Alex Glauberman Mysteries Vol 1-3

by Dick Cluster

  “A nice girl could have saved him,” Graham Johnston declared. His gloved hands seemed to be squeezing something round, like a ball, that wasn’t there. “A nice girl could have given him a proper sense of himself.”

  “Caroline?” Alex started to ask, but Johnston stopped what he’d been doing with his hands and instead picked a broken branch from the snow and pointed through the smoke. Alex felt Suzanne stiffen, and understood whom he was talking about then.

  “She let him destroy himself,” Johnston said. “She had no strength, no background, no backbone. And then when she saw where he was headed, she ran off like a rat leaving a ship.”

  In the kitchen on Brattle Street, Alex had noticed a dissociation between Johnston’s tone and his words. That break, that lack of connection, was even stronger now. Close your eyes and let him drone on, Alex thought, and we might be in a boardroom. He might be lecturing about plans on an easel, a pointer the only weapon those hands had ever held. Open your eyes and hear the words, though, and the hatred could cut like the fire through snow and frozen ground.

  “When she heard about the Davis girl, oh yes, she came running. No, not running. I’d say swimming, cruising toward the scent of blood like a shark. And then she murdered him.”

  “I asked about Caroline Davis,” Alex said coldly. He kept the shotgun barrel level and his finger not far from the trigger. He thought that Johnston truly did not like to be seen as a bloodthirsty bastard. Possibly he was grateful, right now, for a chance to explain. Probably he was telling the truth as he saw it. Alex had no intention of setting off the powder, of propelling birdshot into his heart. He did want Johnston’s confession to continue flowing across the crackling fire and the black smoke in these winter woods.

  “The Davis girl was a troublemaker, making trouble was in her blood. Like you, she stuck her nose in something that had nothing to do with her. Why was it her business, the death of a Puerto Rican whore? It was my business because I was trying to save my son.”

  “How did you know Caroline was investigating Nilda’s disappearance? Did Scat come to you when he found that out?”

  “She came to me, just as you did. She told me Scat and Paul Jakes had murdered this Fernandez woman, one of the string that worked for them. She said she was coming to me before she went to the police. Her attitude was superior, condescending even. She didn’t want money, opportunity, the way Paul did. She wanted justice, she did. She meant she wanted us disgraced, shamed. She said she thought I ought to know, I ought to try to persuade Scat to turn state’s evidence. The fact is she had no proof, I could see that, she had no proof, not yet. She held out to me the hope that if Scat talked to the police, the crime would turn out really to have been Paul’s.”

  “But you didn’t believe it.” Suzanne’s voice came out clear, if thin. She was going to be okay. “You never had any faith in him, never showed any faith in him at all. You don’t even know that he protected you, protected you and your reputation, God knows why, right down till the end. He wouldn’t tell me who it was that put the body in the road.”

  Johnston rocked as if trying to get to his feet, to get at her despite the shotgun and the fire and the cord around his legs. He sank back into the snow, but again made a circle with his hands, and squeezed. Had he strangled Caroline Davis, cut off her air with those soft, fleshy hands? “It was all my doing,” he said to Alex. “Not my boy’s. I told him Paul was going to meet with an automobile accident. I showed him the pictures Paul had been holding over me. I showed him how Paul had been playing with him, using him all these years. Perhaps I did lack faith. Without a personal motive, hatred, I feared he wouldn’t have the strength for what needed to be done.”

  “And then he found out Caroline was going to be the victim, not Paul?” Alex asked. He was puzzled, and he felt Suzanne shiver, and in his puzzlement and concern he put the stock of the gun into the snow and reached to put more branches across the flames. Johnston answered regardless. Once started, he wasn’t going to stop.

