Body Language (36 page)

I stood, interrupting him. “I’m nine years younger than you, Parker. I was nine years younger than Mark Quatrain.”

He shot back, “There were
lots
of us born that year, Mark. The baby boom was revving up, in case you forgot.”

“Mark Quatrain was an honors English major, and you’re a top-notch editor. Mark was a varsity swimmer and track star, and you’re one hell of a runner. Do you still keep up with the swimming, Parker?” Though convinced of his identity, I could not bring myself to address him as Mark—I could not allow the memories of my older cousin to be tainted by what he had become.

He stepped toward the center of the room and perched on the back of one of the big leather chairs, facing me. In a composed, rational tone, he told me, “Those are mere coincidences. You’re far too good a journalist to draw such weighty conclusions from such slim circumstances.” Mustering a laugh, he added, “As your managing editor, Mark, I have to tell you, I’m disappointed.”

“Good”—I nodded—“you should be skeptical. You should demand hard evidence.” I strolled toward the front of the room and perched on the banister, facing him. Separated by some twenty feet, I told him, “There’s far more to this than coincidence.”

“Such as?”

I shrugged. “Just for starters, I felt that I already knew you from the moment you arrived for your interview at the loft in Chicago. Why? Because you reminded me of my cousin Mark—the way you move, your body language.” I didn’t want to get more specific on this point. Why give him the satisfaction of praising his butt? Why tell him that we were wearing identical pants that morning because he had inspired a lifelong fixation within me thirty-three years earlier? Why tell him about the erotic charge I felt when he mussed my hair the day we ran together, resting at the park pavilion?

“
Body
language”—Parker harrumphed—“that’s
evidence?
You undoubtedly made the association because you were preparing to return to Dumont and your boyhood visit was heavily on your mind. But you raise a good point. If I were really Mark Quatrain, wouldn’t someone here
recognize
me?”

“Well,” I acknowledged, “let’s think about that. You’d been gone more than thirty years. Obviously, you’re older now, your hair has thinned, you’ve grown a beard. So the way I figure it, there were only four of us left who stood a chance of recognizing you: myself, Hazel, Suzanne, and Joey.

“As for myself, I’ve already said that I
did
recognize you, sort of, at least subconsciously. I even had a dream in which you and Mark Quatrain switched places. It just took a while for the true recognition to bubble to the surface.

“Hazel wouldn’t be likely to recognize you—she’s half blind. She didn’t recognize
me
when I arrived in Dumont before Christmas.

“As for Suzanne, when you ‘met’ her for the first time on Christmas Day, it struck me that you were uncharacteristically reticent about being introduced. You were all bundled up in a muffler, knit cap, and steamy sunglasses, which you took your time removing downstairs in the front hall. When there was no sign of recognition from Suzanne, you breathed easier, but an hour later, she was dead.

“Then there’s Joey. He often complained that none of us took him seriously, but we should have. He’s the key to all this, isn’t he, Parker? He recognized you, and he said so plainly, but I wasn’t smart enough to take him at his word.”

Parker threw his hands in the air. “Whoa, Mark. You weren’t making sense before, but now you’re
really
sounding nuts. Joey? What are you talking about?”

I stepped a few feet closer, moving from the banister to sit on the edge of the worktable. I began, “From the moment Joey’s body was discovered, his ‘suicide’ troubled me for several reasons:

“First, I don’t think it’s possible, even for a determined adult, to make good on a child’s threat to die from holding his breath.

“Second, Joey was staunchly—I daresay childishly—Catholic, believing that suicide is a sin. He mentioned it at lunch one day, and you weren’t there.

“Third, his generic-sounding suicide note just didn’t make sense. The day before he died, he wanted to make a huge donation to charity—he wasn’t greedy. But he did harbor a lifelong resentment toward Suzanne, and if he had killed her,
that
would have been his motive, not money, as suggested by the note.

