Vitaltrex stock. The entire sum was to be paid to Wendy Cushner. “How did you get this?”
“I found it in his dresser a couple of days after he died. He never showed it to me.”
“Do you think he changed his mind?”
“He didn’t change his mind. He wouldn’t have changed his mind. The marriage was over.”
“How do you know?”
“The house. I got the new deed. It had been changed to be only in my name. At first I thought that somehow the county did that kind of thing the minute somebody died, and I just hadn’t heard of it before. But then the lawyer called to arrange the bank-account stuff to put the money from the sale of the company into my account, and he told me. After that I found this copy.” She took it and folded it up. “The lawyer finally admitted that he had been drawing up divorce papers, too. Bobby was going to give me everything and then get a divorce. That was how he was.”
Prescott said quietly, “I’m sorry I had to ask those questions. I had just figured out that with the Vitaltrex Corporation cleared of the murders, the next best suspect was, sooner or later, going to be you. Keep all the papers connected with the sale, and the house transfer, and make sure that the lawyer who arranged them is easy to reach, and you should be fine.”
“I’ll be . . . fine.” The words brought the tears that had been waiting, and she shook her head, but they kept coming. “I’m thirty-four years old, and my husband got killed on a date with another woman. A date. For the rest of my life, I’m going to have in the back of my mind that the only man I loved got killed because he couldn’t get laid at home. Not because he wasn’t interested in me anymore—because, God knows, he tried enough times—but because I was too tired, from making casseroles for church suppers or taking care of other women’s kids so their husbands could take them out, or something. And just to make things more comfortable, pretty soon everybody on the planet is going to know it.” She muttered, “Yeah, I’ll be just fine.”
“You said you knew Donna Halsey. Is there any chance that anybody was angry enough with her to hire a killer?”
Wendy Cushner shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know. You mean maybe another wife, like me?” She sighed. “She’s not my favorite person right now, but I didn’t think about her at all before. We were friends, sort of, in high school. She was one of those people that other girls don’t care much for but find it convenient to pretend they do. She was a cheerleader, and in the clubs most people couldn’t get into, and she had nicer clothes than the rest of us, and so on. That was a long time ago.”
“What happened after that?”
She shook her head in frustration. “I don’t know much. I heard about her once in a while. We went off to college. Both of us married soon after graduation. She sold real estate for her father’s company. Then I heard she sold stocks and bonds. Her marriage broke up.” She sat in silence for a few seconds, then said, “I hate her. She’s dead, and I hate her.”
“I don’t blame you,” Prescott said. “Right now, you probably don’t believe your feelings will change, but they will. It won’t ever feel good to think about her, but you’ll find that it happens less often.”
“I don’t hate her for wanting him. I hate her because she was smarter than I was. She saw that I was throwing something away that was a hundred times more important than anything I was keeping, so she twitched her butt a couple of times and picked it up, just like that. For a few days after he died, I thought maybe the word had leaked out that he had sold the company and was going to have big money. It hadn’t. It was just a lie I wanted to believe. All that really happened was that she was a lot smarter than I was. She had been married to a guy named Carter Rowland when we were twenty-two. He was an older guy. He had money. In those days, Bobby and I didn’t, and neither did anybody else our age, so it was just another thing to make everybody jealous of Donna. A few years ago, I heard she was divorced, and had come out of it with a lot of the money. Some people said most of it.”
“Where did the money come from?” asked Prescott.
“I don’t know anything, really,” she said. “People talk, and if they know somebody took a drink, all of a sudden he was drunk. Rowland is in the jewelry business, so I suppose he sold somebody something that wasn’t worth what he said. Personally, I can’t tell a diamond from a piece of glass, and I know that a lot of people who think they can are fooling themselves. It’s not important. She had been married to a man who wasn’t nice to her. She saw that I had a perfectly good one, a wonderful, sweet, hard-working man, and I wasn’t smart enough to keep him.”
“If she had it to do over again, she’d leave him alone,” Prescott reminded her. “Being there with him got her killed.”
“Don’t you see?” Wendy said. “Donna wasn’t the cause of this. She wanted what everybody wants. She was just the one who was in that place at the time. The one who would do things differently is me. He didn’t want anything different from what I wanted myself. I just thought all those other things I was doing were more important—no, more urgent, that they had to be done first. And second hardly ever came. Now that I look back, I can’t even remember what all those things that seemed so important were. I’m positive that nobody remembers I was the one who did them, and if I hadn’t, nobody would miss them. Donna wasn’t important. If it hadn’t been her it would have been somebody else. She was pretty and available, but so are lots of other women. If I hadn’t put him off and pushed him away, it wouldn’t have mattered what she was, because he wouldn’t have noticed.”
Prescott glanced at his watch and stood up. “Wendy, I’m sorry I had to bother you again with this, and I appreciate your telling me the truth. I’ll try to make sure you never see me again.” He went to the door, and let himself out.
21
The sign above the building had tiny white lights arranged in elaborate italic script, so the letters sparkled:
Along the front was a row of small, square windows like openings into miniature worlds, one where velvet necks were strung with diamond necklaces and velvet hands wore diamond rings, another where posts wore expensive watches, and one where red, blue, and green stones that had tumbled from a treasure chest served as a background for gold chains. But the fourth and fifth were the ones that caught Prescott’s attention. The small engraved signs behind the two glass panes said ESTATE JEWELRY.
Estate jewelry was trade jargon for anything that was secondhand. Most jewelry stores had some of it. But this merchandise was unusual. There was a yellow diamond bracelet with stones that started at chips and went all the way up to two carats. There was a ring in a brand-new setting that had an emerald the size of a dime. People who owned jewelry like that might sell it, but when they did, they probably didn’t come to Louisville, Kentucky, to sell it to Rowland’s. They would have a better market in New York or San Francisco. And most certainly, they didn’t melt down antique settings and put big stones in new ones. It was a fairly common thing to do if the merchandise had been stolen.
Prescott was beginning to feel a sharpening of his interest in Mr. Rowland. The estate jewelry was too good, and there was too much of it for a city this size. Prescott began to entertain the idea that some of it was stolen. If so, these pieces could not have been stolen in the town where he was offering them for sale. It was too risky. That meant Rowland was dealing with some larger group that was capable of buying them in one town and distributing them in places where they wouldn’t be recognized.
Part of Prescott’s resistance to the idea that Wendy Cushner had hired the killer to get rid of her newly rich husband had been that he couldn’t find a reasonable way that she could have found her way to a killer. She had apparently spent all her time taking care of her kids and doing volunteer work. She had no lovers, no male relatives who had been involved in illegal activities, no old boyfriends who might have been able to introduce her to a killer for old times’ sake. When a middle-class woman decided to hire a killer, she couldn’t just look in the yellow pages. In Prescott’s experience, such a woman always needed the help of a go-between. Usually it was a man who had a reason to take a risk for her and knew somebody who claimed to know a man who was in the business of putting holes in people so the blood would run out. Half the time, the go-between managed to offer an envelope full of cash to an undercover cop, and everybody got to see himself on a grainy videotape in a courtroom.
Watching Wendy Cushner had not changed Prescott’s opinion. She had done nothing that would indicate guilt.
