I drank some of my beer. It was getting warm, but I wanted something to do.
Murphy stopped, poured off the rest of his second into the mug. “So now you know.”
“Dr. Lopez, William’s counselor at U Mass, and Willa talked about William’s getting a free ride at Goreham. Were you helping out there?”
“A little. William wanted to live in the dormitory, like a real college kid, not a day-hopper. Willa was a little short, so I … We can borrow some against our pension.”
“Pretty good alternative investment.”
“Oh, yeah,” said Murphy, tossing off the last of his beer. “Thanks to me, William got to meet the girl they say he killed. Terrific investment.”
“I’m not so sure he killed her.”
“You got proof?”
I summarized for him the discrepancies I’d spotted so far.
Murphy mulled them, then said, “If I weren’t emotionally involved in all this, I’d say you haven’t got squat.”
“I’d like to keep looking.”
“I spoke to Willa about William not helping you. She said she talked to him and he agreed to see you again.”
“I’ll go tomorrow.”
Murphy got up, walked to the door.
“Lieutenant?”
“Yeah?”
“Am I the first person you’ve talked with about you and Willa?”
Murphy half turned, then threw back the dead bolt to leave. “You know your problem, Cuddy? You always ask one question too many.”
It was as good an answer as any.
I called Willa Daniels and brought her up-to-date on the investigation, with the exception of the confessional with Murphy. She thanked me warmly for the small optimism I let her feel.
Next I dialed Information and got the number of the only Wald family in Marion. The operator even asked me if I didn’t mean Wall or Walsh. I thanked her and tried the number.
A woman answered on the second ring. “Hello?”
“Mrs. Wald?”
“Yes.”
“Do you have a daughter named Deborah Wald?”
“Yes. Who is this, please? Is Debbie all right?”
“My name is John Cuddy, Mrs. Wald. I’m a detective looking into the murder of Debbie’s roommate, Jennifer Creasey.”
Mrs. Wald’s voice dropped. “I thought that was all over with.”
“I’m afraid not.”
“Well, Debbie isn’t here right now. She’s out with friends.” A different tone crept into her voice. “I don’t think she’d be of much help to the police anyway.”
Sometimes you get further by not correcting a misimpression. “Even so, Mrs. Wald, I’d like to talk with her.”
She paused. “Well, Debbie works breakfast and lunch at the country club restaurant. She’ll be home tomorrow after two-thirty or so.”
“That should be fine. Can you give me some directions?”
Mrs. Wald dictated a long series of turns, rotaries, and ill-marked roads. She said it was about an hour and a half from Boston.
“Given the distance, Mrs. Wald, are you pretty sure that Debbie will be home then?”
“Oh, yes. She has to be. They’re …” Her voice cracked. “They’re taking the piano away tomorrow.” She started to cry and hung up.
Seventeen
HAVING GONE TO bed unnaturally early, I woke up unnaturally early the next morning. By 6:00 A.M., I was ready to run.
I crossed Beacon Street and over the footbridge, only two or three cars passing on the usually clogged Storrow Drive beneath me. I turned left and moved upriver.
The banks of the Charles are eerie at dawn. The ghost of a full moon, looking embarrassed to be still visible, stares down upon homeless men and women. They sleep on hard slatted benches, wrapped cocoon-like in stained blankets against the damp air. Four or five push shopping carts full of cans and bottles, rummaging through trash barrels and abandoned paper bags to collect enough returnables for the day’s food or drink. Interspersed are the severely mentally disturbed, also without shelter following the wholesale release of the supposedly harmless ones from the Commonwealth’s institutions. They meander slowly and mutter, or march like storm troopers and shout, their strings of obscenities provoked by inner, private devils. Toss in fifteen or twenty fitness-conscious, fast-lane urbanites who sweat and swerve along the macadam running paths, wearing designer jogging outfits and “Have a nice day” smiles for each other.
Hieronymus Bosch was born five hundred years too soon.
I got back to my place and cleaned up. Making a ham sandwich for breakfast, I settled down with the papers on Marek that Murphy had given me the previous evening.
I riffled through the forms, then organized them into what appeared to be a rational order. The first was an Application for Endorsement Registration. It had been filed only two years and eight months before, which surprised me a little. Marek was a lot more recently admitted to practice in Massachusetts than I would have guessed. Maybe his furniture really was rented.
The application requested, and Marek had provided, premedical, medical, and postmedical schooling, together with hospital appointments. He had gone to school in California, with subsequent hospital positions in New York City, Philadelphia, and finally Chicago, before coming to Massachusetts. Marek apparently had never been certified by any specialty board.
Next on the application was a list of fourteen questions, asking roughly the medical equivalent of “Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist party?” They included whether his license had ever been revoked, whether he had ever failed a state exam, and whether he had ever been censured or dismissed by a hospital. Marek naturally had answered each of them “No.”
