by Ed Gaffney
“I understand,” she said. “The doctors say that it’s possible—” But he cut her off.
“I just want you to know that this job is turning out to be something that neither of us had thought it was going to be when I first hired you.”
And here it was. The ultimate irony. Being fired by the nicest boss in the world after he’d promised her that, no matter what, he’d never fire her.
“So, whatever the doctors say,” Anthony continued, “and whatever ends up happening with your recovery, when you are ready to get out of here, I intend to offer you a raise in pay and a promotion to partner.”
That took a minute to sink in, but when it did, Maria couldn’t find any words to say.
Which was probably just as well, because she couldn’t seem to stop crying.
TERRY WAS FIVE MINUTES FROM THE COURTHOUSE. It wouldn’t be too long before that jerk Larry Morrison, nickname Elmo, or more properly “L.Mo.”—God, a sixty-three-year-old ex-cop with a street name—would appear there for his moment in the spotlight, to get tried for Vera’s kidnapping, the killing of his son, and the near killing of the private detective’s assistant, Maria. What a schmuck.
From what Terry had heard, Elmo had pretty much confessed to just about everything.
It all flowed from the fact that Elmo was an alcoholic and a cokehead. What a surprise.
Apparently, Steve Hirsch was his dealer. The night when everything blew up, Elmo went to the convenience store to make a buy, but Steve held out on him. Elmo pushed him into the back room, where Steve normally had some of his stash, but when it turned out that Steve really didn’t have any drugs to sell, Elmo snapped and killed the kid right there.
Back before he had been thrown off the force for discharging his weapon while drunk off his ass, Elmo had learned about things like surveillance camera angles, so he pulled his hat down over his face, returned to the main part of the store from the back room, and took money from the cash register to make it look like a robbery. Thanks to his alcohol-soaked brain, Elmo was afraid to leave the body there, so he lugged it back to his house in the trunk of his car and started wrapping it in plastic bags.
That’s when Detective Morrison found out about everything. He lived next door to his father, partly because the two houses had been in the family for generations, and partly to keep an eye on his father the drunk. So that night, Morrison saw a light on in the garage, popped in unannounced, and hello Mr. Felony. There was Daddy Dumbshit, right in the middle of drunkenly trying to prepare Hirsch’s body for abandonment in some car trunk in the woods.
Terry turned onto Spring Street and passed the costume shop where he’d bought the hair that Sean had worn during the fake guilty plea hearing. There had been a few tense moments when he first thought that his only choice was a “Cher” wig. He pulled up to the next intersection, where the light was red.
Anyway, according to Elmo, when Detective Morrison found his father trying to wrap a corpse in plastic bags and duct tape, he went apeshit, telling him that he was a lousy drunk and that he’d have to haul him in for murder. Before Elmo got a chance to explain why he shouldn’t be treated like any other homicidal drug addict, his son’s cell phone rang.
One of Morrison’s best skills as a cop was keeping so close to what was happening in the city’s underground. No one ever found out for sure who called Morrison that night, but they did find out that the call came from a pay phone way the fuck up near Yancy, a good forty miles north of Glass Lake.
The smart money was on Roger Tedesco.
The theory was that Roger decided to call Morrison to turn Babe in for the murder of Davy Zwaggert. The cops thought that Roger probably called to deflect any guilt, figuring that sooner or later somebody would turn up who remembered seeing Roger’s car driving around near the lake on the same night that Zwaggert disappeared.
Whether Morrison really believed that Babe had done it or whether he knew that Roger was just making sure that the blame fell on someone else, no one would ever know. What was known, though, was that Morrison and dear old Dad had just been handed a patsy on a plate. Elmo thought of it as a miracle.
Which makes sense, if you are a self-absorbed, alcoholic loser, living three feet up your own ass.
Anyway, whatever else Detective Morrison thought, he knew Babe was dumb as a stone, and probably figured that if he and his father could hide Hirsch’s body and point the finger at Babe for the robbery, things wouldn’t be too out of whack. After all, Babe had been involved in Zwaggert’s death, so if he got hooked for robbery, the guy was really getting off easy, right?
So Morrison went to the store, which was still open but unmanned, grabbed the surveillance tape, and then drove home, where he erased everything on the tape after the robbery.
The traffic light turned green, and Terry headed for the parking garage on the far side of the courthouse. He and Zack should have realized that there was something fishy about that tape. They were too busy fussing with trigonometry to see what was right in front of their faces. A normal tape wouldn’t have stopped right after the crime—it would have gone on for much longer, until someone shut it off to give to the police.
Anyway, after Morrison got back to his house, he called the station, reported the robbery and his “conversation” with Hirsch, and headed for Babe’s house to arrest him.
Of course Babe, being Babe, never told his lawyers that while arresting him, Morrison had grabbed him by the hair, which is surely how Babe’s DNA ended up on Hirsch’s body. Whether Morrison did it accidentally when he helped his father throw the body into the trunk of the car that Elmo had borrowed from the junkyard, or whether he was planting evidence against Babe in case the body was found would never be known.
