A Good Marriage (12 page)

“Instincts?”

Once more with the fingergun. Once more with the wink. As if there were a secret, and they were both in on it. “Anyway, they send me out to work on my own, you know—old limping Holt shows his pictures around, asks his questions, and kind’ve . . . you know . . . just
sniffs
. Because I’ve always had a nose for this kind of work, Darcy, and never really lost it. This was in the fall of 1997, not too long after a woman named Stacey Moore was killed. Name ring a bell?”

“I don’t think so,” Darcy said.

“You’d remember if you’d seen the crime scene photos. Terrible murder—how that woman must have suffered. But of course, this fellow who calls himself Beadie had stopped for a long time, over fifteen years, and he must have had a lot of steam built up in his boiler, just waiting to blow. And it was her that got scalded.

“Anyway, the fella who was SAG back then put me on it. ‘Let old Holt take a shot,’ he says, ‘he’s not doing anything else, and it’ll keep him out from underfoot.’ Even then old Holt was what they called me. Because of the limp, I should imagine. I talked to her friends, her relatives, her neighbors out there on Route 106, and the people she worked with in Waterville. Oh, I talked to them plenty. She was a waitress at a place called the Sunnyside Restaurant there in town. Lots of transients stop in, because the turnpike’s just down the road, but I was more interested in her regular customers. Her regular
male
customers.”

“Of course you would be,” she murmured.

“One of them turned out to be a presentable, well-turned-out fella in his mid or early forties. Came in every three or four weeks, always took one of Stacey’s booths. Now, probably I shouldn’t say this, since the fella turned out to be your late husband—speaking ill of the dead, but since they’re
both
dead, I kind’ve figure that cancels itself out, if you see what I mean . . .” Ramsey ceased, looking confused.

“You’re getting all tangled up,” Darcy said, amused in spite of herself. Maybe he
wanted
her to be amused. She couldn’t tell. “Do yourself a favor and just say it, I’m a big girl. She flirted with him? Is that what it comes down to? She wouldn’t be the first waitress to flirt with a man on the road, even if the man had a wedding ring on his finger.”

“No, that wasn’t quite it. According to what the other waitstaff told me—and of course you have to take it with a grain of salt, because they all liked her—it was
him
that flirted with
her
. And according to them, she didn’t like it much. She said the guy gave her the creeps.”

“That doesn’t sound like my husband.” Or what Bob had told her, for that matter.

“No, but it probably was. Your husband, I mean. And a wife doesn’t always know what a hubby does on the road, although she may think she does. Anyway, one of the waitresses told me this fella drove a Toyota 4Runner. She knew because she had one just like it. And do you know what? A number of the Moore woman’s neighbors had seen a 4Runner
like that out and about in the area of the family farmstand just days before the woman was murdered. Once only a day before the killing took place.”

“But not on
the
day.”

“No, but of course a fella as careful as this Beadie would look out for a thing like that. Wouldn’t he?”

“I suppose.”

“Well, I had a description and I canvassed the area around the restaurant. I had nothing better to do. For a week all I got was blisters and a few cups of mercy-coffee—none as good as yours, though!—and I was about to give up. Then I happened to stop at a place downtown. Mickleson’s Coins. Does
that
name ring a bell?”

“Of course. My husband was a numismatist and Mickleson’s was one of the three or four best buy-and-sell shops in the state. It’s gone now. Old Mr. Mickleson died and his son closed the business.”

“Yep. Well, you know what the song says, time takes it all in the end—your eyes, the spring in your step, even your friggin jump shot, pardon my French. But George Mickleson was alive then—”

“Upright and sniffin the air,” Darcy murmured.

Holt Ramsey smiled. “Just as you say. Anyway, he recognized the description. ‘Why, that sounds like Bob Anderson,’ he says. And guess what? He drove a Toyota 4Runner.”

“Oh, but he traded that in a long time ago,” Darcy said. “For a—”

“Chevrolet Suburban, wasn’t it?” Ramsey pronounced the company name
Shivvalay
.

“Yes.” Darcy folded her hands and looked at Ramsey calmly. They were almost down to it. The only question was which partner in the now-dissolved Anderson marriage this sharp-eyed old man was more interested in.

