The Killing Club

by Marcie Walsh; Michael Malone

  Rod had shown up right after the man from the gas company.Sarah, the dispatcher, had called him on her own.We followed the ambulance to the hospital ER.I kept trying to tell him about the Land Rover, but I couldn’t stop coughing.He sent a squad car out to River Bend to see if the car was back there.

  In the emergency room, Dad was rubbing Dino’s curls, telling him that he was “a stupid idiot” and that if he hadn’t come home when he did, he (Dad) would be dead now.I couldn’t stop adding my own “What if?”s to Rod as we waited.If I hadn’t come home when I did, Dad and Dino would both be dead.Or if I’d been at home, the way the killer had assumed I was (because my Mustang was parked right there in front of the row house) when he’d uncoupled the main gas pipe leading from the 2 3 1

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  basement wall to the furnace, we’d all three be dead.Because there was no doubt that someone had deliberately cut through the pipe from the gas main and shoved its open end through the hole into our kitchen wall.It was one of the murders in the Death Book.

  Rod asked, “Why didn’t you go home to bed? Where’d you talk Danny into taking you?”

  “We had a couple of leads about Barclay.I think I know why he’d want to get rid of Ben.”

  ST.ANTHONY’S DECIDED to keep Dino and Dad for a few more hours; they put them in a semiprivate room together.“This is so great,”

  Dino told the nurse, who patted him sweetly.It was now Tuesday morning, two days before Christmas; everybody was postponing elective sur-gery, so, for a change, there were empty beds at the busy hospital.

  I sat with my father till he fell asleep, brushing his hand against the oxygen tube in his nose.As he drifted off he mumbled, “You got me out of the house.You got your brother out.”

  “I’m sorry I wasn’t home before.”

  “God bless you, sweetheart.” And then after a while, sleepily, “Giovanna, I don’t want to hear you say a word like fucking again.What kind of talk is that from a daughter ...?”

  Dino was sleepy too.I brushed his hair with my hand until he opened his beautiful goofy blue eyes.“Hi, Jamie....I’m sorry I screwed up.”

  “Dino.Talk to me just a little bit.”

  “...I’m too sleepy.”

  “I know you are.I just need you to answer a few questions.”

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  “Am I in trouble?” He smiled up at me, and it was the same smile he’d had a long time ago, when I’d leaned over his crib, handing him back the pacifier he’d thrown on the floor for fun.

  “Shhh.You’re not in trouble.Just answer my questions.First of all ...Listen to me, Dino.When you and Clay took Barclay’s Mercedes out for a drive, what did you do with the crossbow?”

  “The what?”

  “The crossbow.Barclay’s crossbow.”

  He looked at me, so transparently puzzled that relief—from the tiny part of me that couldn’t be sure—poured into my bones.“...You mean, like a bow and arrow?”

  “Yeah, sort of ...”

  “You think I stole something like that?” His nose itched so he pulled out the oxygen clamp.I put it back.

  “Talk to me, Dino.”

  It took a while before finally I had the story as straight as someone like Dino could make it.Yes, he’d known it was wrong to teach Clay to drive—when Dino didn’t have a car and Clay didn’t have a license.(“But Jamie, I swear, he’s a great driver.”) Yes, Clay had occasionally picked Dino up in the luxury cars he’d stolen from River Bend and Dino had driven them “around town” just to see what they were like.(“Everybody says, ‘Hey Mercedes, hey Beemer, that’s cool,’ so I wanted to know.We didn’t hurt them.”)

  Yes, Clay had met Dino in Barclay’s Mercedes on Sunday sometime before noon (“Time is not really my thing”) at a rest stop on the expressway.Dino had hitchhiked there with “somebody, I don’t remember exactly,” some other musician playing with him at one of his Atlantic City 2 3 3

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  dives.But at the last minute Dino didn’t return to Gloria with Clay.He had “gotten the gig” to substitute for the lead guitarist of First Offenders, (“Jamie, they are seriously big time”) down in Richmond.He’d called a friend on Clay’s phone and the friend had told him.He wanted Clay to drive him to Virginia.(“Come on, Clay had credit cards, plenty of cash.

