The Death of an Ambitious Woman (17 page)

“Don’t you want to know why?”

“No. It won’t change anything. As soon as I can, I want to forget the end of Tracey’s life so I can remember the rest of it. No offense, I like you, but what I want is to never see you again. I want you to return Tracey’s things from her car and I want you to go away so I’m not constantly reminded of all this.”

“It will go away a lot faster if you release Wink Segrue from privilege.”

He didn’t respond to her question. He stood and walked over to the new sculpture. Ruth followed, stopping by his side.

The sculpture was crude, a three-dimensional rough draft, but its type, size, and mood were unmistakable. A tyrannosaurus rex, with giant hind legs and tiny front ones, he charged across the room, anger and a desire to kill infesting every part of his body. Except his head. Its line resisted the charge, pulling the great body back ever so slightly.

“What do you think of him?” Stephen asked. The question seemed like an honest one, not a request for praise.

“I like him very much,” Ruth answered truthfully. “What’s he doing? Why is he charging forward and at the same time pulling back?”

Stephen pointed to the other end of the studio where a completed triceratops stood, head down also readying a charge. “The T. Rex fights because he must,” Stephen explained. “It’s his instinct. But somewhere in his tiny brain, he knows this fight could mean oblivion. A portion of him hesitates, questioning, but not enough to prevent the battle. He can’t stop himself.”

“You make it seem very sad.”

“It is.”

“What will happen to him now?”

“Once I’m certain every nuance of his position is correct, I’ll build up his layers, burlap, canvas, metal mesh, and then cover his surfaces with fiberglass squares impregnated with epoxy resin. It’s a tedious and noxious process, but in the end he will be strong, and lighter weight than you would think.”

Ruth reflected that Stephen was a natural communicator. Perhaps Tracey’s income had not saved him from teaching, but deprived him of it.

“They’re fiberglass?”

“Yes. Like the body of a sports car.”

Ruth stepped back so she could see the entire piece. “I can’t believe I’m getting this much from just the underlying structure.”

Stephen Kendall nodded. “The armature is the most important part of the piece. It should be a work of art in and of itself. The piece has to be right at its core. If it isn’t, someday, it will all fall down.”

The post-funeral gathering was drawing to a close when Ruth returned to it. Moscone offered to drive her home. Ruth sent him on his way. She was exhausted to the point of befuddlement, hungry from a day when her last meal, breakfast, had been hours before. She walked out the Kendall gates onto the sidewalk, but instead of heading toward home, turned and walked the half-mile to Anna Abbott’s house.

Mrs. Abbott answered the doorbell herself. Mrs. O’Shea was on the Cape visiting her children. “Why Chief, how nice to see you,” Mrs. Abbott said. “You look a little peaky. Everything okay?”

“Fine. Fine. Busy though.”

Mrs. Abbott took Ruth by the elbow, exerting a surprising strength, and pulled her through the door. As she performed this maneuver, she squinted westward. “So hard to tell if the sun is over the yardarm when the days are cloudy,” she said. “I think it must be. We’ll both have a nice sherry.”

Mrs. Abbott led Ruth to the upstairs sitting room. A fire blazed in the hearth. A gardening show was on public television. Mrs. Abbott flicked off the TV and went to the little kitchen off the sitting room to get the sherry. Ruth sat by the warm fire, sipped the sherry, and brought Mrs. Abbott up to date on the Kendall investigation.

“Do the two five-thousand dollar payments to Pace help or hurt your case?” Mrs. Abbott asked.

“They bolster the murder theory, but create a whole new pool of suspects,” Ruth answered honestly. “Maybe it’ll never be unraveled.”

Anna Abbott was not impressed by negative thinking. “Of course you’ll solve it. How can I help?”

“Tell me about Jack Holden,” Ruth ventured.

Mrs. Abbott paused slightly, and then began. “Jack and Hildy are the children of John Holden’s second marriage. John Holden was a wonderful man, a friend of my late husband. He had a son and daughter by his first wife. Sadly, she died when the children were young. John was alone for many years, struggling, building a business, bringing up a family. When I was a young widow, we were often paired at dinner parties and the like. He was a delightful fellow.”

“Oh really?” Ruth teased. “Was it romantic between you?”

“Oh, no, no. After Mr. Abbott died, I was never really interested. I’ve always said of husbands, once a woman has broken one in, she should move on to other challenges.” Mrs. Abbott winked, and Ruth laughed in appreciation.

