They were gathered in the morning room, Roni on the sofa, hands folded in her lap, quiet but composed. Lilly stood next to the fireplace, turning her attention from Roni to Martha Chase, who was in her wheelchair, parked in front of the windows, both absent and present, her view limited to the squirrels chasing one another in the backyard. Terry Walker stood near Lilly, arms at his side, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, looking for a place to land. Kate sat in a chair across from the sofa, watching and listening, dissecting and cataloguing. No one looked my way when I entered the room.
“See to your mother,” Lilly said to Roni. “She needs to lie down.”
Roni rose from the couch, her head bowed, biting her lip. I followed Roni as she wheeled her mother from the room, down a hallway and to an elevator. She pushed the call button, and the elevator door opened.
“Sorry,” she said, backing the wheelchair into the elevator. “No room.”
I took the stairs, meeting them when the elevator reached the second floor. Roni didn’t speak as she pushed her mother past me and into a bedroom, closing the door and leaving me in the hall.
“We have to talk,” I said when she came out. She tried to walk past me, but I blocked her path. “You can be as angry as you like, but you have to talk to me.”
“Why?”
“Because Brett is in a lot of trouble.”
“And you’re the only one who can help him, right?”
“No, but I’m the only one willing to help him. You can help him, but you won’t.”
“There’s nothing I can do,” she said, bulling past me.
“Yes, you can. Tell me about your gun, the one used to kill Frank Crenshaw. What happened to it?”
She took a deep breath. “I don’t know. I kept in my dresser drawer, with my underwear, like everyone else does. Grandma Lilly picked me up at the police station on Sunday after I shot Frank. When I came home, I took a shower, and when I opened my dresser drawer, it was gone.”
“Who knew that’s where you kept the gun?”
She folded her arms across her chest. “Just Grandma and Brett.”
“Then why are you protecting Brett, especially now?”
“Because he didn’t kill Frank or his father. He couldn’t. He wouldn’t. And neither would my grandmother. I don’t know who took my gun or why, but it wasn’t Brett.”
“Why didn’t you tell the police?”
“You don’t believe me. Why would they? Now for the last time, leave me and my family alone.”
The hall where she’d left me ran the width of the house, intersecting at one end with another that extended from the front of the house to the rear. I took a quick walk through both corridors. What had once been a home to dozens of young women and girls had been remodeled into a series of suites, each with a sitting room, walk-in closets big enough for me to live in, and spacious bedrooms. Lilly’s was on the back of the house with a view of trees, their remaining leaves a collage of red, yellow, and orange. Roni’s was next to her mother’s, joined by connected bathrooms.
I made a quick search of her bedroom, finding nothing of significance. She was neat, but not obsessive. She had three books on her nightstand, one a mystery, one about running your own business, and one about understanding strokes. There were no guns, holsters, or ammunition and no love letters from Brett, though there was a framed picture of them, arm in arm, sporting smiles big enough to swallow one another.
Standing at the entrance to her bathroom, I had a clear view of Martha lying in bed on her back. It was a hospital-style bed with a mattress that adjusted up and down and side rails to keep her from falling out. Walking softly so as not to disturb her, I crossed both bathrooms and into her room, watching her chest rise and fall in a gentle rhythm, wondering what life was like for her.
My mother had Alzheimer’s, and once, while visiting her in the nursing home, I remarked to a nurse how awful it was for her. She rarely spoke, spending most of her waking hours staring into space, oblivious to everyone and everything around her. The nurse surprised me when she asked me how I knew it was awful for her, making me realize that I was viewing my mother’s illness through my eyes, not really knowing what she was experiencing. Perhaps, said the nurse, she was content the way she was because she didn’t remember the way she used to be. Since there was no way to know what my mother knew or didn’t know, what she felt or didn’t feel, why, the nurse asked, should I assume it was awful for her when that would only make it worse for me?
I thought about Roni’s mother, trying not to see her through my eyes. She turned her head, opening her eyes, staring at me or through me, I couldn’t tell which. I wanted to ask her what she saw, but she closed her eyes again before I had a chance.
When I returned to the morning room, Roni was standing at the windows, her arms crossed. Terry, his hands in his pockets, was making a slow circle around the room, studying the floor. Lilly stood in another corner, talking on her cell phone with someone about funeral arrangements. Kate was still in her chair, entering all of them into her mental database. I caught her attention and signaled to her that it was time to go. Terry Walker was the only one who noticed us leave, raising his head, his eyes creased, his face grim.
