by Gerald Lynch
Kevin called without turning: “I hear you, Jake, and thanks for that.” He reached to straight-arm the double doors that swung both ways, thinking: There’s one other killer in this, in any way that matters most.
“Kevin, you put Kelly away and Randome will have wiped out your entire family! You’re alive only because you suffering is his true victory!”
He grabbed the right door with his left hand as it swung through its resting position. He turned his head and rested its bruised temple against the cool metal cladding. Posed so, his talking sounded for himself alone:
“She’s more than just the hidden accomplice in DeLint’s murder: she conspired with the sick mastermind.” He raised his voice: “No more rule of law and I may as well be dead!”
He stepped out and headed up the ramp, but heard distantly through the doors flapping towards home:
“And you’ll never see Randome again!”
…That’s true.
“Sláinte, Jake!” he called ahead of himself. “You really need to get out some!”
Chapter 24
The old chestnut trees still tried to serve the world, exchanging oxygen for poison, blocking UV, cooling the house naturally. He and Cynthia had planted the smallest of the four when they bought the place. Cyn knew just where it should go to balance the original three and in time to afford the best protection. Even now, barely a drop of the steady rain reached him. Old chestnuts: there really is no poem lovely as a tree, as the world had come to see. Every planting is an act of faith, hope, and love. He should have told Cyn that her gardens had made his world more beautiful, his life more bearable. He should write a poem. Trees help us live, poems help us die. Will that do?
The three original chestnuts had been there for who knew how long, seventy, eighty years. Some early green-cased nuts lay around like tiny World War One water mines; many others looked shrunken from the drought. Old chestnuts: I think that I shall never see…the future far or near. Because they fuck you up, your past and present.
You don’t live here anymore, Kevin; you have to go up and knock on the door.
But he didn’t go up. He looked into the dark tangle of branches, wondered how long it would take to disengage and align them in an orderly grid. He would need old ANANSI’s help!… What a time to be coming home for the first time in a year. What a time for such an actual widower truth to be coming home to him: I should have shown my wife I loved and appreciated her when she was alive.
The screen door whined from straining its spring. No porch light came on.
“Daddy?”
His left hand went to the top of his head. “Yes, dear.”
She returned the salute with a visoring hand. “What are you doing standing out there in the rain, Kevin?”
She came out onto the porch, his beautiful daughter, in a light print dress and her long pale feet bare — the screen door slapped shut behind her.
“Everything’s set for Bill’s cremation tomorrow! We burn him at nine, visitation and memorial service at ten, then lunch at the Canal Ritz!”
She’s a little crazy over Bill’s death, that’s all. Was it possible only he found her beautiful? He’d not thought Brigid Ertelle beautiful at first, so a man could be wrong in such judgments. And a father? They could be sisters, Brigid and Kelly, mirror images.
Brigid was waiting in an unmarked squad car round the corner, yet he saw her now, standing in the driveway to the right of the front porch, holding up her traffic cop’s hand to mad Don McNicol. But the picture was reversed, front porch instead of back, Ertelle on the right instead of the left, a mirror image.
Beldon, surely that’s a name you know and trust?
You?…
McNicol running scared, scared to death not of Kevin Beldon but of Kelly, as Randome had said on Jake Shercock’s vid. In such a state, mixed-up McNicol had mistaken Ertelle for Kelly. Beldon must have been the suicide trigger Randome had planted in McNicol’s mind.
Kelly running scared now.
“Why did you do it, Kelly?”
“Isn’t it funny the way Mother Nature seems to sympathize, Kevin, what with this dark and stormy night?” She cackled as Kelly never laughed, then plunged a mile. “I feel so sad tonight, so sorry, poor Bill.”
He shouldn’t press her. “Why, Kelly?”
She exhaled dismissively, came down the steps and right up to him. She crossed her arms on her scant chest. Her eyes were unblinking.
