All's Well That Ends Page 2

  Part of what bonded the two women was the irrational belief that the next man would be better, despite their own histories, which proved that the next ones were seldom as good as the ones before.

  Sasha had even used her professional skills to help the hunt for number six by taking photos of Phoebe for an online matchmaking service. She’d needed new ones because all her portraits were in wedding attire.

  She never got to see the photos. Sasha was delivering them the night she found Phoebe dead.

  “Is ordering photos the behavior of a clinically depressed woman about to end her life?” Sasha had demanded. “Posing, preening, worrying about the lighting and how it would make her look?”

  People are unpredictable. Maybe the need for updated photos and an online dating service would make you realize all you’d lost, and drive you into depression. I didn’t know Phoebe well enough to know if she’d been putting up a façade for Sasha’s sake, or if she was subject to rapid mood changes.

  But my private opinion was that this was all about Sasha, who, being human, couldn’t deal with the painful irrationality of the situation.

  Eventually, Sasha noticed the disconnect between what she’d observed and the guilt she felt over what had happened, and had found a way to reconcile them. Phoebe had not been depressed and Phoebe had not taken her life. If someone else had ended Phoebe’s life, then Sasha could feel pain, but not guilt.

  Dennis uncapped Phoebe as, with perfect mistiming, the wind changed course and her airborne ashes caught a thermal and landed on Dennis’s expensive dark overcoat. All over it.

  Retribution for that eulogy, I was sure.

  Dennis scowled and brushed, which smeared but didn’t remove the gray blots, and he looked as if he was about to shout at his mother one last time. Instead, he took a deep breath, leaned low and shook out her remaining remains, turned away from the stream, left the silver mixer on the ground, and wiped his leather gloves clean before facing Sasha.

  Because of Dennis’s flight schedule, there had been a lunch before the memorial service, rather than the more traditional gathering afterward. Now Dennis pushed up his smeared coat sleeve, checked his watch, and came over to Sasha. “Keep me in the loop about the house,” he said.

  She nodded. He’d talked her into finding a realtor and disposing of Phoebe’s “treasures,” since he lived in Chicago while Sasha lived nearby and was sharing in the profits. To me that meant they should also share the work, but Dennis was Phoebe’s executor, and life was complicated enough without getting into this particular battle.

  Sasha put her hand on Dennis’s sleeve. Her forehead had a long, vertical wrinkle down its middle. “Before you go,” she said, “I’ve been wanting to ask…do you…did you wonder…when you heard…” She took another deep breath and cleared her throat. “I don’t believe Phoebe would take her life that way.”

  “She wouldn’t use pills and booze? Why not?”

  He’d spoken too loudly, so that people nearby turned to watch. “I mean she wouldn’t commit suicide,” Sasha said. “It doesn’t fit her. She was upbeat, looking forward—”

  “Wait a minute! What are you suggesting?” Dennis’s face darkened as if his blood had been rerouted and was pounding its way toward the skin.

  “I’m not comfortable with the official version. Why would she—”

  “Damn it, Sasha!” he said, his voice loud enough to scare the Daves, who’d approached to express condolences. “You’re not comfortable? This is not about you. For once in your life can you not be histrionic? You’re just like her—everything’s dramatic and oversized. You want headlines, investigations, your fifteen minutes of fame? Find it somewhere else. She killed herself.”

  “And it’s just like you to want to believe your own mother killed herself. Why would she? She didn’t even leave a note.” At six feet, Sasha was as tall as Dennis, and with the high-heeled boots and enormous hat, taller still, so she held her ground. The hostility radiating off him would have floored a smaller woman.

  “She wasn’t one for writing,” he snapped. “Or for thinking things through. This was probably an impulse like so many others. That’s how she was, an emotional infant!”

  Sasha was silent for a moment, very unlike her normal behavior. Then she said quietly, “Don’t you even want to know why I think that?”

  “I’ve got a plane to catch.” Once again he checked his watch.

  Sasha lowered her voice still more. “Are you at all sorry that your mother died?”

  “Let me know what’s happening about the house.” He turned and walked away from us.

