by Blake Banner
He said, “That’s ridiculous…” but his voice faltered as he said it.
“One of the things that confused me right from the start was, if she was going to Seven Hills, how the hell did she wind up ten miles away, back of beyond in that canyon? We assumed somebody must have picked her up from the bus station and taken her there. But then we found she had never even gone there, never bought a ticket, never caught the train.
“But you, you knew all about Lefthand Canyon, you knew all about its reputation as a place where people dumped bodies, and they could go for years without ever being found.” I paused and shook my head. “And if you hadn’t been so arrogant and lazy, you might have got away with it. But instead of burying her, you were on some kind of power trip, weren’t you? You knew about El Coyote’s reputation and you thought you’d be smart. So when you dumped her, you cut off her head and left her half buried to be found and cast suspicion on Coy. It was a stupid move.”
Mel had collapsed, convulsing and sobbing, repeating over and over that she did not believe it. She refused to believe it. Mo was staring into my face. I held his eye for a long moment. I knew he was ready. I said, “That is what happened, isn’t it, Mo?”
He nodded. “Yes. But I ain’t gonna say another word till I have a lawyer.”
TWENTY FOUR
Mel and Anne-Marie were staring at Mo in horror. They were like odd mirrors of each other, their mouths sagging open, their eyes round and wide, and an odd kind of dumb stupidity about their expressions.
Mel said, “Mo, no…”
And Anne-Marie echoed, “How could you…?”
I looked over at Dehan. She was frowning, like she was wondering if I was going to read him his rights, or if I wanted her to do it. I gave her an imperceptible shake of my head.
“I haven’t arrested you yet, Mo. We’ll get you a lawyer in due course.” I smiled. “No doubt you can get a pretty smart one of your own.” I thought for a moment. “You know, they were a lot of things that gave me a headache about this case. But one of the biggest was the way some of the things you did were smart, and threw me off—like taking her all the way to Colorado, while you and Anne-Marie provided alibis for each other…”
She looked at me in alarm. “I had nothing to do with this!”
I ignored her and plowed on. “But other things threw me off because they were so stupid I didn’t believe anybody would do them, like raping her, or cutting off her head to implicate Coyote without bothering to find out what his real M.O. was.” I paused, shaking my head and narrowing my eyes at him. “You could be so smart in some things, and so stupid in others. It was almost like you had a split personality. One of you was smart, and the other was just a stupid redneck. Why, for example, did Anne-Marie separate from Isaac and eventually divorce him, but you had to go to the extreme of killing your wife?”
I stared at him a while, then shifted my eyes to Anne-Marie. She’d gone from looking outraged to looking scared again. Then I turned and studied Pat. She still looked terrified, only maybe a little more so. They didn’t like the question.
“As I said, it was like two people. And when I realized that, everything began to slip into place. Talking to you, it was clear to me that there was no hidden, brilliant side to your personality, Mo. Forgive me, but you are just plain stupid. And once I accepted that, it was clear that the smart things you had done were somebody else’s idea.
“So, I didn’t have to look very far, did I, Anne-Marie? Now, my next question was, what makes an attractive, moderately intelligent woman like you marry a man like Mo? Even allowing for the fact that you might find him attractive, that is not enough to marry him, is it? So, what would be enough to make you marry him?”
She swallowed. “I love him…”
I snorted. “You married Isaac for the same reason that Mo married Kathleen, to get out of Seven Hills and start a new life in the city. And, like Mo, once you were here, your partner became a millstone ’round your neck. It was easy enough to walk out on him, but hell, you needed somewhere to go. Well, that wasn’t too hard. You and Mel had become close. So you could go to her, right?”
There was absolute silence. I spread my hands. “But that got me thinking. It didn’t make a lot of sense. Her son-in-law is walking out on her daughter, and she is providing a home away from home for his mistress! Providing a place for them to meet and hook up! It didn’t square.”
