Cold and Pure and Very Dead (25 page)

S
o you see
, Lieutenant,” I said to Piotrowski in his cluttered office. “Ah,
Lieutenants
, that is,” I amended and nodded toward Piotrowski’s desk, where Syverson was listening in on the speakerphone. “Here’s yet another suspect in the killings of Marty Katz and Jake Fenton. I hate to say it, because I liked Lolita Lapierre when I met her, but if we’re … ah … if
you’re
going to take into consideration anyone who has a monetary motive for these two killings, Lolita fits the bill.”

“Just explain to me in a little more detail how that works, willya, Doctor,” Piotrowski requested. He hardly seemed to be paying attention, playing as he was with a thick rubber band, pulling it out perilously to its farthest length, letting it snap back on his fingers.

“It’s obvious—or, at least, it’s quite possible,” I said, trying to keep this a little more in the realm of pure conjecture than my previous fevered proposal of Milly’s husband Jim Finch as the killer. “Marty Katz had Lolita’s name in his notes. Am I right about that, Lieutenant Syverson?”

A disembodied agreement came over the wires from New York.

“Katz was a high-powered investigative reporter. Certainly he would have gone to Stallmouth sometime this summer and interviewed Lolita. He
must
have—the
trailer-park address was in his notes. But Lolita never said a word to me about it. We talked about Milly being arrested for killing the reporter. I named him by name. But nary a word from her about having met him. Don’t you think that’s … suspicious?”

Silence from both investigators.

I took another tack. “Look, Marty Katz would have told Lolita that
Oblivion Falls
had become a bestseller again—if she didn’t already know. Let’s say she realized that she, herself, would be in line to get the royalties. Lolita Lapierre is a savvy businesswoman and money means a lot to her. She told me so. Wouldn’t it be in her best interests to eliminate the reporter who threatened to drag Mildred Deakin back into the limelight? The last thing she would want is to have Mildred Deakin found, because, who knows, the novelist might change her mind about renouncing the proceeds from
Oblivion Falls—”

“This is all beginning to sound pretty convoluted,” said the disincarnate voice from the telephone speaker.

I glanced over at Piotrowski, but he was silent, wearing the cop face, flat, expressionless. There must be a shop where they buy that thing, or maybe it’s issued as part of the standard equipment, like handcuffs and a .38.

“And what about Jake Fenton? Why kill him?” Syverson persisted.

“Obvious, again. Wouldn’t she want to eliminate a Deakin child who might contest the Lapierre family’s rights to a fortune in royalties?” Suddenly an image of Lolita’s cozy trailer home came to mind. The rocking chair. The pumpkin-colored cat on my lap. Just as suddenly my homicidal conjectures seemed absurd. “This is, of course, all pure speculation, all based on the … ah … unlikely supposition that Lolita Lapierre is a
cold-blooded killer.” I didn’t want to be accused of blatant fictionalizing again.

But Syverson wasn’t willing to let it drop. “Only thing is, Ms. Pelletier, how would Lapierre know that Fenton was Milly Finch’s love child? And he
was
, you know. The adoption records finally came through. Mildred Deakin’s male child was adopted by Thomas and Janet Fenton in upstate New York in 1959.”

“So, I was right—”

“But,” she repeated, “how would Lolita Lapierre know that?”

“Uh, beats me. I don’t see how she could have.”

“Well, there you are,” said the phone voice. Piotrowski was still silent, stretching the rubber band out to its farthest length, letting it go.
Ouch!

“She did visit Milly in jail, though,” I said, half to myself. Piotrowski’s head snapped up. I had his attention now.

Syverson also heard me. “I remember you told me that,” she mused. “It didn’t mean anything to me at the time.”

Why was I pursuing this? I wondered. I had nothing against Lolita Lapierre. I didn’t want to get the woman in trouble. “But I
liked
her, you know. She’s good people. She wouldn’t kill anyone.” I heard how lame that sounded. “Just forget I said anything.”

“Right,” Syverson said, dryly.

Snap
, went Piotrowski’s rubber band.

