Authors: Jeremiah Healy
“Let’s talk about Dr. Marek. How did you come to see him?”
“Jennifer’s idea. She was in this group, thought it might be good for me.”
“Was it?”
“Yeah, terrific,” he said, exaggerating again and sweeping his head around the room. “Given me a whole new perspective on my existence.”
“Was it doing you any good before Jennifer was killed?”
William exhaled, ran his hand down over his eyes quickly. “Look, I was fucked up. I was in over my head, you dig? I went from the street to U Mass to big time in like months. I know it reads years on the calendar, but not to me. I was dizzy, man. You got no idea. It was like watching television all your life, being envious of what you saw, then all of a sudden starring in your own show. Having people focus on you, evaluate you without you knowing what the measure was they were using. You know what it’s like to have the people at U Mass tell you you’re a fucking genius, then hit a place like Goreham and realize that genius is a real relative thing?”
“So did Marek help with any of this?”
“I dunno. The hypnosis stuff, yeah, I think that did me some good. In the beginning anyway. Then …”
“Go ahead.”
“Forget it, man.”
“William, what were you going—”
“I said drop it, man! Or I’m fucking finished talking with you.”
“Okay.” I made a mental note to come back to it. “Did you get to know any of the other members of the group well?”
“You shitting me? You talked to them, right? They were more fucked up than I was. Lainie was a slut, Ramelli was married to one, and Homer, I think he was in for some kind of weird training reason. Like it made the old fuck a better runner to listen to us nuts crack open once a week.”
“How about Marek himself?”
“He was crazy too. He’d have to be, to put up with the rest of us.”
“How else did he strike you?”
“He’s a headshrinker. He makes his money like a hooker, charging for his time to make you feel better.”
“You think Jennifer and Marek ever made love?”
William’s anger flicked on again. “The fuck do I know?”
“You were pretty close to her, and you must have seen her with him before, during, and after group. That sounds like enough basis for an opinion.”
He grew angrier. “You wanna know, I’ll give you my ‘opinion.’ My opinion is that you like to ask about fucking sex more than you like to have it.”
I took a deep breath, let it out. “Before Jennifer was killed, how were you and she getting along?”
William looked down, anger draining. “Fine, just fine.”
“No arguments, splits, anything like that?”
“I said no. We were fine. We fucked fine. All right?”
“You know a cop named Bjorkman?”
“Oh, yeah. Another great friend of the Negro.”
“He harass you?”
“You could call it that.”
“Any specific instances?”
“Yeah, plenty. Jenn and me would be walking, and him and his partner would pull up in their police machine and tell us stories.”
“Stories?”
“Yeah, about how little nigger boys that bother with little white girls end up as fertilizer back in the woods somewhere.”
“Both Bjorkman and Clay said things like that?”
William thought for a second. “No, to be honest, I only remember the partner being there once, and he came down on Bjorkman and made him drive the car away. Bjorkman, though, he’d sometimes wait outside Marek’s building and ride me, or just watch me when I’d get there.”
“Was he there the night Jennifer was killed?”
“I dunno.”
“What time did you get there that night?”
“I dunno. I just remember shooting, that’s all.”
“You have no memory prior to … that?”
“No, man. How many times I gotta say it. No. I remember shooting her, and coming into the group session, and telling them about it. But I don’t remember nothing before. Nothing.”
“William, if you didn’t do it—”
“What the fuck is wrong with you, Jack? Watch my fucking lips. I shot her. I … shot … her. Got it? No question.”
“Bear with me, huh? Please?”
“Not if you keep talking shit.”
“I need your help on this, William. If you didn’t do it, then whoever did was smart enough to set you up gift-wrapped. My guess is neither McCatty nor Bjorkman is that smart. Or sly. Is there anybody you think—”
“Man, that’s it! That’s fucking it! What do you think—you can look inside my head and tell me something that’s there isn’t?” He pointed to his temple. “There’s a memory in here, Jack. A picture of me pulling the trigger on her, that fucking little two-timing bitch. I killed her, I fucking killed her. Why you making me go over it again and again, man? You wanna drive me crazy?”
“William, you said that the hypnosis did you some good at the beginning, but then—”
William was already standing. “Get laid, motherfucker.”
He motioned to the guard and left.
