He disappeared into the house. Sarah and I were put into the back seat of different cruisers. I could see her from mine, but she wasn’t looking over in my direction. I couldn’t resist trying the door handle, to see whether it would open, and it did not. I sat there, feeling like a criminal, and feeling even greater shame that Sarah was being put through the same ordeal. It was about ten minutes before Flint reappeared. He got into the back of Sarah’s car first, questioned her for at least fifteen minutes before he got out and settled in next to me. Even though he appeared to be done with Sarah, she had not yet been allowed out of her cruiser.
Flint shifted in the seat, got comfortable, and asked to see my wrists.
“Ouch,” he said empathetically, inspecting the bruises from the handcuffs. “That part checks out.”
He got out his notebook, clicked his ballpoint a few times, made some scribbles. “Where’s Trixie Snelling gone?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“You don’t know, or you won’t tell me?”
“I honestly don’t know. She said something about trying to find her little girl. I’m guessing she means her daughter.”
“Where’s her daughter?”
“I didn’t even know, until she said that, that she might have a daughter. So I have no idea where she might be.”
“Hmm.” He made some notes. “I understand that you know the deceased.”
“Yes.” I cleared my throat. “Martin Benson. A columnist for the Suburban.”
“Yeah, I’ve read him now and again. Saw his big expose on suburban kink, a dominatrix in the neighborhood. Lordy lordy.”
“There was a picture,” I said.
“Yeah, I saw that. She was dressed in her civilian clothes, though,” Flint mused. “I guess, if they’d got a picture of her on the job, they couldn’t even have run it. Family newspaper and all that.”
“I guess,” I said. “Listen, should I have a lawyer?”
“I don’t know,” Flint said, scratching his prominent nose. “You think you should have a lawyer?”
“I haven’t done anything wrong.” I paused. “Stupid, maybe, but not wrong. That’s why I called the police.”
Flint grunted. “When did you get here?”
“I guess, around one-thirty. I got here before Trixie.”
“She wasn’t already home?”
“No, she’d been away somewhere, I don’t know where, and we arranged to meet here at that time.”
“So both of you went into the house at the same time.”
“That’s right.” I remembered something. “As we were going into the house, Trixie thought maybe the door was already unlocked, but she wasn’t sure. You know how, sometimes, you turn the deadbolt, but it’ll still turn even if it’s not in the lock position?”
Flint shrugged. I went through the rest of it with him, how I’d gone into the basement for some coffee and found Benson. That Trixie came downstairs wondering what had happened to me, screamed, found a note, started to panic. That she handcuffed me to the railing and took off in my car. That she called Sarah at work to rescue me.
“Hmm,” Flint said. “So what were you meeting her here for…?” He leaned in a little closer, as if there were someone else in the car he didn’t want to overhear. “You can tell me. Nice-looking lady, I gather. Your wife might not understand, but I would.”
I swallowed. “It wasn’t like that. Trixie and I were friends, from when we used to live on the street. She helped me out when I was in trouble, with that other mess.”
Flint nodded, remembering.
“She’d been having trouble lately with the local paper, and wanted my help with it, and I told her there really wasn’t anything I could do, and then she set up this meeting between me and Benson-I thought she was going to be there but she bailed-thinking I’d try to talk him out of taking her picture, but I explained to her I couldn’t do that. But there was a huge misunderstanding, with Benson, and it got me in a lot of trouble at work. I was pretty pissed with her. But she called, said she was going to come clean, tell me what kind of trouble she was in, and I agreed to come out and see her, one last time, to hear her side of the story.” I shook my head. “Good call.”
“So you weren’t having a sexual relationship with Ms. Snelling?” Flint asked.
“No.”
“You weren’t one of her clients? You didn’t get those marks on your wrist some other way? You weren’t coming out here, paying her to do some things for you your wife’s just not too crazy about?” He smiled, like we were just a couple of guys, talking. “Look, it happens. You’re married awhile, you have the kids, the wife’s just not into it like she used to be, and her idea of kinky is doing it with the lights on.”
“Don’t speak about my wife that way,” I said.
Flint’s eyebrows went up. “My apologies. That was rude. I was just speaking generally. But you didn’t answer my question. Were you paying her? Were you hiring her for one of her little sessions?”
“No.”
Flint kept going over the same ground, again and again. What time I got there, what I’d been doing before my arrival, where Trixie might have gone, did she have any family that I knew of, who might have done this to Benson, whether I’d noticed anyone else around the house. My earlier meeting with Benson, how it had gone wrong, my subsequent demotion at the Metropolitan.
I was getting a headache.
“So both you and Ms. Snelling, you had really good reasons to be angry with Martin Benson,” Detective Flint said.
I thought about that. “The thing is, the damage had already been done,” I said. “The paper got the picture they wanted, they ran it. I think that’s when things started to totally unravel for Trixie. Someone saw that picture, tipped off someone who’d been trying to find her, and they tracked her down to this house. It was the thing she’d been worried about from the beginning.”
“And what was Martin Benson doing here in the first place?”
It was a good question. “Maybe he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Maybe he was trying to get more dirt on Trixie, and the guys who came to get her found him instead.”
Flint’s lips pursed out, considering it.
“Or,” he said, tipping his fedora back an inch and exposing the top of his white forehead, “it could be a whole lot simpler than that.”
“What do you mean?”
Flint took a long breath. “She invited Benson over. She offered him a little demo of what she does for a living. Told him, ‘What the hey, you know what I do, you might as well get the tour.’ Gets him strapped down to that cross thing. Then she kills him.” He ran his index finger quickly across his throat. I shook my head, but Flint continued. “She leaves. She drives around for a while. Calls you. Tells you she’s been out of town, whatever. Arranges to meet you at her place. Makes sure she arrives after you do so you get the idea she’s been away, hasn’t been home for a while. She does this thing at the door, like maybe there’s something wrong with the lock, plants the idea with you that maybe someone broke in. You go inside, everything seems fine, she finds a reason to send you downstairs to get something, the coffee you said. You go down, you find the body. She comes down, acts all surprised. I’ll bet she screamed just right, huh? Made it seem like she was seeing Benson’s dead body for the first time.”
“No,” I said. “It wasn’t an act.”
“Oh, it was an act,” Flint said. “A command performance, just for you.”
“I think you’re wrong.”
“And the beauty of it is, not only does she have you convinced that she didn’t know anything about it, she’s set it up perfectly, making you her alibi. You’re here before she arrives. So how can it be her? She wasn’t even here. And you’re the one who can testify to that fact. And how shocked she was at finding some guy who’s bled to death in her torture chamber.”
Flint adjusted his hat. “She used you to try to get Benson to back off. And now she’s using you to cover up the fact that she murdered him.”
