New Year's Eve Murder (20 page)

Jack took notes as I talked a few blocks from the Childs house. “That missing pen is a real stroke of luck,” he said. “The upstate cops'll have it if it was in that house. There are bound to be prints on it. Once we establish he was in that house, any alibi he may have breaks down.”

“And then there's the cell phone.”

“That cell phone is going to be a big piece of evidence, too. It'll tell us exactly where he was at a particular time. We ought to be able to get the record of that call pretty quick. He's probably been billed for December already. You did great. What we need to find is the murder weapon or a matching fingerprint on the pen or anywhere else. There were a number of prints in that house that didn't match the victim or Susan.”

“Probably some from Teddy Toledo. He dropped by a lot.”

“It would be nice if this Jerry Childs left one, too.”

“I wonder if he went there to kill her or just to talk to her.”

“Could be either. His father must have confided in him before he died.”

That had been my thought. “Mrs. Childs said Jerry had just visited his father before the fatal heart attack.”

“Old guy unburdens himself and then dies. Son takes up the cause.”

“So what do we do?”

“We go to the local police station and get some phone calls made. We need that telephone bill, we need to see if that pen is in custody and if it has Childs's prints, we need a search warrant for their premises for the kind of weapon that killed D.D. Butler.”

“Like a shovel?”

“Right. I hope they can get a judge to sign a warrant today. And then we need to bring Childs down to the police station and get him printed. So let's see what we can accomplish.”

It was fairly complicated, what with all the police departments that were involved. Bladesville said, sure, pick the guy up. The upstate coroner had determined that something like a garden shovel had been the weapon, so that was what the local police would search for at the Childs house, albeit very reluctantly. Jerry Childs was well known in town, well liked, an all-around good citizen. He was pretty far from the usual suspect in a bludgeoning case.

Getting a warrant to search the Childs premises was a lot harder. It isn't easy to get a judge on a weekend. They like their days off as much as the rest of us, and the first one the police tried to contact wasn't home. The second one wanted something more substantial than what he referred to as vague suspicions. Fortunately, while one detective was on the phone with the judge, another detective was able to get a fax of Childs's December cellular telephone bill. Late in the evening of December thirtieth he had called his home number from the central office that served Bladesville. As far as I was concerned, we had him. The judge apparently agreed and said he would sign a warrant.

When the detective talking to Bladesville was finished, Jack got on the phone and asked whether a pen had been found in the house. There was a lot of discussion and a
pause while, I assumed, questions were asked about whether a pen had been logged in. He hung up looking unhappy.

“Pencils and ballpoints,” he said. “Nothing that a man would notice was missing.”

“Unless he patted his shirt pocket the way I've seen you do and realized that the cheap little pen he'd had in the morning wasn't there and he had a good idea where he'd lost it.”

Jack gave it a second's thought. “He wouldn't mention it to his wife. It must have been a decent pen, maybe one she gave him as a gift. Let's see if we can hold his attention before the cops come to execute the search warrant.”

We drove back to the Childs house but the empty space in the garage was still empty. Then I saw a child in an upstairs window.

“He's come and gone, Jack.”

“Uh-oh.” He stopped in front of the house and we dashed up the front steps.

Mrs. Childs opened it. “Can you tell me what's going on?” she said, looking distressed.

“Where's your husband?” I asked.

“I have no idea. He came home a little while ago and when I told him you'd been here he got very upset. Then I said something about his missing pen and he just—” She held her hands apart, indicating she had no more idea where he was than we did.

“He took off,” Jack said.

“Yes, but why?”

“Come on, Chris. Thanks, Mrs. Childs.” He started moving back toward the car and I ran after him. “Want me to drop you at the police station and ask them to take you home?”

“You'll lose him. Just go. I know the best way to get there.”

It was one of those moments when I wished we had a phone in the car. We should have called ahead to Bladesville for a welcoming committee to greet Mr. Childs, but we couldn't take the time. Jerry Childs had probably made this trip in the dark and might have to slow down to look for landmarks. I had done it during the day and somewhat more recently than he had and I was sure I would recognize every turn.

When we got there, a black Mercedes was parked up near the house and Jack pulled in tight behind it to keep Childs from fleeing.

