“Yes. I—”
“Look, I know she’s dead. And I also know you people don’t want a repeat of last night, so I haven’t told anybody.”
“Who told you?”
“...Well, a lot of people in the country have scanners. Word’s getting around.”
“Who told you?”
Mimi’s lips twitched in irritation. “Will, of course. When a man’s wife is insured for a million dollars with a double indemnity clause and she dies accidentally, he’s quick on the phone.”
“I can’t believe Will could be that callous.”
“Can’t you? I guess not. You’ve always been on the naive side.”
“That’s not true. And I know grief when I see it. Will was completely broken up earlier; he didn’t just turn around and file a claim.”
“Then maybe it was a purely altruistic gesture on his part. He probably figured I’d die of shock if I heard on the local grapevine that my company’s going to have to pay out that kind of change on a policy I wrote.”
Rho and Mimi had been friends since the third grade; she knew when the woman wasn’t telling the truth. It was there in the belligerent tilt of her chin, in the way her fingers played with the edge of the table.
“What’s the real reason Will called you?”
Mimi shook her head. “Ask your questions and leave me alone, Rho.”
She studied her for a moment. “All right. Ridley said you spoke with Virge when she was in here yesterday.”
“Briefly.”
“About?”
Mimi’s date returned with fresh drinks. She took hers, dismissed him with a flick of her hand. “I expressed concern about her drinking, asked her what was wrong. She said... Let me see if I can get this right. She said, ‘Don’t ever try to do somebody a favor. You might end up owing more than you can handle.’ But when I asked her who and what, she told me to forget it.”
“And then?”
“And then Will came in and started fussing over her like she’d been soiled by the bad company she was keeping and took her home.”
Mimi’s bitter tone alerted Rho. It was the same way she’d spoken during their one and only confrontation about Zach, when Rho had gone to her house in a drunken rage and demanded she stop seeing him. Then she’d said, “I’m surprised he’d tell you about us, given the way he tries to protect you from every little thing. God, he even acts like you’re being victimized by the booze, instead of doing it to yourself.”
“You’re seeing Will, aren’t you?” Rho asked.
Mimi’s eyes widened, but she recovered quickly. “‘Seeing.’ What a quaint term.”
“Answer the question.”
“It’s none of your business.”
“This is an investigation of a suspicious death. Answer it.”
“All right! Keep your voice down. I was seeing him, but only sporadically, and it’s been over for more than a year now.”
“So why’d he call you after he found out Virge was dead?”
“I told you—”
“The truth this time.”
“Jesus! He... Oh hell, he was scared. He wanted to warn me not to tell anybody about us.”
“Why would he worry about that if it had been over for a year?”
Mimi’s fingers tapped on the rim of her glass and she ran the tip of her tongue over her lips. “All right, but this can’t go any further. Promise, Rho.”
“You know I can’t do that.”
“Promise you’ll at least try to keep it to yourself.”
“I’ll try.”
“Okay. That policy on Virge, I talked Will into it. She was getting crazier and crazier. She’d had some minor accidents, one with the truck, another by falling from a ladder at home, another while hiking on the ridge. He said it was like she was living so much inside herself that she couldn’t look out for the hazards outside. He knew it was only a matter of time till something major happened, so I told him to upgrade their hospitalization insurance and suggested a ten-year term policy with double indemnity.”
“And he liked the idea?”
“No. But I convinced him that he deserved to be compensated for what she was putting him through.”
Rho thought back to when she and Mimi had first become friends. The Griggses had lived in the big Victorian that now was the Pelican Cove Bed & Breakfast. Mimi’s room was the one with the turret that Guy Newberry currently occupied, and she had a canopied bed and a beautiful doll collection and a closet full of clothes. For her tenth birthday her father bought her a horse that was boarded at a stable near the beach, and he’d promised her a sports car when she got her driver’s license. Mimi was generous with what she had, but Rho was still wildly envious of her.
But then it came out that Charlie Griggs, a local manager for the state highway department, had been taking kickbacks from their subcontractors, and he’d gone to prison. Mimi’s mother was forced to sell off everything to pay the attorneys’ fees, and she and Mimi went to live in the trailer park. Suddenly instead of envying her friend, Rho pitied her. Still, they’d remained close till the night Zach confessed to his affair.
All that loss, of course, accounted for Mimi’s drive to succeed, and she’d built her insurance agency into the most profitable on the Soledad Coast. But loss had also created a need that she couldn’t possibly fill. Rho could imagine her writing the policy on Virge while contemplating a future with Will, high on the ridge with two million dollars as a cushion.
She said, “So you were only concerned for your client’s interests when you made those recommendations.”
“Of course.”
“You gave no thought to how you eventually might benefit?”
“Aside from my commission, no.”
“Aren’t there regulations against writing a policy on your lover’s wife? And on writing that kind of policy on an emotionally disturbed woman? Weren’t there things about the situation that you were bound to disclose to your company?”
“So I looked the other way, presented it in a more positive light. It’s done all the time.”
“Is it?”
“Jesus, Rho, why’re you badgering me? Does this have to do with Zach?”
“Zach?”
“We’ve never talked about him. Not since the night he told you about us.”
“There’s no need to talk. It was over years ago. For all three of us.”
Rho stood and regarded her former friend. Mimi looked tired, too thin, and deeply discontented. The life she was leading was taking its toll; in a few more years she’d be a desperate, worn-out woman, grasping at whatever man came her way. Rho wished it were otherwise, but there was nothing she could say or do to help her.
“I’ll try to keep what you’ve told me to myself,” she said. “But if I ever hear that you’re looking the other way and bending the rules for one of your clients again, you’re busted.”
“Come on, Lily,” Guy said. “You and Alex can’t have done anything so bad that Wayne would kill you.”
“You don’t know him.”
“True.” He signaled for another round of drinks.
“Well, I do, and he scares me.”
“You weren’t too scared to go over to his house tonight.”
“I only go there when I know he isn’t home.”
“In what way does he scare you?”
“He gets really violent. You think Alex is bad, you oughta see what Wayne does to Janie. Used to do to me when I lived with them.”
“He always been that way?”
“No. When I was a kid he was real gentle and protective of me. The same with Janie when they first got married. She says something went wrong in him around the time of the Cascada Canyon murders, and he’s never been himself since.”
“It all keeps coming back to those murders, doesn’t it?”
“I guess so.”
Guy waited while the waitress placed their fresh drinks on the table and departed. “Wayne’s violent streak aside, if you know something about that woman who was murdered, you really ought to tell the sheriff’s department.”