by Ingrid Black
His brother told us that Randall had been twitchy around cops ever since he was questioned in New Mexico about the murder of a woman. They’d given him a hard time, apparently, which was why he’d been so nervous when he came across the same treatment in New York.
Piper must’ve told him he could keep him away from the cops this time. Maybe he said he knew someone at the American Embassy who could clear up the misunderstanding. By then it was too late. All the time, Piper had been laying the final pieces of the trail for Kaminski to follow, until finally he pulled the biggest rabbit of all out of the hat: himself.
He’d made contact with Kaminski.
Offered to help.
I recalled the book of matches Kaminski had in his pants the night he’d found the ring in Cecilia Corrigan’s grave and been arrested. The Mountain House Lodge in Aspen, Colorado. I should have remembered this was where he and Piper had gone skiing together during their vacations. That had probably been Piper’s sign to Kaminski that he was back in touch, that he’d forgiven him for taking Heather from him, and he wanted to help find the man who killed her. That was what Kaminski had been talking about that night. “I’m making progress at last,” he’d said. But his only progress had been right into Piper’s hands.
And how would it end?
I thought I knew the answer to that, but I was almost afraid to form the thought in my head. Almost afraid that thinking it would make it true.
For now, only one thing mattered.
Finding Kaminski.
Chapter Forty
Shortly after midnight, a woman returning home late from work noticed that the wooden gates leading into Marsha Reed’s house in the Liberties had been forced open. She called the local police station, and the despatcher sent out an order that the nearest patrol car should go round and check it out. We heard the message over the radio as we returned to town along Morehampton Road from Becky Corrigan’s house.
“It’s probably just a coincidence,” said Walsh.
“Better check it out all the same,” said Fitzgerald, and she took the next left onto Marlborough Road, heading to Ranelagh, and from there down to the Grand Canal.
The night still looked unfeasibly new, despite the lateness of the hour. No one was going to bed. The warm lights of the city kept them from wanting to go home. On the side of the canal, a group of young men, giddy from the evening’s merrymaking, stood cheering round a lamp post as one of their number shinned up to place a traffic cone at the top like a hat. Lovers embraced on bridges.
The streets were bleaker and more deserted once we crossed onto Clanbrassil Street, because here the city was less inviting, and there was less to stay outside for, and the only other sign of life as we came to the place where Marsha Reed had lived was the patrol car which was only now arriving at her gate in answer to the radio’s summons.
The uniformed cop looked almost startled to see us until Fitzgerald waved her badge at him. Then he looked relieved when she told him we’d be taking over.
“Just wait in the car in case we need you,” she said.
“See,” I said.
The gates had been forced with a crowbar. Splintered wood flowered from the wound. I pushed them open a fraction and peered into the shadowy alley, trying to make out movement, shapes, anything. The darkness wasn’t cooperating.
It certainly didn’t look so pleasant a spot as it had the other day when I came here to meet Marsha’s friend Kim. The night may have been warm, but there was a harder edge now.
“Walsh, have you got a torch?”
“In the boot, Chief.”
“Go get it.”
Walsh walked to the car and returned quickly with a flashlight. He handed it to Fitzgerald, and she switched it on, pointing the beam down the alley, probing for the same signs of movement, like a searchlight picking out enemy aircraft.
The beam was bright enough to reveal the whole scene ahead as luridly as though lit by a blast of lightning, only this lightning didn’t burn itself out instantly. Way down the end of the lane, light reflected against a window and disturbed the bats in the trees. They squeaked in protest as they flapped out of the way of the light. Leaves were exposed like negatives.
“It’s probably nothing,” said Fitzgerald. “Kids. Or some drunk looking for a place to sleep. But there’s only one way to find out for sure.”
She pushed the gate and we stepped inside and began to walk the path down to Marsha’s house. The church loomed up in the darkness, more ominous now than it had seemed in the daytime. This must have been what it looked like that night Marsha Reed was murdered. This must have been what Lucas Piper saw as he approached.
Or maybe that night there’d been a light ahead, shining by the front door, forming some destination to aim at. Maybe the stained glass windows had glowed from within.
Maybe Marsha had even been waiting at the door.
When we reached the end of the lane, where the grounds opened out around the church, Fitzgerald stopped and pointed the flashlight into the corners of the garden.
Just to be sure.
Emptiness gaped back.
That left only the church itself.
I heard Fitzgerald gasp as the light spread across the doorway.
The door was open.
“Should I get backup?” whispered Walsh.
Fitzgerald took a moment, composing herself.
“I want to take a look first,” she answered.
We crossed quietly to the door and climbed the steps. Fitzgerald reached out a hand and pushed at the door. It opened smoothly, without a sound. The stone hallway behind it was cleared of furniture now. It looked more like a church again than a place to live.
“Let me go first, Chief.”
Fitzgerald raised her finger to her lips.
“Can you hear it?” she asked him.
I heard it too.
