The Hellfire Club (20 page)

42

NORA PARKED IN
the slot Davey had taken behind Fenn’s office, and saw through his window the back of his head and shoulders as he talked to Barbara Widdoes, who was wandering back and forth in front of his desk. Several other people, dark shapes in the back of the room, also seemed to be present. Through the humid air, Nora rushed past the row of police cars. She had put on a blue chambray shirt, jeans, and brown loafers. Wet hair clung to her ears. Her heart pounded.

It isn’t quite that simple.
What did that mean?

The back door swung open as she hurried up the concrete path. A red-haired, acne-pitted fullback in a tight uniform shirt stepped out. He looked from side to side before turning his corrugated face to her.

“Mrs. Chancel, okay? I’m going to take you down the hall to Chief Fenn’s office, and we’re going to have to do this fast. Things are real complicated here today.”

“They’re real complicated here, too,” she said. The policeman gave her a neutral look. She moved through the door into relative coolness. A chaos of voices came from the front of the building. “This way,” the policeman said, moving past her to walk briskly down the cement-block corridor. It occurred to Nora that she spent a great deal of time following men. They passed the door marked station commander and approached the metal door to the double row of cells. A vivid memory of Dick Dart’s winking at her reminded Nora to look straight ahead, and she took in no more than that men in the tribal uniforms of police officers and lawyers crowded the passage between the cells. An intense, quiet conversation was going on among the lawyers, but she could not, and did not wish to, make out their words. The babble from the front of the station increased as she double-timed behind the officer. At last they came to Fenn’s office.

The policeman knocked on the door and leaned in. He said, “Mrs. Chancel.” Several people moved into different positions. A chair scraped. Fenn said, “Show her in.”

Behind his desk Fenn was standing with his arms at his sides, looking at her in a distinctly unsmiling fashion echoed by Barbara Widdoes, who stood at attention at the far corner of his desk. Nora felt panic’s icicle jab her stomach. Two men in dark suits and white shirts, one wearing black-framed sunglasses, stepped forward from the adjacent wall: Slim and Slam, the FBI men who had been in Natalie Weil’s house.

“Hello, Mrs. Chancel,” said Fenn. So Nora was no longer Nora. “I think you’ve met all the people in this room. Barbara Widdoes, our station commander, and the federal agents assigned to this case, Mr. Shull and Mr. Hashim.” Mr. Shull, the taller of the two, wore the sunglasses. They gave him a vaguely hipsterish air which suddenly struck Nora as hilarious.

“Nice to see you again,” she said, and a second of silence greeted her remark.

“I guess we can get this thing straight,” Fenn said, and became Holly once again. “Let’s try to figure out what we have here.”

“About time,” said Mr. Shull, speaking either to himself or to Mr. Hashim, who crossed his arms and watched Nora take one of the chairs. Holly sat down, and Barbara Widdoes perched herself on the edge of the chair next to Nora’s and put her fat knees and calves together. The two federal agents stayed on their feet.

Mr. Shull folded the sunglasses into the top pocket of his suit jacket.

“Well now, Nora,” Holly said, and smiled at her. “The people in this room have differing opinions on various matters, one of them being what to do with you, but with your help we might work out a consensus. It’s going to be important for you to be completely frank and open with me. Can you do that?”

“What did Natalie say?” Nora asked. Behind her, one of the FBI men made a little popping sound with his lips.

“Mrs. Weil said a lot of things, which we’ll get to in a minute. I want you to go back to the time we met on her front lawn. We had a little discussion there that made me think you and your husband might be able to help us. Do you remember that?”

“I remember,” Nora said. “We said we’d been there a couple of times.”

“Six, if I recall. The last time being two weeks before her disappearance.”

Nora nodded, silently condemning Davey for his self-serving lie.

“Do you want to stand by that statement, or have you had second thoughts about it?”

“Well, the truth is, I hadn’t been in that house in over two years.”

Barbara Widdoes clasped her hands on top of her knees, and Mr. Hashim and Mr. Shull slowly moved to the other side of Holly’s desk.

“That agrees with what Mrs. Weil told us. If there was some point to misleading me as to the nature of your relationship with Mrs. Weil, I’d certainly like to hear it.”

