Till the End of Tom

by Gillian Roberts

  “Not even to help him? A character witness? Something?”

  “No. No. What would I say?”

  “You’d say why you’re sure he didn’t push his father down the stairs.”

  “No,” she said again. “I couldn’t. Please, Miss Pepper, don’t make me—don’t—no.”

  I hadn’t expected her to, but I’d been hoping that in the middle of her denials, she’d slip and say something more concrete about why she was sure Zachary hadn’t pushed Tom Severin.

  “It’s a feeling, that’s all.” She said it while looking down at the floor. “It’s just a—he’s too nice,” she continued, eyes still averted. “He isn’t the type, but a person can’t say that to the police. They would laugh at me.”

  She was right, but I was convinced she was leaving other things unsaid. I had no choice but to thank her for the use of the phone and get ready to leave. I wrote down the phone number at Ozzie’s, and the address. “In case Carole Wallenberg calls back, okay?”

  She took the paper carefully, nodding, and then she read it and looked surprised and pleased. It was a weak form of joy, but still, it was the jolliest expression I remembered seeing on her. “I know just where this is,” she said with such delight that I feared she usually didn’t know where she was. “I could walk them there!”

  “There’s no need,” I murmured.

  She let out a sound that was close to a chuckle. Amazing.

  “Is there—what’s so—did I say—”

  “I didn’t—I wasn’t making fun of you,” she said, back to her worried expression. “It’s just that I live right next door!”

  I thought of the neighborhood, which was commercial, not residential, of the apartments above second-rate first-floor stores. I couldn’t imagine where they found light, or air, but I could imagine how lonely they would be at night when the lights went out on all the first floors.

  “I—I don’t mean this badly,” she said, “but I had no idea you were a dance instructor, too! Do you put on a ballgown when you get there, too, like the other lady?”

  “Oh, no—I’m not there.” I thought about the dance studio that never seemed populated, and the instructors in their sad worn tuxedo and ratty ballgown.

  “But I live next door. Right next door. So I know there’s a dance—” Then she did a double take, and I witnessed one of life’s few actual jaw drops. “You’re a detective? Miss Pepper—a detective?” Her habitual expression of fright had returned.

  “I do clerical work to earn a little extra money. This school doesn’t exactly pay well, and . . . you understand. I do the same things you do here.”

  “The detective agency.” Her voice was dreamy, lazy. “I’ve wondered so much about what goes on in that place.”

  “Are you a fan of mysteries?”

  She nodded. “I guess I shouldn’t say that in front of an English teacher, should I?”

  I couldn’t tell if we were bantering, and this was all to be taken lightly, in the manner of normal people, or if she was now honestly nervous about having admitted her literary tastes. I took the safe and literal road. “I’m a fan myself. But my advice is to stick with the books, not real life. They’re much more exciting.”

  She didn’t look convinced.

  “Stop by some time and see for yourself.”

  “Really? You’d . . . you’d show me?”

  “Everything.” I wondered what I meant by that—there was almost nothing to see. A large, drab room with desks, a wall, Ozzie’s door, computers. But the idea made her happy. Maybe we’d bonded and she wouldn’t be as afraid of me anymore. “I promise.”

  “Do I have to, should I phone you first, make an appointment?”

  I shrugged. “If you want to check with me, that’d be good—only so you’ll know if I’m planning to be there or not. But no appointment’s necessary. Come whenever you have the time.”

  She was still beaming—actually beaming and dread-free—when I left the building.

  * * *

  Nineteen

  * * *

  * * *

  I was not as overjoyed. I was, instead, depressed about Zachary and confused about everything, including him. I stood in front of the school, waiting for Mackenzie, enveloped by the sensation that all of the people I’d been dealing with rejoiced in some way in Tom Severin’s death, all of them chattering to their own purposes, and all of them lying. I didn’t know how they all lied, but I had the clear sense that not a one of them had told the complete truth, and that only the missing data was important.

