“Did Dad know them?” Alison asked. “Were they guys he knew?” It was a question that didn’t make sense to Tom, and he saw Helen puzzling over it, too. Then he realized that she was envisioning the scene, her father accosted in his own home by men who’d entered uninvited, charged by some authority to intrude and then remove him against his will. Did she think it would be better or worse if those men were familiar to her father? Did she allow herself to imagine that, if they’d met before and maybe shared a beer or a laugh or a resentment against a common superior, Doug wouldn’t mind so much their carting him off, and might even try to make light of the whole thing? What a fucking joke, Tom could hear him saying, doing his best to engage their camaraderie.
Or would it work the other way if they all knew each other, Doug averting his eyes and the troopers also looking elsewhere as they snapped on the cuffs? “Did they use handcuffs?” he asked Helen, before she could respond to Alison’s question about whether the men were acquainted.
She looked at him so blankly that for a moment he wondered if he’d only heard the words in his mind, and not spoken them. But just as he was about to repeat himself, she said, “Yes, they used handcuffs. They took him out of here like a criminal.”
Alison set down the teacup before her mother, who looked at it but did not move.
“Do something,” Alison told him, and of course Tom could not tell her that he already had.
Returning the call Tom had made to the district attorney’s office the day before, saying it was urgent, Nelson Kovak asked, “This can’t wait? We go to the grand jury tomorrow,” and Tom said, “That’s why I need to see you tonight.”
He thought he’d heard Kovak groan over the phone before saying, “I can’t come to you,” and Tom told him that was fine, that was better, he’d meet him at the prosecutor’s office. After supper he told Alison he had to check on a delivery at the shack and drove to the courthouse office building. Though he knew he was being paranoid, he parked the truck in back so nobody driving by would see it and wonder what Tom Carbone was doing at the criminal division.
He began telling Kovak and his assistant, a woman named Tabitha, what Delaney Stowell had said to him after Joy’s funeral. Tabitha took notes with a pink feathered pen while Kovak asked questions. Though both of them were obviously trying not to let on how surprised they were by each new revelation, Tom could sense the growing uneasiness in the room. He understood why: until he’d called them, the prosecutor had been preparing a case against Martin Willett. After he told them about Joy blackmailing Doug, Kovak said, “Wait a minute. Jesus Christ. You found this out Friday? And you’re just telling us now?”
Tom looked down at the table, where his fingers were twitching. “I know,” he said. “You have to understand, this is my father-in-law.”
Kovak made a clucking sound like So what? When they were finished, he left the room without shaking Tom’s hand. Tabitha told him not to feel bad, her boss was always that way. “And just so you know, but this is between us,” she said, placing the pink feather cap back on her pen, “you’re not the only one to come in and talk to us about this guy. Armstrong.”
Tom started. “Who else? What did they say?” But Tabitha indicated she’d already told him too much, putting a vertical finger against her mouth. Active investigation, she said.
“But you’re still going through with the grand jury tomorrow? With Willett?”
“Well, that’s the plan. It’s already lined up, and we don’t have anything firm on Armstrong. They want an indictment before the holidays.”
“But if he’s not the right guy—”
“Trust me,” Tabitha said. “Nelson’s a lot of things, but he won’t prosecute if he doesn’t have a case. Or if somebody else ends up looking better for it than Willett. We’re just not at that point yet.”
Tom headed for the shack instead of home and checked on a delivery that didn’t need checking, so he could tell himself he hadn’t lied to Alison. He made sure he didn’t return until after she was asleep. He didn’t sleep at all himself, figuring that Kovak had set things in motion and that the police would be making the move on Doug at any time.
But he’d forgotten about it in the rush to the hospital and then the news about the baby, so when the call came from Helen as they left the doctor’s office, he felt almost as blindsided as Alison.
