by Drew Franzen
“No,” said Eugene. “No.” He indicated the money lying untouched on the table. “This was so she never would. It would kill her to know that he was doing to Missy, what he did to her.”
“It’s too late for any of that now, Eugene,” said Burke.
Eugene Bitson brought his hands to his face and shuddered, a silent sob. He wiped the moisture from his eyes with fingers that resembled the roots of a small tree. Where once it may have made him appear boyish, the tangle of dark curls hanging at his forehead made him appear shaggy, like a dog. With the process of turning himself inside out like a reversible skin complete, Eugene Bitson seemed like a man uncomfortable with the change, as if having finally acquired a new suit he was satisfied with the color, though uncertain of the cut.
“It’s too late for that now,” agreed Eugene. “It’ll kill her to find out. Her own father, for God sake.” Eugene moved slowly from his chair. “I should go, Maggie is home alone.”
Burke pressed his hand to Eugene’s shoulder, settling Bitson effortlessly back into his seat.
“Sorry, Eugene, you’re coming with me,” said Burke. “You’re both coming with me. When Dojcsak returns we’ll chat. The three of us, together with Ed. There’s still a lot we don’t know—that I don’t know.”
“But Maggie,” pleaded Eugene. “She’s home alone.”
“Maggie will keep,” said Burke.
“I’ll not say a word without my attorney,” repeated Seamus. “Not one word.”
“That’s already three, shithead, and counting” said Burke, gathering the photos and cash into a large envelope supplied by Eugene. “But you know what they say.”
Neither Eugene nor Seamus did.
“A picture is worth a thousand words.”
They departed the Exxxotica together, Eugene turning the key in the lock behind him, aware, that for him, it would be for the final time.
CHAPTER FORTY TWO
AN HOUR LATER, Dojcsak stood with Pridmore and Christopher Burke in his office, the men smoking, Sara drinking decaffeinated coffee from a mug, Eugene and Seamus locked together in a broom-closet cum holding-cell down the hall. After the previous evening, Sara’s stomach had finally settled; the coffee was her first of the day.
“When do we pick them up?” asked Burke.
“Morning should be soon enough,” replied Dojcsak. “No rush; I don’t suppose either Leland or Radigan is going anywhere so long as we keep these two fools under lock and key. Let’s process the paperwork first. Besides, I need to notify the State Police. I don’t trust us to bring in those two alone.”
“Any news on Jordy?” Burke said.
“Nothing,” Dojcsak replied.
Sara said, “Is he a suspect or merely wanted in the questioning of…?”
Burke said, “Well, he’s a suspect in something, isn’t he? Stat rape, contributing to the delinquency of, dealing drugs.”
Dojcsak shrugged. “An embarrassment of riches.”
Sara was uneasy with Dojcsak’s decision to delay picking up both Radigan and McMaster. They’d already lost track of Jordy Bitson, hadn’t they? But if they were to detain every reasonable suspect—as Dojcsak had first described it—they’d require the services of the National Guard.
Leaving Dojcsak to make calls, Sara and Burke returned to their respective cubbies to prepare reports. Sara was careful to include each detail, supposition and conjecture. All but the call from Missy’s mobile to the Dojcsak home on the day Missy died. Until Sara reconnected with Jen, she’d leave that out.
Sara completed her report on the computer, printing it only after she had reviewed it three times. At five o’clock, Sara submitted the final edit to Dojcsak, poured a second cup of coffee, thought about telephoning Cassie McMaster from the office, then decided against it. Sara would get to bed early tonight, in anticipation of a busy day tomorrow.
There was some satisfaction knowing Leland McMaster Senior would now be punished for the rape, if not the murder, of his granddaughter. It couldn’t compensate, however, for her despair over knowing it had been allowed to occur in the first place.
Christopher Burke popped his head into the cubicle and asked, “Buy you dinner?”
“What’s in it for you?” Sara said, regretting immediately the tone of her reply.
“Can I take that as a no?”
“I’m tired, Chris, beat. If we’re going to have an early morning, I need to get an early night.”
