St. Patrick's Day Murder (4 page)

It occurred to me it might not even have been something Scotty himself did. New York had become a conglomeration of sectors, each representing the old residents and the new, a variety of races and language backgrounds, and even among people speaking the same language, there were hostilities based on their national origin. In some neighborhoods the anger bridged generations, with sons carrying on their fathers’ battles. The melting pot that my elders had spoken of with such pride had frozen into discrete chunks that rubbed against one another abrasively, more so when they shared the same turf. Maybe Scotty had smiled once too often at a member of one group and not enough at another. Maybe he had become the scapegoat of their internecine wars.

We kissed at my car and I drove home while he went off to his evening law class. The next time we would meet would be at Scotty’s funeral.

The funeral was Thursday morning. I sat inside the church while Jack attended with his squad and members of the precinct, standing outside in the dreary cold. The burial was private and we drove to the cemetery in Jack’s car, the rest of the police returning to Scotty’s precinct. When we got back to Queens, we stopped at the McVeigh house. Ray and Petra had just arrived and were talking to Jean.

“Jean can’t find Scotty’s discharge papers,” Ray said when we joined them.

“You have a safe-deposit box?” Jack asked.

“We should, but we never got one. We kept the kids’ birth certificates and stuff like that in a metal box. I’ve been through it so many times I can tell you the order of the papers. I’ve even shaken things out, but there’s no discharge there.”

“I can call the VA,” Jack said. “About when was he discharged? Six, seven years ago?”

“Oh, gosh, no. It must be about eleven years now.”

“Eleven?” Ray’s skepticism was bare and harsh. “Come on, Jean. He came on the job right after he got out of the army.”

“You’ve got it all wrong. He went in when he was eighteen or nineteen. We got married when he was twenty-four and he’d been out awhile by then. Believe me, if he’d served while we were married, I’d know it.”

“OK,” Jack said. “It’s just a little misunderstanding. I’ll get in touch with the VA and see what they say. It might help if you had his birth certificate. You’ll probably need that for Social Security anyhow.”

“I’ll go down tomorrow. He was born in Brooklyn. I’ve got his driver’s license if they need it.”

We changed the topic rather pointedly after that and spent half an hour listening more than talking. It was late afternoon when the four of us left.

But outside on the quiet residential street, we stood and talked for a few minutes. Ray was up in arms.

“I think she’s lost it,” he said. “Something is very screwed up in there.”

“I know. I’ll look into it in the morning.”

“I mean, did I hear Scotty say a thousand times he went from the army to the job with only a couple of months between?”

“You heard it. I heard it.”

“So what’s she pulling?”

“She’s confused,” Petra said soothingly. “Something else happened when he was eighteen and she’s mixed it up.”

In Jack’s car a few minutes later he came back to it. “It doesn’t feel right.”

“Maybe Scotty went in a little later than Jean thinks and
got out a little earlier than he told you. Maybe he was out of work for a year and didn’t want to admit it.”

“But there’s no discharge. If you’ve got a box where you keep birth certificates, you keep your discharge papers there, too. You keep the important pieces of your life in one place.”

I wondered if he was thinking the same thing I was. “Could it have been a dishonorable discharge?”

“I hope not.” He looked grim and dropped the subject. When we got back to his apartment, I picked up my bag, kissed him good-bye, and drove home to Oakwood.

I live in a small town on Long Island Sound in the house my aunt lived in for as long as I can remember. When she died last year, she left me the house at 610 Pine Brook Road and her nest egg and a responsibility that was in no way a burden. Her only son, Gene, who is my age and whom I have known all my life, is retarded and lives in a group home that recently moved to Oakwood, about a mile from the house. Now that he’s so close, I visit frequently and take him for overnights when he’s in the mood. Although he misses his mother, he’s made a great adjustment, and I feel, as I always have, that he adds to my life as I hope I add to his.

Happily, I have become part of the community. I go to council meetings and join in discussions. I voted in my first election on the school budget, pulling down all the Yes levers for what I consider are all the right reasons. And I have made friends in town, mostly the McGuires who live next door and the Grosses, who live down the block and across the street.

