By the time I got back to her house, the crime-scene tape was up and cops weren’t letting anyone through. Neighbors stood watching on porch steps, on curbs, and right up the yellow tape—the real lookieloos you see at every bloody crime scene since they invented that plastic yellow tape. The only difference is that you didn’t see people holding up expensive smart phones to capture images and videos like now. I was at a boxing match in Youngstown when Kelly (“the Ghost”) Pavlik was still fighting. A referee collapsed outside the ring between bouts. He was surrounded by onlookers, all holding up cell phones over the heads of the ones in front to get good shots of the man dying on the floor.
When I entered the police academy twenty years ago, I actually believed people were worth protecting and serving. That was before my time in East Cleveland. I was invalided out on a pension eight years later, owing to a fall from a rickety fire escape trying to catch up with a local kid who had a connection to the Heartless Felons, a dangerous Cleveland gang, I didn’t think many people were worth serving by then. When I opened my private investigation office, a one-man outfit in a resort town fifty miles from big-city mayhem, I was down to a few kids and maybe an old couple or two worth saving.
Jake Gittes in Chinatown says to Faye Dunaway’s character in his office, “Marriages are my métier.” I love the implied snobbery of that line. I could say the same about my line of work, except that I would have to find foreign words for “runaway dogs” or “deadbeat dads.” Never anything glamorous, but the skip-traces kept the rent on the office paid and me in alcohol. I don’t have a problem drinking, by the way. They say that’s a joke. I’m not sure.
Pardon the digression. I moved around the lookieloos and their cell phones and chatter about the “family inside.” Some of the women talking among themselves in stage whispers seemed concerned about the safety of the two children who lived there, a boy ten and a girl nine.
When I saw her blonde head in the back of the cruiser and cops and paramedics running in and out of the garage, I was relieved because I knew she and the kids were safe. She was the one who drove the children to different schools every morning. Betting wasn’t my vice, but if I had a few extra dollars to lay down, it would go on her husband being the body inside.
Her head moved up and down from time to time and a hand reached up to her face with a Kleenex to dab at the tears.
I left. There was no point in staying, even though she was my client. The cops would find me or not. I was pretty sure she’d tell them about me and what I was doing for her. Murder is like a small tsunami that washes up on a private beach. It washes out everything in its path and when the water recedes, things go back to the way they were. Murder is like that; it seeks its own equilibrium.
* * *
I would have lost that bet unless it was parimutuel betting with a predictable outcome involved. Not one body but two: her husband’s and her ex-lover’s, the man she hired me to warn off. He was bombarding her with emails, stalking her every time she left the house. His wife kicked him out after he told her he was in love with Georgiana, a woman she never heard of before that moment.
He was living in a shabby downstairs apartment in a no-frills, concrete block building. I warned him off in my cop’s voice. I was surprised to see he’d been crying—crying and drinking alone, sitting at the edge of his bed holding a printout in his hand. He was distracted, confused but not at all hostile or aggressive toward me. He admitted everything. He was pleasant, denied nothing. He nodded when I asked him about the emails he sent Georgiana. I showed him copies she’d given me to show him. He denied nothing.
“I did it, I wrote them,” he said, sniffling and wiping his eyes. “I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”
He even offered me a drink. I declined and left.
That should have been the end of it, not that horror show in her garage. I found out later from one of the Sheriff’s investigators what the scene was like. The husband’s head was pulverized with a sledgehammer—“No telling how many blows,” he told me.
Her husband was wearing his terrycloth bathrobe. He must have heard her come home after dropping off the kids at school, she told detectives, because he came downstairs when he heard the garage door opening. He wanted to go into his office late because he wasn’t feeling well and wanted to sleep in. He was worried about her ever since he learned the identity of her stalker and that the man was living nearby.
That day, I’d just returned from meeting his personal assistant at the insurance company. When I asked her how long she’d been his secretary, she immediately snapped at me, “I’m his P.A., not his secretary.” He was a big shot at his firm with a corner office overlooking the traffic below one of the triple-decker titles on an engraved plaque.
The building houses several companies and had a cafeteria in the basement so we went down in the elevator together.
“I’m telling you this in confidence before Mister Orris comes in,” she said. Her name was Alice and she had one of those narrow fox faces and slitty eyes people don’t trust but should. “Gerald—Mister Orris, I mean, is worried about her.”
“I understand,” I said. “That’s why she hired me.”
“You don’t understand,” she said, her eyes narrowing even more; you couldn’t squeeze a dime through her eyelids.
“Then tell me what I don’t understand, Alice.”
“He’s afraid of her!”
She swiveled her head around to see if the other diners had heard.
