Carolyn G. Hart_Henrie O_03 (7 page)

Howard the clown. Howard the kidder. Who kills somebody like that?

But I asked the question anyway. “Did Howard have any enemies? Anyone who disliked him or was angry with him?”

“Enemies—that's a heavy word, Mrs. Collins. I mean, Gail's brother didn't like him. Howard told me about that.” Singletary shrugged. “A lot of people thought Howard came on too strong. But I can't say anybody would have been his enemy.”

“What about the girls he dated before Gail? Anyone who might have been jealous?”

Singletary's gaze was thoughtful. “I don't think so. Howard had dated a bunch of different girls. But as far as I know, he wasn't serious about anybody until he met Gail.”

“How about Gail? Was there another man who might have been angry that she was going to marry Howard?”

“I don't think so.” But his voice wasn't so confident. “At least, not that I know of.”

“Did you see Howard and Gail that night?”

“Howard. Not Gail. He left about seven to pick her up.” These words came quickly, as if they'd been said many times. There was no hesitation, no tension. “I think he said they were going out to dinner. Anyway, I invited Cheryl over for pizza.” He looked again at the framed photo.

Even at a quick glance, I could see Cheryl Singletary's resemblance to the man who'd hurried to help Dennis at the Green Owl last night. Tom Abbott's daughter had the same open, freckled face. Her lips curved in a warm smile.

Singletary's gaze was proud. He nodded toward another photo. “That's our daughter, Cindy.” The little girl had smooth chestnut hair and a narrow face.

Stuart's pleased expression fled. “Anyway, that night Cheryl and I hung out, watched TV. I took her home around eleven. Then, bam, bam, bam, a
knock on the door about six-thirty woke me up. I didn't even know until then that Howard hadn't come in.”

“A two-bedroom apartment?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“So if Howard had wanted to have Gail over for the night, it would have been okay.”

“Sure.” He hesitated briefly, then continued. “Sometimes she spent the night. Sometimes, he stayed at her place.”

“So why Lovers' Lane?”

He stared at me. Something flickered deep in those velvety brown eyes, flickered and was gone.

I asked, “Do you think they went there to make love?”

“I don't know why they went there.”

“Did it surprise you when the police told you where they'd been shot?”

His frown was quick and irritated. “Surprise me? Listen, you can't imagine what it's like. Your roommate shot and killed! I was knocked over. Sick. I don't think I even thought about
where
it happened. It was a nightmare.”

Now I was thoroughly at sea. I pride myself on detecting genuine emotion. As a reporter, I had observed people in every kind of stressful situation. My instinct told me that Singletary's unhesitating answer to my question was truthful.

But that was definitely at odds with the sense of strain at various points in our interview.

What caused the swift swings in Singletary's mood?

“Is this basically what you told Maggie on Wednesday?”

“Yes.” The irritation bubbled close to anger.
“It's what I've always told everybody, ever since it happened.” Now his glare was defiant.

“Is there anything else?”

“No. Believe me, if I knew anything that would have helped, I would have told the cops. I never could figure any reason why it happened. And that's exactly what I told Maggie. I told her it had to be a drifter. Somebody on Lovers' Lane that night, somebody who just wanted to kill people. Anybody. For no reason. Things like that happen sometimes. You read about it all the time. People who are so alone, it's like they're sheathed in ice.” The words were smooth and quick, almost a patter. “They see other people as stick figures. Not real. Somebody like that. Maybe he killed them just to see life end.”

“He?”

His fingers smoothed his mustache. “That's sexist, isn't it? But I can't see a woman doing something like that, walking up to a car with two people sitting there, talking, hell, I don't know, maybe making love, and shooting them dead.”

“So you think the murders of Howard and Gail happened for no reason? Simply because they were in Lovers' Lane the wrong time, the wrong night?”

“Yes. Definitely.” His reedy voice was truculent.

“Did you tell this to Maggie?”

“Yeah. But she said she wanted to keep on looking into it.” His shoulders rose and fell. “So I gave her some names. Gail's family still lives here. Her brother Frank's a lawyer in town.”

