Slightly Abridged (21 page)

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Authors: Ellen Pall

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“If you want to.”
Juliet remembered the ride up. Landis's driving was on the harrowing side, but she still trusted him more than herself. “Not really.”
She consulted her map and advised him on the turns that would take them back to Route 131. A few minutes later, lofted by a sudden puff of courage, “Listen, Murray,” she blurted out. “I'm really sorry about that weirdness at lunch.”
“Don't be.”
“No, I mean it. I just—”
Dear God. What did she “just?” “Just” really liked him? “Just” really wanted it to “work?” If she was honest, what had moved her to push him away at lunch was a fear that last night had been both less important and less welcome to him than to her. Could she say that?
Apparently not.
“It's just, you've been really great,” she heard herself say, at the same time as an inner voice screeched, “Shut up, shut up, shut up!” “I really appreciate your coming up here with me.”
“No sweat. I enjoyed it.”
Congratulations, Juliet. He enjoyed it.
The night was dark and the traffic light. The Jaguar smoothly followed the beam of its steady headlights to the thruway. There, nothing awaited them but the long, dark drive home. Despite sporadic attempts, this was accomplished with none of the engaging conversation they had fallen into so easily on the way up. Around Saugerties, Juliet mentioned her sense that there was something hidden about Matt McLaurin, something creepy. He might have secretly guessed Gina's find was valuable, she suggested, followed Ada to New York, and killed her for it.
But Murray uncooperatively insisted on reading McLaurin as more tense and unhappy than sinister.
Next, Juliet brought up the Giddys. What if Cindy had known about the manuscript? They had only her word for it that Ada hadn't mentioned it. And Cindy had gone for Jenny Elwell's eye with a knife, for God's sake—
“I thought you told me during the missing investigation that Mrs. Caffrey herself said she didn't tell anyone in Espyville about the manuscript.”
“Oh. Right,” said Juliet, in a small voice.
A few minutes later she hypothesized aloud that Claudia Lunceford might have been so angry at her aunt for failing to leave the family property to her that she had arranged for a hit, choosing New York as the locale perhaps to throw off the police, perhaps because hired assassins were more plentiful there. Or it might be that Dr. Lunceford, self-employed as he was, had taken the day off and gone down to do the job himself.
“All the stories of teenagers run amok Caroline Walsh told us,” observed Murray, “you'd think they could find some local talent to carry out a killing.”
Juliet tried to imagine Claudia Lunceford arranging a two-part payoff of blood money to some local delinquent. Tried and failed. Dr. Steve?
She supposed an orthodontist must meet a lot of teenagers. But even she had to laugh at the outlandishness of her suppositions. Why not face it? Dennis Daignault had killed Ada Caffrey. And she, Juliet, had brought Ada to him.
The rest of the drive down took place in near silence. Juliet's thoughts drifted uneasily. She felt that she had not only hurt her chances with Murray today, but also that she had actually hurt him. But, as often happened when her emotions became uncomfortable or tender, this recognition only deflected her thoughts toward work.
With all the books she had lugged to Espyville about the commons system and enclosure, she had read nothing over the weekend. Tomorrow, when she sat down at her desk, she would be no more learned about sheep farming than she had been when she stood up from it on Friday. Still, she clung to the hope that something of the country had rubbed off on her to spruce up “A Christian Gentleman.”
They crossed the George Washington Bridge and Manhattan sparkled into view—vast, gleaming, packed with life, and (as it always was to Juliet after she had been away) as astonishing and improbable as a flying saucer. Then she remembered the World Trade Center. Momentarily, fear, sadness, and anger swept through her. The body of her city had been mutilated, it seemed to her, as much as if a lover had suffered an amputation. Like everyone else, she had to learn its new shape and how to love it all over again. For her, the new attachment was more fierce and passionate than ever.
Murray insisted on driving her to her building, then taking the car back to the rental agency himself. In front of her awning, with Marco waiting attentively, he went around to the trunk of the car to pull out her suitcase and the cartons of Ada's papers. Juliet hurried to meet him by the trunk, then allowed the doorman to carry her things inside while she followed Murray back to the driver's door. Here he finally turned to face her.
“I'll call you,” he said, and she bit her lip. He reached out his arms. She thought he was going to hug her, but a moment later she realized a cab was coming down the street fast behind her, threatening to hit her. So he was just saving her life.
Disappointed, “Thanks,” she said. “Thanks for everything.”
He looked hard at her. Then he shook his head, as if unable to decide what he saw.
“Murray.”
She put her hands behind his neck and kissed him.
He kissed her back. But then he made a fist and lightly knocked it against the side of her hatted head.
“What's in there?” he asked.
Later, alone in bed and unable to sleep, she wondered the same thing. Whatever it was, she decided at last, it was not a comprehensive understanding of agricultural change in nineteenth-century England. With a sigh, she sat up, switched on the light, and reached for the stack of books she had uselessly carried to Espyville and back. There was Burt and Archer's provocatively titled
Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property, and Culture in Early Modern England.
Or Warren Ortman Ault's
Open-Field Farming in Medieval England.
Or why not Brian Bailey's
The English Village Green
? In the end, she almost managed to make herself pass over the photocopied pile of Ada's poems in favor of one of these.
But not quite. Which, as it turned out, was rather a good thing as regarded finding Ada's killer.
The Sound of One Penny Dropping
Juliet opened the cardboard box provided by Copy-Kwik, hefted out
the thick gleanings of Ada Caffrey's mind, sat back against the pillows, and propped the first hundred pages or so against her knees. “The Cider Press” and the next few dozen after it were girlish, amateur affairs—singsong meters and bouncy rhymes used to evoke blooming daisies or autumn leaves. But soon Ada began to develop the voice Juliet had heard at the Ashtray. Soon, too, her subjects grew less pastoral, more erotic. There were witty poems and wrenching poems, sonnets, odes, even haiku, as well as free verse. The language in the better ones was quite down to earth.
Juliet leafed through, setting aside the first batch to delve into a second, then a third. The subjects, she found, reflected the arc of Ada's life, perhaps any life: from discovery of the world, to discovery of her inner world, romance, sex, disenchantment, and back again to the outside world. At one o'clock in the morning Juliet started to yawn and sleep began, finally, to look inviting. But before she closed her eyes, she decided sleepily, she would just take a quick look at Ada's last few poems.
The very last, dated December 2001, was a cinquain called “Morning Birds.”
“Mine!” sing
birds while my fine
feathered friend says, “Move, old
crow, we need your place.” But I squawk,
“Mine, mine!”
Juliet pushed the covers off her knees, sat straight up and read the poem again. She read it three times, then turned to the previous poem. This, also dated December 2001, was a villanelle, titled “Landmine.”
He sips his coffee, turns it in his hand,
Looks out my window, says, “All flesh is grass.”
This is my place, this was my father's land.
 
