by Jane Haddam
“Whoever. Each one of them told us the same thing, that Liz Toliver was writing a piece on the night she was locked into the outhouse.”
“But that’s not true, is it?” Bennis said. “I don’t think she’s writing a piece about anything at the moment. At least, she didn’t mention any work. Why would they think she was writing something about being locked in the outhouse?”
“Guilty consciences,” Kyle Borden said solemnly.
“I think that if you check with the remaining members of the group, you’ll find that Maris Coleman told them that that’s what Liz Toliver was doing. The information really couldn’t have come from anywhere else. The tabloid press isn’t big on reporting writing projects. And nobody else would have had the authority—I think I mean authoritativeness. You see what I’m getting at. Maris worked for Liz Toliver in New York. When Maris said that was what Liz Toliver was working on, the others naturally thought she knew what she was talking about.”
“Wait a minute,” Bennis said. “The car. Liz told Maris Coleman that she’d seen Peggy Smith Kennedy driving Maris’s rented car. Rats. I can’t remember how that went. We were in the middle of a terrific scene, and Liz was firing Maris and threatening to prosecute her over some checks and it was all because Liz had seen Peggy driving Maris’s rental car.”
“Thank you,” Gregor said. “Kyle will have to check that out, too, but that solves the problem of the car. I knew she had to have had access to one, in spite of the fact that her husband won’t allow her to drive, but I wasn’t sure exactly where she was going to get it.”
“Wait,” Kyle said. “You mean that first Maris went around telling all the rest of them that Betsy—Liz—I don’t know, that she was going to write some big article on the outhouse thing and, what? Tell who murdered Michael Houseman? Did she even know who murdered Michael Houseman?”
“She figured it out eventually, I think,” Bennis said.
“The point isn’t whether she knew,” Gregor said, “but whether the rest of them thought she knew.”
“And they did?” Kyle asked.
“I think Maris Coleman made sure they did,” Gregor said.
“Okay,” Kyle said. “So first Maris tells them Ms. Toliver is writing this thing on the outhouse incident and is, what, going to name names? Then she tells them that Ms. Toliver knows all about who killed Michael Houseman. Then she loans Peggy her car. What was she trying to do, get Ms. Toliver killed?”
“I don’t think so,” Gregor said. “I doubt if it ever occurred to her that anybody would resort to violence. She’d have known as well as anybody that Stu Kennedy was in no condition to cause that kind of trouble. And remember, Peggy Smith Kennedy didn’t kill Michael Houseman. As far as Maris Coleman knew, Peggy had done nothing but be in the wrong place at the wrong time when Stu Kennedy got violent. No, Maris Coleman didn’t want Liz Toliver dead—heaven forbid. Liz Toliver was her meal ticket. Maris Coleman wanted Liz Toliver embarrassed.”
“Well,” Kyle said, “Ms. Toliver certainly ended up embarrassed. Royally embarrassed. And Chris Inglerod ended up dead. And Emma Kenyon Bligh nearly ended up dead. And this still doesn’t make any sense. If she really wanted to kill Ms. Toliver, what was Peggy doing attacking all these other people? What was the point here?”
“The point,” Gregor said, “is what the point has always been for that woman, to protect her husband.”
“Crap,” Kyle said. “I mean, for God’s sake—”
“Fucking damn,” somebody said in the outer room. “You can’t tell me I can’t come the fuck in there if I the fuck want to, you fucking little cunt, I’ll cut you up, I really will, and then I’ll cut up the other fucking little cunt, you let me at her, you—”
All the police officers, state and local, were in Kyle Borden’s office. There was nobody outside to hold the fort but Sharon, who was looking sullen and mulish. The men who were holding Stu Kennedy back were all reporters. Some of them were middle-aged. Most of them were out of shape. Stu Kennedy was dangerous mostly because he seemed to be hopped up on speed or coke or something else that revved all your motors and blew out all your corks. He looked awful. He had vomited down the front of his shirt some time ago. The vomit was crusted against the dingy blue material like the ridges on a three-dimensional topographical map. His face was filthy. His hands were cracked with dirt. If Gregor hadn’t known who Stu Kennedy was, he’d have thought he was one of those crazy old drunks who lived on the streets in the worst back alleys in Philadelphia.
