Till the End of Tom

by Gillian Roberts

  Before I reached the corner, and despite having seen the black car cross the intersection and keep going, I checked and rechecked the street, glancing behind and to the sides of me, as if other, equally insane drivers were apt to strike from any angle. I’d lost my sense of safety and possibly was descending into paranoia.

  On one of my swivels, I spotted Zachary talking with unusual animation to a well-dressed, pretty woman—his mother. They stood near the school, out of the line of pedestrian traffic, and reading their body language, they were involved in a tense dispute.

  Zach noticed me, then turned quickly back to his mother, who leaned close to him, her expression agitated. He tilted his head in my direction, then grabbed hold of the shoulder of her coat as she turned toward me. “Miss Pepper,” she called out. “Please, a moment?”

  “No, Mom,” I heard Zach say. “Don’t. You’ll only—just don’t.”

  “Miss Pepper,” his mother said again, and before I could respond, she said, “I’m Carole Wallenberg, Zachary’s mother.” She put out her hand. “We’ve met before.”

  “Of course. I recognized you.” I shook her outstretched hand. She was obviously upset, or she’d have remembered that for the past two years at least we hadn’t needed to identify ourselves. “Glad to see you again,” I murmured. Zachary looked as if he might bolt and run.

  “I came as quickly as I could. I don’t understand this at all. Why on earth would the police think that this boy—this gentle, good boy—could have murdered that man! God knows he’s given us grounds for it, but still—this is insane!”

  “Mom,” Zachary moaned.

  “You don’t have to convince me,” I said. At that instant, the black sedan reappeared, coming up the street this time, as if it had circled the block. This time, it moved slowly. I couldn’t see the face through the tinted glass. I told myself that I was overreacting. The world was full of black cars. But I didn’t listen to myself because I was sure this was the same car, and I couldn’t convince myself that it posed no danger to me or to the students.

  Carole Wallenberg grabbed my elbow. “How could Zachary have known, how could anybody have known, that Tom was coming here? He’d never come before. He only knows—knew— the name of the place because he paid the tuition.” Her derisive laugh had a bitter, hard-edged sound. “When he severed ties with me, both of us became past tense. Zach and Tom had no relationship, and recently, he was turning it into less than nothing, deliberately humiliating my son.” She turned her head away, her lips pressed tight, as if containing a further torrent of words.

  “Mom,” Zachary said, “she knows. You don’t have to—”

  “How? How could she?” Carole Wallenberg’s head swiveled toward me at top speed, risking whiplash. “Who told you?” she asked me, her eyes wide.

  “I did,” Zach said.

  Her head swiveled again, and then she shook it. “What did you tell her about me?”

  “Nothing! Mom, we didn’t talk about you, so stop it, you’re embarrassing—you’re—”

  “What did you tell her?” She wasn’t screaming, but the tendons of her neck looked as if she were.

  “I told her about—about what . . . my father did.”

  She opened her mouth. Looked at me, as if she could read something through my skin. Closed her mouth. Took a deep breath. “When?”

  “When did I tell her?”

  “What thing that he did—he’s been doing ‘things’ forever. I could list a million malicious, mean-spirited things. Which one?”

  “About college.” His eyebrows pulled together, and his mouth opened slightly even when he wasn’t speaking. His mother had frightened, or at least worried him, and I couldn’t blame him, though I wished I knew what she was afraid he’d said.

  “Can you imagine that?” Carole spoke rapidly, with more animation than was necessary, running over her awkward gaffe, hiding it under a barrage of words. “A man with all the money in the world denying his firstborn child a college education, and for no reason except that the law allows him to do that. But that’s what kind of man Tom is—was. So proper to the world. A pillar of society indeed, and privately, a . . . rat.”

  I had the distinct sense that she had censored words that came more naturally and, I suspected, often.

