“You mean,” Tully snarled, “I’m a suspect in this case, too?”
“Under the circumstances,” Lieutenant Smith said unhappily, “I’m afraid I’ve got to ask you what you did with those two hours.”
Tully drew the back of his hand across his mouth, tasting a clammy slick. It had not occurred to him that he might be under investigation, too.
“For one thing, I got a shave and haircut,” he said.
“At the Capitol Hotel barber shop?”
“No, at a place near Monument Square. Not far from the restaurant where I had my breakfast.”
Smith reached for a scratch pad and a pencil. “Want to give me the name of the shop?”
“I don’t know the name of the shop. I don’t remember what the barber looked like, or the shine boy. I didn’t realize I’d need them for an alibi or I’d have taken notes, Julian.”
“You didn’t spend two hours in the shop,” the Homicide man said. His face was slightly flushed.
“Of course not! I decided that as long as I was in the capital, I’d take a quick look at the Markham development. The one with the artificial lakes.”
“Did you call Mr. Markham?”
“No. He’d have insisted on showing me everything in detail and I’d have lost half a day. I was only interested in his use of the terrain. I drove out there, cruised around, saw what I wanted to see, and then left.”
“You drove directly home from there?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, Tully, thanks.”
Tully drove away from police headquarters depressingly certain that Julian Smith was far from through with him.
It was easy enough to see it from the detective’s point of view: Tully returning early from upstate; Ruth, skulking in a darkened house, waiting for her husband, half out of her mind, hysterically confessing in his arms that she had shot a blackmailer; Tully, completely in love with his wife, hiding her without thought of the consequences...
Bleakly, he almost wished it were that simple.
6
The mansion — no one ever referred to it as a house — lorded it over the landscape from its eminence above the town. It was a gigantic white-brick edifice with the tall white pillars and sweeping verandas of the Virginia Colonial style, out of place and out of time. But if you could ignore the modern developments clustering about its skirts, and the grimy town far below, it was beautiful.
Tully drove up the winding approach between the immaculate palisades of seventy-foot arborvitae trees, worth a fortune in themselves, catching glimpses of the intricate terracing beyond that kept a crew of landscape gardeners busy nine months a year. Then he passed the tennis courts and the Olympic-sized swimming pool. Over the hill behind the house, Tully knew, were stables and riding trails and a nine-hole golf course, separated from the rear terrace by an immense acreage as carefully tended as a Londoner’s postage-stamp garden.
The English butler — only Mercedes Cabbott would have the nerve to employ an English butler in a community where the acquisition of a cook or even a mere maid was a major triumph — preceded Tully through the gleaming two-story entrance hall and showed him out onto the flagged terrace at the rear of the mansion, overlooking the incredible lawns. Mercedes was seated in flowered grandeur at a white-ribbed glass table, big enough for twelve, before a display of savory-smelling silver-lidded mysteries.
“Good morrow, David,” she said.
“Good what?” Tully said, in spite of himself.
“What else can I call it? I don’t know whether the hell it’s morning or afternoon — whether this is breakfast Edouarde whipped up for me, or lunch. What is it, Stellers?”
The butler said, dead-pan, “A bit of each, Madam.”
“Thank you, Stellers. How about disposing of this grapefruit for me, David? It’s laced with sherry. Or would you care for some he-man chow?”
“I only dropped in for a few minutes, Mercedes—” Tully began.
“And a great mercy it is, David — you look half starved. Pull up one of these spidery iron chairs George picked — I can’t imagine why! Another place, Stellers, and tell Edouarde to fix Mr. Tully a filet. Medium rare, David, isn’t it?”
Tully smiled faintly. “That’s right. But really—”
“Shut up, darling. It will make me happy. Don’t you want to make me happy?”
Sipping Edouarde’s Lucullan coffee, listening to Mercedes Cabbott’s brisk small-talk, Tully resigned himself to a long session. She was a tinkling, vivacious little woman, all pinks and whites, with the figure of a young girl and the temperament of a fifteenth century queen. She wore her white hair like a crown and left the dye bottles to commoner females.
No one told Mercedes what to do, not even her husband George Cabbott, whom she adored. She kept whimsical hours, ate when she pleased, abhorred exercise and never gained a pound. She was a many-sided creature with unpredictable moods, and the inherited millions to indulge them. She would suddenly take off for Europe, or India, or some unannounced destination and be gone for months. She would often, without explanation, refuse to support a much-needed community project; yet Tully knew that she just as often made huge anonymous donations to causes or institutions that caught her fancy.
This youthful woman with the imperious blue eyes was old enough to be a grandmother many times over — which she would have been, she had once remarked to him, had her daughter Kathleen Lavery lived. Tully knew how much Mercedes wanted grandchildren — grandchildren of “the right sort.” He supposed this had something to do with her ferocious possessiveness toward Andrew Gordon, her only remaining child, and the fierce eye she kept on the girls in whom he showed an interest.
Tully had known Mercedes all his life as most others in town had known her, which was to say not at all. Then his plans to build Tully Heights brought them together. During their negotiations for the purchase of the land he wanted for his development, they had become friends.
It was through Mercedes Cabbott that he had met Ruth Ainsworth. Ruth had exploded into Tully’s life when she made a sudden appearance in the storybook mansion as Mercedes’s house guest that memorable summer. Mercedes’s insistence on making the wedding for them had seemed to touch Ruth deeply; Tully, who had other plans, found himself abandoning them without a struggle.
It was at the wedding that he first met his bride’s sister; Sandra Jean had come from somewhere in the East to be Ruth’s maid of honor. And in the mansion Sandra Jean had remained, playing a rapidly warming game with Andy Gordon, as a sort of quasi-member of the family. The Ainsworth girls’ mother and Mercedes had been intimate friends since their college days, it seemed, and Mercedes had characteristically kept an eye — and often a hand — on her friend’s daughters when Mrs. Ainsworth died. Between Mercedes and Ruth there had been an obvious affection; toward Sandra Jean the wealthy woman evinced no such personal involvement. Their relationship was too complex for Tully to grasp.
He had once asked Mercedes, “Sandra Jean seems to bring out the iron in you. Why do you let her stay?”
“Because,” Andy’s mother had replied sweetly, “here I can keep tabs on what she’s up to.”
Something Mercedes was saying jolted Tully out of his ruminations.
“Sorry,” he said. “I was off on Cloud Nine. What was that again, Mercedes?”
“I said you’re not eating your steak. Now let’s talk turkey. When are you going to get down to the reason for this visit? I know it’s about Ruth.”
Tully put down his steak-knife. “How did you know?”
“Darling, two men were here. Policemen. Very discreet and well-mannered. And pathetically anxious to sniff out Ruth’s whereabouts.”