Mallory had abandoned the boots for a new pair of running shoes. She stood apart from the rest of the party, holding an heirloom wineglass up to the window and staring at the etching of the Shelley family monogram. All the furnishings of this elegant formal dining room had been taken down from Cass Shelley’s attic for this occasion. The long rosewood table was laid with antiques of gleaming silver, crystal and lace.
Charles watched as she carried her glass into the adjoining room, a library of bare shelves. He would have followed her, but his hostess stood in front of him now, blocking the way.
“She’s saying goodbye to the house,” said Augusta.
Charles nodded. He raised his glass and smiled. “To another successful real estate deal.”
She clinked glasses with him, and behind her back, Henry Roth signed in the air, “She’ll be after my place next.”
“I hope there was a deed restriction,” said Charles. “You’re not planning to burn this place or let it rot?”
“Mallory made those very stipulations.” Augusta grinned and went off to see to Riker’s glass, which was in danger of going empty.
The bandaged detective was comfortably ensconced in a well-padded armchair with a footstool. The plaster cast on his arm had been autographed by pretty nurses, state troopers and the lovely Lilith Beaudare. He was enjoying the role of invalid, only needing to glance at the table to have his every wish fulfilled. Augusta had taken a liking to Riker. The rest of the company were left to fend for themselves. The sheriff and his deputy poured their own wine while Augusta and Riker shared a cloud of smoke from cigarette and cheroot.
Charles looked through the wide doorway to see Mallory standing before the library fireplace. The wind rattled the panes all around the house. A draft found entry through an open chimney vent, and a small flurry of dust swirled about the brick hearth at her feet.
So you’ve come home again, Mallory. Was it everything you thought it would be? You have your revenge – the thing you wanted most – and what do you think of it now? You only stand there, waiting for the dust to settle in the chimney.
She was such a closed and private person.
Augusta was right. He would never have answers to all his questions, and he knew better than to voice the most personal ones. So the queries went round and round his brain, blind bats every one, all doomed to fly in endless circles.
As to why she had chosen the name Mallory, he liked his theory that it was her father’s name, but she would tell him nothing about the man. Or perhaps she cared nothing for antecedents. Louis Markowitz had been her father from the age of ten, and apparently he was father enough.
Mallory turned to catch Charles staring at her. As she was walking back to him, she stopped by the doorway to pick up the carton of her mother’s personal possessions. She set it down near the foyer, for soon they would load it into the car. The party was almost over.
Now that they were all together in one room. Augusta proposed a toast to the long road home. Charles turned to Mallory.
And where is home now?
Tomorrow morning she would drive back to New York with him, but how long would she remain there? He resolved that home was neither what nor where, but a person, and it was highly unlikely that she would ever come home to him; one only visited with friends. However, her friendship was no small thing, not something he settled for, but something -
Yeah, right. As Mallory would say.
Charles ceased to tell himself comfort lies and looked down at his watch. It was nearly time to pick up Riker’s bags at the hotel before dropping him off at the airport.
The glasses were drained, the door was opening, and now one of Charles’s unsolved riddles left the formation of circling bats and flew into the room. “Will someone tell me who killed Babe Laurie?”
Riker had not appreciated that, and did his best to pretend he had not heard it. Henry only smiled pleasantly, inscrutable, taking no sides in this matter. Tom Jessop stood with one hand on the door he had held open for Lilith, who had escaped. The sheriff was not so lucky, for Charles was looking directly at him and smiling in expectation.
The sheriff’s face relaxed in good-natured surrender. “Off the record?”
“If you like.”
“It was Fred Laurie. He’s been missing ever since Kathy’s dog disappeared. The little bastard tried to kill Good Dog once before. So I figure he took care of that piece of unfinished business before he ran. I got two witnesses to put him in those woods with a rifle.”
Well, that would neatly clear up the murder of a dog. But it wasn’t even -
“It works for me.” Augusta was polishing an imaginary spot on her wineglass.
Mallory was examining the floorboards, saying, “I suppose Babe’s son is the motive?”
