Act of Betrayal

by Shirley Kennett

  “Come in out of the heat,” she said. “Would you like some ice tea?”

  PJ sidled past her. “Are you Mrs. Ramsey?”

  “Can’t be too careful these days,” Libby said.

  “Oh, I agree,” PJ said. She hoped she wasn’t going to be asked for press identification. “I’d love some tea.”

  The living room was small but pleasantly furnished. The wood floor gleamed, and there was a faint scent of pine cleaner that called up images of shining tubs and toilets. The air-conditioning was set frigidly low. Sitting on the couch, which took up one whole wall of the room, PJ felt the sweat starting to evaporate on her back. Libby disappeared, presumably into the kitchen to prepare tea. PJ put her purse on the floor at her feet and propped it open enough to see the tape recorder inside. She wondered if the microphone was sensitive enough to pick up their conversation.

  PJ spotted some family pictures hanging on the wall opposite the couch. She got up and took a closer look, matching the faces to the pictures in the case file. Eleanor looked a lot better than she did in the crime scene shots. She was a blossoming teenager, with a glow in her cheeks and her mother’s intriguing gray, almost colorless, eyes. PJ narrowed her eyes. She thought she recognized that glow. Eleanor might have been pregnant when the picture was taken.

  “Pretty, isn’t she? It’s a terrible tragedy. I don’t know why God saw fit to visit this hardship on us.” Libby was at her elbow.

  “You must have been very proud of her,” PJ said.

  “Smart, too. Just like my son Jeremiah.” Libby reached out her finger and touched Jeremiah’s photo lovingly.

  PJ resettled herself on the couch, with a glass of ice tea on a coaster on the coffee table. She opened her notebook.

  “I thought all you reporters used tape recorders,” Libby said. There was the slightest twinge of suspicion in it.

  “I found that it makes people nervous sometimes. They start talking to the tape recorder and not to me.”

  Libby nodded. “I hate ’em. I’m one of those people who would clam right up.”

  PJ kept her eyes on Libby’s face, resisting the impulse to cast a guilty glance at the purse at her feet.

  “So you want to know what effect Jeremiah’s execution had on us,” Libby said. “I don’t mind talking about that, and I’ll tell you right out. It was devastating, and it still is. My son was innocent.”

  “I understand you believe another man was guilty”—PJ pretended to consult her notes—“Clarence Richman, Eleanor’s boyfriend.”

  Libby’s face hardened. “He was more than just her boyfriend. He was the father of her child. And him twenty-two years old, taking advantage of a teenage girl like that. A minor. He killed her, all right. The police just didn’t look hard enough.”

  PJ jotted notes. “Why do you think they didn’t, Mrs. Ramsey? Did they have it in for your son, somehow?”

  “The boy confessed. The fool thought he could protect his little sister’s reputation, or something. Who knows what was in his mind, but as soon as the police got that confession they didn’t let up on him. Even after he took back every word he said.”

  “Speaking of little sister, I’ve noticed a big age difference in your children, Mrs. Ramsey. Eleanor was the baby of the family by quite a few years. Why did you and Elijah have a daughter after your other children were grown?”

  Unexpectedly, Libby laughed. “You’re too damn nosy,” she said. “Now I know you’re really a reporter.”

  “You mean you had doubts?” PJ said innocently.

  “Honey, a lot of people have wanted to talk to me about our family’s tragedy. Not all of them had good intentions.” Libby left unfinished what those bad intentions were, such as putting her son on trial for murder and executing him years after a conviction.

  “Elijah and I got married when I was fifteen years old. I had Darla six months later, if you catch my drift. Then Jeremiah right after that. Got pregnant as soon as I took Darla off the breast. Hormones or something. I worked my tail off with those kids. Never had much of a childhood of my own, you know. Never got to enjoy the time when I had a good figure and the boys wanted to put their hands on me every chance they got. And I’d give ’em plenty of chances.” Libby smiled, remembering. “You got any kids?”

