I said, “I don’t know. Is that legal?”
“Oh, do you suppose it might not be?”
“Just to be on the safe side, maybe you should consult an attorney, Mrs. Osborne. And an agronomist.”
“I suppose I ought to.”
“As a precaution.”
“You don’t hear of people,” she said, “being hauled into court for— what would the charge be? If it’s on your own property it wouldn’t be littering. And I don’t believe there’s any hazard to public health—the cremation fire surely would eliminate any risk of bacteriological contamination. What would any legal objection possibly be based on?”
She had me there. I said, “It won’t hurt to ask. You might learn something neither of us knew.”
She looked doubtful and unconvinced. “It’s nothing I need to worry about today,” she said. “Today we’ve all got more immediate concerns. How is your investigation progressing, Mr. Donaldson? Have you accumulated enough evidence yet to have Chester charged with fratricide?”
“I am making progress, Mrs. Osborne, but I’m still short on any evidence a prosecutor could use in making a case that would stand up
in court. As for Chester’s being a murderer, I don’t know about that.”
“Well, I sure as the devil know about it Just you keep digging, and it’s Chester you’ll get the goods on. I know my son.” This was said not with irony, so far as I could tell, but with some weird combination of clinical detachment and maternal conviction.
I said, “Chester has a reputation for violent explosions of temper, Mrs. Osborne, but has he ever been calculating in his violent acts? As far as I’ve been able to determine, premeditation doesn’t seem to be his style.”
“He was always sly,” she said thoughtfully “And I hate to say it, but frequently untruthful too.”
“Scheming in business, or even family matters, is one thing,” I said. “But my question to you is, on those occasions in his life when Chester actually hurt people, did it ever seem planned?”
“No, it always seemed to erupt out of nowhere And I’m sure, Mr. Samuelson, that when you get to the bottom of it, you’ll find that that’s what happened with Chester and Eric. Eric refused to change his vote on selling the Herald to Harry Griscomb, and then Chester blew up at Eric, and this time he murdered him ” She looked pained but not horrified, as if fratricide were a difficult matter that the Osbornes had to contend with, the way another family might have to face a child born out of wedlock or a scandal involving the personal use of PTA funds.
“But why,” I asked, “would Chester and Eric be discussing Herald business affairs on a hiking trail miles from town? Is Chester a hiker?”
“Sometimes he used to be,” she said “All the Osbornes are naturalists. Even June was as a child.”
“Did Eric and Chester go hiking together—in recent years, as adults?”
“I wouldn’t think so. I’d be awfully surprised.”
I said, “You’re not the only member of your family, Mrs. Osborne, who believes that Chester murdered Eric. But the more I think about it, the more trouble I have imagining the two of them meeting in the woods by chance and an argument ensuing during which Chester loses control and bludgeons Eric, who dies. Nor can I imagine Chester the hothead plotting to follow Eric nearly a mile into the woods, where he sneaks up on Eric and pounds him with a weapon he’s carried along from home. Both are out of character. Either is possible, but I think unlikely.”
Mrs. Osborne was due in court in three days to answer a charge of
having gone soft in the head, but on that Friday afternoon in her herb garden she looked alert and her reactions to what I told her suggested full comprehension—even though she couldn’t seem to get my name right. She said, “But why else would Chester say what he said to me about somebody else having to get hurt in order to keep the Herald out of Harry Griscomb’s hands?”
“It’s possible,” I said, “that this was just Chester blowing off steam— losing his temper with you and blurting out something he knew would hurt you and frighten you. Doing that would be in character for Chester.”
Looking bewildered, she said, “Then you don’t think it’s Chester who’s plotting to change the makeup of the Herald board and prevent the sale to Harry Griscomb?”
