Damn.
Reasonable doubt. Without a body, there’s always reasonable doubt—the criminal’s best friend.
But in this case … Was she alive?
I removed her photograph from the envelope. The eyes had changed somehow. So had the rest of her face. She looked different to me now.
“Are you alive?”
She had committed adultery; she had cheated on her husband. Stephen Emerton had told the truth about that. But what about Raymond Fleck? Had he also been truthful? It was hard to believe. But not as hard as it had been fifteen minutes ago. Alison was not the woman I thought she was.
“You lied to me,” I told the photograph.
I shove the glossy back into the envelope and drove back through St. Paul toward my office in Minneapolis, as depressed as I ever hoped to be. And angry, convinced that Alison had played me for a sucker.
“Ahh, nuts!” I shouted, slapping the top of my steering wheel. Two days ago I had it solved. Two days ago I was the greatest detective since Eugène François Vidocq, the nineteenth century crook-turned-crook-catcher who founded the French Sûreté. Which reminded me, I really needed to return Scalasi’s book.
thirteen
Cynthia looked delicious in a black turtleneck sweater dress with a carefully fitted bodice and a long, sweeping skirt. You’d never have supposed that she had dressed in a feverish seven minutes flat while I monitored her progress on my watch as I paced her living room. It would have taken her six minutes except for the great “with pearls or without” debate. She went without.
The way Cynthia acted as we drove to the theater in Minneapolis, though, you’d have thought I never took her anywhere, and I told her so.
“Only sporting events and jazz clubs,” she reminded me.
There’s no pleasing some people.
“Actually, I’m amazed anything could drag you away from your precious baseball. Don’t you have tickets for the St. Paul Saints tonight?”
“It’s like Tallulah Bankhead once said, ‘There have been only two geniuses in the world. Willie Mays and Willie Shakespeare.’ Besides, the Saints are in Sioux Falls tonight. They’ll be home tomorrow, though; they’re playing Ida Borders and the Duluth-Superior Dukes. Want to go?”
“Oh, rapture.”
Marie Audette played Portia in The Merchant of Venice, a typical Shakespearean heroine: tough, clever, resourceful, who confounds her rivals and generally saves the day—but only while disguised as a man. And, of course, she is never recognized until the final scene, even by her lover. I pointed at Marie when she ascended to the stage.
“She gave us the tickets,” I told Cynthia.
“Shhhh!” Cynthia hissed.
She shushed me several more times during the performance, punctuating her entreaties for quiet with sharp jabs from her elbow. Yet try as I might, I could not stop fidgeting. I couldn’t stop shuffling through the notes in my head—apparently making quite a racket of it—searching for the one clue that would determine who actually had killed Alison Donnerbauer Emerton.
I had liked Irene Brown. But that was yesterday. Today, Dr. Bob, the jilted lover, looked good, except there was nothing to tie him to the scene. And both Raymond Fleck and Stephen Emerton still rated high in my estimation.
“Nuts,” I muttered under my breath.
“Shhhhh!” Cynthia hissed at me.
I tried hard not to believe Dr. Bob’s theory. I didn’t want to believe it. Alison wasn’t the kind to run away from her problems. No way. She would have stared them in the eye and taken them on. Yes, that’s what my Alison would have done. My Alison. But was my Alison the same Alison as the woman in the photograph? I had seen things in her face, emotions that touched me. Yet were they real? Was that the face of a woman who committed adultery? Twice? Apparently it was.
I shook my head, tried to clear it. Instead, my mind’s eye superimposed Alison’s photograph over the stage; I was looking at it and through it even as I watched Marie Audette going about her business. And I knew. Of course the emotions weren’t real; the photograph had been taken to promote a play, to reflect a character Alison was playing. What was the line Jon Lovitz used to say on Saturday Night Live? Oh, yeah.
“It’s acting!”
“Sheeesh,” a voice behind me answered.
Stop it, Taylor, my inner voice told me. Get a grip. Start thinking like a detective. Be objective, dammit. “Be objective,” I muttered.
Cynthia’s elbow almost cracked my rib. I didn’t blame her for being miffed. We were at a critical juncture in the play, the scene where Shylock the Jew is demanding his pound of flesh, and Portia, disguised as a hot-shot arbitrator from Padua, says he can have it, just so long as he does not “shed one drop of Christian blood.” Shylock is a louse, of course. Yet I always figured he got the shaft. I mean, no one put a gun to Antonio’s head, made him take the loan, and if he couldn’t pay the vig, well … Still, I enjoyed watching Marie, standing center stage like a gunfighter waiting for the bad guy to slap leather, beseeching Shylock “to cut off the flesh” if he dared. But my concentration wouldn’t hold, and soon I was reflecting on my list of suspects again.
Irene Brown. Raymond Fleck. Stephen Emerton. Dr. Bob. Hell, all things considered, even Mrs. Donnerbauer could be considered a suspect.
I squirmed in my seat some more, asking myself, Who put the note on my windshield telling me to quit the investigation? Not Irene. Not Raymond. Both were guests of the Dakota County Sheriff’s Department at the time.
Stephen Emerton? Had to be. Who else was there?
I sighed noisily, drawing more frosty stares.
Motive and opportunity. Motive and opportunity. I kept repeating the words in my head like a mantra.
Meanwhile, Portia, still disguised as a male lawyer, was now dancing around her befuddled husband, messing with his mind, diddling him out of the ring she had given him on the day they were married, the ring he vowed never to be without.
“I see, sir, you are liberal in offers: You taught me first to beg, and now, methinks, you teach me how a beggar should be answer’d.”
Marie Audette was a good actress. Wait a minute! my inner voice shouted. So was Alison! My mind spun back to the first act of the play. What was it that Portia told Jessica when she took up her disguise?
“I’ll hold thee any wager.… I’ll prove the prettier fellow … and wear my dagger with the braver grace; and speak, between the change of man and boy, with a reed voice and turn two mincing steps into a manly stride; and speak of frays, like a fine bragging youth: and tell quaint lies, how honourable ladies sought my love, which I denying, they fell sick and died.… And twenty of these puny lies I’ll tell, that men shall swear I have discontinued school above a twelvemonth. I have within my mind a thousand raw tricks of these bragging Jacks which I will practice.”
Motive and opportunity.
“Alison really is a genius,” I muttered loud enough to earn another punch in the ribs.
Remember when you first came to my office?” I asked Truman the next morning. “Remember I said Alison might have gone out for a pack of cigarettes and kept on going? That it’s been done before? Well, maybe she did.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Truman answered, pacing my office floor like a caged cat.
“Hey, man, this is America,” I reminded him. “It’s always been easy for Americans to go somewhere else and start over. That’s what our ancestors did. That’s why America exists today. Remember the executive director of the Minneapolis City Council? She packed her bags, arranged for her attorney to pay off her debts, and—poof!—she was gone. Nobody knew where she went. Everybody thought she had run away with a lover or had been abducted or ripped off the city. Turned out she simply went to San Francisco to become a different person.”