Anyway, things looked pretty good for criminal mastermind Elmo, until the combination of Zack’s great lawyering, Louis Lovell’s commitment to the truth, and Babe’s pathetic inability to lie convincingly started to make it seem that he might beat the charges.
Even before the trial, Elmo had been trying to intimidate Babe and Anthony, through Inmate Roderick “Rock” Rolle and some other, as yet unnamed, coconspirators. But as the trial got down to the last day, Elmo panicked and decided to kidnap Terry. When the killer followed him and found him together with Vera—a woman Elmo thought was his girlfriend—he went for what he thought was the easier target.
Terry ground his teeth as he parked and slammed the door shut too hard. Vera was very lucky to be alive. Elmo was, too.
As Terry entered the lobby, he was immediately treated to the happy sounds of friendly people partying. A boom box was pounding out something from the seventies.
The hall was decorated with colored crepe paper, pictures of Gloria through the many years of her service as a court officer, signs wishing her well. Lawyers, cops, A.D.A.s, judges, clerks, court administrators, tons of people were there.
Including Louis Lovell, who still had his job, even though he’d nol prossed—dropped—the charges against Babe. The judge had suspended the trial pending an investigation, and yesterday, Lovell had made it official. Babe was going home. Even his stupid boss, that dope F.X. O’Neill, knew that the “Case Closed” program wouldn’t benefit from the publicity of railroading an innocent man into jail.
And then, from a group of people to his right, Vera appeared, looking almost as good as ever. If Terry hadn’t known about her ordeal, he might not have noticed the fading bruising around her head and eye. Her smile was undiminished and dazzling.
And was aimed directly at Louis Lovell.
When she reached him, they joined hands, and then she tipped her head slightly and leaned in to kiss him.
And Lovell kissed back. For a while.
This was not a hey-this-is-sort-of-a-fun-get-together kind of kiss. It was more like a hey-it’s-really-nice-being-with-you-now-and-it-will-be-really-nice-being-with-you-later kind of kiss.
Damn. Terry had definitely arrived a little late to the party.
ZACK PULLED INTO THE PARKI
NG AREA IN FRONT of the administration building at MCI–Wakefield. This would be the last thing he did on the Babe Gardiner case.
For reasons Zack still didn’t understand, prisoners were released from custody at two times in the day—between one and two in the afternoon, and between seven and eight at night.
Babe got the evening time.
He was sitting on one of the benches outside the front doors, and stood as Zack pulled up to the curb.
“I spoke to your mother, Babe,” Zack explained. “I offered to give you a ride to the rehab center to see her.”
Babe processed that as he climbed into the car. “Oh,” he replied. “Okay.”
They rode in silence until Zack reached the main road. Then he looked over at his former client. The poor guy had been pathetically mistaken about the consequences of Davy Zwaggert’s death. By rushing in to attempt to defuse a lethal situation, Babe did not commit a crime, even though Zwaggert had been shot. But Babe was so mistrustful that he was afraid to ask his lawyers about it. And then when he walked in on them discussing the excited utterance exception to the hearsay rule, he assumed that because he shouted, “Oh my God! I shot Davy!” he was automatically guilty of murder. So he misled them right to the end, and almost wound up with a conviction for something he had nothing to do with.
“Hey, Babe, can I ask you something? Totally confidentially?”
Babe took a minute to respond. “You mean it will be a secret between us?”
“That’s right.”
He hesitated again. “Okay, I guess.”
“I wanted to ask you if the reason you tried to steal that car radio was because you wanted to give it to your mother.”
Babe inhaled quickly. “How did you know?”
“I guess I figured it out the other day, while I was talking to my son.”
Babe was surprised. “You have a son?”
Zack nodded as he merged onto Route 44 and headed north. “Yeah. He’s six. And he wanted me to tell you that you shouldn’t be afraid to tell the truth anymore.”
Babe didn’t respond for a while. He just stared ahead through the windshield, as they approached the exit they would take to get to his mother. When they were a few minutes from arriving, he said, “Tell your son that I think he’d make a good lawyer.”
Zack drove on quietly, silenced by the man who was always wrong. Then he smiled, realizing that this would be his last, and most unusual, Babe moment.
Because this time, Babe had finally gotten something right.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ED GAFFNEY took ten years of work as a criminal lawyer, added an overactive imagination, and came up with a new career as a novelist. This has led to an unexpected number of requests from his softball teammates to appear with Terry and Zack in future books.
Ed lives west of Boston with his wife, New York Times bestselling author Suzanne Brockmann, and their anxious but ever-loyal dog, Sugar. Suffering Fools is his second novel.
If you enjoyed Ed Gaffney’s SUFFERING FOOLS, you won’t want to miss his electrifying crime novel debut, PREMEDITATED MURDER, available in paperback from Dell. Look for it at your favorite bookseller’s.
And coming soon from Dell, the third mystery in the series praised by critics as “full to the brim with thrills, spills, and chills…electric, tingling fare!”*
DIARY
of a
SERIAL KILLER
by
Ed Gaffney
SUFFERING FOOLS
A Dell Book / June 2006
Published by Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved
Copyright © 2006 by Edward G. Gaffney
Dell is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
www.bantamdell.com
eISBN: 978-0-440-33609-9
v3.0