by C I Dennis
When I was with Barbara, I felt uncomfortable. I had been dating her, and she had unexpectedly gotten pregnant, and I’d figured, fine—this was how it worked, so step up and be a husband and a dad, because that’s what you do. She had also helped me recover from the worst injury of my life, and I owed her. So we got married.
Then she fell in love with someone else. I could have waited until it blew over, like the sudden, torrential storms that pass through Florida in the summer. But after only a few weeks of living apart I’d had time to examine our relationship, and it didn’t hold up well under the bright light of our separation. Bottom line: don’t marry someone because you think you owe them. Owing isn’t loving.
I was now on my way to find Karen Charbonneau. She might be at Goody’s, or at the college. Or she might be somewhere completely different, and the trip would be wasted, but I have this thing about not calling ahead. I’ve learned that if you give someone too much notice they will come up with all kinds of plausible explanations and alibis that they’ve practiced in the mirror. Of the three of Goody’s women, Karen seemed like the most promising. Cindy had already told me what she knew, and Lila would probably stonewall me, but I hadn’t fully probed the drama department chair yet, beyond idle conversation before dinner and the few tidbits she’d tossed out when we had talked in her office.
I also sensed a vulnerability—something that went beyond being a former heroin user. If Cindy and Lila had seemed perfectly at home in Clement Goody’s harem, Karen Charbonneau looked like she was being held against her will, or maybe she was going along with things out of some sort of obligation. Bad idea, like my marriage.
I decided to start at the campus, because I wasn’t all that enthusiastic about going back to Goody’s place. The guy creeped me out, and if Cindy had told him about my unannounced visit the previous day, he might not feel too welcoming. Karen’s white Jag was in the lot next to Dibden, so I parked next to her and let Chan out for a few minutes before shutting him back in the car. There wasn’t a student in sight, and I remembered that it was a Sunday afternoon and the college kids would still be in their beds, having stayed up into the single digits the night before.
Ms. Charbonneau wasn’t in her office, although all the doors were open. I wandered through the hallways until I entered the main theater, which was dark except for a redheaded woman with a clipboard standing in the middle of the stage, looking upward. A single white spot illuminated her from above, giving her a ghostly look. I approached the stage, careful not to stumble in the near-darkness. “Excuse me?”
“Yes?” the woman said.
“Do you know if Karen Charbonneau is around somewhere?”
“Vince?” a voice said from far above us. “I’m up here. Fran, show him the way up, would you?”
I followed the woman backstage and down a hall that led to a stairway. “Take the ladder at the top of the stairs,” she said. “You’re not afraid of heights, are you?”
“No,” I lied. If Karen could do it, so could I. But a few minutes later as I was inching out a steel catwalk I wished I’d been more forthcoming. Don’t look down, Vince.
“Are you OK?”
“Sort of,” I said. Karen was dressed in black jeans and a black T-shirt with a Magic Hat Brewery logo. Her blonde hair shimmered with light that leaked sideways from the spot that she was adjusting. “I wanted to ask you some more questions. It can wait until you’re done.”
“I’m done,” she said. “Let’s go back down. You’re sweating like crazy.”
“It’s kind of warm up here.”
“You’re not going to faint on me, are you?”
“I don’t think so,” I said, but the jury was out on that one. I’d better not, or they’d have to call the fire department to fetch me like a kitten stuck in a tree. I carefully retraced my steps and descended the ladder. Karen followed and took my arm at the top of the stairs.
“We’ll go to my place,” she said. “You look like you could use a beer.”
“I’d just as soon not go back to Goody’s,” I said.
“I have an apartment in Morrisville,” she said. “I don’t stay there very often unless I need some alone time.”
“Do you need that now?”
“Yes,” she said. She brushed some dust off of the black T. “I think I’m moving out.”
“Seriously? I thought—”
“I love Clement very deeply, Vince. He’s an amazing man, and he saves lives. But’s he’s a sex addict, and so am I. It’s as bad as heroin.”
“Maybe worse,” I said.
*
Karen’s apartment was located over a vacant furniture store near one of the few stoplights in town. Morrisville was one of the villages that the hippies invaded in the ’70s, opening bars, head shops, and other establishments in a setting that had been left largely undisturbed since Calvin Coolidge—a Vermonter—was president. “Silent Cal” might not have approved of the present-day town, seeing how you didn’t have to find a speakeasy to have some fun—it had a distillery, a microbrewery, and plenty of barstools from which to soak up the local hooch.
Chan and I followed Karen up a long flight of wooden stairs to her loft. The building was post and beam inside, and someone had gone to the trouble of refurbishing a huge open space that showed off the precise joinery and leftover machinery of what must have been a mill. Steel rods crisscrossed the high ceiling with gears and pulley wheels still attached. I wondered what had been manufactured here. The professor had made it her own with an eclectic mix of junk store furnishings and modern touches.
Chan found a space to lie down under a window that let in the last of the afternoon light. Karen directed me to a seat at a butcher-block table while she disappeared behind a tall purple drape that might have once been part of a theater. She came out a few minutes later dressed in a white peasant blouse and the same black jeans that she had been wearing earlier.
