Dead Ball Page 6

  “To him, not to you,” Lainie assured her. “You did nothing wrong.”

  “I married him,” Patty said. “I married a man who spent the last evening of his life with a chesty blonde.” She was growing agitated.

  Lainie sprang out of her chair, moved behind Patty, and dug her fingers into Patty’s shoulders in a soothing massage. “This is why we didn’t want to tell you—because now you’re upset. But we’ve got to go to the police with this. They’re investigating a murder. They have to know about this woman.”

  “Whoever the hell she is. Sorry,” Patty said, leaning back into Lainie’s thumbs and closing her eyes. “That feels so good, and here I am, using bad language.”

  “Use whatever language you want,” Lainie said.

  Patty smiled faintly, then sighed. “Do you really have to tell the police about her? I mean, okay, so he took this fucking floozy to a cheap Mexican diner for a drink, and then he did whatever he did with her, and then he went to Emerson Village. Probably because he knew what would happen if he came home wearing some other woman’s perfume. And then he got killed. Why do the cops have to know that on the last night of his life he was with some fucking blond bitch?”

  Lainie began to regret having granted Patty total linguistic freedom. “So they can figure out who murdered him,” she said.

  “But . . .” Patty sighed. “Everyone’s going to look at me and think, ‘Her husband was a two-timing piece of scum and then he went and died on her.’ I’d really rather the entire world didn’t know my husband was a two-timing piece of scum.”

  “I’m no expert,” Lainie said, digging the heels of her palms into the knotted muscles at the base of Patty’s elegant neck, “but I think once there’s a murder investigation, all the dirty linen gets aired. Did the police ask you about Arthur’s activities? His friends?”

  “If that lady was a friend of his, I sure didn’t know about it.” Without breaking contact with Lainie’s hands, Patty managed to grab the wine bottle and add a little more wine to her glass. “The police asked me a million questions. I don’t remember what. If I drink enough wine, maybe I won’t remember any of this.”

  “Stop drinking wine,” Lainie said, drawing her hands from Patty’s shoulders, corking the nearly empty wine bottle, and carrying it to the counter. “You’ll wake up with a headache.”

  “If I’m lucky enough to fall asleep, which is doubtful. After what I’ve been through, do you think I care about a fucking headache?” She sipped, then lowered her glass. “The trouble is, I don’t even feel the slightest bit drunk. I never get drunk. God knows why.” She stared at the purplish liquid in her glass. “Arthur decided we should learn about wines, so we took a class. The most boring class I’ve ever sat through. My feeling is, if wine tastes good, it’s good wine. If it tastes bad, it’s bad wine. But no, Arthur decided we had to be connoisseurs.”

  “It’s useful knowledge to have,” Angie told her. “I always feel like a moron when everybody’s standing around, talking about the nose and the bouquet and the finish, and all I’m thinking is, could I have a margarita instead? Not that I’m complaining. This is very good,” she said, lifting her glass. “It has a very nice nose.”

  “Patty.” Lainie circled the table to face Patty. “The rest of the team is planning to drop by this evening.”

  “No problem. I’ll serve a casserole,” Patty said.

  “And we’re going to tell the police about the blond woman.”

  “I know. You’re so fucking ethical.” She managed a limp chuckle. “Do what you’ve got to do, Lainie. My reputation is destroyed, anyway.”

  “No,” Sheila said. “Arthur was the bastard in this scenario. He’s the one whose reputation is destroyed. You’re just his deceived widow.”

  “Oh, good. It’s so much more gratifying to be pitied than sneered at.” Patty rolled her eyes. “Listen, could you wait until tomorrow to tell the police? If you tell them tonight, they’re going to be back here with more questions for me, and I don’t think I can stand that. I’ve been through too much today. One more minute with Officer Knapp and I will scream.”

  “Of course we can wait until tomorrow,” Lainie said. What would a few hours matter? Patty had indeed been through too much already.