  “And even so, Zach was going to go.” She used her free hand to poke me, as if I weren’t paying sufficient attention. “We weren’t letting that man ruin his own son’s life. We’d find the funds, and I told him that, didn’t I? I’ve been in school, and I have a part-time job that has every chance of becoming full-time, plus, there are loans. We would have managed, so there would be no point, no motive. Even assuming he came here to see his son, which I can assure you with all my heart and soul he would not, did not, never would.”

  As she spoke, her tempo and tone returned to something closer to normal, but a mother-lion fire burned behind her eyes.

  “Could you?” she demanded of her son who, for his part, looked as if he wanted to sink through the pavement forever. “Answer me. Could you possibly do such a thing? Murder someone?”

  “Mom!”

  “He’s already told me that he didn’t, Mrs.—”

  “Carole, please. I’m sorry I’m so crazed, but my son did not do this. He simply isn’t that kind. He didn’t inherit Tom’s meanness.”

  “Mom, please!” Zach could barely stand still, he’d become so agitated.

  “I’m sorry Zach has to go through this mess,” I said. “If I had the power to stop the investigation, turn it toward a better goal, I would. The police questioned Zach. They didn’t arrest him.”

  “Hasn’t he been through enough already? That man—his father—did everything in his power to destroy this boy. When Zach was . . . acting out, why do you think that was? It doesn’t take a degree in psychology to understand what total rejection—meaningless, unjustified, unmotivated rejection—does to a child, does it? And now this, this—”

  Her eyes glittered with unshed tears, but her words nonetheless had the feel of a prepared speech, or one that she’d been forced to deliver too many times, to school officials or the police during those earlier, rougher days. She was coming unhinged, preaching to the already-converted because she knew I’d listen, and she was afraid nobody else would. “If there’s anything I can do, please, tell me,” I said.

  And then I must have shown some of the growing fear I felt when I again saw the black sedan cruise by. This time, I watched it more carefully. I couldn’t see the license plate, but I saw that it was a Mercedes and it might as well have had a banner stretched around it saying, “I am watching you!”

  Carole Wallenberg turned, following the direction of my eyes. “What?” she said. “What?”

  “Nothing.” By then, of course, the car had turned the corner. Once again, I told myself that I was imagining monsters, but it was getting really difficult to believe that.

  “It’s the drug part of it,” Carole told her son, sounding half out of breath, as if she’d run to him with the message. “That must be why they’re after—”

  “They aren’t really after—”

  “—Zachary. He knew where you could get drugs like that and that they were easy to make, and he knew it because he wrote that article for you!” She glared.

  I put my hands out, palms up. “And a great article it was,” I said. “Fine investigative reporting, but exceptional as it was, I doubt that anyone on the police force reads the Inkwire. Even if they did, even if they thought that it was somehow incriminating, we’d make sure they understood that it wasn’t. Anyone who reads it would know it wasn’t.” Zachary’s article had condemned, in no uncertain language, the very idea of drugging a girl so that she’d be forced to have sex.

  His mother wasn’t listening. Perhaps she thought nothing I said mattered. “Zachary didn’t drug that man. I know that. I can prove—”

  “Mom! Jesus. Please. Miss Pepper doesn’t—leave her alone.”

  I envisioned Zachary and his mother
as poor rats in a maze, running frantically to nowhere, another dead end, and from what? Nobody had accused Zachary of anything specific, and his mother was windmilling, making claims she couldn’t support, insisting she could prove things she couldn’t and didn’t have to in the first place. And she said nothing about all the silent indictments, the circumstantial evidence against him, though I couldn’t keep them out of my mind.

  Zachary’s unfortunate past history of problems with the law.

  His unexplained absence from assembly at just the right—or wrong—time.

  His recent blowup with his father, whether or not it was justified.

  The cast on his arm. Tomas Severin’s dented cheekbone.

  I wondered whether Zach was in Tomas Severin’s will and whether he’d be better off with a dead father than a living one. I thought again of the Steinbeck quote: “. . . live so that our death brings no pleasure to the world.” So far, with the exception of Tomas’s muddled mother, and even she, only sporadically, nobody seemed to be grieving about his death.

