Red Leaves by Paullina Simons
‘No, why? Should there have been?’
‘I don’t know. Should there have been?’
Nathan looked mystified. ‘On whose part foul play?’
‘Yours,’ said Spencer bluntly.
Nathan first tilted his head back and then smiled broadly. ‘No, detective. There was no suspicion of foul play on my part. You see, I was in the car with her.’
Spencer nodded, unconvinced. ‘It seems that no matter where you go, Nathan Sinclair, you leave death in your wake. Kristina is dead –’
‘Are you accusing me of killing Kristina, detective?’ Nathan laughed.
‘Death follows you like Aristotle used to,’ Spencer said. ‘How did you manage to get your wife to die, too?’
‘Ah, well, this is not such a friendly visit after all. Detective, as I told you a number of times, my wife was driving. It was an unfortunate accident –’
‘Unfortunate accidents seem to be your MO.’
‘Unfortunate accidents are not my MO at all,’ said Nathan, mimicking Spencer. ‘What happened with Kristina –’
‘Which time is that now? The time you got her pregnant? Or the time you …’ But Spencer stopped short of accusing Nathan of murder.
There was no profit in it.
He didn’t want to get Nathan’s emphatic, condescending denial on tape. Instead Spencer fell quiet, wanting whiskey, but having black coffee instead.
Having lost his wife in an accident, Spencer knew what a grieving man behaves like, and Nathan did not behave like one. He might as well have been speaking about a spring break loss by the Red Sox. Nathan didn’t care. He looked straight at Spencer with insolent eyes, as if to say, I dare you. You’ve been trying so long to catch me in something, and all this time you haven’t caught me in shit and now you’re coming to me again, and I’m telling you, you will again go away empty-handed to your apartment in the suburbs while I will continue to live on Sound Beach Road, in a house you can only dream of. I won’t even allow you to set foot in my house. I won’t allow you into my house, and do you know why? Because you really, really want to come in. But I will not let you in.
But Spencer knew there was something in their conversation that would open a door for him.
‘A philosophy major, weren’t you?’ said Spencer. ‘I’m surprised your sense of guilt isn’t more developed.’
Nathan laughed dryly. ‘Sense of guilt? It has nothing to do with philosophy. It has to do with religion and mothering. And I’ve had neither. Philosophy has to do only with rationalization. I’ve had plenty of that.’
‘You’ve had plenty of mothering, too.’
‘Who? Katherine?’ He scoffed mildly. ‘If you call going to charity functions four times a week and entertaining friends the other three mothering, then yes, I’ve had plenty.’
‘She loved you very much.’
‘Is that what she told you? Well, I’m sure she believed it.’
‘She took you into her home and made her house yours,’ said Spencer in an impassioned voice. ‘How can you be so ungrateful?’
‘What should I be grateful for? Did I ask her to do that for me? Who said I wasn’t happy where I was? I had friends, I had three nuns who took care of me better than Katherine Sinclair ever took care of me. I went from a warm place to a gilded cage with no supervision and no discipline. A lot of show. A lot of manners. But what besides that? I was seven when I came to the Sinclairs. They thought I had just been born, but I was already somebody before them. Then all of a sudden they didn’t like the somebody I was and threw me out. Not just me but their own daughter, too.’ He sounded angry when he said that.
Spencer was surprised. He hadn’t seen much emotion in Nathan.
Except for the maroon coat.
Spencer said, ‘They didn’t throw her out.’
‘What would you call it? They arranged a marriage for her just so there would be less of a scandal. They couldn’t keep their only child in their home? It was so important to make nice for the neighbors. God forbid the Sinclairs should become the talk of the town. They discarded her as they had discarded me. And it was the worst moment of her life.’
‘Well,’ said Spencer caustically, ‘she didn’t have much of a life. I’d say dying an unnatural death at twenty-one was the worst moment of her life, wouldn’t you agree?’
Nathan flinched, barely, and it was this wincing that stayed with Spencer. Nathan flinched. Spencer hadn’t been prepared for that.
Shrugging and outwardly calm, Nathan said, ‘I don’t know. I’m sorry she’s gone.’
