Eleven Little Piggies (20 page)

 

My footsteps sounded loud as I walked into the darkened detective division, debating with myself about where to start. When I turned on the lights I saw rows of neat desks with covered computers. My own office was the only one with piles of work sitting around – in my haste to get Ben I hadn't stayed to tidy up.
Fine
, I thought, rummaging through a pile.
I'll find a notebook and a pen, and make a list.

Then Ray's voice behind me said, ‘Ah. You are here.' When I turned to face him he said, ‘I saw your pickup. Is this all right with Trudy?'

‘She doesn't love it but she knows it's what I do. But your new bride, are you—'

‘She said, “I knew you were kind of a nut when I married you”. Where do you want to start?'

‘I . . . with Nicole, I think. But since you're here . . . you're good at all this searching business, too, and I wonder . . . do you think you might be able to dig up some skinny on Maynard?'

‘That's what I was thinking,' he said. ‘The labs are all closed but the Internet's still working.'

‘Exactly. So why not start with Been Verified for the basics of who he is, and go on to CriMNet to see if he'd been in trouble hereabouts before he offed himself. If he did.'

‘Good. After CriMNet go for NCIC, huh? And . . . Matt Kester too, while I'm at it?'

‘Why not? He's been gone for a lot of years – first thing, why don't you see if you can find enough prize money to live on? Because otherwise—'

‘What was his ace in the hole? Good point.' He chuckled. ‘Digging for dirt about the Kesters – feels kind of radical, doesn't it? But fun. How about old Ethan? You think I could find something to hang on him?'

‘I don't expect him to turn up on CriMNet but if there's a note anywhere about how he sneaks an extra cookie at Chamber of Commerce meetings, I'll be on him like a swarm of bees.'

I began loading my body – first with recorder, notebooks, pens, camera . . . Strapping on my Glock, I wondered: was Nicole the intellectual going to refuse to speak to me if I was packing? Hell with it, I decided; if she does I'll handcuff her and bring her downtown.

Then footsteps sounded in the hall and Winnie walked in.

She said, ‘I was passing and saw your cars. Where do you want me to start?'

‘Winnie,' I said, ‘I can't let you – the rules—'

‘I took two sick days earlier this pay period,' she said. ‘You make up the payroll lists; show me as working those days.'

‘But your family, won't they—'

‘Jake, Thanksgiving is not a Vietnamese holiday. My sister's children love all this business with the Pilgrim hats and pumpkin pies, but I guess I was just too late getting started. I have never been able to find anything attractive about turkey with cranberries. Please don't tell immigration.'

I laughed and asked Ray, ‘What else do we want most?'

He said, ‘Get Doris to say exactly what Maynard didn't do before she fired him. Maybe we can figure out what hours he could have been doing something else, see if they fit any blanks in those diagrams we been making.'

‘I can certainly do that,' Winnie said, and turned to go.

‘I said, ‘Take your Glock. And your Taser.'

‘Oh? I'm only asking a few ques—'

I stopped her with a raised palm. ‘The Kesters are going through a bad patch. From now on, when you deal with them, go armed.'

Before we left, I got Ray to run off several copies apiece of the picture he still had up on the monitor in the meeting room. ‘Every place you go for the next few days, show this to the people you talk to,' I said. ‘This guy's been working around here for some time, somebody must know him.'

Then Winnie got into her dinky Prius, and used maybe a cupful of gas to drive to the extreme north edge of town, previously known as ‘country'. I turned up the heater in my apple-red Ford pickup with dualies and tool chest, and burned through a couple of gallons getting across Rutherford on flawlessly paved streets. Americans, even quite new ones, have always used their means of transportation to express themselves, and it's going to be a hard habit to break.

Ethan Kester's house was on Mercer Street, in a section of town where all the houses were large and substantial. Ethan's had the extra elegance that characterizes houses built by well-to-do people in the first two decades of the twentieth century. They have features any sensible person would want but nobody builds any more, like pantries and second-floor sleeping porches.

