The Death of an Ambitious Woman (18 page)

Ruth and McGrath had partnered for seven years until she’d become a captain and the head of the detective force and he’d paired up with old Parsons, who’d retired, making way for Moscone.

The Goubanov boy’s court-appointed lawyer had pled him out. Looking at the seriousness of the charges, he’d had the boy cop to simple possession for three years’ probation. No one ever asked Ruth why she wasn’t involved in the case anymore. No one noticed the too-neat report. At least the boy had avoided juvenile hall, though the guilty plea might have ruined his chances for citizenship. Ruth still thought about the hurt in his

mother’s eyes.
Welcome to America,
she thought.
It must seem a lot like home.

“Damn!” McGrath jerked his head around so he could glare at the car behind them. It was tailgating, crowding their back bumper. Miles of empty road around and the two cars rushed on, eighteen inches apart.

Ruth glanced at the speedometer. They were going too fast. When the car crept up behind them, on a two-lane road full of curves with painted double yellow lines that meant no passing, McGrath responded by speeding up, trying to put some distance between them and the other car. The other car stayed right on their tail, adjusting its speed to their own, until finally McGrath, pushed beyond his comfort level, swore and slowed down. The car behind them flashed its high beams, twice. McGrath muttered and pulled to the side of the road. The car sped by, obscured in the morning gloom.

“Jerk,” McGrath said and pulled back onto the road. Shortly afterward, they left 1A and crossed to Route 95 without incident. They drove straight to Karen Pace’s house.

The vigil at the Pace house had been building as the days went by. Despite the early hour, parked cars surrounded the corner lot. Outside, a group of men and older boys were standing sheltered by the overhang of the old stable. McGrath seemed to know most of them from his previous visits. He split off and went to talk to the group, greeting many by name.

He’s still a good detective,
Ruth thought as she continued toward the house—
thorough, straightforward, honest.

Inside, an assembly line of women made pancakes to feed the crowd. Children of all sizes ran through the rooms or watched cartoons in the living area. A woman at the kitchen table rose when Ruth walked in. She was holding the Pace infant.

“I’m Karen’s sister,” she said.

“I need to speak to her.”

“She’s in their bedroom. She’s been up all night. She won’t see anybody, not even her children. I’ve tried to tell her they need her now more than ever, but she won’t even nurse the baby.” Karen Pace’s sister shrugged her shoulders at the futility of it all.

“It’s urgent.”

Karen Pace’s sister handed the baby to another woman. “Wait here,” she said and started for the stairs.

She returned five minutes later. “Karen wants you to come upstairs.” The sister turned again. This time Ruth followed.

At the top of the stairs was a tiny landing framed by three closed doors. Karen Pace’s sister knocked on the one directly ahead.

“Come in.” The voice was a whisper.

There were no lights on in the room and the clouds outside prevented natural light from coming through the windows. Karen Pace lay curled up on the bedspread of the double bed. A mass of tiny, pink papers lay beside her. She had been crying. Though there were no tears now, a line of broken blood vessels across her forehead attested to the violence of her sobs. Ruth wondered for a second if she had already heard the news about her husband. No. Not yet. The name hadn’t been released.

Ruth crossed the room to look out the window into the backyard below. McGrath was still out there, talking earnestly to the circle of men. Ruth could tell he’d already told them Al Pace was dead. Their heads were bent, the conversation quiet. Ruth didn’t have much time.

“Mrs. Pace, I’m here because the news is bad. Your husband is dead.”

Ruth expected renewed crying, but Karen was all cried out. When she finally spoke, her voice was thin. “Where?”

“In Salton Beach, in a motel room. Mrs. Pace, there’s more—”

“I know.” Karen rolled herself up to a sitting position. “I found these in a box in the attic,” she said, indicating the papers on the bed. “I wasn’t even looking—I just wanted some old clothes for the baby.” She handed one of the papers to Ruth. It was a motel receipt for the Hightide Motel in Rockport, one town beyond the New Derby PD’s original search. “They’re all the same,” she went on when Ruth had finished reading. “There are thirty-one of them.” Karen began to sniff. Tears oozed from her eyes.

