by Joan Brady
Beside the sketch he’d written what looked like ‘pressurized tanker’, but he couldn’t be sure. Certainly a pressurized tanker, a couple of hoses and a very simple industrial whatsit would do the job. Aha, manifold! That was the whatsit’s name. The assembly wouldn’t need more than two or three men to handle it either, maybe a couple of hoses to get from the carrier to the manifold, which could probably be hooked up directly to the pump. A small contribution of protein, and the bugs weren’t energized enough to cause anything at all. Increasing amounts of protein caused increasing illness. A huge amount? Springfield Fever.
He’d need Aloysia’s patent registration before he could declare victory, but he had no doubt. He’d won. He’d cracked it. The victory was his. And it wasn’t even nine o’clock in the morning.
There was one thing that seemed a total mystery. What terrorist group would perpetuate such an atrocity on such a scale and with such success – and yet fail to lay claim to it? Could somebody have intended something else? And made a mistake? A miscalculation with the manifold that resulted in pressure changes in the delivery system?
Of course, there could have been some kind of accident. But the why and the how of such an attack was hardly his problem.
59
SPRINGFIELD: Same morning
Jimmy hadn’t slept, and even the idea of breakfast made him queasy, but he’d showered, shaved, put on clean clothes. He was ready to go at nine-thirty – right on schedule – when he received the call he’d had to bargain hardest for. He left at once and drove to the Springfield Police station.
‘I want to report a murder,’ he said to the desk sergeant.
Then came a bit of plain old luck.
The desk sergeant showed him in to Detective Inspector Sullivan. Irish cop. Freckles and one of those soft Dublin faces: the right kind of Irish cop. Maybe you could see both hands on the table but somehow one was picking twenty-dollar bills out of your pocket even so. They’d played poker together for years. It takes two to cheat effectively in the game – it’s called ‘collusion’ even in poker – and they made a brilliant team. Their discussion took less than half an hour.
The rest of the morning was harder to get through. Much harder. Mayor James Zemanski fizzed with anxiety, barely able to keep his mind on congratulations to an ancient citizen on her hundredth birthday, press worries over garbage, telephone calls to bereaved families, the ruffled feathers of a couple of aldermen who were always at each other’s throats. An aide had written his lunchtime speech to the Rotary Club; he put on his half-moon glasses to read it, began, then tossed the speech aside, released some of the morning’s tension in the form of passion for the Rotarians’ worldwide Youth Exchange Program – not that he gave a damn about it – and it got him a standing ovation.
On the way back from the Rotarians to his office, Sullivan came through on Jimmy’s mobile.
‘You know what’s really funny?’ Sullivan said. ‘We were bringing Marion into custody right while you were—’
‘You what?’ Jimmy interrupted, voice incredulous but heart soaring.
‘We were bringing the bastard in, my friend. Right at that very moment.’
‘He killed somebody else?’
‘Naw. Pity about that. Just assault and reckless driving. But even before you came in, I knew we’d get him on something sooner or later. I knew it. The call came—’
‘Jesus,’ Jimmy interrupted again, ‘assault certainly sounds like him but . Anybody hurt?
‘A few cuts and bruises.’
‘Marion just . put his hands behind his back and surrendered?’
‘You might say that.’
Jimmy took in a breath, let it out. ‘What about the house? You find anything there?’
‘You’re fucking right we did.’
At the police station, Jimmy had turned over the package addressed ‘For J. Zemanski in the event of my death’ and the envelope marked ‘David Marion’. He’d explained that the great mass of material had been academic manuscript, which the police were welcome to if they wanted it. Sullivan dismissed it with a shrug. Like Jimmy, what he cared about was the ‘David Marion’ envelope. Not that Jimmy had turned over all its contents. He’d decided Aloysia’s covering letter was relevant as well as a selection of the angriest letters from David to her. Put together, they looked – so Jimmy and Sullivan agreed – as though she might well be afraid David was going to kill her, was entrusting the letters with Jimmy as evidence for the simple reason that everybody in Springfield, including Aloysia, knew how much he loved Helen and hated David Marion.
