“Mr. Tucker, you got to let me arrest these two, and we got to get them to Detective Huyne right now.” His voice betrayed the surface of a deep, erupting excitement. “This is so big.”
I took in a breath. “Okay, I guess you’re right. But I’m not having Huyne spirit them off before I know what’s what, so you can arrest them and give them their rights like you’re supposed to, but you’ll drive pretty slow after that, right?”
He considered, then nodded. “That’s only fair.”
*
Officer Dirt Gainer arrested the two lost souls, put them in handcuffs, and read Miranda rights, loud, from a printed card. I had to suggest that he get something secure to put the wine bottle in. Even though she had more or less admitted what was in it, we both knew it still had to be tested. I personally felt I needed some proof for my theory about Beth’s feeding the third toxin, the rabies stuff, to Joepye: to keep him quiet permanently. Not to mention the fact that I certainly didn’t want it floating around loose.
We all struggled getting back up the hill, which was nearly white with shaved ice by then, and there was all manner of slipping and sliding on our way to the prowler.
Joe and Beth took the back seat, and I rode shotgun. Seemed the official way to do things.
I waited in the car while Officer Gainer donned a surgical mask, and two pairs of gloves and went back down the hill with a serious containment bag to get what was left of the wine bottle and anything else he could find.
It took a little convincing from me that I would really be all right in the car with the other two. I’m not certain which of us he was worried about the most.
After he’d disappeared into the woods, I looked back at Beth. She was staring at the floor of the car. “Beth?”
“Huh?” She seemed startled.
“Who was the first girl?”
“What?”
“If that wasn’t you hanging up there the other night in your clothes, then who was it?”
She focused for a moment and squinted out fire at me through both eyes. “How should I know?” Snap to her left. “Ask him.”
I tried to keep my voice calm. “And what did you mean when you said that about Joe here — speaking of Joe — doing something at the police station?”
“I don’t know.” She’d turned sullen in the blink of an eye.
Joe nudged her with his knee. “You might as well tell him; he’ll find out anyhow.” Whisper. “He’s real smart.”
She cracked out a laugh so sharp it could have cut bone. “Yeah. He’s real smart. He thought that was me hung up there like a bunch of bananas.”
“Isn’t that what you wanted me to think?”
Her eyes met mine again, almost smiling. “You’re not so smart. You didn’t get half the clues. I wrote the notes on corny old computer paper, and you never got the connection. I named the bodies after dances, and you never found the goddamn Website.” She shook her head. “And you didn’t even find my hotel room. How the hell do you make a living at this?”
“Luck, mostly.” I looked at Joe. He was staring out the window like we were taking him on a little ride in the country. “So, Joe … she was trying to kill you, you realize that? She had the rabies, the third thing you stole from CDC; it was in the wine bottle.”
He kept staring. “I expect it was at that.”
“Doesn’t that make you … I don’t know, mad or something?”
“At Beth?” He finally looked at me. “Naw. She’s just doing what she has to do.”
“Shut up,” she told him.
“Look, it don’t matter what I say now.” He looked at her. “We’re caught, darlin’. We’re in a police car. That up there in the front seat, that’s Flap Tucker. He’s got us. He has this — how would you say? — way that lets him find out everything. He already knows what you did.”
While I sat there wishing that what Joe had said were true, a couple of things came to me. I knew I only had a very little time before Dirt would be back and we’d go to the police station and Huyne would ask all the questions and I wouldn’t find out anything.
“You knew Minnie,” I said softly. “I know that much.”
“So what?” she spit.
“So why’d you have to kill her? She wasn’t involved in any of this.”
“See?” Joe told Beth pointedly.
“I didn’t kill nobody!” Her voice was jagged with hysteria.
“But you did know Minnie. I saw a photo of hers in your bedroom.” Suddenly the rest of Beth’s apartment was floating in my mind’s eye again. “And there were some charcoal sketches at your place too.” I nodded. “That’s how you met Minnie. You posed for the life class at the College of Art — or maybe even at your apartment.”