I
t had been
a long day: first Evelyn Sackela’s apartment in Manhattan, then Piotrowski’s office. Hell—it had been a long two weeks since Piotrowski’s first call. Driving home through the supper-hour traffic, I got caught in a tie-up on I-91: cars stopped as far ahead as I
could see. Lowering the sun visor to keep the glare out of my eyes, I slipped a Neil Young cassette in the tape player, sat back, and tried to process the various bits of information I’d gathered during the day. Milly’s avid pursuit of men during her sojourn in New York, her drinking, drugging, “hysteria.” The fact that she’d vanished from Manhattan months before she showed up in Nelson Corners during the autumn of 1959. Where had she been all that time? Who was the father of her child? Why had she renounced the profits from
Oblivion Falls?

We’d been sitting stock-still on the Interstate for at least twenty minutes. People were getting out of their cars now, craning their necks, talking to other drivers, trying to get a fix on what lay ahead. I stayed put. After all, I was doing the same thing, only I was trying to get a fix on what lay in the past. On the tape player, Neil Young wailed about loneliness.

Piotrowski had been maddeningly taciturn during our meeting, and he’d hardly looked me in the eye. The only sign of life he’d exhibited was adding yet another suspect to the roster of potential killers: Evelyn Sackela.

I’d laughed. “Lieutenant, the woman is so sick and frail, it’s a wonder she can walk to her hairdresser, let alone travel to remote towns to commit murder.”

He’d treated me to a cool stare. “Mightn’t she have someone in her family who’d do it for her, Doctor? Or mightn’t she pay off a handyman or someone else who could use the money?”

Mightn’t she? Huh?

“All I’m saying is that this lady would of had as much of a monetary motive as anyone else to commit these homicides. The agent gets a percentage of the royalties, right?”

“Probably ten percent.”

“Which, from what I understand about how well this
Oblivion Falls
book is selling, would not be peanuts, right?”

“Right.”

“And if you, a perfect amateur at investigation—”

I sputtered, indignantly.
Amateur, indeed! I had a Ph.D. in literary research. If that didn’t constitute a type of investigative expertise, what did? Not to mention all the work I’d done for him in the past!
Piotrowski held up a hand to forestall interruption. “If you—an amateur—could find this agent, Katz probably got there first. Did she say anything to you about that?”

I shook my head.

“So—what if he went to see her and let on that Deakin was still alive and that he was close to locating the writer? What if she—this Sackela woman—started thinking maybe this recluse is gonna do something to screw up her royalties windfall—withdraw the book, or something? Or …”

“Or, what?”

“Didn’t you say the Deakin woman had been playing around with Sackela’s husband?”

“That was forty years ago! Talk about far-fetched!”

“What’s good for the goose is good for the gander,” the lieutenant had muttered obscurely, then retreated back to silence.
Maddening!

The car behind me honked. Traffic was inching forward. It was time to come back to the real world.

T
he next morning
I met George Gilman for breakfast at the Blue Dolphin. When I’d gotten home after my visits to Evelyn Sackela and Lieutenant Piotrowski, I’d found three messages from George on my answering machine. He had something he wanted to
tell me, was even willing to come all the way out to my house right then. But I was exhausted and stressed, and I put him off until morning.

The Blue Dolphin’s customary aroma of onions, bacon, and coffee drew me irresistibly to a booth near the grill. After a meager supper of Wheaties with overripe banana, I was primed for a bounteous breakfast. When George didn’t arrive by 9:25, I ordered my cheddar-and-bacon omelet, and was half finished with it by the time he rushed in at a quarter to ten, forty-five minutes late.

“You’re still here!” He plunked himself down opposite me. “I thought for sure you’d have given up on me.”

“I did give up,” I said, spreading marmalade on a slice of toasted rye, “but I hung around because I was hungry.”

The weather was sunny, but September crisp. I’d been overly cool in my light denim jacket, thankful for the efficient heater in the car and the aromatic warmth of the diner. George wore a red windbreaker with a blue collar. He shrugged out of the jacket, and placed it neatly folded on the seat next to him.

“Sorry to be so late, Karen,” he said. “The phone rang, just as I was leaving the house, and it was a call I had to take.” There was a suppressed excitement in my little colleague today. His gnome’s face seemed alight with anticipation. As he studied the menu, I studied him. His intelligent brown eyes, large nose, thin lips, and receding chin made up the same less-than-harmonious array of features as always. But what was left of George’s fly-away brown hair was neatly trimmed, for a change, and he was dressed with far more care than usual in a pair of neat khakis and a navy-and-white striped polo shirt.

