A Perfect Crime

30

Back in her own house, Francie found a stranger talking to Roger in the living room. “Here she is now,” said Roger as Francie came in. The stranger rose, a big, broadly built man with a broad face; he reminded her of the blacksmith in the background of a Dutch genre painting she could picture but not identify at that moment.

“Francie, this is Mr. Savage, chief of police in Lawton Center,” said Roger. “Mr. Savage, my wife.”

“Pleased to meet you,” said the chief, speaking to Roger although his eyes were on Francie. “And it’s Savard. Joe Savard.”

“My apologies,” said Roger. “Will you be needing me any longer?”

“No,” said Savard. “Thanks for your help.”

“Think nothing of it,” said Roger. He came to Francie, took both her hands in his, said, “Oh, Francie. It’s dreadful, just dreadful.” Then he left, pausing to pick a few dead leaves from the base of a plant as he went out.

“Please sit down,” Francie said. Savard sat on the window seat, back to the morning outside, darkened by thick, low clouds; Francie couldn’t sit, but leaned on the arm of a chair by the fireplace, about three steps away. “What happened to Anne?”

“She was murdered sometime last night, Mrs. Cullingwood, in the cottage owned by your friend-” He leafed through his notebook.

“Brenda.”

He found the page. “It says here Countess Vasari.”

“She’s not a real countess,” Francie said, an unconsidered remark that made her sound like a pompous fool, exactly the opposite of her intent.

Savard looked up from his notebook. “What’s the difference?”

A good question. What had she meant? That Brenda was back to being plain Brenda Kelly again; that she didn’t want this man to form a false impression of her, Francie, because of some improbably and temporarily titled friend. “Nothing. I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

“There’s not much to interrupt at this stage. The lab guys are still at the scene and we haven’t got a suspect.” Savard closed the notebook, laid it on his knee. His hand was big, thickened by some sort of hard work, but not ugly. “I’m hoping for some help from you,” he said.

“Anything,” Francie said.

He nodded. “Your friend says she hasn’t been to her place for two or three years-she couldn’t remember exactly-and that you kept an eye on it for her.”

“That’s true.”

“How often did you go up there?”

“A few times a month in summer. Sometimes more.”

“And in winter?”

“Almost never.”

“When was the last time?”

A Friday. The day after she’d fallen through the ice. Ned had called her for the first time on her car phone, had been waiting there, surprising her on the darkened porch with his fury over her call to the radio show. She made the calculations in her head-it took longer than it should have because she kept remembering him out on the river: Wouldn’t there be something wrong with two people who could just throw it away? — and gave Savard the date.

He wrote it down. “Did you notice anything unusual when you were there?”

“No.”

“No sign of a break-in, or an attempted one?”

“No.”

“Nothing missing or out of place?”

“No.”

“Anything spilled, knocked over, broken?”

“No.”

There was a pause. Francie had a cast stone figure by Jean Arp on the bookcase-Roger’s wedding present to her, not a big or important one, but Arp nevertheless-and the policeman’s eyes were on it: whether taking it in or thinking about something else, she couldn’t tell.

His gaze swung back to her. “I assume you have a key to the cottage?”

“Two,” Francie said. “One for the gate, one for the door.”

“Have you ever lost them?”

“No.”

“Given them to someone else?”

“No.”

“Had copies made?”

“No.” Although Ned had asked for one, she now recalled: Might help if I had a key. It’s cold out there. But she’d never gotten around to doing it: everything had fallen apart first.

“You know of no other person with access to the cottage, then?”

“No.”

“Would you mind showing them to me?”

“Showing what to you?”

“The keys, Mrs. Cullingwood.”

They were in her car in the garage, hanging from the ignition. When she came back with them, Savard was standing by the bookcase, bent over the Arp, his hands behind his back. Francie almost said, You can touch it if you want.

But did not. Instead she said, “Here they are,” and handed him the keys.

Savard glanced at them, handed them back. Standing next to him by the bookcase, Francie sensed his physical strength. Not that he made himself look big or puffed out his chest-he slouched a little, if anything. Neither was he dressed in clothes designed to show off his physique-he wore a baggy gray suit, a little shiny at the elbows. But she sensed it, all the same.

“So Anne Franklin didn’t have keys to the cottage.”

“No.”

“Did she know your friend Brenda?”

