“It was the last thing I expected,” Daphne whispered. “Truly, the very last thing I expected.”
T
HE FIRST PERSON
G
ABE INTERVIEWED ON
Sunday afternoon was Candy Dirkson. She lived in the house in which she had grown up, a two-story place that was old but well maintained. Old-fashioned flowerbeds along the front walk were starting to blossom with vibrant purple irises and snowy white lily-of-the-valley. Candy had ranched with her abusive, alcoholic husband for over twenty years, then finally divorced him after her own parents passed away. She told Gabe that she'd realized that life was too short. Recently she had started to exercise and watch her diet. As two divorced, middle-aged women, she and Peg had bonded more tightly than they ever had as teenagers. Peg had taught her how to power walk and supported her struggle to change her eating habits.
“I knew she was dead, but she looked so uncomfortable.” Candy sobbed anew then blew her nose into a wad of damp tissue.
Gabe waited her out, avoiding the temptation to put words in her mouth. Candy was a mess.
“I had to make her comfortable, so I stretched her legs out.”
“So you moved the body.” He corrected himself. “You moved Peggy before anyone else came?”
Candy nodded. “I can't believe Peg died before me. I've been waiting for a heart attack to strike me down for ages with all this excess weight. She was so skinny. A stroke.” She shook her head as though she still couldn't grasp that her friend was gone.
“You're sure she was dead?”
“Yeah.” Although her lower lip trembled, she managed not to cry and her voice was more controlled. “She wasn't cold yet, but she wasn't warm either. There was no question that the life had gone out of her.” She described the cat-eaten breakfast on the floor and the spilled glass of water.
Gabe knew she'd be familiar with death from her decades ranching. “And did you touch anything else?”
“Of course! I had to clean it up. Peg paid a fortune for that new carpet.” The thought was enough to send her into heaving sobs again.
He cringed at her answer and handed her another tissue. “I have to take you back to Friday night, Candy. You okay?” She nodded and he continued. “Can you tell me again what you did after the band quit playing?”
“Marlena wanted me to hang around for a drink so we went into the lounge. It was past last call but Nick gave us a shot of rye anyway.” Her eyes went wide. “He won't get in trouble will he?”
Gabe shook his head. Serving after hours was the least of his worries.
Candy blew her nose. “I hadn't had rye in years and I couldn't finish mine so Marlena did. Then I went to pick up Maryanne, my daughter. She was babysitting for Steve and Linda Howard. Steve usually gives her a ride but he was still hanging out at the hotel with the other guys in the band. I brought Maryanne home. We made popcorn without butter, and watched TV for a while, some stupid zombie film. We both fell asleep on the couch.”
Candy confirmed that it was about twenty after one in the morning when she had collected her daughter. She remembered calculating how much Linda had to pay Maryanne for babysitting.
That meant Candy would have left Marlena at the Twin Pines at about 1:15 am, forty-five minutes before Marlena found Roger dead. What, wondered Gabe, had Marlena done in the intervening time? “Candy, I need to ask you about your relationship with Roger. Were you . . . ?”
A laugh bubbled up and she blew her nose. “Gabe, are you asking if I slept with him?”
Gabe smiled wryly. “Yeah.”
“Of course I did. But that was thirty years ago. All of us did, all the girls. He told us to keep it quiet so it wouldn't affect his image. He insisted that rock ân' rollers had more sex appeal if they were single. Who knows if that was the real reason. And, Gabe, you gotta know,” she smiled coyly, “now I like my men with a bit more meat on them.”
After Joan left, Ed Fowler wondered if he should have told her the entire story but comforted himself by remembering Vi's advice. She believed that people owned their secrets and this, he thought, applied to the dead as well as the living. She had promised that she would leave sleeping dogs lie and he would do the same. Now he questioned whether or not inaction had been the honorable choice. Sometimes one had to make things right, no matter what the cost. As he tidied the lounge he carried on a wild, silent debate between himself and the Vi that he knew thirty years ago. Once again, she won.
