by Jane Haddam
“Why not?” one of the state police asked.
“Because,” Gregor said, “I’m fairly sure she’ll be more than happy to enter a plea as long as the sentence tops out at, say, twenty years. The issue, for her, is not going to be taking the biggest possible risk to see if she can get off without any penalty at all. It might be if she were willing to let an attorney wage a battered woman defense—”
“Wait,” Kyle said. “I thought those were about women who kill the men who beat them, not about how they kill somebody else because their husbands beat them.”
“Actually,” Gregor said, “defense attorneys have taken both tacks. There was the Joel Steinberg case, with the child in New York who was battered to death, and the woman involved, Hedda Nussbaum, I think, her defense was that she took part in the abuse of her adopted daughter because she was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder because her husband beat her. Except that I don’t think he was her husband. I think they’d been living together a long time, but that they’d never made it legal.”
“So, did the jury buy it?” the other state trooper said. “Did this Hedda what’s-her-name get off because her husband beat her?”
“No,” Gregor said. “But defense attorneys try the tack every once in a while. I was thinking about Karla Faye Tucker just a minute ago. Her case was like that. On drugs, battered and pathologically dependent on her boyfriend.”
“It didn’t help her, either,” Kyle pointed out.
“No, it didn’t,” Gregor said. “And Mrs. Kennedy’s case is different, because in all those other cases the man was present at the violence and took part in it. In a way it was a kind of sex. I’ve always wondered about those cases, if the man sees something in the woman so that some part of him knows all along that she’s attracted to the blood and the pain and the violence, or if she’s normal enough when she enters the relationship, and then—I don’t know. Gets addicted to the man? Gets addicted to the sensation? You’ve got to wonder how it all starts, what she thinks the first time he goes violent, not against her but against somebody else. There’s got to be some kind of psychological progression. I don’t know if anybody understands what it is.”
“But that isn’t what happened in this case, is it?” Kyle asked. “Stu wasn’t there when she killed Chris Inglerod. He wasn’t there when she attacked Emma, either. She was on her own.”
“Oh, yes,” Gregor said. “The only time he was there was when Michael Houseman died, and then he was the one who committed the murder. She only stood by and watched. Or maybe that’s too passive. From what Liz Toliver has told us about what she heard that night, it’s possibly more apt to say that Peggy Smith Kennedy was a cheerleader off the field as well as on.”
“Stu Kennedy murdered Michael Houseman,” Kyle said. “This is insane. I thought you said that the same person who murdered Chris murdered Michael.”
“No,” Gregor said, “I said the two murders were connected. And they are connected. All of this is connected. None of this would have happened if Michael Houseman hadn’t been, what did you call him, a Dudley Dooright?”
“Yeah,” Kyle said. “He was a Dudley Dooright. Why did Stu Kennedy want to kill him?”
“Because Stu Kennedy was most certainly taking drugs that summer,” Gregor said, “and he might have been selling them. Do you remember that crime record my friend in Philadelphia got for me? You were impressed with the other murders that might have been done by razor or knife around the same time.”
“I remember that,” Kyle said. “There were a couple of them.”
“Yes, there were, but there was also one of possession with intent to sell narcotics. Everyone kept saying—you kept saying—that drugs were pretty much undergroud in Hollman in 1969. I didn’t believe it. There were drugs everywhere in 1969. But I thought it was a good idea to see if there was any trace of evidence about the existence of drugs in the area at the time, and there was that. My guess is that there’s a lot more if you look for it in the local records, maybe even in the local records here in Hollman. I wouldn’t be surprised if your Mr. Kennedy hadn’t been picked up once or twice for possession, or for intoxication, and just let go. That was before the drug war, when we treated casual users like casual users instead of the twenty-first-century personification of the Antichrist.”
“Druggies are scum,” one of the state troopers said virtuously.
