“So she didn’t drown? You sound so emotionless, Haiden. Surely the death of a human being, and one whom you once cared for, shouldn’t be so casually dismissed. And why wait five years?”
“She wanted a divorce and threatened me with blackmail.”
Tosca shifted in her seat and asked, “How did you kill her?”
“It was easy,” he replied. “I remember every single detail. We were having a dinner I had cooked especially for the occasion, and I said something to her that was quite poetic—in fact, profound.”
“Yes?” said Tosca. “What was it?”
“I said, we wear our lives like raincoats, Monica, hoping we won’t get wet. You, my dear wife, not only got wet, you became totally drenched. In fact, right now you are drowning, or perhaps I should call it something else.”
“I’d call that macabre, more than poetic,” said Tosca, “but go on.”
Whittaker took another sip of mead, licked his lips and settled back as he continued with his story.
He rose from the oak dining table and began clearing the dinner dishes. He carried them to the adjoining kitchen.
“You’ve hardly touched your food, Monica dear, the first meal we’ve had together in months,” he called over his shoulder, padding about in scuffed suede slippers. “No appetite? Sorry we had to eat so late. What time is it?” He looked at his wristwatch. “Eight o’clock. Right on schedule.” He emptied the remains of their lobster dinner into the trash can under the sink.
“What are you babbling about?” said Monica. Raising her voice, she added, “For God’s sake stop scraping those plates. You’ll scratch the pattern off them. Just stack them in the dishwasher.”
He heard her fiddling with the crystal salt and pepper set they’d bought twelve years ago on their honeymoon in Paris.
“Haiden, the only thing we have to talk about now is the divorce. The sooner, the better, right?”
Ignoring her question, Whittaker finished loading the dishwasher and closed its door. He walked past his wife to the front of the room and paused to look out the wide, floor-to-ceiling windows. As usual, the mallard ducks were dodging the three-car ferry on its short run across the bay to the peninsula. At the sound of a car engine he glanced down the street where J.J. was parking her Porsche. What was it J.J. had told Monica? That her mother Tosca, a gossip columnist from London, was coming in a few days for a visit? Odd name but probably not the kind of busybody the islanders would appreciate. The professor turned away from the window and back toward Monica.
“I am babbling about revenge, darling. Sweet revenge and poison.” Whittaker rolled the word around in his mouth like a rare cognac as he resettled his solid girth into his chair at the table. “An eye for an eye. Then there’s that little matter of blackmail you tried to pull on me.” He smiled at his young wife, creasing his fleshy jowls into folds that disappeared into his neck. He’d been so attracted to her at first, he remembered, a pretty blonde in her early thirties, whose short skirts revealed shapely legs and deep cleavage filled out her low-cut blouses.
“I’m only claiming what’s due me,” she said, “including the coin collection you tried to hide. That’s not blackmail. My attorney says I am entitled to half of it in the divorce settlement.”
“Really?” He refilled her glass. “Drink up. We’re celebrating.”
“You mean you agree to the settlement? That’s a big turnaround.”
“We are celebrating the fact that I am finally seeing justice served.” He chuckled and raised his glass of burgundy. “That’s a pun, of course. I served you a lethal dose of liquid morphine in the creme de menthe you finished earlier. I also added a large amount to your drink after lunch. I wanted to test it, to see if you could taste the difference. Obviously not, but I did notice you canceled your tennis lesson. I’ve poisoned you. Very successfully, I must say.”
Monica blinked. “Morphine?” she said. “That’s a painkiller. You’re being ridiculous as usual. What could you possibly know about poison?”
“Enough to see that your breathing is beginning to slow down, and so is your speech. You’ve been groggy all afternoon, haven’t you?”
Monica tilted her head as she looked at him. A small frown wrinkled her forehead “Is this one of your sick jokes, Haiden? I didn’t taste anything,” she said, fluffing the curls that framed her face. “Sure I feel tired, but it’s because I’m coming down with the flu or something. Anyway, you wouldn’t have the guts to get rid of me. I know about your secret stash, and I know you’re too concerned about your precious reputation to do anything. Professor Passive Civility, that’s you. That’s why you didn’t make a fuss about that thing that happened.”
