“And the blood? What about the blood?”
“Very small specks, as I understand it. You cleaned up the worst and didn’t see the rest on the dark paneling.”
“Ah.” He waved his hand dismissively, a professor to a thick pupil. “Crap.”
“Why did you refuse a polygraph if you’re innocent?”
“Because I’m a scientist and that’s not science. Besides, my attorney said he’d cut off my balls if I took it.”
“And you’re gonna need those.”
He teared up. I had the sudden, nearly overwhelming urge to smash my fist into his face.
“Right at the cusp, Ruzak. At the very brink of it. Like Moses on the mountaintop. I was going to start my life anew. I was going to have everything, everything that bitch denied me.”
“Children,” I said.
He hit the countertop with his fist and then literally fell off his stool. Archie beat a quick retreat before getting squashed. I pulled Tom Bates from the floor and he collapsed into my body, pressing his face into the crook of my neck, where I felt his tears against my skin, which was crawling by this point. I pushed forward as he pressed back, his hands gripping my shoulders.
“I wanted a son, all I wanted … all I wanted!” he sobbed. I eased him backward toward the sofa, thinking, Who’s the hysterical one now? His feet shuffled on the hardwood between my bowed legs, as if we were engaged in some weird, vaguely Eastern Europe an folk dance.
“And she knew it. She knew it was the one thing. The one thing that would hurt me the most. She could have given me that, she could have, and if she had, she wouldn’t be dead.”
He felt the sofa with the back of his legs and let go, one arm thrown over his eyes, the other dangling over the edge. Archie eased up and gave his knuckles a tentative lick.
“That’s why you killed her?”
“I … didn’t … kill … her.”
“See, this is where intelligence can whip around and bite you, Tom. You wouldn’t confess to me. You know I’d testify to it at trial.”
“That judge is a fucking moron. I should be in a cell, under a suicide watch.”
“Stop it,” I said. “You’ve already said too much. Now I’ve got to call the DA in the morning and tell him you said if she had given you a son, she’d still be alive.”
“That’s not a confession to murder. That’s a statement of the inevitable. You think I would have jeopardized my marriage if I’d had a family?”
“Have kids, no Kinsey?”
“Kinsey,” he moaned. “That’s done now, no matter what happens.”
“Was it her? Did she come over and help you clean up, follow you down to Tybee so you’d have a lift home?”
“That’s what they think.”
“Who?”
“The fucking DA’s team, who do you think? I called her that afternoon. They pulled the records.”
“And she came over.”
“I asked her to come over. Not for any fucking cleanup operation. I just said, ‘Hey, she isn’t here; come on over and help me pack.’ They offered her a deal. Immunity if she testified against me.”
“She turned them down.”
“She stayed with me that night. She’s my alibi.”
“Pretty weak one.”
“And I’m hers.”
“You’re … hers?”
“Hers. Hers. I’m going to tell something now no one else knows, Ruzak, and you tell anyone, I’ll deny it, understand? She’s on the cop’s side. She thinks I did it.”
“Some alibi.”
“Not because she saw anything or I told her anything. It just makes sense to her: I killed Katrina to get her out of the way, to keep her from taking everything in a divorce. That’s what’s so fucked. That’s why I should be on suicide watch, why I’m drunk, and why I intend to stay drunk until this trial’s over, whether I walk out the front doors or into the death chamber, because a couple months before Katrina goes missing, she finds out she’s pregnant.”
“Katrina was pregnant?”
“No, you obtuse son of a bitch. Kinsey. Kinsey was pregnant.” His arm fell from his face, and I had never seen such complete despair as I saw in Tom Bates’s eyes—not even in the eyes of my dying mother, for whom all hope of life had departed.
