Goldilocks

5

I spent the next ten minutes in a telephone booth outside a gasoline station. The traffic at a quarter to ten had thickened considerably, automobiles and trucks moving bumper to bumper in both directions. For as long as I’d been living here, there’d been talk of financing an interstate superhighway that would divert traffic away from the city and ease the burden on U.S. 41. They were still talking about it. The talk said that even if they started building it this very minute, it wouldn’t be ready for ten years. By that time, the line of traffic on the Trail would be frozen solid from Tampa all the way down to the Everglades.

I called Aggie first.

The phone rang three times before she answered it.

“Hello?” she said.

“Hi.”

“Matt, good! I was just getting ready to leave the house.”

“Where are you going?”

“I’ve got a dumb rehearsal. Is there any possibility you can get away this afternoon?”

“Why?”

“Julie’s got a guitar lesson, and Gerry’s got basketball practice. They’re both being picked up, I’ll be free till at least five.”

“Don’t tempt me.”

“Let me tempt you.”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “From the way it looks now, I may not even be able to call you later.”

“Why not?” she asked at once. “Is something wrong?”

“Jamie Purchase’s wife and kids were murdered last night.”

“You’re joking!”

“No, honey, I wish I—”

“Oh, Matt, how awful. Do they know who did it?”

“Not yet.”

“It wasn’t Jamie, was it?”

“I don’t think so.”

“But you’re not sure.”

“I just don’t know, Aggie.”

“What do the police think?”

“A man named Ehrenberg’s in charge of the investigation. He said Jamie’s not a suspect, but I’m not sure I believe him.”

“What’d Jamie tell you?”

“That he didn’t do it. Honey, I’ve got to go. What time will you be through with that rehearsal?”

“One at the very latest.”

“I’ll try to call you after that. Aggie...?”

“Yes, darling?”

“I almost told her last night. I almost told Susan I wanted a divorce.”

“But you didn’t.”

“No.”

“All right, darling.”

“Aggie, I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

“I’ll try to call later.”

“Yes.”

“I love you,” I said, and put the phone gently back on the cradle. I fished another dime from my pocket, looked up the number for the Magnolia Garden Motel, and quickly dialed it.

“Magnolia Garden,” a woman said, “good morning.”

“Good morning,” I said. “May I please speak to Dr. Purchase, he’s in room number twelve.”

“Unit number twelve, yes, sir,” she said. “Dr. Purchase, Dr. Purchase...” Her voice trailed. I had the feeling she was running her index finger down a list of guests. “He’s checked out, sir,” she said.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, sir.”

“When did he leave?”

“About nine, I guess it was. Calusa Cab picked him up.”

“Thank you,” I said, and hung up. It was very hot in the phone booth. I opened the door to let in some air. A trailer truck was rumbling past, it filled the booth with noise and diesel exhaust. I knew from experience that taxicab companies, in Calusa or anywhere else, would tell no one but the police where they had driven a passenger. I debated calling Calusa Cab and saying I was Detective Ehrenberg. I didn’t have the nerve. Instead, I tried to figure where Jamie might have gone at nine in the morning, still dressed in what he was wearing the night before — he’d taken nothing with him when we left the house. Not even a shaving kit. I figured the only place he could have gone was back home to shower and shave and change his clothes. I knew the number by heart.

“Detective Di Luca,” a voice said. Ehrenberg’s partner, the small dark man with the blue eyes. His voice was rather high-pitched. It came as a surprise. I’d have expected from him something closer to a rasp or a whisper.

“This is Matthew Hope,” I said. “I’m Dr. Purchase’s attorney.”

“Yes, sir, good morning,” Di Luca said.

“Good morning. I was wondering if Dr. Purchase might be there.”

“Yes, sir, he got here just a little while ago. Did you want to speak to him?”

“If I may.”

“Well... just a second, okay?”

He put down the phone. I heard him yelling something to somebody named Harry. I caught the word “doctor,” and then Jamie came on the line.

“Hello?” he said.

“Jamie, this is Matt. Listen to me. I want to see you right away, and not at the house with policemen crawling all over the place.”

“What’s wrong, Matt?”

