by G. H. Ephron
We all looked outside. My mother was walking Mrs. Babikian around the pool, arm in arm, their heads bowed as if they were deep in conversation.
Nick rushed for the door. Annie and I followed. Nick flipped on the outside lights. Spotlights at the corner of the house lit up my mother and Mrs. Babikian, casting their shadows deep into the woods. The pool glowed aquamarine. There, in the deep end, near the drain, was a small dark object. The grenade.
It was Mrs. Babikian’s voice that broke the silence. “My parents lived in Erzurum,” she said.
“Mom, no,” Nick said, moaning.
Mrs. Babikian stared off into space, unhearing. “The Turks came to their house.” Her voice was a singsong. “The soldiers’ eyes were empty, faces like masks.”
“Oh, God,” Nick said, staggering back and leaning against the side of the house, “please, not again.”
“They took my mother and made her follow them. Tied them together with ropes. It was snowing. My grandmother …” Her voice wavered and seemed to float above the pool.
“No!” Nick screamed.
“My grandmother …” his mother whispered.
Nick shook his head back and forth.
“My grandmother …” Mrs. Babikian said, this time louder.
He looked up at her. She opened her palms to him, as if begging him for change. He walked over to her, took her hand.
“My grandmother,” he said, taking over, his voice now low and lilting, “they dragged her into the courtyard. They dragged her and threw her onto the dirt.”
Mrs. Babikian listened. She was humming under her breath.
“She was pregnant,” Nick went on. “The gendarmes looked at each other. ‘Boy or girl?’ one of them said, like it was a guessing game.”
“Brrgrr, brrgrr,” Mrs. Babikian intoned. It was the same sound I’d heard her make before. Boy or girl? Boy or girl?
“Then, one of them sliced her open,” Nick continued, his voice gliding over the word sliced as if it held no horror. “He reached in and took the baby from her belly. He threw it against the church wall and screamed, ‘Boy!’”
The final word was shouted. Mrs. Babikian looked up, as if she were watching the word as it spiraled up into the night sky.
“Boy …” Nick whispered, a tear making its way down the side of his face. “It was a boy.”
Mrs. Babikian only nodded to herself.
26
NICK AND I sat on the front steps of his house, waiting for the police to arrive. I’d agreed to ensure that his mother was taken care of, and he’d signed his confession.
“Lisa said she was going to leave me,” Nick told me. “Didn’t love me anymore.” He gazed out at the trees surrounding his property, his voice low. “She said there was no point in arguing about it. She was going to have a baby. Another man’s child. If I loved her, I’d let her go.” He shook his head. “I couldn’t do that.”
I sat, looking down into my lap, not saying anything. I wondered why he was telling me this. It was just a rehash, almost verbatim, of his written confession.
“We argued. I was desperate. I picked up the fireplace poker. I wouldn’t have hit her, but she didn’t know that. She screamed and tried to get the poker from me. That’s when my mother came in. She saw us struggling, shouting at one another.”
Nick kneaded his hands over and over. “When the poker fell to the ground and Lisa grabbed it, my mother must have thought Lisa was going to hurt me. She attacked Lisa. In the confusion, Lisa fell backward onto the coffee table, hitting her head on the corner.”
“Why didn’t you call an ambulance?” I asked. “You could have explained. It was an accident.”
Nick started to say something. He faltered.
“She might not have even been dead,” I said.
“I thought she was. I … I don’t know.”
“So you just left her there?”
“I made breakfast for Mother,” Nick said, his face grim. “Then I went back to Lisa. I picked up the poker …” He closed his eyes.
“And you struck her.”
“Once. Twice.” He shuddered. “I kept hearing this voice in my head. Boy or girl? Boy or girl? I carried her out to the pool. That’s where I cut her. The baby was so tiny.” Nick cupped the palm of his hand, as if the unborn baby could fit into it.
Nick glanced at me. I wondered if he was gauging my reaction.
