Crooked Heart Read online

  George had never heard that it was ungenteel to read in a restaurant. Silently cursing his parents for never having taught him what was obviously an essential point of etiquette, he simultaneously thanked God (with whom he normally had little to do) that he had learned it before he’d made a fool of himself in front of these or any other important people. And from that day he had steadfastly resisted the attempts of his wife and friends to convince him that the Wealthy Clients had pulled this idea out of thin air and not out of Miss Manners or even Emily Post; he would have died (well, almost) rather than be caught with any reading matter in a restaurant.

  So it was that George did his usual: He drove from Manhattan to Harton in the rush hour, swearing he’d never do it again. He also swore at every one of the countless cars around him, generously including not only the ones in which his own car was imprisoned, but the oncoming traffic as well (because they were having an easier time of it). In a leaden dusk they all slushed their way slowly past an endless parade of huge industrial plants, alike in their ugliness, hunching like malevolent hobgoblins over the tired earth they occupied, belching out unbreathable air. There was thus plenty of time for George to work himself up into a considerable ill temper.

  “Grace!” he shouted as he let himself in the back door. “Grace, I’m home!”

  There was no response.

  “Grace!” he shouted again with an edge to his voice.

  Silence.

  Damn and blast the woman, where was she? As if he hadn’t had enough to contend with already! He took off his coat and threw it over one of the kitchen stools. Grace would hang it up later. She didn’t have enough to do to keep her busy, anyway. He took a glass from a cupboard and ice from the freezer and went into the dining room, to the bar. Pouring himself a stiff bourbon, he went to the hall, stood at the bottom of the stairs, and shouted up them, “Hey! I said I’m home!”

  Still getting no response, he began to prowl around the downstairs, steadily drinking the bourbon and refilling his glass periodically from the bottle he still carried. Finally he decided he would have to go to the totally unreasonable length of actually going upstairs and fetching Grace from the bathroom or wherever else it was she was hiding herself. He plodded grudgingly up the stairs and shouted some more. He looked in every room on that floor, but his wife was in none of them. He became, naturally, even more exasperated. She was supposed to be here. She was always here when he got home, and today she knew that he’d be driving back from the City, so she knew he’d be tired, so where the hell was she? Thinking he might have failed to see a note, he went back to the kitchen and looked where she usually left notes, on the countertop next to the refrigerator. There was nothing there. He looked over all the countertops in the kitchen and checked all the bits of paper stuck to the refrigerator door with magnets. At this point he noticed that there were no signs of dinner in preparation. He swore.

  Still looking for a note, he went back to the dining room and looked on the bar. Then he went to his chair in the living room, where the mail and the evening paper would be waiting for him. There was nothing there, either. Not only was there no note explaining where she was, she hadn’t even fetched the mail and the paper. Grace could be very inconsiderate at times. She would have to pick today for it.

  He made himself sit down in his chair and think. What would be the reasonable thing to do next? Call next door, of course. Ask if Grace was there, and if not, did Bill know where she was? Or had Carolyn said anything, before leaving on her trip, about Grace going somewhere or doing something today? Yes, that was it, he’d do that.

  He tossed off his fourth bourbon and rose, somewhat unsteadily, to go into the kitchen to use the phone. He dialed the number and stood staring out the window that looked over to the Stanleys’ house, as if willing Bill to answer.

  Next door, Bill Stanley was sitting in the exact center of his house, that is, halfway up the stairs. He did not have the faintest idea why he was sitting there, as opposed to somewhere sensible like the living room. He had gone to this place without conscious thought, and was sitting in it without being at all curious as to why he was there. He did not know, nor would he have cared if told, that he was hiding from the windows, all the windows, as if they were hostile eyes. What he did know was that his life lay about him in jagged fragments; if he moved carelessly, they would slash him, and he would bleed. He had had enough of blood.

  When the phone rang, he jumped, and started to tremble. He counted. Four rings. He was afraid of it, that harsh braying; he wished it would go away. Five rings. He was not going to answer it no matter how long it rang. Seven rings. No matter how long. There was not a single soul in the universe whom he wanted to talk to. Ten rings. His teeth were clenched, and he began to sweat. Jesus, thirteen rings!

  Then it stopped.

  George cursed at the phone and at both Stanleys. It didn’t make sense that no one was at home, not at this time of day. Maybe their phone was out of order. His anger prevented his noticing what his eyes might have told him. From the Kimbroughs’ kitchen window, five of the Stanleys’ windows were visible, and none of them showed a light.

  George stood for a while, considering. The next logical thing was to go over there, wasn’t it? He left the kitchen by way of the back door, crossed his driveway, went through the gate in the hedge to the Stanleys’ driveway, ran up the steps to their back door, and began to pound on it. But the door had a large glass panel in it, and at that point it would have taken more than temper to keep even George from noticing the obvious. No light shone on the other side of the door. He stomped back down the steps, marched into the middle of the driveway, and turned to survey the house. It was completely dark.

  He swore loudly and long.

  Meanwhile in the house, halfway up the stairs, Bill Stanley had heard the thumps on the back door, and his heart had contracted to the size of a child’s fist. Then it began to beat so loudly, he actually began to fear that it would be heard by the person on the back porch.

