by Blake Banner
We turned into Morris Avenue and crossed the road. As we did so, she asked me, “Plan? We have a plan? Seriously, Stone? It seems to me we are as lost today as we were the day we picked up this case. Maybe more so!”
I looked at her in surprise as I held the door open for her. “Really? It’s very clear to me. All I need now is to find the proof.”
She stopped dead in the doorway and turned to look at me as I squeezed past her.
“What? Are you telling me you know who killed Al Chester?”
“Don’t you? I thought it was obvious. What do you want for lunch? I need a chicken taco, and a beer.”
I sat at a table by the window and Dehan sat opposite me, with a sour scowl on her face. “She was right,” she said after a moment. “She had you pegged. You’re a supreme pain in the ass!”
I gazed innocently, with raised eyebrows, at the menu.
SIXTEEN
I spoke around a mouthful of chicken and taco.
“Jush fink imfroo, Jeehang!”
She chewed and watched me through narrowed eyes. “Just think it through… Seriously? You’re telling me to think it through? I thought it through, up, down, across and with every damn preposition in the English lexicon!”
“Wowm!” I said, refilling my mouth. “Dash pweddy goob.”
“Stop talking with your mouth full. It makes me want to hit you.”
I gave a small, derisive laugh. “Bwave werje.”
“What?”
I swallowed and drained half my beer, sighed and wiped my mouth. “Allow me to quote you, Carmen, entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem! Remember? Quite literally, things are not multiplied except where necessary, Occam’s Razor, the simplest answer is usually the correct one.”
“I remember.”
“Well, this case has been about all that: the individual against society, against the community, against the gang. Always too many people. Too many options and at the same time, too few.”
“You going to keep BS-ing me or are you going to tell me?”
I chuckled annoyingly. “OK, I’ll give you a hand. Think of the shots. The shots are key. Think of that knife. Where is the knife? Whose knife was it? That is key too. And think, also, Little Grasshopper, about who would want that injunction so badly they would apply for an emergency hearing during the night?”
“I don’t know, Stone! Tell me, please!”
My phone rang.
“Yeah, Stone.”
“Detective Stone, this is Chevronne Brown. I need to talk to you. It’s urgent.”
“Sure. Where are you?”
“No, I’ll come to you at the station.”
I looked at my watch. “Be there for three thirty. We can’t make it before then.”
She was silent for a moment. “All right, I’ll be there at three thirty. Please, don’t be late.”
“We’ll be there.”
She hung up and I sat frowning at my phone. Dehan intruded upon my thoughts. “Something else you’re not going to tell me about?”
“That was Ned’s mother. Her tone had changed some.”
“Really? What did she want?”
“She wanted to meet with us. She said it was urgent. She sounded worried and asked me not to be late…”
“Huh.”
“Come on, Dehan. Let’s go have Annunziata Chester talk at us. I am curious to see what’s on her mind.”
I left the car on West 112th and we walked the short distance to 400 Riverside Drive. As we rounded the corner, I was surprised to see Annunziata standing out on the sidewalk. She was dressed in a scarlet dress with a slash down one thigh, a small black pillbox on her head and a string of pearls around her throat. She also had a large rat on a lead, which on closer inspection turned out to be a Chihuahua. I recognized her from her photographs and approached her.
“Dr. Annunziata Chester?”
“You must be the detectives. So good of you to come. Do you mind if we walk in the park while we talk? One never knows these days when one is being bugged. And what with all the warnings about Facebook and Whatsapp… one doesn’t know whom to trust. Don’t you agree, Detective?”
We identified ourselves and all three of us crossed at the pedestrian crossing to walk in among the trees and gardens that border the Hudson along Riverside Drive. The bug-eyed rat trotted along beside her, looking permanently scared.
Dehan made a face that was skeptical and showed it to Annunziata. “You think somebody is bugging you?”
Annunziata eyed her a moment, like she was wondering who she was and what she was doing there.
“One never knows, does one?”
I began to fear that one was going to get stuck in the Land of the Vague if one wasn’t careful and asked bluntly: “What did you want to see us about, Dr. Chester?”
She gazed up at me while we walked, chewing her lip without saying anything. I could feel Dehan getting antsy and started to feel a little irritated myself. I drew breath to ask her again, but she preempted me and said, “Justin.”
Dehan growled, “What about him?”
“If you’ve spoken to him, you’ve no doubt noticed that he is… eccentric.”
I sighed and didn’t try to hide it. “That is not a crime, Dr. Chester.”
“Do please call me Anne. I detest all this formality. It is so trying to be a Chester.”
“You were telling us about Justinian.”
“When I say eccentric, I mean that, though he is by no means psychotic, as poor Al was, he does have a tendency to fantasize a little...”
Dehan glanced at me. I read the look and gave her a small nod. She stopped in her tracks and faced Annunziata. “Dr. Chester, did you and your brother Maximilian conspire to murder your brother Al?”
Annunziata took a very deep breath, looked down at the path and then up into my face, like she wanted me to rescue her.
“Yes,” she said. “We did.”