‘Of course. She is the only family you ever had. The only one who treated you like family.’
Nathan smirked. ‘See, here you’re wrong, detective. You’re romanticizing our relationship. I’m an orphan, or have you forgotten? Every female I ever meet melts at the sound of that word. “Or-phan.” Oh, they say, poor baby, let me take you home, let me show you to my mommy, let me love you as if you were mine, let me cook you a meal, let me make your bed. Kristina was this way, Conni was this way. Elizabeth was this way and then some. Every protective fiber of their female souls is shaken by the word “orphan.” They want nothing better than to take care of me. To bring me into their family circle.’
‘That’s because they don’t know what you are.’ Spencer was becoming convinced that Nathan had murdered Kristina. He was the only one capable, the only one remorseless and heartless enough to snuff out the life of a young woman who loved only him, and then go on as if it didn’t matter. Like his old dead cat. It didn’t shake him up one bit. He killed her and went on with his life as if she had never existed. This broke, poor kid from nowhere killed the hand that fed him and then quit the college she had paid for.
He was obviously well off, thanks to his late wife. He was now alone and seemingly happy about it, ensconced in the same social sphere that had spit him out as an adolescent. Nathan Sinclair didn’t need to go to Edinburgh to learn the philosophy of rationalization. He seemed at peace with everything he’d ever done, and there was nothing that made Spencer’s Catholic soul sicker. Had he shown some remorse, her death would have been less meaningless. But he acted like a man for whom the act of murder was as forgettable as taking Aristotle for a walk.
With an amused expression, Nathan said, ‘I know who I am. But what am I, detective?’
Spencer leaned across the table, his fists clenched underneath, and said, ‘The Sinclairs adopted you! How can you be so heartless?’
‘Who’s heartless? They adopted me and changed my name, calling me after their dead kid. Every year on November twenty-first, Thanksgiving or not, they would bring me to the family cemetery and make me put down flowers at the grave of Nathan Sinclair. Every year since I was seven. Boy, that was fun,’ Nathan said dryly. ‘According to the tombstone, I was already dead.’
Spencer listened. It wasn’t what he had come to hear. ‘Did you have a name before?’
‘I’m sure I did. I don’t know it. The nuns called me Billy.’
Shaking his head, Spencer said, ‘Billy, Nathan, Albert. Do you even know who you are?’
‘Do you know who you are?’ Nathan retorted. ‘You say your name is Spencer, but I heard your cop buddies call you Tracy, and when you introduce yourself you say Spencer Patrick O’Malley. No one includes his middle name in an introduction.’
‘That’s who I am,’ said Spencer, beginning to tremble in helpless anger. ‘Spencer Patrick O’Malley.’
‘And that’s who I am – Albert Maplethorpe.’
‘Kristina chose that name for you, didn’t she?’
Blinking twice, Nathan said, ‘We chose it together.’
‘Did you get the tattoo on your arm together too? With her initials on it? Have you tried since her death to have it surgically removed?’
‘What are you talking about, detective? Why would I do that?’
‘Tell me, Nathan-Albert-Billy, did you love her?’
Nathan answered him fast, without thinking. ‘Yes, I loved her,’
‘Did you kill her?’
The reply came instantly. ‘No, I did not.’
The tape recorder whirred.
‘Are you lying?’
‘No, I’m not.’
‘You’ve lied your whole life to everyone about everything. Are you lying now?’
‘No, I’m not.’
‘I see.’
‘I have an alibi, detective. You know that.’
‘Yeah, alibi.’ Spencer was tapping furiously on his empty glass.
Nathan laughed.
Then they were quiet. Nathan ate his turkey club with no mayo and no bacon, while Spencer nursed his coffee. He thought of something else, the grandmother.
