“Timothy, I can see how you’re feeling disoriented and confused at this point, but keep in mind that it’s Skeeter who’s more likely to be delusionary. His brain was given a ferocious whack by a heavy-duty steroid drug. And I hate to say it, but there’s also the possibility of the onset of HIV dementia. I doubt very much that it’s you who is mixed up about the past.”
Timmy shook his head fiercely, as if to try to loosen a mental ice jam. He moaned, “I don’t know!” and then slumped in his seat.
After we’d sped up the Northway another mile, I said, “So where was Skeeter’s birthmark?”
Timmy shifted, sat up a little, gazed over at me. “How did you know about that?”
“Skeeter mentioned it Tuesday night while you were out of the hospital room. He mentioned that you were once mighty pleased with that birthmark of his, but he didn’t tell me where it was. Where was it?”
Timmy grinned. “I guess I’m not crazy.”
“Of course not. Did you really think you were?”
“No. But I am confused, and it helps that you’ve come up with actual incontrovertible evidence that I’m not hallucinating. It all did happen, and it’s Skeeter who’s losing his mind. Poor Skeeter.”
“So where is it?”
“The birthmark?”
“The birthmark.”
“It’s on the back of his dick. When it’s limp, the birthmark has no particular discernible shape. But when Skeeter’s penis is erect, the birthmark is shaped exactly like the state of North Carolina. If it was standing on end, of course.”
“I guess you would tend to make a mental note of something like that. Is Skeeter originally from the South?”
“No, he was born in Poughkeepsie and grew up about a mile from our house.”
“I’ll bet the McCaslins were originally from Dixie. How else to explain this remarkable phenomenon? I think Skeeter should send an inscribed photo of his erection to Jesse Helms.”
After a moment, Timmy said, “So if I didn’t ruin the first half of Skeeter’s adulthood—or if I did but he’s actually forgotten all about it, I guess I didn’t really have to drag you—drag both of us—into this whole Osborne family morass of murder and intrigue. I didn’t have to get you involved, I didn’t have to get my foot broken, and I didn’t have to get into a situation where I’m maligned and abused by Dale Kotlowicz every time I’m in the room with that merciless, unrelenting, sarcastic harpie.”
“Much of what you say is true, Timothy, although I’m confident your opinion of Dale will go up once the air has been cleared on your alleged transgression. Surely it’s all a simple misunderstanding. So, are you removing me from the Osborne case? Am I fired? Shall we drive past Edensburg and up to Montreal for a relaxed weekend of jazz and French food and afternoon strolls along the waterfront?”
“Of course not. Jeez. Janet is depending on us now. And so is Mrs. Osborne. And even—other people.”
“Dale.”
“Yes, Dale too. Dale, Dale, Dale, Dale.”
He shifted in his seat again, careful not to get conked on the head by his crutches.
I’d phoned Eden County Air Service from Albany. The pilot who had taken Eric and Skeeter up the previous April to scatter Tom Osborne’s ashes over the Adirondacks was away for the day, ferrying a canoe-company executive to Rochester and back. He was expected in around 11:30 p.m., so Timmy and I had time for a sandwich at a diner near the Edensburg airport before we met the charter pilot on his late-evening arrival.
The pilot, a placid, alert-looking man in his late twenties, remembered Eric and Skeeter well—he’d known the Osbornes by reputation for years—and when I told him I was working for Janet, he told me how much he respected and admired her and the Herald. Then he went on to tell me everything he knew about the April excursion.
The pilot did recall the “glitter” of the ashes as they drifted down toward the forest just after sunrise on April 4th. He said he had spread ashes on three previous occasions for other mourners and had never seen ashes sparkle before. He said both Skeeter and Eric seemed as surprised as he was by the glittering display.
The pilot also told us, in answer to a question of mine, that Dan Osborne had—a month or so after the dispersal of the ashes—tracked the pilot down, questioned him about the scattering of the ashes, and paid him to fly Dan over the precise spot where the ashes had been tossed from the plane.