  The person on the back porch. George. It was probably George. He never wanted to see George again.

  CHAPTER 5

  Everybody at the station knew of the Chief’s standing orders about calling him at home when he was off duty: They were never to hesitate to do so. Sergeant Fischer admired the Chief for this policy; he thought it showed a noble dedication to duty. Sergeant Rossi knew better. Not that Rossi was all that perceptive, but he, too, suffered from a home life in which any interruption would be welcomed.

  When the phone rang in the drab little living room, it was just after ten o’clock. Tom Holder was sitting in the shabby armchair that had mercifully faded from its original poison green into something marginally more tolerable; he was reading, as was his habit, a paperback best seller, tuning out the noise from the television with an expertise born of long practice.

  That night, however, his virtual earmuffs were being tested to an unaccustomed extreme. The squalid river of confessional talk shows oozed off the screen as usual, but for the past several minutes the sludge had become both intellectually more respectable and harder for Tom to bear. The show in question, God knew why, had temporarily forsaken interviewing neo-Nazi lesbians who’d sold their grandmothers into white slavery in Namibia and was instead inviting the audience to comment on various film clips of the newly re-elected President of the United States. That distinctive and detested drawl crawled into Tom’s consciousness despite his most desperate attempts to block it out.

  Tom Holder had been unable to bring himself to vote for any man who had a bright, gutsy, attractive wife and who still couldn’t keep his pants zipped. On the other hand, Tom would die drunk in a ditch before he would vote Republican, so he hadn’t voted at all. Not for President, anyway. And since all his life he’d poured scorn on people who shirked that citizenly duty, he was now stewing in a pot of custom-made guilt. The voice of the unfaithful President now reminded Tom of his own defection from responsibility.

  A few feet away on the sof
a, as oblivious to the squirms of her husband’s conscience as she was to his very presence, Louise was stretched out in an ancient orange bathrobe. She held the remote control in one limp hand and a cigarette in the other; the ashtray rested on her stomach. Tom had a fantasy, of which he was exceedingly ashamed, that one day she would fall asleep with a cigarette and he would be summoned to the scene by the fire department to discover that he was a widower. In some versions of the fantasy the whole house burned down, and he collected the insurance and started a whole new life.

  When the ring of the telephone interrupted the flow of soft, Southern plausibilities from the man in the Oval Office, Tom kept his nose pointed at his book and sat dead still, evincing no interest—another practice in his repertoire of survival skills. He had given up answering the phone years before. (Whenever he had gotten to it first, Louise had complained that he was trying to keep her from knowing what was going on.) Louise, without muting the television or taking her eyes from the screen, put the cigarette in her mouth and, with the hand thus freed, reached down to the floor where she kept the phone.

  After a desultory hello from which all upward inflection had been scrupulously drained, she listened for a few moments, then extended the receiver vaguely in her husband’s direction and announced, with the satisfaction of a pessimist who has been proved right, and in a voice clearly audible to the person on the other end of the line, “I knew it, they want you again, they have no respect for your privacy, do they, I don’t know why you put up with it.”

  Tom took the phone without comment—he had also given up making comments years before—and said neutrally, “Yes?” After that he made listening noises for about a minute, then asked for an address, then said, “On my way. Meet me there,” and hung up.

  As he donned his coat, he answered a couple of Louise’s non-questions (“I can’t imagine what could be so important that a man would have to go out and work at this time of night, when you do this kind of thing I never know, do I, when you’ll be home, it never said anywhere, did it, that you were going to be gone all the time”) and ignored the rest. “Just business, dear. Missing person.”

  With that he was out, and closed the door behind him, welcoming the chill November rain as a companion preferable to the one he’d just left. He took a moment for the silent scream he allowed himself on these occasions, and then thanked God (with whom he talked regularly) for this escape. Whoever and wherever this Grace Kimbrough was, he blessed her and wished her well.

  He remained in charity with her as he drove into the Kimbroughs’ affluent neighborhood, peering through his windshield wipers at the big, comfortable-looking houses set well back from the streetlights in neatly landscaped yards. It had been years since Tom Holder had felt any envy of people with money—he had seen too many of them with their misery showing.

  No, the people Tom envied were the ones who were happily married. According to his stringent standards, he hadn’t met very many of them. When he did, he always wondered what it was that made the miracle; was it just luck that some people had made the right choice, when by all rights they should have been too young to know what they were doing? Or was it some special virtue in them, a quality he didn’t have and couldn’t understand? And if that was it, could that virtue be acquired? He had tried prayer. God, had he ever tried prayer.

  His kindly feelings toward Grace Kimbrough suffered a setback when he and Sergeant Rossi were ushered into the Kimbroughs’ living room. It was, Tom thought ungrammatically, the awfullest room he’d ever seen. No, he corrected himself, the awfullest expensive room he’d ever seen. A sofa of some extravagant style he couldn’t name was upholstered in different shades of gold stripes and littered with fake-tiger-skin cushions. The black background of the wallpaper was scarcely visible for the profusion of mustard-yellow flowers on it. The carpet was patterned like a leopard, but here and there were clearings in the spots occupied by large pink roses. Where the coffee table should have been there was instead something like a giant round footstool covered in wine-colored satin with gold tassels. The curtains were an abstract nightmare of copper and black, and were literally too much; they fell lavishly from brass curtain rods, hit the floor, and frothed into piles of extra fabric on the carpet. The overall impression was one of barbaric extravagance; Tom thought that Attila the Hun would have loved it.

