The Night Remembers

7

“Do you have a family lawyer?” I asked Mrs. Pennyfeather.

“Yes.”

“I’d call him after I call the police.”

The son was still visibly disturbed. “You know what the police are going to think, don’t you?”

“I know,” I said. “But the longer we put off calling the police, the worse it’s going to look for him.”

“Would you — go inside with me?” Mrs. Pennyfeather asked me. “Perhaps you would call the police for us?”

“Of course.”

David said, “Do you want me to stay out here — with her?”

“I don’t think it would be a bad idea,” I said, taking his mother by the elbow. “Thank you, David.”

“It’s all right. I understand.” Those were his first civil words to me.

We went back across the wet, moonlit lawn, the neighbor’s dog starting in once again, the wheels of a car splashing through the street out front, romantic music playing low, as background, coming from inside. Just as we reached the back door, she paused and took off my sport coat and handed it back to me. “George has always been the jealous type.” She tried to smile but couldn’t quite.

We went in through a big shadowy kitchen that smelled of spices and out into a wide dining room. A long formal dining table with a silver candelabrum in the center glistened from scrupulous polishing over the years. The lighted candles cast a soft tan glow in the room.

At the table sat three people, a prosperous-looking man and woman who were dressed up properly, he in an expensive blue double-breasted suit, she in a black evening gown with a gigantic diamond brooch riding her bosom. Lisa Penny-feather said, “Nedra and Paul Heckart, I’d like you to meet Mr. Walsh.”

The couple looked puzzled. Who was I? What was I doing here? Every one of their social instincts said I didn’t belong here. I put out my hand. Heckart, who had to be in his early sixties, grabbed on with an almost painful clasp, one that said despite white hair, a bit of jowliness, and a certain air of country-club indolence, he was still a strong and purposeful man.

Mrs. Heckart took my hand, too, though it was a brief social touch and nothing more, nothing to prove in it. Despite the twenty extra pounds that encased her, you could see that in her time she’d been a good-looking woman, bright of gaze and teasing in a pleasant womanly way of rich, full mouth.

The third person was a younger, trimmer version of Paul Heckart. He spoke with a certain secretiveness into a mobile phone. The way he squirmed in the chair, the fist he clenched and unclenched on the table, spoke of a deep anxiety. I wondered if it could have anything to do with a dead woman in the gazebo swing. He glanced up at me with frank resentment. I was an intruder. The Heckart brothers ran a locally prominent interior design studio for the carriage trade. They were just as snotty as you’d expect them to be.

He said, “Well, Donna, he’s your husband. If you don’t feel he needs to go into detox for treatment, then I guess I won’t bother trying to help anymore.” He spoke not in anger but instead with a certain weariness. “I’d better be going now,” he said into the phone. He clicked off the connection by pushing his thumb into a button. Shaking his head, he said, “Office problems. They never end.

“It’s no use, Paul,” he said to the man across from him. “We’ve done all we can now. About all that’s left to do is let him go, I’m afraid.”

“God, I hate to do that,” Paul Heckart said, sounding genuinely sorry.

Lisa Pennyfeather leaned forward, putting a hand on the man’s shoulder. “Richard, this is Mr. Walsh.”

“Nice to meet you,” he said, not sounding happy at all. He didn’t offer his hand. He sat there in an open-necked white shirt and blue blazer looking something like a clothing ad. His silver hair lent him a sophistication his rough blue gaze denied. He was one of those seemingly pampered men whose violence always surprised you. I’d had to arrest my share of rich drunks over the years and while the majority tried to bully you with their connections, there was still a good number who were every bit as given to biting, kicking, and punching as the lowest derelict.

“I have to tell you something,” Lisa said.

They sensed the urgency of her tone right away. They watched her carefully.

“I’m afraid the night’s been rather ruined.”

She couldn’t find the words.

I leaned in and said, “Mrs. Pennyfeather found a dead woman in the gazebo out back.”

“My God,” said Paul Heckart.

“A dead woman?” asked Richard Heckart, trying to absorb what I’d said.

“Poor George,” Mrs. Heckart said.

“We’re going to have to call the police, of course,” Mrs. Pennyfeather said.