Jimmy went on to tell Sullivan about last June when David had arrived late at his own wedding party, sodden and mud-covered, and said that he’d just come from the Mississippi. Floaters are common enough for policemen to get a feel of how long it takes a corpse to travel down river. The three months before Aloysia turned up in Tennessee wasn’t a bad fit if he’d drowned her somewhere near, say, Hannibal, just west of Springfield, on the day of the wedding party.
‘It isn’t enough evidence to book him on,’ Jimmy had said to Sullivan. ‘I know that. But look, it occurs to me that the Gonzagas only got in from England a day or so ago. A lot of unhappy paperwork. A lot of grieving. Donna’s sister said they haven’t been able to bring themselves to go out to Aloysia’s house yet, much less start an inventory. You just might find something there.’
He certainly hadn’t given Sullivan the small envelope labelled ‘The key to my house in Leland Grove’ or the key itself. The woman had known that Jimmy was the only person she could rely on to carry out her plans if she died, and he’d fulfilled her final wishes. Sullivan’s boys found the results of his terrifying predawn errand at her house: the remainder of the ‘David Marion’ file, the gentler, more loving letters he’d written her, the marriage certificate, the birth certificate for the child with David listed as the father and the child’s death certificate. Clear evidence of bigamy. But better – oh, far better – these documents constituted a painfully clear motive for murder. Even a dumb prosecutor could land a guilty verdict.
Kill wife Number One to secure marriage to rich wife Number Two as well as escape an otherwise inescapable life sentence. Who wouldn’t kill for that?
And, oh, dear God, did the people of Springfield want to see David Marion back behind bars for good.
Jimmy’s role was pure glory. He was not only the informant in the case but the star witness. He was also the one who’d put the facts together and to whom the victim had left her legacy as well as her proof. He’d have no choice but to be prominent in both the investigation and the trial, and he could maximize that part of it to the hilt. The exposure would bring in new clients and with them new client accounts from which he could ‘borrow’. It would tell Springfield that the hero of dark times was their hero still. It would revive the town saint, Hugh Freyl, and everybody was certain Hugh had been David’s victim too. If Jimmy worked that part of it right, he could even bring Becky back on board, and that would really turn the momentum in his favour.
A bit of careful manoeuvring, and he might yet set foot in the governor’s mansion with Helen at his side.
Jimmy had almost forgotten the joy of winning – pure oxygen mixed with ecstasy.
All afternoon, he kept having to repress smiles as he signed bylaws passed by his Council, chaired a planning committee meeting and cut a ribbon to open a new runway at Abraham Lincoln Capital Airport. He didn’t even have time to go home before dinner at the Sangamo Club with representatives of a reluctant Chinese investor; by the time coffee arrived, his ebullience and optimism won the Chinese over to a restoration programme that mayors rarely dream of.
He didn’t start back home until well past eleven, still flying high on adrenalin. Only as the garage doors closed behind him did the exhaustion hit. He could barely stay upright as he got out of the car and into the house.
‘Fuck!’ he said as he caught a whiff of the air inside.
The firm he’d hired last week to c
lean for him didn’t seem able to get it through their thick skulls that he didn’t want anybody smoking in his house. He dithered a moment. Thirty-six hours without sleep, too much liquor and an emotional rollercoaster like he’d never known: he was so tired his stomach was turning over. The smoke almost made him gag. He switched on the lights, stormed into the living room to open the windows over the lake.
And stopped dead.
David Marion lay dozing in the original Eames where he himself had been lying only that morning. The prison-pumped, arrogant body was unmistakable even with the face turned away. And he had his feet actually on the footstool, the original one where only Jimmy’s feet were allowed to rest. Nobody else would do that. Cigarette butts nearly filled a Murano glass bowl worth a small fortune. Nobody else would do that either. A waft of cigarette smoke curled up from the hidden face, and Jimmy’s terror was so abrupt – it hit him right beneath the ribs – that his eyes went out of focus.
‘You!’ he cried.
60
SPRINGFIELD: The early hours of Saturday
David didn’t move, didn’t even roll his head to look at Jimmy. ‘Don’t shout like that. I have a very bad headache. You set me up, Mr Mayor. That wasn’t nice.’