“Stay back,” he said to me, and I watched the other personality take over, the one that was all business. He took the off-duty revolver he was carrying from the belt holster, went quietly up the steps, moved to the side, and opened the door.

When he was inside I followed him up the steps and into the foyer, listening for a sound that would tell me where Jack was. I didn't want to go any farther in case Childs showed up, although I was pretty sure he wasn't armed. All he wanted to do was find the missing pen and get out. He wasn't expecting a confrontation and surely didn't want one.

And then I heard it, loudly. “Police! Don't move!”—the universal phrase. It had come from the kitchen and was followed by exclamations and sounds of disgust and fear.

“What's your name?” Jack shouted.

“Jerry Childs. William J. Childs. Who the hell are you?”

“Down on the floor,” Jack shouted.

“What the hell is going on?”

“Mr. Childs, you're under arrest for the murder of Delilah Butler,” Jack said, as I walked with relief and
confidence toward the kitchen. He recited the Miranda warning as the man complained loudly.

When I got to the door of the kitchen, I saw that he was sitting uncomfortably on the floor, handcuffed by his left hand to one foot of the old iron stove that had given D.D. her only heat.

“You OK?” Jack said as he saw me.

“Fine.”

“Don't touch anything. We're going to do this by the book.” He turned to his prisoner. “You got that cute little cell phone you always carry with you?”

Childs reached into his pocket with his free right hand, pulled something out, and tossed it to Jack.

“Thanks. This will spare you a trip,” he said to me. Then he opened it up, dialed the police, and we sat back and waited.

It didn't take them long. Two uniformed deputies came into the house and introduced themselves.

“We're looking for a pen,” Jack explained. “The suspect here may have lost it when he murdered the Butler woman.”

“I thought they had a girl in New York for that,” one of the officers said.

“They have no case. Chris, you have any idea where to look for that pen?”

“It could have rolled under the mattress or behind one of these cabinets.”

The men started looking, poking around, sticking their hands beneath and behind anything movable or slightly off the ground. There was no pen under the stove, under the mattress, under any of the clothes still piled on the floor. They moved, pushed, reached, and poked. No pen.

“There's a bedroom upstairs,” I said, “where it looks like she slept in warmer weather. All of her papers were
taken. If they were lying on the floor up there, he might have bent over to pick them up. I'll show you where it is.”

I led the way up the stairs to the second floor, then to the bedroom with the old dresser and bedframe. I was about to take my little flashlight out of my bag when the deputies both reached for theirs.

The floor of the room was pretty clean, except for dust. They shone the light under the dresser, under the bed, and around the perimeter.

“Let's try the closet,” I suggested.

One of them went into it, shining his light on the floor. “Hey,” he said. “I think maybe I've got it.” He stopped and put a plastic glove on. Then he knelt. When he stood up he was holding something black and shiny. “This what you're looking for?”

“I think you've done it,” I said.

They put the pen in a plastic bag, sealed it, made notes on the paper label, and then took Childs into custody. He was angry and confused, more worried, it seemed to me, about his Mercedes than about his future.

“You didn't have to kill her,” I said, as they prepared to take him outside.

“I didn't kill anyone. I just talked to her. I told her to leave us alone.”

“Was she blackmailing you?”

“Not me, my father. She killed my father. She dug in and she wouldn't let go. There was nothing he could give her that would make her stop. She wanted to destroy his life, his family, my mother especially. She had no right.”

“Why did you come up here that particular night?” I asked.

“She told my father to come on New Year's Eve in the morning. He thought she wanted to kill him, that she'd be
waiting for him. I told him I would go instead, come early and surprise her, see what I could do to get her to stop. About an hour after my father and I talked, he had a heart attack and died.”

“I'm sorry,” I said.

“Not as sorry as I am. I came up here the night before New Year's Eve. I didn't know she lived like this. She was a nobody and she pushed people around. She didn't want to talk. We got into a fight and she hit her head on the stove.”

I knew it wasn't true. There was no blood on the stove and she hadn't fallen anywhere near the stove. It was the beginning of a story to keep himself from paying the full price for what he had done.

“I'm not sure she wanted to kill your father,” I said, aware that the two local cops were listening with fascination to this unsolicited confession. “She wanted a kind of family reunion.”

