The Man Who Loved His Wife (28 page)

“Must we go over all of this again? I told you everything already,” she reminded him fretfully.

“Can you deny that after your husband's death you said you felt guilty?”

Boredom ended. They all sat up straight or slid forward in their chairs.

“Did you?” demanded Ralph.

Elaine lay back against the leather cushions, regarded the long tanned legs stretched out upon the ottoman. “Did I?” Her voice sounded feathery, careless, without substance.

“You did.” Knight shuffled his papers again.

“Perhaps I did.” Elaine kept them waiting while she thought about it. “I don't remember, but how can one remember every word one's ever said?”

Ralph leaped up. “So what?” he cried. “Suppose she did say she felt guilty? A person can feel guilty about picking his nose.”

Cindy's hand dropped. She looked wildly around for a cigarette.

“I'm afraid, Doctor, this did concern her husband's death. She said it to Mr. Hustings while”—Knight had leaped like a ballet dancer to offer Cindy his cigarette case and his back was toward Elaine as he tossed the tidbit—“she was changing her husband's bed linen at three o'clock in the morning.”

Don said, “I hope you're not vexed at me, love. Sergeant Knight asked me a lot of questions and I simply told him what you told me.”

“I'm not angry at all,” Elaine replied with acid sweetness, “but I am wondering what this is all about. You told us you weren't going to repeat what we all know, Sergeant Knight, and you've spent an hour doing nothing but that. Is it a trick of some
sort? Are you trying to trap one of us into saying something that might be useful to you?”

Ralph shot her a look of warning. In her situation it was injudicious to offend the detective. Knight's vanity was obvious. Ordinarily Elaine would have been sensitive to the nature of the man, shown appreciation of his little tricks of charm. Ralph could understand her not liking Knight, but knew it unwise of her to bait him in this way.

All of Knight's attention was given to his right thumbnail. He studied it as scrupulously as if he were doing research on cuticles. “Perhaps one of you is waiting,” he bent closer over his thumb, “to be trapped. Deviously.”

A nervous smile crossed Elaine's face. She had become rigid. Everyone, even Cindy, had become aware of the extraordinary tension. To those who had read the diary the word was potent;
devious
. Fletcher had learned it from Elaine and used it often.
My wife is a devious creature
. The word was ammunition and Knight had fired it, deviously.

WHEN SHE HAD given him the diary, Elaine said she had not read what her husband had written. Knight had not believed her. But now that he knew the contents, he conceded (as he had in that dreary session in District Attorney Hanley's office) that Mrs. Strode had been truthful about it. No sane woman, however innocent, would have allowed that document to fall into the hands of the police. Knight had read and reread, memorized and indexed important entries. The fact that Elaine knew nothing about the fears and prophecies recorded by her late husband was helpful to Knight. He intended to keep secret the source of his information until its exposure could profit him.

“I'd like to remind you of something, Mrs. Strode. A certain conversation with your husband.”

The telephone interrupted. Don answered and summoned Ralph. The exchange gave him the telephone number of an anxious patient. The call took a long time. Ralph's absence pleased Knight. In asking Ralph to stay, he had in mind the possibility
of catching him and Elaine in some revealing lie or inconsistency, but he found the doctor too alert to reveal himself or to allow indiscretion.

Don had gone to the bar. “How about something cool, sir? You won't think we're trying to suborn the police if we offer you a fruit juice?”

“I see,” said Knight with an appreciative wink, “that you remember my addiction.”

Corbin looked wistfully at the Bourbon poured out for Cindy and Don, but had to content himself with a ginger ale. Elaine sipped ice water.

Knight did not wait for Ralph to come back, but went on glibly, “You had a conversation with your husband about the poisons in the garden shed.” He waited. At last his patience was gone and he said sharply, “Didn't you?”

She answered like someone who had been napping. “Didn't I what?”

Knight repeated the question with emphatic pauses between words. He saw her hesitancy as a stall to keep him waiting while she formulated an evasive answer.

Elaine was honestly confused. “Poisons in the garden shed?” she repeated like a student who ponders a question too difficult for a prompt answer.

“Don't you recall the conversation?”

She had kicked off her high-heeled slippers, which she left on the ottoman as she ran across the room in bare feet. “I know I didn't like having all those Danger and Beware bottles in the shed. When you live with someone like he was, my husband, you're naturally,” she passed a limp hand across her forehead, “frightened. Who wouldn't be?”

“What does that mean, someone like your husband?”

“I was afraid he . . . that is, I knew . . . he thought about committing suicide.”

“And you were so frightened that you called these poisons to his attention?”

Elaine did not remember mentioning the poisons to Fletcher although she knew, definitively, that she had told the gardener
to take them out of the shed. And he did. He kept them in his truck and only brought them out when he had to get rid of snails and slugs and aphids. “Did I talk about it to Fletcher?”

“Last June,” Knight said.

“How do you know?”

“Not long afterward you spoke to a girl on the long-distance phone. About being free. You said a girl ought to be ecstatically happy to have her freedom.”

“I remember that. It was Joyce Kilburn, she'd just got her divorce. I wanted to console her. But how—”

Knight cut in. “You thought a lot about being free again. You dreamed about being free and living in New York like you did before you met Mr. Strode.”

There was no denying this. She had already confessed guilt. Color jetted up from the richest, darkening face and neck. Her voice coarsened. “What are you trying to do, convict me for my dreams?” Whirling about, “Why don't you say something, Don? You're supposed to be a lawyer. I thought you wanted to help me. Has he any right to ask me these questions?”