The next page of the application contained a completed verification of medical instruction and graduation from the dean of Marek’s medical school, along with a photograph of a younger, thinner-faced Marek. Apparently our climate was agreeing with him. There followed a certificate from a Dr. Jerome Gemelman, at the hospital in Chicago, that Marek was of good moral and professional character. Finally, there was an affidavit of the secretary of the Illinois medical association that Marek was duly licensed there, with attached Xeroxes of certificates from Pennsylvania and New York.
The second document was an application for a FLEX endorsement, which seemed to deal with some kind of standardized test. The form called for, and received, the same information in the same order as the initial application for registration.
Read in the context of the rest of the documents, it seemed that Marek, having received a high enough score on the FLEX test and having been licensed elsewhere and vouched for personally, was pretty much automatically granted a license to practice here. There was also a pro forma application for renewal from Marek and an approval of the renewal of his license. I pulled a sheet of blank paper from a desk drawer and made some notes. Then I slipped the documents into a manila folder and put them into the drawer. I dressed in a coat and tie and went down to the car.
William didn’t look any happier to see me this time. The guard who brought him took up his same position and watched William carefully.
“Hi, William,” I said. Involuntarily, I found myself examining his face for any surface resemblance to Murphy. I saw none.
“Look, my mother wants me to talk to you, I’ll talk. For her. But you and me ain’t friends, so let’s just get on with it, okay?”
“Whatever way you want it to be.”
“That’s how it is. What I want don’t matter.” He paused. “Never has.”
I started by listing the people and steps I’d pursued so far. When I finished, William snorted derisively.
“That Murphy must have you on the hook real bad for you to blow so much time on this thing.”
“Maybe I’m beginning to believe that all this didn’t go down quite like everyone says.”
“You wanna be thick, that’s your business. Ask me your questions.”
“How did you meet Jennifer?
”
William made a face, but started answering. “When I got to school—Goreham, I mean—I met her one day in the dorm.”
“In Richard McCatty’s room?”
“Yeah. Him and some of his goon friends were there too.”
“McCatty give you a hard time?”
“Oh, no,” said William, exaggerating the words. “He didn’t give me no trouble. He the soul of integration, the motherfucker.”
“When did you start seeing Jennifer?”
“She come out to apologize for McCatty’s attitude. She come on real nice, asked me to have coffee with her.”
“Did you?”
“Yeah. We went to the student center and talked.”
“How long?”
“Coupla hours. What the hell does this have to do with anything?”
“Probably nothing, but I have to get a sense of how things came along.”
“‘How things came along’? What the hell you think came along?”
“What do you mean?”
“She did me, man. She took me back to her room after the coffee and all and she did me.”
“Sex.”
“No, mother’. Body painting. Shit, of course sex. Blow job. Said it was her period.”
I stopped for a minute. William looked at me reproachfully. He said, “That all your questions?”
“No. I was just thinking.”
“What?”
“Just that everybody I’ve talked to implied that you and she were serious. As in romantically serious.”
William laughed. I took a chance. “William, you’re the first one who’s suggested she was just a convenient piece of ass.”
He got angry, then tried to cover it. “People don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about. You shoulda learned that by now.”
“Was Jennifer seeing other guys while she was seeing you?”
“You mean was she fucking other guys, don’t you?”
“That’s what I mean.”
“Probably. Yeah, definitely. She liked to fuck.”
“Who?”
“Who she fucked?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know.” He laughed again, short and bitter. “Tell you what—you bring me a student directory, maybe a faculty directory too, and I’ll underline the definites and check off the probables.”
“Let’s talk about Dr. Marek. How did you come to see him?”
“Jennifer’s idea. She was in this group, thought it might be good for me.”
“Was it?”
“Yeah, terrific,” he said, exaggerating again and sweeping his head around the room. “Given me a whole new perspective on my existence.”
“Was it doing you any good before Jennifer was killed?”
William exhaled, ran his hand down over his eyes quickly. “Look, I was fucked up. I was in over my head, you dig? I went from the street to U Mass to big time in like months. I know it reads years on the calendar, but not to me. I was dizzy, man. You got no idea. It was like watching television all your life, being envious of what you saw, then all of a sudden starring in your own show. Having people focus on you, evaluate you without you knowing what the measure was they were using. You know what it’s like to have the people at U Mass tell you you’re a fucking genius, then hit a place like Goreham and realize that genius is a real relative thing?”
“So did Marek help with any of this?”
“I dunno. The hypnosis stuff, yeah, I think that did me some good. In the beginning anyway. Then …”
“Go ahead.”
“Forget it, man.”
“William, what were you going—”
“I said drop it, man! Or I’m fucking finished talking with you.”
“Okay.” I made a mental note to come back to it. “Did you get to know any of the other members of the group well?”
“You shitting me? You talked to them, right? They were more fucked up than I was. Lainie was a slut, Ramelli was married to one, and Homer, I think he was in for some kind of weird training reason. Like it made the old fuck a better runner to listen to us nuts crack open once a week.”
