by Linda Ladd
Maybe, maybe not, but if my guess was right, he was going to change his tune in a New York minute. “I’m Detective Claire Morgan with the Canton Country Sheriff’s department, and this is my partner, Detective Bud Davis.”
“I know who you are. Ms. Winters told me.” Mr. Murphy didn’t reach out to shake our hands, but then he paused, and uh oh, he recognized our names. He was pretty easy to read, too, for such a self-important ass. He looked at me. “You’re that detective down at the lake, right? The one who keeps almost getting killed.”
Well, that’s one way to describe me, I suppose, not the way I prefer, of course, but one way. Almost was the operative word in that assessment, but I was already beginning to share Debbie’s tacit opinion of this joker. Sometimes when on a sorrowful mission like this, Bud and I acted lighthearted as long as we could, mainly because we didn’t want to think about what was coming when we met the parents of a deceased murder victim. But now, we were here and whether we liked this man or not, it was time to get serious and show some respect.
“Mr. Murphy, you might want to sit down. I’m afraid I’ve got some very bad news.”
“Oh, my God, is it Mary Fern? Is she okay?”
I knew that to be the name of his unfortunate wife. “This concerns your son, Michael, sir.”
“Mikey?” His worried expression metamorphosed to anger pretty damn quick, so quick, in fact, that I had to blink to keep up with it. “What the hell has he gone and done this time?”
He didn’t really want to know that, nor did he want to play the angry father. He just didn’t know it yet.
Bud said, “Why don’t you sit down, Mr. Murphy?”
“I don’t want to fuckin’ sit down. What has Mikey been arrested for this time? C’mon, get to it, like I told you, I’m very busy.”
Well now, the F bomb and everything, right here in the innards of the sacrosanct capitol building, too. I stared at him a short moment, then I said, “Your son is dead, Mr. Murphy. We found him hanging from a bridge support in Osage Beach last night. We suspect at this point that he took his own life. I’m very sorry.”
Murphy just stared back at me for one beat, then two, then he looked at Bud. Bud nodded. Murphy shook his head back and forth. “What do you mean? Mikey isn’t dead. No. I don’t believe you.”
I said, “I realize this comes as quite a shock, sir. Please, sit down, and we’ll tell you what we know about your son’s death.”
“Mikey’s not dead. He can’t be dead.”
Bud and I merely stared at him. We’d done this before, more times than we’d like to remember. Then we watched in silence as the stark realization and horror dawned in his dark eyes. I tensed at the anguished look that twisted across his lined and deeply tanned face, and I remembered, remembered the day, the hour, the worst moment of my entire life, when I’d been standing in an ER in Los Angeles, when I’d been given a similar message about my own little boy, Zachary. I swallowed hard, felt the internal tensing of my stomach muscles, and I forced the grief rising inside me back down, down, down into that dark, dank corner of my mind and locked it there as I had learned to do over the years. I knew exactly what Joseph Murphy was feeling, but I didn’t want to know or remember or relive it.
I watched him fall on his knees on another expensive Oriental carpet beside the table, this one blue-and-forest green-and-burnt orange, all his pomposity and arrogance drained out of him like air from a punctured air mattress, the loss of a lifetime, the kind of horror that never ends. He was groaning deep in his throat, making awful choking sounds, and Bud gave me a what-should-we-do-now look. I didn’t know what to do, but neither of us moved to touch him or lay a comforting hand on his shoulder as we sometimes had done in other cases.
“Oh, my God, my God, my God…” Murphy was moaning out loud now, his words only half intelligible, and then he burst into a blubbering sort of crazed tears, his imperious facade in tatters, his mind destroyed by the mere magnitude of the unthinkable. I knew, I knew, only too well did I know.
I said, “Please take a chair, Mr. Murphy. I know this is terrible for you.”
Murphy heard me somehow and managed to struggle up into the nearest chair. He folded his arms on the table and lay his head down atop them then bawled like a neglected baby. We waited for him to calm down, uncomfortable, you bet we are.
Murphy didn’t get over the shock quickly, or easily, and he wasn’t quiet with his grief, either.