That was news. I’d met the husband briefly in their living room when I first went to the house, which was one of the biggest in town, although that isn’t saying much. Few people lived here year-round. Most of the locals who do own businesses and small shops catering to tourists. My tiny office is across the street from a bar and behind that is the smallest of the Great Lakes, Erie, separated by a few stunted trees, windblown sand dunes and a small, private beach.
“He told me, ‘If anything happens to me, Alice, it’ll be George who did it.’”
George was her nickname, short for Georgiana.
“Did he tell you why—or how?”
She pinched her lips together, the way she’d done her eyelids a moment ago. “No, he didn’t.”
“Then how do you know Mister Orris wasn’t joking?”
“He never jokes,” she huffed. “He would never joke about that.”
“Did he ever tell you whether he thought his wife was or had been cheating on him?”
She gave me one of those looks mothers give their kids when they catch them picking their noses.
“Never,” she said.
“Would he if he thought she was?”
“Our relationship is purely business, Mister Haftmann. Except for that one time, or mentioning something he thought George had done that amused him, he never mentioned anything that personal about their marriage.”
“Tell me about that time,” I said. “Where were you? Where was he?”
She told me as though she were watching it play out again in a film in her head.
“He just . . . just came out with it,” she said. “I was shocked. I only met her the one time. Had a Southern accent you could cut with a knife.”
“What did you say to him after that?”
“Nothing!”
Again, the neck swivel, afraid she’d raised her voice too much. I asked her a few more questions along that line but she gave me no answers that didn’t convince me of anything other than a boss complaining to a subordinate his wife spends too much of his money. I think she suspected I had an inkling of my suspicions about her because she closed down right away and insisted she had to get back upstairs to work.
“You won’t tell Mister Orris about this conversation, will you?”
I mimed zippering my lips shut for her.
That earned me another razor-slit expression and a tilt of her head like a bird assessing a homely bug’s viability as food.
I added the Boy Scout salute. She clucked her tongue in dismay, stood up, and headed off alone to the elevators. I stayed to finish my coffee. It wasn’t half-bad. I drink a lot of it on and off the job. Most restaurants in town serve the same liquid filth they call coffee. Vending-machine quality.
Returning at a leisurely pace, trying to assess the P.A.’s motives beyond a lovelorn and unrequited affection for her boss, I was stunned to see the tape up. My first thought was that I had been played by the ex-lover, who gave me an Academy Award performance. When Det. Johnny Roback of the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office told me his body was cooling besides the pulped face of Mr. Orris, I had to reassess Alice’s words in a different light, a much harsher light that I had so far allowed to play over the beguiling form of Mrs. Georgina (née Hollenbecker) Orris.
* * *
“Call me George,” she said when I took a seat on her couch. “All my friends do.”
That was three weeks earlier when I found myself sitting on something in black leather, elongated and sprawled in her living room like a partially constructed maze. A U-shape at one end and an L-shape at the other end of the sectional, as though the designer couldn’t decide which way it should go. The adjustable head rest snapped forward and hit me in the back of the head. I didn’t remember hitting any buttons. I pretended it didn’t happen; she ignored it.
“My husband’s upstairs,” she said. “He’ll join us in a few. Can I get you coffee or something else to drink?”
She giggled. “I’ve never dealt with a gumshoe before—oh, is that a bad word for what you do, Mister Haftmann?”
“Tom,” I said. “Call me Tom or Thomas. No, it isn’t. Trust me, I’ve been called many worse names before and after I decided to become one.”
“Good, I’m glad, and I didn’t mean to offend you!” She beamed a smile at me.
Here’s the part where my book-learning falls short. I’m just going to say, for the record, I smiled back. My teeth aren’t perfect like hers. My hair’s thinning not like that butter-yellow ponytail casually tied off with a black scrunchy, as though she couldn’t be bothered. I have developed, to my chagrin, jowls in middle age. Her face and body—well, I’ll leave that alone for now. It wasn’t Beauty and the Beast sitting opposite each other, but I wouldn’t refute anyone who said it was.
My few female clients to that point ranged from women with tattoo sleeves, lip studs, and biker boyfriends or husbands. One had a nasty smoker’s cough, the other had needle marks in her arms and a meth twitch that I first mistook for dyskinesia, a symptom of Parkinson’s. In short, they were all from a stratum of society you would not find women like Georgiana Orris associating with. I’ll risk hyperbole here: she was elegance personified.
Orris’ personal assistant threw a monkey wrench into that first image like a mean-spirited child kicking over a house of cards. I kept going back to that image of her, which kept trying to reinstate itself in my mind as the true one. They taught us about “officer bias” and how even trained cops are no better than civilian eyewitnesses at suspect identification. Worse, according to the sergeant teaching us crime-scene preservation, because cops—being cops—are prone to overconfidence.