“She wanted that, too,” Childs said. “I found her script for New Year's Eve when I went through the house. The bitch had it all written down like a play, who would say what. It was going to be a massacre. It was crazy.”

“Then you knew who the other players were,” I said.

“Not for a while. She had them coded. She just called them Mother, Father, Sister. I wasn't included. It was just her half sister she invited. My father never told me the names.”

“Did you figure out who the half sister was?” I asked.

“When Susan came back I put it together. I decided it was better to treat her as if she was innocent than make an issue of it. I couldn't see how anyone would ever connect me to this place.”

“It took a little doing,” I said.

“OK, Mr. Childs, we gotta go,” the younger deputy
said. “You got a big mouth on you. One of these days it's gonna get you in trouble.”

I couldn't imagine a greater understatement.

There was an impromptu party the next day at the Golds'. We took Eddie, and everyone commented on how he had grown in the last seventeen days. It was true. At half a pound a week he was now more than a pound heavier than on New Year's Eve, and he looked much more like a bouncing baby than he had when they had last seen him.

The Starks were there, Ada looking even more worn than she had when I had met her soon after Susan's disappearance. Arnold, who, of course, had learned all the family secrets the easy way from the players themselves, told me when we got there that Ada had finally, after all those years, told her husband for the first time about the child she had given birth to before she met him. Ernie seemed as calm and contented as a man could be. If he had been troubled by her confession, you couldn't see it in his face or demeanor. Somehow Ada had failed to understand that her husband loved her and was unconcerned by something that happened before he came into her life.

“Nobody has to talk about anything,” Arnold said as we sat in the living room. “Chris and I want to know everything but that's our problem, right, Chrissie?”

“Right as always, Arnold. We've got it pretty much figured out by now.”

“What I don't understand is how you made all those connections,” Susan said. She was sitting on the sofa next to Kevin and holding his hand as though she were afraid he would get away if he had the opportunity, but he looked as though he wouldn't leave even if someone pushed him.

“I'm not sure where it really started,” I said, “but there were two things that got me going. One was Sister Joseph, the General Superior of St. Stephen's, where I was a nun. She said something about there being so many magazines in this case. Somehow there was a magazine connection that I had to find. The other thing was that when I read that awful story that D.D. Butler wrote, I couldn't believe that a literary magazine—or any other magazine for that matter—would publish it. I mean, it was really terrible. And as it turned out, the editor of the magazine published it because she was asked to. By her father.”

“But how did you get to Jerry?”

“By default,” I admitted. “I finally got down to his father, who I was sure was the killer. I drove up to Brewster, got into the house to talk to Mrs. Childs, and she told me her husband had died about two weeks before New Year's Eve. For a while I really thought I'd come to a dead end. But when I got home, I called the publisher of the magazine that had printed D.D.'s photo-essay, and he told me Mr. Childs had a son as well as the daughter I had already talked to. I didn't really recognize the first name, but when I heard the name of your magazine, I realized he was my next suspect.”

“Well, you did a great job, Chrissie,” Arnold said.

“And you must all be hungry,” Harriet put in. “Let's sit down and eat. I'm sure we all know how to talk with our mouths full.”

I was the one who still had questions. Susan and Kevin
sat across the table from Jack and me. I decided to give it a shot. If she didn't want to answer, I would see it in her face.

“I assume,” I said, “that you went to Bladesville the morning of New Year's Eve.”

“I did. I had already arranged to borrow Jill's car, and I just got up that morning, had breakfast, and walked over to the garage where Jill kept it. I knew where I was going. I had called the AAA and asked for directions. So I drove up there.”

“Did your parents know you'd slept in the house the night before?”

“Sure,” she said with total innocence, looking at her parents as though she couldn't imagine why I had asked the question.

“I said I didn't know whether you'd stayed over,” Ada said unhappily.

“Well, I did. And I got up to the house where D.D. Butler was staying at maybe ten, ten-thirty that morning. I pulled the car up on the property where it looked like other people had parked—it wasn't plowed or anything—and I rang the bell and knocked on the door. When she didn't answer, I went in.”

“I'll bet that's a moment you'll never forget,” Jack said.