“Simple: I was never as interesting to you as crime, so I became crime. By way of proof: at our lunch Sunday, for you I disappeared soon as you got the call from Frank.”
“That’s it? That daddy-dearest bullshit! Seeking attention from the great patriarch? You of all people, Kelly! What about the law, the rule of law, Madame Prosecutor?”
For a moment her eyes were nowhere. When they found him again they’d transformed into two spiteful holes.
“The rule of law?” she all but spat. “You believe in nothing, Kevin, and you think believers are weak-minded fools. Maybe you’re right. But you have no idea how people believe in you: Mom, Frank, Bill, me! I believed Kevin Beldon couldn’t be beaten. But I had to be sure — and I’m right! Now you’ve come to arrest me, your only living child, for the murder of Eugene DeLint, Mom’s true murderer — the Widower! The end! Perfect fucking poetic justice! Oops!” She covered her mouth and laughed through her fingers.
“But dear, I am beaten. Ewan Randome —”
“Don’t dear me, Daddy dearest. You believe your great factioning gift comes from your dear Irish Mammy, right?”
“Where did you hear —”
“Mom told me. Ewan told me.”
“But Kelly —”
“Well, that just shows how fucked up you are, Kevin Beldon. Because your whole life has been devoted to punishing your father. You punish him with every investigation, every solution, each and every sentence. When you were beaten on the Widower, you punished yourself and us. And you’re about to do it again, big time! Ewan Randome read me his favourite poem once; all I remember is the line, ‘Man hands on misery to man.’ Man, Kevin, as in fathers.”
Madness. She grinned and she frowned and she opened her mouth in a laugh that never came, like some even worse Pant-O-Mime miming madness when truly mad.
He blinked hard and tilted back his knob of a head. A light rain reached them through the dark branches densely intertwining above, cooling his face. He didn’t lower his gaze till his breathing regularized.
“Oh, Kevin, this time round it never really had anything to do with DeLint the Widower. It was jes’ li’l ol’ me an’ you, Day-a-dee.”
She threw back her head and laughed a laugh straight from his welcome eternity in hell.
They looked at each other. The rain poured suddenly, too much gush for the sheltering trees, instantly drenching them.
Rain was a relief. Kelly was right, right as rain: nature could be weeping for these two Beldons who, wifeless, motherless, sonless, brotherless, would either never cry again or never stop crying. Could be, if nature could care for human nature, which it couldn’t.
“Well?” she upturned her wrists. But her eyes fluttered upwards, momentarily showing only whites, like someone suffering the petit mal. They returned and she touched two fingers to her mouth like signing thank you, then blew him a kiss, coy as some Salome.
“What’s your next move, Detective Daddy? No cuffs? Tah-tah then!”
She turned and sashayed towards the porch. This was the girl who could lunch wittily with her widowed father on the day she’d partaken in a butchering with her late brother.
He had no next move. There was no dropping inside himself for a clue what to do, no factioning, nothing. It ended like this. Cynthia dead by her own hand. Bill by his own or Randome’s, it hardly mattered. DeLint murdered by Bill and Kelly. Treacherous Frank. Randome the Widower, murderer of many,
victorious.
It could not end like this.
“Kelly?”
She stopped and turned but didn’t return. “Yes?”
“Will you answer a question for me?”
She smiled small. “I will even self-incriminate!”
“Why did you choose to start wearing perfume the other day when we had lunch?”
She was taken aback…then tittered into a loose fist.
“I’d thought I picked it up first in McNicol’s bedroom, and was sure I did in Randome’s secret Omphalos office today. Don’t you see, Kelly?”
“Oh, Kevin, of course I wanted you to find me out. That’s what Ewan wanted too!”
“You and Ewan.”
“Or Ewan you!… I needed to succeed where you had failed. And you had to know it. I had to have it both ways. And that is precisely why we’ve arrived here!”
He drifted towards her. “And your mother? Bill? How do they figure in your grand scheme?”
