I was about to hang up when he said, “Steve, wait. I’m sorry. I know I go overboard sometimes.”
“You do.”
“But I need your help, and I don’t know anyone else I can ask.”
“My help with what?”
“I took on a new client. Maybe you’ve heard about her in the news. The Black Widow of Birch Valley.”
“I’ve heard of her,” I said. “Margaret something, right? Aren’t they saying she killed three husbands in a row?”
“That’s what the press is pushing. But right now she’s just accused of killing the last one, a bum who died when the brakes failed on his motorcycle.”
“And this has what to do with me?”
“She insists that the bum had a lot of bad shit going on, that he was always emailing people, though she never saw any of the messages. We know from the evidence the police collected that right before he died, he wiped out everything in his email account. She’s sure that if somebody can retrieve all that stuff, it will exonerate her. The police have his laptop but they’re not doing shit to recover anything from it. I need somebody who can go into his email account and get back everything he deleted.”
“There are companies that can do that,” I said.
Rochester sniffed at the hand holding the phone, and I scratched him behind his ears with my other hand.
“And they’ll charge through the nose,” Hunter said. “I took this case pro bono because I believe Peggy’s innocent.”
“Peggy? I thought her name was Margaret.”
“Yeah, that’s her legal name. But I used to see her dance at Club Hott, back when I was going through my divorce, and she went by Peggy then.”
“Come on, Hunter. You’re lusting after an exotic dancer who’s already killed three husbands?”
Rochester butted his head against my leg. I didn’t know what he was trying to tell me—should I be nicer to Hunter? Get him off the phone? I gently pushed him away.
“I’m not lusting after her, Steve. She’s a good lady who’s had a rough life.”
“She told you that while she was giving you a lap dance?”
“You know what? Forget I asked. I’ll find somebody else. Somebody with a shred of human decency.”
He must have been on a land line, because I heard a bang through the phone as he hung up. This time, when Rochester put his paws up on my leg and leveraged himself up to face me, I scratched under his chin. “Don’t worry, puppy, I’m not going to get in trouble.”
Lili looked up from the dining room table. “I don’t normally like to pry in your conversations but that one just begs for explanation.”
“Hunter Thirkell.” Lili had met him once or twice when we were out and about in Stewart’s Crossing. “He’s representing that woman accused of killing three husbands.”
“I read an article about her in the Boat-Gazette,” Lili said. That was the local paper for Stewart’s Crossing, a mix of local ads and digested versions of Bucks County and national news. “She met her first husband when they were students at the community college. He overdosed a couple of years into their marriage.”
“He was a junkie?”
“Apparently his parents died when he was a kid, leaving all their assets in a trust fund for him. He started using to medicate his pain, and eventually it got to be too much for him.”
“And her second husband?”
“He was a drug dealer, and he forced Margaret to be his mule, bringing drugs in from South America. She got caught, flipped on him, and then he died before he could go to trial.”
“Ouch. Two bad husbands in a row.”
“Tell me about it. Though at least neither of mine were into drugs the way hers were.”
She sighed. “I kind of empathized with her because I’ve been through two husbands myself, though I never had any interest in killing either of them.”
“Good to know. Hunter says the third husband was a biker who died when his brakes failed. That tally with what you read?”
She nodded. “The article said she had means, motive and opportunity in all three deaths. What does Hunter want from you?”
“To retrieve the last victim’s emails, because he thinks they’ll exonerate his client.”
“And the lap dance part?”
“She was an exotic dancer at Club Hott in Levittown for a while,” I said. “That’s how Hunter made her acquaintance.”
“I remember that from the article,” Lili said. “That’s how she met husband number three.”
Rochester jumped to the floor and rolled on his back. He waved his legs in the air—his equivalent of an exotic dance, letting me know he wanted his belly rubbed. I got down on the floor beside him and obeyed.
“Hunter gets around,” Lili said.
“That he does.”
“You going to help him?”
I shook my head. “I don’t want to put myself in jeopardy to help a total stranger, who’s most likely killed three times. Let the criminal justice system work.”
Despite the fact that I’d gone to prison myself, I had faith in the system. I did the crime, and did the time. Everyone I met while I was incarcerated was guilty of something, even if it wasn’t the specific crime he’d been sentenced for. Sure, I’d read of cases where poor, illiterate people of color had been railroaded for crimes they didn’t commit, but that didn’t seem the case here.
Lili went back to her grading, and I played with Rochester on the floor for a couple of minutes. But Hunter’s plea kept echoing in my head, and I couldn’t resist the urge to see what the papers were saying about his client. To paraphrase a quote I’d heard somewhere, losing one husband was unfortunate, two careless, and three downright criminal.
I sat across from Lili at the dining room table and opened my laptop. I was intrigued at the tabloid-like story that spilled forth from newspaper websites. Margaret Landsea had married a kid she met in her political science class, whose parents had died in a car crash when he was twelve. The insurance settlement had gone into a seven-figure trust fund for him, which he was able to access when he turned twenty-one.
