Murder Suicide (11 page)

The man knows his spirit could still soar if not shackled to the past.  He suffers greatly for his bondage, unable to move in the direction of his dreams.  Why is that man worthy of less concern than the others?  Why should his soul not be set free?  Why should his spirit age and die in lock step with the body, when in truth it can be reborn by simply removing the appropriate obstacles in the nervous system?

I am this man, strangled by tethers that bind me to a loveless marriage, to children I am no father to, to friends and a business partner who are those things in name only.  I wish to be free of them all.

My story has gone wrong, and I long to write another.

Let them have their lives and let me have mine.  But let me truly begin anew, unencumbered by even a distant memory of them.  Because then they will have no claim on me.

The man they knew will be dead
.

And I will be reborn
.

The medical science to achieve this personal renaissance is at hand.  Do I have the right to use it?  Is it moral to cleave myself from the past, to move cleanly on from my current life story to begin another?

Snow had stopped writing there, filling the next few pages with drawings and calculations.  The drawings were three-dimensional and highly detailed, depicting a cylinder in various positions — lying flat, at a thirty-degree angle, a forty-five degree angle, upright.  In one rendering Snow had drawn arrows to indicate the cylinder spinning counterclockwise, in another clockwise.  In still others, it tumbled end-over-end.

The calculations looked like lengthy solutions to physics equations.  Beneath them, Snow had written, ‘Every Action Causes an UNEQUAL and Opposite Reaction.’

Clevenger flipped the page and stopped short.  Midway down the right-hand side, surrounded by calculations, was a two-inch by two-inch drawing of a woman’s head and shoulders — Grace Baxter’s.  Snow had obviously lingered over it, spending time shading in her hair, eyes, lips, capturing subtleties of her beauty.

The portrait was imbued with emotion missing not only from Snow’s schematics and calculations, but from his writing.  There was real passion in it.

Clevenger turned page after page — more cylinders and numbers, more philosophical reflections.

He checked his watch.  10:47.  He started the car and drove to Brattle Street, pulled up in front of 119, a majestic brick colonial on half an acre, behind fifty yards of stone wall and a semicircular driveway shaded by massive oaks.  The place had to be worth at least $5 million.  A Mercedes limousine, a Land Cruiser and three police cruisers were parked outside.

He got out of the car and walked toward the front door.  A cop named Bob Fabrizio got out of his cruiser, headed over to him.  Clevenger knew him from working another Cambridge case — a Harvard professor who’d murdered his wife.  "What’s with the show of force?" Clevenger asked him.

"Paid detail," Fabrizio said.  "The widow feels uneasy."

"Enough to order up three cruisers."

"Four.  We had three available."

"I guess you can’t blame her," Clevenger said.  "Her husband was shot about thirty hours ago."

"Hey, I don’t mind the work," Fabrizio said.  "But it give this whole thing a little O.J. — JonBenet feeling, if you ask me."

"Meaning?"

"Four cruisers?  Who does she think is coming for her, the frickin’ Mossad?  You said it yourself:  a show of force.  Maybe this is all show.  Maybe she wants to
look
good and scared, keep all eyes off her — or the son."

"You know anything about him?"

"Like every other cop in Cambridge.  Two arrests, cocaine possession.  One arrest, A and B.  One malicious threatening.  He called in a bomb threat to his prep school in Connecticut.  He had a crude device on him, wouldn’t have ignited a Duraflame log.  All charges were dismissed or continued without a finding.  Fancy lawyers.  Kid’s basically a hothead, but you never know.  I mean, either this guy Snow killed himself, or he got killed by someone with access to his gun.  Either way, the compass in my gut points right here."

"Thanks for the consult."

"No charge.  Hey, how’s Billy doing?"

"Fine," Clevenger said, a little taken aback by Fabrizio’s interest.  He sometimes forgot Billy had gotten famous from the Nantucket murder case that cost him his baby sister.  Once his name was cleared, just about every national magazine ran a story about him.  And when Clevenger adopted him, the feeding frenzy only intensified.

