Dutch Me Deadly (20 page)

“Did you guys see men
and
women?” asked Chip. “How come the place I went only had women?”

“Der Bananenbar features women only,” Vanden Boogard informed him.

“I was at a banana bar,” Peewee told Chip. “Was it the same one you went to? How come I didn’t see you there?”

“I got absorbed into a bachelor party in a private salon, so I wasn’t in the main room. You wouldn’t have believed the raunchiness. Lap dances. Pole dances. I wanted to leave, but hell, I didn’t want to appear rude.”

My gaze bounced from one to the other as they compared the
depravity levels of the shows they’d seen. And since they all professed abject horror at what the Dutch offered up as entertainment, they agreed not to tell anyone back in Bangor about their adventure. “People would only criticize,” said Mindy. “Can you imagine the gossip? People might suggest that devout Catholics
like us might actually have enjoyed watching that filth.”

“Father Harvey would recommend we go to confession,” said Sheila.

“What people don’t know won’t hurt them,” said Gary. “It’ll be our little secret. Agreed?”

I stared at them, thunderstruck. Is that why everyone had run away from me when I’d questioned them about Paula Peavey and the Red Light District? Not because they were trying to cover up their complicity in Paula’s death, but because they didn’t want anyone to know that they’d sneaked into a bunch of seamy sex shows?

The atmosphere all of a sudden seemed more cordial, kind of like a room gets when its occupants discover they support the same cause, denounce the same enemy, or are trying the same diet. They laughed. They exchanged quips. They made a pact to keep their dip in the naughty pool to themselves. And as quickly as that, sworn enemies became friends, fused by their bond of secrecy.

But the fact still remained, someone had killed Paula.

I popped out of my chair. “Did your surveillance tapes show Pete Finnegan buying a ticket to any of the erotic theaters?”

“There are many tapes,” Officer Vanden Boogard admitted, “not all of which we have analyzed.”

“Pete Finnegan threatened Paula on the night she died, and just about everyone in this room heard him.”

Helen looked surprised. “We didn’t hear him. Where were we?”

“Playing croquet with George’s leg in lala land,” Jackie said under her breath.

“If Pete didn’t spend the evening in a sex club like everyone else,” I hurried on, “he would have had ample time to stalk … and maybe even kill Paula.”

Vanden Boogard made a quick notation on his papers. “Mr. Finnegan kills Ms. Peavey, and der following day, ends up dead himself ? Are you suggesting der possibility that he may have committed suicide in remorse for his actions?”

“No. Actually, I think Pete was killed, too.”

He stood statue-still, regarding me oddly, while the Mainers whispered behind their hands and gasped some more. “Could I have your name, please?”

“Emily Andrew, but my married name is Miceli.”

The door to the conference room creaked open and Nana appeared, her face lit up like Lars Bakke’s grain elevator at Christmas time. “Would you look at what the cat drug in?” she announced, stepping aside to allow Dick Teig and Dick Stolee to precede her into the room.

“Oh, my God!” I cried. “You’re back!” We left our seats en masse and descended upon them like a swarm of locusts, group hugging, smiling, sobbing, laughing.

“Where have you been?” demanded Helen after squeezing sufficient air out of her Dick to shrink him by an inch.

“Forget that,” griped Bernice. “Gimme back my glasses.”

“Why didn’t you call?” spat Grace, her voice escalating into a Palin screech. “Do you know how worried we were? Do you know how long it took us to fill out your stupid missing person questionnaires? And by the way, what’s your favorite color? Black or white?”

“I dropped my phone,” Dick Stolee explained in a contrite voice, “and not only did it fall apart when it hit the ground, it got run over by a girl on a bike.”

“I suppose you’re going to tell me
your
phone ended up on the pavement, too?” Helen taunted her husband.

He shook his head. “Mine ended up in the canal.”

“Of course, it did,” she said skeptically. “Which one?”

“The one that had the pretty flying saucers hovering over it.”

Osmond scratched his jaw. “Now that you mention it, I think I mighta seen them, too.”

