Purgatory Chasm: A Mystery Part 33

I said nothing, watched her eyes instead. I decided I believed her, knew Randall did, too.

Finally I said, "So he knew you weren't his. Your mother was fuzzy on that."

"Of course he knew. He used to tell me that. After. While we were cuddling." A tear rolled from her left eye. She made no move to touch it. "He was big on cuddling after, and he was big on reminding me I wasn't his biological daughter. Because that made it all right, you see?"

"Did your mother know?"

"She didn't know because she didn't want to know. After a while she hazed out with the booze, and then she didn't know much of anything."

I pushed the uneaten pie aside. "When did it end?"

"Halloween night when I was seventeen. He drove into a pond trying to avoid a pack of trick-or-treaters. He drowned." She barked a laugh. "They said he was a hero."

I glanced at Randall. His eyes showed me nothing.

"Can you blame me for wondering who my true father was?" Patty said.

"When the rape started," I said, "you stopped having friends. You found something to focus on. You fixed on the who's-my-father question and became an information seeker. To your mother, maybe your guidance counselor, it looked like obsession. To you it was a way to control something."

"You've heard my story?"

"I hear a lot of stories."

Patty began to shake, a little at first, then harder, tears flowing now. "Are you so jaded? Is my story so common?"

I took both her wrists. "Your story is yours," I said. "Your story is like n.o.body else's."

Then Patty Marx slipped her hands from mine, set her elbows on the table, covered her eyes, and cried a long while. Randall, who'd been hovering at the end of the table, sat next to her and set a big hand on her back.

I went to the stand, grabbed a handful of napkins, and brought them to our table. Patty used them to wipe her eyes and blow her nose. She looked from Randall to me and tried to laugh. "Sorry about the girly-girl nonsense. I haven't done that since college."

I said, "By the time Bobby Marx died, you were set to go to ... Clemson, was it?"

She nodded, then told it. Talked about college, her career, moving from newspaper to newspaper, climbing the ladder. She kept her eyes on the table while she spoke, tracing the wood grain with a blood-red fingernail.

I knew the story already but heard her out, letting her tell it her way. By the time she got to the part about working for The Globe, the shade had worked around to our table.

"You met Phigg a year and a half ago when you wrote the story about dying cities," I said, as it all clicked into place. "You knew by then he was your father."

She hesitated, then nodded.

"Was the whole story a setup? A pretext to meet him?"

"Yes."

"You hit him with it. You told the poor guy he was your father."

"Yes." She whispered it.

"How'd he react?"

"He sat on a log and said it couldn't be true."

"You convinced him."

"I told him some things about my mother that would be difficult for a stranger to learn," she said. "To seal the deal, I showed him a photo."

"A photo he took back in the New York days."

"Yes."

"Of your mother."

"Yes."

"And?"

"He cried," she said. "He said he should have been with me the whole time. He wanted to know everything about my life and my mother's."

"Did you tell him about Bobby Marx?"

"G.o.d, no. Why would I?" But I'd seen the hitch in her fingernail tracing before she answered. Huh.

We sat quiet awhile.

"Talk about Josh Whipple," Randall finally said, and turned to me. "This is key."

"I met Josh while I was researching my father."

"Researching him?" Randall said. "Before, you called it stalking."

"I was joking, for Christ's sake." She fake-laughed and touched Randall's arm, then looked at me. "During my research, my stalking"-she rolled her eyes-"I followed Tander to Motorenwerk, where he shot the breeze for a good long time. It piqued my curiosity. Who spends forty-five minutes at a garage when they're not having a car fixed?"

"He was having a car restored," I said.

"Of course, but I didn't know that. So when Josh took his lunch break, I managed to stumble into him and start a conversation."

"You pumped him for info."

"Josh was ... an opportunist." Randall and I glanced at each other, read each other's minds: He wasn't the only one. "He smelled money at Motorenwerk," she said, "and he wanted a slice. I could respect that."

"You started seeing him."

"He was intimidated by me, a black woman nearly old enough to be his mother, but I got him past that. I was the third black person he ever spoke with in his life. Yes, the third. He remembered precisely."

I said, "When did you realize Josh was something other than a garden-variety country b.u.mpkin?"

"Once he got past the 'aw shucks' stuff, I saw he was a lot smarter than he let on. And he never talked about his upbringing."

"So?"

"I talked about mine," she said. "Including the Bobby Marx part. Josh and I spent a lot of time staring up at ceilings, side by side, do you see? I opened up to this kid, unloaded all this baggage, and he gave me nothing in return."

"You got curious," I said. "You researched him." Same way she'd researched Phigg.

Her skin was darker than Randall's, but I saw her blush.

"You bet I did. And got my money's worth."

I waited.

"Only child, raised by his mother, never knew his father," Patty said. She was leaning in now, elbows on the table. The storyteller side of her had taken over, and she knew she had a doozy going. "So the mother died when Josh was nine. Fell down the bas.e.m.e.nt stairs, broke her neck. Josh bounced over to an aunt and uncle in White River Junction. They had two girls. One night, their propane tank exploded. Aunt, uncle, and girls, all dead. Josh was at a middle-school basketball game. He was twelve."