“What did you find upstairs?” Kate asked when we got outside.
“How’d you know I was searching?”
“Like I haven’t seen you work. You never pass up an opportunity to snoop. And, Roni was in a real snit when she came back downstairs.”
“I didn’t find anything. She knew I wouldn’t. That’s why she left me up there.”
“If she doesn’t have anything to hide, why doesn’t she just tell you that?” Kate asked.
“She didn’t have anything to hide in her bedroom. As for anything else, I can’t get her to talk to me.”
“That’s because she doesn’t want to lie to you. Some people are so uncomfortable with deception they go out of their way to avoid lying. That doesn’t mean they don’t have something to hide. They may be willing to do the wrong thing even if they have a hard time covering it up. Instead of lying, they use hostility to discourage too many questions.”
“Knowing that doesn’t make me any smarter. She keeps a picture of Brett and her on her dresser. It’s one of those
we’re so much in love we can’t stand it
pictures.”
“I thought you said she couldn’t make up her mind about him.”
“Her mind was sure made up when that picture was taken. And, when I told her about Nick being killed and that Brett was at the top of the suspect list, she wouldn’t have any of it. She’s still defending him. Says he couldn’t have done it. What did you pick up from the people in that room?”
“When Lilly told Roni to take care of her mother, Roni bristled. Lilly runs the show, and Roni may have had all of that she can take. I watched her with her mother. She loves her and resents her, which is par for the course when the child becomes the parent.”
“And Lilly?”
“She’s a very strong woman who is short on patience and can’t stand weakness. You remember how Ellen Koch showed contempt for Peggy Martin? That’s the way Lilly looked at Roni.”
“What about Terry Walker? How did Lilly look at him?”
“That was a puzzle. She hasn’t seen him in fifty years, but one minute she’s mad as hell at him and the next she’s all gaga and dewy-eyed.”
“Any idea how he feels about her?”
“He’s pretty distant. I’m not sure he has much feeling about anybody.”
“I hope Lucy is having a better day than we are,” Kate said.
“I don’t know. It will be hard for her to top two dead bodies and one fractured family.”
“Don’t say that. You could be describing the Martins.”
She was right, but the Martin family wasn’t the only one to which that description applied. Frank and Marie Crenshaw were dead, their children orphaned, and, depending on what happened to Brett Staley, the description could fit his family as well. It was as if someone had singled out these three families for destruction.
In a world where chaos and randomness held more sway than five-year plans, such misfortune could be nothing more than a commentary on harsh reality. But these families were too closely connected for their pain and suffering to be dismissed as a run of bad luck. The Crenshaws and Staleys were joined by blood and marriage, while Nick Staley and Jimmy Martin had grown up together, gone to war together, and come home together.
“Not just the Martins, all of them, the Martins, the Staleys, and the Crenshaws,” I said, running down the list of missing, dead, and damaged. “There must be something else that ties them together, something that would explain all of that.”
“Why? Remember what I said about looking for a theory of everything. It’s like when there’s a cluster of brain cancer cases in one small community and right away people start claiming they’re all victims of a corporate conspiracy to pollute the water supply, only it turns out that the cluster is just one series of random events among billions of random events. We live in a world governed by physical laws we can’t control or change, and bad things just happen.”
“And that world is populated by people with free will who screw up, go nuts, and make a hell of lot of those bad things possible. These three families had one other thing in common. They were all on the ropes financially,” I said.
“What difference does that make? Almost one in ten people in this country are out of work, and we’re in the worst recession since the Great Depression.”
“It could make all the difference depending on what they decided to do about it.”
“Okay,” Kate said. “Start with Jimmy Martin. He stole five thousand dollars worth of copper tubing, but it was worthless to him unless could sell it to someone. Frank Crenshaw was in the scrap business. He could have parceled the copper out with other scrap and split the money with Jimmy. It may not have been enough money to keep them both above water, but it was a start.”
“Which could explain why Frank wanted a gun. Selling stolen property may have made him nervous. And, just before he shot Marie, he told her something that really set her off. That could have been it.”
“But that leaves out Nick Staley. Where does he fit in?”
“Hey, aren’t you the one who said I should quit looking for a theory of everything?”
“No. I’m the one who told you never to remind me of what I just said. I could be wrong. Maybe we need to look at it another way.”
I thought for a minute, charting the permutations in my head, a light going on. “Maybe Nick Staley isn’t the one who doesn’t fit in. He and Frank Crenshaw are both dead, which could make Jimmy Martin the odd man out because he’s still alive.”
