Touchy and Feely (Sissy Sawyer Mysteries) (9 page)

‘Something big is my guess. It could have been a full-size sedan, but I’d put my money on a station wagon or a panel-van.’

‘Why do you think that?’

‘Because the bullet hit Howard Stanton at an upward angle of approximately eleven degrees from the horizontal, which tells us that the perpetrator fired from very low down. Not more than thirty inches off the ground, maybe even lower, if he was firing from the spot across the road where this vehicle was parked.

‘Thirty inches is too high for somebody lying flat on the ground, and too low for somebody kneeling. So my guess is that he was lying in the back of his vehicle, and if that’s correct it was probably a station wagon or a van, since he could open the tailgate or one of the rear doors to give himself a clear shot.’

Steve opened his desk drawer and took out a flexible ruler. He pulled it out and measured thirty inches up from the carpet. ‘OK . . . I see what you mean.’

Jim said, ‘We ran some computer simulations this morning, using various types of cars and station wagons and panel-vans. We tried aiming a sniper-type rifle from all of them. With the van and the station wagon, no problem. But even when the front windows of the sedan were fully lowered, the sill was thirty-seven inches off the ground, and the rear windows of most sedans can only be lowered halfway down, for child safety. This means that even if the shooter was kneeling on the front seat of the sedan and firing at an angle through the rear window, he couldn’t have made the shot that killed Howard Stanton.’

‘Maybe he opened one of the doors,’ Doreen suggested.

‘Well, we tried that too, but it still makes for a very awkward shot, especially if the shooter was right-handed. Apart from that, there would have been a much greater risk that somebody from a passing vehicle would have noticed him.’

‘Are you sure about your trajectory?’ asked Steve.

‘Within two or three degrees, either way. The cashier witnessed the moment of impact, and he was sure that Howard Stanton was holding his head straight. Even if he had tilted his head to one side, the shot still had to come from a very low firing position.’

Steve leaned back in his chair. ‘So you’re pretty sure that we should be looking for a panel-van or a station wagon?’

Jim tucked his shirt back into his belt. ‘My personal guess is a panel-van. It would give the perpetrator a much higher degree of concealment. Like, when he’s taken his shot, all he has to do is close the back door and nobody’s any the wiser. In a station wagon he’d have to climb out the back and anybody could see him doing that. If I’m wrong, I’ll take you both to Harbor Park and the lobster bakes will be on me.’

Doreen flicked through her notebook. She was wearing a pond-green rollneck sweater that made her look even more tired and liverish than usual. ‘I talked to everybody at Howard Stanton’s office. They’re all very shocked, of course, although my feeling is that Howard Stanton wasn’t outstandingly popular. His boss said that he was “meticulous,” and his secretary said that he was “very fussy.” One of his customers was there, and he said that if it had been possible to cross “i’s” as well as dot them, Howard Stanton would have done it. Nobody actually said “pain in the rear end” but the suggestion was there.’

‘So . . . he wasn’t especially well loved?’

Doreen shook her head. ‘They trusted him, for sure, and they respected him for all the business he brought in, but, no, I couldn’t find anybody who felt any great affection for him.’

‘Do you think anybody felt insufficient affection for him to blow his brains out?’

‘Mmm . . . I don’t think so. There was an angry young man called Kevin Westenra who told me that he had argued with Stanton over his expenses, but he certainly didn’t seem to be the kind of person who would put out a contract, or try to shoot Stanton himself. Besides, Westenra was watching TV at his girlfriend’s parents’ house in Cornwall when Stanton was killed.’

‘Lieutenant-colonel Lynch just called me from headquarters,’ said Steve.

‘In person? Wow, you’re honored.’

‘Not really. The media are crawling all over him, and he’s very anxious that we don’t let this baby go cold.’

‘Well, good for him! I hope you told him that we don’t have a single eyewitness, nor any idea why anybody should have wanted Howard Stanton dead, nor any forensic evidence whatsoever. I hope you also told him we didn’t even find a bullet yet, and even if we
do
manage to find a bullet we don’t have a weapon to match it to.’

‘We have one straw to cling to. Jim thinks we’re looking for a van.’

