She looked as good as always, Joanna Lodge, starched white blouse, blue cardigan and trim jeans flattering her slender body, her tumbling golden hair drawn up into a loose chignon.
I went over, grabbed a warm Diet Pepsi, filled two plastic glasses half full and then handed her one of them.
She smiled. “I’m not sure I should thank you for this.”
“I’m a jet-setter,” I said. “I live large.”
She looked around. “I really do feel sorry for anybody who would have to stay here for any length of time. Rooms really affect my moods.”
“Which chair do you want? The blue uncomfortable one or the red uncomfortable one?”
“How about the blue uncomfortable one?”
“It’s yours.”
We spent a few minutes talking about her grief, or lack thereof. “I keep wanting to cry.”
“You will.”
“Maybe not. Maybe — well, I had been sort of psyching myself up for a divorce, anyway. I just couldn’t deal with all the women he had. Maybe I just closed myself off to him. Permanently, I mean.”
“Possible, I suppose.”
“When I talked to his parents last night I really hurt their feelings.”
“Because of how you sounded?”
She sat there in her blue uncomfortable chair sipping her warm Diet Pepsi. “I wanted to sound dutiful. You know, properly bereaved. I gave it a good try but I don’t think I was very convincing. And I know I hurt them. They’re very decent people. I always wondered if Sam hadn’t been adopted. Emotionally, he was their total opposite.”
“You really think he was adopted?”
She shook her head. “No, he looked very much like both of them. But in every other way, he was unlike them.”
“You said you had something you wanted to show me.”
She opened her purse, took one white number-ten envelope from it and then a manila envelope.
“I didn’t tell you this the other day because I wasn’t sure about you. Sam had been acting very strange lately. Upset. Frightened, may be a better word. Jumpy when the phone rang; always looking out the window when he heard a car go by.”
“Do you know why?”
“No. But last week, I followed him a couple of times.”
“Followed him where?”
“To the old Brindle farm. I went there the morning after his death, too. Jane Avery stopped over earlier this afternoon and all but accused me of knowing something about his murder. She also said that she’d seen me drive out to the Brindle farm this morning.”
“Did you?” I said, knowing the answer because, like Jane, I’d seen her blue Toyota sedan go into the main barn on the Brindle farm.
“Yes. I was trying to figure out why Sam kept going out there.”
“And did you?”
“No. I mean, I walked around but I couldn’t find anything. Nothing at all.”
“But you must have found something.” I nodded to the two envelopes in her lap.
“Oh, right. These.”
She got out of the blue uncomfortable chair and walked the envelopes over to me.
I opened the manila envelope first and knocked out a piece of heavy, official paper from inside.
“Craig Tolliver,” I said.
“Who?”
“Craig Tolliver.” The son that the rich man Tolliver had told me had “died,” but was still alive and somewhere in town.
“You never heard your husband mention him?”
“No.”
“June 23, 1958,” I said. “That’s the birth date given here.”
“I wonder why my husband had that birth certificate.”
I set the birth certificate down and opened up the flap of the white number-ten envelope.
Inside was a piece of letterhead from the First National Trust Bank — “Your Friend in Deed Since 1926” — that thanked Sam Lodge for renting a safe-deposit box. The letter went on to say that it was sure he’d find many of their other services to his liking, too.
“He ever mention a safe-deposit box to you?”
“Not this one. Where we do the rest of our banking, in Iowa City, we have a safe-deposit box there.”
“When can you get this opened?”
“I called my attorney. He said that if I take in proper ID, along with this letter, the bank will probably let me open it up tomorrow.”
“You going to do that?”
She nodded. “Maybe when I get it open, I’ll find out who killed him.” She smiled sadly. “Maybe by then I’ll be able to cry.”
“You mind if I keep this birth certificate?”
“That’s fine.”
We were silent for a moment. She looked around the room. The rain pounded and bounced on the roof.
“This room really does depress me,” she said.
I was the same way after my wife died, so I recognized the feeling, fleeing any room where my memories of her grew too painful. It could be any room at all, one I’d never even been in before. But when the memories overtook me, I had to get out.
She was up, at the door.
I walked over to her.
“Thanks for bringing these over.”
She looked up at me. “Maybe I’ll drive to Iowa City and go to a movie.”
She wanted my permission. “That sounds like a good idea. See something light.”
That was another thing I’d learned about mourning. Comedies can help you a lot.
She stepped forward and gave me a hug — not because I was me, but because I was another warm sensate human animal, and she very badly needed contact with a like creature. It was a sisterly hug, and I gave her a brotherly one right back.
After she left, taking her soft intelligent voice with her, there was just the thrumming sound of the rain.
9
The house where Tolliver was staying was three blocks east of my motel. The walk was good. My middle-aging body was in bad need of exercise. In the fresh, wet air you could smell the summer flowers struggling for birth in the damp, dark mud. You don’t know what rich black soil is till you’ve held Iowa soil.
Tolliver was staying in a stone Tudor that looked as if it might be more comfortable in Beverly Hills. Lights shone in the mullioned windows.
He answered the door on the second knock. He wore a denim work shirt and a pair of chinos. He looked like a rich man trying hard to look ordinary.
“You look kind of stressed out,” he said.
“I am.”
He stepped aside and let me walk through the vestibule and into the living room with its massive open fireplace and Edwardian antiques. G. K. Chesterton had probably sat in just such a room while he wrote his Father Brown stories.
“Some sherry?”
“No, thanks,” I said.
He pointed to a Morris sofa. “Why don’t you sit down?”
“I need to keep moving. But I wanted you to see this.”
I handed him the manila envelope. He opened it up and took out the birth certificate, which he carried over to a lamp with a baroque shade.
“Is it authentic?” I said.
“From what I can see of it here, yes.” He moved it around in the light under the shade. “Where did you get it?”
“Sam Lodge’s wife found it in their house.”
“Does she know how Lodge got it?”
“No. But that’s not too hard to figure out.”
“It isn’t?”
He brought the certificate back to me.
“Lodge found this somehow and then started blackmailing your son. Eve McNally told me that her husband suddenly came into a lot of money. Joanna Lodge said the same thing about Sam.”
“So they figured out who Craig is.”
“Yes, and Craig returned the favor by killing Lodge.” I didn’t mention that he’d also kidnapped McNally’s daughter.
He looked at me with great weariness and sorrow. “We’re getting close to him, aren’t we?”