Deadly Beloved (22 page)

“That couldn’t have gone on for too long. Corbett’s barely been a congresswoman at all. She just got elected, for God’s sake.”

“She was in politics before she ever got to be a congresswoman. She was very active in Causes. She’s a very big feminist.”

Henry made a face. “Feminism is a phase. I told you that. What it is you see in those women, I’ll never know.”

“I was talking about Patsy.”

“Maybe that’s why you’re so fat. Maybe it’s feminism. Maybe you’ve decided that being thin is a form of oppression you’re not going to put up with and so you’ve become gross instead.”

“I was talking about Patsy,” Evelyn said again.

“Don’t talk to the police,” Henry said, popping open the driver’s side door. “We don’t want to get mixed up in that kind of thing.”

With the door open, the air from outside rushed in. It was hot and sticky and thick. She opened her own door and got out onto the driveway. From where she stood, she could see Gregor Demarkian and the two policemen. Demarkian was walking up and down the edges of the Willises’ long, curving drive.

“It’s just like Sherlock Holmes, isn’t it?” Evelyn didn’t want to move into the house. The house had more air-conditioning in it, even better air-conditioning than the Lincoln. Evelyn liked it out in the heat. “It’s just like a detective novel. He ought to have a microscope.”

“You mean a magnifying glass, Evelyn. For Christ’s sake.”

“I’ll be back in a minute,” Evelyn said.

She could be surprisingly fast when she wanted to be. By the time Henry realized what she was doing, she was almost all the way down the drive, in full view of the three men over in the Willises’ driveway. She knew Henry wanted to shout or chase her, but she knew he wouldn’t do either. He would be worried about what the detectives would think. She reached the road and walked even faster. Without gravel to fight, she could move more quickly than most people of average weight. She half jogged along the road, listening for the sound of Henry’s footsteps behind her. She didn’t hear them. He wasn’t following her. He was just going to blow up at her when she got home.

In the Willises’ driveway, the three men had stopped whatever they were doing and begun watching her. Evelyn carefully blanked out of her mind any speculation as to what they might be thinking—
look at that gross fat ugly horrible woman
—and when she got to the drive itself she came to a stop and climbed carefully up the slope. Slopes were not like straight-aways. She sometimes blacked out on slopes.

“Mr. Demarkian?” she said when she got almost to where the three men stood. The older of the two detectives was Dan Exter, who was with the police department here. Evelyn recognized him from the fund-raising drives for the Police Community Contact League. The other one was black, and too good-looking. He was the kind of person who would look Evelyn over and decide that she was too ugly to talk to. But Gregor Demarkian was all right. He could have stood to lose a few pounds himself.

“Mr. Demarkian,” Evelyn said, holding out her hand. Then she snatched it back. She couldn’t remember if it was the right thing to do. She blushed furiously. “How do you do.”

“How do you do,” Gregor Demarkian said very politely.

Evelyn had hardly any air in her lungs. The hat on her head hurt her terribly. She looked at the ground.

“I’m sorry for what I saw on the news this morning. About your friend. About Miss Hannaford.”

“Thank you. But she’s all right, you know. She’s just got a broken arm.”

“They didn’t say on the news. They said some woman tourist from New York was dead.”

“Caroline Barrens, yes. She wasn’t a tourist though. She was the representative of some kind of PAC. Health care reform. Single payer system. That kind of thing.”

“Yes,” Evelyn nodded. “Well. I was thinking. That it might make sense, you know. The pipe bomb.”

“I wish it made sense to me.”

Gregor Demarkian sounded sincere. Evelyn relaxed a little more. She liked this man’s face. She liked it a great deal. It was lined and soft and gentle. It was much better than Henry’s. Maybe if she left Henry she could marry Gregor Demarkian. Maybe this Bennis Hannaford person wouldn’t mind.

“Well,” Evelyn said. “The thing is. Patsy was a big supporter of Julianne Corbett’s. Did you know that?”

“I know she’s on the contributors’ lists for Julianne Corbett’s campaign,” Gregor said. “Those are the public lists, you know, the ones you have to publish by law.”

“I didn’t know about the money,” Evelyn admitted, “but Patsy really admired Julianne Corbett. She had pictures of her all over the house. Did you find the pictures in the house?”

