HOLLY DEXTER
When I got off the phone, I went out to see Nick in his workshop. He spends most of his Sundays in there, not that I mind unless the weather is nice and we can be out in the fresh air doing something together. Woodworking is his only hobby besides sports. I have to admit he’s good at it—he’s made a highboy, tables, a few other things for the house that are as good as any you’d buy at Macy’s.
“I’m going over to see Liane for a while,” I said.
He shut off the noisy power saw he was using and rubbed a chubby arm across his sweaty forehead. “Why?”
“I just talked to her and she sounded funny, in the doldrums again. She wouldn’t say why. I’ll be back in time for dinner.”
“Okay. Get me a beer before you leave, will you?”
“What am I, your slave?”
“Come on, Holly. I’m in the middle of this job and it’s thirsty work.”
“Oh, all right.”
I went back into the house and opened a Coors and took it out to him. He was sawing something and didn’t even notice when I set the can down on the bench, much less thank me. That was Nick for you. Off in his own little world half the time, no real interest in me or my problems. Not much help in this family crisis of ours, either. Allan Zacks cared more about Liane than Nick did.
I backed the pickup out of the driveway, grinding the gears on purpose when I shifted from reverse into low. He probably wouldn’t have heard if he was still running that rackety saw. If he did, he’d grumble about it when I came home and I’d play innocent like I always did. Sometimes he brought out the worst in me.
Down at the end of the block, just as I was passing through the intersection, a police car came up to the stop sign on Maple and then turned onto our street behind me. I only had a glimpse of the driver, but it might have been that annoying lieutenant, Ortiz. Well, if it was and he was coming to bother me again, he was out of luck. Nick could deal with him this time.
ROBERT ORTIZ
The driveway at the Dexter home was empty and no one answered the doorbell. But as I came down off the porch, I heard a muted buzzing noise from the direction of the detached garage—a power tool of some kind. It drew me along a side path to the driveway. The buzzing was somewhat louder there, coming from behind the closed garage doors.
I followed the driveway to a side door that stood a few inches ajar. The buzzing stopped just after I pushed the door open and stepped inside. Nicholas Dexter was alone in a section at the rear that had been converted into a home workshop. He had been working at a table saw, the source of the noise, evidently cutting and shaping a section of wood for a piece of furniture he was making; now he stood with his head tipped back, drinking from a can of beer. He did not see me until he lowered the can, by which time I was halfway across the oil-stained concrete floor.
He blinked several times, reaching back to set the can down on the workbench. “Oh … Lieutenant. Gave me a start there.”
“I would have knocked before I came in, but you wouldn’t have heard me.”
“No problem. Holly’s not home if you’re here to see her—”
“No, Mr. Dexter, it’s you I came to see.”
“Oh? Well. What can I do for you?”
I moved ahead to stand in front of him, the table saw between us. The workshop area radiated warmth from an electric space heater. The mingled odors of new wood and sawdust, linseed oil, furniture stain, might have been pleasant at some other time, in some other place.
“You can tell me why you lied to me.”
“Why I … what?” He blinked again. “I never lied to you.”
“I think you did.”
“What would I lie about?”
I said, “You bowl regularly, is that right?”
The question confused him, as I had intended it should. “Bowl? What does bowling have to do with anything?”
“A great deal. You’ve been with the Soderholm Brewery team in the same Tuesday-night mixed league for several years. Seven, to be exact.”
“I guess that’s how many, sure, but—”
“And all that time you’ve rented the same locker. Number twenty-one.”
The expression on his round face altered, his gaze shifting away from mine. “That’s right.”
“Seven years. The same locker, the same locker key.”
“So?”
“I have been told all the locker keys have red dots on them, every one issued to renters since Santa Rita Lanes opened. That means yours has one. But when I asked you last week about a silver key with a red dot, you told me you’d never seen one.”
“I told you I’d never seen the one Marty had …”
“No. ‘I’ve never seen one anywhere’—your exact words.”
