Almost True Confessions

by Jane O'Connor

  “But Ms. Donahoe didn’t know that for certain.”

  Rannie frowned and suddenly started to conjure up a new scenario. Maybe Ret’s final manuscript did contain a bombshell and somehow the murderer found out about it. Could Ret have been engaging in a little prepublication blackmail on the order of “Pay me to leave out the dirt, or else”?

  “I don’t know what to think. If the disk with you guys is meaningful, why didn’t the killer take it? It was in a briefcase right in plain sight—it seems to me a briefcase would strike anyone as a logical place for the disk.”

  He nodded. “How familiar are you with the manuscript, the version you worked on?”

  “Very.”

  “So you’d notice differences between the two?”

  “Anything substantive, absolutely.”

  He asked if she’d mind coming down to the precinct.

  Armed with her photocopy of Portrait of a Lady, Rannie accompanied the cop to his car and rode to the Twenty-Fourth Precinct on the Upper West Side, about a mile and a half from her apartment. It was a white-brick sugar cube, four stories high. Somehow the scraggly, three-quarters-dead plantings in front made the building look even uglier.

  She was left at the desk of a detective on medical leave. It took two hours to read Ret’s final manuscript on his PC. Phones jangled constantly, announcements came over a loudspeaker at frequent intervals, and the cops’ preferred means of communication was shouting across the room to each other. None of it bothered Rannie. It was gratifying to think that her expertise was needed and valued. She was not snooping, she was aiding an investigation. And she felt completely safe inside the precinct building, safe in the same way that she’d felt when her dad would tuck her into bed before turning on her Tinker Bell night-light.

  When she was done, Grieg thanked her. “I appreciate you giving up your time.”

  The problem was that she’d turned up bubkes. Exactly as Ellen had predicted, the two versions were essentially the same. On Ret’s disk there was a more detailed description of Charlotte’s Northeast Harbor “cottage,” which, after her death, would become a research center for a vast wildlife preserve created from the acres of shoreline property that she owned. Again, Rannie found herself wondering if Ellen might have been Audio. She mentioned this to Grieg and showed him the acknowledgments. Ret trusted Ellen as much as she trusted anyone. They worked well together. Somehow it seemed likelier that Ellen had been killed for snooping than for editing. And yet nothing scurrilous appeared in the manuscript. Grieg scribbled all this in his pad but didn’t seem impressed with Rannie’s reasoning.

  Once outside, Rannie took Grieg up on his offer of a ride. It was rush hour, therefore horrendous traffic.

  “Actually could you hold on a sec?” she asked when they reached the sidewalk. Rannie texted Nate. “Going straight to Grandma’s. Meet me there.” It was better to avoid a phone conversation. Dinner at Mary’s was the source of untold arguments between Rannie and Nate, who rightfully resented the almost inedible fare that was served. Usually they both wolfed down a quick burger or slice of pizza beforehand, but time didn’t allow for that this evening.

  “Instead of home, would you mind dropping me off at Eighty-Third and Park Avenue?”

  “Whatever you say.” Grieg opened the car door for her. “Want a real-deal police escort?”

  “Absolutely!”

  In less than a minute he had a flasher attached to the roof of his car and away they went, siren blasting. It was even better than riding in Ret’s Rolls . . . well, maybe that was going too far. They sped through the Eighty-Sixth Street transverse and down Park Avenue in record time. So in addition to walking and two A.M. cab rides, there was yet a third way to travel aboveground in NYC unimpeded—police escort!

  She thanked Grieg as Mary’s white-gloved doorman extended a hand to help her from the police vehicle. Certainly this was not the usual mode of transportation for residents of the building or arriving guests; nonetheless, the doorman’s smile was as cordial as ever.

  “I wished I’d turned up something,” Rannie said.

  “I would have been amazed if you did. Double-checking is ninety-nine percent of my job.”

  “Same with copyediting.”

  The doorman was about to shut the door behind her when Grieg held up a hand to forestall him. “One more thing.” He was addressing Rannie. “By any chance, were you Audio?”

  Come again? “Me! No! Of course not! What makes you—”

  Grieg cut her off. “Just asking,” he said and then, motioning for the doorman to shut the door, he took off, leaving Rannie standing under the canopy, mouth open, eyes as round and wide as in a cartoon double take.

