She paused and sipped the coffee. “I’m rambling, I know. I’m too tired to think straight.”
“It’s okay. Do the best you can,” I said.
“Conrad Fletcher asked me out on a date about six weeks after we met. At the time, I didn’t even know he was married. I went to dinner with him, but that’s all. I’ve spent my whole adult life preparing to be a doctor. I’m human; I have the same needs as everyone else. What I don’t have is time for relationships. Someday maybe, but not now.”
“Yeah, I can imagine.”
“So when it became clear that Fletch the Lech wanted more, I put a stop to it quickly. There was no choice; it had to be that way.”
“What happened after that?”
“As you can guess, the situation changed. Suddenly, the minor mistakes were huge screwups. He got cold, angry, resentful that I’d rejected him. Every day, it seemed, he’d find some new reason to criticize me.”
Jane Collingswood, even in her fatigue and discomfort at relating what could not have been a pleasant story, sat with an air of propriety and dignity. It made me like her even more, which made me even more suspicious. Just the cynic in me, I guess.
“Eventually, we had a big blowup right in front of a group of fourth-year students. He called me incompetent, threatened to bust me out of the program. Wanted to know if I’d taken my medical training at Auschwitz.”
“He said that to you?”
“In front of patients, nurses, and students. And yelled it, not said it. That’s when Albert got into it. Albert’s very sweet, very protective of me. He said no one had to take that kind of abuse and he wasn’t going to watch Fletcher hand it out. He said he’d file a complaint with the dean of the medical school, go all the way to the university president if he had to.”
“What did Fletcher say?”
“He said that if Albert didn’t watch himself, he’d wind up a salesman for a pharmaceutical firm just like me.”
I rubbed the sides of my forehead with my hands. Jeez, Conrad had a real style with people. “When was this?”
She paused, her lips tightening almost unconsciously. When I sensed her hesitation, I looked up. Her tired eyes were strained, even darker than before. “The day before he was killed.”
“So the day before Conrad was killed, you and Albert Zitin had a public blowup with him. And in this blowup, everybody wound up threatening everybody. I’m surprised the police haven’t already questioned you.”
She picked up her coffee cup and drained the last inch. “They have, Mr. Harry,” she said, placing the cup in front of her. “They have. Only no one really knows why it all happened. You’re the first one I’ve told.”
I looked at her closely. “Are you in love with Albert Zitin?”
She smiled, looked down almost shyly. “Albert’s very sweet, and he cares deeply for me. In my own way, I care very much for him. But am I in love with him?” She stood up, pushing the chair behind her. “I don’t know.”
23
The problem with this whole mess was that every time I felt I was getting closer to Conrad Fletcher’s murderer, I ran into somebody else who got taken off the list. Pretty soon, I was going to get right next to a murderer who didn’t exist. And like dividing by zero, that’s impossible.
I drove out 21st to Hillsboro Village, then parked in front of the shop that sells relics from the Sixties, with tie-dyed clothing draped throughout the window. I crossed over to the Pancake Pantry.
The PP was another restaurant that had been around forever, while fancier places came and went weekly. I got a booth down near the kitchen, ordered a woodchopper’s breakfast, more coffee, and settled back with the newspaper.
The news of Mr. Kennedy’s death was page one on the local section, with a picture of the death car on Seventh Avenue and a reproduction of his Atlanta Falcons team picture off to the side. He had a wife and two boys. Seemed like a perfectly normal middle-class husband and father. Except that he worked for a guy who was the illegal gambling kingpin of the whole west side of town.
On the jump page, thankfully near the bottom, was a notation that I’d been questioned, but the young reporter fortunately didn’t do his homework well enough to catch the connection between Bubba, me, and Conrad Fletcher’s death. This younger generation! I don’t know what to think about them.
I ate like a condemned man, if that’s not too grim a simile under the circumstances. I deliberately tried not to think about the murder, hoping that like an artist looking for inspiration, something would burble up out of my subconscious.
Only it didn’t work that way. I sat there through a pot of coffee and a stack of pancakes that would have intimidated a St. Bernard and came up with nothing. I paid my check and walked out of the restaurant in a fog. It was close to mid-afternoon now, hot as blazes, post-lunch traffic nearing gridlock. I decided to get back to work and, as long as I was in this part of town, drive out and check on Rachel. I hadn’t seen her since the funeral.
The Ford was hard to start in the heat, probably some kind of vapor lock or something, and I had to sit there grinding the motor for about a minute before it finally caught. I heard a small pop in the back and looked in my rearview mirror just in time to see a puff of blue-black smoke spurting out behind me. That’s all I need, to have this piece of junk die on me. I wished I still had my good car, only by now Lonnie would have repossessed it.
The stick shift made a grinding noise and shook under my hand as the gears meshed and I pulled out into traffic. It was stop and go, start and stall, all the way out past I- 440 where the traffic thinned out enough to be manageable. I turned onto Golf Club Lane and followed the shaded tree-lined street up to Rachel’s house. The long driveway was empty. I drove up anyway and pulled in behind the house. Conrad’s Jaguar was in the garage, but there was no sign of Rachel’s car.
I walked around to the back door. There was no sign of movement inside. I figured if I tried the door, I’d set off an alarm. I started to get back in the car and roll off, but I suddenly noticed how quiet the place was, how well-ordered.
What I wondered more than anything else was how so much misery could exist in a place this beautiful. I leaned against the hood of the car and craned my neck upward. The house and the grounds were like a sanctuary. But they were also filled with tension and even violence.
I stood there for a couple of minutes, half thinking/half fretting over everything. Then I heard the sound of an approaching car. I walked around the corner of the house just in time to see Rachel turn into the driveway.
She pulled in just to the left of the Ford, behind the garaged Jag, and stepped out. Her blond hair was pulled back, a wet sweatband holding it off her forehead. Her skin was still flushed.
“Must have been some run,” I said as she got out.
She came around the back of the car, still panting. “There’s a track a couple of miles away. Some days I jog. Others I go down there and run the clock. How are you, Harry?” she said, throwing her arms around my neck and pecking me on the cheek.
“Fine, Rachel, how are you?”
“Hot. I haven’t had much chance to talk to you lately.”
“You were a little preoccupied at the funeral home,” I said, as she dropped her arms from my neck and led me over to the back door. She pulled a ring of keys from her fanny pack. A Chicago Ace lock in a brass plate controlled the burglar alarm; she pulled out the tubular key, worked it into the cylinder, and twisted it to the right. A tiny red light set in the plate went dark. Then she unlocked the deadbolt, stuck another key in the doorknob cylinder, and opened the door.