Nora sighed. “Actually, it was Davey, my husband, who said we’d been there all those times, and that we had dinner at her place two weeks before. Remember? He said we had Mexican food and watched wrestling on TV, but that was what we did about a month before we bought our house, the time we did go there.”

“Do you have any idea why he’d say all that?”

She sighed again. “He has this, I don’t know, habit of stretching the truth. Almost always, it isn’t anything more than exagger-ating—like decorating the facts.”

“As I remember, you went along with this particular decoration.”

“We’d just had a quarrel, and I didn’t want to irritate him, especially by contradicting him in front of you. Now that I’m thinking about this, I thought you knew he was lying right away.”

“Didn’t take Sherlock Holmes,” Holly said. “From our point of view, this made the two of you kind of interesting. So I decided to let you into the house and see if any other interesting things might come up.”

“Are we getting to it now?” asked Mr. Shull. “Can we skip the cracker-barrel stuff?”

“It?” Nora looked at Mr. Shull, who smiled at her.

“There’s something all of us find puzzling,” Holly said. “It has to do with the physical evidence at the crime scene, and also a couple of remarks made by you and your husband. Do you recall your husband telling me that you didn’t think Mrs. Weil was dead?”

“I don’t know where he got that from. I was sure she was dead.”

“Your husband’s comment showed considerable foresight, wouldn’t you say?”

“To tell you the truth, I think he was just trying to make me look foolish.”

“Because of your quarrel?”

“I suppose.”

“What was your quarrel about?”

“He thinks I don’t show his father enough respect, and I think his father’s a bully. We go round and round.”

“The argument isn’t important,” said Mr. Shull. “If you don’t get to it right now, I’m taking over.”

“We’re there,” Holly said. He smiled at Nora again, but not vindictively, as Mr. Shull had done. “Let’s get to when we were standing outside Mrs. Weil’s bedroom. Do you remember the condition of the room?”

Nora nodded.

“Do you remember what I said to you?”

“I didn’t have to go in if I didn’t want to.”

“Do you remember what I said right after that?”

“No, I don’t. I’m sorry.”

“I suggested that you might want to reconsider the idea that Mrs. Weil was not dead.”

“I don’t remember that,” Nora said.

“You don’t remember your response? It concerned the blood in the room.”

“It did?”

“You said, ‘Maybe it isn’t her blood.’ Do you remember now?”

“Oh, you’re right, I did, I remember. But that just popped into my mind because of Davey, what he told you outside.” She glanced up at Mr. Shull, who, smiling, looked back. “Of course it was her blood, it couldn’t have been anything else.” She turned to Holly Fenn. “It wasn’t her blood? It was some kind of blood.”

“Yes, it was some kind of blood.”

“What kind?”

“Animal blood,” Holly said. “Pig, most likely. You see why we’re interested in your remark.”

“I guess I do,” Nora said. “But it was just this dumb thing I said.”

“We’re in sort of a quandary here, Nora.”

“You’re in a quandary,” said Mr. Shull.

“So you weren’t speaking with any real knowledge when you told me that the stains in that room might not have been Mrs. Weil’s blood.”

“None at all. But everything connected to Natalie’s disappearance is strange.”

“Yes, let’s turn to Mrs. Weil at this point. Mrs. Weil said a lot of contradictory things, but she did give us one new bit of information.”

Barbara Widdoes spoke for the first time. “You were aware that your husband and Mrs. Weil were having an affair, weren’t you?”

“I only found out on Saturday afternoon.”

“How did that happen?”

“Davey told me. He was very distressed about what had happened to her, and he blurted it out.”

“You deny any involvement in Mrs. Weil’s abduction and mistreatment?”

“It still isn’t clear that abduction occurred,”

Holly said. “Holly, you were in my office Saturday morning,” said Barbara Widdoes. “You saw the woman go into hysterics when she saw Mrs. Chancel and stay that way until she was sedated. What occurred is pretty clear to me, and it ought to be clear to you, too. Mrs. Chancel learned about her husband’s affair, removed the victim from her bedroom, and kept her prisoner in her old stamping grounds, the former nursery. I’m sure you remember the incident. She detained her there until the victim managed to escape. I don’t like all these coincidences. We have a pattern here, and I don’t think Mrs. Chancel should be permitted to leave this station until she is read her rights and booked on a variety of charges.”