I said I was never one for books. One line from a poem way back in high school shot to the front of my brain, if that’s where thoughts go: “She walks in beauty like the night.” For some reason, I felt like reciting that line to my reflection in the upstairs bathroom mirror back then. I tried saying it different ways to see what the effect would be. Then I spotted the face of my mother’s current boyfriend sneering in the mirror. He called me the obscene version of a sissy.
My mother had a lot of boyfriends back then. Most of them came from the bars around town. I wasn’t glad or surprised when he stopped coming around because I knew there’d be another just like him. She liked rough men. I think she thought she could control them unlike my father who never raised his voice but always got his way.
I fantasized about killing a lot of people back then. Not all of them were my mother’s boyfriends. Some were my classmates, especially the jocks who bullied me and boys who didn’t play sports or had parents who’d do something about it. The deaths I inflicted on them weren’t horrific, nothing like the mayhem that goes on today. Now that I think of it, they were mostly mundane and usually bloodless. I gave the man who smirked at me in the mirror a choking death. He was always going on about barbecuing, considered himself a master chef. My mother certainly didn’t care for it. If it wasn’t burnt pork chops on Tuesday, leathery meatloaf on Thursdays, with cans of Spaghetti-O filling in the gaps during the rest of the week, she didn’t waste time thinking about food.
When I graduated, I put the diploma on the kitchen table. Three days later, she asked me what I was going to do to make a living. I told her I wanted to become a cop. It was the first thing that popped into my head.
“That’s nice,” she said; “you’ve got until August thirty-first to get moving on it.”
She meant I had all summer before I had to move out. I was lucky because the police academy in Columbus was accepting applicants for the next class to start on September first.
I saw my mother twice more before she died. Once after I graduated the academy; the second time when I opened my private investigations business. She was bloated, dying of a cirrhotic liver, and heavily sedated. I think she recognized me, but I remember much that was incoherent, a long ramble that had several twists and turns in it that didn’t include me or my father.
A couple of her old boyfriends came to the services. They muttered “Condolences” one after the other and shook my hand. I had her cremated because I didn’t have enough money yet to have her buried in Queen of Angels.
Her urn has an inscription besides her birth and death dates. I have to read it every time I open the cupboard to remember what it says. She told me we were Scotch-Irish, so I keep a bottle of Glenfiddich and one of Hennessy on either side of the urn.
She killed my father. I can’t prove it now, and there wouldn’t be much point. She told me he committed suicide. That’s what the cops thought. I believed it, too, until I was training to be a cop. My mother was good at swinging men into her orbit like Georgiana and discarding them when she got bored of them. It was good practice for her when the uniforms showed up to find my father dead on the floor beside the bed and moreso when the detectives interrogated her.
At the time the detectives talked to me, I didn’t know cops were allowed to lie. If the detective didn’t have the same phony, ingratiating manner as one of “Your mother’s drinking friends,” as my father described the men who trailed her, I might have fallen for it. As it was, I said, yes, my father often got drunk and passed out. I said he often bumped into furniture and tripped. I didn’t know they were looking for a more logical explanation of the bruise on his throat than “he fell into the night stand trying to get undressed for bed,” but I suspected, deep down, my mother had something to do with it. I just didn’t know what, so when she told me in a giddy fit of hysteria that he’d sliced open his carotid “and painted the damn bedroom walls red,” I wanted to believe her and absolve myself from abetting whatever she’d done to make him do it.
My career as a cop began with the knowledge I had unwittingly abetted a murder. By the time I had five years in as a private investigator, I was on the verge of doing worse because of a woman who reminded me of my mother when she was young and pretty and liked to pose for the camera the way young girls do today with their selfies and their duck faces in the mirror.
I’m telling you all this, knowing I’m making Georgiana’s story my story, which isn’t the point, but it has a bearing on how I handled her case. Let me rephrase that: how badly I handled her case.
I’m telling you this because those bittersweet memories of living with my mother came roaring back, even though my mother was no beauty like Georgiana. Something stuck in my craw about my client, something I had to investigate.
* * *
She called me on a Friday afternoon about three weeks after the murder of her husband and former lover. She wanted to see me, she said, “to settle the bill.”
Making out the report for her and the itemized bill for services shouldn’t have taken as long as it did. Most of it was gas mileage running around looking for the ex-boyfriend. How much do you charge for bracing a dead boyfriend? I’ve had a few motel peeping jobs for wayward spouses, and I always added a surcharge for the overnight surveillance. Pissing in an empty 32-oz. pop bottle and getting through the night on a stock of energy bars wears down the immune system as well as the bladder. I finished by 2:30, in time to get cleaned up a little and get over to her place. It surprised me how easily I substituted “her” for “their.”
