Playing God (3 page)

This wasn't a day for reflecting on beauty anyway. This was a day for death. Going to see Pleasant's wife. Widow. He hadn't called ahead. He wanted a fresh, unrehearsed reaction. She hadn't reported him missing, so maybe he often stayed out all night, or maybe she already knew why. The widow of a man who frequented prostitutes—Aucoin said the guy was a regular—might, if she were aware of her husband's extracurricular activities, have an interest in stopping them. If so, it was a pretty damned dramatic stop.

Times like this, steeped in death and the reasons for it, when weariness eroded his rigid control, his own issues crept out. It was ironic that his job was to deal competently with death in others' lives yet he dealt with it so badly in his own. Two years since his mother's death and he couldn't put it behind him. Sometimes he'd go weeks, even a month, without that choking sensation, that surprising wave of sadness, but it always came back.

Wallowing. Goddammit! He hated wallowing. Self-pity was such a useless emotion. Angrily, he jammed the vehicle into gear and skittered backward over the ice, nearly running down an overweight patrol officer mincing carefully across the lot. The man shot him an angry look, then lowered his eyes. His reputation again, Burgess supposed. Bad-tempered hardass who chewed new recruits to shreds the way some guys chewed gum. Despite his own excess pounds, he couldn't stand fat uniformed cops.

Down Franklin and onto Commercial Street along the wharves and the waterfront, sun gilding the windows and glancing off the ice-glazed streets of the restored old shopping district, quiet this early in the day. He took 77 south over the Fore River. On a morning like this, with the air so cold, great columns of sea smoke rose off the salt water, sunlight turning it a soft golden color, so that he might have been driving toward the gates of heaven instead of South Portland. The grim-faced drivers around him had their gaze fixed on the cars in front of them. God had laid on a spectacular performance this morning and no one was watching.

His mother would have noticed. She was the one who'd taught him to see, summoning him to the window and whispering, "Look, Joseph," in her soft voice. He rarely mentioned his mother—once they grew up, men didn't admit they had mothers, except to begrudge the services mothers required of them—but spending so much of his life dealing with death had reinforced the importance of honoring the dead. It was almost certainly his mother's noticing and wondering that had made him a detective.

Pleasant's house was an oversized white monument to success. The doorbell drew a slender young woman who flung the door open with an eager, "Steve!" Finding Burgess there instead, she flinched, her face falling like a disappointed child's.

"Sergeant Burgess, Portland Police," he said. "May I come in?" She stepped back wordlessly to let him enter, clutching her pink robe together with one small hand, her nervous blue eyes flickering across his face. Her appearance confirmed one thing. Pleasant had liked blondes. As he followed her into the kitchen, Burgess saw that her long, straight hair was held at the nape of her neck with the red wire twist-tie from a bread bag.

The house was new or had recently been redone. Everything was fresh and shiny and had an unused look. No chipped paint or scratches on the woodwork. She led him into a huge kitchen-family room with stunning ocean views, a room that was painfully neat. No papers. Clutter. Life. She waved a vague hand toward an oak table big enough to hold a roasted ox. "You can sit there. I'll make..." Her voice failed. She turned away, gripping the granite edge of the counter with both hands.

He gave her the space to do it, pulling out a chair, putting his coat over the back, getting out his notebook. She turned back to him, lips trembling, pale fingers twisting an enormous diamond. "It's about Stephen, isn't it?" she said. "I thought you were going to be..." She swallowed. "He didn't come home last night."

"You didn't report him missing," Burgess said. "Is he in the habit of staying out all night?"

Her eyes fell, a delicate pink rising in her cheeks. Instead of answering, she asked, "Has something happened to him?" He said yes and waited. What she did next—how she reacted—was important. "I... he... Stephen..." The pain in her voice was palpable. However she took the news he'd brought, Stephen Pleasant had already hurt this woman badly. "Is Stephen all right?"