“No.” Gregor Demarkian was watching her very carefully now. “No, we didn’t.”

“Well, Patsy had them. And she was always saying that Julianne Corbett was the woman she would be if only she had made different choices in her life. Julianne Corbett was what she would be if she was only at her best. Does that make sense?”

“I think so.”

“I wish it made more sense to me. She was very intense about it. And Sarah Lockwood said she didn’t understand it at all, because Julianne Corbett was so low rent, because of all the makeup she wears, you know, and the jewelry and the hats. Does she wear all that stuff in person?”

“She did last night. Except I don’t think she was wearing a hat. I don’t really remember.”

“I thought maybe that that stuff was just for the public, you know, a way of creating a personality people will remember and then when they went to vote you might be the only one they’d heard of. Patsy said it didn’t matter to her what Julianne Corbett wore, she was a wonderful woman. And Patsy said that anytime she looked at her, she wanted to change her life. And maybe she did.”

“Maybe she did,” Gregor Demarkian agreed.

“But I was thinking of something else,” Evelyn continued. “I was thinking that maybe it wasn’t Patsy who blew up her car. Maybe it was somebody who hated Patsy and everything about her and they blew her up first and now they’ve decided to blow up this woman she idolized. Do you see?”

“But there wasn’t a body in the Volvo when it blew up,” Gregor said. “There was no one in the car.”

“Maybe there was supposed to be. Maybe the bomber is just inept. Maybe Patsy is afraid now and she’s in hiding.”

Gregor Demarkian nodded. “I think she’s in hiding. What about her husband? Do you think somebody other than Patsy MacLaren Willis shot her husband?”

Evelyn looked back at the brick Federalist. Henry was no longer in the driveway. The house looked blank. She adjusted the hat on her head again.

“It’s funny,” she said. “I completely forgot about Stephen. I mean, he was never around, do you know what I mean? He had some job that made him travel for weeks at a time and he was just never here. I’d heard that was going to change though. He was getting promoted or something and he was going to be able to stay put in the Philadelphia office instead of traveling all the time. Had you heard that?”

“Yes. Yes, I had.”

“Nobody else could have killed him though.” Evelyn felt suddenly depressed. She motioned back at the Federalist. “I live there. I was sitting in my window seat almost all that morning. I saw Patsy leave. With all those clothes, you know.”

“She was carrying clothes?”

“She had tons and tons of them loaded into the Volvo. But it was just her. Nobody else came out of the house with her. She left all on her own.”

“Did she take anything with her besides the clothes?”

“Nothing that I could see. I don’t want you to get the impression that I was spying. I wasn’t spying. I sit in my window seat a lot at that time of the morning. Mostly, there isn’t anybody at all around except maybe people coming out to get their newspapers. The newspapers are supposed to be delivered right to your doorstep, but they end up on the lawns a lot.”

“Did you see Mrs. Willis when she started to pack things into her Volvo?”

“I think so. I saw her when the Volvo was almost empty, and then she began to go back and forth into the house for the clothes, and I thought she was putting together her dry cleaning.”

“Weren’t there a lot of clothes for dry cleaning?”

Evelyn shrugged. “It’s spring. People do that in the spring. Take all their things to have them dry-cleaned, I mean. There wasn’t anybody in the whole neighborhood then except Molly Bracken picking up her paper.”

“Do you know what time this was?”

“I think so. It was six-thirty or so when Patsy left. I heard my cuckoo clock go off. And I sat there a long time, until my husband woke up at ten minutes to eight, and nobody else came out of the Willis house. Nobody at all.”

“That’s good to know.”

“Yes,” Evelyn said, feeling embarrassed again. “Well.” The pair of police detectives seemed to be hovering just behind Gregor Demarkian’s back. They made Evelyn feel uncomfortable. “Well,” she said again, backing up a little. “I have to go now. We just got back from shopping, my husband and I did. I have to unpack the groceries.”

“Thank you for coming forward,” Gregor Demarkian said.

Evelyn continued to back up. “I’m sorry I couldn’t be more help. I really am. I didn’t know Patsy all that well. I don’t know anybody here all that well. I don’t go out much.”

“You’ve given us some very valuable information.”

That was supposed to make her feel good about herself. Evelyn knew it. It wasn’t working. She backed up faster.

