Pursuit: A Novel

20

Prescott sat in the window of his rented room and watched Wendy Cushner. He knew she was thirty-four, but she had the kind of face that might have been any age from twenty to forty, a small, unlined round face with light skin and a few freckles. She was wearing shorts that were neither revealing nor fashionable, a pair of sneakers with no socks, and a T-shirt that was too big for her.

She was filling a small wading pool with water from a hose, her eyes turned down at the blue vinyl bottom of the pool as though she saw something in the water, or maybe just looked for it there because it wasn’t anywhere else. She didn’t look like a woman who had been left with thirty-four million dollars. She looked like a woman who had just been left.

She and Prescott had a secret that the rest of the people in the world she inhabited did not seem to suspect. She turned off the hose and disappeared into the back door of the low, rambling brick ranch house. A few minutes later, she came out again holding a girl of about four by the hand, and carrying a boy in her left arm who must have been about one. They both had light purple bathing suits—the girl’s with a ruffled skirt around the hips, and Prescott could see that the smaller one’s rear end was padded with a diaper and plastic pants. Wendy held the little boy over the pool, bending at the hips as women did, so the baby could touch his toes in the cool water. The baby started to laugh and began to run in place, only his toes brushing the surface, until his mother lowered him into the water and he spent a moment feeling the cold creep into his suit. His big sister unceremoniously stepped in and sat down with a splash.

As they played, Prescott noted the appearance of brightly colored plastic objects from a small tub by the pool: boats, ducks, a whale, a bucket. Wendy retreated a bit after a few minutes and sat on the back steps, where Prescott could watch her watching her children.

He had been here for two weeks observing her to determine whether she had paid to have her husband shot through the forehead. At first he had been surprised when he had not detected any sign that the Louisville police were doing the same, but he had welcomed the freedom it gave him in his work. He had already eliminated a few of the signs he had been searching for.

Prescott had seen no indication that she had taken a lover. He had followed her whenever she went out, and found himself not at hotels or restaurants or houses but at a wilting succession of supermarket parking lots, a nursery school where she took the older kid three mornings a week, and a couple of shopping malls where she made relatively brief visits to stores that sold children’s clothes and toys.

He had watched her house at night with an infrared scope and listened with an X-phone, an electronic device about the size of a deck of cards that he had plugged into an unused phone jack in her bedroom. Whenever it heard anyone come up the stairs near the room, it silently dialed Prescott’s telephone number.

When he lifted his receiver, he could hear everything happening within thirty-five feet of Wendy Cushner’s bed. He had learned that she went to sleep at ten and was up at five-thirty with the boy, followed at about six-thirty by the older girl. The only visitors were women about her own age, usually with children in tow, her in-laws, a woman who looked as though she might be a younger sister, and an older woman who had to be her mother, Mrs. Hayes.

Prescott had seen no sign that she had yet taken any notice that she was a rich woman. She had a cleaning woman who came in two days a week to wash floors and windows. When he had understood the schedule, he had searched harder for the lover. A woman with thirty-four million could afford a lot of help, but a woman with any calculation at all would know that she could not hide the existence of a man from another woman who cleaned her house each day. Prescott devoted another week to watching, and found no lover.

Prescott tired of watching Wendy Cushner at about the same time that the children got tired of the water. When she scooped them out, one at a time, wrapped them in towels, and took them in, it was a relief to him.

Prescott had examined Wendy Cushner’s credit reports, searched the Louisville and Jefferson County records for any criminal or civil decisions involving Wendy Hayes, and looked for any close relative who might ever have been involved in any court proceeding. He had checked the archives of the Louisville Courier-Journal for the high school graduation announcements printed in the spring of her senior year, and found the names of others who had graduated in the same class. He had tracked down a few and called them, pretending to be a reporter. The ones who would talk at all seemed to be primarily interested in making sure no one had said anything negative about her.

On the first Sunday Prescott was in town, he went to the Methodist church where Robert Cushner’s funeral had been held, but Wendy Cushner was not there. He went again the next Sunday, and saw her father-in-law, the man who had hired him. Prescott had sat in the back where Cushner would not see him, then made sure that as soon as Dr. Stevenson, the minister, had pronounced the benediction, he was on his way out the door.