“See?” Joe’s voice was nearly screeching.
“Shut up. So what? I posed. I know you can check that with the college. I posed. It was great money … just to sit there nekked.” She stared at me. “That means absolutely nothing.”
I went on. “So, anyway, you faked your death, then you had Joepye blackmail your uncle so that you could both have money —”
Joe interrupted. “But I was the one who told her we needed something to throw you off.”
Beth chopped out a short laugh.
“Yeah” — I turned to Joe — “why did you get me involved in the first place?”
“Oh.” He looked out the window. “I don’t know.”
I leaned back. Somehow Joe had known I would be involved in the deal and had decided to make the first move, a preemptive strike, or maybe that had even been Beth’s idea. That would explain Joe’s odd behavior that night and then his not even telling me that he knew Beth Dane. But why would I have been involved in the first place? What could possibly have connected me to this except for the fact that Joepye had gotten me up in the middle of the night and forced me to look at a dead girl swaying in the wind?
I was staring at Beth, wondering what I could do to make her crack and give me the answers I wanted. But all I could think about, like the first time I’d seen her picture, was how much she looked like little Janey.
I only had a few seconds of that ricocheting around my brain before it actually hit something important and jogged loose the key image from my dream thing.
I saw a gallery, a long line of photos in a darkened hall. One of the images climbed out of the frame of the photograph and stole away, down the hall, laughing quietly. Then, a moment later, it brought another photo of another girl and hung it where the original had been, tossing away an empty frame. It was so mind-numbing that I couldn’t really put it into coherent thoughts for a few more seconds.
“Jesus.” I startled both Joepye and Beth. They were staring at me. I was staring back at them.
“Flap?” Joe’s eyes were peering into mine.
“That’s why you knew I’d eventually come to be involved in all this no matter what.” I could barely form the words. “That first body” — I closed my eyes, and I could see it — “was Janey Finster.”
36. Faith
Before I even had a chance to swallow, Officer Gainer was slamming the lid down on the secure box in the trunk of the squad car.
“Damn, it’s cold out there.” He jumped in and cranked the car.
I turned back around in my seat, and I heard Joepye whisper to Beth, “I told you about Flap.”
Beth didn’t say anything.
I tried to make my voice sound nonchalant. “Say, Officer, would you mind just dropping me off back at Ms. Oglethorpe’s house? Don’t you think Detective Huyne and everybody would have gone home by now? I think I’ve had enough for tonight.”
“I guess that would be a good idea.” He nodded. “This is a police matter really.”
“Yeah.” I took in a deep breath and blew it out again. Might as well let the police in on the big secret. “You might just mention to Detective Huyne that the reason his stuff was burned in the park this evening was that all those files had Joe’s fingerprints on them.”
“What?” He nearly stopped the car.
“Isn’t that right Joe?” I called to the back seat.
“Right as rain, Flap.” He sounded almost happy.
“Joe switched the fingerprints on the first murdered girl while he was in the jailhouse. It really wasn’t that hard for him — like picking a pocket, wasn’t it, Joe?”
“Just that easy.” He was content.
I managed a smile in Officer Gainer’s direction. “I’ve seen how some of the guys at the station house have Joe fix things when he’s in for the night — a Walkman here, a toaster-oven there. So he took advantage of the situation and switched the prints somehow.”
“But —” The car slowed. “So who was the first girl?” Officer Gainer sounded more excited than anything else.
I was hoping my voice wouldn’t come out funny when I told him. “Well, that’s another little thing to tell Detective Huyne from me: That was Jane Finster.” It was still hard for me to say.
“What?” The kid’s eyes opened wide.
I turned a little to catch Joe out of the corner of my eye. “That’s why Joe got me out of bed a couple of nights ago.” More educated guessing. I looked him in the eye. “You’d overheard the cops talking about how they thought Mickey Nichols had killed Janey, and you knew Janey and I were friends, so you thought I might be involved already — because of that.”
