“I tried to see you at your office yesterday. You weren’t in.”
“Some things came up that required my presence in New York.”
“Your wife and Mr. Berger rode into the city themselves yesterday morning.”
“That’s right. She told me she ran into him on the train. I drove in a bit later in the day.”
“Why didn’t you and she go in together?”
“It was something of a last-minute thing on my part,” he answered vaguely. “A financial matter.”
“Can anyone confirm what time you arrived?”
“The fellow at the parking garage I use, I imagine.”
Des nodded, well aware that for twenty dollars your average parking lot attendant would swear under oath that he had seen Elvis pull up in a pink Cadillac-with Marilyn Monroe seated next to him in the front seat.
He rubbed a thumb carefully along his big, thrusting chin, as if to test his morning shave. “It’s on Second Avenue and Sixty-sixth Street. And I still have the ticket stub somewhere, I think. But, frankly, I’m having trouble seeing how my visit to New York has anything to do with matters that concern you.”
“It concerns me,” Des explained, “because someone tried to shove Mr. Berger in front of a subway train yesterday morning in Times Square. He claims it happened shortly after he said good-bye to your wife.”
Now Bud Havenhurst went silent on her, his face a stone cold blank. The man conveyed nothing. It was just like sitting across the table from a lawn statue. Lawyers. They were worse than born liars, she reflected bitterly. These bastards were trained at it by high priests.
She elected to move on. “Let’s talk about your ex-wife’s missing money.”
“Mitch spoke to you about that?” Bud asked her uneasily.
“He did.”
“And you understand why I did what I did?”
“I understand bupkes,” she said sharply. “Maybe you believed you were acting in your ex-wife’s best interest. But I’m not prepared to say whether what you did was legal or ethical or proper. Or whether a Connecticut State Bar Association grievance panel will find probable cause for misconduct. Or whether a judge will suspend your license to practice law.” She paused a moment, the better to dangle her bait. “Of course, if you’re prepared to give some news I can use, then that’s another matter entirely…”
Bud Havenhurst suddenly became very interested in the view. He even got up and went over to the porch railing so he could get a better look at it. “Such as?”
“Such as it occurs to me that you are in and out of Mrs. Seymour’s house…”
He turned back to face her. “It used to be my house,” he said quietly.
“Did you write that Dear John letter?”
He shook his head emphatically. “If I had done that, then I’d be Niles Seymour’s murderer. And I’m not.”
“You weren’t home in bed the night that Tuck Weems was murdered. Where were you?”
Havenhurst didn’t respond. Just went into statue mode again.
“Were you with your ex-wife? Were you sleeping with her?”
He heaved a pained sigh. “No, Dolly wouldn’t have me again in a million years,” he replied, his face expressing a curious mix of longing, frustration and hopelessness. He was an older man besotted with a volatile and promiscuous younger woman. Yet he clearly remained attached to his first wife. Maybe he just didn’t know what, or who, he wanted. Maybe he was just a fool-he was a fully grown adult male, after all. “I just looked in on her,” he explained. “To make sure she wasn’t wandering. She does, as I believe I’ve mentioned to you.”
“You didn’t mention that you were soaking wet when you got home. How did you get so wet, Mr. Havenhurst?”
“I walked on the beach.”
“In the middle of a violent rainstorm?”
“I like to walk in the rain. I find it therapeutic.”
“Are you in need of therapy?”
“Everyone is in need of therapy.”
And these were supposed to be the happy people. Had their own damned island. If they weren’t happy, who was? “Did anyone see you?” she asked.
“No, of course not.”
Just as no one could recall seeing his son, Evan, and Jamie Devers docked out on Little Sister Island having themselves a bonfire. She had checked with the Coast Guard. She had checked with the boatyards. Nothing. Everywhere she turned it came up nothing.
Havenhurst abruptly glanced at his watch. “I really have to be getting to my law office, Lieutenant. A number of my later appointments got pushed up to this morning because of Niles Seymour’s funeral this afternoon. Are we done?”
“Not a problem,” Des said agreeably. “I wouldn’t want to keep you from your appointments. The big wheel of justice must keep on turning.” She climbed to her feet and treated him to her maximum-wattage smile. “But, counselor, I would not be saying we’re done.”
CHAPTER 13
“HONEY, I’M HOME!” MITCH called out as he came charging in the door.
And bright-eyed little Clemmie was right there, slipping and sliding her way across the wooden floor to greet him. She seemed kind of clumsy for a cat, in his opinion. In fact, she was so adept at tripping over her own feet that Mitch was starting to think she might have a future as a starting wide receiver for the New York Giants. He picked her up. Petted her. Told her how much he’d missed her, managing to discover yet again just how sharp her young teeth were.
He could not believe how happy he was to be back. To smell the sea air. To be in his little house on Big Sister Island. He could not believe it.
The lieutenant had been there some time earlier that morning. Mitch knew this because Clemmie’s litter box was clean. Also because the lieutenant had left a highly prized possession of her own behind on his desk.
Her portfolio.
She had set it there without fanfare. No note. No fuss. Just wham, here it is. This, Mitch concluded, was the woman’s style.
Inside, he found two dozen charcoal drawings that had been torn out of a sketch pad and loosely gathered. Mitch was not sure what to expect. The only time he’d observed her at work she’d been parked out on the bridge sketching what he’d assumed to be a landscape. He didn’t know what her art would be about. Had no idea what it would show him.
What it showed him was pure horror.
Faces that were smashed and contorted and frozen. Innocent lives that had been destroyed by violence and hate and the evil that men and women do to each other. What it showed him, one drawing after another, was the soul of an artist. Lieutenant Mitry was trying to cleanse herself of the destruction she saw in her daily life. To capture it. To understand it. And she had-her drawings jumped right off the page. They were breathtaking in their visceral impact. They were positively haunting. Leafing through them, Mitch was reminded of the tabloid crime photographs of Weegie. But there was more to the lieutenant’s drawings than that. Within them, Mitch found both the noirish foreboding of Edward Hopper and the violent spiritual anguish of Edvard Munch, the great Norwegian impressionist who gave the world The Scream. Within them, he found a vision that was uniquely her own.
Dead people. She drew nothing but dead people. All except for the last one Mitch came to. This one was a portrait of a living man whose face was a wretched mask of pain, his eyes hollow and etched with sorrow. As Mitch stared at it, he realized with a shudder that it was a portrait of himself.
He immediately gathered her drawings back up, jumped in his pickup and headed for Dorset’s graceful, tree-lined historic district. Several cruisers, marked and unmarked, were parked out in front of the white, wood-framed town hall. Also a television news crew van. Mitch left the portfolio on the seat of his truck and went inside, where he was nearly bowled over by the smell of musty old carpeting. The office of the first selectman, the village’s equivalent of a mayor, was just inside the front door. His desk was positioned out in the middle of the room and his door was open. A quaint old Yankee custom-anyone who wanted to speak his or her mind just had to walk in, sit down and start talking. Right now, that anyone was a freshly minted J-school grad who looked remarkably like an eleven-year-old child wearing Lesley Stahl’s clothing and hair. A cameraman was stationed in the doorway, capturing their conversation on video, the lights from his camera bathing the office in artificial brightness. The first selectman, a wheezy white-haired man with an extremely red nose, looked very unhappy.