Someone to Watch Over Me Read online

  Chapter 28

  * * *

  Joe O’Hara strolled into the kitchen just as Michael poured the last of the wine into Leigh’s glass. In one startled glance, he took in the dimmed lights and cozy scene, and tried to back out of the room. “Excuse me—”

  “Wait, Joe—don’t leave,” Leigh said, anxious to correct his impression. “I want to introduce you properly to Mr. Valente—”

  “We already met, Mrs. Manning. Remember? Last Friday?”

  Despite all her very serious woes, Leigh laughed at his baffled expression. “Of course I remember. What I’m trying to say is that I didn’t remember that I knew Mr. Valente when I saw him on Friday. Many years ago, when I was in college and living downtown, he worked in his family’s grocery market on the corner, and I used to shop there. He had a beard and I didn’t know his name, but his aunt—who I thought was his mother until tonight—made shrimp pizzas just for me!”

  O’Hara’s gaze bounced to the empty wine bottle, then shifted accusingly to Michael Valente. “How much of that wine have you given Mrs. Manning?”

  “I am not drunk, Joe. I’m trying to explain why I didn’t recognize Michael until tonight. He saved me from being mugged—and probably much worse—one night.”

  “And I guess you probably forgot to ask his name afterwards?” Joe O’Hara suggested, but instead of sounding skeptical, the loyal chauffeur sounded as if he were trying to believe the unbelievable. He approached the table, ready to acknowledge the formal introduction that Leigh, in her present state of mind, felt was absolutely necessary.

  “I knew his name at the time,” Leigh explained, “but in those days, everyone in Michael’s neighborhood had nicknames. He was called Hawk back then—Falco in Italian—and Falco is the only name I knew him by, until tonight.”

  O’Hara reached out to shake Michael Valente’s hand, but his announcement carried an unmistakable warning to the other man: “We had nicknames in my neighborhood, too,” he said bluntly. “My nickname was Bruiser.”

  Leigh swallowed a laugh at Michael’s grave response. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  When Hilda returned from her afternoon out a short while later, Joe O’Hara imparted the same information to her about Valente while Leigh and Michael looked on. It was the only relief from anguish and suspense that Leigh had known in a week. It ended abruptly when the telephone rang.

  Hilda answered it, spoke briefly to the caller; then she turned slowly to the table. “Detective Littleton and a Detective Lieutenant McCord are on their way up here.”

  Leigh jumped up from the table and rushed into the living room, filled with hope and fear.

  In the kitchen, Hilda looked worriedly at O’Hara and lowered her voice. “Detective Littleton wanted to be sure Mrs. Manning wasn’t alone. She wanted to be certain someone would be here with her—”

  “That doesn’t sound good,” O’Hara said, turning automatically to Michael Valente for his opinion. “Does it?”

  “No,” Valente said tightly. “It isn’t good.” He nodded toward the doorway. “Both of you need to go out there and stay with her.”

  O’Hara did not suggest that Valente step into view along with them. He had already seen how Leigh was treated by the police when she was with him. Instead, Joe took Hilda’s arm and they went into the living room.

  Michael Valente remained out of sight, listening to the voices in the living room, unable to protect her—or even stand at her side—while she heard news he knew was going to wound her more deeply that any assailant’s knife. . . .

  Leigh looked at both detectives’ faces, her mind trying to reject what they were telling her. “You’re wrong! He wasn’t at the cabin. I was there. You found someone else!”

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Manning,” Detective Littleton said. “There is no doubt. His body was discovered in his car, in a garage cut into the hillside behind the house.”

  Her tear-brightened eyes grew huge with anguished accusation. “He froze to death while you people wasted time—”

  “He did not freeze to death,” the man who called himself Detective McCord told her unemotionally. “Your husband died of a gunshot wound to the head. The weapon was on the floor of his automobile.”

  Wildly, Leigh shook her head. “Are you crazy? Are you telling me you found a man who shot himself in his car and you think it’s my husband? Logan would never do that! He would never, never, never do that!”

  Leigh believed none of it, none of it . . . except that Logan was dead. No matter how much she stood there, trying to argue, she already knew he was dead. He would have come home to her days before if he’d been alive. He would have crawled or hitchhiked or dragged himself. She felt Hilda’s arm slide around her shoulders, and she twisted the hem of her sweater like a frantic child trying to understand why the grown-ups were punishing her. “He—he did NOT kill himself, do you hear me?” she cried. “You’re lying. Why are you lying?”

  “We don’t think your husband took his own life,” McCord told her bluntly. “We’ll know more tomorrow, but at this point, we have reason to believe someone else pulled the trigger on his revolver.”

  Leigh’s vivid imagination chose that moment to display a horrific scene—Logan, with a gun held to his head by someone else. Someone else pulling the trigger, ending his life. Ending her life. The room began to sway and twist, and she clutched at Hilda’s sleeve. Her eyes swimming with scalding tears, she looked at the kinder of the two detectives, and she nodded her head, as if by nodding at Sam Littleton, she could force the other woman to nod, too, and agree with her. “He’s wrong, isn’t he? He is. Say he is.” She held out her hand to her. “Please. Say he is.”

  Detective Littleton’s soft voice was sympathetic but certain. “No, Mrs. Manning, he isn’t wrong. I’m very sorry . . .”

  HILDA PUT HER TO BED that night. O’Hara fixed two stiff drinks and made Hilda have one of them. He finished his, and escorted the heartbroken housekeeper to her room; then he went to his own room and had two more drinks, leaving Michael Valente to let himself out.

  At eleven o’clock, Joe got up to make certain everything was locked up. He was partway across the silent living room when he realized Valente hadn’t left. The man was sitting on an uncomfortable, straight-backed chair at the far end of the living room, next to the hallway leading to the master bedroom. His head was bent, his forearms propped on his thighs, hands clasped loosely in front of him. He was listening to the anguished weeping of the woman down the hall.

  He had stationed himself there like a centurion.

  As Joe silently moved closer, trying to decide what to say, Valente wearily rubbed his hands over his face.

  “Are you plannin’ to sit there all night?” Joe asked softly.

  The other man jerked his hands away and looked up. “No,” he said.

  If Joe hadn’t had those drinks, he would have kept his realization about the other man’s motives to himself, but he had been drinking, so he didn’t do that. Instead, he said, “You might as well go home and get some sleep, Hawk. You can’t do anything to protect her from what she’s going through tonight.”

  Valente neither confirmed nor denied Joe’s interpretation of his motives for being there. Instead, he stood up and slowly put on the jacket he’d hung over the back of his chair. “In that case, Bruiser, I’ll leave her to you.”

  Chapter 29

  * * *

  “I know this is a difficult time for you, Mrs. Manning,” Sam Littleton said as she and McCord sat down in the living room the next morning. Shrader was in the kitchen, interviewing the housekeeper, the chauffeur, and the secretary. “We’ll try to make this visit as brief as possible,” Sam continued. “There are some questions we need to ask you, and some of them may seem offensive or even cruel, but I assure you they are just routine. They’re the same questions we ask every spouse after a homicide.”

  Sam paused, waiting for some response from the pale, shattered woman across from her. “Mrs. Manning?” Sam prompted.