With all that money, you’d think the couple would have been set for life, but according to the article the young man suffered the loss of his parents greatly, and he soothed that pain with illicit drugs. Three years into his marriage to Peggy, he died of a heroin overdose.
At the time, no one questioned the situation. He was a junkie without any family beyond his wife, who had been hustled into a rehab program. Eventually she remarried, a Colombian who went by the name of Juan Perez—though eventual investigation revealed that was about as false as every other thing in his life. Nine years into that marriage, she was arrested as she arrived in Miami on a flight from Medellin. The customs agent noticed she was sweating profusely, and upon examination she was discovered to be carrying six condoms filled with cocaine in her vagina.
She avoided jail time by turning state’s evidence against Perez. Before he could go to trial, though, he was found dead in their home. The coroner believed that he had been attempting to inject heroin into his veins, but accidentally introduced a bubble of air instead, causing a fatal heart attack.
After another stint in rehab, Margaret began dancing at Club Hott. I did a quick records search and found that Hunter’s divorce had gone through a few months after Perez’s death. So it made sense that he’d have run into her then, some seven years before.
Hunter had remarried a couple of years later, and according to the newspaper Margaret Perez had met and married husband number three, Carl Landsea, about the same time. He was a shift supervisor at US Steel’s Fairless Plant, and an active member of a biker group called Levitt’s Angels.
After four years of marriage, he died in a motorcycle accident, and an investigation revealed that someone had tampered with his brakes. Within a few weeks after Carl’s death, Margaret Landsea had been arrested, based on evidence provided by an anonymous caller and later verified by Margaret herself that Carl was abusive
toward her.
That’s when the story hit the news, and I realized I’d been following it off and on for the past three months. An eager young district attorney had discovered the deaths of her previous two husbands, and a reporter for the Bucks County Courier Times had coined the “Black Widow of Birch Valley” nickname, after the Levittown neighborhood where she and Carl had lived.
The reporter had assembled a collage of photos of Peggy at different times. In a fuzzy group shot, she was a freckle-faced teen posing with the pre-law club. In her mug shot from the drug mule arrest, she looked old before her time, with bags under her eyes, her hair a scary mess of tangles like Medusa. A promotional photo from her Club Hott days focused more on her figure, with a narrow waist and artificially enlarged breasts, but when I zoomed in on her face I saw the same sadness.
She looked familiar, and I knew she was about my age—had I known her at some point?
I looked at Rochester, who was snoozing on the floor. No help there.
I went back to the article. Her name was Margaret Ann Doyle Stanwood Perez Landsea. Hunter had called her Peggy, though.
Peggy Doyle. “Oh, shit,” I said out loud.
Lili looked up. “What?”
“I know her,” I said. “At least I did when I was a kid. Peggy Doyle.”
“She went to school with you?”
I nodded. “More than that. I told you my parents sent me on a summer study program to France when I was a teenager, didn’t I?”
She nodded. “You said you were too young but they sent you anyway.”
“I was a couple of months short of my fifteenth birthday, and everybody else on the course was older. But I was shy, always had my nose in a book, and my parents thought that sending me on a summer study program abroad would open up my horizons and give me more self-confidence.”
Our school system was a wealthy one, full of the sons and daughters of doctors, lawyers and engineers, and the administration was keen on offering lots of opportunities for us. I could have studied Spanish in Salamanca, German in Frankfurt, or European history in Luxembourg. Instead my parents chose the French language program at the University of Grenoble.
“I didn’t know any of the other kids, but Peggy adopted me and I tagged along with her and her friends. I never would have taken the cable car up to look over Grenoble, gone to the beach in Nice, or found my way to the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, if she hadn’t taken me under her wing.”
Lili smiled. “You were such a cutie pie back then. I’ve seen the pictures. So skinny you disappeared if you turned sideways, with that mop of brown hair.”
“And I’m not a cutie pie now?” I protested.
“You filled out, and you’re losing your hair. Today I’d call you handsome, not cute.”
I was mollified. “Peggy was so full of energy and enthusiasm that I couldn’t help liking her. Gradually I learned her back story – she was the oldest of four girls born in rat-a-tat order. She grew up in a run-down neighborhood in Trenton. Her father was a drunk who rarely worked, and her mother was a maid. Her father died when she was nine, and Peggy had to take care of her younger sisters and at night, help her mother with ironing and dressmaking.”
“That’s so sad,” Lili said. “How did she get to Stewart’s Crossing?”
Sad was one of Rochester’s words—whenever he heard someone say it, he hopped up and offered comfort in the form of a cold black nose and a long pink tongue. Lili petted him as he rested his head in her lap.
“Three years after her father died, her mother married a widower she’d been cleaning for and moved the girls here to one of the big split levels on the other side of town. Once her family had some money, she babysat for neighbors, walked dogs and did whatever she could so she could go on that trip to France. I was amazed that after everything she’d been through, she was so eager to reach out and grasp everything the world had to offer.”
“I’d think the opposite,” Lili said. “That her background would make her eager to see what the rest of the world was like.”
I shook my head. “That’s because of who you are, and the way your parents moved around so much when you were a kid. Lots of the kids I grew up with had no desire to leave Bucks County—they wouldn’t even go on field trips to New York or Philadelphia. Look at Rick – he’s never lived anywhere but here.”