Their house sat at the end of a cul-de-sac overlooking Lake Erie. The views at sunset would be spectacular, the only enticement this burgh offers to outsiders. The boundary wall was some kind of stucco over masonry affair that wound through the adjacent woods in a kidney-shaped pattern.
I don’t know house architecture well. One huge, gaudy house looks as pretentious to me as any other. Hers was attractive, if spacious enough to house a small army. Instead of shingles, it had a terracotta roof tiles like those estate homes on the California coast.
She met me at the door in some kind of print outfit. My ex called them “shorty PJs.” I knew Georgiana had a cook, a cleaning maid, and a nanny for the kids. A local driver was a temporary chauffeur until Orris grew weary of the drive and decided to spend part of the week in Cleveland. The place felt empty.
“My children are visiting relatives out-of-state for a while,” she said.
“I understand,” I said.
“My husband’s parents. They’re his kids. I’m just the stepmom.”
That I didn’t expect.
“Come in,” she said, turning to lead the way. The foyer had a chandelier overhead that was half the size of the harbor lighthouse lantern.
I’ve always wondered: when pretty women walk ahead of men, do they expect them to watch their hips swiveling? I always do. One of life’s few perks. I lost the habit—or chucked it—when I got married. That lasted two years, then I magically reacquired the habit.
We took the same places opposite each other we had when she hired me to find and stop her stalker. The difference now was that her sleeveless pajamas in the middle of the afternoon seemed deliberately off. The flimsy material outlined her pudenda; it was obvious she wasn’t wearing a bra, but was it inappropriate for woman as large chested as she was to be going braless in her own empty house? My wife, a bookworm, once told me Cleopatra used to bathe nude in front of her Nubian slaves. They weren’t important enough to be concerned about, she said.
“I haven’t had a chance to offer you my condolences,” I said.
Her eyelashes batted, she looked at her feet in sandals for a moment, then raised her head slowly, met my eyes and said, “Thank you, Tom.”
All cops, former or not, think we have a functional bullshit detector that never fails. You meet so many losers, walking sociopaths, and shitbird ex-cons on the job that you develop one or you pay for not having it. The sheer, raw power of her physical beauty was like a shield she could slap up and knock down a laser stare better than anybody I had ever conducted a field interview on.
“I see you brought me something,” she said. “Would you care for a drink? I’m having a randy.”
“Whiskey neat, thanks,” I said, blurting it out. I usually confine my boozing until later in the day.
I handed over the manila file folder with my printout of the report and the manifest. She barely glanced at it.
“I should have asked before. Do you prefer cash or will a check suffice?”
“Check is fine,” I said. “But I was hoping you could fill me in on . . . what happened, Mrs. Orris.”
“Oh? Fill you in how exactly?”
“My take on your—on Paul Mansfield—was that he wasn’t a violent man,” I said. “I didn’t have time to do a background. You said you didn’t care about that. You just wanted him found and stopped.”
“And so I said and so you did, Mister Haftmann.”
The house was cool despite the heat wave outdoors. But I sensed the temperature drop a couple degrees after she said that.
“What I’m asking is, how did he become so enraged that he not only shot your husband when he confronted him in the garage but he beat him so savagely?”
My friendly detective at the Sheriff’s told me they didn’t even discover Orris had been shot until the autopsy X-Ray revealed it. That explained the lack of blood pooling on the floor. The man was dead; his heart had stopped pumping while he lay on the floor having his brains beat out with that sledge. That bothered me a little, too. An insurance executive who had no other tools in his garage but he happened to own a sledgehammer.
“I think Paul had snapped when he refused to accept I was breaking off all contact,” she said. “I told him when I met him at his apartment I never wanted to see him again, and if he bothered me once more or I saw him anywhere near me or my children or husband I would have him arrested.”
She told police she was filing a restraining order right after meeting Mansfield. He must have snapped, she said, and driven to her house in a frenzy, stopped hallway in the garage. She’d left the garage door open because she expected to return right away and the remote wasn’t working.
“I told the police detectives all this,” she said. “I didn’t want to wake my husband. He has the only other working remote and I didn’t want to wake him up before he wanted to get up to go to work.”
She put her face in her hands and bent over as though the pang of anguish was hitting her so hard that it doubled her over. The effect put her cleavage on full display. I waited for her to straighten up.
When she did, her eyes were wet. “It hurts to keep saying this. I’ll never stop thinking about the what-ifs, you know? What if I had gone home right away? What if I had told Gerry to lock the hose down?”
The cops were happy with the break-up homicide/suicide motive. It was the most dangerous time for a woman, homicidally speaking, when she broke off the relationship. It didn’t matter whether the spurned lover was a teenaged boy or a middle-aged man.