  Nothing was close to clear-cut, with Cornelius spying on Tomas, and Penelope spying on the both of them, and Zachary insisting he’d killed Severin and yet forgetting about getting the drug into Tomas’s bloodstream or how he’d actually done it, and Carole Wallenburg melting down over the phone and Georgeanne claiming no current relationship with Cornelius, but phoning him immediately after my visit—and what else? The mysterious person with whom Tom had had tea that day, and who’d slipped him the drug, if that’s who did it. And where did the threatening phone calls fit in, and why did Tom Severin tell his son his visit to Philly Prep had nothing to do with him?

  Worse—when any of these questions were answered, would they have any bearing on who killed Tomas Severin?

  Mackenzie was on time, and we drove out to the southwestern part of the city, past Penn’s ever-expanding campus into a neighborhood of run-down row homes, their porches tilted, and some vacant and boarded up.

  I recited my list of questions. It felt good hearing them said out loud, but it didn’t work any magic cure.

  “The force of the blow,” Mackenzie said. “That could have been what he meant—it pushed Severin down the stairs. He did fall backward, after all.”

  “It didn’t sound that way, but I bet that’s what he’ll say to the police.”

  “Manslaughter, then.”

  “He said he heard a shout.”

  “I can’t tell you how many people I’ve interviewed who said they heard shouting—and it turned out to be them. They were shouting and didn’t realize it.”

  I didn’t like any of these responses, so it was lucky that within a minute, we pulled up outside The Green House. That was its name, and that was its description as well, though the acid green of the clapboard didn’t suggest anything that grew naturally. The building was ringed by plantings, and sat next to a property completely given over to a garden and display stands. I looked around. It was almost possible to see waves of the energy this area was putting into reclaiming itself. There were still sadly neglected houses, but they were in the minority. Tiny brick facades had window boxes and painted shutters, though there were still metal grills over most first-floor windows.

  “This is actually a nice project,” Mackenzie said. “I did some checking on it. Nobody has real gardens around here, but they have little backyards, and community gardens, and The Green House is greening the city, patch by patch.”

  “I hope in another shade, though.”

  “They have classes, too.”

  “Does it make sense to have a guy who was imprisoned for growing marijuana working in a nursery?” I whispered as we walked to the door. “I wouldn’t call this the five-minute excursion Zach mentioned, but it isn’t far from the school.”

  “You have to decide if you think he sold somebody the drug or he used the drug on Severin. Which one is our theory? I forget . . .”

  And then we were inside The Green House, in a room filled with potted chrysanthemums and tiny poinsettias, and vases and pots for forcing amaryllis during the bleak months of winter. The space smelled of wet earth, almost as if it were spring.

  “You Jay Kress?” Mackenzie asked a man in his twenties who’d been carefully watering a row of mums.

  The young man froze, his arm still halfway out, the thin hose dribbling onto the floor. He looked from Mackenzie to me and back to Mackenzie and finally nodded and asked, very softly, “Why? Who are you?”

  “We’ve been hired t
o help out with matters pertaining to the Severin estate,” Mackenzie said, “and if you could give us a minute—”

  His eyes had narrowed at the word “Severin.” “A minute, okay,” he said. “No more. I’m busy here.”

  “We’ll be quick. You are, I believe, related by marriage to Tomas Severin?”

  “So? I didn’t have anything to do with what happened to him, if that’s what you’re asking. I barely had anything to do with him ever, in fact, and that day, I was here the whole day—ask my boss. I’m like a slave in this place.”

  His words were tough enough, but his voice was soft, and low. A gentle voice.

  “I’m sure you know there were drugs involved in his death,” Mackenzie said.

  “That’s what this is about?”

  Mackenzie shook his head. “We aren’t the police.”

