“I’ve got a gun. Who’s there?” Jerry repeated. Mimi opened the door to the cabin and light flooded the dark in a wide wedge. She came up and peered at her husband.
“Jerry, what’s going on?” she whispered.
“Get back down there,” Jerry said. He spoke in a full voice, well aware that nobody was around to hear either one of us. “We have a visitor. We’re coming down now.” Jerry gestured with his gun to the side of the boat, using his flashlight to show me the way. I thought about trying to do a mule kick once he was behind me, but he must have expected it because he stayed back until I got on the deck. “Down below,” he barked. I did as I was told.
Mimi Cunningham was standing back, away from me. I looked around and thought about grabbing the hot water, but then felt the gun at the back of my head. “Sit down, over there.” I sat in the banquet seating, taking the bench that put my back to the deck door. My best hope was to get both of them in front of me and then take a running leap. Timing would be critical, since Jerry had the gun and I had nothing but my wits.
“Mimi, close the hatch.” Jerry came around and sat on the other side of the table. “Sully? Is that you?” He had the gun trained on me. I’d misjudged the size of the cabin while I was outside. It was quite large and very comfortable, with three seating areas. I looked straight ahead and noted a few stairs by the kitchen area that led below decks. That must be where the bedrooms were.
“It’s me, Jerry. Didn’t realize that you had your boat up here in Charlestown until a friend told me about it a little while ago. I’ve been trying to find Babs Allyn, and I wondered if she was staying on the boat. I had no idea I’d be running into Mimi.” I turned and faced Mimi. “Mimi, I thought you were dead.”
“Good, you’re supposed to,” she said. She sat on a couch that was on the other side of the cabin, facing the table. She picked up her cup of tea and bobbed the tea bag vigorously. She took it out, drained it with her fingers, and then tossed it into the sink.
“Jerry did a good job,” I said, “making us think you were dead. Even came up with a corpse. Or created one?”
“No, we didn’t create one. What do you think we are?” Jerry said.
“I think you are, or may be, crooks,” I said. Neither one of them blinked, so I went on. Was Toni listening to this, or had I gotten her voicemail? Did the call even connect? I needed to focus on the now, give her clues if she was listening, figure out how to save myself if she wasn’t. “I’ve been hearing about some money shenanigans with the Cunningham Corporation.”
“We’re not murderers. Never that,” Mimi said. She was sitting in very faded light, so it was hard to see her clearly. That said, her hair was tied back in a ponytail and she didn’t seem to have makeup on. She was wearing yoga pants and an oversized fleece. Mimi was not looking her best. “Even we have our standards, don’t we darling?” she said as she turned toward Jerry.
“Mimi, drink your tea. I need you to sober up, sweetheart. We have a lot to do.” He smiled at her and she smiled back. She took a sip of tea.
“The tea needs sweetener,” she said.
“Sorry, darling, you’ll need to drink it black. Mimi’s right, though, Sully. We’d never kill anyone.” Jerry winced. The circles beneath his eyes were more pronounced. He took the hand without the gun and ran it over his chin. He needed a shave, and his eyes were sunken. He sat back on the bench and looked at me with fatigue and curiosity.
“What are you doing here?” he said.
“I met with the private investigator that Babs hired. He told me she had been looking into Martin’s disappearance, and also mentioned that your boat was here.”
“So you thought you’d stop by and—”
“See if Babs was here. I had no plan beyond stopping by. It’s been a long day. I thought I’d look around, hope it inspired some thoughts. Now I’m wondering if I was wasting my time looking for Babs …”
“You got it in one,” Mimi said. “Sully’s really very clever, isn’t she, sweetheart?”
“Babs was the person killed in the park?” I asked. My chest tightened but I forced myself to breath and remain calm.
“Whoever did it thought she was me,” Mimi said. “Babs had taken my coat—they look alike. My ID was in the pocket, so they assumed it was me. Then they called Jerry to come down and identify the body.”