A
S
I
DROVE SOUTH
toward Marion, I tried to sort out what little I had learned from William. Racial taunts from all sides, difficulty in adjusting to life on academia’s fast track—these were things I’d expected, given my talks with others. What was harder to figure was his jumping from street slang to classroom eloquence, from vague cooperation to flaring hostility, every time I mentioned Jennifer, sex, or both together. I decided to check in with Dr. Lopez at U Mass if time permitted.
I swung onto Route 24, taking it south to where Route 25 branches off to the left. Slowing and winding for intermittent construction, I got onto Interstate 195 for a few miles to the Marion exit. I eased up on the gas pedal, glancing frequently at Mrs. Wald’s intricate but apparently accurate directions. I also began to get a feel for the town.
Marion is located on a cove off Buzzards Bay. While not a joy to the ear, Buzzards Bay is moneyland, the southwestern terminus of the Cape Cod Canal, the ambitious construction project that transformed the Cape from a peninsula into an island. The canal permitted boat passage from Cape Cod Bay southwest toward the fingery southern coast of Rhode Island, thereby bringing high real estate prices and prosperity to the towns located on Buzzards Bay. In Marion, however, both prices and prosperity had been high for generations, the town being one of the summer enclaves for the old rich and the very rich (with the fabulously rich going to Newport, Rhode Island, and the nouveau rich slumming it on the Cape).
As I ran out of turns to make, the old family compounds (two or three understated houses sharing tennis courts and wide lawns to the cove) began to get smaller and more compacted. Soon I was in a more commercial district and then, on my last left fork, I came into a neighborhood of amateurish summer homes converted to year-round use. I slowed and stopped in front of a parked moving van with its wide ramp already down.
I got out and walked toward the door of the house. A tall, slim girl in her late teens, who I guessed was Deborah Wald, was talking to a boxcar of a man in blue work pants and a strappie undershirt.
The man said, “And, honey, I’m tellin’ ya, the kid and I can take it out, but we gotta take the door off the hinges.”
She said, “The guy on the phone didn’t say anything about that.”
The man was sounding exasperated. “Look, the guy on the phone, he didn’t see the door, for chrissakes. He’s calling from Falmouth and buying a baby grand from Marion and he probably doesn’t know you ain’t got double French doors opening into the garden, y’know?” The man looked inside and barked, “Jimmy, for chrissakes, leave that till I tell ya, huh?”
“I don’t remember them having to take the door off to get it in,” said the girl, stubbornly.
“Then they musta built the house around it.” He called inside again. “Jimmy, come out here.” The man turned to the girl. “Tell ya what. Me and Jimmy are gonna take a break, walk back to that coffee shop down to the main road. You think about it, call your mother, whatever you want. We’ll be back in half an hour. Then either the door comes off or we take off.”
A freckled kid edged sideways past the girl, who was holding her ground in the doorway. He was maybe sixteen and stared at her rump as he moved by her.
As the man passed me, he muttered, “Fucking college. Doesn’t have the brains God gave …”
I missed the next part as Jimmy said, “Fuckin’ A, Uncle Vin,” and followed the big man down the path.
Deborah Wald looked at me for the first time. “You’re too late. We already sold the piano.”
I gestured toward the departing pair. “Maybe not.”
She sighed, looked at the door. “What if they can’t get it back on?”
“If they can get it off, they can get it back on. So long as they don’t break or bend anything.”
Wald turned back to me, cocked her head. “You aren’t here for the piano, are you?”
“No, my name is John Cuddy. I’m—”
“You’re the one who called last night. About Jennifer.”
“That’s right. Your mother—”
“Can I see some identification, please?”
Smart kid. I showed her. Wald examined it, then said, “Mom said you were from the police. That’s not what that says.”
“I told your mother I was a detective investigating Jennifer’s death. She may have assumed—”
“What you wanted her to assume.” Deborah Wald gave me a scrunched-up smile. “Come in anyway.”
As she walked in front of me into the house, I could see why Jimmy was admiring her. She had on faded cut-off jean short-shorts and beautiful legs marred only by matching varicose veins on the backs of her calves. I could also see why Uncle Vin was ticked at her. The baby grand occupied at least half of the old cottage’s living room.
Wald pointed me toward a stuffed armchair and seated herself in its mate across from me. “So how come you’re still investigating when they have William already?”
