I glanced around. “Nice house,” I remarked.
“Come on. I’ll show you around.”
I followed while he talked back over his shoulder at me.
“It was a shit heap when we first moved in. The guy’d been renting it out to these weirdos who kept a ferret in the closet and never flushed the toilet because it was against their religious beliefs. You’ve probably seen ‘em around town. Barefoot with these red and yellow rags around their heads and outfits like something out of the Old Testament. He said they hardly ever paid their rent, but every time he came to hassle them about it, they’d start humming and hold his hand, making significant eye contact. You want some wine? I bought you some high-class stuff-no twist-off cap.”
I smiled. “I’m flattered.”
We detoured into the kitchen and he opened a bottle of
white wine for me, pouring it into a wineglass that still had the price tag on the bottom. He grinned sheepishly when he saw it.
“All I had was plastic glasses the kids used to use in the backyard,” he said. “This is the kitchen.”
“I kind of figured that.”
It was a nice house. I don’t know what I expected, but someone had made good choices. The whole place had a stripped-down feeling: bare, gleaming wood floors, furniture with simple lines, clean surfaces. Why had Camilla left this? What else was she looking for?
He showed me three bedrooms, two baths, a deck out back and a small yard enclosed by a vine-covered stucco wall.
“I’ll tell you the truth,” he said. “When she walked out, I packed up all her stuff and had the Salvation Army come take it away. I wasn’t going to sit around looking at her little artsy-fartsy geegaws. I kept the kids’ rooms intact. Maybe she’ll get tired of them like she got tired of me and send them back, but her stuff I don’t need. She was royally irritated when she heard, but what was I supposed to do?” He shrugged, standing there holding the beer bottle by the neck.
His face was beginning to take form now that I’d seen him twice. Before, I’d only registered qualities like “bland” and “harmless.” I’d been aware of the extra weight he carried, a personality made up of something nice mixed with something droll. He was direct and I responded to that, but he also had a trait I’d noticed in certain cops before: bemused self-assurance, as if he were looking at the world from a long way back but it was all okay with him. Clearly, Camilla still loomed large in his life and he smiled every time he talked about her, not with affection, but to cover his wrath. I thought he needed to go through a few more women before he got down to me.
“What is that? What’s that look?” he asked.
I smiled. “Beware of dog,” I said. I’m not sure if I was talking about him or me.
He smiled too, but he knew what I meant. “I got the stuff in here.”
He pointed toward the dining-room table in an alcove just off the living room.
I sat down in a hot circle of light, feeling like a glutton with a napkin tucked under my chin and a knife and fork upright in each fist. Along with the reports he’d Xeroxed, he’d also managed to slip me some duplicate photographs. I was going to see the after math of the crime with m own eyes and I could hardly wait.
Chapter 14
I read through everything quickly, just to get an overview, and then I went back and noted the details that interested me. The official version of the story, as much as I knew it, and the interviews with Leonard Grice, his sister Lily, neighbors, the fire inspector, and the first police officer on the scene more or less spelled out events in the same way I’d been told. Leonard and Marty were scheduled to go out for their traditional Tuesday-night dinner with Leonard’s widowed sister, Mrs. Howe. Marty wasn’t feeling well and canceled out at the last minute. Leonard and Lily went out as planned and got back to the Howes’ at about nine P.M., at which point a call was put through to Marty to let her know they were home. Both Mr. Grice and his sister spoke to Marty and she finally terminated the call in order to respond to a knock at the door. According to both Lily and Leonard, they had a cup of coffee and chatted for a bit. He left at approximately ten o’clock, arriving at Via Madrina twenty-some minutes later to find that his house had burned. By then, the blaze had been brought under control and his wife’s body was being removed from the partially destroyed residence. He collapsed and was revived by paramedics at the scene. Tillie Ahlberg was the one who’d spotted the smoke and she’d turned in an alarm at 9:55. Two units had responded within minutes, but the blaze was such that entry couldn’t be effected through the front door. Firemen had broken in through the rear, extinguishing the fire after thirty minutes or so. The body was discovered in the entryway and removed to the morgue. Identification had been established by full-mouth X rays supplied by Marty’s local dentist and through an examination of stomach contents. She’d apparently mentioned to Leonard on the phone that she’d fixed herself somecanned tomato soup and a tuna sandwich. The empty cans were found in the kitchen wastebasket. The time of death had more or less been fixed in a narrow framework between the time of the telephone call and the time the fire alarm had been turned in.
I read through the autopsy report, mentally summing up a lot of technical details. The pathologist reported no carbon granules deposited in the bronchial passages or lungs and no carbon monoxide in the blood or other tissues. It was therefore determined that she had been dead when the fire broke out. Additional lab tests had revealed no alcohol, chloroform, drugs, or poisons in the system. The cause of death was attributed to multiple skull fractures apparently caused by repeated blows with a blunt instrument. Because of the nature of the wounds, the pathologist estimated the object to be some four to five inches in width, speculating that it might have been a two-by-four wielded with great force, a baseball bat, or some kind of club, possibly metal. The murder weapon had never been found. Unless, of course, it was a big old board burned up in the fire, but there was no evidence to support that possibility.
The arson investigators didn’t seem to have any doubts that the fire had been deliberately set. Lab tests showed traces of kerosene in the floorboards. Charring patterns throughout the house had borne this out. They’d seen the same blackened splash marks and the same liquid trails that I’d spotted when I went through the house earlier. They’d also used some sophisticated methods of verifying the point of origin and the course the fire had taken as it burned. Leonard Grice had been questioned about the kerosene and he said he’d been storing a quantity in the basement for use in two lamps and a cooking stove that he and Marty took on camping trips, which accounted for the intruder’s having had access to a flammable liquid. It looked as if the burglar had come with a weapon in hand, but without any intention of burning the place down. The fire was apparently an afterthought, a hastily concocted plan to conceal the bludgeoning of Marty Grice. So far there was nothing to suggest that anybody knew she’d be there, so the cops were having a hard time imagining that the murder had been planned in advance.
There was no evidence that a time-delay device had been employed, which ruled out the possibility that Grice had rigged the fire before he left. Grice’s nephew, Mike, had
been questioned and cleared. He’d been seen by numerous impartial witnesses in a hangout called The Clockworks in downtown Santa Teresa during the critical period when experts speculated that the fire had been set. There were no other suspects and no other witnesses. Any other hard evidence including fingerprints had been destroyed by the fire. Elaine Boldt’s name was on a list of persons to be interviewed and there was a note that Lieutenant Dolan had contacted her by telephone on the fifth. He’d made an appointment to see her on January 10, but she’d never appeared. According to the information I had, she’d left for Florida the night before.
One entry, appearing in the middle of a typed report, interested me considerably. According to a deputy at the police department, a call had come in at 9:06 on the night of the murder that might well have been placed by Marty Grice. The caller had been female, in a panic, and had blurted out a cry for help before the phone went dead. Since the call was placed to the police station instead of 911, the deputy had no way of getting a fix on the address from which the call had originated. She’d made a note of it, however, and when the murder came to light, she’d reported it to Dolan, who had included it in his report. He’d questioned Grice about that too. If it was Marty, why would she have called the station instead of dialing 911? Leonard had pointed out that he and Marty had a telephone answering machine with a rapid-dial function. She’d entered the telephone numbers of both the police department and the fire department. The answering machine was found, undamaged, on a table in the rear of the hallway with the numbers neatly printed on the index. It looked as if Marty had had some warning of the attack and had been able to reach the telephone, calling out at least part of a distress signal before she’d been killed. If she’d actually placed the call, it pinpointed the time of death at 9:06 or soon afterward.