Authors: David Bishop
As I saw things, most folks, men and women, thought of themselves as normal and those who were different as having either a quirk or being maladjusted. Truth being, most people consider idiosyncrasies to be things other folks have.
When Gretchen went back into the kitchen, Quentin leaned forward, toward Tedy. “I don’t like that old witch. She’s always watching me.”
If memory served me well, Quentin is Latin for the fifth child and PQ had only three. On the drive he had told me that Quentin had been his grandfather’s name, who had been the fifth child of his father, Phineas. That filled out the rest of PQ’s name: Phineas Quentin Winston Rutledge, while also explaining why he preferred simply being called PQ.
The newest member of the family was Robyn, PQ’s wife of five years. At twenty-eight, Robyn was the same age as her stepdaughter Tedy, nineteen years younger than I, and forty-eight years younger than her husband. The articles Axel had printed out that I read in the plane reported that PQ met Robyn during Cord’s trial. Tedy had not come home for the trial, choosing to stay at college where she was in her last semester. The heartsick father had sat alone the first day watching the story of his son’s skullduggery being presented in cold, calculated step-by-step detail. The next morning, Robyn introduced herself outside the courthouse. From that day through the end of the trial Robyn sat quietly next to PQ, the two of them holding hands. They were married eleven days after Cord’s conviction.
I had asked PQ if he and Robyn had signed a pre-nuptial agreement. They had and he had brought me a copy about an hour after we arrived at his home. I spent part of that afternoon reading it with my feet on the steps in the shallow end of the pool. Their prenup had lots of provisos, but no matter what happened Robyn got a minimum amount that to regular folks would seem more like a maximum. It also stipulated that if they stayed together until he died, she would share equally with his children, an amount that would dwarf her minimum.
Well, you’ve got the idea. PQ had no ordinary family, but a collection of oddballs with a bloodline, and a wife his daughter’s age.
That night, sometime after I fell asleep, I heard a tapping on the window, as if a woodpecker had become a glasspecker with an uneven cadence. Then I heard a woman’s voice.
“Matt. It’s Tedy.” Tap. Tap. “Matt! Matt!” Tap Tap. “Wake up. It’s Tedy.”
I got up, twisted my boxers straight enough to escape the full nelson they had applied while I slept, and opened the door.
Tedy stood in the doorway, panting, her face streaked with tears, the moon casting a faint nimbus around her black satin robe. “You didn’t answer your door. I knocked.”
“I’m a sound sleeper. What’s wrong?”
“Daddy’s been shot.” She stared at the floor. “He’s dead.”
“Who shot him?”
“We don’t know. Whoever did it is gone.”
She collapsed against me, her head fitting under my chin, her tears blotting on my naked front. I pushed Tedy back from my wet chest hair and spoke softly.
“Did you find PQ?”
“No. The cook. Daddy had called her for a cup of tea.”
“Tea?” I said with the inflection of a question. PQ seemed easy to imagine leaning on a dusty bar, sided by Randolph Scott or Duke Wayne. Such men would smirk at sarsaparilla, and laugh out loud at the mention of tea.
Tedy undid her satin robe, revealing a white chemise, and used the tie to wipe her tears. “Daddy has drunk hot tea at night for as long as I can remember.” She went back into my arms, the sound of a little girl sobbing for her dead father. But Tedy was a full-grown woman crying against what would have been my lapel, if I were wearing something that had a lapel.
Tedy’s crying eased and I had to get to the main house. I gently nudged her back until she stood on her own. “Where was PQ shot?” I held my pants open and slid in one leg, quickly followed by the other, a slight hop kept my balance.
She crossed her arms below her breasts. “In his bed.”
After pulling on a polo shirt, I touched her shoulder and spoke softly. “I meant, where did the bullet strike him?”
“In the head.” She swiped the back of her hand across her wet cheeks. First one, then the other, her fingers curled outward. “In his head,” she repeated, quieter this time. Her face revealing she knew now, emotionally knew her father would not be back.
“Were there any visitors tonight? Visiting anyone in the household?” Tedy shook her head. “Deliveries? Emergency repair crews? Anyone at all?”
She had kept shaking her head while I asked, then added, “No one, Matt. Only the family and you have been in the house in the past two days.”