Prescott kept up his observation and widened his research for three more days. Then one day he waited until midmorning, when the older child was in nursery school and the younger was in the back bedroom for a nap. He walked around the block to the front of her house, and knocked on her door.

She opened it only a few inches, with a bit of the trepidation that a woman alone often displayed when a strange man came to the door. “Hi, can I help you?”

“I’m Roy Prescott,” he said. “I’m the man your father-in-law hired to find the killer.”

She looked at him with a mixture of alarm and exasperation, but she let him in. Wendy Cushner was not an especially neat housekeeper, and she was not apologetic about it. The living room had a few of the kids’ toys in unlikely places. She simply picked up a doll from the couch, told him to sit where it had been, set it on the coffee table, and sat down across from him. Close up, she looked tired and sad and worn.

He patiently lulled her by asking the questions he knew that she would have already been asked. They were about the enemies her husband might have had, the strangers she might have noticed near the house in the days before the crime, the worries her husband might have mentioned to her. She answered that nothing had come to her attention. He asked about the possibility that a business competitor might have ordered her husband’s death. She answered the question truthfully: she didn’t believe that could have happened. He had already sold his business before he was killed.

Prescott took that in and kept asking other questions, always sympathetically. After a time he left. The next day, he came again, and asked more questions. He came several times, always speaking gently and patiently, always careful to tell her things that he knew, so she would come to feel that they were sharing information. On the first day, he’d told her what the local police had told Millikan, and what Millikan had seen in the restaurant. On another day, he’d told her about his conversations with the killer, and what they had made him believe about the man. After a few days, he was sure he had convinced her he liked her and felt sorry for her. He left her alone for a couple of days, and kept her under even closer surveillance. Then he was ready for his final visit.

He waited until they were settled in the living room, then said, “I’m afraid that this time I’ve got a hard question. The police will eventually get to it, so we might as well do it now. It’s about Donna Halsey.”

He paused, and watched her face grow still and rigid, then begin to waver and get a rubbery look around the mouth. Her eyes were wet, not weeping, but watering as though she had been hit in the face. She said, “You know about Donna Halsey?”

He said, “I figured it out a couple of weeks ago. How long have you known?”

“I never did know. I thought . . . I didn’t think he would do that.”

Prescott said, “You mean you found out after he was dead?”

She nodded. “He said he was working that night. It was something about trying to get the bugs out of a program to get it ready for production so he could introduce it in some computer show. The show was going to be in—like—January. He lied. He knew that by January the company would already have belonged to somebody else for months. He already hadn’t owned it for a week.”

“You didn’t know he’d sold the company,” Prescott said.

“No,” she said. “He didn’t think I was even listening to what he said about staying late that night. It was just a bunch of words, plausible because they were words he had used a lot. But it’s amazing, isn’t it? I remembered exactly what he said.”

“Did you know the marriage was in trouble?”

“No.” Then she shivered, as though she were shaking off something that had clung to her, like dirt. “That’s not true. We argued a lot . . . not always out loud. He wasn’t happy with the way things were.”

Prescott was silent, not even pretending to understand. He just waited, and she spoke again.

“I didn’t get it,” she said. “I mean, I understood the words he was saying, but I didn’t understand that he meant them, exactly as he said them. I thought he was just complaining, whining for attention, like the kids do. What he was doing was something more. Sometimes I think it was his fault for letting it go, saying something and then not saying anything again for a month or two, so that I didn’t take it seriously enough. Sometimes I think if he hadn’t mentioned anything—just kept his mouth shut—then in time everything would have been okay by itself. I was busy from dawn to dusk with the kids, and cooking and shopping and the stuff that you have to do just to be a family. I was tired, and half the time I was frantic.”

