by JJ Partridge
“I went for it hook, line, and sinker.” I picked up T.R., which remained on the top of the drum table, and thrust it at her. Holding that book gave me moral authority. “The most believable lie is always clothed with truth. That was the whole idea.” I replaced T.R. on the table, pointedly turning Reinman’s face toward her. Her eyes strayed momentarily to his photograph before returning to me.
“Last night, the police arrested The Stalker. In no time, they’ll know he had nothing to do with Annie Sullivan’s death. That means they’ll start from scratch, examine everything again, including her past associations, and this time, they’ll pay attention to the money they now know she was receiving—”
“Carl didn’t do it!” she shrieked. “Can’t you get that through your head?”
It was time. Like a jury summation, after the confusion of confrontational and contradictory witnesses at a trial, I had to lay out my case and I was only going to get one chance.
“Annie Sullivan,” I began evenly, “was as intelligent as she was perverse. She lied for the pleasure of it, because she could get away with it. She had the confidence required of a good liar and believed in her ability to manipulate almost anyone. She played with her victims, teased them, ridiculed them, and was capable of deceit as your son-in-law.” From my inside jacket pocket, I pulled out the vasectomy pamphlet and flattened it on the coffee table next to T.R. “From Carl’s office.”
She stooped to pick it up, read its cover more than once, and didn’t comprehend its significance until she flipped through the pages and unfolded the invoices. Then, as though some life force had evaporated, she sank into the chair opposite me, tightly grasping the pamphlet and receipt, staring past me across the room.
“Carl and Annie Sullivan had an affair. It must have been discreet. That would have fit their personalities—for her to have an affair with the University’s most well-known faculty member while other students had their schoolgirl crushes, and he was as randy as ever with his secret escapades showing his disdain for campus convention. Maybe he told her not to worry about the sex because of the vasectomy, maybe he didn’t. She wasn’t, or shouldn’t have been, on the pill because she had hormonal problems and the pill would have had side effects.”
At that, Mrs. Cabel’s brow furled with a question which I ignored.
“Toward the end of the school year, Annie knew she was pregnant. Carl must have vigorously denied his paternity, and if he hadn’t before, he made it ...”—I pointed to the pamphlet—“... known to her. That’s why the pamphlet was in his office. And to make sure, there was a second visit to the urologist in May. He probably thought Annie had been sleeping around if she was pregnant and would go away; Annie may have thought the vasectomy was a ruse because she hadn’t been and knew she was pregnant. Seems likely she also discovered his vulnerability. A paternity suit would have destroyed his morality guru image, ended his public career. When Carl paid her for the abortion and silence to get her out of his life, she knew he would pay more if there was a child.” I shook my head, disparagingly. “Smart as he was, he underestimated Annie.”
As I continued, the old woman’s face showed that her mind was working feverishly on where I was heading.
“His heart attack spoiled everything. If Carl died, or if he was too sick to care, her doublecross—to keep the baby, insist it was his, and blackmail him—was blown.”
Mrs. Cabel’s mouth opened and she put up a hand to stop me which I ignored.
“So, she took a chance with another ploy. She told your daughter that she was carrying her husband’s baby and proposed an arrangement. Annie would deliver the baby to your daughter, a surrogate of sorts, and was to be paid each month until the baby was born, and probably more when the baby was turned over to Deborah. How did she know that Deborah wanted a child so badly? Something that Carl said? Had he abused Deborah’s confidence? Since Deborah controlled the family’s cash, the payments would be no problem. It was for her a bargain with the devil and one she accepted for a baby. Carl’s baby! Even if Carl died, she would have the baby, and alive, Carl would be in no position to deny her the child, even as an adopted child, not now, not after all these years, not in his condition ....”
“Conjecture,” she croaked back at me, “... complete, absolute conjecture. This is so absurd ....”