I listen—seem to listen—but the sand
Runs slowly through my mortal hourglass.
He sips his coffee, turns it in his hand.
 
“You hold the key to jobs. You understand?”
I bridle at the slur, then let it pass.
This is my place, this was my father's land.
 
He's not a bad man, but a man unmanned.
He sputters, coaxes, begs, then, like an ass,
He sips his coffee, turns it in his hand,
 
And brays at me, “It's worth six hundred grand!
“Buy what you like.” But I like this, alas.
This is my place, this was my father's land.
 
At last, “My friend,” I say, “here's where we stand.
I make no deals. Now, pay attention, class:
This is my place, this was my father's land.”
He sips his coffee, turns it in his hand.
Galvanized, Juliet threw off the covers, scattering poems everywhere. She jumped out of bed. Land, land, land—neglected land, valuable land, the development of land. Land in the English Regency. Land in the foothills of the Adirondacks. With its tumbledown house and untended hundred-odd acres, in a hamlet virtually bristling with FOR SALE signs, the police had accepted it as a given that no one particularly wanted Ada Caffrey's place. Dazzled by the glamour of the Wilson manuscript, they had discounted any other financial motive for killing her.
But the value of land could change, as the enclosure of the English commons proved. What if Ada's farm had special value to someone, great value? Then might it not be worth scheming for, killing for? Juliet thought of what Caroline Walsh had said about her area's vigorous efforts to attract business. Variances, tax abatements, and exemptions, even training for workers, such were the enticements she had mentioned. And Ada's place was just on the edge of the Adirondack Park. Could that combination of circumstances, perhaps, make it uniquely valuable to some business or other? Maybe a resort? Or an industry that capitalized on some resource from the mountains: the plentiful water, possibly, or the fact that development of the land inside the line was tightly restricted? Someone clearly had been leaning on Ada Caffrey to sell, someone who offered a lot of money, who told her the sale would bring jobs to the area, who pointed out to her that she was old.
Juliet dashed down a few quick thoughts in the notebook she kept on her night table. Then she called her father's personal line at the office and left a voice mail message to phone her back the moment he got in. Ted Bodine knew more about office buildings in urban capitals than commercial development in the boondocks; but
he was still, by far, Juliet's best source on real estate. If he didn't know someone in Albany or Utica, he would know someone who did.
This done, she got up, peed, then reassembled Ada's carefully numbered pages. She climbed into bed again and methodically checked every one of the 412 poems. She slowed as she got to the last fifty, methodically scrutinizing them for any hint of content concerning the purchase or sale of land. But she found nothing. At four in the morning, she finally set them aside, opened
The English Village Green,
and read herself to sleep.
 
 
She was dreaming about seed drills when the ringing of the phone
woke her.
“Dad?” she said. Her thoughts flew back into place with unusual clarity as she checked the time. It was just after eight.
“It's me, Jule,” said Murray.
“Oh!”
“I guess I woke you. Sorry.”
“No, that's okay. How are you?”
“I'm fine. But I thought I'd let you know something that came up here over the weekend regarding the Ada Caffrey case.”
“Oh!” Juliet said again. It had already occurred to her that this early morning call might be of the sort that seeks to erase what came before it—for example, a weekend of unexpected sexual passion. On the other hand, it might be the sort of call that seeks to smooth over tensions after same. But it had not occurred to her that Murray might be calling about Ada's murder.
“Look, John Fitzjohn is in the clear.” Murray was using his best I'm-just-a-simple-cop-from-Brooklyn voice. “Evidently, he's been having a torrid thing with a fifteen-year-old girl, the daughter of one of his clients. When the blizzard slowed down his office and
closed her school, he called her to arrange a get-together at a hotel in your neighborhood. Since he was going to be nearby, he stopped in at Rara Avis.