“No.”

He nodded to himself. It suddenly hit Francie that this man, or an assistant, had probably asked Ned these same questions already, hours before, that he might be searching for discrepancies as well as facts. She was considering the implications of that, and how they fit with Ned’s instructions- nothing about you and me- when Savard said,“How long has she known about it, then?”

Francie felt a strange rush of blood to her face and neck, as though she were going scarlet; couldn’t have been, of course, not with her complexion. “It?” she said.

“The cottage.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Its existence and location,” Savard said.“When did you first tell her about it?”

Discrepancies: awareness that he might be searching for them was no help without knowing what he’d heard already from Ned. She stuck to the truth. “I never did.”

“So she made no mention to you of going up there?”

“We never discussed the cottage.”

Savard opened his notebook, read to himself. Francie, reading upside down, saw lines of neat handwriting too small to make out, culminating in a circled notation writ larger at the bottom of the page: FC-nexus? That scared her for many reasons, not the least of which was the presence of a word like that in the notebook of a man who looked like this. She realized she had no idea what was coming next.

“I wonder, then,” he said, closing the notebook, “how she found out about the cottage.”

“So do I,” Francie said.

“And what she was doing up there.”

Francie said nothing, was sure she knew the horrible answer to that question, lacked only the steps in between. Was silence the same as a lie? In some cases, like this one, yes.

“When was the last time you saw her?”

“Saturday night. We went to dinner, the four of us, after tennis.”

“How was she?”

“In what way?”

“Her mood.”

Francie thought of the scene in the locker room. “A little upset, at first.”

“Any idea why?”

“We’d just lost the match.” Was a partial truth the same as a lie? Ditto.

“Is that enough to upset a grown woman?”

“Ever play competitive sports, Mr. Savard? It was the club championship.”

Savard gave her a quick look; for a moment she thought he was about to smile, but he didn’t. “Who else knows about the cottage?”

“You mean that Brenda has it? Lots of people.”

“And were any of them acquainted with Anne, to your knowledge?”

Besides Ned, there was only Nora. Francie gave Savard her name and number. Why not? Nora knew Brenda, so he would have found her eventually.

Savard wrote Nora’s name and number in his notebook and said, “Then there’s your husband.”

“What about him?”

“I assume he knew about the cottage as well.”

Had Roger known? Francie had never told him: at first, for no particular reason other than the kind of marriage it had become-he wouldn’t even have expected to hear a detail like that-and later because of Ned. She gave Savard a careful answer: “Roger didn’t know Anne-they met for the first time on Saturday night.”

His eyes went to the sculpture, were still on it when he said,“What was Anne like, Mrs. Cullingwood?”

“She…” Francie got a grip on her emotions; if she was going to get through this, whatever this was and whatever getting through it meant, she would have to keep them well capped. “She was wonderful, Mr. Savard.”

He gave her a sharp glance. “Do you want to sit down?” he said. “A glass of water?”

“I’m fine. Anne was… good. There was no meanness in her, if you’re thinking about enemies, or something like that. She was good.” Francie, realizing she had raised her voice, lowered it, went on: “She was talented, she was loving.”

“In what way talented?”

“She was a fine tennis player, for one thing. And a very good painter.”

“Painter?” he said.

“Yes.”

“Do you mean an artist? The kind you evaluate in your job?”

How did he know about her job? Roger, of course. “I didn’t evaluate Anne. She was my friend.”

“I’m just making sure I understood what you meant by painting, that’s all,” Savard said. “The fact that she painted could be important.”

“Why?”

“Let’s sit down.”

“I told you I’m fine.”

“Whatever you say,” Savard said, but he returned to the window seat. Francie followed, leaned again on the armchair, feeling manipulated in some way. “It doesn’t surprise me to learn she was an athlete, Mrs. Cullingwood.”

“Why not?”

“There’s evidence of a tremendous struggle last night.”

Francie felt faint, might have fallen had it not been for the chair; had he foreseen that? Savard’s image began to dissolve, almost did, then slowly returned to normal, as though some director had changed his mind about ending a scene. Savard was watching her closely.

“Go on,” she said, her fingers digging into the fabric of the chair.

He folded his massive hands in his lap, a gesture that seemed ceremonial to her, even religious. “Before she died, she managed to write a word on the floor. Very small. She must have changed her position slightly after that, because it was covered by her arm and we didn’t see it at first. The word she wrote was painting.”