I stepped into my tan loafers. “Did you hear the shot?”
“No.”
We ran through a hot desert wind with enough fury to blow the light out of the stars. The cattle seemed restless. The wind probably, or maybe the herd somehow knew the lead bull was dead.
Gretchen met us at the front door, the smell of leftover turkey saturating the space around her. “I called the sheriff,” she said.
“Have all the family members been told?”
“They know,” Gretchen said.
“Where are they?” The cook pointed.
I walked into PQ’s room with Tedy close behind. Quentin sat sidesaddle on the wide wooden footboard of his father’s bed, his ears clear of his music plugs, his hands not holding his smart phone. Robyn stood beside Cord, her arms crossed, her eyes pointed toward Quentin’s bare feet. They were all in sleep clothes except for Cord who wore all black with a pewter belt buckle the size of an all-you-can-eat salad plate.
“Did any of you hear or see anything?” No one spoke. Most shook their heads. “Gretchen, apparently you were awake, what about you?”
“Nothing, Mr. Kile.”
“Everybody out.”
“You can’t order us around,” Quentin said, his teary face rainbowed with smeared colors from his sleep-blunted spikes. He had apparently used some washable coloring on his hair rather than having it dyed. “This isn’t your house.”
I turned to the oldest and largest family member. “Cord, the sheriff’s on his way. Take your family into the living room. Gretchen, please wait in the chair just outside the door. And close the door as you go out.”
Cord, the new big bull, took the point and led his small, two-legged herd out of the room, leaving his father there with me, only PQ didn’t know I was there. He likely didn’t know he was there either. Most of us hope to die at night in our own bed. If that had been PQ’s wish, it had been granted.
Gretchen left last and closed the door as I had asked.
PQ had taken a single shot just about square in the center of his forehead, a quick death. I felt glad of that. There were no stippling or burns around the entry, so he hadn’t committed suicide, something pretty much ruled out by the angle of the shot. PQ’s pants were draped over the back of a leather recliner, his wallet bulged the pocket. This was no robbery that had gone bad. That no one had heard the shot probably meant a silencer. The dead-bolted door to his private patio and the windows were all locked from the inside. The shooter had gone back into the main part of the house before leaving.
That is, if, in fact, the shooter had left.
The cup of tea Tedy had mentioned sat on a rough-cut table next to a book with a playing card placed as a bookmark. The card inserted in the long side of the pages rather than the more common position: from the top. I dipped my finger into the tea and touched my lips. Slightly warm. No sugar. No whiskey. The lamplight showed the book to be Daphne du Maurier’s classic,
Rebecca
. Like his drinking tea, the book didn’t fit my impression of PQ. The same thing was true for his choice of a bookmark. He hadn’t used the ace of spades or one of the kings, but rather, the Old Maid card from the game of the same name. I held the book firmly and opened it without letting the card move. The edge underlined the famous passage: “You think I loved Rebecca? I hated her.”
PQ’s grandparents had nested the first ranch house in the valley near a spring, a good ways outside Copper City, the last half a dirt washboard road. I had maybe forty-five minutes to figure what all this meant before the sheriff would start chewing my hide for contaminating his crime scene.
I opened the door and asked Gretchen to join me in the kitchen. When we entered, she pointed. “My room’s through there. No one could’ve gotten outside through the kitchen without me hearing them, but there are four other outside doors.”
“What time did PQ call for his tea?”
“Two-fifteen. He woke me.”
I glanced at my watch: two-forty-two. The state of PQ’s body and the temperature of the tea fit that timeline. I opened the dishwasher: empty. I picked up a teapot from the drainboard where it sat with its lid up: wet inside. I put the pot back letting the lid fall closed.
“Is this the teapot you used?”
“Huh? Oh, yes. Can I get you anything, Mr. Kile?”
“No.” I opened the door into her room. Everything looked orderly, including the neatly folded back sheet and blanket. A lonely magazine centered a small table. “No outside door?”
“No,” she said.
“The turkey smell in here is wonderful.”
She angled her head toward a black iron stove, “My favorite part. I started the soup before going to bed.”
“Why isn’t the teapot in PQ’s room?”