“Fourth—and this gets to the heart of it—I was troubled by something you said, Parker. In fact, you said it twice. I couldn’t quite put my finger on what was wrong, but Joey sure did. A couple of weeks ago, I took Joey and Thad to lunch at the First Avenue Grill. Joey made a scene there, and Thad had to snap him out of it. After lunch, I met you at the
Register
, mentioned Joey’s snit, and you made a joking reference to ‘his threats about turning blue.’ Then, this last Wednesday night in the dining room, Joey threatened, ‘I’ll
do
something, and this time I’ll die.’ We all tried to calm him down, and you told him, ‘No more threats about turning blue.’ The point is: Parker Trent never heard Joey talk about turning blue, but Mark Quatrain did, many times, as a child. Realizing this, Joey recoiled from the dining-room table, pointing toward the fireplace, shouting, ‘It was you all along, Mark. You killed Suzie.’ I was standing at the fireplace with a king-thing, and you were right there next to me on the hearth. Joey wasn’t talking to
me
, Parker; he was unmasking
you.
You knew it. You knew you had to act. And you acted fast.”

Listening to all this, Parker was no longer taking my accusations so glibly. Pacing behind the sofa, he asked, “And then what did I supposedly do?” His tone now had a distinctly testy edge.

I remained seated on the edge of the desk, idly swinging one foot as I explained, “You took Joey upstairs to his bedroom on the pretext of calming him down. You’d already made up your mind to stage his ‘suicide’ at some point, bringing the investigation to an end and taking the focus off the ‘brother from the grave’ theory that you yourself had promoted—very clever, by the way, very bold of you. So you had prepared a generic suicide note on Joey’s old typewriter, making the wrong guess as to his most logical motive. You knew where the machine was, and you had access to it anytime since Christmas. What you
didn’t
know was that Hazel threw the typewriter out with a load of junk on Wednesday afternoon, hours before Joey could have used it to write his note. So you took him upstairs that night, and you could’ve gotten him to sign the note on some pretext, and then you could’ve suffocated him, and then you could’ve placed the note in his hands.”

“‘Could’ve, could’ve’.” He stepped to within six feet of me. “That’s still a hell of a lot of speculation, Mark. Besides”—he smiled with a sense of relief as something dawned on him—“what about Allan Addams? Only minutes ago, you told me Suzanne had a dossier on him.”

Nodding, I reminded him, “Yes, Allan Addams was a survivor of the ambush that supposedly killed Mark Quatrain, but Suzanne’s investigator deemed Addams to be ‘above suspicion’ as an alias for Mark Quatrain.”

“It all fits, though,” Parker insisted. “He came to Quatro shortly after Edwin’s death. He asked Joey about the family all the time…”

“Allan Addams is black,” I told him. “The investigator, like Joey, easily concluded that Addams never had a former life as Mark Quatrain.”

Parker reacted with a blank expression, but a ripple of his bearded cheek betrayed the clenching of his jaw.

I lifted a file from the tabletop where I sat. “I discovered another dossier of interest this morning. Here.” I stood, handing it to him. “A summary of the life of Parker Trent since his honorable discharge from Vietnam following a gruesome massacre that he survived. Mr. Trent has established a successful career as a newspaper editor, though it seems he’s done a lot of job-hopping, at least until about three years ago—about the time of Edwin Quatrain’s death—when he began his most recent stint as editor of the
Milwaukee Triangle.
The report concludes that Mr. Trent is logically ‘above suspicion’ of the rape and murder of a Vietnamese girl because he is gay.”

Parker tossed the file on the desk—there was nothing of news to him in it. “Look,” he told me calmly, “it’s time to level about this.” He tapped the folder. “Yes, I was there. Yes, it was awful. Yes, I committed a lie of omission in not telling you this background, because yes, I came to fear that it might incriminate me as an impostor who had a motive to kill. But I’m not Mark Quatrain. I couldn’t be.” He tapped the report again. “I’m gay.”

I crossed my arms, shook my head. “You’ve been
posing
as gay, and you’ve been doing it for three years, since the time when you first got wind that Suzanne suspected you were alive. Glee sensed that you were straight from the day she met you—she had vibes that you were flirting with her. Then I saw that kiss you gave her on New Year’s Eve—‘transference’ indeed. And now I hear that you’ve made a
date
with Glee for Monday night—what the hell’s that about? With my own suspicions aroused, I knew there was one way to determine conclusively which way you swing. Parker, I know what makes men tick, and, believe me, there’s no way you could have survived that grope session without a hard-on if you were gay. Hence, the surprise ‘seduction.’ I had to know.”

