Текст книги "Dearly Departed"

Автор книги: David Housewright

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Текущая страница: 7 (всего у книги 17 страниц)

eleven

The Donnerbauers lived in a house in an old-fashioned St. Paul neighborhood that harkened back to the days of F. Scott Fitzgerald and bootleg booze. But the house itself wasn’t old-fashioned, merely old, with a spotty lawn and crumbling sidewalk. Mrs. Donnerbauer greeted me at the door, waving frantically. “Come in, come in,” she urged, as if she were afraid the neighbors might see me.

I had called the Donnerbauers from a pay phone before leaving Deer Lake and asked if I could visit. They agreed. But it was well after ten when I arrived, and no visible lights burned in the house as I stood on the porch and stared at the front door, deciding whether I should knock or not. I figured they must have gone to bed until Mrs. Donnerbauer opened the door just as I was about to leave.

I stepped across the threshold into virtual darkness. An ancient floor lamp burned in the far corner of the living room, but the dim light it cast was supressed by a burnt-orange lampshade and didn’t reach the door. The only other light in the room came from a seventeen-inch television mounted on a metal TV tray, also in the far corner; its flickering shadows gave the plastic-covered furniture an eerie sense of movement. A man that I assumed was Alison’s father sat under the floor lamp in a chair facing the TV screen, his bifocals balanced on his nose. He was either watching the Entertainment channel or reading the People magazine that was opened across his knee. Mrs. Donnerbauer introduced me, saying, “The detective person is here.” Mr. Donnerbauer didn’t reply. Maybe, in fact, he was sleeping.

Alison’s mother led me to the kitchen in the back of the house, where a single bare lightbulb burned overhead. She offered me a chair after first removing a large cardboard box from the seat. The box was at least fifteen inches square and filled with the small rubber bands that the delivery kids wrap around your newspaper. She set the box on the counter next to an impressive stack of wrinkled aluminum foil. “Would you like some coffee?” she asked. When I said I did, she filled a tall juice glass and handed it to me.

“Would you like some fish sticks?”

“Fish sticks?” I replied.

“We have plenty,” Mrs. Donnerbauer said, confessing that she worked as a food demonstrator, enticing supermarket shoppers with free samples as they pushed their carts up and down the aisles. She always brought the leftovers home to feed her family, which now consisted only of herself and her silent husband.

I declined the fish sticks.

“That woman in the paper, are they going to make her pay for hurting my little girl?” Mrs. Donnerbauer asked abruptly.

“I don’t know. There’s not much physical evidence,” I answered.

“It ain’t fair,” she insisted.

I agreed with her.

Mrs. Donnerbauer was a small woman on the downside of fifty, an age she hadn’t reached without hard struggle. Any resemblance to the young woman in my photographs had been eroded by time. Without prodding, Mrs. Donnerbauer began speaking of her Alison—only not with the hallowed devotion you would expect from a grieving mother. Rather, she spoke of Alison as if she were the wayward daughter of an unpopular neighbor.

“Very peculiar child,” Mrs. Donnerbauer said.

“How so?”

“Well, she wasn’t like the other children.”

“How so?” I repeated.

“For one thing, she was always reading,” Mrs. Donnerbauer said as if she had caught her daughter drinking three-two beer behind the garage. “Reading at the dinner table. Reading in the car. Reading in front of the TV. Reading at night under the covers with a flashlight.”

“Nothing wrong with that,” I suggested. “I did much the same thing when I was a kid.”

“War and Peace?” Mrs. Donnerbauer asked. “The Selected Plays of Eugene O’Neill? Canterbury Tales? In old English! Once I caught her reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. She was eight years old. Imagine.”

Imagine, indeed.

“And she would never answer when I spoke to her,” the woman added from across the kitchen table. “I would chant her name: Alison, Alison, Alison. Nothing. At first I thought she was deaf or something. Then I thought it was because Alison hadn’t been named until after she was three months old because of a family disagreement.… His mother,” she mouthed silently, gesturing toward the living room. “I thought maybe she didn’t realize that Alison was her name. Of course, I now know that she was just ignoring me, like her father. Isn’t that right, dear?” she asked the man in the living room. When he didn’t reply, she shook her head. “See?”

“Maybe he didn’t hear you.”

“Oh, he heard me fine; he just doesn’t want to say anything.” Mrs. Donnerbauer sighed dramatically. “It’s the cross I bear.”

