Little Death by the Sea (19 page)

“I wish you luck, Miss Newberry. And
remember, we’re doing our very best for you.”

“Thanks again, Detective,” she said, flipping
on her computer. “I appreciate it.”

“Hold while I switch you.” The line went soft
as he rang the front switchboard. When she got a new operator, she
asked to speak to David Kazmaroff in Homicide.

3

Maggie sat in one of the wicker chairs that
lined the little office courtyard. It was too hot to sit out there
for long, but she was putting off the moment when she had to
re-enter the artificially-climated building. She was sure the air
conditioning was drying out her skin and helping her ingest
chemicals and tobacco smoke from the offices upstairs. She smiled
wryly at the thought. She ingested plenty of tobacco smoke right in
her own home.

Laurent had packed a small lunch for her:
stuffed courgettes and roasted peppers. She carefully peeled the
peppers—in glistening red and green strips—off the wax paper in
which he’d wrapped them, swirls of golden-green oil dribbled off
the paper in testimony to how bad they were for maintaining her
size eight trousers. The peppers were exquisite, melting in her
mouth with just the essence of their flavor and without the
pepper’s usual bite. How does he do that, she wondered?

She’d already called him twice today. Twice
to hear his voice and remind herself that he was there, in their
apartment, waiting for her. She’d resist calling this afternoon,
even though she wanted to discuss with him her conversation with
Kazmaroff. It would have to wait until this evening. Laurent would
be with her father. At his club. She shook her head. Curiouser and
curiouser.

Living with Laurent was a surprise, she
decided. It was not as if she’d ever lived with a man before and so
possessed some kind of control sample of cohabitation, but she’d
had expectations. Concerns. Probably bred from answering too many
Does-He-Love-You quizzes in magazines at the hairdressers. Natural
foreboding, even. And Laurent had defied them all. He was there for
her. He was accommodating, sweet, loving and strong. Did he have
any problems of his own? Maggie wasn’t aware of any. Did he
disapprove or dislike anything about the way she lived? Not
seriously, anyway. Not in a way that wasn’t teasing or playful or
flattering to her. The fact was, she decided, as frenetic and
compulsive as she was normally—even without a murder investigation
topping her “To Do” list—Maggie found herself needing the balm of
Laurent’s soothing, caretaking ways. She hadn’t expected to find
such a thing, and now couldn’t imagine living without it.

She popped the last pepper in her mouth and
savored it. He’d also packed a quarter baguette of French bread in
her little brown sack. She nibbled off a corner.

So, she thought, the police think some
drug-dealing homeless person came in off the street, came into
Maggie’s apartment, came down her hallway and into her apartment.
They think Elise’s drug history is connected with this guy—whoever
he is—and that it was a drug deal that went wrong. Real wrong for
Elise. So there you have it, Maggie thought, wiping the smears of
grease from her fingers as she packed up the remnants of her
lunch.

“What about Gerard?” she had asked the
detective, not wanting to believe the story about a wandering drug
dealer.

“Well, we talked to him,” Kazmaroff had said
in a drawling, sleepy voice. “Had a pretty good alibi, though.
Really good, in fact. Seems he was having a party in his hotel room
with half the call girls in the metro area. Lotta people gonna
confirm he was with them. So to speak.”

“He was having a party at four in the
afternoon? Because you know, Elise was killed at—“

“Miss Newberry, he has an alibi for the time
of the murder.” Kazmaroff had been patient with her.

“Of course,” she’d mumbled, embarrassed, but
not willing to let go of the idea. “You think these witnesses are
pretty reliable, do you, Mr. Kazmaroff?” she had asked
pointedly.

“I think their testimony will stand up in
court, yes, Miss Newberry. I’m sorry.”

The heat was becoming unbearable. Maggie
removed the scarf from around her throat and smiled wanly at a
couple of female layout artists from her office as they approached
with their own brown bags and settled into chairs a few feet away
from her. She watched them extricate their tuna fish salad
sandwiches and little Charles Chips bags from their lunch sacks,
and then she stood up and brushed the crumbs off the front of her
skirt and went inside.

