Conundrum

by Susan Cory

  An unseen organist had been playing a dirge-like tune guaranteed to depress the audience, but now segued into something more lively. The Meeker boys and their minder progressed slowly down the aisle to the front pew, followed by an overdressed minister exuding a bit too much pomp for the circumstance. He turned grandly at a podium up front and let his purple robe settle. The eulogy, delivered in a loud plummy voice, with an overtone of breakfast sherry, was so flattering that Iris suspected Norman was its author. Her mind kept going back to the cassette tape. Would its text be admissible in court? She thought that she remembered from a TV show that one participant had to be present for the opposing lawyer to question. What happens if the witness is dead and leaves a tape behind? Let it go, Iris. It’s not your problem to make the case. Now that the police had Adam, maybe they could match his DNA to something.

  As the minister rumbled on, Iris considered Norman. Since she had heard his cold voice on the tape her estimation of him had changed from selfish jerk to heartless monster. How had she missed seeing that side of him? What kind of person witnesses a murder and doesn’t report it because he sees the chance to get something he wants out of it? Isn’t that kind of behavior considered psychopathic? Or is it sociopathic? She could never remember the difference from Psych 101. What a pair Norman and Adam were! And poor Carey…

  After a closing song—its words helpfully printed in the program—six men from the front row stood up and surrounded the coffin. Resting the support poles on their shoulders, they slowly filed out, followed by the boys, heads down. The rows of attending mourners followed, front row to back, peeling out of the pews right and left into a smooth flow to the door. Alyssa glared at Iris as she passed, no doubt wondering why she and C.C. were sitting together. The temporary congregation spilled out into the road, dividing around a black FDR-era hearse, complete with running boards, that was being loaded with Norman’s remains. Everyone scrambled to their own cars to join the long line forming behind the hearse.

  The cemetery roads wound up and down in a serpentine, passing mausoleums resembling mini-temples. Some plots had their turf defined by wrought-iron fences. The rolling procession wended its way toward the rear of the property where, for a price, one could purchase prime real estate overlooking Willow Pond.

  Iris had to hand it to Norman. This was a beautiful spot. Too bad it was paid for by Carey’s life. She couldn’t help contrasting this pompous ceremony with Carey’s simple one, Norman’s prime plot with Carey’s unadorned gravestone in a crowded field. She waited in her car for the ushers to carry the casket over to a contraption ready to lower it into the grave. Most of the Norman Meeker Enterprises staff, once reunited with their cars, had taken the opportunity to escape. So it was a smaller group that she now joined, clustered by the fresh grave site near Willow Pond path. Iris noticed that Alyssa had drifted away from the group. The minister said a final prayer, arms uplifted dramatically. The two boys awkwardly threw clumps of dirt on top of the casket, making thudding sounds with a dull ring of finality. Iris felt woozy from the strong smell of newly cut grass, or maybe it was the momentarily pathetic tableau of the fatherless boys. They, at least, were innocent.

  As the ceremony wound down, C.C. approached, saying “I’m going in to the station now with the Detective to give him a statement about that leverage business.”

  Iris looked over to see Detective Connors watching them. She nodded. “Good. I’m going to go visit another grave.”

  Chapter 42

  Malone turned to the department’s audio-visual guy, “Does the office even have a cassette player anymore?”

  “Of course we do.” He seemed affronted. “We have everything in this new set-up.” The AV technician snapped the tape into the player and the miniature spools began to rotate.

  After a few seconds of scratchy static, the words came through clearly: “I’m telling you, Adam, that I’m making a recording of this. It’s my life insurance policy.”

  “What the hell, Norman. I never agreed to this.”

  “You don’t have a choice. I saw you push Carey over the handrail, so what’s to keep you from killing me too? I’m putting this in a safe place in case anything happens to me.”

  The detective’s mouth had transformed from a line to a circle. “Stop the tape! Hang on.” He pressed the speed dial on his cell.

  “Did you find Adam Lincoln yet?”

