Black Widow (3 page)

She refused to rise to the bait. Sternly, she said, “There’s somebody here to see you. I swear, I never thought the day would come when I’d see the likes of that woman here at city hall. Leastways, not on this side of a cell door.”

His curiosity was piqued. Score one for his visitor. If Rowena didn’t like her, she had to be doing something right. “By all means,” he said, “send her in.”

With a sniff of disdain, she turned and stalked away, her spike heels
tap-tapping
in the cavernous corridor. He heard the murmur of voices, Rowena’s scorn obvious even though her words were indecipherable. Footsteps approached his door, and a young woman paused at the threshold.

She wore a short-sleeved white blouse over a splashy flowered cotton skirt and white high-heeled sandals. Beneath the clothing, she had the long, lean body of a runner. Spectacular legs, he noted, before his eyes moved northward past a slender waist and softly rounded breasts to the blonde hair she’d pulled back into some kind of convoluted affair. The hairdo was obviously intended to play down her looks, but in reality, it had just the opposite effect.

“Thank you for seeing me on such short notice,” she said in a soft voice that carried the broadened vowels of New England. Massachusetts, he thought, or maybe New Hampshire. “I’m Kathryn McAllister.”

She paused, as though expecting that the name would have meaning for him. Nick quickly ran through his mental files, but drew a blank. “Nick DiSalvo,” he said, standing to shake her hand. He indicated the chair opposite his desk. “Have a seat.”

Reclaiming his own chair, he leaned back, propped his feet on the desk drawer that refused to close, and folded his arms across his middle. “So, Ms. McAllister,” he said, “what can I do for you?”

He knew the instant she recognized Brooklyn in his voice. In this Southern paradise, he’d grown accustomed to heads swiveling the minute he opened his mouth. Her chin snapped up and her eyes narrowed, holding his in a lengthy stare. They were blue, those eyes, a cool, distant blue, like the Hudson River on an overcast winter day. “You’re from New York,” she said.

“That’s right,” he said. “Damn accent gives me away every time.”

Still looking at him, she said, “I’m here about a murder.”

After sixteen years as a cop, he’d become adept at hiding his feelings. Nick dropped his feet to the floor, straightened his spine, and wheeled his chair closer to the desk. In a deliberately neutral voice, he said, “A murder.”

“My husband’s murder. Michael McAllister.”

The name clicked, and it all fell into place. After four years, the locals still talked about the biggest scandal in the town’s history. A rising young architect, the son of one of Elba’s most prominent families, brutally stabbed to death in his own home by his pretty young wife. Nick picked up a pen and began idly tapping it against a pile of papers atop his desk. “I thought there’d been a conviction in that case,” he said, and met those cool blue eyes head-on. “His wife.”

She gripped the arms of the chair so hard her knuckles went white. “Last week,” she said, “the conviction was overturned.”

He kept his expression politely professional. “I’m afraid I’m not following you.”

She leaned forward, determination etched in every line of her body. “I spent four years in prison for a crime I didn’t commit,” she said. “I lost everything, Mr. DiSalvo. My husband, my freedom, my reputation, my self-respect. And the person who stole my life from me is still walking around free. One way or another, I intend to see that he pays.”

“I see.” He didn’t see, but he was willing to play along for a while until he figured out what she was really after. “And how do I fit into that scenario?”

She recrossed her legs, demurely smoothed the flowered skirt over her knees. “I want you to reopen the investigation,” she said.

He dropped the pen and leaned back in his chair. “I can’t do that,” he said.

The fire in those blue eyes banked itself and cooled. “I see,” she said, and stood up. “Well, I certainly do want to thank you for your time, Chief DiSalvo. I’m so sorry to have troubled you.” She glanced around the office and set her lips in a thin line. “I can see what a busy man you are.”

“Ms. McAllister. Sit back down, and listen to me. You have to know that the case isn’t in my hands anymore. And even if we were in a position to reopen a four-year-old homicide investigation, I can’t spare the manpower to waste time looking behind every bush and under every rock when the only suspect in the case is standing right in front of me.”

The mask dropped, for just a moment, allowing him a glimpse of the fury behind it. “I didn’t do it!”

