by Linda Barnes
She was staring at the big house, her mouth moving. No words came out.
“What?” I asked.
“Have they kept it shut? Have they installed an alarm?”
“It’s been closed since you left. I don’t know about alarms, but I could give the place a once-over.”
“If we can get in, I can show you proof,” she said.
“But you don’t have a key.”
“There used to be a way, through a window with a loose jamb. As kids we crawled through, into a sink, so we never got hurt.”
“Show me,” I said. “Pix?”
No answer.
I’d told her to stay put.
But she was gone. She couldn’t help by fetching tools, getting a crowbar from my trunk.
First I checked the house for signs of a system. Almost everybody’s got one these days, those little glowing keypads by the side of the door, the red and green lights. The Camerons, bless them, had the kind I know best.
“Unless we’re unlucky and this is the particular window they’ve wired, we ought to be able to do it.” I kept my voice optimistic. If I’d deserted a beautiful home on the seaside, I’d have driven heavy nails through the ground-floor window jambs.
The rich are different. Once Thea had pointed out the window, one of fourteen identical slits, it went like clockwork. She helped me remove the screen. Her nails were clipped short, unvarnished. No nonsense, like her clothes. She moved like a woman in a dream. I rarely took my eyes off her.
“The, lock’s broken. The top half of the window should slide right down,” she said. “We may have to tap it or something.”
Oil would have been nice. A hammer, a screwdriver.
Even as I thought about the items we lacked, the sill groaned and gave, sinking twelve inches.
“You first,” I ordered Thea. “Clear space for me, but don’t move around. If you see a glowing red light on the wall, don’t, I repeat, don’t walk in front of it.”
Her face grew even paler. “Don’t leave me in there alone,” she said.
“The sooner you go, the sooner I follow.”
She slipped off her sandals like a veteran housebreaker. She went in backward, feet first.
Don’t think I had no qualms about following. For the first time, I envied cell phone owners. I could have called Mooney, gotten his scalding advice. I didn’t want to crawl into an unlit basement with a confessed murderess.
But, dammit, I did want to find out what Thea’d hidden there so long ago.
Head first? Feet first? I followed Thea’s example.
Sometimes the riskiest moves turn, in a tick of the clock, into the most ridiculous. Inside, I flicked on my flashlight to discover Thea and me cowering in a huge old double sink, one woman to each compartment. We exchanged glances, mine wry. This didn’t look like the boogeyman’s hideout to me. But Thea’s eyes hid no smile. They stared blankly across the room. I held up my flash. When she saw the huge white freezer chest, she gasped.
“You’ll see,” she said, starting to unfold herself.
“Wait,” I said.
“Why? You got me in here. I want to get out as fast as I can.”
“Unless you know the four-digit code, we have to crawl under the motion detector. See the red light on the left wall? It’s between here and the freezer. If that’s where you want to go, crawl.”
“What if we—”
“Set off the alarm? You get your choice—identifying yourself as a member of the family, or running like hell.”
“Great,” she muttered.
“I don’t think we’ll have to,” I said soothingly, lifting myself out of the—thank God—empty sink. “I’ve seen this system before. To set it ringing, you pretty much have to walk straight through a beam, and the beams aren’t wide. You ought to tell the family to upgrade.”
The floorboards were wooden. Heavy planks, six-by-tens, worn smooth, dusty as hell.
“Keep your tail down,” I hissed as we slipped under the beam, Thea doing the baby crawl, me going army-style, hands and elbows, dragging my legs.
“Okay,” I said. “Up.”
Thea said, “Is it locked? The freezer?”
“If it is, I hope you have the key.”
“Try the door,” she said impatiently, looking away.
“What’s inside?”
“Whatever remains of a man after twenty-four years in a freezer,” she said firmly. Then she swallowed.
I assumed the door would be locked, so I gave it a halfhearted tug. It opened. Nothing tumbled out. I shone my flashlight on wrapped packages tagged “spareribs.” Ice cream cartons. Frozen lemonade in yellow cans.