Gregor rubbed his temples. “Anyway, that’s what happened, that night in the park. I can’t prove it. You’re never going to try Stu Kennedy for murder, but I’d bet my life on it. Stu Kennedy was doing drugs and possibly selling them, and Michael Houseman threatened to turn him in. My guess is that they had a confrontation in that park, on that night. If Michael Houseman had known earlier, he probably would just have told. They had a confrontation, and Stu had the linoleum cutter—”
“But why?” Kyle said.
“If he’d started selling, for protection,” Gregor said. “And my guess is that he had started selling. That was what all this was about. Somebody we interviewed—I’d have to go back and check on who—mentioned the fact that you could get stuff to get high with during your senior year in high school and the summer after. I think if we nailed that person down, we’d find that she’d gotten it from Stu—”
“Why she?” one of the state troopers said.
“Because everybody important to this case is she,” Kyle Borden said. “It’s been ladies’ night all the way. So okay. Stu was selling a little dope in his free time, Michael Houseman caught him at it, Stu took what he had on him for protection and killed Michael Houseman. What was Peggy doing during all of this? What were the rest of them doing? Just standing there?”
“The rest of them weren’t there when the murder took place,” Gregor said. “They were all very protective of each other, but none of them would have cared a damn what happened to Stu Kennedy. If they’d all been together, not one of them would have been in danger of being charged as an accessory, because they could all back each other up about not being a party to what happened, about only being witnesses. Only Peggy was with Stu when Stu killed Michael Houseman, and the problem—for all of them—was that Peggy was an accessory. That’s what they all heard that night in the rain. That’s what Liz Toliver heard that she’s dreamed about ever since, except that she’s been misinterpreting it. As far as I know, she’s misinterpreting it even now. But the rest of them never did misinterpret it. They knew exactly what they heard.”
“And what did they all hear?” Kyle asked.
“They heard Peggy Smith screaming, over and over again, ‘slit his throat slit his throat slit his throat.’ I haven’t talked to the rest of them yet about this, but you’ll have to. Liz told me the voice sounded like a woman’s in the midst of sex. Having an orgasm, she meant. And that’s what it was. Sex and death. The erotic possibilities of murder. It’s too bad that Liz Toliver didn’t realize at the time whose voice she was listening to.”
“She said she didn’t know,” Kyle said. “She said that at the time. She had no idea whose voice it was. They all said that at the time.”
“I know,” Gregor said. “But the rest of them knew—Belinda, Emma, Maris, Nancy, and Chris. They all knew who it was. And Liz Toliver was certain. She just lied.”
“You just said she didn’t know,” Kyle said. “You make less and less sense every time I talk to you.”
“I said she didn’t realize who it was,” Gregor said. “But that’s not the same thing as saying she didn’t think she knew. She thought she knew. She thought it was Maris Coleman’s voice. And she didn’t even consider the possibility of Stu having anything to do with it. What she thought was that Maris had committed the murder, gotten caught up in some kind of group hysteria, and done something she didn’t intend to do that was threatening to ruin her whole life. Liz Toliver’s relationship with Maris Coleman has always been as dysfunctional—to use a wholly inadequate word—as Peggy Smith’s with Stu Kennedy.”
“Even if we could v
erify all of this,” Kyle said, “we couldn’t use it. It might not even help us. I mean, juries don’t tend to believe in lots of different murderers for one murder. If you know what I mean. They’re going to think it was Stu who killed Chris Inglerod. And what I don’t get is, why wasn’t it? Why was it Peggy? Why didn’t Stu just do it the way he had before, assuming he had done it before?”
“He had no reason to think he needed to,” Gregor said. “Haven’t you got the least bit of curiosity as to why this has all started up now that Liz Toliver has come home and not before now? After all, if Chris Inglerod was a danger to Stu Kennedy, he had thirty years of pretty decent access to her right here in Hollman.”
