She moved her hand up his thigh, smiling. “You know you want to. You just don’t want it to fail. It’s already failed. How can your giving it a small push do any damage?”
He looked at her then, his expression critical. “Jesus, listen to you. Mother Frigging Teresa. You’d think you would’ve learned by now.”
She laughed and got up, knowing better than to push. “I had, till I met you. You made me an optimist.”
* * *
Joe stood beside his car, taking in the neat, square, rubble-filled cellar hole on Hillside Terrace. He was struck by the sad irony that what was once the foundation of a family home had become the custom-made receptacle for its charred remains. There was a discussion about preserving the wreckage as a crime scene, complete with around-the-clock guard, but the consensus had been that it was all too little, too late by now, and that the case against the killer of William Friel and his mother would have to rely on evidence beyond what might be lurking here.
Which is what had lured Joe back. For, while the site had been destroyed-no doubt with the hope of erasing all traces of a crime-that crime had nevertheless taken place. And it was Joe’s experience that-as with a lingering odor-the residue of such an event often hovered in place, sometimes to the advantage of those in search of it.
As if on cue, he saw what he was looking for, even sooner than he’d anticipated. There was a movement at one of the windows neighboring the Barber property, indicating-Joe anticipated-the presence of the almost customary neighborhood busybody.
He left his car and crossed the street to knock on the front door.
He didn’t get the opportunity. The door opened as he reached the front porch steps.
“Are you from the insurance company?” a woman asked, whose body and hairstyle reminded Joe of a Saint Bernard on its hind legs.
“Police,” he countered. “Joe Gunther. And you are?”
She stepped out onto the porch. “Karen Freed. I thought the police were finished here.”
They didn’t bother shaking hands, having already passed that part.
“Oh, you know,” he said lightly. “The usual ton of follow-up paperwork.”
“I thought it was a homicide,” she said, her voice rising.
He continued up the steps. “What makes you say that?”
Her eyes narrowed craftily. “Okay. I get it. Don’t worry about me. I’m going to my grave with all my secrets intact. People know that about me around here.”
Joe wasn’t quite sure what that meant. He stayed quiet.
“I saw it go up,” Freed said. “My house was built the same time as Barb’s. If you’re telling me that was an accident, I’m selling tomorrow, ’cause it exploded like a bomb.”
“And that’s why you’re thinking homicide,” Joe suggested.
She smiled, and for a moment, he thought she added a wink. “That’s why you’re thinking homicide,” she said.
He didn’t argue. “Okay. You seem to be aware of what happens in the neighborhood, could you tell me what you saw that night?”
“I already told a cop in uniform.”
“I’m aware of that,” he lied, having relied on Jonathon Michael’s narrative, rather than on individual statements. “But sometimes, with the passage of time, memories sharpen.”
“It was real sudden,” Freed recalled, needing no further prompting. “I was sitting watching TV, and there was a bright flash out the window-and a boom, like an explosion. Shook the house.”
“When was this, roughly?”
“Late. About eleven.”
She hadn’t asked him in, so Joe settled onto the porch’s broad wooden railing, enjoying the sun on his back. She remained standing, framed by the open doorway behind her.
“Any comings or goings from there earlier that you noticed?” he asked.
“Earlier that night? Nope.”
“How ’bout right after?”
But she rejected that. “There was tons of action after the fire department got here, and that was pretty quick. They were really fast and good, moving cars around and setting everything up, just like on TV. But it was a goner as soon as I saw it through my window. The whole house looked like the mouth of a volcano. That’s why I know it’s a homicide-that a bomb did ’em in.”
“I take it you knew Barb and her son?” Joe asked.
Freed looked disapproving. “Oh, yes.”
“That doesn’t sound good,” he said, leadingly.
She pursed her lips. “Very odd people.”
“How so?”
“Oh, you know…”
Joe didn’t let on that he did, remaining silent.
Freed sighed impatiently. “You ever meet them?”
“Once,” he admitted. “Of course, that was after she’d been disabled.”
She broadened her stance slightly, as if responding to a boat deck’s slow roll. “I know it’s horrible to say, but that disease was the only thing left that could quiet that woman down.”
Even for Joe, who’d heard some pretty harsh things, that was a corker.
“Really?” he said as blandly as he could.
“She was like the Wicked Witch of the West,” she explained. “Treated everybody like dirt, no matter what they did. Most negative person I ever met. And the way she talked to him. It was terrible.”
“Yelled some?” Joe prompted.
“I’ll say. He could never do anything right.”
Joe tried to be philosophical. “They say that anger and paranoia often run hand in hand with Alzheimer’s.”
But Karen Freed was having none of it. “Bah. Unless she’d had it for forty years, I wouldn’t hide behind that fig leaf. She was just a terrible person. Sometimes, there’s no getting around it.”
“And yet he stayed with her.”
She considered that. “Yes,” she agreed. “That confused me, too, at the beginning. But sometimes a man is just too spineless to act in his own best interest. Plus,” she added. “It was her house, and as long as he could put up with her, he lived there for free. I bet he used all her money for groceries and the like, too. I never saw him work a lick, so that has to be true.”
Joe thought back to something that Beverly had mentioned in passing. “You think he might have killed her and committed suicide?” he asked.
She looked genuinely astonished. “Good Lord. What a thought.” She paused. “I suppose it’s possible,” she added without conviction.
“I’m not saying that’s what happened,” Joe carefully followed up. “But you knew them better than I.”
“Then I’d say no,” she replied. “He didn’t have it in him. Besides, the smart thing would have been for him to kill her and live happily ever after. Nobody would have been suspicious-a woman in her condition.”
Joe reflected on an earlier comment. “Mrs. Freed, you said that when the fire department showed up, they moved some cars. What did you mean by that?” He turned to point across the way. “I see his Chevy right there, and it looks like it got burned pretty badly. Did they move it?”
“No, no,” she said. “The other one. Her car. That’s the one they moved. It was closer to the house.”
Joe was still for a second, trying to process this. “What kind of car?” he asked. “Is it on the block now?”
She moved, marching to the edge of the porch, resting her hands on the rail like Captain Bligh, and scrutinized the street.
“No,” she announced. “It’s not there. Maybe they towed it. It hadn’t been legal for years. It was a Buick Skylark-dark green.”
“You remember the plate number?”
She gave him a withering stare. “I don’t go around keeping things like that in my head.”
“Of course,” he said agreeably. “Did you actually see the car being moved? I’m just trying to figure out who drove it.”
She tucked in her chin thoughtfully. “No. One minute it was there. The next, it was gone.”
“And now that we’ve been discussing that whole evening, can you recall anything else? Something you saw through one of their windows, maybe? Or something you heard?”
A look of distaste crossed her face. “I’m no Peeping Tom. What do you take me for?”
Joe kept that to himself and thanked her for her time.