‘Yeah? What about her? We stayed with her every summer. It was a lot of fun. The lake was nice. She was a good cook. Kristina was sad when her grandmother died.’ ‘Did you know Louise Morgan had a will?’ ‘Of course I knew she had a will. These are the Sinclairs and the Morgans. They’re born with a will.’ After taking a big bite of his club, Nathan continued, ‘When Kristina was living in Brooklyn Heights she told me that her grandmother was furious at the way the family treated Kristina – Grandma’s only grandchild. Louise couldn’t believe Kristina had been thrown away with the baby, so to speak, just to maintain appearances on North Street. So Louise turned her back on her family after they turned their backs on Kristina. She vowed to cut them all out of her will, including Kristina’s mother.’ ‘Did Kristina tell you who Louise Morgan was leaving her money to?’
Nathan paused. ‘Krissy said she didn’t know.’ Spencer shuddered at the diminutive of Kristina’s name on the lips of Nathan Sinclair. There was something sacrilegious about it.
‘You sound like you feel Louise Morgan was right to disinherit the whole family.’
‘Absolutely. They had treated Kristina horribly. Me, I don’t care, I expected it. Who am I to them? But she was their princess, she was the pinnacle of their dreams. All of what they both were, John and Katherine, was sublimated into Kristina.’
‘I thought John was sublimated into you.’
‘Is that what she said?’ He scoffed. ‘Yeah, right.’
‘Nathan, you can’t ignore the fact that because of what happened between you two, the entire family completely fell apart.’
He shrugged. ‘They were a weak family.’ He was silent for a second and stopped eating. ‘When I was very young, maybe a year, something happened to my mother. She died. My mother’s sister wanted to take care of me, but my father would have none of it. He was living with other women then. One day my aunt took me with her after school. We had been living in Colorado and she drove to New Mexico. We lived in Albuquerque for a little while, until my father hunted us down. I don’t know what he did with my aunt, but it was the middle of a summer night. He took me from her, and we hitchhiked for a long time till we got to Texas. Then something happened to him at a truck stop. He got into a fight, I think, because I found him in the back lot. I sat by him all night, and when I realized he wasn’t going to get up, I got up myself and left. I went out onto the highway to find my aunt.’ He paused. ‘Go figure, I ended up with the Sinclairs.’
Spencer listened quietly. Nathan picked up his sandwich.
‘I don’t know their names; I don’t know my own name, or where my aunt is, or where in Colorado we first lived. I’m not that sure it was even Colorado. It could’ve been Wyoming. In any case, what happened with the Sinclairs was unfortunate, certainly, but it was not death. In fact, there was a baby. It could’ve been much worse, and shame on the Sinclairs for not seeing it that way. How many grandkids are they going to have now?’
Spencer was too dumbfounded to speak. How could a man be so devoid of humanity? When he found his voice, he said haltingly, ‘They thought of you as their son, don’t you understand that? What good would a grandchild from their son and daughter do them?’
Nathan shrugged and went on finishing his club sandwich. ‘Whatever,’ he said.
‘Did you understand then, or now, that what you did had consequences?’ Spencer asked angrily. ‘Listen, you didn’t just take up with each other in a vacuum. This world isn’t a black amoral hole where your actions have no meaning, and where nothing you do matters. Did you ever think of the people you hurt?’
‘They weren’t strong. I didn’t ask them to be hurt.’
Spencer said, ‘Had you not behaved like an idiot, you would have had a trust fund worth millions when you turned twenty-one.’
‘I did not behave like an idiot,’ Nathan said indignantly. ‘How did I know they were going to overreact?’
‘Because you should have known your little dalliance would break their hearts. Knowing that would have set you apart from an animal.’
‘Knowing that and doing it anyway?’ said Nathan sarcastically.
‘Knowing that would have been a beginning,’ said Spencer, seething.
Nathan just smiled.
‘The whole world is pretty dispensable to you, isn’t it?’ said Spencer.
‘Don’t know what you’re talking about.’
Spencer wanted to smash the table with his fist. ‘Let me ask you, Nathan Sinclair,’ he said, ‘in the quiet of the night when you’re alone, are you ever, tell me, are you ever simply revolted with yourself?’
Wiping his mouth and putting down his napkin, Nathan said gruffly, ‘What did you come here to accuse me of, detective? Because if I’m not under arrest, I think I’m about done.’
