McNally's Dilemma (31 page)

“You have to excuse me,” she apologized. “It helps my nerves. I’m very nervous. I got problems, and I figure the liquor is more sensible than pills. Pills kill, you know. Marilyn Monroe took pills and look what happened to her.”

“You had a child with Geoff Williams?”

“Why the hell not? He was my husband. Is that a crime?”

So Geoff Williams, or Jeff Wolinsky, had been married to this woman and had had a son with her. No wonder he didn’t want the boy parading around Palm Beach with the name Jeff Wolinsky. When I asked the supposed Seth Walker what his connection was to Geoff, the boy had said, “He was an acquaintance of my mother’s.” Well, he hadn’t lied, I’ll give him credit for that.

“Geoff rented this place for you when he was in Palm Beach alone, about six weeks ago. Is that right?”

She finished her beer and refilled the glass, emptying the can of Bud. “Not for me. I was happy in the trailer. It was the kid, little Jeff, like we used to call him, who has big ideas. The kid was crazy jealous with the way his father was living while we were marking time in Boynton. He told his father that if he didn’t improve our lot—that’s what he said, improve our lot—he would rat on his father.” She poured herself another neat rye without apology.

The kid was a born blackmailer. “You mean he’d tell Geoff’s wife that Geoff had an ex-wife and a son?”

“You’re a laugh and a half, Mr. McNulty.” I didn’t bother correcting her because I doubt if she would know what I was talking about. “Ex-wife, my eye. We were never divorced. I’m the only legal wife J-E-F-F Wolinsky ever had. So if he left an insurance policy...”

I couldn’t have been more stunned if she had hit me on the head with her bottle of Four Roses. I sat there in what I believe is called a state of suspended animation as she droned on in a drunken rage.

“... He started giving tennis lessons. Oh, man, he was good at tennis. Only, all his students were women old enough to be his mother, and after a hot day on the court they retired to a hot time in the bedroom. He changed his name for professional purposes. How do you like that one? Professional purposes. Geoffrey Williams...”

The story unfolded like a soap opera scripted by the Marquis de Sade, and as I listened all I could think of was Melva. Poor, poor Melva. As if murderess wasn’t bad enough, she would now also be known as the second wife of a bigamist. Geoff Williams—or Jeff Wolinsky—had gotten off easy.

“... I had the kid and my nerves were bad. They always were.” She poured herself another shot of Four Roses, but her beer glass was empty so she chased it with yet another shot of Four Roses. How much longer could she stay on her feet?

“Then he gets married again. Can you beat that? To a rich bitch, no less. So what am I supposed to do? Put him in jail? Then who’ll support us? Me and the kid. Tell me that, Mr. Mac. Tell me that.”

In her own befuddled way, she had a point.

“... bought us the trailer and gave me a thousand a month. A thousand. In cash. Every month. Hey, who’s complaining? Not me. All I had to do was keep my mouth shut, an’ I did. But not the kid. Oh, no, not him. When he’s old enough to know where his father is, he don’t pass a restful night until he gets what’s coming to him. What’s coming to us. Me, too. The kid says his father owes us, and the kid bugs him until we end up in this mausoleum on a lake.”

“Geoff got the boy a job with Fairhurst?”

She ran her hands through her hair and groaned. “That job. A driver for a rich guy. Little Jeff was angry, let me tell you. Angry, like he wanted to kill his old man. But big Jeff says the job is just a stepping-stone, and he talks the kid into doing it for now, because big Jeff wants the kid to see how the other half lives, like the job is a freaking finishing school. Big Jeff could talk even better than he could play tennis. But he couldn’t talk the rich bitch out of shooting him.”

“So your son decided to blackmail his employer,” I said, bringing the subject back to the original purpose of my visit. But then, how often does one get sidetracked by a tale of bigamy, booze, and betrayal in sunny Florida?

“I don’t know anything about that, Mac. I swear.” Again, she didn’t appear to be even remotely interested in what her son had on John Fairhurst to threaten him with blackmail. “An’ little Jeff ain’t got nothing to do with the crap that’s been going on around here. He got in with a bad crowd in Miami, my kid. When we moved in here they muscled in on him an’ started throwing parties almost every night, looking to cash in on the rich Palm Beach brats. My kid ain’t in on it, but he owes them, you see—so they moved in on us.”