“Then I took a shower, changed clothes. I drove my mother to a nursing home, one I’d passed every day on my way to work. After that, I went to Teitlebaum’s and buried their baby. He’d taken her from me. I had to make it look like he killed her.”
“Then you returned home and called Chip?”
He nodded.
“What about the shoes?” I asked.
“The shoes?” At first he looked confused. Then his eyes shifted back and forth. “Teitlebaum’s shoes. I—” He cleared his throat. “When I buried the baby, I saw the shoes. That’s when I got the idea. It was one more piece of evidence for the police to find. I brought the shoes home, tracked them around, then brought them back.”
I didn’t say anything. Two trips back and forth to Newton? It would be up to the forensics experts to determine whether there had been time. I looked at the steam rising off the pool and wondered. It cost a small fortune to keep a pool heated in May when almost no one in New England swims. Had the pool been heated deliberately to blur the time of death?
“And why the mask?” I asked.
A shadow of satisfaction crossed Nick’s face. This was a question he was ready for. “I couldn’t cut her. I couldn’t. But I had to do it. So I covered her face.”
It would fit with Teitlebaum’s account that Nick couldn’t make love to his wife unless she was wearing a mask. It was part of his pathology, that he couldn’t be physically intimate with her without covering her face. I’d never considered butchering a form of physical intimacy, but I supposed it was.
Then I asked the question that had been bothering me. “Why did you pick Teitlebaum?”
“Pick?” Nick seemed genuinely surprised. “Lisa picked him.”
“She did, did she?”
He looked at me evenly. “C’mon? You think it was my idea to see a shrink? She’s the one.”
I had no doubt that Lisa was the one who’d initiated therapy. But would she have picked a therapist whose most famous former patient had been murdered by her husband? Or did she pick Teitlebaum not realizing his past? It was too big a coincidence for me to swallow.
“But—” I stopped short. Was this what Nick was up to? Rehearsing his story with me, working out the kinks before running it up the pole with his real interrogators?
It seemed a whole lot more likely to me that when Lisa announced she wanted to seek counseling, Nick knew the marriage was unraveling. He started to plan her murder. He put the pieces in place, just as carefully as he designed one of his games. He picked Teitlebaum precisely because of his connection to the Ely case. And I was pretty sure there had been time for only one trip to Newton—to return the shoes. If Nick took Teitlebaum’s shoes before the murder, that suggested planning, not an accident followed by a break from reality.
Nick had researched Teitlebaum. Found a shrink with just the weak spot he could exploit. It was probably a strategy Nick had used before. Find a weakness. Then I remembered what Nick had said when I met him at Bridgewater. I’ve been reading up on you. You’re the shrink whose wife was killed, aren’t you? Was that how Nick had found my weakness? Found out about my wife’s murder on the Internet, then exploited my vulnerability? I wondered how much of what I’d been blaming on Ralston Bridges was really Nick Babikian’s work.
Now Nick wanted me to believe that Lisa’s death started out as an accident. But I knew in my bones that none of it had been accidental. Every action had been planned. Just as I had no doubt that him sitting here with me, waiting for the police to arrest him, had been planned too.
He’d accused me of arranging it so I’d be at his hom
e when the call with the DNA results came in. But he was the one who’d set it up. He wanted me to be there when my garage got broken into, when my beeper went off. It seemed too convenient, unless it was by design. And if it was by design, that meant Nick, not Bridges, was responsible for destroying my car. If he was responsible for destroying my car, then what about the special-delivery packages? He’d been in my office the day the old book on phrenology came from my brother. He’d seen it drying on the floor. I could imagine him coming into my office, finding it empty. He’d have checked things out, the way he checked everything out. And yes, he’d even have looked in the trash can, the way he went through his employees’ trash each night. He’d have found the wrapping paper, the address labels. It would have been easy to make another package that looked like it was from my brother, containing Annie’s doll.
There was the sound of gravel crunching and two police cruisers emerged from the shadows.
“And all those packages? That was all your doing?”
“Not all,” he said, staring into the headlights. “I had to keep you off balance. Otherwise you’d figure it out before I made him pay.”