I didn’t say anything, either. After a moment, Mrs. Donnerbauer sighed again. I took that as a cue.

“It must have been difficult raising a girl who was so intelligent,” I said.

“Very difficult. And a little bit”—Mrs. Donnerbauer searched for a word, settled on—“frightening. Imagine trying to raise a child who’s smarter than you. It was bad enough when she merely thought she was smarter. But then the teachers at the school told us Alison should be in special classes because she was a genius. They tested her—they never asked me if they could, but I guess they test everybody. Anyway, they tested her, and the tests results said Alison was a genius. A genius,” she repeated as if the word made her nauseous. “It gave Alison a reason to ignore me. Suddenly I wasn’t smart enough to tell her when to go to bed or to eat her vegetables or what clothes to wear. I wasn’t smart enough to be her mother. ‘Leave me alone, leave me alone.’ Everyday it was the same thing until finally I just threw up my hands and did leave her alone.”

Mrs. Donnerbauer took time out to stare at something way above my left shoulder. I sipped coffee from the juice glass. At last she said, “I guess Alison found out what happens when you think you’re so much smarter than everyone else.”

I was amazed by the statement and flashed again on the photograph in my car. In the end, Alison couldn’t even depend on her mother.

“She used to say she was blessed,” Mrs. Donnerbauer continued. “Well, I didn’t see it. Where’s the blessing in being so different from everyone else? You tell me. I remember when she was graduated from high school—graduated three weeks before her sixteenth birthday. I was so embarrassed.…”

“Really? I would have thought you would’ve been proud.”

Mrs. Donnerbauer shook her head. “You don’t know what it’s like, having people look at you, stare at you. Having people ask you questions because your daughter is so … different. People asking how she was around the house, like if she ate strange food or something. People asking if I—if I—took vitamins or something when I was carrying her; if I listened to Mozart of something in the delivery room. Imagine! People. Sometimes I don’t know what to think.”

“Sometimes I don’t know what to think, either,” I agreed.

“And of course, she didn’t have any time for boys,” Mrs. Donnerbauer continued. “She was too busy doing genius things.”

“What about Stephen Emerton?”

“That was the one time I put my foot down,” she answered proudly. “Stephen was such a good-looking boy and smart, too. But the way Alison treated him … Well, I practically forced her down the aisle.”

“Alison didn’t want to get married?”

“Oh, of course not. That’s what normal people did. But I knew marriage was the best thing for her. And so …”

“Was she happy do you think?”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Was she happily married?”

Mrs. Donnerbauer stared at me as if she had never heard the expression before.

“I heard that she might have been seeing someone else,” I added.

“Committing adultery!” Mrs. Donnerbauer was genuinely shocked.

“I heard—”

“No daughter of mine ever committed adultery. I don’t know where you got your information, young man, but you better go back and get some more, yes sir. We are Catholics in this house. Roman Catholics. We don’t break commandments.”

I was actually relieved to hear her denial. “I didn’t mean to offend you.”

“Offend me? Why should I be offended because a man comes into my home and calls my little girl a trollop!”

“Mrs. Donnerbauer, I deeply apologize, I truly do,” I said, trying to defuse the situation. “But you have to understand that when we hear rumors like this, no matter how ridiculous, we have to look into them. It’s the courts that make us do it.”

“The courts,” she repeated and looked around, like she was searching for a place to spit. No one likes the courts. That’s why it’s easy to blame them when you get into a jam.

I tried again. “This rumor says that Alison was involved with a doctor while she worked—”

“No. No. No. My daughter would never get involved with … A doctor, you say? No. I don’t want to hear any more. I think it’s time you left.”

I rose from my chair.

“My daughter is no adulteress.”

I was happy to believe her.

“Thank you, Mrs. Donnerbauer.”

She eyed me suspiciously. “My child never cheated on her husband, I don’t care what that … that brute Raymond Fleck told the newspapers,” she added slowly and carefully in case I was leaving with the wrong impression.

“I never thought she did,” I agreed.

Mrs. Donnerbauer apparently had to think about that. And in the silence that ensued, Mr. Donnerbauer said one word very clearly from his chair in the darkened living room: “Holyfield.”

The word hung in the air like an unpleasant odor.

“No,” Mrs. Donnerbauer muttered.

“What was that, Mr. Donnerbauer?” I stepped toward the arch that separated the two rooms.

