The Housewife(76)

“Please don’t take my word for it,” I say, reaching into the pocket of my tracksuit pants, where I transferred the crunched-up letter I grabbed from the wastepaper basket earlier.

I hand it to them. I know it by heart. I have an excellent visual memory.

Detective Marcos reaches for it. “What’s this?”

“It’s a letter to Roy from his lover, Veronica.” I say, watching him put on gloves, then unraveling the paper until it lies flat.

I point at it. “She writes, ‘How much longer, my darling Roy, before we can be together? I can’t stand being apart. You are all I think about.’ Suspicious, I think. Especially since they didn’t have a prenup.”

Detective Marcos takes it by a corner and drops it in a clear plastic envelope.

I tap on the date. “While he was still married to Deb, I might add. ”

They exchange a look. “That in itself doesn’t—”

“I know.” I tell them about accessing the safe, finding the thumb-drive video. I describe what was on it, careful not to exaggerate or draw conclusions. I need them to think that I am a truthful person, not prone to exaggerations. I tell them about losing the drive that day in the office and how Marie found it later when she was vacuuming.

“She didn’t tell me right away, but she took it to her room and watched it. That’s when she came to me. She adored Deborah, you know. She would have done anything for her. So the shock of seeing how Roy treated her…”

I grab a tissue from the box. “Marie told me”—I dab at the corner of my eye—“that Deb’s face was changing. But that was because he was injecting her face with horrible products to make her ugly. And he was doing it to me, too.” I show them my face. They squint at the spots and pull back with vaguely disgusted expressions.

“Did you see Dr. Davies do this to you?”

I hesitate. I’ve thought about this, and I know that it wouldn’t make sense to say I’d seen him and then did nothing about it, not calling the police, not reporting him, not even walking out of the house.

“Not exactly,” I say. “But I have a memory of a big shadow coming down upon me and rubber gloves. I remember rubber gloves. And later when Marie told me, I thought I could remember a syringe. Marie told me about the products because she had found them while cleaning the en suite bathroom. She took them and hid them in her room. And of course she knew he kept Deborah locked up in that room upstairs. She was the one who brought her food. ”

“Why didn’t she go to the police with this information? Or tell us when Mrs. Davies died?”

“Look, Marie is a trusting and trustworthy employee. She believed him. She told me that he’d helped her through a rough patch. She thought he was a wonderful man, everybody did. He told her he was helping his wife and that he kept her locked up to stop her from harming herself. He was lying, of course, but she believed him. Everybody believed him. But all the time, he was torturing her, waiting for her to kill herself.

“Except Deb wasn’t killing herself. And honestly, if you’d met Deb, you would have known that plan was never going to work. She was the most hopeful person you’d ever met. She had more capacity for happiness in her little finger than the rest of us put together. That woman lived in a world of silver linings and green shoots. Roy must have grown tired of waiting and decided to do it himself.”

“Hang on. Again, how do you know that?”

I shrug. “I’m extrapolating.”

“Okay. Just so we’re clear.”

“Absolutely. Clear as Steuben crystal. Anyway, so one day, Roy tells Marie to take the day off. This is what Marie told me, by the way. I’m not inventing this.”

“When did she tell you that?” Marcos asks.

“Last night. She’d watched the video, and you had come to the house. She showed me the thumb drive. We agreed to talk after Roy had gone to sleep. So I did. I went up to her rooms.”

“Noted, thank you. Keep going.”

“Well, she said she was confused about Roy giving her the day off because Roy never gave her time off. But she took it because why not? She went to visit her brother. She wasn’t supposed to come back until that evening, but she decided to come home a few hours early. And that’s when she found her. She was dead. As you know.”

I take a sip of water.

“Roy used his lover as his alibi…” I look from one to the other, careful not to pass judgment, and yet passing judgment, because let’s face it, how could they not know? What kind of police work is that?

But I don’t say any of that.

“And that was it,” I say.





49





“Let’s go back to yesterday evening,” Marcos says. “You went upstairs to talk to Marie about the video. What happened then?”

“We were going to bring it to you and ask you to reopen the investigation. I know the video doesn’t actually show Roy hurting her…”

“But it’s pretty damning,” Bates says, working his jaw. I know they already watched it.

“What about the wedding dress?” Marcos asks.

I put my hand over my eyes and scrunch them up till I see stars. “Marie didn’t think the video was enough. She had this crazy idea to entrap him.” I bring my hand down and take a deep breath. “You have to understand that Marie adored Deborah. I don’t know if you’ve seen that photo of the two of them in her room? They were close friends, not just employer and employee.