The pilot had done so and had, at Dan’s request, marked the area on a topographical map where the ashes would likely have landed in the forest. Because of the relatively low flying altitude of about 1,500 feet, as well as the calm air that day, the probable landing area for the ashes could be narrowed down to about three square miles. Dan had told the pilot he was interested in the ashes’ location “for sentimental reasons,” which the pilot had had no reason to disbelieve. The pilot helpfully provided me with a map showing the area he had directed Dan to, about twelve miles west of Edensburg.
22
It was close to one a.m. when Timmy and I returned to Maple Street, and while the rest of the neighborhood was dark, the Osborne house was ablaze with light. A police patrol car was parked in front of the house, with two officers visible in the front seat, their foam coffee cups on the dashboard.
Inside the house, I was relieved to find that Mrs. Osborne was safe and had gone to bed, and that Janet and Dale were safe and still up; I wanted to recruit them for an expedition early the next morning to visit the three square miles of mountainside west of Edensburg where I was certain we would find Dan Osborne combing the woods for the $16 million worth of jewels, and where we could use our knowledge of Dan’s aiding and abetting a felony to extract from him answers to questions about the sale of the Herald, Eric’s murder, and Dan’s hypersensitive stomach.
Janet and Dale, however, were not alone on the back porch. “Don, Timmy, I want you to meet Lee Ann Stasiowski,” Janet said, and introduced us to the woman who had stuck her head in Janet’s office door with a message from Dale the day before. Lee Ann was a tiny, hazel-eyed middle-aged woman with a gray-blond pixie cut, a reporter’s notebook in one hand and a bottle of Sam Adams in the other. She was the Herald’s reporter, Janet told us, who had once covered police and the courts and now wrote about business. Lee Ann had been reporting in recent months—in a circumspect way—on the Herald’s own financial difficulties and impending sale to a chain.
“And now,” Janet said, “it’s time for Lee Ann to prepare a story on the latest developments in the situation—that is, attempts on the lives
of pro-Griscomb family members and a developing connection between the sale of the paper and Eric’s murder.”
Lee Ann said, “I’m amazed to hear about all this wild stuff. Well, I’m amazed and I’m not so amazed.”
This exercise in aggressive good journalism struck me as premature and maybe reckless. I said, “I don’t know. Is this for Sunday’s paper or Monday’s?”
“It’s for later,” Janet said. “It’ll run sometime next week, or the week after—whenever Lee Ann’s got the entire story, including who’s been arrested for murder and/or attempted murder.”
“What I’m gathering right now,” Lee Ann said, “is background, most of which I’m getting from Janet and Dale. I’m also—on Janet’s excellent suggestion—using your involvement in the case, Don, as an excuse to grill Osborne family members on Eric’s murder. I’m telling any Osborne I talk to that since a private detective is investigating them, I’m reporting on his activities as much as I am any possible family connection to Eric’s death. That way they’can vent about you—and, believe me, they do, they do—and at the same time I can ask them, almost in passing, where they were on the morning Eric was murdered, and do they have an alibi, should they need one.”
Dale said, “Cagey, huh?”
“Very clever,” Timmy said. “Good for you, Janet.”
“It was Dale’s idea,” Janet said. “Chester and June are both fuming,
naturally. And Stu Torkildson called me a couple of hours ago and said he would never dream of interfering in the editorial side of the paper, and if he did, at least three Osbornes would be spinning in their graves. But wasn’t it likely, Stu suggested in his oleaginous, vaguely threatening way, that Lee Ann’s investigation at this point might spook InfoCom or Griscomb or any other potential buyer, and the family might get left in the lurch altogether?”
“Torkildson took that line with me too,” I said. “What did you tell him?”
“That the news is the news,” Janet said, “and the Herald reports the news. Stu didn’t see it that way, but it’s not my impression that when Lee Ann’s story is set, Stu will hurl himself bodily into the presses to sabotage the run. That’s not the way he operates.”
“How does he operate?” I said.
“Legally. He’s greedy and he’s cunning, but Stu comes from a Glens
Falls family that’s produced judges and brain surgeons and even some honest politicians, and his name and reputation mean as much to him as money does. So I don’t think he’ll interfere. But Stu will bear watching, of course,” Janet said, and we all agreed solemnly with that.