“And that's all you told Maggie?”

“That's all I know.” He spoke with finality.

“When did you last see Maggie?”

“After my nine-o'clock Wednesday morning.” His mouth closed into a tight thin line.

I closed my notebook, dropped it in my purse. “Do you know Rita Duffy?”

“Casually. I've seen Rita and Dennis around. The Faculty Club, basketball games. That sort of thing.”

“Do you think she could have killed Maggie?”

He stroked his mustache. “Well, she's pretty volatile, and everybody knows he's a womanizer. So”—he frowned—“maybe it happened like the police think.” A quick frown. “But why would she and Maggie be in Lovers' Lane?”

I opened my mouth, then realized the morning paper had simply reported that Maggie's body had been found in Lovers' Lane and that she had been strangled.

There was no mention that the police believed the murder had occurred elsewhere.

So I simply shrugged as I stood. “I wish I knew, Professor Singletary.”

As I walked out, I glanced at some framed daguerreotypes of the Battle of Gettysburg. I wasn't a collector, but they looked pricey to me. But my last glimpse as the door closed on the beautifully furnished office was dominated by the uneasy expression on the face of the young professor.

 

I pre-empted a monitor in the J-School morgue from one of my students. “Ten minutes, John. I promise.”

“No problem, Mrs. Collins.” John flashed me a grin and moved over to the filing cabinets.

I hadn't intended to come back to the J-School yet. I had other stops I planned to make. But Professor Stuart Singletary had attracted my attention.

He'd been alternately nervous, convincing, uptight, and relaxed.

Of course, it's unnerving to have a close connection to murder. Maybe that's all it was.

And I wondered a hell of a lot about Singletary's expensive clothes and fancy office furnishings. Although I saw no connection between the deaths of Howard Rosen and Gail Voss and Singletary's somewhat surprising affluence, still, it was an odd note, it bugged me, and I wouldn't let it go until I understood.

I punched in Singletary's name.

Good grief, twenty-six stories.

I'd said ten minutes. It took thirty. There were little stories and big ones—scholarship awards, Phi Beta Kappa, awarding of degrees—and then I found the coverage of Singletary's wedding in 1990 to Cheryl Marie Abbott, daughter of Thomas Wheeler Abbott, chairman of the Thorndyke University English department, and Mr. and Mrs. Wendell Blaise Harrison, La Jolla and Chicago.

As I scanned the story and the photos of the wedding reception—flowers and ferns sprouting like the Hollywood version of a rain forest—I was impatient with myself. Of course! I knew where the money came from now. Tom Abbott was not only Stuart Singletary's father-in-law, he was the author of
Listen to Me
, which hit the top of the best-seller charts. So there wasn't any mystery about Singletary's expensive polish. But as long as I was taking the time, I looked over all the entries.

I was almost finished, whipping through the headlines like a gambler shuffling cards when I found a feature by Maggie Winslow that ran in
The Clarion
a month ago. I felt that old flicker of ex
citement that every reporter gets when there's a nugget in all the grit.

Maggie had interviewed Stuart Singletary after he was awarded a grant from the Thorndyke Foundation to edit a literary magazine showcasing faculty writings. Maggie had done an excellent job, capturing Singletary's no doubt genuine enthusiasm for teaching and describing his well-regarded volume of poetry that had been published by the University Press, but, like a good reporter should, she'd also come up with the unusual and odd fact that provided a different perspective on her subject: Stuart Singletary had a black belt in karate and was an accomplished rock climber.

So the nervous young professor who'd known Howard Rosen and Gail Voss was strong, athletic, and gutsy despite the reedy tenor voice and gaudy office.

And he'd not bothered to mention to me his previous in-depth interview with Maggie.

I would remember that.

 

The apartment looked like a garage sale: clothes piled in chairs; rumpled blankets helter-skelter on the single bed; a car's jumper cable jumbled in one corner with a pair of skis and a baseball bat; books stacked on the coffee table, the mantel, the window seat. Newspapers littered the floor. Unwashed dishes loaded the kitchen table, poked out of the sink. The air was close, stale, and tainted by a garbage pail that should have been emptied days ago.

