The Death of an Ambitious Woman (19 page)

Her tears flowed again. Behind the glass, Ruth leaned in, studying the scene. Were the tears real this time, she wondered, or were they for the benefit of the male detectives?

“Sandy came from money, all right, but the money came from a trust left by his grandmother, money he came into when he turned twenty-five; seven million dollars. In the ten years we were together on the coast we burned through every dime of it and then some.” Fran Powell managed a sardonic smile. “It’s terrible when you marry a man for his money and then find out he hasn’t got it anymore. We were in real trouble by the time Xander was born. We couldn’t pay our mortgage and the house was worth half what we’d paid for it. I hadn’t worked since I met Sandy and he never did package a single deal in Hollywood. He just threw his money into other people’s pictures, one disaster after another. His parents have the real money, of course, but they’re still alive, so a fat lot of good it does us. They finally stepped in and bailed us out, but there were conditions, terrible conditions. They built us the house on the service road and moved us back East. Sandy went to work in his father’s firm where he can’t even pretend to be important. I shut myself up in the house and stayed there as much as possible. That’s where I was, in my own driveway, when along strolls Tracey Noonan, tanned and fit only weeks after having a baby.”

“You hated her,” McGrath said from the shadows. “You decided sleeping with her husband would hurt and humiliate her, knock her down a notch or three.”

“I hated myself,” Fran Powell insisted. “So when Stephen Kendall said he wanted me, he thought about me day and night, that I was his energy and his inspiration, I thought, at last I am useful. I am something.”

“Did Tracey know?” McGrath asked.

“We took elaborate precautions.”

“How did it end?” Moscone’s voice was almost tender.

Fran Powell covered her eyes with her hand. “The way it always does. Hannah Whiteside arrived to take care of Carson in September. By October, she was Stephen’s inspiration, and I was back to being just a neighbor.” Fran pulled her hand from her eyes and looked back at Moscone. “I will always be proud of the work he created in the one year, seven months and ten days we were together,” she said. “No one can take that from me.”

“Your affair with Stephen Kendall ended in October,” Moscone spoke it as a statement not a question, “and you decided to console yourself with Al Pace.”

“Your fourth lie, Mrs. Powell, and the one that will cook you.” McGrath ticked them off on his fingers. “You knew Al Pace. We can prove it. You were sleeping with Al Pace. We can prove that, too. You gave Al Pace money. We can prove that. In fact, you gave Al Pace ten thousand dollars to kill your oldest friend, the wife of your former lover, because you were jealous of everything she had. You hated Tracey Kendall.” By the time McGrath was finished, he was nose to nose with Fran Powell, his finger jabbing the empty air just inches from her chest.

Ruth’s eyes were glued to Fran Powell’s face, evaluating her reaction. In the interview room, Moscone quietly Mirandized her. Fran Powell’s eyes mirrored her terror at McGrath’s accusations. Her mouth hung open. She gulped air twice and then her entire being deflated. Her body slumped on the tabletop and she burst into noisy sobs.

An hour later, McGrath and Moscone were in Ruth’s office. Ruth was leaning back in her desk chair, palms pressed to her eyes. McGrath sat slumped in the chair across from her and Moscone had his elbows on the conference table, holding his chin up with his hands. All three were exhausted, McGrath and Moscone because they had painstakingly led Fran Powell through her story again and again, Ruth because she had sat outside, staring at the glass, reading every nuance.

Fran Powell admitted to sleeping with Al Pace. She said Pace had come on to her and that she had once again gone without a struggle. She was deeply wounded by the end of her affair with Stephen Kendall. She knew that Tracey and Pace had some sort of special relationship. She believed they were lovers.

Ruth hadn’t been able to follow the twisted logic that made sleeping with the wife’s boyfriend revenge against the husband. It wasn’t clear Fran herself could reconstruct her thinking now. In any case, she had later discovered Al Pace and Tracey Kendall were more than acquaintances, but less than friends, and certainly not lovers.

Fran and Al’s affair continued through October and November. The meetings at the Hightide Motel in Rockport were as frequent as three times a week. It was just after Thanksgiving when Al Pace first asked for money. She gave him two hundred dollars cash. He said he needed it to buy Christmas presents for his boys.

It was remarkable to Ruth that both the sex and the payments had continued. Fran Powell said there had been an air of menace in Al Pace’s demands for money, but she had been unclear about whether the threat had been to expose her or to stop seeing her. “If Al Pace were alive today, would we charge him with extortion or prostitution?” Ruth wondered aloud. McGrath shrugged and Moscone shook his head.