  He just stuffed his pockets with whatever he wanted at home—purses, wallets—they just left it all lying around the house....Clay? You think he’s this little kid? He hands me two hundred bucks when we split up!

  How cool is that?”)

  Clay, brighter than my brother, had refused to drive him to Virginia.

  So Dino had caught a ride with a truck driver he’d just met in the Roy Rogers’s line at the rest stop.

  He didn’t know what had happened to Clay.(“Doan be mad, Jamie.

  We split and he left.You don’t get Clay! He can do anything.He said he was going home.”) No, they’d never looked in the trunk of the car and seen the crossbow there.No, they’d never driven to Etten Park in the Mercedes.No, Dino had not known that the police were looking for him.

  There was a screwup and the band he’d gone to play with in Richmond, the First Offenders, didn’t need a lead guitarist after all.But, though disappointed, Dino had met a college girl at the club who was “really nice”

  and whose parents had gone to London for the holidays, leaving their cars and their beach house in her care.(“I saw dolphins! I mean whole herds of them, just having a good time in the ocean.”)

  “How’d you get home, Dino? Who got you home?”

  “I hitched.I didn’t want to get in trouble with the judge.And I wanted to be with you and Dad for Christmas.I borrowed some money from this girl, she was a really nice girl, and I took the bus to A.C.”

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  I smoothed the blanket over him.“Dino, I need you to be honest with me.This is about somebody trying to kill Dad and me.This is serious.Did you and Clay paste together those notes, like ‘Death has come to your little town, Sheriff ’? Did you stick them in the door yourself?”

  He shook his head vigorously, then winced as if he’d worsened a headache.“No way.”

  “Did Clay pick you up tonight in Tricia’s Land Rover? Did he drop you off at home?”

  Dino stared up at me.“Clay loves you.”

  “I know.Just tell me, did he bring you home in Tricia’s Land Rover?”

  Dino nodded yes.“Did he come in the house with you?” He shook his head no.“He just dropped you off?”

  “That’s right.He had to get the car back ...I’m so sleepy, Jamie.

  Merry Christmas.You love me, don’t you? I love you.”

  “Go to sleep.”

  I TALKED THE WHOLE while Rod was driving us from the hospital to River Bend.We laid out a case against Barclay.He knew about the Death Book murders in the Killing Club and could have carried out all three homicides so that they corresponded—even planting on each victim a signature club key.He had the physical strength to bludgeon or push Ben down his basement stairs and to dunk Pudge’s body into the oil vat.He owned and had in his car trunk the murder weapon (the crossbow) that had killed Amanda, and he had the hunting skill to use it.Near the times of the homicides, we could place him (a) outside the Tymosz house and on the same day that Ben had refused to sell him the Pine 2 3 5

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  Barrens Playhouse, (b) in the lot at Etten Park a hundred yards from where Amanda was killed on the morning after he’d fought bitterly with her for breaking off their affair and (c) in downtown Gloria across the green from Pudge’s restaurant the same night that Pudge—who had blocked his development deal—had just claimed to be able to prove that Barclay had murdered Ben and Amanda.Presumably in the beginning, he’d thought only that it would be easy to get rid of Ben, a stumbling block in his plans for building Etten Landing (and possibly even a threat to his political fu
ture if Ben—dying—felt compelled to confess an old act of group hazing that had led to a fellow club member’s suicide).But then whatever fear or rage drove him to kill Amanda, he saw he could pass off her death as the second act of a crazed person mimicking the Killing Club.The same cover-up got rid of Pudge, who possibly had more direct evidence against Barclay than we knew.

  It all made sense.

  That Barclay had fled made the case so strong that even Chief Waige couldn’t protect the Obers any longer.We had our arrest warrant.

  WHEN WE TURNED at the curving brick entrance to the Ober estate, morning light had already pushed the darkness off the horizon.One of our GPD squad cars blocked the black Land Rover that sat neatly parked in the five-car garage by the guest cottage of River Bend.The fender was dented.

  Meredith Ober, in a black velvet bathrobe, spoke with us in her morning room.