“Nothing’s wrong, I have to talk to you. How nearly dressed are you?”

“I’m dressed.”

“Had you planned on working today?”

“No. I’ve already called in and told Louise to cancel my appointments.”

“Good. Can you get to my office by ten-thirty?”

“What is it, Matt?”

“Can you get there?”

“Yes, sure.”

“I’ll see you then,” I said. “Good-bye, Jamie.”

“Good-bye, Matt,” he said. His voice seemed puzzled.

I put the receiver back onto the hook and went out to where I’d parked the car near the air hose. The garage attendant was standing there with his hands on his hips. He seemed offended about something; I guessed I was blocking his hose. He kept watching me as I climbed into the car. Just as I started to back out, he said, “How much you want for that car?”

“It’s not for sale,” I said.

“You ought to get that fender fixed,” he said. “Ruins the look of it.”

“I’ll get around to it.”

“They don’t make those cars no more, you know.”

“I know,” I said. “It’s a classic.”

“Damn right, it is,” he said.

The day was beginning to warm up. I turned on the air conditioner. It rattled and clonked and clunked, but it cooled off the automobile. It was almost ten o’clock when I reached the cutoff to Route 74. I switched on the radio and caught the last few bars of a schmaltzy arrangement of “Sunrise, Sunset.” The news came on immediately afterward. The lead story was the murder of Maureen Purchase and her daughters Emily and Eve.

It was real at last.

Cynthia Huellen was a native Floridian with long blonde hair and a glorious tan that she worked at almost fanatically; never a weekend went by that did not find Cynthia on a beach or a boat. She was easily the most beautiful person in the law offices of Summerville & Hope, twenty-three years old, and employed by us as a receptionist. We kept telling her to quit the job and go to law school instead. She already had a B.A. from the University of South Florida, and we were ready to take her into the firm the minute she passed her bar exams. Cynthia just grinned and said, “No, I don’t want the hassle of school again.”

She looked up as I came into the office.

“Frank would like to see you right away,” she said.

“Okay. Any calls?”

“Mr. Galatier.”

“What’d he want?”

“Said to remind you of his appointment at twelve.”

“How could I forget? Anybody else?”

“Your wife. Said it wasn’t important.”

“Okay. Buzz Frank and tell him I’m going to shower and change. I’ll be with him in five minutes. Tell him Jamie’s coming in at ten-thirty.”

“What an awful, awful thing,” Cynthia said.

“Yes. And Cyn, I think maybe you’d better call Galatier and tell him I can’t see him after all. It’s liable to get hectic around here, and I won’t need a goddamn lunatic underfoot.”

“Did you win?” Cynthia asked.

“No,” I answered.

The one luxury I’d insisted on in our offices was a shower stall. The architect wanted to put it on the wall between my office and Frank’s, next door to the bathroom, where the plumbing was going to be. But he couldn’t do this without cutting down on the interior size of Frank’s office. Frank said he did not mind people taking showers in the office when they should have been taking them at home. He did, however, mind his office being trimmed to the size of a broom closet simply to accommodate a sweaty athlete. Our architect had opted for the other side of the corridor instead, putting the shower stall between the conference room and Karl Jennings’s office — Karl was just out of law school and enjoyed no executive privileges. I went into my own office, picked up my change of clothes, and was starting toward the door again when the telephone rang. I put everything down on the leather couch opposite the desk and picked up the phone.

“Yes?” I said.

“Mr. Hope, it’s your wife again,” Cynthia said. “Can you talk to her now?”

“All right, put her on,” I said. I looked at my watch. It was almost ten past ten; Jamie would be here in twenty minutes and I still hadn’t talked to Frank.

“Hello?” Susan said.

“Yes, Susan, what is it?”

“Are you still angry?” she asked.

“No, just in a hurry.”

“I’m sorry about yesterday.”

“That’s all right,” I said. “Susan, I really can’t talk right now. We’ll discuss it when I get home, okay?”

“You haven’t forgotten tonight, have you?”

“What’s tonight?”

“The gallery opening, and then dinner at—”

“Yes, right. It’s here on my calendar. Susan, I’ve got to say good-bye now.”

