Dearly Departed (14 page)

For someone who had refused to speak with me until I leaned on him, Dr. Holyfield was surprisingly forthcoming. I encouraged him, yet I didn’t trust him.

“How did the affair end?” I asked.

“Stephen found out and threatened Alison with a divorce.”

“I’d have guessed she’d have welcomed a divorce.”

I thought I detected just a smidgen of regret when Dr. Holyfield answered, “No.” But I could’ve been mistaken.

“She came from a family that was vehemently opposed to divorce,” he continued. “She had been brainwashed long ago into accepting the fallacy that she was married forever.”

“How ’bout you, Bob?”

“When Alison informed me that our involvement had to cease, I came to the realization that I owed it to myself to rescue my own marriage, and I pledged myself to that goal.”

“Did you?”

“Did I what?”

“Save your marriage.”

“Unfortunately, no. My wife also learned about the affair. I understand a
friend
told her all about it. Our divorce was final just over seven months ago. It was acrimonious, as you might expect. There was a great deal of name calling, finger pointing, and suspicion. When it was concluded, my wife had custody of my children, my house, two cars, several IRAs, and an enormous alimony and child-support settlement. Prior to the divorce, I had made several unwise investments, so there wasn’t as much money as she expected, or she would have taken that, too. As it was, I was forced to undergo an audit; she claimed I had hidden a substantial amount of our financial assets. The court concluded that it was merely one of her unfounded allegations.”

I didn’t do the polite thing and tell him I was sorry. I wasn’t. Instead I asked, “Was your divorce final before or after Alison disappeared?”

“Before.”

“Did you try to contact her after the divorce?”

“Certainly.”

“And how did she respond?”

The good doctor shrugged. “The sun had set on that relationship.”

“Oh?”

“As I recall,” he said, looking up at the ceiling, “her exact words were: ‘I do not believe the resumption of our relationship at this time would be productive for either of us.’”

“Her exact words?”

Holyfield nodded.

“How did that make you feel?” I asked.

He shrugged again.

“I would think you’d be pretty upset,” I told him. “After losing your wife and children, after being put in debt for the rest of your life for wanting her. Yeah, I’d be pissed off.”

“To be honest, I was relieved.”

“Relieved?”

“I had just survived one relationship. I was unprepared to leap into a second.”

“Yet you contacted her,” I reminded him.

He had nothing to say to that.

“Where were you the night Alison disappeared?”

“I’d need to consult my calendar,” Bob said.

“Why don’t you do that,” I encouraged him.

He smiled and shrugged. “Why bother?”

“It might supply you with an alibi.”

“For what?”

Was he purposely being obtuse?

“For the murder of Alison Emerton,” I answered too loudly.

“What makes you think she was murdered?”

That one caught me right between the eyes.

“Excuse me?”

“What makes you think she was murdered?” he repeated.

Dr. Holyfield smiled, and in that smile I saw his intentions. He was giving me a preview of his defense.

“What do you believe became of Alison?” I asked, the dutiful straight man.

“Alison was greatly disappointed in the life she was living with Stephen,” he answered. “I have no doubt that, given her intelligence, her drive, her beauty, she naturally hoped to achieve more.”

“More?”

“More money, more prestige, more power, more adventure, more … I once told her that the hardest lesson an individual can learn is to be content with who they are, to accept themselves for who they are. Alison was not prepared to do that. That’s probably why she left.”

“Left?”

“Do you always ask one-word questions, Holland?”

The sonuvabitch had turned the tables on me. Now I was the student, and he was the teacher.

“What do you mean, left?” I asked again.

“I believe she decided to become someone else.” He smiled some more. “I appreciate that there are several unanswered questions concerning the circumstances of her disappearance. However, that does not alter my theory. In fact, I can appreciate how the difficulties she was forced to endure during those dark days might have motivated her to leave.”

“Leave for where?”

Dr. Holyfield merely shrugged.

“Why didn’t you inform the police of your theory?” I asked.

“I am under no obligation to do so. If Alison wants to start her life over, I say good luck.”

I
left Robert Holyfield’s office exactly fifteen minutes after entering it, feeling I had been played like a Stradivarius. Anne Scalasi would have been appalled. Still, what would she have done differently? Dr. Holyfield had readily admitted to having an affair with Alison, and he confessed that the affair had contributed to his divorce, to his losing nearly everything he owned. And he had admitted that Alison had blown him off when he had attempted to resume their relationship. However, he couldn’t have killed her for rejecting him because, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, Alison is not dead. Goodness gracious, no. She’s pumping gas in Fayetteville, Tennessee, at a service station owned by Elvis Presley. And, as implausible as it might sound, that argument could just as easily be applied to Irene Brown’s defense. Or Raymond Fleck’s. Or Stephen Emerton’s.

Damn.

Reasonable doubt. Without a body, there’s always reasonable doubt—the criminal’s best friend.

But in this case …
Was
she alive?

I removed her photograph from the envelope. The eyes had changed somehow. So had the rest of her face. She looked different to me now.

“Are you alive?”

She had committed adultery; she had cheated on her husband. Stephen Emerton had told the truth about that. But what about Raymond Fleck? Had he also been truthful? It was hard to believe. But not as hard as it had been fifteen minutes ago. Alison was not the woman I thought she was.

“You lied to me,” I told the photograph.

I shove the glossy back into the envelope and drove back through St. Paul toward my office in Minneapolis, as depressed as I ever hoped to be. And angry, convinced that Alison had played me for a sucker.

