Penance

by David Housewright

  “I’m disappointed in you,” C. C. told me, turning in her chair. She was wearing a black silk shirtdress with a shawl collar, a long slim skirt that closed with four gold buttons and a jeweled belt. She crossed her legs, giving me a good look at her thighs. She was grinning.

  “Marion letting you dress like a grown-up tonight?”

  C. C. shot a hurt look at her mentor.

  Marion ignored her. “We don’t have time for this,” she reminded me.

  “Make time,” I said.

  She nudged the envelope toward me. “Twenty-five thousand dollars,” she said between clenched teeth. “Not a penny more.”

  “I don’t want your twenty-five thousand dollars,” I told her.

  “You said…”

  “There must be some mistake. All I want, let’s see, five days multiplied by four hundred … you already paid me for two days, plus expenses … You owe me, let’s call it twelve hundred bucks.”

  Marion was confused as she ever hoped to be and admitted it.

  “You hired me to find a blackmailer,” I reminded her. “I succeeded.” During the drive over I had planned to do a drumroll before making the announcement in a loud voice. But once I was there, I thought better of it. I merely pointed at Representative Carol Catherine Monroe and said, “Here’s your blackmailer. That’ll be twelve hundred dollars, please.”

  “What are you talking about?” Marion demanded.

  I cast an accusing glance at C. C., who uncrossed and crossed her legs again.

  “Carol Catherine Monroe, Dennis Thoreau and Meghan Chakolis made the porno flick together. They did it to cause a scandal that would force C. C. out of the campaign.”

  “But why?” Marion wanted to know.

  “Yeah, tell us why,” C. C. added.

  “My guess? They did it for two million dollars, for the money in the campaign fund.”

  “I don’t think I want to hear this,” Marion moaned.

  “I don’t blame you, Marion,” I told her. “Your protégée and her comrades made the tape and planned to release it to the media—anonymously, I assume. They made it last week, not six years ago like C. C. claimed. It was made between the time C. C. frosted her hair and you made her change it back.

  “Once the tape was made public, the ensuing scandal would have forced C. C. to withdraw from the race. And, as you know, any money that remains in a campaign fund after the candidate’s bills are paid becomes the property of the candidate. She can do with it as she pleases—give it to other candidates, give it to her party, keep it for herself. C. C. was going to keep it. Weren’t you C. C.? And nobody would have bothered her about it, either. Hell, it’s unlikely that anyone involved in local politics would have even admitted to knowing her. Probably including you. She and her friends would have walked away … rich.”

  Marion was watching C. C. now. Her expression did not change.

  “How do you know all this?” she asked softly.

  “The videotape. I was supposed to find it. That’s why I was sent to see Thoreau.”

  “You were sent to pay off a blackmailer,” Marion insisted.

  “Thoreau was already dead when C. C. said he called your campaign headquarters with his blackmail demands. My guess is that Thoreau was going to release the tape using the original cover story, that he was C. C.’s ex-boyfriend. Only someone killed him first. When C. C. and Meghan discovered he was dead, they decided to hell with it, they’d go through with the plan anyway. The blackmail nonsense was just a ruse to get someone over there to find his body and the tape—or to call the cops and let them find them.”

  “Why would they want to become involved in a murder investigation?”

  “Why not? They wanted scandal, remember? Besides, the tape wouldn’t have been much use as a motive for murder. Why kill Thoreau for the tape and then leave it? No, they weren’t worried about that. They just wanted to keep their hands clean. That’s why they came to you, so you would take charge. They wanted you to send someone over there to discover the body. If not your friend at the St. Paul Police Department, a private investigator would do just fine. There was only one problem.”

  “The tape is missing,” C. C. said, rubbing a smudge of dirt off the toe of her shoe. “I put it in the camera. I figured that was the best place for it. I was really surprised when neither you nor the police found it. You think it could still be there?”

  I shook my head no and C. C. sighed heavily.

