by Peter Manus
“Yes, and in the interim you kill your partner to pretend I am surprised by him,” I say. “But maybe you want him dead, too, huh?”
Brewster eyes me over his glass as he drinks, then sits up and wipes him mouth with his knuckles. “Partner,” he says petulantly. “My father was in favor of turning the business over to the little mouse and letting him run it solo. A plan designed to torment me, of course, but Armand was all for it. So he got nothing he didn’t earn.” He gestures around us at the ruined house. “Mother talked Dad into making Armand and I partners, playing up the fact that a Van Ness should be at least partially at the helm of Van Ness Collectibles. Good of her. Still, I think once the old man died she should have forced the usurper out, don’t you? A family business ought to be run by family.”
Not waiting for an answer, he hops up, apparently having noticed a flicker of headlights through a slice of exposed window out by the front door. He creeps out there and peers round the edge of the plywood. “Oh, the Carlton lady,” he says, half to himself. “The old buzzard must be about to move into town for winter. Bit late this year. Good for her for holding out.”
He returns and eyeballs me as he heads for the bottle. “Shouldn’t you be begging for you life?” He throws himself roguishly across the settee and waits, ankles crossed.
I shrug. “I have nothing to say. In the end you may be found out for your crimes and I may be found out for mine. It is a likely eventuality, I think, yes?”
He absorbs this, then throws his head back and belts out a loud laugh. “You are really so fucking deliciously cold-blooded. Even about yourself,” he says. “You know, if I could trust you, I might actually be tempted to try and devise some way to let us both live on, trading murders like two old club cronies. We could—oh, I don’t know—frame old Mrs. Carlton down the way? What do you say—beg me just a wee bit?”
I gaze across at him. “You owe me nothing. I am certain of that.”
He sits up, snapping a finger. “But of course I do owe you, modest thing. Your killing D’Amante is what launched everything.”
I scoff. “I have already told you that I did not kill him.”
“Don’t be tiresome.” He smokes. “You know, that man represented a serious threat to me and mine. I mean, our settlement with the Culligans and the Commonwealth had absolutely no bearing on the fact that D’Amante was already bound to be handed over to serve time for the multiple sins of his past, but I’m sure he was far too intellectually crude to see it that way. No, he’d been stewing in his own diseased testosterone for eight years, blaming my family money and his skin color for the fact that he was the only one of the Five who saw time. One skillfully administered bullet to the skull, and the D’Amante problem was resolved. So kudos to you.” He rises and crosses to where he’s left the bottle and pours for himself, then turns. “And you know, far more importantly than removing D’Amante as a threat, what you did by killing him was to awaken in me my own resolve to tidy up my life’s loose ends.” He gestures. “What do you think my reaction was, when I first read about D’Amante’s death? Do you think it was relief? Wonder? Simple joy? What do you think?”
I know his reaction, of course, because it was mine as well. What was awakened in me was awakened in him as well—for far different reason, however. I say, “I will not guess.”
He doesn’t care. His asking was but a flourish. “My first reaction was jealousy! Jealousy that I hadn’t pulled that trigger. And that is when it occurred to me that deep down I so very, very, very much wanted to obliterate Elliot Becker. I began tailing him, a tad on edge at first about being spotted, but then he and I went face to face a few times, and I realized that I was too unimportant for a self-absorbed prick like him to recognize.” He laughs and cocks his head at me. “You must have had the same thought when he didn’t recognize you.”
I shake my head. “I did not expect him to remember me.”
“But he hired you in the first place, for the trial.”
I shrug. “I was nothing. A courtroom prop. Why would he focus on me?”
He eyes me steadily for a while. “Well, I knew you. Never really paid attention to you during the trial—as you say, what were you to me? But I realized something was up when he trailed you out of The Underground that night, and I made you while you were with him on that roof deck. You have a way of staring at nothing when you’re concentrating—your eyes go cloudy and your jaw goes a bit slack—and I got a flash memory of you checking Culligan’s tubes during the trial. Interesting twist for me, by the way, watching from that ballroom while you angled in on my murder for me.”
