by Sarah Graves
“No,” he said. “But you scared her pretty good when you threatened to say that she had. See, she was getting automatic deposits, her FBI pay to a checking account in New York. Under another name, and she didn’t access it much. But if Henderson ever dug into her finances in any serious way—say, if he had someone follow her around when she went to the city—”
“He’d find it, and the jig would be up,” I finished for him. “That makes sense.” Something else still didn’t, though.
I just couldn’t quite put my finger on what. Bob smiled reminiscently. “Sure wish I had a picture of the look on her face when that dummy came zipping down the wire,” he recalled. “And what the hell did it say, anyway, did you hear?”
“No. I mean…maybe. I’m not sure.” Short-term amnesia was common after an injury like mine, the doctors had said, a mental blurriness that would clear on its own with time. But right now, remembering the episode in the barn was like trying to touch something with the tip of my tongue and not quite being able to.
“I asked Mudge but he said he didn’t remember,” Bob added. “In all the excitement he just blurted out something, he told me, too busy throwing his voice at all to think about what he said.”
“Is that so?” I replied evenly.
“Jemmy said he didn’t hear, either,” Bob went on. “Didn’t even have a plan for what would happen after the dummy appeared, according to him. Just figured he’d try something radical. If it didn’t work, no real harm done, but shaking things up might speed matters along, he thought.”
“Uh-huh.” It was what Jemmy had said when I asked him, too. Exactly what he’d said, word for word.
Bob finished his seltzer. His gaze traveled to the lake’s farther shore where, among last year’s pale broken reeds, Sam sat motionless in a kayak with the paddle across his knees. “Hope he ends up okay.”
Me too, but somehow I no longer believed I could do anything about it. Suddenly I felt exhausted. “I’m driving back to town,” I said, getting up. “I need to get a head start on a good night’s sleep.”
“Want me to take you?” Bob offered.
“No, thanks. I’m fine. Just tired, that’s all. You stay here and relax awhile.”
It was what I told Jemmy as well when I encountered him after retrieving my car keys from inside the cabin.
“Okay,” he agreed, smiling vaguely while swatting at a pesky mosquito.
It was the second last time I ever saw him.
I didn’t ask you to do this for me,” I said.
It was past eleven that night when I walked back to where Jemmy sat at a table in the rear of the Bayside Café. Despite my earlier intentions I had not gotten a head start on a night’s sleep, and what I’d thought about while I tried wasn’t pleasant.
Because as the doctors had promised, my memory was clearing. And as a result it seemed to me now that as often happened, Jemmy had been so impressed by the cleverness of his own idea that he’d taken it too far.
“You killed that kid just as sure as if you put a gun to his head,” I told him.
Jemmy looked unsurprised. This was the way we used to meet years earlier when we both knew we still had something to talk about: local place, end of the evening, no appointment required.
I hadn’t been sure he’d come tonight, though. “You’d decided you were either going to turn yourself in, which you didn’t at all want to do, or you needed Henderson neutralized,” I said. “So you came here and hatched a plan.”
A good plan, too. But he’d made one mistake: After the Cory thing slid down the wire at Walter Henderson’s barn, it spoke.
And I remembered now what it had said: “Ann.” Which meant Jemmy hadn’t only been trying to shake things up with the thing’s sudden appearance, as he’d insisted. It meant he’d known.
“Ann Radham killed Cory Trow because he knew who she was,” I went on. “But there was only one way he could’ve found that out—the same way you knew who’d killed him. Because you arranged it. You set the whole thing up right from the start.”
“Sit down, Jake,” he said. He kicked out a chair.
He was drinking a Rolling Rock. “I don’t want to sit down with you. You told Cory that Ann’s identity was fake. You clued him in to what she was really doing here, too.”
Just walked up to him on the street and told him, probably; that’s all it would’ve taken. Once Cory had gotten a rise out of Ann with the information, he’d have known it was true.
