The Killing Club

by Marcie Walsh; Michael Malone

  When I turned back to Barclay, he had a twisted grin on his face.

  Maybe he already knew that he would spend no more than an hour being interrogated in the Dixon Building before I was ordered to release him.

  Despite the late hour, two lawyers from Ober Land Development and Realty came marching down the hall into Chief Waige’s office before Barclay had finished telling me that he had nothing more to tell me.The chief had shown up in sweats and a bad mood.Maybe he’d been over at Gert’s.The lawyers showed up in tuxedos, apparently having left a gala performance of The Nutcracker in order to come to Dixon to convince the judge—who’d left the Ober cocktail party in order to be convinced—

  that there were insufficient grounds to hold Barclay Ober any longer than we already had.

  In the hour I’d spent with Barclay, I kept bringing him back to the fact that his Mercedes had been parked yesterday morning in Etten Park in the same lot as Amanda Morgan’s Jaguar, which was 141 yards from where Amanda Morgan had been murdered with a crossbow bolt.The crossbow found in the trunk of his Mercedes shot arrows exactly like the one that had killed her.He had motive, means and opportunity.Did he kill her?

  Barclay admitted the affair with Amanda.He admitted the Mercedes 1 8 5

  T H E K I L L I N G C L U B

  was his car and the crossbow was his crossbow.But he denied that he’d killed Amanda with the bow, or put it in his trunk, or knew who had put it there or knew how they’d gotten hold of the car or the crossbow either.

  Someone had stolen his car.Wasn’t it obvious what had happened?

  Hadn’t I told him the SL had been found abandoned in an expressway rest stop? Whoever killed her stole the car and the crossbow both.

  I let his words sit for a while, just looking at him, sipping my coffee from a Styrofoam cup, hoping he would drink from the cup I’d brought for him.Then I asked, “You think it was Clay?”

  “What?” His body came off the seat.“Clay? What’s Clay got to do with anything?”

  “Tricia says Clay drove off in your Mercedes Sunday morning.You think he might have shot Amanda with your bow? Maybe it offended him, your cheating on your wife.” I didn’t say that at nine fifteen, when Clay presumably had left the house with the car, Amanda had already been dead for two hours.Even so, one of our uniformed cops was now watching River Bend to make sure Clay didn’t leave it.

  “Clay can’t drive.”

  “I hear otherwise.”

  “Because Tricia will say anything.She hates me.”

  I nodded.“I don’t think she hates Clay.”

  “Maybe not.” He rubbed his face and hair with both hands, like he was toweling off after a shower, like it would all go away if he did.“You’re not charging him, and you’re not charging me.” He smiled tightly. “As you’re going to find out, very soon.” Picking up the Styrofoam cup I’d placed in front of him, he drank from it, making a face.

  “Sorry about the coffee.” I was working hard, with my voice and 1 8 6

  T H E K I L L I N G C L U B

  body language, to make us feel like family, even if conflicted family.“Barclay, you had a fight with Amanda Saturday night.I was standing there.

  You said, ‘You got what you wanted and now you’re dumping me? I don’t think so!’ What did Amanda get that she wanted?”

  He looked strangely at me but didn’t speak.

  “Was she trying to get pregnant?” The question hadn’t surprised him, though he pretended that it did.I kept my voice quiet, friendly even.

  “Maybe you arranged to meet her yesterday morning in Etten Park, or maybe you just showed up there.You’d know where she’d park when she was going riding early.Maybe you wanted to try to talk things out, see what had gone wrong between you?”

  Something suddenly happened deep inside him, like a long electric shock.His whole body shuddered.He leaned over the metal table on which his cuffed hands were resting.“Jamie, what the hell?”

  I put my hands on the table across from his.“I know.What the hell.”

  We sat there for a while, not talking.

  His voice cracked quietly.“You think I want to live in a world with her wiped out of it?”

  “Did you ever love Gina?”

  “Not like that,” he admitted.

  It was the shift to something real I’d been working an hour for.And naturally it was just at that moment that Rod knocked on the interrogation door and told me to stop asking Barclay questions.

  After Barclay and Rod left the room, I slid his coffee cup into the plastic Baggie in my pocket and stuck it behind the water cooler.

  I was back in the squad room when the Ober lawyers emerged with Chief Waige from his office.The chief told me Rod would explain things.