“How about Marek himself?”
“He was crazy too. He’d have to be, to put up with the rest of us.”
“How else did he strike you?”
“He’s a headshrinker. He makes his money like a hooker, charging for his time to make you feel better.”
“You think Jennifer and Marek ever made love?”
William’s anger flicked on again. “The fuck do I know?”
“You were pretty close to her, and you must have seen her with him before, during, and after group. That sounds like enough basis for an opinion.”
He grew angrier. “You wanna know, I’ll give you my ‘opinion.’ My opinion is that you like to ask about fucking sex more than you like to have it.”
I took a deep breath, let it out. “Before Jennifer was killed, how were you and she getting along?”
William looked down, anger draining. “Fine, just fine.”
“No arguments, splits, anything like that?”
“I said no. We were fine. We fucked fine. All right?”
“You know a cop named Bjorkman?”
“Oh, yeah. Another great friend of the Negro.”
“He harass you?”
“You could call it that.”
“Any specific instances?”
“Yeah, plenty. Jenn and me would be walking, and him and his partner would pull up in their police machine and tell us stories.”
“Stories?”
“Yeah, about how little nigger boys that bother with little white girls end up as fertilizer back in the woods somewhere.”
“Both Bjorkman and Clay said things like that?”
William thought for a second. “No, to be honest, I only remember the partner being there once, and he came down on Bjorkman and made him drive the car away. Bjorkman, though, he’d sometimes wait outside Marek’s building and ride me, or just watch me when I’d get there.”
“Was he there the night Jennifer was killed?”
“I dunno.”
“What time did you get there that night?”
“I dunno. I just remember shooting, that’s all.”
“You have no memory prior to … that?”
“No, man. How many times I gotta say it. No. I remember shooting her, and coming into the group session, and telling them about it. But I don’t remember nothing before. Nothing.”
“William, if you didn’t do it—”
“What the fuck is wrong with you, Jack? Watch my fucking lips. I shot her. I … shot … her. Got it? No question.”
“Bear with me, huh? Please?”
“Not if you keep talking shit.”
“I need your help on this, William. If you didn’t do it, then whoever did was smart enough to set you up gift-wrapped. My guess is neither McCatty nor Bjorkman is that smart. Or sly. Is there anybody you think—”
“Man, that’s it! That’s fucking it! What do you think—you can look inside my head and tell me something that’s there isn’t?” He pointed to his temple. “There’s a memory in here, Jack. A picture of me pulling the trigger on her, that fucking little two-timing bitch. I killed her, I fucking killed her. Why you making me go over it again and again, man? You wanna drive me crazy?”
“William, you said that the hypnosis did you some good at the beginning, but then—”
William was already standing. “Get laid, motherfucker.”
He motioned to the guard and left.
Eighteen
AS I DROVE SOUTH toward Marion, I tried to sort out what little I had learned from William. Racial taunts from all sides, difficulty in adjusting to life on academia’s fast track—these were things I’d expected, given my talks with others. What was harder to figure was his jumping from street slang to classroom eloquence, from vague cooperation to flaring hostility, every time I mentioned Jennifer, sex, or both together. I decided to check in with Dr. Lope
z at U Mass if time permitted.
I swung onto Route 24, taking it south to where Route 25 branches off to the left. Slowing and winding for intermittent construction, I got onto Interstate 195 for a few miles to the Marion exit. I eased up on the gas pedal, glancing frequently at Mrs. Wald’s intricate but apparently accurate directions. I also began to get a feel for the town.
Marion is located on a cove off Buzzards Bay. While not a joy to the ear, Buzzards Bay is moneyland, the southwestern terminus of the Cape Cod Canal, the ambitious construction project that transformed the Cape from a peninsula into an island. The canal permitted boat passage from Cape Cod Bay southwest toward the fingery southern coast of Rhode Island, thereby bringing high real estate prices and prosperity to the towns located on Buzzards Bay. In Marion, however, both prices and prosperity had been high for generations, the town being one of the summer enclaves for the old rich and the very rich (with the fabulously rich going to Newport, Rhode Island, and the nouveau rich slumming it on the Cape).
As I ran out of turns to make, the old family compounds (two or three understated houses sharing tennis courts and wide lawns to the cove) began to get smaller and more compacted. Soon I was in a more commercial district and then, on my last left fork, I came into a neighborhood of amateurish summer homes converted to year-round use. I slowed and stopped in front of a parked moving van with its wide ramp already down.
I got out and walked toward the door of the house. A tall, slim girl in her late teens, who I guessed was Deborah Wald, was talking to a boxcar of a man in blue work pants and a strappie undershirt.
The man said, “And, honey, I’m tellin’ ya, the kid and I can take it out, but we gotta take the door off the hinges.”
She said, “The guy on the phone didn’t say anything about that.”
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