Don raced to her side. “Easy now, sweet. It won't help to lose our tempers. I'd have advised you if you'd been willing, but you said you wanted to tell the truth.”

“He's right, Mrs. Strode. You offered cooperation to the fullest extent.” Knight's amiable tone gave contrast to Elaine's shrillness. “Please don't be distressed if I ask a few more questions about your private life.”

Don tried to lead her to a chair. She brushed him off and ran out to the hall. At the telephone Ralph was telling a patient that laxatives were not the answer. She raced back into the room, saw Knight in Fletcher's chair at Fletcher's desk where Fletcher used to sit when he kept his accounts, considered his investments, paid his bills, and wrote in his diary.

Knight inclined his head.

“Fletcher wrote those things!” Belief gathered slowly. “About the poisons in the shed and what I told Joyce and all the crazy, trivial things that happen in a house?”

“I hardly think you'd consider them crazy and trivial if you
had read your husband's diary.”

“He didn't think I meant to poison him?”

“No such accusation has been made, Mrs. Strode.”

“Why did he put such things into his diary?”

“You ought to know better than anyone else.”

“It's a trick,” she said, “I don't believe a word,” but knew, while she denied it, that there could be no other source of information so crazy, so trivial, and so true. “I'd like to see the diary.”

“Sorry, Mrs. Strode, I am not at liberty to show it to you.”

“Why not?”

“You gave it to me of your own free will.”

“You asked if I'd read it and I said I hadn't. Now I want to. I have a right to know what my husband wrote about me.”

A soldier does not yield his gun so readily. The diary was more than a weapon to Knight; it was also his shield, and more, a walking stick to help him up the steep climb, a magic wand to waft him to a place among the mighty. “I'm afraid I can't give it to you right now.”

“Is that right, Don? Is it legal for him to keep it from me?”

“I'm not sure of the law in this state. It's not a matter that comes up every day,” Don answered smoothly, “but for the moment, let's not make an issue of it. It's as much to your advantage as anyone else's to get this ugly mess cleaned up.”

“But why won't he let me see it?” She had become fretful. Narrowed eyes, locked muscles, the darkness of her face destroyed her beauty. She had run her hands through her hair so that it was as wild as a witch's. “It looks like a trick to persecute me.”

“Careful, dear,” Don murmured, “it can never be more than circumstantial evidence. You have no reason to be so agitated, sweet.”

“Please don't blame me, Mrs. Strode. I'm only trying to understand the things your husband wrote in his diary.”

“But Fletcher wouldn't have, he couldn't believe”—she rubbed her hands and bent her head and moaned because she could not bear to voice the hideous thought—“such stuff. He loved me.”

“He thought you were trying to provoke him to suicide when you told him you'd taken a lover.”

Shock was intended. Knight allowed himself the luxury of a glance at his audience. Corbin bared his teeth at the juicy information that the drama had included adultery when only murder had been expected. Cindy's chest and shoulders rose with every breath. An irrelevant stream of giggles escaped. Don tried to look grave. He dared not show pleasure in a statement that sent warm blood racing through his body and filled his head with visions of prosperity.

Elaine had regained a measure of calm. Anger remained, but at a lower temperature. Rigid, head high, she asked, “Is that what my husband wrote or your own interpretation, Sergeant Knight?”

“What was your reason for telling him about your
lover
?” Delicate inflection gave the word an obscene sound.

What reason? Like acute pain the scene returned. Elaine saw her husband stamping into her bedroom, his body bare and brown above the shorts, a bandanna tied about his neck. He had smelled and shone with sweat.

“He asked me.”

“Asked if you had a lover?” Knight kept the question hanging in the air until Elaine assented with a nod. “And you told him that you had?”

“What does that prove?” she demanded.

“Will you allow me to read what your husband wrote about that incident?” Of course she would; how could she disallow it? Knight riffled through pages, but only for effect. “Ah,” he breathed and began to read slowly and with emphasis like a student of elocution:

“Yesterday she hit me with the news she had a lover. How much can a man take? No matter what plans are in her head she ought to be loyal while I am still alive. Maybe she is too passionate to control herself—”

“You see,” squealed Cindy, “Mom knew, she always said a girl like that couldn't behave decently.” Don commanded her
to shut up, but she had to express superiority with another trill of proud laughter before she settled down to listen to Knight declaim:

“What a shock to a husband. I drove to the ocean and stood on those high rocks and looked down at the water and was tempted. Then a terrible thought came to my mind. I saw through her devious plan. She may not be brave enough to strike so she is trying to provoke me to do it myself. I refuse to make it easy for her.”

Elaine had gone back to the leather chair. Moaning softly, she sank onto the ottoman and covered her face with both hands.

“Sorry, Mrs. Strode, I didn't hear what you said. Could you speak a bit louder, please?”

More to herself than to the others, “Poor Fletch, he was so sick,” she said. Her hands fell from her eyes. She raised her head and saw that Ralph had come into the room. Conflict tore her to bits. She thought of too many things at the same time; of the terrible agony which had driven Fletcher to these accusations, of the shame of the cuckold, and of the way it had all ended. At the same time she wondered how much of this Ralph had heard and how he must feel at having their affair exposed to this vulgar group, with Knight so righteous, Don so smug, with Cindy sniffling happily, and Corbin grinning so that each of his pearls glowed separately.

“It seems my husband kept a diary,” she tried to explain to Ralph calmly. “He had some sort of idea, a crazy obsession,” but she could not name the nature of it. “Sergeant Knight read some of it to us, but he won't let me see it.”

Knight sensed accusation. “I'm very sorry.”

“Don says I haven't the legal right to demand it.”