The Killing Club

by Marcie Walsh; Michael Malone

  “It’s not nothing if Clay’s delivering death threats.”

  She didn’t argue that.“I know he’s struggling.Can you blame him?

  Gina dies on him.Barclay’s a shit.Meredith’s no help.Come on, give the kid a break.He’s so smart.”

  “Maybe too smart,” I said.

  I left the house without even looking for Garth in the loud happy bedlam of the party where Bob Dylan was rocking.

  AS I HEADED HOME, the snow started to stick on the road but wasn’t a problem yet.The longest day of my life wasn’t over yet either.I called Naoko on her cell phone.She said she’d heard that I’d been yanked 2 0 7

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  from the Morgan homicide.I said yank was a good word.She told me Chief Waige had pulled her off surveillance at River Bend so she couldn’t tell me whether Barclay and Clay were home or not.I asked her to check the desk for me.Had the Richmond PD called in with any news about Dino? Naoko called back in five minutes, just as I was pulling onto Dock.

  There was nothing.

  The Christmas tree lights still blinked merrily in our front window.

  I’d forgotten to turn them off.Hurrying inside, I told myself that at least Dad wouldn’t notice, since he never came out of his room after retiring there at night; he could manage his bathroom and the climb into bed on his own, but it was a struggle and he almost always fell straight to sleep afterward.I peeked in his room; he was snoring.

  Still bundled in my coat, I was checking to be sure I’d locked the door behind me when I heard a rapping knock—not the bell—on the front door.

  It was Danny Ventura.“I saw you come in,” he said.“I didn’t want to ring and wake up your dad.Listen, I got to tell you something.” He had on a pilot’s jacket, a black cowboy hat and black cowboy boots.He often went to Western bars to do line dances.

  The truth is, I was sort of touched that Danny had come all the way over to my house, despite the hour.Because I thought it was about Rod’s turning my homicide case over to him that he’d come to talk about.

  “Danny, you didn’t have to do this.It’s okay.You didn’t ask Rod to pull me off the case.Go home.I’m wiped.I’m going to bed.”

  He tried to say something but couldn’t.Then he took a deep breath and slowly let it out.“Man, this is too much.I don’t want to do this again.

  I know he’s a friend of yours.”

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  He was scaring me.“Who? Who’s a friend?”

  “They just found him at Dante’s.I’m headed there now.I figure maybe you want to come too.”

  “Dante’s?” I could see it in his eyes.“Pudge is dead.”

  Danny nodded.“I got the call, I came straight here.Just leave your car, we’ll go in mine.”

  I nodded without talking, walked into the living room and turned off the tree lights.

  As I pulled the front door shut behind me and locked it, I asked him,

  “How was he killed?”

  “They’re saying heart attack.”

  “They’re wrong.”

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  18

  S W E E T S

  EARLIER, UNABLE TO SLEEPonce I’d awakened her with my phone call, Eileen Salerno had driven to Dante’s to check on Pudge, suddenly anxious after their quarrel that something was wrong with him.In fact she had started to wonder if his strange and belligerent outbursts might have been the result of a stroke.She had always worried about Pudge, who indulged in the worst possible diet for a man who, even at twenty-nine, had clogged arteries, who smoked and drank and got no exercise but the high-stressed frenzy of a busy restaurant.While the Salernos lived in the same gated community as Jim and Amanda Morgan, Pudge had never once set foot on its golf course.For years he’d promised to use his treadmill for more than a clothes rack, to lift weights, to join a gym.He never had.So, suddenly panicked about her husband’s spending the night alone in his office at Dante’s, Eileen phoned him, then dressed and drove into town to check on him.It was midnight.

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  Eileen had found Pudge in Dante’s kitchen, bent over a fifty-gallon electric frying vat, with his head submerged in the boiling oil.Screaming, she’d somehow managed to haul him out but he was already dead, his face and his hair horrifically burned away.She’d told 911 that her husband had had a heart attack.

  It also looked to the EMS team who arrived eight minutes later from St.Anthony’s Hospital as if Pudge had had a heart attack, either before or because he fell facedown into oil boiling at 400 degrees Fahrenheit.