“Obviously, he was reluctant to reveal all this to Jeff,” Murray went on. “To Detective Skelton, I mean. But over the weekend, the girl told her parents. On Sunday they brought her down to the station and allowed her to make a statement. She was with Fitzjohn when he said good-bye to Caffrey; she'd been waiting for him downstairs. So he's pond scum, and he has been charged with rape. But he didn't do the killing.”
“Oh,” said Juliet, resorting to what seemed to be a staple of her vocabulary today.
“Yeah.”
“That leaves Dennis at the top of the likeliest suspects list?” she ventured.
“Dennis and/or you,” Murray corrected. “I mean, in Skelton's mind. No offense.”
Juliet hesitated. She had meant to trump whatever he had to tell her with her midnight epiphany. But it didn't seem like the moment. “You couldn't—could you have a word with Skelton, Murray?”
“‘Have a word' with him?”
“You know, sort of vouch for me? Explain … ?”
“Jeff Skelton is well aware you and I are on a friendly footing,” Murray said. “Unfortunately, all that achieved was it precluded my being assigned to the case. It doesn't make him cross you off as a suspect.”
“Oh. I see.”
Juliet was silent a moment. In her excitement, she had somehow managed to forget that Murray was a policeman a long time before he was her lover. Perhaps she'd better check out some facts before mentioning “Landmine” to him.
“Footing?” she echoed instead. “Is that what you call what we did the other night?”
“I wasn't thinking of that, but yes, we could call that footing. Footing, footsie. Footling.”
“Footling,” Juliet repeated, then added in a rush, “Do you think we could footle again? I'd like to.”
There was a pause, a very long and uncomfortable one for Juliet, before Murray said, “I would enjoy that very much, Juliet.”
She smiled.
She rose and dressed feeling—despite her greater legal peril—much more cheerful. Footling apart, if it should happen to turn out that Ada's land figured into the murder, she and Dennis would be demoted to the lowest ranks of the suspect list. At least, she hoped so.
The thought of Dennis gave her a guilty shiver. Apart from deciding he was a murderer (and how guilty she felt now about coming to that conclusion!), she had barely allowed herself to think of him all weekend. She supposed she ought to talk to him, break things off officially. Although “things” had never amounted to much between them after all. By the time of their last meeting, indeed, they seemed to have fizzled to a mutual cinder. Perhaps Dennis had found being viewed as a possible co-conspirator in murder as dampening to sexual ardor as she did. Would it be very cowardly just to skip any breaking off, treat him as if they had never been more than friends?
She decided that she must at least share her suspicions based on “Landmine” with him, and tell him what Murray had reported about Fitzjohn this morning. She e-mailed him but omitted any mention of her romantic adventures that weekend. Instead, leaving the matter unsettled, she diverted herself (as usual) from uncomfortable thoughts with the slightly less uncomfortable thought of work. The weekend's events, and the latter part of this morning's phone call, had suggested to her a rather drastic change for “A Christian Gentleman.” Suppose Sir James Clendinning was not the bloodless prig she
had taken him for but, on the contrary, so highly charged sexually that he believed only a double-barreled superego, reinforced with weekly lashings of organized religion, could make it safe for him to walk the Regency streets? Why else should he maintain such a fierce insistence on propriety except to check innate torrents of rampant desire?
Looked at this way, Juliet found Sir James instantly more sympathetic. Before going down to eat breakfast, she sat at her desk and allowed herself to glance through the manuscript so far. Indeed, each scene of prudishness made much more sense considered in this light. Cheered, she decided to rewrite these passages so as to make his underlying penchant subtly clear.
But it would not do to be reading
Open-Field Farming in Medieval England
as a preparation, or even
Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property, and Culture in Early Modern England.
No, she must find something racier than that to nourish her mind. As she stirred oatmeal a few minutes later, the answer came to her: As soon as she had checked through the last year or so of Ada's poems, in case there were any others touching on land, she would immerse her imagination in the complete, unexpurgated memoirs of Harriette Wilson.
 