They persuaded Helen to come with them back to the duplex, so the reporters wouldn’t be able to track her down right away. Alison offered more tea, but Helen asked, “Do you have any wine?” When Alison laughed, thinking it was a joke, Helen repeated it.
Alison shot Tom a look of confused dismay. He knew what she was thinking: that her mother might be having a stroke, or that her cognitive abilities had been compromised by the trauma of watching her husband arrested in front of her.
“No, we don’t have any wine, Mom,” Alison said in a light voice, still trying to jolly her mother back to herself. “And even if we did, you don’t drink, remember?”
“He could go get me some.” Helen jerked a thumb toward Tom, the most indelicate gesture he’d ever seen her make.
Finally Alison seemed to understand that her mother might be serious. Her features collapsed. “I’m not sending him out to get wine for a sober person. Do you think I’d stand here and watch you pour ten years down the drain?”
Helen raised her hand at Tom. “Tell her,” she said.
“Tell me what?” Alison made the now-familiar gesture of putting her hand over her abdomen.
“I’m not sober.” Now Helen made a laughing sound herself, though it was clear she felt anything but amused.
“What are you talking about?”
When Helen didn’t answer, Tom went over to put an arm around his wife, but she flung it off and said, “What the hell’s going on here?”
He said, “There was this night last summer I walked into the kitchen—”
“Oh, for God’s sake. It was way before that.” Helen swung her legs onto the couch, lay down, and covered her forehead with the tastefully manicured fingers of her left hand, her engagement and wedding rings clinking against her glasses. When her skirt hitched around her hips and she didn’t smooth it down immediately, Tom knew she had given up.
“Do you want me to call Dr. Stowell?” he asked, realizing only after he said it that Alison didn’t know about her mother being in treatment with Delaney’s father, and that he himself knew it only because it was part of everything Delaney had told him about Doug after the funeral.
“Why would she want you to call him?” But it was dawning on Alison even as she asked the question, Tom saw, that Geoffrey Stowell might be trying to help Helen get sober again. Instead of focusing on this fact, Alison turned to accuse Tom: “How would you know that and I don’t?”
“I didn’t. It was just a guess,” he said lamely, knowing that he would eventually have two choices: either undo this lie and tell her everything (including his role in her father’s arrest), or keep the truth to himself and do his best to forget it. In that instant, he recognized that his marriage could not survive either choice, in the first case because Alison would refuse to live with him, and in the second because he would not be able to live with himself.
It struck him like a sucker punch: there was no way out. Later, he would identify this as the moment he knew the marriage was over. But at the time he refused to accept it, thinking instead about how they were all going to get through the next few hours.
“A guess, my ass,” Alison muttered, but on the couch her mother was muttering, too—oh my God, oh my God—and Alison turned her attention to her.
Tom went into the bedroom and—setting the volume low so that the women wouldn’t hear—turned on the TV, where the local station broke into its regular programming to carry the story. State police had arrested the Chilton interim police chief, Douglas Armstrong, for witness tampering and obstruction of justice in the case of Joy Enright’s murder.
Further charges, possibly including se
cond-degree murder, were pending.
Holy shit. Hearing the last sentence, Tom sucked in his breath. Before speaking with Delaney, he’d assumed that Doug’s pursuit of Martin Willett—the “hard-on” he had for the black man, to use Delaney’s word—resulted from his desire to get a conviction in the case, believing it would make him a shoo-in for permanent chief. Delaney had been the one to suggest there might be more to Doug’s zealousness, but Tom hadn’t been able to swallow the idea that his father-in-law would go as far as killing someone (especially a teenage girl) to get what he wanted. He hadn’t mentioned Delaney’s suspicions to the DA.
But somehow, they’d found out what Delaney knew, either from the girl herself or through their own legwork.
“Police have not released information about a possible motive for Armstrong’s actions,” the anchorwoman said, “but a source close to the investigation says it is believed the victim may have threatened to expose the interim chief for deliberately concealing a family member’s DUI arrest and then wiping it from the books. Such an act, if discovered, would likely not only have prevented Armstrong from being named permanent chief but led to criminal charges.”
