A Ticket to the Boneyard

Page 4

"We both knew her."
I studied the clipping again. The wife's name was Cornelia, and her age was given as thirty-seven. The children were Andrew, six; Kevin, four; and Delcey, two. Cornelia Sturdevant, I thought, and no bells rang. I looked at her, puzzled.
"Connie," she said.
"Connie?"
"Connie Cooperman. You remember her."
"Connie Cooperman," I said, and then I remembered a bouncy blond cheerleader of a girl. "Jesus," I said. "How in the hell did she wind up in- where was this, anyway? Canton, Massillon, Walnut Hills. Where are all these places?"
" Ohio. Northern Ohio, not far from Akron."
"How did she get there?"
"By marrying Philip Sturdevant. She met him, I don't know, seven or eight years ago."
"How? Was he a john?''
"No, nothing like that. She was on vacation, she was up at Stowe on a ski weekend. He was there, he was divorced and unattached, and he fell for her. I don't know that he was rich but he was comfortably well-off, he owned furniture stores and made a good living from them. And he was crazy about Connie and he wanted to marry her and have babies with her."
"And that's what they did."
"That's what they did. She thought he was wonderful and she was ready to get out of the life and out of New York. She was sweet and cute and guys liked her, but she was hardly what you'd call a born whore."
"Is that what you are?"
"No, I'm not. I was a lot like Connie actually, we were both a couple of NJGs who drifted into it. I turned out to be good at it, that's all."
"What's an NJG?"
"A neurotic Jewish girl. It's not just that I turned out to be good at it. I turned out to be capable of living the life without getting eaten up by it. It grinds down an awful lot of girls, it erodes what little self-esteem they started out with. But it hasn't hurt me that way."
"No."
"At least that's what I think most of the time." She gave me a brave smile. "Except on the occasional bad night, and everybody has a few of those."
"Sure."
"It may have been good for Connie early on. She was fat and unpopular in high school, and it did her good to find out that men wanted her and found her attractive. But then it stopped being good for her, and then she got lucky and met Philip Sturdevant, and he fell for her and she was crazy about him, and they went to Ohio to make babies."
"And then he found out about her past and went nuts and killed her."
"No."
"No?"
She shook her head. "He knew all along. She told him from the jump. It was very brave of her, and it turned out to be the absolute right thing to do, because it didn't bother him and otherwise there would have been that secret between them. He was a pretty worldly guy, as it turned out. He was fifteen or twenty years older than Connie, and he'd been married twice, and while he'd lived all his life in Massillon he'd traveled a lot. He didn't mind that she'd spent a few years in the life. If anything I think he got a kick out of it, especially since he was taking her away from all that."
"And they lived happily ever after."
She ignored that. "I had a couple of letters from her over the years," she said. "Only a couple, because I never get around to answering letters, and when you don't write back people stop writing to you. Most of the time I would get a card from her at Christmas. You know those cards people have made up with pictures of their children? I got a few of those from her. Beautiful children, but you would expect that. He was a good-looking man, you can see that from the newspaper photo, and you remember how pretty Connie was."
"Yes."
"I wish I had the last card she sent. I'm not the kind of person who keeps things. By the tenth of January all my Christmas cards are out with the garbage. So I don't have one to show you, and I won't be getting a new one next month because-"
She wept silently, her shoulders drawn in and shaking, her hands clasped. After a moment or two she caught hold of herself, drew in a deep breath, let it out.
I said, "I wonder what made him do it."
"He didn't do it. He wasn't the type."
"People surprise you."
"He didn't do it."
I looked at her.
"I don't know a soul in Canton or Massillon," she said. "The only person I ever knew there was Connie, and the only person who could have known she knew me was Philip Sturdevant, and they're both dead."
"So?"
"So who sent me the clipping?"
"Anybody could have sent it."
"Oh?"
"She could have mentioned you to a friend or neighbor there. Then, after the murder and suicide, the friend goes through Connie's things, finds her address book, and wants to let her out-of-town friends know what happened."
"So this friend clips the story out of the paper and sends it all by itself? Without a word of explanation?"
"There was no note in the envelope?"
"Nothing."
"Maybe she wrote a note and forgot to put it in the envelope. People do that sort of thing all the time."
"And she forgot to put her return address on the envelope?"
"You have the envelope?"
"In the other room. It's a plain white envelope with my name and address hand-printed."
"Can I see it?"
She nodded. I sat in my chair and looked at the picture that was supposed to be worth fifty thousand dollars. Once I'd come very close to emptying a gun into it. I hadn't thought about that incident in a long time. It looked as though I'd be thinking of it a lot now.
