Somebody Else's Music (36 page)

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Authors: Jane Haddam

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“Right,” Kyle said.
Gregor stood up. “Thank you again, Mr. Kennedy,” he said, holding out his hand.
“Fuck,” Stu Kennedy said. Then he walked over to the front door and pulled it open. “Get the fuck out,” he said. “I've had enough.”
By the time they got down the front walk to the car, it was raining again, not the lunatic pelting that had been going on for most of the morning, but a deep, steady, heavy fall that was almost silent.
Gregor got into the car. Kyle got into the car and started it up.
“What was that about?” Kyle asked. “You didn't mention Peggy. You didn't mention what happened to her.”
“There was no need to.”
“Well there was maybe one need to. Eventually this is all going to come out in the wash. Stu is going to know where Peggy was earlier this afternoon. Either it's going to be on the news, or the hospital is going to call, or Peggy is going to tell him. And then what? I've got my ass in a sling for withholding information on the medical condition of a—”
“There's a record of all the times he's beaten her up?”
“I don't know about all of them. There's probably a record a mile long about some of them, though. We've got them in the police department. They've probably got them in the emergency room over at Kennanburg. Why?”
“Because that's all you'll need not to get your ass in a sling. Some states have mandatory arrest laws—”
“We've got one here,” Kyle said. “But they don't do any good, Mr. Demarkian. Oh, they sometimes do, when the woman really wants out and she's got no way to get out herself, but in a case like this—” Kyle shrugged.
Gregor shook his head. “We should get going.”
“Get going where?”
“Out to that hospital. I'd like to talk to Mrs. Kennedy for a while.”
Kyle put the car in gear and began to pull away from the curb. “Do you think she'll be in any position to talk? She looked like she was sleepwalking the last time we saw her.”
“I need to know a few things from her, especially about the death of Michael Houseman. Does Mr. Kennedy always behave like that? With the language. Or did he put it on for my benefit?”
“He always behaves like that to me,” Kyle said, “but he could be putting it on for
my
benefit. Why are you still so interested in the death of Michael Houseman? Did the same
person who killed Michael Houseman kill Chris Inglerod Barr? And try to kill Emma?”
“Let's say that the same person who murdered Michael Houseman was responsible for the death of Chris Inglerod Barr and the attempted murder of Emma Kenyon Bligh. And for the death of the dog, of course, although that was something in the way of an accident.”
“How do you eviscerate a large part-malamute, part-shepherd dog by accident?”
“You find it in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“Marvelous. Wonderful. I can see the prep sheet I'm going to make up for the town prosecutor right this minute—”
“You know,” Gregor said, “you've got nothing to worry about. The fact of the matter is, this case is going to have a Gordian knot solution. Sooner or later, Emma Kenyon Bligh is going to wake up, and when she does she's going to hand you your solution on a plate, and hand you a star witness, too, in the person of herself. And that's going to be enough to go to trial on.”
“That's going to be enough to go to trial on for the attack against Emma,” Kyle said, “but does that mean it's going to be enough to go to trial on for the death of Chris Inglerod Barr?”
“You're going to have the linoleum cutter,” Gregor said. “That will be a start. With any luck, what I'm doing now will get you the rest of what you need. It's odd to think, though, that Chris Inglerod would be alive and Emma Kenyon Bligh wouldn't be in the hospital with a slash wound in her abdomen if Elizabeth Toliver hadn't decided to take her younger son to McDonald's.”
“What?”
“She wasn't home, you see,” Gregor said. “She was supposed to be home. She had a nice set schedule that day. She was driving her mother to one set of doctors in the morning. Then she was leaving her mother and the nurse at the ob/gyn clinic in the early afternoon so that the doctors could run some tests. While that was going on, she was
supposed to be having lunch with Maris Coleman at the Sycamore, and when that was over she was supposed to pick up her older son at the town library and her mother at the gynecologist's and go straight home. She should have been home by two o'clock. But she wasn't.”
“We know she wasn't. Emma and Belinda brought Mark home from the library and they got to the Toliver house at three and there was nobody home.”
