Rachel Alexander 09 - Without a Word

his desk, opening the top right-hand drawer, prime space being used for whatever it was he wanted to show me. He picked up a sheaf of notes held together by a paper clip, came over to the couch and handed it to me. I read the top one.

    Charlie,
    Many, many thanks for your offer. You’re as stand-up as they come.
    Betty

    “Betty?”
    “It was from when we decided to get married. I’d told her I’d always wanted to marry a Betty and she’d said, ‘Then that’s what you should do.’ ”
    I began to look through the rest of the notes, some on pale cream notepaper, some on scraps of paper tom off a paper bag or written in the white space around a crossword puzzle. She always called him Charlie. She always signed the notes Betty.
    “You told the police this?”
    “I did.”
    “You showed them these?”
    He nodded.
    “And?”
    “One of the detectives put his hand on my shoulder. ‘Mr. Abele,’ he said, ‘no one wants to believe that someone they,’ he hesitated, you know, because we were divorced. Then he said, ‘someone they were fond of would do a thing like this.’ ”
    “So they don’t think this means anything?”
    Charles shrugged. “The detective said that people don’t act like themselves at a time like this, when they’re so desperate. They act out of character. He said I should understand that when someone is this despondent, enough to want to end their life, they do things to cut off their feelings for the people they’re leaving behind. If they didn’t do that, he told me, they wouldn’t be able to . . .“ He just lifted one hand, twisting it so that the palm faced up, then dropped it again. “They said she had no plans.”
    “No plans?”
    “ ‘No investment in the future,’ one detective said. He had her appointment calendar in his hand. He said there were no dates with friends, no dental appointments, no theater tickets. They said there wasn’t much food in the house, that the yogurt was out of date, that the hamper was full. The detective said these were signs of depression. But there could be reasonable explanations for all those things, couldn’t there?”
    “Then you don’t agree with the detective? You think she was coerced,” wondering who but not how. How someone had gotten her to write the note, probably dictated, with JoAnn asleep in the next room was a no-brainer.
    He nodded. “What I want, the reason I called, I want to hire you. I have to know who did this to Celia.”
    “Me, too,” I said, “because whoever did this to her also murdered Eric Bechman.”

Chapter 28

    I could hear Dashiell barking as I climbed the stairs to Madison’s apartment, and then the door opened and he came barreling out at me, his whole body wiggling with delight. Madison and Leon were both standing in the doorway waiting. Something about it was like coming home after being away a long, long time. Except that it wasn’t home and what I’d come to tell them was going to break their hearts.
    And then something happened. I followed Dashiell into the apartment. Leon asked me to sit and asked if I wanted anything to eat. I heard myself telling him no, that I hadn’t slept at all, that I needed to take Dashiell and go right home, my voice sounding as if it were coming not from me but from someone else, someone standing across the room.
    Madison took a step back, a step away from me. Was it because I wasn’t staying or because Dashiell would be leaving? I opened my bag, gave her back the heart-shaped glasses, telling her I wore them all the time, thanking her, but she just put them down on the coffee table.
    “We’ve had a great time with Dashiell,” Leon said, as if that was all there’d been to it. He looked at Madison, then back at me. Was he waiting for her to tell me more?
    “We were at the dog run yesterday and the day before,” he said, picking up a pile of contact sheets from his desk and handing them to me. “Take these with you,” he said. “After you sleep, or whenever, see if there are any you’d like to have.”
    I slipped the contact sheets into the open tote bag, slipping them in next to the folded copy of the picture that had been found on Bechman’s desk the day he was killed.
    Leon was still talking about their adventures with Dashiell, me only half listening, Madison, I thought, not listening at all. “We walked along the river,” he said, “all the way down to the tip of Manhattan. Every time we passed those metal grates dogs hate to walk on,