Perfect Sax (26 page)

“I’m sorry. I swear I never knew.”

“So you can see why I’d want to check you out.”

“You started following me.”

“Chuck told me you were a party girl and came home late at night. I knew about your Grand Wagoneer and I got your address on Whitley off of your driver’s license. I went to your house one night. I watched you come home. That first time I saw you I had such pain. Like fire. You were so young. You were so young and thin and vibrant—that’s the right word. I hadn’t expected that. And I watched you go into the house and turn on some lights.”

“When was this?” Some creepy strange woman had been stalking me. I had felt it. I had known it. But I had always managed to push it out of my thoughts. It was creepier by far to hear about it from the point of view of the stalker.

“A week ago Saturday night. Or I should really say early Sunday morning.”

And it all clicked into place. This jealous/crazy woman had been staking out my house on the night Sara Jackson had returned my Jeep Grand Wagoneer. Sherrie Honnett had not known what I looked like then. She mistook Sara for me.

I
t was Sara,” I said, my voice dead.

“I thought it was
you.
So young. So pretty. She let herself into the house by the kitchen door. She left the door ajar and I entered behind her. She was already walking up the stairs when I entered the kitchen.”

I was shocked. Why had Sara Jackson gone up to my room? I had never figured that out.

“She was standing in your bedroom, opening drawers, playing with your jewelry box.”

I was astonished. “My what?”

“She was holding up a pair of emerald earrings. Now, why would I imagine that that young woman fooling with your earrings was anyone else but you?”

“Sara was ripping me off?” Of course she was. Alone in my house, she had to investigate to see if there was anything around worth stealing. From what I knew now about Sara Jackson’s character, I should never have given her the combination to my back-door lock. But at that time I was careless, trusting. A fool.

“When I realized I’d killed the wrong person, I had to think it over,” Sherrie said. “The girl was going through your pathetic little jewelry box. When you think about it, you owe me some thanks. I shot a burglar in the middle of the act. If
only I had known, I might have spun the story correctly at the time. I’d be wearing a medal today.”

“You shot her.”

“With the Lady Smith, as a matter of fact.” I remembered the revolver that was currently loaded and resting at the bottom of my shoulder bag. Sherrie was smiling, recalling that night with a chillingly inappropriate, matter-of-fact calmness. “It was an odd scene now that I recall it. I told her to leave my husband alone. I told her I had cancer. I told her she could fall in love with any man in the world and he would fall in love with her back.”

Oh my God. What had Sara Jackson, the sometime prostitute, made of this bizarre woman begging her to leave her man alone?

“She laughed at me, Miss Madeline Bean,” Sherrie said calmly. “The little bitch told me that it was cold old women like
me
who made her work easy. She said I deserved to lose my man. She showed not one single ounce of remorse, do you understand?”

I nodded, getting the picture.

“And to shut the smug bitch up, I told her to sit on the bed. She ignored me and turned back to the jewelry case. So I had to take my gun out and tell her again.”

I was about to be sick.

“And that wasn’t smart, I know,” Sherrie said, sounding almost apologetic. “Chuck would be angry. And I didn’t want him to be angry, even though he had just that very day broken my heart into a million pieces. He said he loved you. In our therapy session on Saturday afternoon. He said he needed to be honest with me.”

My head couldn’t take in everything she said. Like this last bit. Honnett had never used the word
love
with me. Ever. So there I was, for months holding a grudge against this man for his betrayal. I had convinced myself that I had read him
wrong, that he had never really cared about me. While for months, Honnett was painfully extricating himself from his entanglement with a sad and sick wife, telling her he loved me before he would ever say those words to me.

“So I had to make a decision.” Sherrie picked up the story, enjoying my captive attention. “Chuck would never understand why I had gone over to your house to meet you, Madeline Bean. He’d be angry with me for going inside. I had to think very quickly, but there was no way I could get out of it. And all the time, this girl that I thought was you kept berating me. She had a filthy gutter mouth. No God in her at all. She kept swearing at me. I was holding the gun on her and she didn’t care. She kept calling me disgusting names.”

I shook my head, unable to imagine Sara’s foolish toughness.

“I was horrified,” Sherrie whispered, “horrified to see whom my Chuck had given his heart to. Madeline Bean was a stupid, foulmouthed whore,” Sherrie said, still in that eerie casual tone of voice like she was talking about a recipe. “And I had to shoot her to shut her up.”

I swallowed down my sudden feeling of nausea.

