To Die For (22 page)

Susie herself looked just beautiful, of course, in a tragic kind of way. Who she reminded me of that day, if you want to know, was Jackie Kennedy after the President was shot. That same quiet dignity and class. She carried this one white rose. She asked the funeral director if Larry could be laid out holding their dog’s leash. Unfortunately it couldn’t be an open casket. The nature of his injuries and all.

Well, people were just wonderful at that point. And of course, though you’d never know it to see how they’re treating her now, the Marettos regarded Susie like their own daughter. So we were all together in our grief. Suzanne told Angela Larry was the only man she’d ever love so long as she lived. Angela told her at least she could take comfort knowing Larry had that one happy year of marriage before being taken away from us. Joe, the father, gave Suzanne Larry’s basketball ring from the year his team made it to the state finals. All those years he’d kept it, he said, but it seemed like Susie should have it now.

For days it was all you heard on the news. There were very few leads in the case since the burglars appeared to have worn gloves. There were no fingerprints. No tire tracks. Nobody in their condo development had seen a thing.

Eventually things quieted down. Suzanne wasn’t allowed to go back and stay in their home since it was still taped off as a crime scene. She couldn’t get her own clothes and makeup, which was hard for her. Not that those things are that important in and of themselves when you’ve lost a loved one. But I always feel it’s important to keep up appearances no matter what. If you start letting yourself go on the outside it works itself in to the point where you’re not keeping it together inside either. I mean, sometimes something as simple as a new hairdo can give me a boost when I’m feeling down. And here was my daughter, that had her husband brutally murdered, and she couldn’t even wear her own shade of lipstick. We had to go out and buy her all new clothes, toiletries, even underwear. And at a moment like that.

F
IRST
I
HEARD ABOUT
it was on TV. They had it on the five o’clock news, you know. At that point I hadn’t even laid eyes on Mrs. Perfect there, but I thought I recognized the name. “Hey, Lydia,” I said. “That Mrs. Maretto you’re always talking about? She have a husband named Larry?”

Liddy’s in the kitchen, polishing off a pint of ice cream. I don’t know what happened to this rice cake business, but all of a sudden she’s eating again like there’s no tomorrow. “I guess so,” she says. “What’s it to you?”

“He got killed,” I say. “Murdered. Looks like burglars broke in their apartment and shot him.”

Now I never met the woman, so I can’t get too upset about her, you know. I mean, sooner or later everybody gets nailed, one way or another. Looks like this was just her turn. And his, needless to say. So the one I’m worried about is Lydia. How she’s going to take it, them being so close and all. I try to put an arm around her and think what Ann Landers would say in this type situation.

But she doesn’t want to hear it. “So?” she says. “I never knew the guy. I never saw him before in my life.”

“I know,” I say. “But her being your friend and all, I figured you’d be torn up about it.”

“He wasn’t that nice to her anyways,” she says. “He didn’t want her to take this workshop she wanted to go to. I think maybe he took drugs.”

“Oh yeah?” I say. “Maybe it wasn’t really a burglary then. Maybe it was a drug deal that went bad. Maybe he bought some cocaine or angel dust and then he skunked someone for the money, and they sent a hit man. You hear about that all the time, on TV.”

“Search me,” says Lydia.

“Well if that’s it,” I say, “someone should tell the police. That’s important information to give them. And they were just saying how if anybody knew anything, there’s a special number to call.”

“No, Mom,” she says to me. I hate to tell you how unusual it is, for my flesh and blood daughter to call me mom. Last time I heard it was probably 1987. Nowdays it’s strictly “Hey You.”

“You know something about this murder?” I ask her. “Is there something you want to tell me?”

“I don’t know a thing,” she says. “Will you just lay off me?”

“Well one thing’s for damn sure, little missy,” I say. “You can bet she won’t be coming around here, picking you up to take you shopping anymore. Too many bad memories. Plus I bet she gets a pile of money from the insurance, and goes out and buys a Miata or something. Probably take off for Hollywood.”

“You don’t know Suzanne like I do,” says Lydia. “She’d never leave like that. She’s got her friends here.”