“Exactly. Because Elizabeth Toliver and Maris Coleman had an argument at the Sycamore, and Liz took Geoff out to the Interstate to the McDonald's there, and she didn't get home until after four. And that's why the dog died. Because nobody was home.”
“You just said Mark was home.”
“I know. Essentially, nobody was home, because he went to sleep in that room in the basement. You can't hear somebody knocking on the front door from there, or on the back door, either. So, you see, she got to the house expecting to find Elizabeth Toliver, and as far as she could tell nobody was home. She probably walked around the yard a couple of times, with the linoleum cutter in her hand, and nobody to use it on—”
“Wait. Are you saying that whoever this is was intending to kill Betsy? I mean, Liz?”
“Of course. Didn't you know that? The thing is, it's very difficult to kill somebody in Liz Toliver's position with a knife or a razor. It's not impossible, but it's difficult, because those people usually have other people around them. It's much easier, if you want to murder a celebrity, to use a gun, because you don't have to worry about getting physically close. Either our murderer didn't have access to a gun or she didn't know how to use one and was afraid to try.”
“Right,” Kyle said. “Who the hell doesn't have access to a gun in a place like this? There are guns all the hell over the place. Half the town hunts.”
“All right,” Gregor said. “I'll give you three people who
didn't have access to guns. One, Peggy Smith. There are no guns in that house. I'll guarantee it.”
“Why? How could you know that?”
“Because you haven't said a single word about his shooting her, and if he'd had a gun he'd have shot her at least once by now. I don't care about background checks or laws that say you can't own a gun if you've ever been charged with domestic violence, people like Stu Kennedy have guns if they want them, and if they have them they use them.”
“Hell,” Kyle said. “He did shoot her. Or tried, anyway. He missed by a mile. About eight months ago. I went through the house and picked up a pistol and two rifles and read him the riot act.”
“And he listened to you?”
“I'd like to think so,” Kyle said, “but I have a feeling it was more a matter of finances. Stu spends a lot of money on chemicals. There doesn't tend to be a lot left over to buy guns and ammunition with. The guns I confiscated had all belonged to his father.”
“Fine,” Gregor said. “Now I'll give you another one. Belinda Hart Grantling. Or are you going to tell me that she keeps a pistol in her bedside drawer?”
“No. No, as far as I know, she's never had a gun in her life. Her family never had them either. There are families around here that hunt, and there are families around here that shoot at gun ranges, and there are families around here that are just plain whacko, but the Harts never were any of those things.”
“Two down and one to go. Maris Coleman.”
“Oh,” Kyle said. “Funny, isn't it? I don't usually think of her as a suspect. I mean, it's not like she's here anymore. She's just sort of all over the place. Visiting. Like the tooth fairy.”
“She also is extremely unlikely to have a gun,” Gregor said. “I suppose it's possible, and I could always check the New York gun registry, but the fact is that I've been watching her for days. I've seen her do all kinds of things, I've
seen her empty her handbag on a table, and there's been no sign of a gun, no sign of ammunition, and no talk from anybody around her—Liz Toliver, for instance—to indicate that Maris ever even had a gun in the city. Of course, if I had to pick one person who might decide to stab instead of to shoot even if she had a gun, Ms. Coleman would be that person. The one thing she's very, very good about is knowing what she's capable of when she's drunk, and she's nearly always drunk.”
“I wouldn't call it drunk,” Kyle said. “I'd call it not exactly sober.”
“Call it what you will. That linoleum cutter was most likely the best weapon available, better than a knife, for instance, because it's sharper.”
“Do you know where the linoleum cutter came from?” Kyle asked.
“I'm about ninety-nine percent sure. We'll have to check. It won't matter, though, the fingerprints will be clear enough and a good lab analysis ought to get a lot more.”
“Do you intend to tell me where it came from?” Kyle asked. “Are you going to let me in on this? And if you think you know where it came from, why haven't we gone there and checked it out?”
“For the same reason you didn't search Mr. Kennedy's house back there. Because we didn't have a warrant. Eventually, you're going to have to get a number of warrants and search a number of places—if I were you, I'd search that house, too, on general principles—but at the moment it would just waste a lot of time, and there's no hurry. It doesn't matter where it came from much now that we have it. The trick is to get all our ducks in place so that nobody can claim we've got a case shot full of holes. I'm mixing metaphors. Bennis would kill me.”