  “I should give some of the casseroles to Officer Knapp,” Patty added. “He’ll eat them. He looks like someone who eats everything that comes his way, whether or not it’s edible. It’s hard to believe a guy who looks like the Pillsbury Doughboy is one of Rockford’s finest. Okay, I’m getting bitchy now.” She laughed dolefully. “You girls ought to leave before I turn into a dragon lady.”

  “You can be dragon lady if you want,” Lainie assured her, leaning over Patty’s chair and giving her a gentler hug than the crusher Angie had given her when they’d arrived. “That’s one of the few benefits of being a widow. You get a free pass, behavior-wise. You can be as bitchy as you’d like. See? I can use that word.”

  “Thanks.” Patty leaned into Lainie’s embrace, then pulled back and met her gaze. “You survived. I will, too.”

  “Yes,” Lainie promised her. “You will.”

  Chapter Six

  KAREN HAD THE mudroom door open by the time Lainie had turned off the Volvo’s engine. She hovered anxiously on the threshold, watching while Lainie climbed out of the car and hauled her gear bag from the trunk. “Are you all right?” she asked.

  “Why wouldn’t I be all right?” Lainie responded as she climbed the two steps from the garage to the mudroom.

  Karen stared at her, her dark eyes round with concern. “I heard about the murder. Everybody’s heard about it. Grandma called. Jew Grandma.”

  “She’s heard about it?” Lainie asked in amazement as Karen trailed her through the mudroom into the kitchen. Lainie’s parents lived outside New York City, on Long Island. How would they have heard about the murder?

  “She knows about it now. I told her,” Karen said.

  For a smart girl, Karen could be very stupid. “Why did you tell her? Now she’s going to worry. She’s going to think we live in the murder capital of Massachusetts. She’s going to fear for our lives.”

  “Well, she asked me how things were going.” Karen continued to shadow Lainie as she moved to the sink to dump out the remaining water in her sports bottle. “What was I supposed to say? This is the biggest thing that’s ever happened in Rockford.”

  Lainie wanted to disagree, but she couldn’t. Nothing—not the construction of the new high school a few years ago, not the year a Rockford native made the U.S. Curling team, certainly not the time a skunk got its head stuck inside an empty yogurt container and stopped traffic at the town green for fifteen minutes while an animal control officer tried to pry the yogurt cup off the critter without getting sprayed—could compare to Arthur Cavanagh’s murder. “Am I supposed to call her back?”

  Karen shrugged. “She called to talk to me, not you. Her neighbor’s cousin’s friend has an in at Citicorp. She thought maybe I could use this connection to get a job there.”

  “Do you want to work at Citicorp?”

  “Hell, no.” Karen wrinkled her nose for emphasis. “I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in finance. Money isn’t that interesting.”

  “It has its charms.” Lainie set her bottle on the rack to drain. “Where’s Big Brad?”

  “His parents wanted him home early. Everyone is freaking out about the murder.”

  In other words, Lainie thought, Brad’s parents don’t want him to remain with Karen, protecting her from a nail-gun-wielding killer on the loose in Rockford. Since he lived a few towns away, maybe they thought he’d be safer outside Rockford’s borders. At the very least, he could have brought Karen with him to keep her safe. Some hero.

  “I’m going to take a shower,” Lainie said, “and then I’ll get something to eat.” Not a casserole,
she added silently. Not anything that would remind her of the crime that had descended upon their town that morning. Not anything that would remind her of Patty’s dead, cheating husband, of Bill Stavik’s clumsy attempt to two-time his wife—or, for that matter, of Big Brad’s refusal to stick with Karen during this time of crisis. She would eat the most non-male food she could think of.

  She wound up eating a bowl of vegetable soup and a salad, which was quite female and pretty much all she had an appetite for. After dinner, she collapsed on the sofa in the family room to watch TV. Did Karen and Brad have sex on this sofa? Did they have sex in Karen’s bed?

  She supposed someone ought to be having sex in this house, and for the past two and a half years, it hadn’t been her.

