Outwitting Trolls

by William G. Tapply

  I thought I saw the flicker of a shadow in the garage behind Ellen. It was quick, and then it was gone. Probably my imagination.

  Maybe not.

  Keep her talking.

  “So,” I said, “that wasn’t Wayne who tortured the animals when you were growing up, right? It was you.”

  She was shaking her head. “I don’t want to talk about that.”

  “You told your mother it was Wayne,” I said. “You put those awful thoughts into her head.”

  “Stop that. I’m going to kill you. Nothing you say will change my mind.”

  “I already gave the police your name,” I said. “If you kill me, it’ll just be worse for you.”

  “There’s no proof,” she said. “You tricked me with the cat, that’s all. I can explain that.”

  A shadow appeared behind her, and in the dim yellow light I saw the shadow materialize into Marcia Benetti. She wore a dark windbreaker over a black T-shirt, with blue jeans and white sneakers. She was holding her service revolver in both hands beside her face, pointing up at the ceiling, and she was easing along with her back against the wall, moving toward Ellen.

  “Was it really just about the money?” I asked Ellen.

  “Of course it was the money,” she said. “He was going to keep it all. He said he needed it more than I did.”

  “Your grandfather’s inheritance?”

  “I’ve got a right to that money,” she said. “My father didn’t deserve it, and neither did my brother. You can understand that, can’t you?”

  That’s when Benetti darted out of the parking garage shadows. Her scream echoed and rebounded off the concrete walls. It was a wild canine sound, a growl from deep in her chest, and then she slammed into Ellen, grabbing the arm that held the gun and sprawling her sideways. Ellen bounced off the wall, and when her shoulder slammed against the floor, her revolver came out of her hand and went skittering across the concrete, and Benetti was on top of her, rolling her onto her belly, pushing her face against the floor, and twisting her arms behind her.

  Then the door to Charles Street flew open, and Roger Horowitz burst in from the sidewalk with his weapon in his hand. He looked at Marcia Benetti and Ellen Nichols on the floor, and then he looked at me. He smiled and gave me a little shrug, then put his gun back into his shoulder holster. “She’s something, ain’t she?” he asked.

  “She just saved my life,” I said, “if that’s what you mean.”

  Benetti had everything under control. Ellen was lying on her belly with her hands cuffed behind her. Her gun lay on the parking-garage floor near the wall, safely out of reach, and Marcia was kneeling beside her with her own handgun now in her hip holster.

  Horowitz stood there inside the door. He looked at Marcia Benetti, smiled and nodded, then turned to me. “You okay?”

  I nodded. “Thanks for showing up.”

  “Marcia’s idea,” he said. “She said we had to pick your brain. Said we shouldn’t let you off the hook. She said, let’s intercept the son of a bitch, bring him in whether he wants to or not. Woulda been easier all ’round if you’d come to the office voluntarily, had coffee and doughnuts with us.” He cocked an eyebrow at me. “The offer still stands.”

  I shook my head. “The doughnuts are tempting, but you don’t need my help anymore.”

  “Your help?” Horowitz asked. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but we just saved your sorry ass here. This pretty little girl was gonna blow a hole in you.”

  “I had everything under control,” I said, “and now you’ve got yourselves a real live double murder suspect. That should keep you busy for a while. Have a nice night. I’m going home.”

  I had started to push open the heavy glass door to the sidewalk when Horowitz said, “Hold on a minute.”

  I stopped and turned to look at him. “What?”

  “How’d you figure it out?”

  “Ellen, you mean?”

  He nodded.

  “If it had been only Ken who got killed,” I said, “or only Wayne, I probably wouldn’t’ve. Each of them had plenty of enemies, just like most of us. Could’ve been anybody. Tonight, though, when I found Wayne murdered, I assumed it was the same killer, and that narrowed it way down. I just asked myself who was linked to both men, and of those people, who’d benefit from them both being dead.” I jerked my head in the direction of Ellen, who was now sitting on the floor with her back against the concrete wall. “Ken Nichols stood to inherit several million from his father, Ellen’s grandfather, who’s old and in bad health, and, in fact, is comatose in the hospital as we speak. Ken had huge debts. With him out of the way, the two grandchildren, Ellen and Wayne, were next in line for it. With Wayne gone, it’d all be Ellen’s.”