Whittaker shook his head in feigned disbelief and got to his feet again. “Thing? Dearest, your vocabulary is sadly lacking.”
Monica raised a hand toward her eyes, but it missed its mark and fell listlessly to her lap. He saw shock on her face as she realized she was losing control over her limbs. She tried to stand up, but her legs gave way. She fell back into the chair.
“Ah, excellent,” her husband murmured. This was the first time since the Paul episode that the professor had seen his wife frightened. It was interesting to observe the actual process of a human being in the death throes. It reminded him of his cousin’s pony when they were kids. It had taken a week to die. Monica, he knew, would succumb much more quickly—within the hour, in fact.
The professor was brought back abruptly to the present by his wife’s voice. “Haiden, for God’s sake, what have you done?” Her words became slurred. “You, you … can keep ... the coins.”
Whittaker reached over and put out a hand to catch his wife as she slipped sideways. He arranged her limp arms and legs to an upright position on the chair.
“Sit still, dear. It won’t be much longer.” He took a small vial from his pocket. “I didn’t even use half of it,” he said, shaking the container’s liquid contents. “I have to admit I feel quite clever. The morphine, which you so agreeably drank, causes complete paralysis of the body’s respiratory system. I looked it up. Frankly, I’m surprised if you feel anything at all right now.” He bent toward Monica, his face inches from hers. “Seven drops of blue liquid that can’t be seen by the naked eye if mixed with a green or blue drink. I’m so glad you like liqueurs. Alcohol makes poison work much faster, I have learned. Didn’t you wonder why I so lovingly chose your favorite creme de menthe? Of course you didn’t. Don’t worry, darling, at least the drug is easing your breathing, and you’ll soon be in a comfortable coma. Then your organs will shut down one by one and will cease to function. Are your muscles still twitching? That would be uncivil, I will admit.”
Returning to the dishwasher, Whittaker set their two glasses in the top tray, closed and latched the door and turned the knob to Normal Wash.
At a faint, choking cry, he turned slowly around, an expression of hopeful anticipation on his face. Monica’s forehead rested on the table, her arms hanging straight down. He saw that her mouth was frozen open, a small pile of brownish-white vomit on the yellow plastic place mat. She no longer breathed. Whittaker grabbed her hair, savagely pulled her head back, studied her dead eyes, and dropped her head back onto the table. He nodded in satisfaction.
“Cardiac arrest. Very good.” He paced, hands clasped behind his back, every now and then turning to address his wife. “It’s amazing how little revenge can cost, isn’t it, sweetheart? Righteous slaughter, I believe, is the correct term.”
Whittaker walked over to the baby grand piano against the living room’s west wall and launched into Chopin’s “Funeral March” sonata.
“I suppose you’ll accuse me of being predictable for playing this piece, dearest, and you’d be right,” he said, turning his head slightly over his shoulder toward his dead wife. “Dull, fat old Professor Haiden Whittaker, lost in his music. Never gets excited about much and can’t even come up with anything more original to speed you across the River Styx than this poorly conceived sonata. Chopin must have been homesick for Poland when he wrote it.” He stopped playing and closed the piano lid over the keys. “Well, you’re certainly not worth one of my own compositions, my dear. You never were.”
Whittaker stopped his recitation and looked at Tosca. “That’s it. End of story.”
“No, not quite the end of the story, Haiden. You haven’t explained Monica’s fake drowning in Mexico.”
A smile lit his face. “Ah, yes. My meticulous planning took care of that. Here’s what happened. After I finished playing the ‘Funeral March,’ I went over to the dining table to check on her again. She was still slumped in the chair. I wanted to tell her that I’d bought a pair of garden shears, but of course, she was dead. Did you know, Tosca, that pathologists use them during autopsies to cut through the rib cage?”
Tosca kept her gaze on him, not answering.
“All right. I’ll tell you the details you seem intent on knowing.”
