To the Power of Three

by Laura Lippman

  But of course he was gay, Peter thought now.

  “Lasko!” the teacher cried out, his face truly lighting up. “What a welcome surprise at such a sad, sad time. Did you come back for Kat’s funeral?”

  The question shamed Peter a little. But it wasn’t his fault that he had planned his trip before Kat was killed, he reminded himself.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Of course.”

  “Isn’t it horrible?”

  “Horrible doesn’t begin to approach it. What happened anyway?”

  “No one knows. Perri lost her mind, I guess. Lord, I feel terrible about it. She was in my homeroom, you know.”

  “Hey, just because she was your student doesn’t mean you could have seen it coming.”

  The stage had been set with chairs, and Giff began loading them onto a wheeled cart.

  “I’m not being melodramatic.” Giff allowed himself a half smile at his choice of words. “Perri was very angry with me over something that happened last fall. She and a few other students persuaded me to stage Anyone Can Whistle as our fall musical. I cast her and Kat in the leads, and we started rehearsing.”

  “That’s pretty cool, actually. Doing a show like that at the high-school level.”

  “Well, it’s dated, and the problems in the book have never been resolved, but it feels powerful and sophisticated to high-school students. And the chorus is huge, just utterly expandable, which is always a good thing for us.”

  “So what was Perri’s beef, if she got the play she wanted and the part she wanted?”

  “Three weeks in, we had to give up on Anyone Can Whistle and sub in Oklahoma! There were some complications with the rights—turns out that Everyman wanted to do it. You know an Equity company within a certain-mile radius had bumping rights. To be fair, I told the leads they could have comparable parts—Kat as Laurey, Perri as Ado Annie.”

  “Most girls would kill to be Ado Annie.” Peter regretted the wording, but Old Giff didn’t seem to notice.

  “That’s what I thought. But Perri wanted no part of it. She accused me of selling out, of bowing to pressure from Kat’s father, so his daughter could have a bigger part.”

  “Crazy.” The word echoed a little in the empty auditorium, and Peter realized he had sounded insensitive.

  “Well, between us, a lot of parents were upset, once they began reading the script. The Everyman Theater gave me a graceful way out of a tight spot. The mental institution! I mean, half the kids in this place are on Prozac or Wellbutrin. It’s a kind of sensitive topic. And when Hartigan read the lyrics to his daughter’s little seduction number, ‘Come Play Wiz Me’—well, the guy was on the phone trying to rewrite Stephen Sondheim. And my Hapgood was no good. Now, you—you would have been extraordinary in the role. Sexy and a good singer.”

  While Peter had come here in hopes that his old drama teacher would gush over him, this was more affection than he had bargained for.

  “Do you honestly think choosing Oklahoma! over Anyone Can Whistle is a reason to shoot somebody?”

  Giff rubbed his cheeks, massaging them in circles, forward and back. “People have killed over the cheerleading squad, why not the school musical? But—no, no, I don’t think this is a case of cause and effect. Perri may have had some resentment of Kat. You know I always saw my classes as—”

  “A repertory company, like the Old Abbey,” Peter finished. It was one of Old Giff’s more repeated riffs, and Giff repeated a lot of his riffs. Yet Peter had never been relegated to spear-carrying. He had been too good to waste on the chorus, for even a single production.

  “Yes, exactly. And Perri had played by the rules, taking parts large and small, doing a lot of behind-the-scenes work. The year after she was the lead in The Lark, she did chorus in Brigadoon with no complaint. It was one thing to cancel Whistle—I think even Perri knew it was a stretch—but to see Kat, who had never auditioned for a school play, waltz in and end up with a plum lead in a show that her father had lobbied for…well, I’m sure it stuck in Perri’s craw. She didn’t even try out for the spring play this year—Our Town, which I chose because I thought she would be a wonderful Emily. She was mad at me. She was mad at everyone, it seemed, this past year.”

  “Well, that explains it, doesn’t it?” Peter didn’t see how he could ever lead the conversation back to himself now, not in a graceful way.