“With my son,” he whispered. “My goddamned son, Ruzak! The one thing I wanted. The one thing. Would have traded all of it, down to my last stitch of clothing. That one thing. Yesterday, I go home to the scene of the crime—the scene of the crime!—and she isn’t there, and I call and call and call, and when she finally answers, I ask her where she’s been, told her I’d made bail, told her I was home—our home—and she tells me then, she confesses then, she did it, she’s the killer. She’s the one who took it from me. First Katrina and then her. That one thing. That one thing. She’s the fucking murderer, not me.”
“She aborted the baby.”
He wailed at the words. This time—I can’t really give all my reasons—I held him while he cried. But cried really doesn’t do it justice. This was the sound of a man’s soul being ripped to shreds. The only genuine tears we cry are for ourselves. I wondered if I had read that somewhere or if it popped into my head wholly formed in all its profundity, like the goddess of wisdom exploding from the head of Zeus. Didn’t matter.
SCENE FOUR
District Attorney’s Office
Early the Next Morning
Wow,” the man said. “That’s weird.”
Assistant DA Howard Beecham threw one cowboy-booted foot on top of his desk and leaned back in his chair, craning his neck to peer at me over the listing stacks of case files piled five or six high on the desktop, like a wary meerkat eyeing the terrain.
“The jury might not think so,” Meredith Black said.
“Ah, the jury’s gonna take one look at that girl and know she couldn’t have—just not in her.”
“Offer him a deal, Howard,” Meredith said.
“No deal.”
“I’ll go to French.” Martin French was the district attorney, Beecham’s boss. Beecham gave a dismissive wave: Go ahead to French; you’re wasting your time. “This changes things,” she insisted. “If he was covering for her, he might be ready to change his mind.”
“Where is he now? Where’s Bates?”
“Asleep on my sofa,” I said.
“You are walking a very thin line,” Beecham said, aiming his index finger between the stacks and pointing at my face. “No more contact with Bates, understand?”
“He came to me.”
“I’m gonna go to the judge and get his bail revoked,” Beecham vowed.
“Maybe you should,” I said. “He’s unstable.”
“Think so? Not what I think. Wanna know what I think? I think he’s playing you for a fool, Ruzak. ‘I didn’t kill my wife. Boohoo.’ ”
“You wanna know what I think?” Meredith said. “I think you’ve got a bigger problem than Tom Bates crying to Ruzak about his wife.”
“He didn’t cry about his wife,” I said. “He cried about his baby.”
“Ah, come on, don’t you get it, Howard? This is a gift,” Meredith said. “They’re going to use Kinsey to establish reasonable doubt.”
“Well, Meredith, the defense always uses something.”
“Right, and the something they’re going to use is Ruzak.”
“Ruzak?”
“If you don’t bring up what happened last night on direct, you can bet they will on cross. They’re gonna ask, ‘Did the defendant state he was her alibi, Mr. Ruzak?’ They’re gonna ask, ‘Did the defendant say, quote, “She’s the one, she’s the killer?” ’ ”
“What I was saying. It’s a game.”
“It might be a setup,” I said. “It might have been orchestrated, but why go to all the trouble? Why not just put Tom on the stand and have him tell the jury the same thing? Why have it come through me?”
“Which is why you go back to them and offer the deal,” Meredith said. “No death p
enalty if he turns. Go to trial and you risk a hung jury or even an acquittal. Least this way, whether he’s guilty of the murder or guilty of the cover-up, he pays.”
Beecham didn’t say anything for a minute, but he was smiling at us.
“This is bullshit,” he said. “That girl didn’t take a fireplace poker upside that lady’s head. You know it; I know it; Christ, even Ruzak knows it. But here we sit, discussing it like it’s a real possibility. Then you suggest I go to them and throw in the towel, like, Jesus Christ, there’s no way we can overcome this powerful ‘my girlfriend did it and I covered for her because she was bearing my child’ theory, so guess what? You win; we’re throwing in the towel. … I’m not buying it, Meredith, and I’d bet my left nut the jury wouldn’t, either.”
She said, “I want to wire Ruzak.”
“Huh?”
“I want Ruzak to wear a wire and talk to Kinsey Brock.”
