The detective who’d been put in charge of the case was a burly man by the name of Stewart. As far as I could tell, he had no first name. He was about forty years old, with thick black hair, cropped short. His hazel eyes hinted at a sense of humor and were framed by the thickest lashes I’d ever seen wasted on a man. But after spending less than five minutes with him, I found myself mentally humming the Eagles’ hit “Lyin’ Eyes.”
I was glad Aunt Winnie had agreed to my suggestion that the reading room, rather than her cramped office, be used for the questioning. But even settled in the relative comfort of an overstuffed yellow chair, the interview process with Detective Stewart was a painful one.
He had seated himself in the only hard-backed chair in the room, no doubt to lend an air of authority to his questioning. I suppose he felt it would be difficult to intimidate his subjects while being half swallowed by a gaily patterned club chair. But after my seemingly endless interview with him, I realized the man would be daunting even if lounging on a pool raft with an umbrella drink in his hand.
After asking standard questions such as my name, age, and address in a raspy voice reminiscent of the chain-smoking aunts on The Simpsons, he launched into the heart of his interrogation.
“Where were you when the lights went out?”
I refrained from asking if that was the title of a song and obediently answered, “I was standing near the sideboard, opposite the door.”
“Right. And where was Mr. Ramsey in relation to you?”
“He was still sitting at the dinner table. It was in front of me, to my right.”
“What was he doing?”
He’d been glaring at Daniel or Polly or both of them, but I didn’t say that. Instead I said, “He was watching his daughter on the dance floor.”
“I see. And how was his demeanor?”
“He didn’t seem pleased.”
Detective Stewart looked up from his notes. “Really? Any idea why?”
I could think of at least eight reasons off the top of my head, but somehow it didn’t seem right to assign motives to a dead man. I shrugged. “Not really.”
Detective Stewart didn’t respond. Instead, he stared at me. I wish I could say my courage rises with every attempt to intimidate me, but I can’t. Instead, my reaction is Pavlovian: my palms begin to sweat and all the moisture evaporates from my mouth. In fact, his piercing gaze produced such a pronounced reaction in me that I briefly wondered if it was a skill taught at the police academy. If Detective Stewart noticed my reaction, he gave no indication. He merely noted my answer and moved on to the next question.
“Who else was near him?”
I tried to remember. “No one, really,” I said. “Everyone else was milling about the room. Mr. Ramsey was the only one still sitting.”
“Okay. And then the lights went out. Did you know that your aunt was going to turn off the lights?”
“No, I didn’t. She told us afterward that she was supposed to do it for the show, but I didn’t know that in advance.”
“I see. Did anyone else?”
“I don’t know. I mean, the actors must have been aware. But …” I thought about it. While I hadn’t known that the lights were going to go out, I wasn’t surprised when they did. Why? I was struggling to figure out why when it came to me: Aunt Winnie’s invitation.
“Ms. Parker?” Detective Stewart prompted.
“I was just remembering the invitation for this party. It said something about ‘screams in the dark.’ I was wondering why I wasn’t surprised about the lights at the time. It must have been because of the invitation.”
“I see. Can I get a copy of that invitation?”
“Yes. My aunt kept an extra one.”
“Good. Okay. Now, what happened after the lights went out?”
“Well, at first I think everyone thought it was part of the show. I mean there was no sense that anything was wrong. I saw a flash of green, then I heard a gunshot, and someone screamed—”
Detective Stewart interrupted, “A man or a woman?”
I considered the question. “It was a woman,” I said finally.
His pen scribbled. “Thank you. I’m sorry. You said you saw a flash of green?”
“Yes. I guess it was the gun going off.” But that didn’t make sense. I had seen the flash before I heard the shot.
“And then what happened?” he prompted.
“Well, there’s really not much else. I heard the plates and glasses shattering. I guess that’s when I first thought that something seemed odd. I mean, I doubt if these actors usually break the hostess’s good china.”
He nodded to his notebook. “Anything else?”
“Someone pushed past me. And then the lights went back on. I saw Eric’s face—he’s one of the actors—and that’s when I really knew that something was wrong. He looked horrified.”
“Do you know who pushed you?”
“No. I just assumed it was someone moving around in the room.”
“From what direction did he come?”
“He ran toward me.”
He noted all this down. By this point, I was nauseous and more than a little panicky. The last time I had been interviewed by a policeman, I was sixteen and had been pulled over for speeding. The officer’s name was Ed Tighe and he couldn’t have been more than twenty-five. In the end, he had let me off with a warning, but I had been so shaken from the encounter that when I got home, I promptly threw up.
Detective Stewart was about a million miles away from Officer Tighe. Plus, he had that scary stare thing on his side. “What exactly was your relationship with the deceased?”
“I had no relationship with him,” I replied. “I’d just met him this evening. I served him some hors d’oeuvres.”
Detective Stewart studied me for a long time after I said this, as if he were debating the veracity of my statement. Finally, he wrote something in his little battered black notebook. No doubt something like, “Suspect is unstable and unreliable.” I was now officially nervous. Unfortunately, when I get nervous I tend to get “chatty,” which explains why I added, “He seemed particularly fond of the crab cakes.”
Detective Stewart frowned. After a long pause he said, “Are you trying to be flip, Ms. Parker?”
“No,” I mumbled, embarrassed.
“All right. How did Mr. Ramsey seem to you tonight?”
“Well, having never met him before, I really couldn’t say.”
“I understand that, but why don’t you just give me your general impression of his behavior this evening.”
As I’d been raised a strict Catholic, it had been ingrained in me not to speak ill of the dead. My personal view was that Gerald Ramsey was a self-important, controlling bastard, but I opted for a more sedate version. “He seemed to be enjoying himself.”
My evasion did not go unnoticed. Detective Stewart leaned as far back as the wooden chair would allow. Raising his left eyebrow slightly, he said, “Come now, Ms. Parker. This isn’t a cocktail party where it isn’t polite to gossip.” Clearly he and I went to completely different kinds of cocktail parties. “This is a murder investigation,” he continued, as if addressing a particularly slow child. “I need absolute honesty, not polite double-talk. Now, if you can’t do that, we can continue this conversation at another time and in another place.”
I was relieved that he hadn’t said “downtown.” If he had, my strained nerves would surely have given way to a fit of giggles. I had seen “downtown” on my ride in yesterday. It consisted of four antiques stores, three gourmet bakeries, two garden centers, and more boutiques than you could shake a credit card at. It certainly wasn’t the kind of atmosphere that inspired fear, unless maybe you were a recovering shopaholic.
Nevertheless, something about his tone got under my skin. I sat up a bit straighter and looked him directly in the eye. “Fine, you want my opinion of the man? I’ll tell you. He struck me as a controlling, disagreeable, pompous ass. I don’t know what he was like on the other nights of his life, but that’s how he was on his last.”