  “Only when he helped me get her out of my car and lay her there on the road. She was already dead then, at least I think she was. She was stupid to let me catch her the way I did. The young are always too trusting. Scat turned to me with a wild face, and he said to me, ‘Why her?’ ”

  A lost look, an expression of sadness, finally came over Graham Johnston’s face— as if the cherub had found himself out past curfew, locked for the night outside of heaven, amid wind and snow and flame. “I said, ‘Scatty, she’s been spying on you. She has proof you and Paul killed that other girl and dumped her body in the pond. He said— I’ll always hear it— he said, ‘Oh, Dad, you ultimate fuck-up, Nell killed herself. Paul has the goddamn suicide note, if anybody needs any proof. All we did was bury her, hush it up. We got rid of her body so nobody would know.’

  “It was too late then, though, wasn’t it?” Graham Johnston went on, and now he spread his hands, palms up in appeal, and there was almost a note of pleading in his voice. “My boy might have argued then, but he didn’t, he did what he was told. In spite of everything, I think he appreciated that I had done this, even if mistakenly, for him.”

  It was all making sense to Alex, a depressingly senseless kind of sense. He reached for another branch, to poke at the fire, to make the mass of half-burned wood more compact so he could lay more branches across the top before the coals at the bottom grew cold. Suddenly Suzanne was off his lap, out of his reach, down on her right knee in the snow. She had the butt of the shotgun up against her right shoulder, her good shoulder, and the barrel in her left hand, propped by the elbow on her upraised left knee. She looked like a painting, a soldier taking aim during a bleak winter’s campaign.

  Alex stood on one leg and tried to kick at the barrel before her trigger finger could move. The exploding shell thundered as he fell. When the echo died, he heard rather than saw the last shell being pumped into place. He forced himself up out of the clinging snow. “Don’t!” he screamed, but he saw that Suzanne was braced in firing position again. He looked for Graham Johnston, slumped toward the firepit, but Johnston wasn’t there. He was three yards off, trying to get farther in a half-crawl, half-slither through the white drifts and the gray and black trunks of the trees. Suzanne’s first shot must have gone wide. Alex’s kick must have done the job. Now he saw her aim and say something, but whatever it was, he couldn’t hear it. Her words were drowned under the sound of a snowmobile, maybe two. She dropped the shotgun and put both hands to her mouth.

  Alex stood up slowly, walked warily toward her, then let the gun lie where it had fallen, put his arm around her waist, and led her to sit in front of the fire again. Her face was close to his, the flames crackling close to her blanched cheeks, the light of the fire reflected in her dark eyes. “It’s like he’s this big, bloodthirsty tick, all swelled up,” she said. Her voice came out shaky but urgent. “A big tick that I just wanted to reach out and burn it off the dog. You stopped me, I guess I’m glad. Poor Scat, he was such a bastard, but he learned his ways from that man.”

  “You did kill Scat?” Alex asked softly.

  “I did,” she admitted finally. “It started out as self-defense. That story Natalie told you, about Scat wanting to show he was the man, the boss, it really happened, only it happened between Scat and me. Like my letting him fuck me would show he was still in control, it wasn’t me trying to lead him to some kind of safety, some kind of peace, but him throwing his weight round all over again… I don’t know… I wasn’t going through that. He picked up the knife, but you saw me just now, I can’t tell you it was only self-defense. Once I had the knife, it was… I was the knife, a dagger, rage, I was God. I thought I’d never stop stabbing him, ever, and he was never going to stop pleading and moaning. When I snapped out of it…”

  She didn’t get to finish the sentence. The snowmobiles roared in like cavalry, like whinnying horses charging and trampling all obstacles underfoot. They didn’t stop on the trail, but twisted wildly through the trees. Then b
oth black-jacketed drivers turned down their throttles and jumped from their machines, rifles at the ready in their hands. One of them was the young policeman from Jericho’s car number 3. The other was Sergeant Trevisone. “It’s all right, Sergeant,” Alex called. “Nobody’s armed anymore.”

  Leaving their engines running, the two policemen walked in opposite directions through the snow. The local one took possession of Graham Johnston. Trevisone stood over Alex and Suzanne, staring down fixedly. He said, “Time to hand her over to me.”

