The Cold Blue Blood: A Berger and Mitry Mystery

by David Handler

  Superintendent Crowther took one last pull on his cigarette before he ground the butt out against the heel of his shoe. He laid it on the table and clasped his hands together in his lap, raising an eyebrow at her. “What do you want from me, Lieutenant?”

  “The truth, sir. That’s all.”

  He let out a grim laugh. “The truth? I’ve been in law enforcement for thirty-five years, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s that the truth is whatever someone wants it to be. O. J. Simpson was telling the truth when he said he was busy practicing chip shots on his front lawn while someone else was cutting up Nicole and Ron. Bill Clinton was telling the truth when he wagged his finger at us and told us he never had sexual relations with that Lewinsky woman. Did Dolly Peck kill Roy and Louisa Weems? You want the truth? Maybe she did. I don’t know. I never knew.”

  “You put her back out on the street.”

  “I did what I was told to do by the powers that be. I was a scared, confused kid, just like you are at this very minute. I’d just gotten married. I was living from paycheck to paycheck. And that girl was a Peck. I don’t have to tell you that the wealthy elite get treated differently than everyone else. For crying out loud, that’s how they stay the wealthy elite.”

  “How tight were you and Tal Bliss?”

  He glanced at her curiously now. “Why, what did he say about it?”

  “That you weren’t.”

  “Then why ask me about it?”

  “He became a state trooper when he got back from ‘Nam, that’s why.”

  “Well, it wasn’t any kind of a payoff, if that’s where you’re heading,” he said. “Tal was bright and competent and they were happy to have him. I did try to offer him my counsel on occasion. To me, he was wasting his time as a resident trooper. But he ignored me. The job in Dorset was all he ever wanted.”

  For the simplest of reasons, Des reflected. So he could look after Dolly.

  “Let’s stop dancing around, Lieutenant,” Superintendent Crowther blustered, abruptly seizing back the conversation. “Who else knows about this story Bliss supposedly told you?”

  “No one.”

  “The Deacon?”

  “No one.”

  “Internal Affairs?”

  “No one.”

  “You came right to me?”

  “I came right to you.”

  “Okay, here’s what I believe, Lieutenant,” he said. “I believe that you’re either incredibly smart or incredibly stupid. Because your handling of this case is presently under investigation by I.A. And one word from me that you’ve shown up here, peppering me with wild accusations, and you will no longer be in the employ of the Connecticut State Police.” He paused, stroking his chin thoughtfully. “I like to think I know your father pretty well. And he’s not stupid. So I’m going to give you the benefit of your genes. I’m figuring that you’ve come directly to me because you want to cut a deal. You’re thinking I’ll be grateful to you—so grateful I’ll somehow help you out of this mess that you presently find yourself in. Does that about cover it?”

  Des said nothing to that.

  Crowther narrowed his eyes at her piercingly. “Then again, this could all be a scam on your part. You climbing way, way out on a shaky limb. And me sitting right here with a chain saw in my hand. Which is it, young lady?”

  “I’m trying to find out who killed Torry Mordarski, Niles Seymour and Tuck Weems,” she answered quietly.

  “Tal Bliss killed them,” Crowther said easily. “It’s clear. It’s clean. It’s closed. Why can’t you accept it, Lieutenant? I have. Everyone has.”

  “I can’t accept it because if Dolly murdered those two people thirty years ago she may have murdered again. And if Tal Bliss knew that, he may have taken his own life to protect hers.”

  “I don’t buy it,” he said dismissively. “That’s too high a price for anyone to pay.”

  “He would have paid it. He’d loved Dolly since he was eight years old. If it meant shutting down my investigation, I have no doubt that he would have paid it. None.”

  Crowther got up out of his chair and began to pace around the room with his hands in his pockets, distractedly jangling his coins and keys. He finally came to a stop, gazing at her sternly. “Do you want to know what I think?”

  “Yessir, I do.”