Some of these things happened slowly, some quickly. I was aware, during the years that I visited Aunt Meg regularly, that I was “that nun” who came to see Margaret Wirth. I like to think I’m now Chris Bennett, known for my personality, not the clothes I used to wear.

I had some work to do at home for Arnold Gold and I sat down to it at eight-thirty Friday morning, having walked and breakfasted. Part of it was proofreading, part typing. Arnold gave me an old word processor recently when he bought new ones for the office, and, never having used one before, I
found it fast and easy to use while the women in his office thought it was so old and out-of-date they teased him until he broke down and replaced it. I was putting a brief on a disk when Jack called.

“Something’s very crazy,” he said.

“About Scotty’s discharge?”

“He never served. There’s no record of his serving in any of the armed services.”

“Why would he lie?”

“You got me. But it gets worse.”

“What do you mean?”

“Jean just called. There’s no record of Scotty’s birth certificate.”

I felt a distinct chill. “Could she have the year wrong?” I asked, knowing Jean would have tried other years if they failed to find the certificate.

“She says she got someone to do a pretty thorough search. They know who she is. His name’s been in all the papers. I don’t like the feel of this.”

I didn’t, either. “What about his parents, Jack? I didn’t hear Jean mention them, and they didn’t seem to be at the funeral.”

“They died years ago. At least that’s what he said. Now I’m starting to rethink everything he ever said about himself.”

“Maybe that’s not a good idea. He was someone you knew and cared about. If he had some reason for lying about his age or his birthplace or his military service, it doesn’t change the person you knew.”

“I can accept that, but Jean can’t. I haven’t even told her about the service. She was pretty shook up when she called about the birth certificate. I’m going to talk to the captain about it this afternoon. He has access to Scotty’s personnel records.”

“You think he lied on his job application?”

“I don’t know what to think. Listen, I’m way behind in my schoolwork. I’m going to pass on this weekend unless I get a lot done tonight and tomorrow. If I call Sunday, you think we could get together for a few hours?”

“Gosh,” I said theatrically, “I’ll probably be booked solid by then. My phone never stops ringing.”

“Yeah, here, too. The hallway’s lined with naked women waiting their turn.”

I laughed. “Throw them a towel.”

“I didn’t say they were wet. I implied they were eager. I’ll try for Sunday.”

I finished my work and got it into the mail before the post office closed. On Saturday I put my house in order and did my shopping. Then I visited Gene and took him for lunch. Afterward, we went to a store that sold miniature cars, and I let him pick one out for his collection. I watched with pleasure and some awe as he made his decision, measuring the cars against one another by criteria I could not imagine. He started with seven and worked his way down to three, then finally two. He put them side by side, turned them over, ran them over the glass case and up his arm, his face intent the whole while. Sometimes when I watch him I wonder what kind of person he would have been if he had been born with normal intelligence. I’m almost positive he would have been smart, a thorough, careful worker, a kind and thoughtful human being.

Finally he said, “This one.”

I smiled. “Good choice, Gene.” I picked up the runner-up and handed both cars to the man behind the counter.

“No,” Gene said. “Just this one.”

“I think you deserve two today.”

His smile was overwhelming. “Why?”

I gave him a kiss on the cheek. “Because you always play by the rules and you’re the nicest person I know.”

When we got back to Greenwillow, he had had enough of me. All he wanted was to play with his cars. I left him happy.

Jack called before noon on Sunday. “Feel like driving in?”

“Sure.”

“We’ll have a little food and a little fun.”

“Sounds good. Jack, I haven’t asked, but is there anything yet on Scotty’s killer?”

“Nothing. It looks like a very professional job.”

“That’s what the papers say.”

“If the guy left a print in that stolen car, no one’s found it.”

“Have they looked into old unsolved murders of cops?”

“It’s the first thing they do. The Intelligence Division comes in right away on a case like this. Apparently they don’t see any connections, but they’ll be looking into copycats, crimes that are similar in some way.”