"Holy s.h.i.t," I said. "Is this going where I think it's going?"

Patty raised an index finger to shush me. "The only other family was a grandmother near Utica. So Josh bounced there. The morning of his seventeenth birthday, he called the cops and said he was worried about granny, she'd locked herself in her room."

She paused to sip water, extending a pinky. She'd chosen the right line of work. I was holding my breath, knowing what came next, dying to hear it anyway. Patty knew that, relished it.

"So the cops showed up and broke through the door. Which Josh could easily have done himself, by the way." She screwed the cap on her water. "Apparently, Granny had tied one end of a pair of pantyhose around her neck, then the other around her iron bed's headboard. Then she'd just rolled off the side."

"Apparently," I said.

We all went quiet.

Three sets of killings. But the first one came when Josh Whipple was nine. Who suspects a nine-year-old? And the others were spread across a couple of states, in rural counties.

"The nearest anybody came to tying it all together," Patty said, guessing my thoughts, "was a feature story in a little Vermont paper. 'The Tragic Life of Joshua Whipple,' orphaned at nine, et cetera. Whoever wrote the piece was a sap. Had all the pieces laid out in front of him, but couldn't get past the Josh-as-victim angle. By then he was homeless, panhandling and riding the rails. He said after the article ran, some social-services do-gooders tracked him down and set him up for mechanic training. He eventually wound up working for Ollie."

We were quiet awhile.

"You think?" Randall finally said to me. "Nine years old?"

"What do you think?" I said to Patty.

She shrugged. "In light of recent events."

A semi Jake-braked past on Route 62, tr.i.m.m.i.n.g speed as he neared Berlin's tiny downtown. I needed to press, needed to throw Patty Marx off balance. When the noise died I said, "So when were you and Phigg going to cross the border?"

Her double blink told me I'd nailed her. Randall straightened, too: This was new to him.

"I told you Josh tried to kill me not two hours ago," I said. "Guess I forgot to tell you we had time to chat. So I know Phigg was cashing out to run to Canada with you, devoted daughter. Live the artsy-fartsy life forever and ever."

"Complete and utter bulls.h.i.t," she said.

"Like h.e.l.l," I said. "I got you. I can read it in your eyes. But it's not enough. It doesn't fit."

"Do tell."

"You sold him the idea, didn't you?" I was figuring it out as I went along. "You wouldn't last six months carving ducks in a freezing cabin, any jacka.s.s can see that. You got Phigg to convert everything to cash because you were going to separate him from it, and sooner rather than later."

Patty Marx said nothing, looked hate-rays at me instead. I knew I'd scored. But there was another piece, a keystone that held it all together-and I couldn't find it. So we had a stare-down.

Finally Randall cleared his throat. "Shall we turn to practical matters? Patty, you know what's prudent and right."

"Turn state's evidence."

He nodded.

"I wasn't consulted and I wasn't present," she said. "Can we be absolutely clear on that? As far as I know, the Dufresne tragedy was a murder-suicide, even though..." She trailed off.

"Even though?" Randall said.

Patty locked eyes with him, and for the first time in ten minutes I saw no trace of journalist bulls.h.i.t or legal-beagle bulls.h.i.t. "Josh was in such a fine mood when he got back from Vermont," she said. "He chuckled to himself and sort of skipped around. When the news broke about Ollie and his mother, Josh explained how something like that might, just might, have happened." She swallowed, obviously scared even now as she recalled it. "The way he talked ... the detail, for G.o.d's sake ... things became pretty clear."

He took her hand in his. We sat quietly.

"So you weren't an accessory before the fact," Randall finally said. "All the more reason to hop over to the good guys' side. The sooner the better."

"I know that's the smart move," she said, patting his hand. "Still..." She looked at me, evaluating, and I knew what she was thinking.

Money changes people.

"Big picture!" Randall said, knuckle-rapping the table. "You are involved, in several senses of the word, with a man who kills anybody who looks at him crossways. No sum of money will improve your lot if he hangs you with your own panty hose."

Patty cut her eyes from him to me to him, still trying to see her way around to a big payday. Jesus, money makes people stupid.

I sighed, pulled my cell. "One b.u.t.ton dials Josh," I said. "If you don't promise to dime him out, here's what'll happen. I'll punch you in the face while Randall takes your keys. I'll tell Josh exactly where you are. Randall and I will drive away, leave you here on foot. How long will it take Josh to find you?"

Patty touched her right jeans pocket.

Randall held up a set of car keys. "You left them in the ignition." He smiled. "That wasn't smart."

"Congratulations," I said. "Now I don't have to punch you in the face."

"f.u.c.king a.s.sholes," she said, but her eyes clicked acceptance and she rose, arched her back, stretched. She'd tried her best, had played every card. She'd lost the trick, and she knew it. But she was still in the game.

What an operator. You could almost like her.

Almost.

"What are you going to do about Josh?" she said after a while.

I thought about Montreal and muscle man, the death sentence I'd laid on them. Was I prepared to take out Josh Whipple the same way? What if I was wrong again? My eyes met Randall's. He was thinking the same thing. "I want to give Trey a heads-up and find my father," I said. "Let the cops take care of Josh."