The Sleeping and the Dead (26 page)

“Jesus, you're soaked.” He looked past me at the empty driveway. “How did you get here?”

“Bus.” I held out the plastic frog for him to see. The rain had already washed most of the mud away.

“What's that?”

“A key frog. I found it in the flower box behind the garage.” His face puckered with a confused frown. “My guess is the person who murdered your wife found a key in this. That's how he got inside your house, and that's how he locked the door behind him when he left.”

 

35

I
PUT THE KEY FROG
in a gallon plastic bag and set it on the kitchen table. James handed me a flowery dish towel from a drawer.

“How long have you known?” he asked. He opened the fridge and grabbed a can of Dr Pepper. He didn't offer me one. Other than a few sodas, the fridge was empty. Not even any moldy mystery meat.

When he closed the door, there was this little old lady standing in the corner between the fridge and the wall. She wore a print dress with a couple of inches of lace, a fat string of pearls, black gloves and black block-heeled old-lady shoes, which meant she'd been buried after Labor Day. With her bold swoop of thick white hair and narrow, almost-Chinese eyes, she looked vaguely familiar for some reason. She stared sadly at James, like she wanted to take him into her frail arms and comfort him.

“I've known about it for a couple of days. Why didn't you tell me?” I tossed my hat in the sink and rubbed my hair with the dish towel. As short as my hair was, it wouldn't take long to dry, but my jeans were cold and wet and stuck to my legs.

“It's not something you talk about on a first date, is it? How your wife was murdered and the police think you did it, but hey! How 'bout them Tigers?” He took a long swallow of his soda, then turned to face me. “Why didn't you say something before now?”

“I had to think about it. I was a little shocked. I'm sorry.”

“Don't apologize. I should be apologizing to you.” He downed the rest of the can and crumpled it in his fist, just like a normal guy would, except he was buttoned so tight he couldn't even drink a beer. It had to be a soda. “What would you have said if I told you?”

“Did you kill your wife, James?”

“Of course not.” He said it softly and deliberately.

“Then why shouldn't I believe you?”

“The police don't.”

“They don't believe anybody,” I said. I pointed at the frog on the table. “They'll believe you now, though.”

“What does an empty key frog prove?”

“How soon after you moved in was your wife murdered?” My teeth began to chatter with the cold coming off the old woman. James didn't seem to feel her at all. I wondered how normal people could go through their lives completely unaware of the death all around us.

“I don't know. A year?”

“Did you change the locks after you moved in?”

“We didn't need to. The woman who lived here had passed away.” She smiled and tugged at one of her gloves. She was beginning to fade, the fruit pattern of the wallpaper behind her showing through her face. “We bought the house in the estate sale. Actually, Ashley's parents bought it.”

“The old lady must have left a key in the frog and Ashley's murderer found it.”

“But how?”

“Because he looked for it,” I said. “That's how I found it.”

“But there's no way to prove there was ever a key in it.”

“You act like you don't want this to be true.”

“You've no idea,” he said, his voice trembling. “You have no fucking idea at all. It wasn't enough that Ashley was murdered. Because the cops can't figure out who did it, they blame me. But they can't arrest me because there's no evidence. The night she was murdered, I was on a plane to San Diego. So it pisses them off, because they think I've outsmarted them, and if there's one thing a cop hates, it's losing.”

“Have they lost, James?”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“It's just a question. It was a funny thing for you to say, so I asked.”

“They're not looking for the real murderer because they think I did it. Meanwhile, he's still out there. Maybe he's killed somebody else. Who knows? The cops don't know. They don't care. The only thing they care about is pinning this on me. You show them that frog, it won't make any difference at all.”

“Then tell me something that will make a difference,” I suggested. The old lady continued to fade, taking her cold with her. “Something else the cops missed.”

James leaned against the counter with his hands behind his back. There was a toaster with a mirror finish behind him and I could see him fiddling with his wedding ring in the reflection. He hadn't taken off the ring this time, even though he knew I was coming over. “When I got home and found her…” He didn't say
body
. “Ashley's car was parked in the driveway, but she always parked in the garage.”