“Dr. Robert Holyfield,” he said, without taking his eyes from the TV screen.

“What? What? What are you saying?” Mrs. Donnerbauer pushed past me, practically running to her husband’s chair. “What are you saying? Do you know what you’re saying?”

Mr. Donnerbauer refused to look at her. “She was a woman like all other women,” he answered coldly.

“What is that supposed to mean?” Mrs. Donnerbauer demanded.

Mr. Donnerbauer turned his head maybe ten degrees and tilted it just enough so that he could see his wife’s face. His upper lip curled into an ugly snarl. “You know exactly what I mean, woman.” Then he just as deliberately resumed watching TV.

“You bastard!” Mrs. Donnerbauer spat at him.

Mrs. Donnerbauer’s high-pitched whine was gaining in volume behind me as I walked rapidly from the room, out the door, and into the night. I didn’t look back until my car door was open and I was sliding in.

twelve

M innesotans. Like most Americans, are summer people. Perhaps more so than most Americans because we spend such a large part of the year without its warmth, yearning for it, planning for it. True, few people have as much fun in the snow as we do. Yet, when we recall the joys of childhood, we always think of summer.

On this particular bright, cloudless summer day, I drove with all my windows rolled down, searching South St. Paul for the Holyfield Clinic. I found it just where they said I would, a few blocks off Lafayette. It looked like a pillbox, with white concrete walls, a flat roof, and only a few windows. The parking lot was spacious and contained an inordinate number of handicapped slots; they took up all the spaces closest to the building except for one. The slot nearest the front door was reserved for R. HOLYFIELD, M.D. A new Lexus was parked in the space. I was tempted to “accidentally” scratch the paint with my keys as I walked by—revenge for seducing Alison. I might have, too, if not for the woman watching me as she leaned against the building and sucked on a cigarette, banished from her place of employment by Minnesota’s anti-smoking laws.

Normally the Lexus wouldn’t have troubled me. I am usually indifferent to the wealth of other people. You need to be if you’re a baseball fan. But I find it obscene that the average doctor grosses over two hundred thousand dollars a year along with five weeks of vacation, yet a third of the citizens of the United States can’t afford their services, can’t afford health care at all. Like the man said, there’s something wrong.…

With that in mind, I was surprised to find a large number of elderly patients in the waiting room. That is until I remembered that the Holyfield Clinic specialized in caring for patients fifty-five years and older. Their arthritis, hardened arteries, and respiratory ailments were Holyfield’s bread and butter. Besides, they probably all had insurance companies footing the bill, otherwise they wouldn’t have been allowed through the front door.

Getting to see Dr. Holyfield was no easy matter. I had called earlier that morning. Before I even mentioned my name and purpose, the receptionist made it clear that no appointments could be had for at least two weeks. And when I confessed that it was a nonmedical matter, well, time is money, and Dr. Holyfield was not one to squander either. That’s when I turned nasty.

“Look, lady. This is a murder investigation. Now, I can come over there at the good doctor’s convenience and chat quietly in his office, or I can send a few officers to drag him over here in handcuffs. Which would you prefer?”

Most people, especially people who are accustomed to civility, are frightened by loud voices. They shouldn’t be. Loudness, what’s that? It doesn’t mean power or strength or confidence. Usually it means the opposite. No, it’s the guy who talks softly, who looks you in the eye and says what he has to say without looking away, that’s the guy to worry about. Fortunately the receptionist didn’t realize that. Instead of calling my bluff and telling me to stick it where the sun doesn’t shine, she quickly put me on hold, forcing me to listen to a John Denver tune—how’s that for payback? She was back in less than a minute to inform me that Dr. Holyfield would see me for fifteen minutes at eleven o’clock. Don’t be late.

I wasn’t.

Dr. Holyfield was what too much money, too much education, and too much deference to his title had made him: a snob, who had little respect or appreciation for life that existed beyond the comfortable confines of his daily activities. True, I hadn’t seen him in action. No doubt he was all kindness and light. Yet I would wager my retirement fund that tree surgeons cared more for their patients than he did. At the same time, you just knew he was well loved and even adored by a whole throng of people who hardly knew him at all. Just the kind of guy to seduce a lonely, vulnerable woman like Alison.