“I’m working with William’s lawyer. There are a lot of disparities in what happened. I’m hoping you’ll be able to tell me something that will help.”
“Help William get off, you mean.”
“Help find who’s really responsible.”
“Don’t expect any miracles.”
“I won’t.”
“Okay. What do you want to know?”
“I understand that William met Jennifer at Goreham, in the dorms.”
“That’s right. Her boyfriend of the hour was hassling him or something and she picked him up. At least, to hear her tell it.”
“By ‘boyfriend of the hour’ I take it you mean she was pretty popular?”
Wald stifled a laugh. “Yeah, she was ‘popular.’ Or maybe I ought to say ‘copular,’ if that’s a word. Because that was what she did best.”
“I thought you two were roommates.”
“We were.”
“Doesn’t sound like you were too close.”
Wald shifted in the chair, feigning relaxation. “We didn’t get along too well.”
“How do you mean?”
She shifted again. “Look, I don’t see how this can possibly matter to you. About William, I mean.”
“I need to find out everything I can about Jennifer. I didn’t know her, and if someone other than William killed her, then I …”
“All right. My dad died of cancer. Three months ago, all right? I found out—he found out he had it just before Thanksgiving. And Jennifer was a shit about it, an absolute shit. I mean, I’d be in our room, crying, for God’s sake, and she’d be sticking her head around the door, trying to get me to leave for a while because she had some guy with her. She wouldn’t go out to dinner with me, or talk with me, or even just listen to me. Understand?”
“I understand.”
“No, you don’t.” Wald started to get teary. “You couldn’t understand unless you were losing someone to cancer a day at a time like I was. Someone you loved.”
“Like I said.”
She was about to cry, then bit it off, assessing me. “One of your parents?”
“My wife.”
“God,” she said. “But you’re so … I … I’m sorry, I didn’t mean …”
“That’s okay. It was a while ago. I can talk about it now. It gets a little easier as time goes on.”
Her face reset a bit, the tears on hold. “That’s funny. Odd, I mean. I wanted to talk about it. With him, with my mother, but they’re … My father survived the camps. In Germany, the death camps. He was just a baby, but he got out and came to this country when he was seven. He went to pharmacy school, and he opened his own drugstore here. I was thirteen, thirteen, before I ever found out about him in the camps, and then from some man who called here one day, looking for money for a Holocaust observance. My father never talked about it. But I got interested in Judaism, like in my roots, you know, and Goreham’s got a great religion department, and then David was going there already.”
“David?”
Wald darkened. “Just a guy I knew from here. There aren’t many Jews in this town. I dated him in high school. He’s a junior at Goreham now.”
I thought back to my visit to McCatty and something Mrs. Creasey had started to say. “Exams all over?”
“I’m sorry. What?”
“Exams. At school. I thought exams were still in progress there, but your mother said you were working around here.”
“I, uh, had to leave school. Between my dad and … all.”
“And all?”
“Look, I don’t mean to be rude, but this is my personal life and I still don’t see what it has to do with William.”
“If ‘and all’ doesn’t involve Jennifer, we can skip it.”
Wald crossed her arms, waggled her foot at me. “Jennifer and I double-dated, her with a kind of creepy guy named Dick McCatty and me with David. This was maybe two weeks before … before we found out about my dad.”
“I’ve met McCatty.”
“Anyway, I thought it went okay. Jennifer seemed to get along with David, and I was glad. I mean, she was my roommate, and he was my boyfriend, and, you know, I was glad they liked each other. Well, I got the news about my dad, and I needed someone to talk to. Bad. But Jennifer wasn’t in our room, and the only other girl in the dorm that I knew well enough was in class somewhere, so I ran over to David’s place—he has an apartment just off campus. I get there and run up the stairs and I’m starting to cry, I mean the news about my dad was just starting to sink in, so I pounded on his door, and nobody came, so I kept pounding and pounding. Finally I hear him inside, cursing but coming, and he opens the door just a little bit, and I kind of push past him. That’s when I see he’s got just a towel on, and the door to his bedroom is open, and there’s Jennifer stretched out on his bed, and … Well, I just ran out of there. He tried to grab me and was saying something to me, but I broke away from him and got out of there and just ran and cried and …”