by Lee Harris
“That’s fine. I’ll be around if you need me.”
I sat down to wait. This was Virginia McAlpine’s office, and she had moved all the furniture and books from the old Greenwillow in a nearby town to this wonderful new location right in Oakwood, a large, old house that had been converted into a comfortable residence where my cousin Gene lived. It appeared that Virginia had been able to duplicate her old office. I got up and looked at the books in the large bookcases built into the wall. As I was reading titles, the doorbell rang.
I went to the front door, unlocked it, and pulled it open. Dodie Murchison, a silk scarf around her head and tinted glasses on her face, stood there. “I found it,” she said, and walked inside.
I asked her if she wanted any coffee or juice but she didn’t. She just wanted to get into a room with a door that closed, sit down, and begin talking.
“Have you learned anything?” she asked first, pulling the scarf off and shaking her hair.
“A few things, but I’m no closer to determining who murdered Ken Buckley or Tina Frisch than I was several days ago.”
“I wish I could pull a name out of a hat for you but I can’t. But I know several things that you may not, and perhaps they’ll help you. And I’ll work with you in any way I can to get this settled. I know the Blue Harbor chief thinks I committed these acts, but I didn’t, Chris. And the sooner we find the person or persons who did, the sooner I can go back to living my life.”
“Why don’t you tell me what you know?” I suggested. I had my pen and notebook and was sitting in a leather chair.
“I have to be sure you aren’t recording this,” she said. She looked around the room, then walked to the bookcase and surveyed the shelves, pulling an occasional book out. She then went to the desk and checked the drawers, all of which were apparently locked. She moved things in the room, looked behind and under furniture, then turned to me. “I’m sorry, Chris. I need to check your person.”
I stood and raised my arms as though I were a victim in a Western. She came and patted me down gently, and, I thought, with embarrassment and misgivings.
“OK. Let’s begin.” She sat in the other leather chair, positioned so we could look at each other. “I met Ken Buckley in New York, not on the beach at Fire Island as you surmised. The circumstances don’t matter. What’s relevant is that he had been carrying a load of guilt for a number of years and he wanted to alleviate it the only way he knew how, by giving someone money. It goes back a lot of years, to another Labor Day, in fact, when he got a phone call that someone needed help.
“He wasn’t the fire chief at that time but on that day he was filling in for the fire chief, and for the police chief that preceded Curtis Springer as well, and that may be why he received the call. He was very careful when he was talking to me not to mention names of people who might be incriminated by his story. So you’ll understand if I speak of people without identifying them.”
I had no way of knowing whether this was true or whether she knew the names and had simply decided to keep them to herself, but it didn’t matter. If her story pointed in the direction Joseph, Jack, and I had been heading, I would recognize many of the players. “That’s fine,” I said.
“The call came at night from a house in Blue Harbor. He went there and found that a young girl, a teenager, I believe, was crying hysterically. The story he was told was that she had picked up—or met—a man on the beach that afternoon, a young man, probably in his twenties, and they had spent the afternoon together. Before they realized it, it was evening and the last ferry had left for Bay Shore. She didn’t want to tell her parents about him, but she knew of an empty house—neighbors of her parents owned it and they had left the island—so she told him he could stay there if he was careful and didn’t leave any traces that he’d been there. What happened was that when she was showing him the house, he attacked her and tried to rape her.” She stopped, her feelings plainly shown on her face.
“What did she do?” I asked, certain now of what the answer would be, an important missing piece in my puzzle.
“She stabbed him with a kitchen knife and killed him.”
Even expecting it, I felt a chill. “And then she had a problem.”
“Then she had a big problem. She didn’t know what to do and she was afraid to tell anyone, especially her parents. But eventually she did. They discussed the alternatives, one of which was that they would leave the body in the empty house for the owners to discover when they came out to Fire Island the next time. They discarded that plan, and decided to get help from someone they thought they could trust, and that someone turned out to be Ken Buckley.” She stopped for a moment and then said, “You know, I could use a cup of coffee after all, if you know how to get hold of some.”
“Sure.” I left the office and found Jonesy. We went to the kitchen together and I saw a carafe half-full. Jonesy put it all into a thermos pitcher and we carried that and a couple of mugs back to Virginia’s office. I didn’t let Jonesy in, so Dodie could keep her privacy.
Dodie was walking around the room nervously, as though still looking for a recording device, but when the coffee arrived, she seemed to relax a little. We sat and sipped for a while and finally she smiled.
“That’s better. I didn’t know how much I needed that.”
“Take your time.”
“Well, not too long. I have to get back to—” She didn’t finish. Her whereabouts were not my business.
“I understand. You were saying that they decided not to leave the body for the owners of the house to find, and instead they called Ken Buckley to help.”
