“Several days-long enough to make Jamie really frantic.” She shook her head slightly. “It was my fault, I guess. He didn’t say that, but it wouldn’t have happened with him.”
“What wouldn’t?”
“Junior wouldn’t have been stolen. Jamie always took him for walks, you know? On a leash? It always seemed so stupid to me-I mean we’re almost out in the country. I used to just let him outp›‹ let hi when Jamie wasn’t around and call for him after he’d done his business. He’d always come back. When he didn’t that last time, I had to tell Jamie what I’d been doing.”
“Was he upset?”
“He was stunned. Not angry with me though. He never was.”
She stopped speaking for a few seconds. “That dog was like his child. We don’t have any children; and Jamie didn’t have any by his first wife.” She held up her ring finger. “We haven’t been married very long-just four years.”
“And the kidnapper called?”
“Yes-yesterday. He told Jamie to deliver a thousand dollars to a certain address or he’d kill Junior.”
“Was there anything more specific about those instructions? A time or a certain door to be used, or some special clothing that your husband was supposed to wear?”
“I don’t remember the address, but he had to go to the back door of the house at two this morning and just walk in. He wasn’t supposed to knock. There was no mention of clothing.”
“The thousand dollars didn’t have to be in mixed bills, or old currency, or something like that?”
“No.” She passed a hand across her forehead, picked up the unused pot of tea and poured it into the sink. With her back still to me, she asked, “How did he die?”
“He was shot. The house he went to belonged to an old lady who’d been terrorized by threatening phone calls. She fired before she even saw him.”
Her head drooped forward onto her chest, and she leaned on the sink. “Don’t tell me he went to the wrong house.”
“No, I’m afraid he didn’t.”
She turned and stared at me with a look of disbelief. “Then what are you saying? What happened?”
This was more than I wanted to admit at the moment, but I couldn’t turn her away now. “My guess is that the old lady was used to kill your husband.” I held up both hands to stop her from responding. “Mrs. Phillips, like I said, it’s a guess. This thing just happened. I’ll need more time to nail it down, but you asked, so I told you. But I’d like you to not tell anyone else, okay?”
She nodded. “Did Jamie ever mention the name Thelma Reitz?”
“Is that the woman who shot him?”
“Yes.”
She thought for a moment. “He may have-I don’t remember it.”
“They served on a jury together.”
Again, the hand went to her face. “Oh, no.” She crossed over, grabbed the glass of milk I hadn’t touched yet, and poured it into the sink, leaving a trail of white droplets across the counter and floor. “That was the worst experience of his life. He couldn’t sleep, he almost stopped eating, he had to be treated for stomach troubles. I thought he was getting an ulcer. That trial nearly di heal neard him in.”
I was thinking maybe it had. “What trial was it?”
She whirled around from washing my glass. “You don’t know? It was the Kimberly Harris murder. My God. I heard about that case until I was blue in the face. Every single thing he heard in that courtroom he brought home to me. He went over it again and again, as if he were judge and jury wrapped up into one. I remember Thelma-he never told me her last name. I never thought I’d forget any of them. She was the one he accused of going with the crowd-of not having a mind of her own. First he’d persuaded her to vote his way, then when the majority voted against him, she switched without a second thought. For months after the trial, it was all he could talk of.”
“You mean Thelma?”
“No. All of it. Thelma was just a piece of the whole thing. He didn’t have it in for her-he pitied her. He said she’d been following men’s orders for so many years she was totally incapable of original thought. It was just the whole thing. And the guilt.”
“Guilt?”
She was still holding the wet glass. “Well, he voted with the majority too. He did the same thing Thelma did in the end. After all that anguish, he caved in. He hated himself for it. He said he should have stuck by his guns and caused a mistrial, or whatever it’s called-you know, when the jury can’t make up its mind.”
“Was this trial still an obsession with him?”
For the first time, her expression changed gradually. Her face lost its tension and became softer and more reflective. Her eyes slid off me and focused somewhere beyond the walls around us, and she smiled in sad remembrance. In the last five minutes, at some point I hadn’t recognized, she’d accepted his death. It occurred to me then that she was built of sterner stuff than I’d imagined.
“You obviously didn’t know Jamie. I suppose the trial had become an obsession. But that word isn’t right-it’s too negative for him. I mean, the trial was a negative thing, but that was the exception. Jamie went from enthusiasm to enthusiasm-even the trial was kind of like that. He got totally involved in things-to where you’d think he was becoming a little nutty-and then he’d focus on something else. Most of the time, they were harmless enough-the dog, this kitchen, Christmases were big. I think even I was one of them. All of them-or I should say all of us-were possessions. We weren’t discarded after our time-he treated me at least as well as he treated Junior, and that’s saying a lot-but we just weren’t the latest acquisition.”
She finally put down the glass and dried her hands. “Jamie gave his love to me, and to Junior, and to building projects, and even to that dumb trial. If things had turned out the way he’d wanted, he’d have turned the hearts of every person on that jury, just like Henry Fonda did in Twelve Angry Men. The fact that he couldn’t do it really bothered him a lot, but he didn’t carry it around with him for too long. Maybe longer than usual, but it passed eventually.”
“But he ended up betraying his own convictions. Why didn’t he force a mistrial?”
She got a normal-sized glass out from a cupblig from aoard, poured a moderate amount of milk into it, and handed it to me before answering. “He was a social creature. If he couldn’t change someone’s mind after a good argument, he’d quit, and he wouldn’t bear a grudge.”
I resisted saying how big I thought that was of him and merely muttered, “A man’s future hung on that good argument,” and drank my milk.
But she took it in stride-better, in fact. “Was the man innocent?”
I handed her back the glass. “Good point. I suppose not.”
She was silent for a moment, looking at me. When she spoke, her voice was hesitant, even a little scared. “Where is he, now?”
“He’s been taken to Burlington for an autopsy. They have to do that by law. They’ll bring him back, probably by the end of the day, or tomorrow at the latest.”
“Will I be able to see him?”
“Yes. In fact, someone will want you to, just to make sure.” This last part didn’t make me feel too good, so I tried to skate around it a little. She had settled down amazingly from when I’d walked into her house, but I didn’t want to presume too much, especially just as I was leaving. “Mrs. Phillips, he was pretty badly hit. His face is okay, but I think you should realize that you won’t be seeing someone who just looks asleep. It’s not like the movies.”
I got to my feet and she let me get away with simply that much. “Thank you… Did you tell me your name? I probably forgot.”
“Lieutenant Gunther-Joe Gunther.”
She escorted me to the living room and my coat and held the front door open for me. I noticed she was still holding the glass. “Mrs. Phillips, is there someone I can contact to come stay with you? Even someone from the police force, just for a while-to help you drive or whatever? I mean, you’ll have your car returned to you today sometime, but still, you might want somebody to talk to, even if it’s about the weather.”
She reached out and patted my shoulder, as if I were the one in need of comfort. “Thank you, Lieutenant, I’ll be fine. There are people I can call if I need them.”