  Rossi seated himself gingerly on a small black-lacquered chair just inside the entrance to the room, as though unwilling to commit himself further. His boss, a man of stouter heart, crossed to a large gold-velvet chair with ball-and-claw feet, parked himself on it as if perfectly accustomed to such surroundings, and decided he didn’t care too much for the missing lady after all. But some of his preliminary questions elicited the information that George Kimbrough was an interior decorator, and no, his wife did not assist him, she had no talent at all in that direction; in fact, she couldn’t produce a room like this (Mr. Kimbrough indicated their surroundings) if her life depended upon it. This immediately brought Grace back up in Tom Holder’s esteem; indeed the irreverent thought came to him that maybe she had run away to escape her own living room.

  Fifteen minutes’ conversation with George Kimbrough, however, was enough to convince Tom that it was the decorator, not the decor, that had prompted Grace Kimbrough to flee. He reckoned he had discovered a kindred soul and fellow sufferer in her, and thought, More power to you, dear, I only wish I had your guts. He was also thinking, had been thinking ever since the phone call, that heaven had handed him his wish: an interesting crime. So it wasn’t really a crime, maybe it was even better as a topic of conversation. Nothing violent, just a nice upper-middle-class housewife who had decided to make a run for it. He hoped they wouldn’t find her too soon.

  It appeared that in the two and a half hours that had passed since George Kimbrough had gotten home, he had been busily doing all the correct and sensible things.

  “Well, first I looked all over for a note in case she’d left one,” George had said to the two policemen sitting in his living room. Or more precisely, he had said to Holder; he ignored Sergeant Rossi. “I looked in all the possible places she might have left it, and then I looked in some impossible places. Trust me, there is no note.”

  “Yes, Mr. Kimbrough,” said Holder pacifically. “And then what did you do?”

  “I called next door. My cousin lives there with her husband. Name of Stanley. My wife and my cousin are good friends, hell, we’re all good friends, so much running back and forth between here and there, you’d think it was one family.” George managed a shrug and a pinched smile.

  Holder’s placid expression betrayed no clue, but his attention sharpened: hostility there. Kimbrough was being polite, but he’d had too much to drink—who could blame him, under the circumstances?—and he was losing a fraction of control over his less civilized emotions. Rossi, who was used to being ignored, was more or less returning the favor—which was why he was still a sergeant—and heard nothing in George’s statement except the words.

  “So I figured Grace might be there, but she wasn’t. No one was, they weren’t home. I should say, Bill wasn’t home. Carolyn—my cousin, that is—left for California earlier today. So of course she wasn’t there. Anyway, Bill wasn’t home. It wasn’t likely Grace’d be visiting anywhere else around here; we don’t have a lot to do with the other neighbors; there was only one other place in the neighborhood where she might have been, and that’s really too far to walk, but I called them anyway.”

  “Why would she have to walk?”

  “I thought I told you, her car’s in the shop.”

  “Mmm. Are you sure about that? Because it would make a lot of difference, whether she had a car or not.”

  “Of course it would, and that’s why I’m telling you she didn’t have one, and yes, I’m sure. We took it to the garage first thing this morning, and they said it wouldn’t be ready till Wednesday.”

  There was a faint but—to Holder—unmistakable air of “I told you so” about thi
s speech, mingled with a bit of “My God, the people I have to deal with.” Tom’s vague dislike of George Kimbrough began to be less vague, not least because he guessed that in the company of people whose opinions he valued, George would pass for charming because he would take pains to be so.

  Gradually, with patience in the asking and impatience in the answering, they established that George had called the likeliest people, the less likely, the completely unlikely, the hospital, the Stanleys again without success, and finally the police.

  “Yes, sir, that sounds very thorough. Does your wife ever call a taxi to pick her up when her car’s in the shop?”

  “Sure, if she has anywhere to go. I thought of calling the taxi companies, but I figured they wouldn’t tell me if they’d picked her up.”

  “Well, I imagine they’ll tell me,” Holder said, “if I ask nice.”

  Rossi shot the Chief a quick look. It wasn’t like Holder to wise off when talking to citizens.

  George, always quick to take offense, took it. But before he could figure out exactly why the remark was offensive, the cop was talking again.

  “Your next-door neighbors, Stanley, did you say? Is it unusual for them to be out of the house at this time on a Monday evening?”

  “I’d say it was unusual for them to be out this late on any weeknight. Carolyn’s a demon for getting to bed early.”

  “But Carolyn—Mrs. Stanley, I should say—she’s gone to California?”

  “That’s right. San Francisco. On a buying trip for my firm, Elton Kimbrough Interiors. She’ll be gone for a week.”

  “Have I got your name wrong, Mr. Kimbrough? They told me George.”