Soon they were all out of sight. Things went quiet. I rolled down both windows of my truck and pushed away Fred thoughts.
They were replaced by thoughts of Montreal. I’d done state time for manslaughter two after I shot someone who was trying to shoot me, but the calculated, indirect way I’d just handled Montreal and muscle man didn’t sit right.
Tough shit. Barnburner sacrifice, like the time I’d spent at Mass. Correctional Institute, Cedar Junction, on the manslaughter.
After a while I locked the F-150, walked to an area with picnic tables, chose one in full sunshine, and sat drying. In my peripheral vision I saw a nothingburger car—dirty beige, Altima, Taurus, whatever—parked on the other side of the Sequoia.
The nanny had dumped a big cloth bag of toys and snacks on a picnic table. I noticed one of the blond boys and the girl were sticking close to the nanny as she walked laps around the picnic area calling for Jeffrey, saying it Heff-ray.
The sun was nice.
Wheels turned as I tried to tie off loose ends. Josh Whipple, Phigg’s blown fortune, his hidden stash.
Patty Marx. I thought about our farm-stand meeting and realized she was the best kind of bullshitter, the kind that vibes hey-I’m-giving-you-the-lowdown straightforwardness. People like that know the soft sell works best when they’re lying.
Patty Marx, Diana Marx, D.P.R. Marx. She was hiding her name and a lot more—meeting with Phigg the day before he died, living a couple miles from Jut Road, apparently dating Josh Whipple.
Patty and Josh? Working Phigg like a speed bag?
While I thought it through, the nanny’s perimeter walk gained urgency, her calls for Heff-ray grew louder. The daughter, who was the youngest, picked up on the nanny’s fear, squatted, and covered her eyes with her hands, whimpering some. The nanny peered down into the chasm itself, pulled her cell, made calls. I wondered why she didn’t just walk down the chasm. It’s not an easy climb, but people do it with kids. Then I saw she wore stiletto-heeled sandals. Stupid.
I sighed. Looked like I was volunteer-by-default to find the missing blond son. Dollars to donuts he was less than thirty feet away behind one of the big rocks.
As I began to rise, a hand on my shoulder pressed me back to the picnic-table bench. Behind me Josh Whipple said, “Where’s the fucking money?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Where the hell had he come from? Had he followed me?
“Money’s not your problem,” I said, turning. He looked awful. Blue-white face. Black bags beneath eye sockets deeper than I remembered. Crimson Windbreaker with a lump in the right pocket, the lump pointing my way like a joke, like when a junkie uses a finger in his pocket to hold up a convenience store.
He followed my gaze, wiggled the lump. “Found it underneath your passenger seat,” he said, jerking a thumb at my truck. “I believe it belonged to Ollie originally, right?”
Shit.
I needed to gut this thing out. “I say again, money is not your problem,” I said. “Every cop in Vermont and New Hampshire is looking for you. That’s your problem.”
The nanny approached, probably pissed that the big strong men hadn’t yet offered to find Heff-ray. But before she could say anything, Josh shot her a look that stopped her in her tracks. As she retreated to the edge of the chasm I stood.
Josh said, “Where’s the rest of the fucking money, Sax?”
“What money?”
“Don’t play dumb. Tander Phigg’s hidey-hole money.”
I wondered what he meant by rest. Said nothing.
“Did you help him stash it in that pump-house floor?” he said. “Hell of a hiding place. Took me two days to find it, even though I knew it was somewhere in that shack. Hell, I figured out it had to be in the floor somewhere, but it still took me three hours to figure out how the bottom swung away.”
I said, “Tell me about the money.”
“What about it?”
“I thought playing dumb was over,” I said. “He lived in a shack. He was broke. He picked up returnable cans in ditches. How the hell did he have seventy-five grand stashed?”
“That was for Ollie, for services rendered,” Josh said. “Where’s the big pile?”
“What big pile?”
