A Secret Rage & Sweet and Deadly, page 35
And provoking that courtesy, making him speak when he wanted to finish his job and leave, gave her an awful enjoyment.
The notes Tom had made on Leona’s murder contained nothing that was not commonly known.
While Catherine identified items and notes to help the deputy, she also transferred Gazette material – sheets of columns and comic strips – to her own desk. She would have to handle that now.
As she gathered up the columns, she saw Tom leaning back in his chair, reading them with lazy interest, trying to decide which ones should be in next week’s paper . . . pulling on his mustache, smiling, as he no doubt thought about persuading Leila to bed that evening.
For a moment her grasp weakened, and the sheets almost cascaded to the floor; but the next second she had hold of them again, and put them on her desk.
Then there was Tom’s camera, in a bottom desk drawer. He had preferred to use his own, instead of the Gazette’s. It had film in it, she saw, and she realized she had to remove and develop the film before the camera could be returned to Tom’s parents.
She thought of a question to ask Ralph Carson.
‘About the house,’ she said abruptly.
He looked surprised.
‘The one Tom rented from me,’ she explained. ‘What can I do about getting it cleaned? His parents will have to get in there to get his things out. They can’t see that.’
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Well, you could see if you could hire some prisoners from the jail to do it. Some trustees, maybe. They might be glad to do it for the money. Why don’t you ask the sheriff?’
‘I’ll do that,’ she said, and they continued their fruitless sifting. All they found were a couple of magazines that made Carson turn red and caused Catherine to lift her eyebrows. She pitched them into Tom’s wastebasket.
It was just as well, she decided, that she had gone through the desk instead of someone else.
When Carson left, his hands empty and his face glum, Catherine sat down at her desk and looked around aimlessly. She had to do something.
Her eyes lit on Tom’s camera. She would develop the film in it. No one would bother her in the darkroom.
The reporters’ tiny darkroom was to the left of the door that led to the production department. Catherine grabbed up the camera, buzzed Angel to tell her she was still incommunicado, and dived into the little room, turning on the red light that shone outside when film was being processed. Now no one could talk to her for a good length of time.
The smock she wore to protect her clothes from chemicals was hanging in its usual place on a hook on the door. Tom’s heavy denim work apron was beside it. On an impulse, she ran her hands through the pockets of the apron. There was nothing in them, and her mouth twisted in self-derision as she let it fall back against the door.
She pulled on her smock, snapping it down the front, and looked around the darkroom to make sure where everything was before she turned off the lights.
While the film developed there was nothing to do but wait. Catherine lit a cigarette and propped herself against the high counter.
This was the nicest moment of a jarring day. She lounged in the eerie red glow, safe from intrusion because of the light shining outside the door. The Gazette’s little darkroom satisfied her catlike fondness for small places.
The ‘bing!’ of the timer roused her from her reverie. She finished developing the film, her mind at ease and refreshed by the isolation and darkness.
Other places had big beautiful dryers, Catherine thought enviously. The Gazette had a clothesline and some clamps and a fan.
While the film was hanging from the clothesline, drying, Catherine switched on the light and examined the half-used roll of film. The pictures were, as she had supposed, Tom’s shots of the Lion’s Club meeting, featuring its guest speaker, the lieutenant governor. In reversed black and white, Catherine saw shots of a speaker at a podium, and men seated in rows at a U-shaped collection of tables, the plates in front of them showing up as black circles.
Somehow, Tom’s last pictures should have been of something more memorable, Catherine thought.
He had been by far a better photographer than she, but he had been too impatient to enjoy darkroom work. She had often developed his film while she did her own.
He made me feel like a regular Martha, Catherine thought: and despite her weariness and confusion, the peace of the little room relaxed her so that she could smile at the recollection. She was beginning to assimilate the fact that Tom was gone.
She decided to enlarge all the shots. It would take up time, while keeping her busy with something she enjoyed. And besides, she was not a good interpreter of negatives. Tom had been able to run a look down the film and choose this one or that one, as the best shots. Catherine had to put much more time and thought into picking out pictures.
She let out a sigh and set about enlarging the five shots Tom had taken. The Gazette’s enlarger was old and cranky, had been secondhand when purchased. But she had always felt she had a kind of silent understanding with the enlarger. And sure enough, today it cooperated.
As Catherine rocked the pictures in the developing tray, she decided that there was something romantic about photography. She watched, enthralled, as the faces began to emerge from the solution.
There was a dramatic shot of the speaker, bent over the podium, one arm extended in a point-making gesture. And operating on the theory that faces sold papers, Tom had taken several shots of the assembled Lions listening, with greater or lesser degrees of attention, to the address.
There was Sheriff Galton, looking bored. These past few days had made an awful difference in the man. Catherine focused on the face beside his: Martin Barnes, obviously daydreaming, perhaps about Jewel and her little house by the highway, she thought wryly. The mayor’s face materialized. He was staring at a roll on his otherwise empty plate, perhaps wondering if anyone would notice if he ate it (he had been battling his paunch for years.)