  Analyzing what prompted Grieg’s last question, delivered with an undertone of accusation, had to be put on hold. The elevator door opened. There was Mary, waiting to greet her.

  “Come in, come in, Rannie dear. What a day! I’m in quite a dither!” Mary exclaimed. In the past year Rannie had noticed how increasingly minor nuisances—a mix-up in a delivery from the dry cleaners, a misplaced electric bill—could send Mary into a tailspin.

  The phone started ringing and Mary’s hands flew up.

  “Oh, Lord! It’ll be Daisy again! This must be the tenth time she’s called. I’d better dash off and get it.”

  “Dashing off” now translated to proceeding with great caution, Mary making her way haltingly from the large entry hall, through the living room, and into the small den. Mary had a cane. Rannie wished she’d use it.

  “No, Daisy dear, I’m not hard of hearing,” Mary was saying and motioned to Rannie to sit down. “It sometimes takes me a little while to reach the phone.”

  The TV was on mute in the den; however, from images flashing on the screen, all of the same tiny, fashionably dressed, anciently old lady, Rannie understood why the day had been so dither-making for Mary.

  Charlotte Cummings had exhaled for the very last time. Rannie raced to Mary’s bedroom and turned on the TV. The mayor, in front of City Hall, was speaking before reporters, full-bore somber: “New York has lost a true icon,” he intoned.

  The coverage focused on the extraordinary length of Charlotte Cummings’s life, someone born before World War I. The NBC anchor signed off, saying, “Now the life of this extraordinary lady has at last come to an end.” His demeanor and tone were appropriately grave too; yet hearing a slight stress on the words “at last” made Rannie think of the Oz Munchkins warbling about the Wicked Witch, who was “really most sincerely dead.”

  When commercials came on, Rannie returned to the den. Mary was still on the phone.

  “Oh, you managed to book a direct flight?” Mary was saying. “At this time of year and such short notice, well, yes, I am amazed.”

  Mary nodded several times in silent response to whatever Daisy was telling her. She opened an end table drawer and took out a notepad from Piping Rock Country Club, on which she began writing in her neat Chapin School print. “Yes, dear. I have everything down, though I still say Charlotte would want you to stay in Florida.”

  A moment later, Mary hung up. At the same time Rannie’s phone pinged, announcing a text. Nate. He was bailing. “Bio test. Gotta study.”

  Yeah, right.

  “Daisy got a call this afternoon from Charlotte’s granddaughter. The first thing Daisy asked was, ‘This isn’t another false alarm, is it?’ ” Mary giggled. “But now it’s all over the news.”

  “When and where is the funeral?” Rannie asked as Mary freshened her drink.

  “Saint Thomas on Saturday morning.”

  A neo-Gothic structure the soothing color of chocolate pudding, Saint Thomas Church sat at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-Third Street and was famous for its boys choir. The church also boasted two walls of giant stained-glass windows, more than a hundred years old. However, over time the metalwork holding the glass had disintegrated to the point where hundreds of pieces were threatening to burst from their frames. From copyediting Portrait of a Lady,
Rannie now knew that Charlotte Cummings had come to the rescue, coughing up three million dollars for their restoration.

  “The first year we were married, Peter took me to Saint Thomas on Christmas Eve to hear the ‘Hallelujah’ chorus. It was transporting.”

  Oops. Mary’s smile suddenly tightened.

  Rannie rarely brought up her ex-husband, yet never mentioning him only made the elephant in the room grow more enormous. “Charm can only take you so far” had become Mary’s terse and pretty much on-the-money appraisal of her youngest son. She had never really forgiven him for leaving Rannie and their kids.

  Quickly Mary turned the conversation back to Charlotte Cummings’s funeral. “There’s a guest list and reserved seating. Can you imagine? As if it’s a wedding.” Mary paused to jiggle ice cubes and imbibe. “Well, I suppose a lot of important and fancy people will be there. Oh, how Daisy hates crowds since she broke her hip. She’s terrified of someone knocking her over.” Then all at once Mary looked “dithery” again. “Will you look at me! What an awful hostess I am!” Mary rose from the silk striped armchair and moments later Rannie had a glass of white wine in her hand. She sipped it tentatively. It tasted okay. Mary kept white wine in the minifridge under the bar solely for Rannie’s pleasure. However, the number of visits it took to polish off a bottle meant the wine always turned sour before the bottle was empty.