  “I think I’m not going to tell anybody we had this conversation. I think you’re a good officer who got a raw deal. And I think this flap with I.A. will blow over. In fact, I’m prepared to guarantee it will.”

  Outwardly, Des’s expression remained guarded and serious. Inwardly, she was doing cartwheels. Because she wasn’t wrong. Not about any of it.

  “When it does,” he went on, “I want you reassigned to my team. Politically, it will be good for both of us. I can help your career. And you can help me in the minority community. You come across very well. You’re an extremely telegenic, well-spoken young lady. I especially like your hair.”

  “You do?” Des absolutely could not believe they were talking about her hair.

  “I do,” he said earnestly. “It conveys that you’re someone who’s new and modern. Someone who understands what’s going on out there.” Now the superintendent smiled at her tightly, as if it were causing him great pain. Possibly, it was. “So you see, Lieutenant, where the rubber hits the road, we both want the same things.”

  “Do we?” she asked him challengingly.

  He narrowed his eyes at her again. “Don’t we?”

  “I really don’t know, sir. Because I don’t believe this case is closed. I believe the murderer’s still out there, walking around. And I believe you know it, too. And that’s the part I will never, ever be able to accept.”

  Now Superintendent Crowther glared at her, a vein in his temple beginning to bulge. “Let me spell something out for you, Lieutenant,” he said in a low, menacing voice. “If you’re not my friend you’re my enemy. And you don’t ever want me for an enemy. Do you understand?”

  “Perfectly. Thank you for your candor, sir. And your time. Good day.” Des started for the door.

  “Where do you think you’re going, young lady? We’re not done talking—!”

  She left him there in that banquet room. She didn’t stop. She didn’t look back. She just marched back down the long corridor to the lobby with her head held high. She was elated. She was smiling. She was definitely smiling.

  But the hair would absolutely have to go.

  “Awesome move on your part,” Mitch Berger said admiringly as he sat there across the table from Des, hunched over his soup. “You’ve got Dolly for the Weems killings. You’ve got the head guy of the entire state police admitting to a thirty-year-old cover-up. This is major stuff. There’s only one problem with it.”

  “What’s that?” she demanded.

  He reached for a hunk of bread and tore into it, chewing with his mouth open. “Dolly didn’t kill Niles Seymour or Torry Mordarski or Tuck Weems. I’m positive.”

  The Black Pearl was on Bannister’s Wharf in what had once been a sail loft. There was a formal dining room called the Commodore’s Room. And there was the casual and boisterous tavern, where she’d found Mitch slurping up his third bowl of fragrant New England clam chowder, a napkin tucked into the collar of his shirt. When the man ate soup he sounded remarkably like a drain unstopping. There was a huge basket of bread and a schooner of beer in front of him. He seemed positively starved.

  Des ordered coffee when the waitress appeared.

  Mitch was aghast. “No chowder? You’ve got to have the chowder. It’s a sacrilege not to. Tell her it’s a sacrilege,” he commanded the waitress.

  “You’ll go straight to hell, honey,” said the waitress, nodding.

  “Just coffee,” said Des.

  The waitress went off to get it.

  Mitch peered at her across the table. “You don’t eat when you’re tense, am I right?”

  She nodded reluctantly.

  “Me, I eat like crazy. Which I guess
explains why you look the way you do and I look the way I do. This is a big difference between us.”

  “Well, what do you know—we found one,” said Des, wondering how he’d look if she cleaned him up. Say, three months on the treadmill. No between-meal snacks, a decent set of threads, proper haircut … Then what would she have?

  An average-looking white man who’s hungry all the time, that’s what.

  When her coffee came she took a sip, shaking her head at him. “If Dolly Seymour isn’t our killer, then why did Tal Bliss go and kill himself?”

  “For the very reason you gave,” Mitch answered. “He was afraid that you’d unearth the truth about Dolly murdering Tuck’s parents. He took his own life so as to short-circuit your investigation. That much is true. But there’s much more to it than that. A boatload more.

  “What are you telling me—that Bliss did kill them?”

  “Yes and no.”