“Suit yourself,” he said, walking away.
“Maybe next time?” she called, but Burke had already gone.
Sara left ten minutes later, heading for the rectory instead of home. However inappropriate, Sara herself was unable to resist the inevitable pull of desire.
…
Maggie drove deliberately, her hands placed precisely on the steering wheel at ten o’clock and two, applying sufficient pressure on the gas pedal to maintain acceleration but to not exceed the posted speed limit. Surprisingly, the palms of her hands were dry; Maggie had expected they would be damp, greasy with nervous tension. But Maggie was not nervous. She was something (perhaps resolute?), realizing now, like Cassie, that in order to claim her future, inevitably she must re-claim her past. For Maggie, the realization had come much later in life, at the cost of her youngest child. Without a college education, Maggie was unable to define it this way either to herself or to anyone else who was to later ask.
Maggie supposed her feelings had to do with the killing of Missy, the absolute circumstances of her passing, yes, but more to do with how her daughter had died, the relative circumstances surrounding her death. Had Missy been killed in a traffic accident, or drowned, Maggie would be devastated, of course, but could take comfort in knowing her death was arbitrary, a random act of tragedy that could happen to anyone. As it was, Maggie would be tormented by the realization this death could happen only to a daughter of hers.
Maggie arrived to her parent’s home after dark, exhausted from over thirty years of humiliation, recrimination and despair.
Her father answered the door at the first knock; he had anticipated Maggie’s approach, though she had not telephoned in advance to warn of her arrival.
After almost a quarter century, Maggie crossed the threshold into her childhood home. She hadn’t thought what to expect, but now experienced a sense of familiarity, as if wrapped with an old blanket; a not particularly comfortable blanket but one musty and smelling of damp, as if left in the cellar too long. Her father carried a drink in his hand. A moist, unlit cigar hung from his lips. The home was as Maggie remembered it, only aged.
“You’re here because of her,” Leland McMaster said, extending neither a formal nor informal salutation, his eyes refusing to meet those of his daughter. To Maggie, it was a small triumph, but one she savored.
“Because of who, daddy?” she replied. The voice was of another generation.
“Your girl,” he said. He closed the door behind her.
As he passed near, Maggie recalled the sound of ice cubes against glass, the stale smell of tobacco and alcohol on clothes, body and breath, the feel of damp, coarse hair against her smooth skin, and the salty tang of sweat on her tongue, the desperate encouragement from him, followed by anxious reassurances and always the thoughtless and shameful promise that it would never happen again.
Maggie was breathing heavily, struggling to draw oxygen into her lungs, her momentary triumph forgotten.
Her father said, “Your mother is in the living room.” He turned, leaving Maggie standing alone in the front hall.
Helen McMaster sat in her wheelchair in the living room, before a hearth in which there was no flame. She too had a drink clutched in her bony fingers. A spider’s web of blue veins crawled over the back of her hand, traveling up her arm to disappear in the cuff of a shabby, chenille throw, hair carelessly piled on her head so it appeared lopsided. Under other circumstances and on another woman it would be pitiable. Maggie felt only contempt. She c
rossed the room to her mother, kissing her on the cheek.
“You smell,” Helen McMaster said of her daughter. “When was the last time you had a bath? And your mouth; is that contagious?”
Maggie had become inured to her appearance and her odor. Without responding to her mother, she sat.
“Why have you come?” her mother asked.
“Dojcsak sent her,” Leland said before Maggie could reply.
“The man who killed our son,” Helen murmured, staring into her drink as if somehow hoping to glimpse an image of Leland Junior floating in the bottom.
“The man who crucified our son,” Leland corrected. Her father stood in the center of the floor. He swayed on legs made uncertain by alcohol. “He persecuted your brother, made me send him off to Vietnam. Now he wants to persecute me.” He pointed a trembling finger to Maggie. “This one has come to finish what Dojcsak started, to blame me for the child’s death.” McMaster turned to his wife. “To blame us for her death.” He drained his glass in one swallow and moved to the sideboard to pour another. He did not offer for either his daughter or his wife.
