Crooked Heart Read online

  It had required serious willpower to keep his nose pointed at Amalie while Kathryn responded to his last comment. But the only way he’d been able to get away with that remark was by making it (writing it) and then acting as if it weren’t important and he didn’t care what she said back. In fact, he hadn’t the faintest idea what Amalie had said during that crucial twenty seconds; his entire concentration had been in his peripheral vision. Kathryn had looked at him, that much he knew, but what her expression had been he had not been able to tell. Nor could he tell much from her reply. Whether she was pleased, flattered, amused, offended, or utterly and completely indifferent, he couldn’t say. All he knew was that it was incredibly stupid of him to even think about it.

  You’re old enough to be her father, he reminded himself. You’re forty pounds overweight and you’re going bald. She’s got college education coming out of her ears and the best thing you ever graduated from was high school. And in case you haven’t noticed recently, he told himself witheringly, you’re married.

  As usual, the thought of Louise plunged him into a moment’s depression. Against it he marshaled—again, as usual—that reliable anesthetic, fantasy. For a few sweet seconds he was free, and fit and attractive, and Kathryn was laughing at some witty thing he’d just said. Now, that had actually happened once. Fantasy segued into memory.

  Kathryn had been one of a lively group at coffee hour who appeared to be engaged in some sort of word game. What had gotten them started Tom never knew; when he had moved unobtrusively into an open space in their little circle, they were trying to make sentences out of the street names in Canterbury Park, in the order they occurred, north to south. The streets were all named after famous writers (the main cross street, inevitably, was Shakespeare Lane), but the game was turning more on bad puns than on literary criticism.

  Tom, who was capable of punnery when inspired, nevertheless had little hope of scoring points in this contest; the subject matter and the audience (Kathryn, a lawyer, a university professor, and the professor’s husband, who had recently retired from selling insurance to enroll in the seminary) were a bit intimidating—what if he said something dumb?

  The lawyer was lamenting the order of the next two streets: “If we could just reverse those two, we could say, ‘Austen is a Dickens of a writer.’ ” The professor and her husband greeted this with cries of “Tame!” and “Boring!”

  Then Kathryn ventured, “Dickens is an Austen-tatious writer?” which had been greeted with acclaim by all, including the lawyer, whose own suggestion had been spurned. Kathryn added, “And isn’t he! All frills and furbelows and gobbledygook.”

  Amid the chorus of protests that this opinion brought forth, Tom had somewhere found the temerity to say, “What’s the matter? They give you a B in that course?” This had surprised a whoop of laughter out of Kathryn, and a whistle of appreciation, raised eyebrows, and “Touché!” from the others. Kathryn, still laughing, said, “Ouch!” then put her arm around his shoulders and gave him a quick squeeze, telling him, “You missed your calling, my friend. You should have been a psychologist.”

  She had then added, “Of course, a good cop would have to be something of a psychologist, wouldn’t he?” and before Tom knew it, they were off and running on the more sophisticated aspects of criminology, deferring to him as the expert.

  This was heady stuff. Besides being hugged by Kathryn (thank God Louise had been twenty feet off, looking the other way), he was being included as an equal among intellectuals. He rarely had this feeling, especially at church. In fact, for years he had regarded the way he was treated on Sundays as God’s way of keeping him from getting a swelled head from being The Man at the police station the remainder of the week.

  Tom Holder’s bailiwick was Harton, New Jersey, so his church—St. Margaret’s Episcopal—was perched between an Ivy League university and a major seminary in a wealthy commuter town, which meant it attracted rather an impressive lot of parishioners. Everybody, it seemed, had either money or brains. Holder, laying claim to neither, was generally accepted as one of the pillars of the church simply because he had been there forever and he volunteered for everything. And when the Wall Street barons and the university professors found themselves face-to-face with him at coffee hour, they obligingly talked football.

  Kathryn Koerney never talked football, at least not to Tom Holder, and that may have been the thing that first endeared her to him.