“Just a couple more questions, Mrs. Orris, and I promise I’ll never bother you again.” “No! No more questions! I can’t take more questions from you or anybody else! You’ve been paid. Finish your drink and get out of my house.”
The transition from shattered widow to fire-breathing harpy was complete. I stood up, thanked her, and headed for the door with her check in my hand. His name was already missing from the account.
I wanted to look back. I really needed to see what kind of expression she had on her beautiful face just then.
* * *
My wife ditched me for a lawyer. I don’t hate them as much as I used to. In fact, her cheating on me was part of the reason why I wanted to become a private investigator. Getting the license through an online, six-week course was only slightly more difficult than buying a box of Crackerjacks and finding the p. i. license inside. The real problems for a fledgling gumshoe were the expensive gee-whiz devices like directional mics and cameras with long-range lenses. Cops have databases I can’t afford. When I asked Johnny at the Sheriff’s to get me a map of Mansfield’s phone pings, he laughed in my face.
Before my wife stormed out after I confronted her over her infidelity, I said I didn’t need to be a private eye to know she was unfaithful. She told me I couldn’t find my ass with both hands and a mirror. That sarcasm from her didn’t hurt. It was what she said next that did: “You’re still pissed off about your mother but you can’t admit it because you couldn’t do anything about it then or now.”
Maybe she was right. The hurts of childhood never go away. Whoever said time heals all wounds neglected to mention that time wasn’t much of a cosmetic surgeon when it came to healing scar tissue.
Mrs. Orris had paid me to the exact amount, no bonus promised if her stalker gave up, but I couldn’t fault her on that score. I was, however, going to give her more for her money than I’d indicated on the contract she signed.
* * *
For a few beers at Penny’s Lounge across the street from my office on the Strip, Johnny was willing to tell me what the detectives there had.
“Not much,” he said. “The master bedroom was clean. The maid was in the day before. He was killed downstairs in the garage, remember. You know what a showboat our mighty M.E. is. Both men died there. Mansfield must have been demented to clobber he guy like that, especially a dead guy he just shot in the forehead. The round went through Orris’ skull, chewed his brains to mush even before Mansfield went to town on him with that big hammer.”
“It’s her gun, the papers said.”
“Correct-o. A Lady Smith and Wesson, chambered for a thirty-eight of a three-fifty-seven.”
“Yet the husband has it, he brings it downstairs supposedly because he hears a car pull into the garage. Something he heard every day during school. That make sense to you?”
“Why not? He’s in a lather. He’s not thinking straight.”
“But he lets this stalker, a guy he knew, take the gun from him and kill him with it.”
“Mansfield knew her husband was home, he saw the car at the end of the driveway.”
“But it never dawned on him that he might be confronting a scared homeowner with a gun in his hand? For all Mansfield knew,” I said, “he might have been walking into a double-barreled shotgun.”
“Hers was the only firearm registered to that house,” Johnny said, pleased he’d knocked my argument on the head.
“I know that,” I said. “But even people in a rage don’t abandon their self-preservation instincts.”
“Deal with it, Haftmann. Our prima donna Medical Examiner never revises a death certificate. Murder-suicide, sayonara baby.”
“Tell me your boys gave her the gunshot residue test.”
“Of course not, you mutt,” Johnny said, laughing. “She wasn’t on scene. Bobby and Phil watched her drive up. Your boy Mansfield was covered with soot particles. Case closed.”
“So everything’s copasetic? Not one thing out of place?”
“Nope—unless you call having tubes of cleanser under every sink in the place.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You know, Comet, Ajax, Bartender’s Friend, whatever. A shitload of the stuff. Some particles the lab identified on the counters—maybe forensics thought it was dope. No blood, though, Sherlock. The woman’s got a fetish for cleaning house, I guess. What a babe, huh? I’d love to nuzzle those big boobs of hers and make raspberries between them for an hour.”
I couldn’t bribe him to ask for a deep financial dive on Orris. He shut it down as soon as I mentioned I’d be willing to pay.
“Forget it, Haftmann,” he said. “I like working there.”
* * *
Mansfield’s wife didn’t want to see me. She lived across the state line. I showed up unannounced and uninvited. I told her I had information for her before she could slam the front door on me.
She was what the glossy women’s magazines called “cute.” Her hair styled to keep that “girl next door” look.” The corners of her eyes betrayed her with crow’s-feet deep enough to catch and hold shadows. Her house was an average brown-and-yellow Craftsman on an average street in Greenville, nothing like Georgiana’s. Mansfield must have been dazzled right off his feet by such a gorgeous woman.
“I knew he was in love with her when he told me he wanted a divorce,” she said. “He didn’t even care about shared custody.”
I’d seen the coloring books and crayons on the coffee table when she let me in, but didn’t invite me past the door.
“Was your . . . was he a violent man, Mansfield?”
