Suspicion of Vengeance (15 page)

A long time ago, visiting Aunt Irene, Jackie had seen this snapshot and asked to have it. She'd never told her father. He had used the word disappointment.
Your mother was a disappointment.
An embarrassment. Louise had left him, betrayed him, walked out on her kids.
No sense of responsibility.

Why had she left? No one had ever explained, and Jackie had always considered it disloyal to her father to ask.

Jackie wondered if her mother had talked to Aunt Irene. Sisters shared things like that. And maybe Gail knew. It was possible that everyone knew but her.

CHAPTER 10

Sunday afternoon, March 11

Before coming up to Stuart, Gail had done a title search on the Dodson house. It showed that a few weeks after the murder of his wife, Gary Dodson had put the house on the market, and in the years since then it had changed hands three times. This could only be explained by bad karma. The narrow street was not prosperous, but pretty enough, shaded by tall pines that left a layer of brown needles on the shingle roofs. Boats were stored in some of the side yards, and shiny SUVs announced the presenceof families.

As they reached the house on the corner, Gail saw the FOR RENT sign. The place was vacant. "That's lucky," she told Anthony. "Park in front so I can get a clear shot of the driveway." No one was about except for some kids on bikes and an old man next door adjusting a sprinkler.

Gail got out and aimed her camera. One-story white house, green trim. Hedge to the left. Weedy flower beds. To the right, the driveway ended at a double carport, one side enclosed by decorative concrete blocks. On the other side, a door to the kitchen. Amber's husband had come through it that night and found blood on the floor.

Anthony walked toward the west side of the house. Gail followed. Sunlight gleamed on his hair and picked up the narrow gold stripes in his shirt. Sandspurs had attached themselves to the hems of his trousers. Lovely trousers. A lovely fit. She zoomed in, then pressed the shutter.

Stopping between the house and the hedge, he turned around, looking across the street. The eyewitness lived in the house directly opposite. "Take a picture."

"She might be watching us."

"She doesn't know who we are," Anthony said. "We could be real estate agents."

With a flutter in the pit of her stomach, Gail raised her camera. "If Garlan throws us in jail for trespassing, I'm making you pay my bond too."

"Garlan Bryce can't do a damned thing to us."

"This isn't Miami,
Señor
Quintana."

Gail swung around to shoot the west side of the Dodson house. A row of windows, all cranked tightly closed. A rusting air conditioner held up by angle iron. The algae on the concrete pad underneath it was dried and cracking. No one had lived here for a while. Gail shaded the glass to look through the windows, but the bunds were shut.

Around back, more photos. The patio had been enclosed, making it impossible to see the sliding-glass door where the killer had entered. The woods behind the fence had turned into more houses. She focused on the kitchen windows. Another air conditioner. The utility shed. They continued around the house.

The elderly man stood in the driveway, apparently waiting for them to come out from under the carport. He wore a bright yellow golf shirt and plaid pants. A cotton fishing hat shaded his eyes. The sprinkler next door waved slowly back and forth over the grass.

"You folks looking to rent the place?"

"Are you Arthur Grigsby?"

"I am. How'd you know that?"

"My name is Gail Connor." She gave him a card. "This is Anthony Quintana. We're investigating a homicide that took place here twelve years ago. Your name was in the police reports. Do you have a few minutes to talk to us?"

He studied her card, then nodded and took them over to his house.

"Bess? Got a couple of folks here that want to know about the Dodson murder."

His wife poured iced tea on the back porch while Arthur Grigsby settled himself into a folding chair. He tipped his hat back and interlaced knobby fingers across his belly. He answered the question that Gail had just put to him. "I didn't know Gary too good. I liked his wife all right. She'd be out strolling the baby and stop to chat. You remember Gary and Amber, don't you, honey?"

Bess Grigsby sat down with her cigarette. "Sure I remember." Her voice was a sack full of rocks. "Art thought Amber was the cutest little thing on two legs."

"She was, next to you."

Bess winked at her husband.

Gail glanced across the table. Anthony's dark eyes danced with amusement. She asked, "How did the Dodsons seem to get along with each other?"

"They got along all right," Art Grigsby said.

"Oh, Art. They fought all the
time."

