T
wo days later, Cassandra Payne had a visitor. That would make it Tuesday. From this point, each day, each hour, becomes important, because it gives me a road map to what happened to my life from the day of the party until now.
Bryan, David, and I were doing our usual thing, sitting around in white lawn chairs, drinking beer, and talking. A small sports car—a Datsun 280Z—shiny red with a loud engine—stopped in front of the Paynes’ house. A very thin man got out. He wore jeans, a black T-shirt, and a black leather jacket. He also had shades on—Raybans. He walked with a bounce. His long hair was in a ponytail and he had a goatee. He knocked on the door. Cassandra Payne answered. I couldn’t catch what she was wearing, the man was in the way, but I believe she may have been wearing a robe. She hugged the man. They lightly kissed on the lips.
This is what I was thinking:
She has a lover
?
From the looks on Bryan and David’s faces, they were wondering the same.
The man went inside, and the door closed.
“Well, well,” Bryan said.
“She’s never had company before,” David noted. “I don’t think. Has she?”
“Nope,” Bryan said.
No, I thought.
“I wonder who he is,” David said.
“Who do you think he is?” Bryan asked.
“He could be anybody.”
“He’s somebody.”
I said, “Her squeeze?”
“Bingo,” Bryan said.
“Do you think she’s the kind to cheat on her husband?” David asked.
Bryan said, “I think she’s the kind that just might do about
any
thing.”
“No,” I said.
“What?”
“He could be an old friend.”
“He could be her brother,” David said.
“He could be that,” I said.
“Or someone who fucks better than Mr. Payne,” Bryan laughed.
David said, “If that’s so, where did she meet him? At a bar? At a club?”
“At the park?” I added.
“At work,” Bryan said.
“We don’t know if she works,” I said.
“Well she does
some
thing,” Bryan said, “all that in and out.”
David laughed. Bryan laughed. I joined, but it was fake. I was jealous. That man might be making love to her right now, kissing her … in
and out …
“Maybe he’s a drug dealer,” I said, “dropping off an order.”
Bryan raised his eyebrows. “Now there’s something.”
“He kind of looks like a drug dealer.”
“Yes, he does.”
“Our Cassandra,” David said, “a drug user?”
“You bet,” Bryan said.
“What kind of drugs, you think? Pot?”
“Coke or meth,” Bryan said.
“Or heroin.”
Bryan said, “If he is a dealer, he won’t stay long. Drop off the package, get his money, and go.”
“Unless he screws her, too,” David said.
“Good point.”
The visitor didn’t come out soon, or at all. An hour went by. Everything was quiet and uneventful across the street. David went home. Ellen drove up, and Bryan went home. Tina drove up, and we both went inside. I made dinner and Tina and I put the kids to bed. As Tina was taking a shower, I went outside. The sports car was still there. There were no lights on in the Payne house. They were fucking in the dark, I just knew it. I wanted to go over there and look in the window and verify my fear. I wanted to pound on the door and stop them. I wanted to call her on the phone and say, “What would your husband think if he knew?”
I didn’t have her phone number.
Later, I woke up from the sound of a car starting. I looked at the clock: 2:45 A.M. Tina was lightly snoring next to me. I slipped out of bed, wearing boxers, and peeked out the window. The sports car was driving away. Cassandra Payne stood on the porch, the features of her face shadowed by the dim porch light, her hair messy. She wore a dark robe that she clutched around her. She was staring at the car, watching it go down the street and turn the corner. She did not have the look of a woman who’d just been in the throes of passion and was sad to see her lover depart. She looked worried
Maybe it was a trick of the shadows.
T
hursday night, two days later, the police converged on our neighborhood. There were two squad cars and two unmarked Oldsmobile sedans. They were at the Paynes’ house.
Tina was out with her girlfriends, Thursday being her going-out-and-drinking night. The kids were asleep. The cops didn’t arrive with sirens, but I could hear the commotion of their radios—dispatchers, other cars calling in. I went outside. I feared something bad had happened to Cassandra Payne. Bryan and Ellen came out of their house and looked, as did everyone else in the neighborhood.
“Do you think something happened to her?” I asked Bryan.
He shrugged.
“Maybe she called them,” Ellen said. “Maybe there was a prowler.”
Bryan said, “I’m gonna go over there and find out.”
“Can you do that?” Ellen said.
“I used to be a cop, dear.” He smiled.
“‘Used to be,’” his wife said. She didn’t smile back.
“I’m also a concerned citizen,” he said. With that, he hoisted up his shorts and marched across the street. He talked to a uniformed officer at the door. The officer said something over his shoulder, then nodded, and let Bryan in. Ellen and I looked at each other. The minutes went by very slowly. Ellen and I looked at each other again.
