Almost True Confessions

by Jane O'Connor

  ANGRY FOOT REICH

  OGRE FAIRY NOTCH

  FRANTIC HOE ORGY

  It was later, while hanging up her navy funeral suit, that Rannie noticed F. Anthony Weld’s business card, printed in sober yet elegant Helvetica semibold, peeking out from her jacket pocket.

  On Google Images, from the three photos that popped up, one showed F. Anthony with Bibi at some arts benefit. He’d mentioned having restored a painting in Silas Cummings’s collection, so there was a professional connection between them. But their body language, which according to Gerry the gym instructor spoke more truthfully than words, said “We are a couple.” A very attractive couple at that.

  F. Anthony’s career accomplishments were highlighted on a site called Art Discoveries. The information might have appeared on the curriculum vitae passed out at the Yale lecture but since she’d no more than glanced at it then, Rannie scrolled through the entire entry on Weld, learning that his cleaning of an eighteenth-century landscape painting had lifted it from the obscurity of “School of Constable” to the heights of genuine Constable masterpiece, one that subsequently sold for a whopping amount to an oil overlord in Dubai.

  At ten, Nate returned looking dazed and confused. Not stoned; Rannie knew the telltale signs of that well enough. But something far more mind-altering. Love.

  He sprawled across Rannie’s bed on his back, his T-shirt hiked up, revealing the whorl of dark hair around his navel. That he was the official owner of a man’s body still blew Rannie away. Staring up at the ceiling, Nate muttered, “I really like her, Ma. I really like her.”

  For once Rannie avoided the temptation to pepper him with questions, and trusting that whatever was happening was happening with safety precautions, she restricted herself to “She’s worth liking.”

  Evidently that sufficed. Nate awarded her with an uncharacteristically joyful smile and went to his room. She was in bed shortly thereafter and half asleep when the intercom buzzer started sounding. “Nate, can you get it?” she croaked. “Nate?”

  No response. More buzzing. As soon as she hauled herself out of bed and opened the door of her room, Rannie could feel the throbbing bass of the Decembrists through the soles of her bare feet. Oh, shit. The couple in 5B.

  Yelling at Nate from the other side of his door to turn the volume down, Rannie hurried to the intercom. “Listen. I am so sorry,” she said. “Really. This won’t happen again.”

  “Rannie, it’s Tim.”

  “Oh!” was all she said.

  “I need to come up.”

  There was no time to think. All she could manage before hearing a knock at the door was to get her teeth brushed and throw on some clothes.

  Tim looked grave. “I’m really sorry.”

  “Don’t be.”

  “I came the sec—”

  “Don’t talk. Don’t say a word. I’m just so happy you’re here.”

  Grabbing him by the shoulders, she pressed herself against his chest. For a moment, Tim stroked her hair gently. Through the downy bulk of his parka she could feel the steady rhythm of his breathing. But way too soon, Tim took her by the arms, unclasped himself, and held her a few inches away. “I only just heard the news,” he said.

  Her body was still firing off “all’s well with the world” pheromones, which was why it took a nanosecond for her brain to register that something in his words and tone was amiss. Rannie blinked. Her throat went dry. “What news?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “Spit it out, Tim!” Rannie commanded. Nate was safe in bed. “Is it Alice? Is Alice okay?” Oh, God! There’d been an accident and somehow Tim was contacted to come break the news.

  Tim looked confused “Alice? Your daughter?”

  “What other Alice is there?” Rannie spat out frantically.

  “It’s not your daughter. Look. Larry Katz is dead.”

  Rannie’s arms broke free from Tim’s grasp and flailed about wildly. “No! You’re kidding. That’s impossible!”

  “He was found dead an hour ago. The cops at the Twenty-Fourth want to talk to you.”

  “No!” Rannie insisted. “I just saw Larry. No!”

  “Rannie, listen to me.” Tim held her by the upper arms and forced her to meet his gaze. “A downstairs neighbor of his got concerned, because water was pouring down from his apartment. He didn’t answer when she rang, so the super came . . . and then the cops.”