“Well?” she said.
“You can look,” I said. “I don’t think you’ll find it too upsetting.”
I was wrong.
“Oh, my God,” she said. “Where could he be? They could have buried him anywhere on the estate, towed him out to sea.”
“I don’t think so, Thea.”
“Susan,” she said automatically, still stricken by the contents of the freezer.
“Susan.”
“They’ll never believe me now.”
“Who’s they?”
“The police.”
“The other ‘they.’ The ones who moved the body.”
“None of your business,” she said.
49
I tried to find Pix on the way back to my car. Couldn’t.
I urged Thea/Susan to confide in me all the way to South Boston. Nada.
I ushered her in the front door of the D Street station house. No camouflage beyond her hat. No cameras. Who would link her to a woman dead twenty-four years? Under the harsh fluorescents, I could see the lines age had dealt her. She held herself beautifully erect, walked with a measured tread dominated by a statue-like passivity. To me, she seemed like a figure in a Greek tragedy—all parts played, all oracles read, all actions come full circle. Clytemnestra, having dealt the inevitable blow, waiting, waiting, waiting for Orestes.
No choice, ho choice, everything about her seemed to echo. No choice. I followed my path. I did it well. It led me here. Inevitably here.
I willed her to run, rail, curse, do anything but walk like a sheep toward slaughter.
Thea Janis, child prodigy, returned runaway, marched into the interrogation room, sized Mooney up with a single cool glance before sinking into a chair. She tapped her foot while I brought him up to date.
“Do you wish to confer with an attorney?” he asked immediately.
“Where’s my son?” she said.
“Do you want an attorney? You can call your own lawyer, or we can provide you with one.”
“No.”
“Are you aware that anything you say may be used against you in a court of law?”
“I expect it to be.”
“You waive your right to an attorney.”
“I waive all rights. I’ve killed two men. I wish to clear my conscience and my soul.”
“Conscience” and “soul” made Mooney uncomfortable. I could tell by looking at him.
“Can a matron search her?” I asked quietly.
“Why?”
“Look, Mooney, I don’t want anything else to happen tonight. She could have a knife, pills, a gun.”
“You didn’t search her on the way in?”
“I wanted it strictly legal.”
“Okay.”
As we waited for a female officer, Mooney rummaged through a pile of papers. I glanced at them. MacAvoy’s spidery handwriting was familiar from Thea’s file. Page after page in MacAvoy’s hand fluttered past. Had he left a secret legacy?
Thea seemed eager to begin. “Do you use a stenographer or a tape recorder?”
“You should confer with an attorney,” Mooney said.
“I don’t agree. I killed Alonso Nueves on April 8, 1971. That’s the day Thea died. I remember it well.”
Mooney flicked the tape recorder on, gave his name and mine, the date and time. For the record
, he repeated his question concerning an attorney. Thea affirmed her decision to speak without counsel.
She glanced at the tape recorder with affection before beginning, a storyteller at heart.
“My name is Dorothy Cameron. I once wrote a book under the name Thea Janis. Thea, Dorothea, was my own name, but Janis I chose deliberately, because of the two-faced life I already led. My name proved prophetic. I have lived for the past twenty-four years as ‘Susan Gordon.’ I believe I made up the name although I may have known a Suzanne Gordon when I was a child. I don’t recall.”
“Would you like something to eat or drink?” Mooney asked.
“No. On April 8, 1971, I had an argument with Alonso. He was a traditional man, an older man. He thought he owned me. He didn’t know I was seeing others, sleeping with others. He thought because I was young, I was inexperienced. I was anything but inexperienced.
