When I had made it back into the kitchen, I could see Catherine at the bottom of the stairs, Renee above her on the second step.
Catherine was clutching at her grandmother with her sound arm. “No, Granny, nobody forced me to come; it was my idea, not V l.’s, not Benji’s. I kidnapped him, he didn’t force me to do anything.”
“Catherine, they call this the Stockholm syndrome; I’m all too familiar with its effect on people. I’m not surprised, after the week you’ve had, with your injury, and the anesthesia still in your system. Go outside now and wait in the Rover; I’ll be with you directly.”
Catherine turned to me, tears streaming down her face. “Oh, tell her, tell Granny. Benji came with me, he didn’t force me, you didn’t force me! Granny, Granny, it’s all right!” she screamed.
“Catherine, go out to the Rover. You’re in the way in here.” Renee stepped down to point her gun at me. “You! Drop your gun! Now! Kick it under the table!”
I couldn’t risk a shot at her without hitting Catherine. I dropped my gun and kicked it under the kitchen table.
Catherine’s eyes were black holes in her white face. “Granny. You don’t understand. VI. came here to help me. She’s a friend.”
“And you don’t understand, Catherine. You’ve gotten involved in something too big for you right now.”
Catherine ducked under Renee’s arm and ran up the stairs. Her grandmother fired at me, a reckless shot that made me hit the floor. She ran after her granddaughter. By the time I had crawled under the table for my own gun and gotten back on my feet, Renee and Catherine were both at the top of the stairs.
I heard Benji scream, “No, I doing nothing, nothing to Catterine, not touching, you not shoot,” and Catherine shouting, “You mustn’t, you mustn’t shoot him, he’s my friend. Granny, no!” and then the gun sounded again.
I pelted up the stairs, but before I reached the top, Renee appeared in the stairwell head and shot down at me. Plaster fell on me, blinding me, and I flattened myself against the side of the stairwell. Squinting through the plaster dust, I could just make out Renee’s legs and the motion of her hand. I tried a shot. Her legs moved back, but she fired again. Crouching down, hugging the wall, I ran up the stairs, shooting twice to back her away.
Renee’s legs suddenly crumpled. Her gun clattered past me on the stairs. I climbed the last three steps uncertainly. On the upper landing, Geraldine Graham was standing over Renee, the Gabonese mask clutched in her arthritic hands. She was trembling, and blood oozed through the towel on her left foot, but she was smiling grimly.
“Look to the children,” she said.
Benji and Catherine lay in a heap of coats and blood. Flowers of blood spread petals around them. I didn’t know at first which one was wounded, so closely were they entwined, but when I knelt to feel them, Catherine was warm and Benji’s fingers were ice, his pulse a thread. He opened his eyes, said something in Arabic, and then, in English, added, “I seeing Granny before one week. She driving thing like tonight, thing not car, like tonight I seeing from window, she putting man in water.”
“Hush. I know you did. You hush now. Catherine, let go of him, I’m going to carry him downstairs and take him to the hospital.”
I pried her fingers from his cold side. “You bring the coats so we can keep him warm.”
I picked him up, a slight youth, a feather in my arms. “Hold on. You hold on to me, Benji.”
Catherine followed me, leaning against me so she could keep her good hand on Benji’s body. In the kitchen, I kicked Renee’s gun in front of me, tipping it into the snow on my way out. Before we reached the Rover, Benji was dead in my arms.
CHAPTER 54
Unnatural Sleep
I longed for sleep more than I had wanted anything my whole life. I wanted a bath and a bed and oblivion, but instead I had the Eagle River cops and the Vilas County sheriff, as they tried to make sense of the senseless.
When Catherine and I returned to the house with Benji’s body, I laid him on the dining room table, a catafalque of sorts, a laying out in state. Catherine refused to leave him, even though she was shivering so violently that her hand couldn’t stay in place on Benji’s head.
I went to the living room for the blankets we’d wrapped Geraldine in earlier. When I brought them back to the dining room, Catherine had climbed up on the table beside Benji. She was cradling his head in her lap. I swathed her in blankets, but her shivering wouldn’t stop.
