Penance (33 page)

He shot Meghan in the face. She was dead before her body hit the floor.

Conan spun and fired at me, but I was already moving. I dived across the desk, taking Marion down with me. I heard two more shots as my head hit something hard, setting off an explosion of light and sound followed by darkness.

When the dark fog lifted, I found myself next to the credenza behind C. C.’s desk. There was a smudge of blood on the corner and much more matting my hair to my head in the exact spot where Freddie had cracked my skull. I used the credenza to pull myself vertical. I stood leaning on it until the dizziness passed and the nausea subsided. My head throbbed and there was a stabbing pain in my lower back, but other than that I was in one piece.

I couldn’t say the same for Marion. A bullet had hit her high in the left shoulder, near the collarbone. She was conscious and holding the wound with a bloody right hand. “Help her!” she pleaded. I glanced around the office. C. C. was gone. So was Conan.

“You need help,” I told her and reached for the telephone.

“I can help myself,” she replied.

I handed her the telephone, then went through the office door and down the corridor, not even bothering to glance at Meghan’s lifeless body. I stopped at the elevators and listened. All I could hear was my own breath coming hard. I used the stairway, going down, my Nikes squeaking with each step. I stopped at Green and listened. Nothing. I stopped at Maroon. The same. I went down to the next landing, the lobby. Two people stood talking just inside the door, a man and a woman, their backs to me. I hit the stairs again and descended to the next level. That’s when I heard them. I followed the sound. It led me to the tunnel, brightly lit, with video cameras and emergency boxes every hundred feet. I activated one of the boxes as I moved along.

I found Conan and C. C. in the middle of the tunnel. C. C. was on the floor, her back pressed against the tunnel wall, trying to disappear into the wall, a broken heel a few feet away. Conan was pulling her arm with one hand and holding the Iver Johnson with the other, holding it like he knew how to use it. C. C. pleaded with him: “Please, please, please …”

“Galen!” I called. It was probably the only time I used his rightful name.

He whirled toward me and snapped off a shot, missing me by three feet. An Iver Johnson .25 holds seven. He had two left.

C. C. regained her feet and tried to run, but Conan grabbed her, wrapping a beefy arm around her throat and pushing the muzzle of the gun into her ear. “Don’t move,” he ordered.

I stopped, leaning against the wall for support. “Let her go,” I said.

“No, I love her.”

“Yes, that’s why you have a gun pressed to her head.”

“I have two bullets left,” he told me; apparently he was keeping track, too. “One for her and one for me.”

“Put the gun down!” I yelled.

“Why should I? Why shouldn’t I kill her and then kill myself? Give me one good reason. C’mon! Just one! You know what they’re going to do to me. So, c’mon. Give me a reason.”

“Because they’ll make fun of you,” I told him, not knowing where the words came from. “They’ll say you’re insane.”

Conan thought as I poured it on.

“They’ll say you killed sweet, innocent Carol Catherine Monroe because you were some kind of nut, like Jeffrey Dahmer and John Hinckley Jr. C. C. will become a political martyr and they’ll profile her in
People
magazine and write quickie books about her and make TV movies—and in every one you’ll be portrayed as a homicidal maniac. Do you want that? Or do you want to tell your side of the story? I think you should tell the world your side of the story. What do you think?”

I was fairly amazed when Conan slowly released his grip and C. C. slid to the floor. He turned to face me, reaching out the hand holding the Iver Johnson, like he wanted me to take the gun. Then a loud
crack
rocked the tunnel and Galen Pivec’s chest exploded as a bullet bore its ugly hole through it, exiting above his heart. The force of impact slammed him against the wall. He bounced off and fell down dead on top of C. C., who pushed and clawed and kicked herself free of him, all the while screaming, “Please, please, please …”

The security officer called John came cautiously down the tunnel from the opposite end, his gun trained on Conan. “I saw it all on the TV,” he said, gesturing toward the cameras.

C. C. crawled to the officer and yanked on his trouser leg. “Did you see, he was going to kill me, he was going to kill me for no reason, did you see?”

I had nothing to say to either of them. As the guard attempted to half carry, half drag C. C. to the tunnel’s State Capitol entrance, I went in the opposite direction, toward the State Office Building. “Where are you going?” the officer questioned.

“Send an ambulance and officers to C. C.’s office,” I answered.

By the time I reached the office, Marion was standing and leaning over the desk, drops of blood soaking the blotter. She was barking orders into the telephone. “Do it now!” she shouted at someone as I arrived.

“Carol Catherine?” she asked me after she hung up the phone.

“She’s fine,” I said. “Galen’s dead. The Capitol Security cops got him.”

Marion smiled. “It’s all going to work out after all,” she said.

The dead body on the floor didn’t bother her one damn bit.

THIRTY-TWO

I
N NO TIME THE
joint was crawling with the blue uniforms of the State Capitol Security Force, the maroon uniforms of the Minnesota State Patrol, and the dark suits of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. One of the suits escorted me from C. C.’s office to the State Capitol Security Center. We went through the tunnel. A photographer was snapping shots of Galen Pivec’s fallen body. I refused to look.

When we arrived at the Security Center, a disheveled C. C. Monroe—looking as if a Hollywood makeup artist had mussed her hair and a costume designer had artfully ripped her clothes—was charming nearly a dozen uniform and plain-clothes officers; they pressed around her, hanging on her every word. One of them handed her a cup of water and she smiled at him. He smiled back. Another draped his coat over her shoulders and she smiled at him, too, while all the others looked on enviously. C. C. told her story calmly and quietly while absentmindedly trying to brush Conan’s rich red blood off her dress. One officer sighed, actually sighed. Oh, if only he were a glove on that hand …

As I predicted, in C. C.’s version of the events she and Marion were innocent victims of a psycho villain.