  “No! He came to return a scarf. . . .” Suddenly Tim seemed very far away as if she was looking at him through the wrong end of binoculars; a flurry of white speckles began to descend like a snowstorm, clouding the outer edges of her vision. Her legs buckled.

  Tim caught her before she dropped and got her on the sofa. “Put your head between your legs. Okay, now. Deep breaths. Just concentrate on breathing. Nothing else. In . . . out. In . . . out. Thatta girl. Keep your head down.”

  A cup of tea later, one loaded to the brim with sugar, Rannie felt steady enough on her feet to get her duffle coat. The reason Tim had come was to take her down to the precinct. That and only that. Rannie scrawled a note for Nate: “Grabbing coffee with Tim.”

  As they waited for the elevator he said, “I’m so sorry. I figured you already knew. ”

  In the car, except for Tim checking whether she was okay, to which Rannie replied, “If you mean, am I going to pass out, the answer is no,” they didn’t talk. Rannie was grateful. She was in no rush to learn the nitty-gritty of Larry’s death—and even if she had wanted to know, Tim would follow protocol with some evasive reply like “The cops have all that information.”

  Larry. Rannie pictured water dripping down a neighbor’s ceiling. An overflowing bathtub or shower. With Larry slumped in it. And blood . . . Lots.

  Her gorge rose; Rannie put a screeching halt on this train of thought and breathed into the brown paper bag that Tim had insisted she take along.

  “Need me to pull over?”

  “No. I just want to get this over with.”

  In less than an hour, it was.

  While Tim waited on the first floor by the front desk. Grieg took Rannie upstairs to the open pen of work spaces where only a few days earlier she’d read through Ret Sullivan’s copy of Portrait of a Lady. He pointed to his desk chair and then, after fiddling with a tiny tape recorder, hoisted himself on the desk. The sergeant didn’t waste time: around nine P.M., he told her, Larry had been found in his bathtub, both wrists slit. No note. No signs of a struggle. “Toxicology reports won’t be in for a couple of days. But he had a bottle of Ativan in his medicine cabinet—”

  “Who doesn’t?” Rannie almost said.

  “—that was nearly empty. And an open bottle of vodka in the kitchen.”

  He made Rannie go over each of the occasions when she and Larry had met and relate verbatim, or as nearly as she could, their conversations. Unsurprisingly, Grieg drilled her most intensely on what had transpired that afternoon.

  “Did Mr. Katz seem despondent? Was he acting remorseful in any way? Frightened? Was his behavior erratic?”

  “He seemed frightened. Definitely. But not frightened in a guilty way because he was the murderer and you were closing in on him. I mean, he realized he was a suspect.” She had to look up at Grieg while speaking, which convinced her that positioning himself on the desk had been purposeful, for a psychological advantage. “What scared Larry was that he’d wind up the next victim.” Saying that made Rannie’s eyes clamp shut and she swallowed hard. Larry had come to see her and Rannie had essentially blown him off, told him to get lost, sending him home to get murdered.

  When she opened her eyes, Grieg was still peering down at her, his hands tented together at his waist. “And . . . ?”

  “You’re asking do I think he was killed? Or if he killed himself ?”

  Grieg nodded.

  “He was killed. There’s no doubt in my mind. Look. It was a long time ago when I knew him. But based on that, if Larry were going to commit suicide, no way would he slit his wrists.”
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br />   Grieg’s brow furrowed and his lips pooched together—the pondering expression described by Larry. He seemed to be waiting for elaboration.

  “He was—squeamish.” Rannie had been about to say “a big baby.” “If Larry were going to kill himself, it wouldn’t be messy,” Rannie concluded. Then after a pause, she went on. “I’ll be honest. I was suspicious of Larry. I mean, you know that. That’s why I called you the other day. He worked very closely with Ret on the book for S&S. Doing that could have gotten him fired from his job at Dusk Books.”

  “Because?”