“Paul? Are you kidding? He was the most gentle man I ever knew. Never raised his voice, never raised a hand to me. I’m the one with a temper. When he told me about her, that bitch, I lost it. He had to hold my fists to keep me from beating the shit out of him, that—that, Oh my God, I don’t know what to do.”
She broke down sobbing, hunched over, weeping so hard I thought she might choke in front of me. I can’t show compassion easily. I wanted to comfort her. I wasn’t guilty of anything but I was wrapped up in the whole sordid catastrophe that destroyed her life. I mumbled some stupid words I know she didn’t hear and I left her there, sobbing and weeping like no one I’d ever seen.
* * *
Those cleaners Johnny mentioned. They’re handy to have around if you want to ruin a gunshot residue test.
From my office, I called several names from Georgiana’s sorority. I spent three hours on the phone, the real detective work nowadays, asking if anyone remembered her. Three women said they did remember her but gave me banalities and what I detected was Southern charm meant to put me off. They ended the conversations abruptly, one recommending a name on my list to call instead. I did. I hit the jackpot with a woman named Mary Elise Boatwright.
“My God, yes, I do,” she said. Her accent was pure Southern. “Georgie was a stunner, a knockout. Looks to kill, I’m tellin y’all.”
“I know this will sound abrupt, Mrs. Boatwright, but as I mentioned, I’m working on a civic project for her, and I’m hoping you can tell me something about her character. Something we can use to honor her at the company’s annual banquet.”
Cops aren’t the only ones who can lie.
“Oh sure. She’s sweet as pie, but if you messed with her, she’d knock your teeth out.”
That perked me up. She told me about a fraternity boy who got too “fresh” with one of the sisters living in the house. She hit the boy in the stomach, knocked the wind out of him.
“I saw her arm-wrestle guys in bars,” she said, laughing. “She beat more’n a few of them.”
Georgiana had a college diploma on her wall near the bookcase. It said she graduated magna cum laude in education. “Do you recall whether Georgiana ever taught school after graduation?”
Silence, thinking going on at the other end.
“Well, it’s no secret, I guess,” she said finally. “Georgie never graduated. I never saw her again after she had to leave the house.”
“Had to leave?”
“Our chapter president, I don’t mind sayin’, was one mean old gal. Rules, rules, rules, all the time. Georgie came back around three a.m. from a party off campus, and Beth confronted her. I was on the staircase when she came in. I heard it all. My, that girl can cuss up a storm.”
“The sorority president?”
“Lordie, no. Georgiana! Beth was all into Jesus, a real pain. Two days later, Georgie was gone.”
Her voice turned wistful. “I always thought we would stay friends, you know? We’d stay in touch, but it never happened. Ya’ll tell her Mary Elise says hi and ask her to call me.”
“I’ll do that.”
* * *
Digging away until late into the night from one public database to another and then my one expensive one for skip-tracing, I bypassed my nightly wrap-up at Penny’s Lounge, I was obsessed with Georgiana.
Georgiana wasn’t her real name. She was born Roberta Leigh Pancake, a name I had to check several times to be sure it was legitimate. It’s not uncommon in Appalachia, which was where she was born in a village so small it wasn’t on my Atlas. I had to google it—Coalton, West Virginia. Her family had some acreage to farm but lost it to a timber company that paid taxes on the property.
One local woman with a thick hill accent thought she remembered the family.
“Passel of kids runnin’ around bare-assed naked half the time. I don’t recollect no girl named Bobbi, though. The dad was poor as a shithouse mouse,” she said. “He couldn’t farm, couldn’t raise no chickens. Couldn’t hold down a job in the one factory around here. They was cursed from the git-go.”
“What about the girls in the family? Do you remember what happened to them?”
“Oldest girl was wild. She had all the boys in a whoop-de-doo tizzy. Around fourteen, she got pregnant. Ain’t seen her since.”
* * *
I clocked my time between her children’s separate schools, back to her house where she switched cars with her husband, then on to Mansfield’s apartment on the outskirts of Jefferson, and back to her house.
Her husband was either dead or incapacitated on the floor of his garage by the time she left the house to switch cars for the drive to Mansfield’s apartment. She needed him alive, although time of death, onset of rigor mortis and liver mortis aren’t exact sciences. She knew she couldn’t allow for too big a discrepancy between killing the men. The Tarantula Hawk wasp will sting a spider with its venom to keep it alive so that its young can feed off it. She probably lured him to a place upstairs off the bedroom where she could coldcock him in the back of the head. Because no blood was found anywhere but the garage, she might have used plastic sheeting. If he saw it, it was too late.