I had a strange sensation, like I had brain-ache. I screwed up my face and said, “Dr. Chester, Anne, are you aware that you just confessed to a very serious crime, that carries a very long prison sentence with it?”
She nodded and started walking again. “But when you hear all the circumstances, I think you’ll understand. And once I have told you everything, you must…” She placed her hand on my forearm. “…do whatever it is you must do.”
I met Dehan’s eye again. Her eye was saying we should take this dame down to the station and charge her with conspiracy to commit murder. My eye told her eye to hold its horses.
“Come, Calypso.” This was directed at the dog as she started to walk again. “We may not have many walks together after today.”
“Tell us about this conspiracy, what was discussed, by whom, where and when.”
“It was in 1990. Al had returned from his stay in Latin America.”
“How long was he there?” It was Dehan.
Annunziata studied her red satin shoes. They had little straps across her ankles. She answered glancing at me, as though I had asked the question, not Dehan. “In all, he was there almost ten years. Before that, he had been to Turkey, India, Indonesia… Wherever he could find some kind of mind-altering drug in his constant search for true consciousness. He had read the Castaneda books when he first went to Harvard, and it became an obsession with him to become what he called a man of knowledge.”
“So he spent ten years traveling in Latin America, and then he returned in 1990?”
“Yes.”
We had come to the tennis courts. One of them was occupied by a young couple in whites playing a fast game. She walked up to the mesh and stood staring through. Her voice sounded strangely empty as she spoke.
“There was some stupid reunion; a group of alumni who had all dropped out around 1969 were going to have a reunion there, a long weekend where they were going to get stoned out of their minds. Al returned from Brazil especially for this reunion.” She frowned. “He looked awful.”
Dehan asked, “You sa
w him?”
“Of course. He flew in to New York and I went to meet him at the airport. I wanted to see what state he was in. He was frightful. Very slim and tanned, obviously. But his eyes were hollow and there was a kind of manic look to them.”
She turned away from the court and started walking again. “While he had been traveling, especially while he was in Latin America, he had not been a concern to us. He had given me his proxy vote on all board decisions, and all he wanted to do was travel and experiment with drugs. But when we talked that day…” She shook her head.
“What? What did you notice?”
“He was taunting me, saying he was tired of living in the jungle, he wanted to come back to civilization, write books about his experiences, take up his position on the board. The more he talked, the more manic he became. He wanted the family firm to move into hallucinogenic drugs and lead a campaign to legalize mind-altering substances. It was his destiny, he said, to bring about a new era in human evolution…” She sighed. “You can imagine how I felt.”
Dehan replied. “Yeah. You felt like killing him.”
Annunziata gave a small, private smile. “Not precisely, Detective Dehan. It took a little longer than that. He came to stay with me and I urgently called Max and Justin to come and have dinner and see what they made of his condition. Conversation over dinner was much as it had been throughout the day, with Al ranting like a madman about his insane plans. He intended to herald in a new age of enlightenment, using everything he had learned over the previous twenty years about mind-altering substances.
“The next day, he traveled up to Boston for his reunion. Apparently, I learned later, he and his drop-out friends had gone on what he called a ‘raiding party,’ picking up young students and inviting them to a party that night. The party was in fact an orgy of sex and drugs aimed at freeing the young students’ minds, and encouraging them to drop out.”
Dehan asked, “How long did that go on?”
“For three days. We had to pull strings and call in a lot of favors to avoid it hitting the press. And that was when we had the first meeting. Max was the first to propose it. Justin was predictably against it. His reasoning was entirely sentimental. It went along the lines of, ‘We can’t just kill our own brother,’ as though introducing the adjective ‘own’ made our brother somehow more difficult to kill.”
She came to a bench and sat. Calypso sat beside her ankle and viewed the world through bulging, terrified eyes. Dehan stood facing Anne with her hands in her back pockets. I stood too, staring at the trees, thinking.
“Of course I didn’t want to kill my brother, and obviously I would miss him. But those considerations, when weighed against the damage he was about to do to all of us, as a family, as individuals, to the company… It seemed to me that it was perfectly legitimate to consider that extreme alternative. I remember I asked Max who would carry out the execution. He was frightfully gruff and said, ‘Nobody! I will drop a word in a certain ear and it will be taken care of.’”
She sighed and went silent. After a moment, she took a small lace handkerchief and wiped her eyes. “We never quite got around to making the decision. We agreed to talk to him when he got back from Boston. When he did get back, it didn’t take us long, especially Justin and myself, to realize that he had suffered serious damage as a result of all the drugs he had taken. At the time, we believed he was borderline psychotic, but within a matter of a very few weeks, we realized he was descending rapidly into full blown paranoia and probably schizophrenia.”
My voice was harsher than I had intended: “And that was when you decided to disown him.”
She shrugged. “He was a loose cannon. He was actually dangerous. We put him in several clinics, we tried various therapies, but nothing worked. Eventually, at the turn of the millennium, we gave him an allowance that would, if managed sensibly, provide him with rent and food, but not drugs, and we cut him loose.”