“Couldn’t they have done a visual identification?” I asked. “Didn’t they know it wasn’t you?”
“Whoever killed Babs kicked her in the face,” Jerry said. A shudder ran through him. He swallowed hard and continued. “She was unrecognizable. So they thought she was Mimi. I, of course, knew she wasn’t, since Mimi was beside me when I got the call. But I went down to make the identification. I knew right away it was Babs. But I told them that yes, it was Mimi.”
“And they took your word for it?” I asked.
“Of course they took my word for it, Sully,” Jerry said. “Surely it can’t be a surprise to you that some people get more accommodations than others in their grief ? Trust me, the idea of Mimi being killed did not require a great deal of acting for me to appear upset.”
“And everyone thinking that Mimi was dead would offer you time, right?” I asked. “You needed to come up with some way to put off people like Gus Knight for a little while longer while you got your finances in order.”
“Our finances,” Mimi said, “were never going to get in order. We need to start over. Again. Challenging but not impossible. We have one more act in us, don’t we darling?”
“We didn’t kill Babs,” Jerry said, pointedly ignoring his wife. “We simply took advantage of a situation. That’s how we’ve made a fortune throughout the years. Several, actually. Taking advantage of situations. Staying nimble.”
“Did you kill Martin Samuel?” I asked quietly.
“Martin, dear Martin,” Mimi said. She got up and walked over to the kitchen area, opening the cabinet underneath the sink. She pulled out a bottle and set it down on the table by her seat. “He’s the ghost that haunts us all, don’t you agree, darling?”
“Please be quiet, Mimi,” Jerry said. “Sully doesn’t need to know everything—”
“She may as well,” Mimi said. She unscrewed the top off the bottle and took a deep swig. “Sully knows the worst of what we’ve done, or she’s guessing it, from the look on her face. I won’t have poor Martin’s blood on my hands. It’s bad enough I see his face every time I close my eyes these days. Staying on this boat has been a nightmare.”
“Darling—”
“True confession time, Sully,” Mimi said, ignoring her husband. She poured a healthy shot into her tea cup. “Want some bourbon? No? Well, you’re welcome to it if you change your mind. I’ve got nothing better to do. Jerry won’t even let me go online just in case somebody’s watching us—”
“Not just in case,” Jerry said. “Feds are all over the place. The only safe haven we have is this boat, mostly because no one knew it was here and they didn’t know to bug it.”
“So paranoid, my love,” Mimi said. “But probably with good reason.” She took a sip of tea and added more booze.
“Sully doesn’t need to—”
“We decided to go down to the islands, take a little sailing vacation, do a little business,” Mimi said. “We were working on some banking paperwork with our friend Fred. We all agreed to be in the same room together, so that everyone would be complicit if anything happened.”
“We all?” I asked.
“Hal, Martin, Fred, Jerry, me. Terry Holmes tried to come down but he couldn’t get away. He sent us his proxy instead.”
“Babs was there,” I said.
“She wasn’t part of the deal,” Jerry said.
“So Babs didn’t know what was going on?” I asked.
Jerry sighed and watched his wife as she closed her eyes to better enjoy her tea. “No, Babs didn
’t know,” he said. “Hal wanted to keep her out of it. So did Martin, for that matter. There seemed to be a complicated relationship there, don’t you agree, darling?” he asked Mimi.
“Woo boy, that’s one way to put it,” Mimi said.
“That night, Hal and Martin began to bicker,” Jerry said. “Martin got up and took a swing at Hal—”
“Hal was surprisingly limber, don’t you think? He just jumped back, out of the way,” Mimi said.
“Martin lost his footing and hit his head,” Jerry said.
“He hit it there, right there, on that corner of the table, right under your elbow. Probably if you look really closely you can see part of Martin’s skull in the wood,” Mimi said.
I lifted my arm up and hugged it close to my body.