  Jay pushed out his chin. He’s used to this, I thought, or getting used to being questioned whenever the word “drug” applied to the situation. “Yeah. I read that. I heard that, too, from Nina. So? You’re not thinking— I don’t have anything to do with chemical garbage, man. Never did. Everything I did was natural and organic, no sprays even. Not the same at all.” He shook his head with disdain, then looked sharply at us. “And I don’t do that anymore, either, okay? I’m retraining, see? I’m into this now,” and he gestured with his arms wide, embracing the room of growing things. Unfortunately, one of his hands still held the hose, and I was watered along with the potted plants. “Sorry,” he said.

  “No problem.” I dried my cheek. “Were you . . . close? On good terms?”

  He watered another pot, focusing on what his hand was doing, then he turned to us more directly. “Why lie? I hated him, he hated me. He treated my sister like . . . No, we weren’t close and I wouldn’t want to be close with such a jerk. Ask my sister.” He shook his head and watered the next two pots and I noticed his hand trembled slightly, but that could be because we made him nervous. “People don’t know.”

  “Sounds as if he treated you badly,” I said.

  He shrugged again. “Within his rights. My sister, she thought I could move in with them for a little bit when I—well, you probably know about it, right? When I got out. Our parents are out in Arizona. Nina and Tom had this huge house with lots of empty bedrooms, and it was just to get on my feet, get my bearings. Tom said no. Didn’t want an ex-con around his kids. But . . . a man’s home is his castle, like they say, it was his call, even if he moved out of the castle the next month and didn’t seem to give a damn about his kids then.

  “I actually respected him a little when he said I couldn’t stay there. First time I ever saw him think about his kids, try to protect them, even if it was stupid. But hey, it was an honorable impulse.”

  “Must have been hard on you, all the same. Where could you go?” He looked barely older than my seniors, too young to be abandoned that way.

  His shrug was a tic, trying to say that no matter what he had to say, no matter how sad it might sound, it didn’t bother him at all. That’s what it was supposed to convey. It didn’t work. “A shelter, halfway house kind of place. It wasn’t that bad. Nina gave me money for food and some clothes, and I stayed there maybe three weeks, and then Nina found a friend who let me have this job, and I rent a room from somebody in their house, but I’m still on a trial basis, so I can’t talk to you forev—”

  “What was it like, in the shelter?” I asked.

  Mackenzie shot me a quick glance that asked me to get back on track, but I didn’t know where the track was, so I let the question stand.

  “Mostly it sucked. The people there—they were pretty hard, some were nuts, and old, but—” the shrug again, “some were okay. There was a girl around my age for a few days. She was okay. And this guy who’d really been around, seen the whole country, and this one lady who, like, provided refreshments . . . When she’d get hold of a bottle of wine we talked a lot, told each other our troubles.”

  “Everybody must have had lots of troubles,” I said.

  He nodded. “Some of the stories got interesting. Real interesting. People have been through some really bad stuff.” He paused, watching us.

  He was still a kid, and so obviously withholding something—and hoping, almost daring us to probe, make him tell.

  I honored his unspoken request. “In what way interesting?” I asked.

  “Very. Especially if you were interested in Tom Severin.”

  “This story, it was told by the guy who’d been around or the girl or the lady?” Mackenzie asked.

  “The lady. Small world, huh? Turns out I didn’t have to wait for Hallowe’en to find skeletons in Tom’s closet. And ghosts, man.” He shook his head as if still in wonderment.

  “She knew Severin?”

  “Better than his own wife did. Even Nina didn’t know how much of a bastard he was till I told her.”

  “Like what?”

  He held up his hand, like a traffic cop. “Guy’s dead, so what does it matter? Nina knows, and I’m glad. Makes her not care so much about losing him.”

  “Could you tell us who the woman was who knew Tom Severin so well?” Mackenzie asked.

  Jay shrugged, then shook his head. “I never knew her real name. She called me ‘honey’ and I called her ‘ma’am,’ and we both called the other guy ‘Tex’ even though he was from New Jersey, and that made us all laugh. We were a little . . . you know.”

  “Drunk? High?”

