Thirty–nine
Beaufort had called the house while the Quinn woman was taking a shower, awfully convenient for his purpose. Carlo had answered the phone, and Carlo was no match for his brains.
Beaufort had said he was calling to invite the two of them out for dinner. It had been meant to show that he acknowledged Gloria as his live-in, what they used to call a “significant other” and what they now called “partner,” which he discovered from hearing the term used that it could mean gay or straight. It was also to quiet down Gloria, who appeared to be less and less trusting of what he might have going on with the Quinn woman.
Beaufort had thought he could detect some new hesitancy in Carlo’s voice as soon as the other man knew it was him on the line. He congratulated himself, that he could read people without even seeing their face.
“Gloria, my partner, I mean, she’s a little shy,” he had said. “I thought it would be good for her if the four of us could meet for dinner. You’re so easy to talk to. Say, tomorrow night?”
“Um … Gosh, Jerry. I’m sorry, but Brigid will be … away?”
“Away? Where’s she going?”
There had been a pause in which Carlo obviously tried to lie, and failed to some degree. “Tampa? Area?” he added, the uptick at the end of each word making it sound more like a question than an answer.
“When will she be back?” Beaufort had asked, and then so as not to sound prying, said, “So we can get a date on the calendar.”
But then there had been some sort of commotion and Carlo had welcomed someone who’d come in that didn’t sound like Brigid. Carlo said he would have to call Beaufort back. Beaufort had said good-bye and hung up the phone, putting two and two together to come up with the realization that Quinn was on to him, though how that could be he didn’t know. All he had known was that “Tampa” must mean she was going to talk to Detective Ian Meadows, and that had been enough to get him on the phone with Yanchak.
Once this was all over he had to take care of Gloria. Over the last few days she hadn’t seemed as perky as she had been at first. He’d had to put her in her place that night when he caught her going through his wallet, right? You’d think she would have gotten over it by now. Maybe flowers were getting a little old. Some Russell Stover’s maybe? Or even a trip up to the Grand Canyon. She said she’d been there, but he’d never seen it. They could take Achilles.
As for wondering what to do about getting rid of Brigid Quinn, it looked like she was doing it for him.
* * *
If there had been any more possibility of talking, Gemma-Kate spoiled it. She had let herself into the house with a stack of books in her arms yelling (at least yelling insofar as Gemma-Kate is capable of expressing her emotions) something I couldn’t quite hear.
I had left the bedroom door open when I went to take a shower, but Carlo, who had put his jeans and shirt back on, was in the living room and knew to close the door. I thought I heard the phone ring, but found the pugs trapped with me and barking madly to get out to Gemma-Kate, though again I couldn’t imagine why. They must know something about her that the rest of us do not, I realized. By the time I had dressed and come out, Carlo had poured three glasses of tawny port and was listening to GK like his life depended on it. How strange for me to think of it that way.
Now much more her subdued self, when Gemma-Kate saw me she halted the conversation to ask, “What’s with the surveillance equipment? If you were any more fortified you’d have drones bombing you for potential ISIS intelligence.”
“Too bad about inheriting the Quinn sarcasm,” I said. “How did you get here and why did you come?”
“Uber,” Gemma-Kate said. “Uncle Carlo says you’re going to Florida tomorrow, so I’ll stay here and you can drop me off in the morning on the way to the airport.” She sat on the couch barricaded with two pugs, at least seven books, and some thick manila folders. “I need to talk to you about In Cold Blood,” she said, answering the second part of my question.
“You told me last week you read it. So what’s the big epiphany?”
Gemma-Kate shot me a look intended to wither, a special look for aging aunts. “I didn’t just read In Cold Blood. I read all of Capote’s works, autobiographies, critical analyses, and whatever was online in archives. Dad helped me get access to the police reports from Florida, too. Capote got a lot of it wrong and I can’t tell whether he did it on purpose or was duped by Perry Smith. I’m totally obsessed.”