"I never heard him yell at her."

"Okay, he didn't yell. She yelled." Bess crossed her thin, darkly tanned legs. A leather thong sandal dangled from one foot.

"What did they fight about?"

"Please. Stupid stuff. She played the stereo too loud. He never wanted to go out. There wasn't enough money. Of course there wasn't. Look at the cars. He had a BMW, and she had a Mustang convertible. And the way she dressed."

Art said, "They had big plans to remodel the house, then he left his job. Had a nice job in a big firm, but he wanted to start his own. Didn't work out so good."

"Uh-uh. He didn't quit, he got fired."

"He did? Gary told me he quit."

"Amber said he got fired."

"A man ought to know if he quit or got fired, honey."

"Gary? Admit he was a loser? Ha."

"Now, Bess, have some pity for the poor guy."

She blew her husband a little kiss. "You're sweet. Wrong, but sweet." Her laugh sent the rocks rattling in her throat.

Gail remembered that Gary had worked at the Stuart branch of a high-priced Palm Beach firm. "Did Amber use those exact words? They fired him?"

"They fired him, they let him go, whatever. Next time I saw her she was going on and on about his new law practice, lah-de-dah.That girl could put on such an act." Bess Grigsby reached to tap her cigarette over the ceramic coconut ashtray. Wrinkles crisscrossed her brown forearm. "She's dead. I shouldn't talk that way."

Anthony said, "Do you think she could have had a lover?"

"I don't know. Gary kept her on a short leash. I could hear him out there in the garage. 'Where've you been? You're ten minutes late. Go change that skirt, it's too short.' If she was fooling around, she didn't do it here."

"She wasn't that kind of girl," Art said.

Bess rolled her eyes and blew smoke toward the ceiling. It drifted past a mobile of painted tropical birds.

"Did you tell this to the police?" Anthony asked.

"What's to tell? That they acted like married people?" She nudged her husband's thigh with her toe and laughed.

Gail asked, "What was Gary like?"

Art Grigsby answered. "He kept pretty much to himself Never did come over to chew the fat or get neighborly, you know, like ask how the game went or to borrow a tool or something. But I liked him okay."

"Oh,
please.
He was a sanctimonious
twerp.
Gary was the kind of guy who'd walk across the yard to pick up a leaf and accuse you of dropping it. He kept firing the yard men because they couldn't edge straight enough for him. The place looks like shit now, but when they lived there, you couldn't find a
speck
of dust. Amber showed me the pantry. Gary wanted all the canned goods lined up like soldiers exactly half an inch from the front of the shelf, and don't let me see the applesauce next to the peas. Applesauce goes with the
fruit."

Art Grigsby chuckled. "Hell to pay around here if I tried to tell Bess where to put the applesauce. Hoo boy."

"Did it ever occur to you," Anthony asked, "that her husband might have killed her? When you heard she was dead, what did you think?"

The Grigsbys looked at each other across the table. Art said, "Bess and I had a few go-arounds about that. I won five dollars off her when they got the guy that did it."

His wife held her hand out and motioned for him to give.

"Nope. It's not over yet. Anyhow, Gary was at work." His wife exhaled smoke to the side. "He could've hired a hit man."

"Bess watches too much TV."

Gail sent a quick glance toward Anthony, then said, "Mrs. Grigsby, do you think that your neighbor, Dorothy Chastain, could have been mistaken?"

"Ha! She's never wrong about
anything,
is she, Art? I hired a girl to come in to cook dinner for him when I had to be out of town visiting my sister, and Dotty spread it around that Art had a girlfriend. I let
her
have it. Bitch."

"Now, honey. Dotty didn't mean anything."

Anthony made a slight shrug. Nothing more could be learned here. Gail stood up. "We should be going. Thank you so much for your time."

At the front door, Art Grigsby shook their hands. "Come back and see us. We like company."

Anthony said, "It was a pleasure to meet you."

Bess Grigsby gave him a long, sideways look. "Love your accent. Where are you from, by the way? If you don't mind my inquiring."

He made a polite smile. "Cuba."

She snapped her fingers. "I knew it.
Cubano."
Then another gravelly laugh. "Art and I went to Havana on our honeymoon.
Cha-cha-cha."
Arms overhead, she swiveled her hips.