Fran Powell had absolutely denied paying ten thousand dollars to Al Pace, five thousand in February and five thousand the day Tracey Kendall died. After the first time, her payments to Al had been fairly regular, but had run in the hundreds, not the thousands of dollars.

“Look, I swear,” Fran Powell had finally said, “I just don’t have access to that kind of money. Sandy’s father pays him a salary that meets our basic needs, but we have to go and grovel for every little ‘extra’—like Xander’s nursery school tuition or a working car. I couldn’t very well have gone to my dear in-laws and said, ‘I need ten thousand dollars to have a friend rubbed out.’ ”

In the end, they’d believed her. McGrath would spend the rest of the morning with her going through bank accounts, but it would be a formality.

Moscone spoke from his chair. “It seems to me that we have an awful lot of people coming on to Fran. First Stephen, then Al. What’s so special about her? I don’t get it.”

“Stephen Kendall is what he is,” Ruth answered. “We already know that. I believe Al Pace targeted Fran Powell specifically. Her house, her car. He must have believed she was rich. His plan was always to take money from her. His bad business judgment was going to result in losing his wife’s favorite thing in all the world—her grandmother’s house. He was desperate for money.”

“The threat of foreclosure turned him into a killer?” Moscone sounded doubtful.

Ruth shrugged. She wasn’t ready to answer that question.

After McGrath and Moscone left, Ruth sat at her desk, turning the investigation over in her mind. She knew they were closer to solving the mystery of Tracey Kendall’s death than they’d ever been. She was sure the answer was… somewhere, perhaps somewhere close. What had they missed? After a few minutes, she rose and made her way down the long central hallway of the headquarters building to the basement stairs.

Inside the property room, uniformed officers were completing a post-break-in inventory under the watchful eye of Lieutenant Lawry. Ruth craned her neck to see the window where the thief had tried to cut the bars. It was boarded up with plywood and secured with metal rods that ran horizontally across the inside.

Ruth returned to the section of shelving that held Tracey Kendall’s things and took down the box. Once again, she walked down to the furthest of the old jail cells, put on a pair of surgical gloves and laid out the contents of the box in the circle of light on the table.

Ruth looked at Tracey Kendall’s gym bag, briefcase, and pocketbook. She had pinpointed the detail gnawing at her. Stephen Kendall knew that Ruth knew about Tracey’s appointment with Wink Segrue and her subsequent three-day disappearance.Yet, in their last conversation, Kendall had again asked about Tracey’s property. The attempted break-in at the property room had occurred that night.

The conclusion was inescapable. Tracey’s possessions had not yet told everything they had to tell.

Ruth started with the gym bag. It disturbed her. Tracey Kendall, the woman who had everything, had been so scared she kept old clothes in her car in case she had to run. “Tracey, who were you so afraid of?” Ruth muttered into the bag.

It broke Ruth’s heart that Tracey Kendall had been so alone she could tell no one her troubles. But whom would she have told? Brenda, Jane, and Ellie were subordinates. Hannah, Susan, and Fran were Stephen’s lovers or ex-lovers. Tracey wouldn’t have confided in them. It would make her look weak.

Why, as Tracey drove herself to her perfectly imagined future, hadn’t she created a role for a friend, an equal, a confidant? Tracey couldn’t admit to vulnerabilities. People who can’t ever show the chinks in their armor can’t have friends, Ruth reflected. There’s no intimacy, no shared trust because there is no need to trust. Alone in the property-room cell, Ruth winced in recognition.

Ruth removed everything from the gym bag, layer by layer. She shook out each piece of clothing, even examined the tags inside looking for extraneous markings. Then she slowly felt her way from one side of the gym bag to the other. She crinkled the sides looking for hidden pockets, false linings. Nothing.

She opened the pocketbook and was struck once again by how impersonal it was. She emptied all the pockets and checked for false linings, papers stuffed up in the fabric, secret compartments. There were none.

She went through the pile of reading material in the briefcase next, looking for something that was more than met the eye, a paper shoved onto the pile that didn’t belong there, something underlined or highlighted that had extra significance. If there was anything like that, Ruth lacked the sophistication to understand it.

The computer and the personal organizer remained. She turned to the organizer first. Unzipping it, Ruth felt her excitement rising. This organizer was Tracey Kendall’s most personal possession. It might be left by a phone at home or locked in a locker at the gym, but it would never be far from her. This was where anything Tracey Kendall wanted to hide would be hidden. It was also where anything she wanted found would be kept. Ruth turned the pages carefully, mindful that the calendar had already yielded a clue. She went through the calendar section, the To Do lists, and the notes.