  1 8 7

  T H E K I L L I N G C L U B

  Rod explained that Barclay Ober was no longer, at this time, a suspect in the Amanda Morgan homicide.He was free to go.

  “That’s bullshit!” I said, loud enough for Chief Waige, hurrying away with the lawyers, to hear me.None of them looked back.

  The desk sergeant returned Barclay’s personal effects.Barclay went through them as if he suspected us of stealing a few.

  Barclay never looked at me, speaking only to Rod, as we walked him to the door.He tucked his red scarf under his thrusting chin.“Leave me and my family alone.You’ll not only be out of jobs, I’ll bankrupt your department.”

  Slowly nodding, Rod said, “Fair warning.”

  As Barclay strode off, his polished shoes clicking loudly on the ter-razzo floor, I called after him, “Amanda was pregnant.When we find out, you want to know if the baby’s yours or not?”

  He ignored me, pushing into the revolving doors.

  Rod and I stared at each other for a long time, and then he shook his head.“You heard the chief.Ober is not a suspect now.”

  “In which case? Because maybe you recall, Barclay had lunch with Ben the day he died.Barclay was parked outside the Tymosz house, he called in the fire ...too late.”

  “You know what the chief means.Ober’s not to be interrogated again in the Tymosz homicide, or the Morgan homicide.Not unless we’ve got him cold.” Rod waved his arms at me in a crossing gesture. “And no Lone Ranger, Jamie, okay?” He tried to turn me toward him.“Can you get it through your head that you could be in danger too?”

  I yanked away.“Fine, no Lone Ranger.Because I sure can’t count on Tonto, can I?”

  1 8 8

  T H E K I L L I N G C L U B

  We argued for ten more minutes, backing each other into corners it would be hard to get out of.Finally Rod did what he always does when he’s not going to talk about something anymore.He crossed his arms.

  “This isn’t going anywhere.Follow orders or you’re off the case.”

  Without looking at him, I walked back through the squad room.I didn’t go over to the water cooler till Rod had slammed shut the door to his office.But then I found the bagged cup and took it down to Abu in the lab.Abu was watching a DVD of Denzel Washington in The Bone Collec-tor on his laptop.“How’d you like to be able to move nothing but one finger on one hand?” he asked me, peering over his square-rimmed black-framed glasses.

  “I wouldn’t.”

  He hit pause.“What you bet, Denzel’ll solve it anyhow.Like Mister Tibbs.Every generation we get one black man can do no wrong.”

  I handed him the cup.“Yep, and you’re the one for my generation.

  Match this saliva to the semen in the Jaguar, will you, Abu? I’ll love you.”

  “You mean it’s over between you and Dan the Man Ventura?”

  “Totally over.I don’t know what I ever saw in him.”

  There was no way for Abu to know I had no right to ask him to run the tests.

  1 8 9

  16

  J O E

  ALL I WANTEDwas to go home to Fourteenth and Dock,sit on that big dumb leather couch with a glass of Gavi di Gavi and let my dad help me pull off the heavy lace-up boots I’d been wearing a
ll day long.I wanted to hear him say it was all right for me to go ahead investigating Barclay Ober as the prime suspect in two homicides, even though I’d been officially told not to do so.Of course, I knew my father wouldn’t say any of that.Joe Ferrara had been a cop all his adult life.

  Injured in the line of duty and forced to retire, he was still a cop.He believed that the survival of the force depended on following the chain of command.Maybe Rod was wrong, and maybe Rod was my fiancé, but, most important, Rod was a superior officer who’d given me a direct order and I had to obey it.That’s what my dad would say.And that doesn’t even take into account what it would do to his blood pressure if he heard that Dino Ferrara’s mug shot from his joyride in Ramon’s truck was on the 1 9 0

  T H E K I L L I N G C L U B

  Fugitive Apprehension Wanted lists of police departments as far south as Richmond, Virginia.

  So I was half-relieved when Dad called out as I hung my coat on the rack in the hall, “Hey, sweetheart, you’ve got company.”

  In the living room, Garth sat drinking from a longneck, his legs stretched out from Dad’s couch onto some magazines lying on a coffee table that had seen better decades.Sam sat on Garth’s lap.It was hard to imagine more of a contrast in styles than Garth’s soft charcoal sweater and slacks and my father’s old plaid bathrobe and L.L.Bean sock slippers.