“Fucking cunt,” Stu Kennedy said, over and over again.
The two state troopers moved in to tie him down.
3
There was no place to put Stu Kennedy in the Hollman town jail. The jail was only two cells in the basement of the police department, and at the moment Peggy Smith Kennedy was in one of them. The idea of Stu and Peggy in adjacent cells, while Stu screamed and Peggy did they didn’t know what, gave pause even to the state troopers, whom Gregor had begun to think of as animatrons. They talked and moved so much like some bad movie’s idea of what state troopers should be, he had a hard time accepting them as real. Kyle Borden was just stunned. It wasn’t that he didn’t know what Stu Kennedy was like. He was the one who had taken Gregor to Stu Kennedy’s house only hours before, and he had sat through the barrage of bad language and hints of violence without looking in the least bit surprised. It was more that he hadn’t expected everything to be so outfront and unambiguous. With little or no personal knowledge of real crime and real criminals—and especially with real murders and real murderers—Kyle Borden seemed to have expected subterfuge and puzzles, the kind of thing that went on in the novels of Robert B. Parker, or maybe on the City Confidential show that aired on Court TV. Actually, Gregor himself was highly addicted to Court TV. It was the only television he watched regularly. Still, one of the reasons he liked to watch it was that outside its broadcasts of actual trials it was a repository of law enforcement exceptions. Unsolved mysteries, convoluted clues, forensics nightmares: if you wanted to know what really went on in crime investigation, you watched those actual trials, where defendants tried to explain away the fact that they had been caught standing over the body with the smoking gun in their hands.
It was in the middle of the scuffle that Gregor suddenly realized there was something he wanted to do, something he did not get to do often, but that might be possible this time. He waited until Stu Kennedy was in handcuffs and the troopers were talking about what to do with him. Take him out to the state police car seemed to be their best suggestion, and then off somewhere else to be locked up. They had never been faced with just this situation before. They weren’t sure what was legal for them to do. Stu bounced and struggled against the handcuffs. The state police debated among themselves: where to take him, what to charge him with, how to make sure he didn’t do something stupid once he was released, which he would be, because he hadn’t actually done anything except get rowdy. That meant that Kyle Borden could arrest him, but beyond that it didn’t mean squat.
Gregor went up to Kyle and made him a proposition. Kyle seemed both surprised and unconcerned.
“I don’t see why not,” he said. “She only has to tell you to take a hike. I wonder if she can hear what’s going on up here. I don’t see why she wouldn’t.”
“I don’t see why she wouldn’t, either,” Gregor said. “How do I get down there? Do I use the stairs out front?”
“Nah. That goes to the basement basement. We wouldn’t put anybody underground like that. The jail is in the walkout. You take that door over there.” Kyle pointed to a door in the wall on the opposite side from the one that led to his office. Gregor had seen it before, but always assumed it was a closet. “And you go right on down. You won’t get lost. There’s only the two cells. Christ. What does Stu think he’s doing?”
Gregor thought that “think” was not high on Stu Kennedy’s to-do list, but he didn’t say that. He just walked across the big inner room to the door on the other side, ope
ned up, and found that he had no need to switch on a light. There were already lights on in the stairwell, and lights on at the bottom of the stairs, too. He slipped through the door and closed it behind him. He went down the short flight of stairs and discovered what Kyle Borden had meant by “the walkout.” This was not, technically, a basement. The police department building was built into the side of a hill, and this part of the lower level was entirely above grade. When he got to the bottom of the staircase, he found the two cells to his right, and a row of windows looking out at the side yard to his left. It was, he saw, raining yet again.