  “No. His wife said he felt sick and went back to the hotel. He took their car. She left from the chapel with the professor. I’m headed back now with the magazine lady. She’s going to make a statement about that phone call that Reynolds made last week.”

  “Listen, Connors. Lincoln is our guy. We’ve got some proof on this tape. Is it the same hotel they were in before? Go pick him up. Put the magazine lady in a cab. I’ll send back-up, so wait for it. He might be packing.”

  “Roger that. I’ll call when I’ve got him.”

  Malone turned back to the AV guy. “Okay. Play me the rest.”

  ***

  “He’s not in his room. The car’s not here. The receptionist said that she hasn’t seen him. Whadda you want me to do?”

  “Damn— he must have figured we’re onto him. Pick up the wife and bring her in. We’ve got to grab him before he can disappear.” Malone slammed down his desk phone.

  C.C. regarded Detective Malone sullenly from under the bangs of her pageboy.

  His furious gray eyes glared back at her. “Lemme get this straight. You’re saying Will Reynolds told you he intended to blackmail Norman Meeker into backing him in some development deal? In other words our first victim was going to try to get money from our second victim, but you didn’t think this was worth mentioning to the police? Anything else that you haven’t bothered to tell us about?”

  “Well, since Will never got there, I thought it didn’t matter. And he didn’t say ‘blackmail’. I would’ve remembered that. I’m coming here voluntarily to make sure you have all the facts, even the ones that seem unimportant. Will was my friend.”

  Malone kneaded his right temple, eyes closed. A knock on his door brought his head back up.

  The young plainclothes detective from the funeral leaned his head into the room. “They all left, Detective Malone. I checked them off the list like you said.”

  Malone walked out to the hall and closed the door behind him. “Adam Lincoln looks like our guy and he’s still on the loose. So, no one’s left at the cemetery, right?”

  “Well, the Reid woman was still there when I left. I think she was making a phone call, but she wasn’t on my list.”

  C.C. opened the door and volunteered “Iris said she was going to walk around the cemetery for awhile.”

  “Oh, shit. DiAngelo, get back there and find her NOW before we have another body on our hands. And YOU,” he turned to C.C., “sit down while I decide whether to book you for withholding evidence!”

  Chapter 43

  Maybe now she could reach Ellie. She wandered down to her car and retrieved her cell phone. Ellie’s voice mail message came on. She was probably on the ferry to the Vineyard.

  “Ellie, it’s me. Call my cell ASAP! I have news.”

  She rested her head back against the driver’s seat and let the events of the morning settle in her mind. Norman had been a terrible person. She couldn’t get over how she had underestimated his greed. She and Ellie had been right about Carey’s death being a murder. Adam had killed him and he must have killed Will and Norman too, alibi or no alibi. Was he insane?

  She wanted to call Luc. She wanted to hear his completely sane, reassuring voice. The clock on her dashboard read 11:21. He’d be catching up on sleep, so she wouldn’t wake him.

  Carey’s memorial service had been in this general area of the cemetery. Wasn’t it in a field just beyond that ridge in the direction of the Crematorium? She’d recognize the spot when she saw it. As she realized that she’d finally be able to tell her friend that his murderer had been unmasked, the space between her shoulders relaxed.


  The trees shimmered with light. The green of the manicured grass almost hurt her eyes. She wandered up the hill to examine a modern sculpture—a tall, twisting bronze plane that suggested redemption and release. She found this modern expression of an afterlife far more moving than the clunky angels and saints standing solemn guard nearby. The soaring bronze was encircled by feathery plants that, Iris suspected, would give her hay fever if she lingered, so she kept moving. Her eye was caught by a prominent headstone. It listed three people with three birth dates and two dates of deaths. She wondered how the third person, born in 1927, felt about some impatient stonecutter itching to finish his commission. Also, wasn’t it tacky to lump people together on one headstone? ‘Thrift above all’ was the Yankee motto, she mused.

  Her own parents had been cremated, according to their wishes. She and her brother had scattered their ashes from the top of a mountain near their childhood home in Norwich, Vermont. Would it have been more comforting for her to have had a grave site to visit? Probably not. She still felt her mother’s presense. Sometimes she would carry on whole conversations with her mother, taking both sides, as Sheba watched her warily.

