Undue Influence (24 page)

False lead. I pass it. A mile down is an open gate, on the left, a sign.

I turn in. Gravel and lava stone, chained-off private drives two hundred feet in, so I turn left, under a grove of giant banyan trees that transform the driveway into a cave of foliage, dead moss hanging from their limbs. Then I see it. The little church from the snapshot, green clapboard over white plaster. I dead-end in a dirt parking lot under the shade of the trees. Two mangy dogs lying like they are dead a few feet away. One of them raises his head enough to look at me as the dust from my wheels reaches, then settles on him. He sneezes, then puts his head down and goes back to sleep. There are two other vehicles in the parking lot, a small pickup with gardening implements and a sedan. A guy is loading a mower into the back of the truck, along with some plastic bags of cut grass. A man and woman standing, looking at a headstone in the cemetery at the side of the church, under a large banyan tree. Some distance off beyond the cemetery, through a gate, an old lady, cloaked in flowing garb, a broad straw hat, sits at an easel painting. The signs of serenity. Fronds clacking in the dwarfed palms that line the open grass. I take the little path through a gate in the low stone wall leading to the church. The door is not locked, but I peer through one of the windows. A few wooden pews and a raised pulpit up front. There is no one inside, so I take the path to the right, toward the graveyard at the side of the church. Here the sun’s rays are warm. The humid air hangs heavy. In the distance is a fence, maybe a hundred yards away, where the world drops off, land’s end, blue water to the horizon, white breakers crashing on the few rocks that have clawed their way up from the depths.

There is the rumble of a junker engine and the sound of rubber on gravel as the gardener in his beat-up pickup pulls out. Headstones and other monuments line the narrow path that zigzags toward the open grass and the cliff beyond. I wend my way through. The couple, Asian tourists, seem finally to lose interest in the headstone. They make their way across the grass toward the parking lot. I take their place. Under the banyan tree at the near edge of the grass is a grave, a plain flat marker, nothing fancy, no shrine. The name engraved there had been its own monument during life, flashed round the world before the information highway was a deer track in the electronic brush. We make idols of rock stars and bobbing heads doing gangsta rap, people whose contribution to life is as fleeting as the pixels that carry their image to our televisions screens. Nothing enduring. It is a measure of our spiritual poverty. He was from a different time. A rectangular pile of lava rocks ringed by a pinioned chain just a few inches off the ground. The headstone, unpolished gray granite, a soft cursive script: Charles A. Lindbergh Born, Michigan, 1902 Died, Maui, 1974 “If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea” C A L As I look up, the aspect of the little church looms before me through the hanging frowns of trees that ring it. Whoever took the snapshot had done so from this location. There is no sign of Kathy Merlow. I turn and walk toward the fence, the cliff fifty yards away, undulating blue waters, and the glint of sunlight on crested waves. The old woman is packing up, folding her easel, the afternoon’s work done. She is in on a section of grass beyond a gate, a sign hanging on the fence:
KIPAHULU
POINT
PARK
. This seems to merge with the grass of the cemetery. I plant myself by the fence and wait, looking at the sea, hoping that Kathy Merlow will appear. I look at my watch after four-thirty. I wonder if Opolo has had any luck with the mail carriers, whether Dana is frantic looking for me.

I see a big blue sedan out on the highway. It cruises by at a slow speed. Stops at the gate. The driver, his head a dot in the distance, stops to read the sign on the gate. Then he drives off. The Asian couple have made their way to the car, the thunk of doors being closed, the engine started. Pretty soon they will be closing the gate on the road.

My chances of slipping back here tomorrow are not good. Dana and Opolo will want to know where I’ve been, the third degree. The old lady is drifting by on the grass, thirty yards away, struggling with her easel and a small stool, a wooden box of painting paraphernalia. I look at the parking lot. Except for my car it is now empty. I watch as the old lady moves away from me now, toward a small opening in the fence, near the entrance to the park, and suddenly it hits me not the gait of an old woman. I am off the fence, moving toward her at a good rate. Ten feet away, staring at her back. “Excuse me.”

She turns. Not the wrinkled and weathered countenance of age, but tan and more vigorous than our last meeting, the vacant gaze of Kathy Merlow. She looks the part of the chic art set from the tharties, a loud silk kimono with wide sleeves, open down the front, like the academic gown on some Oxford don. Underneath she wears white cotton slacks and a blue top. Capping it all is a broad-brimmed straw hat, cocked at an angle for the sun, and oversized dark glasses. “Yes?”