“You’ve done more research than I ever did. Did you find out anything new about the Walker family murder?” I asked. “We know they killed the Clutters, but it’s the Walkers who’re still the mystery. That’s the important thing.”
Gemma-Kate shook her head no and sipped her port with a deflated air of regret. “Maybe you can make her understand,” she said to Carlo. “I’m not sure I have the energy.”
Well, that was snarky.
Carlo thought. Gemma-Kate seemed fine with the length of time he was taking. Feeling the post-sex munchies, I took the opportunity to get out a tumbler and spoon myself a generous helping of Cherry Garcia, then took it to my chair where I poured my glass of port over it. By the time I stirred the concoction into a milkshake, Carlo was ready to talk.
“Here’s an example of what Gemma-Kate was telling me before you came in,” he said. “She says Hickock and Smith told Capote they took forty dollars from the Clutter house. That was in their confession as well. But the prison archives show, in a post-conviction hearing for clemency, Hickock admitted they took over a thousand dollars.”
“No shit? That’s a huge difference,” I said, letting the ice cream melt on my spoon and drip back into the glass. “It would account for how they got the money to travel to Mexico and from LA to Miami and back to Las Vegas before they were caught. In those days a grand would do it.” Then I put the glass down, got up from my chair, and went over to the couch because I could see dozens of pink stickies protruding from the pages of my book. I opened it. “You underlined my first edition!”
Ignoring me, Gemma-Kate went to the fridge, got out the container of Cherry Garcia, popped off the lid with her thumb, grabbed a tablespoon that was in the dish drainer, and started eating out of the container, all without losing her train of thought as she came back to the couch.
“And what about Smith changing his confession to take responsibility for all the murders, and Hickock agreed to it, and no one, not a single person, ever pressed him on why. Why did he take responsibility for killing all four people?”
When I heard her mention a confession I gave up on expressing outrage over the desecration of my book and went to fetch the sketch from my office and the letter from my carry-on. I put them on the coffee table in front of her. “You get a sticky note anywhere near these and you die,” I said.
Gemma-Kate gazed first at the sketch and then at the letter, and then at me with all her questions in her eyes. I’ll be damned if she didn’t lose her composure for the first time ever, her voice trembling as she said, “Why didn’t you show me this when I was here the first time?”
Carlo explained that he wanted to surprise me with the sketch as an anniversary present, and that we didn’t know about the letter until the framer found it.
“Do you know what this means?” she asked.
I was enjoying too much breaking through her usual cool lack of affect to let the moment go. I let her dangle there before saying, “With you coming in the door without knocking I’m thinking it means I need to have the locks changed before your uncle Carlo and I want to make love again.”
Gemma-Kate gazed at the letter the way some people would look at a sliver of the true cross. “That does it. I’m writing a book. Do you have the confession?”
“That’s one of the reasons I’m going to Florida tomorrow, to talk to the detective who talked to the priest.”
Like a child hearing that her parents were going to leave her with the babysitter while they went off to Disney World, Gemma-Kate’s plaint
ive cry startled the pugs from their slumber. “Let me come!”
On top of the cry Carlo said, “That’s right, Gemma-Kate’s starting in about this business made me forget. While you were in the shower Jerry Nolan … whatever his name is … called.”
“About what?”
“He asked if we wanted to go out to dinner with Gloria and him.”
“What did you say?”
“I said I thought you were going to Florida?”
“Oh, Carlo. No.”
“I was taken off guard.”
I said to Gemma-Kate, “If Beaufort is guilty and it has to do with me, and if he has the connections he could have, he’ll send someone after me. I can deal with that. But if he comes here to quiz Carlo—”
“Excuse me—” Carlo started.
“I should stay here until you’re back,” Gemma-Kate said, looking at me.
“Look, I hardly need—” Carlo started again.
“I could skip a few classes,” she continued as if Carlo hadn’t spoken.
