by Blake Banner
I nodded at him. “Santa Maria, tua Donna.” His lady. Then I made a query with my face. “Where is your treasure? Votre tesoro?”
He reached in among the tangle of branches and bramble behind him and, with some difficulty, pulled out a wooden box. He put it on the ground in front of me and opened it. I sat and stared and felt sick. There it was, the big bowie knife, bizarrely sealed in a large, transparent plastic bag, with traces of dry, crusted blood still visible on the blade and on the handle. Next to it, a large, Sabatier kitchen knife. There was also an old photograph of a smiling black woman with a young Humberto on her knee. Carmela, I guessed. There were a couple of stones, a Christmas card, a few other bits and pieces that constituted his treasure. I looked at him.
“Who gave you the knife? Quien ti ha dato el punhal?”
He grinned. “Angelo di la guarda.”
I gave him the thumbs up. “Obrigado.” He nodded and grinned back, not realizing that I was the diavolo incarnato who was about to turn his world upside down and inside out.
By the time we crawled back out, the CSI team had arrived. I said to Paul, “Do you own a bowie knife? Have you ever owned one?”
He frowned. “No, never. Of course not.”
“Take Humberto inside. Keep him there. You and I need to talk.” I looked around for a uniform. “Carter! Accompany Reverend Truelove and Humberto into the rectory. Stay with them till I get there.” I looked Paul in the eye. “Stay there!”
He nodded and the three of them left. Dehan joined me and we trudged through the wet grass that was turning steadily to trampled mud, toward where the CSI team was climbing into their plastic suits at the back of their truck. There were only two of them. I knew the leader.
“Hey, Stone. How’s it hangin’? Dehan.”
“Hi, Phil. The real objects of interest here are the two knives. I’m curious as to why one of them is in a plastic bag, but the other isn’t. If I am right, the bowie knife was used to kill Simon Martin eighteen years ago. And the Sabatier was used to kill Jacob Martin two years ago. As far as I am aware, you have samples of both of their DNA back at the lab.”
“You got it. We’ll run the tests for you. See if there is anything else we can find, too.”
“I appreciate it.”
Dehan followed me then, in silence, wiping rain from her eyes, to the rectory. We found Paul and Humberto in the living room, where Paul was lighting a log fire with a match. He stood as we came in. He didn’t speak, he just heaved a big sigh.
“Paul, I am not going to arrest you or Humberto right now. If the blood on the knives proves to be that of Simon and Jacob, I might.”
Dehan frowned, but didn’t say anything.
“I could take you both into custody as material witnesses. I don’t want to do that because I don’t believe it is in the best interest of Humberto. So I am going to ask you to allow me to leave a police officer here until the DA decides how to proceed, once all the evidence is in. Will you agree to that?”
He nodded. “Yes. I am grateful to you, Detective.”
I went on, “Paul, whatever happens next, whatever the DA decides to do, you need to start doing things right. Humberto is the victim here. He needs you. He needs you to be a father for him. Stop playing fucking Peter Pan. I am going to argue on your behalf for him to stay in your care, because I know you have risked your life for him. But,” I shook my head. “It is time for you to grow up.”
His face flushed. “I suppose I have earned that.”
“And some. This situation cannot continue. Your son deserves more. Claim him, own to him, either through a paternity test or by adoption. If you are afraid for your lives, talk to the Feds. We’ll arrange something. But man up and get this sorted, Paul.”
He nodded. “Yes. Thank you.”
I turned to leave but his voice stopped me. “Detective…”
I stopped.
“What about Sylvie, will you tell her…?”
“When there is something to tell her. We will see what the lab says.”
“Yes. Of course.”
In the car, the wipers set up a dreary squeak as the drizzle turned to steady rain. We moved, stopping and starting, grinding up and down through the gears, through the dense lunch-hour traffic, toward the 43rd. Whatever I had told Paul, there was no doubt in my mind what the lab was going to find, or what the DA was going to decide to do. The boxes would be ticked and the system would kick in and take over. And that worried me, because there were questions that I wanted answered. Questions about things that, whatever way you looked at them, still did not make sense.
Dehan startled me by speaking suddenly.
“You know what the lab is going to find.”
“Yeah. They are the murder weapons. There is no doubt in my mind about that.”
“Then I don’t understand why you haven’t arrested Humberto.”
I felt a sudden rush of irritation, but suppressed it. “There are things that don’t make much sense to me right now.”
“Like what?”
I took a deep breath and tried to organize my thoughts.
“Well, to begin with, what, precisely, would make Sylvie conceal Humberto’s identity as her husband’s killer, even from Paul?”
She raised her eyebrows. “Even from Paul? That is odd.”
“I can see her colluding with Paul, if she wanted to get rid of her husband, or if she really wanted to protect Humberto. But I can’t see her witnessing Humberto murder Simon, and not telling Paul. What does she gain by doing that? It doesn’t make sense.”
“I agree.”
“Also, Humberto’s account, such as it is. It’s all… external.”
She frowned at me, like I was crazy. “External? What do you mean?”