“Bullshit,” I said.

“Mr. Taylor, I’m so glad you’re all right,” she said, smiling. “I thought he killed you, too.”

“No such luck, honey,” I said. The officers were greatly offended by my remark. Call Carol Catherine Monroe “honey”? I half expected one of them to grab a rope.

“Galen shot Mr. Taylor in the head,” C. C. told the officers and they looked at me skeptically.

“There’s nothing wrong with my head,” I countered. But one of the suits touched the side of it with his handkerchief, sending a bolt of lightning through my brain. He held it up for the crowd to see. The cloth was stained with blood. My blood. The officers all nodded and decided to forgive my boorishness.

The suit took me into a separate office and I gave him my statement, complete and unabridged; gave it to him while a paramedic performed maintenance on my skull. They made me wait after I’d finished. I waited a long time. I fell asleep waiting. When I woke, a man was standing in the doorway, the light streaming past him. He was calling my name. When I answered he introduced himself as an assistant to the attorney general. He did not give his name, only his title.

The assistant AG wanted to review my statement. He said he had a few problems with it. He asked me questions about the statement for well over an hour. By the time he was finished, I didn’t believe a word of it either. Eventually, he suggested that I should go home and rest for a few days, rethink my story. In the meantime, I should keep my allegations to myself—at least until I was in a position to produce corroborating evidence to support them. And as a personal favor to me, the assistant AG would contact the Department of Public Safety and inquire as to the status of my license. He was sure that with his recommendation, my application for renewal would sail through without any problems. I nearly started laughing. Here was another guy threatening to take away my license, my livelihood. Well, get in line, pal. Get in line.

I thanked the assistant AG and left. No one paid much attention as I walked through the Security Center. Outside the center, Marion Senske, her arm in a sling, was conducting a hushed conversation with the attorney general. He smiled at me. He looked like a man who made his living playing cards and right now held a fistful of aces. Marion did not smile. She had already used up her allotment for the day.

“I believe you have something that belongs to me,” she said.

“What could that be?” I asked her.

Marion came forward and whispered so the AG couldn’t hear. “Twenty-five thousand dollars,” was her bid.

I glanced sideways at the AG. “No sale,” I said.

“We’ll talk,” she called to me as I walked past her and down through the tunnel. The tunnel was clean; there was no indication at all that Galen Pivec had been killed there. There wasn’t even a chalk outline to show where he had fallen.

It was very late or very early, depending on your point of view.

I found Louise’s address in the telephone book. She lived not too far from Amy, in a small, unassuming white house on a dead-end street near a park built for small children, a park with swings, sandboxes, monkey bars and a merry-go-round. I woke her with my incessant pounding. She opened the front door after identifying me through the spy hole.

Louise was wearing a tired blue robe that she held closed at the throat with one hand. The robe covered a white cotton nightgown that brushed the top of ridiculously large slippers made up to resemble alligators, their long red tongues flapping up and down as she moved.

“How do you feel?” I asked as if she had been ill and I was bringing her Tupperware filled with chicken-noodle soup.

She didn’t answer.

“I’m sorry to bother you so late,” I told her.

She turned away from the door and I followed her inside. The living room was immaculate; you could eat off the floor if you didn’t mind blue and white carpet fibers with your food. Pillows were placed at exact angles on the chairs and sofa, magazines were fanned evenly on a highly polished coffee table, even sections of the newspaper were stacked neatly on the sofa where she had been reading them. On an end table was a photograph framed in silver, a photograph of an old, white-haired woman and a much younger, much livelier woman who was dressed in late-sixties style: bell-bottoms, tie-dyed T-shirt, long hair that fell to her waist. The young woman was beautiful. The young woman was Louise. What had happened? I wondered. What had transformed that vibrant flower child into the woman she had become, a woman who refused to walk barefoot in her own home for fear she would leave a mark?

Louise pivoted toward me. The neck of her robe fell open but she quickly closed it again, pinching the lapels together with her right hand. She patted her hair with her left hand. She did not speak.

“The man who killed Amy Lamb is dead,” I said.

She did not respond. Maybe she was afraid of interrupting me.

“Galen Pivec did it,” I continued. “He was shot to death this morning by the State Capitol Security Force after he killed Meghan Chakolis and wounded Marion Senske. You’ll read all about it in tomorrow’s paper.”

Louise nodded. Other than that, she did not move.

“I’m telling you about it now because the paper won’t say anything about Amy,” I added. “It’s possible that Pivec will never be accused of Amy’s murder. Joseph Sherman had already been blamed for it and the attorney general … Anyway, Pivec did it. He told me so before he died. I just thought you should know.”

Louise nodded again.

“Sorry to bother you so late,” I repeated.

“Do I owe you anything?” Louise asked. “Money?”

I shook my head and for the first time realized it was unlikely I would be paid for any of this.

“Thank you,” she said and drifted toward me, dropping her hand, letting the top of the robe fall open to reveal the unadorned neckline of her white gown. “Would you like to stay a while? I can make coffee.” Her voice was hopeful.

“Thank you, I can’t.”

“You were right, what you said, about being lonely,” she said. “I’m not a homosexual. When I kissed Amy … I was just pretending.”

“I understand.”

“Do you? Do you know what it’s like to be someone like me? When I come through that door each night, I know I’ll be alone. I know I’ll eat alone, I know the phone won’t ring. When I go to bed at night, I’m alone. When I wake up in the morning, I’m alone. That’s the worst part, waking up alone. Sometimes I whisper ‘I love you’ even though there’s no one to hear me. Sometimes I pretend there’s someone else saying the words to me. I just want to belong to someone. Can you understand that?”