Playing God (13 page)

Kelly got himself another beer. "Want more coffee?"

"I want the rest of the story."

"Right. Sorry. It was the usual thing. He stayed out late. Came home smelling of perfume. Seemed less interested in sex. She thought it was because she was pregnant and unappealing. Detective, you've seen Jennifer. If anything, pregnant she was even prettier. I told her I'd see what I could find out. So I followed him. What the hell, I'm a widower, what else do I have to do with my nights? I saw where he went and what he did."

"You confront him?"

Kelly gave him a level look. "You were her father, what would you have done?"

"What did you do?"

"Went to his office. I walked in, closed the door, told him I knew what he was doing and he'd better knock it off or he was going to ruin his marriage and break his wife's heart. He said he loved Jen and didn't want to hurt her, but sometimes he needed more sex than he got at home. Said it wasn't going to be easy to stop but he'd try. He begged me not to tell Jen. I agreed, but I didn't trust him. I kept following, he kept doing it. No change. No difference." The big hand gripping the bottle was dangerously close to breaking it.

"So you told Jen?"

"I didn't want to. Didn't see how it helped. But it was her life and with conduct so risky, he might have been exposing her to things. I decided she ought to know."

"How'd she take it?"

"How do you think? She looked stricken, like I'd used my fist instead of words. Then she folded her arms over her stomach, sighed, and said she'd have to think about what to do." The baby murmured and shifted and Kelly's grip relaxed.

"Did you kill your son-in-law, Mr. Kelly?"

Kelly didn't seem offended by the question. "I thought about it." He planted his big hands on the table and pushed himself up, meeting Burgess's eyes. "Someone else got there first. I suppose I ought to be sorry about the waste of a talented physician, but I'm not. He was ruining her life, that little boy's life. He would have ended in disgrace soon enough."

"What does that mean?"

Kelly shrugged. "You're the detective."

"You think your daughter killed her husband?"

Kelly shook his head vehemently. "No way. Jen's a gentle girl and a hopelessly forgiving one. She would have given him a hundred warnings and a hundred chances. Despite how he treated her, see, she still loved him. But if Ted knew?" Kelly's shrug was eloquent.

"Was your daughter home last night?" Kelly didn't answer. "I need to talk to her," Burgess said. He put on his jacket, picked up his papers and notebook, and followed Kelly into the living room. She lay on a big white sofa, covered with a blue blanket, curled up on her side, long hair draped over the cushion. Sound asleep, she looked about twelve. "I'll come back," he said. "Thanks for the sandwich."

They all needed sleep. He hefted himself onto the seat, turned on the engine, and punched the buttons for the tape player. After a scattering of applause, Emmylou Harris began to sing "Love Hurts."

"You can say that again, Emmylou," he grunted. "Love Hurts and everybody lies." He jammed the Explorer into gear, maneuvered around Jack Kelly's truck, and crunched away down the drive.

Chapter 10

From Jen Kelly's description and the voice on the phone, he'd expected Janet Pleasant to be a greedy and well-tailored Talbot's shrew. He was surprised by the woman who answered the door. She was taller than Pleasant had been, and her dark hair was hennaed, punk-short, and spiked. She probably outweighed Pleasant, too. The black leggings and turtleneck did nothing to disguise her body, which was full-breasted, wide-hipped and comfortable. She wore an expensive silver and turquoise necklace, Native American, and heavy silver earrings.

"Detective Burgess?" He nodded. As he followed her inside the small cape, he had an odd vision of his day as a collection of rear views. Jen's small, tight girlish behind. Alana's voluptuous one. Now Janet Pleasant's nice womanly one. He could be a Fuller Brush salesman. You hear the one about the traveling detective and the victim's wives?

She led him into a small room—the sort people called a 'den'—and asked him to sit. She paused at the door, listened carefully, and closed it quietly behind her. "Mackenzie's having a hard time with this," she explained. "Despite his flaws, she loved her father. She's only seven. I wouldn't have thought..." She didn't finish. "I think she's finally settled."

She got right down to business, settling herself on a small flowered sofa and curling her legs beneath her. "What did you want to know?"

"What was your relationship with your ex-husband?"

"Divorced."

"But you stayed in touch, because of your daughter, Mackenzie?" She nodded. "What kind of contact did you still have, Mrs. Pleasant?"

"Every third weekend, Mackenzie would stay with Stephen and Jennifer. Occasionally he would see her more often, but that was rare. Stephen was busy; Jennifer was preoccupied with her pregnancy and renovating their house."

"Mackenzie had a good relationship with her father and his wife?" She nodded, not giving him anything he didn't ask for. "How did she get to her father's house?"

"I dropped her off after school on Friday. Jennifer drove her back on Sunday."

"Who initiated the divorce?"

"What does that have to do with anything?"

"If you could just answer the question?"

"I did. It was a no-fault divorce. We had grown apart."

"So it was an amicable divorce?"

"I didn't say that." She sighed. "Do we have to do this, detective?" When he didn't respond, she answered her own question. "I guess you need to know about him. It's just..." She hesitated. "I'm so much happier when I don't have think about him. I suppose... I mean, I know. Right now, what makes me happy doesn't matter."

"Please tell me about your divorce, Mrs. Pleasant."

