by Blake Banner
He nodded. “She was. Postpartum depression. After Sinead was born, she got real low. I didn’t know what to do to help her. We were real close always, ever since her pa died. But then everything seemed to kind of change when Baby came along.” He shrugged and glanced at Anne-Marie, as though seeking support and confirmation. “We hadn’t really planned on having a baby yet. My work wasn’t real secure. In fact, I got fired just after Baby was born. And Kath was worried about having kids if we wasn’t financially secure. She was sound like that.”
Dehan raised an eyebrow. “How did you feel about the baby?”
His face lit up. “Oh, I was over the moon. She was the cutest thing you can imagine. Still is.”
I smiled, liked I shared his pleasure. “Mo, can you think of anything besides the birth of the baby that might have been depressing Kath?”
His smile faded. “Not really. I mean we had our money problems, and that was getting to both of us, but we was solid, and we had the family right by us, didn’t we?” He turned to Anne-Marie and she took his hand.
Dehan studied her a moment. “Did she ever confide in you, Anne-Marie? Did she ever talk to you about what was troubling her?”
Anne-Marie nodded vigorously. “Oh, Lord, yeah. We was real close. We was almost like sisters. She would tell me most everything. Even told me a few secrets about this feller!” They laughed and we smiled patiently. “But when this depression came on her, she just clammed right up. She wouldn’t talk to Mo and she wouldn’t talk to me. In a sense, that was what started me and Mo getting close, cause we used to talk about her, and what was wrong with her. And so we kind of come together.”
Dehan raised an eyebrow. “So were you two seeing each other before…”
They both erupted simultaneously, and the look of horror on their faces seemed genuine.
“Oh, Lord no!”
Then Mo added, “We became close as friends. But what really brought us together was when poor Kath died. Then Anne-Marie was a real consolation. She was my tower of strength. But we spoke to Isaac before we ever took it any further than holding hands. We never went behind his back, or Kath’s.”
I scratched my chin. “Here’s the thing we can’t understand. What would make Kath take off and travel one and a half thousand miles across the country, when her mother and her whole family was right here?”
He nodded a few times, like he was saying the question made sense, but had a reasonable answer. “What she said to me and her ma was that she needed to get away from me and baby for a few days. We didn’t have money for her to go on a weekend break or anything, so she was going to go and visit my parents. She got on real well with Ingrid and Alfredo.”
Dehan’s eyebrows shot up. “Ingrid and Alfredo?”
“My parents.”
“I know. You don’t call them Mom and Dad?”
He gave a sheepish grin. “I guess we never did. Ingie was kind of strict that way. Ingie, my mom.”
“So…” I scratched my chin again. “Kath had a good relationship with Ingrid and Alfredo.”
“Yeah, they loved her, got on real well.”
“When was the last time she had seen them, Mo?”
“Oh, well, that would be a couple of years. Since we moved out here.”
“You and Isaac.”
“And Anne-Marie.”
Anne-Marie spoke before I could ask. “Me and Isaac got married just before we all three moved out together. Mel was real helpful and supportive. She helped Isaac get his construction job before we come. Then he helped Mo.”
I nodded for a bit, drumming my fingers on the table. Dehan asked, “How did Isaac take Kath’s death?”
Anne-Marie’s face hardened for a moment, then she shrugged. “It hit us all real hard. He was upset, like the rest of us.”
“Do you stay in touch?”
Mo shook his head. “Not really. It was hard for him.”
There was something ruthless in Dehan’s voice when she said, “Triple blow for him, huh? His childhood sweetheart, his wife, and his brother.”
They both looked down at the table. Unconsciously, Anne-Marie reached for Mo’s hand. He gave a small shrug. “I guess that’s just the way the cookie crumbled. We didn’t mean him no harm.”
I patted the glossy brochures with my palm a couple of times. “Sure. Listen, you’ve been very helpful. We may need to talk to you again. I hope that’s not a problem.”
Mo smiled, but Anne-Marie was still staring down at the table. She hadn’t liked Dehan’s crack. Mo said, “Anything we can do to help, Detectives.”
