The Judas Heart

by Ingrid Black

  “The point is,” I said, “he’s the one that someone wants to die.”

  “And they’re using Kaminski to do it?”

  “Remember how Fisher described the same phenomenon when he spoke of how it was possible for a killer to act out his will using other people as the weapons?”

  “But who could hate Buck Randall that much to want him dead?” asked Fitzgerald. “The only person we knew who hates Randall sufficiently is Kaminski.”

  “But it’s necessary for anyone to hate Randall to want him dead. Iago didn’t hate Desdemona either. He simply wanted to use her death to bring about the downfall of Othello. It was Othello that he despised. So surely it’s Kaminski that our own Iago hates too?”

  “Then let me change the question round slightly. Who hates Kaminski enough to want to turn him into a killer?

  “There was a part in the play early on,” I said, trying to recall exactly how it went, “when Iago was explaining his reasons for wanting revenge. How did it go? Something about Othello getting it on between the sheets with his woman.”

  “It is thought abroad that ‘twixt my sheets he’s done my office,” she quoted effortlessly.

  “That was it. It reminded me of something Kaminski told me that night in my apartment when he showed up. He said Heather was going out with someone else when they first met.”

  “You mean, Kaminski had been doing someone else’s office between the sheets too?”

  “That’s what I’m thinking.” Now I could tell that she was interested. “I just need to know something first.”

  I took out my cellphone and called Lucas Piper. There was the usual series of clicks as the call was diverted to his location.

  “Piper, it’s me, Saxon. Listen, I need your help again.”

  That familiar empty laugh.

  “Who’re you trying to get in touch with now?”

  “It’s nothing like that,” I said. “I’ve got something to tell you. I found Kaminski. He’s been here in Dublin all along.”

  “You found him?”

  He sounded hesitant, like he didn’t believe me.

  “I found Randall too,” I went on. “Leastways, I know he’s here, and I know why he’s here. I think I know at last what’s been going on.”

  “Right,” he said slowly.

  He still didn’t sound sure.

  “So where exactly are they now?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted.

  “But I thought you said –”

  “I know what I said. I had Kaminski, but he’s split on me again. Are you listening to me? Buck Randall didn’t kill Kaminski’s wife.”

  “He didn’t?”

  “He couldn’t have. Nothing he does makes any sense if he really did kill her. Someone just wants Kaminski to believe that he did.”

  “I’m not following you,” Piper said.

  “It’s complicated,” I said. “You have to trust me. Someone’s trying to set up Kaminski. That’s what it’s been about all along.”

  “Who?” he said.

  “That’s the problem. I don’t know. I thought you might be able to help me. I know who it is, I just don’t know who it is, if you understand what I mean.”

  “Saxon, there’s probably not another soul on the planet right now who understands what you mean.”

  “I think Heather was seeing someone in the Bureau before she met Kaminski. I think Kaminski was having an affair with her whilst she was seeing this other guy, and that’s why he killed her. And now he’s making Kaminski pay too.”

  “Saxon, listen to me, you have to stop this,” said Piper. “What you’re doing here, it’s too dangerous. I don’t know what Kaminski’s up to, but he’s got you involved in it too now. He’s been out of his head ever since his wife died, he’s just been waiting to blow, and you don’t want to be near him when he does. You have to walk away.”

  “You were the one who told me Kaminski needed a friend.”

  “It was wrong of me. I shouldn’t have let you get involved. I didn’t think you’d go this far. Listen to yourself. You sound half-crazy. You’ve got to forget about Kaminski before he drags you down with him.”

  “It’s too late for that,” I said. “The only thing I can do now is get to him before he destroys everything. I just need to know, was Heather seeing someone else in the Bureau when she met Kaminski? I need a name, nothing else. You must know. You know everyone.”

  “You’re serious,” he said.

  “I’ve never been more serious in my whole life.”

  “Then you’re crazy,” Piper said. “You need to leave this thing alone before you get hurt. You have no idea what you’re involved with.”

  I was silent suddenly, remembering what Burke had said about Iago.

  He’s like the Pied Piper.

  Piper.

  I almost laughed. It was so simple. You ring an office in New Jersey, the call’s diverted, you have no idea where it really rings.

  “It was you, wasn’t it?” I said.

  “For Christ’s sake, what was me?”

  “It was you Heather was going out with when she met Kaminski. It was you she left to be with him. That’s why you and Kaminski fell out. I’m such a fool. Why, Piper? Why did you kill her?”

  I counted ten cars passing, and a truck whose breaks squealed like an animal in pain as it came to a belated stop at a red light, before he answered. Before he stopped pretending.

  “They betrayed me,” he said simply. “I don’t know if you understand what that’s like, if you can comprehend what it’s like to have your insides torn out by the one person you thought you could trust, but I don’t recommend the feeling.”

  “All she did was fall in love,” I said.

  “I’m not talking about Heather,” he said scornfully. “I’m talking about Kaminski. How could he do that to me? And don’t talk to me about love. She made me puke the way she tried to tell me she couldn’t help herself, she had to be with him. Well, she paid the price.”

