“But I thought you were the downfall of that relationship,” I said, looking at her carefully through the steam rising from my teacup.
Nikki ran both hands into her hair, lifting it away from her head and letting it fall again, giving her head a slight toss. “Oh no,” she said, “I was his revenge. Never mind the fact that he’d been screwing around on her for years. He found out she was having an affair so he had me. Nice, huh? I didn’t realize all this until much later, but that’s how it was.”
“Wait a minute. Let me see if I got this straight,” I said. “He found out she was involved with someone, so he gets involved with you and then divorces her. From what I understand she got reamed.”
“Oh yes. That’s exactly what he did. The affair with me was his way of proving he didn’t care. Taking the kids and the money was her punishment. He was very vindictive. It was one reason he made such a good attorney. He identified passionately with anyone who’d been wronged. He’d whip himself into a frenzy over the least little thing and then he’d use that as a driving force until he’d ground the opposition down. He was merciless. Absolutely merciless.
“Who did Gwen have the affair with?”
“You’d have to ask her that. I’m not sure I ever knew. It was certainly something he never talked about.”
I asked her about the night Laurence died and she filled me in on those details.
“What was he allergic to?”
“Animal hair. Mostly dogs but cat dander too. For a long time he wouldn’t tolerate pets in the house but then when Colin was two, someone suggested that we get him a dog.
“I understand Colin’s deaf.”
“He was born deaf. They test newborns’ hearing so we knew right away, but nothing could be done for him. Apparently I had a mild case of German measles before I even realized I was pregnant. Fortunately that was the only damage he seemed to suffer. We were lucky to that extent.”
“And the dog was for him? Like a guard dog or something?”
“Something like that. You can’t watch a kid night and day. That’s why we had the pool filled in. Bruno was a big help too.”
“A German shepherd.
“Yes,” Nikki said and then hesitated slightly. “He’s dead now. He got hit by a car right out there on the road, but he was a great dog. Very smart, very loving, very protective of Colin. Anyway, Laurence could see what it did for him, having a dog like Bruno, so he went back on the allergy medication. He really did love Colin. Whatever his faults, and he had lots of them, believe me, he did love that little boy.”
Her smile faded and her face went through an odd alteration. She was suddenly gone, disengaged. Her eyes were blank and the look she gave me was empty of emotion.
“I’m sorry, Nikki. I wish we didn’t have to go into all of this.”
We finished our tea and then got up. She removed the cups and saucers, tucking them into the dishwasher. When she looked back at me, her eyes were that flat gun-metal gray again. “I hope you find out who killed him. I’ll never be happy until I know.”
The tone of her voice made my hands numb. There was a flash in her eyes like the one I’d seen in the eyes of the geese: malevolent, unreasoning. It was just a flicker and it quickly disappeared.
“You wouldn’t try to get even, would you?” I asked.
She glanced away from me. “No. I used to think about that in prison a lot but now that I’m out, it doesn’t seem that important to me. Right now, all I want is to have my son back. And I want to lie on the beach and drink Perrier and wear my own clothes. And eat in restaurants and when I’m not doing that, I want to cook. And sleep late and take bubble baths … ” She stopped and laughed at herself and then took a deep breath. “So. No, I don’t want to risk my freedom.”
Her eyes met mine and I smiled in response. “You better hit the road,” I said.
CHAPTER 7
I stopped off at the Montebello Pharmacy while I was in the neighborhood. The pharmacist, whose name tag said “Carroll Sims,” was in his fifties, medium height, with mild brown eyes behind mild tortoiseshell frames. He was in the midst of explaining to quite an old woman exactly what her medication was and how it should be taken. She was both puzzled and exasperated by the explanation but Sims was tactful, answering her flustered inquiries with a benign goodwill. I could imagine people showing him their warts and cat bites, describing chest pains and urinary symptoms across the counter. When it was my turn, I wished I had some little ill I could tell him about. Instead, I showed him my I.D.
“What can I do for you?”
“Did you happen to work here eight years ago when Laurence Fife was murdered?”
“Well I sure did. I own the place. Are you a friend of his?”
“No,” I said, “I’ve been hired to look into the whole case again. I thought this was a logical place to start.”
“I don’t think I can be much help. I can tell you the medication he was taking, dosage, number of refills, the doctor who prescribed it, but I can’t tell you how the switch was made. Well, I can tell you that. I just can’t tell you who did it.”
Most of the information Sims gave me I already knew. Laurence was taking an antihistamine called HistaDril, which he’d been on for years. He consulted an allergist about once a year and the rest of the time the refill on the medication was, automatically okayed. The only thing Sims told me that I hadn’t known was that HistaDril had recently been taken off the market because of possible carcinogenic side-effects.
“In other words, if Fife had just taken the medication for a few more years, he might have gotten cancer and died anyway.”
“Maybe,” the pharmacist said. We stared at one another for a moment.
“I don’t suppose you have any idea who killed him,” I said.
“Nope.”
“Well, I guess that’s that. Did you see any of the trial?”
“Just when I testified. I identified the pill bottle as one of ours. It had been pretty recently refilled but Fife himself had done that and we’d chitchatted at the time. He’d been taking HistaDril for so long we hardly needed to talk about that.”
“Do you remember what you did talk about?”
“Oh, the usual thing. I think there was a fire burning across the backside of the city about that time and we talked about that. A lot of people with allergies were bothered by the increase in air pollution.”
“Was it bothering him?”
“It bothered everyone a little bit but I don’t remember him being any worse off than anyone else.”
“Well,” I said, “I thank you for your time. If you think of anything else, will you give me a buzz? I’m in the book.”
“Sure, if I think of anything,” he said.
It was midafternoon and I wasn’t meeting Gwen again until 6:00. I felt restless and out of sorts. Bit by bit, I was putting together background information, but nothing was really happening yet, and as far as I knew nothing might ever come of it. As far as the state of California was concerned, justice had been served and only Nikki Fife stood in contradiction of this. Nikki and the nameless, faceless killer of Laurence Fife who had enjoyed eight years of immunity from prosecution, eight years of freedom that I was now being hired to violate. At some point, I was bound to tread on someone’s toes and that someone was not going to be happy with me.
I decided to go spy on Marcia Threadgill. At the time she tripped on that crack in the sidewalk, she had just come from the craft shop, having purchased items necessary to make one of those wooden purses covered with assorted shells. I imagined her decoupaging orange crates, making clever hanging ornaments out of egg cartons festooned with plastic sprigs of lily of the valley. Marcia Threadgill was twenty-six years old and she suffered from bad taste. The owner of the craft shop had filled me in on the projects she had done and every bit of it reminded me of my aunt. Marcia Threadgill was cheap at heart. She turned common trash into Christmas gifts. This is the mentality, in my opinion, that leads to cheating insurance companies and other sly ruses. This is the kind of person who would write to the Pepsi-Cola bottling plant claiming to have found a mouse hair in her drink, trying to net herself a free case of soda.