Till the End of Tom

by Gillian Roberts

  Did he really have to ask? The police had questioned Zachary, that was why.

  He really did have to ask, and he did. “Do you have more about Cornelius?”

  Cornelius. The one we were being paid to investigate.

  He had to ask more. “New ideas?”

  He was so single-minded, so annoyingly linear. Now, he waited, smiling expectantly. “Cornelius? New ideas? Yes,” I said. It was partly true. Maybe only one percent had to do with Cornelius, but that was a part. “I think we should find out about that meeting with the lawyer Monday morning. How did it go? Maybe Cornelius hung around and saw him go buy the tea and drugged him.”

  “Why would he? What did he have to gain by something that inept? That wasn’t what killed the man.”

  “Unless it made him trip and fall, which it most definitely could have done.”

  “Was he prescient? Drugged the tea because he knew the man would then climb a marble staircase he could fall down?”

  I admit it sounded foolish when said out loud. I tried a new tack. “It wouldn’t hurt to know whether the meeting left Cornelius expecting to get zilch—no prenup, no changed will because his fiancée is cuckoo—or expecting to become a multimillionaire real-estate tycoon someday. Talk about a motive!”

  This time, Mackenzie gave a half-nod, half-shake that meant grudging, incomplete agreement.

  “Penelope will know the name of the lawyer,” I said. “And they’d talk to you. Nothing confidential, simply whether or not the meeting happened.”

  He sighed.

  I was failing to impress him with my deductive—or was it inductive—powers. I tried harder. “You have to take into account that so far, we’re relying on what Penelope chooses to feed us about the two men’s relationship.”

  I heard a nice grunt of assent from my partner, but his attention had wandered back to the antique pocket watches on his computer screen.

  “And so, in order to do what our client wants, that is, to ascertain Cornelius’s guilt, I’d have to eliminate other potential suspects.”

  C.K.’s eyes were doing the visual equivalent of holding their breath, refusing to budge, but he finally forced his gaze from the screen to my direction. “Who are these other suspects?” he asked. “There’s only one, far as I can see. Penelope’s got a bug up her about Cornelius. Nobody else thinks he’s involved. They might think he’s contemptible, but that doesn’t make him a killer.”

  “He had millions at stake. But there’s also Nina Severin. She’s way better off as his widow than she’d have been as his ex.”

  “That may be true, but the idea of her following him into the school and beaning him there—does that make sense? There’s a wide world of possible places to get rid of your husband, particularly when you’ve got money, so why there? Why that way?”

  Of course it didn’t make sense, but neither did the Zachary scenario, not in the way things make sense in your emotional core. “Maybe that’s the brilliance of the plan,” I finally said. “To make it so illogical that no theories make sense, and yet the man is dead.”

  Mackenzie rolled his blue eyes.

  I rushed on. “And speaking of rich, speaking of opportunities, here’s something that bugs me. Why us? Of all the investigators in all the world . . . why choose us? Just because Sasha knew me? That doesn’t make sense. A man that rich would research his options, find the most famous detective, whoever was considered the best. Once I found out Severin was Zachary’s father, I thought he might have come because of his son. That it wasn’t about the phone calls at all. But after hearing Zach’s mother, it’s obvious that parenting didn’t matter much to Tom Severin. Sounded more as if he was finished with Zach.”

  That got no response.

  “Anyway, if we’re still employed, I owe it to Penelope to ask a few questions,” I said.

  “Questions about how it doesn’t make sense to arrest Zachary?”

  “I never said that. But our client thinks Cornelius is behind this, so that’s what I’m trying to find out. If in the meantime, I happen to clear Zachary’s name—where’s the harm in that?”

  He grinned. “It veers toward the unethical side of the fence to pursue alternate goals on a client’s dime.”

  I raised my eyebrows and tried for Penelope-like authority. “Indeed! If that were what I was doing. But I’m simply trying to get to the truth, to be as comprehensive as possible. Can’t blame me for trying extra-hard, can you?”