  “It was Meghan who found Dennis. She said the house had been ransacked and she was worried about the tape. Only I had it.” C. C. shrugged. “I was kinda watching it at home. She said we should put it back and let nature take its course. So I did, Saturday night, after I did the speech for the Teamsters.”

  “Tell me something,” I said. “When Thoreau turned up dead, what did you think? Who did you think killed him?”

  C. C. shook her head—there was a lot of head shaking going on. “We figured it was maybe one of Dennis’s girls from California.”

  “What girls?”

  “When he was down there he made movies of himself having sex with women without them knowing it—mostly married women. Then he would sell the movies back to them. He told us about it when he came back; that’s what gave us the idea in the first place.”

  “Nice guy,” I said.

  “Actually, he was kinda funny,” C. C. volunteered.

  Marion slumped in her chair as if all the weight in the world had been dumped on her shoulders. I actually felt sorry for her. But not too sorry. Finally, she slowly rose and walked around the desk to C. C.’s side. The slap was lightning swift and fell on C. C.’s cheek so hard it knocked her to the floor.

  “Oooo, I bet that hurt,” I told C. C.

  “Have you any idea what you’ve done?” Marion asked C. C. in measured tones. “Have you any idea how badly you’ve hurt the movement, the state?”

  “Fuck the movement, fuck the state and fuck you,” C. C. replied, baring her teeth like a dog. “I never wanted any part of this election. I only wanted to be left alone.”

  “Yeah, left alone with two million bucks,” I said.

  “Carol Catherine, what do you think paid for the campaign headquarters and the telephones and the Buick?” Marion asked her. “What do you think paid for the flyers and the mailers and the signs and the bumper stickers? What do you think paid for the TV spots and the radio spots and the newspaper ads and the billboards? Why do you think we were attending a fund-raising dinner tonight? The two million dollars is gone! We spent it! You did all this for nothing!”

  “Nothing? There isn’t any money left? There has to be! How about the money we’re supposed to take in tonight?”

  Marion left her to puzzle it out, going back to the chair behind the desk.

  “I can’t believe you spent all of it! I told you not to spend all of it! Didn’t I say that?”

  “I’ll be damned,” I muttered.

  “I didn’t do anything wrong,” C. C. insisted.

  “No, of course not,” I said.

  “I didn’t!”

  Marion sighed audibly. “You have the tape, don’t you, Taylor? That’s why you know so much.”

  I shrugged.

  “So, now what?”

  I’d shown them the stick, now it was time to give them a good whiff of the carrot. “No one needs to know about the tape or what C. C. and her friends intended to do with it. You can still pull off the election.”

  Marion eyed me suspiciously. Then her gaze fell on the envelope. “How much?” she asked.

  “You never listen, do you? I don’t want your damn money.”

  “What then?”

  “I want C. C.’s testimony …”

  “Testimony?” Marion repeated.

  “And let me tell you what happens if I don’t get it.”

  “What are you talking about?” C. C. asked.

  “I’ll see that she’s charged as an accessory to murder,” I told Marion.

  “What?” C. C. scr
eamed, panic in her voice.

  I turned on her. “You didn’t kill Thoreau. We know that. You were in Mankato at the time he died. But you know who did. And a pretty good case can be made that you sanctioned the killing.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Is it? Thoreau was trying to blackmail you, wasn’t he? That’s what you told me. That’s what you told Marion.”

  “But he wasn’t…”

  “To protect your political career you had someone kill him.”

  “No, I didn’t…”

  “Sure, that’s what you say now.”

  “But you said yourself…”

  “Did I?”

  C. C.’s eyes grew wide with confusion. “I don’t understand,” she said at last, shaking her head.

  “I understand,” Marion said from her seat behind the desk. We both turned to her. “I’m a lawyer, remember?”

  “I forget,” I told her.

  “Sometimes I do, too.”

  “What?” C. C. said again.

  “He wants you to roll over on your friend.”

  “Roll over?”

  “He wants you to testify against your friend. He won’t hurt us if you give up your friend.”

  “What friend?”