“About that beer,” she said. “I have some Labatt, but I’m afraid that’s it.”
“My high school beverage of choice,” I said. “So…Charbonneau is French Canadian?”
“From a couple generations ago,” she said. “I grew up in St. Albans. My dad drove a milk truck.”
“And you became a college professor. He must be proud.”
“My father wanted us to be educated. He’s gone now. And we’ve pretty much screwed it up.”
“Why?”
“The pill thing, like I told you,” she said. “It got way out of control.”
She took a seat at the table and put two bottles in front of us. I took a long swig, finishing a third of mine. The cool, tart flavor brought back memories of being sixteen and getting a buzz from illegally obtained liquor with my friends of the time. “It has to be more than that,” I said. “You don’t just pick up a heroin habit because your sister has one.”
“We’re unpredictable about those things,” she said. She began to fidget with a lock of her hair, rolling it up on a finger and then unrolling. “Cindy and I used to share men. She called it the Salami Swap. One of us would get a boyfriend and we’d change places in the middle of the night. I already know it was wrong, so don’t be shocked.”
“I’m not.”
“And don’t judge.”
“I was a cop for twenty-five years,” I said. “I did the arresting, not the judging.”
Karen took a sip of her beer and set it back down. “How old are you?”
“Fifty-three.”
“I’m forty,” she said. “Younger than your wife.”
“Ex-wife.”
“Oh, right,” she said. “Cindy said that she left you.”
“Yes,” I said. “We spoke earlier today. She told me that she misses being married.”
“Really? How does that make you feel?”
“Like I need another beer,” I said.
“I was married once. It lasted two months.”
“That sounds like the short version of a long story.”
“Th
is is all the beer I have,” she said. “There’s a decent bar down the block.”
“Let’s go, then.”
Karen Charbonneau tossed her empty bottle into a recycling bucket twenty feet away. It landed exactly in the middle with a tinkle of breaking glass.
“Three-pointer,” I said.
“I like you, Vince,” she said. “If we’re going to be drinking, you and the dog can stay here. I’ll tell you what I can, because I want to help you. But I’m not going to bed with you, just so you know. I’m done with being an addict.”
“Your sister said the same thing,” I said. “I must be losing my touch.”
*
After two pints of Lost Nation IPA I knew a lot more about the Charbonneau sisters, and slightly more about Grace Hebert.
Karen and Cindy had spent their girlhood in a world of their own: always together and shutting out everyone else. It was safe that way. They trusted no one, and the only thing that they needed was each other’s company. And then puberty arrived, as if the UPS truck had come up the driveway and dropped off a big, nonreturnable box of snakes. The man-sharing episodes were mild in comparison to some of the things Karen confessed to over our beers and enough chicken wings to count as dinner. We sat in a corner booth at Moog’s Place, a down-home bar with a stage but no music, because it was a Sunday. It was my kind of joint: unpretentious, good food, and loud enough to be able to talk without the next table listening in.
The high school boyfriend swapping had evolved into a long series of ménages à trois. The twins didn’t have to peruse the classifieds, much less run an ad: all it took was a visit to the nearest bar, a brief selection process, and off they would go with their mark, some of whom were married and some not, but all highly willing to participate. Lots of men fantasize about the three-way thing, but I’m not among them. I prefer to screw up my relationships one at a time.
Things had deteriorated quickly when Cindy’s broken ankle started the pill habit, which became the smack habit. I asked Karen: how she had allowed herself to be drawn into that?
“You don’t get it, do you?”
“No,” I said, because I didn’t.
“If Cindy gets a headache, I do too. That’s how we are. We’re a matched pair, like dueling pistols. It got really, really bad, Vince. I would be dead a long time ago if it wasn’t for Clement.”
I call the third beer the Pint of Truth, because it’s the one when your tongue is the loosest, and is also the last one before you start making little or no sense. We were halfway through number three, and Karen had finally stopped twirling her hair in her fingers. “I want to know something,” I said.
“What?”
“Why did you tell me to ask Grace’s mother where she would be? You said that in your office the other day.”
She looked down into her glass. “Carmela gets money. Money to stay quiet.”
“From who?”
“Grace’s sugar daddy. Grace told me about it, last spring, when we were doing the Brecht play and she was the prostitute. She said that she was living the part. But I can’t tell you who it is. I swore to her that I wouldn’t.”
“I already know,” I said. “Angus Driscoll.”
“What?” she said. “I mean—how?”
“How did I find out? This is what I do, remember?”
“It’s why I’m so worried,” Karen said. “Clement doesn’t know about this.”
“You’re worried because of what?”
“Because of what happened to Donald,” she said. “My theory is that Driscoll found out that Donald and Grace were lovers, and he was jealous. Guys like him think they own people. Plus, his own daughter was being cheated on.”
“I’m with you, so far,” I said. “Do you have a theory on Matty?”
“The mechanic? I thought they said he killed himself.”
“Maybe.”
“You mean, maybe not?”
“Did you ever meet him?”
“No,” she said.
“Grace never talked about him?”
“No.”