She stopped and looked at Prescott with the purest expression of sadness and regret he had seen in years. “He didn’t threaten me, or say, ‘If you don’t start paying attention to me, I’ll find somebody who will, beginning next Thursday.’ See, in life it would be a lot better if there were big signs that popped up at important times and said, ‘Hey! Drop everything and handle this. You’re fighting for your life now!’ There isn’t anything like that. Everything comes at you at once, and you do your best, and then you find out you picked the wrong thing.” She was crying now. “I did that. I kept this house as neat as a pin. I took wonderful care of the children. I did everything, volunteered for everything at the school, the church, helped friends and relatives. I cooked nice meals, I . . .” She seemed to hear her own voice and not want to go on.

Prescott prompted her. “Did you ever meet Donna Halsey?”

“I knew Donna Halsey as well as he did. As soon as I learned she was one of the ones who got killed, I said, ‘Who was she with?’ She would never, in a million years, have gone into that restaurant by herself. The police were positive she was with that man Gary Finch, but I didn’t believe it. There was only one person there that she could have been with.” She sobbed. “Even my mother knew it.”

“Your mother?”

“She had warned me, at least two years ago. She got the feeling one day that things weren’t quite the same between me and Bobby. It was something she saw in his face one night when he was talking to me. She sat me down the next day and said, ‘It’s none of my business, but is everything okay?’ I told her she was right: it was none of her business. But she wouldn’t give up. She was sitting right where you are. She looked around, not in my eyes, and said, ‘You’re a good housekeeper. You’re a better mother than I was. You’re a terrific cook. But I’m going to say one thing because you’re also the best daughter in the world and I love you. In the history of the world, no man ever left his wife because some other woman was a better cook, or was more eager about setting the food on the table, or arranging it more attractively on the plate. The way to a man’s heart is not through his stomach, it’s a bit south of there.’ Then she stood up and left. You have to know my mother. She’d never said anything like that in her life. I saw her blush in church one time when the minister read some passage about somebody’s loins. But as soon as Bobby was dead, and the paper printed the names of the other people who had been in the restaurant, she knew. She has never said anything about warning me, just come and tried to help me and be sympathetic. But what she said will always be there between us, just lying there. She was right, and I didn’t take it to heart.”

“I’m sorry you ever had to find out,” said Prescott. “It serves no purpose. But I’ve got to say that you’re being too hard on yourself. You have nothing to blame yourself for. You weren’t the one who did this. He was.”

She sighed, then sobbed a little, so her breath came out shivery and choked. She said, “He paid for being tempted. I’m paying for being stupid.” She squinted. “He wasn’t bad. Nobody but me can really know that. He loved us. He would have stayed faithful—had been faithful for twelve years, before this. I told myself after it happened what a bastard he was, what a pig, what a rat. The truth is, he wasn’t.”

Prescott said, “I believe you. People make mistakes, and usually they get the chance to make up for them. If he had been given the chance, I’m sure he would have gotten over Donna Halsey pretty quickly, and your marriage would have been fine.”

As he spoke, she began to shake her head irritably. “I’ll show you something.” She got up and went to a kitchen drawer, and pulled out a piece of paper. She came back and handed it to him.

Prescott took it into his hand, and he could feel that the stiffness was already going out of the paper because she had held it in her hand so many times, folded and unfolded it. The letter was a memorandum of agreement between Vitaltrex Corporation and her husband to transfer his company for $20 million in cash and $14 million in Vitaltrex stock. The entire sum was to be paid to Wendy Cushner. “How did you get this?”

“I found it in his dresser a couple of days after he died. He never showed it to me.”

“Do you think he changed his mind?”

“He didn’t change his mind. He wouldn’t have changed his mind. The marriage was over.”

“How do you know?”

“The house. I got the new deed. It had been changed to be only in my name. At first I thought that somehow the county did that kind of thing the minute somebody died, and I just hadn’t heard of it before. But then the lawyer called to arrange the bank-account stuff to put the money from the sale of the company into my account, and he told me. After that I found this copy.” She took it and folded it up. “The lawyer finally admitted that he had been drawing up divorce papers, too. Bobby was going to give me everything and then get a divorce. That was how he was.”