She wasn’t a big woman but she was abnormally strong, according to her sorority sister. I remembered the muscles bunched in her shoulders and biceps when she wore the pajamas for me. Dragging him down the stairs while he wrapped in a blanket or a sheet of plastic would have nothing for her. Then she went over to Mansfield’s and either killed him there if he balked at coming with her, whatever the story she concocted for him, and drove him or with him right to the garage in her husband’s car, making sure no neighbors could see her getting out of the car. She could say he went over there, angry, to confront him and Mansfield forced him back to the house to force his wife to choose between them—that was the explanation she offered, according to Johnny, who overheard one of the detectives talking. I had to pry that out of him.
“Weak as rooster soup,” I told Johnny. But she had to work around it and so the “jogging” came into play for her alibi. She had to leave one vehicle as close to the house without risking being seen on a Ring camera or some store’s CCTV. I learned that neighbors saw her leave the house in a jogging outfit and return two hours later right after her kids were dropped off. The outfits were chosen for their bright colors and tightness to emphasize her shapely figure. More than one husband parted the sheers along her route to watch her go by—always in the direction of Mansfield’s apartment. I had no intention of running it. I’m too out of shape but I drove it as slowly as possible. It had one bonus: she could come back from her run, see the police cruisers, the bystanders, and launch into her histrionics for all to see. Cops have a gimlet eye when it comes to alibis, suspicious or not. She gave an over-the-top performance for them.
Just as she obliterated her husband’s head beyond recognition to delay discovery of the bullet hole. I could hear the detectives speaking in the garage: Only men kill like that . . .
Mansfield’s embittered widow wasn’t likely to come running to detectives with stories of his gentleness. They’d write her off as trying to clean up his reputation if she did.
If Orris wanted a divorce, which was definitely the case, according to Mansfield’s widow, who told me her husband was convinced Georgiana/Bobbi intended to leave him, he might have been suspicious. He probably knew Bobbi was still seeing him on the sly. He spent two or three days in Cleveland a week at a luxury apartment on East Ninth Street near the Guardians’ stadium rather than make the back-and-forth, fifty-mile drive every day.
By the time, I found Orris’ lawyer, I had what I needed. But I wanted one more thing. I cornered him in the parking lot and told him who I was and what I believe happened. He was shocked that cops hadn’t investigated it more thoroughly.
“I’m still bound by client confidentiality, Mister Haftmann. Attorney-client privilege applies even after death.”
“Just one thing,” I said, “for justice for your client, sir. You don’t have to answer in words. Was Mister Orris taking her out of his will?”
He stared at me for a long moment. Then he said, “We had an appointment the day he was killed. That’s all I’m going to say.”
* * *
Mansfield’s maudlin behavior the day I confronted him bothered me still. I couldn’t get it out of my head. I couldn’t say he wasn’t the kind of rejected lover to drive over to his lover’s house in a rage, wrestle a gun away from her husband, and shoot him with it. Stranger things happen in life and love is a poison in some people, an accelerant like gasoline to a smoldering fire. To my mother, it was nothing more than a dirty dishrag to be replaced with a new one.
His landlady was obese. She had carrot-colored hair and wore a muumuu with big yellow flowers. She huffed and wheezed ahead of me to the storage unit behind the apartment. She smoked and puffed while she waddled.
“I called his wife,” she said. “She told me to burn it, all of it.” Puff-puff.
“Why didn’t you?”
“Ain’t got around to it yet,” she said.
“I want the papers, “I said. “You can keep the clothes. I’ll give you fifty for it.”
“Hunnert.” She coughed and spat a gob of greenish-yellow phlegm on the sidewalk.
“Seventy-five. It’s all I have including my cash for lunch.”
She had no pity.
A couple one-use bags held all of it. I think she wanted to charge me for those too. Odds and ends, scraps of handwritten notes, including several grocery lists and stops at a liquor store. A reminder to pick up a gift for Anna’s birthday party. His child, I assumed. No diary, no cell phone the cops could dump for me, no love notes to Georgiana. Five paperbacks, all self-help variety: Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life, dogeared.
I did find one item interesting; “I am a fool” was penned three times on the inside cover of a paperback titled The Courage to Be Disliked. It seemed to resemble his handwriting but I’m no expert.
* * *
Nobody likes seeing cops at their door. But cops don’t care. They get in regardless. It’s different for a private investigator. Like the Devil or vampires, we have to be invited in.
She used some of that salty language Mary Elise said she was infamous for, and when I wouldn’t go away, she threatened to call 9-1-1. She wagged her cell phone in my face through the elaborate filigreed glass frame of the door. It probably cost more than I paid in rent for a year.
In counterpoint, I held up my sheaf of printout from my extracurricular investigation of Georgiana Orris.
“Let me in, Bobbi,” I said, a last resort.
Open sesame. That did it.