She went blank. Then slowly worked herself up again: “Mom was DeLint’s doing. He was uncontrollable, Ewan said. Ewan revealed to Bill and me that DeLint was the Widower, as you suspected all along! The only thing was for Bill and I to kill him! But Ewan overestimated his control of Bill, and that all went wrong. Oh, I gave Ewan proper shit for that this morning! I even hit him!”
He needed to settle her first. “Did your relationship with Randome begin when you got the charges dropped seven years ago?”
“Yes. I got Ewan to convince Eugene to let me leave Omphalos and to help me in my career. At first I owned Ewan and Eugene with what I had on the two of them. Then, without my even noticing it, DeLint owned me.”
His back hurt. “He owned you?”
“Well, more his mother and DeLint. But yes, they owned me, mainly by threatening to tell you how I’d advanced so quickly. They owned Frank the same way. They owned Ewan too, at first, anyway. At one point Eugene and Ewan were blackmailing each other! Then Ewan got Mother DeLint into the comfy chair. This was just before the Widower slayings…began…but right away the old witch saw what Ewan was up to, trying to fuck with her Gene’s mind through her, and she turned the tables on Ewan. I don’t know how, but Ewan does have some mummy issues of his own. Mother DeLint marched right in there and cleaned up Gene’s mess! Then she died and the Widower murders started. I suspect Mother has a lot to answer for.”
“Kelly, you helped the Widower.”
“You’re not listening, Kevin,” she sang. “Per usual. Bill and I killed the Widower, for Mom! For all of us!”
He held her with his gaze and the two of them just breathed for a spell. She blinked. He spoke in a whisper:
“Kelly, Ewan Randome was the Widower — is the Widower. He’s the one made all those women’s deaths look like suicides, and your mother’s, and Bill’s. It was done with post-hypnotic suggestion powerful enough to make murderers and suicides, mind-numbing treatments involving drugs, and trigger words — you saw it with Bill. Think, Kelly. Randome was robbing Omphalos all these years. And when that cash cow dried up — for whatever reason, probably Mother DeLint’s death and DeLint’s own narcissistic scruples — as the Widower, Randome began murdering those women, getting at their money and laundering it to those gangster Duvaliers in Haiti. But that wasn’t enough. He needed Omphalos.”
Kelly appeared to be concentrating on the bridge of her nose as her breathing grew laboured. He had to persist:
“Randome left the real murder weapon in his secret dome office for me to find, with your and Bill’s fingerprints all over it! He used you and Bill to get to me through your mother. In his mad mind, I am some kind of ultimate challenge to his rule, or misrule. Randome is as sick as they come, Kelly. Or not sick: evil. And now he’s gone! He wins, we lose again!”
She blinked. “But Ewan showed me evidence that DeLint was…the Widower… Randome the Widower?… It was Ewan told me that DeLint was always threatening to tell…you how he’d been helping me all those years. I just couldn’t stand that!… Mom?… Oh Daddy!”
She closed her eyes and didn’t respond when he reached his left hand to steady her. But he needed still to hear the facts of DeLint’s murder confirmed from her own lips. Even at such a time. That, too, was Kevin Beldon.
“Bill murdered DeLint, right? You stood at the door to DeLint’s office and distracted him, set him up, and triggered Bill with the word Gene. Then Randome came down the spiral stairs with the other machete, the one incriminating McNicol and Kynder, and you exchanged it for the one Bill had used to decapitate DeLint. Its handle was sealed, but not its blade. You had Bill cut DeLint some more. Later, you planted that machete at McNicol’s.”
Her eyes popped wide, shining in darkness. “You and Ewan! It’s like he rehearsed it with you, Kevin, not with me!”
“So that’s it then?”
She mimed zipping her lips. Her hair, something like his old hair, was in wet strings now.
“Kelly.”