  He had an oddly bemused expression.

  “What?” I asked.

  “You ever realize how much you’ve picked up from your students? Like that explanation, right now. That excuse was sufficiently self-serving and twisted and phrased so as to avoid the charge I made altogether to have been written by one of your little darlings.” He returned to his screen.

  Teaching is a give and take. They learn from me and I learn from them. I made a list of questions including who had been with Tom Severin when he bought the tea, and where he had bought it, and what he had done after his morning meeting at the lawyer’s office, and what, if possible, the meeting was about, and what Carole Wallenberg had thought her son might have told me about her, and what Nina the widow Severin was like. And then I thought of another question, the biggie of who Tomas Severin had truly been. Aside from his business acumen and his astounding monetary assets—who? What if there was no underlying logic, and the school setting had simply been a lucky break for someone who saw the man walk into the building? What if that someone had nothing to do with the family circle, but was an enraged acquaintance, or someone who felt personally harmed by Severin’s sale of his companies?

  The possibilities were endless. I could only hope that Penelope’s purse was equally vast.

  * * *

  Thirteen

  * * *

  * * *

  I told Mackenzie about the black sedan, hoping he’d treat it as the imaginings of a ninny, discount it, say something like, “You’re being silly.” All the things I hate for him to think, let alone say, I wanted him to think and say. Instead, he said to be careful. Be alert. And most important, get the license number. He didn’t mention the obvious, that I should have thought of that myself and have done that already. He is a kind man.

  So when I went outside, and started walking home down Market Street, I was both careful and alert.

  And I saw it again.

  I was nowhere near school now, and in fact, was headed in a completely different direction from it.

  He was after me.

  I kept my hand on my bag, on a notepad and pen, and I managed to see and write down the first three numbers before the car was too far away.

  But on the next block, it was back. I grabbed the notebook again, but I needn’t have hurried, because the car slowed down, then pulled into a parking space at the curb.

  I considered turning around and running toward the office, but instead, doubled my pace, dropped the notebook back into my bag, and grabbed my cell phone while I looked for a safe harbor. The pickings were slim: a restaurant not yet open for the evening meal, a locked up realtor’s office, a dusty sporting goods shop that looked so deserted I was sure it was a front for something and not a place to find protection.

  A luncheonette across the street was no more prepossessing than the sporting goods shop, but it was open and might at least have more people and better lighting. I crossed the street against the light, horns honking as I dodged and ran. I pushed open the door—and he barreled in behind me.

  I didn’t even have time to use my phone. “Call the po—”

  “Wait! Don’t!”

  I squelched myself mid-shout and turned around.

  He looked puzzled. And familiar.

  Cornelius.

  I clutched the phone and waved it in front of him. “What are you doing, following me around? You want to scare me, but you aren’t!”

  “You sure? You look scared right now. And why did you run across traffic to come here? That’s not safe! Do you love t
his place that much?”

  The restaurant looked as if it had been sprayed with grease, and every inhalation was the equivalent of an oil and lube job. A lone customer sat at the counter, and two or three more were in the leatherette booths lining the other wall. They seemed permanent, shell-shocked fixtures vacantly pleased that entertainment had popped through the door.

  “Lady, are you all right? He bothering you?” The burly man behind the counter looked willing to go for Cornelius’s throat. I felt vindicated in my choice of safe harbors, but I assured him that I was fine.

  “What do you want?” I asked Cornelius in my most authoritarian teacher voice, one I kept in my arsenal but almost never use.

  “I want to talk to you.” His voice wasn’t surly or intimidating. It was, in fact, mild and matter-of-fact.

  “Then why stalk me? My God—outside the school, circling the block, tracking me on the street, what on earth did you have in mind?”

  “Finding a parking spot. This city gets worse every year. I thought in front of your school, but then I saw it was a loading zone, and then I couldn’t find anything till right now.”

