“Whoa—Dickie. Chill out, baby. I just stopped by to say hello. No one answered in the main house, so I thought I’d try back here.”
George had the habit of coming over when he was bored or in the neighborhood. Sometimes he called first, other times he just showed up, and I never minded. Usually I was happy to see him because it broke up my routine. Not today.
“You just scared the shit out of me, is all.”
“Jesus Christ—what happened to your noggin?”
I shrugged. “Long story.”
He arched his brows.
“I’ll bet . . . Anyway, since we haven’t toured the links in a few weeks, I never see you anymore. I didn’t figure you for a guy who forgets his friends.”
“Just . . . just, um, been kind of overwhelmed lately. Besides, it’s November. It’s a little chilly for golf . . .”
“Since when has that ever stopped us? Didn’t we play the day before Thanksgiving last year?”
George glanced at my bag of TaylorMades, which was standing next to the tool locker. “If I know you, you’re out here working on your swing so you won’t get stuck for lunch.”
“Yeah, right . . .” I forced a laugh.
Hands in pockets, George sauntered in and began wandering around the room, as if he was planning on staying awhile.
“Hey, seriously, what do you say? You can take time off from your gig, can’t you? Why don’t we try and walk on at the public course in West Orange? Do us good to try another place, don’t you think? Keep us sharp. Besides, the rain’s supposed to hold off until late afternoon. But don’t let me interrupt you if you’re about to put the finishing touches on some new ads. You’re the guy who likes to work, not me . . .”
George loved needling me. I figured it was his revenge for losing on the links most of the time.
He stopped moving when he was on the opposite side of the table.
“What the hell’s the matter with you, Rich? You look like you’ve just seen a frigging ghost.”
His gaze drifted down to Morgan’s picture.
“So . . . is she the one you were—”
He stopped and threw a jittery glance over his shoulder toward the main house. He had enough discretion to be careful about possibly letting Monica or Diane hear.
“No.”
“So you’re on the prowl, are you?” He leered. “I’m the guy who needs some action. I guess I didn’t tell you: it’s definitely over between Adele and me. At least you still have your wife—and whoever.”
“Too bad about Adele.” I didn’t know what else to say. I didn’t care, either.
“No big deal. There’s more where she came from. She was something, though, wasn’t she?” He seemed suddenly wistful. “And a real minx in the sack. Hey, who knows—maybe she’ll convince me to patch it up. We actually got along pretty well.” He nodded at “Morgan.” “So—whatcha got there, Rich? Mind sharing?”
I shook my head. “It’s not what you think. I was just getting ready to dump this stuff.”
I could tell from the look on George’s mug that he didn’t get it. How could he? To him I was a trusted old pal. There was no way he could ever fathom what I’d done in that Soho hotel room.
But the cogs of my brain were turning like mad. I needed George now. If there was anyone I could take the chance with, anyone I could trust, it had to be George Addington. He was my number-one option for an alibi, my go-to guy, my ace in the hole—he had been from the beginning, and I realized it now.
“I’m in trouble, George. Real trouble.”
“What—your wife found out you were diddling around on the side? I thought you said you could explain your way around it.”
I didn’t want to hear any snide horseshit now.
“I need your help, man.”
The supercilious expression on his face was displaced by a look of genuine concern.
“Whatever I can do, Rich. You know that. We’ve been buds a long time.”
“You’re not going to believe this, but—well, here it is . . .”
Maybe it was a mistake, telling George what I’d had to do to Wellington, but what were my options? I couldn’t take the chance of him getting caught off guard in crunch time. He had to know exactly what it was he was dealing with if he got a phone call from the cops, or worse, was forced into a sit-down with them.
I switched up the details on him a bit, making the whole thing look like Wellington’s fault. If he bought what I told him, he’d have to stick by me no matter what.
“The motherfucker attacked me, George. I was just fighting back. I told him I wasn’t paying him blackmail money, and he went ballistic on me. It was an accident, that he died . . .”
When I was finished talking, George was speechless. He stood there, mouth agape, as if he’d never set eyes on me before in his life.
“I happened to catch that story in the Times this morning, Rich.” He seemed bewildered. “That—that was you?”
“The fucking snake was planning to bleed me for everything I’ve got, man. And besides, like I said, it was a mistake, an awful, terrible mistake. All I wanted was to get those photos away from him, and that’s when it turned ugly. When we got into it, his head hit the nightstand, hard. I didn’t mean for it to happen, but . . .”
“You’re putting me on, right, Rich?”
“I wish to God I were.”
He shook his head. “No. You’ve got to be putting me on. I know you’re putting me on, you sick bastard. Now I get it—you’re getting me back because I whipped your ass by two strokes last time out.”
He started to laugh again, the laugh of a man who’s been had, and had well.
“I’m not putting you on, George. I’m not putting you the fuck on.”
He stopped, and stared at me as if he still wasn’t sure.
“Jesus Christ, Rich. Jesus Christ . . .”
His fingertips touched the table. He looked as if he was about to collapse.
