“You may be right,” he said finally, “but you do realize how difficult it’d be to publish something like that without any solid evidence, don’t you?”
“I’m not talking about publishing something,” I said, and he seemed relieved. “I compared the chapter in the proposal Wieder sent to Allman and Limpkin with the first one in Laura’s book. They’re virtually identical. Obviously, that might be evidence that she stole the manuscript from the professor, or else it might just show that they worked together on the book and that her contribution was a very significant one. In any case, it wouldn’t be proof that she killed him in order to steal his manuscript, with Richard Flynn as an accomplice. A written testimony from Flynn would have been something else.”
“I find it hard to believe that the man who sent me that manuscript was a killer,” Peter said. “I’m not saying that he couldn’t have committed the murder, but . . .” He looked away. “Do you think his manuscript was a confession?”
“Well, yes. He didn’t have long to live, he didn’t much care about the reputation he’d leave behind, and he had no heirs. Maybe Laura Baines had lied to him and manipulated him into murdering Wieder, then left him to face the music by himself, while building a career on the result of the murder he’d committed. When he received the book and it dawned on him what had really been at stake, he realized what had in fact been going on during those months. He’d destroyed his life for a lie. He’d been tricked from the very start to the very finish. Maybe at the time she’d promised she’d go back to him, that their breakup was just a precaution, so as not to give rise to further suspicion.”
“All right, it’s an interesting story, but the manuscript has disappeared, and you don’t seem prepared to write a book,” Peter said, getting back to the subject at hand.
“Yes, that’s the way things stand. It looks like I’ve wasted your time.”
“No problem—to be honest, I don’t think any publisher would be willing to take on all the legal complexities of publishing such a project. By the sound of it, Laura Baines’s lawyers would make mincemeat out of them.”
“I agree, man. Thanks for the coffee.”
I went home, collected all the documents related to my investigation of the past few weeks, put them in box, and tossed them in a closet. Then I called Danna Olsen and told her that I hadn’t been able to discover anything new, and that I’d agreed to drop the whole thing. She said she thought it was better that way: the dead should be left to rest in peace, and the living left to get on with their lives. I thought to myself that her words sounded like an epitaph for the late Richard Flynn.
That evening I visited Uncle Frank, on the Upper East Side, and told him the whole story.
Do you know what he said, after carefully listening to me for about an hour? That I’d thrown away the most interesting story he’d ever heard. But he’d always been overly enthusiastic.
We chewed the fat, drank a couple of beers, and watched a ball game on TV. I tried to forget Sam and all those stories about lost books. It seemed to work, because that night I slept like a baby.
A couple of months later, a former colleague from the Post who’d moved to California called me and offered me a job as a scriptwriter for a new TV series. I accepted and decided to rent out my apartment before heading to the West Coast. Trying to make some room in the closets, I came across the papers about Wieder’s case and phoned Roy Freeman to ask him if he wanted them. He told me he had news.
“Thanks for thinking of me—I was about to call you, too,” he said. “It seems we’ve had a confession.”
My heart skipped a beat.
“What do you mean by that? It was Laura Baines, wasn’t it? Did she confess?”
“Well, as far as I know, it wasn’t her. Listen, why don’t you come over for a cup of coffee? Bring the papers, and I’ll tell you the whole story.”
“Sure, what time?”
“Whenever you like—I’m home and not going anywhere. Remember where my place is? Okay then, and please don’t forget those papers: there’s something that still bothers me.”
/ Part Three /
ROY FREEMAN
[He] states distinctly what things he saw and what things he heard from others. For this book will be a truthful one.
—The Travels of Marco Polo, Book 1, Prologue
ONE
Matt Dominis called me on one of those evenings that make you feel sorry you don’t have a cat. After we finished talking, I went out onto the front porch and lingered there for a couple of minutes, trying to put my thoughts together. It was getting dark, a few stars shone in the sky, and the traffic on the highway echoed in the distance like the buzzing of a swarm of bees.