Mel stammered, “I had no idea, so help me God…”
I went on, “So what, how do we explain all of this odd behavior?” I looked at Pat, at Anne-Marie, at Mo. I pointed at him. “You had thrown in your job, Kathleen and Isaac were making the bare minimum. Money was in very short supply.” I sighed, shook my head and turned to look at Mel. “Especially since your insurance pay off from your first husband had started to run out. In fact, the biggest provider in the family was Pat, with her income from selling dope for Sly and Coy.
“But then she went and blew it. The one big earner you had went down the chute. And Greg made it clear. He would protect Pat from El Coyote, but he was cutting her off. She would not sell for them anymore. Your goose had laid her last golden egg. What to do?”
Mel had gone very still. I pointed at her. “You know? You are one of the most charming people I have ever met, Mel. A bit too charming. Because one of the first things that struck me when I first met you was that, even though I was there to discuss your daughter’s murder, rape, and decapitation, all you could think about was whether I would have a cup of tea and a biscuit.” I gave a small, humorless laugh. “It wasn’t like she’d died twenty years ago.” I frowned. “Even then, it wouldn’t have made much sense. But five years? After such a brutal murder? And then I started to put the pieces together: you provided a home for your son-in-law and his mistress; you moved, from a small house on Rosedale Avenue to this big, comfortable home in Morris Park, and brought your son-in-law and his mistress with you. You felt no grief, no resentment, no compunction… In fact, you felt nothing.”
Her face was drawn, hard. “That’s not true.”
“When your husband died, leaving you comfortably off thanks to his life insurance, he had no idea that in doing so, he had planted the seed for his daughter’s murder. The solution was simple. Mo, acting as always on your instructions, took out the insurance. To cover himself, he took it out in your name. You, the matriarch, would take care of everybody. But…” I laughed. “You were audacious! Two million bucks! Enough, with the sale of your old house, to move to this place and have a comfortable income for the four of you for the rest of your lives. Not luxury, but comfort. Enough to invest in a small business for Mo and Anne-Marie. Enough never to have to worry again about paying bills.”
She shook her head. “No…”
Anne-Marie had collapsed on the sofa and had covered her face. Mo seemed to have slipped back into a catatonic state. I went on.
“But it had to be planned very carefully. “Mo and Anne-Marie would provide alibis for each other. The fact that they were both having an illicit affair would explain away any secretiveness on their part, any reluctance to be forthcoming or give details about their movements.
“Dumping the body in Lee County was clever. I’m pretty sure that was down to you, Mel, right? Not only was it a different jurisdiction from where the crime had taken place, it was a remote jurisdiction with few resources. So a major investigation was never likely to get under way. It was just another unexplained body dumped in Lefthand Canyon. If Sheriff Watson hadn’t kicked it back to us, if Mo hadn’t beheaded her, if he hadn’t kept the machete, we might never have got this far.
“And even the insurance was smart. Mo never figured as the beneficiary. And the beneficiary was not only her mother, but did not even take out the insurance, and could claim ignorance of it.” I sighed. “But the monthly premiums, they were what gave it away. Kathleen was on such a limited income. Mo had no income. And the premium on a two million buck insurance policy are high. So the three of you were splitting the payme
nts. It’s right there in your bank records. The three of you set up the insurance, knowing that you were going to kill her. That takes a very special kind of evil, Mel. A very special kind of coldness.”
She turned to look at me and her eyes were hard and cruel. I believe if she could have killed me right there and then, she would have.
“It was for the best. Her and that streak of parrot’s piss, Isaac, were never going to get us out of that shit hold we was living in. Sure, wasn’t Kath living in one feckin’ room with a bathroom, and wasn’t Isaac and Anne-Marie the same? What way is that to live? She was better off dead. The only ones with any balls to try and get out of the mess was Mo and Anne-Marie!”
“And me…” I turned. It was Pat, staring at her mother with a pleading face. “I did my best…”
Her mother looked at her with venom in her eyes. “Ah, feck off, you gobshite! If it wasn’t for the likes of you, we’d not be in this mess in the first place! And you!” She scowled at Mo. “If you’d done it like I said, we’d’ve got away with it, you stupid, feckin eejit!”