“All I need from you—and this is only if the cops ever get close to me on this thing—is for you to say that we were together Tuesday afternoon.”
“Rich—”
“Look, here’s what you say. You say that we spent the entire afternoon at the driving range. First we were up at the place on Route 46 in Wayne, then we switched over to the range in Roseland, off 280. The reason nobody saw me is because you paid at the counter, since you owed me from when we last played a full round and you lost. Besides, it being November, there weren’t many other people around to see us . . .”
I was in a state of near panic. My tongue was running ahead of my brain. Maybe I wasn’t even making sense, but I could explain it better if I had to—if George needed me to.
He was shaking his head like a man who was being offered poison and didn’t want to take it.
“We can do this, George, I’m sure of—”
“Rich.”
“Yes?”
“I can’t.”
“What?”
“I can’t do it.”
“But George—”
“Listen to me, Rich. I’m not going to do this insane bullshit for you! Are you fucking crazy or something? Think about what you’re saying here. You . . . you’re telling me you fucking killed somebody and . . . and you’re asking me to cover for you? Rich, this is my life, not some—some fucking TV show! Whoever this bitch is, she’s shredded your brains into oatmeal. You better get yourself together, man. Look at what you have to lose here.”
He waved his hand toward the main house.
“Maybe it’s already too la—”
“Don’t you fucking get it, George? Why the hell do you think I did what I did? Why else would I ask you to help me?”
He fixed me with a mute stare. Did he get it, or didn’t he? He backed away from the table.
“I’m
going to walk out of here, Rich, and I’m going to pretend this conversation never happened, okay?”
The son of a bitch was lying—I could see it in his eyes. After all these years, he was going to turn me in. My best friend is going to turn me the fuck in.
“You’re going straight to the cops, aren’t you?”
“What gives you that idea?”
“You’re lying. Talk about screwing your friends.”
George stood there for a couple more seconds, then he began to inch slowly toward the door, as if for the first time in his life he was a little afraid of me.
“Look, George, let’s talk about this. Let’s just talk about this before you—”
“There’s nothing to talk about, Rich. I really don’t want to talk about anything. Like I said, this conversation never happened. And I still don’t even buy a word of what you told me . . .”
He turned his back on me and went for the door.
I reached out and yanked the nearest club—an iron (later I discovered it was the seven)—from my golf bag. Before George could turn the handle, I whipped it with everything I had at the back of his head. After the collision, he dropped to the floor like a sack of potatoes off the back of a truck.
The sound that came out of George’s throat was bizarre, something between a whelp and a curse. I’d never heard anything like it before in my life.
It didn’t matter how much noise George made, since Monica and Diane were gone. No one in the entire hamlet of Essex Fells could hear what was happening all the way back here.
I raised the club again—and again—and again, and brought it down hard on George’s skull. The clubs were graphite hybrids—they wouldn’t break no matter how hard I swung. Tiger Woods himself couldn’t bust them. But now that I’d started it, I had to finish it. I didn’t want to—I’d known George a long time—but I was backed into a corner. I’d made a mistake in telling him about Wellington, and I had to clean up the mess.
Because George was going straight to the cops, no matter what he said to the contrary. And if he held off at first, he’d open his trap the minute even an ounce of pressure was applied.
And something else: doing it was easier the second time. Once you killed, the second time was—well, if it wasn’t exactly a walk in the park, it wasn’t nearly as hard as the first time. Once you cross a certain line, it’s easier to rationalize, for sure. Even though I knew George and he’d been a close friend, if killing him meant saving my own skin, he had to go. Simple as that.
He was gone quickly. When I dropped the iron and stooped to check, he wasn’t breathing and his eyes were wide open, glazed and unseeing, like the eyes of a dead deer. Unlike with Wellington, I’d had an effective weapon at hand, and the job was that much easier.
In a million years, no one would ever suspect me of killing George Addington. They wouldn’t even think to suspect me. Why would they?
In the back of my mind the entire time, of course, had been the knowledge that no one was in the main house and that the coast would be completely clear when it came time to move the body. The way I saw it, the first person the cops would go to when they discovered George Addington missing was his jilted ex-girlfriend. Adele. Poor Adele. She was going to have to answer lots of prickly, ugly questions. When news of this disaster came down, she wouldn’t know which end was up. And what I’d tell the police of course was that she’d been turning up the heat on George for a solid commitment, and that he’d been bitching to me about it pretty much all the time. According to my pal, I’d tell them, Adele was a big-time nutcase, and he’d actually been afraid of her, which was a major reason he wanted to cut her loose. For that matter, maybe it would be worth checking out George’s ex-wife, too, or some of the many other babes—and there’d been quite a few—he’d been involved with over the years. That’s what I’d feed them.
I reached into George’s jacket pocket and pulled out his car keys. Then I went out to the driveway and jumped into his spanking new, shiny black Nissan Maxima. I cranked it up, made a K-turn, and backed it trunk-first to the carriage house door.
The beauty of living on a spacious plot of land surrounded by a high wall and trees is that nobody out there can see what you’re up to. You can do anything, from conduct an orgy to beat your best friend to death, and you’re protected by your money, you’re in your own insular world that can’t be easily penetrated.