I told her I was not prepared to absolve Chester of anything— maybe not even Eric’s murder—but that I thought a broader, more complex conspiracy was under way. I said I believed some members of the conspiracy were unaware of the activities of other members of the conspiracy, and that it was probable only one or possibly two conspirators were behind Eric’s murder and the more recent attempts on Janet’s and Dan’s lives. Without mentioning Craig Osborne and the diamond robbery and Dan’s alleged criminal activities on behalf of saving the Herald, I told Mrs. Osborne that she should be prepared in the coming days for a number of revelations about Osborne family members that might shock and disappoint her.
She listened with interest to all of this, and said, “You’ve got quite a lurid imagination, Mr. Donaldson. My curiosity is certainly piqued. But I’ve found that the truest answers to hard questions tend to be the simplest ones. I hope you aren’t being led astray by the fact that most of us Osbornes are, to one extent or another, nuts. It would be a pity if you were thrown off by Osborne looniness.”
I asked her which Osbornes were the loony ones I should be careful not to be misled by, and she had a good laugh over that.
19
Ruth Osborne said she had no idea where Dan and Arlene might have gone off to, and when Janet arrived at the house an hour later, she said she too was baffled. There was no indication Dan and Arlene had been lured into a trap, yet they had been gone for more than ten hours without letting anyone know of their whereabouts. Janet phoned all of Dan and Arlene’s friends in the immediate area that she could think of, but none said they had heard from Dan and Arlene. One—or all—of them could have been lying, but we had no way of checking.
“What about Liver Livingston?” Dale said. The four of us were having a beer on the back porch. Elsie had left for the day, and Mrs. Osborne had gone into her late husband’s study to commune with his cremated remains.
“It seems odd,” Timmy said, “that Dan would go visit his dope dealer with the police so interested in his whereabouts. Why would he chance drawing attention to Liver and his illicit enterprise?”
” ‘Illicit,’ ” Dale said. “There’s a funny old word.”
Janet said, “It won’t hurt to check with Liver. I’ll see if he’s in the phone book. And then, Don, I want to hear about your visit with Craig today. I take it there’s no earth-shattering news out of Attica, or we would have been let in on it by now.”
Timmy and Dale had finished up their Scrabble game just minutes before—Timmy had scored highest but he still had not puzzled out how he had incurred Dale’s wrath some years earlier—and now Timmy said, “Yes, Dale and I are eager to hear about your trip too, Don.”
“Cough it up, Donald,” Dale said.
Janet had located the Livingstons in the phone book and said, “No Liver Livingston—or Samuel, his real name. There’s a Malcolm, and a Robert. Maybe it’s one of those two. I’ll check.” She dialed one number and said, “Have I reached the Liver Livingston residence? No, sorry, wrong number.” Then the second number: “Liver Livingston? No, sorry, wrong number.”
“Try information,” Dale said. “Maybe Liver is unlisted.”
Timmy said, “NYNEX doesn’t call them ‘unlisted’ numbers anymore. Now they’re called ‘nonpublished.’”
“That’s quite an advance for Western civilization,” Dale said.
Janet asked, “directory assistance”—formerly called “information,” and now another phone company innovative piling-on of useless syllables—for Liver or Samuel Livingston’s number, but the operator had no data on either, published or otherwise.
“I’m wondering if we should notify the police,
” Janet said, “if Dan and Arlene aren’t back by a certain hour. What do you think?”
I said I thought not yet. I reminded them that Dan had said in his note not to worry about him and Arlene. I said I believed Dan’s disappearance might conceivably have devolved from certain complexities in the current situation that up until that moment Janet, Dale, and Timmy had not been privy to. Then I told them about the jewel heist and Dan’s criminal complicity.
They looked at me.
Dale said, “Donald, are you shitting us?”
“No.”
“A jewel thief!” Timmy said. “Holy mother! Do you believe it, Don?”
Janet had gone white, and now she said, “I can almost believe it.”
“Almost?” Dale said.
“I mean, I believe it. I mean, on the one hand I believe it, and yet on the other hand—Craig is probably the biggest pathological liar the family ever produced. So you have to take that into consideration.”
I said, “Why might Craig make up a story like that about Dan?”