He looked at me for damn near thirty seconds, saying nothing. Both blond kids were crying now. Behind me, the nanny sounded desperate.
“Tander Phigg wanted out,” Josh said.
“What’s out? Out of what?”
“When his daughter showed up,” he said—did he stumble over daughter, or did I imagine that?—“he couldn’t believe his luck. She was the link to his happy younger days, blah blah blah. They came up with a plan to cash out, disappear to Canada, and be happy artistes forever and ever, or some such bullshit.”
Click. “So Phigg was converting everything to cash,” I said.
“And Ollie was using his drug-stashing expertise to get them over the border. The seventy-five K was his fee.”
“Why didn’t he take the fee up front?”
“He didn’t have much leverage,” Josh said. “Phigg showed up at the shop and said he knew about Ollie’s other trade. Phigg called the shots after that.”
I thought for a minute. “What was the big deal about Canada? Phigg had enough dough to move anywhere he wanted in the States. There was no need to cash everything in, smuggle it, all that nonsense.”
“He liked the idea of fucking the IRS,” Josh said. “He hated everything about taxes. Ollie once said Phigg was one of these half-smart guys who let the tax tail wag the fiscal dog.”
He was right about that, when I thought about it. Phigg never missed a chance to talk about the death tax especially, about the feds helping themselves to half of everything his father had built.
Above us in the parking lot, I thought I heard wide tires on gravel. I needed to keep Josh talking a minute or two longer. I said, “Did Phigg know you were banging his daughter?”
His face went tight. “No more than he knew I’m going to gut-shoot you.”
“Why not hang me? Plenty of stout trees around.”
“Let’s take a hike down there,” he said, gesturing toward the chasm trail.
“The problem with a weak link,” I said, making no move to turn, “is that it stays weak. Think Patty Marx will be any stronger for you than she was for Phigg?”
Gears spun in Josh’s head. He licked his lips, made twitchy moves with his gun hand. I was scanning the horizon behind him. Nothing yet—maybe I’d imagined those tires on gravel, or maybe they’d belonged to a sightseer who’d rolled past.
Time to press. “If she was here right now,” I said, “you could treat her like a loose end. But she’s not here. She’s picking up her mother at the airport. I know because I put the whole thing together.”
“She’s hip-deep in it,” he said. But I felt his doubt; I’d killed his momentum.
“Of course she is,” I said. “But when she’s in a little room with three cops, and those cops are dying to talk with you, and Patty’s looking at life no parole, do you think she’ll admit she’s hip-deep in it?”
Josh said nothing, licked his lips again.
“Or will she be a brave journalist who was kidnapped by Josh Whipple and dragged along on his two-state crime spree?”
His face was now the color of peed-on newspaper. “Turn and walk or I’ll do it right in front of the brats, I swear I will.”
I barely heard him. I was waving my arm and hollering by then, having finally spotted two park police. “This guy here!” I said, pointing at Josh, gesturing. “This guy thinks he saw Jeffrey! Hurry!”
It took Josh a couple seconds to realize what was going on. When he did, he looked at me in a way that made my neck hairs stand up. Then he pulled his hand from his Windbreaker, zipped shut the pocket, and played along. He wasn’t crazy enough to shoot two cops, a nanny, and a couple of blond kids.
“Right back there, yes!” he said, bouncing on the balls of his feet as the cops, a man
and a woman, both short and squat, scrambled toward us. “No, to your left, way down there.”
I wanted to turn him in—until I saw the park police carried no side arms. If I forced Josh to make a choice, maybe he would start shooting.
While he gave the cops the runaround, with the nanny and the two kids barking useless advice, I quietly walked toward my truck.
But Josh had one more arrow in his quiver. “Take care, Conway!” he hollered, making sure both cops turned and looked at me. I had no choice but to make a friendly wave and say I’d talk to him later.
Josh cupped his hands. “I’ll tell Fred you said hello!”
I stood. Couldn’t move. My wet boots felt like concrete.