‘You’re not under arrest,’ said Spencer, disgusted.
‘I didn’t think so.’
Nathan got up from his chair. As he stood up, he gave Spencer a kind of half mock salute, half obscene gesture.
Spencer sat quietly in his chair and tried to stay in control. He didn’t want to lose his temper in a public place, and when he realized that, he got scared. He thought, I don’t want to lose my temper in front of all of these people and have a fistfight that everybody in the restaurant will remember. Spencer calmed down after realizing this, but not before he said, ‘Watch out, Nathan Sinclair.’
Nathan leaned down menacingly. ‘No – you watch out, detective,’ he whispered.
Spencer said, ‘You destroyed a family. You ruined Conni Tobias, who is sitting in jail for five years of her life. Don’t you give a shit?’
Spencer saw Nathan’s face. He saw Nathan did not give a shit.
Nathan reached into the back pocket of his pants for his wallet and pulled out a fifty-dollar bill. He threw it carelessly on the table and said, smiling, ‘Thanks for a pleasant lunch.’
Spencer cursed under his breath as he paid for lunch out of his own pocket and left the fifty-dollar bill as a tip for the waitress.
He didn’t go back home. He couldn’t. It was midafternoon, and Spencer drove around Greenwich, chanting a mantra to himself, What am I missing? What am I overlooking?
He went to the registry office of births, marriages, and deaths and looked up the date of the marriage of Nathan Sinclair and Elizabeth – Elizabeth Barrett, as he found out. They had been married two years earlier, on June 12, 1995. Elizabeth had been a June bride. Then Spencer looked up her death. She had died on April 13, 1996. Nothing more was said about it, so Spencer went to the local library, where in an old issue of Greenwich Time he read a short article about the death of Elizabeth Barrett Maplethorpe.
In the middle of the day, on an open country road, going about forty-five miles an hour, a sober Elizabeth Maplethorpe lost control of the car and went off the road. Her passenger had survived. She herself, however, was not wearing a seat belt and went through the collapsible steering wheel, suffering massive head injuries. Members of her family were quoted as saying they could not believe Elizabeth was not belted in, because she would not put the car into drive unless she and all her passengers were wearing seat belts. It had something to do with a bad accident years earlier. Albert Maplethorpe confirmed that his wife usually always wore a seat belt, but she had been getting more lax with them lately.
Spencer sat in the library and thought for a long time. He knew it was in there, right there, somewhere, right between those lines, right in those words, but he didn’t know where, he didn’t know what. Elizabeth had died intestate, which meant all she had went to her surviving spouse. But what did she have that made disconnecting her seat belt worthwhile?
On a clear day, Elizabeth was taking a Sunday drive with her husband, who was properly belted in. Spencer was sure she was, too. Until just before the ‘accident,’ Elizabeth was belted in. Then he unbelted her. All it took was five pounds of pressure from his pinkie finger, and then he could have done a million things to make her lose control of a vehicle. They weren’t on a highway, they weren’t on an interstate. Nathan couldn’t ensure his own survival as easily if their Jaguar had been doing seventy instead of forty. No, they were humming along on a country road, breezy, springy, sunny, and then all of a sudden she was dead and he wasn’t. The investigation was closed after the insurance company made sure the seat belt had not malfunctioned. And it hadn’t. He was in the car with her, the ambulance came and took them both away, and he went home and took her money.
Spencer wasn’t sure Elizabeth Barrett had had money, but he was certain Nathan Sinclair hadn’t had a penny. That was the whole point. Poor penniless Nathan always had to mooch off the women who loved him, thought Spencer.
Elizabeth Barrett’s name sounded familiar. The brief article said she was from New Hampshire. Where in New Hampshire?
He left the library and drove out north on I-95 – in the direction of New Hampshire. Spencer was not going home until he found out about Elizabeth Barrett.
Absentmindedly, Spencer listened to the radio. Occasionally a song he knew would come on, and he’d hum it. He hummed to Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Dancing in the Dark,’ Nirvana’s ‘Come as You Are,’ and Elton John’s ‘Benny and the Jets.’