Mansions Of The Dead (44 page)

“When you heard about how Brad had been found, you thought that one of your children might be responsible. I did too, and Jack came forward and admitted it. But then we discovered that in fact Camille had tied Brad up. Assuming she was telling the truth, whoever it was that killed Brad must have come along later and put the bag over his head and, for some reason, put the jewelry on him. That was the thing that I couldn’t figure out. Why had this person put the jewelry on him?

“So for a while I was very focused on the jewelry—which turns out to have been the right thing to be focused on. I began to think that maybe Brad had been killed because he was going to reveal something he knew about the jewelry, something that turned out not to be very important. But it was good to be looking at the jewelry and I should have stayed on it. I think that once, I almost got to the truth, but I became very confused about it all.”

She stood up. “Think about how Brad was found. The bag had
been put on his head first,
then
the jewelry had been put on. That, to me anyway, suggests that the jewelry was something of an afterthought, or at least something that occurred to the killer
after
killing Brad. So why put it on? What if the murderer put it on because he or she hoped that it would point the police away from the truth?”

“What do you mean?” Quinn asked. “Point us away from the truth?”

“Try to picture yourself as the killer. You don’t want Brad to reveal what he knows about the night his brother was killed. You think that it’s a safe bet he’s not going to do it, that he’s going to abide by the promise he made that night never to tell a soul. But then one night, you get a phone call. He’s drunk. He says that he’s tired of the deception. He wants to tell the truth. Finally he wants to tell the truth. You go to his apartment to try to talk to him. But by the time you get there, he’s passed out and someone has tied him to the bed. He’s going to sleep off his hangover and the next day he’s going to go to the police and tell them what he knows. You can’t let this happen. You’re desperate. The scene already suggests something sordid. What can you do?

“You look everywhere for something you can put over his head. That’s all you can do. But there aren’t any plastic bags in the house. You look everywhere, opening drawers and cupboards. Nothing. Then you go back into the bedroom and there, on Brad’s bedside table, or on his desk, is a plastic bag. It has something in it, some pieces of jewelry, but you dump them out and you put the bag over Brad’s head and secure it with the tie and it’s all over in just a few seconds.” Sweeney said it very softly. “Maybe he doesn’t even wake up.”

Kitty gasped and began to cry.

“But didn’t you find fingerprints on the bag? How did this person not leave fingerprints?” Andrew asked.

Quinn said, “There was a pair of dishwashing gloves. The killer was very smart. He or she used the gloves, then rinsed them out in Brad’s fish tank to make it look like he had used them to clean the tank.”

Sweeney continued. “So Brad was gone. But what to do with the
jewelry? The killer gets an idea. Why not put it on him. It will make the police think he’s been with a woman, or had dressed up. They’ll try to track it to a woman, start looking into whether Brad was a cross-dresser, anything but the truth about why Brad was killed.”

“But no one would think that,” Jack said. “We all knew where the jewelry had come from.”

Sweeney saw realization dawn on Andrew’s face. “Not everyone,” he said. “Not Melissa.”

Kitty looked up sharply.

“Yes,” Sweeney said. “It was Melissa who killed Brad.”

Camille had begun to cry too and now she got up and came to stand next to Sweeney. “But Melissa wasn’t driving the car the night Petey died.”

Sweeney looked over at Camille and Jack and Drew. “No, that’s right. But she couldn’t let the truth about who had been driving that night get out.”

“Oh God,” Drew cried. “Oh God.”

Sweeney continued. “It was Brad. Brad was driving that night. But it could have been any one of you, and I think that you all decided that no one was ever going to know. You wanted to protect him and you told him that he was never to let anyone know about it, and that none of you would either.” She looked at Drew. “I think you thought you were doing the right thing, but it weighed on Brad. He wanted to come clean.

“He always seemed so, just so
sad
to me, and I finally realized that what he asked me that day in my office might have been about whether he should reveal his own role in his brother’s death. The night he died, he was very angry and he said to some friends that he didn’t have any courage. As I said, I thought maybe he meant that he didn’t have the courage to tell which of his siblings had been driving the car, but I think now that what he meant was that he hadn’t had the courage to reveal that it was him, to stand up to Drew and Jack and Camille, who after all just wanted what was best for him.

“But that night Brad had decided he was going to tell, finally. It was
a strange night. He and some of his friends had been spending a lot of time in cemeteries, playing with Ouija boards and having what seemed to some of them to be supernatural experiences. A month or so ago, while they were playing with the Ouija board, Brad got a message from a so-called spirit, saying it was his brother Peter.”

Kitty looked shocked. “What do you mean?”

“I think that Brad made the Ouija board spell out his brother’s name because he was feeling guilty. It also spelled out the name of an ancestor who Brad had been doing research on. In any case, in the last few weeks of his life, he was grappling with the question of whether he should come clean about having been the driver the night Peter died.

“The night he died, he had been out with these friends and according to them, he got very, very angry, and then very, very sad. He drank more than was normal for him, and I think he had come to the decision that he was finally going to tell his parents, finally going to face the consequences.

“He made three phone calls, one to each of his siblings, to tell them that he was going to confess. The call to Jack wasn’t answered. The one to Camille was, but he didn’t tell her what he was going to do on the phone and by the time that she and . . . well that she got to his apartment, Brad was already passed out. She had a very good reason for not being able to stay with him.” Sweeney looked at Camille. “So she did the best she could and she left him.