“Yeah, I tend to favor that one,” said the sheriff. “The boy belonged to Fred, not Babe. So one of them snapped, and they had it out on the road. I already wrote up the report and put out a warrant for Fred Laurie’s arrest.”
A look passed between Mallory and Augusta, but Charles could not decipher it. In another minute, he found that he could, but he didn’t want to. In fact, he went to a great deal of trouble to abort an idea at the moment of creation. He managed to altogether eliminate one of the myriad questions in the bat room of his mind, and he ceased to ponder how many bodies might lie at the tip of Finger Bayou.
All he knew for certain was that Fred Laurie had not killed his brother.
That much he had gleaned from the tone of liars coming to agreement on the fine points.
“What’s the evidence against Fred Laurie?” asked Charles, knowing he was alienating everyone in the room. “Don’t you need something besides suspicion to back up a warrant?”
“I’ve got Travis’s deathbed confession,” said Jessop. “He named Fred as the killer. Riker signed a statement to back it up.”
Charles turned to Riker, who found his pack of matches most engrossing, examining them as a strange and rare artifact he had just pulled from his pocket.
The sheriff broke the silence. “Hey, Riker, why don’t we get back to town and pick up your bags? I’ll take you out to the airport myself.”
Riker seemed to like this idea. Of course he did, and he was already moving out the door.
The sheriff turned to Mallory. “Coming back for the trial? Not that we’re short of witnesses. They’re crawling all over each other to turn state’s evidence.”
She shook her head. “I’m done with this place.” After the last goodbyes were said in the driveway, and Riker had made his getaway with the sheriff, Charles lifted the heavy carton into the backseat of the silver Mercedes.
Something had begun to tick, and it was regular as a clock. He looked at Mallory, not suspecting that she was harboring a bomb among her mother’s things, but it did tick.
“It’s a metronome,” she said. “The pendulum must have come loose.”
As they slid into the front seat, he asked, “Do you remember Ira’s piano lessons at all?”
She nodded. “We played duets. There were two pianos in the house then, my mother’s baby grand and an old player piano. Sometimes Ira and I would race each other through the music.”
The metronome ticked off four beats in a measure. The cacophony of birdsongs in the surrounding trees refused to conform to the rhythm.
“Mallory, why did he come to the house that day? Did your mother continue his music lessons after Ira’s father stopped the therapy?”
“The therapy never stopped. Ira missed her. He kept showing up at the house on his regular schedule. His father was supposed to be watching him while Darlene was working, but he wasn’t much of a baby-sitter. So there was Ira, standing out in the yard. My mother couldn’t turn him away.”
Charles sat with the ignition key in his hand. The metronome was slowing its ticks, filling each measure with a single note. The birds were singing louder, faster, in such a rush to get the music out. Tomorrow morning, when they were on the road and beyond the reach of Augusta’s sanctuary, it would be all too quiet, miles of road and -
“You never asked me if I killed Babe Laurie,” said Mallory.
“I didn’t need to. He was hit from behind with a rock – not your style. Now if they’d found him with a nice symmetrical bullet hole and less mess, that would’ve been quite different.” He turned back for one last look at the Shelley house as he put the car in gear. “But I had the feeling that I was the only one in that room who didn’t know the killer’s name.”
“Not true, Charles. Riker and Augusta have their own ideas, but they’re wrong.”
“And the sheriff?”
She turned away from him now. “No one cares who killed Babe Laurie. It just doesn’t matter.”
“I’m so sick of hearing that. I care.” The car moved out of the yard, and then he brought it to a sudden stop on the dirt road. “Are you saying the sheriff knows, and he’s not doing anything about it? You know too, don’t you?”
Of course she did. But she kept her silence. Why had he even bothered to ask? Well, he sometimes forgot that she still followed the children’s code of not ratting on thy coconspirator.
“Hints, Mallory? Anything at all?”
She looked at him for a moment, perhaps weighing trust, as if that were in question after everything she had put him through. The metronome made a tick. He waited for the next beat, but the seconds dragged by. Then it ticked again.
“There’s no proof,” she said.