“All right, we’ll talk when you get home.”

“Fine.”

“Do you have any idea what time that’ll be?”

“Susan, I just got here this minute, I haven’t even—”

“All right, darling, go ahead,” she said.

“We’ll talk later,” I said.

“Yes, good-bye.”

“Good-bye,” I said and put down the receiver and collected my clothes again. I was carrying them across the corridor when Frank stepped out of his office next door.

There are people who say that Frank and I look alike. I cannot see any resemblance. I’m six feet two inches tall and weigh a hundred and ninety pounds. Frank’s a half-inch under six feet, and he weighs a hundred and seventy, which he watches like a hawk. We both have dark hair and brown eyes, but Frank’s face is rounder than mine. Frank says there are only two types of faces in the world — pig faces and fox faces. He classifies himself as a pig face and me as a fox face. There is nothing derogatory about either label; they are only intended to be descriptive. Frank first told me about his designation system last October. Ever since, I’ve been unable to look at anyone without automatically categorizing him as either pig or fox.

“Why’s Jamie coming here?” he said at once.

“I asked him to. He was lying about that poker game, Frank. He was winning when he left.”

“Who says?”

“Mark Goldman was in the same game.”

“Then why’d Jamie say he was losing?”

“That’s what I want to ask him. That’s why he’s coming here.”

Jamie came into the office fifteen minutes later. He looked well rested, well scrubbed, and cleanly shaved. He was wearing a white linen leisure suit, dark blue sports shirt open at the throat. Frank took his hand and expressed sincere condolences. I asked Jamie if he wanted a drink, and he looked at his watch, and then shook his head. I looked at Frank. Frank nodded.

“Jamie,” I said, “we’re your lawyers, and we’ve got to ask you the same questions the police are going to ask. And we need the answers before they get them.”

“Okay,” Jamie said. There was the same puzzled tone in his voice that had been there earlier on the telephone.

“I’ll give it to you straight,” I said. “I’m not trying to trick you into anything, I’m asking only for the truth. A man named Mark Goldman was in that poker game with you last night. You’d met him before, I’d introduced you one day when we were having lunch at Marina Blue. I guess you’d forgotten him, you didn’t seem to recognize him last night. Man with a mustache, about your height...”

“What about him?” Jamie said.

“I played tennis with him this morning. He told me you were winning when you left the game. Is that true?”

“No, I was losing,” Jamie said.

“How much were you losing?” Frank asked.

“Thirty, forty dollars.”

“So you decided to go home.”

“Yes.”

“But instead you went to The Innside Out for a drink. How come?”

“I was feeling low. About losing.”

“About losing,” Frank repeated.

“Yes.”

“Jamie,” I said, “Detective Ehrenberg is going to talk to all the players who were in that game last night. That’s why he took their names from you. He’ll eventually get to Mark Goldman, even though he was one of the players whose names you didn’t know. Mark’s going to tell him exactly what he told me. You were winning when you quit. You were tired. You were going home to sleep. Now unless you can prove you were at The Innside Out, Ehrenberg’s going to think you did go home. He’s going to think you got there a lot earlier than a quarter to one, when you called me. He’s going to think you were maybe there in time to murder Maureen and the kids. Now Jamie...”

“I didn’t murder them.”

“Did you go directly home from that poker game?”

“No. I told you where I went. I went to The Innside Out.”

“Jamie, we’re talking about first-degree murder here,” Frank said. “We’re talking about the death penalty.”

“I didn’t kill anybody.”

“Were you winning when you left the game?”

“What difference does it make?”

“If you were winning, the other players’ll tell that to the police. And the police’ll wonder why you later said you were losing. So which was it, Jamie? Were you winning, or were—”

“I was winning.”

“All right. Then why’d you leave the game?”

“I was tired. It was just what I said. I wanted to go home to sleep.”

“But instead you went to The Innside Out.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t believe you,” I said.

“Was it a woman?” Frank asked.

“No.”

“Was it?” he insisted.

“Oh, Jesus,” Jamie said, and buried his face in his hands.

“Tell us,” I said.

He began talking.