  “Did you ever hear of honking? Letting me know you were trying to reach me?”

  “Didn’t want to scare you.”

  “You wanna booth or what?” the man behind the counter asked. His apron looked like the “before” part of a detergent ad.

  I reminded myself that Cornelius was a con man, currently charming an old and addled woman out of her property. I was to ignore the open innocence carefully arranged on his face, the suggestion that he wouldn’t even park illegally, let alone do anything more malicious. “What do you want to talk to me about?” I asked.

  His forehead wrinkled in puzzlement, real or feigned, and he waved his arms. “Everything. What’s going on. Why you’re checking up on me.”

  “Lady?” the man behind the counter said. “This ain’t a museum or something. The booths and stools are for sitting on.”

  “A booth,” Cornelius said softly. “More privacy, okay?”

  I shrugged, and picked the cleanest looking one and tried not to look at the ripped part of the vinyl, or think of what microorganisms dwelled inside it.

  “Two coffees,” Cornelius told the man. Then he looked at me. “Okay?” He was polite, or pretended to be. But of course, that would be part of a paid escort’s bag of tricks.

  I waited, my hand still on the telephone, even though I had no idea what I would have said to the dispatcher. “A man wants to talk to me and he ordered coffee for me without asking first!” lacked a certain urgency.

  “I know you’re checking around about me,” Cornelius said. “And I resent it.”

  “It’s what I do.”

  “I thought you taught.”

  “That, too.”

  He bit at his bottom lip. That first impression I’d had of him, that he wasn’t particularly bright, was reinforced as he deliberated, rubbing his hand over his chin, wrinkling his brow. His expressions suggested that thinking hard wasn’t something he attempted too often.

  “You spoke with Georgeanne,” I suggested.

  He nodded. “She called me right after you visited her.”

  Interesting. I’d gotten the distinct impression—she made sure I got it—that they were casual friends of long ago, not currently close at all. Penelope’s theory that the two of them were in cahoots might have more weight and truth than I’d allowed it.

  “Why me?” he asked.

  “Not you,” I said. “Not you exclusively or for any specific reason. We’re talking to everybody.”

  “No. You aren’t. Or at least you aren’t listening to them. And that includes Ingrid. You didn’t really talk with her or you’d stop thinking I’m some kind of criminal. She trusts me. She knows she can.” For the second time, he added sugar to his coffee. I wasn’t sure if it was intentional or not.

  “I know that Ingrid doesn’t think you’ve done anything wrong,” I said. “She thinks a woman did it. Do you know who she meant?”

  He stirred the coffee and looked unhappy with the question. “No,” he finally said. “And I wouldn’t want to get anybody in trouble by guessing.”

  “People are already in trouble. One of them is dead.”

  “Nina, then.”

  “Who?”

  “Nina Severin. Tom’s wife.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Ingrid said stuff about drugs. About knowing about them.”

  “Tom’s wife is addicted, or what?”

  “Not her—her brother. I don’t know if he was addicted or not, but he was in prison for being involved with the stuff. He’s out now, and . . .” He shrugged. “He’s not an okay guy, and Nina . . . she’s crazy lately. She won’t stop talking about Tom or screaming at him. I mean I guess now, he’s dead, sure, she stopped, but she would call the house and scream at anybody who answered the phone. It didn’t even have to be Tomas. Even her brother called. I picked it up one day—I didn’t have a clue who was talking. He must have thought I was Tomas, and he says, ‘You’re going to pay.’ Something like that. Freaked me out till I realized he wasn’t talking about me. It was Tomas and the divorce. Tomas was—he had a reputation for not giving his ex-wives much.”

  There was too much meat in that one sentence. I didn’t know where to start. Why a phone call from the brother? What did “You’re going to pay” mean? A literal divorce settlement—or death? And the entire idea of a phone call again. Nina’s brother as avenger? Also as insurer of a large inheritance? “What’s his name?” I asked. “Nina’s brother?”