“Fine, I’m not looking to make a citizen’s arrest. But if you don’t give me a sporting chance to work this out, I’ll go stark raving mad.”
“I told you the hospital was storing old hardcopy files on the mainframe. When the clerk scanned Ira’s first hospital record, she must have seen the old lab report for VD. She flagged his computer entry for a prior child abuse. When I hacked into the hospital computer, there was no file in the system yet, just the flag, Ira’s name and the disease.”
“Child abuse? But he was no longer a child.” He held up one hand. “No, wait – I’ve got it. Tell me if I’m wrong. I know Ira’s diagnosis was changed from autism to profound retardation.” In the absence of a separate facility to treat autism, that was the only way to qualify him for a state therapy program. “That and his dependency on his mother gave him the legal status of a minor child. Right?”
“Right. So when Darlene brought Ira into the emergency room with his broken hands, the abuse flag came up on the computer. The hospital was obliged to call the sheriff.”
The metronome never ticked again.
Riker had mastered the art of one-armed packing in ten minutes flat. He opened the top drawer of the dresser and wadded up his underwear the better to smash it into his suitcase. Normally, he never moved this quickly, but he was almost home free and not taking any chances. The metal clasps snapped shut. Done.
But too late.
Shit!
“Not so fast.” Charles Butler was leaning against the doorframe, all but wearing a No Exit sign around his neck.
Riker sank down on the bed beside his suitcase. He wished he had a drink. He had been looking forward to a comfortable chair in the airport bar and maybe swapping a few war stories with Tom Jessop.
“About Travis’s deathbed confession.” Charles closed the door behind him. “Why did you back up the sheriff in a lie?”
“I think you know.” But now it dawned on the detective that knowledge and belief were different things in Charles’s strange relationship with Mallory, this blind friendship which kept her cloaked in innocence despite every bit of evidence to the contrary. Riker had a more pragmatic form of loyalty. If Mallory had shot an elderly nun in a wheelchair, he would assume the nun had it coming to her.
“So you still believe Mallory did it.”
“The motive is pretty strong.” Riker was making an effort to keep the sarcasm out of his voice. Derision was undeserved. Charles’s blindness touched him as nothing else ever had. “She also had opportunity and no alibi.”
“Because Babe was in that mob? The logic is a bit flawed, isn’t it? Travis was there too, but she saved his life. You must realize she couldn’t have had any idea who was in that mob. She was inside the house, locked in a – ”
“She could hear everything from her bedroom, Charles. Listen to the birds.”
Charles turned to the closed window. The tree in the yard was indeed full of singing birds, and their voices easily penetrated the glass. And now that he paid attention, he could hear Betty on the front porch. She was greeting new guests. The voices of a man and a woman were not so clear as the birds, but he could pick out the odd word in their conversation.
“Augusta gave me a tour of the Shelley house,” said Riker. “I saw the kid’s room. Did you notice the window near the top of the closet? I never saw a thing like that before. Augusta said the closet window was pretty common in old houses built before electric lights. Now Mallory couldn’t have seen anything. It was too high up for a little kid. But you know she heard something – maybe not Travis’s voice, but something, maybe just a few words. She wouldn’t have understood what was happening, but she put it all together when she saw her mother after they were done with her. I told you the kid had more to work with than the sheriff did.”
“Travis only stoned a dog. Alma was there too, but she took her rock home with her. If Mallory heard – ”
“Charles, drop it.”
“That mob was Malcolm’s work, not Babe’s.”
“The whole mob is accountable – that’s the law. For Christ’s sake, that’s even Mallory’s law!” Riker held his silence for a moment, calling back his temper.
“You’re right, Charles. Malcolm had to implicate every witness at that meeting, everyone who might’ve led the sheriff back to the letter, the blue letter. But even if some of them didn’t throw rocks, they all watched that woman die. They never moved to help her, they never told. There are no innocent people here.”
Riker walked to the window and pulled up the sash. The sheriff was leaning against his car in the street below. “Hey, Tom. Two minutes, okay?”
“Take your time.”
Riker closed the window again, and now he turned around to finish off Charles Butler. But gently, he cautioned himself.