‘Oh, yes. I forgot. Just as well that there are only one hundred thirty-one thousand commercial vehicles registered in Connecticut, of which forty-seven thousand, two hundred are vans. Otherwise, you know, it might be difficult for us to find.’

‘Doreen, you’re such a pessimist.’

‘I’d rather be a vindicated pessimist than a disappointed optimist.’

‘You need to get out more. Socialize. Go to barn dances. Find yourself a man.’

‘I don’t want any more men, thank you. Why do you think I’m a pessimist? You know, when I was married to Newton, my parents came over to dinner one evening and Newton didn’t break wind once. Not once. That was so much more than I could have hoped for, I burst into tears.’

Steve couldn’t help smiling. All the same, he felt deeply unsettled. He hadn’t come across a homicide so lacking in circumstantial evidence since the Mark F. Rebong case in January, 2000. Mark F. Rebong was the night manager of the Danbury Hilton Hotel, and early one evening he had been shot while driving to work on I-84, for no apparent reason at all.

The more Steve thought about it, the less likely it seemed that the shooter had been specifically aiming to kill Howard Stanton. For instance, there was no way that anybody could have known in advance that Stanton was going to pull into that particular gas station. If Jim Bangs was right, and Stanton had been shot from a vehicle that was
already
parked on the other side of the highway, then the killing was almost certainly motiveless.

Steve didn’t like ‘motiveless.’ ‘Motiveless’ meant psychos and drifters, who were almost impossible to track down. They didn’t have social security numbers, they didn’t have credit records, they had no fixed abode and they didn’t vote. He swiveled his chair around and looked out of the second-story window. The sun was still shining, but he could see that it wasn’t going to stay that way for more than twenty minutes longer. A diagonal band of pale-gray cloud was creeping toward Litchfield from the north-west, and it had that radioactive orange glow, which meant that it was full of snow.

Doreen said, ‘What do you want to do? We could put out an APB for troopers to stop any van that arouses their suspicion, for any reason. You never know your luck.’

‘Do you know what, Doreen? That’s almost optimistic.’

He reached for the phone but before he could pick it up, it rang.

‘Homicide, Wintergreen.’

‘Detective Wintergreen? This is Trooper McCormack, B Troop, up at Canaan. We have a fatal shooting, sir. Thought you ought to know about it ASAP.’

‘When did this happen?’

‘About a half-hour ago. A woman was killed in her own back yard. A single rifle-shot, from a distance. It seems to bear some similarities to your shooting down at Branchville, so I guessed you’d want to take a look.’

‘Good thinking, Trooper. I can get up to you in twenty minutes. Wait—listen, this is important. We believe that our shooter probably used a panel-van to make his shot from, or maybe a station wagon, so please make sure that your people don’t drive or trample over any tire-tracks.’

‘OK, I got you. Any idea what kind of a van?’

‘Not yet. But you could ask any witnesses if they saw one, or any other vehicle parked in the immediate vicinity. Give me the address.’

Steve jotted down the details on his notepad. Then he put down the phone and said to Doreen, ‘Sounds like our shooter’s done it again. Get your coat.’

 

S
issy had just finished her morning bath. She was standing in front of the full-length mirror on the back of her closet door, in her white silk bathrobe with the big splashy poppies on it, combing out her wet hair. Her hair was completely white now, and she had been debating with herself if she ought to try coloring it. Cerise streaks, maybe, to give it some character. Or viridian.

She still found it really strange that her reflection had become so old. She didn’t feel any different than she had on the day that she and Gerry had first moved into this house, August 12, 1969. Here was the same bedroom, and the same bed, and the same mirror. She was even using the same comb.

She was still skinny, and thin-wristed. Gerry used to call her ‘my ballerina.’ But even though her cheekbones were still sharp, her prettiness had collapsed like a crumpled paper bag, and her lips were pursed. And why was she so
colorless
? Did the color fade out of you, as you grew older, the same way it did with furniture?

As she peered at herself in the mirror, the voice of the news anchorman penetrated from the living-room. She lifted her head a little, and listened. The television had been arguing and laughing to itself all morning, and so she didn’t know why this particular item caught her attention. Maybe she had been expecting it.