“Ahh, nuts!” I shouted, slapping the top of my steering wheel. Two days ago I had it solved. Two days ago I was the greatest detective since Eugène François Vidocq, the nineteenth century crook-turned-crook-catcher who founded the French Sûreté. Which reminded me, I really needed to return Scalasi’s book.

thirteen

C
ynthia looked delicious in a black turtleneck sweater dress with a carefully fitted bodice and a long, sweeping skirt. You’d never have supposed that she had dressed in a feverish seven minutes flat while I monitored her progress on my watch as I paced her living room. It would have taken her six minutes except for the great “with pearls or without” debate. She went without.

The way Cynthia acted as we drove to the theater in Minneapolis, though, you’d have thought I never took her anywhere, and I told her so.

“Only sporting events and jazz clubs,” she reminded me.

There’s no pleasing some people.

“Actually, I’m amazed anything could drag you away from your precious baseball. Don’t you have tickets for the St. Paul Saints tonight?”

“It’s like Tallulah Bankhead once said, ‘There have been only two geniuses in the world. Willie Mays and Willie Shakespeare.’ Besides, the Saints are in Sioux Falls tonight. They’ll be home tomorrow, though; they’re playing Ida Borders and the Duluth-Superior Dukes. Want to go?”

“Oh, rapture.”

M
arie Audette played Portia in
The Merchant of Venice
, a typical Shakespearean heroine: tough, clever, resourceful, who confounds her rivals and generally saves the day—but only while disguised as a man. And, of course, she is never recognized until the final scene, even by her lover. I pointed at Marie when she ascended to the stage.

“She gave us the tickets,” I told Cynthia.

“
Shhhh
!” Cynthia hissed.

She shushed me several more times during the performance, punctuating her entreaties for quiet with sharp jabs from her elbow. Yet try as I might, I could not stop fidgeting. I couldn’t stop shuffling through the notes in my head—apparently making quite a racket of it—searching for the one clue that would determine who actually had killed Alison Donnerbauer Emerton.

I had liked Irene Brown. But that was yesterday. Today, Dr. Bob, the jilted lover, looked good, except there was nothing to tie him to the scene. And both Raymond Fleck and Stephen Emerton still rated high in my estimation.

“Nuts,” I muttered under my breath.

“
Shhhhh
!” Cynthia hissed at me.

I tried hard not to believe Dr. Bob’s theory. I didn’t want to believe it. Alison wasn’t the kind to run away from her problems. No way. She would have stared them in the eye and taken them on. Yes, that’s what my Alison would have done.
My Alison
. But was my Alison the same Alison as the woman in the photograph? I had seen things in her face, emotions that touched me. Yet were they real? Was that the face of a woman who committed adultery? Twice? Apparently it was.

I shook my head, tried to clear it. Instead, my mind’s eye superimposed Alison’s photograph over the stage; I was looking at it and through it even as I watched Marie Audette going about her business. And I knew. Of course the emotions weren’t real; the photograph had been taken to promote a play, to reflect a character Alison was playing. What was the line Jon Lovitz used to say on
Saturday Night Live?
Oh, yeah.

“It’s acting!”

“Sheeesh,” a voice behind me answered.

Stop it, Taylor
, my inner voice told me.
Get a grip. Start thinking like a detective. Be objective, dammit
. “Be objective,” I muttered.

Cynthia’s elbow almost cracked my rib. I didn’t blame her for being miffed. We were at a critical juncture in the play, the scene where Shylock the Jew is demanding his pound of flesh, and Portia, disguised as a hot-shot arbitrator from Padua, says he can have it, just so long as he does not “shed one drop of Christian blood.” Shylock is a louse, of course. Yet I always figured he got the shaft. I mean, no one put a gun to Antonio’s head, made him take the loan, and if he couldn’t pay the vig, well … Still, I enjoyed watching Marie, standing center stage like a gunfighter waiting for the bad guy to slap leather, beseeching Shylock “to cut off the flesh” if he dared. But my concentration wouldn’t hold, and soon I was reflecting on my list of suspects again.

Irene Brown. Raymond Fleck. Stephen Emerton. Dr. Bob. Hell, all things considered, even Mrs. Donnerbauer could be considered a suspect.

I squirmed in my seat some more, asking myself, Who put the note on my windshield telling me to quit the investigation? Not Irene. Not Raymond. Both were guests of the Dakota County Sheriff’s Department at the time.

Stephen Emerton? Had to be. Who else was there?

I sighed noisily, drawing more frosty stares.

Motive and opportunity. Motive and opportunity. I kept repeating the words in my head like a mantra.

Meanwhile, Portia, still disguised as a male lawyer, was now dancing around her befuddled husband, messing with his mind, diddling him out of the ring she had given him on the day they were married, the ring he vowed never to be without.

“
I see, sir, you are liberal in offers: You taught me first to beg, and now, methinks, you teach me how a beggar should be answer’d.
”

Marie Audette was a good actress.
Wait a minute!
my inner voice shouted.
So was Alison!
My mind spun back to the first act of the play. What was it that Portia told Jessica when she took up her disguise?

“
I’ll hold thee any wager.… I’ll prove the prettier fellow
…
and wear my dagger with the braver grace; and speak, between the change of man and boy, with a reed voice and turn two mincing steps into a manly stride; and speak of frays, like a fine bragging youth: and tell quaint lies, how honourable ladies sought my love, which I denying, they fell sick and died.… And twenty of these puny lies I’ll tell, that men shall swear I have discontinued school above a twelvemonth. I have within my mind a thousand raw tricks of these bragging Jacks which I will practice.
”

Motive and opportunity.

“Alison really is a genius,” I muttered loud enough to earn another punch in the ribs.