“Oh, yeah, I think she did it. That’s why I backed up the sheriff on that bullshit confession. At the time, I was just so happy that Mallory didn’t take out the whole town.”
Oh, wait. She did take out Owltown. It was level ground now, wasn’t it? Ah, but most of the human casualties were only punctured and burned.
Charles only stared at him with sad eyes.
“What do you want from me?” Riker picked up his suitcase and set it near the door as a hint that Charles might move away from the room’s only exit. No good. The big man showed no signs of moving.
“I’m not gonna recant that statement, Charles. There’s no point in it. The sheriff doesn’t care who killed Babe Laurie. Nobody does.” No one except for himself and Charles. But Mallory was well out of it now. She was going to get away with murder.
“It wasn’t Mallory,” said Charles. “I know that for a fact – I’m not going on blind faith this time. Does it matter a bit more now?”
Riker felt something close to that weightless moment in an elevator when the contents of his stomach rose and fell. Because he had never known Charles to run a bluff, the detective was experiencing every cop’s waking nightmare. The outlaw act, that one step across the line, was about to come back on him. He would have been more comfortable with the premonition that his plane was going to crash.
“No, it doesn’t matter.” Riker was lying, of course. He had always been the victim’s paladin – until now. Loving Mallory had cost him a great deal. “Babe Laurie raped two kids that we know about. How many more? That murder was a public service.”
No, murder was never that. It was the worst crime. All his feelings for Mallory had been altered by it. He was sorry and sick at -
“Well, you only have Jimmy Simms’s statement to back that up,” said Charles. “You wrote it down as he was telling it, didn’t you? It must have been difficult to be coherent while he was crying.”
“Are you telling me I missed something?” It was the last question he wanted answered. Charles seemed to intuit this and kept his silence.
“Charles, why are you doing this to me?”
“I just wanted to be sure that you weren’t playing the blind man this time around. So you don’t want to know who killed Babe? It doesn’t matter? Fine.”
Charles turned to go.
“Wait. Who was it?”
“You can’t have it both ways, Riker. Either you care or you don’t. I’m surprised that you would even ask. Suppose it was the sheriff? You know, I rather like him. Oh, did I mention that he had motive, opportunity and no alibi? But I’m sure you’d be happy to excuse him too. Isn’t that one of the perks of your job – all your friends get away with murder?”
“The sheriff? Are you saying – ”
“I’m not saying who did it. I know – but you don’t care.”
“Who killed him, Charles?”
“It doesn’t matter – your very words.” He walked to the door and opened it wide.
“Don’t make me nuts. Who -?”
“Have a good flight home, Riker.”
The door was pulled shut.
Riker ceased to hear the birds anymore. He stood by the window, looking down on the sheriff’s car. Cops could not kill their suspects, not ever – that was Riker’s law. But now he finally believed in Mallory. His suspicions of the man waiting below were a lesser sickness and easier to live with.
Thank you, Charles.
Ira was asleep in a soft nest of white bandages and linen sheets. His mother sat by the bed, reading a magazine. Darlene Wooley was not wearing a suit today. A simple dark skirt and blouse accentuated the pallor of her skin, and Charles wondered if she had seen the sun even once in the past four days.
Darlene looked up at him and smiled. She folded back a page of the magazine to mark her place, then looked quickly to Ira, as though this rustle of paper could have disturbed his sleep. She motioned Charles to join her in the hall outside the room.
Softly, she pulled the door closed behind them, saying, “It’s his first day out of the intensive care unit. His doctor says he’s going to be just fine.”
“I’m glad to hear it. I have some good news for you. Let me buy you a cup of coffee in the cafeteria.”
As they walked down the corridor, he noted that Darlene did not fill out her clothes anymore, and her nails were bitten down to the quick and raw.
“You know,” said Darlene, “when he’s awake, he lets me hold his hand. I’m sure he still hates to be touched. I think it’s sort of like he’s giving me a present.”
