Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 122, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 745 & 746, September/October 2003

I wanted to find out where the safety-deposit box was located and what its contents were, but I didn’t know whether I’d be able to get into it even if I found it. Technically, Tony would inherit everything of Valerie’s, unless her will specified otherwise, but criminals aren’t permitted to gain financially from their crimes. On the other hand, Tony hadn’t been convicted of anything yet. Something to talk to a lawyer about. In the meantime, I had asked Tony to check with Valerie’s bank, and there was plenty of digging around for me to do.

The Caldwell house looked like a cosy English vicarage right out of Masterpiece Theatre. I parked my 1998 Neon across the street among the BMWs and Audis, and, feeling vaguely ashamed of its unwashed state and the dent in the front right wheel arch, I walked up to the door.

Outside the house stood a huge old oak tree, and I wondered if it would provide an intruder enough cover from the nosy neighbors. Even so, anyone who wanted to get in would have to get past the heavy door, which Tony told me had been locked, bolted, and chained. There was no porch, just the dark, paneled door set in the sandy stonework. The key let me into a small hallway, and a second door led into the living room. The police had taken the carpet, leaving the polished wood floor bare.

Three of Tony’s photographs hung on the wall. They were very good, as far as I could tell. I’d expected modernistic effects and cut-up contact sheets, but two of the three were landscapes. One looked like a Beach sunset, showing the Leuty lifeguard station in effective, high-contrast black-and-white, and the other was a view of a rocky coastline, probably in Nova Scotia, where the cliff edges cut the land from the sea like a deformed spine. Again, Tony had used high contrast.

The third was a portrait signed by Valerie, along with what I took to be her lip prints, dated two years ago. She was posing against a wall, just head and shoulders, but there was such sensuality about her Bardot-like pout and the way her raven’s-wing hair spilled over her bare, white shoulders. There was something about the angle of her head that seemed to challenge and invite at the same time, and the look in her dark eyes was intelligent, humorous, and questioning. For the first time in the case, I had a real sense of the victim, and I felt the tragedy and waste of her death.

Upstairs, I rummaged through her bedside drawers and checked out the walk-in closet, but found nothing I didn’t expect to. I assumed the police had already been through the place before me and taken anything they thought might be related to the crime. On the other hand, if they believed they had caught the criminal and had enough evidence against him, then they wouldn’t go to the expense of an all-out, lengthy crime-scene investigation. Not exactly CSI; they’d leave their lasers and Luminol at home. Valerie’s clothes were high-quality designer brands, her underwear black and silky. I felt like a voyeur, so I went back downstairs.

Next I moved into the kitchen, where the parcel of books still lay on the table, brown paper and string loose around it. The books, first editions of early Mavis Gallant and Alice Munro, were from an antiquarian dealer in Halifax, I noticed, and the string was a quaint, old-fashioned touch. The only thing missing was the knife itself, which the police had taken as evidence.

The door opened onto a back stoop, and my intrusion scared off a flock of red-throated house finches from the bird feeder. Judging by the untidy lawn surrounded by its flagstone path, neither Tony nor Valerie had been very interested in gardening. At the far end, the lawn petered off into bracken and roots where the ravine threatened to encroach, and finally the land dropped away. I walked to the end of the garden and noticed that the ravine was neither too steep nor too overgrown to be inaccessible. There was even a path, narrow and overgrown, but a path nonetheless. You certainly wouldn’t have had to be a mountain lion to gain easy access from the back.

The ground had been hard and dry at the time of the murder, I remembered, and we’d had a couple of heavy storms in the last week, so there was no point in getting down on my hands and knees with a magnifying glass, even if I had one. I stood at the end of the lawn for a while enjoying the smell of the trees and wild flowers, listening to the cardinal’s repetitive whistling and the chip-chip sounds of warblers, then I went back inside.