  Karen joined her on the sofa, carrying a box of ginger snaps. Lainie didn’t remember buying them, and it dawned on her that Karen must have bought them herself—that, in fact, Karen was contributing to the food supply when she wasn’t working her way through it like a locust attacking a field of wheat. So what if she was having sex? So what if she was having it with a guy who, while perfectly pleasant, was nowhere near good enough for her? Lainie had never been happier to have her daughter snuggled up next to her on the couch than she was at that moment.

  They sat glumly through a few sitcoms, forcing themselves to laugh at mugging actors and lame jokes, and then the news came on. Murder was always big news in Boston, and even bigger news when it occurred in a sleepy little hamlet outside the city, in one of those zip codes the Boston media liked to refer to as the “leafy suburbs.”

  Lainie reached out and gripped Karen’s hand as the screen filled with a picture of the half-finished mansion where Arthur Cavanagh had been found.

  “This morning, the peaceful town of Rockford was the site of a grisly murder,” the dewy young reporter announced as the camera lingered lovingly on the sheets of insulation fastened to the sides of the building. “Construction company executive Arthur Cavanagh was shot to death with a nail gun inside this partially-built house.” A glossy photograph of Arthur in a dapper sports coat and tie replaced the image of the house. “Cavanagh, a resident of Rockford, was found this morning at the Emerson Village Estates subdivision being developed by his company.”

  The camera returned to Emerson Village Estates, this time panning the denuded acreage surrounding the house where Arthur had been found and the few concrete basements that had been poured.

  “Controversy has often surrounded the president of Cavanagh Homes. Two years ago, his company faced charges that it was neglecting to pay overtime to construction crews. The company has also been accused of environmental insensitivity.

  “A spokesman for the People for the Preservation of the Planet, an environmental organization that has tangled with Cavanagh repeatedly over the years, was quoted as saying”—the photo of Arthur returned, much smaller this time, occupying only the upper left hand corner of the screen while the quote filled the rest of the screen—“‘Cavanagh Homes is responsible for the destruction of the natural habitat of a great deal of indigenous wildlife in the region. Arthur Cavanagh’s reckless disregard for the environment has led to the deaths of many animals and the loss of pristine tracts of land. Arthur Cavanagh will not be missed by the wild animals of Rockford.’

  “Police have no suspects but are following several leads. Cavanagh leaves a wife and son. He was fifty-six years old.”

  “Cavanagh will not be missed?” Karen echoed.

  “That’s a vicious thing to say,” Lainie muttered.

  “I’m picturing a bunch of Disney animals getting down and partying,” Karen said, then popped a ginger snap into her mouth. “Do you think an animal could have killed him?”

  “I imagine you’d need an opposable thumb to fire a nail gun. I wonder, though . . .” Lainie had heard about the protests that had targeted Arthur Cavanagh over the years. Despite the fact that his wife was her Colonielles teammate, Lainie had been sympathetic to the environmentalists who’d fought his projects. But extremists were extremists. Killers were killers, regardless of their politics. “Do you think some crazed environmentalist might have murdered him?”

  “Crazed environmentalists live in trees,” Karen said. “They don’t kill people. And if they did, they wouldn’t use a power tool. Power tools aren’t environmentally friendly.” Lainie must have looked skeptical, because Karen added, “At college, we were all crazed environmentalists. They had us recycling toilet paper there, Mom. I know these things.”

  “You didn’t kill him, did you?” Lainie asked.

  Karen laughed and passed her a ginger snap.

  THE NEXT DAY, Sheila backed out on her.

  They’d agreed to go to the police station together at three thirty, once the school day ended. Lainie had considered phoning the police with her information, but if she’d phoned she would have had to talk to the cops alone, and she’d wanted at least one of her friends by her side when she faced Rockford’s finest. Angie wouldn’t get home from work until five thirty or six, depending on traffic, so Lainie and Sheila had decided to go without her.

  But when, en route to her car in the faculty lot, Lainie turned on her cell phone to call Sheila and tell her she was on her way, she saw the message icon and punched in her PIN.

  “Hi, Lainie? It’s Sheila,” she heard. “Megan’s been running a fever all day, and she’s got a sore throat. It could be strep. The only appointment I could get with her pediatrician is for four o’clock. I’m sorry I can’t go to the police station with you.”

