Suspects (3 page)

Thinking of the supermarket gave him an idea for a quick source of funds. He had observed how careless women food shoppers were, especially those with small children. They often carried shoulder-strap purses, which with their movements, sometimes abrupt ones necessitated by what the kid was getting into, swung to a blind spot back of one hip. Often these big bags even yawned open to offer easy access. Sometimes they put their purses in the carts and left them to inspect the shelves.

It would be only justice to work the store from which he had just been fired, but he might be too conspicuous there to the other employees, some of whom, after three weeks, he knew slightly.

There was a big PriceRite on the same road as its nearest competitor, but a mile and a half distant, which meant a walk for Lloyd, who had no car. Three months earlier, he had come to town by bus for his father's funeral.

“Well, okay, my car was repoed,” he had told Donna over the slice of her warm Dutch apple pie not long from the oven.

“Why couldn't you just say that in the first place?” She cut a backup wedge so that it would be ready whenever he finished the first. Donna was like that.

He swallowed, then took a sip of the only fresh-brewed coffee he ever tasted. First time he watched her make it he hadn't known what she was doing: where was the jar of powder? “I was embarrassed,” he said. “I couldn't keep up the payments. Old story. I get tired of telling it.”

She showed him the most beautiful smile in the world. He knew he shouldn't make too much of it, but it was always as if for him alone.
“Old?
You're not even twenty-two.”

“Come on,
Donna,”
he whined for effect. “I'm almost twenty-three, and you know it.”

“Do you count leap years? I don't when it comes to
me!”
She stuck the wedge-shaped silver gadget—leave it to her to have just the right tool for every job—under the already cut slice of pie. “I'm determined to fatten you up, so you don't make your brother feel heavier than he already does.”

“Did Larry put on more since last time?” This was Lloyd's first visit since early fall. He tried to limit himself and would not have made it for several months now, had it not been for their father's death.

Donna immediately acquired a slight stiffness. She was supersensitive regarding any hint of negative reflection on her husband—even when it was she who had brought the subject up. “He's still in great shape,” she said. “But you know how people are. They always think they could stand to lose a pound or two. You can't be too thin or too young or too…”

“It's ‘rich,' isn't it?” he offered after waiting politely. It was the only one of the three that mattered to Lloyd, who was slender without trying and this early in life cared little about age, but, significantly, it was the one Donna had difficulty remembering. With another kind of woman, he might have observed now that
she
certainly had no problem with her own figure, but of course he would have been mortified to have Donna know he had so much as thought anything of the sort, he who averted his eyes when passing the open doorway of the master bedroom on a trip through the hall. “It's
rich,”
he repeated. “What I still hope to be if I can find the right thing.”

“‘Still'? At your age you shouldn't use that word. You've got lots of time for anything you want to do, but if you don't mind some advice from an old woman, you could use some focus. What are you doing at the moment?”

“Now who's misusing words?” he asked. She was twenty-five. He then lost his smile and looked away. “I've been trying various lines of work.… Look,” he said hastily, “I'm trying to learn how businesses are run, you know, profit margins and taxes and all, how to get the best out of people who work for you, and…” He smirked at the expression she was showing him. “I shouldn't have told you the truth. I should have lied.”

“It wouldn't have worked,” Donna said, putting her hand lightly on the back of his, setting his afire. “I know you so well. I know you like I feel I would have known my own little brother by now, if he had lived.”

He disliked the comparison but could not hint that he did, for it was dear to her, and he cherished any kind of intimacy he could get. “You
do
know me like nobody else.”

“Now, don't say that. It's Larry who knows you best. You're brothers.”

Lloyd finished the coffee that with the half-dissolved sugar made a pool in the bottom of the cup. “As you know, we never lived in the same house. My father ran off with my mother, leaving Larry's mom and Larry behind, but he didn't stay long with us. Larry may have forgiven him, especially when he got old and sick, but I never did. I'm here for the funeral because of Larry, not
him.”
This too was a lie, but he could hardly confess he was using his father's death as an excuse to see
her
.

