Reunion in Death (6 page)

"Oh yeah, she did it."

"You knew it. The minute she walked into the apartment, you knew."

"Doesn't matter what I knew or what I know. It's your case, so what matters is what you know and getting her to tell you."

"If you did the interview-"

"I'm not doing the interview, you are. Your case. Work out your approach, your tone, then bring her in and break her down."

Eve pulled into a driveway, and Peabody looked around blankly. Somehow they'd gotten from city to suburb.

"Now put it away," Eve ordered. "Pettibone's front and center now."

She sat a moment, studying the rosy redbrick house. It was modest enough, even simple until you added the gardens. Floods, rivers, pools of flowers flowed out from the base of the house, streaming all the way to the sidewalk. There was no lawn to speak of, though there were tall clumps of some sort of ornamental grasses creatively worked in to the sea of color.

A stone walkway ribboned its way through to the base of a covered porch where flowering vines, thick with deep purple blooms, wound their way up round posts.

There were chairs with white cushions on the porch, glass-topped tables, and yet more flowers in pots that had artistically faded to verdigris. Obviously Shelly Pettibone liked to sit and contemplate her flowers.

Even as Eve thought it, a woman stepped out of the front door carrying a tray.

She was deeply tanned, her arms long and leanly muscled against the short sleeves of a baggy blue T-shirt. Her jeans were worn and cropped off at midcalf.

She set down the tray, watched Eve get out of the car. The mild breeze stirred her sun-streaked brown hair worn short and unstyled around the weathered, appealing face of a woman who lived a great deal of her life outdoors.

As Eve drew closer, she saw that the woman's eyes were brown and showed the ravages of weeping.

"Is there something I can do for you?"

"Mrs. Pettibone? Shelly Pettibone?"

"Yes." Her gaze shifted to Peabody. "This is about Walter."

"I'm Lieutenant Dallas." Eve offered her badge. "My aide, Officer Peabody. I'm sorry to disturb you at this difficult time."

"You need to ask me questions. I just got off the 'link with my daughter. I don't seem to be able to do anything to help her. I can't think of the right words. I don't think there are any. I'm sorry, sit down please. I was going to have some coffee. I'll just get more cups."

"You needn't bother."

"It gives me something to do, and just now I don't have nearly enough to do. I'll just be a minute. It's all right if we talk out here, isn't it? I'd like to be outside for a while."

"Sure, this is fine."

She went back in, left the door open.

"A guy dumps you for a younger model after thirty years or so," Eve began. "How do you feel about it when it kicks off?"

"Hard to say. I can't imagine living with anyone for three years much less thirty. You're the married one here. How would you feel?"

Eve opened her mouth to make some withering comment, then stopped. She'd hurt, she realized. She'd grieve. Whatever he'd done, she'd suffer for the loss.

Instead of answering, she stepped over, glanced in the door. "Nice place, if you go for this sort of thing."

"I've never seen anything like this yard. It's seriously mag, and it must take a ton of work. It looks natural, but it's really well-planned. She's got it all planted for maximum effect-seasonally, fragrance-wise, colors, and textures. I smell sweet peas." She took a deeper sniff of the air. "My grandmother always has sweet peas outside the bedroom window."

"Do you enjoy flowers, Officer?" Shelly stepped back out, cups in hands.

"Yes, ma'am. Your garden's beautiful."

"Thank you. It's what I do. Landscape design. I was studying horticulture and design when I met Walter. A million years ago," she said softly. "I can't quite believe he's gone. I can't believe I'll never see him again."

"Did you see him often?" Eve asked.

"Oh, every week or two. We weren't married any longer, but we had a great deal in common." She poured coffee with hands that wore no rings. "He'd often recommend me to clients, as I would him. Flowers were one of the bonds between us."

"Yet you were divorced, and he remarried."

"Yes. And yes, he was the one who wanted to end the marriage." She folded her legs under her, lifted her cup. "I was content, and contentment was enough for me. Walter needed more. He needed to be happy, to be excited and involved. We'd lost some essential spark along the way. With the kids grown and away from home, with it being back to the two of us... Well, we couldn't revive that spark. He needed it more than I did. Though it was difficult for him, he told me he wanted a change."