Too bad he didn’t realize just how big a rise he was going to get. “You knew by then that he was the kind of kid who’d use anything he could, and that he needed some leverage.”
I took a deep breath. “Because he was going to jail if he didn’t come up with something to keep himself out,” I added. “And on top of it all you nearly killed me.”
Because that was another thing: blowdown, my Aunt Fanny. It really was Jemmy who’d hit me out at the cottage. That way I’d go on thinking someone else had, so I’d continue snooping not only to find Trish, the baby, and Mudge, but with the added incentive that now Jemmy needed rescuing.
Jemmy, who’d saved my life. Not that he’d known I was going to spring a brain-pan leak. But he’d been willing to risk it.
“How come he trusted you?” I asked. “Henderson, who was so hot to kill you?”
Without letting Jemmy answer I rushed on. “But you and Mudge got all that stuff into his barn, the dummy of Cory and the wire it slid down on and I don’t know what all.”
They hadn’t sneaked in with it, that was for sure. “So how’d you convince him to let you…?”
“Hey, Jake? If you don’t want everyone in the whole place listening to you, you’ll sit,” he interrupted mildly.
I looked around, saw I was beginning to have an audience at the tables around us, and sat. Jemmy nodded approval. “Fine. Now look friendly,” he instructed. “People like anger. Friendly bores them, they’ll look away.”
I forced a smile. They did. “I didn’t know she’d kill him,” Jemmy said quietly as soon as they had. “I thought she’d tell her superiors, the way they’re supposed to when anything like that happens.”
Like Cory finding out she was a cop, he meant. Whereupon her bosses would pull her off her assignment and somehow Jemmy would take the credit for it with Henderson, for getting rid of her…
No. It didn’t wash. “Why didn’t she?” I demanded. “Instead of running off the rails she might have been able to find some other way to salvage her situation. Or worst case get yanked off the job, you’re right,” I conceded.
But instead she’d gone straight to premeditated murder, and Jemmy must’ve had an idea she would. Because to cut any ice with Walter Henderson—enough for the information to save his own life or keep him out of federal custody—Jemmy would’ve had to show who Ann was, not just have her up and vanish.
“Come on, don’t try to kid me anymore. You knew all about her before you even came here,” I told him.
He said nothing. “Well, didn’t you? Don’t tell me you just blew in without getting the lay of the land.”
When he didn’t answer I recited for him. “Ann Radham was a cop, she got close to Jen Henderson on purpose, cozied up to Jen in the clubs Jen liked to go to so she could spy on Jen’s dad. But Ann was also a loose cannon, she already had a reputation for it, didn’t she?”
A reputation Jemmy’s federal buddies would’ve discussed with him. Because at Jemmy’s level, the cops and crooks talked to one another…and that was the only way he could’ve known about her; that her own bosses had told him.
For the first time he looked uncomfortable. “Yeah, she was a real ladder-monkey,” he admitted. “Someone who doesn’t care about anything but the career,” he translated when I looked puzzled. “I figured I’d have a better shot at Henderson without her, is all.”
I made the face he deserved at him. “Oh, don’t give me that, either. You’ve never killed anyone in your life.”
Jemmy was a money man; it w
ould’ve been dumb for the guys he’d worked for to let him kill anyone. If he got caught for it, he was in a position to betray too much.
Just like me. I leaned across the table at him. “You knew there was a very good chance she’d kill that kid if he threatened her,” I said. “So you made him do it, you practically forced him into it.”
I grabbed his Rolling Rock bottle, swallowed some. “You told Cory Trow that Ann Radham was an FBI undercover cop,” I repeated my accusation.
“Next step was, he threatened her with the information just like you knew he would. He told her she’d better help him out of his jam or he’d tell Walter Henderson what he knew about her.”
Still nothing. “After that Ann Radham did what you figured she’d probably do, based on what you knew about her: she tried to go it alone.”
He listened with mild interest. “Instead of reporting what had happened with Cory to her higher-ups, risk being called off an assignment that could really help her career-wise, she decided to keep silent and take care of it herself.”