When you finally discover the truth about a case that has obsessed you for a while, it’s like losing a traveling companion. A talkative, prying, and perhaps even ill-mannered companion, but one you’ve grown used to having around when you wake up in the morning. And that had been the Wieder case to me over the past few months. But what Matt had told me placed a heavy lid on all the hypotheses I’d come up with in all those many hours spent in the small office I’d fixed up in the spare bedroom. And I told myself that things couldn’t just end like this, that there was still something that didn’t fit, even if everything my friend had said was true.
I went inside again and called Matt back and asked him if it’d be possible for me to talk to Frank Spoel, who’d confessed to the murder of Professor Joseph Wieder, a few months before he was scheduled to be executed. Matt was a veteran at Potosi Correctional Center, and the director did him the favor after he found out that the visitation request came from a detective who’d worked on the case in the late 1980s. I wanted to see the guy with my own eyes, hear with my own ears his story about the West Windsor murder. I wasn’t convinced that he was telling the truth; I suspected that perhaps he was just trying to get attention after he’d heard that an author from California wanted to put his name in a book. Wieder had been murdered immediately after Spoel had been released from a mental institution and was hanging out in New Jersey, so he’d probably read about the killing in the papers at the time.
John Keller paid me a visit, bringing all the papers he had about the case. He didn’t know that I’d started to dig back into Wieder’s murder after our conversation in the spring, and we talked about Spoel’s confession over coffee. He told me that he’d lost his girlfriend because of that story.
“I don’t believe in hoodoo, but there’s something like a jinx about this case,” he said, “so you should watch yourself. I’m glad I dropped it, and I don’t want to be involved in this stuff again, now or ever. Anyway, it seems it’s over, doesn’t it?”
I told him that it did seem that way and wished him good luck with his new job. But I wasn’t sure at all that the truth about Wieder’s case had finally come to light. So after two weeks, when Matt called back and told me that everything was arranged, I bought a plane ticket online for the following day and packed a small bag.
The cab picked me up at five a.m., and half an hour later I was at the airport. Matt would be waiting for me in St. Louis, ready to take me to Potosi.
During the flight, I was sitting next to a salesman, the kind of guy who, if he were about to be executed, would try to persuade the firing squad to buy a new vacuum cleaner. He introduced himself as John Dubcek, but it wasn’t until ten minutes later that he noticed that I was too absorbed in my newspaper to really be listening to him.
“I’ll bet you’re a high school teacher,” he said.
“You’ll lose the bet. I’m not.”
“I’m never wrong, Roy. History?”
“Not even close, sorry.”
“Hey, I’ve got it: math.”
“Nope.”
“All right, I give up. I know a quiet little place by the airport, and I’ll buy your breakfast. I bet you skipped breakfast this morning. I don’t like eating alone, so you’ll be my guest.”
“Thanks, but a friend is picking me u
p.”
“Okey-dokey, but you haven’t told me what you do for a living.”
“I’m an ex-cop, retired detective.”
“Wow, I’d never have guessed it. Know that joke about the three police officers who walk into a bar?”
He told me one of those dull jokes, and I didn’t get the punch line.
After we landed, he gave me his business card, which was so gaudy it looked more like a small Christmas card, and loftily told me he could get hold of anything I could possibly think of; all I had to do was call him and tell him what I needed. As I was walking to the exit, I saw him talking to a girl dressed up like a country singer, in Levi’s, a gingham shirt, and a leather vest, with a cowboy hat perched on her long blond hair.
Matt was waiting for me by a newspaper stand.
We went outside the airport, to a coffee shop nearby. I wasn’t due at the Potosi Correctional Center for another couple of hours.
We’d been colleagues for eight years at the West Windsor Township Police Department. In the early 1990s, he’d settled in Missouri, but we’d remained friends and spoke on the phone every now and then, keeping each other up to date about what was happening, and two or three times I’d visited him and we’d gone hunting. Matt had been working at the Potosi Correctional Center for eleven years, but he was on the verge of retirement. A lifelong bachelor, he’d married a colleague named Julia just two years previously, and they’d invited me to their wedding. We hadn’t seen each other since then.