“He never wanted a pot. Just one cup of Chamomile and he liked it very hot.”
“Talk to me about when you took in the tea.”
“His room was dark except for a little light from the nightlight in his bathroom. I put down the cup and turned on the lamp to wake him. That’s when I saw he had been shot. I guess my screaming woke up Tedy. She came down. Then she called Cord.”
“Who else came right away?”
“Only Tedy. Quentin sleeps with that music thing in his ears. He’s in another world, that one.”
“What about his wife Robyn?”
“Her bedroom’s right at the top of the stairs,” Gretchen said.
“Closer than Tedy’s room?”
“Yes.”
“But she didn’t come down?”
“No.”
“You have an opinion as to why she didn’t?”
“Maybe she took a sleeping pill. Not my business to know these things.”
I leaned against the counter. “How long have you been employed here?”
“Two weeks.”
“And during this week, your second week, PQ drove to Phoenix, in part to meet me at the airport?”
“I believe so, Mr. Kile.”
“Thank you. You’ve been a big help.” I looked at Gretchen and smiled. “You asked if you could get me anything. I’d like a glass of water, a tall one, half full with no ice.”
“Certainly.”
She set the glass on the white ceramic tiled counter, next to where I stood.
“Please join the others in the living room. Wait ten minutes, and then tell Robyn I’d like her to come here to the kitchen.”
When Gretchen entered the living room, closing the double doors behind her, I headed upstairs, two at a time. Quentin’s room at the far end of the hall was a mess. Hard rock music leaking from earphones hung over the headboard. Next, Tedy’s room: her bed had been slept in. The clothes she had worn had been folded neatly, as if they would be worn again, and left on top of the hamper just inside her closet.
To the contrary, Robyn’s bed had been rustled, but the pillow had only a small cavity, as if punched. The covers were jerked around, but not expanded adequately to handle her full torso. The clothes she had worn to dinner were tossed over the vanity chair in a jumble. Her high heels were scattered, lying on their sides, each facing away from the other, as if having bickered. All her other shoes were in cedar wood cubbyholes in her closet.
I hurried back to the kitchen, opened the microwave and found a damp paper towel. In the wastebasket, on top, was a wet tea bag, Chamomile.
* * *
Slam.
The kitchen door bounced back from the wall. I turned sharply to see Robyn, her spread legs straining the buttons down the front of her full-length robe. She stared at me hard before looking me up and down. Her eyes, unsteady from anger, moved like tossed dice.
“You
sent
for me?”
“Tell me about your husband’s health.”
“He’s dead. I’d say his health is not good.” She leaned on the back of a kitchen chair and hardened her glare.
“On the road from Phoenix, PQ grimaced several times, not from sitting, from pain. If you two were as close as …” I let my words trail off.
Her next breath seemed more huff than exhale. Then she sat in the chair on which she had been leaning. “I s’pose it’s no big deal now. My husband had terminal stomach cancer, inoperable.”
“Who else knew?”
“His doctor.”
“What about the family? The execs at his company?”
“No. He didn’t want people fussing over him.”
“And you kept his secret?”
“That’s the way my husband wanted it, Mr. Kile. So that’s how it was.”
Robyn struck me as a woman who could keep a secret, if it were her secret or in her interest to keep it. I narrowed my eyes. “Where were you when your husband was murdered?”
“What do you mean by that?”
“It’s not a hard question. Where were you when your husband was murdered?”
“I don’t know exactly when he was murdered. I went out for a walk. Then I came back and went to sleep.”
“If you’re going to pick something to be bad at, lying isn’t the best choice.”
She stood abruptly. The chair tipped over backward. Her face filled with fury. Spread fingers cupped her hips. Her trim legs again challenged the limits of her robe, the lines of her garter belt obvious, the only undergarment she wore.
“So, to sleep you took off the bra you wore to dinner, but kept your garter belt on. Do you regularly sleep in your garter belt?”
“If I were not a lady, I’d …” she left the rest unfinished.
“If you were a lady, a lot of things would be different, wouldn’t they?”
“I’ll have you know I attend church every Sunday. Accompanied by my husband.”
“Attending church no more makes you a Christian than standing in water makes you a fish.”