“So you admit I did my own killing?” I say, slicing him a look from under my eyelids.
“You failed,” he assures me. “Don’t worry, as the deed was yours, morally. But I stepped in and tipped him when you blacked out. Imagine his surprise, with you in a heap below—heaving himself back onto the safe side of the rail, already beginning to breathe down, when yet another righteous avenger attacks from out of nowhere! No, my dear, Becker was my murder. Petrianni and Morley—well, who knows what that gut-dissolving crap you fed them would have eventually done, but each was alive when I entered to tidy up after you.”
“And why this level of hatred for your own lawyer?” I ask, knowing.
He sniffs. “His maneuverings came between me and my father. Do you know how much money he siphoned off my family alone?”
I wave it away. “You said yourself that you hated your father.”
“Why should Becker benefit from that? Besides, the fact that I hated my father, and had for years, didn’t mean that the old man hated me back, now, did it? Becker’s deal made it mutual. And once he hated me, Pa became very cheap. You know he intended to write me out of my inheritance? I mean completely!”
“Ah, so why not kill him too?” I say offhandedly.
He studies me. “I would have if I’d had the time to work it out. Cancer got him first.”
“So,” I say. “What was this plan to bring down Elliot Becker, as you put it?”
He brightens up, back on track. “We knew he’d been abusing the trust for years and had arm-twisted his way into a lot of other goodies involving state or private funds. You know how they have all these charitable trusts for nonsense like charter schools and green energy. People owed him for defusing Dorchester, but they wouldn’t remain grateful if they were publically embarrassed for putting so much dough under the care of this obvious shyster. You launch one ethics board complaint and with a few deft tips to a few sleezy pols about similar set-ups involving sizable pots of money, some of them fairly sacred, well, pretty soon it all comes out, one leak after another. All we had to do with file for an accounting of our own trust.
“Pa wouldn’t hear of it. Thought he’d come off as the petty Jew he was. After Pa did the decent thing and died, however, the path forward was simple. I simply had to eliminate that bathetic commemoration Becker had set up to his betrayal of my family by terminating the support needs of the beneficiary.” He eyes himself in the dusty mirror, then takes a small comb out of his breast pocket to smooth his hair back. He studies his stitches for a long moment, then turns to me, suddenly aware of what he’s glimpsed in reflection. He smiles, seeing the gun I’ve taken from my purse, then gives me a look like I’ve been sneaky in an amusing way. “Yes, I thought you might have caught that little slip on my part while we were sailing,” he says. “I did, in fact, make note of your film collection while in the process of smothering the heir apparent of the Culligan fortune. The Beast to your Beauty, the Caliban to your Ariel, your brain-damaged half-brother and lover.”
I stand, the gun on him. “You have a plan. I have a plan. We each carry them to this point. The difference is you harbor a delusion that you will escape.”
He backs up a step, raising his hands like in the old movies. “Doll-face, I just love you when you’re cold as ice.”
“Perhaps I like you that way as well.” I lift the gun.
“Now look,” he
says, eyes on the gun. “Be logical. I needed Jakey dead to launch the trust accounting. And you have to admit, his life was rather repetitive. What’s another half century of the same old routine when you can’t remember a day as it passes?”
“He was aware,” I say.
He makes a face like he doubts that. “Well, then I was mistaken, and for that I’m deeply regretful.” He raises his eyebrows, as if this apology should satisfy me. “Look, if it’s any consolation, let’s remember that he really did have it coming.” I say nothing. “Oh, come now, sweetness. I assume that at some point during the trial you caught onto the fact that he’d hit the old biddy on purpose?”
In spite of myself, I listen. The gun, still aimed at him, lowers to my waist. He laughs.
“New perspective? Yes, granny was out to drive the wicked drug-dealers from her neighborhood, but the Culligan boys were equally determined to resist. She knew the car, but she didn’t know that it was Jakey behind the wheel—impetuous young cub, out to prove his manhood and thus even more dangerous than his animal of a brother. The old lady flags him down and he takes her out like he’s bowling candlepins.”