Her fingers went mechanically to her mouth. Suddenly self-conscious of the ragged nails, she drove both her hands deep into the pockets of her skirt. “When Ira was little, he used to bring me flowers from Cass’s garden. I always thought she made him do that, maybe as part of his therapy. But Mallory said no. When she came by last night, she told me Ira always asked Cass if he could pick flowers for his mother.”
Charles thought that was a beautiful story. And if Mallory had made it up, it was even better.
The cafeteria was noisy with the rush of feet and fifty conversations, clattering dishes and silverware. The staff and visitors were all deep in their own preoccupations and taking little notice of Charles and his pale companion.
Darlene’s skin was sickly in this brighter fluorescent lighting. He seated her at the nearest table. If she did not sit down, and soon, she might fall. When had this woman slept last?
“You wait here. I’ll get the coffee.”
He meant to bring her only that cup of coffee, all that she had wanted, but while he was in line with the other patrons, he also loaded down the tray with nutritious green vegetables, and suspicious gray meat swimming in dishwater gravy. The piece de resistance was a dry-looking slice of chocolate cake encased in a cellophane bag. It was his intention to fatten her up.
When he set the tray down in front of her, she laughed.
Well, that was an improvement.
As he sat down, he handed her the letter of introduction from the Dallheim Project. She read in silence, and then the paper fell from her hands. “They want him! They want Ira!”
“Oh, yes. Now they’re very excited about him. Eat something. And it’s not just the multiple talents. I think it was Ira’s star that finally won them over.”
He had badgered the project director for days with stories gleaned from Betty, Mallory and Augusta, until Darlene’s son had become a person instead of an application number. Ira had jumped to first place on the long waiting list.
“They’ll take him as soon as he’s well enough to travel to New Orleans. You won’t be allowed to visit him for the first three months. But later, you’ll be able to bring him home on the weekends.”
“I understand. You really think he has a chance of making it on his own?”
“Thanks to you. If you hadn’t kept up his therapy, he’d be a lost cause by now. Please eat something. It might take years of work, but in time, he will be able to survive outside of a care facility.”
“So if anything should happen to me – ”
“He won’t go to a state institution.”
She was happy for a few moments, even outglowing the brilliant overhead lights. Then something else must have occurred to her, for her eyes were saddened now. Perhaps she was grieving over something that had not happened yet. He could make a shrewd guess at what that might be. “That’s good – wonderful.” She was more subdued now. “There’s something I have to do. I only needed – ”
“Try the meat, Darlene. I’m just wildly curious to find out what species it is.”
She picked up the knife and fork and went through the motions of cutting the meat. Losing the last of her energy now, the knife and fork were laid down in the thin gravy. “Not too appetizing, is it? Sorry.”
“I need to talk to the sheriff,” she said. “There’s something – ”
“Did you hear the sheriff’s theory that Fred Laurie killed Babe?”
“Fred didn’t do it.” Her hand upset the coffee cup, and a stream of brown liquid ran across the table.
“I know.” Charles pulled napkins from the metal dispenser at the center of the table and mopped up the spilled coffee. “But, you see, everyone really likes this theory. So it might be difficult to force your confession on the sheriff. Try the vegetables.”
“You knew.” She raked one hand through her hair, fingers thin as claws. “I wanted to tell Tom. I wanted to tell him every day. I don’t sleep at night. I keep hearing that rock hit Babe’s skull.”
“You don’t have to tell me any of this.”
“But I do,” she said, a bit too loud. The people at the next table turned to look at her. Darlene lowered her head. “I want to.” Her voice was a whisper now. “I have to talk to somebody.” She worked her wedding ring up and down her finger. “I saw Babe leave the car at the gas station. He was heading for the bridge over Upland Bayou. I went back after him while the doctors were working on my boy. But it’s not what you think, not because of what he did to Ira’s hands.” Her ring was so loose now, so little flesh on the bone. Charles stared at his reflection in the metal napkin dispenser. He couldn’t meet her eyes anymore. She was in so much pain as she described the violence on the road to Cass Shelley’s house.