  Kathryn had arrived in town the previous fall to take a teaching position at the seminary; she had a Ph.D. from someplace in New York City that Tom had never heard of but that other people seemed to be terribly impressed with. The Rector of St. Margaret’s, always happy to have an extra priest he didn’t have to pay, had invited her to teach the adult Sunday school class of which Tom Holder was a member.

  Holder, one of the earliest in the congregation to have supported the ordination of women, had had his liberal views sorely tried by the Rector’s previous assistant: The woman had been the second (and much younger) wife of one of the parish millionaires, and Tom had never quite shaken the notion that she treated her priesthood as if it were some sort of hobby. Sure enough, she had quit her job at the church a year after she started, saying that her children needed her at home.

  Then here came another woman, and before she ever showed her face in the parish there were rumors she’d inherited a fabulous amount of money from her father; Tom had thought, Not again! On her first Sunday he took one look at her—an attractive thirtysomething, moving gracefully down the aisle in snowy vestments, her perfect chestnut hair putting shampoo commercials to shame—and thought, Debutante. Playing priest.

  But Tom was one of those unusual people whose opinions, however strong, are revised when they begin to clash with observable fact. At the end of three months he had become one of Kathryn’s most vocal supporters. Then one day Louise had wondered, with the air of one much imposed upon, why on earth he liked that Koerney girl so much. The truth (“Because she’s the first Ph.D. I ever met who talks to me as though I’m every bit as smart as she is, that’s why”) was obviously not an option. He said instead, without enthusiasm, “Who—Kathryn? Oh, she’s O.K., I guess.” As soon as he’d said it, he realized that “Who—Kathleen?” would have been much better. Pity he hadn’t thought of it in time.

  After that, of course, he had decided that it would be wise to talk to—and about—Kathryn less often. That wasn’t too difficult; after all, he got an hour of her every week in Sunday school. But in the fall of her second year in Harton, Kathryn had asked to be reassigned to a children’s class, God knew why, and Tom was horrified to discover how much he missed her. At coffee hour he caught himself trying to watch her out of the corner of his eye so he could go back to the serving table for a refill at the same time she did. Which was dangerous as well as foolish.

  So he rationed himself: He spoke to her only on one Sunday out of every three. This was good from the standpoint of Louise, who seemed not to notice anything wrong, but bad from the standpoint of his feelings, which just got stronger. He began to think up good questions to ask Kathryn, so that when he joined the group she was part of, he had a way of getting her attention fairly quickly.

  The trouble with this approach was that it meant she was always the one teaching, while he was the one learning. That was O.K., he didn’t really mind that, but he longed for that wonderful feeling he had had the day she told him he was a good psychologist, and everybody had treated him like an expert. To make something like that happen again, there would have to be a conversation about something he was an expert on, and that meant crime and police work. But it had to be interesting. Stolen hubcaps and speed traps weren’t going to do it.

  And so it was that Harton’s Chief of Police sat in a boring committee meeting and wished that somewhere in his jurisdiction, somebody would commit an interesting crime.

  CHAPTER 3

  i

  How she had successfully driven to the airport she would never know. Ever
y turn, every stop, had been negotiated for her by some automatic system in her brain, and as she pulled into a place in the parking garage and turned off the ignition, she realized she had no recollection of the journey at all. She might just as well have been driven by someone else while she slept. Now, however, she was going to have to do things, talk to people. Unless she just kept on driving, of course. She could do that; nothing said she had to get on that plane.

  But she resisted the temptation to do the easier thing. This was harder, seeing people, being seen by people, but the plane was the better option; it would take her farther and faster.

  She got out of the car and opened the back door to get the two pieces of luggage on the backseat, but she found to her annoyance that she couldn’t pick them up. They seemed to weigh a ton. She tried first one, then the other, but all that happened was that her whole arm began to shake. She had been shaking when she first got into the car, but the tremor had stopped somewhere on the drive to the airport, and she had thought then that the worst was over. Obviously it wasn’t. Shock, or perhaps guilt, had drained all strength from her. The hanging bag contained only dresses; it weighed only a few pounds. But it might as well have been lead. She tried for two more minutes, which seemed like thirty. All that happened was that her arm trembled all the more, her breath grew ragged, and she began to be afraid she was going to burst into tears.