  TELLING ME YET AGAIN that I was “just along because the guy’s your buddy,” Danny pulled up in front of Dante’s, where the swirling blue and red lights on the ambulance and squad cars flickered eerily over the manger on the town green.The briefly falling snow had stopped long ago and was already dripping off the camel and shepherds.It would be gone by noon tomorrow.

  By the time we got to the restaurant, I’d made four calls to tell the other members of the Killing Club that someone had just killed Pudge in the same way Pudge had once imagined killing Eileen’s sadistic father—

  by boiling him in the deep-fat vat of the local bakery.

  My first call was to River Bend.I was told that Barclay wasn’t at home and no one knew where he was.Debbie I reached on her cell phone.She was safely fifty miles away from Gloria, leaving at 6 A.M.for the airport.I told her not to let anyone into her friend’s house, even if she knew them.I almost didn’t tell her about Pudge.It confirmed her view of the world.

  Connie said he’d already arrived at the restaurant to be with Eileen, who’d phoned him.At Chelsea Morning, Katie couldn’t find Garth anywhere in 2 1 1

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  the crowd still there partying.I told her to keep looking and when she found him to tell him to stay there.

  There must have been a dozen people from GPD milling around Gert and the EMTs in Dante’s.Apart from them, in a shadowy corner of the room, Eileen sat with a woman I recognized as a human services worker from the Crime Victims Center.Eileen’s arms were bandaged.Her hands rested on a trumpet in her lap.Gert stood beyond the yellow tape that blocked off the kitchen, talking to one of the paramedics.Connie, still in his coat and gloves, was saying something to Rod that Rod wrote in a notebook.Danny joined them, shook Connie’s hand hard.Connie winced; Danny had that effect on lots of people.Rod saw me and nodded, but said nothing as I ducked under the tape and went into the kitchen.

  The fifty-gallon frying vat stood near the industrial stoves.Pudge’s body lay on the floor beside the vat, covered by one of his green-checked tablecloths.With Gert standing beside me, I pulled back the cloth.But his face was covered with gauze.

  “The burns were bad,” Gert said quietly.

  “Danny said a heart attack.”

  “AMI.Massive, I think.They used the intravenous nitro, and also the AED, but it was too late.” She was saying that Pudge had suffered an acute myocardial infarction (a heart attack), that the emergency responders had tried to bring him back with an automatic external defibrillator and a hypodermic of nitroglycerin but were unsuccessful.“The shock, you know, of oil was severe.And then the health habits so poor,” added the trim medical examiner, who had no bad habits of her own except Chief Warren Waige.

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  She patted my back.“Your notion there’s this killer turns out to be the sad truth, ja? I wish you had been wrong.”

  “Me too.”

  Joining the two women still seated in the corner, I told Eileen that I felt heartbroken for her.The social worker left the two of us alone.Eileen and I sat there together for a while, until finally she said, “How am I going to let our kids know? They loved him so much.”

  “Everybody loved him, Eileen.”

  Her voice sounded numbed.“I’m glad I called and told him I was coming over and this was crazy, fighting at Christmas.I just
had a sort of, like a sixth sense something was wrong.So at least the last thing was me saying I loved him.”

  “He knew that, Eileen.We all knew that.I’m so sorry.”

  Awkwardly she held up the trumpet in her bandaged hands; it was old, dented, tarnished.“He kept it here in the office.He was going to take lessons again.He was always sorry he let his music go.But we were so busy here.” She gestured at the restaurant angrily, as if Dante’s had killed Pudge.“You know what? He got up, got dressed.I saw on the couch he’d already put on his pajamas.But he—you know what I mean, Jamie?—he wanted to look nice for me.He always tried so hard to make everything nice for everybody.”

  “I know.”

  “Why did I get so mad at him for getting drunk?”

  “Because he wasn’t supposed to drink.”

  “He knew that, and with the smoking and the weight ...” She stopped herself.“It was stupid.We never fight.”