Janet thought this over. “I don’t know,” she said finally. “There was never any bad feeling between them that I’m aware of. They never had a whole lot to do with each other, but I don’t think Craig ever particularly disliked Dan, either. They just lived very different, separate lives—Dan the political and social rebel, Craig the antisocial mischief maker and eventual criminal. It’s possible, I suppose, that Craig harbored some terrible resentment against Dan for being the type of rebel that American society reserves a small, grudging place for that isn’t jail. But that’s just a guess. Anyway, Craig’s story that Dan was in on the robbery—even that the idea for the robbery was Dan’s—that part of it rings all too true. Dan always believed that a moral end justified immoral means It’s a point we always disagreed on. Back in the movement days, Dan did some things he admitted to me that would have landed him in federal prison if he’d ever gotten caught. That’s all I’m going to say on that subject, but I think you get my point.”
We all said we got it
“But then, where are the stolen jewels’” Janet asked “Dan told Craig they ‘got away’ from him? What does that mean’”
“That’s what I planned on asking Dan, but it seems I can’t, because he’s gone. My guess is, Dan was afraid Craig might be going to tell me about Dan’s involvement in the robbery, and that’s one reason he bolted minutes after I left for Attica.”
“And maybe the other reason he left,” Dale said, “was to try again to locate and retrieve the jewels.”
I said I guessed that was the case too.
“Jesus,” Janet said, and took a long swig of beer.
“This is just too friggin’ much,” Dale said.
I said, “And there’s more.”
They gawked at each other as I repeated Craig’s theory—his gut conviction—that after Chester Osborne had learned of the plot to save the Herald with the jewel-robbery proceeds, he wrongly accused Eric of participating in the scam and then killed Eric when Eric refused to substitute Chester’s fence for Dan’s and allow Chester to use the sixteen million to gain control of the Herald for Chester, June, and Stu Torkildson.
Both Timmy and Dale were gape-jawed, but Janet said flatly, “There’s something wrong with that.”
“I think so too,” I said.
“I can’t believe Chester would ever think Eric was involved in a robbery where two people were killed. Chester knew how straight Eric was. He’d believe it of Dan, but not of Eric “
“On the other hand,” Timmy said, “Chester is the brother with the history of violence, not Dan.”
“On the third hand,” Dale said, “it’s Dan who pukes his guts out
whenever the subject of Eric’s murder comes up. Chester doesn’t do that—or does he?”
“Not in my experience,” Janet said.
I said, “Nor mine. It’s possible, though, that Dan retches at the mention of Eric’s murder not because he committed the murder, but because he knows who did. He can’t announce to anyone that he knows who did it because the murder was somehow connected to the save-the-Herald-with-a-jewel-heist conspiracy, and Dan can’t talk about that without risking exposure of his complicity in a crime where an innocent security guard died. Dan is surely grown-up enough now to understand that no cause justifies the murder of an innocent. I suppose he’s also sickened by the thought that both the guard and Craig’s accomplice in the stickup died uselessly, as far as Dan is concerned. The jewels got away from him somehow—he lost them or they were stolen from him in some kind of double cross or whatever—and the jewels haven’t been used by anybody to save the Herald from either the good chain or the bad chain.”
Timmy said, “That makes sense, but if Dan does know who killed Eric, why couldn’t it have been Chester? It might not have been rational for Chester to accuse Eric of being involved in the robbery, but Chester sounds to me like a man with an irrational streak a mile wide.”
I asked Janet: “Where were the various members of the Osborne family on the day of Eric’s murder? Has this ever been determined? Where were Dan, Chester, June? Where was Tidy? Tacker, we assume, was on an island in the South Pacific, but I’m checking on that. How about Stu Torkildson? He’s not family, but he’s got a direct interest in the disposition of the Herald. Where was Arlene? Or Pauline? Where was your mother? Where was Dale? Where were you?”