  “If it ain’t for love,” Horowitz said, “it’s for money.”

  “Just about every time,” I said.

  Twenty-five

  My alarm went off at eight in the morning. I wasn’t happy to hear it. I’d read Moby-Dick for a while after I finally got to bed, but my adrenaline had juiced me up so high that even Melville’s usually reliable prose had failed to ease me to sleep. I’d lain there thinking about what must have gone wrong with Ellen Nichols, what wires got crossed so badly that as a child she could torture pets and then, as an adult, murder her father and her brother with malice aforethought—and tell me that it didn’t bother her—never mind try to murder me.

  I found no answers. Words like “sociopath” and “psycho-path” were meaningless, except as descriptors. They didn’t explain anything.

  Nature or nurture. Whatever. It has usually seemed to me that anybody who had the capability of murdering another human being epitomized the definition of insane. Then again, there were times when I thought I understood how a sane person could decide that murder was a reasonable solution to a problem.

  In that gray light just before sunrise, nothing made a lot of sense, and when I finally managed to drift into edgy sleep, I had nightmarish dreams about blood and explosions and hospitals.

  I’d set my alarm so that I could catch Tally Whyte before she left for her office. Smart me, I’d also set my automatic coffeepot to begin brewing at seven thirty, so when I went downstairs a little after eight, the aroma in my kitchen was enough to perk me up.

  I filled a mug, picked up my phone, and grabbed a Milk-Bone for Henry, and he and I went out back. I sat at the picnic table, and Henry flopped down underneath it with his treat propped up between his front paws.

  I took a big swig of coffee, sighed at the miraculous infusion of energy and clarity, and called Tally’s home number.

  She answered with a cheerful “Tally Whyte. Good morning.”

  “Good morning yourself,” I said. “It’s Brady.”

  “Uh-oh,” she said. “What’s wrong?”

  “Sharon Nichols,” I said. “Events of the weekend. She’s going to need you, but knowing her, she might not call you. I don’t know if you—”

  “I never hesitate to reach out to my clients,” Tally said. “Talk to me.”

  I proceeded to tell her about Wayne’s murder and Ellen’s subsequent arrest. I left out the details of my own role in the drama.

  “Ellen did it, then?” Tally asked when I finished. “She murdered her father and her brother?”

  “It looks that way,” I said.

  “Wow,” Tally said. “It’s an old-fashioned Greek tragedy. It’s going to be a tough one for Sharon. This means she’s off the hook for her ex-husband’s murder, though, huh?”

  “I’m sure of it,” I said.

  “Well, that’s something, anyway.” She blew out a breath. “Okay. I’m glad you called me. I’m gonna say bye-bye now so I can call Sharon. I’ll spend time with her today, you can count on it. If necessary I’ll drive to her house. She’s going to need a lot of help with this.”

  “Thanks, Tal. Keep me posted?”

  “Not me, pal,” she said. “You know better than that. I don’t talk about my patients, any more than you talk about your clien
ts. Don’t worry, though. I’ve done this before. I’ll take good care of her, and I’ll encourage her to keep in touch with you. Thanks for calling. You did the right thing. You’re a good man, Brady Coyne.”

  I spent the next few days catching up with my other clients and plowing through the never-ending reams of paperwork that Julie kept dumping into my in-box. Sharon called me at home on Tuesday evening, just to tell me that she’d been spending a lot of time with Tally and was doing as well as could be expected, and that Tally had urged her to touch base with me. It was a short conversation.

  Wednesday after work I’d changed into jeans and a sweatshirt, and Henry and I were sitting out in the patio garden watching the evening grosbeaks and purple finches filch seeds from the feeders. I was sipping a Sam Adams lager wondering what I’d do about supper when my cell phone began hopping around on the arm of my chair.