“Why should she do that? What have we to do with it?” Helen asked as if speaking only to her husband.
Leland shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “After all this time, you’d think she’d be over it.”
“Over what?” Helen asked. “What has she to be over?”
Maggie found her voice. “Don’t, ma’” she said.
“Don’t what?” Helen replied, glaring at Maggie. “I said I was sorry didn’t I? I’m sorry that she’s dead, not because I had anything to do with it. Is that what you believe?”
“She wouldn’t be here otherwise,” said Leland.
“You’re so self-centered, as if you’re the only mother who has ever lost a child,” said Helen.
“I was a child, ma’,” Maggie said, as if pleading.
“You were never a child,” said Leland, settling himself carefully in a wingback chair, shaking his head to and fro as if to exclaim the thought.
“You’re right, daddy,” said Maggie knowingly. “I never was.”
“Never,” he repeated. Maggie stiffened as if to speak, but remained silent. “Couldn’t keep your knees shut,” Leland continued, as if by refusing to challenge him, Maggie had exonerated him. “Couldn’t keep your bathrobe closed.”
“I won’t listen to this,” said Helen.
“Shut up, Helen,” Leland said, turning to his wife. “You’ll listen.”
“I won’t,” Helen squawked. “Not in my home. I won’t listen to this filth.” Her voice trembled. “Not in my home.” Helen raised a hand to her ear, as if to shut out the sound.
Rising to refill his drink, Leland said, “Shut your flap-trap woman. You will listen. You weren’t born in a bloody convent and neither,” he said turning on Maggie, “were you.” He poured from a half-drained bottle of Jack Daniels, not bothering to add ice. “A man has his appetites. A man makes mistakes. You,” he said, pointing an accusatory finger at Maggie, “were a big, bloody mistake. From the time you were born, I looked at you and said to myself, Uh-oh, here comes trouble.”
Helen’s drink dropped to the floor, the glass shattering on the tile hearth. Leland sat, as if he hadn’t noticed. Helen’s other hand went to her ear. For a moment, Maggie thought of the three monkeys, though for all the comfort she offered her daughter, Helen might just as well have been blind and mute too.
“What in the name of God was I thinking?” McMaster said, as if expecting an answer. “Don’t think you’re without blame,” he said now, turning on Helen. “You drove me to it.” Then to Maggie, “What was I supposed to do? Have an affair? Ruin my reputation?” He sat for a moment, concentrating on his drink. “I should have fucked your sister,” Leland said to no one.
The room was silent, the wind against the shutters the only sound. At that moment, it was as if a bomb had been dropped, or a dam burst, or a great cloud of toxic ash had descended upon them so rapidly they hadn’t time either to speak or to react, the three of them suspended in a single moment where one life ends, another begins—like victims of the eruption at Pompeii. Had she been able, Maggie would have imagined this to be the way Missy felt when she died, the moment her father snapped her daughter’s neck.
“Stay up half the night if you want,” Leland said to no one in particular, rising from his chair. “I’m going to sleep.” He grasped the bottle of Jack Daniels in his hand, and before walking from the room turned to Maggie and said, “If he comes for me, I won’t go. If he comes for me, I’ll tell him the same as I told you. A man has his appetites and a man makes mistakes. I’ve done nothing a thousand men haven’t done before me, and a thousand more won’t do after.”
With those parting words, Leland McMaster made his way up the stairs and to bed.
…
By the time Dojcsak arrived, the home was fully engulfed. The firefighters had removed the remains, which now lay on the gravel in the front drive, covered with plastic tarp. All that was left was to contain the blaze and to prevent the rising breeze from carrying the flame toward the barn, where more than one dozen horses, sensing the danger, snorted and kicked, stamping their hooves and ramming their heavy flanks into the paddock until the splinters pierced their hide. The Fire Chief was watchful, prepared to release the animals to the fields the moment it appeared the fire might spread. Given their frenzy, he wondered if it might be best to do it now.