Janet said, “The police never questioned all of us. There seemed to be no point in doing so at the time. Some of those people can certainly be ruled out on the grounds that they’d never walk more than ten feet into the wilderness. Pauline, for example. Incidentally, she called me today, and she was looking for Dan too. She said she had to talk to him about something, but she wouldn’t say what. She sounded as if she’d had a few drinks, but she wasn’t hysterical and didn’t sound as if she might be waving a gun around.”
“Craig told me today he’d phoned his mother on Wednesday,” I said, “and informed her that Chester had killed Eric for not turning over the
stolen diamonds. My guess is, that’s why Pauline was unhinged when I stopped by her house yesterday. What are the chances she would have believed Craig’s malicious story?”
Janet looked deeply skeptical. “Pauline knows better than anyone what a liar Craig is, and how much he despises Chester. Although, even if she didn’t believe it, the story is so ugly it could have set Pauline off.”
Dale said, “Maybe Pauline is trying to reach Dan to check out the jewel-heist story with him.”
“Right,” Timmy said. “Maybe she asked Chester about it, and she knows him well enough to have been unconvinced by his denial.”
I said I would talk to Pauline Osborne at the first opportunity. Without bringing up Craig’s inflammatory phone call, I said, I could approach Pauline under the guise of interviewing all the Osbornes regarding their whereabouts on the morning of Eric’s murder. Each Osborne ‘would take umbrage, but none could claim to have been singled out. I said, “In the next forty-eight hours I’ll try to get a fix on where each Osborne was at the moment Eric was killed. I’ll check on each family member, and Stu Torkildson, and—who else is there? Have I left anybody out?”
“Skeeter,” Dale said. “He’s actually family too, if your list is going to be inclusive.”
Timmy said, “Skeeter? That’s absurd.”
“The State Police checked his alibi,” I said. “Skeeter was in Watertown all day on May fifteenth.”
“Yes, they would do that,” Dale sneered. “Homophobic twits.”
Timmy started to speak, hesitated, looked wary, then opened his mouth anyway. “The idea of Skeeter as a murderer is ridiculous, but generally it is not necessarily homophobic when a gay man is murdered to check his lover’s alibi. When a straight woman in this country is murdered, nearly half the time it’s her husband, ex-husband, or boyfriend who did it.”
Dale looked surprised and said, “You’re quite right in your statisti�
�cal observation, Timothy. It’s also true that in most jurisdictions I’m familiar with, when a homosexual man is murdered, the police immediately assume the crime was committed by another homosexual because they can’t imagine a straight man wanting any physical contact whatsoever with a gay man, even for purposes of homicide.”
She looked at Timmy drolly—I wasn’t always certain when Dale was putting him on and when she was hectoring him sincerely—and Timmy said, “That’s the biggest load of psychobabble horseshit you’ve dumped over me since we first met, Dale. I’m speechless “
A faint smile flickered on Dale’s lips, then disappeared. “Speechless again, Timothy? Where have I heard that before?”
Timmy screwed up his face and stared at Dale, who stared back, tight-lipped
Janet said, “I’m not at all that surprised that the police checked Skeeter’s alibi for the day Eric was killed—that is routine stuff. But they didn’t check out any other Osborne that I’m aware of. I’m trying to remember where everybody was. It happened on a Monday, and I was in the office all day. The murder took place in the morning, the police said. But Eric’s body had been dragged off the trail and wasn’t discovered by another hiker until late afternoon. And by the time the police notified me it was after five, maybe even closer to six. I know I was just getting ready to leave the Herald I went right to Mom’s house and told her—the very, very worst thing I have ever had to do.
“The cops asked me to notify June, Dan, and Chester too, which I did. I phoned them all—June at home, Chester at home too I know I tried Chester at his office, and then at the club, but he’d gone home early that day. Dan I didn’t track down until later. He and Arlene weren’t home when I called and I left a message on their machine to phone me at Mom’s as soon as he got in. He finally called around eight, I think, and he’d been—I can’t recall where. Out of town is all I can remember.”
Chain of Fools Page 15