  It was Horowitz. “You home?” he asked.

  “I am.”

  “I’m parked out front. Got a beer for me?”

  “Sure. Come on in.”

  I went to the front door and let Horowitz in. He trailed me back through the house to the kitchen, where I snagged a bottle of Sam from the refrigerator. I handed it to him, and we continued out to the backyard.

  I sat in my chair, and Horowitz sat at the picnic table. He lifted his beer bottle, took a long swig, said, “Ahh,” and plunked the half-empty bottle down on the table. “That hits the spot,” he said.

  “There’s more where that one came from.”

  He nodded. “Good to know. What’re those yellow-and-black birds?”

  “Evening grosbeaks,” I said.

  “They look like they should be living in a jungle.”

  I smiled. “So what’s up, Roger? Or did you come to look at my birds?”

  “The birds are nice.” He took another sip of beer, then turned to look at me. “So, yeah…about your client.”

  “Sharon Nichols,” I said.

  “She’s no longer a suspect in the Ken Nichols murder.” He gazed up at the sky. “Thought you should know.”

  “Good. Thanks. The daughter, then, huh?”

  He looked at me and nodded. “Her fingerprints were all over the vic’s hotel room, and one of their security cameras caught her leaving that same evening. That took care of opportunity, and we’re already pretty solid on motive. Turns out the weapon that killed the brother was not recovered. According to ballistics, it was not the one Ellen Nichols pulled on you. She did test positive for GSR, and she couldn’t account for her time Sunday afternoon before around five o’clock, when she arrived at the hospital in Fitchburg. So we got some good stuff, and we’re still working on it. When we confronted her and her PD with what we had, they huddled for a while and then decided they wanted to plead out.”

  “You going to negotiate a plea with her?”

  He shrugged. “Leaning that way. We’re still going back and forth. We’d love to take her to trial, but we don’t have that steak knife that killed the vet, and we haven’t yet come up with the brother’s murder weapon or a witness to place her in Websterville that afternoon. We like our case, but it’s still got some circumstantial elements to it that make me uncomfortable.”

  We both sipped our beers and watched the birds. After a minute, I said, “So drugs had nothing to do with any of it.”

  “Doesn’t look like it,” he said.

  “Even though Ken was probably trafficking in ketamine,” I said, “and Wayne was selling stuff to the college kids. Right?”

  “Like father, like son.” Horowitz shrugged. “The Maryland cops had their eye on Dr. Nichols. He had big debts, including to some dubious people in Baltimore, and he was using his ability to write prescriptions in, um, creative ways, but we weren’t getting very far with the ketamine piece of it from this end. We had no luck trying to ID the guy in the hoodie you saw at the hotel that night. The other guy, Clements, he’s got a nice motive—our vic owed him a lot of money—but he’s also got a solid alibi for the night of the murder. Detective Wexler up there in the Granite State, he said they’ve had their eye on Wayne Nichols for some time, and the drug connection was his original assumption. Their dogs found his stash in his house, but that just confirmed what they already knew—and there was no ketamine.” He took a swig of beer. “If you look hard enough, everybody’s got a reason or two to end up with a bullet in them. Anyway, that’s immaterial now. We’ve got a good circumstantial case against the girl. There will be a conviction, one way or the other.” He cocked his head and looked at me. “Her fingerprints were on that matchbook in the hotel door.”

  “She left it there after killing her father?”

  He nodded.

  “Why would she do that?”

  “She knew her mother was on her way,” he said. “She wanted to make sure she could get in.”

  “So Sharon would find the body and be an instant suspect?” I asked. “Is that what you think?”

  “She’s a devious one, that girl.” Horowitz shrugged. “I’d love to take her to trial.”

  “Your case is better than circumstantial, I’d say,” I said. “She practically admitted to me that she did it.”

  Horowitz nodded. “For the money she’d inherit from the grandfather with her father and brother out of the way. She told you that, right?”