“And it gets better,” Sherrie said. “The irony. You’ll like this part. When I was leaving your house, I realized I had been observed. I almost peed in my pants when I spotted him out there in the dark. At one-thirty in the morning, when no one should have been anywhere near your house. Some nasty old man was hiding in the bushes. Probably some Peeping Tom, but that pervert picked the wrong night to peep. When I came out of the house, he ran away like a scared squirrel.”

“Who was it?”

“Some man who lived up on the next street. I had to track him to his house,” she said, remembering back. “I’m sure he heard the gunshots. It was dark, but he may have seen me. I couldn’t take the chance.”

Albert Grasso must have come down to my house early Sunday
A.M.
, perhaps looking for a way to get his briefcase papers back. And during his late-night prowling, he’d had the bad fortune to witness Sherrie’s spur-of-the-moment burst of terrorism. Grasso fled, but not before Sherrie was able to discover where to find him. She must have come after him later and killed him, just to cover her tracks.

“You are the one to blame for all of this,” Sherrie said adamantly. “You backed me into a corner, and when you wouldn’t listen to reason, I had to kill you.”

“Sherrie. That wasn’t me, remember? I
would
have listened to you. But you were talking to some twisted hooker who was in my room to steal my things. It was Sara Jackson who taunted you, not me.”

“Shut up! That’s not what this is all about. I don’t care about myself. Not at all. I am just a vessel for justice, which is exactly as it should be. I prayed to God for years over my marriage. I asked God for babies, but He didn’t have that blessing for me. I was confused about that, I’ll admit it. I was lost for a little while. But I prayed and I found God again. God didn’t see fit to give me children, but he does have a job for me, Madeline Bean, and I’m doing it the best I know how.”

This was not going to end well. She had a job to do. I wanted to scream.

How had Honnett managed to put up with her for so long? Or did her mind unravel so slowly that her quirks and moods might go unrecognized as they shrank further from the bounds of sane behavior? Perhaps Sherrie had the gift of hiding her inner turmoil from her husband, her mental illness progressing to a state where she had nothing left but vengeance and fury, without Honnett seeing into the depths of her despair.

“I know what I have to do,” she continued. “I have to
leave this earth. I have taken two lives, and although they were hateful lives, I can’t stay. I know I have broken the law. So I’m not crazy. But then there’s Chuck. Do you think he could forgive me?”

“You’re still his wife, Sherrie,” I answered carefully. “There’s always hope.”

She shook her head sadly. “No. He’s too good. He’d have to send me away. But I had one more task to perform before I go to God. I had to look after my dear husband. I had to find the real Madeline Bean and decide if you were honorable enough for this man.”

“But, Sherrie, Chuck and I broke it off months ago. We haven’t even kept in touch.”

Sherrie ignored me. Her voice held utter contempt. “And I discovered your true moral character.”

I thought about the night she was standing out on Dexter Wyatt’s deck in the moonlight, looking in. “But, Sherrie,” I said, worried. “Chuck and I were not even seeing each other then. We were over.”

“Didn’t take you long, did it? You were already catting around with another man. No better than that insulting hooker I killed in your bed. You never loved Chuck like he deserves. And he loves you, don’t you see?”

I stared at the barrel of the Beretta. “You’re going to kill me because I’m…” How could I say it so she’d wake up? “Because I’m not a good-enough person. Why don’t you just tell Honnett. Tell him.”

“I noticed my favorite gun was missing the other day, and I can tell you, it worried me. It worried me greatly. Did you know that pistol had been a gift to me from Chuck on our first wedding anniversary? I love that gun.”

Oh God.

“And as it happens, that thirty-eight can be tied to those two shootings, can’t it? I couldn’t very well have this
weapon traced to the killings. I just came here to retrieve my own property. So where is it?”

“It’s in the trunk of my car.” I wanted to get out of this empty house. I wanted to be outdoors.

“You’re lying.”

Something else occurred to me. The other night I told Honnett the stalker woman drove a Honda Accord with a missing front plate. He had to have known right then it was Sherrie who had been following me. He’d gone kind of quiet and I’d put it off to his mooning over the wreck of our relationship. But no. He had more to worry him that night. He had to have noticed Sherrie’s ever-more-disturbing behavior, realized she was unstable, and then discovered she had been acting out against me, but he never mentioned a word of it to me.

“Where’s the gun?” Sherrie shouted at me.

“In my car. If I was lying, I’d have said I don’t have your gun anymore.”