And now came the heart of the matter. “So she made her own plan, prepared the equipment, the rope and so on. She had access to the place, of course, and she knew the alarms were off because that was her job, keeping an eye on Henderson and his doings.”
Jemmy nodded, added a little background for me. “Henderson was actually planning on killing the kid already,” he confided. “He didn’t know Jennifer had broken up with him for real. She’d been sneaking out to the Bayside at night just to get out from under the old man’s thumb, but he thought it was to meet the boy in the barn, like she had been.
“He found the body,” Jemmy said. “Had no idea who did it. But the trap door was shut, he figured the kid hadn’t reached up there and closed it himself.”
No kidding. “That must’ve been a shock.”
“Yeah. For once in his life he didn’t know what he should do next.”
“Really,” I said, taken aback. The idea of Henderson being unsure about anything was a new one on me. But so was what I now knew about Jemmy.
That he was the kind of guy, I mean, who if somebody had to die to save him or a friend, somebody did. Even if the somebody was an innocent bystander.
Like Cory Trow. “So Ann picked a night when she’d have half an alibi and called him on the cell phone Jen had given him,” I went on with my own recital.
The phone hadn’t been there when we found him; Henderson must have recognized it and taken it along with the scarf, after opening the trap door and faking the note.
“She lured him there by telling him Jen wanted to see him,” I said. “Then she waited, had the rope all nice and knotted ahead of time. Wore Jen’s perfume, probably, kept it dark in the barn, put that scarf over his eyes for good measure.”
The one that had left a tiny blue fabric scrap hooked on his fingernail. The beer tasted bitter.
“Timed it all so she could bike out from the Bayside and back during the break between sets,” I went on. “Anybody saw her, so what? She did it all the time, there was no reason for anyone to mention it.”
As for handing me the Bayside flyer for that night…had it been a mistake? Or had she been so sure of herself, so certain I’d never catch on, that she could afford the taunt?
I might never know. But now Bob Arnold’s phone message about the autopsy came back to me and suddenly it too made sense. “She got him up to the loft, dropped the rope over him fast. The final shove she gave him was probably with a drumstick, of all things. Made a tiny bruise on his back, no one thought anything of it.”
Closing the trap door had definitely been a mistake. But as it turned out, that hadn’t mattered. “Once she’d killed him,” I said, “you knew I’d think Henderson did it, start poking around the way Ellie and I always have.”
I took a breath. “You got lucky when Bella turned out to be Henny Trow’s friend; if you got a little luckier, I’d stumble onto the truth. And you meant to be around for that. Participate in it so you’d come out the hero in Henderson’s eyes.”
As Jemmy had. The result: he was free without having to kill Henderson, which he no more knew how to do than I understood how to jump off the roof of my old house and fly.
He took a sip of beer. “She’d done it before, you know. Got in a situation, shot her way out.”
“Ann Radham did?” I asked, and he nodded. I must’ve looked curious; he made a face of distaste.
“The details don’t matter. But they called it justifiable,” he said. “Even though it wasn’t.” Which gave Jemmy what he wanted: an Achilles’ heel, something about her he could use.
“She said her folks were government workers,” I mused aloud. “FBI, maybe? Got herself legacied into the Academy that way, then turned out to be a nut job?”
If in fact she was too well-connected to fire, this could’ve been a plot to get her to flame out. But Jemmy wasn’t telling. “Once I got here I kept my head down,” he said instead. “Listened to the talk in the bars and so on.”
Not getting in touch with me, though. Not yet. He must’ve been around for weeks; it was the only way he’d have known Sam was going to be in Cooper the night the Fiat went off the road.
“There turned out to be plenty,” he continued. “Once I knew the nuts and bolts of the story…”
The Cory Trow vs. Walter Henderson feud, he meant. That part he hadn’t arranged, of course, just used it the way he found it. “You’re right, though,” he added, “I knew if the kid got killed you and Ellie would look hard at Henderson.”
