“Hello, Mrs. Branigan,” I said again.
This time she heard me.
She looked up with the eyes of an old woman, a certain bitterness, a certain resignation playing in the mysteries of the irises, like secrets glimpsed through vapors.
She nodded.
“How are you doing?” I asked.
“Oh,” she said.
Given the circumstances that was a legitimate answer.
“Dr. Chamales wanted to see me.”
“Yes,” she said.
“Where’s Mr. Branigan?”
“Sleeping. The hospital fixed up some rooms for us. Nice of them.”
“Yes, it was.”
“She talked to us for the first time last night.”
Neither of us knew how to speak to each other with any degree of comfort. We’d been enemies too long.
“I hope you can help her,” she said and started crying abruptly. The suddenness of her tears alarmed me. What had Jane told them?
I started over to Mrs. Branigan and was about to put a hand on her shoulder or say something soft, if meaningless, but the old self-consciousness returned and I just stood there, helpless, until my feet took over and led me out of there.
Behind Dr. Chamales was a poster of Albert Schweitzer holding a starving African child. Next to that poster was a signed photograph of Dr. Chamales shaking hands with President Reagan. Go figure.
Chamales was a tanned man — you suspected he vacationed a lot — with a flat, strong grip and a flat, strong face. He had a corncob pipe in the corner of his mouth, a pipe that never got lit and showed no signs of tobacco residue in the bowl. Probably it was a pacifier.
The first two minutes he explained several things in an agreeable and unpatronizing way about trauma and shock and repression. Then he said, “She’s very confused.”
He was maybe fifty, Dr. Chamales, but right now, despite his tan and his trim tennis-club body, he seemed to slump in his chair. He sighed.
Obviously he wanted to say something. I had to help him.
“Do you think she killed Stephen Elliot?”
He said, “Yes.”
“Shit,” I said.
“I’m sorry.”
“Did she tell you that she did?”
“In so many words. At least, I don’t see what other conclusion could be drawn. She... she broke through shock last night and began talking.”
“And?”
“Well, what happened that afternoon was this. She called Elliot’s apartment around dawn, found him home, and went over there. He surprised her by letting her in. They apparently got drunk together. She’d been taking sleeping pills and tranquilizers during the previous twenty-four hours, which means the alcohol could very well have induced a condition not unlike psychosis. About twenty minutes before she phoned you, she ‘came to,’ as she phrased it, standing over his dead body with the gun in her hand.”
“But if she was drunk—”
He pursed his lips. “Diminished capacity? I realize you’re looking for legal angles here, but I can’t be very helpful, I’m afraid.”
“So it wouldn’t be uncommon for somebody in her state to repress knowledge of the actual killing?”
“Not at all. Most of us have a difficult time admitting to even minor faults. Admitting to being a murderer — well, that would be very, very tough.”
I nodded.
No wonder Mrs. Branigan had looked the way she had.
“May I see her?”
“I’ve cleared it with the police for you to spend ten minutes with her. I feel you can help her. She has a very high regard for you. Maybe you can help her find the strength to — face reality, if you understand.”
I stood up. He pushed out his hand. “I’m sorry,” he said.
There wasn’t much else to say.
Her hair had been brushed to blonde radiance and her makeup had been applied artfully. If you didn’t look carefully at the blue eyes, you wouldn’t guess she was doing anything but resting there in the white empty room.
She sat in a cane chair next to a window. She wore a tailored blue robe and hospital slippers. She managed to look both very old and very young.
I had almost reached her before she turned to look up at me.
She said, simply, “Sorry I got you involved in all this.”
“I know.”
“They think I killed him.”
I nodded.
“The thing is, maybe I did.” Her cheeks, usually gaunt, looked puffy from tears. Her patrician nose was red from crying too. “The funny thing is, I don’t know if I did or not.”
“You feel up to some questions?”
“Dwyer, I—”
“You don’t need to say anything.” I leaned in and kissed her on the forehead. She took my hand and held it, keeping me in my awkward position.
“I really treated you badly, with Stephen and all.”
I sat on the window ledge and looked at her. “I’ve been thinking about that. I don’t think it was all your fault. I was pretty crazy from my divorce, pretty demanding—”
Watching her then, I realized for the first time in two years of knowing her that she was actually a frail sort of woman. Her golden looks misled you into attributing to her a self-confidence she didn’t possess. I’d loved her so long that somehow I’d never managed to just like her. But I did right now. I liked her very much.
“I don’t think you killed him,” I said.
“I’m afraid you’re in a minority.”
“When you called me — when I met you in the park — you never said you killed him. You only said he was dead.”
She tipped her head into her hand, shook golden hair. “I just don’t remember—”
I asked her to reconstruct the events surrounding Elliot’s death. The details fit exactly what she’d told Dr. Chamales. Especially the part about “waking up” with the gun in her hand, standing over Elliot’s body. I’d spent enough time getting lost in a liquor bottle to know how things like that could happen.
When she finished, I said, “I have to ask you something that’s going to make us both feel very bad.”
“What?”
“I found a photograph of you with a man named Davies.”
“Oh, God.”
“I—”
I had to give her a long and painful moment to gather herself.
“I don’t imagine I’ll ever seem the same to you now that you’ve seen that,” she said finally, almost whispering.
“Who took the picture?”
“You know who took it.”
“Elliot?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“He said it would make Davies feel better. Davies always talked about me to Stephen — how attractive he found me. I—” She shook her head again. “For several weeks I refused to do it. But Stephen kept after me — you don’t know how he could work on me.”
But I knew what she was talking about, of course. There’s a certain kind of relationship you get trapped into sometimes that you’ll do anything to maintain. I’d had a few of them myself. It wasn’t hard to believe that Elliot, who was persuasive enough anyway, talked her into it.
“Anyway, I let Davies pretend that he’d lured me into his motel room. Nothing happened, really. We just took our clothes off and held each other — he was pretty drunk — and then—”
“This was at a place called the Palms?”
“Did Stephen ever tell you what he did with the snapshot?”
“Not really.”
“He blackmailed Davies with it.”
I guess I’d expected her to act shocked. Instead, she said, “I wondered about that. He asked me to see other clients that way too — but I never gave in. That was one of the things we argued about.”
“He found other people to help him.” I told her about the photo with Lucy.