‘Thirty-two-year-old Ellen Mitchelson was shot dead in the yard of the Mitchelson family home at 3400 Canaan Road, apparently by a sniper firing from the highway. Her killing was witnessed by her six-year-old daughter Juniper Mitchelson. Randall Mitchelson, her husband, was upstairs sick in bed at the time of the shooting.’

Sissy stopped combing. As she stood listening, the bedroom gradually began to darken, as if somebody were drawing a curtain across the sky.

‘State police detectives have been called in, and the crime scene has been cordoned off while forensic investigators comb the area for clues. However Detective Steven Wintergreen of the Western District Major Crime Squad told WUVN News that it is still too early to speculate on exactly what happened, or what possible motive anybody might have had for killing Mrs Mitchelson.’

Sissy went through to the living room, still holding her comb. A neighbor in a purple wooly hat was talking to a TV reporter. ‘It’s such a terrible shock . . . you don’t think that anything like this could happen in a quiet town like Canaan. The worst of it is, an innocent young girl has had her mother taken away from her.’

Sissy looked across at the coffee table and there lay the Predictor card. La Poupée Sans Tête. It had happened, just as the DeVane pack had said it would. A child had been unexpectedly orphaned.

‘Police appealed for anybody who might have seen a van or station wagon or other vehicle parked close to the Mitchelson house at the time of the shooting, or anything else suspicious or out of the ordinary, even if it seems to have no direct relevance to Mrs Mitchelson’s death.

‘The killing of Mrs Mitchelson follows the shooting yesterday of forty-seven-year-old realtor Howard Stanton, who was gunned down by an unknown sharpshooter at the Sunoco gas station on Route Seven near Branchville . . . again, with no obvious motive.’

Sissy slowly sat down. Maybe Trevor was right, and the cards were nothing but hocus-pocus. Maybe she was deluding herself, and looking for some kind of magical answer to the meaning of life when there
was
no answer.

She picked up the cards and reshuffled them. She was tempted to read them again, but she decided not to. Supposing they were going to tell her that something
worse
was going to happen?

She looked across at the photograph of Gerry on the table beside her. It had been taken at Hyannis, in the early summer of 1971. Gerry was wearing a yachting cap and he was giving the thumbs-up. At the end of that year, Sissy had gone to bed, twice, with a handsome painter called Victor Raven. Gerry had never found out about it, and she had never confessed it. But now and again, when she was reading Gerry’s cards, she had turned up Le Corbeau Infidèle, the unfaithful raven, and almost every time that happened, Gerry’s car had refused to start, or he had lost his wallet, or he had brushed up against poison ivy.

She had never been sure if she ought to blame the raven card for Gerry’s mishaps, or if they were nothing more than coincidence. Maybe she blamed the card as a way of blaming herself, because she felt so guilty. Maybe, after all, none of the cards had any significance whatsoever, except in her imagination, and her imagination was fading, like her hair, and her skin, and the color of her eyes. On the other hand, La Poupée Sans Tête had come up, the card that signified a child’s sudden bereavement, and what had happened? Bang. A mother had dropped in the snow.

Almost absent-mindedly, she unwrapped another Cherry Mash. She wished Trevor hadn’t bought them, because they reminded her that she was self-indulgent and weak, in the same way that the raven card had reminded her that she was self-indulgent and weak, and faithless, too.

 

F
eely waited over an hour-and-a-half at Chesney’s Diner and the sun shone bright through the windows but there was still no sign of Robert. He ordered another cup of coffee (his fourth) and a large slice of lemon-curd sponge cake. Now and then he glanced up at the vivid yellow photograph of the ‘extra-fluffy 4-egg omelet with melted Jack cheese,’ but the chef hadn’t yet made any effort to wash his hands, and Feely couldn’t stomach the thought of unknowingly eating a booger.

The girl in the khaki stocking hat suddenly slapped her book shut. ‘He’s not coming,’ she announced.

Feely turned and blinked at her. ‘Pardon me?’

‘My friend. He was supposed to meet me here an hour ago.’

‘Oh,’ said Feely. He had thought that she was referring to Robert.