The maid, Caroline, met me at the door. This time she allowed me to wait in the foyer while she summoned her employer.
Cilia’s heels made a loud tapping sound on her tile floor as she approached, and for a moment I wondered if she was going to or coming from a business meeting, or if she always dressed so exquisitely around the house. She was wearing a butter-colored dress under a matching jacket. The skirt on the dress was shorter than most high schools would allow.
A looker, Michael Piotrowski had said.
She was a beauty, said Detective Sochacki.
“My goodness, Mr. McKenzie, what happened to your face?” Cilia asked.
“I ran into a door,” I told her.
“A door?”
“A car door.”
“Did it hurt?”
A silly question, I thought.
“I’ve been hurt worse playing hockey,” I said.
Cilia nodded, but I don’t think she believed me any more than Sochacki had.
“What can I do for you?” she asked.
“Has the Anoka County Sheriff’s Department contacted you yet?”
“Have you come all this way to ask that again?”
“Among other things.”
“The answer is no. I have not spoken with anyone from the sheriff’s department. Why would I?”
“The check.”
“Why is the check so important?”
“It proves that someone was in the house other than Merodie when Eli Jefferson was killed.”
“Apparently, the authorities haven’t accorded it nearly as much importance as you have.”
“Apparently.”
“There’s something else you wish to inquire about?” Cilia asked.
“When last we spoke, you explained how you came to take custody of Merodie’s daughter.”
“Yes.”
“You took charge of Silk after Brian Becker was killed.”
“Yes.”
“According to my information, Silk was not living with Merodie when Becker died.”
“No, she was here. Or rather she was with me.”
“Imagine my confusion.”
Cilia smiled, and for the first time I realized that there was no joy in it. Nor did it ever change. Cilia could be looking at a sunset or a plate of mashed potatoes or me—her smile was always the same.
“Silk would stay overnight with me on the evenings that Merodie played softball with her friends. It was my understanding that having a four-year-old daughter to care for cramped Merodie’s—style, is that the correct word?”
“No, but it’s close enough. So Silk was already with you when Becker died?”
“Yes. She was safe in my home in Andover.”
“You’re not a natural blonde, are you, Cilia?”
“McKenzie. What an impertinent question.”
“I have a reason for asking.”
Cilia studied me for a few moments and then smiled as if she could read my mind. “No,” she said. “My hair is naturally auburn. I began coloring it when I turned forty, to hide the gray.”
“You wore it long.”
“Longer than it is now, yes.”
“You had long auburn hair when Becker was killed.”
“Yes.”
“If I may be so bold . . .”
“Bolder than you’ve already been?”
“Back then most men would have described you as being a stone babe.”
“They still do.”
Cilia smiled her empty smile.
“Yes,” I said. “They still do.”
Cilia smiled some more, waiting.
Somewhere in the distance I heard the rumble of thunder. It was only after staring at Cilia for a few moments that I realized it was the sound of a vacuum cleaner overhead. Caroline had worked her way down the upstairs hall and was now on the staircase.
“An attractive woman with auburn hair was seen with Brian Becker the night he died. She hasn’t been identified.”
“That was me,” Cilia said.
The fact that she admitted it so freely caught me by surprise, and my expression must have shown it. Cilia smiled again, but this time it reached her eyes. I had the distinct impression that she was enjoying herself.
She rested her hand on my arm. “Do you play chess, Mr. McKenzie?”
“Chess? Yes, I play . . . I used to play . . . Cilia, do you realize what you’re telling me?”
She took my arm in both hands and gave it a squeeze. “Let’s see what kind of game you have.”
Cilia led me across her sprawling living room to a den. Inside the den was a fireplace so large I could have parked my Audi inside it. We sat in front of the fireplace in ornate wooden chairs carved in the Spanish style, facing each other across a matching table. A chessboard was on the table, the pieces already arranged in neat, orderly ranks.
“Would you like something to drink?” Cilia asked.
