Ring of Truth (25 page)

“You don't think she ever drank before, Mrs. Tobias?”

“Heavens, no. She knew what I'd do if I caught her.”

“What would you have done?”

She never answered that, except to repeat, “She knew what I'd do.”

Neither of them were what you'd call well-adjusted, but she, especially, seemed unbalanced to me when I met them. So I can't say that it surprises me to hear that she may have slipped further off the deep end. Lucy Tobias has been “unbalanced” all along. That was always simmering beneath the words I wrote about them, when I was trying to bend over backwards to be kind to this couple—and not to libel them—who had lost their daughter so horribly. It was obvious, too, in what Emily Rubeck said in her interview, as well as in the extreme financial vengeance that Lucy and Ben wreaked on the hapless landlords. By the end of my first meeting with them, I knew that this was a woman I would never want to cross, because she had already shown me she would stop at almost nothing to satisfy her compulsion for revenge. And for punishment. She had always punished Allison far beyond the pale of ordinary discipline. The slightest infraction of her impossible rules seemed to propel her into uncontrollable rage and cruelty.

Now I worry: At the outer limits of her fury, how far would she go? What sort of punishment would she lay on a daughter who had moved out over her objections, who disobeyed, who didn't call, who got drunk, who had sex with a stranger?

If there was any truth at all in Lucy's offer to show Deb the actual note and the cake tin, then Steven Orbach didn't kill Allison.
“Whoever it was, she had to let them in,”
he said to me today. And then he said,
“Or they were already inside her room.”

And who, besides the landlords, had a key? Her mother.

By the time I turn off the highway into the Lauderdale Pines, it is dark. I can just barely remember the Tobias address and how to get there, but eventually the ugly house rears up in front of me.

Deb's little red car is parked in front. She told me her appointment was for 8:00, and it's now 8:15. What I want to do is to race to the front door, pound on it and shout for them to let me in, but I make myself sit and think what to do next, and how to do it calmly and rationally. There may be nothing at all amiss here. My concern may be wildly misplaced. It may be that I am the crazy one, not Lucy. This could all be a product of my imagination, fired into feverish delusion by listening to Steve Orbach's fantasies, and by the guilt I feel over George Pullen's murder.

Forcing myself to calm down, I decide that I have two immediate goals, and they're urgent: I want to draw Deb safely out of that ugly house, but I also want to know if there's any evidence that could keep Orbach out of the electric chair in three and a half days. That's it.

“Be careful. Protect the evidence,” Franklin said.

I stare at the house and see lights on downstairs. They're probably all three sitting in there, having one of the weird conversations the Tobiases have with people, probably the only kind they do have. Deb's asking her questions. Lucy's acting batty. Ben is agreeing with everything his wife says, even when it's completely nuts. And everything's fine, if you don't object to a bit of insanity, megalomania, narcissism, or early senility.

Okay, I think I know how I'm going to handle this.

I have to make sure that Deb's young presence, her pointed
questions, don't trigger this unstable woman's wrath, and I have to find out if there really is any incriminating evidence to worry about.

I get out of my car, shutting the door softly behind me.

This one's for you, George.

I walk quickly up to the front door, ring the bell, and then move back down off the steps. After a couple of endless moments, I hear movement on the other side, sense somebody looking through the peephole, and then hear and see that person slowly opening the door to me.

“Yes?” Ben Tobias asks, from behind the screen door.

He looks the same as before—a short, stocky, nondescript man of sixty or so.

“Do you remember me, Mr. Tobias? I'm Marie Lightfoot?”

“Hello. Yes. What is it?”

“I believe my assistant is here. I need to see her.”

“Oh.” He pushes the screen door open and I back a little further away from it. “Well, come on in, then.”

“No, thank you. I'll wait here.”

My plan, feeble though it is, is to get Deb out here so I know she's okay, and then ask her if she's actually seen any sign of the note or the cake tin.

From inside, Lucy Tobias yells, “Who's at the door, Ben?”

“Nobody, Lucy!” he calls back, then says to me, “She wouldn't understand. I'll go get your assistant, but you ought to come in.” He glances over my shoulder at something and then gets a puzzled expression on his face. “Lyle? What are you doing here?”