After about ten minutes, Bud said quietly, “How about I get you a glass of water, or cup of coffee, something like that, sir? It might help a little.”
Murphy raised his face to us, pale and blotchy now, running with tears, then he shook his head back and forth some more. His precisely barbered light brown hair was no longer manicured into place, his gold-framed glasses were off, tossed down on the table, his life destroyed. Finally, he mopped the wetness off his face with a crisp white handkerchief that he pulled out of the chest pocket of his navy suit. “Oh, God, no, did you say it’s a suicide? Mikey committed suicide? Oh, God.”
“That appears to be the case, sir, but we have just begun our investigation. There is a possibility that your son’s death could turn out to be a homicide, but we can’t tell you what happened until after all the evidence is collected and examined by the medical examiner. That is being done as we speak.”
Murphy heaved in some deep breaths, but it didn’t seem to help much. His hands were trembling, his whole body collapsed in the chair, all self-control gone. “Oh, my God, this can’t be happening. This can’t be true.”
We all turned as a door at the far end of the room opened, and who should appear but the Honorable Governor Edward Stanton himself. He was a distinguished looking guy in his early fifties, had won his last election big-time with about 70 percent of the vote. I didn’t vote for him, thought he was too slick and self-assured. Bud didn’t, either, but he just forgot it was election day.
Stanton was the father of all politicians, according to Black, who claimed to know him personally. Today, he was wearing a pinstriped gray suit and white shirt, and the obligatory little American flag on his lapel like Barack Obama learned to do the hard way. His eyes were black as coal and glowed with inner intensity, and his hair was graying at the temples or he had them bleach it out in some fancy salon to affect age and wisdom. But that impression could be the result of my extreme and ultra distrust and/or dislike of all politicians, great or small.
Eddie Boy had a nice white smile on TV, but he wasn’t smiling now. He strode down the room toward us, tall and trim, very athletic for his age. I bet he was into golf and something else like cross-country skiing in Vermont at his vacation home. He kept his gaze fastened solely on his distraught adviser. “Joseph? Are you all right? What the hell’s going on?”
Murphy tried to pull himself together for the boss man, didn’t quite execute it, and looked up at me with weepy agony in his eyes. I got his message, too.
I said, “Governor Stanton, Mr. Murphy has just gotten some very bad news of a personal nature.”
“And you are?”
Well, now I know where Debbie Winters got it. “We’re detectives from Canton County at Lake of the Ozarks. My name is Claire Morgan and this is Bud Davis.”
“You’re Nick Black’s girl.”
Well, hell, I sure didn’t like the sound of that one little bit. I wasn’t anybody’s girl. In fact, I wasn’t a girl. I was a woman, a policewoman. He might as well have added Friday on the end. I didn’t respond. A glance told me Murphy was openly sobbing again, and Bud wasn’t saying anything, so, crap, I had to speak, even after that rather insulting and sexist remark. So I said, “Mr. Murphy’s son, Michael Murphy, was found dead at the Grand Glaize Bridge in Osage Beach. It appears to have been a suicide.”
That rocked the guv back on his heels. “Oh, my God, Joseph, I’m so sorry.”
In the next few moments, the governor seemed to be a pretty good guy; at least he didn’t mind touching a suffering employee. He put his arm
around his friend’s shuddering shoulders. “Oh, Joseph, this is just terrible, terrible news.”
Yeah, that pretty much summed it up, all right.
“Well, you have to go home immediately and be with your family. Don’t worry about a thing here. Does Mary Fern know?”
Murphy just groaned some more and looked at me. I began to feel like a ventriloquist’s dummy.
“We were told by Mr. Murphy’s housekeeper that his wife is on a shopping trip in Kansas City. She’s expected home any time now. We can call her for you, Mr. Murphy, if you prefer, but I thought you might want to inform your family yourself.”
“Yes, oh, yes, thank you, Detective. I will. I have to, oh, God, I have to be the one who tells her.”
Then the governor said, “Joseph, listen to me, you need to get home right away. I’ll order around my limo. Maybe the officers could follow you there?” He looked at me for verification.