“That’s what happened. Ken went over. He knew the people, knew the girl—Ken knew everyone. He assessed the situation as I’ve described it to you. The man was dead, there was no question about that. By the time Ken arrived, he had probably been dead for some time, possibly as long as an hour or so. They talked. Ken told me how very deeply he felt for the girl’s situation. He believed her story that the man had tried to rape her, that she had grabbed a kitchen knife and stabbed him with it and that the wound had been fatal. He told me he could think of no other reason for the girl to have done what she did, and he may also have said that the victim’s clothes indicated he might have been starting to undress. And he said eventually it came down to the question of what to do with the body. He didn’t want the girl involved in a homicide.”
“Did he know who the victim was?”
“He took all the ID he could find and kept it. The man’s name was William Jamieson. There was an address, keys, but no documents for a car. He had told the girl he didn’t have one, that he had hitched a ride with some guys and told them not to wait if he didn’t make the last ferry. He had apparently come out to see a girl he’d met somewhere else, but he never found her. He thought maybe he’d taken the wrong ferry and ended up in the wrong town on Fire Island.”
“So whoever she was, she thought she was stood up and it wasn’t a serious enough relationship for her to follow up on it.”
“That’s the way it sounded to me.”
“What did they do with the body?”
“He burned it. It wasn’t as simple as that, of course. Nothing ever is. The house had a fairly new country-pine floor and it was covered with blood in the kitchen where Jamieson had been stabbed. The blood had seeped into the wood, and there was no way they could clean up the floor and get rid of the stain so that the owners would not know something had happened there. So Ken decided that the house would burn down.
“He gave me some of the details but they really don’t matter. He was both acting fire chief and acting police chief that day, and the fire was in his domain so it gave him the right to issue orders. He arranged things so that the body would burn and he allowed no one to go inside except himself and one other person until the next day.”
“The father of the girl,” I said. “He used to be a volunteer fireman.”
She looked at me with surprise. “You know all this.”
&nb
sp; “I knew about the fire. I didn’t know there was a homicide, but of course, that answers a lot of questions. I spoke to people who I assume were the parents of the girl. There are pictures in their living room of a daughter at her wedding and later with her husband and children.”
“I see.” She refilled her mug and sipped, leaning back in the comfortable chair. She looked as though the last few days had taken a toll on her. Her face seemed thinner. “How did you come to them?”
“I believed the murder of Ken Buckley and the torching of his house were retaliation for some past act. But everyone seemed to like him, even though it was quite well known that he was a philanderer. Of course, someone I talked to may well have been putting on an act, but I still don’t know who that was. Every time I start to suspect someone, something comes up to exclude that person. It was the fire at the Buckley house that made me think the Great Fire of fifteen years ago might be connected. The bullet in Ken’s head killed him, not the fire. Someone set the house on fire to make a point, not to kill him.”
“So your questions led you to what you call the Great Fire.”
“That’s right. But I don’t want to stop you. You have more to tell me.”
“Yes, I do. There’s not much more about the accidental killing and the fire. The house, I gather, was a total loss. The owners were led to believe that they’d left something on the stove when they left the house, that whatever it was caught fire, and that was that. Ken said they moved to another town on Fire Island. They sold the property and the new people rebuilt. But that has nothing to do with the story.
“The rest of the story is a tale of guilt. Whatever you may think of Ken Buckley, he had a conscience and his conscience told him that whoever this William Jamieson was, he must have had a family. He decided to try to find any relatives of Jamieson’s that might still be living and give them an anonymous gift or, if that proved too difficult, to leave something to them in his will. As an estate attorney, I often have to find missing heirs, and I agreed to try to find Jamieson’s family. We had several documents to work from, a Social Security card, a driver’s license, a few very old snapshots, and a couple of other things. They led me to a dead end. The Social Security card was for a deceased person with the same name. I think the name was assumed at some point in his life, and I don’t have a clue what his real name was. Ken authorized me to keep at it. He felt that somewhere out there”—she waved her right hand—“were people who had been waiting all these years for the person known as William Jamieson to return.”
“There were,” I said. “Tina Frisch was one of them.”
“Tina Frisch? Tina Frisch knew William Jamieson?” It was clear the news had surprised her.
“She thought he was someone known to her family. She’d been looking into his disappearance all summer.”
“I was unaware of that. What happened to her is a terrible story, a tragic story. Someone killed her after I spoke to her Wednesday night.”
“Do you know who?”
“I don’t have any idea. But I’m sure Tina knew him.”
“How do you know that?”
“She told me she knew who killed Ken Buckley, not who it was, but that she knew who it was.”
“Why did you go to see her, Dodie?”
“Because of what you said, that she had been at the Buckley fire, that she was trying to hide her face as she left, that she denied having been there. I’d been working all summer on trying to trace William Jamieson for Ken Buckley and suddenly this fire happens, Ken is murdered—it was getting too close to home. I figured it would be safe to talk to her because she wasn’t likely to have a weapon, especially if she was wearing shorts like the rest of us. I walked over to the house where she was a grouper. She came downstairs and we went out for a walk. She was pretty tense. At first she didn’t want to say anything. Then she asked me if she could be my client and I said, ‘Sure. Give me a dollar and I’m your attorney.’ She didn’t have any money on her so she unscrewed a small diamond earring she was wearing and handed it to me. She said she’d buy it back later.”