  25. COURTS OF LAW

  “Jesus Christ, Glauberman,” Trevisone said Monday morning, looking over Alex’s statement again before handing it back for Alex to sign. “You study all this oriental martial arts. Don’t they teach you to think inside your opponent’s head?”

  “Too many opponents,” Alex said. “Too many heads. And you told him I was in touch with Dennis, right? So after I left him behind, he went to Dennis, claimed he had to find me, life-and-death. Dennis told him I was going to the cabin. I’d already made the mistake of telling him I was going to get Suzanne.”

  Alex admitted that mistake easily. It had been stupid, but it had also forced Graham Johnston to take a chance. Now Alex got to be the lucky kid, the amateur, and Trevisone got to be the gruff grandfather, the one from Peter and the Wolf.

  However, Alex understood that all this was beside the point. The important thing Trevisone had said was about the oriental arts. Alex had not tried to shield Suzanne, but he’d done his best to skip lightly over what Natalie had done. So he’d left Terry out of his story. Trevisone wanted to indicate that he hadn’t been fooled, that he’d done his own homework in the past few days. Therefore Alex had a further admission to make.

  “I got led around by the nose a lot,” he said. “Those guys in the dime-store masks I told your man O’Connor about, the way they found me at my shop and again at the hotel? I didn’t make them up. But one of them could’ve been Natalie Cooper, the other could’ve been Tommy Lutrello. They wanted to keep me moving, keep me involved. The same as Suzanne’s story about escaping from the guy with the syringe.”

  “Yeah,” Trevisone agreed. “You swallowed all that. Well, it took guts, the one girl rolling the other down the steps so the bruises would be real. Going ahead with it even when her shoulder popped out.”

  “Did they have any choice?” Alex asked. “I mean, how deep into the Johnston family’s affairs would you have dug on your own?”

  Not very deep, was the most likely answer. It wasn’t my job to investigate a homicide in New Hampshire, Trevisone could say now, but he’d be too proud for that. Maybe, if Suzanne had turned herself in right away, he would have looked into what she claimed Scat had done. Maybe he could have persuaded a colleague in New Hampshire to do so. But most likely not. Instead, it would have been up to Suzanne’s lawyer to prepare that kind of defense. Only in the wild claims of Suzanne Lutrello, on trial what for what was indisputably murder, would Caroline Davis’s death have been anything but an accident in the eyes of the law.

  Trevisone didn’t answer. He proceeded as if carrying on a conversation with himself. “They wanted to pin the Johnston kid’s murder on whoever turned out to be involved with him in running down the Davis girl. But there wasn’t going to be any evidence. I don’t see how that was going to work.”

  “No,” Alex agreed. “It probably wasn’t.” If Caroline’s killer had not been Scat’s father, though, maybe it would have, who could say? “By the way, that hole in my windshield, that note I gave you? That was really Johnston’s work, am I right?”

  “Uh-huh. He came in and owned up to that the same day. Embarrassed as all hell, or that’s how he seemed. But helping us to do our job, that’s what he meant. He hasn’t owned up to much else, if you’re asking me how he’s going to plead.”

  “No,” Alex said, and he imagined himself on a New Hampshire witness stand, under cross-examination: And could you describe for the court the exact circumstances under which this alleged confession was made by my client? However, that wasn’t what he’d come in today to find out. He waited, and then he asked the question that Trevisone might be willing to answer, the one that had brought him here, in person, rather than submitting the statement through the mail. “What do you think is going to happen to Suzanne?”

  Trevisone leaned back in his chair and scanned the small, dusty office — its cluttered bulletin board, its insurance-company calendar, its single window and pale green walls. He stroked his mustache just once, then linked his hands and tried to crack his knuckles, which gave off no sounds. “This is the station house,” he told Alex, as if Alex might be lost. “The county courthouse was over by Lechmere, last I heard. Over there, the DA decides about charges and prosecution. A jury decides on matters of fact. A judge decides about matters of law. What do you want me to tell you— who I like if it’s Saugus High against Andover Academy, if it’s North Cambridge against Brattle Street? She stabbed a guy to death. She could stab another guy. She says it was self-defense. That’s the part for a jury to decide. Considering what the jury hears about everything that’s supposed to have happened up in New Hampshire before and since… yeah, I think the jury’ll believe her, now. Whether to bother prosecuting, whether it’s involuntary manslaughter or second-degree murder or whatever the hell… get your downtown lawyer friend to talk to the DA.”

