Sweet and Deadly aka Dead Dog

4

SHE CAME IN the side door from the garage. Her coffee cup and the empty percolator still stood on the counter, waiting to be washed. The hands of the kitchen clock glided electrically smooth on their course.

She was almost surprised that the house was the same, so much had passed since she had left it that morning.

She stood in the middle of the bright tiled floor and listened. She had never done that before.

Catherine shook herself when she realized what she was doing, and started down the long hallway that divided the house, beginning at the kitchen and ending at a bathroom.

But she looked quickly into each doorway as she passed. She saw only the big familiar lifeless rooms, lovingly (and lavishly) redecorated by her mother. She paused in the doorway of the formal living room, where her parents had entertained, and suddenly recalled her father half-ruefully telling guests, “Rachel’s rebuilt this old house from the inside out.” It was the only room Catherine had changed.

At the end of the hall Catherine almost went right into her old bedroom. It’s been months since I did that, she thought.

She went straight through the master bedroom to its cool tiled bathroom and shed everything she had on. She stepped into the shower, but not before self-consciously locking the bathroom door.

She had never done that before, either.

The shower was bliss. With cool water shooting over her, washing off the layers of dust and sweat, she was able to forget the shack for a few minutes.

She dried herself and combed out her wet hair slowly. She lay down on the big bed and hoped for sleep, but her body hummed with tension like a telephone line. Finally she quit hoping and got up, padding across the heavy carpeting to the closet and folding back a mirrored door to pull out a long loose lounging dress, pale gray and scattered with red poppies. She yanked it over her head and went down the hall to the kitchen, where she began searching the refrigerator.

Good. Beer. With one of those in me, I bet I can sleep. I’m glad Tom left some.

Armed with the beer and a fresh pack of cigarettes, Catherine wandered into the living room. She settled in her favorite chair, which she had pulled out of its original spot so she could look out the bay window. She had arranged beside it a heavy round table, and, some time later, another chair to keep the first one company. It was her own little base in a house too big for one person; a house still echoing with loss.

The old home across the street had been renovated into the town library. It closed at eleven on Saturday, so Catherine was just in time to see Mrs. Weilenmann, the librarian, lock the front door. Mrs. Weilenmann was the town wonder: an educated northern black woman, who spoke with no trace of the heavy accent white Southerners associated with blacks. And, rumor had it, Mrs. Weilenmann, a widow, had acquired her name by marrying a white man. It was a bandage to Catherine’s conscience that Mrs. Weilenmann had gotten the librarian’s job. The only wonder, as Catherine saw it, was that she wanted it.

I meant to go to the library today when I got back, Catherine recalled, glancing down at the heap of books on the floor as Mrs. Weilenmann maneuvered her Toyota out of the library parking lot.

Catherine reckoned she had enough to read to last until Monday. And took a swallow of beer to celebrate that minor goodness.

A possible diversion occurred to her. She craned forward to see if Mr. Drummond next door was holding true to form in his late-Saturday-morning grass mowing. But the lawn beyond the hedge that bordered Catherine’s yard was empty. She was disappointed and puzzled. She faithfully witnessed Mr. Drummond’s ritual each summer Saturday. After a moment, she remembered that the Drummonds were still in Europe, and shook her head at her forgetfulness.

Perhaps she could move her chair to face a side window. She could look across Mayhew Street, see if the Perkinses were back at work in their yard.

It didn’t seem worth the trouble.

I’ll just sit and drink my beer, she decided. Maybe I’ll think of something to do to use up this blasted day.

Her eyes fell on a half-finished book. She considered reading, but decided she couldn’t concentrate enough. The book was a murder mystery. Not such a good thing to read today. Her mouth twisted wryly.

After a moment Catherine wriggled deeper into the big chair, stretching her legs to rest them on its matching ottoman. She drank some more beer. She was profoundly bored, yet very tense. She decided it was a horrible combination.

“Toes, relax,” she said out loud, suddenly recalling an acting-class exercise. “Feet, relax.”

She had worked up to her pelvis when she was diverted by a car pulling onto the graveled apron at the end of the walkway in front of the house. She suspended her exercise in astonishment.

The car was familiar, but she couldn’t place the owner. Not Tom, her only occasional visitor. He would merely stroll across to her back door from his own.

“It’s Randall Gerrard!” she muttered. Her employer had never come to see her before.

She didn’t realize the impact the beer had had on her empty stomach until she got up.

Instead of straightening up the pile of books, instead of fluffling out her damp hair, Catherine stared at Randall as he came up the walkway.

She itemized his heavy shoulders and thick chest, surprising on a man of his height. Especially surprising on a man who had, Catherine told herself, no butt at all.

The sun glinted on the thick reddish-brown hair of his head and beard, and winked off his heavy glasses.