A whispering like her own, only this sound was continual, a voice talking to itself softly in the dark ahead, without any alteration in tone, as if in prayer. Someone else was still inside the church, and it sure didn’t sound like kids or some drunk.
Only one more door to go.
My skin was taut with tension.
Fitzgerald’s too, I realised as her arm accidentally brushed against mine, and an electric shock passed between us. When did it suddenly get so cold? Wasn’t it summer?
Her hand closed around the door handle.
Turned it.
Click.
The sound of the lock releasing was like a gun hammer cocking.
“Police,” warned Fitzgerald, raising her voice.
Then she entered.
The flashlight in her hand broke into the church first, bright as an angel appearing out of nowhere. But there was no angel standing ahead of us, only a man with his arms raised in front of his face to shield his eyes from the unexpected illumination, hands facing outwards.
His hands were stained red.
Behind him his shadow surged against the stone, huge as a monster.
He was standing on the altar where Marsha Reed’s bed had stood.
The bed where she’d died.
And I saw now that the bed was still there. Her father must have wanted it left untouched, as though it was cursed somehow. Fitzgerald dipped the light so that the man standing there could lower his hands, and the beam of light spread across the bed - and found something else. Another figure, except this one was not standing, and would never stand again. Instead it was doubled over, arms clutched under a belly that must have been seared with agony at the moment of death but which was now far beyond the reach of pain. Blood pooled out on the mattress underneath the body, black as treacle in the flashlight’s gaze.
A knife, coloured in the same black along the blade, lay discarded on the floor.
“JJ?” I said, because the figure standing in front of the bed had now lowered his arms, and I could see that it was Kaminski, and he was smiling, his lips still moving in whispers.
“Kaminski,”
said Fitzgerald. “What have you done?”
“I killed him,” he said, and the smile grew wider.
“Killed who?” she demanded. “Who have you killed?”
“Randall,” he said, frowning like the question was so ridiculous as to not even deserve an answer. “Buck Randall – he’s dead. It’s over. He thought he could get away with it. He thought he could kill Heather and I’d just let him get away with it.”
I couldn’t speak.
Piper had told Randall he’d be back in Texas before the end of the summer.
What he hadn’t told him is that he’d be returning in a casket.
I saw now that this had been the lynchpin of his plan.
Our last hope, that Kaminski would learn the truth, and that Piper could take Randall’s place, the place that should have been his, was gone.
Fitzgerald’s voice was cold.
“You fool,” she said. “Buck Randall didn’t kill your wife.”
Kaminski started to laugh, and then the laugh became angry when he realised he was laughing on his own.
“What are you talking about?” he demanded. “What are you -? Are you fucking crazy or something? Do you think I don’t know what this bastard did to me?”
“Buck Randall did not kill your wife,” repeated Fitzgerald.
Kaminski looked from her to me.
“Saxon?” he pleaded.
“She’s right.”
“Then who -? Who killed her?”
“It was Lucas,” I told him.
Kaminski began shaking his head violently.
“No,” he said. “He was helping me.”
“Kaminski, stop.”
“No.”
“He wanted you to suffer for taking Heather away from him.”
“No. He told me he’d find Randall. You know what Piper was like. He could find anyone. You wouldn’t help me. He said we’d do it together for Heather. No,” he said. “No.”
But the word wasn’t a denial anymore, and it wasn’t disbelief. The word was the sound of a man who had just seen every reality on which he had built his life crumble.
A man who had suddenly woken up from a dream, and now realised that everything he had accepted as right was actually wrong. He was where Piper had wanted him. He was at the end of the line, with nowhere left to go. He’d crossed that invisible line and made himself a killer, for the sake of what he thought was justice, but it had all been in vain.
He had murdered an innocent man.
And now Kaminski knew it.
And he’d know it forever.
His eyes were wild with strange truth.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
Kaminski didn’t hear me. Instead he dropped to his knees. He was mumbling something under his breath as his hands felt around the floor.
A moment too late, I saw what he was looking for.
The knife.
Just as I realised what was happening, Kaminski’s fingers closed around the handle of the knife and he turned it round and pointed it to his chest. He closed his eyes.
He thrust the knifepoint towards him.
I watched it all as if in slow motion – but Walsh was quicker. He’d seen what Kaminski was about to do and had managed to make up the space between. As Kaminski’s grip tightened on the knife, preparing himself for what was to come, the young detective threw himself forward to snatch at the handle. The knife still entered Kaminski, but not where he’d wanted it to go, not where the decision would have been irreversible.
Kaminski gave a low moan of pain that swiftly turned into a lower moan of despair as Walsh cheated him of the knife and stopped him finishing what he’d started.
“Let me die,” he begged. “Please, let me die.”
I often wondered afterwards if it wouldn’t have been kinder to just let him do it.
Epilogue
The following evening we repaired to Shanahan’s On The Green, a restored Georgian townhouse now transformed into an American-style steakhouse, and best known, apart from the fact that the body of a young woman had been found in the foundations in the 18th century, for the rocking chair behind the bar in the basement where we were now sitting.