“I … I never pay any attention to what keys look like …”
“One you’ve had for seven years and use at least once a week? I find that very hard to believe.”
He blinked again and shook his head, a reflexive movement.
“Your brother-in-law also rented a locker when he joined the Soderholm team last year. But when he quit after three weeks, he retained the locker. Number thirty-two.”
“… What’s wrong with that? Some bowlers keep their equipment at the lanes even if they’re not in leagues. Marty liked to bowl, he just didn’t like being on a team.”
“He bowled often then, did he?”
“Not often. Now and then.”
“With you?”
“By himself mostly. But sometimes, yeah, I’d go with him. You know, just for fun.”
“His wife told me he hadn’t bowled at all since quitting the team.”
“She did?” Dexter half-turned to pick up the beer can, took a long swallow from it. “Well … she’s wrong. Marty didn’t tell her everything …”
“Did he keep his equipment in his locker?”
“I guess so. That’s what it’s for.”
“Then why have his ball and shoes been in a carton in his garage for several months, gathering dust? What happened to his bag?”
“I … I don’t …”
“And why is his locker empty now?”
I counted silently to eight before he said, “I don’t know. How should I know?”
“You’ve lied to me twice now, Mr. Dexter. What are you hiding?”
“I’m not hiding anything, I …”
“Whoever emptied his locker must have used his key. Was it you?”
“No. I never had his key.”
“You didn’t remove his bowling bag from inside?”
“No. I just told you …”
“And then take the contents to the North Park Marina and leave them under one of the benches?”
Dexter’s face had lost color, become pinched and creased like unkneaded tortilla dough. Tiny bubbles of sweat had popped out on his forehead. “What contents?”
“A bundle wrapped in a bowling towel.”
“No, no! Why would I do a crazy thing like that?”
I said, “Friday night, April sixteenth.”
“… What?”
“The night Martin Torrey was shot to death in Echo Park.”
“What about it? I told that other cop I was home watching a ball game that night …”
“You didn’t go out even for a few minutes?”
“No. Stayed in the house the whole evening.”
“Then one of your neighbors couldn’t possibly have noticed your pickup leaving or returning.”
He jerked as if I’d struck him. “What neighbor?”
I said nothing, watching him.
“Somebody told you that,” Dexter said, “he’s wrong or he’s lying.”
“What reason would a neighbor have to lie?”
“How the hell should I know? You keep mixing me up, accusing me …”
“I haven’t accused you of anything except lying to me, twice.”
“You think I killed Marty. That’s what this is all about, isn’t it?”
“Did you
kill him?”
“No! Why would I? The miserable son of a bitch owed me fifteen hundred dollars …”
“Miserable son of a bitch, Mr. Dexter? I thought you and your brother-in-law were friends, close friends.”
“Close? Nobody ever got close to Marty.”
“Then you weren’t friends.”
“I didn’t say that …”
“Why did you call him a miserable son of a bitch?”
“Because he was. Because he …”
“Because he what? Because he was the serial rapist and you knew it?”
“I didn’t know it, not until—”
He’d said too much, and when he realized it, a panicked look spread over his doughy features. His head swiveled from side to side and then held still, his eyes on a hammer that lay on the workbench. I moved around the end of the table saw, opening my coat and resting my hand on the butt of the Glock. When he saw me do that, he stiffened and the panic ebbed. He had nowhere to go. Would have had nowhere to go even if he weren’t trapped behind the table saw, hemmed in by it and the bench on two sides, a lathe behind him, me in front of him. His shoulders sagged; he leaned heavily against the table. If it had not been there, I thought, his legs would not have continued to support his weight.
“Martin Torrey raped those four women, didn’t he,” I said.
“… Yeah. Yeah, he raped them.”
“And you murdered him because of it.”
“No.” His voice, now, was a hoarse whisper. “I didn’t murder him, it wasn’t murder.”