“It looks like marriage agrees with you,” I told him, pouring a sachet of sugar into a cup of coffee the size of a soup bowl. “You look younger.”
He gave a sad smile. He’d always had the downtrodden air of a man convinced that some catastrophe was about to overtake him. As he was tall and well built, we’d nicknamed him Fozzie in the department, after the bear on The Muppet Show. It was a friendly nickname, not a scathing one—everybody liked Matt Dominis.
“I can’t complain. Julia’s great, and everything’s going fine. But I’m now at that age where all I want is a good retirement, to enjoy my golden years. Before you know it, a heart attack may come, or I’ll be wetting myself like a baby. I wanna take a trip to Louisiana or have a long vacation in Vancouver. Maybe we’ll even go to Europe, who knows? I’m sick of watching over those dickheads all the time. But she says we should wait.”
“I’ve been retired for three years, and apart from a trip to Seattle when my granddaughter was born, and another two trips here, I haven’t been anywhere, pal.”
“Okay, I get what you’re saying. Maybe I won’t go to Louisiana or damn Vancouver. But I wanna get up in the morning, drink my coffee, and read my paper without knowing I’m gonna be spending the rest of the day with convicts in a goddamn concrete box. Speaking of Seattle, how are Diana and Tony?”
Diana was my ex-wife, who’d moved to Seattle after the divorce, and Tony was our son. It was obvious that Tony blamed me for the divorce, and he never stopped criticizing me for it. He always used the expression “You blew it.” I knew he was right, and that I’d indeed blown it. But I like to think that people should sometimes forgive other people. As far as I was concerned, I’d paid a heavy price for my stupidity back then, and had lived alone for nearly thirty years.
Tony had gotten married three years ago, and my granddaughter, Erin, was one and a half. I’d seen her just once, immediately after she was born.
I told Matt a few funny stories about her, things I’d heard from Diana, but then he abruptly changed the subject.
“What do you think about what happened with this guy, Frank Spoel? After all these years—”
“As chance would have it, a reporter contacted me about three months ago in connection with the same story, so I started looking over the case again.”
“What a coincidence . . .”
“What got into him, spilling the beans all of a sudden? How long has he got before the execution?”
“Fifty-eight days. But thirty days before the injection he’s going to be moved to Bonne Terre prison, which is where they carry out executions in this state; it’s about half an hour from here. What got into him? As I told you on the phone, he got a visit from some guy from California, a professor writing a book about criminal minds, or something like that. The guy was interested in how Spoel ended up being a killer. Up until then it was believed that Spoel committed his first murder in 1988, in Carroll County, Missouri, when he stabbed an old man who’d made the mistake of picking him up on Route 65. He was twenty-three at the time, and had already done two years hard time in Trenton Psychiatric Hospital, back in Jersey. After being arrested for a mugging, he’d been declared insane. The guy has nothing more to lose—he’s been in prison since 2005, the Missouri Supreme Court rejected his appeal two months ago, and Governor Nixon would rather put a gun in his own mouth than pardon a creature like that. He’s decided to put his business in order, so that history will record the truth and nothing but the truth about his great life . . . Pardon me a moment, please.”
Matt extricated his huge body from between chair and table and headed off to the bathroom. I felt tired and asked the waitress to bring more coffee. She gave me a smile as she poured it. The name on her badge was Alice, and she looked about the same age as my son. I glanced at the Ninja Turtle–shaped clock on the wall—there was still plenty of time.
“As I was saying,” Matt continued after he sat back down at the table and the waitress poured him another cup of coffee, “Spoel got it into his head to persuade this guy from California that it’d all started with some crazy thing that Professor Wieder did to him years ago.”