‘Oh, fuck, what are you going to do?’ The words stumbled out of Jimmy’s mouth. ‘You’re here to kill me, aren’t you? Please don’t kill me. I don’t want to die, David. Please.’
‘When I started going through Aloysia’s papers’ – David spoke as though he hadn’t heard Jimmy – ‘I couldn’t see why you’d kept—’
‘Come on, David, talk to me. You’re scaring me shitless.’
‘I don’t look all that dangerous, do I? That childish letter of Helen’s, angry because her daddy had married me off to Aloysia: why keep it? And yet here it is. Right out in the open. Or rather, hidden in that new safe of yours. Didn’t anybody ever tell you that the first place an electrician looks for a hidden safe—?’
‘Oh, God,’ Jimmy moaned.
‘—is behind the wall outlets in the bedroom? And lo! Yours was right there. A straightforward plan would have been best, Mr Mayor. Trap the beast, kill it, capture the princess and her fortune. Maybe not even need UCAI’s money? Ten million under the table, wasn’t it? You really think they’d have paid you off?’ Jimmy sagged against the wall, hardly breathing, not daring to ask how David knew the amount. ‘The first puzzle is that you didn’t kill me, so it was . Are you still standing? Sit down, sit down.’ David waved a weary hand towards the fake Eames. ‘It makes me tired to know you’re on your feet. Aloysia’s easy. She wanted to make as much trouble as possible for as many people as possible. Especially me, but the Freyls too, as well as a number of others. Gave you ideas, didn’t she? If I’d died in some back street, nobody would ever know what a hero you were for getting rid of me. So you get me beat up, land me in the slammer, plant Aloysia’s dirt to keep me there for good. But you’re a businessman. Businessmen need insurance. My present thinking is that here’s where Helen’s letter comes in. If Plan A doesn’t work, old Mrs Freyl will pay through the nose to suppress evidence that Helen knowingly entered into a bigamous marriage.’
‘Goddamn you!’ Jimmy’s voice trembled with a righteous outrage that overrode his fear as well as his exhaustion. ‘I kept Helen’s letter to protect her. She was only a little girl when she wrote that. Just a child. I’d never do anything to hurt her. Never! ’
‘Yeah.’ David nodded. ‘Yeah, that does make sense. Nobody else will believe you, but I think I do.’
Jimmy was so surprised at this response that he sat down abruptly and blurted out, ‘Why aren’t you in jail?’
‘You know, I think I’ve fallen in love with corporate power. I was out of custody ten minutes after a telephone call that old Mrs Freyl would describe as “interesting”. A new experience for me. A serious thrill. Not that big business buys everything. It didn’t buy me into your house tonight.’
A couple of years installing security systems makes even an ex-con part of a fraternity that gossips about clients just as doctors do about patients. While Jimmy was walking into the Sangamo Club, David was having a drink with a ferret – a small, nervous, nerdy man – who headed AU Security in Springfield. AU Security cost an arm and a leg but ensured a ten-minute response time to any break-in. The trouble with systems like that is that they’re sensitive. They lock down easily, and way too many owners forget the secret pass codes they’ve set to bypass the lockdown. Maybe they demand the security, but they sure as hell get mad at the money and inconvenience involved in resetting the system. Most firms – AU Security included – leave a loophole, an internal password that bypasses all that. A drink, a ferret’s commiseration at the ambush carried out on a fellow professional, and here David sat in Jimmy’s living room without the necessity of an overtly illegal act.
David figured the method showed serious progress in his education as a rich man. He was beginning to see that the rich don’t have to break laws. He eased his feet off the Eames footstool and gradually pulled himself upright in the chair.
That’s when Jimmy first caught sight of the face. Christ Almighty, could that patchwork of stitches really be David Marion? Jimmy swallowed, fought against the vomit in his mouth. Forehead, chin – as though ripped off and basted back into place – and cheeks so swollen that if it hadn’t been for the body and the voice, Jimmy wouldn’t have recognized him at all. Frankenstein’s monster? He was a beauty next to this. And that’s not even taking account of one eye blackened shut and the other barely more than a slit.
Jimmy could only mumble the words. ‘I didn’t know they’d hurt you. That wasn’t part of the deal. I swear to you . ’ He trailed off, too shocked at that face to continue.
