It's Not a Pretty Sight Page 16

  “Define what you mean by ‘suggestive,’ Mr. Gunner.”

  “I mean something that could be interpreted by some as having a sexual or romantic undertone to it, Ms. Serrano. As would something you might write to your lover, for example.”

  “My ‘lover’? You think Nina was my lover?”

  “I think that’s one way to read the inscription you wrote on the back of the photograph. Yes. You can’t see that?”

  Serrano was shaking her head emphatically, stung by the accusation. “I don’t believe this,” she said.

  “You don’t believe what?”

  “I don’t believe you’re just as small-minded as she is. That’s what. I knew she’d tell you, of course, but I thought you might be sharp enough to see that there’s nothing to what she says. Nothing whatsoever.”

  “Who?”

  “If anyone’s to blame for what happened to Nina, it’s her. She was the one who drove Nina to leave that house as abruptly as she did. If she’d just left us alone—”

  “You’re going to have to forgive me, Ms. Serrano, but I don’t have the slightest idea who you’re talking about,” Gunner said.

  “Please, Mr. Gunner. I think you know very well who I’m talking about.”

  “It’s your privilege to think whatever you like. But the fact remains I don’t.”

  Serrano didn’t say anything for a long time, looking for either the glimmer of truth or deceit in his eyes. “I’m talking about Wendy,” she said. “Who else?”

  “Wendy Singer?”

  “Yes. Wendy Singer. What other Wendy do you know?”

  “She thought you and Nina were having an affair? Is that what I hear you saying?”

  “She didn’t just think it. She was convinced of it. She didn’t tell you that when you talked to her yesterday?”

  Gunner shook his head.

  “If that’s true, I’m surprised,” Serrano said. “I thought sure that’s where you’d gotten it, this idea that Nina and I were anything more than just friends.”

  “No.”

  “That’s why I’m no longer welcome there, you see. She thinks I’m some kind of lesbian Lothario. That my photography is all a front for my activities as a predator of tender young girls like Nina.”

  “And it’s not.”

  “No. It’s not. First of all, because my work is not a front for anything; to suggest mat it might be is gravely insulting. And secondly, because a person’s sexuality is nothing to be ashamed of. If I were the lesbian seductress Wendy thinks I am, it wouldn’t be a secret to anyone, I assure you. I don’t believe in that kind of duplicity.”

  “Then what makes Singer think you and Nina were sexually involved?”

  “I couldn’t tell you that. No more than she could tell me. I think the woman’s just a prude, and she’s very over-protective of the women she takes in. Which is understandable, considering how fragile and vulnerable they often are. But you put those two things together—a prude’s sensibilities and a mother hen’s overprotectiveness—and that’s what you get. A homophobe with an overactive imagination.”

  “Still—neither of you gave her any concrete reason to think something was going on between you?”

  “We were close, Mr. Gunner. Very close. I liked Nina, and she liked me. Naturally, we spent a great deal of time together. She wanted to take up photography, and I was showing her the ropes. I even gave her a camera to help her get started. I guess seeing us together all the time gave Wendy the idea that we had to be doing more than just taking pictures together, I don’t know. And my being such a tactile personality must have caused her to wonder too, I suppose.”

  “Your being a what? A ‘tactile—’?”

  “Personality, yes. Which is just a more clinical way of saying I’m touchy-feely. Not with people I just met, you understand, but with people I feel particularly close to, or comfortable with. There’s almost never anything sexual about it, but I admit some people take it that way.”

  “There’s no chance Singer saw this bracelet you gave Nina? Or the photograph you inscribed for her? Anything like that?”

  “Anything like what? I don’t understand what you’re asking.”

  “Anything else you might have given to Nina bearing a personal message of some kind. Like another piece of inscribed jewelry, or a card, or a letter …”

  “Oh. No.” Serrano shook her head. “There was really very little of that sort of thing for her to see. The bracelet and the photograph, that was about it.”

  “And you’re sure Nina never showed her either one?”

  The question seemed to throw Serrano off balance a bit. “Why would she have? I don’t—”

  “I thought maybe Nina had the same problem with interpretation Singer did. You did say she’d taken the inscription you put on her bracelet the wrong way earlier.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “What, wasn’t that what you meant? That she’d mistaken it for an expression of love, rather than one of friendship?”

  “I didn’t say that, no. She …” Whatever she was going to say, she held back, suddenly being careful with her choice of words.

  Gunner didn’t push her.

  He waited a few seconds, then asked, “When was the last time you saw Nina, Ms. Serrano? Was it before she went home, or after?”

  His patience had given her time to regroup. No longer looking afraid to say what was on her mind, she said, “It was before. I never saw Nina after she went home.”

  “Never?”

  “No. Never.”

  “I thought you two were so close.”

  “We were. But as you’ve so cleverly surmised, Mr. Gunner, we did grow apart near the end. And yes, it was because Nina, too, came to have doubts about my intentions. Though she had more reason to doubt them than Wendy did, certainly.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Because she was afraid. Someone had made her afraid.”

  “Afraid of whom? You?”