But the park police must have called another unit—a forest-green Ford Expedition pulled into the parking lot with its blue lights strobing.
So I brushed the window Josh had busted from the F-150’s bench seat, climbed in, and drove out, flipping through new ideas. Josh plus Fred? Truth, or a bullshit bluff by Josh?
I called Randall. He picked up on half a ring. I said, “Guess who just about shot me with the little Browning I took away from Ollie?”
“Josh Whipple.” No hesitation. He wasn’t guessing.
“How’d you know?”
“I got an earful this morning from Patty Marx,” he said. “You need to hear it.”
I checked my watch. “She ought to be heading for Logan to meet her mother’s plane.”
“When she dropped this bomb on me I persuaded her to come to my place and sent a car service instead,” he said. “Now I don’t want to let her out of my sight. And oh by the way, why the hell are you pulling Myna Roper into this circus?”
“I, ah, I thought it would be good for her to tell Trey about his father. About his five happy years.”
Long pause. I could picture Randall pinching the bridge of his nose, the way he does. Finally he said, “Priority-wise, that strikes me as pretty low on the totem pole, Conway.”
I said nothing. Randall matched me.
“Let’s meet at the farm stand in Berlin,” I said. “Patty knows it. Bring her, but leave Myna in Framingham to talk with Trey.”
“Okay, Mister Fix-It.” Randall sighed. “See you there.”
“Get an extra fork for me.”
“Things are happening rápidamente now, eh?”
“Bet your sweet ass,” I said, and clicked off.
* * *
When I got there, Randall and Patty faced each other across a picnic table in the sun. They sipped bottled water and stared at each other and ignored the apple pie sitting between them. The day’s heat had spooled up, feeling more like August than June. Good. I sat next to Randall but with my back to the table and Patty, soaking up sun and heat.
I said. “Montreal’s out.”
“Meaning?” Randall said.
“Meaning out. That’s all you need to know.”
He shook his head, rose, walked to the stand.
I kept my face to the sun and said, “So what do you have to tell me that’s so important?”
Patty waited a beat. “Maybe it’s important enough for you to look at me while I say it.”
“Maybe you should convince me you’re not a fucking liar who helped Josh Whipple kill Ollie Dufresne and his mother.”
“What?” She hissed it.
Now I did turn. I talked fast, ticked points off on my fingers, watched her reaction. “You met with Tander Phigg the day before he hanged himself. You haven’t been with The Globe for a good six months. You were working as a maid in a goddamn B and B right in Rourke, I could just about throw a football from there to Phigg’s shack. On your day off at the B and B, you ran around with your boyfriend, Josh Whipple.”
Her mouth had dropped progressively as I said it. She clicked her teeth shut and shot death-ray eyes at me.
“These are all things you either lied about or left out of your story,” I said, putting my back to Patty again and laying my elbows on the table. “So until you convince me otherwise, the big question here is whether I give you to the cops or Whipple. I was you, I’d be hoping for the cops.”
“Asshole!”
Randall came back with another bottle of water, read the vibe at a glance. “Don’t let me interrupt,” he said.
“Nothing here to interrupt,” Patty said.
“I was just telling Patty,” I said, nodding thanks for the water, “that unless we decide to help her out, fifteen, twenty years at MCI Framingham is the best thing that can happen to her.”
“Conway,” Randall said.
“The worst thing,” I said, “is Josh Whipple. He took a pretty good run at killing me just now. And he said you and him are like this, Patty. Friends, lovers, partners.”
“Conway,” Randall said.
But I had a head of steam now. “I told Josh he made a mistake letting you out of his sight, Patty. And you know what? He knew I was right. So maybe I’ll call him, hand you over, let him do what he needs to do.”
“Conway!”
I finally noticed Randall was squeezing my bicep, hard. “You should hear what she has to say,” he said.
I breathed myself calm. “Sorry. My father is missing and people keep trying to kill me.”