After vacuuming the entire lounge of the Couch, he started to take down the decorations then stopped himself. As far as he knew the police were no closer to catching Roger's killer. Madden may be keeping its visitors for a while so he may as well be ready. He taped the crepe paper back onto the wall.
Marlena mixed martinis for herself and Daphne and then, once her girls were out of earshot, provided her assessment of what had happened on Friday night. “Obviously old Joannie Parker wanted in Roger's pants. He rejected her and whamo, knife in the chest.”
“But they would have arrested her, wouldn't they, if she'd done it?” asked Daphne.
Marlena took another drink and shook her head. Poor little Daph. Even though she lives in the city, she's still a rube. She explained the situation. “It's Sergeant Gabe. He's doing her, in return for letting her get away with it. That's how it works. And I have to say,” she leaned forward and spoke in a hushed voice in case her daughters were within earshot, “I'd do Gabe Theissen at the drop of a hat.”
She took Daphne's glass and went toward the open kitchen.
Just then the doorbell rang and she called for Daphne to get it.
Daphne opened the door to Gabe Theissen.
Marlena purred, “Well, come on in, Gabe. We were just talking about you. Let me mix you a drink.”
Gabe shook his head, then looked from one woman to the other. “I'm here on business.”
“Again?” asked Marlena.
He took a step inside. “I have to ask where you were this morning, and I'm reviewing statements about Friday night. I need to know if you've recalled anything more.”
Marlena sat on the couch and patted the seat beside her. “Come sit, Gabe,” she ordered.
Gabe chose a straight-back side chair and silently evaluated the situation. He needed candid answers quickly and it wouldn't happen with these two women together. Just then Ray walked into the house, carrying a gym bag.
Marlena toasted him with her martini glass. “Hey, Ray, we've got company.”
When Ray saw Daphne and Gabe, the colour drained from his face.
Gabe made a mental note. As a cop he was used to getting an uncomfortable reaction from people, but this was different. Gabe could have sworn that Ray's shocked response was to Daphne and not him.
Marlena didn't appear to have noticed. She went to her husband and looped her arm through his. “Gabe's here to find out where we all were this morning.”
“This morning? Why?” he stammered with an uneasy smile.
Daphne answered. “Peg died this morning. There was an ambulance there when I got back to her house.” She choked back tears.
“Not . . . she wasn't murdered?” asked Ray.
“There was no immediate evidence of a struggle. Looks like a stroke and she was being treated for a serious heart condition,” Gabe said. “We're not labelling it as suspicious, but we do have to investigate, given . . . ”
Marlena finished his sentence. “Given someone offed Roger. Someone we know.” They all knew that she was referring to Joan. There was an embarrassed silence. Marlena became defensive. “What?”
Daphne turned to Gabe. “Peggy never told me she had a heart condition. But she did take a lot of pills.”
“Hell, at our age we all do,” said Marlena. She started down her long list of supplements, then broke off. “So, Gabe. Let's get on with this interrogation. What do you need to know?”
“I have to interview each of you on your own. Is there someplace I can do that?”
“Oh, that's ridiculous, Gabe. We're all friends.”
He did a soft-shoe around his request, joking that it was to protect their friendships. When Marlena finally accepted that they couldn't all be questioned together, she suggested that Daphne be interviewed in the living room, Ray in his downstairs office, and Gabe could talk to her in the kitchen.
Gabe started with Ray downstairs.
Ray said that this morning he'd gone for a drive to look at some of his properties then had gone to the gym. Nobody had seen him on his drive, but he'd talked to a lot of people at the gym.
“You do that often, Ray, do your rounds on a Sunday morning?” Gabe watched him shift his body to a more protected position. This could be defensiveness, as though he was shielding a secret, but he chalked it up to Ray always being slightly awkward in his own skin. He hadn't been that way before he married Marlena.
“I like to see the properties when there are no crews, inspect them without eyes watching my back.”
Gabe nodded, thinking that it was probably one of the only times Ray wasn't in line for criticism. He then asked Ray to recap what he did on Friday night. Ray told the same story that he had the day before. He'd had a drink with the band but was one of the first to leave. He'd had enough after hanging with the guys all week, and he had business to attend to the following morning. The girls had been asleep and, no, they hadn't woken up when he'd come home. He drank a couple more beers and watched some TSN.