“I didn’t know if I’d killed him or not. I screamed when I saw all the blood, and I ran for the car. I was sure someone must have heard me or seen me. I left him lying there in the road and went back to the hospital to wait for the sheriff. I was so sure that any minute Tom would walk in the door and arrest me. When the doctor came to the waiting room to talk to me, he didn’t notice that there was more blood on my suit -
“Babe’s blood splattered over Ira’s.”
She buried her face in her hands, and Charles stared at her wounded fingertips.
“Eat something.” This was what his mother had always said to him when he had been through another day of torture among normal children with average-size noses and intelligence. Food conveyed nurture and caring, and it was all he could think of to comfort her.
Darlene picked up her fork and absently stirred the peas into the cranberry sauce. “I was half crazy wondering what would happen to my boy when I went to prison.” The peas swirled round and round in the red sauce, faster and faster. “Every single day, I thought Tom would arrest me. I even tried to tell him once – when I thought I couldn’t stand it another minute.”
The fork slipped and the peas scattered, some to the floor, and one flew to the next table. “But I didn’t tell. Who would have looked after Ira?”
Two people seated nearby stared at the single pea and a dot of cranberry sauce at the center of their table.
Darlene abandoned the vegetables. Peas were too difficult. She picked up the cellophane package with the cake inside. “How did you know, Charles?”
“This is the hospital where Cass ordered Ira’s blood tests. When you brought him in with his broken hands, a red flag showed up on the computer for the previous entry – when Ira was only six. The doctor would have asked you if he’d completed the treatment for syphilis. The computer entry was sparse and he would have wanted a patient history – standard procedure.”
“It was the desk nurse, not a doctor.” Her hands worked over the cake wrapper, trying to tear it open and failing to find the weakness in the cellophane seal. “I didn’t know what that woman was talking about. I said it was a mistake. Ira had been tested for hepatitis that year, not syphilis.”
Charles wondered if it would be rude to assist Darlene with the cake wrapper, to imply that she couldn’t -
“Well, it made no damn sense at all. So the nurse took me down to the basement where they stored the old health department files for St. Jude Parish.”
The cake wrapper was impenetrable. She stabbed it with one finger, forgetting she had no nails left to tear it. “We found one file to match Ira’s computer number. There were no names, only dates and statistics for tests on a boy of six – Ira – another boy thirteen, and a nineteen-year-old. The file clerk told the nurse they were all in that same folder because the doctor – Cass Shelley – was backtracking the infection.”
“Jimmy Simms was the thirteen-year-old.”
“I guessed that. And Babe had turned nineteen that year. Everybody in town knew about his syphilis party. It was a legend. And then there was the faith-healing. Ira was never the same after that. So I thought he’d raped my boy. What was I supposed to think? And he did smash Ira’s hands. I had good reason to believe it, didn’t I?”
“You don’t seem quite so sure of it now.”
“After I killed him…” Not wanting to meet his eyes, she stared down at the insoluble problem of the cellophane bag. “I mean, later that night, I realized my husband must have known about Ira’s syphilis. They have to notify the parents, don’t they? And that would’ve explained his quarreling with Cass. Maybe she accused him of raping his own son.”
Her wedding ring fell off and lay on the table. He wondered how much weight she had lost. He longed to open the wrapper for her, to feed her.
“Had to have happened that way,” she said, twisting the package in her hand, mashing the cake. “Ira’s clean now. So, at least my husband had the grace to get the boy treated before he wrapped his car around that telephone pole.”
“So now you believe you killed the wrong man?”
“I heard Ira tell you his father threw the first rock. Well, that’s proof, isn’t it? Cass was going to tell, so my husband – ” Her hands were resting on the table, covering the cellophane package, too tired to fight with it anymore.
“Your husband didn’t hurt Ira,” said Charles, covering one of her hands with his own. “But I believe he was told that Cass had accused him. Something similar was done to Deputy Travis. Malcolm read him Cass’s letter, and Travis thought she was accusing him of raping a boy in custody – Jimmy, I suppose. When Travis was dying, he said Cass was going to ruin him with science. He was innocent of course, but just the accusation meant ruin. The rock was put into his hand – the idea was put into his mind.”