I turn to find his policeman brother-in-law at my shoulder.

In a deep, gentle voice that matches his appearance, Lyle Karnacki says, “We'll all go in.” He puts a hand at my back and nudges me forward up the steps, through the open doorway and into the foyer of the Tobias home.

“I thought—” I start to say to him.

“And I had second thoughts,” he says to me, sounding infinitely sad.

“Wait a minute, Lyle,” Ben protests, trying to stop us from progressing into the living room. His brother-in-law steps in front of me, takes Ben firmly by one arm and walks him into the cavernous living room. “Lyle, it's not what you think,” Ben says, sounding aggrieved. I follow along behind. In the space between them I see Deb seated on a huge, overstuffed white sofa. Lucy is seated in an armchair; her hair's an uncombed mess and she's wearing wrinkled, mismatched clothing with a pair of oldfashioned high heels. But her face lights up with pleasure at the sight of her brother coming toward her.

On a coffee table in between them Lucy has laid out dessert.

There are fancy plates with gold rims, and silver dessert forks and coffee spoons. There are demitasse cups and saucers, and matching silver creamer and sugar holder. And there is a cake, a white cake with lemon icing, that sits on the bottom half of a battered old cake tin, the top of which sits on the table, too. Deborah is eating a piece of cake. In her lap, there is a small, folded piece of yellow paper.

“Lyle,” Lucy beams. “Want some white cake, sweetheart?”

“Sure,” he says, his voice cracking like a boy's. “That was Allie's favorite, wasn't it? White cake with lemon icing. Isn't that the same kind of cake you carried over to her apartment that night?”

“Um-hm,” Lucy says, moving toward the cake knife.

“Did you take it in that same cake tin, Lucy?”

“Um-hm,” she says, picking up the knife and slicing into the cake.

“And you brought it home with you later, after she was dead?”

“That's right,” Lucy says, sliding his piece of cake onto a plate.

Lyle goes to Deborah and plucks the note out of her lap. He opens it and reads it, and then says, “And you brought the note home with you, too.”

“Um-hm, you have to clean up after yourself, dear.”

She advances on her brother, the cake in one hand and the knife in the other.

“Lucy,” her husband says, sounding weak and frightened. “Don't.”

Lyle lets her get close and then he simply reaches for her wrist that holds the knife and clasps her so that she cannot do any harm to him, or to anyone else. She doesn't even struggle, but only looks confused, as does Deborah, seated on the couch.

“Marie?” Deb asks. “What's going on?”

“Why don't you answer your pager?” I ask her.

“Oh, I'm always turning it off and putting it in my purse and forgetting about it. Why? Did you try to reach me?”

“You don't understand,” Ben Tobias says to Lyle.

“What don't I understand, Ben? Didn't she kill Allison?”

“You don't understand that I didn't know what she did, not until a long time afterward. And I never knew she still had the note and the tin. Not until she brought them out tonight. She never would have”—he throws a venomous glance at my assistant—“if this woman hadn't asked her about them. Nobody had ever asked about them before. It's all her fault.”

“It's always somebody else's fault, isn't it, Ben?”

Lyle has taken the knife away from Lucy and led her to a chair to sit down again. When he looks back up at us, it is not with sadness but with revulsion on his face that he inquires of his brother-in-law, “Were you just going to let us execute that boy, Ben? Were you going to let us kill him in her place?”

“He deserved to die. He had sex with my daughter. He killed his own mother.”

“But he didn't kill Allison, did he, Ben?”

As Lyle makes the phone calls he has to make, and as he draws out of his sister and brother-in-law the story he needs to hear, I start taking notes, because I'm a writer and that's what writers do.

Eventually, these notes will become a new chapter . . .

Anything to Be Together

By Marie Lightfoot

CHAPTER 8

Ben was snoring beside her, which didn't usually keep Lucy awake, but on this night she couldn't sleep. Their daughter still had not called to tell them she'd returned to her new apartment, back safe from wherever it was that she had been this first night on her own.

Horrible fantasies played in Lucy's mind as the minutes ticked by.

In some of her imaginings, her daughter had been kidnapped, raped, and killed; in others she had run away with a man. In none of them did Allie's mom envision her daughter simply out having fun with her friends as a normal graduating senior might do: a few drinks, a little flirting, lots of laughter, and some tears as they recalled the memories of their school years together.