“Friends. Right,” I tell her. “You just see how much she cares about her friends, once she’s got a pocket full of cash.”

That’s when she left. “America’s Funniest Home Videos” was starting, and they were showing this real big woman and she’s dancing with her husband at this real fancy place and all of a sudden her skirt falls down. That show slays me.

We didn’t talk about the Mrs. Maretto situation anymore that night. But I could hear Lydia in the kitchen, dishes clattering. Sound of the refrigerator door opening. I called out to her to come take a look at the show, figuring if anything will perk up a person’s mood these home videos would do the trick. No answer.

“I know one thing,” I said. “With cold-blooded criminals like that on the loose, I sure am glad we’ve got a gun in the house.”

S
HE TOLD ME BEFORE
we done it, after it was over she couldn’t see me for a few days. Her parents and the cops crawling all over her and all. So at first I just wait. The next day, on account of all the time she’d been spending at the school, they have it on the announcements that Mrs. Maretto’s husband died, and they do this minute of silence where everybody’s supposed to be thinking about Mrs., Maretto. Yeah, well I was thinking about Mrs. Maretto all right. But maybe not like they meant.

Four, five days later, when I still ain’t heard a peep out of her, I’m getting anxious. She hasn’t come round or nothing, which I can understand, but still, you got to think she’s got a little time by now to at least contact me. No dice.

Lydia goes to the memorial service. Not me, that would freak me out. So I ask Lydia would she deliver a message to Mrs. Maretto for me. I want to see her. We wouldn’t have to do it or nothing. I just got to see her.

Lydia said Suzanne didn’t say nothing when she told her that. It was like Lydia was invisible. “She’s probably still pretty shook up, Jimmy,” Lydia tells me. “Her being a widow all of a sudden.”

The next week I go over to her parents’ house where I hear she’s been staying, knock at the door. “I got to see you,” I say. “I just can’t wait one more day.”

She laughs. “Oh yeah?” she says. “Why? What do you think would happen if you did?”

I’d bust. I’d yell and scream. Fuck, I don’t know. Only I got to touch her skin. Got to put my face in her hair. Got to climb on top of her and ball her.

“Well,” she says. “I been thinking. That it’s not such a great idea. Seeing you. Considering,” she says.

“Considering what?” I say. I’m whispering, but I want to scream.

“Considering you’re sixteen and I’m twenty-five. Considering the last book you read was the owner’s manual to a Harley-Davidson and the last time you took a shower was probably last Saturday. Considering I’m planning on taking an intensive seminar in broadcast technique this summer in California. I mean what did you think?” she says. “Did you picture us going out to dinner with my folks or something? Did you imagine taking me into the city to a Phil Collins concert or out to dinner at a nice restaurant? Get real.”

“What about what happened?” I says. “What was all that about? I thought the whole point was so we could be together.”

“Well sure,” she says. “Only it didn’t work out. Things change. That’s the nature of life.”

“So what am I supposed to do now?” I ask her.

“That’s not my problem,” she says. “I’m not your mother.”

A
WEEK, MAYBE A
week and a half after we ran our first story on the Maretto murder I come into the station around my usual time and there’s a message waiting for me. Suzanne Maretto wants me to call her up. You’ve got to understand, in my business a reporter usually has a lot of doors slammed in his face, people see him coming they go the other way. Her especially, who had the press crawling all over her life those first days after the murder, you might think she’d just want to go into seclusion. But it turns out, when I call her back, she has more things she wants to talk to me about. OK, I think. Let’s see what she’s got. “I can’t talk about this over the phone,” she says. “But I’ll give you the exclusive if you come over.” So we make a date for me to come by her folks’ house with a cameraman later that afternoon.

When I get there she’s all dressed up in this little jumpsuit outfit, high heels, her hair like she’s just come from the beauty parlor. She invites me in, asks what I’d like to drink. Lemonade, iced tea, beer, half a dozen different brands of soda, you name it. Would I like a sandwich? Cake?

She wants to know where our cameraman studied his technical work. How does he like the new lightweight minicam? What kind of mike do we have here? She says she saw my report the night before on the couple whose ten-year-old daughter gave her mother a kidney. Good work, she says.