“Never for the rest of my life. She was lying there, facedown, in that awful cluttered kitchen, blood kind of frozen on the floor. And all I could think was that my mother had done it. I was so scared, I was so confused.” She stopped talking and a shudder seemed to run through her.

“You knew who D.D. was,” I said.

“I'd known for some time. And I'd known because I saw a couple of the letters she was writing to my mother even before she wrote to me. I figured Mom just reached the end of her rope and killed her.”

“And, of course, when I got there, I didn't know for
sure who that was lying on the floor in the kitchen,” Ada said. “My first thought was that it was D.D. since she lived there. But who would have killed her? Then I thought, ‘What if D.D. invited Susan, too?' D.D. had written me that she was having a ‘reunion' on New Year's Eve and I thought she just meant herself and me. But if she had found me, she could just as easily have found Susan. She gets mail at the house all the time and I pass it along. How would I know what was inside? D.D. could have handwritten one envelope and typed the other and mailed them from different places.

“Susan had left before me that morning. Maybe she had come up to that house and gotten in a fight with D.D. and killed her. And then I thought, ‘What if that's Susan lying there?' My mind suddenly blanked. I couldn't remember what Susan had been wearing at breakfast, but the body had sneakers on and I was pretty sure Susan had been wearing hers. The hair was all messed up but it was Susan's color. I tried to see the face but there wasn't any face to see. It was terrible.”

“Did you think about how Susan had gotten up there?” Jack asked.

“I didn't. I knew Kevin had a car and Susan often drove it. And if D.D. had killed Susan, maybe she drove off in the car Susan came up in.”

“Ada, you must have been at your wit's end,” Harriet said.

“Beyond that. Way beyond. I was so terrified I didn't know what to do. But I'd told Ernie I was taking the car and doing some shopping so I drove around, stopped for coffee a couple of times, and eventually went home. I didn't know if Susan was dead or alive or what I would say to her if she came home, whether I should try to talk to her about it. I just felt crazy. Then, when Kevin called and asked to talk to her, it hit home. She was going out
with him that night, and he was calling to talk to her and she wasn't there. And she didn't come home and didn't come home and I was left with those two terrible possibilities, that she was dead in that farmhouse or that she was alive and a killer.” Her voice broke on the last word and she bent her head over the table.

“Seems to me,” Arnold said from his position at the head of the table, “that the villain in all this was the victim. From what I've learned, a lot of it from Chrissie here, she decided to do what she could to destroy her natural parents and take Susan along for the ride. She must have been a pretty sick person.”

“Or very angry,” I said. “She had a nice family. I met them.”

“It wasn't enough,” Ada said. “Nothing was enough. It's very sad.”

“It's an amazing story, though,” Jack said. “She took years to infiltrate herself into the lives of these people she was related to by blood, pushed them around, showing how superior she was to them. And then she got them all to go up to that house for her reunion.”

“Did Jerry Childs still have that play of hers?” I asked him.

“I talked to the Bladesville cops this morning. Tenafly hasn't been able to find anything like that. But they did find the murder weapon.”

“You've been holding out on us, Jack,” Arnold said.

“Just looking for the right moment. It was a shovel, and he must have put it in his car because there are traces of blood in the trunk. As the autopsy indicated, it must have been the shovel she used to clean out the woodstove. There's ash and charcoal on it. He isn't saying anything.”

“After the speech he made at the farmhouse, he should
be very careful what he says.” I couldn't imagine any lawyer letting him go on as he had yesterday afternoon.

“He says he found a loaded gun in that kitchen,” Jack said. “Probably what she intended to use when her ‘guests' arrived the next morning. She didn't have it handy or Jerry might not be among the living.”

“And D.D. would,” Arnold said. “Where's the alleged weapon?”

“He told the police he stopped on the Tappan Zee Bridge on his way home and tossed everything into the Hudson River—at its widest point, of course. I doubt they're going to dredge the river for it.”

There was a cry and everyone stopped talking.

“Sounds like a hungry baby.” I pushed my chair away from the table and started for the stairs.

“Bring him down when he's finished,” Harriet called.

“And tell the folks how you stood up for women's rights singlehanded against a whole police force,” Arnold said.

“OK. See you all later.” I hurried up the stairs. “Coming, little sweetheart,” I said, as I reached the second floor.