As the waitress delivered his mug of tea, George kept talking—babbling, actually, the words were spilling out so fast. “Karen, did you ever get the sense that life was passing you by?”

Who? Me?
“Well—”

He didn’t wait for a response. “That’s a stupid question. Probably not. You’re so attractive, and you’ve got your daughter and a bunch of friends—”

“Uh—”

“But
me
, all I’ve ever done is work. Then one day this summer, my birthday, actually, it hit me—something’s missing. Seriously missing. It hit me hard. Here I am forty years old, and I’ve been in school in one capacity or another for thirty-five of those years. Schoolwork—my scholarship and teaching—is my entire life. Now don’t get me wrong, Karen. I love what I do. But there’s got to be something
more.”
He spooned the tea bag out of his mug, twisted the string around the bag, and squeezed. Then he deposited the dead bag on my empty toast plate. It was an elaborate operation, and George seemed momentarily incapable of looking directly at me. “You remember that day at Greg’s when I told you, uh, how I … uh … felt about Jill …?”

He poured milk into the mug and stirred, concentrating hard on the difficult procedure.

“Ah—” So that’s what this was all about.

“Yes,
ah
. I went home and, when I sobered up …” He glanced at me tentatively, then his gaze skittered away. He seemed to think better of what he’d been about to confide.

“What?” I prompted.

“Well …” It wasn’t easy, but he choked it out. “I bawled like a baby, okay? All night. In the morning I went to the gym—”

“The gym?”

“I’m in lousy shape, okay? I haven’t been there in years, but I had to let off some steam. And, then, while I was pounding the punching bag, I had an inspiration—hit me like a bolt of lightning, just like I was in some revival meeting or something. Just because I can’t have Jill doesn’t mean I can’t have a better life. That I can’t have … a home and family.”

“Well, of course not—”

“So, I decided to take charge.”

George’s breakfast arrived, carried by Glenda, my favorite waitress, a prototypical diner beehive-blonde. She slapped the bowl of steaming oatmeal in front of him. “Good for what ails ya,” she proclaimed.

It was the first time I’d seen my plump colleague face-to-face with such a healthy meal. It looked as if George had started taking charge already.

He poured 2-percent milk on his cereal. “I’m adopted, you know.”

“You told me that.” I pushed away the remaining omelet. The cheese had congealed unappetizingly on the cold plate.

“And I don’t know anything about my birth family.”

“Oh—”

“So, that morning in the gym, I developed a plan. It all came to me when I was in the sauna. First I’m going to find out where I came from. Then I’ll decide where I’m going.”

“What do you mean, George? Where you’ve come from? And, where you’re going?”

“Step one.” He raised an index finger, as if he were lecturing to a classroom full of students. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see him look around for the blackboard. “Step one,” he repeated, “search for my birth parents.”

“Whoa!”

“Step two.” A second stubby finger. “Begin proceedings to adopt a child. Probably a hard-to-place child from a third-world country.”

“Wowzer!”

“Step three.” A third finger. “Place a personal ad in the classified section of the
Enfield Examiner.”

“Jee-zuz Christ, George. A
personal?
You don’t do anything by halves, do you?”

He stirred his oatmeal and took a spoonful. “That call just now? The reason I was late? That was from a private investigator who’s looking into my sealed birth records.”

“Whew! Isn’t that illegal?”

“Maybe. But it’s not immoral, and that’s what matters to me. Anyhow, she … the investigator … thinks she’s got a line on the location of my birth mother.”

“Oh, George, how exciting. Where is your mother? What have you found out about her?”

He paused. “I’d rather not say anything more until I see if the investigator actually finds her—and how well the reunion goes.” He was silent for a few seconds, contemplating the possibilities. Then he shook his head suddenly, like a dog emerging from a river. “Well, anyhow, that’s not what I wanted to see you about.”

“It’s not?”

“Only tangentially. I’m really here to talk about Jake Fenton.” He abandoned his spoon, reached out, and squeezed my hand. “You’re so brave about his death, but I know how devastated you must be.”

“George! I told you—there was nothing between Jake and me!”