“Tina isn’t home yet,” I said, because I didn’t know what else to say.
Ellen nodded. She was worried.
A news van drove up. The logo on the van’s side was the local station KUSI. One of the uniformed cops talked to the news people; it seemed like the cop was trying to get them to leave. Another news van arrived, and then another.
Five minutes later, Bryan came out of the house, shaking his head.
“What is it?” Ellen said.
“It’s her husband, Lawrence,” Bryan said. “There’s a homicide detective in there, Roger. I know him.”
“What about her husband?” I said.
“Apparently, he’s been murdered.”
Ellen drew in a breath, touching her chest. “Bryan, my God.”
“Killed in a taxicab coming from the airport,” he said. “Cab driver’s dead, too. Bullet wounds.”
Tina’s car pulled up in the driveway. She got out, her eyes glazed with booze.
“Our neighbor’s been murdered,” I told her.
“The British woman?” Tina said.
“Her husband,” Ellen said.
“Oh,” my wife said.
“Oh …”
Bryan said, “They just came to tell her. And ask if she knew anyone who might want him dead. But from what I’ve been told, it sounds like a drive-by shooting. Maybe random. A gang thing.”
“Was she crying?” I heard myself say. “Cassandra Payne?”
“No,” Bryan said.
“Philip,” Tina said, “what kind of question is that?”
I didn’t respond.
Ellen said, “Bryan, let’s go inside. There’s nothing to accomplish out here.”
Bryan nodded. He looked different, maybe like the cop he used to be—here was a crime, and his mind was working on how to solve it.
“Poor woman,” Ellen said as she and Bryan walked away.
“
I couldn’t face
living day after day if you died,“Tina said when we went inside our house. She made herself a screwdriver, and I had one too. We sat at the dining room table and drank. The cops were still across the street. “Especially if you were murdered. I just couldn’t go on,” she said.
“What would you do?”
“I don’t know.”
“And the kids?”
“I’d have to raise them alone,” she said. “But life would be a living hell.” She reached out to touch my hand.
“It would be for me too,” I said softly. “If you were gone.”
“I don’t plan to be. Do you?” “No.”
“That poor woman,” she said, sounding like Ellen.
“Yeah.”
“I don’t even want to think about what she must be going through.”
It was in
the newspapers the next morning, and on the TV: the shooting death of Lawrence Payne, and a taxicab driver. “Investment banker Lawrence Payne was found murdered in a cab last night, along with a cab driver, Darron Gregory,” the anchorwoman on TV said. “Payne, a citizen of the United Kingdom and a vice president at the Consolidated Bank of Manchester on Second and Ash, had returned from a business trip and taken a cab from Lindbergh Field. The taxi was found on First and Grape. Both Payne and the driver were shot. At this time, police have not reported any motive or suspects. Lawrence Payne is survived by his wife, also a British national, living in San Diego’s North Park area.”
Tina thought about not going to work. I told her that was ridiculous. This was not our tragedy.
“It just makes me think what a scary world it is out there,” she said.
I kissed her on the forehead. “I’ll protect you from the scary world.”
“Always?”
“Always.”
“And the kids?”
“Always,” I said.
She went to work, and I drove Matthew to school, Jessica in the back playing with her assortment of plastic dinosaurs and Pokémon.
Most of the
day, I kept an eye on the Payne house. Bryan didn’t join me. He wasn’t home. I didn’t know where he was.
Cassandra Payne. She had two visitors, both cops.
Later in the afternoon, David came over with a six-pack of Budweiser.
“Where’s Bryan?” he said, handing me a beer.
I said I didn’t know.
“Some excitement last night, I hear.” He seemed nervous.
“Where were you?”
“I went to see a play,” he blurted.
“A play!” I said.
“Hey, culture,” he said, shrugging.
“I didn’t know there was any culture in San Diego,” I said.
“You have to search hard to find it,” David said, looking away.
“So I guess you know everything.”
“Jesus,” he said after a while. “Murdered.”
“Yeah,” I said, opening a second beer.
“You think someone had it in for him?”
“Bryan thinks it was a gang.”
“A gang wanted him?”
“Random shooting. An initiation.”
“I’ve heard about that stuff,” he said.”Like the Crips—you either have to cripple or murder someone to get in the gang.”
“Don’t believe everything you hear and see on TV,” I said.
“I read it in a very respectable magazine,” he told me. “These things happen, Philip. It’s a different world out there.”
I wanted to ask:
Out where?
The phone rang
a little after midnight. I wasn’t asleep. I was in my office, looking out the window, searching for any signs of my neighbor: the new widow.
I quickly picked up the extension on the second ring. I was expecting bad news at this hour.
“Philip.”
“Bryan?”
“Sorry to call so late.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Meet me outside,” he said. “We need to talk.”