“We’ll talk when I get there.”

We didn’t talk when I got there. It was more than a week since we’d been together without the shadow of the murder over us. The shadow was still there, but we set it aside, our first kiss lighting fires.

“It’s good to hold you,” Jack said, holding me in a way that was both comforting and arousing.

I moved against his body and found his lips again.

“Mind if we have the fun first?”

“I’ll mind if we don’t.”

“Yeah,” he said, and we went into the bedroom.

Jack is a fantastic cook. He tells me I will be, too, after he develops my taste buds, which he thinks were warped by fifteen years of convent fare. He may be right. I have only recently begun to notice individual tastes, like lemon juice in the salad dressing and cinnamon in a meat dish he puts together that perfumes the apartment while it’s cooking.

We ate about four o’clock to give me plenty of time to get home and him another evening to work. While we were eating he briefed me on what he knew about Scotty’s murder. The crime scene unit had dug Jack’s single bullet out of the backseat of the stolen car and he had gotten his weapon back. The car had otherwise been clean. Since the owner didn’t have a certain recollection of how many miles had been on the odometer, it was impossible to determine how many miles the killer had driven. What
was
certain was that Scotty had been followed when he left Petra’s apartment and the killer had lain in wait in the parking lot for him to come back.

“And since he had no idea Jean would stay behind with
you, you have to figure the guy was ready to kill Scotty with his wife sitting next to him in the car.”

“And professionals don’t do that.”

“Right. But this guy is a pro. He broke into the car without leaving a scratch, hot-wired it, and left nothing behind.”

“So he’s a pro that wants you to think he’s an amateur.”

“Looks like it.”

“You think he killed Scotty for something that has to do with the lies he told about the military or where he was born?”

“Who knows?”

“Are they looking into that?”

“Hard to say. Scotty never lied to the department. The captain had Scotty’s original questionnaire package faxed over from Personnel. Scotty never said he’d been in the army.”

“So it was a story he made up for his wife and his friends, kind of a macho thing.”

“That’s what it looks like.”

“It’s eerie,” I said. “I feel for Jean. It’s bad enough she had to lose her husband. Now she doesn’t even know who she was married to.”

“I’ve never lied to you,” Jack said.

It took me by surprise. “I didn’t think you had.”

“Neither did Jean.”

We finished eating and did the dishes together. As I was drying the silver, the phone rang. Jack turned off the water and picked up the phone.

“Yeah, hi,” he said after he’d answered. “No, no one. I’ve been hitting the books.… They
what?”

I stopped rattling the silverware and started to listen.

“Say it again.… Yeah, yeah … Shit, I don’t believe this.… OK, thanks.… I’ll call him.… Right. So long.”

“What is it?”

He looked several shades paler than he had when he picked up the phone. “They’ve just arrested Ray. He’s being charged with Scotty’s murder.”

Shock is hardly the word for it. Jack tried Ray’s number, but there was no answer; Then he tried Petra several times until her line cleared. Yes, she had heard, and no, she didn’t know why anyone would think Ray had done it. Jack said we were on our way over.

All I could think of was that it was preposterous; it just couldn’t have happened. Ray had been with us, with Petra, and then at home. “Last Sunday,” I said, trying to remember the sequence of events, “you called Ray from the hospital and told him Scotty had been shot. When we got back to the parking lot, he was there looking it over.”

“I know.” Although his eyes were following the traffic, he seemed to be somewhere else.

“What is it?”

“That was the second time I called.”

So he had called earlier, but no one was home. I didn’t want to pursue it. To me it was perfectly reasonable that he had left Petra’s apartment and driven home at about the time of the shooting, but that didn’t mean he had done it. A thousand other people had been in their cars in that part of New York at the same time. At worst, it was a small piece of circumstantial evidence that would need a great deal more to make a case.

Jack found a tight parking space right near Petra’s apartment house, and we went upstairs. She looked disheveled in a way I had never expected to see her, her hair messy, her casual weekend clothes worn without her usual panache. But she was glad to see us.