Gwen’s voice was no louder than a breath. “And kept on worrying for the next fifty years.”
I finished rinsing the bowl and handed it to Chick. Continued my rambling soliloquy. “You’d think your sleeping with David would have ended your engagement. But Rollie needed a woman like you. And you needed a man like Rollie. And I’m sure you truly loved each other. And you were certainly tied to the hip after the murder, weren’t you? So you went ahead with the wedding, forgiving and forgetting the best you could. Life got easier for you after the city built the new landfill and pushed all that new dirt on top of the old dump. Then Sweet Gordon starts digging. And the old worries came back.”
It was clear from Chick’s squinty-eyed scowl that he hadn’t forgiven me for my unannounced visit to his house in April, and the insinuations I’d made about his relationship with Gordon. “Jesus H. Christ, Maddy! Why are you putting Gwen through this? Rollie confessed to both murders!”
“In a suicide note lacking any details,” I pointed out. “Which means we have to fill in the blanks for ourselves.”
Chick gave me another shot: “Lucky for us you’re good at that.”
I shook the hot water off the bowl in my hand. If we weren’t standing right next to each other, I would have thrown it at him, the way he threw Gordon’s bowl in the fireplace that night at the Blue Tangerine. Instead I handed it to him and went on, as if he’d given me a compliment. “Let’s say that Rollie did kill Gordon. He certainly had a motive. Any day now Gordon’s students were going to find his trophy. It wouldn’t have Rollie’s name on it. That would have been engraved on later. But Gordon would have known whose trophy it was and put two and two together.”
“Maybe he’d already done the math,” Ike said.
“Maybe,” I admitted. “But if I had to bet my 401K on it, I’d say the only thing Gordon wanted to find was that cocoa can. Not Rollie’s trophy. And in case you’re wondering, Chick, not that order slip from Mopey’s proving what Jack Kerouac had on his hamburger.”
To say the least, that hit a nerve. “I never once suspected Gordon was looking for that,” he fumed.
I fumed right back, quoting that awful poem he’d recited at Gordon’s memorial service: “ And now that weighty question that never mattered much matters not at all! Good gravy! If it didn’t matter you wouldn’t have written the damn poem!”
“It mattered,” Chick said, nervously twisting his towel. “But not so much that I killed him.”
I took the towel from him. Shook out the damp twists. Handed it back. Continued rinsing and explaining: “Nobody has an alibi for the evening Gordon was killed. Not you, Chick. Not Effie. Not Shaka. Not Andrew Holloway. Not Gordon’s nephew. Not Gwen. Not even me. But let’s focus on Rollie. After all his success, and all the money he’d made, Rollie still worked late at the office almost every night. In fact, you had to drive to the Kerouac Thing by yourself that Wednesday night, didn’t you, Gwen? And we know Rollie was working late again on Thursday, the day Gordon was killed.”
I played devil’s advocate now, recreating Gordon’s murder as if Rollie did do it: “Rollie told detectives he worked alone in his office until eight o’clock that Thursday. He said the three women who work for him left at five. And that’s probably right. I checked it out myself.”
Gwen handed me the last bean bowl. “Rollie always sends them home at five,” she said. “He knows they have families.” She started washing the wine goblets.
I could have bawled when she spoke of Rollie in the present tense like that. But I’d gotten myself into this mess. I had no choice now but to buck up and see my foolishness through. “Andrew Holloway found Gordon’s car at the ball fields north of the campus,” I said. “Gordon must have met Rollie there and then driven out to the landfill with him. Or maybe they took Gordon’s car. It could have happened either way, of course, but I think Gordon drove his car to the landfill. When Andrew found it, the doors were unlocked, the keys were in the ignition and Gordon’s briefcase was in the back seat. It’s hard to believe that even an absent-minded professor would leave his car like that and drive off with somebody else.”
“Unless maybe he was forced at gunpoint,” Ike pointed out.
Gwen handed me the first soapy goblet. I swished it in the rinse water and passed it on to Chick. “Okay,” I said, “let’s say it was at gunpoint. Why didn’t Rollie just shoot him right there by the ball fields? Nobody’s around there in March. No, I think Gordon willingly drove his killer to the landfill. He loved showing people the dig site. Even on a crappy evening in March he would have happily driven out there.”
The goblet slipped from Chick’s hands. Hit the rim of the granite counter. The delicate bowl of the goblet shattered. The stem snapped in two. He screeched at me like an entire flock of cockatoos. “First you tell us Rollie didn’t kill Sweet Gordon, then step-by-stupefying-step you prove he could have!”
I helped him gather up the sharp shards of glass. “Could have but didn’t,” I said.
Until now Gwen’s self-control had been, well, Gwen-like. Now tears were sliding down the sides of her nose, into the frown lines around her pale lips. “So you really don’t think my Rollie killed Gordon?”
“No, Gwen, I really don’t.”
She wiped the tears with the back of her hand. Left a puff of soapsuds on her cheek. “Why would he say he did?”
I forced myself to look her in the eye. “Because he figured you killed him, Gwen.”
Gwen said nothing. No one else did either. Including me. We all just stood there, with our chins on our chests, Gwen washing, me rinsing, Chick playing with the broken pieces of glass on the counter. We still might be standing there if Ike hadn’t come to the rescue-if that’s what you want to call it. “Give us your wisdom, Maddy. Did Rollie figure rightly or wrongly?”
I gave him the dirtiest look I could. He gave me his best smile. I turned back toward Gwen. “I don’t know if you and Rollie discussed the possibility of Gordon finding the trophy when he started his dig. My guess is you didn’t. In fact, my guess is you hadn’t said boo to each other about David Delarosa’s death since the night it happened. What was there to say? But when Gordon’s body was found out there, how could Rollie not conclude that you were the one who put that bullet in his head?”
Gwen didn’t object to a word I said. She just kept washing. The same goblet. Over and over.
“Rollie wasn’t just protecting you in that note,” I said. “He was apologizing to you. You’d protected him when he killed David and now you’d been forced to protect him again. Remember what he said? ‘There is no reason for us to live with my guilt any longer.’ It was a noble thing for him to say. But of course it wasn’t true. Because the guilt was yours. You slept with David. Your betrayal made Rollie lose his head. It’s so ironic and so sad. If Rollie hadn’t been so anxious to show you his trophy, hadn’t taken that early bus home, well, three dead men would be alive today, wouldn’t they?” I stopped my moralizing and returned to the evidence. “God only knows when you decided to murder Gordon, Gwen. But certainly by the night of the Kerouac Thing you had. You knew Chick and Gordon would get into it. They did every year. And this year they fought like a couple of little boys on the playground. In a room full of witnesses.”
I took the goblet from Gwen’s hand. Swished it in the rinse water. “When you found out I was snooping into Gordon’s murder, you got worried. You knew I was the one person in Hannawa with enough history in her noggin to link his murder with David’s. So you invited me to lunch. You made sure I knew how heated the argument between Chick and Gordon had been at the Kerouac Thing.”