Carefully, Ruth began to disassemble the organizer. She removed the business cards, writing instruments, and photograph and felt down to the bottom of each pocket. She opened the rings and slid the calendar, To Do lists, telephone directory, and note pages out. All that remained was a pad of blank paper, held in place by its backing cardboard, which fit in a special slot on the back cover. Ruth slid the note pad out, then slowly put her hand down the opening created by the slot.

Her gloved fingers touched it almost instantly. She grasped gently and pulled. Seconds later, she was blinking at the thing that she’d been looking for—a small square, made out of a piece of white paper, taped shut and squashed flat.

The group that met around Ruth’s conference table fifteen minutes later was unnaturally quiet.

Lawry, McGrath, and Moscone were passing around a photocopy of the sheet that had made up the paper square. Ruth gazed out the window. The big clouds had broken up, revealing patches of blue. Upstairs, Detective Miller was working on the original note. After all three men had examined the photocopy, Ruth placed it on the table. It read:

It was unsigned, printed by inkjet printer on plain white paper.

“This note,” Ruth said, “was terrifying to Tracey, as well it should have been. It is an overt threat.”

“When did it come, do you think?” Lawry asked.

“It’s hard to say,” Ruth answered, “but I think it may have been the catalyst for Tracey’s unexplained disappearance in January. After she returned, she kept the emergency bag of clothes in the car, in case she needed to disappear again. But weeks went by, then months. Tracey probably let her guard down. She didn’t know that her killer had already set a plan in motion.”

McGrath picked up the note again, squinting at it through his reading glasses. “Not very helpful, is it? Who was she about to cast off? The unfaithful husband? The business partner who had become a dead weight? Or the art dealer who had risked everything to retain the husband as a client?”

There was a soft rap on the open door. “Excuse me, Chief.” Officer Cable stood there. “Yes?”

“Detective Miller’s cleaning up upstairs,” Cable said, “but he sent me down because there’s something he wanted you to know right away.”

“Yes, Officer Cable.” Ruth thought if Miller wanted her to know something immediately, he’d sent the wrong person.

“Chief, he said there were only two sets of prints on the note you found.”

“And they belonged to?” Ruth’s patience was worn out.

“One belongs to Tracey Kendall.”

“And the other?”

“He matched it to the set on the acetylene torch from the property-room break-in, just like you said he would.”

Ruth turned to face her men. “The torch belongs to Stephen Kendall. I saw it at his studio the day of the funeral.”

McGrath stood up. “Let’s go.”

“Yes,” Ruth said, looking directly at them. “It’s time to bring him in.”

“You coming?” Moscone asked.

“No,” Ruth answered. “I have one more thing I need to do.”

Ruth paced back and forth in the Fiske & Holden parking lot, talking to herself. The high clouds were breaking up, yielding larger and larger patches of blue. A stiff breeze moved them steadily across the sky.

Ruth walked out of the parking lot, thinking things through carefully.
Tracey accelerates out of the lot. She’s driving confidently. She’s come this way thousands of times before.

Does she brake where the lot meets the road?
Ruth looked to her right.
No.The flat at the top of the hill allows her to see both to her right and down the hill to her left. She can tell no one’s coming, she hasn’t got enough speed to need to brake for control. She rolls out slowly, talking on the cell phone as she leaves the lot.

Ruth started walking down the hill. When she had careened down the road on her wild ride, not touching the brakes, she still hadn’t reached nearly the speeds Tracey had.
Something causes Tracey to accelerate. She steps on the gas hard about fifty feet down the hill. Here or so.Why? Over-confidence? She had a lot of experience with this road. She didn’t know she had no brakes. Something more.

Ruth went back to the parking lot, passed it, and kept walking toward the Deli-Cater. Despite the rain of the last two days, it didn’t take long to find the place where the vegetation was broken and bent.

Ruth returned to the lot and got into her car. As she pulled away, she looked into her rearview mirror. Ellie Berger, Brenda O’Reilly, and Jack Holden were staring at her from Fiske & Holden’s windows.

Hannah Whiteside answered the Kendall front door. “Your detectives are down at the studio with Stephen,” she said before Ruth had a chance to speak.

“I know. I saw the car down there. I need to speak to Carson.”

“Carson? Are you sure? Shouldn’t Stephen… ?”

“I’d like to talk to Carson alone.”

Hannah straightened up, made a decision, and called the boy.

“Thank you,” Ruth said and led him into the empty living room. She sat with him on the couch.

“Carson, do you remember you told me your mom was mad at you when she had her accident?”