“It’s hard to put my finger on it but, the way he describes it—it’s all in his crazy language—but when he talks about it, I get the feeling he is a witness, not a participant. It’s like he was outside looking through the window.”
She gave a single nod. “And then there are the knives.”
“Yes,” I said. “Then there are the knives. How did that happen? Where did he get a bowie knife from? And, what did he do? Creep over that evening, spy on her, rush in when Simon got rough with Sylvie, stab him, and then put the knife in a plastic bag to keep it with his treasure? What would make him do that?”
“And if it’s some kind of fetish, why not do it with the other knife? More to the point, if he still had the bowie knife, why did he use a different knife in the first place?”
“Exactly.” I sighed again and shook my head. “None of these questions is quite enough to put a hole in a prosecution, Dehan, but they make me damned uncomfortable. I want them answered.” I turned onto Bruckner Boulevard. “You know? I think I’d like to talk to Mary, on her own, about her brother’s murder.”
She was about to answer when her phone rang. She looked at the screen. I caught the name, Saul.
She answered, “Hey, I’m at work.” She was silent for a bit. Then, “Okay, seven. Yeah. You too.”
She hung up.
I didn’t finish and she didn’t ask what I was going to say. Five minutes later, I pulled into the parking lot, pulled out my phone and called Sylvie’s number. It rang three times before she answered.
“Mrs. Martin, this is Detective Stone. Could I talk to Mary, please?”
SIXTEEN
I opened the door, but before I got out, Dehan said, “Stone, are you mad at me?”
Cold, wet air crept in around my ankles, along with the splash and hiss of traffic in the rain. I half closed the door again.
“No, Dehan. I kind of thought you were mad at me for some reason. But, to be perfectly honest, we haven’t got time for this kind of personal angst right now.”
Damp streets can produce a particularly depressing kind of echo, as though the echo itself were cold and damp. Fteley Street produced just that kind of echo as I climbed out of the Jag and slammed the door.
I went to the to
ilet, dried my hair with paper, got some hot coffee, and joined Dehan at our desk. I sat and started to review the very few facts on Jacob Martin’s murder. After a bit, Dehan asked, “What are you hoping to get from Mary?”
I looked up. There was something of the chastised child about her, and for a moment, that made me unreasonably angry. I dropped the file on the desk.
“I’m not sure. There are too many parallels between the two murders for it to be simple coincidence. Yet…” I shrugged. “Those parallels don’t seem to mean anything.”
“The first and most important,” she said, “is the fact that they are both…” She hesitated a moment. “‘Martin men’, father and son, Sylvie’s husband and Sylvie’s son. I don’t know how or why that is significant to the murder, but it is the most significant connection between them.”
I nodded. “Okay, yeah…”
“The second, as far as I can see, is the date. So, we have two men in the same family—the only two men in the family—being killed on the same date, but sixteen years apart. Question…” She shrugged. “A question I can’t answer right now, what makes a person kill the only two men in a family on the same date?”
“Almost like an anniversary, or a commemoration…”
“And then there is the position at the bottom of the stairs, and the wounds. Like a reenactment?”
“That is the obvious inference.”
“But you don’t like it.”
I made a face and hunched my shoulders. “How does it work? Especially if we are talking about Humberto. He comes into the house and kills Simon. He runs out the door, and sixteen years later, he comes back to commemorate the first kill, but this time he brings a kitchen knife instead of a bowie knife. It just doesn’t ring true. In the first place, I doubt Humberto is capable of the concept of commemoration. And then, what is so special about sixteen? It’s not even Jacob’s birthday.”
She put her boots up on the desk and folded her hands on her belly. “There are commemorative elements in the act, but the act itself is not ritualistic enough to be a commemorative act in itself.”
I thought about that. “That is very good. That is a very helpful way to look at it.”
“It could be,” she went on, “that something coincidental triggered the murder, and that the commemorative elements were added later, or as the murder unfolded.”
I narrowed my eyes at her. “I think I follow. Give me an example.”
She looked around the room, at the bustle of cops getting on with their work, carefully ignoring us. “Let’s say that you take me out on a date.”
I frowned.
She moved on. “I believe you are single, I really like you, and I am getting into you. And, after dinner, as we are leaving the restaurant, your wife shows up and starts screaming at you. I am so mad, I pick up a bottle of, I don’t know, Corison Kronos, from the table next to me and smash you over the head with it.”
“Okay…”
“Three years and six months later, just any random period of time, I go on a date with a guy. I’m getting into him but, during the course of the evening, I discover that he is married. I am so mad that we start having a row. He gets up to leave and I see a bottle of wine on the next table. The time you did the same thing to me flashes into my mind and suddenly it seems fitting I should deal with this guy in the same way I dealt with you. So I reach for the bottle on the next table, but it’s a Dalla Valle this time. Nevertheless, I hit him with it.”
“So basically, you are responding spontaneously, but in a commemorative way, to a similar situation.”
“Yeah.”
“Using whatever comes to hand in your immediate environment.”