She laughed normally. “Billy really lost it, Dad. He started kicking…stuff around the floor, screaming the very worst sorts of curses against, why, against you, Daddy! He even slipped and fell. It was hilarious, in a sick sort of way! But I guess you had to be there.”
Again he looked up into the tangled branches. For a long time. And thought how much more comfortably numbing was the old Starfield Screen Saver. He said a prayer, the prayer of an unbeliever; he didn’t know to whom he prayed, and he was ashamed to be supplicating from this wet foxhole:
Help me.
But the rain just continued pouring off the leaves onto his face. He levelled his head and made the only decision he could live and die with.
Again reaching with his left hand, he said, “Kelly, you are going to have to come with me after all, dear.”
She didn’t hesitate. “Why, of course, Daddy! I knew you’d do the right thing by the rule of law! It’s a win-win situation for Beldon père et fille! The very opposite of a Sophie’s choice. Can I get my shoes first?”
“No.”
She pushed his hand down and linked her left arm in his, patting his upper arm with her right hand. Her face was everywhere, her eyes dancing to the wrong music. He couldn’t look any longer. Eyes front, he took her to the sidewalk and turned towards the corner.
They could have been father and daughter out for an evening stroll the day the drought ended, with the woman childlike in bare feet. She swung a bit on his arm, smiling away at the rain, saying nothing. They turned the corner and there was the unmarked squad car. Brigid Ertelle waited on the sidewalk, in civvies, and drenched without benefit of chestnut canopy.
As they approached, his throat began to ache like the first symptom of a killer cold, a soft living tube narrowing to hollowed bone, like his own insides were now inside his claustrophobic nightmare. Nothing could ever be more painful than this. Yet it somehow managed to hurt more when he talked:
“Kelly, this is Brigid Ertelle. I want you to go with Brigid. I’ll be along shortly.”
She was doing her southern belle continuously now: “Why thank you, Ms. Ertelle. I have always relied on the love of family and friends.” And tittered into the edge of her hand, like a girl with a secret, or an actress unable to maintain the mad act.
But when Ertelle stepped forward with her hand out, Kelly stiffened. Ertelle waited. Suddenly alarmed, Kelly pushed back against him, shrieked “Daddy!” She bent into the two fists that crashed against her face and continued doing so.
He put his right arm around her shoulder and straightened her, slipped his large left hand before her face so that her fists would have to smash his hand to nothing before he’d let them touch her again. But the mad tap reserves of power, and his hand, wrist and forearm were soon on fire.
After tens of seconds that felt like minutes, she flagged. He bowed to her ear and spoke calmly:
“You were right,
Kelly. I was wrong with your mother, with Bill, with you. And you’re right about me and my father. Still, I want you to listen to me now and remember what I say: I love you, more than my own miserable self, because you are more deserving of love, more than you can ever know. But here’s the problem: I need to be forgiven, and you’re the only one in this hateful world who can do it. I don’t deserve it, I know, but will you do that for your selfish old man, Kelly? For our family that I helped Randome destroy far more than you ever did? Please, don’t carry our Beldon sin any further, like ashes in your heart. Let’s end it here, you and me, dump them right now in this God’s gift of merciful rain.” His voice quavered towards the end.
She stopped the pounding altogether, and groaned into her chest like something subhuman searching for voice. With an effort he could associate only with the few births he’d attended, she reached her left hand to where his right still rested on her shoulder, squeezed once, lingered at it for a spell, then fell more than stepped into Ertelle’s support.
The two women walked away: same height, same build; from the back they could have been twin sisters supporting each other home from a party, one of them drunk and shoeless.
Kevin knew a miracle without ever having experienced one in all the elegant solutions of the criminal universe. The clouds didn’t part, the sun didn’t shine at night. Yet Kelly, his beautiful daughter, had given him a sign of love and forgiveness in the wilderness that was his life now. His brilliant daughter — yes, his daughter. And that was miracle enough for a man of so little faith.