“You’re lying again—”
“I’m not lying,” Dexter said. “The sick bastard killed himself. All I did was pull the trigger for him.”
NICHOLAS DEXTER
My name is Nicholas Henry Dexter. I live at 1427 Stover Street, Santa Rita. I have been advised of my rights, waived my right to presence of counsel, and make this statement voluntarily and with full understanding that it may be used against me in a court of law.
All right. This is the way it was.
That Friday night, April 15, Marty called me on my cell about a quarter of eight, right after Holly picked up Liane for their movie date. He knew I had no plans for the evening except to watch a ball game on TV; I guess Holly must’ve said something to Liane and she passed it on to him. He said he had something very important to tell me, but not at my house or his, it had to be someplace else. I asked him why; he said he had his reasons. Closemouthed, like he always was. He wanted me to meet him on South Street, down near the railroad yards, at eight thirty. It sounded funny … that’s a pretty deserted area on a weekend night. He wouldn’t say why there, just that he’d explain when he saw me.
Well, I didn’t want to go. But he was my brother-in-law, and he kept saying how important it was, and I couldn’t help being curious … so finally I said okay. He was waiting when I got down there at eight thirty. Right away he locked up his car and got into my pickup, but he wouldn’t talk there either. Drive to Echo Park, he said, then he’d tell me what was so important. I asked him why Echo Park? He wouldn’t tell me that, either.
I tried to pump him on the way, but he just kept saying, when we get there, Nick, when we get there. He told me to stop on Parkside across from the park, in a space in the line of cars parked there, then when the street was empty he said Come with me, Nick and got out and ran across into the park. What else could I do but follow him? There was a sort of path where he went into the trees and we walked along that until we came out on that riverbank. He sat down on a bench on the path that comes over from the picnic grounds, and I sat down with him, and that was when he told me, there in the dark so I couldn’t see his face, that he was the one who raped those women.
A sick compulsion he couldn’t control, he said, like the one he’d had back in Ohio, only ten times worse because now he had to do things to the women, not just yank his shank while he watched them through windows. Said he hated himself for that and for thoughts he was having now about not just raping another woman but maybe killing her this time. All of this in a flat voice, no emotion, like he was talking about baseball or something.
Jesus, you can imagine how blown away I was. All the time I believed he was innocent, same as Liane and Holly did. It made me want to puke sitting there in the dark listening to this crazy shit. And mad as hell and about half-nuts, too. I never liked Marty very much and right then I hated him, I mean I really hated the son of a bitch. My first impulse was to clobber him, then I wanted to run back to my pickup and go straight to the police station. But I didn’t do either. I just kept on sitting there.
Why confess to me? I said. Why not go to the cops and tell them? No, he said, he couldn’t stand to be locked up in prison or another loony bin. He’d rather die, he said. He’d given it a lot of thought and that was what he wanted, what he had to do—die before he gave in to the compulsion again. Then why don’t you just off yourself? I said.
That was when he showed me the gun.
At first I was scared. Hell, who wouldn’t be in a situation like that? But all he did was hold it in his hand and start talking again, saying it was the gun he’d stolen after he raped Jack Spivey’s wife, saying he’d tried to use it on himself half a dozen times but he couldn’t do it, he didn’t have the guts. “I need you to do it for me, Nick,” he said. That was the reason he’d brought me down there, opened up to me the way he had. I was the only person he could turn to, he said, the only person who could put him out of his misery and protect Liane at the same time. Not just asking me to shoot him, the way he said it. Telling me I had to. Ordering me to do it.
That was as much of a shock as him confessing. Worse. It scrambled up my thinking. I mean, I didn’t know what to do or say. I should have gotten up then and run like hell, but I couldn’t seem to move. He had me and he knew it, knew how much I hated him now that I knew what he’d done to those women. Knew it from the get-go. Knew me better than I knew myself.