In her office, on her computer screen, under
the headline “Why Opto-Mark Software Will Get Your Company Flying
High,” she wrote “Gerard” and “Alfie.” Under “Gerard” she wrote:
“motive, no opportunity”. Under “Alfie” she wrote “no motive,
plenty of opportunity.” She tapped a pencil eraser against her chin
and stared at the screen.

Slowly, she turned and picked up the
telephone and dialed three numbers.

“Hey, Ger? It’s me. Listen, I need to take
the rest of the afternoon off, okay? Yeah, it’s done, I gave it to
Dierdre before lunch. And tomorrow’s the memorial service for
Elise, okay? Thanks. Yeah, you too.” She switched off her computer
and left the office.

4

Forgive me, Laurent, she thought, as she
pulled into the parking lot of the Hotel Nikko off Peachtree Road,
but it’s got to be now. Kazmaroff had told her where Gerard Dubois
was staying in Atlanta.

“And that’s okay?” she’d asked, “He can just
leave during a murder investigation?”

“He’s not a suspect, Miss Newberry,”
Kazmaroff had repeated.

Unbelievable! And if he were ever going to be
a suspect, she’d better come up with the evidence very soon. She
hurried into the lobby, noting how close the hotel was to the Lenox
Square parking lot where he’d taken her money and given her Elise.
Probably just waltzed back over here afterward and had a six-course
snack at her father’s expense, she thought angrily.

She marched up to the front desk, asked for
Mr. Dubois’ room number and was told that Mr. Dubois had checked
out earlier that morning.

Disappointed, she turned away and stood in
the middle of the Hotel Nikko lobby. Now what? Could she catch him
at the airport? She tried to calculate how many flights there were
daily to Paris out of Atlanta. That is, if he was heading to Paris.
Maybe he was going to Nice, instead? Would the carriers even give
her a passenger list? She felt overwhelmed by the task. A proper
sleuth would probably go to all the trouble, she admonished
herself, as she got back into her Mitsubishi and strapped herself
in. She gave up and decided to query Delta by phone when she got
back to her apartment. What else could she do?

With considerably more exhaustion than she
started out with, Maggie drove down tree-lined Peachtree Road, past
the old Sears parking lot, noting that everyone she knew still
referred to the intersection that way even though there was a
towering, glittering office building in place of the Sears parking
lot and had been for some years now. She continued past the Good
‘Ol Days outdoor café whose feebly flapping awning looked wilted
and bleak in the punishing heat, past the Parthenon, to St.
Juniper’s Street. She pulled into the street and drove to the first
phone booth she saw. It was—not surprisingly for this
neighborhood—filthy, with the glass panels broken out of its door
in jagged gaps.

Although less than a mile from her own
apartment building, St. Juniper was abused and kicked around, an
older neighborhood made up of small, dilapidated crackerbox houses
with blistering paint and stingy-sized garages that had once been
proper sheds. Maggie had often seen old people hobble out at the
mouth of St. Juniper’s Street to go sit in the dismal little park
next to St. Phillips Cathedral, the snooty-grand Episcopal church
directly across the street.

She picked up the hanging phone book and
carefully flipped the pages to the ‘W’s. Kazmaroff, bless him, had
proven a wealth of useful information. Not only had he told Maggie
about Gerard and outlined the police report on Elise’s death, but
he’d given her Alfie’s surname. He’d thrown it out in reference to
“St. Juniper’s”, obviously not thinking she would take it any
further. She ran her finger down the list of names. “Wexford,
Carole.” It was the only Wexford listed on the street.

Maggie let the book drop from her hands. It
swung impotently against the glass on its rusty chain. She looked
around the neighborhood. She thought she remembered seeing a few
sleazy-types come out of this neighborhood as she’d driven by from
time to time—her idea of what crack addicts and pimps look like
these days. Seedy, dirty, looking everywhere at once, going nowhere
in particular.

According to Kazmaroff, the police had
questioned Alfie at police headquarters. Mother Carole had waited
patiently during the interview and then taken Alfie home. No one
had interviewed her.

Although hardly as exciting as the prospect
of a confrontation with Gerard Dubois, Maggie still felt a nervous
anticipation when she climbed back into her car. She expected
Carole Wexford to be protective of her handicapped son. Maggie also
expected that the mother would have a clearer understanding of what
her son had seen that afternoon.

