“And just when I thought that it couldn’t get any worse, she started”—he took a few steps away, as though he couldn’t bear to talk about it and look me in the eye—“to bleed, and I had to take her to the hospital again, and it turned out she’d had a miscarriage. One of those sons of bitches got her pregnant and she didn’t even know it until it was over.”
He strode back to my cell and stuck the gun through the bars. Now it was wavering, which didn’t seem like much of an improvement. “So now are you going to tell me they didn’t get what they deserved? Well, are you?”
I had absolutely no damn idea how to respond. Luckily, Stilwell wasn’t done ranting.
“I’m her father,” he said. “I’m supposed to protect her. I tried. I had to be a father and a mother to her, but I didn’t do a good enough job. I never told her …I should’ve warned her about boys, about what they can be capable of. I should’ve taught her not to trust them. So, you see, this is really all my fault. I failed her, and then I had to make it right.”
He stood there staring at me, like he expected me to say something—to agree with him probably. But although I’m rarely tongue-tied, I couldn’t think of a single thing that might get me sprung.
The silence filled the concrete hall, until it was interrupted by a single word.
“Daddy?”
CHAPTER32
Trish Stilwell came down the hall, stopping ten feet from her father. She looked at him, then at the gun, then at me.
“Daddy,” she said, “what’s going on?”
The expression on his face was goddamn heartbreaking: a combination of fury at the boys, tears at the memory of what his daughter had gone through, and tenderness at the sight of her.
“You can’t be here, Trish,” he said. “You have to go home now.”
She took a step closer. “Daddy, please…” Her eyes were wide and watery. “Please… stop.”
“Trishie, what are you doing here?”
“Dorrie came over. She was upset. She said Alex got her to tell about what happened to me. So I…I needed to find you.”
“Sweetheart, please leave. This doesn’t concern you.”
“Doesn’t concern me? How can you say that? This is all about me.”
“Trish, do what I tell you.” He was obviously trying to sound all tough and commanding with her, but he couldn’t quite pull it off. “Please,” he said, voice cracking. “Please just turn around and go home. I’ll be there soon.”
She shook her head, a gesture so faint I almost missed it. “Daddy, please. Please let her go. You have to let her go.”
“I can’t, sweetie,” he said. “She… did something bad.”
“So did you,” Trish said, hollow-voiced. “So did I.”
His face crumpled. “No,” he said. “No, honey. You didn’t do anything wrong. It was them. They’re the bad ones, not you.”
“No, I…I did. I—”
“Trish, please. You have to go home. Just go home and wait for me, and everything will be all right. I promise. Just—”
“I killed Axel.”
Stilwell stared at her. So did I. Then he shook his head and said, “No, honey. Maybe you think you’re responsible somehow, but you’re not.”
“He came to me. He told me he needed money so he could go to California.” She sounded disconnected, zombified, and for a second I thought she was on something. Then a worse thought occurred to me, which was that she wasn’t. “He said he did you a big favor, but when he asked you for money, you…you threatened him. And when I asked him what the favor was, he said you made him sell the acid to the guys. He said he didn’t know what was in it when he sold it, but after they died, he knew. And if… if he didn’t get some money so he could leave, he’d have to sell his story to the newspaper.”
She glanced at me. It didn’t seem the time for a lecture on how real journalists don’t pay for stories.
“He said he was meeting Alex at Deep Lake Cooling to show her how they messed up the water,” Trish went on. “He said if I didn’t meet him there first and give him some money, he was going to tell her all about… about what you did.” She looked down at the dingy cement. “So I went there, and I brought him all the money I had, but it was only fifty dollars. And he said it wasn’t enough, but if I… if I gave him a little something extra”—she choked on the word, sobs racking her skinny little body—“if I…”
Stilwell holstered the gun and took a few steps toward her.
“Trish, no. You didn’t.”
“I said I would, and he took me down to the basement. But it was so dark and cold and awful, and I …I just couldn’t.” Her voice was still as vacant as her expression; she sounded like the memory was more perplexing than traumatic. “And he got mad and he called me…he called me a tease, and he said now you were going to jail for killing those boys and it’d be all my fault.”
“Trish, that’s not true—”
“And he had me against this railing and I got out from under him and I shoved him as hard as I could and he fell. And he yelled for me to help him, but I …I just stood there. I didn’t want …I didn’t want to help him. I wanted …I think I wanted him to die.”
Stilwell closed the gap between them and wrapped his arms around her. “Sweetie, it was an accident,” he said. “It wasn’t your fault. Nobody will ever find out what happened, I promise.” He pulled away to look at her. “Now, please, just go home. This will all be over soon.”
She didn’t move. “Daddy,” she said, “you have to let her go.”
“I can’t. She’ll ruin our lives.”
Trish started crying then—big, fat drops that plopped onto the concrete floor. “I already did that,” she said.
“No, you—”
“This is all my fault,” she said. “Everything’s all my fault.”
“You’re not responsible for what those boys did to you. You’re the victim, do you understand? What happened was their fault, not yours.”