“You know this?” I scoff.
“Everyone knew it. You saw him jerk the car at her in the video, didn’t you?”
“Then why did it not come out in the courtroom? Would it not have justified the crowd’s reaction all the more?”
He chuckles. “But darling, we were all out to prove that the car got flipped by accident. The more justified the violence, the more retaliatory our actions. And Jakey could have flatlined at any time during that trial. For a while it seems quite likely, matter of fact. No one wanted to be in a position to have to rely on a justified homicide defense. No, no—much better to keep it simple—assault without reason, mob sympathy for granny, that sort of nonsense.”
“So you all lie,” I say.
He smiles at me sympathetically. “Gosh, does it bring you down to have done so very much for a soulless little monster who deserved everything he got and then some?”
“That makes no difference to me,” I say, raising the gun.
He sips his drink. “Mmm, but it does,” he says with assurance. “And do you know what? I’m beginning to believe you when you say you didn’t kill D’Amante. I don’t think you’re really able to shoot that thing.”
“Do not trouble your mind about that,” I say, pulling back on the safety.
“No, it wasn’t you,” he muses aloud. “After all, it doesn’t fit into your artistic theme. In fact, I think you were inspired to action by that killing, just as I was. I think we’re a couple of vigilante birds of a feather, you and me.” He snaps a finger. “The girlfriend did it. Neva herself. You know how resourceful those welfare mothers can be when protecting their whelps. Neva wouldn’t have had to follow D’Amante around or known exactly when he was being released. Just have the gun ready, come out into the vestibule when he buzzes, get your hand up behind his head—a welcome home smooch, easy to pull off—and let him have it.” He smiles across at me. “Maybe we could all learn a lesson from Neva. Simple is best.”
It happens all at once, then. Brewster springs across at me, going for the gun in my hand. The kitchen door kicks in, and a male voice yells at us to freeze as another man kicks the front door out of his way. Behind me, I hear one of the porch doors crash to the wall, its glass shattering. The candles are snuffed by the cross breeze. One falls over, igniting a lace runner, which flares up the wall against the old peeling paper.
I shoot Brewster. I like to think that I shoot with conviction but I cannot say this in honesty. I do not know where I hit him, but he rams his body into mine, still aiming for the gun in my hand. He rips it away from me, and I am flung backwards quite hard. My skull smashes into a person’s face, someone who seems to slip on broken glass and fall to the boards. The cops—more than two of them now—are yelling at all of us to get down, but they are focused on Brewster, who is on his knees, holding my gun and his own gut. I continue stumbling backwards over the legs of the female cop, and finally fall out onto the covered porch. I twist over and climb to my feet, then run into the rain. I see the sun beginning to emerge—white, eldritch, swollen, it raises itself slowly over the edge of the blackened sea, a great cold leviathan peering out of its lair.
I have no thoughts of escape. Freedom is not a priority. I am not afraid of death, either. I want to finish my task, and for that life is essential for the moment. What I seek is a mere shaving of time, a shiver of space, in which to regroup. That is my earnest need. That is my motive in merging into the rain and the grey of this dawn—I hide among the elements.
I hide still. But soon I will emerge again, never you worry. I have not yet had my fifth.
Très sincèrement,
Nightingale
THIRTY-SIX
Marina Papanikitas’s Personal Journal
Excuse the abrupt hang-up, Zoey. Had to see a doctor about some glass in my hand and a broken nose. Not to worry unduly. Talking about a lot of “owwie” and not much damage. When my nose swells, I’ll be plenty pissed—count on it. Right now I’m kind of marveling at how the whack I took actually seems to have straightened the thing.
