by An Anthology
“Let me know what you do find. Nice work as always.”
“Yeah, yeah,” he said, “I’d bill you for my time but—”
“I know. You’re a millionaire now so you don’t need it.”
“Life’s sweet, ain’t it?”
“For some people. Not for that family in New Jersey.”
The next day, the motor vehicles lab found evidence that the explosion that had taken place after Atkinson’s car hit the river was probably caused by an incendiary device. They couldn’t verify this to more than a good probability, but it made sense; cars only explode on impact in the movies, not in real life. This also fit Mike Delgado’s profile since he’d been a demolitions expert in the military.
Jamie’s autopsy on Dr. Atkinson’s body showed blunt-force trauma to the skull as the probable cause of death. There was no water in his lungs.
It took over a month for the mitochondrial DNA results to come back from Washington, and when they finally did we were still pretty much in the dark. It could have been Cady’s (or Slemboski’s) DNA. It could have also been her sister’s (if she actually had a sister); or it could’ve come from almost any female relative on her mother’s side going back tens of generations.
Still, the district attorney thought it was enough to close the case and that’s what he did.
I went for a run with Frankie that night. (Frankie likes jogging, Hooch hates it.) It was mid-November and the air was cold and a light snow was falling. It felt good to run in the snow. It felt bracing and cold and good. When the run was over and we came in the front door my heart was pounding, my blood was rushing, and my skin was flushed. I noticed this as I looked at the full-length mirror in the mudroom, just after I’d kicked off my shoes. The funny thing is, the scar on my forehead wasn’t pink. It had turned even whiter than normal, or had seemed to, while the skin around it was a rosy red.
Why did that seem backward? Then it hit me: collodion. I raced to the living room and called Kristin Downey, an ex-girlfriend from my graduate school days at Columbia. She’d been a theater major and was now a successful Broadway set and costume designer. I asked her about collodion and was it used in theatrical makeup.
Meanwhile, Frankie had gone into the kitchen to lap up some water. He came back, jowls dripping, just as I got off the phone with Kristin. I ran up the stairs to find Jamie, who was in bed, with a bed’s worth of pillows behind her head, reading. Frankie raced in after me, wagging his tail.
“Did you and Frankie have a good run?” she said.
“Yes, it was great. And I just realized something.”
“What?”
“Look at my forehead.”
“Okay…”
“What color is my little scar?”
“It looks white to me, but that’s probably because—”
“—the rest of my face is red from exertion, right?”
“Yeah? So?”
“So Cady Clark, or Janet Slemboski, is still alive.”
“But, Jack, the DNA…”
“Yeah, mitochondrial DNA. You know what that means: it’s a maternal relative but it may not actually be her.”
I sat on the bed and explained my thinking on the eight-hour lapse from the time Atkinson had drugged Cady and me to the time the car went over the bridge, the fact that driving off a bridge is an unusual way to commit suicide, and the flat-out unreasonableness of the logistics involved for a smallish, slender man like Atkinson to load two inert bodies into the car, one a woman—yes, but a tall woman—and the other a healthy male over six feet; he couldn’t have done it.
“Not alone, anyway,” I said. “And even if he had,” I went on, “why does he choose driving off a bridge instead of giving himself an overdose of Demerol? Spur-of-the-moment, maybe someone would choose that way to die. But not with an eight-hour cooling-off period. Besides, I heard two voices arguing when I was in the trunk that night, just before we went off the bridge. And the state police think the guardrail had been tampered with in advance of the crash.”
“Okay. But Atkinson could’ve done that.”
“Yeah, but it’s not very likely. And how does Atkinson put a bomb in his own car? That’s got to be Delgado.”
“Okay, but what does all this have to do with the color of your scar?”
I told her that when Cady had lost her temper at Earl, at her house, her whole face had turned red, including the scar.
“That’s impossible.”
“Yeah, I know that now.”
“Scar tissue has fewer open capillaries to—”
“Yes, honey. That’s what I just realized downstairs. I also realized what that other, arcane use was for collodion that I couldn’t put my finger on before. Remember? It’s used in theatrical makeup to create stage scars.”
“You’re saying this woman wore a fake scar?”
I nodded. “It’s—I don’t know—it’s a sympathy card. Think about her psychology: if the one thing you totally lack is empathy for others, and you look around and see that everyone you know, your friends and family, are all capable of feeling sorry for other people, you might a) think that’s the best way to get people to relate to you, and b) see it as an exploitable weakness in others.”
“And she did that by giving herself a fake scar.”
“There may be more to it, but that’s part of it, yes. Plus, I think it’s also part of what enabled her to impersonate her sister.”
“Okay. So what do you think happened that night the car went off the bridge? I mean, if Atkinson wasn’t driving—”
“It was Mike Delgado.”