“But I took the E, and I …I went skinny-dipping with them. I wanted to go. I wanted Alan to notice me. I wanted him to touch me. But then everything all went… it all went wrong. And I told them no, but it was like they didn’t even hear me, like I wasn’t really even there….”
She was sobbing even harder, and Stilwell put his arms around her again.
“Shh…it’ll be okay,” he said. “It’ll be over soon, and you’ll never have to think about it again.”
She pulled away from him. “You don’t understand. They never even thought they did anything bad. They never meant to….They thought it was just for fun. And when I saw them at school later, it was like they didn’t even remember. All except Tom….”
“It doesn’t matter,” Stilwell said in the same pleading, placating voice. “It doesn’t matter what they thought, just what they did. You said no. You didn’t consent, and they…they hurt you. Trish, honey, please try to understand. I couldn’t let them get away with it.”
“But what about that poor girl in Baltimore? She didn’t—”
“That was an accident. It wasn’t supposed to happen. Robinette wasn’t supposed to sell it to anyone else. But when Bauer turned it down, he got greedy and—”
“And then when you couldn’t get Alan to take the drugs, you ran him over, didn’t you? Didn’t you?”
“Sweetheart, please. I did it for you. I did it so you wouldn’t have to think about those bastards every day for the rest of your life.”
“And what about her?”
Both pairs of eyes turned to me, still clutching the sheets.
“She knows,” Stilwell said, as though that explained it all. Then he pulled out his gun again.
“So does Dorrie,” Trish said. “Are you going to kill her too?”
He focused the gun on me, and his eyes on Trish. “Dorrie knows what happened, but she doesn’t know—”
“She’ll figure it out. So will Alan. Are you going to kill both of them because of… because of what I did? Daddy? Are you?”
Stilwell didn’t answer her. Instead, he cocked the gun and aimed it right at my head. I stood there frozen, the whole world narrowing to that inch of blue-black metal. I remember wondering two things, one of them rather crazy: whether Stilwell was actually going to shoot me in front of his daughter, and why it was that even though the barrel was so short, the hole still seemed goddamn bottomless.
“Make the noose,” he said, sounding suddenly desperate. “You have to…you have to make it. Now.”
“You can’t do this,” I said, as much to the gun barrel as to him. “If you kill me, Trish will never forgive you. You know she won’t.”
“Daddy, please,” Trish said, taking a few steps toward him. “Please just let her go.”
“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” he said. “I can’t. You have to understand; I just can’t….”
He looked right at me, and something in his expression told me this was it. I can’t say my whole life passed before my eyes or anything; it was more like a sudden, miserable realization that I was going to die in—of all places—a jail cell in the basement of the Jaspersburg Town Hall.
There was a flash of movement off to my right as the gun went off, the sound roaring and echoing off the concrete walls. It took me a second to assimilate the fact that I wasn’t actually dead, and a few more to realize that Trish Stilwell was bleeding on the floor in front of me.
I wish I could report that she said something profound as she lay there dying, maybe some melodramatic words for her grieving father. But she never got the chance. She just lay there on the floor, eyes wide, blood bubbling up into her mouth and dribbling a thin trail down her cheek. Stilwell shouted “No,” dropped the gun, and fell to his knees beside her.
It was all over within a minute. From his years in the army, Stilwell must’ve known it would be; that must be why he never even tried to call for help. He just knelt there next to her, not saying a word—not calling her name or telling her to hang on or any of your other battlefield clichés. He just held her and cried, his sobs filling the hallway as the gunshot had a moment before.
Eventually, he wiped at his face and scrambled backward to lean against the wall opposite me. He sat there for a long time, and since I had no idea what to do or say, I just stood there. Finally, he leaned over and picked up the gun. He pointed it at me and I backed up against the cell wall.
“Please,” I said. “Please …don’t.”
He looked back at his daughter’s body, and up at me again. Then he cocked the pistol, and for the second time in five minutes, I contemplated the inevitability of my own demise.
I wish I could conjure up the words to describe the expression on his face. It was the most incredibly haunted look I’ve ever seen, as though he were staring down into some god-awful pit—only the truth is, all he was looking at was me.
The gun moved so slowly, I barely noticed it at first. But eventually I realized that the bottomless hole in the barrel was no longer pointed at me. Then it kept turning, and turning, and turning, until I was staring at Stilwell’s hand clasped over the butt.
He opened his mouth.
He put the gun in.
He pulled the trigger.
• • •
CHIEF STILWELL KILLED HIMSELF at approximately ten P.M. The morning shift at the Jaspersburg police station comes in at eight.
If you do the math, you’ll appreciate how I spent the next ten hours of my life.
I tried to get out, but it was no use; the keys to the cell were on Stilwell’s belt. Even though I tried to get them—which meant leaning across Trish’s body—I couldn’t reach him. I’ll admit that I didn’t try too hard. Stilwell’s brains had literally been blown all over the wall, and the idea of trying to drag his corpse close enough to unhook the keys was even worse than being locked in there all night.