Her husband nodded. "I thought that fellow would've been executed by now. The wheels of justice grind slowly. It's a good thing for him, by golly, especially if you folks are right."

They walked slowly to the car, Gail leading because Anthony had his eyes on Dorothy Chastain's house. He said, "Look. She's watching us. As soon as we leave, she will call the Grigsbys to find out who we are."

Across the street, a woman stood at the living room curtains.

Anthony leaned against the rear fender of his car and raised his foot to pick the sandspurs off his cuffs. "Let's talk to her. We won't have this opportunity again."

"She won't call the Grigsbys, she'll call the sheriff."

"I think not. Now that we have spoken to her neighbors, she is curious about us."

Gail let out a breath. "Fine. You ask the questions, then."

"Me? It's your case."

She gave him a look. He smiled, the corners of his mouth going up, eyes hidden behind his dark glasses. She said, "You won't get through the door, but if you do, this was your idea."

He got through the door. Both of them did. It took an apology for disturbing her and regrets for any prior misunderstanding. But this was a matter of utmost importance, a man's life in the balance, questions that only she could answer.

Dorothy Chastain took them into her living room, where crocheted throws protected the brocade sofa, and silk flowers grew from every marble windowsill and mahogany side table. She smoothed her skirt under herself as she sat. She was taller than Gail had expected. Even at seventy, she was assured in her movements and deliberate in her speech. She was cautious but not fearful. That she offered them nothing to drink said clearly that she didn't want them to stay longer than the five minutes Anthony had promised her this would take.

He sat forward on the sofa, hands loosely clasped. "For now, we are simply trying to gather the facts. We've read the police reports, of course, but they don't contain every detail. I hope you can help us."

"It has been a rather long time," said Mrs. Chastain. Her hair had been gray in the photograph; now it was white. Her glasses bore curved reflections of the living room window.

"If you would just tell us what you saw that day." Anthony beamed a look of concern toward the woman— brows lifted, lines across his forehead.

Mrs. Chastain said she'd seen the young man coming around the hedge, waiting, looking over his shoulder, then going behind the house. She gave details of his clothing, his build, his hair. The time of day, the distances. Gail noticed how remarkably similar it all was to the words in the transcript. She had seen this happen in her civil trials. A story told over and over eventually becomes a memory of itself.

Returning from the birth of a grandchild in Atlanta, Mrs. Chastain had found Detective Sergeant Ronald Kemp's card among her mail. "So I drove over to the sheriffs department the next morning, a Tuesday, and asked to speak with him. He came out and introduced himself and took me into the criminal investigations office. His desk was in a cubicle, with other cubicles in the same room."

"Did you sit at his desk?" asked Anthony.

"He took me into another room. Or that was later. I'm not sure. It's been so long. But I did pick out Mr. Clark's photograph."

"Who else did you speak to?"

"Oh, there were quite a few people."

"Do you remember anyone specifically?"

"Let's see. I met Sheriff Bryce, although he wasn't sheriff then."

"He was Captain Bryce. Did you talk to him about the man you had seen?"

If she had, Gail noted, the conversation was not anywhere in the police reports.

"We didn't talk in depth. He was primarily speaking with Detective Kemp."

"Was this before or after you viewed the photographs?"

Mrs. Chastain gazed away, thinking. "I don't remember."

"All right. Let's go back to the time that you were standing at your window. Did you see anyone else in the Dodsons' yard that morning?"

"Anyone else? No."

"Any cars in the driveway?"

"I saw Gary leave at the usual time."

"Did you see Amber's sister?"

"Yes, that's right. What on earth was her name?"

"Lacey Mayfield. Can you remember when you saw her and what she did?"

"Let's see. It was after Gary left. And certainly before I saw Mr. Clark in the yard. I don't know exactly. She parked in the driveway. She got out, knocked on the door." Mrs. Chastain's eyes closed, and her glasses tilted upward. "She looked through the front window. She walked around to the side of the house. Then she came back, got into her car, and drove away."

Anthony was silent awhile, leaning his forearms on his thighs, gazing past the silk flowers on the coffee table. "Did you tell Detective Kemp that you had seen Amber's sister?"