  “Maybe,” Giff said, rubbing his cheeks again. “Maybe. You know what you should do?”

  “What?”

  “You should speak—or sing, yes, sing—at today’s assembly. We should pick an appropriate song. For Kat.”

  “I don’t know…” Peter was thinking of the songs he had sung to Kat three years ago, made-up songs that he would be mortified to re-create for anyone, ever.

  “Not a show tune, just something sweet and simple. A hymn—well, not a hymn-hymn, someone would complain, and it would be so Madalyn Murray O’Hair all over again. But you should sing. Or speak.”

  “I don’t think so, Giff.”

  “Oh, you must. You must, Peter. For me. For Kat.”

  And so it happened that Peter Lasko stood before the assembled student body of Glendale High School after a series of presentations—by the principal, by the county executive, by a pretty young guidance counselor who encouraged students to come talk to her about anything, absolutely anything, with the promise of absolute confidentiality.

  Like any actor worth a damn, he had stage fright, but he’d never had it in such overwhelming proportions before. Willing his legs not to shake, Peter clasped his arms across his chest and leaned into the mike, singing the song that Giff, the principal, and the guidance counselor had finally agreed was appropriate: “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” It was, ironically, a show tune and a hymn. Peter sang in a clear, unaffected tenor, although it is doubtful that anyone heard the final, powerful build, for the girls in the auditorium began to cry so hard and so lustily that they drowned him out, almost as if he were starring in Bye Bye Birdie. Suffer indeed.

  Peter, who had been Billy Bigelow in Carousel, realized he’d never had a chance to sing this particular song before, given that it’s first performed over Billy’s dead body. And in the reprise, at the play’s end, Bill just stands to the side, a ghost, praying for his daughter to hear the choir’s words and heed them, to know that she is loved, that he would always be there for her even if he was dead.

  The last note, while not the highest, was a bitch, even transposed to a friendlier key for his tenor range, but Peter nailed it. You’ll never walk alone. You’ll never walk A-LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONE.

  He absolutely nailed it, not that anyone heard.

  21

  The Kahns were adamant that they did not want to speak to the police in Perri’s room, but neither did they want to leave her for even a few minutes. Middle-class people, used to having rights, they assumed this ended the discussion. They couldn’t leave their daughter, they didn’t want to be interviewed in front of their daughter, so the police would have to come back later.

  But they were also reasonable people, and when it was explained that the conversation could not be postponed, they agreed to take turns, meeting with Lenhardt and Infante in the hospital’s food court one at a time. Lenhardt allowed them to think he was accommodating them, but it was what he had wanted all along, getting each parent alone. He was surprised they didn’t insist on calling their high-priced lawyer, but it probably didn’t occur to them that they needed legal advice. Good.

  First came the father, Zachary Kahn, although his wife called him Zip. Lenhardt began by asking about that, a way of settling in, as if he were making small talk with the father of one of Jessica’s or Jason’s friends.

  “An old nickname,” the man explained, grasping his cup of black coffee in two hands as if it were a winter day and he was trying to warm himself. “I gave it to myself, in my twenties. I wanted a nickname, and I liked that comic Zippy the Pinhead, so I anointed myself Zip. Twenty years later I’m still Zip. The follies of youth.�
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  “I always wanted a nickname, too. But my mom insisted that people call me Harold. Not Harry or Hal. Now I can’t bear it when someone shortens my name straight off, without even asking.”

  Zip Kahn—what an unfortunate name to carry into adulthood—looked as if he wanted to say something normal, something expected, except he no longer knew what normal was. He and his wife had been at the hospital for almost seventy-two hours, going home only to shower. Of course Lenhardt couldn’t know what the guy looked like on a typical day, but there were traces of energy and vitality. Zip was stocky and athletic-looking, with a round face and an admirably thick crop of hair, the kind that never fell out and barely grayed.

  “As I told you Friday, we traced the gun,” Lenhardt said, plunging in. “To Michael Delacorte.”