She glared at, gripped the cloth of her silk robe tighter to her chest. No peek show today.
“Five minutes,” she said.
“How about a drink?”
“Fuck you.”
“I meant for you, Bobbi,” I said. “You might want one after your hear what I have to say.”
I gave her the highlights, reading fast in a monotone.
“You sound like Jack Webb,” she said when I finished. I managed to get it all in within five minutes.
“I’m surprised someone your age knows who Jack Webb was,” I said.
“Reruns of Dragnet was one of the few programs we could get without cable on our shitty TV reception,” she said. “Gilligan’s Island, McHale’s Navy. If it got syndicated after midnight, our antenna might could pick it up from Charleston.”
Might could . . . giving me a little of the South she’d left behind years ago.
“What are you selling?”
I almost laughed. She said it so casually, so easily, as though I were selling bibles.
“The truth,” I said. “That’s all.”
Her manner had softened, the hands clutching the robe dropped to her side. The belt holding her in didn’t look up for the job. She left me there and walked over to a polished sideboard with pewter pitchers and goblets sitting on lace doilies. Above it on the wall was an oil painting of a tavern in the Alps at Oktoberfest. The pretty blonde serving girl in the painting wore a low-cut bodice. She hoisted cups of beer in both hands above the heads of drinkers at the table.
A stereo was playing softly in a distant room. I just noticed it, something classical, an energetic pianist. She tracked my eyes.
“Khatia Buniatishvili,” she said. “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. I love watching her as much as listening to her. I’ve come a long way since anyone called me ‘Bobbi.’”
I didn’t know who that was.
“My parents named me Kleopatra with a K, did you find that out? I told everyone I was Georgiana from Savannah, and changed it legally when I was twenty-one. I repeat my question. What. Do. You. Want?”
“I don’t want anything from you,” I said. “I want to hear what you have to say.”
“What I have to say. What I have to say,” she repeated as though it were a pretty phrase from a poem.”
“Yes.”
“About killing my husband? Your theory, that is. ”
“Cops might have a different word for it,” I said. “They call it evidence.”
She paced. The robe on her seemed to liquify as she moved. We were back to the other Georgiana now.
“Paul was a sweet guy,” she said.
“Your patsy.”
“That’s unkind,” she said. “I did love him. I told him I did. He never altogether believed me.”
“Should that have surprised you?”
I could see Mansfield standing in her garage looking at the trussed-up Mister Orris on the floor and putting two-and-two together. I doubt he resisted, even when he felt the barrel placed against his temple.
“No, I suppose not. After a while, it gets hard to pretend.”
“I’d say you were good at that, pretending.”
“Be careful. Cops are going to return my gun. They told me this case is closed. I’d hate to have to shoot an intruder.”
“You mean, say, if I come over to pick up my blackmail payment and stay too long to admire your paintings?”
“Now that you’ve brought it up, why don’t we talk about that? Before we do, however, I have a condition.”
“What is it?”
“Take your clothes off, all off, the shoes and underwear included.”
“I’m not wired,” I said while undressing in her foyer.
“You came here to accuse me of a double homicide,” she said. “You didn’t think I might kill you, too?”
“I figured three dead bodies, all connected to you might stretch credulity.”
“Not in this resort town,” she said; her eyes and mouth were stunning when she laughed. “You know, that one detective, the fat one, he wanted to date me? The blood on the garage floor hadn’t been cleaned yet.”
I didn’t want that picture in my head, either the fat cop I knew, who used to trade sex in his cruiser for tearing up the ticket. He prowled for women speeding after the bars closed, or the pool of blood in the garage. It would turn black fast in this heat. Cadaver flies would have been all over it in an hour.
“Okay,” she said. “Turn around.”
“If you ask me to bend over and spread them, I’m going right to the Sheriff’s.”
“Relax. How much? How much is it going to cost me? I’m willing to throw in a bonus.”
Her fingers fluttered at the belt. The robe dropped around her ankles without a whisper.
“How about this?” she said. “Want me to turn around and bend over? Hey, I’m talking to you! Where do you think you’re going?”
I stopped and turned around. Even furious, she was no less beautiful. “I thought it was obvious,” I said. “I’m going to the Sheriff’s Office and demand they re-open the case.”
“What’s your problem, Boy Scout? Do you have mommy issues? You’re not a man!”
She cursed like a man. Nothing new—just the volume and wrath that accompanied it. When the cursing subsided to an unoriginal litany of terms you can hear on television nowadays, the hurled objects began. One bounced off my shoulder. I think it was a goblet. Something else missed my head by inches and sailed through some of that expensive glass door framing.
I thought about her mommy issues crack sitting in my car.
“Not anymore,” I said.
Image credit James CaseCC-BY-2.0 (cropped)
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