  “Conflict of interest. When you work for one publishing company, you can’t help someone write a bestseller for another company. So it crossed my mind that Ret might have threatened to tell Larry’s bosses what he was doing—”

  “Why would she do that?”

  “According to Larry, Ret Sullivan accused him of overcharging her for the work he did. She’d keep repeating how she always got even with anyone who cheated her.”

  “So if he needed his day job, he had a motive to kill her.”

  “But I don’t think he did. Kill her, that is. And there’s nothing to prove she ever made threats. If anything, from what Larry said, it sounded as if Ret was in love with him.”

  “Ms. Bookman, were you in love with him?”

  Rannie had been rubbing her temples. Now her head shot up. “No! Of course not!” Before Grieg cast her as a deranged, jealous ex-lover who killed Ret, Ellen, and now Larry, Rannie quickly moved on to how anxious Larry had been earlier that day. “He was angry because there doesn’t seem to be any break in the case. He said, ‘It’s been a week; all that’s happened is Ellen wound up in a body bag too.’ And he brought up Gery Antioch, whether he’d been found and questioned.”

  No response from Grieg.

  “Have you?”

  “That’s not something I can discuss.” Grieg wriggled on the desk. Maybe his butt had fallen asleep. “So, Ms. Bookman, anything else, anything at all, you should tell me?”

  Ooh. Now they were coming to the embarrassing part.

  “Wellllll.” Rannie strung out the word for as long as possible, then wet her lips. “Larry told me that on the morning Ret was murdered, he left an envelope of photos—duplicates of photos—at the concierge desk of her building. They were of the Cummings mansion. Ret used some in the book.” Rannie wet her lips some more. “He couldn’t understand why she was so insistent about having the dupes. So anyway—” How could she phrase what came next in a way that didn’t make her sound like the newly elected mayor of Crazytown? “I’m afraid that, before dinner tonight, I went over to Ret’s building and, uh, took the envelope.”

  If Poker Face 101 were a course at the Police Academy, Grieg would have flunked. Instantaneously, an “Are you shitting me!” expression consumed every feature on his face, even his nose. Nevertheless, he managed to ask, in a surprisingly level tone, “Why did you do that?”

  “I thought maybe the photos would reveal a clue.”

  “Did they?”

  “No.” Did he believe her or suspect Rannie was covering for herself ?

  “Are the photos still in your possession?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ms. Bookman, I don’t get it. Are you trying to hinder this investigation or solve the case yourself?”

  “The latter.” She almost asked to get Tim up here; he’d confirm that indeed she was a meddlesome lunatic.

  “Because you realize what you did is tampering with a homicide investigation.”

  Rannie held her tongue. Now didn’t seem the moment to point out that if Grieg had been doing a thorough job, the photographs wouldn’t have still been at Ret’s building for Rannie to steal. “I’m sorry. What I did was wrong. I know that. But I’m scared. I was scared before I knew about Larry.” Even if that wasn’t exactly the truth, maybe stupidity was the only reason it wasn’t.

  “So before we go pick up those photos at your apartment, is there anything else?”

  “I remembered something today, something in Ret Sullivan’s bedroom. There was a religious painting above her bed, a Madonna and Child. I’m positive a different painting used to hang in the same spot.”

  “Hold on. According to the report, you’d never been to Ms. Sullivan’s apartment until the day of the murder.”

  “Absolutely true, Sergeant,” Rannie replied evenly. “What I remembered today was that all around the Madonna picture, the wall paint was much cleaner. A bigger painting hung there at one time.”

  “And this has exactly what to do with the murder?”

  “I don’t know. I am just trying to be as forthcoming as possible. Paintings of sweet Madonnas weren’t Ret Sullivan’s typical taste.”

  “You two liked to discuss art?”

  “No.”

  “Because in the report you also stated there’d been no contact for years between the two of you.”

  “That’s true, too.” Rannie did not relish bringing up her trip to the convent or the conversation with Sister Dorothy. Nevertheless, she did. In full.