“The scheme broke down when Annie found out she wasn’t pregnant! Everyone thought her hospital stay meant a problem in the abortion or a miscarriage, some sort of euphemism when she said it was an ‘operation’. They forgot she always liked to play with words in her manipulations. It was an operation, an operation for an ovarian cyst. It had stopped her menstruation, made her puff up, fooled her body into false pregnancy symptoms, and she was still on student health insurance when she had her operation. Just an irregularity, an abnormality, and the operation took care of it. A few days in City Hospital and she was out.”
She was staring at me, her face a mask of varied emotions. “The threat to her meal ticket was real so she dug deeper into her repertoire of deceit. She probably told Deborah that there were complications in her pregnancy, that she needed rest and expensive care, and Deborah could send money to a postoffice box while Annie was being cared for. Annie stayed out of sight during the day so no one would be the wiser. Your daughter, unsophisticated and wanting the baby so badly, went along. She even started planning for its arrival.” I pointed toward the hall. “That room upstairs, the one with the yellow walls, with the painted balloons, the Picasso print. At her age …? You must have wondered ....”
Still no outburst of indignation, of defense from her. So, I wanted the next part to sting.
“While the money came in, Annie enjoyed herself, bought things, took trips, just had a blast—at your daughter’s expense—all the while mocking her gullibility and her weakness. Yes, mocking her. She boasted to her boyfriend and her sister that the money came from the ‘cash cow’. Cash cow! The Vermont farmer’s daughter was the cash cow. Annie demeaned your daughter, where she came from, her size, her vulnerability. It was all part of a great scam! When the jig would finally be up, when there was no baby, what could Deborah do about it? Complain to the police? Or to Carl? Admit how badly she had been duped?” I shook my head. “A perfect scheme—”
Mrs. Cabel threw the pamphlet on the table, nearly hitting Reinman’s photograph. Her eyes sparked with malice; when she spoke, her voice was steely. “You’ve read too many Agatha Christies, Mr. Temple!”
She had no idea that was a good hit on me. And, it angered me. Here’s what Hercule Poirot would do, Ms. Cabel.
“Annie’s plans went awry, maybe because Carl discovered the payments Deborah made to Annie and confronted your daughter or Deborah found the vasectomy pamphlet in Carl’s office—it was as though he’d kept it handy as proof of his inability to father a child, evidence which might be useful someday. I think the latter, on one of her many trips to his office. Either way, after a lifetime of guilt over the abortion, with barrenness and an unfaithful husband as punishment, Deborah discovers her husband deliberately frustrated her attempts to get pregnant. And, since Annie couldn’t be pregnant by Carl, Annie was a fraud, too!”
The hate Mrs. Cabel’s face registered helped me to go on.
“When November’s money didn’t arrive, Annie guessed something had gone wrong. She decided not to push her luck by pressing for payment. She had enough cash to get out of town in style. Then last Friday night, when she was high, and her boyfriend taunted her, she couldn’t resist one last gambit for more money and another malicious twist. She used the boyfriend’s cell phone ...”—I took it out of my shirt pocket and held it to her face—“… this phone. Later, she told the boyfriend that she was again milking the cash cow.” I pressed the phone’s memory button, scrolled back, and read aloud the Reinman’s listed phone number and the time, “Seven forty-eight. Not nine thirty, Mrs. Cabel, seven forty-eight. It retains the last twenty numbers and the time of calls. That was the nineteenth. For thirteen minutes.�
�
The cell phone was placed on top of the pamphlet, next to T.R. She remained silent. I had failed to goad her into the expected denial. Yet, I knew it would come as I drilled deeper.
“You told me that you were Carl’s alibi. I forgot that you were Deborah’s alibi, too. And that Deborah is your alibi. Never occurred to me to ask about it. Annie’s phone call had to have been the detonator. So who killed her? Carl was too frail, no match for Annie. You? Physically, you’d be no match for Annie. That leaves only Deborah, with the motive and the physical strength. She had been robbed of her baby, abused by her husband, violated by everyone, and she went over the edge. Was it before or after Carl’s death when she went to Annie’s apartment, found her tormenter zonked out on drugs, and used a pillow to smother her.”