“I never should have tried taking a picture,” Dick lamented, “but I wanted to show my little lovebug that I wasn’t hallucinating.”

I didn’t know what I found more disturbing—that Dick Teig had been high enough on weed to see flying saucers, or that his pet name for Helen was lovebug.

“Why didn’t you just walk back to the hotel?” asked Grace.

“Couldn’t remember the name,” said one Dick.

“Didn’t know where it was,” said the other.

“You weren’t carrying your itineraries with you?” I scolded.

They shrugged in unison. “We don’t carry that stuff with us,” explained Dick Teig. “That’s
your
job.”

Helen sniffed the air around her husband. “Dick Teig! Is that cheap perfume I smell on your jacket?”

He took a whiff of his sleeve. “It doesn’t smell that bad, Helen. You have stuff that smells worse.”

“If I may,” said Dick Stolee, raising his palms for calm. “The girl on the bicycle felt so bad about running over my smartphone that she offered to take us under her wing until we got our bearings back. She was a real Samaritan, Grace. She took us to her apartment, let us sleep on her sofa, plied us with coffee and some very nice Dutch apple pastry. She’s a student at the university, studying to be a doctor. I don’t know how we would have survived without her. And today, she drove us up and down every street in the downtown area until we spotted our hotel. So, here we are.”

Helen twitched her nose. “She has terrible taste in perfume.”

“Did you offer her any money for her trouble?” asked Grace. “If she’s a student, she could probably use a few extra dollars.”

“She works a part-time job at a grocery store,” said Dick Teig, “and she says the pay is great, so she refused our money. It had a funny name. Sounded like some kind of fruit market. You remember the name, Dick?”

“The Bananenbar.” He pulled several small rectangular boxes out of his pocket and held them up. “They give away souvenir matchboxes with real wooden matches inside, so I stocked up. Chantal had a whole bowlful, so she told us to help ourselves.”

“Her name is
Chantal
?” questioned Helen. “A doctor named Chantal? Hildegard I could believe, but Chantal?”

Helen eyed Grace. Grace eyed Helen. Without exchanging a single syllable, they grabbed their husbands by their prospective ears and marched them to the nearest seats.

“Ow!” wailed Dick Stolee.

“What?” howled Dick Teig.

“Der missing Dicks have returned?” asked Officer Vanden Boogard, his gaze fixed on Grace and Helen.

“Call off your search,” demanded Helen. “Your department wasted enough man hours looking for these two bozos while they were holed up with
Chantal
.”

Stepping away from the podium, he released his mobile phone, and leaving us with an, “Excuse me for a moment, please,” disappeared into the hallway. As Nana, Tilly, and the rest of the gang jockeyed around each other to arrive back at their seats first, I regarded the two Dicks, relieved beyond words that nothing calamitous had happened to them. That they were safe. That no one had harmed them because of some heinous act they might have witnessed.

My brain suddenly hit “rewind” as that last thought sunk in, causing my synapses to light up like the bulbs in an old-fashioned switchboard.

The Dicks hadn’t seen Paula being pushed into the canal that night
. But what if someone else had? Oh, my God. Could I have ascribed the wrong motive to Pete’s death? Was all the information I’d learned about him irrelevant? Did his classmates actually give a hoot that he’d dragged them into IRS hell? Could he have been targeted not because of something he’d done, but because of something he’d seen? Was it Pete who’d witnessed Paula’s death and been killed because of it?

I ranged a look around the room, my gaze lingering on my list of prime suspects.

“We were so offended by the entertainment, we sat through the show a second time just to make sure it was as bad as we thought,” Gary Bouchard told Chip.

“We did the same thing,” crowed the Hennessys.

“The shock wore off for me by the third go around,” confessed Peewee.

How could they have killed Paula when they’d been nowhere near her? How could they have pushed her into a canal at the same time they were clamoring to catch scarves and pasties with their bare teeth? They couldn’t have been in two places at once, could they?