“I’m sorry,” Ruth whispered.

Karen tried to wipe the tears away, but the floodgates had reopened. She doubled over, moaning, head bent to her knees.

Ruth stood at the window and watched the young woman rock and hold her stomach.The worst part was that Ruth wasn’t sure enough of anything to tell her what had happened, and wasn’t sure, in any case, whether the motive for Al Pace’s betrayals would make them any easier for his young wife to endure.

On the bed, the new widow quieted slightly and said in her little voice, “Just tell me, was he alone when he died or was there a woman with him?”

Oh, God,
Ruth thought,
how to tell the rest?

Ruth sat on the bed and explained the circumstances of Al Pace’s death in simple sentences. She was as graphic as she thought the media might be, judging it better to say as much as she needed to all at once. Then she called to McGrath, who returned to the car for gloves and an evidence pouch to remove the motel receipts.

In the kitchen, Ruth spoke to Mrs. Pace’s sister, suggesting a physician be called and that Karen might bear watching.

Back in the car, McGrath asked, “Why would he keep the receipts? It’s hardly likely he paid for the room.”

“Think about it,” Ruth responded.

Because it was Sunday, McGrath drove through the city and up the coast to Rockport. It would take a little longer, but he preferred the shifting scenery of Routes 1A and 127 to the endless malls and office parks along Route 128. Despite his lack of sleep and the chief’s sense of urgency, he was in no hurry. The trip had a feeling of inevitability about it.

The Hightide Motel in Rockport was a string of guest cottages laid out along the rocky shore facing west across Ipswich Bay. In the summer their little porches would be lovely places for tired tourists to sit and watch the sun go down. The rest of the year, they were pretty desolate and depressing. It was an awfully long way for a career woman to go for a midday screw.

McGrath walked across the parking lot and knocked on the office door. The office was in the largest cabin, which also housed the owner’s living quarters. A skinny man in khakis and a flannel shirt answered the knock. “You here about a room?”

“You the owner?” McGrath asked.

“Curse God, I am,” the man answered. “You interested in buyin’? Make a fine retirement business for someone who had some other income—like a pension.” He looked McGrath up and down.

“Not at the moment. I’m not retired. In fact, I’m here on business. New Derby police.” McGrath showed his badge. “I’ve come to ask you about a guest.”

“Only have two couples right now,” the man answered. “Both out somewhere havin’ a fancy Sunday meal.”

“A former guest,” McGrath clarified. “Last fall, mid-October through December. A man and a woman. They wouldn’t have stayed overnight.”

“We don’t rent to that kind here. This is a nice family place.”

“Um-hum.You recognize him?” McGrath showed the picture of Al Pace.

“That’s the guy who’s been on TV. Missing, he is. If I’d recognized him, I would’ve called you. I haven’t seen him.”

McGrath considered this. “You the only one who works here?”

“I wish. This place doesn’t pay enough for that. I’ve had to keep my regular job.”

“Who clerks when you’re not here?”

“Last couple of years, two sisters who go to Salem State have shared the weekdays. They work it around their class schedules, you know. But they don’t rent the place to parties who only want to stay a couple hours. Those are my orders.”

McGrath got the names, address, and phone number for the student clerks.The skinny man showed him to the door, opened it, and looked out at the bay. “When I bought this place, it was a real going concern,” he said. “Filled up every day all summer and weekends every spring and fall. Then the goddamn Canadian dollar went right down the toilet, and the trade never came back when the dollar did. I got nothin’ but empty rooms.”

“The land must be worth a lot,” McGrath said, gazing at the view, which was currently slate gray water under a slate gray sky, but which held a lot of promise.

The skinny man snorted. “Zoning. Setbacks. Septic permits. You can’t build nothin’ here.You couldn’t even build this place today. Nope, I’m stuck, I am, in a hell that looks like heaven.”

