Chapter 15
She looks the part of the chic art set from the thirties, a loud silk kimono with wide sleeves, open down the front, like the academic gown on some Oxford don. Underneath she wears white cotton slacks and a blue top. Capping it all is a broad-brimmed straw hat, cocked at an angle for the sun, and oversized dark glasses.
‘Yes?’ Kathy Merlow’s smile is somewhat artless. ‘Can I help you?’ she says.
She’s burdened by the folded artist’s stool and easel hanging heavily in one hand. The box of paints and brushes in the other.
‘You don’t remember me?’ I say.
Wary eyes.
‘I’m Paul Madriani. We met the night Melanie Vega was killed. Out on the street in front of her house.’
‘I think you’ve mistaken me for someone else.’ She turns and starts to walk.
I take her gently by one arm. ‘I don’t think so. But maybe you could take off the glasses,’ I say.
‘Take your hand off of me,’ she says.
I let go.
‘I have to meet someone and I’m running late.’ She gives me the look of upper-crust arrogance, done so well behind dark glass, and dismisses me.
‘Can I help you with that?’ I reach for the stool and the easel.
She pulls them away.
‘I can manage,’ she says. ‘Now leave me alone.’ She takes a step backward, full retreat, and walks out of one of her sandals. She trips, drops the easel and stool.
I grab her arm again.
The lid to the box of paint supplies has opened as she jostles for balance. Tubes of paint and tiny brushes all over the grass.
‘Now see what you’ve made me do.’
I let go, and she steadies herself.
‘I’m sorry,’ I tell her. ‘I’m not here to cause you any problems. I just need information.’
‘I’ve told you, you’ve got me mixed up with someone else.’
‘You aren’t even curious as to how I found you?’
She’s picking up the paints. I help her.
‘Marcie Reed,’ I tell her.
She gives me a look. If there is any curiosity written in her eyes, it is hidden by shaded glass. But she curls her upper lip and bites it a little.
‘I don’t know any Marcie Reed,’ she says.
‘The ring on your finger,’ I say. ‘The cameo. Is that the one Marcie sent to you general delivery?’
She stops picking up tubes of paint and covers the back of her right hand with the long sleeve of her kimono.
‘We could ask the people at the post office,’ I say.
The outside of one of the tubes of paint is sloppy with green acrylic paste, and what appears to be the drying swirls and ridges of the owner’s thumb. She’s looking into my face at this moment. I pick the tube up by the cap and deftly slip it into my jacket pocket so she doesn’t notice. Last month she was going by ‘Merlow.’ This week no doubt she is called by another surname that I do not even know. It would be nice to have her real name.
She says nothing.
‘I think you remember me,’ I say.
‘How did you get here?’ The first crack in the wall of denial.
I gesture toward my car in the parking lot.
‘I think you should get back in it and go,’ she says.
‘Not till we talk.’
‘We have nothing to talk about,’ she says. ‘You shouldn’t be here. There’ll be trouble if they find us together,’ she says.
‘Who’s “they”?’
‘Never mind.’
Having captured all the colors of the rainbow, she closes the latch on the wooden box.
I pick up the easel. She grabs it from my hand and starts to walk away, across the thick grass, as fast as sandals will allow, like some geisha in flowing gowns.
‘Do you have a car?’ I ask.
No answer.
‘I could give you a lift.’
‘No, thanks.’ She’s opening the gulf between us, twenty yards away.
I start to run, trailing in her wake. ‘I have to talk to you.’
‘No,’ she says. ‘I’ve got nothing to say.’
‘Marcie Reed is dead,’ I tell her.
Suddenly she stops. I nearly run over her from behind.
She turns to look at me over one shoulder.
‘Marcie?’ she says.
I nod. ‘Yesterday afternoon in Capital City,’ I tell her.
She doesn’t say a word, but the news of Marcie’s death, a woman she claims not to know, has suddenly turned her composure to mush. The easel and stool are back on the grass. As if in slow motion the handle of the box slips from her fingers, the sound of wood on wood as it clacks down on top of the easel. One hand comes up, so many fingers in her mouth I think she’s going to swallow them. Deep in thought, she turns away from me. I can no longer see her face. But with a hand she reaches up and takes the glasses off.
‘How did it happen?’
‘A letter bomb delivered to the post office by a private courier.’
When she turns I see her eyes for the first time, tired, dark edges, tracks like a thousand birds in the dried mud at some watering hole on a parched savanna. She’s calculating the barbarity of death in this fashion, looks at me, searching eyes, the sense of one tortured by fear, now rendered fearless by fatigue.
‘Poor Marcie,’ she says. ‘I should never have involved her. She was only doing me a favor.’
‘I know.’
‘Why did they have to kill her?’ she says.
‘Why don’t you tell me.’
‘Oh, God. None of this was supposed to happen,’ she says. ‘They promised us.’
‘Who?’
My question draws her from her reverie over Marcie.
‘Why did you come all this way? What’s your interest?’
‘I represent a woman who has been charged with the murder of Melanie Vega. She didn’t do it. I think you know that.’
‘Ahh.’ Her head is now making big lazy circles, nodding, the way people do when they are dazed. The pieces slowly beginning to fit for her.
‘And you think I can help you?’
‘Before Marcie died she told me some things.’
‘What things?’
‘That whoever killed Melanie Vega had been hired to carry out the murder. That you knew something about this.’
‘I’m sorry that your client is in trouble. But I can’t help you.’
With this she adjusts her glasses back on her head.
‘I think you can. Just tell me what happened.’
In the distance there’s the sound of rubber on gravel. The blue sedan I’d seen moments ago out on the highway, coming this way like there’s no tomorrow. Some tourist in a hurry, a lot of speed and dust as the car slides to a stop in the lot.
For several seconds my question lies dormant, punctuated only by the sound of the car’s engine rumbling in the distance.
‘Mrs. Merlow?’
She’s frozen in place, looking at the vehicle, which is stone-still, its motor running, no one getting out.
‘We have to talk,’ I tell her.
‘Not now.’ Her eyes are on the car.
‘When?’
She’s ignoring me.
‘All I want to know is what happened. Give me a hint.’
‘I didn’t see a thing,’ she says.
‘Then your husband?’ I say. ‘He knew something, didn’t he? And he told you?’ I’m thinking Melanie and her carnal welcome wagon. Maybe she and George, Jack and Melanie, were doing a foursome, some erotic swap-meet. Maybe that’s why Kathy Merlow doesn’t want to talk.
‘Leave us alone,’ she says.
‘No. I won’t leave you alone. A woman is being charged with murder in a crime she didn’t commit. Sooner or later you’re going to have to tell me what you know.’
‘I don’t know a thing, and neither does my husband.’
‘You expect me to believe that the two of you left Capital City in the middle of the night immediately after Melanie Vega’s murder because you didn’t like the weather?’
‘Frankly I don’t care what you believe.’ As she says this she’s giving me eyes-right, less than her undivided attention, her gaze glued to the car in the parking lot.
‘Is he with you?’ she says.
The vehicle’s occupant is now standing beside the car, its motor still rumbling. He’s leaning against the open driver’s door, looking this way, lighting what looks like a big cigar, a large stogie with a glowing red tip.