A Killer's Kiss (6 page)

The knocker on the big green door was a bronze coiled snake, with its forked tongue sticking out. I lifted it and dropped it twice.

Knock, knock.

While I was waiting for the “Who’s there?” I looked around at the poorly lit front lawn, at the large dark BMW parked in the circular driveway, at the brick and white-pillared arbor off to the side. The stone house was big all right, not quite a mansion, like the papers were calling it, though the “of death” part was surely accurate. In the gloom of night, it had a forbidding mien, like a cantankerous old man in a wheelchair, legs covered by a tartan blanket, with money in his wallet and evil in his heart.

Knock, knock, knock.

The door opened a crack. “I heard you the first time,” came a voice, creaky and slightly Southern. “What you want in here?”

“I’m looking for Wren Denniston,” I said.

“Don’t be a fool,” came the voice. The door opened a little wider, and I could see her there, tall and thin with short gray hair and raw hands, a trim white-and-blue dress. “I spent all day dealing with reporters banging on the door and crawling through them bushes. I’ve heard more lies than a priest in confessional the last three days. I don’t need to hear yours, too.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “I’m just looking for Wren. He told me to stop on by when I got to town. This is his house, isn’t it?”

“I never said it wasn’t.”

“Then I’m at the right place. Is he in? Can you just tell him that I’m here?”

“What you say your name was?”

“Taylor, Anthony Taylor. Wren will know me as Tony.”

She cocked her head, narrowed an eye. “How do you know the doctor?”

“We were at Princeton together. In the same eating club.”

“You look younger than him.”

“He was a couple classes ahead of me, and I live clean. If he’s not in, just tell Julia that Tony is here. She’ll know me.”

“Julia, huh?”

“His wife.”

“You really don’t know.”

“Know what?” I said.

“Where are you from?”

“Columbus,” I said. “Just got in this afternoon.”

She stepped out, wagged her head left and right, and then pulled me through the doorway before shutting the door behind us both. “Maybe you should have a seat,” she said. “In the living room, Mr. Taylor. I have some terrible news.”

Her name was Gwen, and she was a lovely, dignified old woman who had worked for Wren Denniston for years, starting when he was a boy, and she’d worked for his parents in this very same house. Her eyes welled as she broke the brutal news of his
murder to one of Wren’s old college pals. I patted her hand, and gave what comfort I could, and I felt like a cad the whole time I was doing it, but I’ve done worse in my life. And I had good reason to be there.

When you need to find the truth about a murder, there is no better place to start than the killing ground. Except I didn’t need the cops to know I was snooping around, or Julia to know either, for that matter. So I wasn’t Victor Carl this night. Instead I reached into the sad history of our city’s baseball past, pulled out one of the few names that still shone, and became Tony Taylor, Princeton grad. I sort of liked the sound of that: Princeton grad. Maybe I should have actually studied for my SATs.

“I came back and found him myself,” said Gwen as she poured me some tea out of a fine china pot. I was sitting on a green couch in a cavernous blue living room stuffed full with French-style chairs and couches. She was sitting across from me, holding the pot with a steady hand. “All that blood and him lying there, pale and dead with that black mark on his forehead and the back of his head gone. It was horrible, Mr. Taylor, just horrible. Would you like more pie?”

“Yes, thank you. I have to say, Gwen, this is the best pecan pie I’ve ever had.”

“My cousin sends me the pecans from back home, fat and fresh off the tree.” She cut a slice from the thick brown pie sitting next to the teapot on the coffee table. “Fresh pecans make all the difference. When I saw the doctor lying there, I just screamed and screamed, which was silly, since there was no one to hear it. But I couldn’t help myself.”

“Of course you couldn’t.”

“More freshly whipped cream?”

“Yes, please. The pie is too rich without it.”

“That’s the way I make it,” she said. “That’s the way my mother made it, and she taught me how. Right away I called the
police. They came quick, but even so it was too horrible being in the house. I waited outside for them to come.”

“I understand completely. Where was Julia?”

“She was gone. They were arguing when I left. I had dinner plans. Norman buys me dinner every Sunday night. So I left them to their argument. It’s not like it was a startling event, the two of them going at it.”