  “Right. Perri baby-sat for the Delacortes.” He seemed to think this fact explained and closed the discussion.

  “Now that we’ve checked it out, we don’t see any of the other girls having access to that gun. But I also have to assume you didn’t know it was in your daughter’s possession.”

  Like a boxer getting a second wind, the guy seemed to sharpen through sheer will. “How can you be so sure the gun was ever in her possession? Have you been able to make that connection with certainty? Opportunity doesn’t equal certainty.”

  Eddie Dixon had prepared the parents well, then.

  “Your daughter worked for them. The other girls didn’t.”

  “And Dale Hartigan was pals with Stewart Delacorte. For all you know, he took the gun, and his daughter took it from him, and that’s how it came to be at the school.”

  Yeah, right. “We’ll ask him about that. Believe me. We’ll ask him.”

  “Okay, then.” Said emphatically, as if something important had been settled. Lenhardt did not want to be unkind to the man, but he needed to tug him gently back to reality, away from the paranoid rationalizations he was using to comfort himself.

  “Now, as you know, your daughter’s hands were tested for gun residue, but the weapon was a .22, which almost never leaves enough barium or antimony to detect.”

  He could have said “trace evidence,” but he wanted to let the father know he was on top of the technical stuff.

  “They bagged her hands. They put paper bags on her hands, and they wouldn’t take them off, not for hours. I wanted to hold my daughter’s hand, and I couldn’t. Can you imagine what that’s like?”

  “I’m sorry,” Lenhardt said. With a look he tossed the interview to Infante. It wasn’t a routine with them, it wasn’t good cop–bad cop, just a rhythm born of practice. Lenhardt could imagine all too well what it would be like, seeing his daughter hurt, not being able to hold her hand.

  “What we didn’t do on Friday was get fingerprints. We’re here today to do that, and we’re asking only as a courtesy,” Infante said. “The gun was taken from the home of a family for whom she worked. If her fingerprints are on the gun, we have to proceed on certain assumptions.”

  They really wanted the fingerprints so they could ascertain the letter had been written and mailed by Perri, but Lenhardt and Infante had agreed between themselves not to mention the letter at the top of the conversation and, no matter what, not to reveal that it raised far more questions than it answered.

  “I would think,” Zip Kahn said, growing more defiant, “that you would want to do quite the opposite. If you investigate on the basis of a narrow hypothesis, you end up finding what you were looking for. That’s human nature. You need to collect the facts with minds open to any possibility.”

  “There is a witness,” Infante reminded him. “A girl who knows your daughter quite well, a girl who was there and has stated that Perri brought the gun to school and shot Kat Hartigan.”

  “I’ve heard the Patels obtained a lawyer. Is that something all witnesses do? In fact, they’ve hired an excellent criminal defense attorney, Gloria Bustamante, someone who has a great deal of expertise in homicide. Why does Josie Patel need a lawyer?”

  Damn Eddie Dixon. He was just too plugged in, Lenhardt thought. And if Dixon knew the Patels had hired Bustamante, he might know why as well.

  “A letter arrived at the Hartigan house today,” Infante said. He was always coldly patient in an interview, unless the person opposite him required out-and-out bullying. Infante played it like a Department of Motor Vehicles bureaucrat, someone who couldn’t be moved under any circumstances.

  “Which one? The house in Glendale or the little love nest that he set up in Baltimore with his young girlfriend?”

  His resentment was palpable, and it interested Lenhardt. Was Zip Kahn trying to suggest that Dale Hartigan deserved to have a dead daughter, because he had left his wife, while the still-together Kahns should not be penalized? Or was he bitter in the way some men were when they saw another guy get out? In Lenhardt’s experience, the only outsiders who begrudged a person the end of a marriage were those secretly wistful about their own.