  Sure, she was sorry. She’d probably infected her daughter just to avoid this unpleasant task.

  Lainie didn’t want to talk to the police. Her encounter at Emerson Village with Officer Knapp, if in fact he was the same cop Patty had dealt with, had left her so unsettled she’d gone to the Old Colonial Inn with Bill Stavik, the toad.

  But someone had to tell the police about the blond woman who’d been with Cavanagh the night before he was killed. The police station was on her way home. And telling the cops in person, rather than phoning with her information, seemed like the mature thing to do. Swallowing the curses that threatened to slip past her chaste fourth-grade-teacher lips, she climbed into the Volvo and steered down Liberty Road to the town green.

  The police station was arguably the ugliest building on the green. Most of the buildings surrounding the rectangular swath of grass at the center of town were hundreds of years old. Three white clapboard churches—the Unitarian, the Episcopalian, and the Congregationalist—occupied three corners, and the stately brick town hall occupied the fourth. A few old houses adorned with placards attesting to their age stretched along the edges of the green. The Grange Hall separated the Episcopalians from the Unitarians, and it looked a bit cowed by the two spired churches.

  Lainie wasn’t sure what the Grange Hall was currently used for. At one time, enough farmers worked the land of Rockford to support a grange. But with construction companies like Cavanagh Homes buying up acreage and converting it into high-priced subdivisions, most of the farmers had given up. Once their land became more valuable as building sites than as crop producers, they sold, pocketed their profits, and retired to Florida.

  Unlike the charming colonial buildings, the police station was a structure of gray brick and steel which had probably been daringly modern in the sixties but currently looked about as up-to-date as a Nehru jacket. Its flat roof often amassed a layer of snow in the winter, and at least once a year as she drove past the building, Lainie saw someone on the roof shoveling off the accumulation.

  Rockford rarely saw a flake of snow this far into spring, so instead of a shoveler on the roof, the police station was being tended to by a woman in a straw sunhat planting pansies in the mulched bed in front of the building. Lainie didn’t think cute, delicately hued pansies set quite the right tone for a police station, but she appreciated the efforts of the
Rockford Garden Club to spruce up the town every spring.

  She parked in the visitors’ lot and entered the building’s small vestibule. A surly-looking woman sat at a desk behind a glass with a slotted metal oval through which she could address visitors. Lainie found the setup, with the receptionist sealed off from visitors, a little paranoid. Did the Rockford Police think people were going to blast into the station with guns blazing?

  Perhaps now that Arthur Cavanagh had been murdered, they did.

  “Yes?” the woman asked none too graciously.

  “I’m here to talk to whoever is in charge of the Cavanagh murder investigation,” Lainie said, then coughed to clear her voice. She sounded too tentative, too reluctant. Summoning her authoritative “settle down, class” voice, she added, “I have some information that might be useful.”

  The woman glowered at her, then swiveled away from the glass window and communicated with someone via telephone. After a moment, a grating buzz filled the vestibule.

  Lainie winced.

  The buzz stopped and the receptionist scowled. “I’m unlocking the door. You’re supposed to come in.” The buzzer sounded again.

  Still wincing, Lainie located the inner door and yanked down the lever handle. The door swung open and the buzzer fell silent.

  She entered a short hallway adjacent to the receptionist’s cubicle.

  The receptionist glared through an open door. “Wait here,” she commanded.

  Lainie wondered whether she would be frisked or wanded or forced to walk through a security gate. Rockford was hardly a significant terrorist target, but taking precautions probably made the police department feel important.

  She waited, checked her watch, waited some more, and checked her watch again. A door at the opposite end of the hallway opened, and the hefty officer she’d seen at the construction site lumbered toward her. In the fluorescent glare of the overhead lights, he looked a little older than he had yesterday, and a little broader, moving in a swaggering gait to accommodate his beefy thighs. His eyes were as black and shiny as olives, and his smile sent a chill down her spine.