“Painting?”

“Yes. Do you have any idea what she could have meant by that?”

“No.”

“But you must know something about her work-in order to have made the judgment that she was good.”

“I’ve seen some of her paintings.”

“Do any stand out in your mind?”

That was easy: the portrait of Ned. But nothing about you and me. “No one more than another,” Francie said.

“Do you know of any painting she might have been working on recently?”

“No.”

“Or something she wanted to try in the future?”

“No,” Francie said. “Do you think she meant to… to tell us who killed her?”

“Perhaps not the actual attacker.”

“The actual attacker? I don’t understand.”

Savard unfolded his hands, rubbed them together slowly. “How would you characterize her marriage, Mrs. Cullingwood?”

“In what way?”

“Were they happy together?”

“I rarely saw them together.”

“Meaning you saw them separately?”

He was so quick; didn’t look like he would be, but was. “Meaning I didn’t see them together enough to form an opinion about something like that,” Francie said as calmly as she could.

“Did Anne ever say anything that led you to believe they had problems?”

Yes, in the locker room. “No,” Francie said. A lie: total, direct, inescapable.

“How would you describe her self-confidence?”

“That’s a strange question.”

“There’s not much to go on, Mrs. Cullingwood, as I mentioned. Getting a picture of her in my head will help.”

“Self-confidence. It’s not easy to know something like that about a person.”

“I disagree,” Savard said. “In my experience, it’s one of the first things you notice.”

They looked at each other. He was right, of course. Quick, and there was more to him than that. “Not as high as it should have been,” Francie said.

“On a scale of ten,” Savard said.

“Isn’t that a rather brutal method for measuring something as abstract as self-confidence?” Francie said.

“No,” Savard replied. “Brutal was what happened to her in your friend’s cottage.”

It finally hit her. “What did she use to write with-the word painting?”

“I think you’ve figured that out.”

Francie didn’t speak; for a moment she couldn’t even breathe.

Savard rose, came closer. “I need your help,” he said. “And so does she, if you accept that rationale.”

“Three,” Francie told him. “The answer to your question is three.”

“Any reason a woman of such qualities would have a self-confidence level like that?”

“I don’t know.”

“You must have thought about it.”

“Why do you say that?”

He opened his mouth, said, “You’re,” then stopped. “I’ll withdraw the question.” A beeper went off. Savard took it from his pocket, read something on its screen, put it and his notebook away. He moved toward the door, then stopped and turned. “Sometimes women unhappy in their marriages have affairs,” he said.

Francie again felt the upsurge of blood in her neck and face.

“If she was,” Savard continued, “what’s to be gained by hiding that now?”

“What are you saying?”

“When a wife is murdered, we always check the husband first, Mrs. Cullingwood.”

“I thought you said there was no suspect.”

“I misspoke. We have no evidence pointing to a specific suspect. But Mr. Demarco has no alibi for last night.”

“No alibi?”

“No convincing explanation of his whereabouts during the period when his wife was killed.” He handed her a card. “Call if you can help.”

He went into the hall; Francie followed. “But there was a struggle, you said.”

“I did.”

“Then wouldn’t there be signs of that on the attacker?”

“There would. On the actual attacker.”

Savard opened the door. Roger was outside, sprinkling a handful of salt crystals on the walk. He looked up. “Safety first, Chief,” he said.

“You’re so right,” Savard said. “I meant to ask if you’ve ever been to Brenda’s cottage, Mr. Cullingwood.”

“Never. The fact is, I’d forgotten all about it, if I ever knew in the first place. Did you ever mention it, Francie?”

“I don’t think so.”

Roger spread his hands. “It was Francie’s baby, Chief.”

Savard glanced back at Francie, then got in his car, not an official police cruiser but an old Bronco, and drove away. Francie and Roger looked at each other. “Close the door, Francie,” he said. “You’re letting in all the cold.”

Roger went inside a few minutes later. He didn’t see Francie in the kitchen, the hall, the living room. He walked over to the plant in the corner, a dieffenbachia. Pausing to pick a few dead leaves from the base of it as he went out! Who could compete with brilliance of that magnitude? He plucked the digital recorder that Francie had given him from behind the stem and dropped it in his pocket.