“So maybe she didn't that one time. Maybe she was in a hurry.”

“Ashley drove a 1959 Fiat Pininfarina Cabriolet convertible that her father refurbished and gave to her when she graduated from college. She loved that car, never left it outside overnight. God, I remember once…” He stopped himself, looked away, and pressed his upper lip down into his lower lip to keep it still. While I waited for him to collect, I watched the old lady disappear. All that was left of her was a perfumy smell, floral and old-timey. It made me think of my grandfather's bedroom off the back of the house. He used to keep my grandmother's old, yellowish perfume bottle on his desk. Sean and I would sneak in just to smell it and gag at one another. It didn't matter to us that we were letting a last reminder of his departed wife escape into the air, never to be recovered.

James was having a hard time pulling himself together. His grief was as fresh and real as any I had seen. He'd have to be a hell of an actor to fake it. To spare him, I finally said, “You know what I think?”

He pushed his wrist across his nose and shook his head no.

“I'm freezing. Do you have something I can wear?”

*   *   *

James led me back to his bedroom, down a long straight hall lined with photographs of him and his wife and their families. There were also photos Ashley had taken, truly artsy stuff like you see in a gallery, mostly black-and-whites, the kind of photos I had never taken and probably never could take. I didn't have the eye for this kind of thing. Ashley seemed to like old people with authentic-looking faces, craggy noses, beetling brows, collapsed toothless mouths, moonscapes of pores and forests of hair, hands knobby with arthritis and wormy with veins. My photos of the dead were vacation snaps by comparison, awkward frames made all the more horrible by their bland symmetry. No wonder Michi had loved them. The only work of mine that compared to Ashley's pictures were the black-and-white photos of Endo I had accidentally taken with the Leica.

Ashley St. Michael's Leica.

James opened a dresser drawer that still contained an assortment of colorful women's sweaters, neatly stacked and folded. “These were Ashley's,” he muttered, almost to himself. His fingers lingered over a red sweater with a white snowflake pattern around the collar. He looked up at me, eyes rimmed with red. “I'm not sure I'd be very comfortable seeing you in this.”

“How about a shirt and some old sweatpants of yours?” He nodded and tossed a pair of jeans and a Carolina Panthers sweatshirt on the bed.

“I'll wait in the den,” he said, and left.

I didn't remember much about the rest of the house but I remembered this bedroom. It was strange being here again. He hadn't moved any of the furniture since the night of his wife's murder. There was a new bedspread, but it was the same bed, the same matching pair of dressers, the same pants tree and avocado-green winged armchair in the corner by the closet door. I shucked out of my wet pants and shirt and pulled on his jeans. They were too big but I managed with a belt. The sweatshirt came down to the middle of my thighs. I pushed the sleeves up to my elbows, sat on the foot of his bed and stared at the floor where her body had lain. He had put in new carpet.

I could see her as plain as if she was still lying there. Maybe she was. She was facedown, head toward the closet, one foot partially under the bed. The first cops on the scene believed she had been posed, but they couldn't say why exactly. A hunch, they said. She was dressed to go out, and now I knew she had. She had photographed a society event, then had drinks with Jenny and her friends at Bosco's.

She hadn't been raped or otherwise molested, but she had been in a hell of a fight. She had bruises on her forearms, thighs, chest, back and face, but no tissue or blood under her fingernails. Cause of death was strangulation. The murder weapon—a pair of running shoes tied together by the shoestrings—was still wrapped around her throat.

 

36

I
FOUND
J
AMES IN THE
den holding the sports page, looking at it but not reading. Maybe he was seeing the life he might have led had things worked out differently, the children he would never have playing on the floor around his chair as he tugged his pipe and rattled his newspaper, the very image of the father he always thought he would be. Maybe these were
his
ghosts. He wasn't even aware of me until I touched his shoulder. “I thought you were going to change,” he said as he turned in his chair. I was back in my wet clothes, shivering again.

“Can you take me home?” I asked.

“Sure.” He set his paper on the end table and stood up. “What's wrong?”