“Don’t suppose you still have that Suburban, do you?”

“No. I sold it about a month after my husband died. I put an ad in
Uncle Henry’s
swap guide, and someone snapped it right up. I thought I’d have problems, with the high mileage and gas being so expensive, but I didn’t. Of course I didn’t get much.”

And two days before the man who’d bought it came to pick it up, she had searched it carefully, from stem to stern, not neglecting to pull out the carpet in the cargo compartment. She found nothing, but still paid fifty dollars to have it washed on the outside (which she didn’t care about) and steam-cleaned on the inside (which she did).

“Ah. Good old
Uncle Henry’s
. I sold my late wife’s Ford the same way.”

“Mr. Ramsey—”

“Holt.”

“Holt, were you able to positively identify my husband as the man who used to flirt with Stacey Moore?”

“Well, when I talked to Mr. Anderson, he admitted he’d been in the Sunnyside from time to time—admitted it freely—but he claimed he never noticed any of the waitresses in particular. Claimed
he usually had his head buried in paperwork. But of course I showed his picture—from his driver’s license, you understand—and the staff allowed as how it was him.”

“Did my husband know you had a . . . a particular interest in him?”

“No. Far as he was concerned, I was just old Limpin’ Lennie looking for witnesses who might have seen something. No one fears an old duck like me, you know.”

I fear you plenty
.

“It’s not much of a case,” she said. “Assuming you were trying to make one.”

“No case at all!” He laughed cheerily, but his hazel eyes were cold. “If I could have made a case, me and Mr. Anderson wouldn’t have had our little conversation in his office, Darcy. We would have had it in
my
office. Where you don’t get to leave until I say you can. Or until a lawyer springs you, of course.”

“Maybe it’s time you stopped dancing, Holt.”

“All right,” he agreed, “why not? Because even a box-step hurts me like hell these days. Damn that old Dwight Cheminoux, anyway! And I don’t want to take your whole morning, so let’s speed this up. I was able to confirm a Toyota 4Runner at or near the scene of two of the earlier murders—what we call Beadie’s first cycle. Not the same one; a different color. But I was also able to confirm that your husband owned another 4Runner in the seventies.”

“That’s right. He liked it, so he traded for the same kind.”

“Yep, men will do that. And the 4Runner’s a popular vehicle in places where it snows half the damn year. But after the Moore murder—and after I talked to him—he traded for a Suburban.”

“Not immediately,” Darcy said with a smile. “He had that 4Runner of his well after the turn of the century.”

“I know. He traded in 2004, not long before Andrea Honeycutt was murdered down Nashua way. Blue and gray Suburban; year of manufacture 2002. A Suburban of that approximate year and those
exact
colors was seen quite often in Mrs. Honeycutt’s neighborhood during the month or so before she was murdered. But here’s the funny thing.” He leaned forward. “I found one witness who said that Suburban had a Vermont plate, and another—a little old lady of the type who sits in her living room window and watches all the neighborhood doins from first light to last, on account of having nothing better to do—said the one
she
saw had a New York plate.”

“Bob’s had Maine plates,” Darcy said. “As you very well know.”

“Acourse, acourse, but plates can be stolen, you know.”

“What about the Shaverstone murders, Holt? Was a blue and gray Suburban seen in Helen Shaverstone’s neighborhood?”

“I see you’ve been following the Beadie case a little more closely than most people. A little more closely than you first let on, too.”

“Was it?”

“No,” Ramsey said. “As a matter of fact, no. But a gray-over-blue Suburban
was
seen near the creek in Amesbury where the bodies were dumped.” He smiled again while his cold eyes studied her. “Dumped like garbage.”

She sighed. “I know.”

“No one could tell me about the license plate of the Suburban seen in Amesbury, but if they had, I imagine it would have been Massachusetts. Or Pennsylvania. Or anything but Maine.”

He leaned forward.

“This Beadie sent us notes with his victims’ identification. Taunting us, you know—daring us to catch him. P’raps part of him even
wanted
to be caught.”

“Perhaps so,” Darcy said, although she doubted it.

