The Night Remembers

9

I sat in a room filled with a Baldwin baby grand and several bookcases packed with the book club editions of the past decade’s bestsellers. A floor lamp, burning low, made everything shadowy and melancholy.

This was another half hour past the time I’d spoken to Detective Gaute. Through louvered windows, I could see where the police had roped off the front of the lawn to keep onlookers out. The ambulance gone, the crowd was beginning to thin. In the rain the onlookers had the soaked fervid air of religious zealots awaiting a miracle. It was unlikely the dead woman was going to come back from the grave.

I had wanted to say goodbye to Lisa Pennyfeather. Now, seeing that my watch read past midnight, I wanted only to get home. I’d tried Faith’s number. The line was busy. I knew what that meant. Whenever she was upset, she took the receiver off the hook. I’d tried the operator just in case. She checked the number and said that there was apparently a problem with the line. She said she’d report it. I said not to bother.

So I sat now with a slick magazine called Country Home, staring at pictures of a rambling rustic home Sharon would have loved, leaning into the soft glowing warmth of lamplight and letting my eyes close every few seconds in drowsy bliss. Not unlike Faith, I sometimes dealt with problems by sleeping through them. Unfortunately, I had learned this trick only a few years ago. Before then I’d been given to pacing and cigarettes and coffee liberally laced with whiskey.

In the back yard you could hear the wind in the darkness and then the police and officials moving around in the light-blasted night. Every once in a while there would be a laugh, and in the silence of this small, handsome room the sound seemed vulgar and out of place.

I must have dozed. I heard my name called softly. When I got my eyes opened I saw that the door had been closed, and before it stood the beautiful daughter Carolyn.

“Mr. Walsh?”

I sat up, setting the magazine back on the stand.

“This is sort of embarrassing,” I said. “I must have been asleep.”

“I’m the one who’s embarrassed.”

“Oh?”

“For treating you the way I did.”

I smiled. “Believe it or not, I’ve been treated much worse.”

She came from the shadows in the circle of light. She was her mother thirty years ago, floating on the generational tide. “I’ve hated you for so many years now, I’m shaking.” As evidence, she showed me a small, well-turned hand. It trembled.

“I would have hated me, too.”

“But you were only doing your job. Somehow I didn’t realize that until tonight.”

“If a man had helped put my father in prison, I would have hated him, too.”

She came closer into the soft shadowy light, an anxious animal. Until now, she’d kept her left hand behind her back. Now, she brought it around. It held a white envelope. She leaned forward and gave it to me.

“I’d like you to take this,” she said.

“What is it?”

“A check for five hundred dollars.”

“For what?”

“I want to hire you.”

I slumped back in the seat, unreasonably tired and already hating myself because I knew what was coming, and because I was going to refuse her. “As I said to your mother this morning, I just don’t think it’s a good idea.”

“He knew her.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“He knew her. My father knew the dead woman.”

“Oh.”

“You heard what he told the police?”

“No.”

“He told them that he’d never seen her before and had absolutely no idea who she was.”

“That wasn’t smart. They can check.”

“They can and will. That’s why I need to hire you.”

“Your mother wanted me to prove your father was innocent of the first murder. Now you want me to prove that he’s innocent of the second as well?”

She put her hands primly in front of her. The Pennyfeather women had a way of making primness most erotic. “They’re connected.”

“The first murder and the second?”

“Of course.”

“You know that for a fact?”

She shook her head. “But common sense would say so.”

“Common sense doesn’t get you very far with the law. Not unless you have some sort of evidence to back it up with.”

“Think about it. He hasn’t been out of prison a week and here a woman is murdered in his back yard. Somebody decided he would be the best candidate for a... well, a frame-up, as melodramatic as that sounds.”

“He was framed for the first murder and now he’s been framed for a second?”

“Don’t scoff.”

“I’m not scoffing. I’m merely being properly skeptical. It’s something to be skeptical about, don’t you think?”

“You know my father. Do you really think he could kill anyone?”

“Sometimes the meekest of people become the most savage of killers.”

“Well, that may be so. But not my father.”

“I don’t see how I can help.”

“Check on the woman. Find out whom she knew and what she had to gain from my father.”

“Why are you so sure he knew her?”

“Because I saw them together yesterday at Ellis Park.”

“You did?”

She nodded. “Yes. I was following him.”

“Your father?”

She stared at me with her huge luminous eyes. “It sounds terrible, I know. But each afternoon since he came back he’d go off somewhere by himself, and when he’d come back he’d seem very upset. I asked him about this but he wouldn’t say anything. He said he just liked to drive around and enjoy his freedom. But I knew better.”

“You didn’t hear anything they said?”

“No, I wasn’t that close. But I did look in her car and copy down her name and address. They’re in the envelope.” She looked off into the gloom of a darkened corner. “He’s so sweet. So gentle. He has been all our lives. He— Well, you can see how beautiful my mother is. I don’t suppose you’d expect her to marry a man like my father. She was obviously pursued by so many more handsome men. But they didn’t have any of my father’s quiet charm or his dedication to being a husband and a father.” She turned back to me, her eyes shiny with tears. I saw her mother again in her face and heard the whisper-soft sorrow in her voice. “There’s nobody else I can turn to, Mr. Walsh. Nobody else.”

I got up and put my arm around her and she came into my embrace and I held her while she cried. She moved with soft frenzy as she pressed against me. The door opened, and her mother came in and saw us. “Carolyn!” she said. “Honey, what’s the matter?”

Carolyn turned from me and started to compose herself.

I said, “She just hired me, Mrs. Pennyfeather.”

“Hired you?” Lisa Pennyfeather asked. “But I thought—”

I laughed. “Nobody could resist two Pennyfeather women. Nobody.”

“Well, at least looks still count for something in this world,” Lisa Pennyfeather said. At another time it would have been a wry observation; now it just sounded forlorn, particularly since it was accompanied by thunder rumbling across the midnight sky.

I said goodbye and was pulling away from the curb in less than a minute and a half.