  “One. A boy, thirteen.”

  “Something special about a son, isn’t there? Just looking at my boy positively filled up my heart. You should get yourself some more kids, though. Isn’t natural to raise an only child. You’re not too old.”

  PJ felt the tips of her ears burning. She hadn’t expected to become the interviewee. She lowered her eyes to her notepad, absorbed in the squiggles she was making there. “I’m divorced.”

  “So?”

  PJ cleared her throat. “Getting back to the question about Eleanor, Mrs. Ramsey. Was she a welcome addition to the family?”

  “Holy shit, you got nerve,” Libby said, ignoring the fact that she had just questioned PJ’s sex life. “You’ll go far as a reporter, you’ll see. The only reason I’m going to answer that is I like a woman who goes after what she wants. Of course she was welcome. I was only thirty-three. My own mother had kids up until she was forty-four.”

  “So you’d describe her as your midlife treasure? Just trying to get quotes for the article.”

  “You could say that. Sure, that sounds good.” Libby seemed amused, but the joke was a private one.

  Libby was answering questions easily enough, but PJ had the strong sense that the woman was in charge of the conversation even though PJ was asking the questions. PJ wasn’t getting the insight she needed, and she couldn’t seem to read the woman as she could other people after a brief conversation. Libby’s body language gave away nothing. PJ would have to knuckle down and dig for both information and attitudes. There was no telling how much longer she’d be allowed to stay in Libby’s small living room. PJ shuffled her feet on the wooden floor and kept up her side of the interview.

  “How did the other children react?”

  “Darla, I don’t think she was thrilled. Always wanted the spotlight, that one. She didn’t take to having a baby in the house when she was already high-and-mighty eighteen years old. She moved out right after that, come to think of it. Jeremiah, he was excited. Took to the baby from the start. Diapered her and everything. He said he was practicing for when he got married.”

  Libby seemed lost in thought for a moment, and in that unguarded moment her face showed something frightening. Jealousy? Hatred? Anger? PJ couldn’t say for sure, but whatever it was caused her to recoil from the intensity of emotion that Libby was radiating. Then the mask slipped back onto Libby’s face, and PJ had the sinking feeling that everything she had seen and heard up until then had been a performance.

  To what end? Normal caution with a reporter? Or something deeper?

  The emotions had been revealed when Libby talked about Jeremiah getting married. PJ remembered Dave’s report that Jeremiah was a bachelor. Either Libby had resented the fact that he wasn’t married yet, or she hadn’t wanted him to marry. PJ couldn’t make sense of that, but marked it “raw data” and filed it away.

  “And what about your husband? How did he feel about Eleanor?” PJ asked without missing a beat.

  “Oh, you know. Another mouth to feed.”

  “Let’s move forward,” PJ said, consulting her notes. “During the trial, you said you were with Jeremiah at the time of Eleanor’s death, so you were his alibi. What effect did it have on you when the jury didn’t believe you?”

  “Honey, it doesn’t make any difference what I think of the jury. They’re already damned and going to hell.”

  PJ blinked. She was getting somewhere now. She hoped the microphone in her purse was recording it all.

  “That’s the Lord’s judgment, not mine,” Libby said. “They knew in their hearts that my son was innocent, but they didn’t listen to their hearts. They listened to the lies of the police and the lawyers. They know what’s waiting for them, and
they should be afraid. Damned afraid.”

  “Do you think they deserve to die?” PJ asked. Her voice trembled. It had occurred to her that things could get dangerous. She was starting to become afraid, herself. “I’m asking for the article, I mean.”

  Libby gave her an odd look. “Of course not. The Lord will get around to them in His own sweet time. Aren’t you a believer in the day of judgment, honey?” She smiled, and her pumpkin face lit up as though a candle had been lighted inside it. There was nothing but sincerity in her face and voice. Or was that part of a superb performance?

  “Um, how did Elijah take the guilty verdict? His own son convicted of murdering a family member?”