He had the whole thing planned down to the last detail. He said the knife and mask and gloves he’d used were in his bowling bag, and the bag was in his locker at the lanes. He said the locker key was in his coat pocket. Wait a couple of days, he said, then get the bag, take the bundle that was inside, and put it someplace where somebody would find it and turn it over to the police. That way, with him dead and no more rapes, it would look like the rapist had dumped the stuff and left town. And Liane would never have to know the truth about him. Holly, neither. No one, ever, but me.
Crazy. Crazy man, crazy plan.
But he didn’t give me any time to think about it. He got up and walked down the bank, saying Come on, Nick, come on, so I got up and went after him. And when we were close to the river he shoved the goddamn gun in my hand, then laid down on the grass with his arms spread out and his ankles crossed … some kind of weird penance position or something, I don’t know, like he was getting ready to ask God for forgiveness. God? Straight to hell was where he was going.
What he said then was I should kneel down and put the muzzle against his temple and pull the trigger. “Just do it, Nick. Do it for Liane, do it for Holly, do it for all those women I hurt, do it for yourself. Do it do it do it.”
So I did it.
I hated him and I wanted him dead and I shot him, just like he knew I would. I thought my hand would shake so much I’d have trouble pulling the trigger, but it didn’t and I didn’t. Rock steady the whole time. But I was glad it was so dark. If I’d had to look at what the bullet did to his head, the blood…
Those two rounds into his groin was his idea, not mine. When he laid down on the grass he said make it look like some stranger did it. Oh, yeah, he had that planned, too. So I blew his brains out and then I blew his pecker and his gonads off. Then I threw the gun as far out into the river as I could. And then I took the locker key and his cell phone out of his coat pocket and went back to my car and drove home.
I went ahead and did the rest of what he’d told me to do because it was the only way I could protect
myself and Holly, not just Liane. That was how I figured it, anyhow. The next day I smashed his cell and mine, both a couple of cheap prepays, and dumped the pieces in the garbage. I waited longer than he told me to before I took the goddamn bowling bag out of his locker because I was afraid of getting caught with the evidence inside. I thought about leaving the knife and other crap in the bag and throwing it all away in a Dumpster, but what if somebody found it and turned it in and the cops figured out the bag belonged to Marty? So I got rid of the bundle just like he told me to, where it’d be sure to be found, and then trashed the empty bag. If I’d done that sooner, maybe the Lowenstein girl wouldn’t have been raped by that drugged-up reporter. I don’t know. I feel bad about her, same as those other poor women.
But I didn’t feel bad that night or since about Marty dying the way he did. I figured we’d both done the town a favor, the world a favor. Like I told Lieutenant Ortiz, I didn’t really murder him, he killed himself. Me … I was just the method, the instrument, like the gun.
The only thing I regret is that now Liane will have to know the truth. Holly, too. But the main thing, the important thing, is that my sick damned brother-in-law will never hurt anybody else again.
GRIFFIN KELLS
And so it’s finally finished.
Four and a half months of a rapist’s reign of terror compounded by a homicide and then a copycat assault, and suddenly, in a span of two days, everything comes together in a speed rush.
It happens that way sometimes in police work. The right wheels are in motion all along, wheels within wheels, but moving so slowly you’re not sure they’ll ever get you anywhere. Then circumstances contrive to start the wheels spinning fast. They say things come in threes. That goes for breaks, too. Catch one, catch a second, catch a third, in rapid succession.
Yet you can’t help thinking that you should have been able to make at least some of it happen sooner. Robert had had Martin Torrey correctly pegged weeks ago; if we’d pushed Torrey harder despite the lack of evidence, we might have gotten him to slip up, to confess. We’d had sufficient information to piece together the answers to his murder, too, if we hadn’t been wed to the wrong assumptions about the motive, hadn’t let all the oddities and inconsistencies—the Echo Park location, the position of the body, the groin shots, the abandoned Camry—cloud the issue.
The Violated Page 20