  The strain of Barclay’s disappearance was telling, even on her.Her 2 3 6

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  thin china coffee cup shook slightly in its saucer, enough that she set it down on the polished table.But her cold bullying voice was as steady as ever.“I thought this invasion of our lives had been brought to a close.”

  She pointed at me but spoke only to Rod.“I understood Jamie had been removed from this case.Why is she here?”

  Rod told her simply that things had changed.“We have a warrant for your son’s arrest.Do you know where he is?”

  “I don’t know where he is.He isn’t here.Tricia’s here.Asleep.My grandson, Clay, is upstairs in his room, also asleep.And I would like to go back to sleep myself.”

  True enough, Clay was in his room.He was even in his bed.But he refused to let me in.I popped open the chain on the flimsy door of his room with a sharp kick that had taken me five years of Tae Kwon Do classes to learn how to do.Flipping on his light switch, I yanked down his covers.The coverlet was blue checks, Ralph Lauren style.The whole room looked designed, and not by its occupant, but like somebody’s idea of the Ivy League a hundred years ago.Clay had done what little he could to ruin the impression.Like taping posters of gangsta rap stars above the blue canvas couch.

  It was obvious he’d been just lying there, in his T-shirt and underpants, wide awake.He looked very pale and thin, a fuzz of hair on his legs, but his chest still smooth as a child’s.

  I pulled him off the bed and over to his desk chair and pushed him down in it.“Start talking.You’re going to tell me about every fucking time you stole a car from here to take Dino for a ride, including what you saw when you dropped him off at my house tonight.”

  “Who said I did that?”

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  “I saw you there, asshole.”

  We stared at each other a while, breathing loud enough to hear.Finally he mumbled, “I didn’t see anything when I dropped him off.Except, like, just like two minutes later, I saw Danny Ventura dropping you off.So I left! I swear!”

  I asked him about the morning of Amanda’s death.His story was identical to Dino’s.He didn’t even know his father had two crossbows.

  The only one he’d known about was the one he’d located in the “billiards room.” “Trying to help you out!” he yelled at me.

  He didn’t know anything about a Beretta pistol we now knew also to be missing from Barclay’s collection.

  We went over all the other “joyrides” the thirteen-year-old could remember taking.

  “The only time I ever hurt a car was Tricia’s, last night.And I’ll pay her back, okay! I was careful.I swear!”

  “Don’t push me, Clay.Now think about telling me the truth about those pasted letters you stuck in my door!”

  He ran back to his bed.“What’s with you and these stupid movie quotes?! I don’t understand what you’re talking about!” He crawled completely under the coverlet, moving to the foot of his bed.

  I pulled the covers off him again.“Three people have been murdered, Clay.Do you understand that, you little jerk?”

  His face struggled between fear and anger.

  “It’s not Dino! Do you think it’s Dino? He’s the only friend I’ve got!”

  He jumped up and ran over to his door where the wood was splintered at the chain plate.“You can’t just break down somebody’s door like that!”

  “Sure I can.You just saw me do it.” I left him there.

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  . . .

  CLAY’S GRANDMOTHER WAS pouring Rod coffee when I returned.She was saying that it had been difficult raising Barclay, an only son, after his father’s heart attack; that sadly the same pattern had repeated itself in the next generation—she’d had to raise an only grandson after my sister had died.“I always wanted a girl,” she surprisingly remarked.Then she gestured for us to sit.“All right.What is it you need to know?”

  I suppose Meredith had finally decided that the best way to get Rod and me out of her house was to tell us anything she figured we already knew.

  I implied that it was from Amanda that I’d learned that there was a prenuptial with Tricia whereby, if Tricia divorced Barclay “for cause,” she received back, not only everything she’d brought to the marriage (enough to build Glen Valley), but half of anything Barclay was worth when he cheated on her.“Was there cause?” I asked.

  Meredith’s white-gray pageboy was so precisely combed that I wondered if it might be a wig.She adjusted the black velvet band in it that matched her bathrobe and decided to drop the pretense that Barclay’s marriage was a “reasonably happy one.” She said, “Yes, in fact I did know of my son’s affair with that whore.”