  “I will,” Alex said. He wondered again about the untold hurts and disappointments in Trevisone’s life. He stood up. Was he supposed to just leave or to offer, man-to-man, to shake hands?

  “One thing.” Trevisone held him with a pointing finger. “Tell me, were you glad when the police showed up to cart the guilty and the wounded away?”

  “Yeah. I was glad. And the police were glad to have me to be following, and to find Meredith to tell them which way to go.”

  * * *

  Alex left the police station and walked five blocks to Petros’s. There was hardly any snow or ice left, but the air was just as cold as the week before. He still felt himself bracing against the climate, against the air that kept him alive. But he brought what was, under the circumstances, the best news. He found Natalie waiting for him. He had invited Meredith, too, but Meredith had felt that this part was between him and Natalie, only them. Natalie went to the counter and ordered, then sat down across the table from him.

  “Putting together what Bernie and Trevisone said,” Alex told her, “it looks pretty good. Probably a plea bargain and probation.” Natalie didn’t react. Her skin seemed slack, her eyes dull for the first time. Drained, Alex thought. Used up. She can afford to feel that way now. She waited for the coffee to be served.

  “Thank you,” she told the waitress. She didn’t thank Alex, directly. She just said, “If it will make you feel better, this is your chance to sit here and call me names.”

  “You’re buying,” Alex answered. “It’s not good manners to bite the hand that feeds. Just tell me why you did it the way you did.”

  “You’ve got a daughter. In fact, it was your daughter that planted the seed of the idea.” Natalie dropped her eyes, took a long swallow of her coffee. She made a face that probably meant she had burned her mouth. Then her jaw straightened and her eyes got their intensity back. “Suppose Maria got… well, suppose she was the one that got the cancer, and you nursed her through it, back to health, and then somebody, your ex-wife, wanted to take her away. I guess that’s not exact. ‘Strong analogy, but not quite precise,’ that’s what Meredith would say. I wasn’t her mother, or her mammy— and I wasn’t any doctor either, just a counselor. But here was somebody in that place that I made the difference to, you understand? And so we were friends, but it wasn’t just like friends. Maybe I’m not on top of all my reasons. What I know is that she lost control, like she says, for one bad minute. If I was there, I could’ve stopped her, but I wasn’t there. So what do I do? Sit back and watch her future get grabbed away? What was it going to do to her, to be sent up to Framingham, even a couple years, locked up, t
reated like shit one more time?”

  Old debates about punishment and deterrence floated through Alex’s mind, but he brushed them away. As Trevisone said, that was for the judge and jury to decide. “Did it occur to you,” he asked Natalie, “that she started out trying to do for Scat what you had already done for her? That the feeling she had to go up there, he needed her— that she was trying to pay you back, to pass on the favor to somebody else?”

  “Maybe. She should’ve picked somebody more deserving, is all I can say. I always had a hard time remembering she really used to be in love with the guy.” Natalie went back to her coffee, but sipped slowly and meditatively this time. “Whatever,” she said finally. “It ended up by her stabbing him and then running away. She called me right away, at work. We had to figure out something to do. The idea was to get you into it. Number one, for you to find out enough to convince the cops that Scat was a murderer or accessory to murder, so they would go easy on Suzanne. And number two, to get them thinking that maybe whoever else killed Caroline then turned on Scat. Somewhere along in there I got the idea of making it look like this double murderer person was still after Suzanne, trying to make her number three. If you believed that, the police might believe you.”

  Alex didn’t like it, but he understood exactly what she meant. In a pinch, you had to fashion something that would work out of the parts at hand. “But even then,” he said, “You didn’t trust me to do it myself. You were afraid I might find out too much, find out the wrong thing?”