“Him?”
Now Nick looked genuinely anguished. Here was the rub. For all his careful planning, attention to detail, watchfulness, he still didn’t know who “him” was.
After the police left, I walked back into the kitchen. This was the one place in the house where I could feel Lisa Babikian. The gingham curtains. The canisters with their mushrooms and elves. The room echoed with the ticking of the cat clock, its tail twitching back and forth. I wondered what Nick had done with the pictures of the infants that had decked the refrigerator.
Did Nick still see a way out? Even if he got off with manslaughter for his wife’s death, Gratzenberg’s murder would be harder to wriggle out of. The police could compare the DNA evidence that Nick supplied to DNA Gratzenberg’s mother could provide, perhaps a strand of his hair, and show that they were the same. Between that, the T-shirt, and the confession, surely there’d be enough to make a case. And for Mrs. Gratzenberg’s sake, I hoped that the police would find her son’s body.
One question remained: Who was Lisa’s lover? I went over to the door to the laundry room and stood, staring at the wall calendar that still hung there. There were June’s kittens, and Lisa’s handwritten chores and appointments. Monday, laundry. Tuesday, grocery shopping.
When? I wondered, as I ran my finger along the calendar boxes with their neatly printed chores. When could Lisa have sneaked away to meet with her friend?
Her two appointments with DR. T. seemed to be the only times each week when Lisa wasn’t under surveillance or with her husband. No wonder Nick had suspected Teitlebaum.
I wanted to kick myself. I’d been in Teitlebaum’s house, had his datebook right in front of me. But I hadn’t known what to look for. I glanced at the phone. Would Teitlebaum be released yet? Probably not.
I traced down the column of Tuesdays, then the column of Fridays. If I was right, then Lisa only had one appointment each week with Teitlebaum. The other one was a shill, giving her the cover she needed to meet with someone she cared for.
Which was it? I stared at the calendar, willing it to render up its secrets. I paged back a month. Then another. I found the week in mid-January when Lisa had her first solo appointment with Dr. Teitlebaum. That must have been right after the break-in. After Jeffrey Gratzenberg was arrested for breaking and entering. Right after Lisa realized she was being spied on.
The first appointment was on a Friday. There was no Tuesday appointment that week. Or the week after. It wasn’t until the last week of February that Tuesday appointments got added. Tuesdays. Since February.
The doorbell rang. I went out to the front hall. My mother had answered it. It was the van sent over by Westbrook Farms to fetch Mrs. Babikian. My mother had packed her a suitcase. After reassuring me that she was unharmed, she’d insisted on riding over with Nick’s mother. “Transitions,” my mother had said. “They’re the hardest part of getting old.” Once again, I realized how much of psychology she gets intuitively.
After they left, I showed Annie the kitchen calendar and explained what I’d discovered.
“Tuesday nights,” she said. The look she gave me said she’d realized something that I didn’t.
“What?” I asked.
Annie pressed her lips together.
“You’re not going to tell me?”
“I need to be sure. You said there’s surveillance data downstairs? Let’s have a look.”
We went down to Nick’s basement office. His computer was on. I opened the top drawer of the CD storage cabinet. “What do you think these mean?” I asked Annie, indicating the tabs separating blocks of CDs: FD, BY, LR, O1, O2.
“Maybe which camera?” she suggested. “Front door. Backyard.”
I fingered the third tab. “Living room.” I flipped through the CDs. They were labeled by date. Which was the one I’d watched Nick going through? It had shown Gratzenberg returning Lisa’s sweater. Had to be before the break-in, before he was arrested. I pulled out the one labeled “1/1-1/16.”
I took the CD out of its case, inserted it into the drive, and brought up the list of files. They were numbered sequentially. I clicked on the first one. A video window with a control panel appeared, similar to the setup of buttons on my VCR at home. I clicked and the video started.