The chair had once belonged to President Kennedy. He took it everywhere with him, including Air Force One. Now it presided over drinkers in the suitably-named Oval Office Bar.
It was Stella Carson who’d suggested we all meet up here – Fitzgerald, Healy, Walsh, herself and me - and I didn’t complain. It was one of my favourite places in the whole city.
We were sitting now on velvet red armchairs around a table on which perched an antique lamp surrounded by champagne glasses, as though they were guarding it.
The champagne had been Fitzgerald’s idea. She’d long been of the opinion that champagne was for celebrations and commiserations and all points inbetween. Me, I’d have preferred a beer, but when someone else is paying, you don’t complain about that either.
So which was it? Celebration or commiseration? Two cases which I’d convinced myself were connected, and then been forced to admit might have nothing to do with one another, turned out to be connected after all, but neither in the way we expected, and the angle which had seemed to most of the investigating team like an absurd distraction turned out to be the heart of it all. Meanwhile the only person behind bars was Leon Kaminski. I didn’t know what would happen to him. Even if a judge and jury took pity on him in the end for the murder of Buck Randall, he was locked now in a prison of his own making, and Piper had the key.
As long as Piper was out there, Kaminski could never be free again, never be at peace.
As for Solomon, he’d been released earlier that day. There was no chance of pursuing a case against him for murder anymore, not after all that had happened, and Ellen Forwood was refusing to press charges against him for the incident in which she’d been injured.
He was a free man, though I doubted his career would exactly flourish in future.
Mud sticks.
“If you close a case, then it’s a celebration,” the Assistant Commissioner ruled in the end. “Even if you feel utterly crap about it. That should be the first rule of detective work.”
“Hear, hear,” said Healy. “I’ll drink to that.”
And he reached out a hand and lightly touched the back of Stella Carson’s own. It was a tiny gesture, scarcely noticeable. Walsh didn’t even see it – though that could’ve been because he was eyeing up the waitress as she weaved her way slinkily among the tables.
I looked at Fitzgerald and saw her smiling.
Silently, I managed to ask if what I was seeing was what I thought it was. Silently, she managed to answer that it was.
I couldn’t have been more astonished. All this time, I’d been tormenting myself with the possibility that something might develop between Fitzgerald and Stella Carson, and all the while the one the Assistant Commissioner was getting close to was Healy.
Othello should have taught me the dangers of jealousy.
It was like Fitzgerald said. You saw what you wanted to see, you made connections where your mind made them, making things appear that were not really there.
You started seeing the world through the wrong eyes.
“There’s just one thing I don’t understand,” said Fitzgerald.
“The necklace,” said Healy.
“Exactly. If Marsha really did inadvertently arrange her own murder, and Solomon had nothing to do with it, then how did the necklace end up hidden in a bag in his office? Piper never said anything about either of them. I’d swear he didn’t know they existed.”
“I can answer that,” said a voice behind us.
We turned to find Todd Fleming standing close by, looking nervous and carrying a small holdall.
**********
Fleming had followed us to Shanahan’s that evening to make a confession. He wanted to tell us what really happened on the night of Marsha Reed’s murder. She’d called him at the internet cafe, he said, and told him what she
planned to do. Told him about her arrangement with her anonymous caller. What he was going to do. He told her she was mad. Told her it was dangerous. Warned her about all the things that could go wrong, but she wouldn’t listen. It was all an act, she assured him, nothing more. Where was the harm in that?
She told him that she’d planned the whole thing to scare Solomon into thinking that he’d almost lost her. She’d tried everything. She’d tried begging and blackmail and a plentiful supply of sex and even the prospect of some of her father’s money to try and lure him back to her, but Solomon was having none of it. He wanted out of their relationship once and for all. He was going to marry Ellen Forwood and nothing Marsha could do would change that. The only thing she could think of to bring him back was to make him believe that she had almost been killed.
Surely once he saw how close he had been to losing her forever, he’d realise he loved her, and had to be with her, and how much she needed him? She had it all worked out.
She was to be roughed up a little and tied to the bed. The bruises would make it look good afterwards. The cuts would heal. She didn’t mind. Didn’t she enjoy pain? Didn’t it turn her on? In fact, she was happy as she told him what was in store. Excited. She wasn’t afraid.
She just needed Todd’s help to make the deception complete. His role was to call round later after work and let himself into the house. The story would be that he had disturbed the killer in the act and the monster had fled. Then he was to call the police. Marsha would take it from there. She was an actress, after all. She knew how to lie convincingly.
Todd Fleming was terrified, he was confused, he was angry that she was still thinking about getting back with Solomon after the way he’d treated her. But she managed to talk him round. He agreed to call to her house after he finished work. How could he refuse? He loved her. Whatever she asked of him, he had to do it. He couldn’t help himself.
What he actually found when he got there and let himself in with the spare key she’d left waiting on the doorstep for him was Marsha’s lifeless body lying on the bed.
