I’m at the Humble Pie Motel in Room two-thirty-three

And if you ever loved me, honey, ask the manager for the

key…

Her heart filled up with love for him. But I’m going to have to do something, she thought to herself, not for the first time. Yessirree.

Then they heard something else, a yowling Jolene knew well. George’s muffled voice trailed off. He was listening too, but he wouldn’t do anything about it. “Hey!” April said, now having fun arranging the mangled food on her plate with the contentment of a well-fed child. “I hear the kitties.”

“That woman’s a nuisance,” said Jolene. “Poor Ruthie. Spending all her money on those animals. We don’t need a bunch of wild cats roaming around this neighborhood. I wish she would just smell the roses and quit.”

“Such pretty kitties,” said Callie. “She’s my hero.”

“You know,” Jolene said, “people who feed abandoned animals aren’t doing anyone any favors. In a place like this, those animals can’t get by without being fed. They’re domesticated but they don’t have homes anymore. Cruel people have abandoned them. In nature, they would… move on.”

“But if they’re hungry?” Callie asked. “Why can’t they get food if they need it? I think the Cat Lady is right. Otherwise, they just wander around crying, they’re so sad and hungry.”

Well, naturally, she would feel that way. Maybe she remembered those days with Cathy, when none of them had enough to eat. She and George had not known about the deprivation until the court stepped in that day Cathy left the babies strapped into car seats in the car for four hours while she played house with a new boyfriend in Seaside.

Luckily, shade had come to protect the car and preserve the girls’ lives after an hour or two. A few days in the hospital and the girls were fit as red ants in August again. “Why don’t you two get yourselves upstairs now and find something cute to wear today?” Jolene suggested, not wanting to think anymore about that ordeal, which she hoped the girls didn’t remember.

Her grandchildren cleared the table quickly, well-trained by Jolene, rinsing the dishes and stacking them neatly in the dishwasher.

Jolene couldn’t ignore it anymore. Cats, making that ear-shredding yowling right outside the kitchen door. After church she planned a game of Monopoly with George and the girls. But first she needed to do something to shut up those dang cats.

“You wear the blue,” she called up the stairs to Callie. “April, how about that white dress trimmed in pink?”

“It’s too small,” April said.

“Just for today.”

“Well, okay. But something new next week, Grandma, if we can afford it. This one’s above my knees.”

The two girls trooped around upstairs quietly, whispering so that they wouldn’t disturb Grandpa’s songwriting. While they ran floods of water in the bathroom, Jolene wiped the table, still trying to ignore the keening whimpers of the cats outside.

George had said only yesterday when she remarked on the daily bedlam outside, leave Ruthie alone. Ruthie had the title of town character and what you do with town characters is you don’t molest them or stare at them, you let them sing to themselves and mutter or in Ruthie’s case feed cats and hand out leaflets.

Her Twelve Points were all over town. Jolene saw those leaflets spreading all up and down the valley, moving down to Big Sur in the pack of some Danish tourist, riding up to San Fran in some migrant worker’s beat-up truck, moving east into the forest like a flea on a squirrel… if only Ruthie had something to say. The problem was, she didn’t think very well, like most human beings.

But the cats… Jolene knew George didn’t like them any more than she did. She had heard about what contamination they might cause in a sandbox, and they had one out back, mostly for April, because at four, she still liked to dig around and dream her baby dreams.

Jolene rubbed a spot into the window with the edge of her apron so that she could see across the street, past the bridge. Ruthie’s heap of junk dominated. Obviously, Ruthie had slept in the lot over there. Someone ought to get her into an assisted-living situation. Maybe Ruthie wasn’t so old, but she was incompetent. The money she spent on those wild cats must absorb any income she had coming in.

Slamming the dishwasher door shut, Jolene pulled at her apron, locating a peg to hang it on. She would have to go out there, speak to her. Make Ruthie see sense.

She had her hair up in rollers, big ones, because she liked a softer look, but it was still early, nobody else would be out. Full of resolve, she marched across the street to the dilapidated white car.