  “Makes a great headline, don’t it? I think Elijah kind of died that day. Inside someplace. He’s been a broken man since then.”

  PJ nodded. “Doesn’t he feel an injustice was done?”

  “Hard to say. He didn’t talk much about it. I always had the feeling he thought Jeremiah actually did it. He loved the boy dearly, so it’s beyond me how he could have thought such a thing of him. It broke us apart, too. We’re divorced now, you know. I haven’t seen him in years.”

  PJ was taken by surprise. “No, I didn’t know that.” She almost said, That wasn’t in the case file.

  “It’s been hard on me. I lost Eleanor, then my business. The day care centers. Parents wouldn’t bring their kids. They thought the whole family was tainted and we were a bunch of killers, I guess. Then Elijah couldn’t stand it anymore and moved out. Darla turned her back on the whole thing. When Jeremiah was murdered by the state, it was the last straw for me. I got out, moved away from St. Louis. I didn’t have anything there.” She sank back in her chair as if she didn’t have the strength to sit up.

  “So what’s happened to you since? This is great stuff, if you don’t mind my saying so.” Spoken like a true reporter.

  “I had a little money from the sale of the Wee Belong centers. I bought this house with it,” Libby said, gesturing vaguely around her. “For my living expenses, I work in a Burger King. Do you want fries with that, Ma’am?” The last part she said in a flat singsong voice that would have been comical if it weren’t for the context.

  PJ drank some of her tea, and took the opportunity to look quickly down at her purse. She could see the tiny reel on the recorder spinning. So far so good.

  She felt sorry for Libby, and was beginning to think of that bit about the jury being damned as nothing but a despairing woman looking to religion for comfort. PJ searched her face carefully, and saw no trace of the deep emotion glimpsed earlier. Libby had suffered so many losses.

  If Thomas was brutally killed—PJ didn’t allow herself to think of the way Rick Schultz had looked—there was no telling how she would react herself. Perhaps she’d turn to religion too, consoling herself with thoughts of the kind of final justice that wasn’t available on earth.

  “So you don’t know where Elijah is?” PJ asked. “I was hoping to interview him also.”

  Libby shook her head. “Not that he was home much during the marriage either. Always off in some godforsaken jungle, wherever there was a fight going on. I raised those kids alone.”

  Libby had been like a single mother even though she was married, PJ thought. Her sympathy went up a notch.

  “Too bad,” PJ said, speaking of both Libby’s experience and her own disappointment in not locating Elijah. “How about Darla?”

  Libby’s lips narrowed into a tight line. “I don’t know where she is. Haven’t heard from her in ten years. That’s what kind of a grateful daughter I’ve got left.”

  PJ imagined what Libby’s life was like. Everything that was important to her, everything she loved, had been yanked out of her life or moved out voluntarily. Most likely all of her friends had edged away from her as well. She lived in a tan brick box, worked at a meaningless job, and had only memories of better times to brighten her existence. PJ shuddered. Would she ever end up like that? Old and alone?

  “Eleanor’s friends said that you had a… difficult relationship with her,” PJ said. “They even said that you would kill her if you found out she was pregnant. Is there anything to that?”

  “You don’t have a teenage daughter,” Libby said. “You don’t know what it’s like. They fight you every step of the way. Between mother and daughter is the roughest.”

  “I know teenagers can be difficult to get along with.”

  Libby snorted. “That’s not the half of it. Eleanor had a temper, bless her soul, just like Elijah does. That man has a cruel streak in him. I always thought he had a cold snake curled around his heart. You got to know how to handle him. But Eleanor, she knew which buttons to push on good old Mom. She did love her brother, though. That’s one good thing. But I knew from raising Darla that all that defiance blows over when a girl gets into her twenties. Then she’s ready to listen to Mama again. In the meantime, I came down hard on her. I wanted so much more for her than I had.”