“Mm-hm…”
“But there were no kitchen knives missing from the Martins’ kitchen.” I sat forward. “Unless…”
“Unless…?”
My desk phone buzzed. “Mary Martin is here to see you, detective.”
“Okay. Thanks, Sergeant.”
I stood. “Let’s talk more about this later—” I hesitated.
She stood and sighed, and looked embarrassed.
I muttered, “Or tomorrow, or whatever.”
We led Mary upstairs to interview room number three and sat her at the table. She looked nervous and kept smiling from one of us to the other. I gave her my best reassuring smile and she asked, “Will this take long? I have to help my mom with the chores.”
“It shouldn’t take long at all, Mary. We just need to ask you a few questions, so we can get a clearer picture of the situation.”
“I don’t know what I can tell you. I was only one at the time.”
“Actually, it is Jacob we are interested in at the moment.”
At the mention of his name she went very pale.
I watched her a moment, then added, “We think the two cases may be connected.”
“Jake?”
Dehan smiled at her. “I know it’s hard, Mary, but we really are trying to help you and your mom.”
“How are they…? How can they be…?”
“We don’t know.” I shrugged. “It’s what we need to find out. So how you can be really helpful to us, is by telling us, in as much detail as possible, exactly what happened that day.”
She put her hands in her lap and stared hard at the table top. She was nineteen, and probably bright, but there was a fearfulness about her that suggested the emotional age of a young child.
“Gosh, it’s kind of hard to remember.”
Dehan spoke softly, “They were holding a fête, or a garden party, over at the church…”
“Yes. I remember I wasn’t well. I went to bed with a chill and woke up in the morning feeling awful.” She looked suddenly startled. “I mean, not so bad I couldn’t go to help. I had to go and help out. We always do.”
“Sure.”
“So…” She stared down at her hands. “I guess we had breakfast, and started taking the things over.”
“Things?”
“The cakes, the cookies. Mom always bakes the cakes and the cookies for the fêtes.”
Dehan smiled again “And the brownies. Those are darned good brownies.”
Mary laughed. “Well, this time she forgot the brownies. That’s why…”
She went very white.
I prompted her, “That’s why…?”
“That’s why I had to come back for them.”
“What is it about forgetting the brownies that scares you, Mary?”
“Nothing. I’m just trying to remember everything accurately.”
I nodded. “Okay, we can come back to that. What happened next?”
A bead of sweat had broken out on her forehead. Her voice was unsteady. “We took all the things over to the church and started setting up the stall. And then people started arriving.”
I frowned. “At what point did you realize the brownies were missing?”
She laughed. It was an impatient laugh with an edge to it. “Why are you so curious about the brownies? They are just cookies!”
“When did you realize?”
She shrugged. “I guess it must have been about eleven or half eleven.”
“Where was Jacob all this while?”
“He was at home.”
“So your mom called and asked him to bring them over.” It was Dehan.
“No, she came and got them herself.”
I scratched my chin. “She came and got them? I thought you went and got them, Mary.”
“God!” There was an edge of hysteria to her voice now. “These brownies! They are not important!”
I frowned and smiled at the same time to show her I thought they were. “So who went to get the cookies, Mary? You or your mom?”
She took a deep breath. “Mom. Mom went to get the cookies. And then…”
I held up a hand. “Just before we go any further. Did Jacob ever get involved in church activities?”
She was rigid. I could see the tendons standing out on her neck and her brow was now beaded wit
h perspiration.
“No.”
“How come? I understood that as a family you were all…”
“Not him.”
I waited. She didn’t say anything.
Dehan asked, “Since when, Mary? What made him turn away from the Lord?”
I glanced at her. It was an odd turn of phrase for Dehan, but it worked.
“When he was eleven or twelve, he started...” She seemed to be not so much searching for the right word, as trying not to use it. Finally, she spat out, “…deviating!”
Dehan looked startled. “Deviating? In what way?”
She closed her eyes. “Do I have to talk about this?”
“Yes, Mary.” I frowned at her. “It could be very important.”
“He started hanging out with…” Again she hesitated. “He started hanging out with non-church people at school.”
“What exactly are non-church people?”
She stared hard at the wall. “People from other faiths.”
I leaned forward, with my elbows on the table. “Did your mother and Paul disapprove of that?”
“Not really. Not at first.”
“Not at first. So what made them change their minds?”
“He started hanging out with them after school as well. Then stopped coming to church events, stopped going to worship, and in the end, he said he was not a Christian at all.”
Dehan gave her head a small twitch. “That must have been really upsetting for your mom and for Paul. How did they take it?”
“They were very upset. We all were. But there was nothing we could do about it.”
“So that’s why your mom went for the brownies instead of asking Jacob.”
“Yes.”
I drummed my fingers on the table for a moment. I had an idea taking shape in my head. “Did he have any special friends, people he used to hang out with on a regular basis?”
She nodded. “Yes, but I didn’t know them.”
“He must have mentioned names.”
“I suppose so. I never listened.”
Dehan asked the obvious question. “Mary, do you think Jacob was getting involved with a gang?”