“Yes, sir. We would be glad to follow him. I’m afraid we’ll have to ask a few questions of both parents before we leave.”
The governor frowned at that but didn’t forbid it. Good thing, too.
Murphy said, “Yes, yes, I’ll take the limo. I need some time alone to get a grip before I face everybody. Oh, how am I going to break this to her, to the kids? They’ll all be home, too. Oh my God, I can’t tell them Mikey’s dead. It’ll kill them.” His voice had risen higher and higher, precipitously shrill in pitch, then finally petered out in a helpless moan.
Bud found his tongue. “We’ll be glad to follow you home, sir. And we’ll break the news to your wife, if you think you’re not up to it. Sorry, sir, but we’ll have to ask her some questions. As soon as the two of you feel up to it, I mean.”
“Oh, yes, please, please help me. I don’t know what she’s gonna do.”
Apparently, Joseph Murphy wasn’t quite the strong, in-command type everybody thought him to be. He was not exactly displaying innate courage at the moment, but who could blame him? He’d lost his son and a hole had been torn in his heart that could never be filled but would lie deep and gaping for the rest of his life.
Governor Stanton turned back to us. He was a commanding man, even I felt his presence, and he hadn’t gotten my vote. “Yes, officers, if you’ll be good enough to escort Joseph home safely, I’d be indebted.” His gaze left Bud and his eyes zeroed directly in on mine. “Joseph’s not himself.”
No kidding, Sherlock, I thought. “Yes sir,” I said.
We turned to leave, and the governor walked us to the door, a real polite gentleman, and everything. “He’s been under a lot of pressure with Mikey the last few years. He’s a fine man, but this is a very stressful time. He’s hit the end of his rope.”
I thought that a rather ironic, and yes, unsuitable, metaphor, considering, but then again, Governor Stanton didn’t know yet that Mikey was found swinging from a noose. Both the governor and Joseph Murphy were really going to freak out when they heard about what their little Mikey left roasting in the oven for us to find.
Here Comes Trouble
As it turned out, the psycho ward was a pretty sweet place. It was way out in the woods, truly out in the middle of nowhere, with rolling green pastures surrounding it, and lush stands of cedar and pine trees and giant red and white oaks with spreading branches. His dad was right, too, about all the sports being available to the patients. They had just about every sport and leisure activity for the kids to play. He’d soon be known as the best athlete in the whole damn place. And it sure wouldn’t take long until all the other kids looked up to him and were just dying to be his friend. He’d never found it hard to control others; in fact, he was an absolute master at manipulation and thought it was fun to mess them up in the head. And lucky, lucky him, he found the absolute perfect victim when he met up with his skinny new roommate, a kid straight out of the Revenge of the Nerds movies.
“Oh, hello,” his new roommate said. He was lying on his back propped up with a bunch of red and white striped pillows. He didn’t sit up, just turned his head.
“Hi,” the son replied. Politely and with that odd embarrassment of complete strangers suddenly forced to live together, they exchanged names and towns and shy grins.
“That’s my real name,” the roommate said, “but everybody around here calls me Buddy. We go by aliases here, if we don’t want people to know who we really are.”
That seemed a cop-out. Weren’t the doctors trying to get everybody used to living in their own skin? He said, “No kidding. That’s pretty messed up. But I’ll call you Buddy, if you want.”
The son glanced around, then took the bed across from Buddy’s. It was a nice size room, not as big as his at home, though, with lots of pictures hanging around with lame inspirational messages on them, like HARD WORK PAYS OFF. Sure, it does, he thought, unless you can get somebody else to do it for you. A framed message above the door said SUCCESS IS 10% INSPIRATION AND 90% PERSPIRATION. He wanted to laugh. He’d always found that to be just the opposite.
“What are you in for?” Buddy asked him, then quickly amended it with, “You don’t have to tell me, if you don’t want to.”
“That’s okay. Everybody knows that my family thinks I’m a nutcase and will kill myself, or something, if the doctors don’t get inside my head and fix me.”
“Yeah, I know, that sounds like me.”
“I saw my mom kill herself,” he said to Buddy then, curious if it would shock him. He watched the other boy closely to see if that triggered any emotions. It didn’t, or if it did, he couldn’t see them.