  I nodded.“Who could fight with Pudge?” We sat there a little longer, 2 1 3

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  both looking at the trumpet.“Why didn’t you just tell him to come home?”

  Eileen said that Pudge had wanted to relieve the day manager of the hassle of driving over in the snow at four A.M.to receive the bakery truck delivery.So he’d told the man that he’d stay overnight instead.

  “That was Pudge,” I said.

  Eileen’s eyes moved someplace past grief, and I didn’t intrude any further.As I was leaving, Connie came over to tell her good-bye.He looked haggard, but his black wool overcoat was pressed neatly and his gray hair was freshly cut.There was a smell of cigarette smoke in his coat, and I wondered if the pressure had sent him back to smoking.He took me aside to say he was glad he’d been home at the rectory when Eileen phoned.He’d just been sitting in his study, trying to think things through, looking out the window at the snow falling.“Then she called, and somehow, despite everything, I couldn’t believe it.Not Pudge ...”

  “I feel the same.Debbie says Pudge had called you too, saying he knew you were the killer.”

  Connie shook his head unhappily.“It was just craziness.It sounded like he’d been drinking.”

  “I tried to phone you about Pudge’s call tonight, but nobody picked up.What exactly did he say to you?”

  “ ‘You killed Amanda and Ben and I can prove it.’ ”

  “What did you think he meant by that?”

  “I just told him he sounded drunk and he laughed and said he was just ‘practicing,’ and he hung up.”

  “Practicing for what?”

  “I don’t know.”

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  I said that Pudge had been right that there was a killer.Somebody was killing the Killing Club.

  “Barclay?” When I didn’t answer him, he said, “That’s going to be really hard on his family.I’m worried about Clay.He’s been through more than he can deal with.”

  I said I was worried about Clay as well.“But Connie, right now, you should just go back home and lock your door.That’s what I’m going to do.”

  He said he’d see me tomorrow at Dixon when he came by to give Rod a statement about the history of the Killing Club.“I don’t know what good it’s going to do,” he added.“If it’s Barclay, it’s about Amanda.”

  “I suppose.So you were at the rectory all evening?” He said yes, but added that he fielded so many calls all day long from parishioners with problems that by late at night he usually let the machine answer.

  “Lucky,” I told him as I walked him to the door, “that you picked up for Eileen.” He explained that she’d called his cell phone, a number few people knew.

  I told Connie to use that cell phone to call 911 if he should run into Barclay.“And by the way, Connie, I’m sorry you decided not to let me know about that night with Amanda and all you guys at the playhouse.

  The night Lyall killed himself.” Connie turned to stare at me. I nodded.

  “Garth told me about it.Yeah, a regular guy thing, wasn’t it? Except for poor Lyall.So you made fun of him.It might have helped if you’d told me.I guess that’s what Amanda was trying to say when we all met here:

  ‘People in this room know the answer.’ To why Lyall might be a little angry.”

  “We took a vow to keep quiet about it.” His eyes sank darkening into their sockets.“We’re not proud of it.”

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  “I wouldn’t think you would be.Maybe Ben wanted to get it off his chest, being sick and all.Maybe Amanda did too.Garth says you and Barclay told him to keep it quiet.”

  “Because it has nothing to do with anything.” As he shouldered open the door to Dante’s, he turned.“We all know it’s Barclay.There’s no chance Lyall’s alive.”

  “You sound like you wish he were, Connie.”

  “Of course I do.”

  I watched him walk with a soldierlike erectness and regularity across the now-whitened street, past the manger and into the shadows of the green.

  A white news van sped into view.They’d heard about Pudge’s macabre death.They’d all be here soon.

  When I closed the restaurant door and turned around, Rod was standing there.He said he knew how much I had liked Pudge and that he was sorry.

  I pointed at the ABC-NEWS van pulling up at the curb.“What are you going to tell them?”

  “For as long as I can that it was a heart attack.”

  “It’s in the first Death Book, Rod.”

  “I figured.”

  “Boiling oil.”