Dehan’s voice was almost a rasp. “That is cold. That is ruthless.”
Annunziata looked at Dehan full in the face for the first time. “I am really not interested in your judgment, Detective Dehan. We did what we did. Al gravitated to his natural level and wound up living homeless on the streets in the Bronx. However, Max thought we should have him sectioned, find a local psychiatrist and pay him a retainer to keep an eye on him, and that was when we found Dr. Epstein.”
I puffed out my cheeks and blew hard. “I very much doubt that any court would convict you on what you have told us, Anne. It is doubtful you ever actually formed the intention to kill. Certainly you never acted to put your discussions into effect. It sounds more as though you contemplated the possibility and rejected it.”
She shook her head. “Not exactly, Detective Stone. We postponed it. It was never said openly, but we all knew it. We were kicking the can down the road.”
I could feel myself getting mad. My patience was straining and I wasn’t precisely sure why. “What exactly do you mean by that, Anne?”
She reached in her purse and pulled out a gold cigarette case. She extracted an unfiltered cigarette and lit it with a gold Cartier lighter. She took her time inhaling and then let out a long stream of smoke.
“You probably know that Dr. Epstein and his practice took Al to their bosom. He took his role as guardian very seriously and went to some pains to help Al. He put a great deal of pressure on us to buy him that grotesque little house he lived in. He also got him a cleaner to come in a couple of times a week, and apparently he encouraged him to drop in to his practice whenever he felt like it. And so it went on for years.”
Dehan curled her lip. “And then he decided to get married.”
Annunziata nodded. “We couldn’t allow that to happen. The consequences were unthinkable. We had a meeting and we decided that Max would employ a private detective to find out exactly who this woman was. What he discovered shattered us completely. Of all the things he had done over the years, none of them came close to this.”
I sat on the edge of the bench, turned slightly to face her.
“What? What was it?”
“We learned that during his three-day orgy in Boston in 1990, Al had met a girl. She was an undergraduate, a psychology student from Harvard, his own alma mater. He had got her pregnant and then, in his inimitable style, he had simply abandoned her. She had eventually given birth to a boy.” She paused, looking away from me. “It is very hard for me to talk about this. It…” She took a deep breath. “It emerged, from the private detective’s investigation, that the child was of…” She closed her eyes and I saw a tear on her cheek. When she spoke again, her voice was shrill. “The child, my nephew, was of mixed race! How dare he burden me with that! A Chester!”
Dehan’s jaw had sagged. “No….”
Annunziata looked at her. “Yes. Ned Brown, that moronic oaf! Ned Brown is my nephew! If it ever came out! That a Chester… that a boy of mixed race…”
I barked a harsh laugh. “But he was going further than that, wasn’t he? He was going to marry the woman he had abandoned seventeen, eighteen years earlier. He was going to marry Ned’s mother.”
She scowled at me. “You think that’s funny?”
“If you hadn’t killed Al, I’d think it was hilarious, but I don’t find murder amusing, Annunziata. What happened?”
“We had dinner, Max, Justin and myself. We discussed the detective’s findings and we all decided that he had gone too far. I don’t think anybody actually said it, but it was understood. Aloysius had to die, before he brought the family down with him and destroyed us completely.”
Dehan raised a hand. “Let me just see if I’ve got this straight. You decided to murder Al Chester because he was planning to marry a black woman.”
Annunziata gave her a slow once over, from head to toe and back again. “How could you possibly understand? Dehan, that’s a Jewish name, isn’t it? Like Dr. Epstein.”
I said, “What happened, Annunziata? I need the facts.”
“I don�
��t know. It was always tacitly understood that Max would take care of it. But what he did, or how he did it, I have no idea.”
“All right.” I stood. “You’re coming down to the station to make a statement. I haven’t decided yet whether to charge you or not. On your feet. And leave the damned dog with your porter, will you?”
She got to her feet and we made our way back to the car, and from there to the station.
SEVENTEEN
Deputy Inspector John Newman refused to look at us. Instead, he stared at his bonsai in the window. I sometimes wondered if he had grown attached to it, as some people grow attached to their cats or their cars, or if it was deeper than that, and he was seeking, by a process of total empathy, to become one with the bonsai. His face said that the prospect of prosecuting all the surviving members of the Chester family made him long to be a very small tree on a windowsill, rather than the deputy inspector of the 43rd precinct.
“What I don’t understand, John,” he said at last, “is why on Earth she would do this. Why come forward and make this confession? She had absolutely no need to do it.” He turned his chair to face me where I was standing, leaning against the door. “Has she given any explanation so far? Is she looking for immunity? What is it? Do you believe her?”
Before I could answer, he had turned to Dehan, who was sitting in a blue chair with her right ankle on her left knee. “Carmen, do you believe her?”
She sighed, shrugged her eyebrows and then her shoulders, like she was expressing three different levels of uncertainty. “I don’t know, chief. In some ways, it seems plausible. But it also raises a lot of questions.”
He nodded vigorously. “Not least, why would she do this? This very action is guaranteed to bring down on her family the very shame and public humiliation they have been at such pains to avoid!”