Look at the damage Darlene had done with a rock and a single maddening idea. But Travis had only stoned the dog. “Actually, there was a letter on file from the hospital lab. It was a negative report on your husband’s blood test.”
“That was the letter Malcolm read from?”
“I believe so. The date matches up with the stoning. Mallory found a copy of it in the hospital files. There was another letter on file, addressed to your husband – the same negative report on his tests. But by the time it was mailed out to him, Cass was dead.”
“That’s why he killed himself.”
Suicide never made sense. But Darlene wanted the world to be orderly for a few minutes. She was coming undone, and this was a small thing to ask.
“Yes,” he said, “Your husband and Cass probably argued when she asked him for a blood sample. He would have been outraged. He was innocent, but she needed to eliminate him as a suspect. So Cass had the results in her hand when she went after the real child molester that day, and she was angry.”
“Then it was Babe. Mal was shielding his brother with that letter.”
“There’s no way to know for sure.”
“Who else could it have been!” Her eyes were suddenly wide and startled, disbelieving that shrill scream could have come from her own mouth. The people at the nearest table left it, upsetting a chair in their haste to be gone. The abandoned chair rocked and teetered on its hind legs and then crashed to the floor.
“Babe had the disease before the others did!” Her voice was louder now and carrying across the cafeteria. Her hands splayed out in the air as if to call the words back and hush them down. All around them, conversations ceased, and the newspapers of solitary patrons went flat on the tables.
Her lips pressed together. She was in control again, but just barely. “I know Babe was the nineteen-year-old in that file. His was the oldest stage of syphilis. The nurse told me so.”
And so it must be true. A man had died because of her faith in hard science.
“That chronology, by itself, proves nothing about who gave it to whom.”
The cellophane package lay by her hand. The wrapping showed no signs of wear, but the cake was badly smashed. She renewed her struggles with it for a moment, and then gave up. “If only Ira could have told me.”
“Children are the best of conspirators,” said Charles. “They’re so easily frightened, they rarely tell. Jimmy never told, and neither did Babe when it was his turn to be abused.”
“Babe?”
“He had a very late stage of syphilis according to the autopsy. But there was no way for a pathologist to pin the date of infection with only a dead body to work with. The coroner didn’t have the history of convulsions, the weakness in the legs, fits of temper, delusions of grandeur – it was all there.”
Malcolm had supplied some of the symptoms in his impersonation of Babe on the stage. “The unsteady gait made everyone think that Babe was stoned on drugs. And I’m sure he was on some kind of painkiller. He would have been in a lot of pain near the end of his life. Those symptoms don’t usually appear until a man is nearly fifty.” And with all the wear on Babe, mind and body, that might have been his true age when he died at the calendar’s measure of thirty-six years. “So Babe must have been a child himself when he contracted the disease.”
“How could that happen? Somebody would have known.” And then she froze. For she had not known about Ira, had she? Did Jimmy Simms’s parents know what had been done to their child?
“I’m sure Malcolm knew,” said Charles. “Babe would have run the gamut of symptoms. But Malcolm was hardly going to have a small child, his own ward, treated for venereal disease. There would have been an investigation.”
“But Cass was treating Babe when he was – ”
“When he was a teenager and it could be passed off for whoring around. Tom Jessop told me Cass dragged Babe right off the street to treat him. Lesions would have been evident by then. She didn’t wait for the test results to tell her what she already knew. When Cass did get the tests back, when she realized the extent and the duration of the disease, she made the link to Jimmy Simms. His hepatitis led her to Ira. And suddenly she had a lot of questions for Malcolm.”
The cellophane had burst open; the cake was in Darlene’s hands at last, and it was mashed to bits. “So it was Mal she went to see at the meeting that day?”
“He raised Babe from the age of five. He had the opportunity.”
Her hand closed. Golden crumbs leaked through her fingers. “Then Babe just did what was done to him. Well, that makes a bit of sense.”
Charles could see she was desperate for something to make sense, but he shook his head. “Only attorneys make the case that their child-molesting clients were themselves abused. All the stats on that are tainted. Malcolm was always the more natural seducer. The time frame works. He probably went after his nephew Jimmy when Babe was no longer a child. And then he could’ve easily taken Ira at the faith healing.”