  Rod explained that they had reason to think that water (the most dangerous combination with oil—and the cause, as Pudge had often told me, of most restaurant fires) had been poured into the still very hot liq-uid (the vat had been turned off only an hour earlier), causing an explosive burst of steam that might in itself have killed Pudge.

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  I thought about this.“Not by accident.And Pudge was pushed.The rim’s too high.If he’d had a heart attack and fallen against it, he would have slid to the floor.”

  Rod nodded.“Agree.Looks like somebody dumped in some water, tipped him over into the vat and the shock caused the coronary.His wife said he had heart problems anyhow.” Rod showed me a small evidence bag.“Gert found this tied around his ankle.” It was a Yale key on a red piece of yarn.

  I felt like I was going to vomit.“It’s the first thing Pudge said when I told him about Ben.That somebody was trying to kill us, people in the club.Now three of us are dead.”

  He nodded again.“This is a crazy person.Or a desperate one.”

  “Pudge had too much to drink tonight.He started calling people, Debbie, Connie, Jeremy, I guess just everybody in the club he could reach, saying he could prove they were the killer.Maybe he was trying to bait someone.Maybe he did.One of them was the killer and it has to be Barclay.And, who knows where he is.Because goddamn Waige cut him loose!”

  Rod’s slow even voice didn’t change.“Did Pudge call you and accuse you of killing them?”

  “No! Of course he didn’t.He knows I didn’t do it.”

  “Did he call Garth McBride?”

  “Garth says not.Besides, Garth ...”

  He nodded.“Yeah.He was with you.”

  The truth was, any one of the club members could have done it.I hadn’t seen Garth since we’d arrived at Katie’s party—no one would have noticed if he’d taken his sister’s Volvo and sped back to town in it.Connie 2 1 7

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  could have walked across the green to Dante’s and back.Debbie could have gone by the restaurant on her way out of town.And Barclay ...Barclay could be anywhere.No one could find him or his BMW coupe.My suspicion was that he’d fled the jurisdiction.But had he committed his third murder before he left? Had Pudge accused him and it cost him his life?

  Danny joined Rod and me.“Some scuff marks off his shoes got tracked
along the floor; probably he got dragged over to the vat.This whole thing is too fuckin’ freaked for me.” He rocked back on his boot heels, shook his head at us, then wandered off.

  Rod said, “Jamie, I’m putting protection on you, twenty-four seven.”

  “Put me on the case, Rod.That’s all I want from you.”

  He stared at me sadly.“Yeah, I get that feeling.” His arms crossed in that familiar gesture.“I love you.So long.Please go home when Danny leaves.”

  “When Danny leaves? You’re not reminding me I’m off the case?”

  “You’re not going to quit, so you might as well help.Danny won’t say so but he can use you.Find out who did this.But unofficial, okay? My ass is on the line about this.”

  “Okay.” I touched his arm and he smiled at me. I said, “I want an APB on Barclay Ober and I want him held when we get him.”

  “You got the APB.Bring me something, anything, outside that Mercedes, because that car was ‘stolen,’ and we’ll hold him.”

  My phone rang.It was Garth.Rod left while I was talking to him.

  THE PULL-OUT COUCH in Pudge’s office lay open,sheets in a tan-gle, oddly old-fashioned flannel pajamas tossed over on the pillows.

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  There was a little sink against the wall.On its glass countertop sat some contact lens paraphernalia, an aspirin bottle, two drinking glasses and some dental fixative.Pulling on latex gloves, I checked the aspirin, then picked up and sniffed at the tube of fixative.Then I telephoned Chelsea Morning, where the party had quieted down, maybe from the news about Pudge—because everybody in Gloria did know Pudge—so that Sweets was able to hear me.I asked her if Pudge wore dentures.She said he wore a bridge—that she’d made it for him—and yes, it was a large one that he removed at night.And yes, usually there was a slight spillover of the fixative when bonding the bridge, and yes, whatever was in the fixative would be transmitted sublingually.

  I thanked her, asked if Garth was still there.She took a moment to look around.“Yeah, I can see him through the window out by Katie’s studio.He’s smoking.Like she’s not going to notice.You want me to get him?”