Carson nodded miserably, staring at his shoes.

“Why did you think she was mad? Did you have a fight?”

Carson shook his head from side to side. A single tear squeezed from his eye and traversed along his cheek.

“Then why, Carson? Why did you think she was mad?”

“She called me a name.” His voice was so soft, Ruth wasn’t sure she had heard. She took his hand.

“What, honey? What did she call you?”

The little boy shook his head. “It’s a bad word.”

“Carson, you can tell me. I won’t be mad.”

Carson leaned in and whispered in her ear. “She called me a bastard.” He began to cry.

“Oh, Carson.” Ruth had fifteen years training as a parent and twenty years as a policewoman, and it took everything she had not to cry with him. “She wasn’t mad at you. When she said that, she wasn’t talking to you.”

Ruth hugged the boy to her. He was crying hard now, crying out the days since his mother’s death, days filled with his father’s remoteness, his mother’s family’s tension, the screaming accusations between his father, Hannah, and Susan Gleason.

“Your mother loved you very much, Carson. I’m sure of it.” Ruth felt Carson’s face against her breasts, the dampness of her uniform shirt from his tears. As he cried Ruth lifted her head to hug him to her chest. She gazed out the window just in time to see Detective McGrath huffing and puffing as he ran toward the house.

She met him on the porch. “Chief, you gotta come quick,” he gasped. “We’ve got a situation—”

“I left Moscone with him,” McGrath explained as they hurried toward the studio. “He went to that hostage negotiation school. Of course, there’s no hostages, but we thought—It doesn’t matter. Moscone’s just marking time. Kendall says he’ll only talk to you.”

On the studio step, Ruth took a deep breath. “Okay. I’m going in there. You coordinate backup when it arrives.” Ruth stepped out of the bright sunlight into the interior of the studio. Off to her right, Moscone called, “Chief’s here, Mr. Kendall. It’s okay. She’ll talk to you now.” Moscone slipped up behind Ruth, put his hand on her back, and gently guided her to the center of the floor.

“It’s me, Stephen, Chief Murphy.” Ruth looked up toward the ceiling. The sun was pouring through the skylight. She shielded her eyes with her hand and looked again.

She was astounded by what she saw. Stephen Kendall must have been working non-stop over the last two days. T. Rex’s face, head, neck, and back had their finishing coat of fiberglass. The surface was rent with giant holes, Kendall’s trademark decay. The sculpture looked grotesque, like its skin was melting.

Stephen Kendall was standing stock still on the crown of the tyrannosaurus’ head. He had a rope taken from the pulley system fashioned into a noose around his neck. The other end was tied to a rafter. From the ground, Ruth could see him trembling.

“Why are you up there?” she called. Her voice echoed in the cavernous space.

“I killed my wife!” Stephen Kendall screamed. “And you found out. I knew you would.You sent those men to arrest me.”

“They didn’t come to arrest you,” Ruth shouted back. “They wanted to ask you some questions.”

“That’s what the detective said, but I knew what he meant.”

Moscone leaned down and whispered in Ruth’s ear, “Try not to argue with him.” Outside, one of the high clouds moved across the sun. The studio grew dark. Ruth took her hands from her eyes and looked up at Kendall again. His face was contorted from crying.

“I can’t talk like this,” Ruth whispered back to Moscone. “I’m going up.” She motioned to Moscone to steady the scaffolding beside the dinosaur sculpture and started up, placing a foot on the metal piping that formed its framework. “I’m coming to talk to you, Stephen,” she called. “Hold on.”

She stopped a third of the way up and took off her pumps. They weren’t climbing shoes. She tossed them to Moscone one at a time. She didn’t want to startle Kendall with the noise of them clattering to the floor. Then she continued climbing. The metal of the scaffold was cold on her feet, but she felt faster, surer in her hose. The ladder ended with a plywood platform at the top of the tower. Ruth gripped the plywood, climbing up until she could lay the top portion of her body across it. The buttons of her uniform dug into her chest. She pushed herself forward. The ridiculous uniform skirt caught the edge of the plywood. Ruth grunted. One last push and she slid across the platform, splinters searing her legs above the knees.

She stood up on the platform. Suddenly, the cloud moved away and she was blinded by the skylights. She froze, afraid she’d fall off the edge. She blinked, focused, and found herself face-to-face with T. Rex. Up close, his expression was terrifying, his teeth enormous. Ruth pulled her eyes from the sight and stared at the dinosaur’s creator above her. Stephen Kendall, bathed in sunlight, looked ravaged, exhausted. Ruth felt her chest tighten with a surge of adrenaline.