His instructions had been simple: ‘Get the guy arrested for assault. Maybe mess his face up a little.’ He knew that getting David into custody for something else was the only way of pressing murder and bigamy charges without immediate Freyl obstruction. Freyl influence could buy a lot, especially in this town, but it couldn’t buy off a murder charge against a convicted felon already in custody. So, well, what had bought it off? Federal muscle? The NSA? That was the only possibility. But why would the feds intervene for David Marion of all people? Or . Could it be? The feds under UCAI’s guidance? The security guy the Slads had sent Jimmy to see – that nasty church lunch with old ladies and no Martinis – he certainly had ties to the NSA. Had they switched sides, teamed up with David against Jimmy instead of Jimmy against David? Could that be what David meant by being in love with ‘corporate power’? And how he knew the amount of the kickback? But why would UCAI help David? They had a contract out on the man’s life. And they’d employed the NSA to carry it out.
Jimmy watched in fascinated horror as this creature he’d created slowly and painfully lifted a briefcase onto the footstool and removed a wodge of paper – easily recognizable as the bulk of Aloysia’s enclosures – and started through the pages.
‘Who could have expected a gift like this?’ the David creature asked, mouth twisting a little, cigarette dangling, smoke curling up. ‘I can’t tell you how pleased . No, not “pleased”. I can’t think of a word that describes it. Thought maybe I was hallucinating. I was looking for something from Aloysia – she had to be your source for the bigamy charge – but I certainly didn’t expect this.’ He ran a loving hand over the pages. ‘Anyhow, most of it’s technical. I can’t catch more than a gist of what she’s saying, but scattered throughout, there are a number of letters, notes, clips from a diary, printed-out emails. They do make a picture. The boring part – the technical stuff – seems to be a sketchy outline of some brew she’d cooked up a couple of decades ago that killed a bunch of rats. She was certain that British secret services would fall all over themselves to get at it. The first person she sent her research to simply lost it. The second held onto it for a year, then said the delivery system was too complex for practical use. There was a third – she clearly didn’t have the right contacts – an
d she ended up only with the reputation of a nuisance. After that, she couldn’t get a look-in. She fought with colleagues, accused them of stealing her ideas, started in on crack, abandoned it with the help of a local hash dealer in Keble College.’
David took out another cigarette, lit it from the one in his mouth. ‘What she really wanted to lay out for future generations began five years ago at a party in London’ – David opened to a page about a third of the way through the wodge of paper – ‘where she ran across an American called Francis Slad.’
‘So that’s where he met her.’
Jimmy remembered his surprise when Francis told him that David had stolen his girl – Francis Slad? A girl? – and then his shock when he’d searched his iPad and found a microbiology student gossiping those five years ago in an Oxford Times blog:
Francis Slad is some American industrialist or something.
What’s he doing schmoozing with our own Aloysia Gonzaga?
Part of what had taken Jimmy aback was that a couple of his non-Council-approved sessions with Aloysia had been enough to let him in on her gift for sex as well as some of her less attractive personality traits. In bed – or anywhere else – she had a truly professional talent with men. He’d taken her home one night to make a meal of her, worn himself out, fallen into a stupor, got up for a glass of water towards morning – and found her going through his desk. She’d been completely unrepentant. Just shrugged, said she’d seen what she needed to see and walked out. He’d been very cautious in his dealings with her after that.
David’s slit of an eye shut for a moment – Jimmy watched it transfixed – then opened again. ‘The twin brothers hadn’t yet made the strategic move in their great takeover of UCAI. They were jetting around Europe gathering up allies for it. The fat one had his wife along, but Francis? Hard to tell. I’d have said his taste ran to boys, but he and Aloysia hit it off at this London party, spent time together, smoked everything they could get their hands on. They met in Oxford a couple of weeks later for more of the same. He stayed at her house, talked about her work, commiserated with her attempts to get it recognized, promised to pull some strings for her. She was used to promises that came to nothing, didn’t really expect these to and when she didn’t hear from Francis Slad, she just tacked him onto her ever-growing hate list. Then Springfield offered her a two-year sabbatical—’