“Look,” Kyle Borden said, “do you know who killed Chris Inglerod and attacked Emma Kenyon Bligh?”
“Yes.”
“And it was the same person in both cases?”
“Oh, yes.”
“And the same person killed Michael Houseman?”
“No,” Gregor said, “but the same person was responsible for all three deaths. That's not quite the same thing.”
“It'll be enough if I've got the person locked up for the death of Chris Inglerod. Was the death of Chris Inglerod a mistake, too? Is this woman—and I assume you're talking about a woman—”
“Right.”
“Was this woman going around slashing people just because she wanted to slash Betsy and Betsy was never available? Because I'm going to have a hard time selling that to the town prosecutor, and he'd never be able to sell it to a jury.”
“Don't worry about it,” Gregor said. “It's nothing that odd. Just let's go see Peggy Smith Kennedy, and then let's hunt down Maris Coleman and insist she sit still for a talk for once. And when we do find her, let's make sure she can't go anywhere.”
In the end, it was Liz who drove Bennis Hannaford's tangerine-orange Mercedes. It was easier not to have to give directions every other minute. You could drive on automatic pilot if you knew where you were going, and Liz did know where she was going. She could have driven these streets every day for the last thirty years instead of not seeing them in all that time. She could have walked this landscape. She remembered things it made no sense to remember, like where old Mrs. Gorton lived and how to get there. Old Mrs. Gorton had been her fifth-grade teacher. Then there were other things. When they were all seven years old and in second grade, Chris Inglerod had started coming to school in black velvet hair bands. Soon they all had black velvet hair bands, even Liz herself, and some people, like Belinda, had started to claim that they wore them even to bed. When they were all eight and in third grade, the fashion was sleepover parties and Polaroid photographs. Girls who had sleepover parties took Polaroids and brought the photographs in on the Monday after the weekend for show and tell. For eight months straight, all Liz had wanted in the world was to have a single Polaroid photograph of herself at a sleepover party, any sleepover party, anywhere. When they were all ten and in Mrs. Gorton's class, Liz had gone from the first of October until the last week of school sitting by herself at lunch with nobody
on either side of her and nobody to talk to, because—well—because. By then they had begun to be explicit about how much they didn't want to have her anywhere around. That year was the year that Harry Spedergelb planted the maple tree in his front yard. Driving by it now, it seemed to dwarf the small lot and the small house that was on it, and to menace the other houses on the street, one of which was Chris Inglerod's mother's house, except that Chris Inglerod's mother no longer lived there. Harry Spedergelb had died of lung cancer in 1974. Liz's mother had sent her the news while she was at graduate school. Liz never knew why. Mrs. Gorton had died of blood poisoning in 1986. She was ninety-two years old, and the picture in the Hollman
Home News
made her look even more like the Wicked Witch of the West than she did in person. Liz's mother had sent her that article, too, or rather that copy of the
Home News
, the way she'd sent a copy of the
Home News
every week for eleven years, on the assumption that Liz would eventually get homesick enough to want to come for a visit. Liz had not come to visit. For a while, everything in the
Home News
had seemed to be an obituary. Dave Grieg and Tom Bellson both dead together in a car crash. Jimmy Strand, Nelson Harvey, and Tim Stall all dead in Vietnam. Cathy Conway dead in the crash of a prop plane outside Omaha, Nebraska.
In the other front bucket seat, Bennis Hannaford seemed to be trying very hard not to panic. Liz would have put some music on if she could have, but although the tangerine Mercedes had a CD player, the CDs Bennis had were restricted to one Charles Mingus album, one copy of the Chicago Philharmonic's rendition of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, and the Three Tenors. Liz hadn't believed anybody really listened to the Three Tenors.
“So,” Bennis said finally. “Are we going anyplace in particular? And do you know how to get there?”
“Yes, and yes,” Liz said. “We're going out to the park, and I could get there sleepwalking.”