I considered. “What if he takes you off guard again?” I asked, finally addressing Carlo.
Carlo spluttered. I didn’t recall seeing him lose control before, except for that time he got upset with Gemma-Kate and me and threw a book at the wall. “I’m a six-foot-three man,” he nearly bellowed.
Gemma-Kate finally acknowledged him. “As opposed to what, a short woman? Aunt Brigid, tell him how Dad trained me.”
“You mean about breaking a collarbone? She can break your collarbone,” I said to Carlo. “Or push the bridge of your nose into your brain. What’s that bone called, GK?”
“Nasal bone.”
“Duh.”
“Oh for God’s sake, she can’t even reach it,” Carlo shouted and then looked embarrassed at letting himself be in the same room as this exchange.
“That Nolan is short,” Gemma-Kate said.
“I will not contribute to this inane reasoning. No, no, no, and no,” Carlo said. “Look at me. Do I look like the child in Home Alone? Nothing is going to happen in the seventy-two hours you’re away.”
“I’m here already,” Gemma-Kate said, as if that clinched it.
Carlo glared at me. It was a lot different from his gaze of just an hour before.
“Can I talk you into staying in the house?” I asked, thinking of all the security I’d installed.
He still looked sheepish but said, “With the doors locked.”
“And you won’t let Beaufort in no matter how he tries to con you? You don’t know anything about me going to investigate my connection to him, right?”
Carlo didn’t grace that with an answer. Against my better instincts, and in light of how adorable he was to me at that moment, I gave in.
Except for one last shot. Knowing how she thought, I said to Gemma-Kate, “Do not, do not get involved with this. Understand?”
Gemma-Kate tried to look innocent and failed. “Nobody hurts Uncle Carlo,” she said, batting her round blue eyes.
“Nice act,” I said, batting her back. “I hear you’ve tried anything with this guy and I’ll report to the university that you lied about being an Arizona resident.” Ah, threats, part of the Quinn family dynamic.
Forty
When I had spoken to Detective Meadows on the phone from Tucson, I had identified myself, and told him about my interest in the Walker case and about looking into drug cases on the west coast of Florida in the eighties. Had he been working there then? He said yes. I asked if he knew the name Jeremiah Beaufort, and he said no. He said he could tell me what he knew, but seemed to be more interested in the Walker case. He asked why I was interested. I said that I had a lead on a new confession purported to have been written by Richard Hickock shortly before his execution, and that I suspected the confession would show, if not the sole responsibility for the killing of the Walker family, then some involvement that he had not revealed.
Meadows didn’t sound surprised about a confession, but he did say, “Written?” as if that was a piece of the puzzle he had not had. He wanted to know where the confession was, and I told him I didn’t have it yet, and was wondering if he did. We danced around like that a bit, him sounding cagey, which was odd. Most investigators are happy to talk about cases, especially if they’re cold and talking won’t destroy the case. Maybe he was working on a book. Maybe my vague comments about a written confession intrigued him. Maybe it was just because he didn’t know me from Adam. If I wanted to come to Sarasota, he said, he’d show me his files. And we could discuss the drug activity, too.
I flew into Tampa, picked up a rental car, and met Meadows at what appeared to be his favorite office, a stool at the end of the bar in the Pelican Pub. He told me there about how he, too, had read the request by Hickock to see a priest. “Asking for a priest felt suspicious, and I wondered if he might have confessed to killing the Walkers, thinking he could ask the priest to keep the seal of confession because he was slated to die anyway. So after the DNA testing came up with nothing, I tracked down the name of the priest through the prison chaplain from that time. His name was Victor Santangelo,” Meadows said.
“I know,” I said. He looked surprised, like he thought that was something only he knew. I explained my husband’s involvement.
“You know someone who was tight with Santangelo?” Meadows looked at me like I was two degrees of separation from God. “I was certain he could give me something substantial. Unfortunately, he’s dead. He was in the final stage of pancreatic cancer, and before I could get up to the monastery, he was gone.”