But I soon realized that not everyone was joining in the banter. Mike, Mary Lou, and Laura, while seated together, were having little to say to each other or anyone else. Mike was clasping Mary Lou’s hand, but she was wearing a pinched expression that indicated he might be squeezing too tightly. Laura stared at the ceiling, looking as if she could hardly wait for the convocation to end. Had the three of them resolved their differences over the miscommunication problems they’d had the other night? Or were the ladies’ ears still ringing from the lecture Mike had probably served up about losing him in the crowd and making him wait on the bridge so many hours?

It was that thought that caused a puzzle piece to quietly shift into place.

That’s right. Mike hadn’t explored the erotica scene because he’d been on the bridge with the JESUS SAVES people, frantically scouring the crowd for Mary Lou and Laura. Mary Lou and Laura—who’d both been victimized and verbally abused by Paula in high school, and now seemed connected at the hip, acting like proverbial best friends forever. And then there was Mike, smothering Mary Lou’s hand as if it were a lifeline. Hadn’t he confessed as much on the bridge? Hadn’t he questioned what he would do without Mary Lou because she was, in essence, his whole life?

A shiver feathered down my spine as I studied the three of them, sitting a few seats away from me in the front row, their name badges flaunting their once youthful faces. Mary Lou O’Leary, currently Mary Lou McManus, and Laura LaPierre, currently—

I zoomed in on the name that appeared in larger print beneath her high school graduation picture, my eyes suddenly widening with recognition. Why hadn’t I noticed it before? Was that her real name, or had she made this particular change as a cruel ironic twist?

Oh, my God. There wasn’t one killer.

There were three.

Twenty

“It was you,” I
accused, leaping up to stand before them. “The three of you! You killed Pete and Paula.”

“I beg your pardon?” said Mary Lou.

“Are you crazy?” said Mike.

“Look,” I said, pointing to Laura’s name badge. “Her last name is Battles.
Battles
!” I made an appeal to the room. “Don’t any of you get it?”

“Show of hands,” announced Osmond. “How many of you get it?”

“Battles is the English translation of Guerrette!” I choked out. “
Guerre
. The French word for war, or battle, or—”

Feeling a presence behind me, I turned to find Officer Vanden Boogard observing with keen interest. “You’ve solved der crime, have you, Ms. Andrew?”

I thrust my finger at the guilty trio. “They did it! Mary Lou and Laura stalked Paula through the Red Light District and pushed her into the canal on their way back to the hotel. But Pete Finnegan saw the whole thing, and Mary Lou and Laura knew it, so the next day at the Anne Frank house, Mike pushed Pete down the stairs to keep him quiet. It was like a
Gift of the Magi
kind of thing, only more warped. The women killed Paula to avenge her cruelty, and Mike killed Pete to protect his wife.”

“That’s kind of romantic,” said Margi.

“No it’s not romantic!” I cried. “They’ve committed a double murder!”

Laura regarded me in bemusement. “Exactly what does my name have to do with your version of the facts?”

“Bobby Guerrette was your protector. You idolized him. So not only were you bent on getting even with Paula for her mistreatment of
you
, you wanted to stick it to her for the role she might have played in Bobby’s disappearance on Senior Skip Day.” I shot an accusatory look at the abashed faces of the reunion crowd. “Something unlawful took place that day, and a lot of you know what it is, but you’ve kept it secret for five decades. Pete told me you were good at keeping secrets, and he was right. Haven’t you already agreed to keep your sex theater adventures a secret for the
next
five decades?”

Whispers of shock from the Iowa contingent. “S’cuse me, dear,” interrupted Nana, “but if them folks are gonna be around for the next fifty years, you might wanna suggest they speak to their financial planners about bulkin’ up their investment portfolios, on account a Social Security probably won’t be around no more.”

Laura smiled, her eyes flinty. “I killed Paula to avenge Bobby Guerrette? Why would I do that? I didn’t need to kill anyone to avenge Bobby Guerrette. I
married
Bobby Guerrette.”

What?

The room exploded with a single, ear-popping gasp.