I stood. It was as good as a confession. “Melanie Vuolo, I am arresting you for conspiring in the murder of your daughter, Kathleen Vuolo. You do not have to say anything, but anything you do say may be taken down and will be used in evidence against you in a court of law…”
“Feck off!”
As I put the cuffs on her, I could hear Dehan reading Mo and Anne-Marie their rights too. Through the window, I could see Sean and Karen pulling up to collect the machete. They climbed out the of the patrol car, breathing billows of condensation as they talked and laughed, moving up the garden path. It was a cold day.
EPILOGUE
“You ought to buy a dishwasher. Everybody has dishwashers these days.”
She was standing at the sink with the cold light of a winter afternoon on her face, slowly washing a plate. She seemed abstracted. On my laptop, Dean Martin was singing that the weather outside was frightful, but he reckoned the fire was quite delightful. I had to agree. I hadn’t lit it for over two years, but now it looked festive and homely. My house hadn’t looked homely for a long time.
“It helps me to think,” I said as I poured two Martinis and contemplated the tree. It looked like a badly wrapped Christmas present. I liked it.
“Washing up helps you to think?”
“Uh-huh.”
She was quiet for a bit. The smell of baking moussaka began to creep out of the kitchen. “I know she was a crazy bitch, and what she did to her daughter was unforgivable, but I hated testifying against her.” She sighed. “She’s plausible. If it hadn’t been for the strength of the evidence against her, I don’t think the jury would have convicted her.”
“I agree.” She was drying her hands and I handed her her drink. “Cheers!”
“Cheers!”
We drank.
She went through and stood looking at the fire and the tree for a long while. “Family,” she said at last. “They have such power to hurt you, because you need them so much.”
“I guess so.”
She turned to face me. I was struck, not for the first or the last time, by how beautiful she was. But I paused this time, to observe that the beauty came as much from the honesty and intensity of her gaze as from the perfection of her features. Then I buried the thought.
She said, “Do you miss your family?”
I shrugged. “I have no family left. But I guess I do miss having a family. If I think about it.”
She smiled. It was a sad smile. “I miss having a family. I miss my mom and dad. They were nice.”
She sat on the sofa, opposite the fire. I sat in the chair and watched her. “Two weeks to Christmas, Stone. What will you do?”
“Read a book. Watch a movie. I don’t know. How about you?”
She shrugged, pulled a face and shook her head. “Same.”
“You not going to your uncle’s?”
“You kidding? No way!”
We sat in silence for a little longer, not sure whether to ignore the elephant that had just strolled into the room. In the end I shrugged one shoulder.
“You want to come over? We could read a book and watch a movie together.”
She smiled at the tree, then grinned without looking at me. “Yeah, why not? Depends on the movie…”
“Wizard of Oz.”
“I love that movie.”
“And then Terminator Two.”
“Oh, man! Yeah! But no rom-coms!”
“Agreed.”
“How about board games? You like board games?”
“Christmas pudding and backgammon.”
“You don’t wanna play backgammon with me, Stone. I will destroy you!”
“Oh, really? Ha! Think again, Ritoo Glasshopper, you nevah praid a mastah before…”
The fire crackled and spat lazily as the aroma of moussaka gradually permeated the house. We talked and laughed, and challenged each other amiably in the warm glow of the flames, and the sparkle of the overdressed tree. And after a while, I poured the wine as she pulled the moussaka from the oven, and set it on the table with the carrots and the broccoli. We drank too much and laughed at things that only we could find funny, and the sun set and the darkness enclosed my small, warm house. And as the fire died to embers, we went up to bed: me to mine, and her to the guest room, which was hers.
BOOK 7
THE HEART TO KILL
ONE
It wasn’t raining. It was a deluge. The raindrops exploded on the blacktop on Simpson Street, raising a mist of spray two feet from the ground. The early morning crowds were bent and hunched under their umbrellas, not so much hurrying, as fleeing from the downpour. I watched Dehan through the windshield as the wipers squeaked and thudded in their losing battle against the water. She stepped out of her apartment block, warped wetly as the wipers swept past, then regrouped and walked around the hood of my car. Instead of an umbrella, she had on an Australian leather hat and a long coat. She pulled open the door and climbed in with a self-conscious grin on her face.