“Carlo doesn’t have anything of use,” I said. “So with Santangelo’s death you’re at another dead end.”
“I can see it in your eyes, you’re suspicious that it wasn’t natural. Even if he was very old and dying.”
“Old, sick, what have you, the timing sounds a little too coincidental,” I said. “Just before you could get up there to talk to him.”
“I’m still going up. Maybe they know something up there.”
“Like who Santangelo was in contact with other than you and my husband?”
“Bingo.”
He looked at me expectantly, so I gave him what he was looking for. “But if there’s something in writing…”
Meadows wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Changes everything.” His eyes drifted off like he was calculating something. “Could be a very valuable thing,” he said, and the way he said it made me think of eBay or a large advance on royalties, but Carlo would call that uncharitable. “Now what makes you think there’s something in writing?”
I hesitated, but thinking of what I wanted from him in the way of history on Beaufort, I took Hickock’s letter out of my tote and laid it on the bar, safely away from the condensation on his glass.
Meadows read the letter. Either he was a slow reader or he went over it several times before finally admitting, “I knew it. This is the biggest thing since I got Hickock’s and Smith’s bodies exhumed.”
I nodded. “This could be the biggest thing ever.”
Meadows was smart enough to not ask if he could keep the letter. I asked if I could join him when he went to visit the abbot. We talked a bit more about what he knew, and he corroborated the progression of Hickock and Smith down to Miami, then their stopping for a couple of days in Sarasota around the time the Walkers were killed. Then he finished his drink and we agreed to meet at his office the next day to go over the files he had. Yes, yes, he said, the drug cases, too. He offered to drop me off at my hotel, but I told him I had a rental car and would just as soon have another glass of wine to relax after the long flight.
So he left first. I watched him go out the front door and start to turn left to where I knew he had parked his car. I looked down at the check he had signed, and that was when I heard that old noise of a car backfiring, only this was three cars all backfiring in succession. My head jerked back up to see the rear end of a white car going past the front window, and Meadows thrown backward against the plate gla
ss. He slid down the glass leaving a trail of blood. The window didn’t break because Meadows had stopped the bullets. Must have been small-caliber semiautomatic and the assassin was a good shot.
I often wonder whether if I had left with him, I’d be among the dead now, too.
Forty–one
The following afternoon, Beaufort was on the phone with Yanchak again, though this time not as confident.
Yanchak was saying, “So you know already?”
“News travels faster these days. It was broadcast within less than an hour. How did you do it?”
“Didn’t the news tell you?”
“All they know right now, at least according to the reports they gave CNN, is that shots were heard, no one else in sight at the time. All they showed on camera was blood on the window and the sidewalk.”
“Drive-by. We had to set it up in advance to make sure it was clean.”
“What do you mean set it up? Didn’t I tell you the best place and time to get him was at that bar?”
“Excuse me, but I didn’t want to take a chance. I had someone watching his movements. He was in his usual watering hole where we’d been scoping him out. It’s off the beaten path. No one saw. Not even the bartender. Or if he did, he knows better than to talk.”
“Are you sure he was dead when you left?”
“Oh yeah, got in a lucky head shot.”
“Not exactly subtle. You’re sure no one saw?” Beaufort asked.
“The only other patron in the place was some woman sitting at the bar. Maybe it was his wife. Maybe it was a stranger he was hitting on.”
That old acid pang stabbed Beaufort’s gut. “What did she look like?”
“Hard to tell. Small? You realize we’re talking drive-by shooting, right? White ponytail. Yeah, ponytail is certain.”
Beaufort took a deep breath and let it out with a yell. “You imbecile. That was the woman you were supposed to kill in Tucson. That job you botched. You were supposed to get Meadows before he talked to her. Now who knows what she knows?”
We Were Killers Once Page 21