The clock on the wall of Frank’s office seemed to stop abruptly; there was only the present, there was only Jamie’s story. It was the story I might have told Susan last night had Jamie’s phone call not shattered the moment. As he spoke now, I became all of us. I was Jamie himself, confessing not to a brutal knife murder, no, but to murder nonetheless — the inexorable suffocation of his second marriage. I was Susan listening to the confession I did not make last night, but which Jamie now made for me. And finally, I was the victim Maureen, unable to escape the blade that came at me relentlessly in this fatal blood-spattered cage.

It was a philanderer’s nightmare.

They had arranged to meet at eleven P.M. By a quarter to eleven, he was winning close to sixty dollars. He’d been betting recklessly for the past half-hour, hoping to bring his winnings down to a respectable amount that would enable him to quit without censure. But each foolish risk paid off — he drew to inside straights and filled them, he saved an ace kicker and caught the case ace, he raised with a pair of deuces and the strong hand opposite him abruptly folded. He could not seem to lose — in bed with her later he would whisper that he was lucky in cards, did that mean he was unlucky in love? He did not yet know that this was to be the unluckiest night of his life.

The poker game was his Sunday night alibi. On Wednesday afternoons, his office was closed to patients, and he went to meet her then as well. Maureen accepted his lies without question. But as he left the game on Sunday night, one of the losing players said, “Who are you rushing off to, Jamie? A girlfriend?” He’d thought the game safe until that moment. He said, “Sure, sure, a girlfriend,” and waved good night — but the gratuitous comment bothered him. He was an old hand at infidelity. He’d been cheating on his first wife for half a dozen years before he met Maureen, and then he saw her regularly for another two years before asking for a divorce. He knew that men were worse than women when it came to gossip, and was terrified that his early departure would set them to talking about him. But he’d already left the game, he’d already taken the gamble. He could only hope to win it the way he’d won all the other reckless bets he’d made that night.

He could not understand how he had once again become involved with another woman. Catherine — he named her at last, and seemed relieved to have her name in the open, and in fact expanded upon it at once. Catherine Brenet, the wife of a Calusa surgeon, Dr. Eugene Brenet, a very good man, he said, evaluating Brenet on the basis of his medical skill and not his aptitude for cuckoldry. He’d met her at one of the charity balls, she was his dinner partner, he chatted with her, he danced with her. She was startlingly beautiful. But more than that, she was available. It was this aura of certain availability that first attracted him to her.

He was, after all, experienced at this sort of thing.

He had met this woman before; in the beginning she was only every woman he’d ever transported to clandestine assignations in countless unremembered motels. She was Goldilocks. The bitterly sarcastic name, first applied to Maureen by his former wife, now seemed to be appropriate. Goldilocks — stealing into someone else’s house, testing the chairs and the porridge and especially the beds. Goldilocks, the other woman. She did not have to be blonde, though Maureen was and so was Catherine. She could just as easily have had hair as black as midnight, eyes as pale as alabaster...

We were in the garden of the Leslie Harper Municipal Theater. Frank and his wife Leona, Susan and I. Statues of dwarfs surrounded us, palm fronds fluttered on the languid breeze. There was the scent of mimosa on the air. Leona had just introduced Agatha to the rest of us. Leona described her as a new “Harper Helper.” Frank despised the term. His wife, however, was proud of her fund-raising activities for the theater, and staunchly maintained that the Harper was a very real part of Calusa’s cultural scene. Frank immediately and unequivocally said there was no real culture in Calusa, there was only an attempt to create an ersatz cultural climate. The Harper, he insisted, came close to being vanity theater. He said this within earshot of seven or eight fluttering dowagers who were themselves heavy financial supporters of what was, despite Frank’s biased New York view, a good repertory theater. One of the old ladies sniffed the air as though smelling something recently deceased in the immediate vicinity. Agatha noticed this — and smiled.