“G’day, Bruce!”
I smiled, shook my head and pulled away. “Bruce?”
She removed her hat. Her hair was tied in a knot behind her head and now she tightened it as she spoke. “Didn’t you know that, Stone? Australians call all men Bruce, and all women Sheila. It’s a thing. So I say, ‘G’day, Bruce!’ and you say…”
“G’day, Sheila. Never let me say you didn’t teach me anything.” We drove in silence for a moment, among the hiss, the squeak, and the thud, the wet noises of a January morning in New York, and the warm sigh of the heater. “I was looking at the David Thorndike case last night,” I said. “I’d like to review it.”
She frowned. “Thorndike. Wasn’t he the journalist?”
“Investigative journalist on the New York Telegraph. Found murdered in the apartment he shared with his girlfriend on Manor Avenue, at eleven AM on 8th March, 2008…”
“Last seen?”
“The night of the 6th, Thursday, by his girlfriend, at about nine PM.”
“So no precise time of death?”
“Nope. Some time between nine PM Thursday and eleven AM Saturday. Thirty-eight hours. No forced entry. Only access to the apartment was through the front door. He had been shot, once, in the head at short range…” I turned and smiled at her. “With his own 9 mm Glock.”
“He was shot with his own Glock? That’s not cool.”
“It’s not polite at all, is it?”
“No. How about forensics?”
“Squat. The prints in the apartment were his, his girlfriend’s, the landlord’s, and a couple of others that got no hits on IAFIS. The only prints on the weapon were Thorndike’s.”
“Obviously, they ruled out suicide.”
I nodded. “He was lying in the middle of the floor, on his back. Entry wound was center of his forehead. The weapon was left on the bookcase by the door. The slug, found on the carpet a few feet away, matched the weapon.”
> She snorted. “I guess that’s pretty conclusive. So the killer was admitted voluntarily, got access to Thorndike’s Glock, then shot him with it. One, single, clean shot.”
“It certainly looks that way, yeah.”
“What about the girlfriend?”
“Katie O’Connor, she was out at a restaurant with a guy, paid with her credit card, tight alibi.”
“Anything taken?”
“Yes, no, maybe. There were no signs of robbery as such. Their money, his wallet, credit cards…” I made an ‘and so on’ gesture with my hand. “All of that was untouched. In fact, it looked like the whole apartment was untouched. It was as though he simply arrived, shot him and left…”
“Except he used Thorndike’s own gun, so he was presumably there long enough to get a hold of it.”
“That, and also his laptop and all his research were missing.”
She sat frowning at her Australian hat, turning it around in her hands, like it wasn’t the hat she’d expected to see there. “That doesn’t make a lot of sense.” She raised her frown from her hat to the windshield as I turned from 169th onto Franklin, among the ugly red brick monoliths, made even more unlovely by the low gray skies and the broken lights on the wet blacktop.
“I guess we’re not going to the station,” she said.
“I thought we’d go and see his wife.”
She gave one slow nod. “Okay, so this is not straightforward.”
“No.”
“Let me sum up what I understand so far.” She hesitated a moment and glanced at me. “Are we headed for Manhattan?”
“Yup. 104th and Columbus. It is the apartment he shared with her, which she now shares with her new husband.”
“Am I playing catch up here? Do you already have an idea…?”
I shook my head. “Ideas, I have a few, but then again…” I shrugged. “Too few to mention.”
“Funny. So Dave is married, he’s doing okay because he has a nice address on the Upper West Side. For some reason you will no doubt disclose in your own good time, he also had an apartment in the less desirable Manor Avenue, in the Bronx, which he shared with his girlfriend. He’s an investigative reporter, you mentioned his research and his laptop were missing, so I’m going to go out on a limb and say he was investigating a story ‘undercover’ or whatever the journalistic equivalent of undercover is.”