by JJ Partridge
I wanted to respond, to seek her consolation and understanding, when Annie Sullivan intervened. Her perversity was the root of all that had transpired. As I considered it that way, my guilt began to ebb. Annie Sullivan, victim and victimizer. Annie in the First Communion photograph. Annie, as described by Franks, by Williams, by her sister, by the old lady. Annie, the daughter of a lout who must have shaped her environment no differently than what wind does to desert sand.
* * *
A few hours later, we were upstairs watching the Patriots-Jets game when Tramonti and Oboe arrived. Tramonti wore a crimson Harvard sweatshirt over a white shirt unbuttoned at the collar and khaki slacks; he looked tired, rumpled, and pleased. I got him a Sam Adams from the fridge; Oboe, after his ritual sniffs of the room, flopped down at Tramonti’s feet.
“His name is Naylor. He lost a lot of blood but he’ll make it. Been employed at the Refectory for about five years, a third cook, cleanup guy ..., the guy who empties the Fry-o-later, takes out the garbage, that kind of stuff. Good employee. Quiet, kept to himself, like they always say. No rap sheet, nothing at all. Into weights and body-building stuff. Right under our noses all this time and no one ever suspected he had a problem. The goddamn knife came right out of the Refectory kitchen!” He took a swig of the Sammy and continued. “Box full of Stalker clippings and videotapes of the news broadcasts in his apartment, lots of pictures of Kingdom and Danby, and even one of Martine out of the Crier. And a lot of copies of that flyer, you know, with the cross hairs. Must’ve hated those black college girls he was serving every night or is just a pervert. We’re trying to find out if he’s involved with any of the skinheads or other crazies. I doubt it.”
He took a long pull on his beer. “Oh, and we also got a positive ID on him as Fingers, too. Anyway, the way we figure it, after Latoya, there was only one black female student with greater campus visibility—Martine—and he was going to get her.” He shook his head. “You look at him and he’s a nothing. You’d never notice him in a crowd of two. Everyone figured him for a wimp. Fat, not too smart, and burning inside. Must have repressed something.” He glanced at Nadie and grinned. “Sorry.”
“Not another one,” she said resignedly, and curled up in her chair.
“Why the pattern, nothing last summer, the missing weekends ...?”
“That’s something you’d never guess,” he responded. “He’s a mess corporal in the Army Reserve! Spent all summer at Camp Drum, and he was on duty at the Armory down in Bristol the last two weekends when The Stalker didn’t strike. He was there Friday night to Sunday afternoon, the whole weekend—cooking! There’s no way he could have left the facility without signing out, and he didn’t.” Tramonti’s face then got a touch more serious. “That means we’re back to square one with Ms. Sullivan,” and his eyes shifted from his beer toward me.
I shuddered, remembering his lecture at Jimmy’s.
“Did you see the newspaper?” Tramonti asked.
I nodded.
“Sorry about that,” he said, not quite evenly. “No, that sounds crass. I know you tried your best for the kid.” He took another swig. “Don’t waste your pity. He didn’t come from nothing. He could have done something with his life. He chose not to. His mother will grieve for him. Nobody else will much care. No angels singing in heaven. He knew what he was doing when he hooked up with the worst, was headed for prison or an early death ....” My unspoken protest must have been plain on my face but Tramonti didn’t flinch. “That’s the truth. You don’t want to see it that way, but sit where I sit and it’s true.”
“It’s over,” I replied glumly. “It was something I had to do. Too bad it turned out piss-poor.”
“Even if you had pressed charges, Franks probably would have gotten Lavoie to let him out.”
That sounded as though he was trying to be sympathetic. I looked at him squarely and his eyes avoided mine.
“Well, maybe. Who knows? Anyway, now, I’m not sure he did kill her or that we could prove it. Time of death is still a problem. Can’t pin it down better than a span of four to five hours. The DNA would only prove that he slept with her, not that he killed her. And the room was full of unidentified prints. Everything is circumstantial, not even good circumstantial. So Franks would have ripped us up with Williams’s so-called alibi, no eyewitnesses, the other prints, and the uncertainty as to the time of death. With Williams either out on the street because of Franks or on bail, Flores and Hones would have gotten to him eventually. He was just too hot and too close.”
“Who?” Nadie asked.
