Death Will Extend Your Vacation (16 page)

Jimmy didn’t know about the showdown between Barbara and Oscar at the party. Someone was bound to tell the cops. It would look bad, taken with the fact that she’d parked the car half a mile away.

“I’ll drive you,” Cindy said. “Let me get my keys and throw something on, I won’t be a minute.”

“Karen or I could drive you,” Lewis said. “Karen?”

He looked at her, and so did I. Karen didn’t answer. She looked stunned. Her eyes darted back and forth, as if she were reading off a teleprompter. What was she thinking? I wondered if Lewis knew or guessed that Karen and Oscar were lovers. He had a puzzled frown on his face. If I’d killed Oscar, I would have put on just that frown.

“Maybe we should all go over there,” Jeannette said. “I feel so bad for Corky.”

“Why Corky in particular?” I asked.

“He was her brother. Didn’t you know?”

“I didn’t.”

“Neither did I,” Stewie said.

“I did,” Stephanie said. “Half brother. She’s a lot younger. They didn’t like to make a big thing of it.”

“Actually, they owned the house together,” Karen said. “It was his money, but her name is on the deed.”

How did she know? Pillow talk? I watched her guarded expression and couldn’t tell if she was devastated or relieved.

“There you go,” Phil said with a nasty sneer. He pulled his bathrobe tighter around him and helped himself to coffee. “She probably inherits a bundle. All in the family, and she’s got the motive. It has nothing to do with us.”

“The police will want to talk to all of us soon enough,” Cindy said, coming back into the room fully dressed in jeans and a plain black T-shirt with a gray sweatshirt tied loosely by its arms around her neck. “Once they hear about the party last night, they’ll want our fingerprints, too. That party will be a headache and a half for them.”

“They’ll track down everybody who went to the party?” Stephanie asked.

“If they can.” Cindy turned to me and Jimmy, jangling her ring of keys on one finger. “Ready? Let’s go.”

As we followed her down the stairs, I heard Phil say, “Who does she think she is? Anyhow, that makes the second body Barbara has found. I think the three of them are in trouble, not the rest of us.”

What a skunk.

In the car, Cindy and I filled Jimmy in on the fight between Barbara and Oscar. Then we had to persuade him that since Oscar was dead already, getting fighting mad at him was neither necessary nor wise. Jimmy has pretty good anger management skills. I could see him shutting the fury down.

“Maybe we shouldn’t have told you. The cops are bound to hear about it. Phil, for one, was in the skinny dipping contingent. If you didn’t know about it, you didn’t have a motive.”

“No,” Jimmy said. “I’m glad you did. I might have had trouble controlling my reaction if I’d learned about it from the cops.”

“If you think the detectives won’t realize you’re her knight in shining armor,” Cindy said, “you’d better not count on it.”

Jimmy, in the front seat beside her, turned his head to stare.

“Her knight?”

“Aren’t you?”

“Hell, no.”

I couldn’t help laughing.

“Barbara would kill him,” I told Cindy, “if he thought she needed him to fight her battles.”

“But he does anyway. He’s galloping to her rescue now.”

“That’s different. We’re being supportive.”

“If you say so,” Cindy said. “Tell us what she said on the phone.”

“She decided to take an early run along the beach,” Jimmy said. “Now you’ve told me about last night, I can see why she parked at Dedhampton Beach. She didn’t want to see him again.”

“And now she won’t,” Cindy said. “Believe me, that will interest the detectives.”

“She’ll tell them that herself,” Jimmy said. “It would be ridiculous to think she’d kill to avoid a little social awkwardness.”

“It was more than that,” Cindy said.

“I’m not minimizing what happened,” Jimmy said. “But Barbara wouldn’t fan the flames. She’d try to let it go.”

“The program says that if you pray for someone you resent every day for two weeks, the resentment will lift. I bet you anything she was praying for Oscar’s health and happiness and prosperity, and that she’s already told the cops that.”

“They’ll think she’s nuts,” Cindy said.

“I know,” he said.

Except if Detective Butler was in the program, she’d understand. If Cindy was blowing smoke about that, I wished she’d stop.

“Barbara wasn’t going to stop at Oscar’s,” Jimmy said, “but as she passed the house, she saw what she thought was a pile of clothes heaped up at the foot of those steps that go from the deck down to the beach. She went over to take a look, and it was him.”