I took my cell phone from my bag and looped the mike around my neck. While I tracked down the local emergency services, I folded my arms around Catherine, trying to rub some warmth into her. By the time I was finally connected to the county dispatcher, the worst of her shaking had eased, but the room was filled with the sickly sweet scent of her fear, and her urine.
A shadow in the living room made me let go of her and run to the arched doorway. It was Geraldine, not Renee, drawing on her own formidable will to hobble down the stairs on her wounded foot. She looked from
me to Catherine shivering in her blankets, then limped over and draped her sable coat across the girl’s shoulders. I tucked it around Catherine as best I could. She wouldn’t move or look at me, but stared straight ahead, Benji’s head in her lap.
I’d seen a set of wicker chairs in one corner of the living room. I brought two of them over to the arch connecting living and dining rooms, so we could sit but still keep an eye on Catherine. I pulled over a coffee table for Geraldine to prop her foot on. She’d lost the towels I’d tied around her wound; blood oozed onto the glass tabletop.
“That was a terrible deed, shooting the boy in front of her own granddaughter,” Geraldine said, adding in a conversational tone, “I wasn’t able to kill Renee. What are we going to do with her when she revives?”
“Try to get our story in first,” I said grimly. “The law will be here soon, and she’s going to be spinning her line about Benji as a terrorist kidnapper.” “Was he a terrorist?” Geraldine asked.
“I think he was an orphan boy far from home who got caught in a war he didn’t know was going on. All he wanted to do was make money to help his mother and his sisters.” Tears pricked the back of my lids. I shook them off angrily-I needed my wits, not my emotions, for whatever lay ahead.
Geraldine and I sat silent, both of us exhausted. At one point, she said, “How odd Darraugh and Edwards will find it, to know their mothers have been fighting.”
I grunted, but didn’t move or speak until I heard Renee stirring on the upper landing. I got up, gun out, as she staggered down the front stairs, disheveled but haughty.
She looked past me to Geraldine. “You have a knack for hovering around my family when you are least wanted, Geraldine. You may leave my granddaughter to me now”
I felt my temper rising. “Renee, I don’t know if you’re insane or just giving a good impersonation, but a high-handed act isn’t going to work tonight. Catherine is in shock because she saw you murder Benjamin Sadawi in cold blood. We will not leave you alone with her.”
Renee looked at me loftily. “I thought you and that terrorist had kidnapped her; I shot him in the belief I was protecting her.”
“I should have hit you harder, Renee,” Geraldine said in her flutey
voice. “It brought me such satisfaction, I should have hit you forty years ago. Perhaps I could have beaten some sense into you. I understand what you’re doing; I understand you believe you can persuade a policeman and a judge of what you are saying, because you have the power and position of the Bayard name behind you. You think Victoria is a servant of no account who can be belittled and discounted the way my mother treated detectives forty years ago. But times have changed; detectives are sophisticated nowadays, and Victoria stands high in my son’s and my estimation. Very high. We are prepared to support her version of tonight’s events.”
“You can’t forgive me for marrying Calvin, can you?” Renee said, amused contempt in her voice. “After all this time, you still don’t understand
that he was weary of your posturing and your neediness-and your aging body; he turned to me for relief from all those things.”
Geraldine smiled. “I’m the one he calls for when he’s frightened, Renee. Not you nor Kylie nor any of the others. Your staff may think he means you when he cries `Deenie,’ but I was always Deenie to him, from the time we first tried swimming together in the Larchmont pool when we were four.”
“I’m the one who protected his reputation,” Renee snapped, her composure cracking. “I’m the one who saved him from prison, who helped build up the Bayard Foundation and the press. I’m the one who turned him into an international figure, while you sat withering, turning grayer and grayer in that mausoleum, buried alive by your mother.”
“Until Calvin’s reputation became so important to you that you killed three people to protect it,” I put in. “I’m not going to pretend to weep over Olin Taverner, but Marcus Whitby was a fine young journalist, a fine young man, while Benji Sadawi was a helpless bystander. Do you think your granddaughter will ever want to live with you again, now that she knows you killed these people? You sacrificed their lives, you sacrificed her well-being-“
“Catherine knows me. She knows I love her as deeply as I do Calvin,” Renee said.