  “Not of me, no. She was afraid of herself. Or more accurately, of what she thought she was becoming.”

  “You’re losing me,” Gunner said.

  “She was afraid of becoming a lesbian, Mr. Gunner. All right? She’d had one homosexual experience, just one, but the woman she’d had it with was trying to convince her it was evidence of her true sexual identity. That wasn’t true, of course, but Nina was starting to believe it, all the same.”

  Gunner was silent, and somewhat numb. Trying to get a handle on his feelings about it, this allegation that Nina had once been with another woman. Mimi’s daughter, and his former fiancée, naked in the arms of …

  “Shirley Causwell,” he said. Taking a not so wild guess.

  “Yes.” Serrano nodded. “She was the one in love with Nina, not me.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because Nina told me. We were friends, remember?”

  Gunner was suddenly reminded of how Agnes Felker had behaved just a few hours ago, when he’d asked her what reason Causwell could have had for wanting to “put some serious foot in Nina’s ass.” Like she knew a secret she was dying to tell, but couldn’t.

  Ain’t my bus’ness to tell you that, she’d said. You wanna know that, you gotta ask her. Or Trini. Trini knows.

  “But if she was the one Nina was involved with—” Gunner said now.

  “Why did Wendy come down on me, instead? Simple. Because she didn’t know about Shirley. No one did. Shirley and Nina were only together once, like I said, and Nina never told anyone about it but me. She didn’t want anyone else to know.”

  “She was ashamed.”

  “Yes. That, and confused. She didn’t know what it meant, or why it had happened.”

  “Was it …” he started to ask, then changed his mind, deciding on an alternate way to ask the same question. “Was she taken advantage of in any way? Did she …” Again, he broke the question off, not caring for the way it sounded, even in his head.

  “You want to know if it was consensual,�
�� Serrano said. “Is that it?”

  “Yes.”

  “For the most part it was. Yes. Shirley simply put her in a position to be tempted and”—she shrugged—”Nina gave in to it. It happens like that, sometimes.”

  Gunner nodded his head, not really caring to hear much more about it.

  “But that wasn’t what you wanted to hear, was it? You’d been hoping I could tell you she’d been raped, of course.”

  “Raped?”

  “Because that would have made you feel so much better about her, I imagine. To know that such a horrible thing had been forced upon her, rather than entered into of her own free will. Isn’t that right?”

  Gunner just stared at her, wondering what the hell she was going off about.

  “It was sex, Mr. Gunner. That’s all. No oaths were taken, no blood was spilled. It wasn’t a pagan ritual.”

  “I never said it was.”

  “No. But your face leaves little doubt how much you approve of the concept,”

  “It’s a little late for me or anyone else to be approving or disapproving of anything Nina did in life, don’t you think?”

  “Still. It’s obvious how you feel about it.”

  “Obvious to you, maybe. But not to me. Near as I can tell, I’m just surprised, not revolted. I don’t care what you think my face tells you.”

  Serrano took a few moments to think about that, the validity of her powers of intuition being called into question.

  “So. Maybe I was wrong,” she said eventually.

  “Yeah. Maybe you were,” Gunner agreed.

  “It’s just … I can’t stand the way some men react to it, that’s all. The thought of their women finding comfort with other women. As if they’d be better off dead, or something.” She shook her head sadly, said, “Life is too goddamn short! You want to get through it in one piece, sometimes you’ve got to take love where you can find it. No matter what other people think.”

  She looked up at the photographs on the wall behind her and went on. “I’ve seen too many women die to ever give a damn again who someone’s found to love them, or why. What’s important is life without pain, Mr. Gunner. Nothing else. Whatever one has to do to find some peace and joy in their lives is all right with me.”

  “I believe you,” Gunner said.

  “But you don’t feel the same way.”

  “I feel a person should be free to pick and choose whom to love, and how to love them, yes. But I don’t think love is something you take from just anyone, simply because it’s being offered to you. I think you have to be a little more selective than that.”

  “And what if being selective isn’t an option? What if a person only finds one offer on the table?”

  “Then that person has to decide whether or not they deserve better. If the answer’s yes, they wait; if it’s no, they take what’s available and try to make do.”

  “You make it sound so simple.”

  “It isn’t simple. It’s just the way it is. You either believe what you need is in the cards for you, or you don’t. Nobody compromises on anything without losing faith in what they really want first.”

  “And that’s why you’re so happy today, right? Because you kept the faith and decided you could do better than Nina.”

  “No. That was a mistake,” Gunner said.

  “But you just said—”

  The investigator waved her off, said, “Look. We’re straying a bit far afield here. Whatever mistakes I made with Nina have nothing to do with what we’re talking about right now, which is the one-night stand you say Nina had with Shirley Causwell.”

  “It’s not the one I say she had with Shirley. It’s the one she had,” Serrano said, correcting him. “I’ve got no reason to lie about something like that.”

  “All right. The one she had. You’re saying Nina regretted it afterward, but Causwell didn’t. That right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And that that was the reason Nina eventually distanced herself from you. Because she was afraid your intentions were the same as Causwell’s.”

  “Yes.”

  “It had nothing to do with you rummaging through her things, or anything like that.”