“Okay. Explain it.”
“I will,” I got up, “just as soon as I’ve had a shower.”
“Jack!”
I ignored her, hopped in the shower, and once I’d toweled off, I sat on the edge of the bed again; she put down her book again, and I explained my theory.
Janet Slemboski wanted to be an actress. She went to a school where other, less pretty girls, did better than she. She wanted that scholarship and killed Cady Clark to get it, but after the NYPD started nosing around, looking for the missing girl, Slemboski got worried and flew the coop for Maine, where she took Cady Clark’s name and SS number, and started a tense, symbiotic relationship with Amanda Whoever.
“But who’s this Amanda, anyway? Is she real?”
“Good question. I think she’s a relative of some sort, but I don’t really know that for sure. It’s all speculation at this point.”
“It certainly is.”
“Yes, but when you’re down on your luck and you need help, where’s the first place you turn, friends or family?”
“Family first, I guess.”
“Right. So my thinking is: her parents had passed away, she was seventeen; maybe she had family in Maine. So that’s how she ended up here, and that’s probably where Amanda came in, whether she was a half sister or a cousin or whatever.”
“Okay, that sounds reasonable. Go on.”
At some point Janet Slemboski met Earl and Bruno, and was probably involved in some of their capers but got bored with Earl’s stupidity or just his lizardlike face, met a “nice,” gullible doctor, seduced him, and started blackmailing him, thinking he had more money than he actually did.
Meanwhile, Delgado had been snooping around, had probably fallen in love with her, too. Then she set up the bank robbery by manipulating Earl and Bruno into doing it. Delgado was probably in on it too because he still had it in for his former partner. In fact, he probably helped get her the job at the law office, though that’s just a wild guess.“
“Isn’t all of this just a wild guess?”
“Some of it. Then she reads about me in the newspaper or sees me on TV,” (I do a bi-weekly dog training segment on the Saturday Morning Show at a Portland station), “and decides to hire me to come for a training session at the exact time she figures Earl will be coming back from the robbery, showing off the money he got for her surgery. That way if there’s a shoot-out, which she’s m
aybe hoping there would be, she’s in the clear as far as Earl’s demise is concerned, and can still collect the insurance, through this other identity of hers.”
“Do you think she really needs eye surgery?”
“Of course not. It’s another sympathy card.”
“Okay,” she sighed, “now get to your visit to the doctor’s office and what happened that night.”
“My pleasure. Okay, after I called that day, telling him I needed to speak to him, he must have told Janet Slemboski about it, not knowing that the meeting was to be about her. She knew, though, and she came running over to pressure him into getting rid of me. She hadn’t counted on him giving her the chloroform, though. That’s where he finally came through in the clutch. But here’s where it gets tricky:
“He’s got two bodies in his office and no easy way to dispose of them. Then let’s say there’s a knock on the door. It’s Delgado, who followed Slemboski. He was waiting outside, and when she didn’t come out he came inside to find out what’s going on because he’s jealous and crazy in love with her.”
“Aren’t all the men in this story?”
“Anyway, he sees that Atkinson has two unconscious people in his office, me and Slemboski—and so he kills Atkinson, probably takes him to a shower stall, because there was no blood evidence found at the office—though if the state police had treated it as the primary crime scene, they might’ve found some—and he does the deed there, using a blunt instrument.”
“That would gibe with my autopsy findings.”
“Right. Then he comes back to office and finds that Slemboski has come to, either that or he revives her, then they devise the plan to set up the fake murder/suicide, putting me in the trunk for good measure. He goes out to the bridge, tampers with the guardrail, then comes back and plants the bomb under the car. Meanwhile, she somehow gets her cousin to come to the doctor’s office and kills her there.”
“This would’ve taken an awful lot of work and planning.”
“Yeah, but Delgado was a stunt driver and the whole point was to have a female body in the car that would be mistaken for hers and as you know, it’s hard to get good DNA from a charred corpse.”
“Yes, but why kill her cousin now and not before?”
“We don’t know for sure that Amanda is her cousin.”
“But you just said—never mind. Go on.”
“And she doesn’t kill Amanda before this because she was useful. Now her only usefulness is as a body so Slemboski can fake her own death.”
“Of course; I get it.”
“Right. Then they leave the suicide note on the computer, load up the doctor’s car with the two bodies, one in the passenger seat and me in the trunk, and Delgado takes off, with Slemboski following in her car.”
“Where’s the doctor’s body at this point?”
“Probably in her car. They probably dumped him off the bridge before pulling the fake suicide stunt.