We left them in the office and stepped out, through the shiny showroom and into the mellow afternoon, where the shadows were growing long as the sun began to sink in the southwest. We climbed into the car and eased into the flow of traffic. Dehan eyed me and said, “Isaac?”
I frowned and shook my head, then nodded. “Call him, will you?” I reached in my pocket and handed her the details Mel had given me. “Ask him to come in to the station. I have a feeling he is going to have quite a lot to tell us. This loving, close-knit family is hiding something, and Isaac might be just the man to tell us what.”
Dehan was dialing. “Yup. My feelings exactly, Sensei.”
FOUR
Isaac showed up at six o’clock. The sun hadn’t set yet, but it was hovering over the rim of the world and making the sky blush. I had a uniform take him to an interrogation room and after five minutes, Dehan and I went up to talk to him.
He was a big guy. If Ingrid was Scandinavian, he had inherited all of her Viking genes. He had big hands, big shoulders and a big head. His eyes were pale blue and his hair, which was thinning on top, was a sandy blond. He didn’t say anything as we came in, but watched us sit opposite him.
I introduced myself and Dehan. “You want some coffee?”
He shook his head. “What’s this all about? This about Kathleen?”
He had a stare like a poke in the eye: simple and direct. I nodded once. “Yup. We’re giving the Lee County sheriff a hand, and we wanted to ask you a few questions. That OK?”
“Why not? You talked to Mel and Anne-Marie, and that son of a bitch Mo?” He turned his direct stare on Dehan. “I beg your pardon, ma’am.”
She blinked a couple of times and I smiled. “We’ve heard that Kath was pretty depressed shortly before she died. What can you tell us about that?”
“Plenty.”
I leaned back in my chair. “In your own words and your own time, Isaac.”
He nodded at Dehan again. “Beggin’ your pardon in advance, ma’am, in a nutshell, she was depressed because she realized she’d gone and married one major son of a bitch. Now, I’ll try not to swear anymore, but I can’t guarantee nothing coz talkin’ about Mo makes me real mad. And that’s about the size of it.”
“In what way was Mo a son of a bitch, Isaac? And what made Kath realize it, just after she had her baby?”
His face flushed and he looked down at his huge hands on the table in front of him. He made huge fists out of them and did a funny kind of sideways twitch with his head. You could tell he was getting mad. “He’s a son of a bitch in just about every way you can name. In fact, there ain’t no way in which he ain’t a son of a bitch!”
Dehan smiled at him. “Try to be more specific, Isaac. Help us out. Give us some examples…”
“Oh, I can give you examples, and plenty of ’em. Starting right back when we was kids.” He pointed at the wall behind him with his thumb, like that was where they had been kids together. “I am older than him, but he was smarter than me. I don’t mind recognizing that. He’s smart. But he always used his brains to get the better of me any time he could. If I had something, that was enough for him to want it more, and take it from me.”
Dehan was nodding. “I had a sister like that.” She shrugged. “But as we got older we learned to get over it. Now we’re friends.”
“With all due respect, ma’am, you’re lucky. Mo and me never learned to be friends. I tried
! Ingie, that’s my mom, she beat it into us most every day. Why, she made my ass bleed with a switch more’n once for fighting with Mo. So I tried, but he always had some way of turning things so I was the one who got punished.”
I gave a rueful laugh. “It was always going to be you and Kath, right? But he took her away from you…”
His eyes went wide. “How’d you know that?”
Dehan was smiling. “We’re cops, and it was kind of obvious from what you were saying.”
His face went sullen. “When their dad died, and they come up to Seven Hills to get away from things for a bit, Kath had turned fifteen and she’d become real cute. Pretty as anything. But she was broken up with her dad’s death. Mo saw his opportunity and got right on in there. It ain’t that I didn’t care for her. I did. I could see she was real upset, but I didn’t have the words the way he did. He just seemed to know exactly what to say and when to say it. I knew he was just playin’ her, and she was none too smart, I guess. He just wrapped her ’round his little finger and she fell hook, line and sinker.”