How old must he be now? she wondered. Thirty-five?

She stood riveted and staring. Like a fool, she told herself when she finally roused. She had just begun to move when he knocked on the door, and she could only be grateful he had not glanced at the window.

“Please come in,” she said. The beer soaked her voice with a duchesslike formality. She blinked in surprise.

Randall’s face, which had been grave, lit with amusement. She followed his glance down to her hand that had gestured him in with a gracious flourish. She saw, appalled, that she was still clutching the beer can. Her elaborate sweep had slopped beer all over her hand.

“Oh damn!” she muttered.

He said gently, “Catherine.”

To her horror, that note of kindness tipped her into collapse. She began to cry. She twisted away to hide her face, covered her mouth to muffle the ugly sound. She hated for anyone to see her crumple.

A heavy arm went around her, and she instantly twitched away. But she didn’t move when the arm firmly encircled her again.

She was somehow deposited on a convenient couch. She dimly heard footsteps crossing the floor and going purposefully down the hall. She looked up as Randall reappeared with a box of tissues. She blessed him mentally, and lowered her face. She was acutely aware of how dreadful she looked when she cried. As she cleaned her face, she felt the tears dry up inside her.

Catherine waited until she could hope that her nose had returned to its normal color before she brushed her hair back and looked sideways at him…and surprised something in Randall’s face that amazed her, something unmistakable; though it had been a long time since she had cared to recognize it in a man’s face.

Empty and giddy, Catherine felt a pleasant little jolt of lust. She had seen and thought too much of death to deny that positive celebration of life.

“Better?” Randall asked, with a fair assumption of gravity.

“Yes, thank you,” she answered with dignity.

He handed her the beer can. Catherine took a sizeable swallow. Her eyes were on his face-a Slavic peasant face, she thought darkly-as he looked around the room, zeroed in on her arrangement in the bay window. The soft chair with the dent her body had left, the paperback with a bookmark thrust inside, the lamp pulled over close to her chair surrounded by a litter of books: it looked like what it was, the habitual den of a solitary person. From where she was sitting now, Catherine thought, it looked pitiful.

“If you heard so fast,” she said hastily, “then…”

An impatient knock on the back door finished her sentence.

“Tom,” Catherine said simply.

She was regretting the end of a promising moment as she went through the den at the rear of the house to answer the knock.

As she had predicted, it was Tom, her only full-time fellow reporter. His long lean frame bisected the doorway.

“Are you all right” he asked perfunctorily. His mouth had already opened to begin firing questions when Catherine cut him short.

“You might as well come on in the living room, Randall’s in there,” she said.

Tom looked almost comically taken aback.

Catherine, bowled over by giddiness, nearly laughed as she preceded Tom into the living room.

“Hey, Randall,” he said casually, folding his length into an uncomfortable Victorian rosewood chair. Then he forgot to be offhand. “The coroner’s jury said murder, of course. And a Gazette reporter found the body! Jesus, what a story!” He yanked his fearsome Fu Manchu mustache so fiercely that Catherine thought he might pull the hair out.

“Calm down, Tom, it’s not like there was another paper to scoop,” Randall said. He took his pipe from his pocket.

“Hey Catherine, is there any of that beer left?” Tom asked, sidetracked into showing Randall that he, Tom, had been there first.

“Three or four,” Catherine said. “Randall, would you care for a beer?”

Randall accepted.

It seemed to Catherine that she took forever pulling out the tabs on three cans, pouring them, and putting the glasses on a tray.

Pouring them out seemed an unnecessary refinement, but she was determined to do everything right.

When Catherine came in with the beer, Randall and Tom were discussing rearrangement of the front page to handle the murder story. The paper only came out on Wednesdays, so there was plenty of time to think about it.

After she had handed the glasses around and resumed her seat, she realized the men were eyeing her with longing-for her story. Randall Gerrard and Tom Mascalco had print in their blood-the only thing they had in common, Catherine thought.

Randall had inherited the Gazette when his elder brother, for whom it had been intended, had shaken that dust of Lowfield off his shoes and headed for the fertile fields of Atlanta. In fact, Randall had abandoned a promising career doing something in Washington (Catherine couldn’t remember exactly what), to come home when his father died.

However deep Randall’s regret over that lost career might be, his raising had implanted in him enough of the newsman’s passion for a story, and enough love for the Delta, to bend his will toward building up the Gazette.

Tom had worked for Randall for three months. He was younger than Catherine. The recent glut of journalism majors had made him glad to accept a job, even at the Gazette.

Tom was possessed, Catherine had observed, by a Woodward-and-Bernstein complex, which had led to some interesting clashes with Randall. Tom was restless with hunger for big stories, scandals. Catherine sometimes felt she had a tiger in her backyard since she had rented Tom her father’s old office to live in.