My voice almost cracked as I accused her daughter of murder and I braced myself for her reaction. “That’s what bothered me. The pillow. From the beginning. Although I didn’t focus on it. The cops didn’t tumble to it because of their mindset. A rapist doesn’t use a pillow. A drug dealing punk doesn’t use a pillow. But a crazed, humiliated, jealous woman ...?”
Her breath caught for the first time, confirming that I was close to the truth. “Why was Annie’s room ransacked? Why were her panties removed, her slip lifted over her face? It had to be someone’s idea to phony up an assault, probably with The Stalker in mind. I can’t see Deborah, in her confused mental state, having the clarity of mind to fake a crime scene.” I paused for effect. “Someone else was there.” I stood, feeling extraordinarily tired and angry at the woman whose eyes latched on to mine, the accomplice, the liar. “Carl, if he wasn’t already dead, couldn’t have made it over to Veasey Street by himself, or stagger up two flights of stairs to get control of Deborah. No, there had to be someone who could manage her, someone who’d take her or follow her, who maybe got into the apartment too late. Someone who could think rapidly enough to cobble together a scene the cops might buy ....”
Her knuckles whitened as she grasped both arms of the chair and slowly hunched forward. “What is it that makes you do this?” she hissed. “Why do you persecute us? You can’t prove any of this. Deborah was never in that apartment, and that cell phone doesn’t prove anything! It was like I said. I was just wrong on the time!”
“They’ll be no alibi for Deborah since you told me and Pine, and no doubt others, that Deborah was in Little Compton when Reinman died. That was when Annie was killed. You hid Deborah from Carl’s doctor or maybe even whisked her away that night or early on Saturday, dosed with her own medications? Don’t know how you did it, don’t care. The money will lead the police here and the records will document the source. And as for Deborah, or someone else, being at Annie Sullivan’s apartment ....” I reached over, picked up T.R., placed the palm of my hand directly over Reinman’s photograph, and pressed down. I took away my hand and a palm print and five fingerprints blotted the shiny paper. “There were unidentified fingerprints all over the apartment. Despite your efforts, some will match Deborah’s and ... whomever else was there. You’ll never explain that.”
Her right hand rose as if to strike me. She held it aloft, unable to bring it forward. Her face admitted everything.
The summing up was over. I thought it would bring me relief but instead I felt drained. The pamphlet, receipts, and the cell phone went into my jacket. I left for the hall; she grabbed my arm with a force that practically spun me around. “If you could have seen her before she met Carl, her sweetness, her talent, her confidence—”
I shook off her grasp. “Sorry, but nobody else should be punished for a murder that belongs here.”
“You’re sorry!” she said in a voice so hoarse that I scarcely recognized it. All pretense was gone. “You’re sorry! You’ve been wondering about Deborah. Where she’s been.” Maybe I should have wondered but I hadn’t thought about it. “On the afternoon of the memorial service, we found her in bed, staring at the wall. She couldn’t hear me. Catatonic. I thought it was an overdose of her medications but it wasn’t. We managed to get her into her sister’s car, and drove her back to Vermont. She was admitted to a psychiatric hospital that afternoon.” She pointed to the two suitcases on the hall floor. “Hers. I’m taking them to the hospital.” She shuddered, and forced out her words. “She hasn’t recovered. It could be days or weeks, or even longer, because something terrible happened, something so terrible that it took her mind away. If ..., when ..., she recovers, if she remembers, and if she can live with it, that’s the time to be dealing with your sense of justice.”
That was as near to an admission against interest as I was going to get. She’d never come close again.
I swallowed a retort and got to the hall with Mrs. Cabel following me. “She’s the real victim.” As I opened the front door, her voice dripped with scorn. “But you’ll do what you want, Mr. Temple, won’t you? You don’t care about real justice, about how the scales should even out. Your life will just go on ....”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
I wasn’t surprised that Nadie, in black slacks and a red shirt, with her hair held back by a red barrette, was at the kitchen counter behind the Sunday Journal with a celebratory box of Krispy Kremes. Except for the scrapes that cosmetics couldn’t quite hide and wisps of strain showing at the corners of her eyes, she appeared none the worse for wear from last night’s adventure. She responded to my bleak stare. “Where have you been?” When I didn’t answer immediately, she took a second look. “Are you alright?”