“Don’t do this,” she said quietly.

“It’s better,” Kendall answered. He sounded sad.

“No, no it isn’t.You know it isn’t.”

He didn’t respond. Ruth waited. “Did you write it down anywhere? Tell the whole story? Leave a note?”

Stephen Kendall shook his head. Outside, the noise spiked as patrol cars, an ambulance, and a fire truck arrived. “Keep them out of here!” Stephen yelled. “Anyone comes in here and I’m gone. I mean it.”

“Stephen,” Ruth kept her voice as low as she could and still be heard, but she could not keep out the emotion. “You cannot do this. Listen to me. This cannot happen.”

“Why not?”

Ruth drew a deep breath and came as far forward as she dared. “Because of your son, Stephen. Because of Carson. Just a few years from now, he’ll be asking questions. Not the kind he asks now, but detailed questions that will demand answers. And someone, your mother-in-law, one of your brothers-in-law, someone will have to tell him. Your mother died in a car crash. We don’t know why. And then your daddy killed himself. We don’t know why he did that, either. Carson is a smart boy, Stephen. He’ll draw his own conclusions. And he’ll be wrong. Don’t leave the boy to grow up thinking he’s a monster’s son.”

Stephen Kendall looked down at Ruth and wiped at his eyes. He made a mewling, hiccupping sound, suppressed, but full of fear. Ruth sat down on the scaffold. She hoped Kendall would get the impression she intended to stay. As soon as she sat, he surprised her by dropping to his haunches. The rope around his neck remained slack.

“We found the note, Stephen,” she said quietly. “It had your fingerprints on it, just yours and Tracey’s. I won’t lie to you. It looks terrible.”

A sob ripped up from Stephen Kendall’s gut so violently Ruth feared for his balance. The noise he made was loud and awful. “I killed her. I killed her. I killed her.”

Ruth rolled up to her knees and leaned as far forward as she dared. “Stephen,” she called. “It can’t be left this way. I know you didn’t kill your wife. In fact, I know who did, but you have got to help me prove it. If you die, the truth will never be known. Let me solve this case. Come down. Release Wink Segrue from his privilege.” When Kendall didn’t respond, she continued. “Don’t punish a little boy forever because you can’t live with the compromises you and Tracey made. I know you loved your wife. I know you love Carson. I know you’ve been too sick with guilt to comfort him. But you must. Come down.”

Kendall didn’t answer. Ruth’s heart contracted. The silence expanded. “I’m coming over,” she said. He didn’t say no. Ruth walked to the edge of the platform and felt the dinosaur’s head. It was slippery, but the contours of the face, the jaw, the eye sockets, offered some footholds. She was nearly forty feet above the hard wood floor below. Stephen Kendall remained crouched, rocking slightly. “I’m coming,” Ruth said again. She removed her jacket, ripped the feet off her ruined hose and stepped out.

Her foot found Rex’s jaw and held. She crept along it as it curved upward toward the back of his head. At the end of his mouth, she reached up and around, trying for purchase on the top of the slick head. The neck sloped downward. If she could lie across it and pull herself up, she could move onto the head. Above her, less than five feet away, she heard Kendall’s weight shift. He was on the move.

Ruth tried. Once. Again. Her arms couldn’t reach around the head with any kind of grip. She shivered. She was covered in sweat. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Moscone slowly, silently making his way up the scaffold. And then she heard the slight noise of friction, hemp against wood. Kendall was trying the noose, pulling on it to test its attachment to the rafter. He was getting ready to jump.

“No!” Ruth pushed off from the jaw, twisting herself as she rose. She landed across the back of the monster’s head with a thud that nearly knocked the wind out of her. Scrambling to her feet, she saw Kendall running for the end of T. Rex’s snout. Ruth leapt forward, arms flailing. “No!”

Kendall turned to face her, the noose still loose around his neck as he headed for the side.

“No! No! No! Think about Carson!” Ruth’s scream transformed into a beseeching wail. “Think about your son!”

Kendall’s expression changed. Determination turned to fear, panic, regret. He reached out, but it was too late. He started to go over.

Ruth ran to him and grabbed for his shirt. For a split second, she thought her momentum was all wrong, that she had pushed them out over the studio floor where her colleagues would find her, swinging from Stephen Kendall’s corpse.

But his descent stopped. At the last moment, he aimed his feet for the beast’s mouth and caught. He had saved himself.

Ruth gripped his shirt as tightly as she could and pulled him toward her, easing him back up over the side until they were lying on top of the monster’s head. Then she closed him in her arms, cradling him as he wept.