as she laboriously pushed her cart toward the meat counter. A very weak finale.
I left the grocery store with several bags, and I managed to feel almost like myself when I got home.
Damned if the chief of police wasn't still there. He'd just moved his car, probably to its parking space behind the apartments, but he'd returned his body to my carport. I pulled into my driveway and unlocked my trunk. I would not be kept out of my own home. Friedrich uncrossed his arms and sauntered over.
"What is it with you?" I asked. "Why do you keep turning up here? I didn't do anything."
"I might think I wasn't welcome if I didn't know better," Friedrich rumbled. "Your face is looking a lot better. How's the side?"
I unlocked my kitchen door and pitched in my purse and workout bag. I went back to the car for the first two bags of groceries. Friedrich wordlessly gathered the next two and followed me into the kitchen.
In silence, I put the cans away in the pantry, stowed the meat in the refrigerator, and slid the juice containers into the freezer of my side-by-side. When all that was done, when the bags were folded and put under the sink in their designated place, I sat down at my plain wooden table opposite Friedrich, who'd seated himself, and said, "What?"
"Tell me what you saw the night Pardon was killed."
I looked down at my hands. I thought it over carefully. My goal in keeping quiet had been to keep the police from asking questions about my past. Well, Friedrich had done that anyway, and been too trusting of his subordinates; my past was out, and the results hadn't been as dreadful as I'd always thought they would be. Or maybe I had changed.
If only Claude Friedrich was here to listen to me tell it, and I didn't have to go down to the police station again, why not tell him the little I knew?
And maybe Marshall had spooked me a little, with his "woman who knows too much" scenario.
Friedrich was waiting patiently. I would feel much more comfortable in this big man's presence if I had nothing to conceal; he would then drench me with his warm approval. My mouth went up at one corner in a sardonic grin. This ambience was undoubtedly what made Claude Friedrich such a good policeman.
"I'll tell you what I saw, but it won't make any difference," I told him, making my decision abruptly. I looked him in the eyes and spread my hands flat on the table. "That's why I didn't see the need to tell you before."
"It was you that called me that night, wasn't it?"
"Yes. It was me. Partly because I didn't want him to lie out there all night, but mostly because I was scared some kids might find him."
"Why didn't you tell me all this to begin with?"
"Because I didn't want to come to your attention. What I saw wasn't important enough for me to risk you calling Memphis, getting the story about what happened to me. I didn't want people here to know. And yet it's happened, anyway." And I looked him directly in his eyes.
"That's a mistake I can't make up to you," he said. "I regret letting that report sit around on my desk, more than I can tell you. I'm taking steps to minimize the damage."
That was as much apology as I'd ever receive; and really, what more could he say?
I shrugged. My anger against him deflated gently. I had known all along that someday it was inevitable that my past would block my path again.
"What I saw was someone wearing a raincoat with a hood, wheeling Pardon over to the arboretum," I said flatly. "I don't know who it was, but I'm sure it was someone from the apartments. I figured you already knew that, since Pardon's body appeared and disappeared so many times. Gone when Tom O'Hagen paid his rent, back when Deedra paid hers. It had to have been hidden in a different apartment, though I can't imagine why anyone would move Pardon's corpse around."
"How was the body moved over to the arboretum?"
"It was in some garbage bags, one pulled on from the feet and another pulled on from the head. Then it was loaded in my garbage-can cart and rolled over there." I felt mad all over again when I thought of the use of my cart.
"Where are the garbage bags?"
"Gone to the incinerator."
"Why'd you do that?"
"My fingerprints