I purposely used his first name, calling him Bob. It’s an old cop trick. It removes a suspect’s dignity and makes him feel defensive, inferior, and often dependent, like a child seeking a parent’s approval; it also lets the suspect know who’s in charge. I don’t know why this is true, but personal experience told me that it was, especially among people who expect to be called Mister and Sir and Doctor.

“It’s nice to meet you, Mr. Taylor. I hope you appreciate that I am on a tight schedule,” Dr. Holyfield informed me after we shook hands and he examined my photostat.

“I do, Bob, and I hope to make this quick.”

Dr. Holyfield waved at a chair in front of his cluttered desk. I sat before he had a chance to—another slight.

“I haven’t much time to give you,” he informed me again and smiled. I wiped the smile off his face with my first question.

“How long did your affair with Alison Emerton last?”

He hesitated, then answered, “We did not have an affair.”

“Bob, I’m going to ask you that question again,” I said calmly. “Think before you answer. How long did—”

“I answered your ruddy question. Now, get out.”

Ruddy? Tsk, tsk. Such language from a respected medical man. “Have it your own way, Bob,” I said, only I didn’t leave the chair. Instead, I pulled a blank subpoena from my inside jacket pocket and started filling in the empty spaces. After my conversation with the receptionist, I thought it’d be wise to bring a few, just in case.

Dr. Holyfield, who was standing now, asked, “What do you think you’re doing?”

“Preparing a subpoena,” I answered. “I’ll take it to the Dakota County sheriff, and he’ll take it to the Dakota County attorney, and he’ll take it to a Dakota County judge, who will stamp his approval on it, and by this time tomorrow you’ll be answering questions before the Dakota County grand jury. Ever been to Dakota County? Nice place. Long drive, though. I hope you don’t have anything planned for the day.”

Dr. Holyfield considered my words for a moment, and I wondered if I had overplayed my hand. A private investigator issuing subpoenas? Yeah, right, happens every day.

“I don’t have time for this,” he declared and moved back to his chair. “Ask your questions and be quick about it.”

“I already asked one,” I reminded him, making a production out of returning the subpoena to my pocket, trying hard not to smile in triumph.

“Five months,” he answered.

“Did it begin before Alison was married?”

“No. We had met at several health-related functions prior to her marriage,” he answered as if he was discussing a brake job. “However, we did not become … involved … until much later. Not until after her wedding. I don’t know what drew us together. Perhaps we both needed to spend time with someone who understood our problems. Alison had come to the conclusion that marrying Stephen had been a dreadful error, and at the same time I was having serious misgivings concerning my own marriage. Originally, that’s all we did: spend time together, go places, go to the zoo—I’ve lived in this state my entire life, and I had never been to the Minnesota zoo. We did not become intimate until several weeks had passed. I’m guessing we were both caught up in a fantasy that our lives were somehow different when we were together—there was no Stephen, I had no wife. In our fantasy, we were starting over, beginning our lives anew, with no attachments, no past to encumber us. Alas, it was only a silly fantasy and it ended. It ended all too soon.”

For someone who had refused to speak with me until I leaned on him, Dr. Holyfield was surprisingly forthcoming. I encouraged him, yet I didn’t trust him.

“How did the affair end?” I asked.

“Stephen found out and threatened Alison with a divorce.”

“I’d have guessed she’d have welcomed a divorce.”

I thought I detected just a smidgen of regret when Dr. Holyfield answered, “No.” But I could’ve been mistaken.

“She came from a family that was vehemently opposed to divorce,” he continued. “She had been brainwashed long ago into accepting the fallacy that she was married forever.”

“How ’bout you, Bob?”

“When Alison informed me that our involvement had to cease, I came to the realization that I owed it to myself to rescue my own marriage, and I pledged myself to that goal.”

“Did you?”

“Did I what?”

“Save your marriage.”

“Unfortunately, no. My wife also learned about the affair. I understand a friend told her all about it. Our divorce was final just over seven months ago. It was acrimonious, as you might expect. There was a great deal of name calling, finger pointing, and suspicion. When it was concluded, my wife had custody of my children, my house, two cars, several IRAs, and an enormous alimony and child-support settlement. Prior to the divorce, I had made several unwise investments, so there wasn’t as much money as she expected, or she would have taken that, too. As it was, I was forced to undergo an audit; she claimed I had hidden a substantial amount of our financial assets. The court concluded that it was merely one of her unfounded allegations.”

