Pennies on a Dead Woman's Eyes (36 page)

“Cordy's dead,” Judy said in a stage whisper. “She's got Mama's good-luck anniversary pennies on her eyes.” She stepped back, looked down at her feet.

Silence . . . Judy kept looking down. Finally she added, “And there's Cordy's finger with the amethyst ring Daddy gave her.”

A current of unease rippled through the spectators. My own foreboding heightened. Judy continued looking downward, at the ground where the larkspur had once grown. Larkspur, which are also called delphiniums. . .

Stameroff raised his head, made a sudden lurching motion toward her. “Judy, don't—”

She looked up at him. “Why not? You know what I did.”

“Judy—”

“I picked up Cordy's finger, and I took the ring off of it. Then I threw the finger off the cliff. And then I went back to the house and hid the ring where nobody but me could ever find it.”

The ensuing silence made it feel as if we'd fallen into a void. At the bottom of the cliff, a high wave boomed.

Judy faced her adoptive father squarely, lips twisted in contempt. “I lied,” she said. “I lied for years and years. And
you made me do it.”

Jack's fingers loosened; I wrenched my arm away. Stameroff moved toward Judy at the same time I did. And stopped as her right arm shot out from under the cape and pointed a long barreled pistol at him.

“You made me lie,” she said, “For all those years, every time I tried to get at the truth, you stopped me.”

The crowd gave a collective gasp, pulled back as one—shocked, suddenly confused. Even Wallace and Joslyn froze.

My first thought was that Judy's gun, the one Lis had shot herself with, was in the hands of the police. That this gun was a stage prop more calculated melodrama. Loaded with blanks, if it was loaded at all. But what if it was real, loaded with real bullets? What if she meant to kill him?

Wallace recovered from his shock, shouted, “Nobody panic! It'll be all right. Just don't move.”

Stameroff ignored him, starting toward Judy, his eyes flickering wildly around. “I did it to protect you! Your mother made me promise—”

“You both did it to protect yourselves.” She grasped the gun with both hands. Stameroff froze.

Everyone except Jack and me was within her line of sight and fire. Jack seemed incapable of speech or motion.

Should I go for the gun? Risk it's being a deadly weapon? Risk her firing at Stameroff or into the crowd?

I took a slow step toward her. She caught the motion in the periphery of her vision. “Don't come any closer, Sharon.”

I stopped, watching the gun. No way to tell if it was real or not at this distance—stage props were that good.
Should
I chance it?

If I were the only one involved, perhaps. But I couldn't risk the others' safety.

Reason with her, then? Feed into the heavy drama she'd constructed?

Try a little of both. Maybe she'd give me an opening.

“Judy,” I called. “I know he's a bastard and deserves to be punished, but not this way. And not in front of all these witnesses.”

“Why should I care about witnesses?”

“Because your life is valuable. You don't want to throw it away.”

“My mother threw it away when she murdered that woman.”

She didn't know. The memory gap had not fully closed.

And that gave me my opening.

“Judy, your mother didn't kill Cordy McKittridge. Are you going to let the person who did get away with it?”

The words seemed to confuse her. Still, she kept the gun aimed at Stameroff.

Quickly I asked, “After you disposed of the finger, you went back to the house, right?”

“ . . . Yes.”

“Who did you see?”

Silence.

“Who, Judy?”

“Not Mama. Her door was locked.”

“But there was someone else, wasn't there.”

She hesitated, the shook her head, taking her left hand off the gun and touching it to her brow as she had earlier in the second-floor hallway.

“Was someone
upstairs
?”

A gust of wind whipped the black cape around Judy's slender body. The gun wavered. She frowned, steadying it.

“Think, Judy,” I said. “The second-floor hallway. You're standing there with Cordy's ring in your hand. Your mother's door is locked. How do you feel?”

She kept her eyes on Stameroff, but after a moment she said, “Cold. I'm barefoot in my pajamas. And I'm scared. Mama and I have done this terrible thing.” Again she spoke in her little-girl's voice, but it now held genuine helplessness and fear.