  Finally she swore in a voice loud enough to startle herself, stepped back from the car, and slammed the door. What the hell. She had a purse full of cash and plastic. She could buy clothes in San Francisco. She took several deep breaths to steady herself, and walked purposefully into the terminal.

  It wasn’t so difficult, after all. No one paid any attention to her. Why should they? Airports were crowded with people. All minding their own business. She attached herself to the end of the appropriate line.

  She was wrong, in fact, in assuming no one would pay any attention to her. Being naturally modest, it did not occur to her that she was particularly worth looking at. Nor could she have expected the remarkable coincidence that occurred when she reached the head of the line.

  “May I help you?” sang one of the ticket clerks, an unprepossessing young man with a large nose, an unflatteringly short haircut, and a smile perched neatly between the personal and the professional. “Yes, ma’am, what have we got here, Flight Three-twenty for San Francisco, Mrs.—Stanley! That’s my name, too. Only mine doesn’t have an E. Well, Mrs. Stanley with an E, would you like a window or an aisle? Mmm-hmm. All right, and how many bags will you be checking?”

  Impossible to explain! She said with as even a voice as she could manage, “I’m not checking any bags.”

  “Carrying it all yourself, eh? We recommend I.D. tags for your carry-on luggage. May I give you a couple, or tag your bags for you?”

  “No,” she said a second too late to sound natural. “Thank you,” she added. If only she could walk away now! But this stupid boy was still holding the ticket. She could stretch out her hand for it, then he would have to give it to her. But her hand might shake. Stifling panic, she said, “I don’t have any carry-on luggage.”

  “O.K. then,” he said after what felt like an eon, “here you go, Mrs. Stanley. That’ll be Gate Thirty-four, boarding at two forty-five.”

  “Thank you,” she replied woodenly, taking the ticket with a hand that considering the circumstances was surprisingly steady. She turned away as the boy called out, “May I help you?” to the next person in line.

  Now all she had to do was find Gate 34. She could do that, it would be easy. After all, she wouldn’t have to talk to anybody. As long as she didn’t have to talk to anybody, she’d be all right.

  ii

  He had put the body in the basement. That was temporary, obviously; he would have to figure out what to do with it before it started to— Here his brain hit a brick wall and stopped. The body in its current state was very nearly more than he could endure. The state the body would be in after a few days was not something his mind could cope with even in the abstract.

  The kitchen. He could think about the kitchen.

  It was only blood, after all, and he had seen blood lots of times. Just never this much at once.

  He stood in the kitchen doorway and attempted to think logically. He was still naked. There were smears of blood all over him, beginning to harden, crinkling stiffly when he moved. He looked at his clothes, still lying on the table. For the first time he noticed that her coat was draped over one of the chairs. He would have to put it somewhere. He couldn’t do it now, any more than he could touch his own clothes, because he wasn’t clean. He would need to clear up the entire mess, he decided, every drop of it; after that he could take a shower, and then he could get dressed. Then he could do something with the coat.

  It helped him, somehow, to have arranged the nightmare into a list of chores. It was still a nightmare, but at least he knew what to do next. He surveyed the shambles that had been, in some previous lifetime dimly remembered from an hour ago, his favorite place in the house. The easiest thing, he saw, would be to put all the stuff that was on the floor into the dishwasher and run it.

  He walked over to the dishwasher, being careful not to step in the pool of blood around it. Dumbo, he thought. You’re covered with the stuff. What does it matter if it gets on your feet? Nevertheless the bare soles of his feet cringed at the moist red threat. Leaning over it, he opened the dishwasher door. It was unusually heavy in his hand, and when it reached its horizontal position it did not stop, but fell another several inches. He had forgotten the hinges were broken. He had also forgotten how bloody it was inside the dishwasher: as bloody as the floor.