  The drug had been peculiar and juvenile. A date-rape drug. Not a typical poison, not fatal. A stupid choice if the intent was to kill, but stupid, alas, brought us back to teens. Zachary’s own article had said it would take no more than five minutes to find a source. All anybody had to do was ask.

  On the other hand, logic also weighed against Zach’s involvement. For starters, according to what Sasha said, Severin’s visit to Philly Prep must have been a spontaneous lunchtime decision, so Zach couldn’t have planned anything.

  That left a big question of how and when he could have administered the drug, and why he would have had access to it in the first place. He was out of assembly, according to his story, long enough to smoke a cigarette in the alley behind the school. I played the necessary steps through in my head: He’d have to have known about and then found the café his father had chosen to drop into en route to the school, and this was a man whose locations and habits he didn’t know. And then, he’d have to have secretly—how?—drugged the tea, then have lured the man who wanted next to nothing to do with him back into the school, avoiding Mrs. Wiggins’s notice. And then he had to convince him to go up the stairs and into my room, and then back out so he could be pushed down the stairs.

  And then he would have had to return to assembly, as if nothing had happened. As if he were an experienced assassin.

  Completely ridiculous.

  “Just because somebody knows where a drug can be found doesn’t mean he—my God, anybody can find or make that stuff. I studied chemistry. Why didn’t the police come to me? Or you? You know, too.” Carole faced me directly. “You assigned those stories. You set him up.”

  This time when Zachary put his large hand on her narrow shoulder it had an instantaneous impact. She spun toward him, and then she shook her head in small, palsied movements and burst into tears. “Who will believe him? They’re so powerful, so cruel—and it’s just us, our word. But he didn’t do it!”

  I tried the hand-on-shoulder technique, very softly. “I believe you,” I said. “I believe Zach. And I believe the truth will out and we’ll learn what really happened. You should try to believe it, too.”

  Once again she was like a wobble doll as she mimed a silent “no.” But there was nothing funny about Carole Wallenberg’s motions. She could barely catch her breath. Silently, except for the hard breathing, she was saying no to everything in a world that she saw poised against her son.

  I stayed with them a little longer, hoping to hear what hadn’t been said, the feared revelations Carole or Zachary Wallenberg had pushed aside, the just below the surface words, but I didn’t learn anything more, and after a polite interval, I left them.

  One block away, I saw the black sedan.

  * * *

  Twelve

  * * *

  * * *

  I walked on automatic pilot, giving free rein now to a major paranoia attack about the car and its driver, about who it might be and what it might want with me. I saw it, or I thought I did, one more time, from a distance, as I approached the office. It—if it was it—kept moving until it blended into traffic and I couldn’t find it anymore. I still wasn’t sure it was the same Mercedes, but that didn’t lessen my anxiety.

  To my delight, Mackenzie was once more at the office. I tried for professional calm and detachment. I tried to remember what I’d wanted to say before I was distracted by Carole Wallenberg and an anonymous black Mercedes. “There’s a hole at the center of this Tom Severin mess,” I said by way of greeting. “It’s driving me crazy. We’re circling something missing, only I can’t see what it is.”

  “Circling something that isn’t there can be a real problem,” Mackenzie said. “So hard to know how large to make the circles. An’ I believe that seeing something that’s not there is generally considered mental illness.”

  “Logic is what isn’t there. The pieces don’t fit.”

  Mackenzie bent forward to stretch out his back. The chairs in Ozzie’s office were anti-ergonomic, sadistically designed.

  “What are we forgetting?” I asked.

  “First we’re circling something not there and now you want me to remember what I’ve forgotten? This is taking on the feel of a Zen koan.”

  “The illogic bothers me. How could Zachary know where and when his father would buy a cup of tea?”