  “It was wine. Only wine . . . and I never saw her around after that night. That’s how that place is. People come in, then they go. Must have moved out, and I did, too, a few days later.”

  “Could you describe her?”

  “Old.”

  “Like what?” Mackenzie said. “Like me?”

  Jay looked at him appraisingly, then nodded. “Yeah, maybe.”

  Poor C.K. Thirty-six years old and Old, just like that. When teens see salt-and-pepper hair, that’s it.

  “Did she say where she was from? Where she’d been?”

  He shrugged. “Not that I remember. The thing was, she told her little story and then Tex, he told how he’d messed up three marriages, and she didn’t say much more.”

  “Any more you want to say about those ghosts and skeletons?” Mackenzie asked.

  “Not really. Like I said, the guy’s dead. None of it matters anymore. It wasn’t like national news or anything.” He busied himself straightening the row of bulbs and that seemed that. I tried to think whether there’d been any actual information in what he’d said.

  I could hear the deep breath he took, and then he looked at us as if we were slow-witted students. “Here’s the point,” he finally said. “You look at me, and you see an ex-con.”

  I saw a plant-loving skinny kid, not yet twenty, who was toughing his way through life with little success. Nobody would picture Jay when they thought the term “ex-con,” but I was afraid knowing that would hurt his feelings.

  I hoped the nursery business worked for him.

  “You think criminal, you think bad,” he said. “But you looked at him, you saw big time. Mr. Made It. The ideal. Success. What a fake! What I learned is that people commit big crimes—crimes that really hurt people, ruin people, destroy people—and they don’t go to jail for it.” He turned and carefully examined a small plant, pulling the leaves apart, then almost unconsciously patting it back into shape while he spoke. “What they do is mean—evil, maybe—but there’s no law against it.”

  “Like not letting you stay at his house?” I asked softly.

  He shrugged. “Sure,” he said after a pause.

  “It would make me very angry.”

  “Yeah. Me, too.” His eyes widened. “But that doesn’t mean I hurt anybody.”

  Of course anybody is capable of anything, but I couldn’t imagine him assaulting Severin, no matter how much he hated the man, and even if we could figure out how and why he’d have been inside the school.

  We’d come here because he’d been invo
lved with drugs, but I also couldn’t see him selling that kind of drug out of this green spot. I’d double-check with Zachary about whether this nursery had been part of his research, but I was sure the answer would be a resounding “no.” “Thanks for your time,” we both said, almost in unison. “You were a big help.”

  “Really?” He shrugged. “How? I still don’t get what you wanted in the first place.”

  I STILL DIDN’T GET what I wanted, either, when Mackenzie dropped me off at the office. He had work to do at Penn, and then he’d join me later before we headed home.

  I hadn’t wanted to meet another sad, messed-up young man. Or to hear vague intimations of stories that further confirmed that Tomas Severin had been a royal jerk.

  I wanted to know who killed Tomas Severin—and I wanted it clear that it hadn’t been Zachary Wallenberg. We hadn’t come within shouting distance of getting that.

  The weather had gotten wetter and colder, but even so, I pulled the hood of my raincoat up over my hair and stood in front of the office while Mackenzie’s car pulled away. He’d agreed that Jay had been something of a dead end and that we’d work on the Zachary situation as soon as he finished up at school today.

  And I? I kept feeling as if there was something to be done that would be more valuable than sending out bills and reports while I awaited Mackenzie’s return.

  I thought about Jay, and his gentle rage at his dead brother-in-law for cruelties that were within the law, and how he would probably have been in agreement with the woman at The Manse who’d felt something had been so wrong in the Severin household that the authorities should have been notified, and it had to do with a daughter, now presumed dead. Except that Ingrid had insisted “she” had somehow killed Tomas. Had she meant this daughter who would, then, be alive? Or had that been the ranting of a woman sinking into dementia?

  I replayed everything I could remember of Meredith Arbusson’s words at The Manse and remembered that she volunteered at the library—the main library—most afternoons, when the children came in after school.