Frank returned with the glass of water and set it on the table in front of Laura, who took a drink.
I waited.
“A while back,” she continued, “I came home with a black eye. Travis and I had an argument.” She paused. “Well, actually, I won’t lie... he hit me for no good reason. My m-mother was furious. She wanted to press charges against Travis, but I told her I loved him and I wouldn’t cooperate.”
Laura took another sip of water.
“Shortly after that, she rented a room out to that woman. At the time I couldn’t understand why — we didn’t need the money.”
“Did you know the Schultz woman was convicted of murder?” I asked.
She shook her head, then she nodded, “Not at first. But I found out later.”
“Your mother brought this woman in to kill Travis Wykert,” I said flatly.
“No!” Laura said sharply, “That’s not true!”
“Then what is?”
She took a deep breath and exhaled. “Pamela Schultz is my m-mother.”
“What?” Frank and I said.
“My natural m-mother.”
Frank and I exchanged wide-eyed glances.
“How did you find out?” I asked.
“I think I always suspected. But I knew for sure the moment I saw Pamela Schultz... and my own eyes looked back at me.”
Laura told us that she had confronted her adoptive mother who said that she and Pam were best friends in high school. After graduation Pam got married and moved away. A year later when Pam came to visit Louise — who herself had gotten married — she had a new baby. But Pam didn’t seem happy. Pam asked Louise to take care of the newborn while she visited another friend. It was a few days later that Louise heard Pam had killed her husband.
“So my m-mother... Louise Harris... kept me as her own,” Laura said, “and never told me about any of it... until my real mother came around...”
The room fell silent.
“Why did she come around?” I asked, finally.
“To try to talk some sense into me.”
“About Travis abusing you?”
“Yes.”
Frank asked, “Why was Travis so pissed off when he came to see you this morning?”
Laura winced. “He wanted me to get an abortion. I told him I wouldn’t.”
“Did your mother know you were pregnant?” I asked.
“Which one?”
Frank rolled his eyes.
“Either,” I said.
“Well, they both knew after he started yelling about it.”
“Then what happened?” I asked.
“When Travis hit me, Pamela attacked him. But he threw her off. Then Travis looked back at me with such hatred that I was really frightened... I was scared for me, and the baby! I grabbed the nearest thing I could get my hands on, a trophy I had given my m-mother...”
Laura stared at her hands. “Funny,” she said, “a decision you make in a split second can change the rest of your life... or somebody else’s...”
She looked up at me with eyes that pierced me.
“Don’t you see?” she said, pleadingly, “I had no choice. I couldn’t get an abortion.”
She shook her head. “No... there was just no way I was going to do that. After all... that would be murder.”
It was 8:45 that evening when I stood with Frank on the steps of the Public Safety Building, watching the three women get into the backseat of a squad car.
We let them go. For now.
“I have a feeling,” I said slowly, “that we may never solve this one. Hell. Maybe I should have been tougher on ’em.”
The car door slammed shut.
“Know what I think?” Frank said.
“What?”
“I think that each of those women thinks that she really did it...”
The car pulled away from the curb.
“...that for one moment, in front of the fireplace, the urge to kill Travis Wykert entered all of their minds... and then it didn’t matter whose hand actually held the trophy.”
I looked at Frank. “But if you had to pick one, who would it be?”
He looked at me, shrugged. “Who cares who killed Travis Wykert?”
We watched the squad car, until it disappeared into one of those magnificent sunsets Mark Twain wrote about.
“Not me,” I said.
Then we went back into the station.
A Cruise to Forget
Before he signed on as medical officer aboard the Carnival Fun Ship Fantasy, Dr. Tom Swayze had interned at Cook County Hospital. At first, the excitement of working in the notorious Chicago emergency room exhilarated him, made him feel indispensable and important; but, in time, the incessant array of blood and pain, torn tissue and red tape, began to chip away at him, and one day the thirty-one-year-old bachelor woke up feeling that if he didn’t get out of that Dante’s Inferno of an E.R. soon, he would be the next patient admitted, strapped to a gurney and shuttled off to the nearest psychiatric unit.
When a former colleague approached him to work for the Carnival line, Tom eagerly “jumped ship” and turned in his hospital resignation. The idea of sun and snorkeling and shipboard romances was irresistibly seductive — fun, even glamorous activities he’d never had time for in his current life.
But after four years of sun and snorkeling and shipboard romances, Dr. Tom Swayze — his hair sun-lightened to the color of a sandy tropical beach, his boyish, round-as-a-coconut face handsomely tanned — woke up one day feeling that if he didn’t get out off this ship soon, they’d be wheeling him down the gangway, strapped to a gurney and shuttled off to the nearest psychiatric unit.
Shipboard life, he found, was incredibly boring, and this latest cruise was no exception. The Fantasy was about to leave Port Canaveral, Florida, for a four-day trip to Nassau, and out of two thousand passengers only three had bothered to look him up in his office adjacent the infirmary on the Main Deck. Two were a husband and wife, Anthony and Margaret Vane, who the doctor found seated in his outer office after coming back from the pharmacy.
The husband was perhaps in his early fifties, suavely handsome, already deeply tanned, with dark, slicked-back hair in the time-honored Valentino fashion, and dark, deep-set eyes hooded with apparent concern. He was wearing tailored tan linen slacks and a silk cream-colored shirt, open at the neck, his black chest hair curling out; his left hand sported an expensive gold watch and a gold ring with a diamond that was no larger than the knuckle it rode.
Seated next to the aptly named Mr. Vane, the wife was a bundle of twitches and tics. Perhaps fifteen or even twenty years older than her husband, she had been beautiful once, but her face had been ravaged by one too many lifts. She, too, was expensively dressed, wearing a white pants suit with gaudy silver rhinestones and too much jewelry.
“Margaret, I’m afraid, has misplaced her medication,” Anthony Vane said, after introducing his wife and himself to the doctor. There was mild irritation in his tone, but Vane seemed, for the most, anxious, genuinely worried for his companion’s welfare.
“I’m so sorry, dear,” she said to him, her body moving in jerky, bird-like fashion. “I’m afraid I’m getting forgetful in my old age.”
Vane slipped his hand in hers. “You? Never... But it was hectic at the hotel — we stayed overnight at Cape Canaveral, and I blame myself, really. When she’s feeling good, my wife tends to put her medication out of her mind...”
“That’s understandable,” the doctor said.