I had held her hand an instant too long while being introduced, I had caught my breath too visibly at the radiance of her beauty, and now I basked too obviously in her smile. I was certain I was blushing, and I looked away at once. The warning bells chimed, signaling the end of the intermission. I looked into her pale gray eyes, she nodded almost imperceptibly, and then turned to go, black hair flailing the air. I watched as she crossed the garden to join a tall blond man whose back was to me. There was a lithe, slender, cat-like look about her; she took long strides over the garden stones and climbed the steps to the lobby. A sudden exciting glimpse of leg flashed in the slit of her long green gown, I held my breath and listened to the clicking chatter of her heels on the lobby terrazzo. The warning chimes sounded again. “Matthew?” Susan said, and the four of us went back into the theater. Throughout the second act I tried to locate Agatha Hemmings; the theater was small, but I could not find where she was sitting. Nor did I see her in the lobby afterward. As we walked toward where I’d parked the car, Frank pronounced the play sophomoric.

I called her on Monday morning.

Her husband’s name was Gerald Hemmings, he was a building contractor. I’d learned this from Frank in a supposed rehash of our evening at the Harper together. It was good information to have. There were at least six Hemmingses in the Calusa directory, and I did not have the courage to call each and every one of them to ask if I might please speak to Agatha please. Even then, as the phone rang on the other end, I was ready to hang up if anyone other than Agatha herself answered. She answered on the fifth ring, I had been nervously counting them.

“Hello?” she said.

“Hello... is this Agatha Hemmings?”

“Yes?”

“Matthew Hope.”

Silence.

“We met at the Harper Saturday night. Leona Summerville intro—”

“Yes, Matthew, how are you?”

“Fine. And you?”

“Fine, thank you.”

Silence.

“Agatha, I... look, I’m about to make a complete fool of myself, I know, but... I’d like to see you if that’s possible, for lunch if that’s possible, alone, I mean, if that’s possible. For lunch, I mean.”

There was another silence. I was suffocating in my own air-conditioned office.

“Do we have to have lunch?” she asked.

Jamie was telling us about the first time he met Catherine alone — why had the clock stopped ticking? I did not want to hear about his sordid affair with the surgeon’s promiscuous wife, I did not want this description of their first rendezvous. It was raining, he said. This was February a year ago, it was unusual for it to be raining in Calusa at this time of year. Catherine was waiting where they’d arranged. She was wearing a black raincoat and a floppy green hat that partially hid her face. He pulled the car to the curb and threw open the door, and she stepped inside at once. The black raincoat rode back to expose her leg. He put his hand on her thigh; the touch was electric. There was the aroma of wet and steamy garments in that small contained space. Daringly, he kissed her. The windshield wipers snicked at the rain...

We kissed, Agatha and I, the moment we entered the motel. I had driven her seventeen miles south to the next town, but I was terrified of discovery nonetheless. When we kissed I could think only that I was a fool to be jeopardizing my marriage for an afternoon in the hay. I had convinced myself it was nothing more than that. I had not spoken to Agatha since I’d made the phone call Monday morning. This was now Thursday. I had picked her up in the parking lot behind the Calusa Bank Building at twelve sharp, and it was now a quarter to one on a Thursday in May, three weeks before my thirteenth wedding anniversary. We were kissing in a motel room, and I was scared to death. She gently took her lips from mine.

“We don’t have to stay,” she whispered.

“I want to stay.”

“Just be sure.”

“I’m sure.”

She was wearing tight white slacks, a long-sleeved lavender blouse buttoned down the front. Sandals. She had rather large feet. Toenails painted a bright red. Fingernails the same color. Scarlet lipstick on her mouth, somewhat garish against the pale oval face. Her hair was the color of midnight, it shimmered with blues in the light of the single lamp. She took off her clothes without ceremony or pretense. She was dressed one moment and naked the next. Her breasts were rather smaller than I might have hoped. The black triangle of her crotch was elongated, a sexual isosceles. She came to me again and put her arms around me and kissed me on the mouth.

“I am going to love you, Matthew,” she said.