  I did not answer. Neither did Marion. Instead we waited while C. C. worked it over in her brain. It took a long time. Finally, she said, “Meghan did it. Yeah, Meghan Chakolis. She was always jealous of me, even when we were in school, because the boys liked me best. She must have thought I was after her husband. I wasn’t. I didn’t want him. I didn’t care about Dennis. But everybody, they think because I’m beautiful I want all their boyfriends …”

  “Oh, don’t be ridiculous, Carol Catherine,” Meghan Chakolis said from the doorway. I glanced at my watch. She was early.

  C. C. looked away when Meghan entered the room. “How long were you listening?” she asked.

  “Long enough,” Meghan said.

  “I didn’t mean to say you killed Dennis.”

  “Oh, Carol Catherine,” Meghan muttered, not surprised at all.

  I moved over to the desk and sat on the corner. “So, what’s your side of the story?” I asked Meghan.

  “I’m pretty sure Joseph Sherman did it.”

  “Why?”

  “He figured out that Dennis was the one who killed Terrance Friedlander with his car.”

  “No. Sherman didn’t even know Thoreau existed until I told him. And that was four days after Thoreau was dead.”

  Meghan didn’t answer.

  “My God, my God, my—Oh my God, you killed Terry,” Marion muttered from behind the desk.

  “We didn’t. Dennis did. It wasn’t our idea,” C. C. assured her.

  “No, we knew we were going to lose the election,” Meghan added. “We knew we were going to lose when we started.”

  “We wanted to lose,” C. C. said.

  “Dennis thought he was doing us a favor.”

  “That’s why you threw him out,” I said to Meghan.

  “I thought it would be best if he disappeared for a while until everything blew over.”

  “Until Sherman was convicted of a crime he didn’t commit.”

  “Sherman was a drunk,” Meghan said contemptuously. “Who cared about Sherman?”

  “Oh my God,” Marion muttered again.

  “Don’t be so melodramatic, Marion,” Meghan snapped. “Taylor can’t prove anything. So what if the tape thing didn’t work out? Carol Catherine can still be governor. You can still run the state.”

  “Maybe they can,” I agreed. “But you? You are going to spend the rest of your life in prison.”

  Meghan smiled. “Give it up, Taylor. You have nothing,” she insisted.

  “I have motive—your jealousy of your ex-husband and your best friend. A motive your friend will testify to, won’t you C. C?”

  C. C. said nothing.

  “And I have opportunity. You already told me you were with Thoreau the night he was killed, testified that you had sex with him. Semen, hair samples, fingerprints … forensics will put you in the house right at the time Thoreau was killed.

  “Something else,” I added. “You’re about to become part of the bureaucracy. When the civil servants who work in Homicide come in in the morning, you’re going to be on their list of things to do; they’re going to be thinking of catching you. It’s nothing personal. It’s a job. It’s what they do for a living, like assembly-line workers who put nut A on bolt B. They may get bored, they may get frustrated, but they’re not going to quit. They are not going to shrug and say, ‘Aww, I think I’ll do something else today’ because what they do every day is catch killers. That’s why, of all the crimes committed, murder has the highest clearance rate. You think you’ve gotten away with something, but you haven’t. Your time is coming.”

  “You’re not trying to bluff me, are you, Taylor?” Meghan asked, a smug grin on her face.

  “Bluff you? Do you know what the cops are doing right now?”

  “What?”

  “They’re showing your photograph to Thoreau’s neighbors, asking them if they saw you there Friday night,” I lied.

  “But I didn’t do it,” Meghan insisted.

  “You look awful good for it.”

  “But I didn’t!”

  “I don’t give a damn,” I told her. “You’re going down for it just the same.”

  “You’re trying to frame me.”

  “Am I?”

  “I’ll show them the videotape …”

  “What videotape?”

  Fear began to creep over Meghan’s face at the realization of what I was doing to her.

  “You can’t do this.”

  “Sure I can.”

  “But why? What was Dennis to you? You didn’t even know him.”