Gabe waited to make sure he was finished, then broke the brief silence with another question. “How'd you end up back at the Twin Pines, Ray?”
“Steve called me. He'd gone up to Rudy's room for a nightcap and to practise the chorus of âCrossroads'.” He looked up at Gabe. “A Cream song.”
Gabe nodded. “I remember. It was a Rank classic. I'm curious, why didn't you go with them? You already had it down pat?”
Ray shook his head. “Rog thought the two of them should do the chorus without me.”
“But you used to do it with them.”
“Rog did that a lot, shut me out on vocals. But, hey, I was dog-tired. Happy to go home.”
“So Steve phoned your cell?”
“On the house line,” corrected Ray. “When all the screaming started, he went out and saw Marlena. That's when he called me.”
“Why do you suppose Marlena was there?”
“C'mon, Gabe. We've already done this. You know she said she was checking on the out-of-town guests.” Ray looked down at his shoes.
“Do you believe her?”
“Would you?”
Gabe looked into the eyes of the man he'd known all of his life. “I need to ask you, Ray. Did you kill Roger Rimmer?”
Ray looked up at Gabe, shook his head and responded with a quiet but firm, “No.”
Gabe sat on a stool across the kitchen island from Marlena while she chopped vegetables.
“Is there a reason to believe that Peg died from anything except a stroke?” she asked.
He shook his head. “Not at this point, no. We're doing a full autopsy so we'll know in the next few days if anything smells bad.”
Marlena mapped her morning for Gabe. She'd run with both the girls, gone for an iced coffee then come home. She also stuck to her story about Friday, with one slight amendment. “Gabriel, my boy, what if I went to Roger's room looking for something more? Would that make me a suspicious character?” Her cynical, steely gaze was meant to challenge him. That look, he thought, was sharp enough to cut flesh.
“Did you?”
She paused a moment, lifted an eyebrow and spoke slowly. “Like I said, I was just offering a little old-fashioned Madden hospitality.”
“What about the time between one-fifteen, when Candy went home, and 2:00 am, when you found Roger?” He held her gaze and she didn't flinch.
“I waited in my car until I saw Roger go into his cabin. Then, believe it or not, I didn't go in right away. I almost chickened out. I watched the light go out, then I waited awhile longer.”
Her admission put her outside the cabin when the murder took place. It also placed her there when Roger was lolling drunkenly outside Joan's cabin door.
This was sticky territory. He trod cautiously. “You said that you saw Roger leaving Joan's cabin?” He left it open ended so that she could fill in the blank without him directing her.
She blew out a mouthful of air. “Okay, I didn't actually see him come out of Joan's cabin. He was sitting outside on the ground. Am I going to get into trouble?”
Gabe forced himself to remain calm and kept his expression blank. “It was a stressful night for everyone.” He flipped to a previous page in his notebook, then back to his fresh scribblings. “Did you see anyone go in or out of Roger's cabin?” He watched her eyes flicker.
She shook her head and answered carefully. “Of his cabin? Not a soul.”
If she were telling the truth, her answer suggested that the murderer had used the patio door on the side facing the river to gain entrance to Roger's cabin. Patio doors were a common point of entry for burglars. They were the doors most likely to be left unlocked and were shielded from view. In the case of the Twin Pines, that side of the buildings was pitch dark.
“One more thing, Marlena.”
“Yes?”
“You'll be up the creek if you keep accusing Joan without grounds.” He kept his tone neutral.
Marlena made a face that Gabe thought was intended to look like a pout but came across as a sneer. “But Gabriel, won't you be in that creek along with me for playing favourites?”
He knew she was right, but he was determined not to lose this stand off. Smartt didn't have the same experience with Marlena that the rest of them did. If she didn't withdraw her accusation, Joan would remain a target. Everything he wanted to say at that moment would sound defensive, juvenile, or both. He silently turned and walked down the three steps into the living room to question Daphne.