“The missing earring,” I breathed.
Dodie gave me a wry smile. “I’ll bet that gave the crime scene unit something to worry about.”
“All of us. It hadn’t been forcibly removed and it never turned up in the house.”
“Well, I have it. At some point I’ll turn it over to the proper authorities.”
“You said Tina knew her killer.”
“Tina had an appointment with Ken Buckley during the Labor Day picnic. She wasn’t clear what she went to see him about, but she told me she found him dead in his bed. On her way out, she saw the person she believed killed him.”
“But she didn’t name him.”
“No. It was someone she knew in Blue Harbor. She looked around as she was telling me this, as though he might be there, as though he might hear.”
A chill went through me. Harry Hershey lived a five-minute walk from the Kleins’ house. Al Jorgensen lived near the Kleins’ house. Kyle lived in the Kleins’ house. But Kyle had given me the notebook that Danielle had found in the refrigerator. Would he have done that if he had killed Tina? I rubbed my forehead. The notebook had told us very little besides confirming what we already knew. He could have taken a calculated risk. But I couldn’t believe it was Kyle. He seemed so real and earnest; he had liked Tina.
But Ken might have told Harry Hershey he was looking for Jamieson’s family, and Harry might have feared his daughter would face charges if the true events of that Labor Day night became public. He might have walked over to the Buckley house on Monday….
“Something wrong?”
“I’m just trying to think who it might be, and it’s very distressing.”
“It’s distressing to know I’m a suspect in her murder.”
“I know.”
“I told her to go to the police with what she knew and she said she would do that as soon as she left Fire Island. She was obviously very uncomfortable being there. I advised her to leave the island as soon as possible, which was the next day. And I decided that would be the best thing for me to do, too. I didn’t like the idea of a killer walking around, someone who might be my next-door neighbor. So after I left her, I went back to my house and packed my bags.”
“Dodie, your fingerprints were found all over the grip on Tina’s handlebars and I think also on the gate to the crawl space.”
She thought about it. “She said she wanted to go somewhere, to say good-bye to someone. She needed the bike. I walked her back to her house—we were still talking—and we went for the bike. There were a couple in there, I think, and she had trouble pulling out the one she wanted. I helped her. That’s all. When you touch something, you leave prints. I left mine.”
“I thought as much.”
“How do they know they’re my prints? I’ve never been printed that I can recall.”
“The crime scene unit went over the house you’d been living in and matched prints in the house with prints on the bike. It’s not a certainty but it’s pretty close.”
“Too damn close.”
“Tina didn’t tell you what her interest in Ken Buckley was?”
“Not really.”
“She was looking into the elusive Mr. William Jamieson.”
“So it’s all tied together.”
“Yes.”
“What was her connection?” Dodie asked.
“She called him Uncle Bill, but she thought he might be her natural father. He was a friend of her mother’s. He visited a lot.”
“Amazing. She probably would have told me the next time we met. We made an appointment for tomorrow in my office. And I was going to give her her earring back.” As she spoke, she opened her handbag, a large, elegant, black bag, and pulled out a tissue. When she opened it, a small glittering stone lay in her hand. “A dollar’s worth of diamond,” she said.
24
We talked a little while longer. She was interested in how I had learne
d as much as I had and I told her a lot of it, but kept a number of things to myself, as I was sure she had also. Finally I asked her the question I most wanted the answer to.
“What did Ken Buckley do with William Jamieson’s body?”
“He wouldn’t tell me. He said he disposed of it and that he didn’t want to say any more about it. I know, because I found out, that there’s a body bag kept at the firehouse, just in case it’s ever needed. So it’s possible he used that. But I have no idea what he did with the body. And there are things I’d rather not know, if you know what I mean.”
I nodded. We had been talking for quite a while and it had been a long day. I felt that I trusted her, but not completely. She had good answers to my questions, but she’d had time to prepare for them. “Are you going to turn yourself in?” I asked finally.
“I haven’t decided. I have to think about my career. I am totally innocent with respect to these homicides, but I have information that the police may need. I’m fairly sure I was the last person to see Tina alive, except for the person who killed her. I can’t withhold that information very long. I’d appreciate it if you’d tell me if you have any viable suspects.”
“They come and go in my head, Dodie. It could be the father of the girl who was almost raped. Ken helped him out of the tightest spot he’d ever been in and he must be very grateful for that, but if Ken told him he was looking for the family of William Jamieson, the father may have feared his daughter’s role in Jamieson’s death would be exposed.”
“That might happen inadvertently. Good point.”
“And I think about the groupers in Tina’s house, but they don’t have any motive that I can think of. If we can figure out who William Jamieson really was, maybe we could go on from there. This is the first I’ve heard that there was a homicide in that house fifteen years ago, and also the first I’ve heard that Tina’s supposed Uncle Bill was living under an assumed name.”
“And this is the first that I knew there was a connection between Tina and William Jamieson,” Dodie said, as though to thank me in return for the information I had given her. “So we’ve both learned something tonight, and unless you have a better idea, I think the next step has to be to talk to Tina’s mother.”