“Brad also called Drew that night, except that Drew didn’t answer the call.” She looked at Quinn. “When you asked him about it, I remember that he looked kind of surprised. But he went along with it. He had to, because he realized that someone at his house had a seven-minute phone conversation with Brad. What I think happened is that Melissa answered the phone. And Melissa heard Brad say that he was finally going to come clean about the night of Petey’s death. And she had to stop him. She told him to go to sleep and then she went to his apartment—Drew must have been out—and she killed him in the way I’ve described.”

“But why didn’t Melissa want Brad to confess? I don’t understand,”
Quinn asked. “She wasn’t in the car. Drew hadn’t been driving. Why would she want to stop him?”

Sweeney looked at Drew. “Because knowing that Brad was responsible for it was all she had. It was the only way she could hang onto you. Isn’t that right? Someone told me that you and Melissa had been very off-and-on and then you got married suddenly after Petey’s death. You must have told her about what really happened that night. I don’t know if it’s why you got married or if it’s why you’ve stayed married, but I think that Melissa threatened to tell about Brad, ruin Brad’s life, if you left. She could always hold it over you. And Brad was going to take that away from her.”

“But who tried to kill Melissa?” Jack asked.

“That,” Drew said, “was me.” He began to speak. “I knew almost from the beginning of course. Because of the phone call, as Sweeney said. They asked me what time Brad called me the night he died. I hadn’t been there—I was out driving, which I do when I can’t sleep—but I knew in that moment that he must have talked to Melissa. I wasn’t sure yet that she had killed him. I thought maybe she had gone to talk to him or something, but in any case it implicated her in some way. So without thinking about it, I said I had talked to him. I didn’t know what to do. I had lied to the police. It didn’t seem like it was going to help Brad to have this huge . . . scandal. I didn’t ask her. I didn’t want to know. But she knew that I had lied for her and she knew she had me. She knew there was no way I could leave her now, because she was holding the whole thing over me.

“But then that night, the night I hit her with the car, she just told me. We were down here and we were arguing and I was so angry that I couldn’t hold it in anymore. I referenced the fact that I had lied for her and she said, ‘Do you want to know how it happened?’ I was afraid someone would hear so I told her we should go for a drive and as I was driving, she told me about how she had done it. And then she told me that she hit the girl too.”

“Alison Cope?” Marino asked. “Melissa hit Alison Cope?”

Drew took a deep breath. “Alison Cope saw her in Brad’s apartment that night, through the window. She must have lived in one of
the other apartments or something. Anyway, she had worked at the Davis Gallery for a while and she recognized Melissa from Jack’s opening and they had one of those moments of recognition, like, I’ve seen you somewhere before. Melissa told me she wasn’t too worried about it. She just thought she was some girl who worked at the gallery. But then Alison came to Dad’s house after the memorial service and introduced herself to us. Later, she got Melissa alone and she said something about having seen her. She didn’t want anything, Melissa said, she was just hoping that Melissa had some kind of innocent explanation, so she wouldn’t have to go to the police. Melissa made something up, but she could see that the girl didn’t believe her. So she asked some kids about her, found out where she works now, and followed her home one night. She said she just drove through the intersection. I couldn’t believe what she was telling me.

“She was crying. She felt bad about it. She said she was almost in a dream when she killed Brad, that the only reason she was able to do it was that he was unconscious and it didn’t seem like killing really. She just put the bag over his head and he was so drunk he never even woke up. It was like a series of lies and once one thing happened, she had to keep going. I was crying. I didn’t know what to do. I told her to get out of the car and she got out and I was going to just let her walk home, but then she looked up at me and it was like she knew she had me. She knew there was nothing I could do. And all of a sudden, I saw that there
was
something I could do. I think I understand what it felt like for her when she killed Brad. There was just this one little thing that she could do—that I could do—to make the whole thing go away. But I couldn’t go through with it. At the last minute, I put on the brakes. So she wasn’t hurt that badly. She knew I didn’t have the guts to kill her. She knew she had me.

“When they told me she was going to be okay, I was relieved. It was like I hadn’t done what I’d done. But then tonight, she was lording it all over me again, taunting me with the fact that I hadn’t been able to kill her when it came down to it. I knew that it was never going to end.”

“Is that why you pushed her down the stairs?”

Drew nodded.

Kitty stood up. “I heard them arguing tonight, and I heard her say, ‘You can’t ever tell about Brad because I’ll tell about you hitting me. You didn’t have the guts to kill me then and you don’t now.’ They were screaming at each other. I heard them go out into the hall. Drew was trying to get her to be quiet, but she wouldn’t. I didn’t know what to do. I was going to try to go out and stop them, and then I heard her scream and when I looked out I found her, and Drew was gone.”

They were all silent for some time and then Drew looked at his parents and he said, “Did you know? We never said anything.”

“I knew,” Kitty said, crying now. “I knew that the only reason you would lie was to protect Brad. You kids had always protected him. When he was six, he broke my mother’s Waterford vase and Jack lied and said he’d done it. Because you were always getting in trouble, Jack. You could handle it. But somehow you knew that Brad couldn’t. It was what I thought of, when you wouldn’t say anything. I knew right away. That’s why we never asked you. You must have thought it was strange that we never asked you.”

Andrew took Kitty’s hand. “I was there that night. The night of the accident. At the bar. You kids never said anything to the police about it and nobody else did either. But you can’t imagine how guilty I was.I . . . I never took another drink and it was why I left your mother.”

“He was so riddled with guilt. He couldn’t even look at me. I reminded him of Petey,” Kitty said, wiping the tears from her cheeks. Andrew let her lean into him, circling his arm around her, and it struck Sweeney that together the two of them looked just about right in the house, Andrew’s formality tempered by Kitty’s casual sloppiness.