“You knew him well?”
She pursed her lips before speaking. “You know most of the answers to your questions before you ask them, don’t you?”
I had to smile at that. “Sometimes. So you were lovers.”
“Friends and lovers.”
I nodded. “A good combination. Maybe you can help me out a little then. I’m trying to get a handle on Charlie-find out what made him tick.”
“Life made him tick, Lieutenant, and that’s over with. What do you really want to know?” The tiredness I’d seen in her eyes earlier tainted the harsh tone, making it more despairing than hostile. In fact, I half sensed a double meaning to her question, as if she were undecided whether to thwart me or pump me for whatever information I might be holding.
I decided to work from the outside in. “I want to know who killed him and why.”
Her face tightened. “I can’t help you then.”
“Maybe not directly, but you can tell me something about his habits, his other friends, his general lifestyle. People rarely kill strangers; they kill people they know. The more I can learn about Charlie’s life, the better my chances are of finding out why he died, and who did it.”
“That won’t do him much good, will it?”
Now it was my turn to be irritated. “Come on, Miss Wentworth, his death doesn’t mitigate finding his killer, you know that. I’m not preaching revenge or justice here-just about righting a wrong.”
“Not putting ‘an animal behind bars’?” She was taunting me.
I looked at her straight, making sure my voice stayed calm and quiet. “I have no idea what kind of person killed him. People kill out of love sometimes.”
She smiled bitterly and shook her head. “I guess they do, at that.”
“Might that have happened to Charlie?”
She leaned her elbows on the desk and covered her face with her hands. Her body seemed to withdraw into itself, shrinking a little in the process. It made her look suddenly frail. With that strikingly youthful face out of sight, I could easily imagine this same body on an eighty-year-old, thin, stoop-shouldered, and powerless. It was a jarring view of a far-distant future.
She straightened and rubbed her eyes. She hadn’t been crying, I realized, but perhaps reorganizing her thoughts or merely taking a break to settle down. In any case, some of her immediate defenses were noticeably lowered. “I don’t know what happened to Charlie, Lieutenant. One moment he was there, the next he was dead.”
“So you didn’t feel there was anything preying on his mind, some threat he didn’t want to talk about?”
“Not a thing. He was perfectly normal.”
“When did you last see him?”
She hesitated. “Three, four days ago.”
“Like a day before he died?”
“Two days. We spent the night at his place and went our separate ways the next morning. Then I called him at home that night, and that was the last time we ever spoke.” Her voice sounded hollow at the end. I wondered if she kept herself this bottled up when she was alone, and whether she’d allowed herself to truly grieve at all so far.
“And he sounded fine then?”
“Absolutely fine.”
“You left a blouse at his place.”
She paused a couple of seconds, thrown perhaps by the sudden shift, and then she smiled sadly. “Yes.”
“Did you have a complete change of clothing there, for when you stayed over?”
“No. Some oil had spilled on that blouse. Charlie had cleaned it up, but it was wet and he said he’d hand-wash it later, so I left it there. I took one of his shirts instead. He was much better at that kind of thing than I am.”
“You mean washing?”
“Washing, cooking, all those things. I have a maid come in. He loved doing it himself. He had a very domestic strain in him.”
“Were you aware of other women in his life?”
“Of course. That was no secret.”
“And no problem, either?”
She was surprised. “You mean jealousy? You think he was killed by a jealous lover?”
“It happens.”
She laughed, shaking her head. “Not with Charlie. That kind of possessiveness never came into it.”
“Maybe not with you; it might have with others. That’s not something you can easily control.”
I expected her to keep rejecting the idea, convincing herself that her experience with Charlie had been shared by all his women, but her intelligence willed out, and her expression sobered. “It’s hard to imagine, but I suppose you’re right.”
“Did you know any of these other women?”
She opened her mouth to speak, hesitated, and then said no.
“What were you about to say?”
“Nothing… Oh, just that we hadn’t formed a club or anything. Maybe there is some jealousy there after all.”
“You sometimes thought about him making love to another woman?”
She shrugged. “Sometimes. I wasn’t faithful to him either, you know.”
“But it bothered you where it didn’t seem to bother him?”
“I know it didn’t bother him. That was one of the ground rules. With Charlie, it was like an exchange. He would give you probably the best sex you’d ever had, but only if that’s where it stopped: no love, no commitment, no expectations.”
“Sounds pretty cold.”
She shrugged. “Maybe, but it was honest, and he delivered on his end.”
My inner vision blurred slightly, imagining this woman being gratified sexually like another might be pampered by a good hairdresser.
“What did he get out of it?”
It was a pretty tactless comment, blurted without thought, but she merely smiled. “I wasn’t a disinterested party, Lieutenant. I played, too.”
I reddened. “Of course. It just sounded… I don’t know… Almost commercial.”
“His payment was in power. I think he liked manipulating a woman’s passion, making her lose control. Sometimes he wouldn’t even join in; he’d just gratify me and then quit.”
“Like he was doing a job,” I reiterated.
She didn’t take offense at my perseverance. She merely corrected me. “No. It was as if while my pleasure was sexual, his was psychological.”
“But it was sexual, too, wasn’t it?”
“Of course, most of the time. But he transcended plain sex. In a way, if I had any jealousy, it was of his pleasure, because of its utter privacy. I felt he was enjoying something beyond what I could ever feel. I’d see him sometimes, watching us making love in one of those mirrors, totally absorbed, as if I didn’t matter, just my body.”
“Did you two do drugs together?”
“Sometimes.” The answer was hard and defiant.
I kept my voice unchanged. “We found some cocaine in the house. Is that what you used?”
“A little.”
“Where did he keep it?”
“You just said you found it.”
I continued to avoid the emotional edge she was skirting, hoping to pull her back, to show her there was no danger from me. “Yes, but we might have missed a place. I want to make sure we got it all.”
“It was taped to the back of a drawer, in the bedroom.”
“Okay. Same stuff then. Ever do any grass or pills?”
“No. We weren’t into drugs. The coke was to relax, like having a beer.”
I resisted arguing the point. “You don’t happen to know where he bought the coke, do you?”
She shook her head.
“But he always had some?”
“Yes. Not much, just that one baggie.”
“How did you two meet?”
She smiled. “At my father’s office. Charlie worked there before he set up his own company. I guess you know that.”
I nodded. “So you just bumped into him?”
“Well, at first, yes. But they spent a lot of time together, so I got to know him pretty well that way.”
I was a little confused by the phrasing. “You mean they were in the office together when you came to visit?”
“No. I saw Charlie at the office-around the building, that is-but he’d come over to my father’s house, too, for dinner or whatever. They loved to talk.”
“Where do you live, Miss Wentworth?”