Of all the questions I would have to answer, that would be the toughest. I could handle the cops, the lawyers and even Samantha’s family, but I had no clue how my lovely Linda would react. Her move from our small hometown to the big city was meant to be a fresh start for us. Now I had royally and tragically screwed things up.
As the media would play up for weeks, the irony of this whole debacle was that my mistress, Samantha, had been killed due to a suspicious wife. I wondered how Linda would feel knowing a homemaker from Plymouth had suspected her husband of cheating, yet she hadn’t suspected me.
Or had she?
I figured I’d never find out. If I were in her position, I knew I would hit the road and never look back.
In life there are certain lines you should never cross: as a kid, you’re programmed to colour inside the lines. In wartime, there’s always a line drawn in the sand. And in committed relationships, the line you never step over is to cheat on your partner.
Devoid of any meaningful emotion, I got out of the van and started toward the officer in charge, inadvertently stepping under yet another taboo line: the yellow police tape that surrounds a crime scene. In that instant, I knew that morally I was no better than Peter Plumber.
Pathetic.
“What’s your business here, sir?” the officer asked as I approached.
“My name is Steve Cassidy. I’m the P.I. and resident dirt bag responsible for this mess.”
TWO
After a night of questioning at Police Headquarters, I arrived home to find Linda gone. On the coffee table I found a note and her set of keys.
As the old song goes: Life is made up of Hellos and Goodbyes.
This is Goodbye.
Linda
I made a pointless tour through the house, hoping to find something that would confirm Linda had once lived here. Sadly, no traces of our relationship had been left behind. Gone were the pictures of us together, as well as her clothes and makeup. Most disheartening was the loss of a packet of love letters we had exchanged prior to Linda’s move to Darrien. My letters to her were still neatly stacked on the fireplace mantle but her notes to me were missing. She had been so thorough in her departure the only personal item I found, aside from her note, was the start of a grocery list in her handwriting: Milk
Good old wholesome milk. If that was all I needed, my life would certainly be less complicated, or so I imagined.
I took a seat on the living room couch and tried to collect my thoughts. I badly wanted to believe I had been the perfect cheater; that prior to last evening, no one had been hurt by my lack of control; that no one knew about Samantha and me, right up to when the “Breaking News Report” aired.
Who was I kidding? The dapper plumber believed he was invincible and look where it got him: a one-way ticket to the morgue.
I figured I could locate Linda in three phone calls, but decided against such a plan for the moment. She wouldn’t want to talk and I doubted the words, “Oops, you caught me,” would restore my credibility in her eyes. I was also too exhausted to attempt such calls. Instead, I unplugged the phone and collapsed into bed. When I awoke a few hours later, I found I had missed fifty–six calls, most of which I believed would be from media outlets, looking for a comment to accompany their scandal-tainted storylines.
With pen in hand, my expectations were soon met, as an astounding forty–three of the calls were from TV, newspaper, magazine and radio reporters. Even the great local columnist, Jeremy Atkins of the Darrien Free Press, made an impassioned plea, leaving me his personal cell number for twenty–four hour access. He’d written a nice piece on me in his “World According To Me” column, after the successful conclusion of a missing person case in my old hometown. I wrote down his information for future reference and erased the others.
Of the thirteen remaining calls, five were hang-ups and six were from male jokers wanting to hire me. “Is it possible to get my wife to a hotel room to get laid and then have her killed?” one smart aleck asked. “I heard that was your specialty.” Not surprisingly, none of these comedians left return numbers.
The final two calls intrigued and worried me.
“Ah . . . hi . . . Linda, are you there?” an older female asked in an unsteady voice. “It’s Dolores from the library. We were wondering if you’d be coming in today? With everything that’s happened, if you want to take the day off go right ahead. Could you give us a call when you get this? Thanks.”
The machine’s time display read 11:01 a.m., which meant Linda was two hours late for her regular Thursday shift. I assumed after leaving here that she would have gone straight to work. Even if she had decided to take a personal day, it was unlike her not to inform her supervisor.
Before I could reflect further on Linda’s current whereabouts, the fifty–sixth message began to play.
“Hey, Steve and Linda. It’s Maria. Long time no hear. The reason I’m calling is I need Steve’s opinion about a strange call I received from an old friend of ours. Give me a shout when you have a minute. Take care.”
I stared at the machine as my high school sweetheart, Maria Antonio, left her home and work phone numbers, which I failed to write down. I replayed the message to verify what I had heard was for real. On the second pass I detected something in Maria’s voice that bothered me: there was an undercurrent of concern which she had tried to cover up with her usual bubbly, friendly tone. Something was definitely wrong. I tried unsuccessfully to figure out what could have caused her to become anxious. Until recently the only person capable of such a thing was me, but we hadn’t talked in a couple of months. It was obvious my latest indiscretions had yet to reach the lovely backwoods community of Delta. I wondered if Maria would still want my advice when the news broke. I doubted it.
I erased the messages, which reset the machine’s counter to zero. I toyed with the idea of calling the library but decided I would only further embarrass the two of us if she didn’t pick up. I did the next best thing and called Linda’s cell phone, which automatically went to voice mail.
“Hi, it’s me. I know you don’t want to talk to me right now—and justifiably so—but could you please call Dolores at the library, she sounded a bit worried that you hadn’t come into work.” I paused and then said, “I hope you’re doing okay . . . and I’m sorry for being such an ass.”
I hung up, not knowing what more I could say at this juncture. As I stood from the kitchen table to grab a drink from the fridge, I sensed my legs shaking slightly and felt a tad light-headed. I steadied myself against a nearby wall and concluded my nervous system must be on the verge of collapse; too many conflicting emotions were about to trip the final safety fuse in my strained brain.
Until this moment, I’d had a very laid-back, no-ulcer attitude about the events that had followed Samantha and the Plymouth plumber’s dinner date. Now the reality of the past eighteen hours flooded my entire being.
Your mistress is dead. Your fiancée is gone and your first love needs your help.
Taken separately, these situations would have been stressful enough. Having to deal with them all at once was overwhelming.
I was so disoriented, I barely registered that someone was knocking loudly on the front door. When a second person simultaneously began to knock at the back door, the brain fog I’d been experiencing began to lift. When a man on the front porch yelled, “Darrien City Police. Open this door or we’ll break it down!” the fog completely dissipated.
I made my way through the front room shouting, “I’m coming! Just hold on!”
I opened the foyer door and found myself facing three officers. All had their guns drawn, the barrels aimed directly at my heart.
“Cassidy, show us your hands and slowly step onto