Something about all this makes me uncomfortable. It blurs the lines so you don’t know where you stand. She’s meant to be the subject. But she’s acting like she’s the reporter herself.

“So,” I say. “What was it you wanted to tell us?”

“Oh,” she says. “Well, it’s kind of—complicated,” she says. After she called me she started to wonder if maybe I’d just get it all mixed up.

“Why don’t you just give me a try and we’ll take it from there,” I say. “Do you have some new theory as to the identity of your husband’s murderer?”

“Not exactly,” she says. Although she wants to emphasize again that the police have done a fantastic job, beyond the call of duty. “Just incredible. We should all sleep a little safer at night,” she says, “knowing there are officers like Detective Mike Warden and his great team watching over our community.”

“You didn’t have the camera going,” she says. “Did you want me to give you a retake on that?”

I tell her I guess that won’t be necessary. Not that I’d dispute what she says.

She sits there a second, playing with her earrings. Am I sure I don’t want a Coke? How about Rick, my cameraman?

“No thanks,” I say. “Really.”

At this point I’m just trying to figure out how to make a graceful exit. I mean, with a woman like this who just lost her husband, you never know what could set her off. Maybe she’s just lonely. Needed to talk to someone.

“He must’ve been a great guy,” I say.

“What?” she says. “Oh, right. Larry.”

“It’s just tragic,” I say. “So young. When you had your whole future to look forward to. And now it’s over.”

“Well I’m still alive,” she says.

“Right,” I say. “Thank God you weren’t there with him that night, or it might have been a double murder.”

“It was bad enough just finding him,” she says. “There was blood everywhere. It was the worst thing I ever saw. Have you ever seen what a person looks like, shot at close range like that? I mean, we’re not speaking of some neat little chest wound.

“When they shot President Kennedy,” she says, “you know the bullet blew off half his head. Of course that wasn’t close range like it was with Larry. But the effect was similar, actually. An unbelievable sight.”

I told her how sorry I was. And then I said something like “Gee, look how late it’s getting to be. I guess we’d better head back to the station if we still want to be on the payroll Monday morning, what do you say, Rick?”

“I never got to telling you what I called you about,” she said.

I say that’s OK. We’ll be following this story on an ongoing basis.

“The thing is,” she says, “as you must know, I’m in your line of work myself. At the moment I’m under consideration for a very big arts and entertainment reporting job in a nearby market, as a matter of fact. Not that I’ve had much time lately to think about that of course.

“Anyway, I’ve been working all year with a group of disadvantaged youngsters, making a television special about the hopes and dreams of a group of teenage kids. I finished the project just before, just, you know, a couple weeks back. I was just getting ready to submit it to my station manager, but now, with everything that’s happened, I was thinking your own station might be interested in taking a look at it and maybe airing it as a special. You could maybe show a little of our tape, or shoot a little footage of me working on the final edit in the studio. You’d have the exclusive of course.”

I told her I’d have to talk to the station manager about that, but it sounded like an interesting idea. What are you going to say? You had to figure the woman must be dazed with grief. Who knows how I’d act, if something like that happened to some family member of mine? You could hardly blame her even if she went crazy. Which clearly she hadn’t done.

We’ve got our equipment packed and we’re just loading it in the van when she comes out to talk to us one more time. “I’ll tell you another interesting angle on all this,” she says. “And that’s my dog. I mean, he loved Larry too, and now all of a sudden not only is he away from his familiar home and his old chew toys and everything, but Larry’s disappeared, and nobody can explain it to him. You know he’s got to be wondering.”

“Yup,” I say. “Dogs are amazing animals. Got as many feelings as people. More, sometimes.”

A
T FIRST IT NEVER
would’ve occurred to me Suzanne could be involved. Not in my wildest nightmares would I think such a thing. She was his wife. He loved that girl with all his heart. She was like our second daughter.

Now maybe if I could go back in time and see her at the funeral, or talking to the television reporters, I’d suspect something. But at the time you don’t think about that. You’re so completely caught up in your grief you don’t even know if it’s sunny or it’s raining. So how would you notice if your daughter-in-law who’s standing there with her face in her handkerchief might really be a murderer?