“I’ve got to go,” she said again, and then she was practically running down the drive, jogging back across the road, puffing up her own drive with heavy pumping motions that made her thighs hurt and her feet feel like glass about to break in a thousand pieces. Henry was nowhere to be seen. Evelyn hoped he was hiding out at the back of the house, sulking in privacy.

She made it to the top of her drive and into her garage. She went through her garage and into her mudroom. For most of this last little run she had had to hold her hat on her head. Now she sat down on one of the benches and took the hat off. Underneath it, lying against the top of her skull, she had a twelve-pound pork roast she had shoplifted from the meat bin at the Stop ’N Shop while Henry had been off on his own pawing through the fresh vegetables and lecturing nobody and everybody about the benefits of dietary fiber.

Evelyn put the pork roast in the box she used to keep her slippers in. She put the box under the bench she was sitting on. The pork roast would have to thaw. She could come back for it when Henry was out of the house, and then her only problem would be cooking it and getting rid of the smell of it before Henry caught her.

Evelyn loved pork roast. She loved the thick fat that lined the outside of it. She loved the thick fat that lined the outside of
herself
.

If Liza Verity had kept her promise to Congresswoman Julianne Corbett, she would have been at the reception for Karla Parrish when the pipe bomb went off. Instead, she had allowed herself to be bullied into working late for the first night in almost two years. Liza had spent the evening monitoring an EKG machine attached to a six-year-old boy with a rare heart abnormality. The boy was supposed to have open-heart surgery in two days, and he was terrified. This was important work and Liza was happy with herself for doing it, but she was also aware that she wouldn’t have done it if she hadn’t had to have an excuse that Julianne was sure to accept. She herself wasn’t sure why it had become so important to her not to attend that reception. Maybe it was just that one more Really Successful member of the old Jewett House group was more than she could bear. Maybe it was just that she hadn’t wanted to look dowdy and bought-her-dress-at-Sears in the middle of all those people who had paid thousands to look good while they were having cocktails. Maybe it was just that she was sick to death of Julianne.

Whatever it was, Liza had worked all night, gone home at six in the morning for four hours’ sleep, and then come back to the hospital to do her regular shift. Now it was noon and she was sitting at a table in the hospital cafeteria, trying to drink enough very strong coffee to keep herself awake. Her uniform felt scratchy and cheap. The coffee tasted horrible. She hadn’t eaten in so long, her stomach hurt, but she was much too tired to eat. On the other side of the table, a very young and very new RN named Shirley Bates was reading through the latest edition of the
Philadelphia Inquirer
, exclaiming every second or so about just how horrible all this violence was getting to be.

“Really,” Shirley Bates said. “I was warned before I came here, but you never understand until you see it for yourself. That’s true, don’t you think? I was warned, but the first time I saw a baby come in here with a gunshot wound, I nearly died.”

“Mmm,” Liza said.

“And now this thing with Congresswoman Corbett. A woman like that. It just goes to show. Nobody is safe anymore.”

“Mmm,” Liza said again.

“They took all the people at that party to St. Elizabeth’s. They should have brought them here. We’ve got much better facilities here.”

“St. Elizabeth’s was closer to where they were.”

“Closeness isn’t everything. Oh, well. There’s a woman who’s dead, you know. And this other woman, the one the reception was for, this Miss Paris—”

“Parrish.”

“Well, she hardly sounds like somebody who leads a calm life, what with all this going off to war zones and all that, but that’s just my point. I mean, she’d just come back from some civil war in Africa and she’d been just fine and she’s here for hardly a day and boom. Isn’t that ironic?”

“It’s certainly something.”

“The paper says it’s the same kind of bomb in a pipe that blew up that car in the parking lot a couple of days ago. You know the one. Where the woman was supposed to have killed her husband.”

“Yes,” Liza said. “I know the one.”

Shirley Bates let a smug little smile paste itself over her face. Shirley was a plumpish little woman, the kind who always seems to be on a diet to lose just five more pounds. She was one of the least intelligent nurses Liza had ever known.

“You know what I think?” Shirley said. “I don’t think that woman killed her husband at all. I don’t think she had anything to do with any pipe bombs. No matter what the papers have to say. The papers have all been taken over by liberals anyway.”