Murder Misread (30 page)

“
Less than none,” said
Cindy. “Literally.”

Anne suddenly realized
what they were talking about. She banged the table with her fist.
“Leave it, Maggie!”

“
Anne, you can’t have it
both ways! Either we try to find out what happened, or we forget
it. Believe me, the cops will be asking the same
questions.”

“
But it’s a waste of
time!”

“
Probably.” Maggie
shrugged. “But look, even if Tal wasn’t blackmailing anyone,
suppose someone thought he might be planning to?”

“
Why would they think
that? After all these years?”

“
Maybe they’d just learned
that he knew something they didn’t want known. It might seem
threatening.”

“
But they should have
known he’d tell me! Unless—” Anne thought, “unless he planned to
bury it. The way he buried Bernie’s past. Or Cindy’s, um,
loan….”

Maggie twirled her
wineglass. “Yeah.”

“
Or unless he didn’t know
for sure. He might not tell me if he was just guessing.”

“
Right. But either way, we
want to find out. If Tal didn’t tell you, it may well be the secret
that led to murder. If he did—well, you may be in danger
too.”

The phone
jangled.

Damn, probably another
reporter. Anne got up angrily to silence it. “Yes?”

“
Professor Chandler?” A
man’s voice. Pleasant enough.

“
Yes?” she
barked.

“
Sorry to bother you, but
is Maggie Ryan there?”

“
Yes. Maggie?” She held
the receiver out stiffly, at arm’s length. Maggie bounded across
the room to take it.

Still shaking, Anne
stumped back to her chair. Could Maggie be right? Could she be in
danger too? Hell, she didn’t want to think about it. She sure as
hell wasn’t going to quit looking for the truth. She picked up the
mail again.

“
Hello?” Maggie said.
“Nick! Hi…. Oh, damn. Damn!” Her fist punched the wall. “Yeah, I’ll
try. Where’s her mother? ... I see, works on weekends. Well, I’ll
try to get in touch with her too…. One other thing. He’ll have a
secret collection, I’d put money on it. Try to find out about it….
No, meet us at Charlie’s office, about an hour. He’s got a
projector there. I’d like to see if that film you lifted from his
office yesterday is really what it seemed to be when we held it up
to the light.”

She replaced the receiver
and closed her eyes a moment. Then she muttered
“
Espèce de
merde!
” and turned back to Cindy and Anne.
Cindy was standing by the sink now, scraping dishes.

“
Hey, guys,” Maggie said,
jabbing her hand through her curly hair and surveying them sadly a
moment.

“
Yeah?
What?” Anne said gruffly. She put aside a note from Tal’s sister
and ripped open the next envelope. Handwritten, with no return
address. A stupid crank letter,
Tell Lambert 6/2 = 8/18. Gazette V
.
The result of getting your name in the paper was receiving this
kind of—

Maggie asked, “Did you
know Charlie Fielding is a child molester?”

“
Christ!” whispered Anne.
The letter dropped into her lap.

“
No!” Cindy’s head jerked
up to stare at Maggie. “That’s—that’s over!” She bowed over the
sink again.

“
You
knew?” Maggie was across the room in two strides, grabbing Cindy’s
arm and spinning her around to face her. A plate thumped onto the
vinyl and rolled into a corner. “You
knew
! You asshole, you’ve known for
years, haven’t you?”

“
No—”

“
And you didn’t say
anything!”

“
Cut it out!” shouted
Cindy. She was prying at Maggie’s fingers, trying to loosen them
from her arm. “You don’t know a damn thing!”

“
Wrong!
I know several damn things! I know you and Charlie Fielding hate
each other, but you’ve been protecting each other like best
friends. So I figure if Charlie won’t tell that you embezzled from
the department, even when someone’s murdered and he’s one of the
suspects—well, then
you
must have a real threat to dangle over him. This
is it, right? You knew!”

“
It’s over, damn it! I’ve
almost paid it off! And as for Charlie, it was only the one
time—”

“
Cindy.” Maggie’s voice
was cold as an arctic wind. “Charlie was in Syracuse today, in a
movie theatre, feeling up a ten-year-old girl.”