“And you’re walking free right now. Why don’t you just count your blessings and go on back to New Hampshire or wherever it is you come from, find yourself some nice guy, and start making babies?”

“Somebody killed my husband,” she said bitterly. “Do you understand that? We’d just bought our dream home. Michael’s career was finally taking off. In another year or two, we were going to start a family. And now that’s gone. All of it, just like it never existed. Do you have any inkling of how I feel?”

He picked the pen back up and slapped it against his open palm. Cleared his throat. “I’m sorry,” he said. “But I can’t help you.”

“Fine,” she said. “But remember one thing. With or without your help, I’ll find this monster, and I’ll put him away.”

“Fine,” he said. “Now I’d like you to remember one thing. If, in the process of putting him away, you step an inch beyond the line of the law, I’ll nail your ass.
Capisce?”

Rowena’s disdain was nothing compared to the contempt he saw on Kathryn McAllister’s face. “Goodbye, Chief DiSalvo,” she said. “Don’t bother to get up. I know where the door is.”

After she was gone, he leaned back in his chair and pondered the situation. The chances that she was innocent were slim to none. The D.A. couldn’t have convicted without substantial evidence. So why the hell was she back out on the street? No judge would overturn a murder conviction without a damn good reason.

In the flowered skirt and the virginal white blouse, Kathryn McAllister looked soft and feminine, but beneath the surface, she was one tough lady. Still, Nick knew enough about pain to recognize it when he saw it. The lady was hurting. But did that pain come from grief or remorse? It was hard to say.

Idle curiosity. That was all he was feeling. Since he had nothing better to do, he wandered out to the front desk, where Rowena was busily knitting a crib blanket for her newest grandchild, due in September. The needles raced, clicking softly as the monstrosity in her lap doubled in size almost daily. He paused by her desk, and she shoved harlequin glasses, the height of fashion back in 1962, up her bony nose. “Yes?” she said, as though he were interrupting something of vital importance.

He jingled a fistful of change in his pocket. Casually, he said, “I’d like you to pull the file on the McAllister homicide.”

Rowena’s mouth fell open, and Nick continued on down the hall to the soda machine. He dropped in three quarters and made his selection. He’d lived for thirty-five years without tasting RC Cola, but after just four months in Elba, he was hooked. He returned with the can of RC, already beading up with condensation. “Jesus,” he said, “it’s hotter than a bastard in here.” He popped the top on the RC and added, “Where’s the file?”

Rowena’s eyebrows drew together in disapproval at his flagrant abuse of the Lord’s name. One more thing she’d made abundantly clear. “It’s not there,” she said.

He paused with the can of RC halfway to his mouth. “What?” he said.

“The McAllister file. It’s not in the drawer.”

He lowered the can. “Well, where is it?”

She looked at him as though he were a very small, very stupid child. “If I knew where it was,” she said, “we wouldn’t be havin’ this conversation, now, would we?”

If she’d been an officer, he would have been tempted to charge her with insubordination. “You’re sure it’s not there?” he said. “It’s not misfiled or something?”

The knitting needles paused mid-click. “Chief DiSalvo,” she said, her voice cold enough to induce frostbite, “I’ve been workin’ here for thirty-two years, and I have yet to misfile anything. If it’s not there, it’s because somebody took it out of the drawer and didn’t return it.”

“But there was a file—
I mean, this department did conduct an investigation into the McAllister homicide, correct?”

“There most certainly was,” she said. “Chief Henley himself headed the investigation.” She pursed her lips. “It was a terrible thing. A handsome young man like that, cut down in his prime. His Momma and I attend the same church, you know. First Baptist, down on Wabash Street.” Lips still pursed, she resumed her knitting. “Poor Neely just went to pieces when Michael died. He was her only child, you know. She hemorrhaged when he was born, and they had to take out half her insides. She couldn’t have any more babies.”

Nick closed his eyes at the vivid picture her words evoked. “Thank you,” he said, and retreated to the safety of his office.