  Iris wandered on, stopping to read handy tree identification tags. Her horticultural knowledge, outside of flowers, was thin. She was passing a particularly ugly modern mausoleum when she heard a sound, footsteps crunching quietly on the stone path behind her. Was someone following her? She ducked quickly behind the tiny building and ran around to peek from the other side in time to see a man’s leg disappear.

  Where was everyone? The public all seemed to be occupied elsewhere on this warm June Saturday. Even the teams of green-uniformed gardeners, walkie-talkies clipped to their belts, must have been tending the grounds in other sections of the vast cemetery. Her cell phone was back in the Jeep. She needed to make her way back to a more populated area.

  She was overreacting. It was probably an innocent mourner laying flowers at a loved one’s grave. She rounded the next corner and saw his back. With icy calm, her brain registered: Adam.

  He must have hidden during the funeral. She tried to silently back away but a twig snapped underfoot. He rounded on her and she rocketed up a hill, dodging headstones. Please, God, don’t let me twist an ankle. Her eyes raked the landscape for a hiding place. Maybe I can make it to that clump of trees. Can he see me? She zigzagged behind mausoleums and bushes but then tripped on a sprinkler head sticking up in the grass and sprawled forward, skinning her palms as she went down. She could hear him wheezing in the distance behind her and scrambled back to her feet. She didn’t stop to look. Her sides burned and she gasped for breath. A huge Weeping Willow appeared on the hilltop and she willed herself towards it. She could try to hide inside its trailing boughs, inside its cave of space, but knew it wouldn’t take long for Adam to guess where she was.

  She pushed through the silvery branches and bent down from the waist to breathe deeply. Focus, Iris! You have to defend yourself. What good was her brown belt if she was out of practice? At least her school of karate, Uechiryu, emphasized close-in fighting. That was all she’d have room for. Time to test her skills.

  She slumped into Sanchin defensive position, elbows protecting ribs, palms up, thumbs tucked in, and waited, practicing long, deep breathing. In less than a minute Adam breached the boughs, charging toward her like a spooked horse, shuddering with rage. He lunged out at her, grabbing for her wrists.

  “Where did you find that tape? You gave it to the cops, you bitch! Why didn’t you stay out of this?” he howled.

  She slashed down on his forearms, knocking his hands apart and attempted to side-kick him in the knee. “Are you going to kill me too, like you killed Will and Norman?”

  Damn—too slow. He grabbed her foot, pulling her down onto her back.

  “Norman killed Will. He was gonna kill me too,” he growled, his shoulders heaving. He lifted his foot to stomp on her face. She rolled aside and sprang back up. She faked a left-foot kick, followed by an actual right-foot snap kick to the groin. Then spinning around, gathering momentum, she rammed her braced left elbow into his ribs, and drove her right palm upwards into his chin. A sharp crunch come from his jaw. He doubled over and crumpled to the ground.

  “It’s over, Adam. Malone knows you killed Carey,” she spat out, trying to shake away the explosion of pain in her skinned palm.

  He clamped a hand onto her leg and said through gritted teeth, “Then it won’t matter if I kill you.”

  She tried to sweep her leg free but his arms were like tentacles. He managed to pull himself up to a standing position, then clamp his hands around her throat. She couldn’t break his grip. He started squeezing. Purple streaks appeared across her blurred vision and she felt herself start to sway. With the energy she had left, she latched onto his right wrist with both hands and, using gravity and her own body weight, she dropped down, taking his right arm with her. Then gulping in air, she shot up from a crouch, shoving his arm up his back as hard as she could. She kept pushing until she heard a satisfying pop, followed by his collapse on the ground.