2
Bennis Hannaford showed up wet. Outside, it had started to rain again, steadily and hard, and to thunder and lightning, too. Gregor found it significant that he hadn’t noticed it. All day, he’d been thinking of nothing but how much rain there was. He’d been listening to drops pounding on roofs and in gutters. He’d been feeling the thunder roll through him every time it passed. Now he watched Bennis maneuver past the little clutch of reporters sitting in the police department’s narrow waiting area and thought at first that she must have been drenched in somebody’s lawn sprinkler. It was only after she’d said something to a much drier woman who did stringer service for the Washington Post that he’d realized the weather must have gone back again. When he went to the window to look out, he saw another steady fall of water and sharp snaking electrical lights in the sky.
“They want to know if they can leave,” Bennis said, wedging herself into what room was left in Kyle Borden’s office. There wasn’t much. “You did say you were arresting someone else. You can hardly blame her.”
“As far as I’m concerned, she can leave anytime she wants,” Gregor said. “But I’m not the person in charge here. She wants to go back to Connecticut?”
“No, they want to go to Paris. It’s all very romantic. They’re finally getting married. And she’s behaving very oddly. She said she wants to know if you’re really going to arrest only Peggy Smith. And that’s how she put it. Only. Is there any coffee in this place?”
“Not any that you’d want to drink,” one of the state troopers said.
Kyle Borden looked frustrated. “She can go all the way to the moon as far as I’m concerned,” he said. “According to your Mr. Demarkian here, we ought to be out arresting Stuart Kennedy, except not. Does he usually make this little sense when he talks?”
The state trooper who had warned Bennis off the coffee now handed her some in a tall foam cup. She took it, sipped it, and got up to put serious amounts of milk and sugar in it, except the milk was that nondairy creamer in little plastic tubs that you got at very low-rent diners, served up to you in heavy ceramic saucers that were never quite as white as they should have been. Bennis took another sip and made a face. She sat down again.
“So,” she said. “What have you been telling these people to confuse them?”
Gregor sighed. He hated drinking coffee in foam cups. He thought it tasted funny. “There’s nothing at all confusing about it,” he said. “There are a few loose ends, but the point of a police investigation is to clean up the loose ends. To recap what I’ve told them already: you start with that night in 1969 when the girls nailed Liz Toliver into the outhouse and Michael Houseman was killed. None of the girls, including Peggy Smith, was intending to kill anybody, although what they did to Liz Toliver might have killed her. People don’t take phobias seriously. They should. But they only went there to do that. They weren’t intending to do anything else. So they nailed Liz Toliver into the outhouse, and then they retreated to the trees a little ways off to see what would happen.”
“What did they expect to happen?” Bennis said. “I mean, the girl was scared to death of snakes and they nailed her in with over twenty of them. Did they think she was going to bond with them? What?”
“They thought she was going to scream,” Gregor said calmly, “which is what she did. Now, Michael Houseman was in the park that night. So was Kyle Borden here. So was Stu Kennedy. But Stu Kennedy came to the park to do two things, to find Peggy, and to get high. He may have been meaning to sell some of whatever it was he had that night. He almost certainly was selling it, to his friends and to other people, at the high school. And Michael Houseman either knew about it, or suspected it, or caught him in the act on that night. It doesn’t particularly matter which. What does matter is the one thing everybody says consistently about Michael Houseman.”
“He was a Dudley Dooright,” Kyle said gloomily. “He was, too. These days everybody goes to church all the time. Practically nobody did then. Michael did. He was an Eagle Scout. He handed in his homework on time. If he caught you smoking in the bathroom, he took your cigarette away or he turned you in. Some of us had times when we wanted to strangle him.”
“Exactly,” Gregor said. “He was a Dudley Dooright. So, faced with Stu Kennedy and a pile of drugs, whatever Kennedy was doing with it, Houseman would have been determined to hand Kennedy over to the authorities and Kennedy would have been faced with a problem that he could only solve by shutting Houseman up. So he took out the linoleum cutter—”
“Why a linoleum cutter?” Bennis said. “That never made any sense to me at all. I mean now, yeah, it might be what was around the house, but why would Stu Kennedy have a linoleum cutter on him in the park that night? Why not a knife? Or a straight-edged razor?”