"Good to hear it," Fabrizio said.  "We’re all rootin’ for him."  He headed back toward his cruiser.

Clevenger walked up to the front door, rang the bell.  Half a minute later a very pretty young woman with straight, long, light brown hair, and deep brown eyes opened the door.  She was dressed in a tight-fitting, V-neck sweater and tighter Levi’s.  She looked about twenty-two, twenty-three.  "You’re from the police?" she asked.

"That’s right," he said, offering his hand.  "Frank Clevenger."

She shook his hand in a halfhearted way, let it go.  "Mom’s waiting for you in the living room."

Could she be just eighteen? he wondered.  "You’re John Snow’s daughter?"

"Lindsey."

"I’m sorry about your dad."

Her eyes filled up.  "Thank you," she said, just above a whisper.  She stepped aside.  "Straight ahead."

Clevenger walked along an oriental runner that took him past a turned staircase and down a hallway with white wainscoting and widely striped wallpaper of deep green and olive hues.  Antique architectural drawings of Cambridge landmarks hung on the walls — probably Snow’s wife’s choice, as the architect in the family.  The hallway ended in the living room, framed on either side by six-foot-high fireplaces with limestone mantels carved with angels blowing trumpets.  Above them hung two magnificent oil paintings.  And above them, the ceiling was bordered by intricate crown molding a foot deep, carved with oak leaves and acorns.

The room was so imposing it took Clevenger a few seconds to notice a slim woman about five-foot-two, standing at an arched window, looking out at ice-covered gardens that glistened in the late morning sun.  She wore gray flannel pants and a simple light blue sweater that almost made her fade into the gray-and-blue-striped wallpaper.  "Excuse me," he said.

She turned around.  "I’m sorry.  I didn’t hear you.  Please, come in."  She motioned toward a pair of love seats in the center of the room.

He met her at the love seats.  "Frank Clevenger," he said, extending his hand.

"Theresa Snow."  She shook his hand stiff, then let hers go limp and fall away.  She was elegant looking, though not beautiful.  Her eyes were the light blue of her sweater, her hair prematurely gray, worn just off her shoulders.  There was an angular quality to her face — her cheekbones and jaw — that made her look as though she was concentrating very hard.  She smiled for an instant, but it did nothing to soften her.  She sat down.

He sat opposite her.

"Detective Coady told me you’ll be helping with the investigation," she said.

"That’s right," Clevenger said.

"Thank you.  We appreciate it more than you could know."  She laced her hands together beneath her chin, as if praying.

"I need to learn as much about your husband as possible," Clevenger said.  "I need to understand him, in order to understand what might have happened to him."

"You mean, whether he committed suicide," she said.  She let out her breath.

"That’s part of it."

"Detective Coady said as much."  She leaned forward, placed her hands on one knee.  "You have to believe me:  My husband would never commit suicide."

Clevenger noticed she wore no jewelry other than a modest diamond solitaire and slim wedding band.  "Why do you say that?" he asked.

"Because he was a narcissist."

"That was no compliment, but Snow’s wife didn’t sound bitter.  She sounded like she was stating a fact — her husband was in love with himself.  "He didn’t care about other people?" Clevenger asked.

"Only so much as they confirmed what he wanted to believe about himself and the rest of the world around him.  He used people like mirrors, to reflect his own self-image."

"Which was what?" Clevenger asked, glancing at the painting hanging over the mantel behind Snow.  It was the silhouette of a naked woman, standing behind a lace curtain, looking out on a lanterned Boston street at dusk.  It looked familiar, like he might have seen it in a book or something.

"That he was infallible, all powerful," Snow said.  She settled back in her seat.  "I’ll miss him terribly.  I don’t know how to go on without him.  but I don’t want to candy-coat our lives together.  He was a complicated man."

"What will you miss?"

"His confidence.  His creativity.  He was brilliant.  Truly.  Once you’ve been in the company of that kind of mind, it’s very hard to imagine being in any other company.  At least it is for me."