The house was dark in front but I saw blazing lights and movement back where the kitchen must be. I rang the bell and watched while somebody, coming forward, turned on a hall light and then the light over my head. I held my shield up by my face while the person scrutinized me through a dark sidelight. When the deadbolt slid back and the door opened a crack I said, ‘Good evening. Jake Hines, detective division, Rutherford Police Department.' I didn't smile, and neither did she – just stood in her barely-open door and said, ‘Ethan's not home. He took the boys to a movie so I could do my holiday cooking.'

‘No problem. I came to see you.'

‘Oh? What about?'

‘I have some questions about the body in your husband's car,' I said.

‘I don't know anything about that,' she said, ‘and I'm very busy tonight, so . . .' She started to close the door but I was standing on the sill and pushed back. We were standing almost nose to nose now. ‘I can't talk through the door,' I said. ‘If you won't let me in I'll have to take you downtown.'

She watched me quietly, deciding whether I was bluffing. ‘I know you're busy,' I said. ‘And if you'll let me in I won't take any more of your time than I have to.'

‘I have things cooking in the kitchen that have to be tended to,' she said. ‘If you'll come back there and talk to me you can take all the time you like.'

The air inside was warm and smelled wonderfully of spices and sugar. I followed her past a shining mahogany staircase that turned at a landing with an elegant carved newel post. She led me along a wainscoted hall hung with family portraits into an octagonal dining room with windows lining three sides. I got an impression of small-figured wallpaper and shutters. We passed a round table, went through a swinging door into a pantry and through another swinging door into a large kitchen with a great deal of stainless steel, where the wonderful smells got more intense.

She wore a large white no-nonsense apron like the ones Trudy uses, mousy hair pulled back in a ponytail and large, thick glasses with heavy rims. Despite her lack of physical charm, something about her erect figure and assured voice led me to believe the assessment her husband had delivered earlier that day: ‘Nicole, you know, is quite capable of arranging things to suit herself.' I did not doubt that she had done exactly that in this perfect house, and wondered if Ethan realized he was living with a major talent.

She went back to work at a chopping block, a big range and a couple of ovens. The granite counters were crowded with high-end appliances, and shiny pans and spoons hung from an overhead rack. One shelf held a row of cookbooks with famous chefs beaming from their covers. Except for Nicole's nondescript appearance, the whole scene might have been ripped from the pages of some glossy home magazine.

Admiring her work wasn't going to get me where I needed to go, though. I laid one of my Maynard pictures on the counter and asked her, ‘You know this man?'

She took her time measuring eight cups of water into a pan and setting it on a burner before she glanced at the picture and said, ‘No.' She set the heat control carefully, thinking about it. How hard could it be to hit ‘High'?

‘Sure? He's the man your husband found dead in his car this morning.'

She made a face and said, ‘Ugh.'

‘He worked at the Kester farm. But you didn't know him?'

‘No. I never go there; I don't know any of those people.'

‘You never go to your family's farm?' She shook her head. ‘Why, you have allergies, or—?'

‘I do not share the Kester passion for the revered family farm, that's all. The sacrosanct acres that suck up all the attention in any room where Kesters gather.'

‘I suppose those conversations do lack variety.'

She laughed a humorless little bark. ‘You might say that. Unless you're fascinated by plans to buy cows with registered tits and train horses with names longer than European kings.'

‘Looking around this house, I'd guess you have somewhat different interests.'

‘Uh-huh. I'm the funny-faced wife that reads
books
, of all things. Likes to talk about movies and listen to music. All total conversation-stoppers at a Kester gathering, where the pressing need for more cows and horses never leaves any money for anything the homely intellectual might fancy.'

‘Like what?'

‘Like a sweet little home decorator's shop with a small inventory and high fees for consulting. You got the picture?'

‘Yup. Clear as day. What was wrong with your car?' She filled a measuring cup exactly to the brim with sugar, poured it into the pan of hot water on the stove and gave it a stir. ‘This morning, Nicole? When you put it in the shop?'

‘Oh . . .' She shrugged. ‘The locking mechanism on the front passenger door wasn't working right.' She measured out another cup of sugar, dumped it into the pan, and stirred some more, giving it her full attention.