I didn’t do the polite thing and tell him I was sorry. I wasn’t. Instead I asked, “Was your divorce final before or after Alison disappeared?”

“Before.”

“Did you try to contact her after the divorce?”

“Certainly.”

“And how did she respond?”

The good doctor shrugged. “The sun had set on that relationship.”

“Oh?”

“As I recall,” he said, looking up at the ceiling, “her exact words were: ‘I do not believe the resumption of our relationship at this time would be productive for either of us.’”

“Her exact words?”

Holyfield nodded.

“How did that make you feel?” I asked.

He shrugged again.

“I would think you’d be pretty upset,” I told him. “After losing your wife and children, after being put in debt for the rest of your life for wanting her. Yeah, I’d be pissed off.”

“To be honest, I was relieved.”

“Relieved?”

“I had just survived one relationship. I was unprepared to leap into a second.”

“Yet you contacted her,” I reminded him.

He had nothing to say to that.

“Where were you the night Alison disappeared?”

“I’d need to consult my calendar,” Bob said.

“Why don’t you do that,” I encouraged him.

He smiled and shrugged. “Why bother?”

“It might supply you with an alibi.”

“For what?”

Was he purposely being obtuse?

“For the murder of Alison Emerton,” I answered too loudly.

“What makes you think she was murdered?”

That one caught me right between the eyes.

“Excuse me?”

“What makes you think she was murdered?” he repeated.

Dr. Holyfield smiled, and in that smile I saw his intentions. He was giving me a preview of his defense.

“What do you believe became of Alison?” I asked, the dutiful straight man.

“Alison was greatly disappointed in the life she was living with Stephen,” he answered. “I have no doubt that, given her intelligence, her drive, her beauty, she naturally hoped to achieve more.”

“More?”

“More money, more prestige, more power, more adventure, more … I once told her that the hardest lesson an individual can learn is to be content with who they are, to accept themselves for who they are. Alison was not prepared to do that. That’s probably why she left.”

“Left?”

“Do you always ask one-word questions, Holland?”

The sonuvabitch had turned the tables on me. Now I was the student, and he was the teacher.

“What do you mean, left?” I asked again.

“I believe she decided to become someone else.” He smiled some more. “I appreciate that there are several unanswered questions concerning the circumstances of her disappearance. However, that does not alter my theory. In fact, I can appreciate how the difficulties she was forced to endure during those dark days might have motivated her to leave.”

“Leave for where?”

Dr. Holyfield merely shrugged.

“Why didn’t you inform the police of your theory?” I asked.

“I am under no obligation to do so. If Alison wants to start her life over, I say good luck.”

I left Robert Holyfield’s office exactly fifteen minutes after entering it, feeling I had been played like a Stradivarius. Anne Scalasi would have been appalled. Still, what would she have done differently? Dr. Holyfield had readily admitted to having an affair with Alison, and he confessed that the affair had contributed to his divorce, to his losing nearly everything he owned. And he had admitted that Alison had blown him off when he had attempted to resume their relationship. However, he couldn’t have killed her for rejecting him because, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, Alison is not dead. Goodness gracious, no. She’s pumping gas in Fayetteville, Tennessee, at a service station owned by Elvis Presley. And, as implausible as it might sound, that argument could just as easily be applied to Irene Brown’s defense. Or Raymond Fleck’s. Or Stephen Emerton’s.

Damn.

Reasonable doubt. Without a body, there’s always reasonable doubt—the criminal’s best friend.

But in this case … Was she alive?

I removed her photograph from the envelope. The eyes had changed somehow. So had the rest of her face. She looked different to me now.

“Are you alive?”

She had committed adultery; she had cheated on her husband. Stephen Emerton had told the truth about that. But what about Raymond Fleck? Had he also been truthful? It was hard to believe. But not as hard as it had been fifteen minutes ago. Alison was not the woman I thought she was.

“You lied to me,” I told the photograph.

I shove the glossy back into the envelope and drove back through St. Paul toward my office in Minneapolis, as depressed as I ever hoped to be. And angry, convinced that Alison had played me for a sucker.

“Ahh, nuts!” I shouted, slapping the top of my steering wheel. Two days ago I had it solved. Two days ago I was the greatest detective since Eugène François Vidocq, the nineteenth century crook-turned-crook-catcher who founded the French Sûreté. Which reminded me, I really needed to return Scalasi’s book.