  Two

  * * *

  * * *

  It makes me angry and sad,” Sasha said over dinner. She had the silver martini shaker on the seat next to her, and she looked at it, as if Phoebe, alive, might still inhabit it.

  “We are all angry and sad,” Mackenzie said. He’d joined us for the meal and looked almost as troubled as Sasha did. While we’d been bidding farewell to Phoebe, he’d spent Sunday on the phone with his parents, three cousins, and two uncles, who’d lost their homes to the devastating hurricane that had leveled too much of Louisiana, including his parents’ parish and the home he’d grown up in. No lives lost, which was the very good news, but three months after the catastrophe, everyone was still scattered, unsure about what to do—or what they could do—next. Their pasts had been eradicated; their futures were murky, and each day was progressively more difficult to wade through.

  His mother, the usually buoyant Gabby Mackenzie, compared their situation to having Vaseline on your glasses while trying to read the fine print. Jobs lost, contacts lost, supplies lost, friends made into distant refugees or missing altogether, promises unkept, seasons passing. All the supports society had built were gone.

  They’d never had much in the way of material goods. In fact, C.K. had said he hadn’t realized till he was out in the world that they’d been “something close to poor.” And now, they had still less. His father, Boyd, called “Boy,” had been a construction worker when young, then a partner in a country hardware store. The fact that he couldn’t rebuild on his former site or supply the tools for others to rebuild was driving him up the wall. If, of course, there had been a still-standing wall to be driven up.

  We’d offered the loft to them and to Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn, their dogs. Either we and our sure-to-be-miserably-unhappy cat would share the space with all of them, or we’d give it to them for as long as they needed, and we’d find friends willing to house us for the duration.

  His parents had politely—they were southerners, after all—declined. Exile did not seem a solution to them, and they needed to be closer to where they hoped to rebuild their lives. One of Boy’s cousins had a spread of land with lots of room for the dogs up in West Monroe, and though that was too far away from home to be efficient, they could stay as long as they needed to. It was no solution, but the only available one. Mostly, they’d been on long forays close to home, staying wherever they could find shelter, working at rebuilding their store and life, and then retreating north to West Monroe.

  We sat glumly in a tiny Ethiopian restaurant, each of us sad and/or angry for our own reasons. We favored third world cuisines—they were generally hearty and inexpensive, although it did feel out of kilter to be dining on the cuisine of a country with a starvation problem. Perhaps it should have put our problems in perspective.

  “Is your cousin really named Junior Bear?” Sasha suddenly demanded of Mackenzie. Then she waved the question away. “I thought you were all supposed to be named Bubba. Except you, given that you don’t even have actual names, only initials. But really—what kind of a name is Junior Bear?”

  Mackenzie smiled for the first time since he’d entered the restaurant. “Northerners have no common sense. Isn’t it obvious? Junior Bear would be the child of Senior Bear.”

  We sat at an hourglass-shaped wicker table, Sasha and I on stools, Mackenzie on a low sofa. To his credit, he had offered t
o switch, but we figured we’d be as Ethiopian as possible and let the male keep the comfiest spot.

  “Those stools of yours,” he said. “To be authentic, they should be covered in monkey fur.”

  I was glad they weren’t. But still, “How do you know that?”

  He raised an eyebrow. “I read.”

  He did read, and mostly the sort of things I did not, but wished I did. Aside from the varied texts he had to read for his doctoral program in criminology, his leisure reading was mostly history, biography, and cultural studies, and he was becoming a world-class master of the justifiably obscure factoid.

  His observation did not relieve the gloom. We were on hold until we were presented with an enormous plate covered with a gray, rubbery-looking pancake. “Injera,” the waiter said, and he then demonstrated how the various stews we’d ordered—chicken, lamb, and vegetable—were to be wrapped into a piece of pancake and popped into the mouth. I liked this part. No utensils, although they had provided forks for the timid.

  The waiter also poured us honey wine, but it isn’t my favorite, so I ordered sparkling water.

  “It makes me sad and angry,” Sasha said. Again.

  “Junior Bear?” Mackenzie asked. “Or the lack of monkey fur?”