  “So, Ms. Bookman. Attending the funeral? Were you just paying respects?”

  “Not just that.”

  “More investigating?”

  She nodded. Being the mayor of Crazytown was a 24/7 job.

  Surprisingly, Tim was still sitting in a row of attached plastic chairs when Rannie descended the stairs to the ground floor of the precinct. Even more surprisingly, his car followed the sergeant’s with Rannie in it back to the Dolores Court, where, possibly thanks to his much vaunted parking karma, his Toyota slid into a legal space even before Rannie had her keys out.

  “You’re coming upstairs?”

  He nodded and Rannie didn’t question why.

  Five minutes later, Grieg left with the envelope of photos, Rannie thankful that Nate hadn’t emerged to inquire about police presence in their apartment.

  She faced Tim. He hadn’t taken off his parka, which she interpreted to mean his departure was imminent as well. “You get a whole lot of mensch points for tonight.”

  He shrugged. His eyes looked tired.

  The sight of him filled her with longing, not sexual longing, something more sorrowful and harder to bear. They could have belonged to each other. I really fucked this one up, she told herself. Then she reconsidered: that made it sound as if she could have behaved differently. Pure and simple, she was wrong for Tim.

  She turned and headed to the front hall door.

  “I’m staying,” she heard him say from behind. At the same time she noticed a gym bag on the floor. Tim’s gym bag.

  “Really?” She turned back to him.

  “I’m worried about you.”

  Rannie attempted a light tone. “My sanity, my safety? Both?”

  A brief smile. He explained Chris was spending the weekend at Amherst, attending some classes. “I’m solo through Monday. When I need to be at the bar, you’ll come too.”

  “L. C. King Security’s round-the-clock service?”

  “A special deal for you, the friends and family rate.” He rubbed his hands together, seemingly relieved that Rannie had put up no argument.

  “Okay. I know where the pullout is. All I need is a pillow.”

  “Tim, do me a favor. Stay in my room.”

  “Not a good idea, Ran—”

  “Not for me. For Nate. He was really happy you stayed over the other night. He barely says two words to me and the next morning, out of the blue, he told me how I deserve a good guy like you.”

  Tim was still shaking his head no.

  “What if he finds you in the den? What am I going to say? We broke up but you’re here playing bodyguard so I don’t end up murdered?”

  He blew through his teeth, looked undecided, then said, “Okay. In a crazy way I guess I get it.”

  Rannie unearthed the sole remaining air mattress from a disastrous family camping trip in Maine—Alice had ended up with infected spider bites the size and hardness of golf balls. Tim blew it up an
d spread a sleeping bag on top of it. “Maybe we can roast s’mores later,” he said.

  “And have a sing-along . . . I know all the verses to ‘Found a Peanut.’ ”

  It took a second but then Tim laughed and caught the pillow Rannie tossed.

  By the time Rannie emerged from the bathroom, teeth brushed and flossed, fleece granny robe knotted over another jumbo T-shirt, Tim had already slid inside the sleeping bag and was lying on his back, his arms crossed behind his head.

  “Comfortable?” she asked.

  “Snug as a bug.”

  Rannie turned out the light. No surprise, sleep was not on the agenda. All her untoned muscles decided to lock simultaneously; her eyes refused to shut and a digital news ribbon looped through her brain over and over. Ret . . . Ellen . . . Larry . . .

  Rustling sounds from the sleeping bag and occasional coughs told her Tim wasn’t off in Dreamland either. Finally she said, “Can I ask you something? About what happened tonight?”

  “I’m listening,” he surprised her by saying.

  Ironic that he’d dumped her because of her snooping and yet now the murders were pretty much the only subject they could discuss. “First of all, you don’t think Larry Katz killed himself.”

  “No. I don’t.”

  “Or anybody else?”

  “No. Not anymore.”

  “The police were following Larry. So didn’t they see who, besides tenants, entered his building tonight? It’s a loft building. I mean, there can’t be that many apartments.”