“You don’t know
shit
,” he said, spitting the words. It was the first time he freely vented anger toward me. “If you know so damn much, get to the bottom line and tell me why I’d kill Suzanne—on Christmas Day, an hour after meeting her, in a crowded house.” He folded his arms.

Hooking my hands in my pockets, I strolled a few paces in thought, recapping, “Suzanne had discovered the possibility that her brother Mark was still alive, and if he was, she was hell-bent on finding him and bringing him to justice for the murder of the Vietnamese girl—motivated largely, no doubt, by revenge for her own incestuous rape. So it’s clear enough why Mark would want Suzanne dead. But what hasn’t been clear to me, until today, is why the murder occurred when and where it did.”

Pacing back to Parker at the desk, I explained, “When you ‘met’ Suzanne on that Christmas afternoon, she chatted with you about her research project, mentioning an interest in DNA, and you offered your help. Later, she came up here to the great room to see if she could ‘find something,’ and we surmised that she was looking for baby books. But her search wasn’t motivated by sentiment, was it, Parker? She was after something specific, and you would risk anything to prevent her from finding it. So you joined her up here, perhaps pretending to help her in the search, waiting for the opportunity to smash the life out of her skull with one of these”—I rested my hand atop one of the banister’s artichoke finials—“a king-thing, a handy makeshift bludgeon whose existence would be known only to someone who grew up in this house. A fire was in full blaze only feet from where she fell, and you could easily have burned the weapon, but, instead, you kept it, planting it in the trunk of my car. Your purpose was not to cast serious suspicion on me—it was an obvious, inept frame-up. No, the point was to help build the case against Joey (the king-things were
his
toys), so that everything would fall into place when he confessed to the crime through his suicide note.”

Parker eyed me with a steely gaze throughout this, clenching one fist, gripping the table’s edge with his other hand. “You seem to have missed the point,” he reminded me. “What was she after? What was so important that I couldn’t let her find it?”

I stepped to within inches of him at the table. I slid aside the copy of
Wine Spectator
, revealing the stack of three baby books. “She was looking for this,” I told him, opening the cover of the top album. “A lock of baby’s hair, Mark Quatrain’s. She knew that the DNA in a single strand could be used to provide positive identification of someone now posing to be someone else—someone who was already under investigation as one of the subjects of her dossiers. Can there be any doubt that the strands of your hair that I collected this morning will match this baby’s lock?” With my foot, I slid the wastebasket from under the desk. Its plastic bag held a generous sample of his hair. “Parker Trent,” I said, “I accuse you of hiding your true identity as Mark Quatrain. Far worse, I accuse you of the murders of three people—the girl in Vietnam, your sister Suzanne, and your brother Joey.”

There was a moment’s silence. Then, with our faces still only inches apart, he said flatly, “You smart-ass cock-sucking queer.”

“Watch your language, Parker.”

“All these years,” he said, turning away from me, his tone suddenly pensive, “I’ve lain low, moving from job to job, just so no one could really get to know me, fearing that one day Suzanne might figure out that I was still around. And sure enough, right after Dad died, she began her investigation.”

Turning, he explained to me, “I’d been so attuned to the possibility, I was smart enough to smell the investigation when it got near. So, yes, I landed the gay job in Milwaukee as a means of putting myself above suspicion. But I could tell that Suzanne was on my trail, and it was no longer sufficient to lie low—I had to take more aggressive action. Coincidentally, while I was weighing my options, it became public knowledge that you were moving to Dumont to take over as publisher here, and I saw the spark of opportunity. My plan, which succeeded, was to get myself hired by you. That would allow me to keep tabs on the whole situation from very close range, and I could take decisive action if Suzanne got too close to the truth.”

He stepped toward me at the desk. “Then what happened? On Christmas Day, within minutes of meeting me, she started yapping about DNA, and within the hour she was tearing up this place in search of baby books. So I followed her up here, offered to help, asked her why the albums were so important. She said she was nostalgic—she
lied
to me—dragging a chair to the bookcase so she could search the upper shelves. Kneeling by her chair, I asked her to describe the books as I searched the lower cabinet. While describing them, her tone of voice turned wary—as if she suspected me of looking up her skirt. Which of course I was.”