  “Terrible to live so long,” Mary said. “Although, really, you wouldn’t say Charlotte Cummings was living, would you? She just wasn’t dead.”

  Rannie nodded and as she sipped her wine she thought more about Charlotte Cummings. It was a shame that Ret Sullivan wasn’t around to dash off a last chapter on the funeral, which undoubtedly would be loaded with pomp and full of famous faces. A celebrity sendoff was just up Ret’s alley. Would anyone at S&S even bother including a short preface in the book, something along the order of “Charlotte Cummings died on blah blah and was buried at blah blah”? Always conscientious Ellen certainly would have seen to it. Suddenly the wine turned sour in Rannie’s mouth. Ellen too was “most sincerely dead.” It wasn’t even twenty-four hours ago that Rannie had identified her body. She shut her eyes as if that could block out the memory of the morgue, Ellen on the gurney.

  “Dear, you look unhappy.”

  “No, no, I’m fine. Just tired.” Rannie stopped then and blurted out a request, the words sounding strange even to her own ears. “Mary, I’d take Daisy to the funeral . . . that’s if she’d like me to.”

  “Lord, volunteering for a funeral! I try to avoid them like the plague!”

  Rannie tipped her head in acknowledgment. “It’s horrible to admit. But the voyeur in me wouldn’t mind seeing the turnout—and the restored windows.” There was more to it than that, of course. A homicide detective had just accused her of being Audio, Ret’s snoop. Well, the snoop in Rannie wanted, pure and simple, to check out Charlotte Cummings’s funeral. She had no expectation of picking up some telltale clue in the pews of Saint Thomas that would solve either Ret’s murder or Ellen’s. Nevertheless, Rannie felt an urge to go, and here was the perfect excuse to do so.

  “Well, I’ll certainly mention it to Daisy. The windows are something to see now.”

  Mary offered a tray of withered baby carrots. “I had absolutely no idea that airlines give a ‘bereavement’ discount,” she said brightly. “Otherwise Daisy would have had to pay more than thirteen hundred dollars for a plane ticket!”

  Rannie dipped a carrot in a small bowlful of something that bore a faint resemblance to salsa and yet tasted more like unheated tomato vegetable soup. Then she broke the news about Nate.

  “Well, isn’t that too bad? But I understand. I told Nate I’ll be there when the Chapel tennis team plays Collegiate. That’s in just a week.”

  Here was one of the reasons Rannie loved Mary. She accepted without a particle of rancor her fairly bit part in Nate’s life now. Rannie’s mother, on the other hand, seemed almost to revel in taking umbrage over any slight from her grandchildren . . . or her daughters.

  The news over, Rannie and Mary watched Jeopardy!, another of Mary’s sacred rituals, most evenings in Earla’s company as well. “Ooh, phooey.” Mary scowled upon seeing the categories pop up. “I’m hopeless at baseball.” As usual, after every correct response from Rannie, Mary declared that Rannie should try out to become a contestant because she’d win “a bundle.”

  After Final Jeopardy!, Mary stood and collected the carrots and dip. “I’ll be back in a moment. I need to heat up one of the dinners Earla left. We have a choice. Tuna tetrazzini or chili. Which do you prefer?”

  “Ooh, that’s hard,” Rannie said. As she’d sampled both in the past, the truthful answer would have to be “neither.”

  “Well, since we had salsa for hors d’oeuvres, shall we do chili and make a Mexican night of it?” Mary suggested.

  “Olé!” Rannie answered gaily, consoling herself that Skippy in all his wonderful chunkiness would be at home, waiting for her.

  Chapter 15

  A man in a trench coat was standing (or did it qualify as lurking?) inside the vestibule of the Dolores Court, his back to Rannie, probably hoping someone would emerge from the elevator and let him in. Obviously not a tenant or he’d have a key. Fruitlessly Rannie felt for the slim wand of Mace that she never remembered to carry. She decided to open the door just as the man turned.

  It was Larry.

  “What are you doing here?” she cried.