  He started to pull out the bottom rack—how much easier it was to touch this time! After what he had done with the body, this was child’s play—but he found that the rack would not stay on the broken door. Unless held in place, it would roll off. This discovery cost him a plate, which slid out of the tilting rack, hit the floor in the middle of the thickening blood, and broke. The sudden movement and the noise made him jump as if he had been shot. He swore under his breath and shoved the rack back into the cavity of the dishwasher. He bent to pick up the pieces of the plate, then stood with them in his hands, at a loss. He couldn’t just put them in the trash; there was blood all over them. After a moment he reached into the dishwasher and laid them carefully on the lower rack, more or less in the place where the plate had originally been. The smaller pieces fell through the gaps in the rack, clattering onto the basin-like bottom of the dishwasher. He swore again, started to reach under the rack to retrieve them, and then decided it didn’t really matter.

  He stooped to pick up the long, narrow cutlery rack that lay among the implements it had spilled onto the floor. One by one, as if picking up items of great delicacy, he placed them in the rack: a butter knife, some forks and spoons, a table knife, a plastic-coated spatula—the modest little tools of ordinary domestic life, now dark and tacky with gore. The large carving knife he came to last of all, out of some confused feeling that was part squeamishness and part respect.

  When everything except the blood itself had been cleared off the floor and placed in the cutlery rack, he leaned over the sagging door, placed the cutlery rack in position, closed the dishwasher, and turned it on. As the machine began to hum, he emitted a shaky sigh of relief that wavered on the edge of a sob. He controlled it, and made himself consider the next step.

  The blood. He had to clean up the blood.

  CHAPTER 4

  It was about seven-thirty in the evening when George Kimbrough at last got home. Every time he drove to New York City he swore he would not try to get home during rush hour. And every time, he would conclude his business toward the end of the working day, and be faced with a choice: Either he could drive home during rush hour, or he could select a pleasant restaurant, have an early dinner, and head for home after seven. The restaurant option was by far the more inviting, but frequently he was unable to find a collea
gue who would join him for dinner; they were tired and wanted to get home, or they already had other plans. The problem could have been solved by making dinner plans in advance with one of the said colleagues, but George didn’t like making plans in advance; it was too much bother. He preferred to be spontaneous. And being one of those people who have never learned that the only way to change things is to start doing something differently from the way you have done it before, George persistently wound up in the middle of Manhattan at the beginning of the evening rush hour with not a prospective dinner companion in sight.

  Of course he could have chosen to eat alone, but that was a possibility he never even considered. He knew, naturally, that other people dined alone, some of them frequently. He did not know how they did it. That was as far as he ever got in thinking about the matter: He didn’t know how they did it. It never occurred to him to wonder why he was so averse to an activity most people had no serious problem with, even though they might not be enthusiastic about it. But the reason George Kimbrough did not fancy his own company long enough to eat a meal in a restaurant by himself was the same reason that he would never know why he had this particular aversion. He was positively allergic to self-examination. George needed at all times to be concentrating on work (his wife said he was a workaholic) or getting the full attention—preferably the flattering attention—of another human being. Left to his own devices, he became prey to a niggling anxiety that he never put his finger on because he was too busy denying its existence.

  The reasonable person might at this point suggest that he could simply take a book or a newspaper into the restaurant with him and safely occupy his mind with reading. In fact, in his younger days George had been accustomed to doing precisely that. But once, in his middle thirties, he had dined in a restaurant that had serious pretensions to elegance, in the company of immoderately wealthy clients for whom he was redecorating a mansion on Library Place. Mrs. Wealthy Client had caught sight of a man a few tables away, dining alone and reading a book. “Look at him!” she snorted, inviting George to share her scorn. “Where does he think he is, a coffee shop in Oklahoma?” Mr. Wealthy Client had huffed, “Might as well have brought a newspaper.”