“We cleaned it,” Jerry said. “God knows, we cleaned it. Anyway, we broke mooring and motored out to deeper waters. We were afraid Babs would wake up, so at one point Mimi went down and gave her half a sleeping pill. We motored out and met a friend of Fred’s, who took poor Martin, his suitcase, a pile of cash, and our lifeboat. From what I understand, the idea was to take him farther out to sea, sink the boat, and let the sharks do what sharks do. If anything was found, it would look like Martin got turned around when he left the boat.”
Mimi poured some more bourbon into her cup and handed it to Jerry. He took a long swig and handed it back to her.
“We got back into the harbor,” Jerry said, “but somebody else had parked at our mooring. We took another one close by.”
“Martin dying a year ago—the timing couldn’t have been worse,” Mimi said. “We thought we convinced people he’d taken a runner, but then Babs started to stir it all up again.” She made a stirring gesture, tossing tea all over the cabin. “There’s nothing more pious than a reformed drinker on a crusade. She’d been causing no end of trouble lately.”
“So you killed her?” I said quietly.
“No, we didn’t,” Jerry said. He looked me right in the eyes and didn’t blink. Was he telling the truth?
“Are you going to kill me?” I asked. “Because I’ve got to say, Jerry, that gun is making me nervous.”
Jerry looked at me again, and looked down at the gun. He blinked a couple of times. I suspected the gun was making him nervous as well. Something in me made me doubt that it was even loaded, but in this small space I wasn’t about to risk finding out.
“No. What we’ll do is tie you up, leave you on the boat,” Mimi said.
“We’ll need to move up our travel arrangements, but that’s easily done,” Jerry said. “Tomorrow or the next day, we’ll get a message to the authorities letting them know where you are. Hopefully you’ll survive the cold, though I’m sorry to say we’ll have to turn off the heat on the boat. It isn’t safe to leave it on while we’re not here.”
“Just like you did with Gus,” I said. “Hopefully you won’t bash me as hard on the side of the head. We’re not sure he’s going to recover from that.”
“Like Gus? What are you talking about?” Jerry asked. He looked genuinely surprised.
I didn’t have a chance to ask him another question, because at that moment the hatch opened with a bang and a hand holding a gun pushed its way down, followed quickly by a shoulder and then a police officer’s head.
“Freeze, don’t even think about moving,” the officer barked.
Jerry dropped the gun on the table and put his hands up.
“The body was Babs Allyn?” Toni asked for the third time. I was sitting in the back seat of her car. She and John were sitting in the front seat, both twisted around to see me while I told them my story one more time. The Cunninghams were on their way downtown, but Toni and John were in no rush. They knew the Cunninghams would lawyer up quickly. Plus, all three of us knew that John and Toni would have to wait in line to be able to question them.
“It was Babs. Somebody thought it was Mimi. She’d accidently taken Mimi’s coat.”
“Or so they say,” John said. “Maybe they gave Babs Mimi’s coat on purpose?”
“Maybe?” I said. The story didn’t hold together for me yet, but I wasn’t sure why.
“I still don’t understand how the mistake didn’t get caught,” Toni said. “This day and age, seems like something that would get double and triple checked.”
“You’d think,” I said. “But I bet the Cunninghams had ways of slowing down regular processes. You both know that rich people have a different justice system than the rest of us. Wouldn’t be the first time corners got cut, or some clerk got enough money to buy a new car, seemingly out of the blue. Plus, the husband confirmed the death. Who would doubt him?”
“Heads will still roll,” John said.
“I have no doubt, and I’m not making excuses. The cause of death seemed pretty cut and dry, though. And Jerry had an alibi.”
“All of that is going to have to be checked again,” Toni said.
“Of course,” I said. “Jerry did mention that her face had been disfigured in the attack—”
“Disfigured is one word for it,” John said. “Thankfully, it was post-mortem. There was a lot of anger behind that.”
“What did the Cunninghams have against Babs?” Toni asked.
“They said they didn’t do it,” I said. I told them about the conversation we’d had, leaving nothing out.
“Do you believe them?” John asked.