Prescott said quietly, “I’m sorry I had to ask those questions. I had just figured out that with the Vitaltrex Corporation cleared of the murders, the next best suspect was, sooner or later, going to be you. Keep all the papers connected with the sale, and the house transfer, and make sure that the lawyer who arranged them is easy to reach, and you should be fine.”

“I’ll be . . . fine.” The words brought the tears that had been waiting, and she shook her head, but they kept coming. “I’m thirty-four years old, and my husband got killed on a date with another woman. A date. For the rest of my life, I’m going to have in the back of my mind that the only man I loved got killed because he couldn’t get laid at home. Not because he wasn’t interested in me anymore—because, God knows, he tried enough times—but because I was too tired, from making casseroles for church suppers or taking care of other women’s kids so their husbands could take them out, or something. And just to make things more comfortable, pretty soon everybody on the planet is going to know it.” She muttered, “Yeah, I’ll be just fine.”

“You said you knew Donna Halsey. Is there any chance that anybody was angry enough with her to hire a killer?”

Wendy Cushner shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know. You mean maybe another wife, like me?” She sighed. “She’s not my favorite person right now, but I didn’t think about her at all before. We were friends, sort of, in high school. She was one of those people that other girls don’t care much for but find it convenient to pretend they do. She was a cheerleader, and in the clubs most people couldn’t get into, and she had nicer clothes than the rest of us, and so on. That was a long time ago.”

“What happened after that?”

She shook her head in frustration. “I don’t know much. I heard about her once in a while. We went off to college. Both of us married soon after graduation. She sold real estate for her father’s company. Then I heard she sold stocks and bonds. Her marriage broke up.” She sat in silence for a few seconds, then said, “I hate her. She’s dead, and I hate her.”

“I don’t blame you,” Prescott said. “Right now, you probably don’t believe your feelings will change, but they will. It won’t ever feel good to think about her, but you’ll find that it happens less often.”

“I don’t hate her for wanting him. I hate her because she was smarter than I was. She saw that I was throwing something away that was a hundred times more important than anything I was keeping, so she twitched her butt a couple of times and picked it up, just like that. For a few days after he died, I thought maybe the word had leaked out that he had sold the company and was going to have big money. It hadn’t. It was just a lie I wanted to believe. All that really happened was that she was a lot smarter than I was. She had been married to a guy named Carter Rowland when we were twenty-two. He was an older guy. He had money. In those days, Bobby and I didn’t, and neither did anybody else our age, so it was just another thing to make everybody jealous of Donna. A few years ago, I heard she was divorced, and had come out of it with a lot of the money. Some people said most of it.”

“Where did the money come from?” asked Prescott.

“I don’t know anything, really,” she said. “People talk, and if they know somebody took a drink, all of a sudden he was drunk. Rowland is in the jewelry business, so I suppose he sold somebody something that wasn’t worth what he said. Personally, I can’t tell a diamond from a piece of glass, and I know that a lot of people who think they can are fooling themselves. It’s not important. She had been married to a man who wasn’t nice to her. She saw that I had a perfectly good one, a wonderful, sweet, hard-working man, and I wasn’t smart enough to keep him.”

“If she had it to do over again, she’d leave him alone,” Prescott reminded her. “Being there with him got her killed.”

“Don’t you see?” Wendy said. “Donna wasn’t the cause of this. She wanted what everybody wants. She was just the one who was in that place at the time. The one who would do things differently is me. He didn’t want anything different from what I wanted myself. I just thought all those other things I was doing were more important—no, more urgent, that they had to be done first. And second hardly ever came. Now that I look back, I can’t even remember what all those things that seemed so important were. I’m positive that nobody remembers I was the one who did them, and if I hadn’t, nobody would miss them. Donna wasn’t important. If it hadn’t been her it would have been somebody else. She was pretty and available, but so are lots of other women. If I hadn’t put him off and pushed him away, it wouldn’t have mattered what she was, because he wouldn’t have noticed.”

Prescott glanced at his watch and stood up. “Wendy, I’m sorry I had to bother you again with this, and I appreciate your telling me the truth. I’ll try to make sure you never see me again.” He went to the door, and let himself out.