Kathy Merlow’s smile is somewhat artless. “Can I help you?” she says.

She’s burdened by the folded artist’s stool and easel hanging heavily in one hand. The box of paints and brushes in the other. “You don’t remember me?” I say.

Wary eyes.

“I’m Paul Madriani. We met the night Melanie Vega was killed. Out on the street in front of her house.”

“I think you’ve mistaken me for someone else.” She turns and starts to walk. I take her gently by one arm. “I don’t think so. But maybe you could take off the glasses,” I say. “Take your hand off of me,” she says.

I let go.

“I have to meet someone and I’m running late.” She gives me the look of uppercrust arrogance, done so well behind dark glass, and dismisses me.

“Can I help you with that?” I reach for the stool and the easel. She pulls them away.

“I can manage,” she says. “Now leave me alone.” She takes a step backward, full retreat, and walks out of one of her sandals. She trips, drops the easel and stool. I grab her arm again.

The lid to the box of paint supplies has opened as she jostles for balance. Tubes of paint and tiny brushes all over the grass. “Now see what you’ve made me do.”

I let go, and she steadies herself.

“I’m sorry,” I tell her. “I’m not here to cause you any problems. I just need information.”

“I’ve told you, you’ve got me mixed up with someone else.”

“You aren’t even curious as to how I found you?”

She’s picking up the paints. I help her.

“Marcie Reed,” I tell her.

She gives me a look. If there is any curiosity written in her eyes, it is hidden by shaded glass. But she curls her upper lip and bites it a little. “I don’t know any Marcie Reed,” she says.

“The ring on your finger,” I say. “The cameo. Is that the one Marcie sent to you general delivery?” She stops picking up tubes of paint and covers the back of her right hand with the long sleeve of her kimono.

“We could ask the people at the post office,” I say.

The outside of one of the tubes of paint is sloppy with green acrylic paste, and what appears to be the drying swirls and ridges of the owner’s thumb. She’s looking into my face at this moment. I pick the tube up by the cap and deftly slip it into my jacket pocket so she doesn’t notice. Last month she was going by “Merlow.” This week no doubt she is called by another surname that I do not even know. It would be nice to have her real name. She says nothing.

“I think you remember me,” I say.

“How did you get here?” The first crack in the wall of denial.

I gesture toward my car in the parking lot.

“I think you should get back in it and go,” she says.

“Not till we talk.”

“We have nothing to talk about,” she says. “You shouldn’t be here.

There’ll be trouble if they find us together,” she says. “Who’s they’?”

“Never mind.” Having captured all the colors of the rainbow, she closes the latch on the wooden box. I pick up the easel. She grabs it from my hand and starts to walk away, across the thick grass, as fast as sandals will allow, like some geisha in flowing gowns. “Do you have a car?” I ask.

No answer.

“I could give you a lift.”

“No, thanks.” She’s opening the gulf between us, twenty yards away. I start to run, trailing in her wake. “I have to talk to you.”

“No,” she says. “I’ve got nothing to say.”

“Marcie Reed is dead,” I tell her.

Suddenly she stops. I nearly run over her from behind. She turns to look at me over one shoulder. “Marcie?” she says.

I nod. “Yesterday afternoon in Capital City,” I tell her.

She doesn’t say a word, but the news of Marcie’s death, a woman she claims not to know, has suddenly turned her composure to mush. The easel and stool are back on the grass. As if in slow motion the handle of the box slips from her fingers, the sound of wood on wood as it clacks down on top of the easel. One hand comes up, so many fingers in her mouth I think she’s going to swallow them. Deep in thought, she turns away from me. I can no longer see her face. But with a hand she reaches up and takes the glasses off. “How did it happen?”

“A letter bomb delivered to the post office by a private courier.”

When she turns I see her eyes for the first time, tired, dark edges, tracks like a thousand birds in the dried mud at some watering hole on a parched savanna. She’s calculating the barbarity of death in this fashion, looks at me, searching eyes, the sense of one tortured by fear, now rendered fearless by fatigue. “Poor Marcie,” she says. “I should never have involved her. She was only doing me a favor.”

“I know.”

“Why did they have to kill her?” she says.

“Why don’t you tell me.”