  “And Kaminski?”

  “I thought killing her would be enough. I thought that would punish Kaminski enough. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t nearly enough. He had to suffer more. Then he called me and asked for my help in bringing down Randall – after what he’d done to me, he wanted my help! I knew how easy it would be to lead him by the nose. I remembered Randall from the case in New Mexico. He was the perfect fall guy. I could’ve sent Kaminski a leaflet saying Randall was the second gunman in Dallas in ’63 and he’d have believed it. All I had to do was make him think, right until the last moment, that he was getting revenge for Heather’s death, and then finally let him see the truth – that the one who he really should have come after had got clean away, and he’d never have the chance to finish what he’d started. He’d simply sit rotting in a prison cell somewhere, torturing himself with what ifs and guilt at killing Randall. All I had to do was provide the bait and he’d fall right into the trap. ”

  “So that’s why you killed Marsha Reed?”

  “Don’t expect me to feel guilty about that. It’s what she wanted. She was the one who made all the arrangements. I simply played my part.”

  “She thought it was all a pretence,” I said thickly.

  “Be careful what you wish for,” said Piper, “it might just come true.” And I remembered that Fitzgerald had used similar words once about Marsha too.

  Desires can be dangerous things.

  Who knows where they might lead?

  “I’d come across people like Marsha Reed before when I was in the FBI. She wasn’t too hard to find. All I had to do was persuade her she’d be safe, and she was up for it. She thought it was a huge joke. Right until the very end... After that, it was easy to get Kaminski to follow me. I just had to convince him that the man who killed his wife had struck again.”

  “You took the ring from Marsha.”

  “I’d taken the ring from Heather’s body because I wanted it back. I’d bought it for her. She had no right to have it anymore.
Therefore I had to take the ring from Marsha too. It proved a little harder to get at than last time, but it had to be done. After that, it was simply a matter of giving Kaminski repeated reminders that Randall had to be stopped.”

  “The ring in the grave... Rose Downey...”

  “That one didn’t work out so well – she was supposed to die too - but hey, you can’t win ’em all.”

  “And Mark Hudson?”

  “He recognised me when I went round to Becky Corrigan’s house to buy those ridiculous letters she’d been sending to Jenkins Howler,” said Piper bluntly. “I bumped into him as I was leaving. He said hello. What else could I do? I couldn’t risk being IDed.”

  “You didn’t strangle him.”

  “I figured I’d make the MO different in his case. Keep you all on your toes. Besides, I didn’t want too much heat from the police in Dublin. My only purpose was playing out the rest of the game with Kaminski.”

  Some game.

  It wasn’t hard to imagine how things might have gone with Hudson. How maybe he saw Piper and got talking, invited him in for a drink, how Piper slipped something into his glass when he wasn’t looking... Then, when he started feeling groggy, he simply struck him on the back on the head to knock him out, put Hudson’s body in the trunk of his Honda and got Randall to come with him out to Bull Island to dump it, making up some story about how they were going to meet some guy called Peters, that way making sure Randall was seen.

  “You still haven’t won yet,” I said.

  “How do you figure that?”

  “All I have to do is find Kaminski. Once he knows the truth...”

  “But I have Kaminski here with me right now. He’s sleeping in the next room. He has a busy night ahead of him. Why do you think he was so keen to get out from under your watching eye at the fair? I’d arranged the real rendezvous with Randall for him. You can’t imagine how grateful he was when I turned up to make amends and offer my help. Buck’s looking forward to it too. I told him I knew someone who could help him. He seems to have got the idea from your press conference this morning that he’s in some kind of trouble.”

  And he laughed.

  I felt the panic rising inside me.

  “Piper, don’t do it. Randall doesn’t deserve this. Kaminski doesn’t deserve it.”

  “Goodbye, Saxon. No hard feelings,” he said. “I never intended for you to get involved. I tried to warn you off, but once you got involved I knew you’d be useful. You’re even crazier than Kaminski. Once he got you involved, you were bound to reinforce his sense of what he had to do. He just needed a little push. But you know, Saxon, despite everything I always liked you. Maybe that’s why we were always at each other’s throats. We were too alike. And maybe we can still have that drink someday, huh? I’d enjoy that.”

  Those were the last words I ever heard him speak. I never heard his voice again. Never saw his face. In fact, I realised as I stood there that learned, I hadn’t seen his face this whole time except in a picture.

  The last time I’d seen him face to face was ten years ago, and yet he’d been directing my whole life in these last days.

  Now he’d vanished more completely than ever, like Kaminski had vanished into the trees in New England, only Piper knew how to do it properly. He wouldn’t be found again.

  The only other contact I had with him was one night, couple of days later, when I came home to find Marsha Reed’s missing ring dangling from a frayed piece of string and slung around my door handle...

  I took it as a warning from Piper to stay well away from him.