  Libby looked away, focused on the photographs on the wall. “Don’t get me wrong. By some people’s standards, I had a good life with Elijah. I mean, he didn’t beat me or drink away the family’s money. But I didn’t want Eleanor pregnant at fifteen, the way I was. I wanted her to make something of herself. Go to college. She was smart, damn it.” When Libby turned back to face PJ, tears moistened her eyes and turned the cool grayness into soft colorless pools.

  PJ took it all in, tried to fit the grief against the earlier violent emotions that had peeped through the mask. It didn’t make a coherent picture.

  While Libby was distracted reaching for a tissue, PJ leaned over, dropped her pen into her purse, and snapped the purse shut.

  “Thank you for your time, Mrs. Ramsey. I know it was difficult for you.”

  “I want you to make it clear in your article how much this whole thing has hurt us. We’re all victims, including my innocent son. Our lives were shattered on the day I found Eleanor’s body.”

  “I’ll tell your story just the way you want it,” PJ said. “It’s good copy.”

  The heat was like a visible barrier outside Libby’s front door. PJ steeled herself and returned to her car, clutching her purse. She had pulled it off. She had tracked down Libby Ramsey and gotten an update, of sorts, on the rest of the family.

  She started the car and moved off to a parking lot a few blocks away, then opened her purse and turned off the tape recorder. The air-conditioner was beginning to cool the car down. She used her cellular phone to call Lieutenant Wall. She told him she was bringing back an interview tape. He berated her for not having authorization to tape, but seemed pleased, nevertheless. She asked if he could contact Dave or Anita to start the search for Darla Ramsey. PJ had two strong impressions about Darla: that she needed to talk to her to learn more about the Ramsey family, and that it wasn’t going to be as easy to find her as it had been to find Libby. From what Libby had said, Darla wanted nothing to do with the rest of her family.

  On the drive back to St. Louis, she tried to sort things out. The mysterious Elijah still looked like a good bet for the killer. His whereabouts were unknown. He was a broken man after the trial. He had a bad temper and a cruel streak, and it was likely he blamed the justice system for everything from the loss of his son to the breakup of his marriage. From what Libby had said, Elijah seemed like the type of man to look outside himself when there was blame to be assigned.

  A bag of jelly beans from a food mart provided comfort food. She drove along, popping them in her mouth. It was something she did when she was nervous. She didn’t know what her next step should be. It was exactly the kind of thing she wanted to talk over with Schultz.

  PJ was discovering that he was an equally hard man to be with, and be without.

  She went straight to the headquarters building and gave the tape from her purse to Louie. If anyone could make something of it, he could. His eyes gleamed when he turned it over in his hand. She felt sorry for the poor tape. It was at Louie’s mercy.

 
; Thomas was pleased when she turned up early at the Lakeland’s house to take him to dinner and a movie. She turned the volume down on her jumbled thoughts and enjoyed an evening with her son.

  Twenty-two

  SCHULTZ DIDN’T HAVE LONG to wait in Glen Mandoleras’s tiny dark apartment. Fifteen minutes after he finished his search he heard the key in the lock. He gently pushed the cat off his lap in case he had to move fast.

  Schultz’s eyes were fully adjusted to the dimness, so he could make out a hand that moved inside the door and groped around on the wall. He tensed and aimed his gun at the door, holding it with both hands, arms raised to slightly below shoulder level. The moving hand found a light switch and flipped it. A small ceiling light came on in the entryway. The light barely reached to Schultz’s feet and outstretched arms.

  The door swung open and Mandoleras walked in, carrying a grocery bag with one arm.

  “I’m home, O’Brien,” he said. “Gotcha some treats.” Then he stopped abruptly. He had spotted a shadowy figure on his couch and a gun pointed in his direction.

  “I’m unarmed,” he said, holding perfectly still.

  “Put the bag down on the floor and close the door,” Schultz said.

  Mandoleras complied. His back made a nice big target. Schultz could end the chase right then, with no risk to himself. But his search of the apartment had turned up nothing, and he had to be sure.

  “Sit down on the floor,” Schultz said.