“I do. I believe that they’re con artists and maybe sociopaths, but I don’t believe they’re murderers.”
“The officer who found you said that Jerry Cunningham had a gun trained on you—” Toni said.
“I doubt he was going to use it. Maybe he would’ve. There was desperation in the air.”
“I don’t suppose you asked them about Kate’s death?” Toni said.
“No, I didn’t.” I rubbed my hands together to warm them up. “Interesting, with Mimi alive, it puts a new light on that, doesn’t it? I wonder if Kate knew Mimi was alive. Would she blackmail them?” I asked.
“From what we’re finding out,” John said, “I wouldn’t put it past her.”
“Maybe they wouldn’t do the deed themselves, but perhaps they’d hire someone to kill Kate?” I said.
“The same exact way Mimi, I mean Babs, was killed?” Toni added.
“Hey,” John said, “she doesn’t need to know—”
“Shut up, John,” Toni said. “You know she’s going to keep thinking. Might as well make sure she’s on the right track. Both deaths caused by strangulation, garroted with a scarf. Done from behind.”
“Were the scarves similar?” I asked.
“Possibly singular: scarf,” Toni said. “The scarf that killed Mimi—sorry, Babs—appears to be the same one that was left by Kate’s body. We’re waiting for more tests to confirm that.”
“So, same killer. Or someone trying to make us think it’s the same killer and using a similar scarf. That indicates inside knowledge.”
“Any luck with the sign-in log or cameras?”
“No. Turns out that Gus’s office building has a lot of security gaps as far as seeing who comes in and out. It may be intentional, to give folks with offices privacy for some meetings,” Toni said.
“By the way, we’ve kept a lid on the scarf details,” John said.
“I’m sure you have,” I said. “But let’s not forget, Jerry Cunningham had enough juice to get folks to agree to a misidentification. The Cunninghams and their ilk have got some influence.”
“That’s going to be an ugly investigation,” Toni said.
“I wonder, what did Kate know?” I asked. “For that matter, what did Gus know? Was Kate killed because of what she knew, or who she was threatening with what she knew?”
“From what your friend Eric is starting to uncover, Kate had her hand in the till,” John said.
“Re
ally?” I said. “It looks more and more like she was killed because she knew too much.”
“About Jerry? You just said you don’t think he killed Babs.”
“But maybe Jerry killed Kate,” I said. “Maybe Mimi killed Babs, and killing Kate was an attempt at misdirection?”
“Once Gus wakes up, we’ll be able to get some more answers,” Toni said. “Yeesh, this is a mess. We’re going to have to go back and rethink the entire investigation.”
“You stay out of it,” John said, looking right at me.
“I’m out of it,” I said. “From here on out I’m focusing on theater. But if the Cunninghams did do it? Makes a certain kind of sense. I just didn’t get the feeling that Jerry could … oh, never mind. I’m tired. Is it okay with you if I head home?” I asked Toni.
“Stay available. Don’t tell anyone about Mimi or Babs, all right?” Toni said.
“I won’t, I promise,” I said. “Your news to share.” I knew that sharing the news would be another way Toni and John would make sense of what had happened, by measuring reactions. I didn’t want to take that tool away from them.
“You up to driving or you want a ride?” Toni asked.
“What are we, a taxi service?” John said.
“I’m okay to drive. It’s not that far. I’ll talk to you tomorrow,” I said. I looked down at my cell phone. It was just past midnight. “I mean, later today.”
• Twenty- One •
I was bone-weary but my brain was whirring. I called the hospital to check on Gus and was told that he was still in his coma. I told them I’d be by in the morning. Even if he was still in a coma, it would do him good to hear my voice. I realized someone needed to tell him about Kate when he woke up, and hoped I would be there to do it. I’d hate for it to come from John Engel.
There was a text waiting for me. You okay? It was from Jack Megan. I wasn’t about to tell him that Babs was dead in a text. I’d let the cops tell him about his client. I’d be following up with him sooner rather than later. He deserved to hear part of the story from me at some point.
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