“What did you mean—your text—my parents?” he asked, his eyes glued to the label on the wine bottle sitting on the coffee table.
Grace took his hand, put it up to her cheek, and kissed it before returning it to the sofa. “TJ. She saw a story about your parents’ deaths.”
He took another sip of wine, paused, and his stare shifted to the fire.
Grace said, quite simply, “Don’t leave me and refuse to take my calls again, Jeff. These weeks have been so empty. I don’t think I could stand it again.”
He didn’t answer her immediately. After a long pause, he slowly shook his head. “I’m sorry, Grace. What I’ve been through in the last few weeks—well, you have no idea. It was so much more than I—”
“Time you shared it with me,” she said. “After all, I don’t believe you can tell me anything that will change how I feel about you. Let’s sweep away the secrets.”
He squeezed her hand, leaned down, and kissed her.
“You know,” she said softly, “the sins of the father are not visited on the son. What happened long ago was not your fault.”
He poured more wine into each of their glasses. “I wish I could believe you, Grace. I am starting to, little by little, but it’s so hard to justify what my father did…difficult to square it with the man I knew growing up.”
She waited for him to go on, watching him look down at his hands as he spoke.
“It’s been so hard not knowing all these years, feeling guilty because I wasn’t there.” He reached over and took his wine glass, swirling it in his hand, and setting it back down. “Well, here goes…the whole story. Maybe it will change the way you feel about me, but it’s time you knew.” He stood up and walked over toward the fireplace, eyeing the smoldering embers and the dancing sparks.
Grace thought, he can’t look at me.
“I didn’t know what my father did for a living other than he was a lawyer. I grew up in the Chicago suburbs in a huge, brick mansion. An only child. My mom didn’t work, but she was heavily involved in charities. We lived a privileged life. I—I always thought it was because attorneys made lots of money. It was the early 1960s, so I didn’t understand much that happened. Sometimes a man would come to the house, and Father would always take him to his office in the back of the house. It didn’t happen much. Often the man—it was more than one specific man—would have a briefcase with him. I didn’t know what was in it; I figured he was bringing my father papers, legal papers.”
He returned to the sofa. “What did I know? I was just a dumb kid. I found out later my father was in court quite often, defending scum, killers, money launderers, pimps, and numbers racketeers. I guess it wasn’t a secret to other people. Back in the early sixties, the mob was powerful in Chicago, as well as other big cities. I knew we had a wealthy lifestyle, lived in a conservative suburb, had a housekeeper, cook, and a gardener, and so forth. I didn’t realize other people didn’t live like we did.”
“Jeff, you were only a kid then.” He looked at her and she muttered, “All right, I’ll stop making excuses. Go on.”
“I know, I know. But still, looking back on those times, I think I just didn’t notice anything.” He held out both hands, considering how to explain. “I took it for granted life would always be that way. I went to a private academy, had lessons in tennis or horseback riding, and ran with other boys from fortunate families. Life was good.”
“You see those things now because you’re an adult.”
“True. I understand. In the summer, I was always shuttled off to camp in Minnesota. I loved the summers too; the summer camp was like a second home.” He reached over and picked up his wine glass, this time taking a long sip, prolonging the moment, Grace thought.
“However, one summer, this all ended. I was taken home by my grandfather. The summer of ’61. I’ll never forget it. I was eleven, about to start sixth grade. He came to the camp in his old, battered-up station wagon, and drove me back to their little town in western Indiana, where my grandmother was waiting. They had moved all my possessions to their home; when we arrived, they sat down to tell me both of my parents were dead. I can still remember every detail of the moment—the pattern of the drapes in their living room, the texture of the burgundy arm on the sofa, the doily my grandmother had crocheted lying on that sofa arm, the television console with my parents’ wedding pictures on the wall behind it…school photos of me. Even now I can see their living room.”
He frowned and looked straight ahead, avoiding her eyes, thought Grace.
“I can’t remember exactly what my grandfather said. However, I’m sure it’s mixed up with my better understanding from later years. My parents had been shot, execution-style, at night in their bedroom. If I’d been there, I would have died with them.” He looked down at his hands, clenched in his lap. “Believe me, I had many moments over the years when I wished that had happened. I missed them so terribly, especially since I never got to say good-bye.”
And now Grace felt tears in her eyes, thinking about Jeff as a boy, listening to the horrifying news that his parents were simply wiped out of his life in one stroke. She put her hand on his arm while he reached up, closing his hand over hers. Then he nodded, patting her hand.
“I’m fine, Grace. I’ve come to terms with my parents’ deaths over the years. I’ve visited the cemetery where they were buried without me. Frankly, once I grew older, I loved the small town where we lived, especially since my grandparents gave me a cheerful, secure, and comfortable home. Not a rich home financially, by any means, but I was loved.
“During those early years, my grandfather was still working as the editor of the small newspaper in town, so I often went to his office after school, helping clean up and stack newspapers to tie them for delivery.” He smiled, turning toward her. “My memories of those days were all so happy except, of course, for the absence of my mother and father. My grandparents—they were my father’s parents—did everything they could to make me feel loved, wanted, cherished. My mother was an orphan, so I only had the one set of grandparents, plus a few distant cousins I didn’t know.