Doing this part of the job, you learned to be grateful for small things. He was grateful he didn't have to ask her to identify her husband's body. By the time she saw him, the protruding rod and the rictus of fear would be gone, the face rearranged into something more composed and human, the body cleaned of lipstick kisses. His job required a certain level of matter-of-fact cruelty—cops couldn't treat people the way people treated people and still do their job—but luckily the ME had known Pleasant. The form of the ID was career first, though. The doctor had stared at the body and said, "Jesus Christ. He must have really pissed someone off this time."

Burgess had made a mental note to follow that up when they weren't standing around in the cold. He'd met Pleasant under professional circumstances, knew nothing about the man's personal life.

He was ready with the speech that never got any easier, but she didn't wait for an answer. Something else was crowding her mind. "He's never not come home before. What happened?" Trying to be calm and in charge but her voice tripped and stumbled. The pink flush deepened, coloring her neck and face. Her skin was fine, translucent. So vulnerable. She swallowed and looked Burgess full in the face. "Stephen has... sees other women. He thinks I don't know but I'm not so stupid as he supposes. But he's never... Sergeant... Detective Burgess... what's happened to my husband?"

"Mrs. Pleasant, maybe you'd better sit down."

"Oh! An accident," she said, nodding to herself, though Burgess hadn't said a thing. Her hand skipped up her body, touching chest, chin, forehead. It stayed there and she tapped her forehead again with two fingers. "I'm forgetting all my manners, aren't I? I'm Jennifer. Jennifer Kelly. Jen. And please don't call me Jennie." The use of a different last name surprised him. Most of the women he met who'd married doctors were proud to be Mrs. Doctor so and so. He bet her husband had called her Jennie. "Did you want coffee?"

People confronted with the news of violent death often apologized for their lack of manners, for forgetting civilities. He pitied them, yet admired the old fashioned quality of hard-wired manners. Mannerly reactions to sad news might be too civilized but they were immeasurably easier to deal with than screaming, cursing and kicking furniture, hysterical tears or a retreat into catatonic silence.

"I'm fine," he said, "unless you were making some anyway."

"I usually..." She stopped, quiet tears sliding down her face, making no move to brush them away. Burgess thought she'd often cried like this, silent grief that simply spilled over. He pulled out a clean handkerchief and gave it to her. "Coffee. I usually make it for Stephen. I don't drink much coffee." She opened the cupboard, took out a filter, then pulled a can of coffee toward her. She scooped coffee into the filter, poured in the water, hit the switch. She stood with her back to him, watching the coffee pour into the pot, her face in the handkerchief, shoulders shaking.

He waited. He learned a lot, waiting, that more impatient people missed.

She got out two mugs, poured coffee, and put them on the table. She set a sugar bowl in front of him, and got out a container of half and half. She tried to open the top with shaking hands, then abruptly thrust it at him. "You do it," she said.

He opened the box, poured some in his cup, then set it on the table. It was time to reel her in. "Sit down, please, Ms. Kelly. We need to talk." He pulled out a chair and waited until she had settled into it. Then he took his own chair facing her. "I'm afraid that your husband is dead. We found him early this morning..."

"Dead?" she interrupted, grabbing his arm. "You're telling me Stephen is dead? I thought... maybe... he'd been arrested or something, because of..." Her eyes jumped so wildly he thought she might faint, but the grip on his arm was strong. Her voice rose. "Stephen can't be dead. We've got an appointment with our lawyer this afternoon. To make our wills. Because of the baby. We can't miss it."

It wasn't unusual, this failure to hear the bad news. He'd had a mother once who, being told that her son's bike accident was fatal, had responded, "Yes, but what about his leg? He's supposed to race tomorrow."

"I'm sorry," he said. "We found him around three this morning. In his car."

She released his arm and folded her hands in her lap, staring down at them. Once or twice she lifted one, trailed it slowly through the air, and folded it back into her lap again. Finally she looked at him. He saw that she was tired, missing the healthy vigor normal in a young woman. Her skin was dry and blotchy and there were purplish half-moons like bruises under her eyes. "In his car?" she said. She shook her head rapidly, as if anticipating something he was going to say. "Stephen didn't kill himself, if that's what you're thinking. He had no reason to. He was happy." She cradled her coffee with both hands and brought the shaking cup to her lips.