“I told him I was pregnant, and that I planned to abort the fetus because I was uncertain of the father’s identity. At first he didn’t believe me. I showed him the suitcase I’d packed. My doctor’s appointment card. Told him about the trick I’d played on my family to get time, at least one night away from home to recover. He went berserk. He hit me. Ironic, really: He hit me so hard he could have caused the very thing he most wished to prevent, but, well, I find people to be unpredictable except for the ones I write about, the characters who exist in my head. He hit me and I hit him back, which surprised him. I think it shocked both of us. We were in the greenhouse behind the Dover estate. I’d met him first at Avon Hill. I helped him get a job at the Weston Institute when he had trouble at the school. It was my fault, you see. He was fooling around with an underaged student. That was me. I had certain contacts. I used them, and I kept seeing him and several other boys and men as well. Teachers. Gardeners. Psychiatrists.”
“Like Dr. Manley,” I asked.
“Never Dr. Manley,”. she said. “Not in that sense. Please, don’t interrupt. I thought the boys could teach me, I suppose. I had a lot to learn. Every boy, every man I slept with was so different, secretive, bold, tentative, proud, worried that I wouldn’t be satisfied, positive I’d beg for more. And yet, in the moment of passion, they were all the same. Released. Abandoned. I thought I’d study them, learn everything I could. I was analytical, in control. I was not passionate. I saw it as a job, to learn these things. I didn’t think of myself as wanton or wild or wicked. I was a recorder, a camera, a writer.
“I knew Alonso had not been faithful to me. He talked of seducing girls at the institute, how easy it would be. Possibly my own sister, who sometimes stayed there overnight, even then. When he was asked to leave the institute, without telling Daddy, I arranged for Alonso to move into the empty apartment over our garage. It was extremely convenient. I felt I’d done so much for him.
“When Alonso hit me, something snapped. That’s the only way I can describe it. A flood of anger opened up, a rip in the universe filled with blood and smut and fog. I’d never been hit before. Never. There’d been rough sex, yes. But I always knew what was coming after the first time, and his violence astounded me, frightened me. There were tools in the shed and I hit him with a trowel, with anything I could reach, but I specifically remember the trowel. It was sharp, triangular. He didn’t move. I kept hitting him. Then I knew I’d killed him—and that my father would never be Senator Cameron and my mother would never forgive me. And it seemed to me that keeping my mother and father from realizing their ambition was a worse sin than killing Alonso, because he’d hit me. He’d hit me.”
She seemed angry and outraged all over again.
Mooney turned off the tape recorder.
“What are you doing? I have more to say.”
“I need to get another cassette.”
“I want to talk about Manley now. He should have helped me all those years ago, but all he cared about was sidling up to my mother, seducing, screwing my mother. He never cared about Beryl or me. I’m not sorry I killed Drew Manley.”
“There’s a technical problem,” Mooney said smoothly. “Don’t worry, we’ll let you confess to your heart’s content. Carlotta, can I see you outside?”
“May I keep talking?” Thea asked, almost desperately, as though the sound of her voice was the most important thing in the universe, as though once she’d started, she couldn’t stop. She grabbed the recorder. “Maybe there’s still a little room on this tape.”
“Go ahead,” Mooney said with a shrug. “Here. Here’s paper. Why don’t you write what you need to say?”
Thea seemed grateful, but I knew something was wrong. That’s definitely not the way the interrogation game is played.
“What is it, Moon?” I asked as soon as he’d closed the soundproof door.
“MacAvoy left a trunkful of papers at his place. In the attic. Fancied himself another writer, a true-crime novelist, the next Joe McGinniss, who knows?”
“Do you believe her?”
“I don’t know what to believe. According to MacAvoy, Alonso Nueves was strangled. Bludgeoned as well, messy. But for cause of death, MacAvoy insists he was strangled.”
“Was there an autopsy? I don’t understand.”
“No autopsy,” Mooney said. “Just observation.”
“Observations from a dead man,” I said.
“Worth a lot,” Mooney observed, tongue firmly in cheek.
I said, “There could still be an autopsy.”
“How?” he asked.
“Thea might help,” I said.
“Ah. Then let’s ask the dead woman,” he said.
I stared at him, wondering how he’d read my mind. For the first time, she was the dead woman to me. Not Thea, not the vibrant girl of fourteen, the collective wet dream of Avon Hill. I thought about skin cells and how quickly we lose and renew them. I thought about snakes, growing larger, leaving their shed skins behind. I thought about myself and who I’d been at fourteen and fifteen.