“Hello in there,” she said. Ruthie sometimes slept in this car under a quilt made of old wool suit fabric. She checked the back, but couldn’t see inside.

“Ruthie?”

The front seat remained invisible. The car seemed covered with a fine, oily wet layer of skin, as thick as a seal’s. A gust of warm wind lifted her housecoat.

Why did she bother, she groused inwardly. Still, a horde of caterwauling cats of all shapes and sizes clustered around the car. Some moved toward her, sidling up to her ankles, purred, and began to nudge her.

Enough! she thought. She pounded on the driver’s-side door. When there was no response, she tried the handle.

The door, unlocked, fell open, and Ruthie, who never did anyone any harm, fell down out of her seat onto the hot asphalt.

Oh, Jolene thought. Oh, you poor thing. Ruthie looked so little and helpless. Her skin was bright red and her mouth hung open and she wasn’t moving at all.

Was this what death looked like?

Because Ruthie, eyes closed, otherwise looked peaceful. As if she had just fallen asleep.

Nina and Paul had been home from Cachagua and the Bucket for half an hour, and Nina was still in the shower, when Ben Cervantes called with the news. “I thought you’d want to know,” he said. “I heard it from Tory, who just got the call from Jolene. She found Ruthie’s body this morning.”

By the time Paul and Nina arrived, the police had photographed, dusted, and examined for hours. Ruthie still lay on the asphalt after all this time, cordoned off and harshly lit, while the ambulance stood by, waiting for the body to be released.

Gawkers continued to come and stare, to act as witnesses to the ritual of death. Nina recognized Darryl and Tory Eubanks. Tory was carrying her youngest. Some of the neighborhood kids ran back and forth across the street, yelling with excitement as though they were at the circus.

“Find anything?” Paul asked the detective in charge. With a weary look, the detective told Paul to back off, and in the interests of good relations, Paul did that. They waited in the Mustang while the ambulance drove off and the detectives called it a day.

Then they went back over to the parking lot. Ruth Frost’s battered Cutlass was surrounded by yellow caution tape. A deputy had been posted, but, distracted by a pile of questions from Nina, he was rendered innocuous long enough for Paul to take one good look at the car.

“Crab and langoustine ravioli,” Nina said to the waiter at the Terrace Grill. The Terrace Grill was an adjunct to the La Playa Hotel, a lovely old place that had been a fixture for many years in Carmel. They had chosen a table outside. It was nine-thirty at night and Nina’s stomach was as empty as a crater on the moon. She had already started on the bread and butter.

Tonight the fog spared them. The warm air settled over them as softly as a veil. Birds shook the trees and flower garden nearby, settling in for the night, and the few streaks of cloud above the waterline were stained cherry.

“We’d like to start with crab cakes,” Paul said, “then I’ll have the prawns.” He studied the wine list for another moment, then ordered a Gewürztraminer, very cold.

Nina reached across the table and took his large hand in hers. Hard, craggy, experienced, she thought, and smiled. “I feel guilty.”

“Here we sit, playing violins, figuratively speaking,” Paul said, “while Carmel Valley burns. People are dying. But we have to eat.”

“The party goes on,” Nina said.

“So it does. What’s bothering you? I mean aside from Wish’s problems, Ruthie’s death, your hangover today from the party, and being tired and hungry from this whole long day.”

“Isn’t that enough?”

“Is it about Bob’s call?”

“No… it’s nothing.”

“Not true.”

“He’s okay.”

“So you’re not ready to talk about it?”

“I’m thinking it’ll blow over, Paul. I don’t want to talk about it, as a matter of fact.”

“Why not?” Paul demanded, as peremptorily as if she were a prisoner at Guantánamo Bay withholding vital information.

“It’s none of your cotton-picking business,” Nina said, her back up. Again.

“You won’t tell me?”

“I will soon.” When I have a solution, she thought.

Paul tolerated Bob, but children, in the generic, he did not like. He would not want Bob in the second bedroom he used as an office. Of course not. Fair enough.

One bathroom. Bob’s forty-minute showers. Paul’s lips would get as tight as an abalone shell at low tide.