“In any case, evidently John Holden didn’t feel the same way. After his children went off to school, he was lonely. He married his secretary, settled her in a big house in Derby Center where they produced Jack and Hildy. For a while, everyone was happy. John delighted in his new family. He told me once he felt guilty because he had so much more time to spend with them. He realized what he’d missed with his older children.”

Mrs. Abbott took a sip of water from her crystal goblet and gazed out the window. “Then suddenly, it went bad. John had a minor stroke. There was no lasting damage, but I think his wife got scared. For the first time, she realized what it meant to be married to a much older man. She ran off with little Hildy’s violin teacher. I suppose John knew where she was, but no one saw or heard from her again. Jack and Hildy stayed in the house with their father. He’d brought up children alone before, and now he had to do it again. Poor man. It took him years to recover.”

“Were the Holdens rich?” Tracey asked, remembering what Margot Holden had said about money.

“Another intriguing question. It depends on what you mean by rich. Does he have a nice house in Derby Four Corners and another in Bar Harbor? Yes. Do his children go to the best schools? Yes. Does he have some expensive hobbies? Yes. But is he so wealthy he doesn’t have to ask how much things cost? I don’t think so. Stockbrokers like John Holden made money because they had rich friends, not because they themselves were rich. He left young Jack the business, so I assume any remaining assets were split among the other three children. And, of course, Jack himself divorced a couple of years ago. That usually adds to the strain. His ex-wife is one of the Dover Brindells. Excellent family. No money whatsoever. I’d say Jack Holden has a comfortable life, but it’s financed largely by the income from his business.”

“Do you know Fran Powell, the Kendalls’ neighbor?” Ruth asked.

Mrs. Abbott harrumphed. “She’s married to that fool Sandy Powell, Alex’s son. More money than brains in that generation. He went out to Hollywood after working in Daddy’s law firm for a few years. He was going to become a big producer. Came back with his tail between his legs and his girlfriend in a family way, as we used to say. Alex and Ginger gave them a big wedding anyway—very tasteless in my opinion. After the baby was born, out of respect for Ginger, I tried to involve Fran in town things, volunteer work, clubs. She never took to it. I called her again after her son went to nursery school, but she made it clear she wasn’t interested.”

Ruth took the last sip of her sherry. It was sweet and made her feel warm inside. Mrs. Abbott’s fire made her feel warm on the outside. The drink and the heat combined with her sleepless night tugged at her eyelids. Mrs. Abbott took their glasses to the little kitchen and refilled them. Then she went to the fireplace and fussed with the logs.

“Mrs. Abbott, how much trouble is my promotion in?”

Mrs. Abbott straightened up and stood by the mantelpiece. “I was hoping you wouldn’t ask. The district attorney has made a lot of trouble for you.”

“Is it over?”

“No,” Anna Abbott responded resolutely. “Not nearly. You’ll be fine. As long as nothing else goes wrong.”

At one-thirty in the morning, something else went terribly wrong.

Marty had picked Ruth up at Mrs. Abbott’s. The combination of the sleepless night and the sherry had been a powerful one. Marty laughed to see his so-in-control wife made soft by drink. She had even allowed him to baby her a bit, giving her a preventative dose of water and aspirin and tucking her into bed. But neither Marty nor Ruth overestimated the degree of her drunkenness. They both knew if she had been with anyone except Marty, the one person who made her feel so safe and loved, she could have pulled herself together and taken charge in a heartbeat.

Ruth was jolted out of sleep by the telephone. It took a moment to get her bearings in the dark. Lieutenant Lawry was on the other end.

“Lieutenant, what is going on?”

“I’m at headquarters. Someone tried to break into the property room.”

Twenty minutes later, Ruth and Lieutenant Lawry were standing in the rain outside the headquarters building watching Detective Albert “Dusty” Miller lift fingerprints. A tarp had been thrown up over the rear basement window that led to the property room and a high-powered light was trained on it. Two of its covering bars had been cut away with an acetylene torch and the pane of glass that had covered one third of the window was broken. Detective Miller worked diligently.

Ruth peered at the window. “Could anyone have been inside? Is the opening big enough?”

Lawry put his hands on his knees and looked closely. “I can’t tell. Maybe a small adult or teenager.”

“We won’t know until I can dust inside,” Detective Miller added. “Fingerprints, footprints. Grossly, it doesn’t look like anyone was down there, but we can’t check too closely, yet. We don’t want to mess up the scene.”