I asked Lee Ann which Osbornes she had interviewed and what she had learned.
“I just got started around five this afternoon,” she said, “so I’ve only seen three so far. June and Dick Puderbaugh had plenty of opinions— about the Herald’s editorial page, about the paper’s future ownership, and about you, Don—but nothing that sounded to me especially useful in the murder investigation. They both had alibis that could easily be checked out. Dick spent the morning, he said, in his office with his secretary and bookkeeper, as he does every weekday morning. And June was at the art museum with Parson and Evangeline Bates helping hang the canoes-at-sunrise show.
“I had trouble getting Chester to talk to me at all. I called his home, and he answered, and I described to him as best I could the story I was working on. But he kept interrupting and telling me how irresponsible it would be for me to be quoting slanderous statements from family members and from people he called ‘outsiders.’ My conversation with Chester was also confusing and hard to sort out because all the time Chester was talking, I could hear Pauline yelling at him and carrying on something awful in the background.”
“What “was she yelling?” I asked. “Could you make it out?”
“Not much of it,” Lee Ann said. “Sometimes she just seemed to be screaming uncontrollably. But I could decipher a word or sentence now and then. I caught, ‘She’s your fucking mother!’ and something about ‘fucking muddy feet!’ And once I’m sure she yelled, ‘I ought to get another gun and blow your fucking brains out!’ My impression was, Pauline had had a few drinks.”
I said, “Chester must have taken the gun she waved at me away from her. Which was a good idea. So you were only able to interview Chester on the phone?”
Lee Ann chugged from her beer bottle and said, “No, he actually agreed to meet me. He said his nephew was visiting and the television was on loud at his place—as if he lived in a studio apartment—so he said he’d meet me at nine at the Herald, which he did. He sounded real rattled, and I kept remembering all those stories about Chester’s
violent temper, which I’ve never seen. But he showed up on time, and we talked in the conference room after he shut the door with a do not disturb sign he wrote and taped on the outside.”
“Who would the nephew be?” I asked Janet. She looked back at me blankly.
“My impression was that was just a line,” Lee Ann said. “The ‘noisy television’ was Pauline hollering, and Chester wanted to get the hell out of there. And I think also that he wanted to get me alone, in the flesh, so he could make a lot of veiled and unveiled threats that would make me back off the story.”
“Physical threats?” Timmy asked.
“No, just legal. But Chester can get himself worked up into a state. Everybody in town knows that. I was glad there were people right outside the door in the newsroom. Anyway, he gave me his whole InfoCom pitch—which we all know by heart by now—and next to nothing on the attacks on Janet and Dan, which he claims are either imagined or contrived. And as for Eric’s murder, the very idea of family involvement is slanderous if spoken, Chester warned me, and libelous if the Herald prints it.
“The one possibly useful piece of information I got from Chester is this: He may not have an alibi for the time of the murder. He went into a three-alarm swivet when I asked him where he was on the morning of May fifteenth, and when I seemed to be calmly noting his hotheaded unresponsiveness, he made an effort to settle down, and he said, well, he was in his office. I asked him if I—or the police—could verify that with witnesses and appointment records, and then he totally lost it. He jumped up, and he was shaking and towering over me and yelling that I could just goddamn well accept his word for where he was if I valued my job. When I eased out of my chair and opened the door to the newsroom, Chester shoved his way past me and stormed out of the place. I really thought the next thing would be the sound of his Lexus doing a couple of donuts in the parking lot before he peeled out. But I guess that’s not Chester’s style. He just drove away normally.”
I said, “All this is extremely helpful, Lee Ann. Who do you plan on interviewing next?”
“Tidy in the morning, if he’ll talk to me, and—for the record—Dale and Skeeter McCaslin. I don’t plan to be bound by conventional notions of family.”
“Thank you, Lee Ann,” Dale said. “I’ll cooperate fully with your investigation.”