  “I don’t give a shit about Dennis. For what he did to Terry Friedlander, he got what he deserved.”

  “Then why?”

  I leaned in close, giving her a good whiff of my breath. “Amy Lamb.”

  She hesitated. “I didn’t kill Amy Lamb …”

  “John Brown.”

  “John … I don’t know any John Brown.”

  “Joseph Sherman.”

  “Joseph Sherman killed Joseph Sherman.”

  “No, he didn’t. He was murdered—murdered with the same gun that killed Amy and Brown.”

  “You can’t prove that.”

  “He changed his shirt,” I told her. “He went back to his old apartment building—your apartment building—to get his old clothes. I’m betting that’s when he figured it all out. I’m betting he went to your apartment—the one across the hall from his—and pounded on the door. Yeah, he was just dumb enough for that. And when you opened the door, he recognized that you were the woman he saw in the parking lot the night Brown was killed. Only you were too quick on the draw for him.”

  “You can’t prove any of this,” Meghan claimed and she was right.

  “I know,” I admitted. “But it doesn’t matter. Not to me. When you go down for Thoreau, you’ll go down for the others, too.”

  “No, no, no!” she repeated. “I didn’t do these things. Why would I kill Amy? Why would I kill this Brown person? Why would I … Oh, Jeezus …”

  The man had knocked softly on the door frame. “Ms. Senske,” he said, “do you still want me to wait with the car?”

  Meghan went silent and we all turned to face the newcomer.

  It was Conan. He took us all in, uncomfortable with our stares, until his eyes fell upon Meghan. “Oh hi,” he said.

  He was wearing the dress uniform of the State Capitol Security Force. The name tag above his pocket read GALEN PIVEC.

  I froze on the name. “Meghan,” I whispered, more to myself than to her, “your mother’s maiden name is Pivec.”

  I sprang at him. “Galen!” Meghan screamed, but it was too late. I hit him. I hit him harder than I’ve ever hit anyone in my life. I executed a hook kick to his head, catching him above h
is eyebrows. Without setting the kicking leg down, I followed with a roundhouse to his face, smashing his cheekbone with the blade of my foot, then, just because I was pissed off, I hit him in the temple with a ridge hand. He went down like he’d been shot by a howitzer. For a brief moment I contemplated stomping him to death. But the words came back to me: When hand go out, withdraw anger; when anger go out, withdraw hand.

  I reached under his coat. He was carrying. I pulled the gun, de-activated it, unloaded it and tossed it on Marion’s desk. “Don’t touch that,” I warned her. It was Joseph Sherman’s Taurus.

  I turned on Meghan. “Galen Pivec is your cousin, isn’t he? I ran a computer check on you. Your mother’s maiden name was Pivec. How many Pivecs can there be?”

  Meghan’s eyes were ablaze with anger; C. C.’s were glazed over with confusion. Only Marion seemed to be seeing clearly but all she had were unanswered questions. “What does Galen have to do with this?” she asked.

  I ignored her. I turned my back on the room and went to the window, turning everything over in my head, seeing how the pieces fit so neatly, wondering why I hadn’t seen it before.

  “Amy told Conan everything,” I said to the window, using my nickname for Marion’s chauffeur and security guard. “They’re sitting together with nothing to do and she told him everything, told him about Thoreau and Sherman’s calls. No doubt Conan took his job as campaign sheriff seriously. He killed Thoreau … No, that’s not right. He was in Mankato. But there’s no doubt he set up Sherman and killed Brown by mistake. The gun proves that. Amy must have figured it out. Read about the killings in the paper, figured it out. She came here, to the capitol that morning, confronted him. So, Conan killed her. The gun again. Later, Sherman went back to his old apartment building, where his belongings were stored …”

  I turned back to the room. No one had moved. All three women were watching Conan, his breathing irregular. I didn’t know if he was conscious or not. I didn’t care.

  “Was I right? Did Sherman confront you? Meghan!” I shouted when there was no reply.