“Come again?” barked Mike, coming straight out of his chair.

“I married him,” she repeated. “He applied to Berkeley after completing his military service, and that’s where we ran into each other again. He didn’t look exactly like the Bobby I’d known in high school.” She raised her hand to her face, touching her forehead and cheek. “He was involved in a pretty serious vehicle accident during his tour of duty, but I would have known him anywhere, even with his new name.”

“You married him?” Mike’s voice echoed off the ceiling lights. “He’s been alive all these years, and he never bothered to contact anyone back home to let us know?”

“He didn’t
want
anyone to know,” Laura fired back. “Why do you think he left in the first place? He wanted to start over again, away from Bangor, away from the small town social elite, away from the idea that he’d never make anything of himself because he was an orphan.”

Mike sank back into his chair. “But how? I don’t understand. How did he pull it off ? Hennessy said—”

“The SOB is alive?” snarled Ricky. “That dirty jeezer. All these years thinking I’d killed him, and he turns up alive?”

“What do you mean you thought you killed him?” Mindy’s face turned ashen. “You said he got into a car. Remember? A car that was something other than white and a station wagon?”

“So I lied. Big deal. Everyone lied after he went missing.”

“You
intimidated
us into lying,” accused Mike. “You told us your
lame story, and you swore it was the truth. And you threatened to rat us out to the police about our drinking if we didn’t regurgitate the story back to them. All to save your guilty butt.”

“Hey, Guerrette got on my case about Laura, so I called him out,” defended Ricky. “That’s what guys in high school do. They get bombed, and they call each other out. If you’d walked down to the river with us, you might have saved me fifty years of nightmares, but
nooo
, the rest of you were either hurling or passed out, so you missed the big showdown. Bunch of wusses.”

“Would you get to the part about where you thought you killed him?” asked Peewee.

“Yeah, dumbass,” yelled Gary. “We’d all like to hear that part.”

Ricky boosted himself to his feet. “When we got beyond the railroad tracks, Bobby said he was gonna teach me the lesson of my life. But the idiot just stood there, smiling at me, so I slugged him but good. I hit him so hard I spun around and landed on the ground. And that’s the last thing I remember until I woke up and found him gone.”

“Why did you think you’d killed him if his body was gone when you regained consciousness?” I asked.

Ricky looked suddenly hangdog. “After I hit him, I thought I heard something fall into the water. Something big. So I figured I’d probably knocked him unconscious into the river … and he drowned.”

“You freaking coward,” bellowed Mike. “Threatening me. Threatening
Peewee!”

“Don’t drag me into this,” squawked Peewee. “I don’t know anything about it.”

Mike shot him a look. “What do you mean you don’t know anything about it?”

“I’m not Peewee.”

“What did I tell you!” hooted Jackie.

Mike’s voice exploded like a sonic boom. “You’re not Peewee? Then who the hell are you?”

Peewee shrugged. “Melvin Crowley. Peewee’s cousin. He didn’t want to participate in the reunion, but the discounted tour price was so good, I couldn’t pass it up, so he told me I could come in his place. Sorry I got you so hot under the collar yesterday, man, but when you were reliving all those high school memories, I didn’t know who the hell you were talking about.” He elevated his hand, waving to the room like an English monarch. “Thanks for being so nice to me, everyone. You’re all right, despite what Peewee had to say about you.”

“I
told
you morons that that Bobby kid ran away,” crowed Bernice. “But no one ever listens to me.”

I stared at Laura. “How did he do it? How did he just disappear?”

“Ricky’s punch never landed, but he was so drunk, he didn’t realize it. He pretty much knocked himself silly when he tried to slug Bobby, and while he was groaning on the riverbank, Bobby chucked an old railroad tie into the river, kind of imitating the same sound a body might make if it fell into the Penobscot.”

“He did it on purpose?” Ricky sputtered. “He wanted me to think I’d caused him to drown
on purpose
? Miserable bastard!”

Yup. I guess Bobby Guerrette had sure taught Ricky Hennessy the lesson of his life.