“After that,” Lee Ann said, “I’ll talk to nonfamily peripheral people like Stu Torkildson and Parson Bates. I might also drive out to Attica and visit Craig Osborne. Janet filled me in on the jewel-robbery angle. It all sounds like a pretty wacky way to try to save the Herald. But the fourth generation of Osbornes produced some extremely wacky people, so—hey, why not?”
Janet asked me if Skeeter had been able to verify that in April Eric had spirited away his father’s remains from the urn on Ruth Osborne’s mantel, and I said Skeeter had. I told Janet, Dale, and Lee Ann that Skeeter, Eric, and the charter pilot had all remarked at the time on how glittery the falling ashes were, and I explained how Dan had later sought out the pilot wanting to learn where the ashes had settled to earth.
“So that must be where Dan is now!” Janet said. “Do you have the directions?”
I said I did and held up my map. “My guess is, he’s out there sifting one more time through several square miles of wilderness that I’ll bet he’s combed a hundred times since April. He’d like to find the diamonds and make a last-ditch attempt to save the Herald for the Osbornes. And, I’m sure, Dan wants desperately to be able to tell Craig he recovered the jewels. He knows Craig is mad as hell and is starting to talk to people, foremost among them me.”
“God,” Janet said, “Dan is such a nitwit!”
“The robbery was bad enough,” Dale said. “But you’d think he’d have had enough sense to stash the loot in a safe-deposit box.”
We all speculated for some minutes on the practical, Freudian, and other reasons Dan might have had for mixing the stolen gems with his father’s ashes in an urn on his mother’s mantel.
We were about to make a plan for heading out to find Dan in the morning when headlights suddenly arched across the backyard and a car screeched to a halt in the driveway. The cop car must have pulled in directly behind the visitor, for three car doors slammed and then there were raised voices, one female.
While Timmy was reaching for his crutches, the rest of us moved fast. Dale barricaded herself at the foot of the stairs leading to the second floor, where Mrs. Osborne was sleeping, and Janet, Lee Ann, and
I trotted out into the muggy night and found the two Edensburg cops attempting to subdue Pauline Osborne. Chester’s wife was unarmed, as far as we could see, but she was unsteady on her feet and flailing at the two cops physically and verbally.
“What the hell are you gorillas bothering me for, when it’s my husband who’s a criminal! You want to arrest a criminal, arrest Chester Osborne—Chester Osborne, the big murderer! Why don’t you go up there and arrest him right now? I’ll testify! I’ll go to court! I’ll swear on a stack of Bibles that the day Chester’s brother Eric was murdered, Chester came home covered with leaves and mud!”
The two cops, both young, baby-faced, and portly, were listening to this recitation with obvious interest while at the same time making occasional perfunctory grabs for the tanned and braceleted arms Pauline was waving around. In peach-colored slacks and a white halter top, Pauline was elegantly put together and nicely limber. But her mascara and green eye shadow had run down over cheeks that were flushed from alcohol and excitement, and her face looked disconcertingly like a summer storm system moving across the radar screen on the Weather Channel.
“Pauline, why don’t you come in for some coffee?” Janet said. Then, maybe realizing that this casual invitation sounded too inane for the occasion, she added, “Or you could come in and suck down another half bottle of whatever’s got you skunked, and then sleep it off under the kitchen table. Either way, we should talk.”
The cops had been barking out things like “Hey, missus! Hey—hey, missus!” and they seemed to know that they should be taking matters in hand—there were murder accusations and drunk driving at a minimum here—but they also had figured out that this raving woman was Mrs. Chester Osborne, and this fact also must have carried weight with them.
I said, “I think you officers can see that Mrs. Osborne would do well to get off the highway, and we’d be happy to keep her car keys overnight and make sure she’s safe—”
“No! No!” Pauline snarled. “I will not get off the highway—I will not rest until somebody arrests Chester Osborne for murder! That man is a killer, and I’ll bet your bottom dollar Tacker Puderbaugh was in on it too! They’re in cahoots—why else would Tacker be up at our house? He’s supposed to be out of the country on his surfboard. Chester was
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