“
What?” Cindy stopped
digging at Maggie’s fingers to stare at her. “What?”

“
Today. A
ten-year-old.”

“
But—he promised! And he
got married, even—”

“
God. That long ago?”
Disgusted, Maggie loosed Cindy’s arm and stuck her hands in her
pockets. Shoulders hunched, she stalked across the kitchen to lean
against the refrigerator. “Cindy, maybe you don’t know that most
child molesters don’t change. I spent a depressing hour in your
library yesterday looking at the statistics. They keep doing it. To
dozens of kids over a lifetime. Hundreds. Psychologists are trying,
but they just don’t know how to fix them.”

“
But how could he? Damn
it, people can change! You think it was easy for me to quit
gambling? What does he think—”

“
I don’t know what he
thinks.” Maggie sounded very weary to Anne. “But it’s time to hear
what you think, Cindy. The whole thing. Start with how you found
out about him.”

Cindy bowed her head. The
mass of highlighted ringlets fell forward from the pink headband,
half hiding her face. “It was a few weeks after Tal had found out
about… what I’d done. Charlie was working on follow-ups to his
thesis back then. Something about reading in older grade-school
kids. Well, some administrative order had come down about changing
the locks in the building, and I went down late one afternoon to
the experiment rooms to see which set of keys worked. The schedules
were posted on the doors, and Charlie was supposed to be finished.
I didn’t even think twice, just unlocked the door, and there they
were, half undressed, him and this fifth grader—” Cindy’s hand went
to her face and she shuddered.

“
Jesus. What did you do?”
Maggie’s fists were clenched in her pockets, the denim taut over
knobby knuckles.

“
I stepped in, closed the
door behind me, and said, ‘Honey, I’ve come to drive you home now.
Get your jeans back on, okay?’ She was scared, poor little thing,
whispering, ‘Don’t tell, please, don’t tell!’ Charlie said, ‘It’s
not what you think, Cindy!’ and I said, ‘Yeah, sure.’ And then he
said, ‘You know, Tal asked me to look at a page or two of the
departmental ledgers a couple of months ago, Cindy. I couldn’t help
noticing some problems.’”

“
Jesus,” murmured Maggie
again.

“
So what could I do? I
said, ‘It’s paid back. And I’ve been in GA for six weeks now. I’m
turning my life around. You turn yours around too and my mouth will
stay shut as long as yours. But no longer. I promise.’ And he
looked at little Melanie, that was her name, and said, ‘I promise.’
I thought—” Cindy raised her head. Tears had run down her cheeks,
leaving pale trace lines in her makeup. “That filthy
slimeball!”

“
Yeah, and you too!”
Maggie’s fists came out of her pockets to thump the refrigerator
door angrily. “All those years, little girls were in
danger—”

“
Hey,
wait a minute! To me,
my
kids come first! To say nothing of the bravest
guy ever shot down in that shitty war! What about the danger to
them, Miss Know-It-All? You think I should have said, ‘Oh, sorry,
Mark, we gotta give up my job and sell the house and go on
welfare’?”

Anne sat dazed, their
words crackling around her.

Maggie protested, “But
those poor kids—”

“
Shut
up!” Cindy’s lashes were beaded with tears. “How the hell was I
supposed to know? I don’t have a fancy Ph.D. like
you.
He
was the one with the goddamn Ph.D.! I didn’t know I was
supposed to look up any goddamn statistics. He said he’d quit. He
knuckled right under about little Melanie, didn’t put up any fight
at all. If he had—”

“
Yeah, what about Melanie?
You just let her deal with it all by herself? You didn’t tell her
parents?”

“
Damn right I didn’t tell
her parents! She begged me all the way home not to tell. Her dad
would beat her, she said. And if she told her mom she’d just get
drunk and tell her dad, and then he’d beat her.” She drew a deep
breath. “She said Charlie was the only person who loved her. The
only one who thought she was nice. I was sick, Maggie.
Sick!”

“
Yeah,
okay,
I’m
sick now!”

“
So what would you have
done? Be honest!”

Cindy and Maggie glared at
each other. Anne sat still, unable to understand, unable to
believe.