  From her seat on one of the big leather couch pillows at the other end of the coffee table, Debbie hopped up and waved.Dad pushed toward me with one strong shove of his wheelchair.“You heard from your brother?”

  “Not yet, but you know Dino.”

  He nodded, not wanting to discuss it in front of company.“Where’s Rod?” he asked.I told him Rod was still at Dixon, where he always was.I didn’t say we’d had a terrible fight and weren’t talking to each other.As I leaned down to kiss my father, I pushed his wheelchair over beside the couch.

  “So what are you doing here, Garth? Aren’t you supposed to be in New York?”

  Shooing Sam off his lap (Sam didn’t like it), Garth stood, holding out his hand to me as if we were meeting for the first time.“Katie called me about Amanda.What a sad thing.My news show actually sent me down here to cover it.Funny, huh? Figured I could give it a local-boy angle.I came back to tell you that you were right and I was wrong.Ben wasn’t an accident.”

  “I’m really sorry I’m right,” I admitted.“Yes.What a sad thing.”

  1 9 1

  T H E K I L L I N G C L U B

  Weirdly, I shook his hand, then turned away.“Hi, Debbie.” Taking a cannoli from the white cardboard box on the table, I offered her one, but she held up three fingers and touched her stomach.“I thought you’d left too.”

  “I’m leaving,” she said.“Tomorrow this time, I’ll be in Cancún slathered with coconut oil.” Debbie had on a short, tight, fake-alligator jacket, unzipped to her cleavage.She had a big green clip in her purple-black spiky hair.She had very white skin and very black, thick mascara.It was hard to imagine her lying around to get a tan on a tropical beach.She pulled a cell phone from her jeans pocket—a tight squeeze—and shook it at me.“Did you get a call tonight from Pudge?”

  I shook my head.“I saw him.He’d been drinking.”

  “I’ll say.” She shoved the phone back in her jeans, as if she’d made her point.

  “He tried to punch out Barclay outside Dixon.Said he was going to prove Barclay had murdered Amanda.Is that what he told you?”

  “No, he called and told me he knew I’d killed Amanda and Ben.

  Jamie, it was crazy.He said he knew why I’d done it and he was going to prove it.Then he hung up.”

  “He said you’d killed them?”

  “I was so freaked I called him back, but Eileen told me he was gone already.They’d had a fight about how he was acting and she’d sent him to sleep it off over at Dante’s.” Debbie rubbed her arms. “So then Connie calls me and says Pudge has phoned him, accusing him of murder too! So I even phone fuckin’ Jeremy in Atlanta and he had the same message from Pudge on his machine!”

  “What did they say—Connie and Jeremy?”

  1 9 2

  T H E K I L L I N G C L U B

  “That Pudge was whacked up.That he’d said he was ‘onto’ them.

  This is so sick.Tell me Pudge hasn’t gone off the deep end.Tell me he didn’t kill Ben and Amanda, and now he’s after me?!”

  “Pudge didn’t kill anybody.And, Debbie, you know he doesn’t seriously think you did either.But I don’t know what he’s up to.It’s nuts.”

  “It’s not nuts that two people are dead! Two people we knew! And we could be next.”

  My father wheeled his chair over to her.“Your imagination’s running away with you, Debbie.If somebody’s killed those two people, it’s about those two people.It’s not about a high school club.”

  “Go to Cancún,” Garth said to Debbie.Hands linked behind his head, he joked, “Wonder why Pudge didn’t call me? I feel left out.”

  Debbie zipped up her jacket.“Garth, I don’t know why you think this is funny.”

  He shrugged.“Sorry.”

  I asked Garth if Pudge knew he was even in town.Would he know how to reach him? Garth admitted Pudge probably didn’t.“Let’s face it.

  Pudge really cared more than we do.”

  “All I care is, I’m out of here!” Debbie headed for the hallway to get her coat.She explained that she was driving to her friend Tara’s in Cherry Hill right now and that they were taking an earlier flight to Mexico.

  “Garth’s staying with Katie for Christmas,” my father threw in as he poured me a little glass of grappa.Because of our day care at the McBride house, Dad had known Garth and Katie since they were children.He never acknowledges, when he mentions Katie, of whom he’s fond, that she lives with Martha, of whom he’s also fond.I didn’t know if he liked Garth or not.“New Year’s too,” Dad added.“Right, Garth?”