Eric March hadn't shaved. That stubble of beard, dark against his pallor, made him look even younger. The muscles of his face were slack, his eyes red-rimmed and dull. He hunched in the corner
of a worn sofa like a collapsed marionette, his long, thin arms wrapped around bent knees.

It was cold in the apartment, but he wore only a wrinkled T-shirt and age-whitened jeans. He was barefoot.

“…keep thinking the door's going to open and she'll be there, telling me to get with it, hurry, come on. Maggie was always in a hurry. And yet, it's funny, every time I looked at her, it was like the world stood still.” A shudder rippled the length of his body. “Do you understand that?”

Grief was devouring him. “Oh, yes, Eric. I understand,” I said softly.

Most lives are spent like Plato's shadows on the cave wall, ephemeral, unconnected, unconnecting, as vagrant and insubstantial as reflections in water.

But when two minds and souls and bodies truly fuse, a reality like no other is created.

Most people spend their lives seeking that kind of connection. Most never find it.

I was glad for Eric and for Maggie. Even though his life was now bitterly barren, they had broken through the shadows to sunlight.

His sorrow made him look even younger and more vulnerable than he was. But it surprised me a little that the so-cool, so-confident, so-sophisticated Maggie had fallen in love with a young man who still had the awkwardness of early manhood.

“She was—so alive. So alive. And now…” His mouth twisted. “You think that woman killed Maggie?” He began to tremble. “If she did, I'll kill her. I will. I'll get her and I'll take her neck in my hands”—he thrust out his hands, big hands, hands of a basketball player—“and I'll squeeze and squeeze and—”

“Eric!”

Slowly his hands, those big, strong, grasping hands, fell into his lap.

I said quietly, “It may not have been Rita Duffy.”

His head jerked up. “Who else?”

“Maggie was working on a series about those unsolved crimes. Did she say anything to you about that?” I shifted in my chair. I'd forgotten how students make do with furniture. A spring poked against my hip.

Eric kneaded his fist against his prickly cheek. “She was excited.”

I tensed. Maybe this was going to be the moment I learned something about Maggie's thought processes, where she'd been with her research, where she was going.

“Maggie told me she was having a blast working on the series. She said”—Eric's eyes squinted in thought—“she said it made all the difference when you put everything in context, when you got the big picture.”

Everything in context. The big picture.

“That's all she said?”

“She said something about what a difference time made.”

“Do you have any idea what she meant? Which crime she was talking about?”

“No.” His voice was dull.

“But she was excited?”

“Yeah. And God, she was so beautiful when she talked about what she was writing. That's how she always was about writing. Her eyes would light up—” He broke off, stared down at his hands, his face tight with misery.

Misery and grief. But Wednesday night he'd slammed away from his desk, his face reddening with anger.

“Eric, why did you leave the newsroom Wednesday night?”

He was quiet for so long I thought he wasn't going to answer.

But finally, his voice deep and tight and thin, he said, “I was going to find Maggie. I went by her place. She wasn't there. Then I went to her class. I waited, but she didn't come. I didn't know where the hell she was. I looked everywhere. I drove all over town.”

He buried his face in his hands, then slowly raised his head. “If she was screwing that bastard—everybody knows how he gets the girls. Shit, Kitty Brewster's been fucking him since she started work on
The Clarion
. You think she'd get the police beat any other way? She's got the brains of a gerbil, and she writes like English is a second language.”

I shook my head. “Maggie had all the brains and talent and ability in the world. Why would she play Duffy's game?”

He rubbed the back of his hand roughly against his face. “She'd gone out with him a couple of times. Just drinks, she said. She promised me. But Duffy's wife seemed to know. And I was going to—” He drew in a ragged breath, shuddered.

“What were you going to do, Eric?”

“I was crazy. I was so mad—and now…now Maggie's dead and cold and gone forever.” He buried his face in his hands—those big strong hands—and began to sob.