  “Any idea what Wayne wanted to show me, why he asked me to go up there?”

  “We figure it this way,” he said. “Wayne had a copy of a document about his grandfather’s will. It showed that he and his sister would get the old guy’s money now that their father was dead. We figure he called you to show it to you as evidence against his sister, and somehow she figured out what he was up to—maybe they talked—so she went up there and…”

  “Killed him,” I said. “Took the document.”

  Horowitz nodded. “She’s a sick puppy.”

  I nodded. “It’s more than just greed.”

  “It usually is,” Horowitz said. “If we do end up taking it to trial, we’ll call you for a witness. We have also charged Ellen Nichols with ADW, among assorted other charges, for what went down with you the other night in the parking garage.”

  “I don’t want to be a witness,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said, “nobody does.”

  I had no clients and no court appearances scheduled for Thursday. This was usually the kind of day when Julie and I worked together to catch up on correspondence, schedule conferences, send out bills, review inactive cases, and generally get organized. At noontime on this Thursday in late April, though, I told her to go home. Her daughter had a soccer game. For once, Julie could get to see all of it.

  After she left, I fished out the business card Detective Wexler of the New Hampshire State Police had given me. The first number I tried was answered by voice mail. I left my name and a couple of numbers and asked him to call me.

  The second number was apparently his cell phone, and he picked up on the second ring. “Wexler,” he growled.

  “It’s Brady Coyne,” I said. “You interviewed me at the Wayne Nichols murder last Sunday.”

  “Yeah, I remember,” he said. “What’ve you got for me?”

  “Just a question,” I said. “I was wondering what happened to Sparky.”

  “Huh?”

  “Wayne Nichols had a cat named Sparky. Where is she?”

  “Christ,” he said. “Wait a minute.” I heard muffled voices, and then Wexler said, “My partner says they took that animal to the shelter in Keene.”

  “You got the name of the place?”

  He sighed. “Hang on.” Again I heard the voices in the background. Then Wexler said, “It’s called the Monadnock Animal House.”

  “Animal House,” I said.

  “Yeah, John Belushi,” grumbled Wexler. “Funny. So is that it?”

  “Yes. Thanks. I appreciate it.”

  “Seemed like a nice cat,” he said.

  I called the Monadnock Animal House, and the young woman who answere
d immediately recognized my description of Wayne’s cat. “Sparky,” she said. “She’s a sweetie.”

  “Will you hold her for me?” I asked. “I want to rescue her.”

  “Sure,” she said. “Wonderful. That’s what we’re for.”

  So I shut down the office, went home and changed out of my office pinstripe, and an hour later Henry and I were heading north and west for Keene, New Hampshire.

  It cost me a hundred dollars, plus another thirty-nine ninety-five for the travel crate, to rescue Sparky from the Monadnock Animal House. She rode in the backseat with Henry, who sniffed the crate a few times and then ignored her. After a couple of plaintive meows, she quieted down.

  I called Sharon Nichols on my cell phone from the road. It was a little after four in the afternoon, and she was at the leather shop, working, which I took to be a positive sign.

  “When do you get off?” I asked her.

  “In an hour,” she said. “We close at five. Why?”

  “If I meet you at your house, will you have a beer for me?”

  “Absolutely. It will be wonderful to see you.”

  “You sound good, Sharon.”

  “It’s not easy,” she said, “but Tally’s been amazing. I think I’m getting there. Late at night is the worst, but Tally’s given me some tricks.” She hesitated. “A customer just came in. Gotta go. See you.”

  I rang the bell to Sharon’s condo in Acton a little after five thirty, and she buzzed me up.

  She was waiting with the door open when I got to her apartment. I went in and put Sparky’s crate on the floor, and Sharon put both arms around my neck and hugged me tight. “It’s wonderful to see you,” she said. When she pulled back, I saw that her eyes were glittery. “What’s this?” She looked down at the crate.

  I opened it up and lifted out Sparky.