  “Man, don’t talk at me in riddles.”

  “It’s like I was telling you—it all comes back to the Fibonacci Series.”

  “And don’t you start gas-facing me about geometry either, because I am so trying not to hear that.”

  “You have to hear it,” Mitch insisted. “It’s a law. Not your kind of law, but a fundamental principle of proportion based upon—”

  “I know, I know. The Golden Section. Which is … ?”

  “Which is a line that’s divided such that the lesser portion is to the greater as the greater is to the whole.”

  “Which means … ?”

  “The Fibonacci Series is an algebraic variation in which each number represents the sum of the two preceding numbers. So instead of counting out one, two, three, four, five, you count out one, one, two, three, five, eight, thirteen, twenty-one and so on. Get it?”

  Des thought about this long and hard before she said, “No, Mitch. I don’t.”

  “Okay, here it is,” he explained. “Two men acting together are capable of doing something that’s twice as heinous as a man who is acting alone. When you add a third man you’re not just adding another player. You’re ratcheting up the disease quotient—each man’s capacity for evil represents the sum total of the previous players combined. Add a fourth and you’re taking a quantum leap over into the dark side. Add a fifth and you’ve got yourself a lynch mob. It’s a law of human nature, Lieutenant. It explains the insanity of mob rule. It explains the atrocities of war. And it explains what happened on Big Sister Island. Hell, it’s the only way this whole crazy thing does make any sense.”

  She gaped at him in disbelief. “You’re saying that every man on Big Sister was in on it, is that it?”

  “And Tuck Weems, too. Don’t forget Tuck—he played a very valuable role.” Mitch paused to take a gulp of his beer, swiping at his mouth with the back of his hand. “We can exclude Evan. He wouldn’t have fingered Bliss as the man who locked me in the crawl space if he had played any part in this. And we can for sure eliminate Dolly, Bitsy and Mandy. This was strictly a guy thing. The ultimate act of male chauvinism, if you stop and think about it. They felt Dolly was too fragile and misguided to make the right choice, so they made it for her. Are you with me so far?”

  “I wouldn’t say I’m with you,” Des said doubtfully. “But I’m listening.”

  Mitch leaned forward in his chair, his eyes gleaming at her. “Okay, here’s what we know. We know that Bud Havenhurst hated Niles Seymour for stealing Dolly away. We know that Red Peck, her big brother, hated Niles because he was a low-class con man who roughed her up—and wanted to build condos on Big Sister. Jamie Devers hated him for killing Evan’s dog, not to mention his constant gay-bashing. And Tal Bliss wanted him gone because he wanted Dolly for himself. It was he who recruited Tuck Weems, a man who had already threatened to kill Niles for beating up on Dolly.”

  “But why would Tuck come rushing to her defense?” Des objected. “Dolly’s the one who murdered his parents.”

  “For which he was exceedingly grateful,” Mitch countered. “Tuck hated his parents. His father was abusive. His mother was an alcoholic. The only real structure in his life was Tal Bliss. They’d been best friends since they were kids. Totally inseparable. Did you know that?”

  “No, but so what?”

  “We’ll call our boys the Fab Five—better that than the Garbagemen, which is what they were. Together, they took it upon themselves to rid Big Sister Island of a man who they regarded as utter human garbage. Alone, not one of them had the nerve or the cunning to pull it off. As a group, they were able to achieve staggering heights.”

  Their waitress came by now to refill Des’s coffee. Des stared down into her cup, her head spinning. “Um, okay, how do you know this, Mitch?”

  “Because it’s what happened. That’s how I know it.”

  “That’s not even close to good enough. You have to give me a reason to believe.”

  “Not a problem,” he said easily. “Let’s play it out, starting with Torry’s married boyfriend, this shadowy Stan person who none of her friends ever saw. We’ve been supposing all along that Stan and Niles Seymour were one and the same. And that’s exactly what we were supposed to think. It’s what they told us to think. Jamie told me that Niles told him he had a girlfriend in Meriden. Bam, we immediately jumped to the conclusion that the girlfriend was Torry. Bud and Red told me they saw Niles and Torry together at the Saybrook Point Inn. Bam, we assumed that they in fact had. Why wouldn’t we? Even though, as you may recall, I said I thought it seemed like a very odd place for a married man to stash his girlfriend.”