"You must have been angry."

"I was. Angry and hurt and baffled. No one likes to be discarded, even gently. And he was gentle. There isn't, wasn't a mean bone in his body."

Her eyes welled again, but she blinked the tears back, took a deep sip of coffee. "If I had insisted, if I had pushed him back into the corner our marriage had become for him, he would have stayed."

"But you didn't."

"I loved him." She smiled when she said it, heart-breakingly. "Was it his fault, my fault, that our love for each other had mellowed into something too comfortable, too bland to be interesting any longer? I won't say it wasn't hard to let him go, to face life on my own. We'd been married more than half my life. But to keep him with me out of obligation? I've too much pride for that, and too much respect for both of us."

"How did you feel when he married a woman younger than your daughter?"

"Amused." The first glint of humor crept over Shelly's face, and made it pretty and mischievous. "I know it's petty, it's small, but I mink I was entitled to a moment or two of amusement. How could I be otherwise? She's a bit of foolish fluff, and frankly, I don't think they'd have stayed together. He was dazzled with her, and proud the way men are when they're able to hang something stupendously decorative on their arm."

"A lot of women would've felt embarrassed, angry."

"Yes, and how foolish is that to measure yourself against a silly ornament? My reaction was the opposite. In fact, his relationship with her went a long way to helping me resolve what had happened between us. If his happiness, even temporarily, depended on a beautiful set of breasts and a giggling young girl, well, he wasn't going to get that from me, was he?"

She sighed, set her cup down. "She did make him happy, and in her way loved him. You couldn't help but love Walt."

"So I've heard. Someone didn't love him, Mrs. Pettibone."

"I've thought about it." All humor fell away from her face. "Thought and thought. It makes no sense, Lieutenant. None at all. Bambi? God, what a name. She's foolish and flighty, but she's not evil. It takes evil to kill, doesn't it?"

"Sometimes it just takes a reason."

"If I thought, for one instant, that she had done this, I'd do everything I could to help you prove it. To see her pay for it. But, oh God, she's a harmless idiot who, if she manages to have two thoughts at once must hear them rattling together in that empty head of hers."

She couldn't, Eve thought, have said it better herself.

"And what reason could she have to do this?" Shelly demanded. "She had everything she could want. He was incredibly generous with her."

"He was a very rich man."

"Yes, and not one to horde his wealth. The divorce settlement was more than fair. I'd never have to work again if I didn't love my work. I know-because he told me-that he'd gifted Bambi with a substantial trust when they married. Our children were generously provided for and each has a large share of World of Flowers. The inheritance each of us, and yes, I'm also a beneficiary, will receive upon his death is considerable. But we have considerable already."

"What about business associates? Competitors?"

"I don't know anyone who'd wish Walt harm. As for business, killing him won't effect WOF. The company's well-established, well-organized, with both our children taking on more and more of the administration. Killing him makes no sense."

It had made sense to Julianna, Eve mused. The woman did nothing unless it made sense. "Since you've maintained a good relationship, why didn't you attend his party?"

"It just seemed awkward. He urged me to come, though not very hard. It was supposed to be a surprise, but of course he knew about it weeks ago. He was very excited. He always was like a little boy when it came to parties."

Eve reached into her bag, drew out Julianna Dunne's two photographs. "Do you know this woman?"

Shelly took both, held them side-by-side. "She's very pretty, in both looks. But, no, I've never seen her before. Who is she?"

"What were you doing the night of your husband's party?"

She drew a small breath, as if she'd known this was a blow she'd have to face. "I don't really have what you'd call an alibi as I was alone. I did work out in the garden until almost sunset, and one of the neighbors might have seen me. I stayed home that night. Friends had asked me to dinner at the club, The Westchester Country Club, but I didn't feel like going out. You might know them. Jack and Anna Whitney. He's a police commander in the city."