McGrath called the motel clerking sisters from his cell phone. One was home studying. She said she’d wait. McGrath edged back onto 127 carefully and, following her detailed directions, arrived at an old house near Salem State that had been divided into apartments. The woman who answered the door was a petite, attractive Filipina. She introduced herself as Christina de las Alas. Her absent sister was Angelica. McGrath noticed the living room had no TV.

Christina agreed to look at the picture. She recognized Al Pace right away. “Oh yes, I remember him because he was so handsome.” She aimed her pretty smile at McGrath. “He came lots of times last fall with a lady companion.”

“Did they stay the whole night?”

The young woman shrugged. “I don’t know. I get off when the owner returns from his job at six-thirty. Most of the guests are out at that time, at the shops or having dinner. I don’t know who comes back and who doesn’t.”

“How did the handsome man pay?” McGrath continued. “Did you give him a receipt each time?”

“The lady secured the room with her credit card. We require a credit card when guests check in. But sometime later, the man would come, give me cash, and watch as I tore up the credit card slip. I don’t know why, but I always assumed she’d given him the cash, that she was paying, but she didn’t, you know, want it on her credit card bill. Then he’d always ask me for a cash receipt. I never understood that part because I doubted he was there on business.” Christina de las Alas laughed a little and smoothed her shining black hair.

McGrath felt suddenly self-conscious in her presence, aware for the first time in months, maybe years, of his shabby old clothes. No wonder the motel owner thought he was retired. “And the lady who was with him, do you remember her name?”

The motel clerk shook her head. “Sorry, I can’t remember. I’m no good with names. Besides, I only made the imprint of the card. I never even processed it, because he always came by after with the cash.”

“Was this her?” McGrath placed a picture of Tracey Kendall on the coffee table.

The young woman shook her head. “No.”

“Can you describe the woman then?” McGrath persisted.

“Oh, yes,” Christina de las Alas answered.

Ruth sat in her living room, restlessly turning the pages of the Sunday paper. Baines’s face blazed across the television screen. A logo in the right-hand corner marked the telecast as a live feed. Sunday evening was the perfect time to put out news you hoped no one would see. “I am pleased to announce,” Baines said in the voice he used for press conferences and political rallies, “that we have found Al Pace, the missing man from Derby Mills.” The picture of Al Pace that the New Derby PD had circulated flashed up behind the D.A. “Unfortunately, Mr. Pace was himself found dead this morning in Salton Beach, the victim of a suicide.”

“Was he the killer of Tracey Kendall?” a reporter asked.

“We could speculate as to why Mr. Pace might have taken his life,” Baines responded, leaving little room for doubt, “but now we’ll never know for sure.”

The camera panned away and the Sunday anchor reappeared. “In other news,” she read, “New Derby’s police headquarters was the target of an attempted burglary last night. That’s right, folks, someone trying to break
in
to a police station! More after this.”

Ruth moaned.

On Monday morning, as Ruth walked through the door from the parking lot into headquarters, she was greeted by a smell so powerful and so awful that her eyes watered. She hurried to the front desk, where a crowd of officers and civilian employees had gathered, most of them holding hand or handkerchief to nose.

Lieutenant Lawry, looking irritated, stood behind the desk. In front of it was a little man covered from head to foot in something absolutely indescribable. Officer Cable, only slightly less covered, also stood in front of Lawry. Finally, off to one side, looking slightly disheveled, but not so much the worse for wear, stood Mrs. Thurmond Bentley, now known throughout the station house as “the dog poop lady.”

It took Lawry, skilled as he was, a little time to get it sorted out. “When the young officer didn’t come Saturday—” Mrs. Bentley was saying.

“I said Monday,” Cable interrupted. “I was off Saturday.”

“You said Saturday,” Mrs. Bentley snapped. “Don’t give me that.”

