Confessions (25 page)

I lean forward now, close to the glass and speaker. “James and Eric killed my sister. You hired them to pull the trigger.” My heart is ramming against my ribs, my stomach churning. “Someone paid you to do that. I need to know who that was. I need to hear it. From you.” My fingers fold painfully into my palms, nails digging flesh beneath clenched fist. “Who wanted my sister dead?”

It could be that, in a cosmic turnabout, to Dyson Fury I look like the caged animal, ready to pounce, but whatever the reason he seems unsettled. He looks away from me, to the glowing green light on the wall next to me, then glances over his shoulder to the peephole in the door. A way, I presume, for the guard beyond to ensure nothing untoward is happening.

“Tell me,” I say, and Dyson snaps fast around, fixing a hard stare on me.

“I had a deal!” It is hushed anger. A shout with no body. Still, it startles me. I inch back at the flash of rage. The mellowed, contrite dead man walking gone in the blink of an eye. Set to a hint of his old self by a few words.

My words.

“I did my part,” Dyson says, harsh and cornered.

“What deal?” I ask the question because I must. It is a stepping stone to move him toward confirming what I know. That the investigation of my sister’s death was quashed by Dave Benz because it would lead to a congressman’s wife. I don’t know what power John Hammond held over my father’s onetime partner and longtime friend, but, as was related to me, all drive to find Katie’s killer stopped cold. For some reason. By someone’s desire.

“What deal?” He repeats the question, incredulous that I am taking him down this road. Again he eyes the green light, as if it is some phantom there to mask its insidious opposite. “I shut up like I was supposed to! Did I ask for help getting me out of this?” He gestures with a toss of his head to the living tomb he’s encased in. “Did I play along all these years for me? No! I did it for my boy.”

Few paths are direct. This one requires a detour, I realize.

“What did you do for your son?”

He calms, if only slightly, and tries to compose himself. It is as if he’s toiled to grow new skin over old, a veneer of fable my visit has cracked, if not shattered whole.

“I kept it to myself,” Dyson says. “And they helped my boy.”

We are dancing the same step. I need to move him forward. I need to make him trust me.

“Dyson,” I begin, and reach up with one hand and remove my collar, laying the thin white strip atop the bible. “I’m not promising you anything as a priest, okay? I’m here as a brother who lost his sister. My baby sister. Okay? And I want…I
have
to know what happened and why. Please.” He is on the fence. Weighing whatever promises he has made, whatever bargain was offered him, against fulfilling what I have come here to extract from him. “If you did something for your son, understand that I’m doing this for someone I love. Someone taken from me. The reason it happened shouldn’t be buried with her.”

“It isn’t.”

“For me it is,” I counter. “It has been. Change that.”

Before my eyes he wilts, settling back in his chair, whatever resistance he’s embraced or manufactured crumbling. Not by my words, I sense, but, in the oddest turn, because this man facing me knows that it is the right thing to do. Where power has worked to cloak Katie’s murder in darkness, this wretched soul has decided to wash the lies away with a burst of light.

“They got my boy out of jail,” he begins, blind eye glistening with its sighted mate. “Stupid car job he pulled with some buddies for a chop shop. Not one of them was older than sixteen.” His head shakes at the stupidity. The waste. It is the gesture of a man who’s awakened from too many dreams alone, having tasted visions of what life might have been. “Didn’t surprise me. I’m the tree, he’s the apple.”

It is a flourish of language that does not surprise. There is a brightness within this man who saw to the murder of my sister. So it is not surprising that he had lifted himself from simple street thug to some position of influence among his kind. A cleverness which allowed him to make this pact.

“You said ‘they’ got him out…”

“He,” Dyson corrects himself. “A cop. Big guy. Hands like hams.” It is Dave Benz he is describing. The final pieces are falling into place. The picture, which I have visualized for some days now, is nearing the point where all players and all reasons swirling about my sisters death will be made plain. The story will be told. For me to do with what I choose.

“He got your son out of jail,” I say, and Dyson nods. I wonder in that instant if, by proxy, Dave Benz was thinking of his own wayward progeny as he pulled whatever strings necessary to aid the child of this man.