  And the world would keep on turning in his absence, the sun would keep on shining, the rain keep on raining. That was the thing about murder. It didn’t disturb normality, it scarcely even scratched the surface of it. The dead went into the ground, and the living forgot them. Thousands every day, killed a hundred different ways. Lucas Piper had gone, but there were always Lucas Pipers, just as there were always innocent fools like Leon Kaminski and Buck Randall III. None of us amounted to much in the end. A hundred years from now, we’d all be forgotten. There was a strange kind of comfort in it.

  In the meantime, as Kaminski had known and had tried to make real in his wrongheaded way, there was always justice and there was always vengeance. In one way or another, one place or another, I hoped Piper would get what was coming to him.

  **********

  The rest of that evening passed largely in a haze. There were phone calls and questions. I was distantly aware of voices. But something in me had become detached. I couldn’t make sense of what had happened. It was like everything I’d thought was true was now lined up against the wall, laughing at me. Fitzgerald said I shouldn’t blame myself. She said you never really know what these people are thinking, and I thought: Is that what he was now? One of those people? And I realised I didn’t even know anymore what kind of person Lucas Piper was.

  Everything I thought I’d known about him turned out to be as insubstantial as cigar smoke.

  If only, I found myself wishing futilely, I’d been straight with Kaminski from the start. I hadn’t wanted to say too much because Lucas Piper told me that first night I called him how he and Kaminski were no longer friends and I didn’t want to complicate things by admitting to Kaminski how I knew about his wife’s death. Who had told me.

  I didn’t want to make him mad.

  Hence I said nothing.

  All I can say is that it seemed like a good idea at the time.

  Story of my life.

  In fact, I’d go so far as to advise running like a cat out of a rabid dogs’ home from anything which seems like a good idea at the time. Most of the greatest disasters in history have started out that way. But then that was part of what I was too. What I’d done, what I’d become, where I was now – none of it had been part of any plan. There hadn’t been a plan. Maybe that was the problem. Everything in my life had been accidental.

  Even seeing Kaminski in Temple Bar a week ago.

  None of it had been planned.

  Still now, I was finding it difficult to accept that it was the FBI man who’d been leading Kaminski by the nose, ass-like, into the darkness. But Becky Corrigan had confirmed that it was Lucas Piper who’d tried to buy Jenkins Howler’s letters to her aunt.

  One photograph.

  That’s all it had taken in the end to confirm his identity.

  She also told us that it was Hudson’s talking about the time he was questioned by the FBI in New Mexico for the murder of a woman that had got her aunt interested in the whole subject in the first place. Hudson had talked up how easy it would be to end up on Death Row for something that you’d never done. Something in his words tugged at her bleeding heart. Soon after, she’d started writing to Jenkins Howler.

  Strange how everything turned out to be connected in some way.

  By this time, Piper’s fingerprints, which had been wired over from the personnel division at the FBI, had also been matched up to those found all over the inside of the trunk of the car in which Mark Hudson’s rotting body had been found.

  As for Buck Randall, it soon became clear that he was indeed as much of a dupe as Kaminski. The only difference was that he was being paid for his stupidity.

  Fitzgerald had managed to pull up his bank records from back home, and found that round about the same time Kaminski was following Randall round Huntsville, Randall had deposited a cheque for nearly thirty thousand dollars into his account.

  The money came from a company run by Lucas Piper.

  After he was persuaded of the seriousness of the situation, Randall’s brother in Oklahoma confirmed the rest. Before he left Texas, Buck had told him that he’d been given the money by Piper in order to take a job with his electronics company. He didn’t know what kind of job it was. Didn’t know what it entailed. All Piper told him is that it would be well paid and that he would be back in Texas before the end of the summer.

  Randall was in debt. He didn’t feel like he was in any position to
refuse. Besides, it seemed like easy money. All Piper asked of him was that he not reveal his whereabouts to anyone else, the police included, no matter what story they spun him.

  Randall knew Kaminski was after him.

  He knew why.

  He was afraid.

  Lucas Piper’s offer represented a way out. If only he’d known that he was walking straight into Piper’s trap. That in running away from Kaminski he was actually running straight towards him.

  Randall’s brother also confirmed that he’d spoken to Buck a couple times since he arrived in Dublin. Piper was acting strangely, his brother had told him. He’d been booked into some mean rooming house in a part of town far from the bright lights he’d been expecting, and he was being sent out around the city on pointless messages, buying flowers, turning up to meet people who turned out not to be there.

  And Randall’s drinking had also gotten out of control, his brother revealed. He could hear it in Buck’s voice. He wasn’t thinking clearly anymore. Most likely that was Piper’s plan too. To keep Randall so drunk that he didn’t know what the hell was going on half the time.

  Maybe he was drugging him too.

  Randall certainly had no idea Kaminski was in the city, still pursuing him. He was just doing what Piper told him. Despite all that, he was getting suspicious.

  He’d had enough, he told his brother in his last call.

  He wanted to come home.

  He didn’t care about the money anymore.

  How he must’ve panicked when he saw that press conference this morning and realised that he was still being hunted, not just by Kaminski this time, but by every cop in town. I guess he ran to Piper, looking for guidance, wanting to know what was happening. And how grateful he must’ve been when Piper said he knew someone who could help.