“Somebody finally came out with it,” said Mr. Shull.

“You want to arrest me?” Nora asked. “I didn’t do anything to Natalie. I wouldn’t treat my worst enemy that way.” She looked across the desk at Holly Fenn. “Didn’t you say Natalie contradicted herself? About me?”

“Didn’t she, Barbara?” Holly said. “You think about this, too, Mr. Shull. We have a victim one step away from saying she was abducted by little green people from outer space. She says Mrs. Chancel forced her out of her house and locked her up in the old nursery, but is there anything in all that about the animal blood in the bedroom?”

He focused on Nora again. “Here’s the situation with Mrs. Weil. The first thing she said when we went in there this morning was that you went to her house, threatened her with a knife, drove her to that building, and chained her up. Two minutes later we want her to repeat her story so we can take a statement, and she says she has no idea what happened to her. She looks back at the past week, and it’s all a fog. She thinks she found her own way to the South Post Road but couldn’t say how or why. So we write that down all over again and read it back to her and we say, Is that what happened? and she says, I don’t remember. Then she lies there for a while, and after that she can respond to questions again, and we ask her about you, and she cries and says you took her to the building, and the whole thing starts all over again.” He looked over at Barbara Widdoes. “Is that accurate? Have I exaggerated anything?”

“Holly, our victim is considerably disordered. But she keeps returning to the accusation, and that’s enough for me. Give her another day or two, she’ll be able to connect the dots.”

“Barbara, Mrs. Weil keeps returning to the kidnapping story, yes, but she also keeps returning to wandering away by herself. Unless Mrs. Chancel gives us a confession and pleads guilty, we’ll have to put our victim on the stand. Do you think we really have a case here?”

Barbara Widdoes glanced at Mr. Shull. “We have the grandmother of all motives, she had nothing but opportunity, and we’ll come up with physical evidence in about ten seconds. In the old nursery where Mrs. Chancel took a child the first time she experimented with kidnapping.”

Nora and Holly Fenn both began to protest, but Barbara Wid-does stood up and said, “I want to move on to the next phase. As soon as we process Mrs. Chancel, she can get in touch with her lawyer.” She looked down at Nora. “In fact, your lawyer is probably here. Aren’t you a Dart, Morris client? Leo Morris is waiting for charges to be filed against Mr. Dart, and we’ll be doing that after we finish with you. If you like, I could advise him of your situation and tell him you have asked to see him.”

Nora swiveled in her chair to look at Holly. “This is really happening? I’m going to be arrested for something I didn’t do?”

“Barbara’s our station commander. This is her call. Get your lawyer on it.”

The entirety of her situation burst upon her, and its sheer, improbable hopelessness caused her to slump against the back of the chair and laugh out loud. Everybody in the room stared at her, exhibiting emotions from concern to contempt.

“Mrs. Chancel, are you all right?” asked Barbara Widdoes.

“I wish you knew what else is going on in my life.”

Holly looked at his watch as he came around the side of his desk. “I’d let you use my phone to call your husband, but we’re running out of time. I want to get you through our procedures before the Dick Dart circus gets out of hand. When we’re done, I’ll take you around to one of the interview rooms. You can use the phone there while you wait for Leo Morris.”

She stood up.

“We need a little time with Mrs. Chancel, too,” said Mr. Shull.

“How could I forget?” Holly placed his hand between her shoulder blades and urged her forward. “If we don’t get this done fast, it’ll take hours. Everything’s going to go crazy around here in about ten minutes.”

“Everything already has gone crazy,” Nora said.

Holly opened the door with one hand while keeping the other on her back, moved her into the corridor, and followed immediately behind. Voices and the tramp of feet came from the front of the station, and before Barbara Widdoes and the FBI men were out of the office, a crowd of men burst around the corner and came hurrying toward them. At the front of the crowd, Officer LeDonne was a few paces in front of Leo Morris, who gave Nora a look of intense, unfriendly curiosity. Next to the lawyer, Dick Dart, in a gray suit and a white shirt but without a necktie, caught sight of Nora and grinned.

“What’s this?” said Holly. “Cripes, they’re taking him around the back to keep him away from the reporters. I’ll send them back to the cells so we can take care of you first.”