There was Carl Perkins, smiling broadly, either at the lieutenant governor’s speech or at some private thought. Randall was beside him, pipe in hand. Then Jerry Selforth’s smooth dark head appeared, his face all eagerness and attention. Jerry would marry a Lowfield girl, she decided, and stay there until he died.
* * * *
When the pictures were ready, Catherine no longer had an excuse to linger in the darkroom. She emerged reluctantly, found Tom’s copy of the story, and attached the picture of the lieutenant governor. She wrote the cut line and attached that. Then she typed in Tom’s byline.
Once again she cast around for something to do.
There were the weekly columns she had lifted from Tom’s desk. Clipping those columns was definitely necessary, and easy to do.
She got out her scissors and in a very few moments had cut out the comic strips indicated by date for the following week. The handyman column was easy, too. She imagined that the one about building rose trellises was suitable for summer, and her scissors snipped it out.
To prolong the little task, Catherine read all the Dr Croft columns. There were seven left in this batch. The one in the previous week’s paper had been on appendicitis. Catherine remembered that it had made Tom a little nervous, since he still possessed his appendix.
Well, here was one on Crohn’s disease. What about that? Catherine scanned it and decided it didn’t appeal to her.
Some of these are really exotic, she thought. Dr Croft must be running out of ailments. My father would be glad of that.
Then her eye caught the word Armadillo.
* * * *
She read the column through once, twice. Pity and loathing made her heart sick.
When she was able to rise, she went to the darkroom and upclipped Tom’s Lion’s Club group picture. She unearthed photo files from ten years ago, five years, two years. She leafed through them and laid a number of pictures side by side.
She understood now why her parents had died, why Leona and Tom had been beaten to death.
Her father had been an innocent. Leona had been foolish, criminally and fatally foolish. Tom had just been in the way.
The day of her parents’ funeral passed drearily through her mind again . . . And the day she and Leona had moved the filing cabinets into the attic of the old office. Leona hadn’t taken a file from the cabinets that day, as Catherine had vaguely suspected after hearing Betty’s story. Instead she had put something in; had hidden it there for safe-keeping.
She had to produce it at least once, Catherine thought dully. To prove she had it; so she could get her damned money. She hid it because she was scared he would break into her house to steal it . . . She wouldn’t have had any leverage after that. Didn’t Leona know how desperate he was? Or was she blinded by greed? Maybe she did see blackmail as a way to avenge my father’s death. She paid . . . He did break into her house to steal it, and he killed her in the process. He came prepared to kill her, with a baseball bat. What a convenient and appropriate weapon.
Catherine twisted her hair in a knot and held it on top of her head. She closed her eyes and thought of all the questions she had answered in the past few days without even being aware they had been asked. Her ignorance had caused Tom’s death. That would be lodged in her conscience for the rest of her life.
Give the devil his due, she thought savagely. He didn’t kill Leila. But then she was screaming, and he thought someone would come . . . Not enough time to kill Leila or search those cabinets . . . What a shock he must have had when she began yelling. It was bad enough that Tom was there, when he thought Tom was out on a date with Leila.
And of course he hasn’t killed me, Catherine thought. He has tried every route in order to avoid killing me. He doesn’t want to . . . He’s fond of me. And he’s probably very very sorry about Mother and Father. And Tom, my friend – too bad about Tom Mascalco. He was in the way. Of course, Leona asked for it.
Catherine shuddered.
Yes, very very sorry about Glenn and Rachel Linton.
* * * *
It was a matter of pride and vengeance that she finish the thing herself. And a matter of habit: she had done things for herself for so long.
And then there was the fact that she had caused Tom’s death. In the first place, she had given the murderer information indicating that Tom was an obstacle in his path; in the second place, she had not called the police when she had heard the rustling in the grass.
Her rational mind told her she had had nothing to do with the car troubles that had caused Tom to remain in the old office instead of going out with Leila; or with the couple’s going to bed instead of using Leila’s car to go to a movie, for example. But her rational mind also told her that words from her own mouth had led, however indirectly, to Tom’s death.
Perhaps she could have saved Tom; nothing could have saved her parents.
When she thought again of the reason they had died, rage came over her. It had been gaining strength, quenching the pity and revulsion, while she sat brooding. The rage shook her as nothing had ever shaken her before. She felt as if she was being burned from the inside out.
She looked at the clock. She had forgotten about the time. Now she saw it was 5:30. Most of the staff must have gone by while she sat deaf and dumb.
Time to go, Catherine, she told herself.
She covered her typewriter and picked up her purse. She put the Dr Croft column on Randall’s desk, in silent apology. She thought of trying to find him. She was sure he was somewhere in the building, maybe in the production room working on the press with Salton. But a rising sense of urgency carried her out to her car.
She drove the short distance home with special care. She didn’t trust herself.
She was so fixed on her course that she was bewildered when she saw a strange car with two people in it parked in front of her house. She saw two heads turning to follow her car into the garage, and realized she couldn’t avoid finding out who they were and what they wanted.