“Why,” Donna said, gasping, “that's an awful thing to say about your father when he's dead.”

“Dying doesn't make him a better man.”

She shook her head. “I'm not saying you don't have a grievance, but his last few years must have been pretty rotten, all alone in that Medicaid place. Larry had lost track of him. He never bothered us before. I guess it was by some kind of accident he found out where Larry was, from somebody at the nursing home.”

“So Larry is burying him. That must cost a pretty penny. But that's good old Larry for you.”

Donna's eyes flashed. “What's that supposed to mean?”

Lloyd was suddenly so inflated with conflicting emotions that he could hardly stay in the chair. “Who is he to be so forgiving?”

It took Donna a long moment to interpret this outburst, and she was never more lovely, with the profusion of amber curls, the incredible gradations of rose from cheek to lips, and, always, the jewellike eyes that could grow huge with tenderness, or contract in disapproval as they were doing now. “Let me get this straight,” she asked. “You are condemning him for his virtues?”

“I'm condemning myself,” Lloyd insisted. He had screwed this up, as usual. What he wanted least was to center the focus on his brother, who had too much already. “Forget it. I apologize. I didn't mean it like it sounded.”

“All right, I will,” Donna said quickly, smiling gloriously. “You know I love you both.”

What he knew was that her love for him was as a brother. He was not demented. But he was aroused all the same. Not erotically: to desire someone you so adored was impossible. To have any hope of gratification was not to adore, which could admit no compromise and remain what it was supposed to be. And there was no serious desire that could rule out all hope of gratification. He was therefore safe, unless all existing categories were false. “Well, I love you…you both. I mean, all three.”

He immediately regretted the reference to Amanda, which caused Donna to rise from the table. “The nap should be over by now. I don't know if something's wrong with her, sleeping so much. Until now the problem always was she didn't want to ever go to sleep at all. Is that just growing up?”

But she stayed awhile longer, smiling down at Lloyd. She wore a shapeless pale-blue sweatshirt. He had never seen his sister-in-law in as little as a modest bathing suit, and did not want to: call him a prude.

“Speaking of sleep,” she went on, her hands on the knobs that topped the corners of the chairback, “how's your insomnia? Did you try my treatment?”

“I did,” said he, lying, “and it worked. I should have told you that before now.” Donna's method, used by herself since childhood, was to trick sleep into coming by pretending to be someone else: that is, by acting a part in an impromptu play. You could be your favorite person, not the one you actually were, and could do anything you wanted, without hurting or taking anything away from anyone else. Usually you went to sleep before very long, because it was relaxing not to be yourself, but if you stayed awake at least you were having fun doing so.

Only Donna would have come up with such a technique, and probably only she could use it successfully. Lloyd certainly could not. He had no idea of how to be somebody else. It was hard enough to be himself: that in fact was his problem.

“I was wondering,” he asked now, “if Larry uses your method. I don't remember if he said, whenever it was you were telling about it.” In truth he never forgot where and when Donna told him anything. In the case of her insomnia cure it was as he dried the dishes she washed after dinner one night the previous fall. The dishwasher, eccentric all week, suddenly refused to operate except on the rinse cycle, and the job had to be undertaken by hand. Lloyd eagerly volunteered. It was a way of being Donna's partner in an innocuous but nevertheless intimate association, of which the warm, steamy water in one compartment of the sink, winking with iridescent bubbles, was an element, as was the hot clear rinse she gave each plate with the flex-hosed spray before inserting it into the draining rack, from which Lloyd plucked it up and vigorously abraded off the remaining droplets with the thirsty-fibered towel. Larry was not in the room. He was putting Amanda to bed.

Donna now tossed her head merrily.
“Larry?
He's never taken more than two minutes to go to sleep in his life. He's out soon as his head hits the pillow.”