Not only did Clevenger detect no bitterness in Theresa Snow, he detected very little grief.  She sounded like a newscaster bidding farewell to a famous politician she’d covered for a couple decades.  Self-consumed people aren’t immune to suicide," Clevenger said.  "Sometimes they can’t stand the difference between who they see themselves and how the world sees them."

"That makes sense for someone who cares about the world around him," she said.  "But John didn’t give anyone that kind of power.  He never wondered whether his thoughts and feelings about himself, or anyone else, were justified.  Maybe that’s why I never saw him depressed.  He always believed the problems in his life were outside him, never inside."

"Did he tend to get angry?"

"He had a temper."

"How did he express it?" he asked.  He glanced at the painting, again.

"By making people feel dead," she said.

"Excuse me?" Clevenger asked, focusing on her again.

"If you didn’t match John’s vision of reality, he simply didn’t treat you as though
you
were real.  There were times shortly after we married when we would argue — over nothing terribly important — and he wouldn’t speak to me for weeks.  He had the ability to pretend a person had disappeared off the face of the earth."

Which was essentially what John Snow was planning to do with everyone in his life, courtesy of Jet Heller’s scalpel.  Clevenger didn’t need to ask Theresa Snow why she had stayed married for twenty-odd years to someone so self-consumed.  The answer had to be that she wasn’t psychologically prepared for a deeper relationship.  Living with Snow had given her the trappings of family, including a gracious home and children, but it all came with a guarantee she would be left alone emotionally.  That kind of trade-off can work to sustain a marriage between two limited people, but it can also set the stage for trouble:  If Theresa Snow came to believe that her husband had become truly intimate with someone else, violating their code of mutual isolation, she might feel branded as the only damaged one, abandoned to her solitude.  And that could make her very rageful.

Clevenger wondered just how much, if anything, Snow’s wife knew about Grace Baxter.  And that question made him realize what seemed so familiar about the painting over the mantel.  It reminded him of Baxter.  But not in death.  That wasn’t the reference point.  It was the drawing he had seen in John Snow’s journal.  Snow had drawn Grace’s head and shoulders from exactly the same perspective.  He had been brazen enough to bring her portrait into his home.

"Like it?" Theresa Snow asked.

"Excuse me?"

"The painting," she said.  "You seem taken by it."

"It’s very fine work."

"John found her."  She glanced back at the portrait.  "She is magnificent, isn’t she?"

Was she being coy, Clevenger wondered, speaking in code about Baxter?

"The artist is local," Snow went on.  "Ron Kullaway."  She nodded over Clevenger’s shoulder.  "That one is his, too."

Clevenger looked behind him at the painting over the other mantle, a winter scene of the Public Garden skating rink, crowded with skaters.  "Remarkable."  He turned back around.

"John hadn’t been terribly interested in art, until recently.  He became very knowledgeable very quickly.  He collected several significant pieces."

"That must have been nice for the two of you," Clevenger said, hearing how hollow his own words sounded.

"I think John enjoyed it a great deal," Snow said, matter-of-factly.  "I never gully grasped his passion for it."

Clevenger wanted to open the door to Theresa Snow telling him she knew about Grace Baxter — if she did.  "You considered him a good husband, in spite of his narcissism?" he asked her.

She stared at Clevenger several seconds.  "He was
my
husband," she said, finally.  "He wasn’t the perfect man he imagined himself to be.  But I forgave him his shortcomings.  I didn’t expect him to be normal.  He was extraordinary."

That didn’t answer Clevenger’s question.  "I wondered whether the two of you were getting along," he pressed.  "His driver took him to the hospital the morning of his surgery."

"And?"

"I wondered why?"

For the first time, Theresa Snow looked a little angry.  "You wonder because of your own frame of reference," she said.  "You believe when people are facing a danger like surgery, their families should be with them — physically.  Most people share your view.  I happen to, as well.  But John’s vision of reality was of himself as invulnerable.  He would never have tolerated me or the children seeing him at a moment of weakness, or fear, pre-op or post-op.  The support we could give him was to leave him alone.  He told me Pavel would be driving him, and I knew not to press the point."

"Or else he would pretend you didn’t exist?"