Then again, Judge might not miss the next time.
He cursed everyone who had forced him out of his comfortable niche – the local press, the Merchants’ Association, Judge, Fauvel, Wallace, Tuppinger – yet he knew that he had no choice but to get on with it. His sole consolation was the hope that their victory was only a temporary one: When this was all finished, he would come back to his room, close the door, and settle once more into the quiet and unchallenging life that he had established for himself during the past year.
Mrs. Fielding did not bother him on his way out of the house, and he chose to see this as a good omen.
* * *
The Allenbys, mother and daughter, lived in a two-story neo-Colonial brick home on a small lot in middle-class Ashside. Two matched maples were featured at the head of the short flagstone walk and two matched pines at the end of it. Two steps rose to a white door with a brass knocker.
Louise answered the door herself. She was wearing white shorts and a thin white halter top, and she looked as if she had spent the past thirty minutes putting on makeup and brushing her long hair.
“Come in,” she said.
The living room was more or less what he had expected: matched Colonial furniture, a color television in a huge console cabinet, knotted rugs over polished pine floors. The house was not dirty but carelessly kept: magazines spilling out of a rack, a dried water ring on the coffee table, traces of dust here and there.
“Sit down,” Louise said. “The sofa’s comfortable, and so’s that big chair with the flowered print.”
He chose the sofa. “I’m sorry to bother you like this, so late at night-”
“Don’t worry about that,” she interrupted breezily. “You’re no bother, never could be.”
He hardly recognized her as the shaken, whimpering girl in Michael Karnes’s car on Monday night.
She said, “Since I’m finished with school, I only go to bed when I feel like it, usually around three in the morning. College in the fall. Big girl now.” She grinned as if she’d never had a boyfriend knifed to death in front of her. “Can I get you a drink?”
“No, thanks.”
“Mind if I have something?”
“Go ahead.”
He stared at her trim legs as she went to the wet bar in the wall of bookcases. “Sicilian Stinger. Sure you wouldn’t like one? They’re delicious.”
“I’m fine.”
As she mixed the drink with professional expertise, she stood with her back to him, her hips artfully canted, her round butt thrust toward him. It might have been the unconscious stance of a girl not yet fully aware of her womanliness, with only a partial understanding of the effect her pneumatic body could have on men. Or it might have been completely contrived.
When she returned to the sofa with her drink, Chase said, “Are you old enough to drink?”
“Seventeen,” she said. “Almost eighteen. No longer a child, right? Maybe I’m not of legal age yet, but this is my own home, so who’s going to stop me?”
“Of course.”
Only seven years ago, when he’d been her age, seventeen-year-old girls seemed seventeen. They grew up faster now – or thought that they did.
Sipping her drink, she leaned back against the couch and crossed her bare legs.
He saw the hard tips of her breasts against the thin halter.
He said, “It’s just occurred to me that your mother may be in bed, if she gets up early for work. I didn’t mean-”
“Mother’s working now,” Louise said. She looked at him coyly, her lashes lowered and her head tilted to one side. “She’s a cocktail waitress. She goes on duty at seven, off at three, home about three-thirty in the morning.”
“I see.”
“Are you frightened?”
“Excuse me?”
She smiled mischievously. “Of being here alone with me?”
“No.”
“Good. So … where do we begin?” With another coy look, she tried to make the question seductive.
For the following half hour, he guided her through her memories of Monday night, augmenting them with his own, questioning her on details, urging her to question him, looking for some small thing that might be the key. They remembered nothing new, however, though the girl genuinely tried to help him. She was able to talk about Mike Karnes’s murder with complete detachment, as though she had not been there when it happened but had only read about it in the papers.