they don’t tell me.”
Mrs. Van Meter snapped her fingers. “I bet it was her husband. I bet she wasn’t a widow like she said. I bet she was a grass widow. Now that husband wants to collect. But, hell, maybe he did it.”
Jack offered Mrs. Van Meter the cigarette. She accepted. He lit it for her, amazed at how steady his hand was. He hoped his voice and face were staying as steady and his anger was still well below the surface. He started rolling another smoke for himself. “Perhaps you should be the investigator.”
“I could find more than the police did, that’s for sure.”
Jack stopped rolling. “They didn’t find much?”
“They didn’t care. They picked up the body and left. Didn’t ask no questions or nothing. All they did was tell me to stay clear of the bungalow. Said they’d clean it themselves.”
“Did they?”
“They had a woman do it. A little fat Mex. Left the place spotless. I was showing it to renters that afternoon.”
Jack twisted the ends of his cigarette, lit it. He inhaled and glanced at the rooming house across the street. “Why do you think her husband may have done it?”
Mrs. Van Meter leaned on the arm of the rocker and tilted her head toward Jack. Passersby could’ve immediately recognized the gossip pose, had there been any passersby. The block was empty of all living things except a mackerel tabby and the house finch he had his eyes on. Mrs. Van Meter said, “Well, Miss Greene came home that evening drunk as a skunk. The sun had barely set. It was maybe eight thirty, nine o’clock. About twenty minutes later, a car comes rolling down the drive. A Packard so old it looked taped together. The fellow must have known her pretty well because he didn’t knock on her door or anything. Just walked right in like he was the one paying me rent. Next thing you know, they’re screaming at each other just like a married couple. She comes running out wearing nothing but a bathrobe. It was indecent, I tell you. I looked out the window right over there and saw one of her breasts flopping like mad outside the robe. Bouncing like it wanted to play in the breeze.”
“How embarrassing,” Jack said.
“Well, she tucked it away soon enough.” Mrs. Van Meter tapped her ash onto the porch. She rubbed her house slipper over it until it ground into the concrete. “Anyway, she runs into the street here, and the fellow comes out chasing her. She’s screaming bloody murder. He’s diving for her left and right. It was a mess.”
“Sounds bad.”
“Well, she was a drunk. We’d hear her all the time, blasting her phonograph, having little parties, laughing like she wanted the whole world to know something was funny.”
“And she screamed a lot?”
Mrs. Van Meter placed a thumb and forefinger on opposite sides of her mouth and rubbed them just below her bottom lip until they met in the middle. If any lipstick had drifted down, this move would’ve put it back in place. Her makeup hadn’t drifted or moved. It was immaculate. She’d put on her face before putting on shoes this morning. “No,” she said. “Except for that night I never heard her scream.”
“And you said ‘we.’ You said, ‘We’d hear her all the time.’ Do you mean you and Mr. Van Meter?”
“Of course. Who else?”
“And Mr. Van Meter was with you on the night in question?”
“I don’t like what you’re insinuating. Where else would my husband be after the sun sets other than right here with me?”
Jack smiled a gentle grin he’d learned during his early days on the force, when he’d partnered with a cagey veteran named Dave Hammond. Hammond had the best poker face Jack had ever seen. He taught Jack a trick or two. Jack said, “I apologize, Mrs. Van Meter. My assumption was that he was home. I’m just double-checking everything.”
Mrs. Van Meter leaned back in the rocker and crossed her arms. “And what else do you assume?”
“These are just guesses on my part, Mrs. Van Meter. Please understand that. But I guess that Mr. Van Meter is either elderly or was in some way incapacitated on the night of July 14, 1944.”
Mrs. Van Meter gasped. Her eyes opened wide. She exhaled slowly. “I’ll have you know my husband is not elderly in the least. He is my age, and he’s healthy as an ox.”
“And he sat in his living room while a woman who never screamed was screaming bloody murder in front of his house? He did nothing?”
Mrs. Van Meter tossed her cigarette butt in the weedy lawn. She stood and opened her front door. With one foot inside her house, she turned back to Jack. “Write this down, Mr. Investigator,” she said. “Wilma Greene was a drunk and a whore. Whatever she got, she had it coming.”
Mrs. Van Meter slammed the door behind her.
Jack left the porch, struggling to banish the thoughts of committing the second murder at this address.
He spent the rest of the morning combing the neighborhood. He started referring to Wilma as Miss Greene, which allowed him to use his father’s license more freely, let the neighbors really examine his credentials. The other neighbors were housewives like Mrs. Van Meter, but they were friendlier. They invited Jack inside, offered him coffee or tea, filled him in on local gossip, and talked about each other. And they all had the same story that Mrs. Van Meter had. Wilma had fled into the street screaming. No one came out to help her. A few minutes later, she was dead. The police never investigated.
For a few months after the incident, the neighbors had talked among themselves. This was how they all came to tell the same story, more or less. They were suspicious. It was too coincidental that someone would slip in a bathtub on the same night she ran into the street screaming. But she was a drunk. They all agreed. And she was a whore. There was no doubt about that. That whole “widow” business was just something she told them for sympathy. Quietly, tacitly, they all seemed to get together and agree that, murder or not, it didn’t matter and she didn’t matter. They didn’t say much to anyone and no one came asking until Jack did.
Jack heard this story enough times to keep his hackles down when he heard them call Wilma a whore. He heard it enough to know the rage was coming and hold it back before it could show on his face. Since she appeared to be doing fifty-yard dashes from one side of her bungalow to the other, Jack hit every house on Newland within a hundred yards.
He spoke to his first man at the last house he visited. A fellow who introduced himself as Mr. Lemus. He bypassed the kitchen table and the living room couch and led Jack into a sunny back room. Three or four easels were scattered about the room, all with canvases starting to soak up paint but nowhere close to resembling anything anyone would consider done. The canvases leaning against the walls had enough paint on them to be called finished, but Jack had no idea whether or not they were good. The colors seemed too dull and metallic to him. He couldn’t make heads or tails of the shapes or what they were supposed to be a picture of. Sometimes, if he used his imagination, he could see something that might be an arm or a carburetor or a fighting cock. Mostly, they were just blocks and triangles and curves, pictographs in a language he hadn’t learned. He raised his eyebrows and nodded with each painting in a mimicry of a man impressed. He asked questions and filled in space with a number of