“Do you think this is healthy, the amount of time you
spend obsessing about all this? Wouldn't it make more sense to give them all a great big raspberry and get married to Jimmy and live happily ever after?”
They were at that fork in the road at the edge of town where the right veer went Liz didn't know where and the left led out to Plumtrees. Liz took the left. “Do you know a science fiction writer named Lisa Tuttle?”
“I've met her a couple of times.”
“I've never met her,” Liz said, “but I read a short story of hers once in a collection. It was one of Mark's collections and we were on a plane and I was restless and it was the middle of the night. I can never sleep on planes. Can you?”
“If I'm tired enough. Did you like this short story?”
“Well, yes, I did,” Liz said, “but that's not the point. The point is, the story was about this woman who had been this ugly, acne-ridden, bespectacled hick in her little town in Texas or wherever when she was growing up, and then she left for college and started writing and she wrote this one science fiction novel that was just huge. Sold tons of copies. She was living in London or somewhere and she had contacts and the acne had cleared up and she was sophisticated and all that kind of thing. The only problem was, she couldn't write. She tried and she tried, but she had something worse than writer's block. And it went on for a couple of years.”
“And that was it? That was the story?”
“No, no, no,” Liz said. “The story was, she got an invitation to speak at this convention near her old hometown. And she went there to show off, but then she got caught up by a couple of geeky, acne-ridden fans. And the longer she stayed with them—she had to stay with them, they wouldn't let her go—anyway, the longer she stayed with them, the more she sort of morphed back into being the geek she'd started out being. And then they started abusing her, calling her names, telling her how ugly she was. And it was true. She lost her contacts and had to put on glasses. Her skin started to break out. Her clothes started to look
funny and wrong. She just got sucked right back into being the person she'd been in high school. But she could write.”
Bennis cocked her head. “Is that what all this has been about? You've got writer's block and you're trying to recapture the inspiration?”
“Not exactly. I think that the point of the story is that nobody gets to be successful at anything without something driving them, and that for a lot of us it was being what I was in this place thirty years ago. There's an awful lot of people out there who are still playing In Crowd and making up for what they resent not having had by re-creating it—oh, God, you know. Private clubs with blackball votes. Coop apartment buildings where the board gets to reject people who want to buy in. Private schools where membership in the parent-teacher association is by invitation only. Do you know what I mean?”
“Absolutely,” Bennis said. “I stay as far away from that stuff as I can.”
“So do I. But that's still what drives me. And that, you see, is why I got so screwed up that I didn't realize I'd been making a mistake. That I had to have been making a mistake.”
“Making a mistake about what?”
“About something I heard. If I'd really thought about it, with my mind instead of my gut—God, you have no idea how many column inches I've eaten up telling people that we all ought to think with our minds instead of our guts—I'd have realized I had to be wrong. I dream about it, do you know that? I dream about it just the way I heard it, and every time I wake up from one of those dreams there's something in my head telling me I haven't been paying attention. And I haven't been. I feel like such a damned idiot.”
“I feel trapped in a car with a manic phase bipolar,” Bennis said.
Liz pulled the car off the road and down the bumpy asphalted strip to an open place on the grass. They still hadn't paved this parking lot, she thought. The place was
deserted. She cut the engine and handed the keys to Bennis. She got out of the car and looked around. The rain had become an off-again, on-again thing. Just this second, it was off again.
“I remember the year this was built,” Liz said as Bennis came around to her from the other side of the car. “Everybody in town was so impressed. Our own park. Our own lake to swim in. No need to go hauling off to Rogers Park in Kennanburg. You ever been to the Caribbean?”
“Several times,” Bennis said. “It's not my kind of thing. I'm a sit-in-tavernas-and-listen-to-strange-music-all-night person. I don't tolerate sunbathing.”
“Jimmy's got this place in Montego Bay. Big Spanish-style house right on the water. We spent a couple of weeks there this past winter. Hot and cold running shrimp and great big avocados and great big drinks that came in glasses so cold that they have a sheet of ice coating them. You see, the thing is, I never questioned it. Never. Not even when Jimmy and Mark tried to tell me. And Geoff, too, God bless him. Even Geoff tried to tell me.”