“Something I need to check.”

I was glad he didn't ask what, because I wasn't ready to explain yet. I couldn't stop shaking.

“You want to borrow a coat?”

“Please.”

He took a jacket from the closet in the hall. Ashley's coats were still in the closet beside his own. He gave me one of his and I followed him outside. He opened the garage door with a remote control on his key ring. Another remote unlocked the doors of the Neon. The drive-out tag was still taped to the inside of the back window. It wasn't even a new Neon, maybe a 2001, if that. “What happened to your Lexus?”

“Sold it.” He didn't offer to explain and I didn't ask.

I stood outside the garage in a steady drizzle while he opened the passenger door for me, ever the gentleman. I didn't get in. The other car, buried beneath its funereal shroud, seemed to lean to one side. “Are you coming?” James asked.

I asked, “Is that her Fiat?” He nodded that it was. “Can I see it?”

He stared at me for a moment, then closed the car door and joined me in the rain. He wasn't wearing a hat, his hair was dripping in his eyes.

“Why do you want to see her car?”

“I'm curious about something.”

He turned and watched the long limbs of the shaggy hedge dancing in the rain. A black Mercury drove by and stopped at the corner, then went on. The rain hissed in the trees and clanged like random off-key bells in the gutters of the garage.

“Why are you doing this to me?” James asked without looking at me.

“Do you ever take her car out and drive it?”

“No.” He shoved his hands in his pockets, stiffened his back and stuck his chin out. “I haven't moved it since I parked it in the garage the next day. I haven't even looked at it.”

“If you want to wait in the car, I won't take a minute. I just need to check something.”

Finally he nodded, but he didn't move, only jingled the keys in his pocket and blinked up at the descending rain. The sky was brighter now than when I arrived. The clouds had lowered and turned a sickly shade of brown from the glow of the city lights.

“I'll just get the key.”

*   *   *

A few minutes later, he returned from the house wearing the same Memphis Tigers cap I had first seen him wearing that morning at the restaurant. He laid a single worn silver key in my palm.

I peeled back the dusty cover from the Fiat. It had once been a sweet ride, but now there were cobwebs in the grille and dirtdobber nests cemented to its crumbling convertible roof. One tire had gone flat, accounting for the list I noticed earlier. The dust on the windows made it impossible to see inside. The luggage compartment was as tiny, empty and dusty as the rest of the car, but on the carpet underneath the dust I found a couple of small dark brown stains that might have been grease spots. Judging by the care with which the car had been restored, I doubted I was looking at grease spots.

I closed the trunk and climbed into James's car. He backed it onto Shady Grove without once looking at me. “Did the cops sweep the car for evidence?” I asked.

“Not that I know of. Like I said, they didn't think it was important.” He drove for a while with his knuckles turning white on the wheel. “Did you find what you were looking for?” he finally asked. He tried to be casual, but the tension in his voice was enough to stretch a tennis racket.

“Maybe. I won't know for sure until it's been tested.” I pulled a damp pack of cigarettes from my back pocket. “Mind if I smoke?”

“Yes. So what do you think?”

I laid the pack on the seat between us, next to the hide-a-key frog in its gallon plastic baggie. “I think you didn't murder your wife.”

“You'd be the only one.”

“Not the only one,” I said, remembering what Jenny had told me. “But I think I can convince some people who matter. I think I can clear you and then maybe you can get your life back.”

“You have to convince me first,” James said. “Tell me how I didn't do it.”

“How you didn't do it is obvious enough—you were on a plane a thousand miles away. Also, why would you leave her body in a way that points suspicion right back at you. Most guys would have at least kicked down the door to make it look like a robbery. I believe the car in the driveway and the missing spare key point to an outsider.” I looked at the key to Ashley's Fiat resting in the palm of my hand, the wards worn smooth from use. In the last few days, especially the last hour in her old house, I felt like I'd come to know her, even though what I knew about her was insignificant, not even enough to form a good theory. There were so many details I didn't know that could change everything, but for the moment my hunch felt right.