He sat at his desk for a while, idly rotating the can of RC in his hands while he reminded himself of all the reasons he shouldn’t get involved. He didn’t give a rat’s ass about Kathryn McAllister. He’d come to Elba four months ago to bury himself in a place where life was sluggish, a place where there’d be no life-and-death decisions to make, a place where he could pretend he’d been born the day he drove into town. He’d been doing a damn good job of fooling himself until Kathryn McAllister walked through his door.

He might have been able to maintain the illusion a while longer if it hadn’t been for the tickle at the back of his neck, just beneath the hair he kept an inch or two longer than was approved by Elba’s city fathers. He tried to ignore that tickle, but it wouldn’t go away, and he was too good a cop to ignore it. It wasn’t just Kathryn McAllister’s protestations of innocence that had his wheels turning. In sixteen years, he’d met only a handful of criminals who’d admitted their guilt. It was always somebody else’s fault, somebody else who’d pulled that trigger or held up that liquor store. But logic said that the McAllister woman had been turned loose for some reason. And there was still the matter of the missing file.

It probably didn’t mean a thing. Somebody had misfiled it when the dragon lady wasn’t on guard duty. When you added it all together, you came up with a big, fat zero. It was probably nothing more than his overactive imagination that had given birth to the gut feeling that something, somehow, wasn’t quite right here.

He called Dora Hastings at the county clerk’s office and arranged to have a transcript of the McAllister trial sent over by courier. “While you’re at it,” he told Dora, “you might as well give me a copy of the judge’s ruling to overturn the conviction.”

It took him another five minutes to get her off the phone. He still hadn’t adjusted to this Southern preoccupation with small talk. In New York, where people barely spoke to each other, it wasn’t uncommon to live next door to someone for twenty years and never have more than a nodding acquaintance. But here in Elba, five minutes after you met somebody, you knew their entire history, back at least four generations, whether you wanted to or not.

Rowena was still knitting, and he could have sworn the blanket had grown by several inches in the last twenty minutes. “Anybody’s looking for me,” he told her, “I’ll be over at the
Gazette
.”

The
Dixie Gazette
was located in a modern brick building a block south of downtown. He parked out front and went in search of Shanice Williams, the efficient young black woman who was in charge of the
Gazette’s
back files. Within minutes, Shanice had him settled at a microfiche viewer with several rolls of microfilm stacked beside him and a dire warning to treat them gently or else.

He started at the beginning, on the morning of May seventeenth, when the
Gazette’s
front-page headline had screamed: PROMINENT LOCAL MAN BRUTALLY SLAIN; WIFE ARRESTED. He paged slowly through the newspaper accounts of the murder, the arrest, the subsequent trial. In sleepy little Elba, murder had been big news, and the
Gazette’s
coverage of it had bordered on obsession.

There was a picture of Michael McAllister, most likely his high school portrait. He’d been a big bear of a man, a good-looking guy with a grin a mile wide. Another picture, this one an informal snapshot, showed Michael and Kathryn McAllister together at the seashore, arm in arm, looking young and tanned and preposterously happy.

Numerous other photos followed. But the photos were only the tip of a very large iceberg. During the months preceding the trial, the city fathers had renamed a small park after Elba’s fallen son. Letters had poured in to the
Gazette’s
editor from citizens urging the State to seek the death penalty. Editorials had painted Kathryn McAllister as a gold-digger, a ruthless daughter of Polish immigrants who had latched onto Michael McAllister because his family had money. The
Gazette
interviewed neighbors, Kathryn’s coworkers, the parents of her students. Every one of them expressed shock at the savagery of the crime. As one neighbor put it, “Miz McAllister seemed to be such a caring lady.”

Nobody argued for her innocence.

Her attorney had been granted a change of venue, so the trial had taken place in neighboring Stetson County. The
Gazette
had published numerous photos of Kathryn entering and leaving the Stetson County Courthouse, her shoulders back and her chin raised, her face blank and expressionless. Because of the lack of emotion she displayed, the press had dubbed her the Black Widow, after the female spider that kills and devours its spouse after mating. NO REMORSE FOR BLACK WIDOW, one headline said, while another claimed, BLACK WIDOW BRAZEN AS EVIDENCE AGAINST HER PILES UP.