The anchor ended the report by saying that grand jury proceedings against the previous suspect in the case, Martin Willett, had been suspended, with charges vacated against him after the police chief’s alleged wrongdoings had come to light. Tom turned off the TV, imagining through his own held breath what Willett must be feeling right now. He was glad he’d played a role in exonerating an innocent man, but had it been worth what he’d sacrificed? What about the vow he’d taken, forsaking all others? Why couldn’t he just be that guy who stood up for his family because they were family, whether they deserved it or not?
But if he’d learned anything by now, it was how pointless it was to pretend to be something you weren’t. He left the bedroom. Alison sat with her feet tucked beneath her, across from where her mother still lay on the couch. “Where do you think he is right now?” Helen was saying. “A cell somewhere? Alone, or with other people? You know how he gets in confined spaces. He’ll have a heart attack.”
Alison murmured sympathetically, “It won’t be that long, Mom. He’ll be released on his own recognizance.”
Tom couldn’t tell, after he joined them, whether the women wanted him there or not. His own instinct was to leave them alone, but Alison might accuse him later of abandoning her, so warily he took the chair across from his wife and asked, “Did you tell her the news?”
“News?” From her prone position, Helen turned to look at him and gave a bitter guffaw. “I can’t take any more news.”
“Mom. We found out we’re having a boy.” Alison leaned forward, touching the skin on her stomach covering the baby. Tom could tell how much she wanted the information to please her mother, to distract her even momentarily from the disaster of the day.
At first Helen registered no response, as if she hadn’t even heard her daughter. Then she said, “God help him,” and turned away from them, pressing her face into the couch.
Mary Krismis
Who was that?” Gil asked. When Susanne hung up the phone and kept her back to him, she could feel him already dreading whatever it was she would turn to say.
And how to say it? The obligation to convey the information was a blessing of sorts, she would realize later, distracting her as it did from the information itself. It was a state trooper from Rochester, she told him, calling to say that they had arrested Douglas Armstrong that morning. The trooper gave her a few details, which she listened to without interrupting, before saying they would be in touch with any further developments.
“They called, instead of coming? At least Armstrong always came to notify us in person.” Hearing him say this, Susanne realized that Gil was indulging in his own form of distraction. “At least he had the decency to do that.”
“Decency? Decency? Are you listening to yourself?”
“What did they arrest him for?” They’d just finished a lunch of frozen pizza, which they had not had the patience or interest to cook all the way through, and when he looked at her she saw that Gil had a piece of mozzarella sticking to his chin. She didn’t tell him.
“They just said they’d taken him into custody in connection with the case. Preliminary charges now, but he said there would probably be more. Possibly including murder.” She said the word as easily as she said her own name now; she had learned to do it without thinking of Joy at the same time. “And they’ve dropped the charges against Martin.”
“They’re saying Armstrong killed her?” She wasn’t sure he’d even heard the part about Martin. When she shrugged, Gil said, “God, Susanne, didn’t you pay attention?”
“I was paying attention.” She knew he didn’t mean to sound as if he were accusing her, but still it took some effort to refrain from snapping back at him. “They said they might add other charges later. And yes, they used the word ‘murder.’”
It would not be long before they learned the particulars: faced with the accusation of withholding possible evidence, the second arresting officer, Raul Dominguez, had told the FBI he believed that Doug may have planted the ski mask in the drawer at Martin Willett’s home after instructing Dominguez to remain with the suspect in another room while he searched the kitchen. In the cruiser on the way to Willett’s house, Dominguez said further, it was possible he’d seen Doug tucking something (black, soft, bulky) into the pocket of his uniform jacket.