  She shook her head.

  Mackenzie and I both sighed. “What?” we both asked with no enthusiasm.

  “That nobody cares.”

  “I care,” Mackenzie said. “It’s breakin’ my heart.” The devastation in his home state and his distance from and inability to help his family grew less tolerable with each passing week. “Can’t imagine why you’d think I didn’t,” he added.

  “You do?” Sasha said. “I can’t tell you what that means, you of all people.”

  “Wait—” I began. “You two are talking about two sep—”

  “So you won’t let this pass as a suicide, either,” she said before I could finish my sentence. “Will you help me?”

  Mackenzie frowned. “What are you talking about?”

  I’d spared him Sasha’s obsessive post-Phoebe discussions. He had enough real and terrible things on his mind. He didn’t need figments and rationalizations.

  Sasha looked surprised. “Phoebe, of course,” she said. “Phoebe’s murder. What else?”

  “What else? My God, there’s an entire…” Mackenzie let his thought go unsaid and he looked at me as if he wanted to read what was behind my forehead.

  It wasn’t always great being with two people you knew well, who didn’t know each other well enough to read the signs. Sasha turned and looked at me with the barest hint of a frown. Her unspoken dialogue was fast and furious and irritated that I hadn’t bothered to tell my husband her worries and theories about Phoebe’s death.

  Having made sure that I knew that she knew what was up, she rolled a piece of the rubber pancake around the chicken stew, chewed, leaked only a little bit of the sauce, nodded approval of the taste, then took a deep breath and used her fingers to tick points off rather than eat. “It’s obvious that somebody wouldn’t take sleeping pills when they’re still in their street clothes, nowhere near their bedroom. It feels wrong. Wouldn’t you be on the bed and not on the living-room sofa if you were headed for either a good night’s sleep or your eternal rest?”

  “She was downstairs?” Mackenzie asked.

  “Dressed to go out.” Sasha spoke with new urgency. Her anger over my failure to involve the great detective in the case was now replaced by this opportunity to make a convert to her cause. “Wearing really nice slacks, a red silk blouse, chocolate velvet blazer, and great shoes. And to think I always worried that she’d break her neck on those spike heels. Life’s ironic, isn’t it? She was wearing jewelry, too, of course. Not too wild, not too overdone, but…perfectly accessorized for company, curled up in the corner of the sofa, her head on the armrest.”

  Mackenzie shot another glance my way. I think he wanted me to stop her, or to explain why any of this was at all important. But I knew either attempt would be futile.

  “The front door was unlocked,” Sasha said.

  “Why were you there?” Mackenzie asked. “Was this nighttime? Did she expect you?”

  Sasha shook her head. “It was a spontaneous visit. She hadn’t mentioned any plans to go out. I phoned from my car, twice and no answer, but she did that sometimes, opted not to answer the phone. I do that, too. I had photos of her—she’d asked me to take them—but mostly, I was out and in my car anyway, and I had a good story to tell her. I thought we’d have a glass of wine and a lot of laughs. Worst case scenario, she would have gone out, and I’d have left the photos for her anyway.”

  “Okay, I bite,” Mackenzie said, and he finally did, on the injera. “This is good,” he said with audible surprise. “Gingery. I could do with a good story and a few laughs. Or is it a for-girls-only thing?”

  “You judge. Somebody Phoebe liked, a friend, had acquired a stepson via a recent marriage. Got that so far? An artist. Divorced, available. And since I’m a photographer, divorced, and available, when she heard about him she was sure it was a match made in heaven. Two artists!” Sasha shook her head, her eyes lowered in mock horror. “I met him that night. The night Phoebe…”

  “And?” Mackenzie prompted when it was obvious her thoughts had drifted away from the story.

  “He hadn’t sounded all that stupid on the phone, not world-class stupid, but for all I know, he had somebody else speak for him. And I say this despite the fact that I have low standards when it comes to men, so—”

  “Actually,” I interrupted, “I’d say you have no standards whatsoever.”