  “Agreed. Way too public. Only, she was there.”

  “I know that,” Mitch acknowledged. “But no one from the hotel ever saw her and Niles together. All we have is the word of Bud and Red.”

  “And you’re saying they made it up?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “To make us believe that Niles was dating Torry, that’s why. He wasn’t. It wasn’t Niles who they saw there with her. Niles never even knew the woman. Niles wasn’t Stan.”

  “So who was—Tal Bliss?”

  Mitch shook his head. “No, no. He was pathologically shy with women. Dorset’s resident cocksman, according to Sheila Enman, was none other than Tuck Weems. Tuck had the midas touch when it came to women. He was Stan. He had to be, if you stop and think about it. Jamie’s a former child star. Too recognizable. Also gay. Red is away too much. And Bud has a jealous, psychotic wife. That leaves Tuck. That’s why he was recruited—to seduce an unsuspecting girl from some low-rent town far enough away from Dorset that no one would connect her death up with Niles Seymour’s disappearance.”

  Des considered this a moment, recalling how Tuck’s young live-in love, Darleen, had admitted that he wasn’t always home nights. “Keep talking.”

  Mitch continued: “Their plot was put in motion when Tuck, who now had Torry good and hooked, asked her to check into the Saybrook Point Inn. She paid cash, per his instructions, and used a fake driver’s license. Thus enabling the Fab Five to cover their tracks. That’s why he had her wear the red wig, too. Poor Torry probably just thought it was good, kinky fun.”

  “Wait, pull over a minute. Why go to so much trouble? Why not just pretend they saw her?”

  “Because they wanted documented evidence that Niles had abandoned Dolly for another woman,” Mitch replied. “That way Dolly could begin divorce proceedings immediately. Otherwise her case might drag on through the courts for years. His relatives might come crawling out of the woodwork … No, no—the so-called other woman had to exist. They needed a disposable Jezebel. Someone like Torry who the law would simply write off as a borderline hooker who got what girls like that get.” Mitch paused to take another gulp of his beer. “And it all worked like a charm. As far as the world knew, Niles Seymour had run off with another woman. Meanwhile, your investigation of Torry Mordarski’s murder …”

  “Went nowhere,” Des admitted grudgingly.

  “Exactl
y. But what they hadn’t counted on was the X-factor—me digging up Niles’s body. When that happened they were screwed, because they’d used the same gun to kill both of them … But wait, I’m getting ahead of the plot. How do you like it so far?”

  “I think it sounds like just exactly that,” she replied skeptically. “A plot. As in one of your movies. As in not real.”

  “Oh, it’s real, all right,” Mitch insisted, rubbing his hands together eagerly. “Now, then, the Fab Five were good and thorough. When Niles ‘disappeared’ they made it look as convincing as possible. They left Dolly the infamous Dear John letter. They ordered plane tickets for two. They parked Niles’s car at the airport. Bud liquidated Dolly’s accounts—supposedly to protect them from Niles—thereby making their case seem all the more convincing. Tuck Weems disposed of Torry, I suspect. And Tal Bliss tidied up the crime scene for him. Who better to make sure that it was spotless than an actual state trooper? Then they sat back and congratulated themselves on a job well done. They had pulled off an elaborate, carefully planned operation to rid themselves of the most odious man they had ever come in contact with. Everyone, most especially Dolly, thought Niles had left town. Only he hadn’t. He was buried right there on Big Sister. Don’t ask me which one of them shot him. I don’t know. I only know that they would have gotten away with it if Dolly hadn’t suddenly decided to take on a tenant. That was strictly her doing. They tried to talk her out of it. Even tried to scare me half to death. But they failed. And you know the rest of the story.”