“That must be exactly what I thought.” He rocked forward.
“Oh, my God!” Beth exploded. “He didn’t know dick! He was too stupid to realize anything about what I had in mind. I got him to go fetch you. I told him how to get Janey’s body out of the morgue. I arranged the fake cremation. I even had to put the spider juice in her tea myself. Damn!” She took a second to calm a little. “I had to find out if people would believe the body was mine. I couldn’t very well get Nichols, or my uncle, out in the middle of the night, but Joe could get you on the pretense of your so-called work. If you didn’t recognize that it was Finster, then I’d be cool. If you did, it would be Joe who got screwed, not me. Got that?”
“She’s right, Flap.” Joe leaned back, smiling. “I was too stupid to realize any of that.”
But I looked at his face, and I saw the triumph there: He’d just gotten Beth to admit it was all her idea — in front of the police. He was staring out the window again, but that look never left his face, he just kept smiling.
I turned to Beth again. “Why Janey?” My voice sounded strained, even to me.
“That’s right,” she hissed. “Why Janey? Why’d she get everything and I get nothing? She got to dance all over town, she got invited to the big parties, she was everybody’s girl.” She broke our stare. “Why not me?”
I thought for a second then — I don’t know exactly why — about the Beth Dane who could have been: somebody in the chorus of The Nutcracker every year, somebody in art school with Minnie Moran. Somebody whose family had watched out for her just a little.
*
After we swung by Dane’s and saw that everybody had gone, and Dally’s car was nowhere in sight, Officer Gainer dropped me off at Dally’s house and roared away. Before I was even up on the steps, she had the door open.
I could see a fire in the fireplace, and I could smell dark coffee. I turned to watch the prowler pull away, then went to the door.
“Who was that in the cop car beside Joe?” she said. Then she got a look at my face. Must have been a sight. “My God, Flap, what is it?”
“In the car?” I told her, trying not to look her in the eye. “That’s Beth Dane.”
Dally dropped a silence heavier than an anvil.
I just went on. “She killed Janey Finster and Minnie Moran.”
“Beth Dane?”
“Just let me come in and sit by the fire for a minute and warm up … if I can. Then I’ll see if I can’t unfold the details, okay?”
She just stood there.
All the details actually came out over the next few days. Some of them came from me; some of them came from state-of-the-art interrogation techniques as practiced by Detective Burnish Huyne on Joepye Adder and Hepzibah Dane.
I guess you could say that it had all really started a few years back when Beth Dane had come to town. She was a tap dancer but wanted to study classical. She was going to be a ballerina. She was young, pretty, and willing to do almost anything. It hadn’t taken long for her uncle to set her up with one of the less reputable escort agencies — to earn money for her dreams. I guess some people’s idea of what the word family means is different from my own — but I digress. By the time Beth had realized what her uncle was doing, she was already turning tricks and “modeling” for the Internet, the site called “The Little Dancers.”
She’d always wanted out, but she’d also wanted money.
Enter Janey Finster, who had it all. Highflying boyfriends, money, looks — everyone loved her. They’d met at parties like the one at Foggy’s house on New Year’s Eve, parties where Janey’d been a guest and Beth had been more or less the employee of a guest, usually. Beth had seen how everyone watched Janey when she danced: swinging up into the air, amazing everyone.
Beth was burned up with jealousy: Why Janey? Why not her? They even looked alike.
Joepye had actually met Beth at Dane’s house. Joe really did do little odd jobs for Dane. When Beth saw him in the Midtown squad room one night after they’d both been arrested — ironically, she on account of her profession and he for his lack of profession — she’d struck up a conversation.
The idea really hadn’t come completely together for her until she’d gone to see Minnie’s show at the College of Art before the Christmas break. Minnie’d invited her after one of Beth’s modeling sessions in Minnie’s life class at the college.