“I always thought I’d live in a small town again.” Now he leaned in toward Grace, taking both of her hands in his. His voice rose as he continued. “I was telling you the truth when I said I’d grown up in a small town and wanted to end my career in the same kind of place. When it came time to go to college, I went to Northwestern, double majoring in journalism and history. I always loved history. Well, you know the rest about how I went from a small newspaper to much larger ones during my career, ending up in New York City.”
Now his voice took a quieter tone. “Over those years I always took care of my grandparents, making sure they wanted for nothing. I visited whenever I could, but I know they worried that I didn’t marry or have a family of my own. Nevertheless, I often went back to Indiana and made sure they were doing well.” He shook his head slowly. “Going home—a welcome respite from the craziness of big cities. I could actually relax, sleep at night, go fishing with my grandfather, and eat my grandmother’s rhubarb pies. Eventually they passed away, first my grandfather, then my grandmother. They’re buried there in a small cemetery I visited, off and on, over the years. I was there last week.”
“I suppose it was like a chapter of your life ending.”
“Exactly. I owe them so much. It couldn’t have been easy for people in their sixties and seventies to take care of a crazy teenager who had become an orphan overnight.”
“After that, you were moving here, there, and everywhere?”
“Yes. I was always restless because my only roots were in my grandparents’ small town. But I could never quite settle down. In a sense, I was married to my job, and I found it endlessly fascinating. Years went by. I suppose it became easier to simply keep moving.”
“So, who called you when you left here a few weeks ago?”
He shifted in his seat, leaning back against a cushion. “I think I always wanted to know what happened exact
ly, and who had killed my parents. I knew the why. As my grandfather explained years later, my father’s ‘clients’ put more pressure on him to work expressly for them. He didn’t want to do it, but it became easier as time went by since it assuaged the guilt he felt when he considered a more secure life financially for my mother and me. While their money might have been illegally obtained, I’m sure they paid my father well. But I imagine they also made some threats.” He shook his head slowly, pausing for a deep breath. “My grandparents, you see, never approved of his work with organized crime, so it was a source of friction between them. A few weeks before my parents’ deaths, my father talked to my grandfather, telling him he was going to turn state’s evidence. In his thinking, it was the only way to keep us safe.”
“Obviously, someone else found out about his plan.”
He pulled back, drawing his hands into his lap. “Yes. Not knowing who killed them, ripping them from me, has been on my mind ever since I was a teenager. I’ve felt guilty because I wasn’t there. I kept thinking I might somehow have stopped it. Of course, that’s crazy; what could a kid do?”
“But Jeff, they would have killed you too.”
“I realize that. I also found out, much later, that over the years before his death, my father had given money to my grandparents to put in a trust fund for me. It’s a great deal of money. Thinking it was dirty money, money laundered from illegal businesses, my grandfather didn’t want to take it. My father assured him it wasn’t; it was money earned from people who had nothing to do with the mob. My grandfather invested it wisely, so by the time I was ready to go to college, I could pay for my education, leaving the rest as financial security down the road. I left the remaining money, after college, in investments, and used the money I made working to pay my own expenses. This means I will never have to worry about having enough to live on. It’s even made it possible to renovate Lockwood House.” He gazed down at his hands. “Of course, the government confiscated my parents’ other assets.”
“It explains a great deal. But you still haven’t told me who called you, sending you off on this wild-goose chase.”
“It wasn’t…a wild-goose chase, Grace.” He stopped speaking, glanced at the fire, and turned toward her, looking into her eyes. “It was the final chapter and it was so dark compared to living in this lovely little town of Endurance. Now I understand my parents wanting to protect me from this. I talked to the hit man who killed them.”
“You what?”
“I talked to the hit man. I met him. I sat across a table from the man who killed both of my parents.”
“Oh, Jeff. How awful.” She wanted to put her arms around him, but she saw him flinch out of the corner of her eye.
He put his face in his hands momentarily and paused. “It was the most horrific thing I’ve ever done. He was simply hired to kill three people he didn’t know, two of whom meant—meant everything to me. You see, over the years I wanted to find out about what had happened that night. I hired an investigator—the man who called me; he’s found various leads through the years. Mostly, they’ve been dead ends, so after a while I stopped getting my hopes up. But recently his contacts gave him information about a prisoner who had turned in another inmate for confessing to the hit. The killer was twenty-nine when he shot my parents; now he is eighty, in prison for a life sentence because of another crime where they caught him.”
“But why? Why would he confess now?”
“Precisely what I wondered. I went with Ben Throwdin, the investigator, to the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana. We interviewed the hit man—Ziggy Einstein—I doubt that was his real name. Grace, he was just an old, broken man—I’d never notice him if I passed him on the street. He said he knew he had nothing to lose because he was going to spend his life in prison anyway. Believe it or not, his conscience was why he agreed to talk to me. The murder had haunted him over all those years. You’ll never guess why.”
Grace shook her head. “Why, when he so obviously had killed other people too?”
