“She was beaten to death with a framing hammer. She had one bruise on her shoulder where she probably flinched up.” I demonrated with my own shoulder. “And all the rest the damage was to her head. That seems awfully careful for a deranged killer.”
“Derangement can be methodical,” Susan said.
I nodded and drank some champagne. I put some salmon caviar on a triangle of toast and spooned a little creme fraiche on top. I held it toward Susan, who leaned forward and bit off the point. I ate the rest.
“And,” I said, “despite what people think, there aren’t that many homicidal maniacs roaming the streets. It’s never the best guess.”
“True,” Susan said. “But it is possible.”
“But it’s not a useful hypothesis, because it offers no useful way to proceed. The cops have already screened anybody with a record on this kind of thing. Beyond that all you can do is wait, and hope to catch him next time. Or the time after that.”
The fire softened the room as we talked. Fire was the heart of the house, Frank Lloyd Wright had said. And if he didn’t know, who would.
“But,” Susan said after she thought about it, “if you assume that it’s not a madman…”
“Madperson,” I said.
Susan put a hand to her forehead.
“What could I have been thinking?” she said. “If you assume it is not a madperson, then you can begin to do what you know how to do. Look for motive, that sort of thing.”
“Yes,” I said.
Susan still had half a glass of champagne, but she added a splash from the bottle to reinvigorate it. While she did that I got up and added two logs to the fire.
“Still there’s something else,” Susan said.
“Just because you’re a shrink,” I said, “you think you know everything.”
“I think I know you,” she said, “and it has nothing to do with my profession.”
“Good point,” I said.
I drank some champagne and ate salmon roe, and thought how to phrase it. Susan was quiet.
“It’s that there’s an, I don’t know, an official version of everything. But the objective data doesn’t quite match it. I don’t mean it contradicts it, but…” I spread my hands.
“For instance,” Susan said.
“Well, the home. It’s lovely and without character. It’s like a display, except for his bedroom; it’s as personless as a chain hotel.”
“His bedroom?”
“Yeah. That’s another thing. They have separate bedrooms separated by a sitting room. His shows signs of use-television set, some books on the bedside table, TV Guide. But hers…” I shook my head. “The kids’ rooms are like hers. Officially designated children’s rooms, and appropriately decorated. But no sense that anyone ever smoked a joint in there or read skin magazines with a flashlight under the covers.”
“What else?”
“He goes to the office every day early, stays late. There’s nothing to do. His secretary, who is, by the way, a knockout, is catching up on her reading.”
“This is subtle,” Susan said.
“Yeah, it is, though it’s not quite as subtle when you’re experiencing it. He talks about his children without any sense that now and then they might, or might have sometime, driven him up the wall. They’re perfect. She was perfect. His love was all-encompassing. His devotion is unflagging.”
“And there’s a legal limit on the snow here,” Susan said.
I nodded. “Yeah.”
“That Camelotian hindsight is not unusual in grief,” Susan said.
“I know,” I said. “I’ve seen some grief myself.”
“It’s a form of denial.”
“I know. What I’m trying to get hold of is how long the denial has been going on.”
“Yes,” Susan said.
“And what’s being denied,” I said.
Susan nodded. The fire hissed as some sap boiled out of the sawn end of one of the logs. The salmon caviar was gone. The champagne was getting low.
“So what are you going to do?” Susan said.
“Start from the other end.”
“You mean look into her past?”
“Yeah. Where she was born. Where she went to school, that stuff. Maybe something will turn up.”
“Wouldn’t the police have done that?” Susan said.
“On a celebrity case like this, with an uncertain victim, maybe,” I said. “But this victim is a well-known pillar of the community. Her life’s an open book. They haven’t the money or the reason to chase her back to her childhood.”
“So why will you do it?” Susan said.
“I don’t know what else to do,” I said.
“You want to eat?”
Susan drank some of her champagne and looked at me over the rim of her glass.
“How attractive was Tripp’s secretary, exactly?” Susan said.
“Quite,” I said.
Susan smiled.
“How nice,” she said. “Perhaps after we’ve eaten buffalo tenderloin and sipped a dessert wine on the couch and watched the fire settle, you’ll want to think about which of us is, or is not, going to ball you in the bedroom until sunrise.”
“You’re far more attractive than she is, Buffalo gal,” I said.
“Oh, good,” she said.
We were quiet as I put the meat on the grill and put the corn pudding in the oven.
“Sunrise?” I said.
“The hyperbole of jealous passion,” Susan said.
chapter eleven
I SAT WITH Lee Farrell in the near empty squad room at Homicide. Quirk’s office was at the far end of the room. The glass door had Commander stenciled on it in black letters: Quirk wasn’t there. There was only one cop in the squad room, a heavy bald guy with a red face and a big belly, who had a phone shrugged up against his ear and his feet up on the desk. A cigarette with a long ash hung from his mouth and waggled a little as he talked. Ash occasionally fluttered off the end and flaked onto his shirtfront. He paid it no mind. He had his gun jammed inside his belt in front, and it was obviously digging into him while he sat. Two or three times he shifted to try and ease it, and finally he took it out and put it on his desk. It was a Glock.
“Everybody got Glocks now?” I said.
“Yeah,” Farrell said. “Department’s trying to stay even with the drug dealers.”
“Succeeding?”
Farrell laughed. “Kids got Glocks,” he said. “Fucking drug dealers have close air support.”
The fat cop continued to talk. He was animated, waving his right hand about as he talked. When the cigarette burned down, he spat it out, stuck another one in his mouth and lit it with one hand.
“The background stuff on Olivia says she was born in Alton, South Carolina, in 1948,” I said.
“Yeah.”
“Father and mother deceased, no siblings.”
“Yeah.”
“BA, Duke, 1969; MA, Boston University, 1982.”
Farrell nodded. While I talked he unwrapped a stick of gum and shoved it in his mouth. He didn’t offer me any.
“Taught Freshman English classes part-time at Shawmut College, gave an Art Appreciation course at Boston Adult Ed in Low Country Realism.”
“Whatever that is,” Farrell said.
“Vermeer,” I said, “Rembrandt, those guys.”
“Sure,” Farrell said. He chewed his gum gently.
“Worked on the last couple of Stratton campaigns, volunteered on the United Fund, and a bunch of other charities.”
“Okay,” Farrell said, “so you can read a report.”
“And that’s it?”
“You got the report,” Farrell said.
“Anybody go down to Alton?”
Farrell stared at me.
“You heard about the state of the economy around here?” he said. “I gotta work extra detail to fucking buy ammunition. They’re not going to send anybody to Alton, South Carolina, for crissake.”
“Just asking,” I said.
“I made some phone calls,” Farrell said. “They’ve got a birth certificate on her. The Carolina Academy for Girls has her attendance records. Duke and BU both have her transcripts.”