“It’s as if the blaze began in two places, simultaneously,” he was telling Dojcsak. “In the living room, downstairs, and at the same time in a second floor bedroom. We arrived quickly,” he said as if excusing himself, “but the house is old, wood frame.” He shrugged. “There was little we could do.”
“Careless smoking?” Dojcsak ventured.
“I’m not a forensic analyst,” the Fire Chief replied, “but I’m guessing an accelerant was involved. The burn pattern is pronounced where we found the bodies. It appears to have been deliberately set, as if the bodies themselves may have been doused.”
“Homicide?” asked Dojcsak.
“Homicide, suicide, both? That’s for you and the coroner to decide, Sheriff,” the Fire Chief said. He then excused himself to monitor the blaze.
Despite the fumes and the acrid taste of charred shingle and wood coating the interior of his mouth and his throat, Dojcsak smoked. He watched as the home of Leland McMaster collapsed in on itself, feeling the heat against his face as if it were the old man’s temper. The timbers squawked and sizzled, straining hopelessly to remain upright in what Dojcsak imagined was a last act of defiance, an extended middle finger to a world to which Leland believed he owed nothing, and to which he made no amends. Tomorrow, after the fire died and the embers cooled, there would be only ash, as lifeless and blackened as the scorched remains of Leland McMaster himself.
Dojcsak extracted his cellular telephone, making a call each to Pridmore and to Burke. He instructed both to meet him at the home of Eugene Bitson and offered Sara the opportunity to contact Cassie McMaster, firstly to inform her that her parents had died, and secondly to advise—in Dojcsak’s opinion—that her sister, Maggie, was responsible.
“We should have picked him up yesterday, Ed,” Sara said.
“He wasn’t going anywhere,” Dojcsak replied.
“You said the same about Jordy,” said Sara.
“Well, Leland hasn’t gone anywhere,” said Dojcsak testily, regarding the covered remains of Leland McMaster. “He’s right here in front of me, not fifteen feet away.”
Five minutes later Dojcsak was on the road, the orange glow from the still smoldering flames illuminating the night sky in his rear view mirror. He ran a finger over his chin, (the heat had irritated his skin) and decided he had time to return home to shave. Before turning off, Dojcsak decided against it, knowing in the morning he would sleep late and aside from endless reports, it would be a quiet day, affording him the luxury to shave as often
as he liked.
So much for people are, people do, he mused, wondering at the range of complicated emotion that had inspired Maggie Bitson. On the radio, Elvis concluded the last track in what the disc jockey announced as a midnight triple play. Elvis Presley, Ick, he asked himself? Not on your bloody life.
CHAPTER FORTY THREE
THE AFTERNOON HAD been warm and clear, for the Oasis a busy end of the school-term Saturday. The patio was jammed with young people drinking frozen margaritas and beer by the frosty pitcher-full. It had taken Pridmore and Dojcsak five minutes to work their way through the noisy and excited crowd before reaching the river to visually confirm what, until then, had been only rumored. It brought to mind for Sara images of an outdoor rock concert, a mosh pit with everyone surging forward to get a better look.
That day, the drinking continued early into the following morning with many patrons scanning the water’s surface and pointing: long after Jordy had been retrieved, but as if the body were still there. He had been discovered floating face up in the Hudson River with his body snagged on the rocky outcroppings at the base of the Oasis patio. Jordy was bloated and battered from his weeks in the river, his face stove in from what Medical Examiner Abby Friedman described later as repeated blows from a blunt instrument, or possibly a fist but not, definitely, from his time in the river. The beating was per-mortem, occurring before the boy entered the water.
It would be another six weeks before Seamus Mcteer would eventually be indicted in his murder. District Attorney Jimmy Cromwell argued—only partly accurately—that Jordy was a victim of blackmail gone wrong. Though Seamus denied the accusation, the small basement studio with stained, foam filled mattress, the dark room, the sophisticated collection of video and photographic equipment, the thousands of dollars in cash and the recovery of hundreds of additional photographs and digital files—most featuring Jordy—stashed beneath a false bottom built into the hearth of his fireplace floor, was sufficient to convince a Grand Jury Mcteer was guilty of something.