“So she’ll stay with you because she knows you’ll kill anyone who threatens your idea of her? I don’t think so. I think nature made something finer than you or Calvin in your granddaughter. She’ll recoil from you the way she would from sewage.”
Renee smiled contemptuously. “You have no children, no home life. I doubt very much you are a judge of family relationships.”
I thought of my mother’s fierce love for me, and my father’s more level affection; the price they demanded in return was not adoration, nor achievement, but integrity. I could not lie or cheat to avoid trouble. I didn’t try to tell Renee that.
“The sad thing is that I liked you, Renee. I admired your husband to the point of hero worship, but I genuinely liked you. You have the kind of energy and competence I’ve always admired.”
She flushed and left us to go into the dining room. Catherine sat motionless on the table, like a small furry Buddha, but when Renee took her good arm and tried to move her, she jerked away and lay down next to Benji, kissing him on the lips.
I could hear the sirens from the emergency crew keening their way up the drive. A moment later, the cars poured into the yard, their strobes staining the night sky red.
CHAPTER 55
Shoot-Out at the Eagle River Corral
A cold sun hung well over Elk Horn Lake before I got into a bed. It took hours to sort things out with the local authorities. I didn’t blame themthe carnage in the house was shocking. Nor did I blame them for first wanting to haul me away-a youth lay dead in the dining room, a teenager and an old woman both had gunshot wounds and I was the one with a gun.
The officer in charge, a raw-faced man named Blodel, ordered a couple of deputies to hold on to me and my gun. When she realized what they were doing, Geraldine put on her grandest dame manner. She commanded Blodel to listen to her before he did anything he might afterwards feel “had been regrettable.” Despite her pain and her loss of blood, she gave a short, fluent account of Renee’s role in the evening’s wreckage. She stayed in the wicker chair, but her air of command was such that Blodel stopped what he was doing to attend to her.
“She shot the boy, she tried to kill Victoria. Victoria, where is Renee’s gun?” I told Blodel he would find the gun in the snow outside the kitchen door. “It will have Ms. Bayard’s fingerprints on it. And you’ll find its bullets will match the one that killed the youth in the dining room.”
Blodel sent a woman out to look for Renee’s gun, but his other officer kept a grip on me. Renee saw this as her opportunity to seize control of the situation. She left Catherine’s side, wearing an air of command like a second jacket, to tell Blodel that Benjamin Sadawi was a terrorist, wanted by the FBI, and that she had shot him to protect her granddaughter. She would appreciate Blodel’s help in getting her granddaughter to an airplane; the child was in shock, was recovering from an injury, and needed to be flown back to Chicago for medical care.
Geraldine and I listened to this with mounting indignation, but we couldn’t edge in a word to contradict her: Blodel kept silencing us when we tried to speak.
Geraldine’s wrath finally pushed her to her feet. “Oh, these lies, Renee, these lies; they fit you like the glove to hand. And you should know, Renee, that Marcus Whitby saw the agreement Calvin and Olin signed together. Whatever was in that agreement, Julius Arnoff has a copy of it.”
Before she could go further, her bad foot gave way and she collapsed, scrabbling at Blodel’s arms on her way down. My deputy let go of me to help get Geraldine back into a chair, and to make sure she hadn’t suffered further hurt. While their attention was on Geraldine-and on Renee, who was saying, “Oh, Geraldine, must you always play the victim to garner attention?”-I retreated to a corner of the living room with my cell phone.
My first call was to Freeman Carter. My lawyer wasn’t happy to hear from me at four in the morning, but he took in a summary of what had happened. He said he knew a lawyer in Rhinelander, the nearest big town, and put me on hold while he looked up the number. When he’d given it to me, he told me to wait half an hour before phoning so he could put the local guy in the picture.
I called Bobby Mallory next. Years of midnight emergencies brought him to the phone grouchy but coherent.