“My mother was the first woman he ever killed. It haunted him. He’d never been hired to kill a woman before; he was also told to kill me, leaving no witnesses.” He rubbed his hand over his forehead and paused. “Turned out, of course, he didn’t have to kill me, so I lived because I happened to be away at camp.”
The last words came out with bitterness, and Grace reached over, taking his hand again.
“Makes a great essay for what I did on my summer vacation,” Jeff said.
“Jeff, how do you know this guy is even telling the truth?”
“I thought about that myself. First, he didn’t have anything to lose by telling the truth, but I had already considered how I might check his honesty. I asked him some detailed questions about our house. I’d lived in that house my whole life up to age eleven. I knew every nook and cranny, every color combination, every fabric in our house. He passed my questions with flying colors. He was definitely in our house.”
Grace stared at him thoughtfully for several seconds. “Did he have any kind of evidence other than the description of the house? After all, he might have been in the house for some other reason: painting rooms or changing the electrical wiring or fixing the television or something.”
“I know he was the killer because he did have something else. Over all those years he had left something with his sister, an older sister, who, remarkably, was still alive in Naperville, Illinois. This Einstein gave us her address, had the warden call her to let her know we were coming, and…we went.”
“How odd he would have kept something.”
“I think it isn’t unusual for killers to keep what they call a ‘trophy’ of some sort. In this case, the murder of my mother had shaken him up considerably. We drove to his sister’s house, a small, eyesore of a place at the end of a street in a much older part of Naperville. The porch steps were rickety and the front doorbell didn’t work. I knocked on the door, and in a moment I saw an elderly woman peer out from a window, holding back a curtain. She came to the door, opened it a few inches with a chain lock, and asked my name. Once I had satisfied her with my driver’s license, she went over to a table, pulling a small, sealed envelope out of a drawer, and handed it to me silently.”
“She didn’t say she was sorry for what her brother did or anything?”
“No, she said nothing. After giving it to me, she did speak. She told me it would be better if I left, that the envelope was the last thing she had of her brother’s. She was relieved to get it out of her house.”
“Amazing.”
“I set it on the dashboard of my rental car when Ben and I left. I thought I would open it when I got back to the hotel, but curiosity got the best of me. A few blocks away, I found a place to pull over because I wanted to see what was in the envelope. I didn’t know what to expect, and my hands were shaking. I managed to tear a small corner, then a little larger hole. Turning it upside down, I watched a necklace fall out and slide through my fingers.”
“Your mother’s?”
He slowly nodded his head, slipping his hand into his jacket pocket. “Here.”
Grace took the small envelope, turned it upside down, and felt the slithering metal chain of a necklace slide into her palm. She sorted out the chain and saw that while the necklace was badly tarnished, it was a silver chain with a heart locket. Opening the locket, she saw a tiny, black-and-white photo with a toddler who had Jeff’s eyes. About an inch of links in the chain was darkly stained, a grim reminder of where it had been.
Jeff looked at the necklace, saying, “My mother’s, of course. I remember this necklace because she often wore it.” And then his voice faltered. “She said—she used to tell me it was her favorite.”
Grace saw the stricken look in his eyes. Tears were sitting on the edge of his lower lids, threatening to fall. She wondered if this buried story would set him free, as he ironically said, or make it more difficult for him to forget.
A log in the fireplace shifted,
sparks flew up the chimney, and Grace realized the fire had burned down to embers during their talk. She looked at the clock over the mantel, startled to see it was almost midnight.
“Have you slept at all?” she asked, quietly.
He shook his head. “I haven’t been able to sleep. I’m exhausted. I keep seeing my parents, their faces, their smiles, the house, and the hooded eyes of their killer.”
Grace stood up, closing the glass fireplace screen. As Jeff watched, she began turning off the lights in the living room. She went out to the kitchen, turning off lights and checking the lock on the door.
Jeff stood up. “I guess it’s time for me to get going. I need to turn in the rental car in the morning so I can clear some things up and try to get back to the paper.”
Grace walked over to him, taking his face in her hands. Then she put her arms around him and kissed him. “I’ve missed you, Jeff Maitlin.” She pulled back, considering his cornflower-blue eyes. “I love you. It’s as simple as that. Tonight you’ll stay here, and I’ll hold you in my arms all night long, keeping you safe and warm.”
He looked back at her and gently cupped her face with his hands. “Are you sure?”
“Yes.” She pulled his hands down from her cheeks, softly kissing the palm of each one, and led him slowly up the stairs, turning off the lower stairway light from the landing.
A few minutes later, her cell phone lit up. “Strange car in yr driveway. You OK?” TJ Sweeney must have been at her house across the street and seen Grace’s lights go out.
She returned the text, hitting “send” before she turned off the phone. She could imagine TJ smiling as she read it.
All is well.
Jeff Maitlin is home.
Chapter Nineteen
“Gin!” Grace shouted, a huge smile on her face. “Another Sunday, another withering defeat for you.” She had invited TJ over for lunch—Lettie had made scrumptious chicken pot pies—and told her much of Jeff’s story.
Death Takes No Bribes: An Endurance Mystery (Endurance Mysteries Book 3) Page 15