“Did Harry Chandler know her?”
“Impossible. He couldn’t have. And I want to be perfectly clear. I know Harry Chandler well. He isn’t a violent man. He’s a scamp, but, apart from breaking hearts, he’d never hurt anyone.”
Chapter 43
CONKLIN AND I took the fifteen-minute drive to the yacht club. I wanted my partner’s opinion of Harry Chandler. And I wanted to see Chandler’s face when I showed him the drawing of the girl whose head had been unearthed from his garden.
As before, Chandler was sitting in a deck chair at the foot of his gangway when we arrived. He had a big smile for me, shook Conklin’s hand, and said, “I hope you have some news for me.”
“We do, Mr. Chandler.”
“Co
me aboard,” he said.
I think Conklin’s jaw dropped a little bit when Chandler showed us to the sitting room on the aft deck. I guess my jaw had dropped the same way when I saw it the day before.
I said, “Mr. Chandler, the remains found in your garden were all examined, and none of them are a match to Cecily Chandler.”
“Oh, thank you, Sergeant,” he said, his expression full of relief. “I don’t think I was ready to hear that she’d been buried in the backyard all these years.”
“But this woman was buried in your garden,” I said. I unfolded the drawing of Marilyn Varick and showed it to Chandler.
He took the paper, looked it over. I stopped breathing for the time it took him to scan that drawing. Then Chandler looked up at me.
“She was killed and her head was buried in the garden?”
“That’s right. Do you recognize her?”
“Not at all. I’m sorry. Sorry that she’s dead. Sorry I can’t help.”
I returned the drawing to the inside pocket of my blazer. I had seen nothing in his face that told me Chandler was lying.
“There’s something else,” I said. “Are you involved with Janet Worley?”
“Now? No, and not for at least ten years. Why would you ask me that?”
“But at one time, you were intimately involved.”
“We had a couple of trysts, that’s all,” Chandler told us. “She was very pretty and delightful, and we both knew it was just for fun. I was in love with my wife.”
I didn’t like a definition of love that included trysts with someone else while you were living with your beloved spouse.
I thought about how Worley had spoken disparagingly of Chandler’s womanizing while crashing stove parts in the kitchen. He had made his accusations sound personal. In fact, Janet had left the room.
The people we had spoken with said that Nigel was brutish, that he didn’t have a flair for fine details. But if he was involved in the murder and in digging up those heads, maybe he hadn’t been working alone.
Chandler was saying, “Janet is a fine person. I care about her. I don’t love her, but I really do care about her. Until I met Kaye, I hadn’t been in love since Cecily disappeared.
“You know why I still live in San Francisco when I could live anywhere in the world? Because maybe Cece wasn’t murdered. Maybe she was abducted. Or maybe she just wanted to get away from me. Maybe she’ll come home, and if she does, I’ll be waiting for her.”
Conklin and I left Chandler on the Cecily. As we walked across the dock toward the parking lot, my partner said to me, “Janet Worley has been holding out on us.”
“Just spitballing now, but try this on for size,” I said. “Say Nigel Worley does the killings because he’s angry that his wife had an affair, plus he’s crazy. Janet goes along with it. And she’s the one who does the decorating with numbers and flowers.”
“And they put the heads on the back step? Why?”
“Because it makes Harry Chandler a suspect. If he gets accused of murder again, then maybe this time, he doesn’t get off.”