He opened his hands and laid them palm down on the table again. “People always said that me and Kath would end up together coz we was the less smart ones. We was good friends, always hung out together in the summer.”
He frowned at each of us in turn, as though he was trying to work out whether we understood him or not. After a moment he shrugged, like it didn’t really matter. “Pat and Mo was the smart ones. They used to talk and laugh a lot about stuff that me and Kath thought was dumb. They used to pick on us and take the Mickey, called us stupid. But that summer it all changed. I think he’d decided he was moving to New York, and he was going to use Kath to get there.”
Dehan asked, “Why not Pat if they got on so well?”
“Coz she was smart, and she knew what he was about. She liked him, but she wouldn’t never trust him. Kath was sweet and simple, and after he seduced her, she would’a done anything for him.”
It was making sense. “So what happened that summer, Isaac?” He looked at me. “Where did the depression come from if she loved him so much?”
His cheeks and his ears colored. You could see the anger in his face. “I think she began to realize what kind of a man she had married.”
“What made her realize that?”
He looked embarrassed and glanced at Dehan. “Personally, I think there ain’t many things on God’s Earth as beautiful as a woman who is with child. And Kathleen, when she was with child, was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen…” He paused to steady his breath. There were tears threatening to spill from his eyes. “But Mo, even though it was his child, didn’t see it that way. And once she was pregnant, he lost interest in her.”
Dehan was frowning. “Was he ever cruel or violent to her?”
Isaac shook his head. “No, never nothing like that. He was always kind to her, and attentive. He’s smart that way. Always charms everybody, even when he don’t need to. But he wouldn’t sleep with her.”
Her frown deepened. “How do you know that?”
He held her eye for a long moment. There was a rage building in him and I realized in that moment that he could be a very dangerous man when riled. He said simply, “He told Anne-Marie.”
I raised an eyebrow. “That’s a pretty intimate thing to be sharing with your sister in-law.”
He turned his direct gaze on me. “I told you, he always wanted what I had.”
Dehan snorted. “He started moving in on Anne-Marie.”
“For all his being so smart, he couldn’t get a job, till I got work on a construction site. I put in a word for him and pretty soon we was both workin’ and making decent money. We all lived close by. Pat and Mel was on Commonwealth Avenue, just across the road from me and Anne-Marie, and Kath and Mo was at the back, on Rosedale. And for a bit there, it was good. I even thought maybe he was learning to be a decent person. An’ that just shows you how darned stupid I can be. Soon as the summer started, and it started getting hot, that work was just too much for him. He kept turning up late, bunking off early, making excuses…” He shook his head. “You just can’t do that in this kind of job. Two strikes and you’re out. I told him, this is unskilled labor, boy! There’s a whole line of eager, hungry men waitin’ behind you to take your job. You waste the boss’ time and you are out!”
He shook his head and pointed a finger like a salami at me. “My mistake? My mistake was thinking that he gave a damn. He got himself fired and lived off of Mel and me, and while he was pretending to be out lookin’ for work, he was visiting with Anne-Marie. Anne-Marie is real pretty, and smarter’an me. I guess she’s a lot like Mo, and maybe she just used me as a way to get out of Seven Hills, the way he used Kath. When we was courtin’ she was always tellin’ me, what she really wanted was to go to San Francisco, or L.A. or New York. When she heard that Mo wanted to go east to be with Kath, she was on to me most every day to go with him.” He shrugged. “Once Kath was out of the picture because she was pregnant, I guess she was happy to hook up with Mo. They had more in common than she had with me.”
He gave me that direct stare again. “I figure it takes a special kind of sick to stop lovin’ your wife because she’s pregnant with your baby.”
Dehan heaved a deep sigh and sat back in her chair. She crossed her arms and blinked several times like she was ticking off thoughts in her mind.
“If I understand you, Isaac, what you are saying is that, like you, Kathleen realized that Mo was having an affair with Anne-Marie, and that was what put her into a depression.”
