Oh, so now Liberty was gay. 'This is the first I've heard of that,' April murmured. 'So, do you think Merrill Liberty was having an affair with your husband?'
Daphne's face hardened. 'I don't know. She was boring. He liked more—exciting women. And he didn't like blondes.'
'Then why did you say it?'
'They were old friends. They were together a lot lately. You know how old friends stick together.' Daphne glared.
'So you were a little jealous of the friendship.' April changed tack. 'You've made a lot of speculations.' April pretended to search through her notes. 'But you left one out.'
'Are we done?' '
'You left out the jealous wife.'
'Oh, here we go.'
'You had more motivation for murder than anybody.'
'It was probably his girlfriend,'' Daphne said abruptly.
'Who?'
'The woman Tor was seeing.'
'Do you know her name?'
Daphne shook her head. 'But I know her smell. Want to smell her?' She jumped up without waiting for an answer. April realized that she was tall, five eleven with her boots on.
Mike watched Daphne's bottom and legs progress across the room. April frowned at him. He didn't seem
to mind. Daphne returned in less than a minute carrying a purple bag with a dry cleaner's name on it, reached inside, and handed a man's large burgundy cashmere sweater to April. 'Smell.'
April sniffed and wrinkled her nose. She handed the sweater to Mike.
He put the soft knit to his face. 'Vanilla musk.' His crookcd eyebrow went up as he examined the sweater. Inside, like a lining, was a white T-shirt. It smelled of deodorant and the same woman's perfume.
Daphne reached out and pulled something off the hem of the T-shirt. 'See,' she said, holding up a four-inch length of black hair that was inky like Carmella's but straight. Both detectives examined it. Then Daphne took it back, put the sweater and the T-shirt and the hair carefully back in the plastic sweater bag as if they were still bits of evidence she might need in a divorce case.
'Maybe she killed him with bad stuff,' Daphne offered.
'Why would she do that?' April asked.
'Maybe he was breaking up with her.'
Mike shook his head. 'From what you've told us earlier, Mrs. Petersen, it sounds more like your husband was breaking up with you.'
Daphne started to shiver again. 'I've never touched cocaine in my life. Tor didn't get the stuff from me. He could have gotten it from that woman, or Patrice— I heard someone was selling at the restaurant. Or it could have been from his driver, Wally. He and Wally were very close.
'You made me say that,' she said, for the first time frightened by something that had come out of her mouth. 'Tor wasn't even murdered, and you made me say that.' She shook her head. 'You'd better go now.'
'Maybe the information you got on the phone this morning was premature,' Mike said. 'We'll need you to come down to the station to make a formal statement. '
'What?' Alarmed, Daphne reached for her coat.
'Not right this minute, Mrs. Petersen. We'll call and make an appointment.' In the meantime, they would check out every comer of her life.
'Oh, do you mind if I take this?' April reached for the sweater bag Daphne had dropped on the table.
'What for?'
April wrote out a receipt. 'Oh, who knows, it might prove useful.' She handed over the slip of paper and reached for her plain navy wool coat. Daphne seemed too tired to object. Maybe it was all that exercise.
'Thanks, you've been a big help.' April smiled. Next time she'd ask Daphne about her calls to the medical examiner's office and how she'd gotten her husband's body cremated in record time.
The two detectives started for the door. Before they got there, Mike turned back to the widow, who had wrapped the coat around her shoulders and was now shivering uncontrollably in her mink. 'By the way, Mrs. Petersen, did your husband always wear a T-shirt under his sweaters?'
Deep in her own thoughts, Daphne responded without hesitation. 'Always. He thought it was unhealthy not to have cotton next to his skin.'
'He wasn't wearing a T-shirt when he died. Where do you think it went?' April chimed in.
Daphne stared at them too stunned to answer.
26
The wail of sirens was almost continuous during the morning hours. Many times Liberty crossed the room to peek behind the parade of orange-and-black giraffes on the African print fabric secured over the window facing the side street. All he saw each time was a group of ragtag males more old than young. They hung out on the front steps of a brownstone identical to the ones on either side. Each time the sirens wailed, two or three of them would drift off in different directions, leaving the same lone man sitting there with a pail and a mop by his side.
The pail and the mop and the man with a flat backpack and bulging side pockets never left the brown-stone stoop. He sat there in the cold as Liberty read his E-mail. Sat there in the middle of the block, without coffee or gloves to warm him. Sat there, lost in some space of his own, impervious to cold as his buddies drifted in around him and then dispersed like a school of aimless fish. Sat there loose-limbed and semi-awake, tuned in somewhere else, waiting.
There he sat, like a benchmark signifying Liberty's own downfall, the man his mother and grandmother feared even before he could toddle or talk that Liberty himself would somehow become. The man with the mop and the pail he didn't intend to use was the bogeyman of Liberty's childhood. He was the black bum, the fatherless, motherless, black everyman. He was all the soulless nobodies, unwashed and unwanted at the table at Christmas or Easter or the Fourth of July. He was the signature of failure in every respect, the one for whom no one was left to mourn each day of his empty, worthless, no-good, self-destructive life. The drinker, the drifter, the wastrel, the thief. Loose-limbed, loose-lipped. Greatest pride and best handiwork of the devil himself. Conspiracy of the Confederate legacy, the federal government, and all the forces against God and decency combined. The anxiety had been there in Liberty's childhood every day of his life, an unarticulated prayer in his mother's heart—Oh, Lord, don't let my boy end up like that. Amen, Jesus.
And there he was, rooted to the spot outside Liberty's window, mocking everything he'd become. Behind another curtained window in another dimension of cyberspace was Liberty's E-mail. It sat there in its own place waiting to ambush him with more opinions he didn't want to have. He was receiving a single message over and over: A lot of people thought he murdered his wife simply because they'd always felt there was no other way the story of a pretty white woman and a nigger bastard could end.
Liberty replied to a few and initiated a dozen or so of his own, assuring his partners and friends that he was safe and seeking legal advice in a timely and orderly way in just the manner they had advised him. He called Wally Jefferson half a dozen times, but Wal-ly's wife, said he wasn't home. He called Marvin, but Marvin was out of the office. He stared at a cockroach climbing the wall in front of him and flashed to the two cops 'interviewing' him in his apartment yesterday.
'If you have something to tell us about the night your wife died, now would be a good time.' The one called Sanchez had looked at him in a friendly manner, as if he had nothing against people killing their wives and would be totally sympathetic to a confession.
'I told you everything I know.' Liberty remembered the heat jolting through his body like lightning as he talked.