“Gee, that’s tough,” said Buddy after a moment, and oh, so earnestly, too. “Bet that sucked for you.”
The son nodded. “Yeah, real bad. She fell off a hiking trail and died right in front of my eyes. She almost took my little baby sister with her.”
Buddy’s face looked horrified. “Man, that’s awful.”
“Yeah, but I managed to save the baby. Mom was carrying her in a sling, but I pulled it off just in time before she jumped. The baby’s just a couple of months old, and it was still nursing and everything, so now she’s gotta be on a bottle. My aunt’s taking care of her for my dad.”
“You don’t have much trouble talking about it, do you?”
“No. Do you have trouble talking about your stuff?”
“Yeah, I guess. Most of us here do.”
“You gotta tell me why you’re in here. I told you.”
“My sister died a few years ago. I can’t quit thinking about it. I think about her all the time and how stiff and white she looked at the funeral in that little box.”
“What happened to her?”
“I don’t wanna talk about it anymore.”
“Okay, whatever. Just tryin’ to be friendly.”
Then Buddy turned over and faced the wall, pretty much dismissing his new roommate, and the son went on unpacking his clothes and putting them in the drawers underneath his bed. He would have preferred to have the other bed because it faced a window that looked out into some big tree limbs. Those branches so close to the building might present a pretty cool way to skip out after hours if he ever needed to. But that’s okay, he’d probably be able to talk Buddy out of the other bed before too much time passed. Buddy came off pretty much like a wimp and a pushover. He was already crying and trying to hide it by muffling his sobs in the pillows. Gee whiz, what a baby and he hadn’t even told him what happened to the sister. Some kids didn’t have any backbone. He began to wonder what exactly had happened to Buddy’s sister. It must have been pretty gory and gruesome, even worse than what happened to Lyla. He couldn’t wait to hear all about it. Maybe some of it would come out in the stupid group therapy sessions he heard they were forced to go to.
“Hey, Buddy. I got a box of chocolate-covered cherries here. Want some?”
The son waited, but he knew Buddy would. Buddy was a little chubby around the waistline. He had already decided that the way to Buddy’s heart was through his stomach, and it didn’t take two minute
s for Buddy to prove him right.
Rolling over, Buddy lay on one side and stared at him. His eyes were red and watery. “I love those things.”
“Me, too. Here, take one, it’ll make you feel better. Take all you want, Buddy, ’cause my dad’ll send me more any time I ask him. He feels real bad about me seeing my mom die. He feels guilty, and all that. So he gives me whatever I want.”
Buddy said, “My dad just says quit being a stupid moron and get over it.”
The son walked over to Buddy’s bed and offered him the candy. “Here, you go, Buddy, take as many as you want to.”
Buddy dug three out of the holes in the plastic liner that held the cherries in place.
“I take it you don’t get along with your dad too well, huh, Buddy?”
“No. He wants me to play football and basketball and stuff, but I like being in the band better. I play snare drums, real good, too, but he said everybody’d call me a band fag, if I joined the band.”
“Did you?”
Buddy nodded, chewing on a chocolate-covered cherry and acting like it was the best thing he’d ever put in his mouth. “Yeah. I got first chair right off, over some of the older kids, too. Our band director really liked me. He said I got the cadences down real good.”
“Did kids call you a band fag like your dad said?”
“Yeah.”
He laughed at Buddy’s expression, and then Buddy looked pretty surprised but he grinned a little but uncertainly.
“Now, don’t you worry about those jerks back home, Buddy. You can practice those drums and end up bein’ as famous as Ringo Starr was with the Beatles but what’re those dumbass football players gonna be? Nothin’. Just big fat ex-athlete losers who don’t know how to do anything but push people around when some coach blows on a whistle.”
Buddy sat up. His grin was slow but very pleased. “Yeah, that’s what I’ve always thought about those stupid jocks, too.”
“Did you tell your dad that?”
“No. He wouldn’t listen, anyways. He was a big star when he was in our high school, you know, made lots of touchdowns and stuff.”