“What were they arguing about?”

“Something personal to them. But, to be truthful, they didn’t need an excuse.”

“Who was usually right?”

“Now you’re going to get me in trouble. More tea?”

“I’m fine, thank you.”

“The doctor was…well, you know, being old friends, like you are.”

“He was prickly, even in college,” I guessed.

“That he was. He wrestled all through prep school and college, as I’m sure you know. He told me once that wrestling was the truest expression of his inner nature. All that twisting and violence, the domination by the man on top. And I don’t think he changed much over the years.”

“What about Julia?”

“The missus is a little more complicated. But she is a kind soul, a sweet woman who I took to right away. We have a special bond. It might not seem it, but she needs taking care of, and in her own way she lets me do just that. The poor missus didn’t understand what she was getting into when she married the doctor.”

“What was she getting into, Gwen?”

Gwen lifted up her teacup, took a sip. “It was a marriage, Mr. Taylor. And, if I can confide—”

“Of course you can.”

“Some loves die hard and some never die at all.”

“Are you talking about Julia’s love for Dr. Denniston?”

“No, dear, I’m not.”

I turned my head to hide the emotions that must have flitted across my face. Was ours the old love that had never died in Julia? Of course it was, and it was indescribably sweet to hear how she had described it to someone else. And if I were to be true to myself, I had to admit that our love held the very same place in my heart. So maybe my foolish hopes from the night before had not been so foolish after all. Suddenly, in the midst of the current darkness, there seemed to be something bright over the horizon, if I could only steer us past the shoals. I looked around at the richness of the furnishings, the sturdy bones of the manse, the housekeeper who seemed to come along with the deed. Julia, my darling Julia.

“Where’s Julia now?” I said with complete disingenuousness.

“She’s still being held by the police. But we expect her back home tomorrow.”

“We?”

“I and her lawyer. Clarence Swift.” She sniffed a bit, as if at a peculiar smell. “Do you want to see where it happened?”

“I don’t know. Do I?”

“He was your friend. You should see it, as a memorial, don’t you think? Maybe leave a token like they do at those street-corner shrines whenever a child gets shot in the city.”

“Could I finish up my pie first?”

“Of course, dear. Do you have enough whipped cream with that?”

After putting down my fork and smacking my lips—I hadn’t been lying, about the pecan pie at least—I followed Gwen out of the living room into the wide central hall. Toward the rear of the house, there was a pair of closed double doors on the other side of the hallway and a piece of yellow tape wrapped around the door handles.

“The police told me not to go into this room,” she said.

“Then maybe we should stay out.”

“No, thank you,” she said, unwrapping the tape. “I’ve lived in this house for more than thirty years. I won’t have anyone telling me where I can and can’t go. This way.”

She pushed open the doors, turned on the lights, led me into a spacious den with wood-paneled walls and beamed ceilings. It smelled a little damp, and a little rusty, and a little ill, like a sickness had come over the place. A large mahogany desk was set by the windows, a round green-felt poker table stood in the corner, and a huge flat-screen television hung over the marble fireplace. Surrounding the fireplace was a wall of bookshelves, covered with trophies on which little wrestlers were posed like bullies with back conditions, ready to strike. The walls and furniture were so highly polished the whole room gleamed. It would have been a room fit for
Architectural Digest
if it weren’t for the patches of dark powder over the walls and windows or the sprawled squat figure outlined on the bloodstained carpet.

“That’s where I found the doctor,” said Gwen. “Just like that. I wanted to clean up the blood, but they wouldn’t let me. I’m not going to wait much longer.”

“Where was he shot from?”

“Over there,” said Gwen, pointing to the end of the bookshelf in the rear corner of the room.

One of the wooden panels beneath the books in that corner was slightly off kilter. I stepped over to it, gently pulled. The false panel swung open to reveal a gray metal safe.

“They got that open this morning,” said Gwen. “Brought a man in from Ohio to do it. There were some papers, some baseball cards, stuff. But no money, when there was always money. Everyone’s wondering where the money got off to. And then, of course, the gun.”

