“I’m quite busy Mister Jones,” she said after they exchanged good mornings. “Believe it or not, the tax season’s already underway for us accountants.”
“I won’t take up too much of your time,” Hannibal said. He took one step over the threshold and stopped. A wave of deja vu struck him and it took him a moment to sort it out. The room was more broad than deep, with a fireplace in the far wall which looked as if it had not been used in decades. Vaulted ceilings kept the room cool and imparted the slightest echo. But it was the decor that struck him. Oscar Peters might just as likely have picked this flowered wallpaper, only different from his in color. The sparse furniture was placed in analogous positions. The standing lamp in the corner, even the drapes on the windows were similar in style to what Oscar had in his house. Hannibal’s eyes dropped to a particular point on the floor. It was a hardwood floor, just like the floor in that other house where Oscar Peters stretched out in front of the door at that exact place and let the blood out of his body.
“That’s the spot,” Ursula said with ancient hatred. “That’s where Dean found Grant. Is that what you came to see?”
“No ma’am,” Hannibal said, backing toward the living room sofa. “But it does help me understand what happened to Dean.”
“And just what does that mean?” Ursula asked in a sharp tone, settling into the love seat, positioned kitty corner to the sofa.
He meant he saw Dean as a man standing just one step over the knife-edge line separating sanity from madness. He imagined Dean opening the door to that house decorated so much like the house he grew up in and looking down and seeing a dead man lying, for all practical purposes, where his father was that night, his body positioned as his father had been, with all the blood spilled in the same pattern on the hardwood floor.
“Nothing, Miss Voss,” Hannibal said, forcing the image out of his mind. “I just let my imagination run away with me there for a minute.”
“Well let’s get down to business,” Ursula said, pulling a silver cigarette case from her purse. “What did you need to see me about?”
“Actually I came to ask you for a favor, something I didn’t want to broach on the telephone.” Hannibal had expected the offer of coffee or tea but clearly this woman did not intend to make his visit any longer than necessary.
“I see,” Ursula said, touching the flame from a silver lighter to her cigarette and inhaling deeply. “Unless it will help my nephew somehow, I hardly see why I would be doing you a favor.”
Hannibal had little motivation to play softball with this hardened woman. “I’ve been hired to try to help him, and I wouldn’t ask anything of you outside that context. But after you told Thompson where he was, I couldn’t be sure how much you cared about Dean yourself.”
Ursula leaned back as if he had hit her. “What? What makes you think I told him?”
“Please Miss Voss. Only a handful of people knew Dean was hospitalized, and none of us had any motivation to inform the police of his whereabouts. But then, Thompson didn’t tell you it was his case, did he?”
“Stan Thompson and I go back a long way, Mister Jones,” Ursula said. “Since he’s working in Virginia now, I figured he could tell me just what kind of trouble my nephew was in. I needed to know what that murdering whore had gotten my poor Dean into. And no, he didn’t tell me he was involved with the case.” She forced the last sentence through clenched teeth.
“Ahh, Bea must have told you his mother had visited him. I take it you didn’t like her very much, even before Dean’s father died.”
“That woman was white trash from the beginning. The kind of white trash you find in the hills in West Virginia.” Ursula spoke through a cloud of smoke and Hannibal could almost see the venom dripping off this black widow’s fangs. “Poor Grant was seduced by her wanton body, but we could all see through her. He married her against our will.”
“Our will?”
“The whole family was against it,” Ursula said, filling her lungs with smoke again. When she pulled the cigarette away from her mouth, lipstick clung to the filter like a bloodstain. “Wasn’t long before they were arguing violently. Grant, he was too gentle a soul for that and she just ran over him. When he finally came to his senses he and little Dean moved in here. He was the spitting image of the little brother I helped raise, not a drop of his mother’s violent blood in him. That cold-blooded murderess.”
She had no way of knowing Hannibal had looked into Francis Edwards’ china blue eyes himself, and failed to find a murderess there. “Odd for a cold-blooded murderess to be on the street in ten years, eh?”
“That trial was a travesty,” Ursula said. “Manslaughter they gave her, not a murder conviction. Her lying trickster lawyer Walt Young convinced those idiots it was a crime committed, let’s see, in the ‘heat of passion,’ I believe is the exact legal term he used.”
“And just how did he manage that?”
Here Ursula leaned forward and lowered her voice. “He convinced those sheep on the jury that Grant had another woman. As if my brother would have strayed, even from that lowlife, before his divorce was settled. She admitted she came to the house that night because she got the final papers and was trying to talk him out of it. If only I’d been home. Dean heard them arguing about the divorce. Poor Grant finally stuck to his guns about something and she…she…and poor Dean had to see it.”
Hannibal wondered why he was not inclined to comfort this woman. “Yes, and Dean told a court that he saw his mother with the knife.”
“Yes, that’s right. If he hadn’t that whore might have gone free.”
“So I gather,” Hannibal said. “But Dean now says he didn’t see his mother at all. He lied, Miss Voss, to please the grownups, he says.”
The drapes were parted, and the blinds threw prison stripes across Ursula’s form. Her mouth held firm but her eyes moved down and for a moment Hannibal let her stew in the silence. When she finally spoke she had left the past behind. “I’m a busy woman, Mister Jones. What did you come here for?”
“I gather you and Thompson are old friends,” Hannibal said with an edge in his voice. “You wouldn’t have called him otherwise. He thinks he’s got his killer, Miss Voss, but I think he’s wrong. I saw a man running from the victim’s house just before we found the body. But I need time to find him. All I want is for you to ask your good friend the police detective to back off Dean for a few days. Give me time to find the real killer.”
When she looked up at him he saw indecision on her face so he pressed harder. “You know he’ll accept anything as evidence to prove a shaky case. Give me a chance to find the truth.”
“I’ll call him.”
13
The Silver Spring Boys and Girls Club wasn't far from Ursula Voss' home, just off Forest Glen Road. The practice field behind it was a vast space of sparse grass bordered by closely planted oaks whose denuded branches swayed gently, sweeping the underside of the clouds above. Hannibal sometimes wondered why trees planted in a line often seemed to stop at an agreed upon height, forming a clean line at the top.
The man waiting for Hannibal near the goal post stood with his hands deep in the pockets of a black windbreaker. Hannibal didn't recognize the logo on the jacket, sort of an orange claw striking from under the word “Predators.” The man inside the jacket flashed a bright smile from the middle of a very dark, round face. Even at a distance, he seemed too pleasant to be a football coach.
“Thank you for meeting me here, Mr. Lee,” Hannibal said, offering a hand.
“No problem, I've got to be here tonight to run the practice anyway. And please call me George.” The man had a strong handshake that challenged Hannibal to match it. “Now you said you wanted to talk about one of my boys, Ingersoll. Is he in some kind of trouble?”