‘It wouldn't lock? Or unlock?'

‘Both. Either. From the driver's side. It's supposed to be, you know, controllable all around from the driver's side.' She cut open a sack and waited. When the sugar water bubbled, she tilted the sack above it, and cranberries poured into the boiling water with fat, satisfying little plops.

‘But they fixed it? Where'd you take it, by the way?'

‘To the dealership where I bought it. The Lexus people out there on the Beltway.'

‘Spielman's?'

‘Um . . .' She was watching the cranberries rise. ‘Yes, I guess . . .' She stirred the frothy mixture with her long-handled spoon.

‘And they fixed it?'

‘No. They said it was something electrical so they'd have to take the whole door apart and it might take all day. So I said, “Well, I can't be without a car all day today”. I took it back and had the yard man return Ethan's.'

‘He was following you, was he? The yard man? What's his name, by the way?' I had my notebook in front of me now.

‘Good heavens, I don't know.'

‘You don't know the name of the man who trims your trees?'

‘It's a service. They hire, I suppose, all sorts of people. From the looks of them, I doubt they all have documentation, but I deal with the company, I don't have to care who . . . Why?' She looked at me coldly with her eyebrows raised. ‘Are you going to check up on me?'

‘That's the way the system works, yes. We verify answers. What's the name of the yard company you use?'

‘I . . .' She peered into the pink froth in the pan, gave it a couple of stirs, picked out a couple of berries and slid them onto a small plate. ‘I have their card there . . . on the board somewhere.' She waved at the framed corkboard by her wall phone. It was bristling with colored thumbtacks holding cards and reminder notes. She blew on the two berries on the plate, tasted one, dumped both in the sink. ‘I'll find it for you when I have time. Or you're welcome to look for yourself.' She flashed a little sideways smile.

‘I'll count on you to find it for me. After you took your car back from the dealer you went on to the store and got your onions, hmm?'

‘Good heavens, you even know about the onions?' Her little mocking laugh was so like Ethan's – did they line up and hold contests in this family, I wondered? See whose tiny laugh could hold the most effective sneer?

‘Which store did you go to, for the onions? No store near that Lexus dealership where you could buy those little pearl onions, is there? And the sweet potatoes,' I said. ‘Your husband mentioned them too.'

‘He's got a remarkable memory,' she said. ‘You too.'

‘But you don't, I guess. Hmmm? If you forgot to buy the two classic items that every housewife in America includes in her Thanksgiving dinner menu?'

‘Do they? I haven't been cooking it that long. Thanksgiving was always my mother's feast to prepare, till she had a stroke last year and—' She turned to face me suddenly, her face flushed from the steam she was bending over. ‘Did my husband's remarkable memory yield up the name of his Saturday secretary yet? Have you talked to her? Patti the Playmate? Pretty Patti, the peter licker?' Maybe it wasn't all because of the steam – her cheeks kept getting redder as she talked.

‘I don't believe – is there something in particular you think I should ask her?'

The laugh wasn't small this time. It burst out in a big guffaw, rage and contempt boiling out of it. ‘Oh, you bet there is, Mr Pussyfoot Detective, there's one particular question I'd love to hear her answer! Ask her' – she leaned across her beautiful granite workspace, her gray eyes gleaming with hate – ‘if she's really simpleton enough to think she's ever going to get her slimy hands on this house and my beautiful boys and the money from that filthy bloated farm they're all so proud of. Does she actually suppose I'm so dim I can't keep her from making that snatch?'

The pot on the stove boiled over with a great crackling as the liquid hit the burner, followed by an awful stench of burning sugar. Nicole gave a little strangled cry, banged her long-handled spoon down on her cutting board and turned the heat off under the pan. ‘There! See what you've made me do? Talking to me when I'm cooking? Now my stove is a stinking mess, damn it! And the cranberries are ruined – I'll have to throw the whole fucking thing down the drain. Ah!' She slapped her forehead. ‘How will I ever get everything done?'