“What gun?”

“He kept a gun in the safe, but that was gone, too.”

“Was that the gun that killed him?”

“That’s what they think.”

“And they really think that Julia killed him?”

“They do.”

“What do you think, Gwen? Did she?”

“Course she didn’t. Why on earth do you think I let you in here and stuffed you full of pecan pie?”

“Excuse me?”

“I made that one for Norman. With the last of the pecans, too, so he’ll be eating apple until I get a new batch. But when I saw you at the door, I knew right away the last pecan pie was going to you.”

“I’m missing something here.”

“I remember seeing Tony Taylor play at Shibe Park,” said Gwen. “Lithe and handsome, skin like polished ebony. He was dreamy. You, sir, are no Tony Taylor. But I knew who you were as soon as I opened the door, Mr. Carl. The missus had tracked your adventures in the paper over the years. We used to laugh at the stories. And then she mentioned you more recently. In fact, you were being discussed in the argument last night before Dr. Denniston was killed.”

I looked at the figure outline on the carpet. “Really? That’s not good.”

“Not for you, and I guess not for the doctor neither, the way it turned out. I figured you were here to help Mrs. Denniston, and so I decided to help you. You don’t think I thought you were an old friend from Princeton, did you?”

“Yes, actually.”

“My mama didn’t raise no fool, Mr. Carl.”

“Mine obviously did.”

“Princeton.” She shook her head. “But the missus called when they first took her to the police station and said that you were going to help her, and so I decided to help you.”

“With the pie.”

“There’s not much a dose of Karo and molasses can’t help. So, Mr. Carl, is there anything else you want to know?”

I looked around the room, thought about it for a moment. “I heard the alarm was activated when you came back last night.”

“That’s right.”

“Who knew the code?”

“The doctor and the missus. Me, of course. A few others. That Mr. Swift. A couple handymen that worked on the house. It wasn’t a well-kept secret.”

“Clarence Swift had the code?”

“Mr. Swift was almost family to the doctor. It was like he lived his life through the doctor and the missus. Mr. Swift was here almost as much as I was.”

“How about a guy named Miles Cave?”

“I never met him, but I think he was an old school friend of the doctor’s,” she said. “I told the police about him. Recently I had heard his name being discussed by the doctor over the phone. Something about money, I could tell. A lot of the doctor’s calls at the end were about money. The calls involving that Cave fellow seemed to be more heated than most. I’m no detective, Mr. Carl, but I told the police and I’m telling you: I believe this Miles Cave has more to do with what happened than the missus. You want to find out what happened, you ought to start by finding him.”

I looked at the safe, at the figure sprawled on the bloodstained carpet, at the big-screen television. I tried to figure out the scene the instant before the violence, the shooter there, the dead man standing there, the safe open.

“Is this just the way the room was when you found it?”

“Yes, sir. The police haven’t let me touch much of anything.”

“No struggle, then, no bashed pottery or books thrown?”

“No, sir.”

“What did the police take with them?”

“They cut some stuff off the carpet, they dusted the whole place.”

“Tell me about Julia. How has she been doing lately?”

“I don’t know, Mr. Carl. She seemed distracted the last few
weeks. It’s always tough to get a grip on the missus. She keeps a lot to herself.”

“How about her health?”

“The same as ever, I guess.”

“Is she on any medications?”

“How would I know?”

“Oh, Gwen, my guess is there isn’t much you don’t know. I suppose you’ve cleaned up her medicine cabinet now and then.”

“There are some pills prescribed by the doctor. Women’s stuff, I think. And some Valium. For muscle pain.”

“I bet. Does she drink much?”

“Not as much as the doctor, but she has a glass or two now and then.”

“Anything more serious?”

“What are you getting at, Mr. Carl?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Is that her car in front?”

“That’s right. She called from jail and told me where she left it. I had Norman drive me over to pick it up.”

“Anything interesting inside?”

“No, sir. And the police went through it as soon as I brought it back.”

“I figured. Can you do me a favor? Can you call me when she returns home?”

“Sure I can. Anything else?”