  Cornelius looked worried, and I suddenly was afraid he’d made the entire incident up. “I said I didn’t want to get anybody in trouble. I mean the guy’s just out of prison not all that long ago, and—”

  “You aren’t, and I can certainly find it out myself. I just thought I’d save time.” I tried to sound casual, as if I didn’t really care one way or the other.

  “Jay,” he said. “Jay Kress.”

  I wrote it down in my notebook and thanked him.

  “You’re patronizing me,” he said.

  His vocabulary was better than I’d expected. “Why would you say that?”

  “Pretending like you think I’m telling you the truth.”

  “But I—”

  “I resent your whole attitude.” The shy-boy aura that had surrounded him until now was gone.

  “What attitude? We’re trying to reconstruct who was where when. Trying to find out as much as possible as to what happened. There’s nothing unusual about that, is there?”

  “You’re trying to figure out if I killed Tomas Severin so that he wouldn’t stop me from inheriting from Ingrid, right? You think I stopped him from having her declared incompetent before she could change her will.”

  I tried not to let the “aha” show on my face, but lots of pieces fell more neatly in place with that.

  “And that’s because you’re sure I’m around only so I’ll inherit from Ingrid, aren’t you?”

  “Of course not.” Of course yes. How could that not be what I thought? But he looked so upset by the idea, I was suddenly unsure about even that. “You had a meeting that day, at the lawyer’s. I’m sure it was full of tension.”

  “And a few hours later he was dead.”

  “Right.”

  He put both hands up, as if he’d made his point and he was angrily giving up, surrendering. “I wasn’t ever inside that school.”

  “He was trying to prevent Ingrid from leaving you buildings worth a fortune.”

  “And you think I’d kill him so he’d stop interfering, because he was trying to split us up?”

  Interesting how he’d made Tom’s intention out to be breaking up the great romance instead of keeping the family fortune intact. “Look, Cornelius, I’m simply trying to do my job, investigating what happened.”

  “I think you—all of you—are the ones with the problem. You look at her and decide that nobody could love her.”
/>   “That’s not fair.” Did I think that?

  “Because she’s old. You have this image in your head of how a woman has to look to be loved.”

  “No!” Hadn’t I been thinking just the opposite in fact?

  “And,” he continued, “she’d better be young, fresh, new.”

  Again I demurred, but of course hadn’t I—hadn’t one of us—said precisely that at the meeting with Rachel? And wasn’t it at least partially true? Even all my bridal junk mail advocating preceremony plastic surgery said it. And most of all, pathetic Ingrid herself, with her pulled-tight face, plumped-up lips, and emaciation said it with every iota of body language.

  “You think that just because a woman’s not young anymore nobody can love her.”

  I wasn’t sure what I thought anymore. Wasn’t I operating under an unarticulated rule that said an old woman could not be attractive to a young man? Even if it was generally true—where was the logic in that? Who was I to impose a statement of what was possible and what was not for all humankind?

  “You think it’s all, one hundred percent, about looks, and nothing to do with experience, or personality, or interests. Do you realize how prejudiced you are? All of you are? How unfair?”

  I sipped my coffee. It was bitter but it bought me time. Then I cut to the chase. “Do you love Ingrid Severin?”

  He nodded, and with the nods, his righteous anger seemed to evaporate. He looked at me defensively, as if expecting me to laugh at him, or explain why it was impossible or even criminal for him to feel that way. “You don’t understand love,” he said softly. “You and that cracked secretary of hers, and her son—”

  “Tomas?”

  Cornelius nodded. “She acted like he was a—a—I don’t even know what. He could do no wrong. He was the best. Maybe that spoiled him, ruined something in him, because he barely had time for anybody, including her. She’d die before she’d say something bad about Tomas, but if she waited for attention from him, she’d die waiting.” He considered his words. “I mean, of course, when he was alive.”

  I was hearing a lot of feeling and not a whole lot of brains. Did that make him truthful, stupid, or crafty?