“And that’s going to accomplish … what?”
“It wasn’t just a fetus she aborted yesterday. She threw the whole thing overboard. She’s got nothing and nobody to protect now—except herself. She might talk.”
“But why Ruzak?”
“He’s not law enforcement.”
“That’s my point, Meredith. Maybe we should talk to her to find out if she’s ready to talk.”
“That ignores the other possibility,” I said. “Tom is playing some kind of game. You guys go to her and he’ll know his bluff’s been called. He’ll know I came to you. I go and both of them might think the mark’s bought the con.”
He said, “ ‘The mark’?”
“Me.”
“Play the fool.”
“I have some experience,” I reminded him. “It’s a waste of time,” he said. “Oh, Howard,” Meredith said. “What the hell do you have to lose?”
He thought for a long while about his answer.
SCENE FIVE
Sunsphere Observatory, World’s Fair Park
The Next Day
The weather had turned humid, eighty degrees by midmorning; the leaves of the Bradford pears had fattened, the emerald green deepening to Celtic. Kids in bathing suits splashed in the reflecting pool, overseen by mothers with dabs of sunscreen on their noses. Somewhere out of sight, a lawn mower roared and spat. Summer was in full swing.
Kinsey Brock met me on the observation floor of the Sunsphere, wearing a midriff T-shirt and a pair of tight cargo shorts terminating two inches below her crotch. A diamond stud glittered in her belly button. No makeup besides a touch of lipstick. She was about a head shorter than I was. Though only about ten years separated us, I felt like a father escorting his daughter on a field trip.
“Wow,” she said. “I’ve never been up here.”
“You a native, or just going to school here?” I asked.
“Oh, I graduated last spring.”
Not an answer, really, and spoken softly, so whispery, I was afraid the mike wouldn’t pick it up. I eased closer to her as she leaned over the wooden rail to look straight down to the park beneath us. Not father now. Molester. I was wearing a windbreaker to help hide the wire, overdressed for the heat.
“Thanks for talking,” I said.
“You sure it’s okay?” she asked. “I don’t want to get into trouble. Any more trouble.”
“Not your fault, right?”
“Not his, either. I know you don’t believe that. You’re on the other side.”
“I’m on nobody’s side.”
“You were on Katrina’s.”
“I guess if I’m on anyone’s side, it’s the truth’s.”
“And the truth is, he didn’t do it.”
“If not him, who?”
“I don’t know who. All I know is, he didn’t. He didn’t have time. And he didn’t leave that night; he didn’t go anywhere. I was there the whole time with him. I know.”
“Maybe somebody else took the car over to Tybee.”
“Well, somebody else had to, because it wasn’t Tom.”
“You know Dresden Falks?”
She shook her head. Now she was looking west, into the hazy sprawl of the interstate and the attendant strip malls and low-cost apartments. I smelled bubble gum.
“He’s a PI,” I said.
“I thought you were a PI,” she said.
“He’s Tom’s PI,” I said.
Blank look. I said, “Dresses like an investment banker. Looks like George Clooney. The actor. Um, Oceans Eleven, Michael Clayton.”
She shrugged. “I don’t know everybody Tom knows.”
“I think you’ve met. He’s the guy who took the pictures.”
“What pictures?”
My face grew warm. “The pictures of you and Tom doing, um … Being intimate. Together.”
“Nobody ever did that. Why do you think somebody did that?”
“I saw the pictures.”
“Oh.”
“Commissioned by Tom.”
“He would never do something like that.”
“And mailed to Katrina.”
“By Tom?”
“So you didn’t know anything about that?”
“Of course not.”
“He must have been hiding somewhere, maybe the closet.”
“Where are the pictures? Can I see them?”
“Not now, but you will. In court.”
“They’re going to show them in court? Oh my God.”
“They establish motive.”
“What motive?”
“You, Kinsey. You’re the motive.”
She shook her head again. “I’m not the motive. What I got rid of two days ago, maybe, but not me.”