“I’m not interested in that,” I said. “I told you I was here on behalf of John Fairhurst.” Then I asked, not on John Fairhurst’s behalf, “If little Jeff is not in on the drug scam, how do you propose to pay the rent on this house? When your husband died, you lost your benefactor.”

She started laughing—one octave below hysteria. “He left us an annuity. That’s what the kid said. You know what an annuity is, Mac? A steady income, that’s what.”

“I don’t believe Geoff Williams was in a position to leave anything. He was being supported by his wife. Or the woman who thought she was his wife.”

She screeched like a parrot as her arms began conducting an unseen orchestra. “That’s what little Jeff said. An annuity. He got himself killed, and that makes it an annuity.”

Tina Wolinsky was now listing, like a ship taking on water. It was only a matter of time before she would sink. She was completely
non compos mentis,
but I had to at least try to make some sense out of the connection between Geoff’s death and her annuity. “Murder isn’t an annuity,” I told her. “What are you talking about?”

She picked up her pilsner glass and put it to her lips. A moment later she realized the glass was empty. “Screw you, Mac. He got killed and that makes—”

“SHUT UP. YOU HEAR ME. SHUT UP.”

The glass shattered when it hit the floor. Little Jeff was standing in the doorway, pointing at his mother, and screaming.

F
OR THE FIRST TIME
since coming to Hillcrest I feared for my safety. The boy was in a rage and the poor woman, completely disoriented, reacted as if a chicken hawk had flown into her coop.

“Shut up,” he kept shouting. “Just shut up! Don’t you know who he is? How many times do I have to tell you to keep your mouth shut around strangers? You don’t know what you’re saying, so keep your mouth shut!”

I stood up. “Take it easy, kid. She’s not responsible for—”

“Who’s asking you?” Now his fury was transferred to me. “Who’s asking you, eh? Can’t you keep your puss out of where it’s not wanted?”

His mother began to sob, the sound both forlorn and unnerving. Little Jeff went to her and took her hand. “Okay. Okay,” he repeated, trying to quiet her. “It’s going to be okay.” His anger vanished as quickly as it had erupted, and now he spoke to his mother with the compassion of a parent reassuring a frightened child. He even made a vain effort to explain the reason for his verbal barrage. “This guy works for
her.
He’s sniffing around about the old man’s murder. Don’t you get it? He’s trying to pump you. He’s trying to prove a case of justifiable murder.”

He led her to the sofa and gently lowered her to a sitting position, but as soon as he let go of her arm she slumped over, her head hitting the armrest. The boy took a pillow from the back of the couch and gently raised her head and then lowered it onto the cushion.

His movements were as professional as that of a nurse. Little Jeff had probably been a caretaker from the age of ten or eleven, and the scene I had just witnessed—the explosion followed by the remorse—an everyday occurrence. I wanted to walk out of the room and out of the house. Turn my back on Hillcrest for the last time and let these people sort out their lives as best they could. She would sleep it off and little Jeff would—would what? End up where he’d been heading since the day he was born, thanks to his father. Oh, yes, Geoff Williams, or a rat by any other name, had gotten off easy.

But I had a job to do and no choice but to tell little Jeff just what that job was. “I’m not working for any
her,
I’m working for John Fairhurst, and I’ve been to trailer
numero
nine.”

I saw his shoulders slump just as his mother’s had. A family trait based, no doubt, on a lifetime of having their schemes, aspirations, and petty intrigues squashed just short of fruition. He looked at me as if he were sizing me up, trying to determine how much bull he could send my way. Then he headed for the bar. On his way there he said, “Tell him to forget it. It was a joke. I don’t give a crap about his fag grandfather. And I’m not going back to that house. Tell him that, too.”

A confession, an apology, and a resignation, all wrapped up in one neat package. A good try, but it wouldn’t work and he knew it.

“It’s too late for that, Jeff. I told you I wasn’t formally involved in your father’s murder investigation, but thanks to your second letter, I find myself in it up to my chin.”

He helped himself to a Bud from the mini fridge, but didn’t invite me to join in. “You know who I am,” he said, then nodded in the direction of the sleeping woman. “Sure you do. What else did she tell you?”

“Everything. Quite a tale.”

“Yeah, like I should go on Oprah, right? Or how about
Family Feud?
Hey, man, that show must have been named for us.”

The boy wasn’t stupid—and more’s the pity.

“Look,” he was saying, “it was a joke. Tell Fairhurst it was a joke. A joke that got out of hand.”

