“He just rang my doorbell one day, not unlike you. I’d seen him around town, of course. How could you miss him? I know what you’re thinking. But thirty years ago he was quite dashing. Thick, dark hair; chiseled body; smooth as Carrara marble. Probably from lifting so much of it. Men around here don’t lift anything heavier than a golf club, if they can pay someone else to do it. When you meet a man like that, that’s the way he always looks to you-no matter how fat or banged- up he gets.” The old softie sipped from her Nalgene bottle and led me through the French doors to her garden.
“We can walk around the property, and if you’re seriously interested, we’ll make a real appointment.” She pointedly checked the time. “I have thirty- five minutes until my court time, so you have fifteen. Shall we?”
No wonder Guido said he needed another twenty years. A large square, it was bordered on all sides by mature trees and squared- off English yews. Between the yews and the enormous, high- maintenance lawn, useful for touch football photo ops, Guido probably guaranteed himself a weekly maintenance gig for life. And then there was the fountain.
That first summer, Guido sold Mrs. Fifield on the idea of an Italian marble fountain. Eager to see Guido with his shirt off, Dina agreed. That’s how I came to be standing eyeball to marble penis with an oversized Roman god who, from a certain angle, looked like Guido and appeared to be ejaculating twenty feet into the air. No doubt one of his little jokes.
“What do you think?” she asked.
“It’s remarkable,” I said, failing to come up with any other word for the twenty- by- twenty- foot marble excrescence in front of me. Roman gods and sea monsters cavorted incongruously with wood nymphs, satyrs, and assorted animals. Four angels with long trumpets stood in each corner, and the entire fountain was surrounded by a collection of statues that seemed to be haphazardly assembled for a fire sale. Despite the occasional lapses into good taste, the end result was more Pizza Napoli than Piazza Navona.
“Guido designed it. I hated it, too, in the beginning,” she said, admiring it as if for the first time. “There are twenty- seven separate statues. Guido just kept piling them on all that summer.” She laughed.
He probably got a nice kickback from the marble supplier, I thought. “When was the fountain installed?” I asked politely, steering myself away from any conversation that might require me to comment on its beauty.
“Oh dear, it was so long ago.” She took another swig from the water bottle, to refresh her memory.
“Let’s see, it was the summer my late husband was away so much. In Washington, D.C., of all places… in the summer. He was an attorney, and something was going on. The Peacocks were having work done in their garden, and the street was a terrible mess-dust and trucks everywhere… it was chaos. Anyway, Guido and I decided we might as well do it. Put the fountain in, that is,” she said coyly.
“Was that when Congressman Fifield got interested in politics?”
“Win? He’s not even that interested now, other than getting reelected. He couldn’t have been less interested back then. That was the year he graduated from prep school. He spent the whole summer chasing ass in Maine, at our summer house. Oh dear, I’ve shocked you.”
“What year was that?” I said, ignoring her crude remark.
“Who remembers? They grow up so fast. Ask that mousy little thing who works for him. She’s probably got all his old report cards filed.”
Another stolen glance at her watch told me I’d exceeded my fifteen minutes.
“I can drop off some garden books if you like, to give you some ideas,” I said, finishing up.
“Would you? I’d adore that. Just leave them with the house keeper if I’m not in. Any fresh ideas for the garden would be wonderful. There are just so many times you can redecorate the houses.”
The lady of the manor dismissed me and I headed next door. Walking slowly, I stole a last glance back at the fountain and found myself thinking I should go for the job. It would be a service to the community to destroy such an atrocious thing.
CHAPTER 48
I walked back through the hemlocks, no smarter than I was before talking with Dina Fifield.
Halcyon’s official opening was a few weeks away, but I had a hard time staying focused. Hurtful, decades-old secrets were in danger of coming out; Anna was distraught, confined to her bed, lighting candles and praying; and, most important, Hugo was still in jail, now facing even more serious charges. And I’d done nothing but stir things up needlessly.
Thinking of Hugo reminded me of his last, curious words before O’Malley led him away. I headed for the espaliered trees blanketing Richard Stapley’s stone wall. I’d forgotten them in the days since Hugo’s arrest.
Espaliered trees were fashionable in small Italianate gardens in the twenties and thirties. I was grateful Hugo had taken an interest, since I had no experience with either fruit trees or espaliers. The pear trees had already blossomed, and wouldn’t need pruning until after the growing season, but Hugo said they needed some attention, so I went to check them out.
Over the course of many seasons, the trees had been pruned and trained to grow horizontally over the handsome stone wall using an intricate grid of wires and bamboo canes forced between the chinks in the stones. I resecured some of drooping branches, but nothing else seemed amiss, until I noticed a deep pile of mulch, sloppily shoved up against the bottom of the wall at the far end. I bent down to spread it around. As I did, I uncovered the top of a hand- hewn cornerstone. I dug farther, with only my gloved hands, and saw the date, as Hugo must have before shoving the mulch there to cover it: A.D. 1974, the same year Yoly Rivera vanished.
I pulled off my gloves and phoned Lucy and Felix, but I couldn’t reach them. I tried Gerald Fraser, but his line was busy. When the phone rang, I assumed it was one of them calling me back, but it was O’Malley.
“I thought you’d like to know, we released Hugo Jurado early this morning. We found our two witnesses, a Mr. and Mrs. Galicia. They confirmed Hugo’s whereabouts the morning Guido was killed. They shot plenty of video in the waiting room of the marriage bureau before tying the knot. You were right,” he added grudgingly.
In the background of the Galicias’ wedding pictures, only occasionally obscured by themselves, were Hugo and Anna, canoodling. And as if their testimony wasn’t enough, there was an exonerating time code in the lower-right- hand corner of the frame.
“The Galicias went home to Guatemala for their honeymoon,” Mike continued. “They didn’t know we were looking for anyone until they returned yesterday.”
I felt an adrenaline rush of success. “What about the fingerprints and the car?” I asked, pushing my luck.
“Felix’s lawyer friend grilled the woman who saw Hugo’s car, and she finally admitted she couldn’t be sure of the time. As far as the fingerprints, the lawyer’s investigator lifted them from a number of other items at Chiaramonte’s. Hugo did work there for a time, so the fact that his prints were on the weapon, too, was inconclusive. We had to let him go.”
At least for now. That was left unsaid and hanging in the air when O’Malley hung up. I reached Anna’s daughter and she told me that Felix and Anna were already downtown picking up Hugo. The phone rang again.
“Hey, it’s about time you called me back,” Gerald Fraser said. He’d left me a message I must have accidentally erased with all the snotty ones from Lucy.
“What was it?” I asked.
“Probably just another false lead,” he said. “I’ll let you know if anything pans out. What’s your big news?”
I told him about the witnesses and Hugo’s release.
“That’s terrific,” he said. “You’re a pretty good little detective once you get going.”