“So did Bobby get into a car with someone or not?” Chip threw out. “All my life I believed what Hennessy—”

“Oh, shut up about me,” yelled Ricky.

“Bobby hiked along the railroad tracks until he reached another town,” said Laura, “and then he hitched a ride with a truck driver headed for Boston.”

“He walked the railroad tracks?” said Gary. “Why didn’t he just hitch a ride from the park? We were so wasted, none of us would have noticed.”

“Because he spied Pete Finnegan’s car parked at the side of the road by the Water Works, so if he’d shown his face again, Pete would have seen him.”

“Isn’t that just like Finnegan to spy on us,” sneered Ricky.

“Maybe if you’d treated him differently, he wouldn’t have had to spy,” snapped Laura. “But he got an eyeful that night. He saw
Bobby and Ricky disappear across the railroad tracks. And he most
probably saw Ricky return to the park alone, and knew that everyone was lying about Bobby catching a ride in a mysterious car.”

“So why didn’t Pete ever say anything to the cops?” asked Mike.

Laura shrugged. “Only Pete knows the answer to that, and it’s too late to ask him now.”

“What happened after Bobby got to Boston?” asked Chip.

“He found a room at the YMCA, got a job busing tables, enlisted in the military, spent time recuperating from his injuries at Walter Reed, headed to California to attend college, married yours truly, and became one of the most respected psychiatrists in the Bay area. He led a good life, right up until the day he died.”

“He was at Walter Reed?” asked Mike, leveling a look at Mary Lou. “Did you know about that?”

Mary Lou nodded self-consciously. “I was in the operating room
for one of his facial reconstructive surgeries.”

“You knew?” blasted Mike. “You knew he was alive and you never told me?”

“He swore me to secrecy! What was I supposed to do, Mike? Be disloyal? Betray his trust? Reveal the secret he’d struggled so hard to keep?”

Mike thumped his chest with an angry fist. “
I’m
your husband! Your first loyalty was to me! Jeesuz-Mighty, Mary Lou, didn’t you think I’d want to know he was still alive?”

“You think it was easy for me?” she yelled, tears starring her eyes. “You think I didn’t stay awake at night wondering if I should throw professional ethics and confidentiality out the window and tell you? Well, it
wasn’t
easy. It was the hardest decision I’ve ever had to make!”

“Don’t be so hard on her, Mike,” chided Laura as she banded her arm around Mary Lou’s shoulders. “If not for Mary Lou, I never would have become Mrs. Battles. She’s the one who told him where I was. She’s the one who got the ball rolling. And if you ask me, she did good.” She clasped Mary Lou’s hand and smiled. “She did real good.”

Officer Vanden Boogard retrieved his clipboard from the podium and tapped his pen on the metal clip, his gaze focused on Mary Lou and Laura. “You have no alibi, ladies. Dat was an intriguing human interest story, but if you weren’t pushing Ms. Peavey into der canal, what were you doing?”

Looking both chagrined and embarrassed, Laura slid her hand into her purse and extracted a matchbox that she tossed to Vanden Boogard.

“Der Dungeon Bar?”

Mary Lou cleared her throat. “It’s an all-male revue. Kind of like the Chippendales, only the dancers are dressed up as macho historical figures like Attila the Hun and Genghis Khan before they, uhh—strip down to the good parts.”

“Do them folks knock money off the cover charge for seniors?” asked Nana.

“You were whooping it up at a strip club while I waited half the night for you on that damn bridge?” railed Mike.

“Give it a rest, hon,” soothed Mary Lou. “After spending all those years at Walter Reed, I was dying to see a few body parts that weren’t screaming out to be stapled, drained, or sutured back together again. And it wasn’t as exciting as I thought it would be. Think busman’s holiday.”

Officer Vanden Boogard rolled his eyes. Glaring at the bunch of us, he let fly a stream of exasperated Dutch that I had no trouble translating into English:
So if Mike didn’t kill Pete, and Mary Lou and Laura didn’t kill Paula, who did?