“What do you hear?”

“ . . .water running, I think in Mama's bathroom.”

“Anything else?”

“Footsteps. Up here, at the end of the hall. In Dr. Eyestone's suite.”

“And?”

“. . . I moved back. To the stairs to where my room is. It's dark there. I get down behind the newell post.”

“What happens then?”

“The door opens.”

“Who comes out?”

She looked at me, shock and comprehension flooding her face. In her adult voice she says, “Leonard.”

More gasps and murmurs ran through the crowd. Eyestone took a step backward, shaking his head.

Judy swept the gun from Stameroff to Eyestone. “Leonard was wearing a tuxedo, and his hair was wet. I was afraid he would see me. I thought if he saw the ring, he'd realize what my mother had done. Only she hadn't—had she, Leonard?”

Eyestone spread his arms in a wide gesture of bewilderment and innocence.

Judy put both hands on the gun again, readying it to fire. The crowd suddenly broke apart and began to scatter away from her.

I ran toward her.

She turned my way, but too late. I slammed into her shoulder. Grabbed her arm, smashed the gun from her grip. She cried out and then wrenched away from me, scrambling after it.

I hurled myself at her again, knocked her sideways. Kicked out at the gun and sent it skittering toward the foundation. Judy tried to fight her way around me, but Joslyn ran up, grabbed her arms and pinned them behind her, then forced her to the ground with a knee in her back. Judy lay sobbing, her face pressed into the dirt.

Another commotion broke out behind me. I twisted in time to see Stameroff rush at Eyestone.

The justice grabbed Eyestone by the shoulder, raised his fist, and slammed it into his face. Eyestone staggered. Stameroff hit him again with every bit of his old-man's strength. Eyestone went down on one knee, then toppled over.

I felt the full force of thirty-six years of anger, shame, and self-loathing behind Stameroff's blows. He wasn't a man who could turn his rage upon himself where it belongs, so he swung out at his corrupter.

Before Wallace could subdue him, Stameroff had kicked Eyestone in the head.

I got to my feet and went over to the foundation. Picked up the gun. Not a stage prop—a .22 Colt Woodsman. I broke it open, checked its load.

Not blanks—real bullets.

More melodrama or a genuine attempted murder? I didn't suppose I'd ever know for sure.

But of one thing I was certain: Judy had finally delivered her one great performance.

On Sunday afternoon, in the police ward where he was recovering from the injuries Stameroff had inflicted on him, Leonard Eyestone confessed to killing Cordy McKittridge but firmly maintained his innocence of the Cardinal murder.

“And he'll never admit to it,” Adah Joslyn said when she stopped by my house to tell me about the confession.

The weather had again turned unseasonably warm. Joslyn and I sat on my deck, Ralph lying companionably at our feet while Allie stalked an imaginary bird in the gnarled apple tree.

“The scenario of the night of the murder was pretty much as you figured it,” Adah noted. “Like you said, it's all there in Benedict's suicide note, once you know what to look for.”

“In the suicide note and the photographs Eyestone suppressed.”

In my mind's eye, I pictured the scene in the upstairs hallway of the Seacliff house: ten-year-old Judy watching Eyestone come out of his father's suite, fresh from his blood-cleansing shower. Judy, too much afraid he would realize what she and her mother had done to wonder why he was there. And Leonard, newly clad in formal wear borrowed from his father, his fresh shirtfront austere with tiny pleats rather than the ruffles that were soaked with Cordy's blood.

Eyestone had returned to the St. Francis too late to join the reception line, but in time to pose for a picture with his father and John Foster Dulles. A potentially incriminating picture, he'd realized when he saw it in the paper the next day, because someone might notice the change of clothing. So he'd called the photographer and requested that all negatives of the evening's photos be destroyed. I'd always wonder what excuse he'd given.

But something must have puzzled Eyestone in the days that followed, intrigued him in spite of his fear of discovery and arrest. He's stabbed Cordy, yes, but he had not hacked her to death. Someone else had mutilated and then laid out her corpse—and Eyestone had a good suspicion of who that person was.

