“Talk about him?”
“What kind of relationship they had, like that?”
“Not that I can remember,” Lainey said. A pair of angular creases like an inverted V formed above the bridge of her nose. “Do you think there’s some sort of connection between Chris’ murder and Mr. Carding’s? Is that why you’re asking about him?”
“It’s possible, yes.”
“But I thought Martin Talbot killed Jerry’s father. I mean, the papers said he confessed… ”
“He did confess,” I said, “but he wasn’t telling the truth. He’s a sick man. But he’s not a murderer.”
The frown creases deepened. “You can’t believe Jerry did it? Not just to Chris but his own father? That’s crazy. He’d have to be some kind of monster and he’s not, he’s just not.”
“I don’t believe it,” I said. Which was not the whole truth-I didn’t disbelieve it yet, either-but it was what she wanted to hear. “Still, it’s a fact that both his fiancee and his father were murdered within two days of each other. And that he’s disappeared. ”
She shook her head in a numb way and hugged herself, as though she felt chilled.
I asked gently, “Had you ever heard of Martin Talbot before you read his name in the papers this morning?”
“No. Never.”
“Do the names Laura Nichols or Karen Nichols mean anything to you?”
“Nichols? No, nothing.” Another headshake. “I just can’t understand any of this. It seemed so obvious who’d killed Chris, and now… ”
“Obvious who’d killed hear?”
“Yes. She’d been getting threatening calls and letters for more than two weeks. Did you know about that?”
I nodded.
“Well, I thought it was him, the motherfucker.”
The last word made me blink. I had more or less grown used to hearing women young and old use street language, the way a lot of them did these days, but the expletive was jarring and a little incongruous coming out of Lainey Madden. I wondered if she even realized she’d said it, as confused and angry and wrought up as she was.
“Maybe it was,” I said. “What can you tell me about the threats?”
“Not very much. Chris couldn’t imagine who was making them and neither could I. We thought it was one of those, you know, creeps who get their kicks from scaring women.”
“It was a man who made the calls?”
“I think so. I listened in once on the bedroom extension; the voice was sort of muffled, but it sounded like a man.”
“What did he say?”
“Just a lot of crazy stuff about getting Chris, making her pay for what she’d done to him. He never said what it was supposed to be that she’d done.”
“The letters said the same kind of thing?”
“Pretty much. Do you want to see one of them?”
“You still have one? I understood you’d given them all to the police.”
“I thought I had,” she said. “But I found one I’d overlooked after they were gone. It’s just like the others.”
Lainey stood and disappeared through a doorway on the far side of the room. Half a minute later she came back and handed me a single sheet of inexpensive white paper business-folded into thirds.
I unfolded it. Typed in its approximate center was a sort of salutation and four short sentences; no signature of any kind. The typeface was pica and I could tell from the look of it that it belonged to a machine with a standard ribbon, rather than one of those newer carbon jobs. I could also tell that the typewriter was probably an older model: the “a” was tilted at a drunken angle and the upper curve of the “r” was chipped off at the top.
It read:
Ms. Christine Webster,
You are going to pay for what you did. One way or another, I promise you that. You bitch, I’ll hurt you worse than you hurt me. I’ll HURT you.
Creepy stuff, all right. The product of a sick mind. I refolded it and put it down on the coffee table. Lainey left it where it lay; she seemed not to want to touch it any more.
I said, “How many of these were there?”
“Six. They came about every other day.”
“Where were they postmarked?”
“Here in the city.”
“Did Christine contact the police about them?”
“Yes. But they said there wasn’t anything they could do because he hadn’t tried to do anything to her. Well, maybe he did do something to her,” she said bitterly. “And now it’s too late.”
“Did she tell Jerry about the threats?”
“No. He would have quit his job and come down here to be with her, and she didn’t want that; he couldn’t be with her twenty-four hours a day. But she was going to tell him if they kept on much longer.”
“You told the police she was thinking about seeing a private detective,” I said. “When did she decide that?”
“Last week.”
“Was my name mentioned at all?”
“No. And I don’t know where she got your business card; I didn’t even know she had it until the policemen asked me about it.”
“Do you have any idea why she didn’t get in touch with me?”
“I guess because she hadn’t made up her mind yet. I told her seeing a detective was a good idea, but she thought it would cost too much; she didn’t have much money.”
It wouldn’t have mattered to me, I thought. I would have tried to help if she’d come to me; I take jobs for the money but I don’t turn them down, not this kind, because of a lack of it. God, why didn’t she come to me?
Useless thinking again. I pushed the thoughts away and asked Lainey, “You’re sure Christine had no personal enemies? Old boyfriends she’d broken up with, men she’d turned down, people she might have offended in some way?”
“I’m as sure as Chris was. Do you think her killer is someone she knew?”
“Yes,” I said. “Unless she’d have gone out to Lake Merced at night to meet a stranger.”
“I guess she probably wouldn’t have. But she was a pretty trusting person, you know. And a kind person, too.” Lainey shook her head. “She never hurt anybody, that’s the thing. Oh, she was forever trying to tell people how to run their lives-but in a nice way, just trying to help them. She never hurt anybody.”
“Had anything unusual happened to her recently, before the threats started? Anything she might have done or been involved in?”
Lainey gave that some thought. “No, I’m sure there wasn’t,” she said at length. “A girl she knew did commit suicide a little over a month ago, but that didn’t have anything to do with Chris.”
Suicide again. “What girl was that?”
“Her name was Bobbie Reid. She worked in the same building Chris did downtown-Chris had a part-time job with the Kittredge Advertising Agency-and they got to know each other.”
“Were they close friends?”
“No. Chris didn’t see her socially as far as I know.”
“Why did Bobbie take her own life?”
“Chris said she was depressed about some sort of personal problem. One night she just swallowed a whole bottle of sleeping pills.”
“Did Chris know what this personal problem was?”
“I think she did, but she didn’t want to talk about it. She said Bobbie was dead and there was no use talking