  She leaned over, hands on knees, trying to see straight. She tasted blood, her throat and hand throbbed, but she needed to escape while she could. Pushing through the branches, she ran out into an open field, searching for help. She made a quick decision to follow the winding road back towards the front gate. Painfully, she began to trot, her lungs burning. Cresting a hill, she thought she saw a car heading her way. She raised her arms and tried to shout to get the driver’s attention but her voice came out strangled. Like a mirage, a police cruiser floated towards her, picking up speed as it got closer. She sobbed with relief. Sergeant DiAngelo spoke into his radio, “I’ve found the Reid woman. Send a bus.”

  Chapter 44

  Two days later, on a sultry Monday afternoon, Iris adjusted the telephoto lens as she peered through the viewfinder at Norman’s house. It sat nestled in the hill, its windows looking blank and undisturbed. Shafts of sunlight broke through the trees. Sheba lay dozing on the grass nearby, snoring softly.

  Luc, from behind her, lifted her hair and gently kissed the bruises on her neck. “I could kill that asshole.”

  “It’s not easy. I tried… Hey, you’re distracting the photographer.”

  “How does the rest of you feel?” He kept kissing.

  “Bruised, pummeled, and scraped. The hospital docs say no internal injuries. When they sprung me this morning, they said I just needed time to mend. Adam didn’t make out so well. I managed to dislocate his shoulder and crack his jaw.”

  “Ouch, I hope he’s in agony.” Luc eased down onto the grass, propping himself on his elbows. “But remind me to watch my step around you. How did you learn how to fight like that?”

  “I’ve taken some karate. He’s strong though. I almost blacked out when he was trying to choke me.”

  “I’m not sure I can listen to that part without becoming murderous myself.” He yanked up some grass. “Okay, you’ve promised to fill me in on all the details. You have my total attention.”

  “I like having your total attention,” she smirked down at him, then squeezed the shutter.

  “You have it a lot, you know.” He regarded her through half-closed eyes. “So, it’s all over? Adam was behind everything? What happened to his unshakable alibi for Friday afternoon.”

  “That’s just it,” she said. “Norman killed Will. Detective Malone was explaining things to me while I waited in the hospital for all those damned tests. He was able to get quite a bit out of Adam before Alyssa charged in with her lawyer.”

  “Wait a minute. Maybe you should start at the beginning with Carey.”

  “Okay. Adam did kill Carey twenty years ago. Adam had been apoplectic about the drubbing he’d gotten at his final review from the same critics who’d idolized Carey, so Adam set out to humiliate him at the party. But after he’d gotten Carey stoned and out on the balcony, Adam couldn’t resist giving him a push. Norman had followed them as far as the bedroom
and witnessed the whole thing, so Adam swore he’d get him Carey’s notebook of inventions in return for his silence.” Iris unscrewed the long lens from the camera, then the camera from the tripod, and headed to a new vantage point ten feet away.

  Luc hopped up and followed, then flopped back down onto the grass. “An ethical guy, our Norman.”

  “No dummy either,” she said, affixing a wide-angle lens. “He later recorded Adam discussing this arrangement with him, and said the tape would be sent to the authorities if he, Norman, ever met with an untimely death.”

  “This was on that cassette you found in his papers about the house project?”

  “Right. He’d probably been listening to it in his office before his Sunday meeting with Adam and had forgotten to put it back in the safe.” Iris tipped her head as she studied the shot. “Norman kept it in an envelope with ‘Linc’ written on the outside, so Claire assumed it was Lincoln renovation paperwork. ‘Linc’ really meant Adam’s nickname.”

  “Telling what he’d seen to the police back when it happened would have been a lot safer than making this recording. He was the only witness to a murder.”

  “True, but then Norman wouldn’t have gotten the notebook. He’d already tried to hire Carey. He knew how valuable those ideas were.”

  “This is like a chess game. They were holding each other in check but neither of them could checkmate the other.”

  “That’s exactly right, and the stalemate held for all those years after Carey’s death. Then Norman upset the balance by holding the reunion party at his fancy new house. He was trying to get C.C. to publish it in her magazine so he could pimp his profile on the social scene, but he ended up rubbing Adam’s nose in how well he had done on the strength of Carey’s notebook.” She bracketed the shot with three quick exposures.

  “How did Will fit into the picture?”