Kate grinned. “A theory of everything after all.”
“Almost everything. What about Evan and Cara Martin? No matter what Frank, Nick, and Jimmy were into, I don’t see how that puts Jimmy’s kids in the mix.”
“It doesn’t have to,” Kate said. “Think of the two cases like circles that touch at a single point but don’t overlap. One circle is Staley, Crenshaw, and Martin, and the other circle is Evan and Cara. Jimmy Martin is the point of contact between the two circles, but that doesn’t mean one has anything to do with the other. Don’t forget that there are lots of other circles, including one with Adam Koch’s name on it, and his circle definitely overlaps Evan and Cara’s.”
“I’ll give you that. Adam is a lot easier to sell on the kidnapping than Jimmy Martin.”
“Which means I’m right and the order of the universe is restored,” she said.
“And I’m hungry. It’s after one o’clock. I need a burger, and I know where I’m going to get one.”
“Where? I only ask because I’m driving. I can circle the block while you eat if you prefer,” she said, giving me a gentle poke in my ribs, her eyes bright and filled with mischief.
She was at her most irresistible when she was alive like this, at turns funny, indignant, insistent, and brilliant, enriching her beauty, masking her fears and insecurities, making me forget about mine and the flaws in our relationship. It was a moment filled with promise and pain and one that I had to let pass.
“Westport Flea Market. Best burger in town. I’ll call Lucy and Simon and tell them to meet us there.”
It took twenty minutes to get to Westport, a midtown collection of bars and restaurants, some more downscale than others. The Flea Market was the only one that counted a serial killer as one of its vendors back when it was just a flea market. Bob Berdella, who kidnapped, tortured, and killed at least six men in the mid-eighties, sold trinkets at the flea market. He died in prison of a heart attack, the Flea Market switched from trinkets to burgers, and the world became a better place.
The restorative power of the Flea Market’s cheeseburgers, fries, and rings may never be documented in a double-blind, peer-reviewed study published in the
New England Journal of Medicine,
but that’s only because the editors do not understand that holistic nutrition means eating the whole thing. While stuffing our faces, we traded notes.
“Ellen Koch is a mess,” Lucy said. “She alternates between blaming herself for what Adam did and insisting that she had no way of knowing there was anything wrong with him and that, if there was, it was all her ex-husband’s fault.”
“Besides playing dodgeball with her, did you learn anything we didn’t already know?” I asked.
“Nope. I had a hard time getting her to focus. I pushed her as hard as I could about the morning the kids disappeared. She finally admitted that she suspected Adam had spent that night at Peggy’s. She said she woke up during the night and couldn’t get back to sleep. She checked on Adam to make sure he was home. He was gone, but his truck was in the driveway. It wasn’t hard for her to figure out where he was.”
“Did she see him come home?”
“She says she didn’t. Says she tried to wait up for him but fell asleep and didn’t see him come in.”
“What about Peggy? Did you talk to her?”
“I tried. She hasn’t stopped drinking since she found out about Adam, and she’s not a clear-thinking drunk. She won’t be any help until she sobers up and dries out. While I was at her house, the doorbell rang. It was a couple of the neighbors that had contributed to the fund Ellen started to raise money to hire me. They wanted Peggy to give them their money back.”
“What did you do?” I asked.
“I told them that Peggy was broke and that I’d be happy to write them and anyone else who felt the same way a check, but that I’d keep looking for Evan and Cara because it wasn’t the kids’ fault that their parents were so screwed up. One of them started to cry and said she was sorry and the other one got mad and called me a bitch, but neither one of them took me up on my offer.”
“Did you take another run at Jimmy Martin?”
“Not yet. Thought I’d try him this afternoon. How’d you guys make out?”
I explained about Nick Staley and Eberto Garza and how much flak I was getting from Roni Chase. Kate summarized her impressions of Lilly and Roni and Terry Walker. Simon repeated what he’d told me about the robberies of the gun dealers, adding that he’d had no luck getting a line on Cesar Mendez.
“Short of standing on a corner in his neighborhood with twenty-dollar bills sticking out of your pockets and a sign around your neck saying you’d like to buy drugs, I’m out of ideas,” he said.
“At this point, it all comes back to Jimmy Martin,” I said. “He’s the only one left who knows what went down.”
“And he’s not talking,” Lucy said.
“Then I’ll have to give him a reason.”
“You have one in mind?” Lucy asked. “Because it better be a good one. Finding his kids hasn’t done the trick.”
“Best one left. Talking to me may be the only way he can stay alive.”