  “Waiting for you.”

  “What do you mean? How do you know I still live here?”

  “Who gives up a rent-controlled apartment? I buzzed but nobody’s home. Listen, I need to talk.”

  Rannie blinked and didn’t answer. Exactly how wrong was this, Larry just showing up at her door? And why wasn’t Nate home? So much for his selfless dedication to biology.

  “Look, I’m sorry if I startled you.” He took a step toward her. Rannie shrank back.

  “What’s the matter with you?” she said. “Haven’t you heard of that nifty little invention called the phone?”

  “Rannie, I spent an hour and a half at the Twenty-Fourth Precinct today.” If it were possible, his shoulders slumped even lower than usual. “I’m a murder suspect! Me!”

  Curiosity got the best of her. Rannie found herself relenting. “All right. There’s a coffee shop a block away. But I can’t stay long.”

  They took one of the faux red leather booths at the Acropolis, where Rannie ordered a cheeseburger with bacon, fries, and a Diet Coke. “I haven’t really had dinner,” she explained—the chili at Mary’s had looked unnervingly like cat food. Then looking quizzically at Larry, she asked, “So? What’s up?”

  “The cop was asking all about Ellen Donahoe, acting like I killed Ellen and Ret. Just because I knew them both. I tried explaining how everybody in publishing knows everybody.”

  So the investigations weren’t separate any longer. “Was the cop named Grieg?”

  “Yeah. Looks like Ron Howard’s double.”

  The resemblance hadn’t occurred to her till now, yet Larry’s description was apt. “Ret was murdered Saturday afternoon. You were out of town. You told me that.”

  “I was at my mother’s house in West Islip. But it’s only fifty minutes away and I had my car.”

  “Surely your mother will vouch for you.” Although how much credence did the police give to an alibi that came courtesy of Mom?

  Larry was shaking his head. “My mother is eighty-seven and has dementia, Rannie. She thinks I’m twelve and about to have my bar mitzvah. All she worries about is whether Leonard’s of Great Neck will be available for the reception.”

  “Well, then she’s not living alone, right?”

  Their order arrived. Immediately, Rannie tore into her burger—bliss! artery-clogging bliss!—while Larry stared balefully at his decaf.

  “After lunch, I let Consuela go to a movie. My mother is terrible to her. Calls her a spic to her face, accuses her of stealing. I live in
fear that she’ll quit. So I’m at the house, I figured why not give her a break. She was gone for four hours. So all Saturday afternoon I’m basically unaccounted for.”

  Rannie looked at Larry and attempted an objective assessment of the man. Here sitting across a Formica table from her, one with cigarette burns from the distant pre-Bloomberg past, was a guy who already wore a hearing aid and judging from the raw nick on his chin still hadn’t learned to shave properly. He’d had one quickie marriage, no kids, and seemingly his only deep and abiding relationship was with his gaga mother. Rannie had always placed filial devotion squarely in the mensch column of Larry Katz’s personality traits. “I hope my kids will be half as good to me,” she remembered saying to him more than once. But what about all those movies where guys with charm turn out to be knife-wielding serial killers with really big unresolved mommy issues?

  Larry’s next words made Rannie wonder if a ticker tape ran across her forehead broadcasting every inner thought. “I’m the same guy you knew way back when. I promise I didn’t turn into some kinky killer.”

  Rannie remembered the noise she’d heard inside Ret’s apartment. Could she imagine it being Larry on the other side of the door? Honestly, no. He was a garden-variety neurotic, a man who’d gone through years of talk therapy. He wasn’t psychotic. Yet Larry had not been forthcoming about his relationship with Ret. Rannie decided to toss out a little bait.

  “It makes no sense, Larry. You hadn’t seen Ret in years. Why should you be a suspect?”

  Larry stalled with a long sip of coffee. Then he sighed. “I actually knew Ret better than I led you to believe.”

  Rannie cocked an eyebrow in feigned surprise. In her kids’ estimation, it was one of her few talents, something that neither of them had yet been able to master. “The police know this?”

  A nod. “Yeah. That’s one reason why a big neon finger is pointing at me.”

  Rannie waited for Larry to continue.

  “For starters, the biography about Ret—Tattletale. She wrote it.”