And locked in I was, the fluorescent lights burning the image of the Stilwells’ goddamn Shakespearean tragedy into my brain for the rest of my natural life. I tried yelling for help, but I knew it was no use until morning. My backpack and cell phone were God-knows-where. After a while, I lay down on the bed and covered myself with the shredded sheets, squeezing my eyes shut and willing the hours to go by. I’m not sure whether my watch was a blessing or a curse; I could mark the minutes, but I was also acutely aware of how much time there was to go.
Finally, a good twenty minutes after eight, my hollering finally brought someone down to the cells. It was one of the cops I’d first seen at Melting Rock, a middle-aged Barney Fife who completely flipped out when he saw the bodies. At first he said he wasn’t sure he could let me out because it would be disturbing a crime scene—Trish’s body was, after all, still blocking the bars—but I finally started screaming at him about lawsuits and emotional distress and he unlocked the door.
With the chief lying dead on the floor—and the rest of the force being better suited to parking tickets than murder investigations—the Jaspersburg cops called in the state police. They showed up with the county sheriff hot on their heels, and twenty minutes later, I was being interviewed by a whole phalanx of guys in Stetsons.
The venue for this conversation was the town hall’s all-purpose room, which had been set up for that night’s bingo game. So as I sat there spilling my guts about the Stilwell case, I stared at hand-lettered posters offering fifty-cent hot dogs and “doubel-fudge” brownies made by the Jaspersburg Lioness Club. Rather surreal—but, frankly, way better than what I’d been looking at the whole night before.
After an hour of this, during which I told the entire story from the beginning of Melting Rock to the present twice over, the door opened and in walked Brian Cody. He asked the staties to give us a minute, and since he’s a rather legendary law-enforcement figure in these parts, they didn’t argue. As soon as the door had closed behind them, he wrapped his arms around me and held on tight, and I finally lost it. I cried until I’d soaked the shoulder of his suit jacket, and then I blew my nose on his hankie and cried some more.
When I calmed down, he had me give him the Reader’s Digest version of what I’d told the state police. By the time I was done, he seemed furious—not even so much at Stilwell as at himself.
“I should’ve known,” he said. “Some goddamn detective, right? I couldn’t even figure out that one of our own was—”
“Jesus, Cody, it wasn’t exactly obvious.”
“Yeah, but…after those drugs were found in your car, it should’ve occurred to me.”
“What should have occurred to you?”
“Who could get their hands on that much coke? Drug dealers… and cops.”
“But, come on, who’d go thinking something like that? Especially somebody like you?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You’re incredibly loyal. You’d be the last person to think a cop was breaking the law.”
“I’m not sure if that’s a compliment or not.”
“It is. And listen …I know I’ve been a total freak since I got busted. I didn’t mean to blow you off, but I just—”
“It’s okay.”
“No, it’s not. It isn’t what you’d call healthy adult behavior.”
“We can deal with it later, okay? Right now I’m just glad you’re still breathing.”
“But—”
“Let’s change the subject, okay?”
“To what?”
“I don’t give a damn.”
“Okay, well…how do you think Stilwell got the drugs, anyway?”
“That’s what you want to talk about?”
“I’m curious.”
“You’re insane. But to answer you, I assume…I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s exactly that much missing from some state evidence locker somewhere, and Stilwell just happened to be there recently.”
“Would it really be that easy?”
“It could be.”
“God, Cody, the idea of Stilwell…You know, despite everything, I think he was a decent human being who just got total
ly twisted over what happened to his—”
“Baby, this ‘decent human being’ that you’re talking about is responsible for the deaths of five people, and that’s not even counting himself.”
“I…”
“What?”
“I wonder why he didn’t kill me.”
“I’m not sure you need to think about that right now.”
“No, really, I…He could just as easily have shot me and then blown his brains out.”
“I guess that’s true.”
“So why didn’t he?”
“Maybe because …everything he’d done was about protecting his daughter. Maybe once she was gone, there was no point.”
“That could be. But maybe it was because he knew once he was dead, it was all going to come out. Everybody was going to know what he did. But I was…”
“You were what?”
“The only person who could explain why.”
CHAPTER33
Explaining why Stilwell did what he did was the central theme of the column I wrote for the paper two days later—by which time Sturdivant had recanted and the Monitor had rehired me. Though my fantasies about getting back pay were dashed by budgetary realities, it felt great to be back in the newsroom. My colleagues, not a particularly sappy bunch, expressed their joy at my return with a rash of mock headlines that got taped over my desk. My favorite was BERNIER DRUG RING GOES BUST; SELLS BRAS INSTEAD.
Since the LSD poisonings had been a national story, news of Stilwell’s guilt attracted reporters from all the usual places. The New York Times, of course, was represented by one Gordon Band, and since I felt guilty about hanging up on him before, I actually gave him a couple of quotes.
The day the column ran, I drove back to Jaspersburg. I can’t say I really wanted to, but I didn’t have much choice. There was someone I needed to talk to, and there was no way he was going to come to me.
Ecstasy Page 33
