by Leslie Leigh
He clicked his phone off and ran into a room off the main hallway.
Allie retrieved her duffel bag from the foyer and then found Bennett in a cozy study. Done in red leather and muted earth tones, the room was his own personal space, probably the one space in the entire house that could boast that distinction. Against the wall was a tiny bookshelf full of bestsellers. Next to that, Bennett sat at his desk, drumming nervously on its surface as he waited for his computer to boot up. The other shelves were occupied by a trophy, a few statuettes, and pictures of people Allie didn’t recognize. A red leather couch sat opposite his desk, off to the side, and a plain brown coffee table piled with oversized art books sat semi-functionally in front of it. Bennett's desk was uncluttered and polished, and dominated by a large computer screen.
Allie placed her duffel bag in front of the coffee table and unzipped it slowly.
Bennett spoke while staring at his computer screen. "Uh, I'm s-sorry, I have a lot of stuff I—, I have to do this—, I'm gonna have to ask you to leave."
This very moment – occupied by his frantic logging on and tapping so nervously at the keys that he backspaced several times and retyped, swearing under his breath – was enough distraction for Allie. She calmly and silently unsheathed the item in her duffel bag and placed it gingerly on the coffee table.
"Bennett, are you ok?"
He clicked furiously at the keyboard. "No, I mean yes, it's just—, listen I need you to go, I just remembered something. I have to do it for work. I'm sorry."
She crept around him to have a look over his shoulder. "Bennett," she said calmly, "what is it?"
"Don't look at th—, I mea—, it's private. Please."
The butterflies in her stomach had turned into bats, yet she knew calmness was key. "You're accessing the company records," she said with breathy control of her voice. "You'll be caught."
"They don’t know what they're looking for!" He looked up at her, a horrified expression frozen on his face as he realized what he'd just said.
"They know now. I called them a little while ago. They have someone monitoring the account for hackers as we speak. They'll see you logging in. They'll see how and when you've logged in before. They'll link the Van de Kamp account with Roger Chernow's bank info. They'll get Chernow when it's time for him to collect the balance for the hit. I'm guessing he probably hasn’t offered you a refund. Oh and by the way, Sam Weller? Tracy Tupman? Do you really think you're the only one who's ever read Pickwick?" She let her indignation show, and she was glad. She let her words sink in before adding, "It's over, Bennett."
He seemed to struggle for words. "What are you talking about?"
She moved in closer and leaned down to achieve eye level.
"I don’t have any proof whether she really confessed to you when you say she did. But I'm willing to bet she confessed an affair to you on the night she was murdered, and the two of you fought."
His face was twisted up with emotion. "I-I don’t know what I'm hearing right now."
"You fought," Allie continued, "and it brought up all the hate and the humiliation you'd been feeling for years. It must have been hard trying to please a wife like Honey and never getting anywhere. Having her chide you in front of the workers, suffering comments about how obvious it is that The Clipboard doesn't wear the pants in the relationship, having her drag you around spending your hard-earned money, having affairs. You fought, and it dredged up all that. And I'm guessing she was dismissive of you and your feelings as she always was."
He trembled, and his eyes welled up with tears.
"At some point she turned her back on you. It was one time too many. So you hit her, in a blind rage, with that."
She pointed at the coffee table where she'd unsheathed the knife block Del had picked up for a song at Something Found, a thrift store in Shelburne.
His expression of sadness turned to wide-eyed panic.
Allie stood up and hovered over him. "It's too bad. The blackmail note would have been pretty good cover. You could always say you never paid the guy and so he came and killed your wife. Who would know? If only your emotions didn’t overrule your plans, maybe you could've gotten away with it."
He stood up and walked toward the coffee table, then put his hand to his mouth as his knees suddenly gave out, sending him to the floor, all the while staring at the knife block as if it were Honey's ghost condemning him from beyond the grave.
