Deadly Beloved

Dan sighed. “Just think about it, okay?...Anything else for me today?”

“No.”

“Okay then. See you tomorrow.”

He stopped by the door to get his dark-brown leather jacket from the closet, slipped it on and took one last look back my way and repeated, “Just think about it,” and went out.

I was next to Bea at her reception desk now. “What do you think? Is he right?”

Her big brown eyes gazed up at me. “Yeah, he is.”

“Really?”

“I am pretty much a glorified receptionist....Why do I have a license-to-carry again?”

I didn’t answer her, thoughts generated by Dan’s complaints leaving no room for hers.

So she gave it up, asking, “You want your messages? A couple of people have been trying pretty hard to get you.”

“They’ll keep till tomorrow. Night, Bea.”

“Good night, Ms. Tree.”

I took my dark blue trenchcoat from the closet and, juggling with my purse, slipped it on and slipped on out.

I’d barely exited when I all but bumped into Bernie Levine, our attorney, a dark-haired, sharp-eyed little man in a tailored black suit and a silver silk tie, a combo that hadn’t cost him any more than our monthly office rent.

“Ms. Tree! Thank God I caught you.”

Normally Bernie is so low-key and self-composed as to be invisible. But right now he was on edge—that was plain in his expression of wild-eyed relief.

“Well, I’m flattered, Bernie. But haven’t you heard of cell phones? Big breakthrough.”

“I’ve been trying yours. And I left half a dozen messages with your receptionist.”

“Damn. Sorry. Turned off my cell during a meeting, forgot to turn it back on, and I’m afraid I just blew my messages off—do we need to step back inside?”

“No, no time for that. You come with me and I’ll explain.”

I shrugged, gave myself over to Bernie’s urgency.

Bernard A. Levine was a man I rarely said no to—as the town’s preeminent criminal attorney, he provided the Tree Agency a good share of its clients and, on occasion, defended our actions, in his service and our own.

Soon I was in the rider’s seat of Bernie’s silver Mercedes, watching my lawyer friend sit forward as if he’d woken up to find himself in the midst of a NASCAR race, not in paralyzed rush hour traffic in the Loop. This time of year, darkness descended around four-thirty and it might well have been mid-night—which, as long and hard as my day had been, was exactly what it felt like.

“Ms. Tree,” Bernie said, gripping the wheel tight, “my client is an innocent woman.”

“Aren’t all your clients innocent? Until proven broke?”

“That’s unkind.”

Notice he didn’t say “unfair.”

“So this is an indigent innocent woman, then? Pro bono work, Bern?”

He winced. “No...not exactly.”

“A wealthy innocent woman, then?”

“Why, is that a crime?”

“No. But what crime are we talking about?”

He sighed heavily. “It’s just that this...this is the weirdest goddamn case. She killed her husband, all right. This afternoon. No question.”

I frowned at him. Traffic might have been slow, but we’d just gone from innocent to guilty in ten seconds. “She admits it?”

“Admits it. Caught at the scene with the murder gun. And yet...”

“There’s an ‘and yet’?”

He nodded, honked at a taxi, and we moved a few inches. “You may have heard of her husband—Richard Addwatter? Addwatter Accounting?”

When Bernie dropped a name, he dropped a name. “I know the firm, obviously,” I said. “Who doesn’t in this town? But I don’t know the man.”

“And you never will. The man is dead. Mrs. Addwatter made him that way. And you’re going to find me extenuating circumstances.”

My eyebrows took a hike. “What happened to the ‘innocent woman’ angle?”

“Oh, she is innocent, legally speaking. Even without your help, I can get her found not guilty. No problem. Slam dunk.”

I didn’t have to say, What the hell? My face did it for me.

“Better give me the basics, Bern. She killed him where and when?”

“This afternoon, about three PM—at a no-tell motel out by the airport.”

Traffic picked up a little, and Bernie told me the story, based upon his client’s confidences and the police reports.

Richard Addwatter, a graying, handsome man in his early forties, had been in bed, apparently asleep and naked as God had first made him though considerably hairier, next to an attractive if slutty-looking blonde woman in her thirties, who was sitting up in bed, smoking a cigarette, looking bored, sheets not covering large breasts with half-circle surgery scars on the underside of large brown nipples.

The woman in bed might have been waiting for a taxi.

This was the tableau awaiting Marcy Addwatter, a beautiful desperate housewife, also in her thirties, impeccably dressed in white stretch twill pantsuit and a pale blue blouse and black Jimmy Choos. Her wildly permed dark blonde hair may well have given her a Medusa aspect, when she threw open the door and sent her own shadow into the room in a slant of sunshine.

The blonde in the bed looked up at the figure filling the doorway, just a little surprised, then immediately got bored again, smoking insolently. “You must be the little woman.”

“You must be the dead whore.”

Then Mrs. Addwatter’s arm swung up and the gun in it aimed itself at the two figures in the bed, the slumbering man and the woman who was scrambling, fighting the sheets as she tried to get out of harm’s way.

Mrs. Addwatter had been smiling, just a little, when the big nine millimeter automatic in her small hand bucked as she blasted away at the bed, emptying all eight rounds, eight small explosions that rattled everything in the room, until Mrs. Addwatter was clicking on an empty chamber.

The newly minted widow did not even bother to step into the room, where her husband had slept through his own murder, his shopworn afternoon delight wrapped up in a bloody sheet like some awful Christmas present, hanging half out of the bed and staring sightlessly with surprised, indignant eyes.

*

“Mrs. Addwatter used a nine millimeter?” the doctor asked.

“Yes.”

“That was the weapon in your dream, Ms. Tree.”

“And the weapon in my purse, doc.” I gave him a sideways glance. “Sometimes a nine mil is just a nine mil.”

He raised an eyebrow. “She shot her husband, and his, uh, ‘date’ until all the bullets were gone. Until she was ‘clicking on an empty chamber,’ as you put it.”

“Right. Like in my dream. You think that’s significant?”

“Perhaps. Please continue.”

Bernie Levine and I were walking down an endless corridor at the city jail. Our pace was steady but not frantic—Bernie had left his anxiety behind once we’d conquered traffic, and anyway he needed me to be filled completely in.

“My client is a disturbed woman, Ms. Tree—clinically a schizophrenic. And her husband was, for years, a