“Of course,” Nedra Heckart said.

“Would you mind staying here a minute or so? I’m going into the front room and speak with George and Carolyn.”

“Of course,” Paul Heckart said.

We went into the living room. On one of the fawn-colored couches, seated as close as lovers, sat George Pennyfeather and his daughter, Carolyn. In a blue frock with white lace at top and wrists, she was most obviously her mother’s daughter, fetching and gentle in the flickering reddish flames of the fireplace.

Her first impulse was to cock her head curiously, something her mother did quite often, and say, with the soft earnestness of someone far younger, “Hello, Mother. Father was just telling me about your first date.”

Her mother offered a sad smile. “Oh, that was a disaster. I’m surprised he even wants to talk about it. I was so prim.”

“A goody-goody,” Carolyn said, laughing. “And you still are.”

My eyes moved to the small man next to her. You see them all the time, the mismatched couples: the man drab, the woman beautiful, and you wonder how and why they ever got together. George and Lisa Pennyfeather were like that, George being short, slender, with thinning gray hair, wire-rimmed eyeglasses, a baggy cardigan sweater, a dull red shirt beneath, and the slightly distracted air of a man who is more alive to internal demons than anything he sees in the material world. He sat slightly slumped, prison-ashen of pallor, offering little smiles that attached to nothing, just a nervous habit, probably, from surviving the wiles of the penitentiary. Seeing him now, I remembered spending three months on the investigation twelve years ago. He’d been like that then — quiet, pained, apologetic. One night, following two hours of intense questioning, he’d said, “I suppose all this is as much a burden on you as it is on me.” He’d seemed concerned about me in some way and I’d never forgotten it, the oddness of such a reaction to a man who was trying to arrest you for murder.

“Hello, Mr. Walsh,” he said now.

“Hello.”

At mention of my name, Carolyn Pennyfeather turned toward me, her eyes filling instantly with anger. “Mr. Walsh?” she said. “What are you doing here?”

I didn’t know what to say.

“He’s going to help us,” Lisa Pennyfeather said gently.

“Help us? Help us with what?” Carolyn Pennyfeather asked. “Help us ruin our evening with Father?”

Now that she was standing, I saw that she, like her brother, stood at least a foot over her parents. She had her mother’s good looks, but she also had an assertiveness new to the Pennyfeather lineage.

“I don’t want him here, Mother. I don’t want him here at all.” I put her age at a few years younger than her brother. She was probably twenty-four or twenty-three.

“I’m not trying to ruin your night,” I said.

“I... I asked him here,” Lisa Pennyfeather said.

“What, Mother? You invited him here?”

“Something’s happened.”

George Pennyfeather put his palms flat on the cushions of the couch and pushed himself to his feet. Prison had made him old. He took Carolyn’s arm. “Honey, Mr. Walsh was only doing his job when he arrested me. Why don’t we listen to what your mother has to say?”

I wanted him to be angry, to hate me for all I represented. It would have made a lot more sense to me, and it would have made me feel a lot less guilty. The longer I looked at this forlorn little man, the more difficult it became to imagine him a killer. Then or now.

“There’s a woman in the gazebo,” Lisa Pennyfeather said.

“A woman?” Carolyn asked. “What woman?”

“We don’t know. That’s why I asked Mr. Walsh out here. To help us figure out how to handle it.”

“Handle what?”

“She’s dead, Carolyn. Stabbed.”

“What?”

George Pennyfeather’s eyes turned ever more inward. He sat back down on the couch, slowly, as if it might be the last act of his life. He looked up at me. “It’s starting all over again, Mr. Walsh.”

I had to say something for everybody’s sake. I could no longer be detached in the way I wanted to be. I said, “I’m going to help you find out what happened here tonight, George.” I glanced at Lisa Pennyfeather. “But now I’d better call the police.”

“They’re going to arrest me, aren’t they?” George Pennyfeather said in a dazed voice from the couch.

The strength I’d attributed to Carolyn Pennyfeather went quickly enough. As Lisa showed me to the phone, I saw Carolyn go over to a plump armchair, sit on the edge, and break without inhibition into little-girl tears.