“Sorry, Jeff, but after mailing the second letter the joke was on you. It wasn’t supposed to be sent, was it? When Veronica Manning came into your life, the twenty-five grand you wanted from Fairhurst began to take on the appearance of loose change. Who mailed that second letter, Linda Adams?”

He carried his beer over to one of the chairs and sat. Pulling off the tab, he drank straight from the can. His mother started snoring, and he looked at her when he answered. “No. I left it with a guy in Miami. I forgot to tell him not to mail it.”

“I’ll bet you did. You had a lot on your mind. You want to tell me about it?”

“I don’t want to tell you dick, Mr. McNally.”

“Tut, tut, son. Let’s watch the language and listen carefully to what I have to say. I might be your only hope out of this mess.”

That got his attention. Hope! Little Jeff knew the word well. It was the story of his life summed up in the only four-letter word that wasn’t naughty.

“First, you got your father to rent this place for you and your mother.”

“Hillcrest. That’s what they call it. How do you like it, Mr. McNally? He took us out of a little dump and put us in a big dump.”

“Then your friends from Miami came up north and moved in with you.”

He stood up, removed his jacket and put it over his mother, touching her head gently. She snorted and mumbled in her drunken sleep. When he took his seat again, he said, “I owed them money, but I’m not involved in what they’re doing here. I’m clean on that score.”

I explained yet again that I wasn’t interested in what was going on here. Little Jeff would have to convince the cops—not me—of his innocence in the goings-on at Hillcrest.

“Then Geoff, as I know him, got you a job with Fairhurst.

“The final insult, right? Driving Fairhurst’s Rolls in a monkey suit.” Little Jeff was infuriated. “Your mother said your father promised you better things if you took the job.”

He drank from the can again, not really enjoying the brew. He pulled a pack of Camels out of his shirt pocket and lit one. “He wanted me to look and learn. You like that, eh? So I looked and learned.”

“You learned the Fairhurst secret from Arnold Turnbolt.”

“Yeah, he told me. With a guy like Turnbolt all I had to do was smile pretty to learn all the Fairhurst gossip.”

“I don’t think I want to know that, Jeff.”

“Oh, no, you don’t want to know that. Too raunchy for you, eh? You people think life is a freaking rose garden. Well, some of us have to soil our hands to make a living.”

Feeling I deserved it, I took out an English Oval and lit it. Jeff eyed the package with curiosity, but didn’t ask what they were for fear of appearing ignorant of life in a rose garden. “You wrote the blackmail letters, took them to Miami, mailed one and left the other with your pal to mail on a given date. That was your first mistake, little Jeff.”

“Mr. McNally, my first mistake was selling pictures from girly magazines to my sixth-grade classmates. I didn’t come into blackmail at an entry-level position.”

I begrudgingly admired him his sense of humor. He might have made it as a stand-up comic or a rap artist, an art form I have long thought should get a C before the R-A-P. “You spotted Veronica Manning at the Horowitz party and introduced yourself to her.”

“Why not? We’re practically kin.”

“What did you tell her?”

“Everything my mother told you,” he said, “only I was sober when I let her in on our family secret.”

“Why?” I asked. “She’s just a kid.”

“Hey, man, she could teach you a few things.”

She could and she had. “Did you intend to blackmail her or her mother?”

“It crossed my mind. But what I really wanted to do was stick it to my old man. He played with us too long. Too many promises he never kept. Putting us in this overgrown flea bag and dressing me in a chauffeur’s uniform. So, thanks to him, his son is told to stay in the kitchen with the help, while his stepdaughter is lapping up the champagne and caviar. Something snapped inside me, Mr. McNally, so I made a date with Veronica and played out my hand. It wasn’t hard. She knows a good-looking stud when she sees one.”

Modesty was clearly not the boy’s long suit, and now I knew what the row was all about in Melva’s solarium on that ill-fated night. “Your disclosure probably led to your father’s death.”

For the first time since coming in the room, he smiled as if he sincerely meant it. “I hope so.”

We were both quiet, smoking our cigarettes, the only sound coming from the congested lungs of Tina Wolinsky. I wondered if he was anticipating my next salvo. “But when Veronica came running here the night Geoff was killed and asked you to swear that she had arrived before the murder, you forgot all about blackmailing Fairhurst and started blackmailing Veronica, only this time around you called it an annuity.”