Peggy Smith Kennedy was in the second cell, the one farthest away from the stairs. Gregor thought she must have heard him come down, because it was possible to hear nearly everything down here. Gregor could even catch the murmur of voices from the floor above, although he couldn’t distinguish words, and he wouldn’t have trusted himself to distinguish persons. Stu Kennedy has been screaming, though. Gregor thought he would probably have been able to distinguish the who and what of that.
He walked down the corridor to the second of the cells. Peggy Smith Kennedy was sitting on the lower of two bunk cots, doing nothing. Her feet were flat on the floor. Her hands were clasped loosely on her lap. Her eyes were on her shoes. She did not look up or greet him, even though Gregor knew she had to know he was there.
“Well,” he said, after a while, clearing his throat as if that would somehow make a difference. “I came to see how you were.”
She turned her head to him and blinked. “They won’t be able to hold him,” she said. “He hasn’t done anything they can arrest him for. They treat him like an animal, but he always gets the best of them in the end.”
Gregor cocked his head. It was hard to read her mood. “He did something he could get arrested for once,” he said. “He committed a murder, back in 1969. And you saw it.”
“Nobody ever understood him but me,” she said. “None of them. Not even people like Maris and Belinda. Nobody saw the inside of him the way I did. Do you believe that there are people on this earth who are different from the rest of us?”
“There are a lot of people who are different,” Gregor said, very careful. “Different in different ways. Every society has people who do not fit in.”
“No.” Peggy stood up abruptly, and turned to him. “Not that kind of different. Different in another way. In a holy way. Different because they’re made of something the rest of us don’t have. It’s like the angels in that television program. They look like us, but they aren’t us. They’re angels. They’re part of God.”
“And you think your husband is part of God?”
“I never really thought of him as my husband. You can’t really marry somebody like Stu. You can go through the ceremony, the way we did, but it doesn’t mean what it usually means. You can’t put someone like Stu into a harness and expect him to work his life away. You can’t expect him to waste himself.”
“What can you expect him to do?”
“I don’t know.” She turned away from him and started pacing. There was no place to pace. The cell was very small, maybe twice the size of Kyle Borden’s office upstairs, and that office was claustrophobic. Peggy went to the interior wall and then turned around and came back toward the bars again. Gregor was struck by how old she looked—no, he thought, not old, but captured by that ugly lumpiness of unopposed middle age. If she hadn’t been the center of a murder investigation, Gregor would have thought of her as one more of the supermarket women, the ones who pushed carts piled high with Pop-Tarts and Cheetos through aisles crammed with carbonated sodas and frozen dinners, in dresses that neither fit nor didn’t fit, with hair that stuck out at odd angles because it had been permed and bleached and teased over the years until it couldn’t relax at all. She moved differently, though. There was no hint of defeat in her posture, and no suggestion that she would even consider the option of allowing her shoulders to slump.
“I knew from the very beginning that we’d never have what you would call a normal life,” she said. “I knew that when we were both in kindergarten. It used to upset him even then, the world did. He’d get so angry, just at little things. Because a teacher shouted at him. Because one of the other boys won some game they’d been playing. Little, little things that the rest of us wouldn’t see any importance in at all. But he saw the importance in them. He cared about them so deeply. And I knew, you see. I knew he’d never make an ordinary kind of life for anybody.”
“I’d have worried that he needed psychiatric help,” Gregor said. “What you’re describing sounds to me very much like one of the borderline schizophrenic states. And schizophrenics can be very violent.”
Peggy flicked this away. “You don’t understand. None of them understand. He was the only member of our class that had true greatness in him. He’s still the only one. I see it in him every day. He lets it out for me to look at it, even if he won’t let it out to show to you.”
“Well,” Gregor said, “I’m not as close to him as you.”
Peggy turned her back on him and went to the bunk again. She sat down and stretched her legs out in front of her. “They won’t be able to do anything to him. I’m the one who killed Chris. And … and the dog. I didn’t mean to kill the dog. I went out to the house to see if she was there. Maris said she was going to be there. And I thought I could talk to her. But I brought the cutter with me, anyway. Just in case.”
“I know.”
