She was enough of a knockout now. In her teens, she must have been breathtaking.
“Yes,” Kate said, “Victoria was convicted of the crime. But Charlotte didn’t think her mother did it, and she hired me to find out who did. I was doing a little research at the library, and I came across your name.”
“How did you find out where I worked?”
“Your neighbor told me you worked at the state courthouse.”
“Margaret?”
Kate shook her head. “A woman across the street.”
“Dayglo Diane,” Wanda said with a wry smile. “She’s the only one of us home at this time of day.”
“She is colorful,” Kate said, matching Wanda’s smile. “Look, it’s almost five. Could I buy you a cup of coffee, and ask you some questions? I’ll try not to take up too much of your time.”
Wanda was silent for a moment.
“Please,” Kate said.
Wanda said finally, “I suppose anyone who runs the Dayglo Diane gauntlet and survives deserves a hearing.” There was a smile in her eyes that had Kate revising the “bimbo” label she had had ready to stick on Eugene Muravieff’s mistress’s file.
Kate got Mutt and they walked down past the old federal building, bought coffee from M.A., and sat on the grass. The tourists, mostly retired people bundling up against the sixty-two-degree temperature in jackets, hats, and thick socks, grazed through the carts hawking T-shirts silk-screened with the legend unless you’re the lead dog, the view never changes, tiny seals carved from ivory, and necklaces made of strands of small round garnets so hard-polished, they looked almost black. They mingled with workers from downtown offices dressed in suits and ties, many of them pausing for a moment to turn their faces up to the sun, eyes closed, determined to catch every last ray because they knew the first snow could be less than a month away.
Echoing Kate’s thoughts, Wanda said, “I wonder how many of these we have left?”
“Feels good,” Kate said, closing her own eyes briefly. Mutt, lying on the grass next to her, pulled her head back in an enormous yawn. Kate heard a clicking sound and looked up to see a woman dressed in navy polyester pants with a matching bomber jacket and a white knit cap pulled down over gray hair lowering a camera. “Thanks so much!” the woman trilled, and trotted off toward a man of the same age who was staring yearningly toward F Street Station and the bar visible through its window.
“You’re a tourist attraction,” Wanda said.
Mutt looked bored. Kate shook her head and took a sip of coffee. It was excellent, rich and strong.
Maybe it was Kate’s refusal to get mad at the tourist. Maybe it was her appreciation of the sun and the coffee. Maybe Wanda thought that something that had happened over thirty years before couldn’t hurt her. Whatever it was, without prompting Wanda began to talk. Her voice was low and precise, unfaltering, unembarrassed. She laid things out in chronological order, stating the facts without bias or self-pity.
“I was dating William,” she said, “and then he brought me home, and I met Eugene. We were attracted to each other, but he was married, and I didn’t do that kind of thing.”
“He was also-what-twenty years older than you.”
Wanda didn’t take offense. “It didn’t matter,” she said. “I wanted him, and I knew he wanted me.”
“You were underage,” Kate couldn’t help saying.
Wanda nodded. “When we first met, yes. I was a year older than William, you see. My parents held me back a grade when I was in second grade because I had a problem with reading. Dyslexia,” she added.
She sipped coffee. “I wanted to see Eugene, but I stopped going out with William because it just seemed too creepy to use him to get to his father. I could see, in the brief time that I was at their house, that Victoria and Eugene’s marriage was falling apart. I had an after-school job at PME, and one day we bumped into each other at a union meeting, and then we met again, outside the office.” She paused and gave a twisted smile. “And then all of sudden, I did do that kind of thing.”
“How long?”
“Almost a year before the divorce.”
Kate thought about how to ask the next question without giving offense, decided there was no way, and asked it straight out. “Did he say he was going to leave his wife for you?”
“Oh no,” Wanda said calmly. “He told me from the beginning that however bad it got with Victoria, he would never leave his children. I believed him.”
Frowning, Kate said, “But he did.”
“Yes, he did,” Wanda said, “but it wasn’t his choice.”
“What do you mean?”
“His father-in-law pulled all the strings in that family.”
“The old man, Jasper Bannister?”
Wanda nodded.
“Why would the old man want to split up his daughter and her husband?”
“He never liked Eugene. Eugene was a Native, and Eugene had always wanted to do serious work for PME. They gave him a job, but it was a make-work, glad-handing kind of job. He wanted to go into management. They stonewalled him. It took a while, but he got mad, and he decided if he couldn’t get into the business one way, he would another.”
“Which was?” Kate said.
“He joined the union that represented the PME workers and ran for business representative.”
“Did he win?”
“Oh, yes. The Bannisters may have had little use for Eugene, but the workers liked him. They were renegotiating their contract with PME, and they figured that Eugene, being a part of the owner’s family by marriage, had pull on the other side. They were wrong, but they didn’t know that.”
It was right about then that Jasper would have been finalizing plans to switch from union employees to contract hires.
“You know,” Wanda said pensively, “the older I get and the more I read, the more I think that most things that happen are personal.” She looked at Kate. “I remember reading something that somebody wrote one time that World War Two happened because Hitler’s mother didn’t spank him enough, or at all, and as odd as it sounds, I think there is some kind of truth to that. Lyndon Johnson said he didn’t want to be the first American president to lose a war, so instead of cutting our losses and walking away, it’s ‘One, two, three, what are we fightin’ for…‘ Benjamin Franklin is personally insulted on the floor of the house of Parliament and he goes home to start the American Revolution. It’s all personal,” Wanda repeated, “and this was personal, too. On both sides.”
Thinking out loud, Kate said, “So Eugene couldn’t get in the front door, and he decided to use the union to get in the back door.”
There was a brief silence. “I felt horribly guilty when he moved out,” Wanda said. “I’ve never thought of myself as a home-wrecker. I certainly wasn’t raised to be one. You know that Woody Allen quote- The heart wants what it wants,” something like that? I’ve always hated it. Eugene married Victoria, and they had three children together. He had no business sleeping around on them. I knew it, and I did it anyway.“
“Were you still together when his son died?”
“Yes.”
“You weren’t subpoenaed to testify at the trial.”
“No.”
“Were you deposed?”
“Yes.” Wanda said, and took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I’ve had a lot of time to think about it. On the face of it, I think I was deposed to establish that Eugene had been with me that night.”
“An alibi.” Which would focus attention on Victoria as the prime suspect.
“Yes,” Wanda said. She closed her eyes and shook her head. “Someone in the district attorney’s office leaked my statement, and it was all over the news the next day, and of course they had to do a little digging, and they found out that Eugene and I had had a relationship before the divorce. My parents were… very upset.”
Kate, in her extensive search through the library’s microfiche files, had somehow managed to miss this particular Bannister scandal. That would teach her to go without the help of a reference librarian in the future. “So Eugene was with you the night of the fire, the night his son was killed.”