“Tell you what? That you had heard something wrong?”
“No, no. About Maris. You come up this way. Go through the gate and then halfway down to the beach but not all the way to the water.”
Liz strode along ahead. Now that she was really here, she was having a hard time containing her agitation. She felt as if she had electrodes shooting all through her body. Every part of her wanted to twitch. She walked through the gates and halfway down to the beach and stopped. If the tall lifeguard's chair was new, it had been built to look just like the old one, made of gray weathered wood with broad flat arms on either side of the seat so that the lifeguard could put down his Coca-Cola and his tuna-fish sandwich without having to worry that they'd fall on somebody's head. The water looked as murky and cold as ever. The raft out near the center of it shuddered and shook on top of the water. Liz waited just long enough to make sure
Bennis was keeping up. Then she took off again, up the little hill, into the trees.
It was dark when she got in among the pines, but it could have been pitch and she would still have known where she was going. She got on the path and continued upward without even glancing at the signs that told her which way the men's rooms were and which way the women's. The closer she got, the harder her heart pounded. It seemed to her that she had lived her life, her whole life, to a sound track of somebody else's music. She'd been starring in the wrong movie. She'd been trying to make the lyrics fit. It was like Jimmy said about the CDs she kept at home and in her car. She was always singing along to the competition. She thought she was going to be sick. She came out through a stand of trees and all of a sudden there it was, right in the clearing, the outhouses. They hadn't changed, either. This place had remained intact, untouched, for thirty years.
Bennis came chugging up the path, breathing heavily. “Is this it? Because I wasn't really ready for physical exercise. Oh—hot damn. Is this it?”
“This is it,” Liz said.
“Are these the same ones? They can't be the same ones, can they? Wooden structures like these, loosely built. They'd have to be new ones by now.”
“Would they? I have no idea. I suppose they must have replaced the door to the one I was nailed into. I wasn't actually conscious when they got me out, so I don't remember myself, but somebody told me later that they'd had to take the door off by the hinge. So there's that. It was raining that night the way it was raining here earlier today. It was totally insane. I can still remember the thunder rolling in. They were nailing the door shut at the same time and I was screaming and it was hard to tell what was what, but it was thunder. And in no time at all, it started to rain. And then I heard her screaming. And that, you see, is the problem. I thought I knew who it was.”
“Who it was who nailed you in?”
“No, who it was later. Who it was who was screaming.
I always knew who nailed me in. I always knew that Maris was a part of it, too. Jimmy thinks I kid myself about that, but I don't. It was just—Maris was always so much better than I was, at everything. So much prettier. So much smarter. I always thought that she was the real thing and I was a kind of fake and that someday the world would get wise to it and my whole career would collapse and she'd be on her way. And then, when that didn't happen, I felt guilty. So guilty. You have no idea.”
“I know you're talking in the past tense,” Bennis said. “I'm hoping that's significant.”
Liz walked around the outhouses in a big circle. They were just outhouses. Satan did not live here. She got back around to the front where Bennis was. “After a while when the storm really got going, I started to hear somebody screaming. A girl. A woman. Whatever. She was screaming ‘
slit his throat slit his throat
' over and over again and it sounded like somebody having sex. Somebody having an orgasm. It was sick. It was nasty. It was depraved in a way we don't use that word anymore. Morally corrupt at the core. And then when they told me in the hospital that Michael Houseman was dead and I heard a few of the details, I thought I knew what had happened. I thought I knew whose voice I heard. I remember thinking that when they heard about this, Vassar would rescind my admission. I don't know why I thought that. It just felt as if it were my fault.”
“How could it have been your fault? You were nailed into an outhouse.”
“I know.” Liz saw a movement in the grass and leaned over to look. Slithering along on the ground was a small black snake, not even three-quarters of a foot long. When she moved the grass above it, it seemed to freeze. She leaned down and picked it up, holding it by the middle, so that it twisted between her fingers.
“Look,” she said, holding it out for Bennis to see. “The park is still full of them. You'd think they'd bring somebody in here to clean them up.”
“I thought you were afraid of snakes,” Bennis said warily.

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