“The notes were printed in block letters. Now people who do that think such printing can’t be identified, but most times it can. The similarities show up. I don’t suppose you have any of your husband’s files, do you?”

“The ones that haven’t gone back to his firm have been destroyed. But I imagine they’d have plenty of samples. Accountants never throw out anything.”

He sighed. “Yuh, but a firm like that, it’d take a court order to get anything loose, and to get one I’d have to show probable cause. Which I just don’t have. I’ve got a number of coincidences—although they’re not coincidences in my mind. And I’ve got a number of . . . well . . .
propinquities,
I guess you might call them, but nowhere near enough of them
to qualify as circumstantial evidence. So I came to you, Darcy. I thought I’d probably be out on my ear by now, but you’ve been very kind.”

She said nothing.

He leaned forward even further, almost hunching over the table now. Like a bird of prey. But hiding not quite out of sight behind the coldness in his eyes was something else. She thought it might be kindness. She prayed it was.

“Darcy, was your husband Beadie?”

She was aware that he might be recording this conversation; it was certainly not outside the realm of possibility. Instead of speaking, she raised one hand from the table, showing him her pink palm.

“For a long time you never knew, did you?”

She said nothing. Only looked at him. Looked
into
him, the way you looked into people you knew well. Only you had to be careful when you did that, because you weren’t always seeing what you thought you were seeing. She knew that now.

“And then you did? One day you did?”

“Would you like another cup of coffee, Holt?”

“Half a cup,” he said. He sat back up and folded his arms over his thin chest. “More’d give me acid indigestion, and I forgot to take my Zantac pill this morning.”

“I think there’s some Prilosec in the upstairs medicine cabinet,” she said. “It was Bob’s. Would you like me to get it?”

“I wouldn’t take anything of his even if I was burning up inside.”

“All right,” she said mildly, and poured him a little more coffee.

“Sorry,” he said. “Sometimes my emotions get the better of me. Those women . . . all those women . . . and the boy, with his whole life ahead of him. That’s worst of all.”

“Yes,” she said, passing him the cup. She noticed how his hand trembled, and thought this was probably his last rodeo, no matter how smart he was . . . and he was fearsomely smart.

“A woman who found out what her husband was very late in the game would be in a hard place,” Ramsey said.

“Yes, I imagine she would be,” Darcy said.

“Who’d believe she could live with a man all those years and never know what he was? Why, she’d be like a whatdoyoucallit, the bird that lives in a crocodile’s mouth.”

“According to the story,” Darcy said, “the crocodile lets that bird live there because it keeps the crocodile’s teeth clean. Eats the grain right out from between them.” She made pecking motions with the fingers of her right hand. “It’s probably not true . . . but it
is
true that I used to drive Bobby to the dentist. Left to himself, he’d accidentally-on-purpose forget his appointments. He was such a baby about pain.” Her eyes filled unexpectedly with tears. She wiped them away with the heels of her hands, cursing them. This man would not respect tears shed on Robert Anderson’s account.

Or maybe she was wrong about that. He was smiling and nodding his head. “And your kids.
They’d be run over once when the world found out their father was a serial killer and torturer of women. Then run over again when the world decided their mother had been covering up for him. Maybe even helping him, like Myra Hindley helped Ian Brady. Do you know who they were?”

“No.”

“Never mind, then. But ask yourself this: what would a woman in a difficult position like that do?”

“What would
you
do, Holt?”

“I don’t know. My situation’s a little different. I may be just an old nag—the oldest horse in the firebarn—but I have a responsibility to the families of those murdered women. They deserve closure.”

“They deserve it, no question . . . but do they
need
it?”

“Robert Shaverstone’s penis was bitten off, did you know that?”

She hadn’t. Of course she hadn’t. She closed her eyes and felt the warm tears trickling through the lashes.
Did not “suffer” my ass,
she thought, and if Bob had appeared before her, hands out and begging for mercy, she would have killed him again.

“His father knows,” Ramsey said. Speaking softly. “And he has to live with that knowledge about the child he loved every day.”

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I am so, so sorry.”

She felt him take her hand across the table. “Didn’t mean to upset you.”