Still, I had to think fast, and act fast, too. I decided not to wrap George in a rug or tarp or something like that. There was no point in placing his corpse in anything that could be traced back to Rensselaer Road in Essex Fells. Best to dump him in his trunk and let the cops try and figure out what had happened to him.
I had another nice thought. If the cops found anything dicey on George—fibers, say, that could be traced to Rensselaer Road—well, it would be easy enough to explain away. George was a good friend. He often stopped by. It would make sense that he carried traces of the place on him. But it didn’t mean anything bad had happened to him here. Hell, what would be my motive? George and I had never even had a disagreement.
I wrapped his head in some old newspaper from the recycling bin. I’d maneuvered the car as close as I could to the carriage house door so that the trail of blood dropped in the space of those two feet or so would be kept to a minimum. But George was one heavy motherfucker. It was a bitch trying to hoist his inert bulk into the boot of the Maxima. I huffed and puffed and grunted, and finally succeeded in getting all of him in there. The whole operation must have taken ten minutes. When I was finished, I slammed the lid down and checked to see if there was any blood residue on the landing.
Nothing. Clear. But when I got back from disposing of George, the heaviest cleanup job of my life would be waiting for me.
Then I changed my mind.
Better get everything cleaned up now, just in case Monica returned unexpectedly and for some reason—a reason I couldn’t even conjure up—decided to make a visit to the carriage house.
I didn’t know if I was thinking straight.
All I knew was that I felt like I had to do it.
I jogged over to the main house and grabbed a bucket, mop, scrub brush, and jug of lemon-scented Clorox from the basement. While doing research for one of my unfinished novels, I’d read somewhere that bleach kills off all traces of DNA. After half filling the bucket with hot water and the rest with the disinfectant, I thoroughly scrubbed the head of the murder weapon and dried it off with an old rag from the tool closet. Then I returned it to the golf bag.
Next, I went to work with the brush on the linoleum floor where George’s head had lain bleeding. Ditto for the flagstone on the landing between the carriage house and the car. When I was through, I dumped the bucket in the bushes behind the carriage house, then dry-mopped the surfaces.
After pouring more bleach over the mop head and brush and then blasting them with scalding water in the basement sink, I deposited the stuff in a corner near the furnace where I’d found them. Then I ran upstairs and undressed.
I looked around my walk-in closet and ripped a black sweatshirt and jeans out of the stacks. I dropped my navy sweats and socks on the floor and donned the new outfit, plus a fresh pair of athletic socks and black Fila sneakers. Then I went down to the basement again, tossed the sweats and sweaty socks into the washing machine, and started the hot regular cycle.
Right. Everything at Rensselaer Road was as clean as a whistle.
22.
I was all set to get rid of George.
I went to the hall closet and pulled out my beat-up black leather jacket, a funky piece I’d owned for ten years but couldn’t bear to part with. I rummaged on the nearby shelf and found a pair of brown part-wool, part-leather driving gloves someone had given me as a Christmas gift and that I’d never worn. Next, I grabbed a black, logoless baseball cap and slapped it on my head. Then I locked the house up and went back outside.<
br />
I pulled the gloves on and jumped into the driver’s seat of George’s Maxima. After wiping down the wheel, I got the hang of the controls, adjusted the seat, depressed the accelerator, and began to roll up the driveway toward the front gate.
When I was just twenty feet from Rensselaer Road, a big splotch of white appeared behind the naked branches of the shrubbery around the mouth of the driveway.
“Can you believe this shit?” I muttered.
Since it wasn’t giving way, I had to back up to let the van in. My heart was doing the rumba in my ribcage.
Whoever was behind the wheel of the van rolled down the window and began waving at me.
I didn’t know what else to do, so I waved back. Being seen in someone else’s car was a problem, especially since that someone else was going to turn up dead. That is, if the van driver ever made the connection between George Addington’s black Nissan Maxima and Richard Marzten . . .
I started moving forward again, then hit the brakes when I was alongside the van and pushed the button that rolled the window down.
Vance Anderson, our general contractor, was in there, all smiles and eager to chitchat.
“Hey there, Mr. Marzten.”
“Hey, Vance . . .”
“Didn’t have time to stop by and pick up that gate yesterday like I said I would.”
“No problem . . .”
The fucking gate had completely slipped my mind. I couldn’t believe my luck. If this guy had shown up only a few minutes earlier . . .
“I’m on my way back there to pick it up now.”
“Go right ahead, pal.”
He nodded at the Maxima. “New wheels, huh?”
I shrugged like it didn’t mean anything. Or that the car wasn’t new—or mine.
“Nice . . . So I’ll work on the gate this weekend and rehang it next week. How’s that sound?”
“Sounds okay to me.” I nodded, thinking of the hot cargo in the trunk and how desperately I needed to get rid of it. “Just let me know what we owe you.”
“Shouldn’t be too much. Figure maybe a hundred, a hundred and twenty-five . . .”
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