“Evidence got lost, I don’t know. He did what a cop can do and made it all go away. The boy, he’s with his aunt now in Florida. Away from here. Far away from me.”

That was what Dyson got. “And what did you give?”

“My everlasting silence,” he answers. “I take it with me to my grave and no charges pop up against my boy. He gets his chance to make a life for himself.”

Another stone. Another step forward. “How did the cop know you were involved?”

“They brought Jimmy and his buddy in for questioning, I guess…”

“Eric,” I say, filling in the blank. For some reason it seems wrong to leave Eric Ray Redmond anonymous here. All cards are being laid on the table.

“Yeah, well, he was the smart one, ‘cause he didn’t have my number in his cell phone. Cops bring me in and I’m facing murder for hire, conspiracy, all sorts of shit the DA is gonna run with. So I tell this cop, the big one, what went down.” Dyson pauses for a moment, his thoughts drifting back. Recalling a memory that is more dream than echo of what was real. “Next thing I know Jimmy and his buddy are on the street, and I’m playing this hulk with a badge to get a pass for my boy.” He glances down at his wrists, metal binding them. “A year later I get popped for taking down some shit heap fence who stiffed me down in Fort Wayne. The security camera in the alley where he met his maker kinda sealed my fate. I maybe could have gone back on the deal and pushed that Chicago cop to pull some strings for me, but…”

“You did it for your son,” I say.

Dyson nods, almost smiling. Maybe pleased with one right thing he’s done in his life. “My lawyer checked for me. The boy’s doing okay. Out of trouble so far.”

And the final stones now. A few steps left on the path. “The cop asked who hired you, didn’t he?”

“Yeah. Jimmy, the other guy, one of them blabbed about the five grand. Five grand for them, actually. Ten for me.”

Fifteen thousand dollars. The value placed on my sister’s life. I wonder if the number was hard and fast, or if some haggling took place. Was it twenty talked down, or ten talked up? It is unimportant to the overall matter, but I do think on it, if only briefly.

“Who gave you that money, Dyson?”

His good eye flits about for a moment, settling on the green light yet again. I reach up and slap a hand over it, forcing his gaze back to me.

“This lady came to me.”

There. I hear it.

‘
…do anything to protect my husband…
’

“At this dive I hung out at, down the block from my place. I practically lived there. Did my biz there. Cops, whenever they were looking for me, that’s where they’d find me.” He pauses, as if trying to arrange his recollections. “It was a Friday. Bacon dog special.” The words stop once more. I lower my hand from the light. He ignores it, though, staying fixed on me. “She sat right down at my booth and just said it. Right straight out. ‘I need a woman killed.’“ He coughs a chuckle. “Just like that. Like she was ordering a burger.”

One word he has shared resonates with me: ‘need’. She
needed
Katie killed.
Needed
her gone.

“She had cash,” Dyson goes on. “Right there in an envelope. A damn bank envelope. Like she came straight from First Chicago. It was all too crazy to be a setup. She handed over the whole roll and told me just to see that it got done.” He must note some reaction about me. Some twitch or shift in my gaze at how coldly he is relating the exchange. The transaction. When he speaks again there is no hint of whimsical disbelief at how it came to pass. No chuckle. No grin. For possibly the first time he realizes that before him sits collateral damage from his willingness that day to facilitate the end of a stranger’s life. “I’d done it before. Played the middleman. See that some punk ass dealer got what was coming to him. That kind of stuff. But this…” He shakes his head at the absurdity of it, time and distance allowing him a perspective he’d never anticipated. This is difficult for him, and despite the circumstances and the mostly quiet rage which has fueled my drive to reach this moment, I find it harder with each word he speaks to loathe Dyson Fury. Feeling that may be the closest I’ve been to my vows in weeks.

“Keep going,” I urge him gently.

“I told her before I could do anything I had to know who she wanted killed. Who was this woman? I told her to tell me about her.” He puzzles at the memory now rising. “She got all…different right then. She started smiling, like a huge smile. Like when your kid does something amazing.”

…
tell me about her
…

A terrible chill fills me.

“So she tells me about this woman, but she calls her a girl.”

