Beautiful Little Fools(11)

DETECTIVE FRANK CHARLES: This is a move you’ve been planning for a while?

DAISY: Of course. These things take time, Detective.

DETECTIVE FRANK CHARLES: Do you know how to shoot a gun, Mrs. Buchanan?

DAISY: (laughs) Now, what kind of a question is that to ask a lady?

“FRANK, COME TO bed. If you’re reading those interviews again, I’m gonna think you’re stepping out on me with one of those women.”

Frank sighed and shut his notebook. How did Dolores always have a sixth sense about what he was doing, even from the other room? Probably because he’d been talking about this case—these women—all through supper with her. And after nineteen years of marriage, she knew what was both his best and worst trait—he didn’t know how to leave well enough alone.

“I’ll be there in a minute,” he called out now, tapping his cigarette in the ashtray. His notebook was no longer in his hands, but he’d reread his interviews enough times he had them memorized. He closed his eyes and he could still hear their voices, too: Mrs. Buchanan’s sultry tones, Miss Baker’s brash and husky denials, and Miss McCoy, whose voice had trembled throughout their whole interview. They were all lying to him. But how—and why—he couldn’t put his finger on that yet.

Frank, why are you obsessing? Dolores had asked him over dinner. I read it in the papers—they already said that Mr. Wilson killed him after Gatsby ran over his wife. They found Wilson on the property dead, killed himself right after with the same gun. The New York Times said the case was closed.

I just have a feeling, he’d told her, vaguely.

But she’d nodded, understanding, by now, that was enough to take him seriously.

Dee was right, though—officially, the case was considered closed. Jay Gatsby had hit Myrtle Wilson with his car in front of Wilson’s garage on the ashiest street in Corona, killing her. The next day, her grief-stricken husband, George, had gone out to West Egg and shot Gatsby dead in his pool. Then he went out into the woods behind the house and shot himself.

But there was something else, something more among the ash heaps and millionaires that Frank couldn’t quite let go. Something didn’t smell quite right. For one thing, why didn’t Gatsby just stop the car? Witness accounts said Myrtle Wilson ran right out into the road, didn’t even look. The neighbor said George Wilson had kept her locked up and maybe she’d run in front of the car on purpose, trying to escape. So why didn’t Gatsby stop? If that had happened to Frank—if that had happened to most men—he would’ve stopped the car, stayed at the scene of the crash. No one would’ve blamed the driver.

But then he supposed Gatsby hadn’t been most men, living in that big mansion of his out in West Egg, throwing all the lavish parties. He was rumored to have been a war hero, or a bootlegger. Or both. Frank tended to lean toward the bootlegger theory himself, confirmed in his mind when Meyer Wolfsheim had come to the precinct yesterday morning and sought Frank out. Wolfsheim offered to pay Frank fifteen grand if he could find out the truth of what really happened.

Why me? Frank had asked Wolfsheim.

You’re the one who solved the Calibrisi murder, Wolfsheim had said, matter-of-factly. It had been in all the headlines last year, a schoolteacher found shot dead by Flushing Creek. They’d arrested her husband, but Frank had thought something hadn’t smelled right then, either, and six months later, he’d been the one to figure out she’d had a boyfriend on the side who was responsible.

Frank had nodded. But what makes you think we don’t already know the truth?

George Wilson didn’t have the guts to do it, Wolfsheim said, sounding so certain.

Frank briefly wondered how Wolfsheim and Wilson knew each other and also why Wolfsheim cared so much about Gatsby’s death. But Frank had been fixating on something else—and this was the other thing he couldn’t let go of, something Wolfsheim couldn’t possibly know about. The diamond hairpin. Frank turned it over in his palm now.

Myrtle Wilson had died in a hit-and-run in his jurisdiction, and he’d tied her death to Gatsby’s car the following morning. He’d driven out to West Egg, only to find Gatsby himself had just been shot. He’d decided to look around, and that’s when he’d found this hairpin, on the ground in the shrubs behind Gatsby’s pool. His Long Island colleagues had dismissed it—surely Gatsby had had lots of women out at his pool this summer. Any one of them could’ve lost the hairpin at any time. And anyway, they thought they already had the case all sewn up: Mrs. Wilson, Mr. Gatsby, Mr. Wilson, all dead by one another’s hands. Open and shut.

But Frank wasn’t so sure. The grounds were immaculate, and he didn’t think the hairpin could’ve been there for long without a caretaker noticing it. He himself had picked it up as the six tiny diamonds had glinted with sunlight, catching his eye.

What Wolfsheim didn’t know was that Frank wasn’t ready to let this go yet, money or no money. He’d already started poking around on his own time, talking to the women. Might as well try and make this money too. Dee could be skeptical all she wanted, but with a payday of fifteen grand, he could make her happy next summer. She’d always dreamed of renting a house up in East Egg for the season, and houses there, even just to rent for a few months, were not something Frank would ever be able to afford on his detective’s salary. She deserved it after all she’d been through these past few years. They both did.