It was the Babikians’ living room. There was a date stamp at the bottom. January 1. The room was dark. I remembered how Nick had used the control bar to move the video fast-forward. I tried it. The room grew light. I watched as Nick, Lisa, and Nick’s mother moved quickly through. There were long periods of no one there at all. Then dark. Then light again. Then people flashing through, in and out of the room. Then Lisa sitting with someone who turned out to be Nick.
When one file ended, I opened the next. More days passed. Then Jeff Gratzenberg was there.
I slowed the images. The date stamp was January 12. It was the scene I’d watched over Nick’s shoulder: Jeff Gratzenberg talking to Lisa, giving her back her sweater. The quick embrace. Then the empty room.
Like Nick, I scanned quickly through the rest of the images. Then I put away the CD and got out the next one. It was labeled “1/16—2/3.”
I started slowly, then pushed on quickly through the images. People entered and left the living room, day turned to night and back again. Nick. Lisa in her bathrobe. Lisa in a pale blue sweat suit, carrying a basket of laundry. Mrs. Babikian and Lisa. Lisa on the couch. Then I caught something I needed to go back to. A shadow in the foreground. I backed up.
Lisa was seated on the couch. A figure stood, back to the camera, just visible at the edge of the frame. Lisa talked, listened. She smiled. It was the first time I’d seen her smile. She talked some more. Then the room was empty.
The next day, the figure was there again, this time farther from the camera, closer to Lisa. It looked like a man in a suit. Most of his broad, dark back was in the frame. For a few camera clicks, Lisa did a jerky 360, staring at the walls of the room, one after the other. Suddenly, the image went dark for a few beats, then cleared to show Lisa’s face hovering directly in front of the camera’s eye. She backed away, her hand over her mouth. A click later and the room was empty.
I reran the sequence. The date was January 21.
“Shit,” Annie said. “Boley had to know about the surveillance cameras.”
He’d never actually looked into the camera. He’d known better. “So Boley was the one who tipped Lisa off about the surveillance cameras,” I said. “I wonder how long after that before she confronted Nick with her discovery?”
“Or did she?” Annie said.
That stopped me. I’d just assumed that Nick knew. But now that I thought about it, I had no reason to assume so. Teitlebaum knew she knew. But maybe Nick didn’t.
I put away the CD and pulled out a later one. I brought up February 28. That had been the first Tuesday evening appointment
written in Lisa’s calendar. On this day, Lisa didn’t linger in the living room long enough for the camera to catch more than a flash of her passing through. There wasn’t much to see, other than at sometime around six in the evening, she changed into a dress and let her hair down. “The first Tuesday night,” I said.
“Poker night,” said a voice from the doorway. Annie and I looked up. Detective Boley was framed in the opening. I remembered how his pals at Johnny D’s had thumped him on the back, acted as if he were a long-lost friend. That had been the first Tuesday night after Lisa Babikian’s murder.
“Hey, Al,” Annie said.
“Hey, Annie.”
“You knew we’d figure it out,” Annie said.
He looked tired, whey-faced. Like if you poked him, the flesh wouldn’t spring back. He smelled as if he’d been drinking.
“You were Lisa Babikian’s lover,” I said, putting the last piece in place.
Boley didn’t bother to deny it. Now his odd behavior made sense. Why he’d been so upset at the murder scene. Why he’d gone white when he first found out what had happened. It explained why he’d want to obstruct any DNA testing. The fetus’s DNA wouldn’t match that of any of the suspects because it matched his. He hadn’t immediately found the surveillance setup because he needed time to destroy the surveillance video, in case there was evidence linking him to Lisa. He probably figured he’d gotten it all when he smashed the hard drive. Then, when I told him about the CDs, he’d acted as if they’d already examined it.
“Been a hard couple of weeks?” I asked.
“I’ve had worse,” he said, his voice slurred. Boley gazed at the computer screen. There was Lisa Babikian, frozen as she’d been before her first Tuesday night with Boley. “He treated her like a child. Took away her will to be anything. To want anything. She couldn’t even think for herself.”
“Tampering with evidence,” I said.
“Yeah, well …” He shrugged.