  “By whore, you mean Amanda Morgan?” I knew that’s who she meant but I wanted her to say it.

  But Meredith paid me back.“Your sister,” she said, “went to her death, all too aware of that woman’s name.I’m sure you know who I mean.”

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  Rod said, “There was a prenuptial agreement with his current wife regarding adultery?”

  “That is a private legal matter.”

  Rod declined the cup of coffee she offered him.“Ma’am, in a multiple homicide investigation, there are no private matters.We’ll subpoena what we need.If you don’t think your son has run off because he killed three people, you want to cooperate.Anything you can tell us is just going to help him in the long run.”

  She studied Rod’s smooth-planed face.No matter what he was doing, he always had that same calm look.“Tricia is a Catholic.She doesn’t believe in divorce.”

  “Tell it to half my cousins,” I said.

  “Is Barclay your prime suspect?” Meredith asked Rod.

  He nodded at her.“I’m afraid so.”

  At that moment we all heard a noise behind us and turned to see Tricia Ober, dressed in corduroy slacks and a thick Irish sweater, standing in the doorway with her coat on her arm.“If you’re going to talk about me, why not invite me to join you?”

  Meredith hurried over to her.“I thought you were asleep.”

  In fact Tricia looked as if she hadn’t slept for days.She said she was going outside to cut some holly branches to take to Immaculate Conception for tomorrow’s Christmas Eve High Mass.Clay was coming with her.

  She had no idea where Barclay might have gone.She laughed without humor.“And you know what? I really don’t care anymore.I’m getting an ec-clesiastical annulment.Isn’t this funny—there’s something in the Church called ‘defective marital consent,’ and God knows Barclay had it when he married me.” She let Meredith kiss her cheek, then walked away.

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  . . .

  SITTING DOWN, carefully folding the pleats of her robe over her knees, Meredith said, “She’s just upset.Father Connor will help her.I don’t know what Tricia would do without him.He’s certainly been here for her.And for Clay ...”

  I said, “An annulment’s not going to kick in that
prenup, is it? Much less, equitable distribution.Because adultery’s grounds for divorce in New Jersey.I guess it’s pretty lucky Tricia turned Catholic, after all.”

  Thoughtful, the white-haired woman walked over to the window and pointed at the extensively landscaped evergreens.“Just as beautiful in winter as in spring and summer.I’m very fond of evergreens.I don’t really like flowers....Your sister, Gina, always wanted to plant roses there along that stone wall.But I think those different shades of green there are really best.”

  Rod said, “I like roses.”

  “Most people do.” She waited by the window, clearly hoping we would leave.Finally she said, “It’s an odd Christmas.”

  “Having your son wanted for murder?” I agreed.“Yep, that’s pretty odd, okay.”

  “Last chance.You have no idea where Barclay might be hiding?” Rod asked her quietly.“Because we have to figure he knows we’re looking for him.We know he hasn’t flown anywhere.”

  “I can’t help you any further.”

  “If you hear from him, call us.”

  “Of course.” She rose now, back in command. “I have no idea why you think he might murder two young men like Ben and Pudge, whom he’d known for years and actually ...liked.”

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  I asked her if she knew Barclay was negotiating with Ben Tymosz to buy the old theater out by the docks, that he had in fact drawn up the contract the day Ben died.For $675,000?

  “That seems substantial,” she said.

  “Well, I’d say so too.Except Ben didn’t want to sell it.But Megan and Ben’s mother are easier to deal with.And for about half that amount.”

  Mrs.Ober said nothing.

  I asked her whether she knew that Pudge Salerno, head of Gloria’s planning and zoning commission, had threatened to stop Barclay’s de-struction of historic landmarks, like the playhouse and the docks, in order to construct “Etten Landing” on the site.

  “Barclay buys a lot of things.A lot of people try to stop him.” She said it with assurance, but her eyes were troubled, and her lips, old and pale in the morning light, twitched before she could cover her mouth with her hand.I suppose it was the look of someone who’d put all her as-sets into one stock and had just watched it tank.