“Oh, God. None of this was supposed to happen,” she says. “They promised us.”

“Who?”

My question draws her from her reverie over Marcie. “Why did you come all this way? What’s your interest?”

“I represent a woman who has been charged with the murder of Melanie Vega. She didn’t do it. I think you know that.”

“Ahh.” Her head is now making big lazy circles, nodding, the way people do when they are dazed.

The pieces slowly beginning to fit for her. “And you think I can help you?”

“Before Marcie died she told me some things.”

“What things?”

“That whoever killed Melanie Vega had been hired to carry out the murder. That you knew something about this.”

“I’m sorry that your client is in trouble. But I can’t help you.”

With this she adjusts her glasses back on her head.

“I think you can. Just tell me what happened.”

In the distance there’s the sound of rubber on gravel. The blue sedan I’d seen moments ago out on the highway, coming this way like there’s no tomorrow. Some tourist in a hurry, a lot of speed and dust as the car slides to a stop in the lot. For several seconds my question lies dormant, punctuated only by the sound of the car’s engine rumbling in the distance. “Mrs. Merlow?”

She’s frozen in place, looking at the vehicle, which is stone-still, its motor running, no one getting out. “We have to talk,” I tell her.

“Not now.” Her eyes are on the car.

“When?”

She’s ignoring me.

“All I want to know is what happened. Give me a hint.”

“I didn’t see a thing,” she says.

“Then your husband?” I say. “He knew something, didn’t he? And he told you?” I’m thinking Melanie and her carnal welcome wagon. Maybe she and George, Jack and Melanie, were doing a foursome, some erotic swap-meet.

Maybe that’s why Kathy Merlow doesn’t want to talk. “Leave us alone,” she says.

“No. I won’t leave you alone. A woman is being charged with murder in a crime she didn’t commit. Sooner or later you’re going to have to tell me what you know.”

“I don’t know a thing, and neither does my husband.”

“You expect me to believe that the two of you left Capital City in the middle of the night immediately after Melanie Vega’s murder because you didn’t like the weather?”

“Frankly I don’t care what you believe.” As she says this she’s giving me eyes-right, less than her undivided attention, her gaze glued to the car in the parking lot. “Is he with you?” she says.

The vehicle’s occupant is now standing beside the car, its motor still rumbling. He’s leaning against the open driver’s door, looking this way, lighting what looks like a big cigar, a large stogie with a glowing red tip. I squint in the sunlight. I had been particularly careful driving, watching the rearview mirror for other cars. “No.”

“He’s looking at us,” she says.

“I don’t think so. He’s looking at the cemetery,” I tell her. “A tourist probably trying to find Lindbergh’s grave,” I say. “Listen. I can’t talk to you now.”

“Later?”

“Perhaps. But I do have to go now.”

“Tell me where I can find you.”

“Maybe tomorrow.”

“Maybe doesn’t cut it,” I say.

She looks at me, reading my mind. The road back to Hana is narrow and slow. I could follow her and she knows it. “Tomorrow afternoon. Two o’clock. Here,” she says.

“You promise?”

“I promise.”

Like some pesty insect, it settles first on her right temple, a tiny red prism of light, a dot no bigger than the point of a pen, dancing like reflections through the facets of a crystal. She stoops to pick up the paint box, and the light disappears, only to find its way into her hairline as she straightens up. It takes an instant before the image registers. Like a cigar with hot embers at the tip, but different, a beam of light, one moment it’s there, the next it’s gone, red glowing like some diffused demonic gaze. With all the force my body can muster from a standing start, I shove Kathy Merlow. I send her sprawling onto the grass and land on top of her. The crack of the speeding bullet snaps the sound barrier overhead and passes into the brush beyond. Silenced.

Guided to a near miss by the deadly accuracy of its laserscope. “What!

Are you crazy?” She’s pushing me off, clawing at my face like I’m some sexual predator. “Get up.” I grab her by the arm. “Get away from me!”

She’s pushing at me, trying to dust off her clothes with one hand. I’m on one knee, crouched. She’s on her feet, standing upright. And it hits me she doesn’t realize a shot has been taken. I’ve got a grip on her arm like a vise. She will be black and blue if she lives. I’m pushing her along ahead of me, moving laterally toward granite headstones and the church. “Let let ” She repeats this three or four times. “Let me go,” she says.