He nodded at his fists. “I think maybe she figured that once the baby was born, he might go back to liking her. She was a good, servile wife and she would’a done anything for him. But when the baby was born, he didn’t go back to her. He just kept right on being his son of a bitch self. She realized it was all over between them, and now she had a baby too. I think she realized it was only a matter of time before he left her.”
I nodded. It made a lot of sense, at least, most of it did. I frowned to show that one part of it didn’t. “What I don’t understand, Isaac, is why she went to Seven Hills. Was her relationship with your parents that good?”
He curled his lip, still scowling at his fists. “Not really. I guess they liked her OK, save that she was a papist. They never said much about her one way or another. My folks are old school Methodist. They don’t hold with Rome. They ain’t the kind of folks you’d go to to cry on their shoulder. They’d just tell you to accept the Lord’s will and pray.” He looked up at me to see if I understood what he meant. “For them, if you got a problem, you get on with it and fix it. And if you can’t fix it, you pray to the Lord for strength, and try again. We’re sent here to suffer, and every problem is a trial of faith. So they don’t really see much point in cryin’, or talkin’ about problems. You just deal with’em.”
“So you’re telling me you don’t understand why she went there either?”
“She was never really that close to my folks.” He studied my face a moment. “She was a sweet, loving person. You know what I mean? She was real tender. She’d do anything for anybody. My folks…” He gave a lopsided smile. “My folks is as hard as old boot leather. I don’t know why she would go visit them.”
Dehan was staring hard at the tabletop, and I knew that she was thinking the same as me. After a moment she said, “Isaac, were you in New York from Friday 6th of July to Thursday 12th, 2012?”
He sighed. “Yeah, I was here all that time. I would never have hurt a hair on Kath’s head, but I can’t expect you to take my word for that.”
I asked, “Is there anybody who can verify that?”
“Yeah, Mo and Anne-Marie, and Mel. We all had a big bust-up after Kath left.”
Dehan asked, “What about?”
“Everything was coming to a head. Me and Anne-Marie was having trouble. Anne-Marie had been stayin’ with Mel while we tried to sort things out. But during that time, Mo and Anne-Marie had been spending a lot of t
ime together and I was getting mad. We had a big row about it and when Kath went off to visit my folks, Anne-Marie said she was going to spend a few days with Mo while Kath was gone, to look after him, seein’ as he was real depressed. I told her if she went, not to bother comin’ back. She said fine and she went.”
We sat in silence for a long moment. There was a piece missing and I couldn’t work out whether Isaac knew what it was or not.
“Can you think of anybody, apart from your parents, that Kath might have been going to visit in Colorado?”
He took a moment to think about it, and when he answered he wouldn’t look at us. “I’ve often wondered. There’s only one person, but I don’t want to tell you who it is.”
Dehan snapped, “Why?”
Now he faced her. “Because I know he didn’t hurt her. He’s tough and hard, the way folks are up there, but he’s a good man, and I don’t want to cast suspicion on him.”
I sighed. “Isaac, if he isn’t guilty, he has nothing to worry about. Sooner or later we’ll find out who it is, and it’s better for him if we can eliminate him as a person of interest. And, bottom line is, you have to tell us.”
I already knew the answer, and I was pretty sure Dehan did, too, but we needed to hear him say it, and after a moment he did.
“Greg Carson. He was our friend, part of our gang, back when we was kids. He was pretty sweet on Kath, we all were, but he was only ever a friend to her. He’s the only person I can think she would go to see. He was…” He thought about the word. “I want to say smarter than the rest of us, but Mo was pretty smart and so was Pat. He was a different kind of smart; kind of mature. Do you know what I mean? You could talk to him and he would listen. Then, whatever he said to you, you could rely on as being right.”
“You got an address for Greg Carson?”
He gave his head a little sideways twist. “If I know Greg, he’ll be where he’s always been, at his pa’s ranch, where his pa was before him, and his grandpa and his great-grandpa before him. Greg don’t move. He told us we was crazy for goin’ east, and I guess he was right, weren’t he?”