That had been the most likely window of opportunity, and it would account for the setback in Ira’s therapy. The child would have been terrified when Babe did the healing act, the laying on of hands. He would have been screaming. Malcolm would have played the role of the calming influence. He would have taken the child away to some quiet place. If Ira had screamed again, if anyone had overheard, who would have guessed the real reason for it? No one – not even his own father seated in the audience that night, perhaps only steps away from his small son during the abuse.
If Darlene had followed this much, she was willing the image away, slowly shaking her head. The dry cake crumbs, crushed to a finer dust, fell from her hand to spread over the tray, the table, and some trickled to the floor.
“It must have been hard for Babe to watch Cass Shelley die,” said Charles. “Cass was his doctor once. Probably the only one who had ever cared what happened to him. Then Mallory appeared – the image of her mother. And Ira began to play those notes over and over on the piano. Those same notes were playing on a scratched record all the while Cass was being stoned by the mob. Babe went wild. He might have yelled at Ira to stop. But you know Ira would have blocked that out and kept on playing. At this stage of Babe’s disease, he couldn’t have handled any frustration. So he slammed the piano lid on Ira’s hands to make the music stop. When the music did stop, the assault was over.”
“But Babe was lying in wait for Mallory.” Louder now, insistent, “He was going to ambush her!”
Her coffee cup crashed to the floor.
The room quieted for a moment. Then the other patrons resumed their conversations, but everywhere about the room, eyes were trained on the dark stain spreading across the floor and the woman who might be dangerously crazy.
“I rather doubt that Babe meant to harm Mallory,” said Charles. “Perhaps he dimly saw her as Cass, an old source of comfort, an easer of pain. Or maybe he was lucid and wanted to talk to Mallory about the day her mother died. That might explain why the brothers fought in the square and again at the gas station. But we’ll never know. It’s always a tricky thing – second-guessing the dead.”
It began with quiet tears, and then she was trembling. Stutters of breath were choked up in her throat, emerging now as racking sobs. The people seated around them had finally redirected their eyes to their own affairs. Tears were the norm in this place, and Darlene’s seemed to comfort all of them, saying there was nothing dangerous here – only death and pain.
Charles patiently waited out the crying, occasionally handing her napkins. When she was composed again, he fetched another piece of cake and opened the wrapper for her.
She tried to give him a smile for the cake, and she failed. “No one gave a damn who killed Babe Laurie. Only you.”
“Oh, that’s not true,” said Charles. “They were liars, every one of them who said Babe’s death didn’t matter. They all thought someone they cared about had done it.”
Well, Mallory might have believed the sheriff had killed Babe Laurie. When pressed, she had pointed him in Jessop’s direction, hadn’t she? But Charles remained uncertain. It was always so hard to tell when Mallory was lying. She might have reasoned that Tom Jessop could easily fend off a false accusation; but if Darlene had gone to prison, who would’ve looked after Mallory’s old playmate? It would be just like her to choose the expedient -
“Charles, what do you think the court will do with me?” Darlene’s words were listless. She was calm now, and seemed only mildly curious about her future.
“Tom Jessop is a very decent man. He’ll have a strong influence on what happens to you.” Jessop would certainly support a plea of temporary insanity for the crime of mother passion. “I suppose your best outcome would be probation.”
“And if you were on my jury?”
“Would I ask for a pound of flesh? No.”
Babe’s life would have been absolute hell if he’d been allowed to live it out. The best medical treatment in the world might have eased the suffering, but not reversed the insidious damage. “However, I do regret Babe’s murder – particularly the way he died.”
“All alone and scared,” she said, nodding. “Left to bleed to death like a dog in the road.”
She was in accord with him now, sharing his regret, her face set with real grief. And pity? Yes, that too. So, the death of Babe Laurie had mattered a great deal. And now the dead man was assured of one mourner, his own murderer, a woman who would certainly visit his grave to bring him the odd bouquet of guilty flowers.