Her next stop was the A&P where, on her way in, she dropped the paper bag into an outside garbage can. Inside, halfway down aisle three, she let a bottle of spaghetti sauce slip from her hand and shatter on the floor. Red sauce splattered over her slacks and shoes. The store manager, Jerry, a big bear of a man with a thin gray comb-over, was very nice about it, particularly when she told him in a desperate voice that she needed to get home. Jerry knew Tom was terminally ill and had simply nodded his head, pursed his lips, and patted her shoulder. That’s when she began to cry, making sure Jerry would not forget that she had been there at that time of day.
And as luck would have it, as she left the A&P she saw that the garbage can was being emptied by some filthy, minimum-wage flunky who seemed to take no interest in what he was dumping into the truck. Soon, the gun and the boots would be well on their way to the garbage-burning plant downtown.
On the way home, though, the thought nagged her that the tears that had come in the store had come too easily. They’d been real — which was what she had wanted — but too real.
When she pulled into the garage a half hour after she’d left, Doreen tried to act as if she had no idea what she’d find. The stillness of death remained in the air, but the gunpowder smell had faded. She walked into the kitchen and dropped the bag of groceries on the floor.
The grisliness of the scene — the hyper-vividness of it; the finality of it — hit her harder than she’d expected. Her stomach tumbled over and she lost her balance for a moment. She stumbled to the phone and dialed 911.
When the dispatcher answered, Doreen’s heart began to pound. “My husband is dead,” she said, surprised by the emotion in her voice. “He’s been murdered.”
Doreen waited in the bedroom, smoking, while the police pored over the kitchen. She’d been interviewed by a Detective Jenkins shortly after he’d arrived, but it had been almost an hour since she’d seen him. Various officers had poked their heads in to offer condolences and see if they could get her something, but she had politely thanked them and declined.
It was Jenkins who stopped in the doorway now. His sport coat was off and his tie was loosened at the neck of a white, short-sleeved dress shirt. He wore brown pants and his brown hair was brushed straight down into bangs. There was no part and no style. He couldn’t have been more than thirty. “Mrs. Martin?”
“Yes, Detective?” Doreen made her voice quiver. “Are you about finished?”
Jenkins frowned. “No, ma’am. We’re treating this as a possible homicide, so it’s going to take us another day to go over the whole house for evidence. Do you have anyone you can stay with? Family? Friends?”
“My — our — kids live out of town. I’ll just get a hotel room if you think it will only be for one night.”
“I’m sorry for the inconvenience.”
“It’s no inconvenience, Detective, as long as you find the animal that did this to Tom.”
“We’ll do our best, ma’am.” He started to leave, but stopped. “Do you mind if I take a look at the shoes you were wearing when you found him?”
Doreen looked at her feet, suddenly alarmed. “My shoes?”
“Yes, ma’am. We’ve found footprints in the... near the kitchen table and want to determine whose they are.”
She pulled off her loafers and Jenkins took them from her. “They could be mine, I guess.”
Jenkins cocked his head. “I thought you said that when you found him, you dropped the groceries and went straight to the phone.”
“Well, that’s right, I did say that, but I may have walked closer to make sure he was dead. I honestly don’t remember what I did exactly. It was such a shock to see him...” Not sure what else to say, she covered her face and leaned forward.
“I understand. We’re just going to make sure. Sorry for the trouble.”
She looked up, thinking that Jenkins had left, but he was still standing in the doorway, his brows raised by uncertainty. As if he didn’t know if he should stay or go.
Doreen tried to add some pain to her voice. “Is there anything else, Detective?” As if something else — anything else — might be too much for her to bear.
“Just one quick question. Do you keep your boots anywhere other than in the mudroom closet?”
“My boots?”
“Yes. There are tracks in the snow outside the bathroom window and we want to make sure they’re not yours or Tom’s.”
“I see. No, just the mudroom closet.”
“Okay. Thanks.” He looked relieved that he could finally go.
When she heard Jenkins’s footprints fade, Doreen stood up and began pacing. She wanted to follow him to keep an eye on him, on what the cops were most interested in, but she knew that might look suspicious. Instead, she lit a new cigarette. Lit it before realizing that there was one already burning in the ashtray on the nightstand.
At the Jolly Roger motel that night, Doreen sat on the hard double bed and smoked. She ran the scene over and over in her head, looking for flaws, trying to think like a detective. She’d acted impulsively when she’d read the suicide provision in the life insurance policy. Had felt the desperation to do something fast.
But in her haste had she forgotten something? She retraced her steps.
The murder weapon: Taken care of. By now it was probably irretrievably melting inside the toxic fires of the garbage-burning plant, destroyed like Frodo’s ring inside the Cracks of Doom. She smiled at the comparison.
The suicide note: She’d made a passable copy of the last page of the policy and had cleanly inserted the new staples through the old staple holes. There was no way anyone would ever know that the last page had been replaced. But something about the note bothered her. Tom said he was “triply sure.” That meant something, but what? The suicide term had been one thing, but she’d overcome that. Were there two other roadblocks to the money that he’d created for her? She’d have to give that some thought.
Her alibi: She’d created a convincing scene at the A&P close to the time of Tom’s death. A scene that Jerry, the store manager, would grimly attest to.
The fake burglary: The key had been to make it look like someone had broken in. She’d found a hammer hanging in the basement over the work bench and had taken it into the bathroom. She’d nearly broken the window from the inside, but had quickly realized that for someone breaking in the shards of broken glass would show up on the bathroom floor. So she’d decided to go outside.
She’d gone to the sliding glass door in the kitchen, still smeared by Tom’s effluvium — damn it, that’s probably when she’d stepped in Tom’s blood — and had thought about going outside to the patio to get to the bathroom window. But then she saw all the fresh snow — an inch had fallen overnight — and how exposed the backyard was to the neighbors when the leaves were gone from the trees. What would they think if they saw her cutting a hole in the screen and breaking the window glass?
She hadn’t wanted to be seen, so she’d shut the door and gone back to the bathroom window. She’d then opened the window, tom the screen so it would hang down, and used the hammer to break the window from the outside by reaching her arm under the raised frame. The result had been a very convincing looking break-in.
Finally, the boots: Using Tom’s hiking boots in the ruse had been her most inspired moment of the whole cover-up. She’d put on those damned boots and walked around the side of the house to the back, leaving large, man-sized footprints in the fresh snow. She’d gone to a spot beneath the bathroom window and pretended to survey the wood siding, as if looking for a crack or a leak or a loose board, something no Gladys-Kravitz-neighbor would think twice about. And like the gun, the boots by now were probably facing the same unforgiving inferno downtown.