Burgess noted that she didn't say "we were happy."

"Your husband didn't kill himself, Ms. Kelly. He was murdered."

"Murdered!" The cup slipped from her fingers and smashed on the shiny granite floor. She stared down at the mess and the spreading pool of coffee around her bare feet. "Murdered?" She shook her head in disbelief. "But no one would want to murder Stephen. He's successful. He's important. There are people who are jealous, I suppose, but you don't kill someone for that. And Janet... well, she hates his guts, but she loves the almighty buck way too much to kill the golden goose."

"Who is Janet?" he asked, just as the wail of a baby came from upstairs.

"In a minute," she said. "Stevie is awake." She stared helplessly at the broken crockery and pool of coffee, as if it was a lake too deep and dangerous to cross. Burgess grabbed the kitchen towel, threw it over the mess, and held out his hand, the Sir Walter Raleigh of Portland. She took it and jumped nimbly over the mess, more like the twelve-year old she looked than the twenty-three-year-old she probably was. "I'll just pick him up. Be right back."

He cleaned up the spill, threw away the broken cup, and poured new coffee. Her "right back" took about fifteen minutes. She returned in a flannel shirt and yoga pants. She had a nice figure, though a bit thin. If she was fine porcelain, he liked crockery. Something to settle his own bulk against. She carried a baby wrapped in a blue blanket. The baby was only a few months old, which explained the weariness. Childbirth and sleepless nights, compounded by an unfaithful husband, and the future that laid out for her.

"Thanks for cleaning up. You didn't have to," she said, unbuttoning her shirt. "I hope you don't mind." She wasn't wearing a bra, so there were no fumbling preliminaries, she simply let the shirt hang open as she unwrapped the baby. She glanced at him with a look that could have meant many things—see what my husband was giving up, or see how easy-going I am at this nursing business—before she attached the whimpering baby to one small, swollen breast. She closed her eyes, holding her breath as the baby settled into its rhythm, then let it out softly. A damp patch appeared as her other breast leaked onto her shirt. She shook herself, as though suddenly realizing she wasn't alone. "I still find this amazing."

"Who's Janet?" he repeated.

"Stephen's ex-wife. The mother of his child. His only... in her opinion... real child. Mackenzie. Mackenzie, though you can't tell from the name, is a girl. Seven years old. Rather a nice girl, which, given she's got Janet for a mother, is something of a miracle."

He got Janet's full name and address, unsurprised to learn that Janet was still Mrs. Pleasant. "Your husband's relationship with his former wife was acrimonious?"

"Janet and Stephen could barely be in the same county, let alone the same room. They hated each other."

"What is your relationship with her?"

Jen Kelly shrugged. "We don't have a relationship, other than that necessary to facilitate the transfer of the child." She fell silent, then said, "Excuse me. That was bitchy. Janet does that to me. I tried. Honestly, when Stephen and I were dating, and when we decided to get married and I knew I'd have to deal with her, I tried to establish some kind of working relationship, but Janet hasn't got a compromising cell in her body. If you're looking for someone who might have wanted to kill Stephen, look at Janet. More than once, I've heard her scream she was so sick of fighting about support for Mackenzie, she was going to give up and kill him for the insurance."

The silence was filled with the slurps and sighs of nursing. She stared down at her baby. "Poor little thing," she whispered. To Burgess, she said, "How did he die?"

"He was stabbed."

She detached the baby, closed her shirt, and set him on her shoulder to burp, her movements jerky and uncertain. "Was it... did he... suffer, do you know, or was it quick?"

He didn't want to tell her much. Not while everyone was a suspect. If she was innocent, then knowing about the expression on her husband's face, the horror there, would only deepen her pain. Burgess had no idea whether this woman might have been involved, but he had an instinctive desire to protect her, one he suspected she brought out in many men. Not, apparently, including her husband. "I think it was quick. I won't know until the autopsy."

She looked stricken. "Autopsy? They'll..." She swallowed. "They'll be cutting him up? Stephen would hate that. He is... was... always so vain about his body. Do they have to?" Her voice almost a whisper.