Jamie was telling virtually the same story. I could have killed him for it. In this timeless chamber, soundless but for the drone of his voice, the clock silenced, time reduced to a geometrically multiplying present, I listened to him telling of his paramour, his doxie, his bimbo, his whore... yes, damn him, he was robbing Agatha and me of the uniqueness of our love, he was reducing our relationship to the level of his own, inadvertently making them both sound like garden-variety affairs. He now loved Catherine more than anyone in his life — she was his second-chance girl, he said. I remembered him saying last night, “Figure it out, how much time have I got left? I’m forty-six, what have I got left, another thirty years?” Forty-six was his age now, his age today, his age last night when he said, “This was my second chance, supposed to be my second chance.” What he’d meant was his second second chance, two to the second power, not Maureen, but the round-heels surgeon’s wife he’d been in bed with while Maureen was being slaughtered.

I felt suddenly faint.

If he did not stop talking I would collapse. He was proclaiming his love for Catherine, telling how together last night they’d talked about their respective mates — he used that word, mates, as though he were a sailor or perhaps an Englishman in a pub, mates; I had never heard anyone before, man or woman, referring to a marital partner as a mate. But Maureen was most certainly his mate, just as Dr. Eugene Brenet was Catherine’s mate. And Susan was mine, and a man I had never met was Agatha’s. A man named Gerald Hemmings, whom she would leave the moment I told my wife, my mate, that I was in love with another woman.

Jamie and his mistress had made the same decision, they made it last night in the place they rented on Whisper Key — this had, after all, been going on for more than a year now, they had advanced well beyond the motel stage, they could afford to rent a small cottage on the beach where they could make love. They promised to tell their respective mates soon, they obviously couldn’t go on this way. Soon, my darling, soon — he was describing their passionate farewell now, Catherine in his arms, kissing her face, her throat, I did not want to listen. Was this why I was ready to end my own marriage? So that seven years from now I could begin another affair with yet another woman, the Maureens and Catherines and Agathas of this world multiplying into an endless sorority of fornicating surgeons’ wives or court stenographers, cocktail waitresses or kindergarten teachers, one and all the same akimbo, each and all named Goldilocks?

He was on Jacaranda Drive now, he was pulling his car into the garage. The lights were on, this wasn’t strange, Maureen usually left them on when he was out playing poker. He cut the ignition and came around to the side door of the house, unlocked it. He was hoping she would be asleep. She sometimes waited up for him, but he hoped she hadn’t done that now. He was flushed with excitement, but this was not the time to tell her about his plans, not yet, he did not want her forcing his hand by asking unanswerable questions.

He snapped on the bedroom lights.

He saw the blood-spattered walls first.

He almost backed out of the room. He thought someone had, he thought his daughters, he thought, he did not know it was blood at first, he thought someone had soiled the walls. The blood smears were not the color of the bright red stripe that follows a surgeon’s scalpel and wells up into the incision, they were not the black-red of blood in a syringe or a bottle, they were almost brown. He thought at first — these were all instantaneous ideas that flashed into his mind with stopwatch frequency — he thought someone had smeared feces on the walls.

He saw her hand then.

The closet door was open, and he saw her hand protruding from inside the closet, palm upward. He moved to the closet door. He stopped. He looked down at the hand. He said, “Oh, my God,” and opened the door. He realized at once that she must have run into the closet to hide, her final refuge from whoever had slashed her nightgown to flowing tatters of nylon, her body to ribbons of flesh. There was a rosette on the bodice of the gown, it registered as a small pink eye against the blood-drenched pink of the gown itself. Her face was almost unrecognizable. There were deep gashes across her breasts, and her throat had been cut from one ear to the other so that there was a wide, grinning bloody mouth below her own mouth gaping at the ceiling. He knelt quickly beside her and closed her eyes, thinking absurdly that she should not witness this horror.

And then he remembered the children.

He got to his feet. He stumbled to the door and down the corridor to their room, thinking, praying they were asleep, hoping the sounds of her struggle had not wakened the children, had not revealed to the intruder that there were two young girls in this house besides the woman he’d already killed.

He almost tripped over Emily in the doorway to the bedroom.

He backed away, he backed away.

He screamed—

The telephone shrilled into the sudden stillness of Frank’s office. He picked it up immediately.

“Hello?” he said. “Yes, Cynthia.” He looked at me. “For you, Matt.”

It was Betty Purchase, Jamie’s former wife, telling me she’d just been visited by a Detective Ehrenberg of the Calusa Police Department, and asking if I could come to her house at once.