Rick Stemper was my best friend, a police detective in Stewart’s Crossing. He had gone to the community college and the affiliated police academy, and he was perfectly happy to spend the rest of his life in his home town.
“It doesn’t sound like Peggy got far, either,” Lili said.
“She tried, at least. When we got home from France, she was a senior and I was a sophomore, and we stayed friendly. Her stepfather bought an old car for her so she could shepherd her sisters around to gymnastics and dance class, but every now and then she’d pick me up and we’d go to a jazz concert at the high school, or we’d take the train into Philadelphia and go to the Museum of Art. Once we even ran up the stairs like Rocky. Peggy waved her arms in the air as if she’d won the lottery.”
“Sounds like she was very lucky.”
“Peggy always said that she was. The summer after our trip to France, she was baby-sitting for a family who lived about a mile from my house, and once a week or so I’d walk over there so we could hang out.”
I remembered those long walks from one suburban neighborhood to the next. There were no gated communities then, and one street flowed into another. Many moms stayed at home, driveways were filled with station wagons and riding toys, sprinklers went off and the streets were filled with the sounds of kids romping in backyard pools.
“The kids Peggy was taking care of were pretty young and easily occupied with building blocks and Barbies, and we’d sit out on the screened-in patio and talk about our futures,” I said to Lili. “Peggy was determined to be an attorney and advocate for kids. She’d known many broken families back in Trenton, and seen how few opportunities were available to the kids. She knew how incredibly lucky she and her sisters were, that their stepfather had brought them out of the city slums to the safety and comfort of the suburbs.”
“Sounds like you guys spent a lot of time together,” Lili said.
“I’m sure it wasn’t all that much. My parents made me go to summer school in the mornings, and I had other friends to hang out with, too. But Peggy was different, maybe because she was older, or maybe because she was more goal-directed than my other friends. She got a small scholarship to Penn State but it wasn’t enough to cover all her expenses and she decided to stay home and go to the community college for two years.”
“That’s not necessarily a bad thing,” Lili said. “I know a lot of people who’ve gotten their early college work done in places like that.”
“I know. And her ambition affected me, too. When I was in twelfth grade, she picked me up two nights a week and we drove up to Newtown, where we took introduction to psychology and freshman composition together.”
I leaned forward and put my elbows on the dining room table. “I lost track of her after I went to Eastern, but I always assumed she’d gone on to law school as she planned and become a successful attorney.”
“That didn’t happen.”
“I need to call Hunter back,” I said. “If there’s a chance that Peggy is innocent, and I can find something in her husband’s emails to prove that, I ought to help her out. She was kind to me when I needed it, and I owe it to her to do the same thing.”
Rochester turned his attention from Lili to me, and rested his big golden head on my knee, dripping a bit of saliva on my bare leg.
“Just be careful, Steve. Even if she’s innocent, she’s lost three husbands, been through drug problems and done a lot of things she probably isn’t proud of. She may not even want your help, because you’ll remind her of who she used to be.”
“I’ll be careful,” I said. “But people believed in me when I was in trouble, and if there’s a shred of the old Peg
gy left inside her, I want to help her bring it out.”
2 – Slippery Slope
I called Hunter back, explained what I’d discovered, and made an appointment to meet at his office early the next morning, on my way to work. While Lili continued to grade papers, I reread the information I’d found online. I didn’t want the Peggy Doyle I’d known as a kid to be guilty of murder. If she was innocent of killing husband number three, I didn’t want her to have to relive the pain of the deaths of her first two husbands, and I certainly didn’t want her to go to jail.
Memories came back to me. Peggy vamping in front of an expensive jewelry store in Paris, then egging a group of us to climb the 387 steps to the top of Notre Dame cathedral. Peggy and me, riding up to those night classes. She had worked all day at a dry cleaner’s, but she still had so much energy.
Too bad the classes we took hadn’t been up to par. Sure, they’d been a bit tougher than high school, but unfortunately they gave me a false impression of college. When I applied to get credit at Eastern for the psych course I discovered that what we took a whole term to study, the class at Eastern handled in the first eight weeks.
I turned to Lili and told her that. “And when I submitted the syllabus for the freshman comp course, I got turned down for that, too—I hadn’t written enough papers or used enough sources to qualify.”
“I’m surprised Eastern was so picky back then,” Lili said. “Nowadays when I get a request for transfer credit for a course I almost always rubber-stamp it. Of course it’s different in arts classes.”
I still taught a class in the English department each term, to keep my hand in and because I genuinely liked teaching, and Lili and I often compared notes on how poorly prepared some of our students were.
“Yeah, well, times were different back then, I guess. My dad was pretty pissed—he thought he was going to save some money on my tuition because I was coming in with credits. He and my Mom made too much money together for me to qualify for most of the government financial aid – it was a couple of years before they loosened up the requirements for middle-income families. For the rest of my four years he grumbled about it, even though I got some scholarships and a work-study grant that made up for it anyway.”
Another Three Dogs in a Row Page 40