“Oh, I will,” she said. “That may not be quite as much fun, but I’ll tell you.”
Seventeen
In the morning he called Bob Newhouser and caught him at his desk. “I’m putting my report in the mail,” he said. “If there’s anything wrong with Raymond Fred Gartner, it flew under my radar. He comes up lily-white on all my databases, and the neighbor lady gives him a clean bill of health.”
“I’m not surprised. I’ve played golf with him, and you get a pretty good sense of a fellow when you’re out in the sun for eighteen holes. Oh, here’s one you’ll like.”
It was a golf story, and one Newhouser had already told him, but it was no great hardship to hear it again. Doak furnished the requisite laugh, and Newhouser asked if the neighbor lady was anybody he might know.
“Probably,” he said. “Is there anybody in Gallatin County you don’t know?”
“Oh, there’s a few.”
“This one’s a nice proper suburban mommy. Name’s in the report, along with being on the tip of my tongue.”
“Hell of a place for it.”
“Roberta,” he said. “Roberta Ellison.”
“Roberta Ellison. Roberta Ellison.” Then the penny dropped. “Oh, Jesus,” Newhouser said. “Bobbie Jondahl. She married a guy named Ellison, and I could probably come up with his first name if I had to, but I can’t think of a reason to waste any of my remaining brain cells on it.”
“You want to hang on to the ones you’ve got left.”
“Amen to that, brother Doak. He’s from somewhere up in the Panhandle, came down to go to work at Zebulon Industries. Knocked up Bobbie Jondahl and married her, and I gather he’s had the good sense to keep her barefoot and pregnant ever since.”
“She’s pregnant even as we speak.”
“Little Bobbie. Looks like butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, and you can finish that sentence on your own.”
Well, that was interesting.
He weighed his options. One, he could pick up his clipboard and try to time his visit to the young Master Ellison’s nap time, whenever that might be. Two, he could take a proactive approach to his Friendship with Benefits and call Barb. Three, he could stay at his computer and do a little more research, because you never knew what you might need to know.
An hour later he was in the Mykonos Diner, sitting across the table from Sheriff William Radburn.
“I somehow missed breakfast,” Radburn said, “which is an oversight that needs to be corrected. You sure you won’t have something?”
“Just coffee.”
“Why I called, I been thinking some about our girl.”
“Our girl. That would be—”
“Oh, why mention a name in a public place? We’ll call her the lady who exercised the female prerogative and changed her mind.”
“Okay.”
“And there’s no question she did just that, because I heard her say so loud and clear on the tape you brought in. You know, I played that some more.”
“Oh?”
“I asked myself, Billy, is that a change of heart you’re hearing? And what I decided is it’s not. So I got hold of another man whose name I won’t mention just now, but he’s the one told us about the little lady in the first place. Got the ball rolling, is what he did.”
Richard Gonson.
“Now on the tape, she says she went back to him and tried to call it off, and he said it was out of his hands.”
“I remember. He told her she could just not show up.”
“Which, if you think about it, is what she should have done. Why keep a date with some homicidal Yankee if she was just gonna tell him to forget the whole thing? Only reason I can think of is to keep her options open, give herself a chance to decide at the last minute. Stand to reason?”
“I guess.”
“You have to wonder who it was first came up with the idea of link sausages. I don’t guess they give out Nobel prizes for that sort of thing, but the least you could have is a statue of him somewhere. But back to our friend.”
“The man who started it all.”
“Well, I’d have to say she’s the one started it, but he’s the one brought us into it. I asked him about this last conversation, the one where she asks him to hit the Undo button.”
“It never happened?”
“Nope. Not to say you can take this fellow’s word to the bank, but why would he lie about it?”
“Well, if she did have that conversation with him, and then he didn’t bother to pass the word to us...”
“Point taken. Still, I got the impression this was the absolute first time he was hearing about calling things off.”
“Which would reinforce your idea that she was keeping options open, and didn’t completely change her mind until she got into my car. You think it was the car that queered the deal?”
“ ‘Guy can’t afford a better car than this, how can you trust him to get away with murder?’ Next time maybe we’ll put you in a more suitable vehicle. If you hadn’t helped put a perfectly good automobile dealer in Raiford, I bet he could help us out. You want a refill on the coffee?”
“No, I’m good.”
“What I’m thinking, her calling it off don’t convince me she’s in love with her husband all over again. Who’s to say she doesn’t still want him dead?”
He didn’t much like where this was going. But if the sheriff was thinking along these lines, he was just as glad he got to hear it. “There must be a whole lot of women who’d just as soon be widows,” he said. “And husbands who’d love to be single again without the expense of divorce. What’s the line? ‘You can’t always get what you want.’ ”
“You’re saying there’s a big difference between having an urge and acting on it.”
“Isn’t there? What percentage of people take the action?”
“But she already took it. Shied away at the last minute, but until then she was on board. I’ll grant you there’s a chance she genuinely changed her mind, but there’s at least as good a chance she didn’t.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning maybe she called you off because she found somebody else she was more comfortable working with. Her boyfriend, say.”
“She’s got a boyfriend?”
“That shocks you? ‘By God, it’s not bad enough she wants to kill her husband, but don’t tell me she’d go so far as to cheat on him!’ ”
“Nobody mentioned a boyfriend,” he said. “That’s all. Has she got one?”
“That’s something we ought to know, wouldn’t you say? I was thinking there ought to be a way for you to earn some Gallatin County dollars.”
“You want me to find out if she’s got a boyfriend.”
“Be good to know, Doak. Be good to see what else you can find out about her. Now you’re the one person who can’t sit down and interrogate her, on account of she already knows you as Jersey City Frank. You’re shaking your head.”
“For no good reason,” he admitted. “Jersey City’s in Hudson County, and we’ve been saying Frank’s from—”
“Bergen County, and isn’t that what they call a distinction that’s not a difference? Never mind, I stand corrected. The point is you can’t ask her questions. In fact you’d best keep your distance from the woman.”
“That was my intention.”
“But you can still dig around without getting into her field of vision, can’t you? I don’t want to use one of my men, mainly because I want to keep this on the down-low, but that’s not the only reason. You’ve been in my office. You see a whole lot of bright bulbs in the chandelier?”
“Well...”
“And if there’s no boyfriend in the woodpile, I just can’t shake the feeling that she might just try and do it herself. Mix some rat poison in with his Raisin Bran, or find some miracle ingredient that’ll give him a heart attack. None of which she could possibly get away with, not with her having established herself as a person of interest even before there’s a case to be a person of interest in. That husband of hers dies of anything, any damn thing from galloping diarrhea to a flash flood, she’ll be hearing her Miranda rights before the body gets to room temperature. Which is fine from our point of view, but it doesn’t do a lot for George, does it?”