Or done.

505 St. Juniper’s Street was less than a
quarter mile from the telephone booth. An attractive little
cottage, obviously appreciated and taken care of, with blue-gray
cedar siding and a bright red door, the Wexford place stood out
among the neighboring houses like a jewel in a basket of seaweed.
The other homes were ranch-style homes in varying stages of
disrepair. Only the Wexford place had any flowers or shrubs—and few
enough of them—lining its broken driveway and bordering the street.
Maggie drove up the bumpy driveway, slabs of cement heaving away in
chunks and craters looking like a scaled-down model of the
aftermath of an earthquake. There was no car in the drive.

Maggie made her way up the tiny walkway,
crowded by overgrown boxwoods and glossy-green azaleas, and knocked
on the door. Her approach had apparently been monitored because the
door opened immediately.

“Yes?” The woman was not attractive. She’d
obviously tried to make herself up to appear so, but the attempt
had not been successful. Her hair, shiny black and worn in dated
spikes of jagged shocks, belonged on a much younger woman. Her eyes
were framed in varying shades of green and purple eye shadow.
Maggie guessed her age at about forty-five or so.

“My name is Maggie Newberry. Are you Mrs.
Wexford?”

The woman looked at Maggie and then sighed.
When she did, it looked like the whole front of her too-short house
dress deflated and sagged inward.

“You can come in,” she said, holding the door
wide to allow Maggie to enter.

“Thank you.” Maggie stepped into the house.
Too small for a foyer or welcoming hallway, the cottage opened
immediately into the living room. Maggie’s first impression was an
olfactory one. The house smelled of old, fried food, as though
years of cooking had trapped the odors in the very fiber of the
wallpaper and the thin, gray-colored carpeting that flooded the
place. The effect of the pretty cottage on the outside was not
carried through on the inside. The atmosphere was stifling, made
worse by the blast of Georgio cologne that Maggie caught as she
passed Mrs. Wexford.

“It’s about the girl that was killed, isn’t
it?” The woman motioned Maggie to a small seating arrangement of
two wingback chairs and an overstuffed sofa immediately ahead of
her.

“Uh, yes,” Maggie said, as she picked out the
least stained chair in the room. The house was tidy but not clean.
A crusted glob of something perched on the back of one of the
chairs. Maggie sat down as if she were using a strange toilet and
didn’t have anything to paper the seat with first.

“She was my sister.”

Maggie could see the woman more clearly now
and it occurred to her that she might have misjudged her age. The
lines cupping Mrs. Wexford’s mouth were harsh and indelible. Too
many years of pursing lips around a cigarette, Maggie guessed. The
face was harder than she’d first thought too. Colder.

“Alfie already talked to the cops.” The woman
sat on the sofa. She eyed Maggie warily.

“I know, they told me. I just thought...I
wanted to talk with you for a minute.” Maggie tried to keep her
eyes from straying around the room. She thought she detected a
light, bitter odor of something burning. Like electrical
wiring?

The woman leaned back and her hand went out
to a pack of cigarettes resting on a scarred oak side table.

“I mean,” Maggie continued, licking her
quickly drying lips, “I’m not sure that Alfie...your son,
absolutely understood the questions the po...the cops were asking
him, you know? I was hoping, maybe, that the two of you discussed,
you know, what happened.”

“What happened?” The woman lit her cigarette
and tossed the match in the general vicinity of a large plastic
ashtray on the side table.

“Well, I mean, what Alfie saw the day my
sister was killed.”

“He already told the cops he didn’t see
nothing.”

Maggie felt her weariness return. What was
she doing here?

“I know, but I thought, maybe he told you
some things he might not have told...I mean, he communicates with
you better than with other people, right?”

The woman nodded slowly, her eyes holding
Maggie’s gaze. She took a heavy drag off her cigarette.

“So, I just thought that maybe he told you
something...even a little something, that maybe he forgot to tell
the cops.” This is hopeless.

“Your sister was a goddamn bitch.”

Maggie knew her mouth flew open and she
couldn’t help it. She simply gaped at the woman.

“What?” she managed to say.