And here’s a tough part of the story for yours truly: Beth got all her ideas about how to hang the girls from a story about Gerard de Nerval that she’d overheard at the opening. Minnie had retold the item about his walking a lobster like a dog and then about his weird suicide — something Minnie had heard from me at her summer party.
Beth had killed Minnie partly so that their connection wouldn’t be immediately obvious. That way Minnie wouldn’t put two and two together when she heard about the particulars of the first murder only a few blocks away from where she lived. But mostly Minnie had died because Beth had decided that killing one person was a crime that was easy to trace. Setting up a serial killer, and one so weird that it scattered everybody’s nerves — that was a great cover. Especially involving two such unconnected people, two such seemingly random targets. Not to mention that Beth had recently told the police in a moment of idle conversation that her favorite bedtime reading material was true crime books. She’d claimed to have read every book about Albert DeSalvo ever written. She’d asked the police if she could have her books — and her Raggedy Ann doll. They were in a cheap hotel room, get this, under the name Gerri Nerval — just one more surreal clue that had gone unnoticed in the cold light of day.
But those notes pinned to the bodies had been Beth’s proudest invention, her best clues, left just for me, as it turned out. She’d concocted the references to dances thinking they would be so obvious, partly because of Joepye’s bragging about my eclectic reading habits, partly because they’d been written on arcane computer paper. Then I would discover Dane’s Website, and I would put two and two together, come to the conclusion that Dane was the murderer. Tying the notes and the toxins together had been the polish on the apple. She really had been, in her best moments, as bright as Dane had said she was.
She’d done it all to set up her uncle for her own murder. Partly to get out of the life her uncle had gotten her in, partly to blackmail him for lots of money, but mostly as cold revenge on the man who had ruined her chances for a life as a ballerina. It was brilliant. And it would have worked too.
The problem with it was that she’d done a lot of it under the assumption that I was as clever as Joepye had said I was. But I think we could all see
how clever I had actually been.
Anyway, Dane had been released pending interstate pornography charges. Beth was on her way to being indicted for two homicides. Joe Adder was held as an accessory. Huyne even gave me an official police thank you call.
When I told Mickey “The Pineapple” Nichols all this information, he just handed me an envelope with more hundred-dollar bills in it. He told me I’d done a good job. His only question was “Then whose ashes do I have in Janey’s urn?” He hadn’t taken them to Piedmont Park to sprinkle in the Botanical Garden. He’d kept them on his mantel.
*
I went to see Joepye in jail a few days later, to ask him about Mickey’s urn, among other things. He told me he was scared of Mickey. “The ashes in that urn were just what was left after one of my hobo fires in the park, Flap. When I got Janey’s body from the morgue? I just fixed the paperwork — like Beth told me — so that it looked like she’d already been sent to the crematorium. I delivered the fake urn there myself that night. When Mick finds that out — with everything else there is for him to be mad about — I’m afraid he might try and kill me.”
I’d shaken my head. “Mickey is more reputation than actual behavior, Joe.”
Then, the day after that, Dally and I were watching the local news and cooking dinner. We stopped our work because of the lead item. A police squad car — the one taking Beth Dane from the Midtown holding facility to the city lockup that morning — had blown up. Beth Dane was dead, but the officer driving the car had been called back inside seconds before the explosion and so had miraculously survived. The investigation was barely started, of course, but experts believed that there might have been an army surplus hand grenade involved.
*
I spent a lot of time trying to sort it all out, talking up a storm late at night with Dally, sitting beside her fireplace. For a change there was no wine involved. I wanted a completely clear head.
“What’s really bothering you, Flap? Why can’t you let this one go? I mean, you were close to Janey, I understand, but it’s not just that. I can tell.” She shifted a little closer to me on the couch. “Is it because you didn’t recognize her when you saw her body?”
Dancing Made Easy (A Flap Tucker Mystery Book 4) Page 20