Maggie’s eyes dropped
first. “I would have—hell, I don’t know, Cindy. I wouldn’t have
told Melanie’s parents, you’re right. Wouldn’t have done any good
to call the cops on him either because it would need Melanie to
make a case.”

“
There! See?”

“
But I would have derailed
Charlie Fielding, somehow.”

“
Easy to say,” Cindy
scoffed. “What would you have done? Poison his coffee?”

Maggie flapped a hand at
her in frustration. “Hell, I don’t know, Cindy. If I didn’t know
that these guys don’t quit… well, you’re right, maybe I would have
believed Charlie too. Hell, he probably believed it himself, at the
moment.”

Cindy’s anger wilted at
the conciliatory words. She said in a small voice, “If only Bernie
wasn’t such a tightass—”

“
Yeah.” Maggie glanced at
Anne, and her gaze sharpened. “Anne. Are you okay?”

“
Yes,” said Anne. But
Maggie, frowning, stepped closer and felt her forehead.

“
You’re pale,” she
said.

Anne made an effort. “So
quit springing shocks on an old woman,” she said. She groped in her
pocket and pulled out her cigarettes. The note in her lap drifted
to the floor, and Maggie retrieved it. Anne lit her Gauloise and
took a deep lung-scorching drag on it. To hell with life anyway.
Full of crank letters and pain and child molesters. Who needs
it?

Cindy had been standing by
the sink lost in thought, one carefully manicured hand massaging
the knuckles of the other. She said, “I’ll do it, Maggie. I’ll tell
Hines. You’re right, we can’t let him keep on and on. Maybe Bernie
will be reasonable—oh, hell, he won’t be. We know that. But I’m
good, I can go somewhere else. Work my way up again.”

Anne cleared her throat
and tried to focus on Cindy’s problem. “You’re willing to risk your
job? But Tal worked so hard to make sure you kept it!”

“
But Maggie’s right. I
thought he’d quit. But if he’s still doing it…. God, I keep
thinking of little Melanie, how he took advantage of that little
lonely beat-up girl, made her think she had to pay that price for
love….”

“
But what price would she
have to pay for justice?” Maggie asked soberly. Her hand was
resting on Anne’s shoulder. “When that rapist attacked me I had to
go to court. Had to tell the story over and over, to a dozen
different people, most of them skeptical. What would that do to a
kid? And his lawyer attacked me too, in public, in front of the
judge and the jury and reporters, everyone. Said I was the one who
seduced that poor vulnerable man. Said I asked for it. Said I was a
slut and a liar. If the rapist hadn’t slashed me with a knife, he
might have been let off.”

“
But that man had killed
people!” Anne exclaimed, and then wondered at herself for even
caring. Nothing mattered. Yet some vestigial bit of the old Anne
was still protesting.

“
Didn’t stop his lawyer
from attacking my character,” Maggie said. “Okay, maybe in this
case he wouldn’t call Melanie a slut, but he’d certainly call her a
liar. Wonderful imagination, he’d say. And the same with that
little girl in Syracuse, and maybe Jill Baker—”

“
Jill Baker? No!” Anne
protested.

“
Maybe.”

“
Look, what are you
saying?” Cindy asked. “A minute ago you said I should have stopped
Charlie. Well, you were right. But now you’re saying I
shouldn’t!”

Maggie squeezed Anne’s
shoulder and placed the fallen note on the table next to her. “No,
not exactly. I’m just saying there are drawbacks to telling Hines.
Anne, listen, are you up to another trip to campus? Because there
may be another way.”

18

The man in the Aran
sweater hung up the phone. His name was Nick, he’d said, and near
as Charlie could make out, he was some kind of private eye. He
climbed back into the driver’s seat and checked Charlie’s bonds. A
careful man. Charlie was tied into the passenger seat of his own
car, wrists crossed behind him. They’d stopped on the highway at an
isolated service station with a roadside phone booth, and Nick had
left him for a moment to make a call. Charlie had wriggled
strenuously, but the ropes were secure. He’d yelled a time or two,
hoping that the garage attendant might help him, but Nick had
parked far from the building and left the windows closed tight. No
one could hear him. He couldn’t even reach the horn with his
forehead.