“He was killed with Clement’s gun,” I said. “Grace had it last, as far as I can tell. It was at the crime scene. Lussen’s cabin.”
Karen shuddered. “And you think that someone killed him, and then made it look like a suicide?”
“Yes.” I finished off my third pint. That would put me at around a point-oh-six, and if I ordered another I would be staying the night. I wasn’t too comfortable with that, even though Karen Charbonneau’s blonde hair and green eyes had taken on a glow that you didn’t need three beers to appreciate. She was not only pretty, she was leaning her face about ten inches from mine, and our knees were brushing each other’s under the table. It was the closest thing to intimacy that I’d experienced since my wife had checked out. Time to go home.
“It could have been Grace,” Karen said.
“What?”
“You said it was her gun, right?”
“Yes, but—”
“A couple of weeks ago. Clement got her drunk. He likes to do that, even though he’s sober himself.”
“Lila told me that,” I said. “The night we had dinner at his house.”
“I don’t know why he did it, but he got her shitfaced. And she pulled the gun on him. The big one that he lent her. It was loaded, and we were sitting around the dinner table, and she scared the hell out of all of us.”
“So what happened?”
“She was aiming it at him with one eye closed like she was about to pull the trigger. And then she starts laughing, and she puts the gun away. Clement was so mad I thought he was going to thrash her, but he’s a complete fool for her. He pretty much does what she says.”
“Cindy said that too.”
“You see what I mean about twins?”
“I have to go,” I said. “I don’t have any food for the dog. I’m a complete fool for him, and I pretty much do what he says.”
Karen Charbonneau’s smile made the room feel like someone had thrown a fresh log onto the fire. I liked her. After two marriages I hadn’t been thinking about women, or relationships, or any of that crap. My bachelor life was going just fine, thank you, and Royal gave me all the hugs and cuddles that anyone could possibly want. But he was a baby, not a woman who was smart, who seemed to like me, and who had closed the ten-inch gap between our faces to five.
“I’m not going to sleep with you,” she said.
“You said that already.”
“She might have killed Matty, but—”
“But what?”
“Nothing,” she said. “Let’s go.” She got up from the table and summoned the waitress. We paid the bill and walked out into the night, not talking.
“You need to finish your sentence,” I said as we got to her door.
“You need to get your dog,” she said. She put her arms around my neck and pulled me to her. We kissed for a long time—long enough for me to want to stay, but I had already made up my mind.
I followed her upstairs and fetched Chan. Karen and I mumbled goodbyes, and I left with the dog. We were halfway to the interstate when he sat up in the back seat and I caught his expression in the mirror.
“Don’t even,” I said.
You’re smarter than you look, Tanzi.
“I could be in bed with her right now,” I said. “But instead, here I am with man’s best friend.”
*
I thought about calling John Pallmeister on the way home, but that was illegal, plus I had a buzz, plus it was a Sunday night, and there was nothing about what I had learned that couldn’t wait until the morning. Maybe Karen Charbonneau was right, and Angus Driscoll had killed Donald Lussen in a jealous rage. Or, he had somebody do it for him.
And worse, maybe she was right about Grace. There might have been some unknown conflict between Grace and Matty, and she could have lured the mechanic to Lussen’s cabin, although I had a hard time thinking of her as a killer. I wasn’t ready to pass any of this on to Pallmeister,
although I would press the lieutenant for more details on Angus Driscoll. I believed Pallmeister when he’d said that he wasn’t in anyone’s pocket. He was a straight arrow, like ninety-nine percent of Vermont cops. The police force of any given area reflects the population, and Vermonters are an honest, no-bullshit group. There isn’t a lot of crime up here, or even sleaze, and if Angus Driscoll was rotten and I could convince my State Police friend that he was, John Pallmeister would be relentless. He would track him down and would solve at least the first of the homicides.
My phone buzzed shortly after I turned off at the Barre exit, and I broke the law and answered it.
“Sneaky little so-and-so, your runaway,” Robert Patton said, “but we found her.”
“Really? Fill me in.”
“Burlington to JFK last night with a fake ID,” he said. “Our software ran a photo cross-reference on her Vermont driver’s license picture. Pretty good job on the fake. It was a West Virginia license, same photograph, but she calls herself Lucinda Kardos.”
“And then she connected to London, right?”
“She’d need a passport for that,” Patton said. “Are you in your car? You sound like you’ve had a few beers.”
“I’m good,” I said.
“Don’t kill anybody, OK?”
“So where is she?”
“You’ll like this,” he said. “She connected to West Palm Beach, not London.”
“Really?”
“It gets better,” Patton said. “I was able to have someone at the airport. My agent followed her to her hotel. Your girl checked in under the fake ID and paid cash.”
“Checked in where?”
“The Breakers,” Robert Patton said. “Way too fancy for a bum like you.”
“I’ll wear my cleanest T-shirt,” I said. “Can your people watch her until I get there?”
“Yes, but don’t dick around. This is on the taxpayer’s dollar,” Patton said. “We’re Homeland Security, not your personal babysitting service.”
“If I find her, you’ll have one less nut job to worry about.”