Eve felt her stomach sink. "Yes. I know the commander and his wife."

"Anna's been trying to fix me up since the divorce. She just can't understand how I can be happy without a man."

"And are you? Did you wonder that if your husband's relationship with his current wife failed, as you felt it would, he'd come back to you?"

"Yes. I thought of that, considered that. And the fact is I don't think he would have come back."

A butterfly, creamy white, flitted across the porch and fluttered down to flirt with the potted flowers. Watching it, Shelly sighed.

"And I know I wouldn't have had him if he did," she added. "I loved him, Lieutenant, and he'll always be a vital part of my life. Even now that's he's gone. This is a man I lived with, slept with, had and raised children with. We share a grandson we both adore. Memories no one else has, and those are precious. But we weren't in love with each other anymore. And I've come to like the life I'm making on my own. I enjoy the challenge, and the independence of it. And while that baffles Anna and some of my other friends, I'm not ready to give that independence up. I don't know that I ever will be. Walter was a good man, a very, very good man. But he wasn't my man anymore."

She handed the photographs back to Eve. "You didn't tell me who she was."

She would hear it, Eve thought, either through the media or her connection with Anna Whitney. "She's the woman who gave Walter Pettibone poisoned champagne. And our prime suspect."

...

"I liked her," Peabody said as they drove back to the city.

"So did I."

"I can't see her hiring a hit. She's too direct, and I don't know, sensible. And if the motive was payback for the divorce, why not target Bambi, too? Why should the replacement get to play grieving widow and roll around in an inheritance?"

Since Eve had come to the same conclusions herself, she nodded. "I'll see if Whitney can give me any different angle on the divorce and her attitude toward Pettibone. But at this point we bump her down the list."

"What's the next step?"

"If Julianna was a hired hitter, she'd be costly. We'll start on financials, see if anybody spent some serious money recently."

...

Julianna wasn't concerned about money. Her husbands, God rest them, had been very generous with the commodity. Long before she'd killed them, she'd opened secure, numbered accounts under various names in several discreet financial institutions.

She'd invested well, and even during her hideous time in prison, her money had made money for her.

She could have lived a long and indulgent life anywhere in the world or its satellites. But that life would never have been complete unless she could take the lives of others.

She really enjoyed killing. It was such interesting work.

The one benefit of incarceration had been the time, endless time, for her to consider how to continue that work once she was free again.

She didn't hate men. She abhorred them. Their minds, their bodies, their sweaty, groping hands. Most of all, she detested their simplicity. With men, it all came down to sex. However they dressed it up-romanticized, justified, dignified it-a man's primary goal was to stuff his cock inside you.

And they were too stupid to know that once they did, they gave you all the power.

She had no sympathy for women who claimed they'd been abused or raped or molested. If a woman was too stupid, too weak, to know how to seize a man's power and use it against him, she deserved whatever she got.

Julianna had never been stupid. And she'd learned quickly. Her mother had been nothing but a fool who'd been tossed away by one man and gone scrambling for another. And always at their beck and call, always biddable and malleable.

She'd never learned. Not even when Julianna had seduced her idiot second husband, had lured him to bed, and let him do all the disgusting things men lived to do to her fresh and supple fifteen-year-old body.

It had been so easy to make him want her, to draw him in so that he would sneak out of his wife's bed and into his wife's daughter. Panting for her like an eager puppy.

It had been so easy to use it against him. All she'd had to do was dangle sex, and he'd given her whatever she'd wanted. All she'd had to do was threaten exposure, and he'd given her more.

She'd walked away from that house at eighteen, with a great deal of money and without a backward glance. She'd never forget her mother's face when she'd told her just what had gone on under her nose for three long years.

It had been so viciously satisfying to see the shock, the horror, the grief. To see the weight of it all crash down and crush.

Naturally, she'd said she'd been raped, forced, threatened. It always paid to protect yourself.

Maybe her mother had believed it, and maybe she hadn't. It didn't matter. What mattered was that in that moment Julianna had realized she had the power to destroy.