  “Maybe the question is—who did know? How fast does that drug act? If it’s instantaneous, and the man brought tea into the school, and the stuff was dropped in it there, how long would it take to affect him?”

  He was not too subtly implying, correctly, alas, that I hadn’t done my homework. I should have researched these questions, but I hadn’t even thought through the implication of the question till I heard it coming out of my mouth. That didn’t stop me from reacting defensively, from picking up a virtual chip and plunking it on my shoulder. “Why would anybody put a drug—that particular drug—into a man’s tea? It would disorient you, make your reaction time be off, but it isn’t lethal, so if you had murder in mind, why that?”

  “They said a big enough dose could be fatal.”

  “But it’s iffy. And he didn’t drink all the tea. There were too many variables. He was able to walk to the school, go upstairs—that isn’t the way to kill somebody. That isn’t the drug to use. And if you were going to push the man down a staircase—”

  “And do a mite of bashing beforehand, too.” He tapped his cheek. “But maybe that was an improvisation. Maybe there were other plans in mind, but that huge staircase was there, an open invitation.”

  We were back to zero. And to me, zero looked like the hole at the center, the one we were circling. Or the spot where the cheese was sent to stand alone, and Zachary was the cheese. Mackenzie had been kind enough not to use words like “sudden impulse” or “rage,” but I knew who he thought had improvised.

  He’d been studying the computer screen before I started talking, and he was sneaking glimpses again, tracking, or trying to, a man who’d disappeared six months ago. The classic story of going out for cigarettes, though in this case, it was ice cream. He never came back, nor was there any sign of foul play.

  He’d never used his charge cards again, and he’d never applied for a job that required his Social Security number. The logical assumption was that he’d been killed while on his domestic errand except for the discovery, days after his disappearance, that he’d removed his entire collection of antique watches, kept in the safety deposit box.

  That’s when his wife knew he’d never intended to bring home dessert.

  Mackenzie was sure that when the man ran out of ready cash, he’d sell some of his valuable collection. And after that, he’d bob to the surface as a collector. He’d be selling or buying at a show or a dealers’ convention, or online, or he’d participate in a real or virtual antique watch collectors’ discussion group. A man will change just about everything, the theory went, except the thing he can’t—his true passion, his obsession
, so Mackenzie was deep into the world of antique watches. At the moment, they seemed to entertain him more than the Severin saga.

  “Look at this.” He pointed at the screen. “Eighteen thousand for that one, eleven thousand for this one. The guy had two hundred at least, his wife said. We’re talking millions. And you should see the wife, the house, so ordinary middle-class. Wife works as a library aide.”

  Which reminded me, of course, of Carole Wallenberg with her part-time job and college studies vs. Tomas the billionaire, but that connection didn’t seem to occur to Mackenzie, who exclaimed at each new watch—the man had collected only pocket watches—and its price. “Even if some of them were only worth ten grand—”

  “Only!”

  “—that was incredible wealth. Wonder for how long he had this planned.”

  I saw the appeal of the missing watch collector. It was a story that made sense in all its parts, and it was probably going to be solved by my trusty, brilliant guy. On the other hand, whatever had happened at Philly Prep was murky and amorphous and therefore less fun. What’s the joy in a puzzle with no underlying logic?

  I respected his choice, but I didn’t have the same options. I was stuck with the one that didn’t make sense. I figured that if I couldn’t see any other logical suspect aside from Zachary, then the police were surely not going to look further. But somebody had to. “Has she fired us yet?” I asked Mackenzie.

  “What? The guy’s wife? Why would she? She’s not so sure she wants him back, but she wants those watches.”

  “Not her—Penelope, the Social Secretary. Has she fired us yet?”

  “She never was going to. You were the one wanted to quit. And by the way, I tried reaching Nina Severin three times today, as per your request.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Only got her answering machine. Now why do you want to know about being fired?” He turned the chair back toward me. “Do I sense a change of heart? Why?”