“Then Delgado drives the car off the bridge, gets out of his seat belt after the car hits the river, ignites the detonating device just as he’s swimming ashore, and the car blows up, destroying all the evidence. Except they hadn’t counted on my getting free. When he finds out I’m still alive, he comes to the hospital to try and finish the job.”
She sat thinking it all over. “It’s a pretty wild story, Jack. Are you sure that’s how this whole thing happened?”
“No, but it’s the only explanation of all the details that makes any sense.”
“But, Jack—how can we know for sure?”
“Easy,” I said, snapping my finger at Frankie, who was lying comfortably in my spot. He looked up at me and I pointed to the foot of the bed. “All we have to do is find Janet Slemboski and Mike Delgado and get them to confess.”
Frankie moved to his usual spot at the foot of the bed.
Jamie said, “But what if no one ever finds them?”
“Then they get away with it.”
“Well, that sucks,” she said.
“I know, but you can’t solve every murder that comes along, honey. Sometimes you just have to accept that and move on to a case you can solve.”
“Maybe you can do that, but I can’t.”
I got under the covers and said, “Well, you’re going to have to sooner or later. That’s just the way it is.” I turned off the lamp and lay holding her, listening to her think.
After a while she said, “Maybe we’ll get lucky and find them.”
“Well, maybe,” I yawned, “but don’t count on it.”
Chapter 3
Snow Job
Thanksgiving and Christmas came and went. Due to several technicalities Earl walked on the bank job and the motel murder, or I should say, he hobbled on them, since the brain injury caused lack of full muscle function on his left side. Jamie and I got involved in another case (concerning a housemaid who was found murdered in her employers’ mansion a week before Christmas Eve). After we’d solved that one, things settled down for a while.
Then one Sunday night in late January we had dinner at O’Neal’s, a cozy Italian joint on Bayview Street, with the lead detective on that case, Brad Bailey, and his wife, Lissa.
Lissa was originally from Utah and said she thought I looked like an actor in a TV series that was shot near her hometown, but which supposedly took place in Colorado.
“I think I know the guy you mean,” I said, breaking a breadstick. “He’s incredibly handsome and he has a beard?”
Jamie hit me with the back of her hand.
“I wouldn’t say ‘incredibly’ handsome,” said Lissa. “But, he is kinda good-looking.”
Bailey said, “He plays a doctor who moves from New York to Colorado, kinda like you moved to Maine. We don’t watch it on Monday nights, though. We TiVo it and watch it on Tuesday.”
Lissa added, “We don’t even answer the phone on Monday nights. That’s our family-home evening with our kids.”
“Really?” said Jamie. “That’s really cool.” When she was growing up her father, who was a famous neurosurgeon, was rarely home, which was similar to the back story of the TV show. She said, “We should do that when we have kids, Jack.”
The next night Jamie decided we had to watch that show to see the handsome actor Lissa Bailey had been talking about.
As we were sitting together on the big leather sofa, eating popcorn, there was a brief scene in a high school hallway, where two of the teenage characters are having a conversation, and another kid, a Eurasian girl, comes up and has a brief interaction about a homecoming dance or something, and I was suddenly interested in the show for the first time.
I had seen that girl somewhere before. She was tall and slender, and had that long-limbed yet ample roundness you can’t get at the gym. And although she wasn’t a very good actress she was very pretty; she had a petite nose, black almond-shaped eyes, and tight, shimmering black hair, cut short. Then one of the other characters said something that angered her and, as she got upset (or was “acting” upset), hard lines unprettied her face.
That’s when I knew who she was.
“It’s her,” I said. “Damn! I wish we had TiVo.”
“What do you mean it’s her?” Jamie asked. “Who her?”
Frankie and Hooch looked up from their spot by the hearth to see what we were so excited about.
“That girl! In the high school corridor! That’s Cady Clark! Or Janet Slemboski! Whatever her name is.”
“Are you sure?”
“Of course not. Why do you think I wish we had TiVo?”
“But she’s in her twenties; she’s not a teenager.”
“Hah! You’d be surprised how old some of the ‘teenagers’ in these TV shows really are.” I picked up the phone and tried to call Detective Bailey but he didn’t answer.
Jamie put down her popcorn bowl. “He’s having his family night with his kids, Jack. Remember? And what if you’re wrong about her?”
“Well, if I’m wrong,” I said, dialing the phone again,
“what’s it gonna hurt this actress out in Utah?”
“What do you mean?”
“So, some dog trainer in Maine calls up, mistaking her for a multiple-murder suspect back east. It’s all just publicity, right? And in show business, there’s no such—”
“—thing as bad publicity.” She shook her head. “Okay, make the call.”
We contacted the state police, the FBI, and the authorities in Utah, state and local, and gave them all the information. They all indifferently said they’d look into it.