“Drink?”
“Yes.”
“Iced tea?” I said.
“Nothing stronger?”
“Put a shot of gin in it.”
Cilia smiled at that. “Caroline,” she said.
The maid appeared at the doorway.
How did she do that?
“Two glasses of your special iced tea laced with gin.”
“Ma’am,” the maid said, and departed.
“So,” said Cilia.
She moved her pawn to E4. I countered with the identical move to E5. Cilia slid her king’s bishop to C4. The move was insulting. She was going for a Scholar’s Mate. In four moves it was nearly the shortest checkmate possible—a strategy you’d only use against an amateur. I easily countered it by moving my king’s knight to F6.
“I expected more,” I said.
“I only wanted to see if you were paying attention, Mr. McKenzie. You seemed dazed.”
“It’s not often that I hear people confess to murder for no particular reason.”
“Did I confess to murder, McKenzie? I don’t think so. I will, however, if you wish.”
“Ms. St. Ana . . .”
“I told you, McKenzie—it’s Cilia.”
She moved another pawn.
“Would you like to hear it?” she asked. “The whole truth and nothing but the truth?”
I moved a pawn of my own.
“Please,” I said.
“It’s a long story.” Cilia smiled her empty smile. “Perhaps we should wait for our drinks before we begin.”
We sparred quietly on the chessboard, neither of us gaining an advantage, until Caroline arrived. Cilia set her drink on a coaster without touching it. I took a stiff pull of mine.
“Where to begin,” Cilia said. She studied the board for a moment and hid her knight behind a pawn. “It begins, I suppose, with the death of my mother. That’s when I decided that I would never allow a man to abuse me in any way ever again.
“You see, McKenzie, my father was an evil degenerate. Corrupt. Depraved. He treated women, treated my mother, maids—as far as my father was concerned, women were a royal prerogative to do with as he wished, a natural entitlement of wealth and power. His specialty was live-in maids. It gave him immense pleasure to tease them, flirt with them, pursue them, and eventually abuse and terrorize them. And worse. Much worse. A lot of money was spent to hush up his transgressions. Then he began . . .”
She paused for a moment, as if she were gathering her strength.
“My father raped me from age fourteen to age sixteen. He would climb into my bed and he would take me and afterward he would say, ‘That’s my little girl.’ My mother knew this, of course. Her way of dealing with it was to commit suicide. My father insisted that Mother’s death was the result of a traffic accident. Yet even as a child I knew you don’t drive cold sober one hundred and twenty miles an hour into a bridge abutment on a sunny summer day by accident.”
Cilia cursed under her breath. She moved her bishop carelessly.
“She was weak,” Cilia muttered.
I moved a rook into position to counter the bishop.
Cilia shook her head to dislodge the black memories and sipped a generous portion of her drink before removing her bishop to its original position. I sent another pawn forward.
“I was not weak,” she said, and moved a pawn to match mine. “Shortly after my mother’s death, I went to my father’s bed. I crawled in next to him—he seemed to like that—and I gently placed the blade of a ten-inch-long butcher knife I had spent fifteen minutes sharpening against his throat and assured him that if he did not leave me alone I would kill him. I spoke calmly, Mr. McKenzie. Softly, almost in a whisper. I think that’s why he didn’t believe me. He shouted at me, insulted me, told me to get out of his bed. I didn’t move. But the knife blade did. It moved about an inch across his throat.
“The cut wasn’t deep, but there was a great deal of blood. It spilled down his neck and onto the pillow and sheets. He clutched his throat to stem the bleeding. ‘You’re crazy,’ he told me. ‘You’re insane.’ But now he believed. I told him to leave me alone, to leave Robert alone. He said he would. He kept his promise. He never forced himself on me again. Nor did he ever again engage me in a conversation that lasted more than thirty seconds. He made it clear that I would need to fend for myself—myself and my brother. It was because of my brother that I stayed in the house even after I reached my majority. It’s your move, Mr. McKenzie.”