As she walked across the lawn to meet them, she noticed the Tennessee license plate on their car. A man and a woman, middle-aged, attractive.
It was hard for her to understand what they were saying. Her ears weren’t at fault, she discovered slowly; their voices were choked and hoarse. The pretty dark woman, still young, with the red-edged eyes, was Tom’s mother, Catherine gradually realized; and the man with olive skin and light hair was his father.
Catherine’s ingrained training triumphed in her handling of these newly bereaved parents. She acted out of sheer reflex, rising out of profound shock. She simply could not think of how to ask them to go away.
‘Won’t you come inside?’ she asked.
‘We don’t want to trouble you, but we would like to ask you some questions,’ said Mr Mascalco.
‘Of course,’ she said blankly.
As she preceded the Mascalcos into the house, she felt as if she was walking through water. It was an almost physical sensation of pressure, a buoyant feeling of absolute unreality.
While the Mascalcos sat on the couch where Catherine had huddled the night before with their son’s blood on her clothes and hands, she made coffee and carried it in to them.
The couple touched her so deeply that a little of her drifting sensation ebbed away. She felt her rage dissolving at the edges as she responded to their grief, their bewilderment at the death of their oldest child and only son.
Mrs Mascalco wept and apologized for weeping. Her husband sat with his arm around her, his face distorted with emotion.
They asked her questions.
I must be careful, she told herself repeatedly.
It would shock them, and they might well hate her, when they discovered their son had died not because he possessed information dangerous to the murderer but because he had rented a house from Catherine.
‘We would like to go into the house,’ Mrs Mascalco said finally. ‘We need to get some of his things for the funeral. One of his suits.’
‘No,’ said Catherine sharply, jolted back into complete awareness. They couldn’t see the old office the way it was. She could hardly bear to think of walking through the spattered hall herself, though that was where she must go as soon as they left.
‘His brown suit,’ Mrs Mascalco said. ‘A tie.’
‘I want to see where my son died,’ said her husband.
‘No,’ Catherine said firmly.
Tom’s father, she saw, was passing from grief to anger, ready to take issue with anything.
Catherine got blanker of face and firmer of voice. She remembered what the scene of her parents’ crash had looked like. She had seen the car, too.
She promised to get them the suit. No, not now, later. The sheriff had sealed the house, Catherine told them. She wondered, after she said it, if that was true.
Go, she urged them silently. Go.
But they wanted to know more details about the night before. They wanted to linger with Catherine. After all, she had been with their son when he died.
Catherine finally thought of offering them food, but she could think of nothing she had in enough quantity for three people. As if she could eat – but she would have to put up a pretense.
At last Mr Mascalco looked at his watch.
‘My God, Elise, we have to go,’ he said.
After many leave-takings, they departed, obviously puzzled by Catherine’s increasingly tense manner. They couldn’t reconcile the time and effort she had given them with the chilly, fixed blankness of her face.
‘I’ll get the suit tomorrow,’ she told them. ‘I’ll send it up the fastest way I can.’
She took their address. Reassured by her sincerity, Tom’s parents were finally out the front door and into their car.
After she made sure their headlights were pointing in the right direction, toward the highway, she shut the door.
Headlights, she thought. It’s dark. It’s night.
She had to move, and move fast. The murderer would act tonight, too.
Perhaps the evidence had already disappeared from its hiding place. He would not have to wait very late. After all, he knew that tonight Tom really wouldn’t be there.
Moving swiftly, clumsy in her urgency, she rummaged through a kitchen drawer for the extra keys to the old office. The police had Tom’s, but she had a set of her own. While searching, she found her gun where she had thrust it the night before.
‘Always check your gun before you use it,’ her father had said.
She hadn’t last night, but she did now. She had reloaded Saturday morning, before she found Leona’s body. The gun was ready.
She had started out the back door when a new thought struck her. If anything happened to her – No, she said. Face it. If I am killed, no one else will know what I know.
She had left the Dr Croft column on Randall’s desk, but she hadn’t told him about Betty’s account of the mysterious interview in Dr Linton’s office shortly before the fatal accident. Betty’s story was not essential, but it was corroborative – though Betty hadn’t seen the man’s face.
The only solid proof was in that file in the attic. She must at least tell someone else that it existed, and then move as fast as possible.
She went back to the telephone, and dialed the Gazette number. Randall answered.
‘Listen,’ she said. Then it was too much like her call the night before. She had to wait for a wave of dizziness to pass.
‘Catherine, is that you? What’s wrong? Where are you?’
‘I’m at home, Randall. I have to tell you something. Have you read that column?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’m listening.’
‘This is what I’m going to do,’ she said. ‘And why.’
‘Wait for me!’ he was saying almost before she finished telling him.
‘No,’ she replied. ‘I have to go now.’
She hung up before he could say anything else.
The Mascalcos’ departure had given her back her rage. She was across the moonlit yard, through the hedge, walking up to the back door. Carried along by her anger, she felt strong as a lion. But her body was telling her something quite different, she found as she approached the old office. She had to stop and wait for a wave of weakness to pass, before she could go on.