After changing Monica out of her dress and underwear and into one of her red bikinis, no need for shoes, the professor half-carried, half-dragged her body to the garage. He had already prepared the Range Rover trunk by spreading a tarp over the floor. He placed her carefully on top, pulled the sides of the tarp around to cover her and topped it off with a pile of blankets. Puffing with exertion, he pulled down the car’s tailgate.
As he walked to the front of the car Whittaker paused to stare through the side window to make sure the bundle could not be perceived as a body by anyone driving alongside. He checked that his overnight bag was on the back seat. Satisfied, he heaved his bulk into the driver’s seat, turned on the ignition, pressed the garage door opener and backed out into the alley behind his house.
The professor pressed the button on the device again to close the garage door and headed for the island’s main street. Then he speeded up. He figured he needed to reach the hotel in Mexico within two to three hours, since that would probably be the time rigor mortis would begin to set in.
Whittaker estimated the drive south on the Interstate 5 to Tijuana would take just under two hours. It would provide plenty of time to listen to a few of his own compositions, written many years earlier. He slipped the CD into the player in the dashboard, relaxed his shoulders and let the opening bars of the concerto wash over him. It had all gone so well, he told himself.
All he had to do was find that hotel again, eighteen miles farther south of the Mexican border. He’d researched the funeral home, too, and found what he needed in Tijuana, which meant a stop on the way back. Steering with one hand, he took out his wallet, opened it and removed the bundle of money. He laid it on the passenger seat. Five thousand bucks. Should be plenty. He wouldn’t need a coffin; a brass urn would look elegant on the piano. He’d read that seven hundred fifty dollars would cover the average Mexican funeral home expenses, including transportation of the body, the cremation and the necessary official documentation. The rest of his money would cover the bribes.
“I crossed the border as usual. We’d never been stopped going through,” he told Tosca. “Like everyone else, we’d made several day trips to the Mexican pharmacies. Monica always needed to buy her prescription diet pills there, which were routinely refused by her doctor in Newport Beach.”
The professor related that by ten o’clock he’d passed through Tijuana, continuing on the toll road that led to Ensenada. But his goal was closer, he said, San Antonio del Mar, where he already had a hotel reservation for a single night in one of their private villas.
The hotel had the requisite swimming pool, and as he drove up the driveway he could see its aquamarine water glinting under a few flickering candles in lanterns hung around the perimeter.
“Good evening, senor,
buen venidos,”
said the hotel clerk. “It’s good to see you back here again so soon. I have the villa you asked for, but we have a larger one available since this time you said you were bringing your wife. We have plenty of suites. It’s really quiet this week. The economy, you know.”
“No, thank you. I’d like the same one,” said Whittaker, “and since we may have to leave very early in the morning, I’m paying cash in advance.”
The hotel manager looked at the wall clock. “I am so sorry you can’t stay longer. You won’t be with us for more than a few hours, then, but we will make you both as comfortable as possible.”
“Thank you. I told my wife so much about this place, so in spite of the late hour we will probably take a swim. She’s napping in the car right now, but she wants to swim, and I like to sit in the spa. The pool is still open, is that correct?” He was assured that the pool and the hot tub were open to guests all night, but no lifeguard would be on duty until seven the next morning.
A week earlier Whittaker had picked out the most secluded villa next to the pool. Now familiar with the narrow driveway to its private entrance, he drove through the thick canopy of tropical trees and bushes, parked, retrieved his bag from the back seat, opened the cottage door and went straight to the front window to check out the pool.
An elderly couple, arms around each other, red beach towels covering their bodies, walked toward the exit gate and disappeared into the garden. No one else was swimming. The professor grunted and turned to the bed. He opened his overnight bag, stripped off his clothes and put on a new pair of swim trunks. He went back to the car, looked around to ensure privacy, pulled Monica’s body from the car and carried it to the pool.”
Whittaker stopped talking, as if waiting for applause, then continued. “After the hotel manager got over the shock, called the medics and arranged to deliver my wife’s body to the funeral home of my choice in Tijuana, I had her cremated there and brought her ashes home.”
He reached over to the coffee table and picked up one of the plastic envelopes containing part of his coin collection. “We are all disposable,” he said, jiggling the envelope. “These are the only things that remain. Even my music has deserted me.”