We were quiet awhile. Then Patty looked at Randall. “Shall I tell him what I told you?”
He nodded.
Patty took a long drink from her water bottle, screwed its cap tight, placed both forearms flat on the table, and looked me in the eye. “Bobby Marx started fucking me when I was nine years old,” she said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
I said nothing, watched her eyes instead. I decided I believed her, knew Randall did, too.
Finally I said, “So he knew you weren’t his. Your mother was fuzzy on that.”
“Of course he knew. He used to tell me that. After. While we were cuddling.” A tear rolled from her left eye. She made no move to touch it. “He was big on cuddling after, and he was big on reminding me I wasn’t his biological daughter. Because that made it all right, you see?”
“Did your mother know?”
“She didn’t know because she didn’t want to know. After a while she hazed out with the booze, and then she didn’t know much of anything.”
I pushed the uneaten pie aside. “When did it end?”
“Halloween night when I was seventeen. He drove into a pond trying to avoid a pack of trick-or-treaters. He drowned.” She barked a laugh. “They said he was a hero.”
I glanced at Randall. His eyes showed me nothing.
“Can you blame me for wondering who my true father was?” Patty said.
“When the rape started,” I said, “you stopped having friends. You found something to focus on. You fixed on the who’s-my-father question and became an information seeker. To your mother, maybe your guidance counselor, it looked like obsession. To you it was a way to control something.”
“You’ve heard my story?”
“I hear a lot of stories.”
Patty began to shake, a little at first, then harder, tears flowing now. “Are you so jaded? Is my story so common?”
I took both her wrists. “Your story is yours,” I said. “Your story is like nobody else’s.”
Then Patty Marx slipped her hands from mine, set her elbows on the table, covered her eyes, and cried a long while. Randall, who’d been hovering at the end of the table, sat next to her and set a big hand on her back.
I went to the stand, grabbed a handful of napkins, and brought them to our table. Patty used them to wipe her eyes and blow her nose. She looked from Randall to me and tried to laugh. “Sorry about the girly-girl nonsense. I haven’t done that since college.”
I said, “By the time Bobby Marx died, you were set to go to … Clemson, was it?”
She nodded, then told it. Talked about college, her career, moving from newspaper to newspaper, climbing the ladder. She kept her eyes on the table while she spoke, tracing the wood grain with a blood-red fingernail.
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I knew the story already but heard her out, letting her tell it her way. By the time she got to the part about working for The Globe, the shade had worked around to our table.
“You met Phigg a year and a half ago when you wrote the story about dying cities,” I said, as it all clicked into place. “You knew by then he was your father.”
She hesitated, then nodded.
“Was the whole story a setup? A pretext to meet him?”
“Yes.”
“You hit him with it. You told the poor guy he was your father.”
“Yes.” She whispered it.
“How’d he react?”
“He sat on a log and said it couldn’t be true.”
“You convinced him.”
“I told him some things about my mother that would be difficult for a stranger to learn,” she said. “To seal the deal, I showed him a photo.”
“A photo he took back in the New York days.”
“Yes.”
“Of your mother.”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“He cried,” she said. “He said he should have been with me the whole time. He wanted to know everything about my life and my mother’s.”
“Did you tell him about Bobby Marx?”
“God, no. Why would I?” But I’d seen the hitch in her fingernail tracing before she answered. Huh.
We sat quiet awhile.
“Talk about Josh Whipple,” Randall finally said, and turned to me. “This is key.”
“I met Josh while I was researching my father.”
“Researching him?” Randall said. “Before, you called it stalking.”
“I was joking, for Christ’s sake.” She fake-laughed and touched Randall’s arm, then looked at me. “During my research, my stalking”—she rolled her eyes—“I followed Tander to Motorenwerk, where he shot the breeze for a good long time. It piqued my curiosity. Who spends forty-five minutes at a garage when they’re not having a car fixed?”
Purgatory Chasm: A Mystery Page 23