Is it better to think your mother falsely accused of murder or to know her for the despicable creature she is? How are you to understand my rage and frustration, my awful sense of being thwarted at the very last? The knowledge that if I didn't act, she would forever be frozen perfect in your father's emotions
?

A despicable creature
, Lis Benedict had written, because she had mutilated a lovely woman's corpse.

Rage and frustration
. . .
thwarted,
because she'd been denied her confrontation with Cordy. Perhaps been denied the opportunity to do to her what had already been done by some unknown person.

Forever be frozen perfect
, because even in death Cordy was beautiful, and such perfection had to be destroyed.

But then at the last she hadn't been able to leave what she had desecrated—because, to the thinking of a superstitious woman like Lis Benedict, the dead staring eyes were looking for the next to die, looking at her. So she placed her talismans over them.

Armed with talismans against failure,
the 1943 good-luck pennies of zinc-coated steel, that Vincent Benedict had purchased as an anniversary gift to her in 1954. Pennies minted in the year they were married. Pennies for the eleventh anniversary, because it called for gifts made of steel. An unusual gift, but Vincent Benedict and his wife were unusual people. And as the coin dealer had told the police, Benedict seemed to take ironic pleasure in the gift—coins that many collectors considered false, to communicate a marriage that contained its own degrees of falsity.

“You were right about Eyestone's motives, too,” Joslyn added. “Bastard made one mistake early in life, and it just kept compounding.”

Leonard's mistake was a youthful flirtation with Communism. In 1953 he began dabbling in radical politics, and by the time he met Roger Woods at a Party meeting in 1955, he was in love with the idealism and intrigue. He even tried to enlist Cordy in the cause, but she dismissed it as merely one more of Leonard's strange enthusiasms. Soon Woods asked Eyestone to take him to the Institute and introduce him to his father and the other staff; this bastion of bourgeois pseudo-intellectualism, Roger claimed, must be infiltrated. Leonard, who had kept his two worlds strictly segregated, balked –until Woods reminded him how much harm it would do him and the organization if his radical connections were made public.

The point was further driven home when the Institute began negotiating for the contract on the domestic security threat and background checks were run on staff members to be assigned to the project. While Leonard wasn't one of them, he now fully realized the danger he'd placed himself in and tried to break with Woods and his other radical associates. But Woods had an irritating habit of popping up unannounced at Seacliff and insinuating himself into any gathering. Leonard was particularly horrified to learn that his former comrade had wangled an invitation to the Dulles reception.

Joslyn said, “When you think of it, Leonard's involvement with the Commies was pretty innocent. He said he never even joined up.”

“Didn't matter back then,” I told her. “McCarthy and his followers destroyed people for far less than what Leonard did.”

“True.” She stretched out her long legs and propped her feet on the deck railing, squinting at the sun. “But I still think Leonard would have been all right if McKittridge hadn't known about it.”

But Cordy had known, and in time, she began to perceive Leonard's radical fling and Roger Woods's continuing presence at Institute affairs as a personal danger. Vincent Benedict had decided to leave his wife and marry her; the divorce would be costly, but Cordy knew that her conservative, publicity-shy parents would cut her off once Lis named her as correspondent. Vincent would need his job: therefore the Institute must be protected. In June of 1956 Cordy put her former lover on notice: get rid of Woods and resign from the staff or she would tell us father everything.

“Cordy was rough on Leonard,” I said, “and there was more than a little self-interest operating there, but I think in a way she thought she was—excuse me for using an overworked catchphrase—doing the right thing. She's always struck me as a woman whose moral sense was black-and-white.

Joslyn snorted derisively.

“No—think about her background. Conservative old money. Proper upbringing. All those rules. Early influences like that can't help but have had a strong effect. What happens with kids who are raised that way? They rebel and sow their wild oats, but eventually they find they can't escape who they are. Look at Leonard.”

“Maybe.”

“Louise Wingfield said something telling to me: that Cordy didn't love anyone, least of all herself. A lot of that self-hatred could have been because she was going against everything that, down deep, she believed it.”