The gist of it was, when Officer Cable didn’t appear, Mrs. Bentley decided to act on her own. On Sunday afternoon, while her neighbors were kept inside by the rain. She carefully removed the pachysandra remaining on her front lawn. Then she hired two high school kids to dig a big pit. While they were digging, she made a trip to Macy’s and purchased a dun-colored top sheet especially for the occasion. “It was on sale. I only use white myself,” she added to the discussion. That night, under cover of darkness and with some difficulty, Mrs. Bentley filled the pit with the contents of not one, not two, but four plastic garbage barrels filled with dog excrement she had been hoarding and preserving for months, by adding water and a special formula of her own invention. Then she covered the pit with a plastic drop cloth, covered that with the brand new sheet and rearranged the pachysandra.

This morning, right on schedule, the little man, whose name turned out to be Chiarousco, came walking down the street with his Great Dane. The Dane, drawn inexorably to its date with destiny, bounded into Bentley’s yard, squatted briefly and dropped out of sight. Mr. Chiarousco, whose brain registered only that his three thousand dollar dog had disappeared, jumped in after it. Only the cushion of Mrs. Bentley’s concoction and Mr. Chiarousco’s diminutive stature prevented the man or Dane from being seriously hurt.

At this point, Officer Cable had pulled up. “I missed it all by only two seconds, Lieu, I swear!” Cable interjected. Hearing the shouts, and the piteous doggy whining, Cable had run to the edge of the pit to help its occupants out. Mr. Chiarousco, recognizing Cable from his reconnaissance mission three days before, assumed it was the police who set the trap. So, when Officer Cable bent down over the pit, full of concern, and put his hand out, Chiarousco slugged him in the jaw. Cable fell sideways, teetering on the edge, and it was only on account of his superior reflexes that he didn’t fall all the way in.

In the end, Cable managed to get the dog and its owner out of the pit. He arrested Mr. Chiarousco for assault and battery on an officer of the law and loaded him and his Dane, aka “Pookie,” into the back of the squad car. He brought in Mrs. Bentley as well, though he wasn’t sure whether to charge her or exactly what the charge would be. He had contravened all accepted procedure and allowed her to ride in the front with him. “I just couldn’t ask her to sit in back,” he said.

Lawry examined all three participants in the fracas with a keen distaste. “Where is the canine now?” he asked dryly.

“Still in my patrol car,” Cable reported.

“Pookie’s an expensive purebred,” Mr. Chiarousco added, “and I hold you personally responsible—”

Lieutenant Lawry picked up his desk phone. “Get me Animal Control,” was all he said.

An hour later, Lawry appeared in Ruth’s doorway, a faint odor of Eau de Pookie still clinging to his crisply starched uniform. “Not that it matters now,” he said, “but USC called back. They never heard of Fran Powell, or Mary Frances Kanjorsky, or any other such alias.”

Ruth checked her watch. “McGrath and Moscone left half an hour ago. They should be back any minute.”

Lawry nodded. “Sounds like this could be it.”

Ruth looked through the back of the two-way mirror into the New Derby PD’s only interview room. Inside, Moscone and McGrath were just bringing in Fran Powell. Moscone took her raincoat. Chameleon-like, she’d changed again and was dressed now like a successful businesswoman: black suit, green blouse, understated jewelry. Moscone offered her a chair. Both men remained standing.

“Do I need a lawyer?” Mrs. Powell seemed tentative.

Moscone answered. “At this point, you’re a witness, not a suspect, Mrs. Powell. You can certainly call a lawyer, but—” Moscone’s tone and demeanor indicated that this would be dreadful overkill.

Fran Powell relaxed visibly. “No, thanks. That’s okay.”

Moscone sat down in the chair across from her. “You’re not a suspect, Mrs. Powell,” he said quietly, “but it’s difficult for us to understand why a witness would need to lie so much.”

Her face closed up. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Well, let’s start with your relationship with Mrs. Kendall. You told us you were neighbors. You met because you lived across the road from one another, had children the same age. But you and Tracey Kendall were childhood friends. Best friends. Why did you hide that from us?”