“Last time she thought it was a log,” I said. “I hate to say that rat bastard Phil was right, but the cops are not going to like the coincidence. Finding one body is bad enough, but finding two will make them very, very suspicious.”

“They might reopen the first investigation,” Cindy said.

“The two deaths must be related,” Jimmy said. “But Barbara had no reason to kill Clea. None of us did. We’d barely met her. The cops already know that. But a lot of the others had motives.”

“Don’t forget opportunity,” Cindy said. “The law doesn’t take motive to court. It takes opportunity and means. Evidence.”

“Everybody in the area has access to the beach,” I said. “Both Clea and Oscar were killed early in the morning. They should look for somebody who gets up early. That lets us out.”

“But it doesn’t help Barbara.”

“How did she know he was dead?”

“She said someone hit him on the head.”

“Sounds messy,” I said.

“The blow could have broken his skull,” Cindy said, “or started internal bleeding. You wouldn’t necessarily know by looking.”

“You mean he could have been alive when she found him?” Jimmy sounded appalled. “Oh, my poor Barbara.” He thought for a second, then shook his head. “She didn’t mention blood or brains. If she’d seen them, she’d have told me.”

“We don’t know enough.” Cindy said. “No point speculating.”

“You seem to know a lot about this kind of thing,” I said.

“Oh, I’ve seen the inside of a lot of emergency rooms.”

She meant in her drinking and drugging days, no doubt.

“So have I,” I said. “So have I.”

“Never mind that!” Jimmy’s head bobbed as he rocked back and forth in his seat with impatience. “Let’s just get there. I can’t stand the thought of her sitting there alone with the body.”

By the time we arrived at Oscar’s, everybody in the house had trooped out onto the deck with Barbara. Someone had flung a sheet over the corpse. Uniformed officers were lifting the sheet gently as we scrambled over the dunes and approached the house. Cindy had parked her car down the road from Oscar’s, far enough so we wouldn’t get turned back. I recognized Officer Mike from the day we found Clea’s body. No detectives yet. We were lucky we’d beat higher authority to the scene. A white wooden trellis with morning glories climbing up it lay flat against the wall right next to the deck, its crossed diagonal slats providing footholds. Barbara swung over the rail of the deck and clambered backward to the ground and into Jimmy’s arms before the cops could stop her.

Shep leaned over the railing. I’d noticed his tendency to corral people. He beckoned and yipped, trying to get her back. Officer Mike swept him out of the way. Jimmy looked up at the cop over the top of Barbara’s head.

“Have a heart, Officer,” Jimmy said. “She’s told you everything she knows. We’re not going anywhere until you say so.”

“All right, all right.” Officer Mike flapped a dismissive palm at us and turned away. “Stay put, people!”

The crew at Oscar’s was giving the cops a harder time than our house had when Clea died. They popped in and out of doors like the cast of an old-fashioned farce. More sense of entitlement to go with the rich-folks’ location on the beach? Longer collective sobriety and therefore a better sense of self-preservation? Whatever.

Corky took advantage of the kerfuffle to sneak away. She puffed and panted as she slid down the dune a hundred yards down the beach and made her way back through the heavy sand at its base to join us. At first I thought her dash for freedom had left her out of breath. But as she got closer, I could see her face was streaked with tears. The heaving breaths demonstrated a barely controlled hysteria.

“They’ve already interviewed her too,” Barbara said, gathering Corky into her arms. “Did you know she was Oscar’s sister?”

Corky rocked and wept.

“Poor bunny,” Barbara crooned. “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.”

“He was always there for me,” Corky sobbed. “He’d say, ‘Big Brother is watching you’.” If she found that line comforting, she’d probably never read George Orwell’s
1984
.

“He was the one who always kept me safe.” Corky’s voice, muffled on Barbara’s shoulder, rose to a wail. “What’ll I do?”

“You don’t have to do anything right this moment,” Barbara said. “And when you do, you’ll take it one second at a time. Go on, let it out. It’s okay to grieve.”

“What’ll I do?” Corky howled. “I’m all alone!”

Barbara’s voice fell into a lullaby rhythm as she continued to rock Corky.

“That’s right, let it out. It’s okay, go ahead and let it out.”

“Ms. Rose, can you spare us a moment, please.” Sergeant Wiznewski stood over us.

I looked over at the house and saw Butler. She stood on the deck, sorting out the remaining housemates with a no-nonsense air.