…
oh she’s a beautiful girl
…

“Gives me a description, blonde hair, green eyes, a little taller than her.”

…
and her eyes, oh, they are the greenest green you have ever seen
…

“Says her name is Katherine. Starts going on about what she’s done in her life, all this shit I don’t need to know, so I cut her off and say just tell me where Katherine lives. She does. Gives me an address. And then, bam, she’s all serious again. The way she was when she came up to me. Night and day. Like someone flipped a switch in her.”

This is not possible. There is no way.

“She gives me the money and she goes. Up and gone like that.” He offers no more right then, watching me as I turn my head half away, a shiver visibly jolting me. “Hey, are you okay?”

I am not. “What did this woman look like?” He describes my mother. “And you told all this, exactly, to the big cop?” He did, and says it’s funny, not in a humorous way, but the big cop reacted just as I have when told the tale. Like he’d been punched in the gut.

It is that and more. The sensation of falling envelopes me. Tumbling toward a personal hell that could not have been imagined, and does not, in any way, make sense.

“You never saw her again?”

He shakes his head. “Don’t even know who she was. The big cop wouldn’t tell me.”

Dave Benz, who I’d brought myself to believe was protecting the last of my sister’s killers, was doing just that. And was still.

I was not wrong. And I was very wrong.

“I passed the job off to Jimmy and his bud and…” He stops. All that can be said, said.

I am falling no more, a heaviness now about me, my body pressed to the stiff chair. No weight lifted, as I had anticipated. No burden gone. Just doubled on itself, revelation no cousin to relief in this moment.

With effort I begin to move, my hands first, affixing my collar back in place. Words come next as I stand, thanking Dyson Fury for his time. Were there no glass I would have offered my hand to the man who helped kill my sister. A press of the buzzer by the door brings the guard. I am let out and given my coat, and a few minutes later, with my keys and personal items recovered, I walk across the parking lot beneath an uncertain sky. Patches of blue come and goes as winds high above whip the stormy clouds. It is winter trying to be itself against the pull of the heavens wanting to be known.

The night this all began for me, after hearing Eric’s confession and denying him the absolution he sought, I wailed to myself in solitude among cars jammed into the lot outside Lakeview Memorial. I reach my car in this place and stand at the driver’s door, not a hint of tears threatening. For a moment I try to fathom the impossibility of what has just been revealed to me. Yet I know the moment could turn to hours and I would have reached no conclusion, because there is none to be found here. The ultimate answer may lie locked away in my mother’s fading reality.

Or not.

Chapter Thirty

Home

It is dark when I pull into the driveway of the house where my sister and I spent our best years. Our innocent years. Warm light glows in the downstairs windows. Smoke rises wispy gray from the chimney and disappears against the black night sky. The weather has cleared on my drive back from Westville, leaving a crisp darkness above, spattered with pinpoints of distant, dead light.

I do not let myself in but knock at the front door. The locks click one by one a moment later and my father opens it for me. There is no greeting as usual. No query as to how I’m doing. No quick invite in to get out of the cold. We stand there, looking at each other, and we both understand right then—each of us knows the truth.

It does not surprise me that he does, considering the involvement of Dave Benz from the very beginning, when Katie lay dead on the market floor, until now, still trying to preserve a secret. Dave would keep nothing from my father, not then and not now. Beyond that, what part my father has played I do not know. But I will.

“Can I come in?”

He nods and steps aside. As I enter and he closes the door my gaze tracks to the living room, my mother there, rocking rhythmically, camera on her lap.

“How did it happen, pop?” I look to him. For a minute he gazes past me, fixed on the woman he married long ago, the woman he’s loved without limit or condition, then he turns and walks into the dining room. He slides a chair out at the far end of the table and sits. I follow him, standing at the opposite end.

“Do you know what I’m afraid of?” he asks me, hands folded atop the table. I have never considered my father a man of eloquence, but there are moments in our lives where the honest expression of doubt and demons trumps the flow of language with which it is conveyed. “I’ve lived my life in fear that everything good which has come to me, your mother, your sister, you…all that would slip away.” He pauses for a second, seeming to contemplate the realization of this fear. “And piece by piece I’ve seen that happen.”