Especially if Jemmy primed me to believe it, as he had. I’d cooperated in the whole thing, too, by keeping him in the know on every detail. As for getting the cooperation he needed from his enemy on the night I’d gathered everyone in the barn:
“I called Henderson, told him if what I had in mind for your party didn’t end up helping him out big-time, I’d stand there and let him put the bullet in my head.” Jemmy put his beer down. “And Henderson agreed. Honor among thieves, and all that.”
In a pig’s eye; by that time Henderson had wanted something also: someone to take care of Ann Radham permanently for him in a way that didn’t require him to commit the ultimate no-no: killing a federal cop.
Because don’t tell me Jemmy hadn’t passed Ann’s identity along in the course of the conversation. Whereupon Henderson had seen the benefits of doing a little adapting himself.
Jemmy looked around; it was late and the crowd in the Bayside had begun thinning.
“You traded Cory Trow’s life for your own,” I said.
And for mine. Just the way he’d planned. “Jemmy?”
Even then I wanted him to deny it but he didn’t seem to have heard me. Instead he gazed past me to the front of the room where a jazz quartet was playing the hell out of a tune I didn’t know.
“Yeah,” he said finally. “That’s it, the whole ball of wax. You’re wrong about one thing, though,” he added. “It wasn’t about you. It all was about me, start to finish.”
He turned back to me. “Now look me in the eye and tell me that in my place you wouldn’t have done the same thing yourself.”
I got up and walked out.
“You get everything straight with Jemmy?” Wade asked.
He’d still been up when I got home from the Bayside, on his hands and knees in the back parlor with a steel-wool rubbing pad. Ellie and I had stripped the varnish off the floor over the past winter, using liquid stripping solution and scraping the old finish away one three-foot-square section at a time.
Underneath lay maple hardwood milled into flooring so fine-grained, it resembled the feathers on a bird’s wing. The stripper took off the varnish but not the stain it had imparted, a golden glow that seemed to radiate up through the floor instead of only from the surface of it.
“Hi,” I’d said, not answering his question. “That’s great what you’re doing there.”
Fine steel wool polished the surface. Next we meant to apply polyurethane; the result
would be a floor so richly finished that it would look as if you could dive into it.
One look at my face, though, and Wade had put the steel-wool pads away, packed up the cooler, then started the truck and aimed us back toward the lakeside cottage, just the two of us.
Now we sat at the end of the dock in the midnight darkness, a blanket over our shoulders and his arm around me. Under a blue-black, star-filled sky the red beacon on the new tower across the lake winked steadily like an eye opening and closing.
“Jemmy set Cory up,” I said. At the edge of the water, frogs emitted rhythmic bass notes and treble trillings. “There’s a lot more to it, though.”
“I see,” said Wade when I’d told him all the rest.
Almost all. Good thing Jemmy wasn’t here now; Wade sounded ready to rearrange my old pal’s new face for him, and his way was a lot faster than plastic surgery.
To the moon, Alice. The old situation comedy line echoed in my head along with the canned laughter that usually accompanied it. But this wasn’t funny. And a punch in the nose wouldn’t fix my buddy and savior Jemmy Wechsler.
Nothing would. “People change, I guess,” I said sadly. “My trouble is, I’m wondering now if maybe he didn’t.”
One of my troubles. “If maybe he was always that way and I just never caught on until recently.”
Or if I’d known all along and just wouldn’t look straight at it until I had my nose rubbed in it. After all, I’d agreed when Ellie said he was a sociopath, and what had I thought she meant?
Wade squeezed my shoulder. “All you did was take whatever help you could get back then. So if some of it was from a guy who wasn’t so decent in other ways? That’s no big crime.”
It wasn’t all I’d done. If it had been maybe none of this would’ve happened. “And if Jemmy’s not your idol anymore,” Wade added, “well, that’s what idols do, isn’t it? They break.”
We sat a while longer listening to the frogs. Bats swooped unseen in the darkness around our heads. Then: