Philly Stakes (11 page)

I knew Laura’s mind was numb with old griefs and new fears, but I hoped that on some level, through her tears, she’d notice that there were some safe harbors, even if you sometimes found them on a ladies’ room floor.

Seven

ONCE WE EMERGED FROM THE WOMEN’S ROOM, OFFICIAL WHEELS SPUN. Servino, the man assigned to the Clausen case, asserted himself and talked with Laura, Alice and Peter in rapid succession, then repeated the process.

Susan Bertram, the policewoman, talked with Alice and Laura separately and together.

Mackenzie talked with Peter again.

I waited. Ever since I was a kid, I’d been intrigued by the two circles joined by a curve that make up the Philadelphia Police Administration Building. It almost looks like a plush resort, or multiplex stadium for games and concerts. But inside, whether or not the curved walls covered with corrugated paneling made for efficient use of space, as touted, there was a definite lack of graciousness, and you’d never confuse it with a pleasure palace. I had a choice between a hard chair squeezed between file cabinets and detectives, or a bench in the municipal court waiting room. The latter at least had a little more elbow room and a view through a dirty window of people being booked.

I found and read an ancient, tattered Sports Illustrated. I paced. I managed to feel both mentally agitated and brain dead. What did everything mean? I was no longer positive about Laura’s innocence, although more than ever I wanted it to be true so that she could get on with her life and healing.

Still, if that brief glimpse of what she’d lived through made me feel homicidal, how could I not allow her the same impulses? I was no longer positive about Alice or Peter, either.

More time passed. I thought wistfully and irrationally about how cigarettes had once helped make blank times like this bearable, serving as little measuring rods.

This would have been an eleven-cigarette wait.

Mackenzie appeared, rubbing his neck and sipping something that resembled crude oil. It was different, seeing him on the job. Once upon a time, when we met and I was a suspect, Mackenzie had been attractive, but less than endearing. Now, watching from the innocent sidelines, I realized there was something breathtakingly elemental about his methodical search for truth and justice. If I squinted, I could almost see him atop a white horse, plumed helmet, pointed lance and all.

And that’s one way women get seduced into unworkable, undefinable and mangled social lives. Not me. I blinked three times and Lancelot turned into one tired cop slouching over a Styrofoam cup.

“What a mess,” he said, sitting down beside me. “And how’d it come to be my mess, anyway? It’s not even my case.”

“I thought you all helped each other out. One for all and all for justice, or something.” I patted his free hand. “Feel flattered. Those kids trust you. And Alice trusts those kids.”

“Damn depressing,” he said. “Inconclusive. Infuriating. Any one of them could have done it. There’s motive, opportunity…”

“But do you think so? Do you really?”

“Three different versions, but not a one mentions how it was done—and we don’t know ourselves.”

“When will you?”

“It hasn’t even been forty-eight hours yet,” he said, looking stunned by my foolishness.

“Still, you told me they have all those snazzy tests, computerized equipment. They’ve had two whole days. What have they been doing?”

“Mandy, there are usually clues to tell you where to start. Marks or discoloration. You kind of know whether he was clubbed, or stabbed, or poisoned. But here…” He shook his head and slumped on the bench next to me. “Wouldn’t you think a guy like Santa, who has to go down chimneys, would wear a flameproof suit?”

Alexander Clausen must have ignited like a torch.

“Anyway,” Mackenzie said, “his skin’s…well, they have to start from zero. I mean they’ll figure it out by internal evidence, but some tests take a week or more. Plus—”

“I know. It’s the holidays.”

“Even cops deserve a personal life. You wouldn’t believe how angry some women get when we have to work nights,” he said gravely.

I sniffed; disdainfully, I hoped.

He finished his coffee. A gritty triangle of grounds stained the side of the cup. “I don’t know, I thought maybe Peter hit him with something. But we checked the fireplace poker, and it’s clean. No hair, no blood, so I just don’t know.”

I enjoyed concepts—murder, guilt, weapon—more than particulars like hair and blood. I wanted, inappropriately, to change focus. It was, after all, the season to be merry. Someone had even pinned red and silver garlands on the walls. It helped soften the sight of four furious and handcuffed teenagers being charged behind the glass partition.

To the casual observer, Mackenzie looked unaffected by everything, slumped as usual on his spine, long legs relaxed. But his normal slur had faded into an unintelligible swamp of vowel sounds. He cared. Good man.

“Ahknowkidslahn.”

He was really upset. I pulled apart the sounds. There was time, because his pace decreased as his drawl increased. What had he said? I. Know. [that?] [the?] kids [are?]…[a] kid is?… Lon? Who was Lon? Kid has long? Lawn?

“Thall ur. Feelt mah gut.”

I said it all to myself again, pushing at the words the way he did, and it finally cleared up. Not lawn, lying. The kid, Peter? was lying—and they all were. C.K. felt it in his gut. So did I, only I spoke Philadelphian and could understand me. “Three questions,” I said. “Why is he lying? What will you do with Peter? And could you either talk Northern or provide an interpreter?”

He crumpled his cup almost angrily and sat forward on the shellacked bench. “Ah talk fahn,” he said. Nonetheless, he did trim the edges of most of his words. “Can’t hold any of ’em. Mother’s completely out of it and Laura’s almost as vague. She doesn’t remember much of anything, ever. I don’t know if it’s trauma or mental problems or what. And I sure as hell don’ know why they’re all doin’ this. Why step forward to do so much lying?”

Again he made it sound like “lahn.” Soft, cushiony. So much less offensive than “lying.” It’s what he did with “crime” and “fire” as well. My twangy homegrown accent made everything sound worse.

Laura had told the policewoman and me that she had nightmare after nightmare of revenge, shapeless methods, misty punishments. But after the first fire—accidentally started with an overturned candle but then deliberately allowed to continue—flames filled her dreams, made them clear and definite, as if the candle fire had been a sign. Fire cleansed and punished. Wasn’t it what God had chosen for sinners in hell?

The night of the party, she’d asked Peter to stay in her room, as a protector. My hunch had been verified. “He cares about me,” she’d said. “We don’t…we weren’t…” Then her voice dwindled to a whisper as she approached the topic of her father. “He loved parties, people paying attention, saying he was important. And then he’d…he’d want to…later, to…keep feeling good.” She had covered her face with her hands. “He said it was my fault. I made it happen. He made me dress like a baby, hide myself, because he said I was so… He said it would kill my mother if she knew what I was really like.”

Later, when she was calm again, we had asked if her father had come to her bedroom that night. Peter was asked the same question, separately. Both said he hadn’t.

“I went downstairs before he could,” Laura said. “I killed him before he could. Pushed the tree down, set it on fire.”

“Why leave your room where you were safe with Peter?” I asked.

She looked even more uncomfortable. “I heard him. I thought he was upstairs, but he wasn’t. Maybe I got afraid of his seeing Peter or…I don’t know. I just went downstairs.”

“She sleepwalks,” her mother had said in her interview. Alice Clausen gripped her purse so hard that her knuckles were prominent and white. Her hands were so elegantly tended, and so out of control, shaking with a life of their own. I imagined Alice, wealthy and passive, turning body parts over to someone for updating and maintenance checks, barely noticing what was done. “She’s sleepwalked since she was a baby. Started out in her crib but ended up asleep all over the house, and never remembered how she’d gotten there. Mixes things up.”

We sat in silence.

“Mackenzie?” I said now. “I know why they’re lying.”

He raised one eyebrow. An endearing, if skeptical, gesture.

“Laura truly believes she did it.”

“Go on.”

“So do the other two. I mean think that Laura did it, and they’re covering for her.”

“That’s how you figure it?”

“She probably was downstairs when the fire alarm went off, sleepwalking.”

“Bumped into the tree, huh?”

“Probably. After Clausen was dead, you see. And Peter found her there.”

“Mama, too?”

“I don’t know. Alice might still have been out cold. But maybe. In any case, she knew. That night, that fight at the party—she knew for sure what she’d known and denied for a long time. So later, when she realized that her husband was dead and she thought Laura probably did it, because Laura kept saying so, she confessed out of shame at her collusion, as a way of making it not so, finally making her the good mother.”

Mackenzie squeezed his crumpled coffee cup.

“And Peter has the same reasons,” I said. “Laura told him her story, and he was enraged, protective—finally to the point of defending her the only way possible, by confessing. So! Now that it’s obvious those three didn’t do it, it’s time to find the somebody else who did. Like one of the guests. What is happening with that list?”

He shook his head. “Clausen’s secretary said the PR firm handled the event. The PR firm says they advised him against the whole project, but finally found a church shelter that only admits the sober and drug free. The pastor of the church says they sent the first thirty, no names asked, no history. ‘We are all brethren,’ he says. That gives us thirty unnamed from there and thirty-five completely unknown from other sources. That’s all I know. They’re still looking, but it’s—”

“—the holidays, right?”

“Would you ease up? Anyway, it’s not my case. But if it were—I wouldn’t worry too much about that list. And what made you think that quote it’s obvious those three didn’t do it end quote?”

I had mistaken noncommittal grunts, yawns and brow raises for agreement. “I can’t believe you don’t see it,” I insisted. “It is obvious that they’re innocent!”

“Uh-huh,” he said. “That’s just it. How hard would it be to conspire to look like they didn’t conspire?”

“I don’t get it.”

“Ah’m talkin’ funny again?”

“Conspire” had indeed been aspirated mush, but that wasn’t what I meant. “It’s your logic this time.”

He spoke as if to a dunce. A Yankee dunce. Slowly, with exaggerated precision, snapping off syllables. “Any one of them could have done it alone or with the others’ help. They’re all happier with him dead. Then the next thing they’d do is confuse us all. Disagree on particulars. Never mention anything the papers haven’t said first. We’ve all seen enough TV shows where the bad guy knows too much and blurts it out. So this group’s careful. They’ll sound upset that the other one’s confessing, seem like they never talked it over together. Look like well-meaning, amateur bumblers, in fact. Confession crazies.”

“Come on!”

“Hey, it’s real smart. Look guilty, claim guilt—but be dumb, unpolished, like your claim’s an obvious lie. Knot up the force, tie up our hands. Have to let ’em go until something links ’em in a conspiracy or implicates one of ’em.”

“That’s ridiculous. Too Machiavellian—so complicated and silly!”

His eyelids lowered in disdain or boredom, I couldn’t tell. “Silly? Silly? You saying they don’t have motive, every one of them? And cause? That the urge to kill and the reason for it wasn’t running real hard in their veins? Especially Laura. My money’s on her. With a little help from the boyfriend.”

“Great. Why not just take her out and hang her, right now?”

“There are mitigating circumstances. She’ll get an easy sentence, maybe probation. Treatment. Psychiatric care. It’s not the worst. You know what they did to parricides in ancient Rome? Whipped them, sewed them in a leather sack along with a live dog, a cock, a viper and an ape, and then threw them into the sea. Things have improved.”

I had no answer. Mackenzie’s work had frayed his view of mankind, and I didn’t like what he saw out of those pale blue eyes. He seemed contaminated. On the other hand, I seemed stupid, my theory naive and as porous as cheesecloth. We sat under the tinsel, glum together. He was angry that he couldn’t prove their guilt. I was angry that he couldn’t see their innocence. The tension built without our doing one more thing. Look, Ma, no hands.

“Cheer up,” he said. “Soon you’ll be a thousand miles away in the sun forgetting all about it.”

The remark fed my growing hostility. I had been waiting for three weeks, since the moment I mentioned the trip my parents kept requesting as their Christmas gift, for him to say, very simply, “Don’t go. Let’s be together.”

He had a few days off, too. It was our first chance, or could have been, to spend a leisurely time together, to begin to know each other like normal people.

Never once did he say “Don’t go” or any variation thereof. Instead, he expressed nonstop delight at my good fortune. Florida in December, what a treat. Oranges, flamingos, sunshine, palm trees. Sometimes I hated him.

He stood up. “I’m followin’ your lead, flying south, too. Haven’t seen my folks in a long while.” He nodded, agreeing with himself that his trip was a great idea. He stretched and yawned. “So,” he said, “you might as well go.” He picked up his crushed plastic cup and raised his arm in the classic, inevitable male rite, the wastepaper toss.

Of all the arrogant, insufferable pronouncements! Freeing me—giving me permission to leave town because his wonderful self would be in New Orleans! I might as well go? “I will go, dammit!” I snapped. “I have my tickets! Or did you think I was sitting around waiting for you to offer me an alternate plan?”

My outbreak messed up his aim. He walked over and picked the cracked Styrofoam off the floor, rubbed his shoe over the wet grounds, spreading the grit over the linoleum. Then he peered at me as if I were a new and mutant form of life. “Merely meant there’s no need to stay here at the station any longer. What got you in an uproar? What tickets you talking about?”