“As I told your chief,” Powell answered, looking straight into Moscone’s eyes. “It just seemed needlessly complicated.” Her own eyes brimmed with tears. “Tracey and I lost track of each other after high school. She went to college here in the East. I went out to USC—”

“Lie number two!” McGrath boomed from the corner of the room. “USC never heard of you.”

Moscone smiled apologetically as if he were embarrassed by his partner’s rudeness. “Mrs. Powell, we don’t really care about your higher education. It’s the pattern that concerns us.”

The tears that had been building in Fran Powell’s eyes spilled over. “It’s true, I never finished—”

Moscone looked saddened. Behind him, McGrath said, “Never started either, never took an evening class or a weekend seminar, according to their records.”

There was a moment of silence. Fran Powell patted her eyes with the sleeve of her beautiful, green silk blouse, but the tears continued to flow. Moscone waited, looking sympathetic. McGrath stepped back into the shadows along the wall.

“It wasn’t easy being Tracey’s friend.” Fran Powell’s voice was a whisper.

Moscone leaned forward. “What did you say, Mrs. Powell? I didn’t get that.”

“Imagine what it would be like,” she spoke more clearly, “if your best friend, your only friend, really, won every race, was valedictorian, class president, captain of the field hockey team. And your claim to fame, your only claim to fame, was that you were her friend. People want to spend time with you because you are Tracey Noonan’s friend.”

“It doesn’t sound that great,” Moscone sympathized.

“It wasn’t. Tracey and I loved each other when we were children, but I spent junior and senior high in a state of continuous anxiety. If Tracey dropped me, I had nowhere to go but down, down, down. I couldn’t keep up with her, stand at the pinnacle of the class on my own.

“Our senior year was a nightmare. In addition to being accepted to do that post-grad year at that fancy prep school, Tracey got bids from five or six colleges. People actually called her house and asked her to apply, offered scholarships, loans, jobs. She turned them all down, because for her it was Princeton or nothing. I hadn’t told Tracey exactly what my grades or my test scores were. She knew they weren’t like hers, but I don’t think she had any idea how big the difference was.”

Fran Powell paused, wiped her eyes again, and looked straight at Moscone. “I used money from my after school job to submit applications to a dozen different colleges, places I thought would command Tracey’s respect. I didn’t get into any of them. My mother had no idea what was going on with me. She never gave a thought to the future, mine or hers. I told everyone I’d been accepted at USC. That September, when everyone went off to college, I took the five hundred dollars I’d saved from my job, packed up all my clothes, and moved to Los Angeles. Tracey wrote to me a few times, but I was afraid to write back. I didn’t know enough about college life to fake news. By two years later, my mother had drunk herself to death and I was relieved of the responsibility of ever facing Southampton, my classmates, or the Noonans again. So you see, that’s why I left out the first part of my friendship with Tracey Kendall when I talked to you. It isn’t a happy memory.”

Fran Powell stopped talking. The tears stopped as well, but watching from the other side of the glass Ruth felt they weren’t far away and could be summoned back if they were needed.

“It must have been quite a shock eighteen years later to find Tracey Noonan living at the end of your driveway,” Moscone said quietly.

Fran Powell nodded. “May I have a tissue, please?”

Moscone rose like a gentleman, left the room briefly and returned with a box. Fran Powell selected a single tissue and blew her nose.

“You were saying?” Moscone prompted. Fran looked puzzled, as if she’d lost her place. “You were talking about what happened when you and Tracey Noonan, now Tracey Kendall, met again.”

Fran Powell blew her nose and forged on. “When we were children, Tracey’s favorite pastime was spinning tales about the future. We’d lie across her bed in the summertime and talk about what our lives would be like when we grew up. Tracey was going to be a successful businesswoman, rich, living in a big, beautiful house. She would describe the house, room by room, the living room, her bedroom, her study. Her husband would be a famous artist, handsome, of course, and caring. They’d have a perfect family. A boy, a talented artist like his father, and a girl, for Tracey to dress and cuddle, and eventually, to do things with and confide in. A replacement for me.”

“And when you saw Tracey again?” Moscone pressed, just a little.

“I wasn’t prepared for what it did to me. When I walked through her house, everything was the way she had described it all those years ago. I felt as if I’d had the life squeezed out of me.”

Behind the glass, Ruth shifted in her chair. That was why Tracey’s study was devoid of technology. She had designed it in her head almost thirty years before.

“All little girls have dreams,” Fran Powell continued, “but Tracey was the only person I’ve ever known who lived hers exactly. She put every ounce of her tremendous focus and energy into making her daydreams come true.”

“Except for the baby daughter,” Moscone said.

Fran Powell gave a rueful smile. “I looked for that little girl for a long time,” she said. “She was completely real to me, because all the other tales Tracey had spun became reality. I’m convinced the daughter would’ve arrived in time. Tracey and her brothers are only eighteen months apart. Tracey would have spaced her children so that each one could be lavished with the attention she felt her mother had no time to give. In any case, I couldn’t ask Tracey what had happened. We weren’t as close in the second round of our friendship as we were in the first.”

“Because you were sleeping with her husband?” McGrath, still on his feet, spoke from the other side of the room. McGrath boomed on. “That’s the third lie,” he said.

“Not a lie,” she protested.

“Omission, then,” Moscone brokered peace.

Fran Powell’s choices flickered across her face. Through the glass, Ruth watched closely.Would Fran deny the affair outright? No, she didn’t know what they had. Full disclosure, then? Perhaps unnecessary at this time. In the end, she tried a dodge. “What did or did not happen between me and Stephen doesn’t have anything to do with any of this.”

“You slept with the husband of a murdered woman and you don’t think it’s relevant?” McGrath was incensed. “Your job is to tell us the truth. We decide what’s relevant. We know you’re lying about this because you have even bigger things to hide.”

Fran turned to Moscone to see if he would help her out. “Your affair began a year ago,” Moscone offered, his voice was low and even. “When Susan Gleason put pressure on Stephen to produce a show for her new gallery. It continued until this October, when Hannah Whiteside replaced you.”

Fran opened her mouth and then closed it.

“Did you do it to get back at Tracey?” Moscone asked. His voice was conversational, inviting gossip from a friend.

Fran Powell shook her head. “It had nothing to do with Tracey. I didn’t seduce Stephen. He seduced me. Not that he had to try hard. Here’s a tip—when a woman is married to a stupid, drunken slob, you don’t have to try too hard. Tracey wasn’t the only one who talked about her dreams. I lived alone with my drunken mother. Before Tracey and I became friends, I think my most vivid daydream was about coming home and finding something hot that smelled good on the supper table. But on those summer days in Tracey’s bedroom, I had to come up with something better. Tracey didn’t respect anyone who didn’t have ambitions. In our stories, Tracey was the successful businesswoman married to the artist. I was the glamorous movie star, known all around the world. Successful in my own right, I was married to the son of a fabulously wealthy, very classy family.

“When I wasn’t accepted at any college, I went out to Los Angeles. I figured by the time anybody realized I hadn’t gotten a degree, I’d be such a star it wouldn’t matter. It didn’t work out that way. Four years later, when most of my classmates were graduating from college, I was working as a dancer, in a bar. By the next year, when Tracey finished Princeton, I was finally working in film, but not the kind of movies I wanted anyone at home to see. I hated every minute of it and I hated myself for doing it. That’s when I met my husband.”

Fran Powell dabbed at her pink nose, threw the used tissue away and took a new one. She took a deep breath. “Sandy was rich. He came to Hollywood to be a big producer. He was handsome then, or at least not so ugly. And he wanted me, desperately, pursued me for months. So I thought, why not? Why not at least let the other part of the daydream be true? The rich husband. So I married him.”