“Well, that’s why I wanted to talk to you. About what you did.”
“I can’t believe he told you. It’s none of anybody’s business.”
“You know, some people might look at what you did as a … well, as a kind of admission of something.”
“Like he’s guilty or something?”
“Like that.”
“But he isn’t guilty. I know he isn’t guilty.”
“So why aren’t you standing by your man?”
“He isn’t ‘my man,’ Mr. Ruzak. He knew what I was going to do before she even disappeared. I’m twenty-three years old. I’m not ready to have a kid.”
“Tom sure was. You two didn’t have any plans to get married?”
“Oh, we talked about it. But I’m twenty-three years old. I’m not ready to get married.”
“If that was the plan, why did you wait till the eve of his murder trial to have an abortion?”
“Can you think of a better reason?”
“So it’s over.”
She nodded. “Over,” she whispered.
“ ‘Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,’ Kinsey, but men are a close second.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It means there’s a pretty good chance Tom is going to use you. He’s going to get even. He’s going to suggest that you killed Katrina.”
She looked at me as if I had just sprouted a second head.
“Because she was in the way, going to take all his money. This meddlesome, hyperkinetic, obsessed older woman with a penchant for melodrama was stopping your ride into the sunset with the father of your child. You know, it isn’t inconceivable; it could have happened. Tom calls you, says, ‘Meet me at my place. I gotta get some things.’ You show; he’s not there yet. But Katrina is, and maybe she loses it. Maybe you were just protecting yourself and your unborn child. What choice did she give you? Then it’s like one of those things that there’s no taking back, no do-overs; it’s done and you have to deal with it. Tom shows up, and of course he’s going to help you deal with it, because there’s the baby to think about, too, an innocent life to protect, not that yours is chopped liver, but it’s the one thing—that’s what he told me two nights ago—it’s the one thing that matters. More than Katrina, certainly, and probably a little more than you. You did what you did and now the thing t
hat has to be done has to be done.”
With gargantuan effort, I stopped myself. I could imagine Meredith and Howard’s reaction: Jesus Christ, Ruzak, you were supposed to tape her!
“You’re right about one thing,” she said. “It was the only thing that mattered to him.”
“So it makes sense.”
She shrugged. We began to walk the circuit around the sphere. There was the campus and the football stadium. There was the boat house and the river. There was Baptist Hospital on the bluff.
“You know what’s funny, Mr. Ruzak?”
“What? What’s funny, Kinsey?”
“Wherever she is, she must be laughing her ass off.”
“Katrina? Why?”
“That’s what I thought when I was on the table at the clinic. Thinking about her. How funny she would think it was.”
“She knew you were pregnant?”
“I don’t know. I’m talking about the abortion. She knew how much Tom wanted kids. It was like a vicious circle, you know? He cheated, so she refused; she refused, so he cheated. She would have loved it that I did what I did. Baby’s gone, I’m gone, he’s going to jail, and her dad’s taking all his money.”
“Her dad’s doing what?”
“Tom said Alistair called him and said once the trial was over, however it came out, he was filing a wrongful-death case against him.”
“That would just about cover it,” I said. “That would be everything.”
And here I had been thinking that irony was dead.
SCENE SIX
The Street
A Few Minutes Later
I loitered in the park for ten minutes, until I was sure Kinsey Brock was long gone, then went to the white van parked illegally next to the fire hydrant on the curb. I rapped on the door. It slid open and Meredith Black stepped onto the curb and stood next to me.
“Snake eyes,” she said.
“Still worth the roll.”
“Howard is never going to let me live this down.”
“You never know. It’s like gardening.”
“What’s like gardening?”
“The seeds you plant need time to grow. She’s been through a heck of a lot over the past few months. Pregnant. Boyfriend arrested for murder. Abortion. She’s in shock. She thinks about it for a few days, she might come clean.”
The Highly Effective Detective Plays the Fool Page 16
