Beauty and the Beast
- Автор: Хантер Эван
- Серия: Matthew Hope #3
- Год: 1982
- Язык: английский
- Год: Holt, Rinehart and Winston
- ISBN: 978-0-03-062198-7
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «Beauty and the Beast». Краткое содержание книги:
“Had you ever been with them socially?”
“Oh, sure.”
“And you never saw Michelle behave like anything but a model wife?”
“That’s right.”
“How did Harper behave on those occasions?”
“He was his usual self.”
“And what was that?”
“Never said a word to anybody you didn’t have to drag it out of him. He’d come to the house sometimes with Michelle, just sit quiet the whole night long, like something was eating him up alive. I mean, this would be like a party, you know, six or seven people in, he’d sit there without saying a word to anybody. All bottled up inside, you know? I’m telling you, I’m not surprised he killed her. It’s the ones who’re all bottled up inside who finally let it out in ways you don’t expect.”
“Did he seem like a violent person to you?”
“Well, he beat her up, didn’t he?”
“You have only Michelle’s word for that.”
“What are you talking about?”
“When she came to see you last Monday morning, she was the one who told you her husband had abused her.”
“And I wasn’t surprised, I’m telling you.”
“That she told you this?”
“No, that he finally got around to hitting her. It was what she was afraid of all along. That one of these days, when he got in these jealous fits of his, he’d hurt her somehow.”
“She told you that?”
“Right, that one of these days he’d hurt her. In fact—”
She shook her head.
“Yes?”
“She told me she was afraid he’d kill her one day.”
“When did she tell you that?”
“It was Halloween night. I remember because when she knocked on the door, I thought it was some trick-or-treaters coming around. Instead, it was Michelle again, in tears, telling me Kong was on another rampage, yelling at her, threatening her—”
“Threatening her?”
“Right, telling her if she ever looked at another man, he’d fix her good.”
“And she interpreted this to mean he’d kill her?”
“That’s what she said.”
“That he’d kill her?”
“Or mess her up some way. The morning she came here, last Monday morning, her breasts were all black and blue, her nose broken, teeth missing from her mouth. Hurting her that way, you know? So she wouldn’t be attractive to other men.”
“Uh-huh. But you heard all this only from Michelle, isn’t that right?”
“That’s right.”
“Which would make it hearsay.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means you never actually saw or heard any indication, in public, that Harper actually was a jealous person. Or that he might be capable of doing such extreme violence.”
“Man’s about to beat up his wife, he doesn’t go inviting a crowd in to witness it, Mr. Hope.”
“I realize that.”
I was silent for a moment. Sally took this as a cue that our conversation had ended. She stubbed out her cigarette and then glanced up at the wall clock. Across the room, the would-be “10” was beginning to show signs of impatience.
“How long had you known Michelle?” I asked.
“Since from when they got married.”
“Which would’ve been about a year and a half ago, is that right?”
“Right. I’ve known her about that long.”
“Were you at the wedding?”
“No, I didn’t really get to know her till afterward.”
“The wedding took place here in Calusa, didn’t it?”
“Yeah. Had a big reception afterward. At the house. Cars lined up all over the street.”
“But you weren’t invited.”
“Nope. Kong and I never did get along, and like I told you, I didn’t know Michelle at the time.”
She looked at the clock again.
“Just a few more questions,” I said.
“Sure, it’s just my customer’s getting itchy.”
“There’s one thing I don’t understand.”
“What’s that?”
“If, as you say, Harper had threatened Michelle on several previous occasions—”
“That’s what he did.”
“Why do you suppose that this time his threats erupted into actual physical violence?”
“Go ask him,” Sally said. “Not that I think you’ll have much luck. Like I told you, Kong isn’t the kind of man who goes opening his heart and soul to you.”
I was thinking of what George Harper, sitting in Bloom’s office during the Q and A, had told us openly and with seeming honesty: “I loved her t’death.” I was thinking of him bursting into tears immediately afterward, and then burying his face in his huge hands, and sobbing as though his heart would burst.
I thanked Sally for her time, and stepped out of the shop into brilliant sunshine that was painful to the eyes.
5
My partner Frank is a firm believer in his own variation of Murphy’s Law, which states that if anything can possibly go wrong just before a planned vacation, it will most certainly go wrong. Your healthy cat — or in this case Dale’s healthy cat — will suddenly come down with a 104-degree fever that the vet will assure you is not particularly high for cats, whose normal temperature range is somewhere between 100 and 103, but that nonetheless will necessitate a battery of tests in order to determine the cause. Normally — the vet told Dale, and she reported to me on the phone late Monday night — a cat’s fever will be directly related to a fight he or she has just had with some other cat or a dog or, in Calusa, a raccoon. But Sassafras, Dale insisted, was the sort of benign feline who never got into even a spitting contest, much less a bonafide battle. Nonetheless, Sassafras was now at the vet’s, and Dale would have to call tomorrow to find out what the story was, and tomorrow was Tuesday, two days before Thanksgiving, three days before we were to leave for Mexico, and she hoped it was nothing serious because she couldn’t bear the thought of leaving a sick cat behind while she went off on a holiday.
That was on Monday night at 11:00.
On Tuesday morning, at around 8:00, a loudspeaker in the Calusa airport crackled with the news that my 8:30 A.M. Sunwing Shuttle flight to Miami had been delayed and would not be leaving till 9:00. It is sometimes difficult for nonresidents of Calusa to believe that we have so much trouble flying from here to Miami, a scant 165 air miles away. There are four major airlines servicing our modest city, but three of them — Delta, Pan Am, and United — don’t fly from here to there at all. Eastern has five daily flights to Miami; only one of them is nonstop, and that leaves at 9:48 P.M. The rest require changing planes either at Orlando or Tampa. It is easier to take Sunwing’s Shuttle (which my partner Frank — accustomed to the more sophisticated shuttles from New York to Boston or Washington, DC — calls the Sunwing Scuttle), a tiny airline with three scheduled flights to Miami and back every day of the week. The flight takes an hour and twenty-five minutes — when it’s on time. My 8:30 A.M. flight that morning did not, in fact, leave until 9:20, confirmation — if any was needed — of the Murphy-cum-Summerville Law.
I arrived in Miami at a little before 11:00, an hour after I should have arrived, and immediately placed a call to my office. Cynthia Huellen informed me that the state’s attorney had already served Harper with the indictment (he was wasting no time, that son of a bitch) and that Karl Jennings of our office had appeared before the same Circuit Court judge who’d earlier denied Harper bail; unsurprisingly, he had denied it once again, setting a date two and a half weeks away for appearance, at which time we would have to enter our plea. The taxi I caught at the airport was driven by a Cuban who did not know Miami half as well as he had known Havana. It took him a full hour to find the address I had carefully lettered onto the sheet of paper I handed him, and then another ten minutes making change for a twenty-dollar bill in a grocery store two doors up from the house in which Lloyd Davis lived and conducted his business. It was 12:15 when finally I got out of the cab.