Why couldn’t Bob follow the plan? It had been so tidy. He had insisted on going to Sweden. Let him stay and build character.

But.

He was overwhelmed. He needed to come home. Home in quotation marks. Home in the abstract. Alas, in truth, there existed no home for Bob to come home to at the moment.

“It’s Nikki, isn’t it? Nikki’s older,” Paul said. “She does things she shouldn’t and that makes her attractive to Bob. What else is new?”

Oh, not much, Bob wants to come home, Nina thought. “Nikki’s cooling off toward Bob.”

“Ah. And what’s his response?”

She decided she would go no further in this direction, especially given the interest she saw rising in his greeny-yellow eyes. Which, in spite of the glass of wine he had just downed, remained sharp. “So, Paul,” she said, licking the tip of her already-shiny spoon, “what did you think happened to Ruthie?”

He cocked his head, but let it go. “I have a few ideas,” he said. “Ruth Frost’s car was old, so I can’t be sure.”

“But…” she offered.

“Right. But…”

“Something struck you?”

“You know how when you have a hunch?”

“You never buy my hunches.”

“But I buy my own.”

“What hunch?”

“The police think because it was a cold night, she left her motor and heat running.”

“You don’t think so?”

“I think she’d run it for a while, then turn it off.”

“Because?”

“Because she was slightly cockeyed, yes; stupid, no. Have you ever noticed that if you’re an outsider, people will believe you’re capable of all sorts of unreasonableness?”

“Maybe she felt running the motor outside would be harmless. She didn’t know she would die. Probably thought the outside air would dissipate any carbon monoxide. Maybe she passed out before she could turn off the car.”

Paul said, “Witnesses say she hasn’t had a back seat in years. That she often left the motor running to get heat, when she needed it. Not smart, with leaks in the exhaust system, but she knew that and didn’t do it for long.”

“Does anyone say she threatened to kill herself?”

“No.”

“So what do you suspect? The police seem satisfied our Cat Lady died a natural death, out feeding her beloved animals in the night, trying to stay warm in her ruin of a car.”

“I guess if I was looking at the situation from the point of view that she was living a risky existence and had a bad accident, I’d be satisfied too. But there were those marks on the exhaust pipe,” Paul said.

Nina stopped eating. “Marks?”

“Maybe natural aging, maybe not. I took a few photographs and looked at them before we came here, but they don’t really prove anything. Those marks could have happened a lot of ways. And it doesn’t look like the forensics people are planning to figure this one out for us. The authorities seem pretty set on natural death.”

“You pointed out what you saw?”

“They saw what I saw. They took photographs too, but, you know, strange way to kill someone.”

“Are you sure what’s been happening around here isn’t inspiring your imagination?”

“Maybe. But maybe somebody rigged a hose into the car to help out the fumes in the back. She went out there to take care of the animals. She ran the motor and fell asleep. Someone ran a hose from the pipe into the car.”

“Without her noticing?”

“She was sleeping. And she slept on. After a while, he removed the hose.”

“Oh, Paul. That poor woman.” Nina pictured her long hair, the heap her body made on the pavement.

“Someone got to her before she died.”

“Was she hit? Did you see a bruise?”

“Nothing so definite. But there was something off about the whole thing. Maybe a hot drink put her to sleep first. Maybe a knock upside the head, then the hose inserted into a window, was the final scenario.”

Nina rubbed her forehead. “You believe she was murdered.”

“She was the only witness to the arsons. You realize that? Remember what you said happened at that party just a few hours before?”

“I’ve been thinking about that. There was jokey talk,” she said, “about doing a lineup for Ruthie, making her pick out who she saw fleeing the arson. I guess if our Siesta Court arsonist happened to be within earshot, he heard that. Maybe he took it seriously.”

“Maybe that got her killed.”

“I’m thinking, how does this help Wish? I hate to be so cold, but his arraignment’s in the morning. And it does help Wish, but we have to prove it was a murder. The theory currently is that Danny was the Siesta Court arsonist and Wish was the outside man. But Danny’s dead and Wish was sleeping on a state-issue mattress.”