“Did you find anything else we need to show the police?” she asked.
“Not yet.”
“Too bad. I brought the letter with me. I wanted them to read it.”
She handed it to me instead. It had been typed very neatly on a manual machine. The first paragraph contained the offer of the footlocker and explained why its owner had been willing to give it up: “My husband isn’t as sentimental about the war as some veterans and most wartime brides, like myself.”
This particular war bride was extremely sentimental. Her closing paragraph was a prose hymn to the generation that had won World War II.
“The strengths and sacrifices of that pure time shaped the rest of our lives. And more than that. The courage and fidelity of those few short years justified and sanctified all the long decades since.”
“She writes beautifully, doesn’t she?” asked Rachel, who’d been reading along over my shoulder.
“Yes,” I said, agreeing to both possible interpretations of Rachel’s compliment. Mrs. Petrone’s writing was impressive and her penmanship, as displayed in her signature at the bottom of the page, was in perfect copybook style. Perfect and wrong. She’d signed herself “Marie Petrone” rather than “Mrs. James Petrone,” but that wasn’t what brought me up short. The first name of that signature was nothing like the “Marie” I’d seen on the letters in the footlocker. An adult’s handwriting changed over time, but it had never been my experience that it improved. Compared to this copperplate, the signature on the old letters was a scrawl.
I waited until my busy supervisor had bustled off before I opened the locker and retrieved the loosely bound packet. Loose or not, I’d respected the seal represented by its black ribbon when I’d first happened on the letters, but now I slipped the flimsy pages out and started reading.
I noted right away that more had changed than Marie’s signature. Her prose style had also improved greatly since 1944. In fact, the style of the letters was so awkward and simple it was as though their author had been writing in a second language.
That insight confirmed what the difference in signatures had led me to suspect. The coincidence of a common name popping up twice had caused me to make a hasty and incorrect assumption, perhaps the thousandth of my career. The wartime letters had not been written by the bride Petrone had left behind.
I read through the packet, finding references to “my village” and “our chance meeting” and “our night together” that seemed to back my latest hunch. There were many wishes for Petrone’s safety, one of which made the warehouse seem even colder: “You think it foolish, but keep my little gift close to your heart.”
7
When my shift ended, I returned to my apartment, which was stylishly decorated with the boxes from my recent move. There I placed a phone call to a television station in New York. The station’s staff transferred my call three times, keeping me on hold between each handoff. Even so, I was back on the road again by six.
I drove to a yellow-brick cottage on a winding street near Mayburg Park. The small front yard, a steep brown slope on either side of crumbling steps, was decorated with a concrete statue of the Virgin Mary. There were traces of blue paint in the deepest folds of her veil.
Marie Petrone answered the front door. She was a tall woman, nearly my height, with bright red hair. That it was her natural color or at least an accurate reproduction of it was suggested by her very pale complexion and by her eyes, which were a blue bordering on aquamarine.
I introduced myself and used the opening I’d thought of earlier, telling her I’d come to return the letters she’d mistakenly left in the footlocker. She didn’t look down at my empty hands or ask to see the letters, which I’d also left in the locker, though not mistakenly.
She just said, “I don’t want them back.”
She started to shut the door, so I quickly jumped to my real business. “Then maybe you can help me save a man named Sleeth. He’s been falsely accused of murdering your husband.”
If I hadn’t read Mrs. Petrone’s letter to the society, I would have considered a slammed door a likely reply. It was still an even-money bet, but something, the mismatched buttons on my coat or the January cold I was standing in, swung things my way.
“Come in,” she said.
By the time she’d settled me in her under-lit living room, which Rachel Terman would have taken intact if she’d been doing an exhibit on the 1960s, the widow had thought of things she should have said on the front porch.
“Raymond Sleeth hasn’t been convicted of anything, Mr. Keane. If he is, I would consider asking the judge for mercy, given the man’s mental problems.”
“You can do better than that,” I said. “You can get Sleeth out of jail tomorrow. All you have to do is admit that you shot your husband.”
Somewhere in the back of the house, a stereo was playing Glenn Miller. “String of Pearls” gave way to “American Patrol” without commercial interruption.
Mrs. Petrone was dressed in a velour sweat suit, and its material was tight at her knees. But she smoothed it absently now with her big hands as though it were a misbehaving skirt.
“Why would I do that, Mr. Keane?”
The question was ambiguous, and I took the easier path. “So an innocent man doesn’t suffer.”
“I meant, why would I have shot my husband? And how could I have done it? I was at work when it happened.”
“The how wasn’t hard to figure out. Geneva Majo lied to the police when she said your husband left her about ten-thirty. It was probably no later than ten past ten. The neighbor who seconded her story has vision problems. She based her testimony on an episode of Cheers that started as your husband left. It was a repeat of an episode the station had run the week before, which is unusual. So unusual, in fact, that it never actually happened. When Majo pretended to turn the program on, she actually started a tape she’d recorded earlier. Then she kept the neighbor talking for hours, so she wouldn’t notice a problem with the time when she got home. Your contribution — besides the murder — was to make sure the body wasn’t found right away.
“The police might have looked into the time business more closely if Majo’s alibi had depended on it. But hers didn’t. It was enough that she was never alone after Petrone left her. Your alibi was the one that rested on the timing of everything. I guess the cops couldn’t imagine you and Majo working together. And, of course, Sleeth distracted them by diving into the wrong Dumpster.”
Sometime during my long speech, Mrs. Petrone had turned her gaze from me to a spinet piano. And to the wedding portrait that sat atop it. The pictured groom was a young soldier with remarkably curly hair. The girl bride was beautiful, with a button nose and a chin held very high. Taking her cue from that artifact, Mrs. Petrone raised her chin now.
“Why would that Majo woman do anything for me? And why would I hurt Jimmy?”
“Jimmy wiped out Majo’s savings. She’d probably have shot him herself if you’d set it up that way. You pulled the trigger because your husband cheated on you.”
“He’d cheated on me many times. I told the police about five affairs I knew of before Miss Majo. I gave them the name of every one of Jimmy’s women.”
“Not every one. You didn’t tell the police about the only woman who mattered. Her name was the same as yours: Marie. Your husband met her in France in nineteen forty-four when you two were still newlyweds. All these years you’ve thought of your early days with Petrone as a pure time. All the things your husband did to you since you forgave for the sake of those newlyweds, for the sacrifices they’d made and for what they’d meant to one another.