I was astonished. Not only at the story, but also at the matter-of-fact manner in which Cilia related it. She spoke about subjects that would send most people into an emotional frenzy, yet her voice held no anger or pain. Instead, it possessed a yearning, thoughtful quality, and when she spoke, she had a way of drawing out some words as if she wished she could think of better ones.
I moved my rook, and Cilia swept it off the board.
“Pay attention, McKenzie,” she said.
“Tell me about Becker.”
“In due time. First, allow me to tell you about my brother. Robert was an alcoholic, like our father, and like our father, he was abusive and totally amoral. Merodie wasn’t the first young woman he corrupted by any means. If there was a difference between the two, it was that Father was also ambitious. He enjoyed money and power and wasn’t above working long, hard hours to accumulate them. Robert did mind. He detested work, school, anything that required effort. Robert lived only to indulge himself.
“Make no mistake, my father adored Robert. At the same time, he was fearful of what Robert would do to the company he built from scratch. So he turned to me. I had a master’s degree in chemistry. My father offered me a job in the company’s R&D department and paid me nearly twice as much as everyone else with similar credentials and years of experience. A number of times I was invited to business functions and other gatherings. We rarely spoke at these events, yet he would introduce me to one and all as his ‘favorite daughter.’ That was as close as he ever came to saying, ‘I’m sorry.’ Later, after he died, my father left his entire estate—his business and the money to run it—to me. I was as surprised as anyone. For a time I amused myself with the delusion that he had a guilty conscience, but time taught me that he left everything to me because he did not trust Robert. I was all he had left.
“Now, this is important, Mr. McKenzie. When I first joined the firm, St. Ana Medical was attempting to develop a product that could compete with Ativan, Valium, and Xanax as a viable treatment for insomnia and anxiety. I was working on an analog of gamma-hydroxybutyrate—”
“GHB?”
“Yes.”
“The date-rape drug?”
“Yes. GHB had been used productively in Europe as an anesthetic, as an aid to childbirth, and as a means to treat sleep disorders such as narcolepsy. We were hoping to develop a superior analog. And I succeeded.
“As a sleep aid—and this is GHB’s primary disadvantage—as a sleep aid GHB has only a short-term influence. Even though sleep is deeper and more restful, people will wake up after only about three hours. This pattern is known as ‘the dawn effect.’ However, with my analog, people remained asleep for eight to nine hours. Something just as significant—while GHB can be detected in urine four to five hours after it is taken, my analog completely metabolized into carbon dioxide and water in less than two hours.
“Unfortunately, it was at about that time that GHB was banned in the United States by the FDA and later designated a Schedule I Controlled Substance because people, mostly men, used it to assist in sexual assault, mostly of women. As a result, my analog was shelved.”
“Why is that important?” I asked.
“The analog allowed me to kill without detection.”
“Kill who?”
“My father, to begin with.”
I tried to speak. No words came out. It was as if I had suddenly lost the power of speech. Just as well. I didn’t know what to say anyway.
“Your turn,” Cilia said, indicating the chessboard.
I moved my remaining rook three spaces.
Cilia brought her queen out.
“You want me to tell you about it, don’t you?” she said.
I reached for my iced gin-tea, hesitated.
Cilia chuckled.
“The drink is fine, Mr. McKenzie,” she said. “Really it is.”
I left the glass undisturbed just the same.
Cilia continued her story.
“My father came home after a night of carousing. He was visibly drunk. I knew he would be. I waited for him by the pool. I was dressed in the skimpiest bikini. I invited him to join me for a drink. Do you believe, Mr. McKenzie, that the sight of me in a bikini would make a man such as my father pause?”
“Yes,” I said.