“You think it would be more likely for him to have a straight-edged razor?” one of the state troopers said. “In 1969.”
“It’s one of those loose ends that needs to be cleaned up,” Gregor said, “although not too strenuously, because it won’t matter to the case against Peggy Smith Kennedy. The reason we know he had a linoleum cutter in the park that night is that Peggy Smith Kennedy used a linoleum cutter when she killed the dog and Chris Inglerod Barr. You know, you all sit around talking about how odd it was that he’d have a linoleum cutter in the park that night, but the fact is that it’s even odder that Peggy Smith Kennedy has had one with her in the past few days. Several people have told us that Stu Kennedy used to be fairly handy before he went completely under with booze and dope. So maybe he brought it for protection. A linoleum cutter is a kind of straight-edged razor. Or maybe he’d been doing something around the house for his parents that day and had it in his pocket or on his belt. Whatever the reason, he had the thing, and when Michael Houseman confronted him, he used it. And that’s where things started getting bizarre. Peggy was either with Stu by the time Stu committed the murder—remember, she didn’t have to go far from where they all started out near the outhouse—or she got there in the middle of the act, but whichever it was, she responded with a kind of trance hysteria. She started screaming ‘slit his throat slit his throat’ and the rest of them heard her. And they came. They—”
“That’s not what they said to the police at the time,” Kyle said. “I remember it. They said they were wandering around in the park sort of lost in the dark and they stumbled on the clearing and Michael Houseman was bleeding to death.”
“You couldn’t get lost in that park if you worked at it,” Gregor said. “They followed Peggy’s voice to the clearing and they found Peggy standing over Michael Houseman and Michael Houseman either bleeding to death or already dead. And the rain was coming down. And everybody got completely and utterly caught up in the moment.”
Gregor said, “But the thing is, their first reaction was to protect Peggy from the consequences of anything Stu had done. And the only way they could do that was to keep their mouths shut and play dumb. And that’s what they did. In other circumstances, it would have been a stupid move. The police could have found the murder weapon. The police could have pushed a little harder than they did and started Stu Kennedy talking. As it turned out, however, they didn’t have anything to worry about. The case was never solved. It never came close to being solved. They went on living their lives. I wonder what they thought when Peg
gy married Stu Kennedy. Maybe they didn’t think anything of it. Peggy and Stu had been a couple for so long. Maybe they thought it was only natural.”
“Okay,” one of the state troopers said, “but that was all thirty years ago. What about now? You said it wasn’t him who did it this time, it was her, but I still don’t get it. You said it yourself. If he’d wanted to kill the people he knew, he had thirty years to do it. Why now? And the same goes for her.”
“It was her,” Gregor said. “Emma Kenyon Bligh will confirm that as soon as we can talk to her. But you have to realize that it must have been her, if only because Stu Kennedy is no longer in any shape to successfully commit murder and hide it. He could commit murder. He could smash somebody up or cause a head-on collision or do a dozen stupid, violent things that would end up with somebody dead, but he’s in no shape to murder somebody with a linoleum cutter and then get clean away so that he isn’t noticed and hide the evidence well enough so that we weren’t stumbling all over it as soon as the investigation started. Thirty years of substance abuse does tend to make someone less than competent at activities requiring mental agility and intellectual integration.”
“But that still doesn’t answer the question of why Peggy would want to kill Chris Inglerod Barr,” Kyle said.
“She didn’t,” Gregor told him. “She wanted to kill Liz Toliver.”
“But why?” Kyle said. “The woman’s been away from town for thirty years. It’s not like she was going to come back and get into everybody’s life. I mean, Christ, would you do that if you were her? The whole thing is completely nuts.”
“Think about it,” Gregor said. “Every single person we talked to from that group of people, Nancy Quayde, Emma Kenyon Bligh, Belinda what’s-her-name—”
“Hart,” Kyle said, “or Grantling. Take your pick.”