"I have to admit, it was also pretty clever how you covered up. The table leg, the prints, and not to mention your keen understanding of Chief Dupond's stake in this case. She did confess that night, didn’t she? And it was his name she gave you."
He said nothing, merely nodded.
"I'm just curious," she said, softening her voice, "how did you get Matson's fingerprints on the leg?"
It was a minute before he answered, "There are no prints."
The final puzzle piece fitted into place, and Allie caught herself smiling. "You blackmailed him. What do you have on him?"
He shook his head, and his face became pinched with self-pity. "Nothing."
Bennett Reilly sat on the floor for several minutes, whimpering and trembling. And Allie took a seat on his couch. She made her last call of the night. And after several minutes passed, the windows suddenly flickered and filled up with red and blue lights.
9.
Allie Griffin waited nervously in the audience for the ceremony to begin. Three months had passed since she left Bennett Reilly in the hands of the police, allies of Beauchenne's who'd responded to her call. She felt a little sorry for Bennett. The press had had a field day with him, painting him as a cuckold. The story hit the wires and even made national news. It was the slow season, after all. Commenters on the online sites running the story were divided: some vilifying Reilly, some, mostly men, voicing support of him for standing up to a shrewish wife.
Allie could do nothing but sit back and watch it unfold this way. Perhaps Honey Reilly was a shrewish wife, but money had made her that way, and although we all have a path in life to choose of our own volition, some of us get stuck in that rut and can’t get out, even though memories of dangling off floats in Church Street parades still retain their sweet scent after years buried in boxes, tucked away behind bags of money and material things.
She couldn’t help but think of these things now. Just as she couldn’t help but think of poor Art Chapman and his memories. How he must have loathed reading those stories!
All these things swam through her head as she watched Chief Roy Dupond take to the dais amid a fanfare and thunderous applause. Thirty years of faithful service, and now a ceremony in his honor, a decoration by the mayor of Verdenier, and local TV station coverage.
She shifted anxiously in her place. This was the first time she'd ever seen the chief in person. Up there on the Verdenier Opera House stage, he cut an imposing figure, larger than life. In pictures he was a sturdy fellow with a benevolent smile, a man you could trust with your life and your children's lives. Here, even at this distance, he was intimidating. Broad-shouldered, a shock of silver hair that was full-bodied and combed neatly over the bull head. His mouth was tight, and he smiled crookedly, and here the benevolence was transmuted into smug magnanimity. He accepted the mayor's award graciously, and he made a speech that was pandering and full of fluff. And the emcee made an announcement that the chief would now take questions from the press.
Allie couldn’t bear to watch anymore. She turned and left the Verdenier Opera House. But not before she heard the first question:
"Sir, are the allegations that you falsified fingerprints true..."
It was sure to come as a shock. The wire had broken the story just that morning. Old Chief Dupond was probably having breakfast, shaving, doing what crooked cops do when it's time to accept an award for doing it.
Allie had felt like a snitch when she actually made the call and gave the reporter his leads. She'd printed photos of Bennett Reilly and Honey Reilly and she printed out Rober
t Jessup's high school picture. And she wrote the name "Art Chapman" on an index card and had drawn a heart around it. And she'd taken all these things and laid them out on the oak table in her dining room, with its knot shaped like an eye watching all, and all she had to do, if she felt the slightest tinge of guilt or unease or even shame, was to look down.
As she walked to her car, Allie Griffin smiled to herself. She'd watch it on the news later. What's more, she'd called Walter Matson and invited him over to watch it with her. That's where her smile had come from. That, and the fact that Sgt. Frank Beauchenne was back at his post, doing the work he loved to do.
The Reilly case, and now this, had put a kink in Detective Tomlin's plans to investigate her husband, Tom's, death. When he found out how Allie Griffin had a hand in this one, he was sure to up his game once the dust settled.
In her car, she muttered to herself, just as she had said the last time, "Bring it on."
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Table of Contents
PART I: STONE CUTTING
Part II: FISSURES AND BREAKAGE
PART III: SHAPING