“Talk to me, Ms. Rose,” Wiznewski said. “It seems you’ve found another body.”

It didn’t take much to uncork Barbara. And when you did, she bubbled up like champagne.

“I didn’t do it on purpose this time either,” she said, “I just happened to be there.”

Jimmy drew her away from Corky and put his arm around her shoulders.

The sergeant held up a meaty palm like a traffic cop.

“Hold it. Let’s get ourselves some privacy, and then you can tell me all about it.”

“Now, look here—” Jimmy began.

“Mr. Cullen, were you present when the deceased was found?”

Jimmy shook his head.

“No, sir.”

“Then you can wait for her here,” Wiznewski told Jimmy. “And you, Mr. Kohler?”

I didn’t much like being known to the police. And I’d gotten used to AA, where my last name stayed safely in my wallet even on the rare occasions when I spilled my guts.

“I just got here, sir,” I said.

“You wait too,” Wiznewski said. “I’ll get to both of you in due course. The deceased was known to you.”

It wasn’t a question.

“Yes, sir.” Jimmy and I spoke together.

“Then I’ll see you later.”

I had lost track of Cindy as soon as we’d arrived at Oscar’s. As we waited for Wiznewski to finish with Barbara, I spotted her in the thick of things. This time she wasn’t hugging Butler. They were arguing. What was with Cindy? What was her agenda? She made my blood heat up, but I didn’t know a damn thing about her. I never used to care about an attractive woman’s history or what she was thinking. AA promised it would get different. I was changing, whether I wanted to or not.

It was hours before Jimmy and Barbara and I had a chance to talk. We pulled a couple of deck chairs and a chaise longue to the far end of the backyard of our house, near the scraggly garden. Barbara lay back with her legs up, a bowl of cherries in her lap. She munched steadily. Jimmy and I reached out for an occasional cherry and competed, without discussion, over who could spit the pit farther.

“Wiznewski seemed pretty annoyed that everybody downplayed the close ties between our house and Oscar’s after Clea died,” Barbara said.

“They could have figured it out,” Jimmy pointed out. “We found Clea within yards of where Oscar died. It was the first house they hit when they started asking questions in the neighborhood.”

“They know all about it now,” I said. “Who told them?”

“Us, I’m afraid,” Jimmy said. “The moment we went rushing over there, we were all connected.”

“It was too late from the second I found him,” Barbara said. “Sorry, guys.”

“Hey, peanut,” Jimmy said. “You didn’t plan to find them either time. Anyhow, we’re the newbies in this crowd.”

Jimmy slapped at a mosquito. One reason he doesn’t like the country is that when mosquitoes have a choice, they go for him.

“I wish we knew what the cops are thinking,” Barbara said.

“What can you find out on the Web?” I asked.

“I can’t hack into police files,” Jimmy said.

“Won’t,” Barbara said.

“Forget it. But I can look through the local newspapers and also see what
Newsday
and the New York papers picked up.”

“Anybody in Oscar’s house might have wanted to point the cops at our house,” Barbara said. “Nobody wants to be the prime suspect in a murder. On the surface, all of them were closer to Oscar than we were. But if you look back before this summer, there’s been a lot of mix and match. Somebody is bound to have said to hell with anonymity and talked about how incestuous the program is out here.”

“In the city,” Jimmy said, “the program really is anonymous.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “Yay city, boo country.”

“Who would want to make the cops put Clea’s and Oscar’s deaths together?” Jimmy asked.

“Anybody who had slept with Oscar,” Barbara said. “Karen, Stephanie. I’ve been thinking— was Oscar a sexual compulsive?”

“We could ask Stewie if he went to meetings,” I said only half sarcastically. “Or if Oscar ever made a pass at him.”

“We could rule it out,” Barbara said.

“I’m not happy with you being the only one the cops know Oscar made an unwelcome pass at,” Jimmy said.

“Neither am I,” Barbara said.

“Who told them?” I asked.

“We did,” Jimmy said. “Both of us. Better us than someone else. They were bound to wonder if I got into a rage and knocked him on the head.”

“I told them you don’t fight my battles!” Barbara said, the light of combat in her eye.

“I’m sure that impressed them,” I said.

“Besides, Jimmy wasn’t there,” Barbara said. “So what about that little black notebook Phil found? I don’t think the cops know about it. If it was a real diary, a thoughts and feelings diary, it would make interesting reading.”