  “No. I told you. I went through her things, yes, but only to find her bracelet.”

  “And you never did, I take it.”

  “No. I never did. She told me she’d given it away.”

  “Given it away to whom?”

  “She wouldn’t say. I always felt she was lying, in any case. I think she still had it, she just couldn’t bring herself to wear it anymore. She was convinced I’d meant it as a token of my love for her, and nothing I ever said could change her mind about it. Nothing.”

  “And you blame Causwell for that.”

  “Yes. Her and Wendy both.”

  “What else do you blame Causwell for? Nina’s murder, maybe?”

  “Nina’s murder?”

  “That’s right. You said Nina’s husband wasn’t the only one who might have wished her ill. Remember? You said both Causwell and Gary Stanhouse could have, as well. I took that to mean you felt they each had a motive for killing her, if nothing else. Wasn’t that what you were trying to say?”

  “Yes, but … to my knowledge, that’s all they had. A motive.”

  “And Causwell’s motive would have been what? Revenge?”

  “I don’t know. I guess that’s what you’d call it, revenge. She was a spurned lover. Spurned lovers kill to enact revenge on the person who rejected them, right?”

  “Sometimes. Sometimes not. They kill out of jealousy from time to time, as well.”

  “Jealousy?”

  “Sure. She could have been jealous of somebody else Nina was seeing, or somebody she thought Nina was seeing. Couldn’t she?”

  “I suppose. But—you don’t mean me, do you? You aren’t suggesting she was jealous of me?”

  Gunner shrugged, said, “Why not? If Singer could get the wrong idea about your relationship with Nina, why couldn’t Causwell?”

  “Because Shirley’s a lot smarter than that, I think. Wendy’s excuse is that she’s paranoid about such things, like I said. But Shirley isn’t. Shirley can tell the difference between what’s real and what’s imagined.”

  “Okay. So jealousy’s out. Her motive was revenge, in your opinion.”

  “Yes.”

  “And Stanhouse? What about him?”

  “The same. Revenge. He was in love with Nina too.”

  “And Nina rejected him.”

  Serrano nodded her head. “Yes. He was her boss, like I told you earlier, but he wanted to be more. He kept trying to get her to go out with him, and she kept telling him she wasn’t interested. When she couldn’t get him to leave her alone, she reported him to his supervisors, but all that succeeded in doing was getting her fired. He was stalking her, but she was the one who lost her job. It often works out like that, I’m afraid.”

  “She told you he’d been stalking her?”

  “Yes. At least, she said he’d followed her home a couple of times. And would call her there, every now and then. That sounds like stalking, doesn’t it?”

  “You know if he ever got violent with her?”

  “Violent? No.” Serrano shook her head. “I never heard about anything like that. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.”

  “Did Nina have any plans to sue over her firing? Or file a complaint with the EEOC, at least?”

  Serrano shook her head again, said, “Not that I was aware of. She probably figured she couldn’t win, so why bother?”

  “Did Stanhouse ever show up at Sisterhood? Either while you were there, or at some other time when you weren’t?”

  “If he did, no one ever told me about it. Ask Wendy, she’d know better if he’d ever been there than I would.”

  The investigator nodded, acknowledging the merit of the suggestion. “Now tell me about Nina’s photography,” he said.

  “Her photography? You mean the stuff she did with the camera
I gave her?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you want to know about it?”

  “Not much, really. Just what kind of photographs they were, and who or what was in them. That sort of thing.”

  “Why?”

  “Let’s just say I’m curious.”

  “Well, most of what she did was similar to my work, as you might imagine. They were character studies, of people at the house primarily. Some candid, some posed. All black-and-white, all rather crude and childlike. But good. Some even very good.”

  “Where are these pictures now? Do you know?”

  “I have a few of them here. I was the one who developed them, of course. But the majority of them were with her, I wouldn’t know where they are now.”

  “Would it be possible to see the ones you have? If they’re somewhere close at hand?”

  “I don’t see why not. Hold on, I’ll just be a minute.”

  She disappeared toward the back of the room, through a door Gunner suspected led to the office she had alluded to earlier. She was gone longer than the minute promised, but not by much. Gunner had just started leafing through the stack of new photographs she’d been mounting on the walls, when she returned, a large manila folder in her right hand.

  “Here they are,” she said.

  There were five of them. All black-and-white eight-by-tens, shot in what appeared to Gunner to be various parts of Singer’s Sisterhood House. Two of the subjects he recognized; the other pair were strangers. As Serrano had warned him, the photos were technically crude, but not without promise. Still lifes of women Nina had once shared living quarters with.

  An unidentified black woman covering her face with both hands.

  A Hispanic woman, also unidentified, kneeling at the side of a double bed, head bowed down in prayer.

  The same woman, sitting at a crowded dining-room table, laughing.

  Agnes Felker tearing pages out of a magazine, her face an iron mask of devious concentration.

  And a blond woman sitting cross-legged on a hardwood floor, watching TV. The same one who had slapped Gunner silly in front of Wendy Singer’s office door the previous afternoon; he couldn’t remember her name.