What Lloyd heard was no doubt mostly wish fulfillment and therefore suspect: if this was true, how often did his brother then—? But he rejected the ugly question, which was no business of his. And, happily, Donna could be counted on not to have gotten so up-to-date as to reflect publicly on her marriage bed, unlike some of the sluttish types with whom he had worked. At times this was obviously intended as sexual invitation to the male listeners, but even more often, to Lloyd's mind, it was unconditioned exhibitionism and repelled him.

“He's a lucky man,” he said now.

Donna's eyes quickened but did not spark. “What might seem luck is mostly hard work. He's running himself ragged these days. You know, he's up for assistant sales manager. The present man is going to retire in the spring. Larry's certainly qualified, with one of the best sales records in the whole Northeast, but there's stiff competition. The boss's second cousin is in the running.”

“Then Larry can kiss the job good-bye,” Lloyd said, his lip curling. “There's always some dirty inside stuff, wherever you go. Unless you're in on it, you haven't got a prayer.”

Donna had been about to leave and wake her child, but was detained by his bitterness. “Now, that's not always true, else how could anybody get a start? Your brother didn't have any connections when he joined Glenn-Air. He soon made them, though, by hard work, and he's done mighty well.”

Donna wouldn't be Donna without the naïveté. That was much of what Lloyd loved about her. She was older than he in the chronological sense, but as innocent as Amanda, and it was by nature, for she had worked a few years in the world before meeting Larry: she could have seen what went on there, but was blind to it. Lloyd knew little about Glenn-Air, but he was certain that if his brother had prospered in the association, it was by the same means used by everybody else who succeeded anywhere and had nothing to do with real talent or true quality.

He sneered. “I've heard that too often.”

It didn't seem all that offensive to him, but Donna was suddenly incensed. Her body grew rigid, and her soft face had become hard. “And you'll hear it a lot more if you come here! Don't use that tone with me!”

“All right,” he said, pushing back his chair and rising in one stark movement. She was not the only one who could be hurt. “You don't have to listen to it any more.” He wanted to get away from her as soon as he could and therefore headed for the back door. Even so, he thought she might call him back before he took the four steps to get there, but she did not. She had coldly left the kitchen by the time he turned, before stepping onto the back porch, to thank her at least for the coffee and pie. His resentment was not so great as to eradicate his manners. But she was not there to hear him. He left town without attending the funeral.

Detective LeBeau was trying to locate Lawrence Howland, husband of the deceased female, father of the murdered child, but as of six hours after the homicides had been reported, he had had no success. The Jones woman had stated that Howland was out of town on some business matter, but she could not name the firm for which he worked, nor had such information yet been discovered in the search of the house. She did, however, say he had “something to do with air conditioners,” and one of the neighbors across the street, an accountant named Lundquist, confirmed this, but in the same general way without a brand name.

While Moody was phoning the local airline offices, LeBeau went to the yellow pages and began to call firms listed there under “Air Conditioning.” By the time he was able to get started on the quest it was well into evening. He received no answers at any of the local offices. He then tried the 800 number of the best-known maker of window units and got a woman who worked for the national twenty-four-hour service that provided suggestions for self-help in the case of emergency breakdowns at night or on holidays. She was not equipped to find every employee of the firm, and anyway there was no reason to suppose that Howland worked for that particular company, but like many civilians nowadays, the woman was eager to help the police even when, as in this case, they were halfway across the country from where she said she lived. She gave LeBeau a phone at which the chief engineer could be reached, and this man was able to supply a number for the central personnel office, which, conveniently for LeBeau's purposes, was on the West Coast, where the time was only four forty-five.

The result of all this effort was only that he finally learned Howland was not employed by the firm in question—at least not under the name given: you had to allow for all possibilities, though most crimes, murders especially, had no mystery about them. They were almost always committed by the most obvious suspect. Both LeBeau and Moody assumed, routinely, that Donna Howland had been murdered by her husband. True, the killing of the little girl was a complication, but not to have suspected Howland would at this point have been unprofessional. And that the man could not promptly be found was hardly at odds with the routine assumption.