But to reality. It is true that I am still groveling with thanks before whatever great god of fate there is who allowed my half-baked premmie and even more convoluted vishie to actually get me to the right place at the right time to prevent a capital crime and solve a handful of others. Too bad three experienced detectives and a swarm of back-ups utterly effed up one of the arrests. I’m almost ready to tell you that forces beyond common understanding came between us and our quarry. But that’ll just be between you and me, Zoey. And H.P., in a backhanded way. To Super Jack, it comes off as botched. Still, he’s satisfied. Claire Morley’s off his sassy ass now that Brewster/Bruno is going to be formally charged with her husband’s murder.
I think it’s Granger who comes up with the plan that we coast by the Van Ness place and then pull into a neighbor’s driveway. This is an elderly year-rounder who stays out in ’Sconset every fall until her relatives fly over and force her to shift her bones over to an in-town residence for winter, where they claim she’s safer, and she complains that there’s nowhere for the puggies to romp. Granger’s idea is that Brewster will see the light and assume the old lady’s holding out. The effect will be to slacken his attention to every creak and crackle he may hear from outside. Life’s just playing itself out when the Carltons are prying old Lillian from the face of the cliff in mid-October. Plus it gives us a chance to shine Granger’s headlights on the Van Ness property and get the lay of the land. Apparently they’re well into the process of digging up the foundation, so the land’s literally got its own new lay every day.
Granger calls for backup, making himself nice and clear about how invisible every single one of us needs to be. Soon we three wet cops are wheeling on over to the semi-deserted cliff neighborhood—picture maybe a half-mile square of classic weathered summer mansions, showing themselves in brief pulses provided by the rotating gleam from the lighthouse that marks the tallest point on the bluff, some fifty feet beyond the last of the doomed residences constructed right up against the cliff. Tires crunching on the shelly streets, we get our oh-so-brief-and-hazy study of the Van Ness place. Talking about a haunted wreck of what was once a period summer estate, with stables out by the road, some funky connecting out-buildings and the ghost of a vast kitchen garden running behind, and then the multi-chimney four-story Victorian rising high against the windy sky. Can’t help feeling a thrill of resentment against old man Myeroff myself for letting the place start to fall in on itself. Spite’s a nasty motivator.
We mark where the excavation ditches are, as well as the scattered piles of earth and deserted equipment—not cool to trip over a backhoe—and then move along to park at the tidy antique saltbox down the street. Granger’s got a plan of the layout that he picked up from the house moving crew’s foreman. He passes it round, warning us that the pla
ce is in the kind of shape where every floorboard, door hinge, and windowpane could give way on very little provocation. We decide to let Granger take the front entry, as he’s the biggest and thus less adept at sneaking about noiselessly while also pretty confident about getting results when he applies a shoulder to a slab of bolted oak. Harry opts for the servants’ entrance, where we understand the door is broken—he’s light on his feet and thus stands a decent chance of getting the gist of what’s going on inside before anyone in there detects his presence. This leaves the French doors to the veranda around on the cliff side for me. Scratch the surface, Zoey, and you’ll catch that all of this means I’m the weakest link. Well, the cliff side’s bound to be wild and woolly, so good thing I’m not fussy about my hair. The backup cops know to hang behind and wait for Granger’s signal. Our jump strategy is to let H.P. take the lead. He’ll be in the best position to hear and see what’s going on. When he blasts in on them, the idea is for Granger and me to make it a 3-D surprise party, just before the rest of the force swarms.
Works pretty darn well, as far as the set-up goes. I pick my way through the mud without losing a shoe. At one point, I crouch under a window and listen to some occasional loud banging until I’m quite sure that there’s a random sort of repetitiveness to it, making it nothing more than a loose door or shutter out back. When I peer round the corner of the place, it’s reassuring to see that we’ve guessed right. Someone’s lit some candles in the main room that looks out over the cliff-top veranda. A couple of the windows are boarded over, but a vivid glow comes through the French doors. I study the expanse of planks that makes up what’s left of the veranda—not much you can tell about the condition of the wood with the amount of dust and blown sand strewn across it, but then I see the wet path that must have been cut by the two inside. Naturally, the boards may creak if I follow the soggy prints, but at least I won’t go through and find myself trying to flash my badge and command some respect with one of my legs three feet shorter than the other.