I went downstairs and checked on Tina. She was on her back, eyes closed; the phone hadn’t woken her. I went out the backyard, around the side gate, and met Bryan between our properties. He was wearing a leather jacket with his pajamas and slippers and holding a bottle of vodka. He looked comic. His expression was serious.
He held the vodka bottle out. It was Absolut Citron. “Ah, the good stuff,” I said, and took a swig.
“We need to keep our voices down,” he whispered. “Don’t wanna wake up the whole neighborhood.” He glanced across the street and sighed.
“Okay,” I whispered back. “What is it?”
“You’ve been paying close attention to her, right?”
“Who?”
He turned to me. “Don’t play dumb. It’s on your face every time you see her—you’re undressing her and fucking her every chance you get. If I was twenty years younger, I would be, too. And it’s not like I haven’t entertained the notion of a roll in the hay with the woman myself. You notice when she comes and goes because you like to watch her.”
Damn ex-cop. “Yeah.”
“How many times did she leave yesterday?”
“Once.”
“What time?”
“Around,” I had to think, “three.”
“So she was home all day?”
“Yeah.”
“But she usually leaves more than once a day.”
“Usually.”
“What time did she come back?”
“Six-thirty,” I said.
“So she was gone for three and a half hours.”
“Bryan—”
“Lawrence Payne’s flight came in from New York at fivefifteen. The taxi driver reported to his dispatcher that he was leaving the airport terminal at five-thirty-five, going to North Park. The taxi with Payne and the driver was discovered at nine o’clock. They weren’t but a few minutes outside the airport. Sometime before six is when the murder took place. Probably, say, five-forty-five. Mrs. Payne comes home at six-thirty. It’s a fifteen minute drive from the airport to here. Twenty, tops.”
“Jesus, Bryan, what are you getting at?” But I already knew. I took a swig from the vodka bottle.
He said, “I spent the day hanging out at the substation. Trying to glean information, you know. I was also a little useful, being a neighbor. But I really don’t know squat. What I do know is she told the investigating officers that she was home all day.”
“What?”
“Yep. Said she never set foot out the door.”
“But—”
“But we know she did, from three to six-thirty.”
“Did you tell the cops this?”
“I just found this information out,” he said, “from you.”
“I see,” I said. “Will you tell the cops?”
“Not yet. She may change her story. Maybe she was so upset that she forgot she went out to get her nails done. Didn’t think it was significant. Maybe you got your days mixed up.”
“No. I don’t have my—”
“I didn’t think so.”
“What are you saying, Bryan?”
He drank. “You know what I’m saying.”
“No,” I said, “I do not.” I did.
“Our little lady over there may very well be a murderess.”
I tried to make light of this. “Come on Bryan, you’re not serious.”
“You forget I worked homicide. I can smell a killer, and I think I smell one.”
“Why would she kill her husband?” I said.
“Why does any person kill a spouse? It happens every day for very common reasons: jealousy, fear, greed. In this case, I believe it may be greed. Lawrence Payne was a banker, he made good money, he may have had
access
to a lot of money. And he’s twice her age. Did you know that?”
“Well, he doesn’t seem older—”
“We were thinking, what? That Mrs. Payne was in her late twenties, early thirties?”
“Yeah.”
“She’s twenty-three.”
“Oh,” I said.
“And he’s forty-eight.”
“It’s not that uncommon.”
“No. But it’s fishy, wouldn’t you say? She said she was married to him for four years. That means she was nineteen when she hitched up with the guy.”
I said, “So you think she left the house, knowing he was taking a cab home, and somehow shot him? How?”
“Pulls up alongside the cab. Payne recognizes his wife, he says, ‘Good Heavens, that’s my wife,’” Bryan said in a funny British accent, “and the cab pulls over, and she pulls out the gun, and—bang bang.”
“Oh boy,” I said.
“But I really don’t think that’s the way it happened.” He took a swig of vodka. “Two days before the murder, she had a visitor, as you will no doubt recall.”
“Yes,” I said.
“Who stayed most of the night.”
I nodded.
“Perhaps a lover. Most
likely
a lover.”
“Maybe,” I said. “Or a friend.”
“A shifty-looking fellow,” Bryan said, “maybe a
killer.”
“Bryan …”
“Think about it. He was young. He’s her lover. The husband has money. She wants the lover, not the husband. The lover wants the girl
and
the money. So he kills the husband. She’s in on it. They planned it: she told him when his flight was coming in. The lover’s at the airport, sees Payne get into a cab. The lover follows the cab, waits until they’re at a dark intersection—which is just where the cab was—pulls alongside the cab in that nifty little sports car he was driving, and bang bang,” he pointed a gun-finger for emphasis this time, aiming at the Payne house.