I lied and told her I couldn’t sleep—well, that partly was true—and had gotten up for a much-needed walk. I asked how she felt and she said, “Fine” as she slit the tape on the donut box with a fingernail; there was enough sugar in those things to rot teeth and I said so. She ignored me, devouring a jelly-filled donut as she recounted her interview at the Public Safety Building “... what a dump!” and appraised her interrogation “... weak!” and added flatly that she’d been told that The Stalker was in intensive care at City Hospital. When she finished a second caloric monster, she licked her fingers, got up, and made espresso for two while jibber-jabbering about the moronic cops and what the capture of The Stalker would mean to the women at Carter. It was evidence of my funk that I found her good spirits maddening; in the last nine hours, she had been attacked by The Stalker, questioned in the friendly confines of the Public Safety Building until one or two a.m., and here she was, green eyes sparkling and acting like nothing much had happened!
I unfolded the Metro News section as Nadie delivered my espresso to the counter. “You should read that,” she said, pointing to a column by one of the Journal’s feature writers, Mark McCormick. I was immediately on guard. Nadie has been known to refer to him as “a wise-ass, macho conservative” and thus beneath contempt; either she was taunting me or it was actually interesting. It took me only a paragraph to understand: his subject was Annie Sullivan’s funeral Mass.
It hadn’t been much like the dry-eyed memorial service of Carl Reinman. In cavernous St. Michael’s, there would have been Dies Ires, incense, flowing vestments, and High Mass candles. According to McCormick, the priest’s homily was emotional, the faces of the congregation were pained and intense, and the anger of those on the church steps ill-concealed. Most assumed she had been killed by The Stalker, or another of the depraved, ignorant, and destructive people in our midst, the marginalized people who just don’t understand the rules or who don’t think any rules apply to them. Police families, he wrote, have learned to accept that a cop could go to work any morning and end up being laid out at Skeffington’s Funeral Home that night. That’s the risk. When the victim is the son or daughter or wife of a cop, the family’s grief is infused with bitterness that goes beyond the ordinary, with their reactions revealing an innate sense of futility at the seemingly endless, and losing, battle against lawlessness and evil. McCormick’s last paragraph concluded, “One of their own is gone, a victim of urban, undirected violence that swirls around us all. These cops will go to w
ork tomorrow, a little more jaded, hardened, beleaguered, and belligerent. How will they do their jobs?”
I put the newspaper on the counter, numbed by the irony it was Annie Sullivan’s funeral—the funeral of a blackmailer—that produced this paeon of praise and sympathy for the cops and their families. I would have told Nadie everything if she hadn’t said, with unexpected solemnity, “There’s something else. Page six in the Local section.”
It took me a few moments to find the right headline and a second longer to stop breathing. “Providence Man Found Murdered in New York.” I flattened the newspaper page on the counter. Lavelle Williams, 20, of Providence, had been found, with .22-caliber slugs in the back of his head, in the trunk of a stolen car in a parking lot at Kennedy International. Crack cocaine and other drugs were found on the body and in the glove compartment. A New York homicide detective said that leaving a corpse at the terminal had become the favored modus operandi of Colombian hit men who murdered and then boarded planes for Bogota, Medellin, or Cali. The last paragraph noted that Providence police wanted Williams for questioning in the Sullivan murder investigation.
I felt my body sag. Ugh! Nadie, who could not have seen my face blanch, came around and began to massage the back of my neck and shoulders. Lavelle Williams might have been in custody—instead of dead—if I had only delivered him up to Tramonti after the assault! My hubris had gotten in the way! For a few minutes, I had unknowingly held his life in my hands and I had let it slip away. My little escapade in detection, my diversion—for that was what it was—had condemned Lavelle Williams!
She continued to knead my shoulders. “I read it, hon,” she said, very sympathetically. “I’m sorry about the kid. But it must happen all the time. They get into this drug system and he probably was dangerous to somebody, and ....”