The envelope was as she'd described it, five-and-dime stuff, cheap and untraceable. Her name and address had been block-printed in ballpoint. No return address in the upper-left corner or on the back flap.
" New York postmark," I said.
"I know."
"So if it was a friend of hers-"
"The friend carried the clipping all the way to New York and put it in the mail."
I stood up and walked over to the window. I looked through it without seeing anything, then turned to face her. "The alternative," I said, "is that someone else killed her. And her kids. And her husband."
"Yes."
"And faked it to look like murder and suicide. Faked a call to the cops while he was at it. And then waited until the story was printed in the local paper, and clipped it, and brought it back to New York and put it in the mail."
"Yes."
"I guess we're thinking of the same person."
"He swore he'd kill Connie," she said. "And me. And you."
"He did, didn't he."
" 'You and all your women, Scudder.' That's what he said to you."
"A lot of bad guys say a lot of things over the years. You can't take all that crap seriously." I went over and picked up the envelope again, as if I could read its psychic vibrations. If it held any, they were too subtle for me.
I said, "Why now, for God's sake? What's it been, twelve years?"
"Just about."
"You really think it's him, don't you?"
"I know it is."
"Motley."
"Yes."
"James Leo Motley," I said. "Jesus."
James Leo Motley. I'd first heard the name in that same apartment, but not in the black-and-white living room. I'd called Elaine one afternoon, dropped by shortly thereafter. She fixed bourbon for me and a diet cola for herself, and a few minutes later we were in her bedroom. Afterward I touched the tip of one finger to a discolored area alongside her rib cage and asked her what happened.
"I almost called you," she said. "I had a visitor yesterday afternoon."
"Oh?"
"Someone new. He'd called, said he was a friend of Connie's. That's Connie Cooperman. You met her, remember?"
"Sure."
"He said she gave him my number. So we talked, and he sounded all right, and he came over. I didn't like him."
"What was wrong with him?"
"I don't know exactly. There was something weird about him. Something about his eyes."
"His eyes?"
"The way he looks at you. What is it Superman's got? X-ray vision? I felt as though he could look at me and see clear through to the bone."
I ran a hand over her. "You'd miss a lot of nice skin that way," I said.
"And there was something very cold about it. Reptilian, like a lizard watching flies. Or like a snake. Coiled, ready to strike without warning."
"What's he look like?"
"That may have been part of it. He's kind of strange-looking. A very long narrow face. Mouse-colored hair, and a lousy haircut, one of those soup-bowl jobs. It made him look like a monk. Very pale skin. Unhealthy, or at least that's how it looked."
"Sounds charming."
"His body was strange, too. He was completely hard."
"Isn't that something you strive for in your line of work?"
"Not his cock, his whole body. Like every muscle was tense all the time, like he never relaxed. He's thin, but he's very muscular. What you call wiry."
"What happened?"
"We went to bed. I wanted to get him into bed because I wanted to get him out of here as soon as possible. Also, I figured once I got him off he'd be calmer and I wouldn't be as nervous. I already knew I wasn't going to see him again. In fact I would have asked him to leave without taking him to bed, but I was afraid of what he might do. He didn't exactly do anything, but he was an unpleasant trick."
"Was he rough?"
"Not exactly. It was the way he touched me. You can tell a lot from the way a man touches you. He touched me like he hated me. I mean, who needs that shit, you know?"
"How'd you get the bruise?"
"That was after. He got dressed, he wasn't interested in taking a shower and I didn't suggest it because I wanted him O-U-T. And he gave me this look, and he said we'd probably be seeing a lot of each other from now on. That's what you think, I thought, but I didn't say anything. He was on his way out, and he hadn't given me any money, or left anything on the dresser."
"You didn't get money in front?"
"No, I never do. I don't discuss it ahead of time, not unless the man brings it up, and most of the time they don't. A lot of men like to pretend to themselves that the sex is free and the money they give me is a present, and that's fine. Anyway, he was ready to walk out without giving me anything, and I came this close to letting him go."
"But you didn't."
"No, because I was angry, and if I was going to have to trick a shitheel like that I was at least going to get paid for it. So I gave him a smile and said, 'You know, you're forgetting something.'
"He said, 'What am I forgetting?' 'I'm a working girl,' I said. He said he knew that, that he could tell a whore when he saw one."
"Nice."
"I didn't react to it, but I did say I got paid for what I did. Something like that, I forgot how I put it. And he gave me this very cold look, and he said, 'I don't pay.'
"And then I was stupid. I could have let it go, but I thought maybe it was just an ego thing, a matter of terms, and I said I didn't expect him to pay, but maybe he'd like to give me a present."