  She nodded. “I was surprised to find out that I did. We met at a restaurant. I was there first, and in he swaggered with the kind of missing-link looks that prove not everybody fully evolved from the apes. Can you remember the experience of praying that an approaching person is not your blind date? I got religion the minute he entered the restaurant. I know you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, so maybe that’s why my prayers were not answered. Instead, he raised his eyebrows when he saw me, wiggled them, and gave two thumbs-up. That was meant as a compliment.”

  She wrapped another morsel of hard-boiled-egg-and-lamb stew and pointed at the gray roll. “This injera has twice the I.Q. he had.” She chewed for a moment, then said, “A better personality, too.” She bit off another piece. “Better-looking as well.

  “This restaurant in Old City, near you guys, was once some kind of retail outlet, and it still has the big storefront kind of window. So he gets the conversation rolling—that’s how he put it—by ordering us beers without asking me what I’d like—which wouldn’t have been a beer—then by telling me at great length, especially for a man with an extremely limited vocabulary, what a bitch his ex-wife was, and why. And how lucky he was to get rid of her, because ever since he had, he was ‘getting plenty’—his romantic description of his love life. More eyebrow wiggling.

  “‘I’m a lucky guy,’ he said, ‘in every way.’ And apparently his great good luck had just been proven once again by the parking spot he found. And then he waves and says his car is outside, and indeed it was, driver’s side facing me.

  “It was orange, with black graffiti all over it. ‘My art,’ he said. ‘Art on wheels. Unique, huh?’ So there’s my soul mate, the other artist. Outlines of naked women with bosoms so large they were like deformities, and sayings like ‘Ready, Freddie’ and painted flames coming out from the wheel wells—and yellow crime-scene tape pasted on the side. And on the rear door facing me it said ‘Honk if you’re horny.’”

  She put one finger up to squelch any editorial comments on our part. “That’s when I told Nick-the-Artist that I had suddenly developed a terrible gastrointestinal problem and had to leave immediately. He didn’t understand ‘gastrointestinal’ so I translated into his language. He sulked, shrugged, and said, ‘Suit yourself.’ He didn’t even say good-bye and before I made it out the door, he was downing my beer.”

  She shook
her head. “Talk about the bottom of the barrel! He was the sludge that’s under the barrel. So I decided to drive to Phoebe’s and tell her how her matchmaking with the artist—artist!—had turned out. I mean she’s—she was—practically right across the bridge. She was there, on the couch, the TV playing, all dressed up, and it took me what feels way too long to realize she was dead. It does not make sense.”

  “Any sign of forced entry?” Mackenzie asked.

  Sasha shook her head.

  “Anything missing?”

  The question made it clear that he had not known Phoebe.

  “Who could tell? Nothing was turned over, and nothing looked rifled through. Drawers weren’t open, but she wasn’t into minimalist décor. She believed that less was less.”

  That was putting it mildly. Divorce was Phoebe’s only method of getting rid of excess possessions.

  “What are you thinkin’, then?” C.K. asked.

  “She had a date. She simply hadn’t told me about him. Dressed up. Drinks—well, at least she had one.”

  “But why, Sasha?” I asked. “Why would anybody want to do that to her?”

  “I don’t know!” she said. “I’m not a detective. You guys are.”

  “Hardly,” I murmured. I am tired of needing to demur, but neither can I speed up the process of becoming an actual investigator.

  “You have an idea who she might have been seein’?” Mackenzie’s accent had increased since the hurricane, as if carefully preserving that remaining bit of Louisiana, no matter what.

  Sasha shook her head. “The photos were for an online dating service.”

  “One she belonged to or was going to belong to?” C.K. asked.

  Sasha sighed, and her shoulders lowered. “I don’t know. I think—I think she already belonged somewhere because she mentioned getting inquiries from guys who ‘weren’t it,’ she said. She thought she looked too stuffy in the photo she was using, a half of a wedding photo. I offered to Photoshop out the hat and veil, but she said the whole dressed-up ‘granny-thing’—that was her phrase—wasn’t the image she wanted to project. Neither was undressed.” Sasha looked down at her hands. I was sure it was so that we couldn’t see her face, but we could see and understand what the rapid eyeblinks meant.