“Two of his bosses,” he answered, fingering the bottle. “As for the savings account, how are we going to find out where she got the money if she didn’t tell anybody? The sister swears she doesn’t know, now that this baloney about an internet job has been shelved. It could have been Williams’s dough but I doubt it. He wouldn’t have trusted her. Punks like him can’t trust anybody.”
Nadie looked quizzical and then frowned. Tramonti had slipped into a cop’s straight from the shoulder attitude which Nadie would not like. “So, what happens now?” she asked.
“Hey …,”—he turned to me—“… didn’t I have this conversation with you yesterday?” Then, he repeated to Nadie the mechanics of a cold case and how the file never officially closes. “As for Naylor,” he said to Nadie, “I don’t think you’ll be bothered. He’s charged with attempted assault on you but my guess is we’ll get a confession on the other assaults. Then it’s only a matter of how many of the rapes and assaults the AG goes with. You’ll almost certainly be out of it. We have him, and that’s enough.”
“The press ...?” she said uncertainly, and I realized that she came here so early to avoid reporters who must be hanging around her apartment.
“They’ll be all over you. You’ll be Superwoman for a day,” he chuckled and glanced at me, “despite your ..., what should I call it ..., statement?”
Nadie’s face crinkled into a smile. “Our guys don’t think too highly of you either, Ms. Monosyllable.” He checked his watch. “Danby should be having his press conference just about now.” He put down his beer and Oboe, sensing his master was about to go, got up, stretched, and put his head in Tramonti’s lap. “Well, one less problem. I’ve still got McCarthy, the brutality trial, and the Reverend on my case. Not to mention my next to zero rating in the polls.” I must have winced because he continued “Should be some lessons in all this but I’ll be damned if I know what they are.”
I knew one big one! Despite Tramonti’s easy excuses, Williams might be alive if I hadn’t acted out of arrogance or some misplaced loyalty. I owed somebody, something.
* * *
A few minutes later, Tramonti left.
“You never did tell him about Reinman, did you?”
“It was just so remote. So what if he knew her. Or paid her off. In his condition ....”
She nodded. “I’m glad. Why do it now? It would only make things more difficult for the family,” she said and used the remote to raise the volume on the television.
Some part of me wanted to tell Nadie that I would not let a victim be forgotten even if the police were stymied and prepared to leave her murder unsolved. While Nadie had prepared lunch, I made phone calls from the loft: Deborah Reinman had been admitted as a patient at the Vermont Psychiatric Center in Middlebury on Tuesday; no visitors allowed except for immediate family. That verification of Mrs. Cabel’s story had resolved my compulsion to protest the taking of a life. It would have to wait. What use is justice for the dead, anyway? To satisfy the living?
Annie Sullivan’s perversity had infected Reinman, destroyed Reinman’s wife, and killed Lavelle Williams. Looking at the shelves of thrillers, I remembered the bleak comment of a detective that every victim carries the happenstance of the person he or she has become and becomes a victim because of where he or she is at a single moment in time. Know the victim, and you are close to the murderer. It could be reversed, too; this murderer was a victim—anothe
r victim of Annie Sullivan—and she deserved to tell her own story, in her own way, if her mind ever let her remember. The great detectives of fiction—Maigret, Morse, Dalgleish, even Sherlock Holmes—had cases when fate prevented the killer from being convicted for the ultimate crime. Which one had remarked that murder is often the logical end of an accurate mind overstretched? And that sometimes a detective’s only satisfaction is to know that there is nothing more that can be done?
I had to take solace that the accomplice would be living with demons as she awaited the moment when her daughter awakes. “Thou shalt fear day and night, and shall have no assurance in this life,” says the Old Testament. Mrs. Cabel had nothing to hope for in this world and little, except God’s mercy, in the next.
I got up and bent over to kiss Nadie’s forehead. “It’s over, sweet thing. Time to concentrate on real life. It’s all been a movie and the credits are on the screen.”
“What ...?”
“Never mind. Remember that weekend in New York ....?”
She looked up and caught my arm, her green eyes intent, her lips in a slight smile. “I hate to admit it but when you focus on something, you are not a really bad detective. Good instincts, and ....”
Focus. Somehow she knew!
“Can I be a ‘not a really bad detective’ and still woo you?”
She smiled again, and that was all the encouragement I got.
It was enough.