Was any of that part of me left?
Any residue of Thea?
Perhaps in the young Alonso. Wherever he might be.
50
Long ago, Mooney and I used to team up for a game called “good cop, bad cop.” At first, we’d taken turns, alternating sweet and sour, but it soon became clear that I owned the rogue role. Something about Mooney’s choirboy face makes him a natural-born good guy.
But since she already knew me, had reason to trust me, Mooney thought I should play the “good cop” role.
I felt miscast.
“Sorry,” Mooney informed her bluntly as we reentered the interview room, “but it’s not going to fly. I don’t have time to waste. Confessors! Geez, it’s nothing to be ashamed of, trying to save your kid. I’m sure we’d all try to cushion our own kid’s path, if we could. But your boy crossed over the line, lady, way over it.”
He started gathering pens, notebooks, and tape recorders, as though he were in a hurry to get home.
“But I killed Andrew Manley,” she said, sitting bolt upright. “You haven’t heard the details, taken my statement.”
“Try this,” Mooney said harshly. “By me, you’re about as credible as that woman claimed to be Anastasia, daughter of the friggin’ Czar of Russia, all those years. Yapped about it till the day she died—how everyone had stolen her birthright—and then a couple forensic scientists did some DNA testing, and guess what? Phony as they come. You should know this: If you’re a fake, we can find out.”
“I know.”
“Keep up on that sort of thing, do you?” Mooney taunted, “bad cop” all the way.
“Mooney,” I said reasonably. “Before he died, Dr. Manley came to me with some stuff about recovered memory syndrome. I did some reading, and believe me, after twenty-four years, she could be off on a few details.”
“Details!” Mooney snorted.
“What does he mean?” Thea asked.
I went on as if no one had interrupted. “She could honestly think she hit the guy with a trowel. Kept hitting him wi
th it, until he bled to death. She could have blanked out on the part about strangling Nueves—”
“What do you mean, strangling him? Who told you that? He was a big man. I couldn’t have gotten my hands around his neck. I couldn’t have killed him with my hands.” Thea stood, clasping the edge of the table for support. Her words came faster. “Dr. Manley and I never spoke about those memories, not the killing memories. I never forgot killing Alonso, not for a single moment, not a single detail. I never will. I can hear the rattle in his throat. I can see the blood—”
“Prove it,” Mooney said scornfully.
“I can’t,” she murmured, staring at me like I could help her if only I had sufficient desire.
“If we had his body,” I said carefully, “there are tests that could be done, even now, to show how he’d died.”
“We don’t have a body,” Mooney said to me, explaining it slowly as though to a child. “And we’re not going to get one, understand? The Nueves guy did a flit, could be anyplace. She’s using him for credibility, so we’ll let her testify that she killed the shrink, get her kid off the big hook. But it’s too late. Her kid was at the scene—”
She looked him over from head to toe, slowly. Then, with ice in her voice, she said, “What exactly do you want?”
“What do you mean?” Mooney returned.
“I’m fairly perceptive,” she said, with an edge to her voice. “Since the two of you returned from your hallway conference, you’ve been behaving quite differently. You obviously have an agenda. You want something from me. Stop fooling around and level with me.”
Moon lifted one eyebrow, stared at me. We must have been rustier at the game than I’d thought. On the other hand, it’s seldom you bring in a perp half as sharp as Thea Janis.
After a pause, I led off. “We need you to request an exhumation, to sign an exhumation order.”
“And who, pray tell, would you like to dig up?”
“Dorothy Cameron,” I said, “also known as Thea Janis.”
“That might get my family in an uproar—and I don’t want them told about me, understand? How would it help me?”
I said, “It might help your son.”
As she thought it over, I could almost hear the gears spin. Without the concealing brown spectacles, her eyes were enormous. How could she bring herself to wear them day after day, like blinders on a racehorse?