“Well, we’ll see. Get up now, missy,” Sherrie said, gesturing with the barrel of the black 9mm semiautomatic. “Up with you. I want you to sit over on this bed here.” There was an old paint-splattered daybed over in the corner of the sunroom that the guys used as a platform to paint the high moldings.

She was going to shoot me here in Wesley’s empty estate, just as she had shot Sara. Just the same, on the bed.

“Stand up!” she yelled.

There was a tap at the front door. We both heard it.

“Don’t make a sound,” she said, walking up to me and putting the barrel of the gun up to my neck as I got to my feet.

The tapping at the door continued. We heard a heavily accented man’s voice call, “Miss Maddie?”

“Who is that?” Sherrie whispered in my ear. She held
me by the back of my waistband, still keeping the gun on my neck.

“I think it’s Rolando,” I answered. “He works here on the property.”

“Miss Maddie, I need the garage opener.”

“Rolando has the key to this house,” I lied to Sherrie. “If I don’t answer the door, he’s going to let himself in.”

Her breathing became more rapid. “Don’t screw this up,” she said to me, holding me by the waistband of my khaki shorts and pushing toward the door. “Just tell him through the door that he should go home. No work today.”

“He won’t believe me,” I said. “He works for—”

Sherrie struck me on the side of my head with the gun. I almost dropped from the sudden crash of black light and pain. “Tell him to go or I’ll kill two people today.”

“Rolando,” I said through the door.

“Miss Maddie? I need to put some things in the garage.”

“Not today, Rolando.”

“¿Que?”

“He doesn’t understand a lot of English,” I explained to Sherrie, worried she was going to shoot both of us for my freaking inability to remember one word I learned in high school Spanish.

“Tell him to go,” she insisted.

“Go, Rolando. Go home.”

“What, miss?”

“Damn it,” Sherrie said. “Open the door slowly and tell the idiot to get out now. You have ten seconds or I’m shooting you both.”

Sherrie slowly opened the door inward and pushed me forward, two feet away from the barrel of the 9mm and a step closer to fresh open air.

The man standing at the door grabbed my arm. He yanked
me so hard I lost my balance. Before I could tell what was happening, I was falling, tumbling to the ground, pulled out of the line of fire.

Some villains are all punk talk; they intimidate their victims by making grandiose threats. When put to the ultimate test, they can’t pull the trigger. But that couldn’t be said for Sherrie. Sherrie had never been bluffing. She had been a police officer too long. She was calm in the face of sudden danger. She had been trained to shoot in situations that were going down wrong, and ask questions later. And now, here, in the bright Hancock Park afternoon, something was seriously going wrong.

As I began falling away, she pulled the trigger of her semiautomatic, squeezing off two shots in rapid succession. Stunned by my sudden fall, Sherrie hadn’t fully adjusted her aim as I barreled downward. The slugs whizzed by, much too close to my head. I watched in slow motion as her bullets did, however, find a home. They struck down the man standing on the front step, my savior. Only it wasn’t some innocent, startled Mexican-American construction worker who went down. It had never been Rolando at the door. It was Sherrie’s beloved husband.

Chuck Honnett fell backward, his face expressing shock, pain, clutching at his chest.

What the hell had he been thinking, just walking up to the front door and pulling me out like that?
My God!
I saw his face for a second after he was hit. He never figured Sherrie would hurt him. But he hadn’t counted on what kind of a wreck she had become, how the sudden confusion of the moment and her cop instincts and her tortured brain might propel her to make a deadly mistake. Or maybe he hadn’t cared about his own safety at all. This wild and rash action was the way he’d chosen to clean up after his disaster of a wife. That’s what men like Honnett did.

I pulled myself to my feet and tripped my way across the front of the house, then dropped again and rolled into the thicket of overgrown bushes, thankful that Wesley had not yet relandscaped. I’d have been shot before I ever made my way to this cover, no question, had not the horror of recognition as Sherrie saw her own man fall to the ground stunned her into a momentary trance. Her husband lay unconscious not six feet in front of her, having taken what I figured were both shots at extremely close range to the chest. I had not chanced another look back to check on him as I clawed my way to shelter, propelled by some force of survival instinct I’d never felt before. When I was deep into the shrubbery, I tried to get into a position where I could see what was going on.

“Chuck?” Sherrie could hardly focus her eyes on Honnett’s fallen body. “Chuck, honey? What did you make me do?”

I had no idea if Honnett lay dead or dying, but I crawled up against the house, pulling myself back through the shrubbery, leaving bloody scratch marks on my face and down both arms as I scraped through the brambles to find shelter.