“You mean he’s saying that he murdered Wieder, but the victim was to blame?”
“Well, it’s a bit complicated . . . When he was twenty, Spoel had an altercation with some guys, and he stole some cash from one of them and beat him up pretty badly. His attorney asked for a psychiatric test, which Wieder performed. Spoel was found not competent to stand trial and was committed to a forensic hospital. His attorney assured him that in two or three months he would ask Wieder to test him again and that he’d be released. But he was locked up for two years, because Wieder opposed his release.”
“Like I said, I reviewed the case recently, after that reporter got in touch. It was a lead I considered at the time: possible revenge as a result of cases Wieder had dealt with in his capacity as an expert. But the name Frank Spoel never cropped up.”
“Who knows—maybe because he was just a small-time crook at the time, a twenty-one-year-old kid? You didn’t think he was important. But he’ll tell you what it’s all about. I couldn’t care less about stories told by morons like him. Anyway, I’m glad you came. Will you be staying at our place overnight?”
“I’m in the middle of repairing my home, so I want to finish before it rains again. Another time, buddy. Let’s go, shall we?”
“We’ve got plenty of time, relax. The traffic on I-55 is light at this hour. It’ll take us an hour and a half to get there.”
He let out a deep sigh.
“Spoel’s complaining about being sent to the nuthouse when he was sane, but usually it’s the other way round. Did you know that a third of the guys behind bars in maximum-security prisons have a screw loose? Two months ago I was in Chicago, at a training session on criminality. There were all kinds of hotshots there from agencies in D.C. Apparently, after a two-decade cycle when crime was in retreat we’ve entered the opposite cycle. Since the psychiatric hospitals have become overcrowded, a complete nut stands every chance of being thrown into jail among ordinary inmates. And people like me, who guard them, have to deal with specimens like that every day.”
He cast a glance at his watch.
“Shall we saddle up the horses?”
As we drove onto the interstate highway, I started thinking about Frank Spoel, whose case I’d studied before I set off for St. Louis. He was one of the most dangerous murderers on death row. He’d killed seven people—eight, if it was true that he�
�d also killed Wieder—in three states before they caught him. He’d also committed four rapes and countless muggings. His last two victims had been a woman, age thirty-five, and her daughter, age twelve. Why had he done it? The woman had hidden some cash from him, he said. Spoel had picked her up in a bar two months before, and they’d been living together in a trailer by the river.
As Matt had said, and the investigators were later to discover, Frank Spoel had committed his first known killing in 1988, when he was just twenty-three years old. He was born and raised in Bergen County, New Jersey, and had committed his first serious crime at the age of twenty-one. He’d been released from the psychiatric hospital two years later and headed to the Midwest, where he’d done all kinds of odd jobs for a while. His first victim was a seventy-four-year-old man from Carroll County, Missouri, who had given Spoel a lift in his truck on Route 65. The loot? A couple of bucks, an old leather jacket, and a pair of boots that happened to fit him.
He then decided to go to Indiana, where he committed his second murder. Next he had taken up with a gang from Marion that specialized in burglaries. After the gang members went their separate ways, he returned to Missouri. It was interesting that for eight years after that he hadn’t committed a single crime, working in a St. Louis pizza shop. Then he went to Springfield and worked at a gas station for another three years. But suddenly he started all over again. He’d been arrested in 2005, after he was pulled over by a highway patrolman for a routine traffic stop.
At the time of the Wieder murder, I was reaching the end of my divorce and I’d found myself living all alone in a house that was far too big for me. Like any genuine alcoholic, I used that as an excuse to pour even more bottles down my throat and cry on the shoulder of anybody willing to listen. With the last remnants of my lucidity, I tried to do my job, but I always presumed that I’d made a hash of the Wieder case, along with some other cases from that time. The chief, Eli White, was a very good man. If I were him, I’d have kicked me off the force with references so bad that I wouldn’t even have been able to find work as a night watchman in a mall.
The Book of Mirrors Page 17
