Her face had cleared somewhat, still stained with tears and flushed. She was no beauty, but she emanated a tangible sensuality with an open, innocent visage and a body given to suggestive fullness.
“You married John because he was safe.”
She took offense, but only slightly. “I married him because I loved him.”
I didn’t respond. Speaking to her was like watching for movement at the bottom of a stream, an effort thwarted by shadows, reflections, and self-doubt.
“And he was dependable,” she added.
“Why did John drop his scholarship and his chance to go to college?”
Her eyes welled up again and her lip quivered. She was emotional enough right now for any reminiscence to cause tears, no matter how trivial, so I had no idea what had set her off. I played it safe by silently taking her hand again and giving it an encouraging squeeze.
She returned the gesture and smiled sadly. “I was pregnant.” That was certainly not trivial, nor had it appeared in any paperwork I’d studied. “And you lost the baby later?”
Silently, wiping her cheeks again, she nodded.
“I’m sorry, Rose.” I let a moment pass for that to sink in, but I had to keep going. “So what happened between you and Charlie?”
“He understood. We kept in touch. We were always friends.”
All of which told me nothing. Her show of openness had been reduced to three telegraphic sentences, closed doors I had to get through by presuming I already knew what lay behind them. I felt now that my night’s reading was yielding benefits. “Until John began drinking.”
She became very still, looking at me in wonder, a prior acquaintance who now seemed to know a great deal about her. “He got so wrapped up in himself. I kept asking him what was bothering him, but he wouldn’t talk.”
“Did Charlie know about the drinking?”
“Not until I told him. After school, he and John never saw each other.”
“So when you said John knew about you and Charlie, you didn’t mean as lovers.”
“No… Well, yes, in high school… And just recently, but not in between.”
There was an awkward silence. I changed tack to safer water, keeping her reference to “recently” in the back of my mind. “What do you think made John hit the bottle? Work? Being a special officer instead of full-time?”
Still she looked distracted, too caught up in the intimacy of her troubles to want to share them, especially with me. “Being part-time… That was part of it.”
I racked my brain to come up with something else, remembering what I knew about John, thinking about what Rose had told me. I was casting on that water, trying to coax something to the surface. “And you were the other part?”
She sighed so deeply her body shuddered. “Yes.”
“Fights?”
She nodded.
“About what?”
Her eyes had strayed to the counter top and now remained fixed there, as if captivated by its cold, white, featureless surface. “Oh, you know…”
That was stretching things a bit, but I gave it another stab. “Married life wasn’t all it was cracked up to be?”
“John is so good. So hard-working, forgiving, generous-”
I was getting the gist of it by now. “But boring.”
That stopped her cold.
“Did you begin your affair with Charlie before or after John began to drink?”
Her expression turned to a pout, reminding me how powerful self-delusions can become. “It wasn’t an affair. It was like I needed something only Charlie could give, like therapy.”
“Something to keep your marriage together.”
I hadn’t kept the skepticism from my voice-a calculated risk. She brought her face up sharply and glared at me for a moment. I remained impassive, as if this entire conversation were merely a rerun for me, the veteran of a thousand broken hearts. She finally acknowledged the point, albeit defiantly. “It helped me, and our marriage still works.”
“So when did John hit the bottle, before or after?” I wanted to establish cause and effect here, to make sure I had the sequence of events down accurately.
She seemed to think about that for a while, perhaps cautioned by the way I was forcing the issue. I was grateful she’d chosen to take this conversation more as a counseling session than as part of a murder investigation.
“Before. That was part of the reason I called Charlie; I was starting to climb the walls.”
“But now you think maybe your feelings for Charlie, and your dissatisfaction with John, helped turn John toward the bottle?”
Once again, she began crying. “It was like he was the only one whose problems counted. I thought if I could take care of my needs, then I could help John with his. I could be strong for him like he’d been for me before.”
“When you were pregnant, you mean?”
“Yes.”
I paused for a moment and then took another gamble. “Were you carrying Charlie’s baby?”
She froze, her eyes focused on some middle space. Her lips moved slightly, but a full fifteen seconds elapsed before she answered: “No, of course not.”
It was a straightforward denial, but I found the hesitation significant. I chipped away from another angle. “Didn’t things get a little complicated once Charlie began to do well? I mean, initially, you’d chosen John because you were in trouble and he was supportive and dependable. But it didn’t take long before you returned to Charlie for both support and sex. What happened when Charlie began looking more dependable than John?”
I wasn’t surprised she became angry. In fact, I wondered why she’d taken so long. “That never happened. Charlie was making a lot of money, that’s all. But he was seeing other women, too. John would never have done that. If I’d moved in with Charlie, it wouldn’t have lasted a month. John’s always been the rock in my life; I would never leave him-not for what Charlie had to offer.”
“Rose, how long did you think you could have your cake and eat it too?” I blurted unintentionally.
She looked stricken.
I played the card she’d dealt me earlier, partly to cover my outburst. “You said John had found out about you two just recently?”
She blinked a couple of times, her shoulders slumping. “Last night he told me he did. He’d never let on. He said he understood what I’d done with Charlie. I explained to him that my heart was all his, and that Charlie had just been something I’d needed to keep it all together, like a safety pin to close a coat.”
I thought, instead of the grenade pin I’d mentioned earlier to Billy Manierre. “How did John tell you about Jardine’s death?”
“He was very sweet, very gentle.”
Given John’s brooding character, I found that hard to believe. The choice, therefore, was either that she was lying, or kidding herself, or that John was being more manipulative than I thought. That idea turned me cold.
“Did he say how he’d found out about Charlie’s death?”
She looked surprised. “He said you’d told him, you and Billy. Didn’t you?”
“We talked. Were you and Charlie seeing each other up to the end?”
“Oh, no. After John turned his life around, it ended between Charlie and me. I started thinking that if he could do it, then so could I.”
A deadly quiet settled in my brain, her lie confirming my earlier suspicions. “I heard your voice on Charlie’s telephone tape machine last night, Rose.”
Her cheeks turned bright red, but she looked at me defiantly. “So? We were still friends.”
But from her yearning tone on the tape, I knew she was still hooked on Jardine for something; even if I paid her the benefit of the doubt and agreed that sex was no longer the attraction, that still left one obvious alternative.
“Rose, do you have any idea why Charlie was killed?”
She curled in on herself slightly, her hands back in her lap, her chin on her chest. The room was still for a while. Finally, she shook her head. Her voice was almost a whisper. “All night, I thought about that. He never hurt anybody.”
“When you took cocaine with him, did he ever say where he got it? That crowd plays pretty rough.”