“I’m all right, if you want to ask questions,” she said with a sigh. After all, she thought, I’m a newspaper person myself. In a rinky-dink kind of way.

“You sure?” Randall had the grace to ask.

“Yes.”

Catherine knew that Tom had only been held in check by Randall’s presence. His pad and pencil had been ready in his hand when he knocked on the door.

In a clear monotone, she went through her story again. She wished it were more exciting, since she had had to tell it so often.

“Galton. Jerry Selforth,” Tom mumbled when she had finished, scribbling a list of people he wanted to interview.

“Who were her friends, Catherine?” he asked, pencil poised to write.

He looked up impatiently when she didn’t reply.

“I don’t know,” she said slowly, surprised. “I don’t think Miss Gaites had friends. She didn’t go to church or to the bridge club, or anything like that. She told my father she saw enough people at the office every day to make her sick of them.”

And Catherine had to admit at that moment that her own attitude was much the same.

The thought of becoming a Leona Gaites frightened her.

“When was the last time you saw Leona?” Randall asked in his slow voice.

“When she helped me go through the things left in Father’s office; things Jerry Selforth didn’t want to buy. They had to be moved out of the house before Tom moved in. We put them up in the attic over there. Some old filing cabinets. I think a few other things.”

“Not since then?” Tom asked. “I thought you had known her for years.”

“Yes, I have-had. But that doesn’t mean I liked her.”

The two men seemed startled by this statement, which Catherine had delivered with bland finality. She returned their look impassively. They had not expected this from her, she saw. She really must have presented a skimmed-milk image.

“Have you talked to Jerry Selforth, Tom?” Randall asked.

“Just for a second. He hasn’t done the autopsy. The pathologist in Morene won’t get here till late this afternoon. From a preliminary examination, he doesn’t think she was raped. She wasn’t killed at the shack, either. She was already dead when she was dumped there. He thinks she’d been dead since early last night.”

“Why?” Randall asked himself.

Catherine’s head swung up. She stared at him blindly.

A reason formed in her head. It caused her such pain that she couldn’t recognize it for a moment. Something thumped and shuddered inside her. An enormous wound, compounded of deep grief and unreleased anger, just beginning to heal, broke open afresh.

“Did she have money?” Tom was asking. He sounded far away.

“Oh no,” Randall said. “If she had, she kept it a secret and lived like a woman who has to be careful.”

Shuddering and screeching, about to be born.

“My parents,” Catherine whispered.

“What, Catherine?”

“My parents.”

“What did she say?” Tom’s voice; an irritating buzz, like a horsefly.

A murmur from Randall.

“I thought they died in a car wreck.” Tom, clearer now.

“They were murdered,” said Catherine.

“And you think Leona’s death ties in with theirs?” Randall asked quietly.

His voice steadied her.

“Oh yes, I think it has to be connected,” she said.

Tom looked bewildered, and angry about his bewilderment. They were talking about something he hadn’t found out yet.

“Their car was tampered with,” she told him. “They were on their way to spend the weekend with me. I was working at a weekly paper in Arkansas, my first job out of college…After they crossed the bridge into Arkansas, their car went out of control. Something-” and here Catherine, incurably machine-stupid, shook her head helplessly-“something was loosened with a wrench, deliberately. The Arkansas police investigated the service station they had stopped at there. Sheriff Galton looked here.”

“They never caught who did it?” Tom was incredulous.

“No,” she said bleakly. “How could they? Anyone could have gotten into our garage, Father didn’t lock it. And it must have been done here. Why would a service-station attendant in Arkansas do anything like that? They were nice people…I met them.” She closed her eyes and leaned back against the couch.

She heard Tom rise, and knew it was because he was too excited to sit. I’ve made one person happy today, she thought.

“I’m going to call Galton,” he said eagerly. Without another word, he stalked out the back door.

She forgot him as soon as he was gone.

I’ve been waiting for this, Catherine realized. Somewhere in this little town he’s been waiting, too, free and alive. Everyone forgot about my parents after a while. But now that he’s killed again, he’s drawn attention to himself. I’ve been waiting…She knew it now and was amazed she had not known it before. She was frightened to discover that this blood lust existed in quiet Catherine Linton.

But it was anger released. It felt good.

She opened her eyes to meet Randall’s. He looked thoughtful.

“Go to bed,” he advised gently, and kissed her on the cheek. “I’ll come by tomorrow.”

She could hear him let himself out as she went obediently to the soft waiting bed. She didn’t wonder at his sliding into the position of man to her woman, instead of employer to employee. She accepted the transition without question. As she turned over on her stomach and wrapped her arms around the pillow, she was able to forget her parents, forget Leona Gaites, for the moment before sleep swamped her.