“I’m in Eagle River, Bobby. Renee Bayard just shot Benjamin Sadawi.” “Give it to me fast, Victoria. And straight, no frills.”
I gave it to him straight. Mostly straight. Not too many frills. I told him how Catherine ran away with Benji yesterday afternoon, at which he interrupted: How did I know? It wasn’t because I had known where Benji was and helped him escape?
I sidestepped that issue and told Bobby about the phenobarb, about
Calvin Bayard’s nurse with her seizures. I even told him about Calvin’s secret deal with Olin Taverner, although I choked over the words, hardly able to utter them.
“Renee helped broker that deal fortyfive years ago, Bobby. Marc Whitby stumbled on it and went to ask her about it. She wasn’t going to let Calvin’s secret see the light of day. She’d built her life around making him into the great man; she wasn’t going to let the world see him as lesser. She probably killed Olin, too.”
“Your say-so?” Bobby was sarcastic.
“The family lawyer has a copy of an agreement Calvin Bayard and Olin Taverner both signed. I don’t know its details, but the firm is Lebold, Arnofl: If he’ll let you read it, it may make everything clearer.”
Bobby grunted in my ear. “So what got the kid involved in this?”
“He saw Renee Bayard put Marcus Whitby into that pond last week. Right before he died, Benji said he saw Renee drive up in some kind of vehicle that wasn’t a car; he watched her put Marc’s body into the pond. Remember that golf cart I told you about on Sunday? It would have been so easy for her.”
I had been picturing how she’d worked it. She would have invited Marc to meet her-privately: “Keep it to yourself so there isn’t a possibility of Llewellyn hearing about it,” she would have said. “You don’t want to ruin your career by having him know you talked to me.” Marc played his cards close to his chest-everyone agreed to that-so Renee could have counted on his silence.
Catherine was spending that Sunday night in New Solway; Elsbetta had the night off. Renee invited Marc to Banks Street, gave him his favorite bourbon doctored with Theresa’s phenobarb. As soon as he started feeling ill, before he lost consciousness and couldn’t walk, she would have hustled him to his car-“I’d better get you to the hospital,” I could imagine her saying, the organizational genius at work.
When Renee reached Coverdale Lane, Marc would have been barely conscious. She could safely leave him in the car, go under the culvert, get a golf cart, push his body from car to cart and drive him to the pond.
Bobby listened to me all the way through, but he was skeptical when I finished. “Picturesque, but no proof.”
I almost stamped my foot in frustration. “If I’m right, that cart in the equipment shed will have evidence for your forensic techs to find. It would be great if they got to it before the golf course repaints it or trashes it.”
He paused. “All right. I’ll move that up the priority list, but what does your fairy tale have to do with the mess you’re in now?”
“Renee hightailed it up here to silence Benji, so he couldn’t identify her. But Geraldine Graham and I both heard him say he’d seen her put Marcus Whitby into the pond when he was up in the Larchmont attic.”
“Yeah, hearsay testimony of a dead terrorist. I’m not even going to try to take that into court.”
“Well, try some real evidence, then, with some real police work.” My temper was fraying. “Before Renee returns to Chicago as a triumphant heroine who killed a terrorist, it would be great to nail down Calvin Bayard’s nurse and the housekeeper, and find out how much of the nurse’s phenobarb is missing. Whether Renee’s prints are on the bottle. Whether they saw Renee last Monday night when she claimed to be in Chicago. Also, someone might have seen Renee go into Taverner’s place the night Taverner died. Also, someone might have seen Whitby go to Renee’s apartment last Sunday.”
“That’s a lot of mghs,” Bobby objected, adding with heavy humor, “and a hundred `mites’ don’t add up even to a flea.”
“The golf cart is pretty damned concrete.” I tried not to shout.
“Don’t swear, Vicki, it’s ugly in a woman. I told you we’ll look at the cart. We’ll do it today, but for the rest of it, you know I don’t like playing with your theories, especially not when they cross jurisdictions like this. And even more especially not with a wanted man like Sadawi involved.”
Blacklist Page 43
