“And the bodies?”
“Overboard.”
“Burial at sea,” he said. He was silent for a moment, and then he said, “She always loved the water. When she—” and his voice broke. “When she was a little girl,” he said, back in control again, “we spent our summers at the lake, and you couldn’t get her out of the water. I called her a water rat, she would swim all day if we let her. She loved it.”
He asked if I would hold on while he passed on what I’d reported to his wife. He must have covered the mouthpiece with his hand because I didn’t hear anything at all for several minutes. Then she came on and said, “Mr. Scudder? I want to thank you for all you’ve done.”
“I’m sorry to bring you this kind of news, Mrs. Hoeldtke.”
“I must have known,” she said. “I must have known ever since it happened. Don’t you think so? On some level, I think I must have known all along.”
“Perhaps.”
“At least I don’t have to worry anymore,” she said. “At least now I know where she is.”
Hoeldtke came on again to thank me, and to ask if he owed me money. I told him he didn’t. He asked if I was sure of that and I said I was.
I hung up, and Willa said, “That was quite a story. You found out all that today?”
“Last night and this morning. I called him this morning to let him know it looked bad. I wanted to let him prepare himself and his wife before I gave him the details.”
“ ‘Your mother is on the roof.’ “
I looked at her.
“You don’t know that story? A man’s on a business trip and his wife calls him and tells him the cat is dead. And he has a fit. ‘How can you say something flat out like that, you could give a person a heart attack. What you have to do is break it to a person gently. You don’t call up and say in one breath that the cat climbed up on the roof and fell off and died. First you call up and tell me the cat is on the roof. Then you call a second time and say people are trying to get the cat down, the Fire Department and all, but it doesn’t look good. Then, by the time you call me a third time, I’ve prepared myself. Then you can tell me the cat is dead.’ “
“I think I can see where this is going.”
“Of course, because I led off with the punch line. He goes on a business trip and he gets another phone call from his wife, and he says hello, how are you, what’s new, and she says, ‘Your mother is on the roof.’ “
“I guess that’s what I was doing. Telling him his daughter was on the roof. Were you able to follow the whole thing by hearing one side of the conversation?”
“I think so. How did you find all this out? I thought you went looking for a crook who used to know Eddie.”
“I did.”
“How did that lead to Paula?”
“Luck. He didn’t know anything about Eddie, but he knew people who took off the pirates in a dope deal. He put me on to somebody, and I asked the right questions, and I learned what I had to learn.”
“Pirates on the open sea,” she said. “It sounds like something out of an old movie.”
“That’s what Hoeldtke said.”
“Serendipity.”
“How’s that?”
“Serendipity. Isn’t that what you call it when you look for one thing and find something else?”
“It happens all the time in the kind of work I do. But I didn’t know there was a word for it.”
“Well, there is. What about all that business with her phone and answering machine? And all her clothes and things moved out, but the bed linens left.”
“None of it amounted to anything. My guess is she took a lot of her clothes along on the weekend, and probably had other things stowed at an apartment her boyfriend was maintaining. When Flo Edderling went into her room, it looked empty to her, with nothing much visible except for the bedclothing. Then, while the room was open, one of the other tenants probably appropriated whatever was left, thinking that Paula had left it behind on purpose. The answering machine was left on because she thought she was coming back. None of it turned out to be a clue to anything, but it kept me playing with the case, and then I lucked out and found the solution almost by accident. Or whatever you called it.”
“Serendipity. Don’t you like the coffee? Is it too strong?”
“There is no such thing. And it’s fine.”
“You’re not drinking it.”
“I’m sipping it. I’ve had gallons of coffee already today, it’s been that kind of a day. But I’m enjoying it.”
“I guess I don’t have too much confidence in it,” she said. “After all those months of instant decaf.”
“Well, this is a big improvement.”
“I’m glad. So you didn’t learn anything more about Eddie? And what was on his mind?”
“No,” I said. “But then I didn’t really expect to.”
“Oh.”
“Because I already knew.”
“I don’t follow you.”
“Don’t you?” I got to my feet. “I already knew what was on Eddie’s mind, and what happened to him. Mrs. Hoeldtke just now told me that she knew all along that her daughter was dead, that the knowledge had to have existed on some level. I knew about Eddie on a more conscious level than the one she was talking about, but I didn’t want to know about it. I tried to shut out the knowledge, and I went out there hoping I’d learn something that would prove me wrong.”
“Wrong about what?”
“Wrong about what was eating at him. Wrong about how he got killed.”
“I thought it was autoerotic asphyxiation.” She frowned. “Or are you saying that it was actually suicide? That he really had the intention of killing himself?”
“ ‘Your mother is on the roof.’ “ She looked at me. “I can’t break it gently, Willa. I know what happened and I know why. You killed him.”
18
“It was the chloral hydrate,” I said. “And the funny thing is it wouldn’t have flagged anybody’s attention but mine. He only had a very small dose of chloral in him, not enough to have any pronounced effect on him. Certainly not enough to kill him.
“But he was a sober alcoholic, and that meant he shouldn’t have any chloral hydrate in him. As far as Eddie was concerned, sobriety was unequivocal. It meant no alcohol and no mood-changing or sedative drugs. He’d tried dicking around with marijuana shortly after he came into the program and he knew that didn’t work. He wouldn’t take something to help him sleep, not even one of those over-the-counter preparations, let alone a real drug like chloral hydrate. If he couldn’t sleep he’d have stayed awake. Nobody ever died from lack of sleep. That’s what they tell you when you first get sober, and God knows I heard it enough myself. ‘Nobody ever died from lack of sleep.’ Sometimes I wanted to throw a chair at the person who said it, but it turned out they were right.”
She was standing with her back to the refrigerator, one hand pressed palm-first against the white surface.
“I’d wanted to find out if he died sober,” I went on. “It seemed important to me, maybe because it would have been his one victory in a life that had been nothing but a chain of small defeats. And when I learned about the chloral I couldn’t let go of it. I went up to his apartment and I gave it a pretty decent search. If he’d had any pills there, I think I would have found them. Then I came downstairs and found a bottle of chloral hydrate in your medicine cabinet.”
“He said he couldn’t sleep, that he was going nuts. He wouldn’t take a drink or a bottle of beer so I gave him a couple of drops in a cup of coffee.”
“That’s no good, Willa. I gave you a chance to tell me that after I searched his place.”