“I placed two grams of my analog into my father’s drink. He fell unconscious in twenty minutes. I rolled him into the swimming pool, clothes and all. The shock of water awakened him, but by then he was suffering from acute loss of muscle control. He thrashed about ineffectually and drowned. I went to bed—after first tidying up, of course. His body was discovered by a maid the next morning. An autopsy was performed, and that worried me. I was concerned that Father had died before his system could absorb the drug. However, while multiple toxicology screens of blood and bile samples revealed that my father’s blood alcohol level was enormously high, there was no trace of my analog. Perhaps, if the medical examiner had looked closer—but why would he? My father had a history of alcohol abuse; there had been many witnesses to his abuse the previous evening. His death was ruled an accident. I inherited everything.”
“Do you realize what you’re saying?” I asked.
“My father abused my mother, our maids, and God knows who else. He raped me for two years. Yet in the end, it was I who fucked him.”
“That’s murder.”
“I prefer to think of it as irony.”
The corners of Cilia’s thin lips curled upward in a slight smile, yet her voice contained no trace of emotion.
“Should we continue our game?” she asked. “I think I’m winning.”
I moved a bishop into a middle square, slamming it down on the board harder than I should have. Cilia’s hand hovered above her knight. She wanted to move it but realized that I had pinned her. If she moved the piece now, I would attack her king.
“Very nice,” she said, bringing a rook up to protect the knight.
I continued the assault, pressuring Cilia’s queen with my own rook. Cilia surprised me by taking the rook with her other knight.
“What happened next?” she said. “Oh, yes. Robert. Several months passed, yet Robert did not change a bit. In many ways he became more and more like Father. I was somewhat disingenuous earlier when I suggested that I did not know about Merodie until after my brother’s funeral. Of course I knew about her. My brother took particular delight in listing the sex acts he forced her to perform—acts that would make a hard-core porn star retch. He was proud of himself, proud that he could corrupt a child.
“Eventually, Merodie became pregnant,” Cil
ia said. “She informed my brother, and my brother rejected her. He claimed he wasn’t the father and called her a whore—he acted exactly the way you’d expect an egocentric child to act. In the past, Robert was able to run to Daddy, who would throw money at the girl and make the problem go away. Unfortunately—for him—Robert was forced to come to me for the money necessary to pay off Merodie. I refused to give it to him. He threatened to sue me for his share of our father’s estate. I told him that was his prerogative.
“As was typical with my brother, instead of securing an attorney, he went that same evening to a bar and became drunk. Later, he called me from the bar and requested a ride home. It had begun to snow heavily. By the time I arrived, several inches had already fallen. It was the first stage of a massive blizzard. You might remember it. Seventeen inches of snow fell in about five and a half hours. While at the bar, I slipped a couple of grams of my analog into Robert’s drink, then hustled him out to his car before the drug could take effect.
“I drove Robert’s car. He sat next to me in the passenger seat. He called me vile, obscene names and demanded that I give him money for Merodie and his other projects until he fell into a nontoxic coma. My experience with my father taught me to be more circumspect. To be sure that my analog would not be discovered in his body, I was determined to kill Robert slowly in order to give his system time to metabolize the drug.
“I drove along East River Road until I found a likely spot near the park, and when I was sure there was no traffic about, I drove the car off the road. I realized later there was a certain amount of danger to me—I could have been injured—but I didn’t consider it at the time. After we came to a stop, I pushed and pulled to get him behind the steering wheel. I locked the doors. After first making sure the exhaust pipe was buried, I climbed to the top of the ravine. The hardest part was trudging through the blizzard back to my own car. It was only a few miles, but the journey took nearly two hours in the storm. My feet and hands were wet and numb from cold—I was afraid I’d succumb to frostbite. Fortunately, I survived the ordeal, drove home, and climbed into a hot tub.”
“What about Robert?” I asked.
“They discovered his car a couple of days later. Once again the autopsy found a great deal of alcohol, but not a trace of my analog. He was ruled dead of carbon monoxide poisoning, and his death was dismissed as an accident.”
Dead Boyfriends Page 17