 
When Ted Bodine finally answered the voice mail his daughter had
left for him, the reply came, disappointingly, in the form of a call from his secretary. Mr. Bodine would be busy all day, traveling and in meetings, but he hoped his daughter would meet him and a companion for dinner that night at Le Perigord. An eight o'clock reservation had been made for three.
The nature of the companion, the nature of the restaurant, and the nature of the evening all sprang clearly to life in Juliet's mind immediately. The companion, of course, was the great gal; the restaurant—expensive, formal, and so far east it was nearly in the
river—one where “Ted Bodine” was a name to conjure with, a man to truckle to; the evening late and leisurely. For Juliet, who grew up so unhappily on Park Avenue, the Upper East Side of Manhattan was her own private Krypton, the place where the powers she had acquired as a grown-up had no force. Immediately upon crossing the threshold at Le Perigord, she would become a mere mortal.
Still, she meekly agreed to be there and hung up, reminding herself that there were worse things than being treated to a dinner of first-rate French food. She spent the rest of the afternoon eroticizing Jim Clendinning (as she now thought of him), a somewhat labor-intensive task at first, but an interesting one.
And it was not unpleasant, she confirmed that evening, to be ushered into an atmosphere of lively, fragrant pleasure. She had arrived late, despite her best efforts not to exercise this particular form of passive-aggression. Ted was ensconced at a table by the bar in a snug little room in back, already well into his first bourbon-and-water and holding forth to a rapt waiter on the subject of bartenders in Madrid.
She paused for an instant to take him in. He was a blue-eyed, handsome man whose modest height and proportions ought to have condemned him to a life of being described as dapper. However, his zest, his continual animation, enlarged him, somehow, so that people spoke of him as a streak, a riot, a whirlwind, always some kinetic metaphor. His favorite word was “hilarious.” “It was hilarious!” he would proclaim, at the end of nearly every story. “We laughed all night!” he'd recall, and a tear would actually form at the corner of his eye, as if of condensed amusement. “Hilarious!”

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