  Even if you were happy in your marriage, as Lenhardt was, it could give you a pang, seeing a guy your age with someone new, someone young. There had been a Christmas party last year, and he had been reminded of the kinds of girls that young cops can get—the pretty young emergency-room nurses, the good-time party girls, even an occasional assistant state’s attorney. Infante’s girl-of-the-moment was enough to give a man a coronary, with long black hair and big fake tits, not that Lenhardt deducted points for surgical enhancement. These were the girls that Lenhardt had once gotten, part of the reason he hadn’t married again until he was in his forties. And Marcia, twelve years younger, was the best of the best—cute, down to earth. Plenty of his colleagues still gave her approving looks. But it wasn’t the young guys and the young girls that had unnerved him at the party. What had been weird was seeing a guy his age, a robbery detective, show up with this total piece. Lenhardt could live with Infante’s beautiful girls, but it had been strange seeing fifty-two-year-old Fred Duda with a high-assed waitress.

  “The envelope was addressed to Kat Hartigan,” Infante continued in his robotic voice. “It came to the house where she lived with her mother. Mrs. Hartigan says the handwriting looks like your daughter’s.”

  “So what does the letter say?”

  “It’s not so much what it said, “ Lenhardt put in, all too aware that the one-line letter could be a boon to a smart defense attorney. “It’s that we want to establish it isn’t a forgery. So between that and the nonconclusive tests on your daughter’s hand, we decided we should get her fingerprints sooner rather than later. Really, we should have done it earlier, but…”

  He didn’t finish the thought, that they hadn’t worried about fingerprints because Perri Kahn was comatose, and not going anywhere.

  Kahn made a move as if to crumple the coffee cup in his hands, realizing just in time it was still full. “That’s shitty,” he said. “That’s just plain shitty. You don’t need to do that now. My daughter might not live. Do you know that? So maybe none of this matters anyway.”

  “But if your daughter didn’t send the letter, and her fingerprints don’t match any of the latents lifted from the gun, we need to know that sooner rather than later. Right? Like you said, we have to be open to every possibility.”

  “Why? What does it say? Was it a threat?”

  “It was kind of…obscure in its intent. In and of itself, the letter tells us nothing. That’s why we need to check the envelope against your daughter’s fingerprints.”

  “Do what you have to do,” Zip Kahn said. “And go fuck yourself.”

  Mrs. Kahn came down fifteen minutes later. She was a large woman, but she carried herself with the confidence of someone who had once been thin and attractive.

  “Perri was her normal self these past few months,” Eloise Kahn began before either Lenhardt or Infante had a chance to ask her a single question.

  “What was normal for Perri?” Lenhardt asked.

  “She was like any teenager, moody and rebellious, nothing more. I
n fact, it makes sense for a high-school senior to get a little irritable. It’s a way of preparing for the transition to college.”

  “Had she quarreled with Kat over anything, to your knowledge?”

  “Girls don’t really do that,” Eloise Kahn said. “They just…drift apart, for whatever reason. Kat and Perri were heading in different directions. Their differences hadn’t mattered as much when they were younger, but that started to change, and it became harder to overlook the ways in which they were incompatible.”

  “Differences?”

  “Kat was…well, so mainstream in her attitudes and aspirations. I don’t mean to be unkind….”

  In Lenhardt’s experience, people said they didn’t wish to be unkind only when they intended to be extremely unkind but wanted dispensation for their cruelty.

  “Kat became more…well, dilettantish after her parents’ divorce. Kat was a charming little girl, but as a teenager all she cared about were the most superficial things. Cheerleading, grades for grades’ sake, but not knowledge. She had a gorgeous soprano voice, but she didn’t want to do anything with it—until she realized that appearing in a school play might round out her college applications. She wanted to get top grades and go to a top college because her father had been preparing her for that since she was small. I don’t know what you’ve heard, but Perri was the one who tired of Kat, not the other way around.”

  “We haven’t really gotten into that,” Lenhardt said. “No one’s told us much of anything about the girls’ relationship. We’ve been giving the Hartigans a little space. Her mom said she knew the girls weren’t close anymore, but Kat hadn’t confided in her.”