Look Closely - Laura Caldwell [74]
It was the letter, I decided. The damn letter suggesting murder. I went into my bedroom, dark but for the streetlights outside, and without turning on any lamps, I found it in my briefcase, bringing it back to the couch with me. There is no statute of limitations on murder. Look closely.
For the first time, I wondered if maybe I had misinterpreted the thing. It had been addressed to me, no doubt about it, but maybe it hadn’t been referring to my mother after all. It had simply been an immediate, gut-level conclusion. But if not my mother, then who? I ran my mind over past clients, possible extended-family members. But I couldn’t think of any clients who had passed away, and as for family members, I didn’t know any. My father had taken care of that.
I took another sip of the cinnamon tea that had grown cool. Enough musings, I decided. Quit putting it off. I picked up the police records again.
The most interesting records were Chief Manning’s handwritten notes and the dictated, typewritten summaries of his interviews with various witnesses. He’d been diligent in his note taking, making mention of the day and time whenever he jotted something. His first few notations were often similar, such as “high suspicion of domestic abuse.” The next ones indicated he had interviewed William Sutter, the husband of the deceased, as well as Dan Sutter, son. According to the note he’d jotted afterward, “The statements of Mr. William Sutter and Mr. Dan Sutter appear rehearsed and strikingly similar. Covering for each other?” Then he wrote, “Physical abuse—husband, son or boyfriend?”
The sickness riding my insides deepened. Had my father or my brother struck my mother? Had they hidden it together? I’d never seen Dan again, after all. Perhaps he had been told to run, to stay away, the same thing he was doing now in New Orleans. Had they done it because they had discovered the relationship with her boyfriend? That man on the beach, the man at the front door on the night she died?
I flipped through pages looking for the dictated summary of the interrogation of my father. Upstairs, my neighbors kicked off a party. Blaring music and pounding footfalls came clearly through my ceiling. I found the interview and began to read. William Sutter and his wife had been separated three weeks, he had told Chief Manning, but they’d not yet filed for divorce. He was hoping for a reconciliation. The reasons for the separation, he said, were his need to live in Chicago during the week and his wife’s affair. He had just found out about the infidelity. She admitted this to him and told him it had been going on for less than a year. She refused to tell him the name of the man she was involved with, and Mr. Sutter indicated he did not have any idea as to who that person might be. Mr. Sutter denied any suggestion that he had abused his wife. He was described by Chief Manning as distraught. The interview had to be stopped on more than one occasion because Mr. Sutter was crying.
I felt a wave of sympathy for my father. If he had told Chief Manning the truth, then in the span of a month, he’d found out his wife was having an affair, become separated and endured the trauma of her death. But Manning hadn’t believed my father, because he made that notation after the interview wondering whether the abuse had been caused by William, Dan or the boyfriend. Was that why my father had been crying?
I turned next to the interview with Dan. My brother was portrayed as quiet and aloof, telling Chief Manning that he had been out drinking beer with his friends, since he believed both parents would be gone from the house that night. He did not know where his mother had been intending to go, but he thought she might have been