  1 9 3

  T H E K I L L I N G C L U B

  I said, “Yeah, Garth seems to be in Gloria all the time.So you rented a car?”

  He grinned.“I took a taxi from Katie’s.”

  My father was flabbergasted, and had to rub Sam’s back while he took this in.“A taxi? From her place? How much did that cost?”

  Garth shrugged.“I don’t know, thirty bucks maybe.”

  “Thirty bucks?” Dad couldn’t believe it.Nobody took taxis in Gloria except from the airport or the train station.“You gonna take taxis till New Year’s? You could buy a car.”

  “I don’t need one, Mr.Ferrara.I live in Manhattan.” Garth had a grin it was easy to imagine on TV every night.“I don’t even have a valid driver’s license.”

  Now my father looked at Garth as if this failing were the ultimate outcome of his radical politics.“You’re an adult American, you have a driver’s license,” he said.“You lose it for drinking?”

  “Nope.But President Bush did.”

  It seemed a good thing to stop this discussion right now.I blurted out, “What about Ashley? I mean, the holidays.”

  Returning from the hall with her big thrift-store raccoon coat, Debbie answered my question.“They broke up.”

  I looked from Debbie to Garth.“You and Ashley broke up?”

  He crawled out of the couch to help Debbie on with her thick coat.

  “That’s right.Here’s the question: Will Ashley notice? To me, she’s a woman in a bed with an eye mask on, who leaves a note on the bathroom mirror that says ‘DON’T WAKE ME UP, I’VE GOT A FOUR AM CALL.’ ”

  Lightly, Debbie smacked his cheek twice in a good-bye gesture.“Hey, dump her.Nobody should be up at four A.M.that didn’t stay up from the 1 9 4

  T H E K I L L I N G C L U B

  night before.So, Garth, if we’re not all killed, maybe I’ll see you next Christmas.Or on TV.Maybe I’ll see you when they crown Connie pope.

  You hear about that monsignor thing, Jamie? Good going for the old outcasts, right?” She pulled a thin silver box with a black ribbon out of h
er big shoulder bag.“Merry Christmas.”

  Debbie had said she was “too totally freaked” to spend another night in Gloria but she’d stopped off on the way to Cherry Hill to leave me my Christmas present.For some reason, the incongruity started me laughing.Here she was, hurrying out of town because there’d been two murders already and she was terrified she’d be the third, but she was taking the time before she left to exchange gifts.Since we’d been doing it ten years or more, I guess murder was no reason to stop.

  When I told her why I was laughing, Debbie cracked up too as she shook the silver-wrapped box at me.“And it’s always a stupid silk scarf anyhow! So where are my depressing DVDs?” My usual gift to Debbie is disaster movies; they confirm her view that life is a catastrophe waiting to happen when you think you’re having fun—like Titanic and The Tower-ing Inferno.

  “Under the tree.” Crawling under the heavy droopy boughs to find her gift, I started laughing louder.Dad and Garth both stared at us like we’d lost our minds.“We’re hysterical,” I explained.

  AS DEBBIE LEFT with her three-pack of Alien movies, she pulled me aside to whisper at the door, “Don’t do it.”

  I knew what she meant.“This is all in your mind,” I told her, shoving her out.

  1 9 5

  T H E K I L L I N G C L U B

  “Yeah.Let’s keep it there.”

  I told Garth I needed to make some calls.He didn’t take the hint.

  After getting the answering machine at Dante’s, I called Eileen Salerno.I woke her up.Eileen was sure Pudge was asleep in his office, where he had a pull-out couch; she thought sleep was the best thing for him.“I don’t know whether to hope he was drunk or worry he’s lost his mind calling people, accusing them of killing their friends!”

  “Eileen, Ben and Amanda were murdered.”

  After we hung up, I tried phoning Connie at Cooke House, a very nice modern apartment the church had built him over the new parish center, but I only got his machine.If he had a cell phone, I didn’t know about it.

  Finally, Dad announced that he was going to bed, but that he wanted me to wake him if I heard from Dino.We told each other that Dino was fine, that he always was.My father then gave me the same nightly reminders I’d gotten since I’d first started staying up later than he did: Turn off the lights, lock the doors, get the cat in.What he thought Garth was doing there so late, I didn’t know.I wasn’t sure myself.Just that he seemed to have no plans to leave.