"I met Stephen when he was in medical school. I was an art teacher. We met through a mutual friend. I was attracted to those clean good-looks. He appealed to the artist in me. I wanted to draw him, to photograph him. I wanted to run my hands over those bones—his nose, his chin, that proud forehead." She touched her necklace, rubbing her fingers slowly over the smooth turquoise stones. "In the spirit of frankness—I assume you do want me to be frank—I should say that I wanted to run my hands all over him. Stephen had a finely-made and aesthetically appealing body. It was his soul, or lack of it, that finally turned me off."

Burgess raised his eyebrows curiously, waiting for her to continue. Instead, she crossed the room, picked a photograph off the desk, and handed it to him. "Our wedding picture. Every time I put it away, Mackenzie has a fit. I think she still hopes... hoped... we'd get back together."

He could see what she meant. The younger Stephen Pleasant had had an appealing face. So had she. Longer hair back then, dark and shaggy and cut into layers that framed her face and accented her eyes. The two of them, frozen for all time in a moment of beautiful youth and happiness. Someone along the line, it had crashed and burned. "Your husband changed?"

"I'm not sure he did." She shrugged. "It may only be that my view of him changed, that what I thought was passion was ambition. What I took for compassion for his patients and a desire to save lives was really a driving need to be admired, to be the best. Success not so much on behalf of people as through them. He needed his patients to be dependent and grateful, to respect him. He didn't understand that he also needed to respect them. Gradual erosion ended our marriage, detective, not some big blow up. We started out so young and naïve. At least, I was young and naïve. Much like poor, befuddled Jennifer."

She laced her hands behind her head and gave an unselfconscious stretch, like a cat waking up, arching her back and pressing her chest toward him. It wasn't a sexual gesture. He knew when a woman was trying to attract him. Janet Pleasant was merely stiff and tired. One of those rare women who are comfortable in their bodies.

"Jen Kelly said your relationship with your ex-husband was unfriendly."

"I'll bet she did. Poor Jen thinks part of her job is to protect him and make his life run smoothly, because he's such an important, hard-working doctor. She would have gotten over it. Under that schoolgirl veneer lurks the heart of a proud and passionate woman." She coughed. "Excuse the purple prose. It's just that she's so pitiful and I can't stand women who let themselves be made pitiful. He was making such a fool of her."

"What do you mean?"

She gave him a thin smile. "Didn't you tell me the first hours are critical? He's been dead close to twenty-four hours by now. Surely you've learned something about him."

"That's why I'm here."

"I'm being bitchy, aren't I? That's what Jennifer really told you. That I'm a bitch and a shrew who fought with Stephen all the time and threatened to kill him." Again that thin smile. He suspected she had a warmer smile she used on other occasions.

"Are you a bitch and shrew? Did you threaten to kill him?"

"No, except where Stephen was concerned. And yes, I did once say, before witnesses, that if only he were dead, I could collect the insurance and then I wouldn't have to worry about always fighting him for support. I'm sure I'm not the first woman who found her ex-husband's inattention to his financial obligations infuriating. Nor the first to announce in exasperation a desire to kill him." She held out her hands, wrists together. "You want to throw cuffs on and lock me up?"

She was good at this. Sharp. Fun, if you liked verbal tennis, but he was too tired to run after her serves. "Please, Mrs. Pleasant. I've been up since yesterday morning. Can we just talk straight and get this over with?" He thought that underneath it all, despite the bitterness, she was shocked by the death and wanted to talk.

Her shoulders slumped. "I'm sorry," she said. "I've been so mad at him for so long. I shouldn't make it your problem. Yes, Stephen and I had an acrimonious divorce. Not because he opposed the divorce—he already had his eye on Jennifer by then—but because of his pathological affinity for the goddamned buck. He made good money. I asked for a reasonable amount of support. I was not greedy but I was not going to let him cheat Mackenzie at the expense of any new family he might engender. I'm willing to work. I do work. But art teachers don't make a lot of money. Stephen and his lawyers fought me for every cent, every scrap. By the time we were done, I
could
have killed him. Without hesitation or remorse."

She leaned toward him confidentially. "Do you have children?" He shook his head. "Well, children change things. When you have kids, divorce isn't the end, it's the beginning of a different relationship. If it had been just me, I could have walked away, good riddance to him, but Mackenzie has... had... rights and interests separate from mine. I couldn't kill Stephen because she's his child and she loves... she loved him. But because of her, we had an on-going relationship which took the form of my fighting for every cent he owed us. I had to suck down my anxiety about the mortgage and her tuition and whether I could keep the car running, put on a bright smile, and chat merrily about her daddy."

She sighed. "Yes, it made me bitter. I think he genuinely lacked the capacity to be fair or generous. No matter how much he had, he wanted more and wasn't scrupulous about what he had to do to get it."

She massaged her cheeks, as though the memory of those false smiles made them ache. "I'm sorry he's dead, because my little girl is hurt by it, and I love my daughter more than anything. At the same time, I feel like someone has lifted a huge weight from me. I'm what Mackenzie calls 'happy-sad.'"

She anticipated his next question. "Yes. He was insured. The divorce settlement required him to carry a policy with Mackenzie as the beneficiary. And given his rather casual attitude toward bills, the cost was included in the child-support and I paid the premium." She watched him write that down, then asked, "Do you have any idea who killed him?"

"I was hoping you might." It was pleasant in the little room. The furniture was comfortable, the paintings soothing. Everything was in soft, hushed tones, like a room speaking in a whisper. It was warm and so quiet the only sound was her breathing. He was grateful for the warmth—those frigid hours at the crime scene were still very much with him—but it made him long for sleep and he still had Ted Shaw on his dance card.