Susanne and Gil liked Dominguez; he’d been the one to return the Mazda to them, after Joy disappeared, rather than make them retrieve it from the pond themselves. “I can’t see any reason for him to lie about the mask,” Susanne said when they learned of his FBI statement, and Gil agreed.
The investigators knew that a teenage girl, the victim’s friend, had been scheduled to testify to the grand jury about seeing Willett in a ski mask outside the shack, but they considered her a weak witness, especially in light of the fact that the original person who’d claimed to see the mask—the clerk at the Elbow Room—was essentially a vagrant who couldn’t be trusted, even if the police had been able to locate him.
After the trooper’s phone call informing them of the chief’s arrest, Gil wadded pizza crust between two fingers and said slowly, “I never did like Armstrong—I didn’t trust him—but what motive would he have to kill her?”
“They said she was blackmailing him.” Susanne could not believe she was saying such a thing about her own daughter, but it was the word the trooper had used. “His daughter, the English teacher, got arrested for drunk driving, and Joy found out about it. He was trying to shut her up. At least, that’s what they think it might be.”
“Blackmailing? No. I don’t believe that. That’s not the kind of girl she is.” Susanne had noticed that they took turns slipping into the present tense. Then he surprised her by adding, “Goddammit. I wanted it to be Willett.”
“Why?”
“I already hated him. Now I have to hate two people, and probably even feel sorry for—your lover”—she could tell he’d tried but failed to resist using the phrase—“because of what he went through. If he is innocent.” He tossed the crushed crust back into the box. “You haven’t been in touch with him, have you?”
“No.” Of course she didn’t add that she’d thought about it every day since his arrest, wanting to see and hear Martin tell her what she had almost consistently assumed and now knew for sure, which was that his arrest had been a mistake. (Though was “mistake” the word he would use? she wondered.) “I think I will now, though. Just to—I mean, if it’s all right with you.”
He blinked at her. “You’re coming with me tonight, right?” It took her a moment to recognize that he was not doing what it sounded like—saying that if she accompanied him to the dinner for families of residents at Belle Meadow, he would condone her seeing Martin one last time.
She reached over finally to brush the string of pizza cheese from his chin. “Yes.”
He was looking directly at her, and she could tell he was trying to read her the way he might read an electrical emergency or some other problem he’d been called in to fix. Trying to assess how much damage lay underneath what could be seen. She stood and began clearing the table, feeling that whatever was allowing her to function, at that moment, wouldn’t survive further scrutiny.
She had no desire to go to the nursing home’s Holly-Day Extravaganza, but she knew it wouldn’t be fair to send Gil alone. He took the first shower, after which Susanne found her husband standing in front of the bureau mirror, looking agitated as he pressed his damp hair to his head.
“What?” she asked. “You look fine.” She was not accustomed to him worrying about his appearance.
“It’s not that.”
“What, then?”
“I just suddenly realized where my mother lives.” He didn’t turn to her as he spoke but addressed her in his mirrored reflection. “Don’t ever let me end up in a place like that,” he said, as he had said so many times since Emilia was admitted. “Really, Suse. I mean it. Shoot me first.”
“Okay,” she said, as she always did, though of course she did not mean it.
It was a luxury she wished for herself—to think about something other than the fact that their daughter was dead. At Belle Meadow, after they had been admitted by Mr. Trujillo, Harry or Hairy grazed the back of Susanne’s heels, and Susanne jumped away with a cry.
“Don’t worry,” Mr. Trujillo consoled her, “that whole death thing is just a myth, you know,” but she’d already started toward the restroom to calm herself, a hand to her heart.
Earlier, after they’d learned of Doug Armstrong’s arrest, Susanne asked Gil if he wanted to go get a tree. He looked at her as if she were speaking another language—the language of insanity—before he realized she was serious, shook his head, and said, “The one at BM will be enough.” When Joy was alive, he’d scolded her about her nickname for Belle Meadow. But since her death, they both referred to it as nothing but.
How Will I Know You? Page 29