“I shouldn’t have killed the dog. I just—wasn’t thinking, that’s what it was. I was thinking when I got there, and then nobody was home. And it was so quiet out there. There wasn’t anyone around but the dog and it came up and bothered me. Poked me. With its snout, you know. Stu won’t have dogs. They make too much mess, he says, and besides they bother him, too. I’m not used to dogs. It kept poking at me and poking at me and I got—I got angry. I don’t get angry very often. But I got angry then. And then—then the blood went everywhere. Do you know what I mean? It spurted out. It got all over my clothes. I didn’t realize there would be so much of it. And then I got scared, so I went back to the car, but when I got into the car there was blood everywhere, too. There was blood on the seat. I must have brought it with me, from the dog. I got blood on the steering wheel. And then, you know, I started thinking. Because it was so much like it had been the night Michael Houseman died, except there wasn’t any rain. Do people always bleed so much, when they die?”
“It depends on what you cut on them,” Gregor said.
Peggy shrugged. “When I went back the next day, I had on some of Emma’s clothes. I took them out of her closet when she was busy in the store. It wasn’t hard. But when I went out there, she wasn’t there then, either. I walked around and around and then there was Chris. And then …” She frowned and shook her head. “There isn’t really any then. She never understood him. Chris didn’t. She never in her life understood him. And she started shouting at me about how I should have him arrested, or lock him up in an insane asylum, or something, and then—” Peggy shrugged. “And then there was blood all over everything again.”
“You need a lawyer,” Gregor said. “You do know that.”
“Of course I know it. It won’t matter, though. Emma will wake up and tell them. She’ll tell them it was me, at any rate. She doesn’t know all of it. Nobody knows all of it. Only I do. And Belinda is right. It isn’t fair.”
“What isn’t?”
“What happened to Betsy Toliver,” Peggy said. “She never understood anything, Betsy didn’t. She never understood Stu, and she never understood us, and she always—she always—she’ll probably write her article now, or her book or whatever it is. And we’ll all look like stupid little hick town jerks. But Stu isn’t stupid. If she accuses him of murder, he’ll sue her. I’ll help him sue her, too. I can do that even from jail, can’t I?”
“I think you need a lawyer,” Gregor said. “And I think, more than that, you need someone to talk to who can be of more help to you than
I can. All I really know how to do is to follow the logic of criminal acts to their possible conclusions. I don’t know much about anything else.”
“I hear on the television sometimes, and in the in-service seminars we have, I hear about the people like Betsy and how put upon they all are. But that isn’t true. It’s people like Stu who are put upon. Really fine people. People that no one understands. You can’t let someone like Betsy destroy someone like Stu. It isn’t justice.”
“I doubt if Elizabeth Toliver is very much interested in destroying Stuart Kennedy. I doubt if she’s interested in destroying anybody.”
Peggy turned her head around and smiled. It was the smile of a serial killer, and Gregor had seen dozens of them. It was the smile of someone who had cut her ties with the human race, permanently and irrevocably. Under the hard light of the fluorescents, her face almost seemed to glow, and her eyes did glow, like the pinpoints of a pair of flashlights through the holes in a black nylon curtain. It was, Gregor thought, the first time he had ever seen anybody he could truly describe as insane.
“He’s got a piece of God in him,” she said. “He’s a piece of God himself. It doesn’t matter what happens to the rest of us. It doesn’t matter what happens to me. He won’t want me back, now, but I don’t care. I’ll go on protecting him. He needs somebody to protect him. You’re all trying to get rid of him. You’ve been trying since he was a child. I won’t ever let it happen. They won’t execute me. You know that as well as I do. They don’t execute nice middle-class schoolteachers in Pennsylvania. They can’t touch him if I tell them I committed all the murders by myself. They can’t touch him no matter what Betsy Toliver says. He’s a piece of God. He’s immortal.”
Up on the floor above, Stu Kennedy let out one more shouted stream of obscenities, and was wrestled out the door.
EPILOGUE
“It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me”