With every minute Lucy's fury grew.

When Allie lived at home—only last night!—there were strict curfews and unyielding punishments for breaking them. It didn't matter if the girl was an hour late or a minute, she knew the rules: a week's grounding for every minute past curfew. Grounding meant no telephone, no
television—of which there was not much allowed anyway—no visitors or visiting, homework and dinner in her room, never leaving it from the moment she got home after school to when she left for school the next morning. Once Allison was fifteen minutes late because the friend's mother who was giving her a ride was late, but the punishment held, because a rule is a rule. For fifteen weeks, a third of her freshman year in high school, she spent every nonschool hour in her room. It never happened again, because Allie never again relied on anyone else to take her places. The only way to be sure of making curfew was to go where her parents took her and for them to pick her up again. There were many rules and many punishments, all of them appropriate, in her mother's view.

In the Tobias household there was only one view: Lucy's.

On this evening, what had begun as anger had quickly turned into fury.

She was enraged at her husband, too, for sleeping through it.

All right,
Lucy thought,
if you won't help, if you don't care, I'll take this into my own hands.
She'd show them both. Forget the car. The apartment was an easy walk. Lucy quietly arose from bed, got dressed, and let herself out of the small house. Keeping to shadows, she paced the sidewalks between home and the Hibiscus Avenue rooming house.

At the back door of it, she saw the note was missing.

She's here. She read my note. She didn't call me.

Allison's mother used her duplicate key to enter the back door.

Quietly, she climbed the back steps.

From one of the rented rooms on the second floor, music was playing softly. The cake tin still sat, undisturbed, beside Allison's door.
She doesn't even care enough about me to take my cake inside!
Her fingers trembling with fury, Lucy used her other duplicate key to let herself into her daughter's
room, expecting to find the girl already asleep—or awake and reading. She flipped the wall switch, intending to wake Allie up, to hurt her eyes with the sudden light, to shock her, frighten her with the fact of her sin against her parents. But the light showed the room was empty.

She took my note and left again. Probably with a boy.

Her daughter was a whore, that was clear. Out all night at the first opportunity. Doing God knows what. Lucy had tried, she had tried so hard to mold the girl into a decent woman, a daughter of whom one could be proud, but it was clear that Allison had failed her.

Lucy turned back and picked up the cake tin.

For an hour she sat on the edge of her daughter's bed, holding the cake in its tin, in her lap, waiting. She would wait all night if she had to. She would be there when the slut got back and she would punish her as no girl had ever been punished before.

When the door to the room finally opened, Allison saw her mother.

What her mother saw was that her daughter's blouse was buttoned askew, that her face was swollen, her lips were swollen. Lucy smelled liquor, she caught the scent of sex.

Allison, still drunk, came into the room, started to say, “Moth—”

Lucy carefully set the cake tin on the bed. Advancing silently toward her daughter, she drew back her right arm and brought it forward into the side of Allison's head with all of her might. The girl staggered, fell to her knees. Her hands flew out to catch herself, but she fell all the way to the carpet. Allison moaned, and started to cry, “Mom, Mom.” Something inside Lucy, some fragment of “sanity” that wanted to preserve her own safety, realized that no one must hear this. Quickly she grabbed the pillow off the bed and pushed it into her daughter's face, pushing down,
down, harder, harder, and holding it there until the girl was still. The note on the yellow paper had fallen out of Allison's pocket and Lucy scooped it up and took it away with her.

Lucy carried the cake in its container on her walk back home.

She didn't tell her husband the truth until much later, after the trial, after the lawsuits, when one day he uncharacteristically opened her kitchen cabinets to look for something. That's when Ben Tobias saw the cake tin that was supposed to have disappeared, and that's when he also realized the truth. Like his wife, from that day forward he chose to believe it was everyone else's fault: his daughter's for bringing discredit to their family; the landlords' for hiring the boy who lived in the basement; Allison's friends for getting her drunk; Lucy's brother, Lyle, for not checking the tenants thoroughly enough; society; the media; the world. Lucy was driven to do what she did; it was everybody else's fault, and it was all so terribly unfair.