Ruth closed her eyes and thought about six months of court appearances in which every defense attorney challenged the chain of evidence. She saw cases being thrown out wholesale. “Where was the property clerk?” she asked, keeping her voice even.

“He says he was at his desk, right along, reading,” Lawry answered.

“I find that hard to believe. This operation must have taken a while, and made some noise.”

“I dunno,” Detective Miller said. “The breaking glass certainly would have made noise on the inside, but I’m not so sure he would have heard the rest from where he sits.”

“He said he investigated as soon as he heard the glass break,” Lawry added. “I think whoever it was accidentally broke the glass. The property clerk must have scared him off. That’s why he dropped the torch.”

“Anything unusual about the torch?” Ruth asked.

“Nope, standard,” Miller answered. “I’ll dust it, but any mechanic or plumber would have one.”

“Or sculptor,” Ruth muttered.

“Excuse me?”

“Nothing. How are the prints coming?”

“Exactly as you’d expect. Very little on the stone, way too much on the sills around the windows.”

“This can’t be a common place for people to put their hands, surely.”

“When was the last time the city painted this woodwork? There are years’ worth of smudged, partial prints here.”

“Footprints?”

Miller shook his head. “Whoever did this knelt,” he pointed, “here. Maybe there’s an expert out there can tell something from these knee prints, the weight of the person or the material of their trousers. We sure don’t have that kind of expertise in-house.”

Ruth knew he was right. “Detective, we need to know as soon as possible whether anyone’s been inside. Lieutenant, when he’s done we’ll need a complete inventory of the property room to make sure everything’s accounted for. I want a full report from the property officer as to everything he did from the minute he came on shift, and I want copies of everything to go to Internal Affairs.”

Lawry grimaced. “Is that really necessary?”

“Yes. I want to understand how anyone could have gotten this far.”

Mayor Rosenfeld was waiting impatiently in Ruth’s office. He was in a track suit, though he certainly wasn’t going jogging in the middle of a rainy night. His expression was strained, his movements staccato. He skipped a greeting and went straight to the point. “This is a disaster.”

“I know.”

“Chief, this is not a good time for a disaster.” The mayor’s voice rose with each syllable. “First the Kendall mess, now another serious problem.”

“It’s not another problem. The break-in’s related to the Kendall case.”

That did it. The mayor started to shout. “There’s a half million dollars worth of drugs in there! And evidence from about a hundred pending cases. There are guns, there’s jewelry. There’s as many reasons to break in as there are boxes of property.” The mayor paused. “You’re killing me, you know that? Haven’t I supported you every step of the way? When people said you were too young, the promotion came too fast, I defended you. And when they made noise about your transfer, I was there. I even spoke up for you on the female thing.” The mayor stopped to catch his breath. “You’re obsessed with the Kendall woman’s death.You’re killing your chances to be chief, and you’re killing me.”

Mayor Rosenfeld picked his wallet and keys up off the conference table and headed toward the door. At the midpoint, he turned. “Make the Kendall case go away. I don’t care how you do it. I don’t care what you do. End it. Now.”

When the mayor left, Ruth stood in the center of her office, the blood in her cheeks and neck pounding in time with the rapid beat of her heart. End it? Even if she wanted to, how could she end it now? She’d set too many wheels in motion.

Her office phone rang. It was Lawry, his voice urgent on the other end.

“It’s Pace. They’ve found him in Salton Beach. He blew his head off.”

Ruth moved through the throng in front of the Ocean Vu Motel looking for rank. The Ocean Vu was on the bay side of the spit of land that formed Salton Beach. Like all the buildings in this former combination honky-tonk and working class resort, it was built to maximize a tiny lot. The street in front of the building was crowded with New Hampshire State and Salton Beach police cars. Uniformed and plainclothes personnel, standing well away, formed a wide circle around one of the ground-floor units. A sour-looking man in his fifties emerged from the motel room. He stood on the front walk, sighed deeply, and lit a cigarette. Ruth stepped up to his side.

“Lieutenant Thibodeaux?” she asked, sticking out her hand. “I’m Acting Chief Murphy. We spoke on the phone.”

Thibodeaux nodded, skipping the handshake. “Go on in. Not that it will help you much. The sonofabitch put a shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.”

“Did he leave a note?”

Thibodeaux shook his head.

“Where’d the shotgun come from?”

“You tell me. He comes from down your way. Did he have it with him?”

“Dunno. We’ll check at our end. Have you released the name yet?”

“Nope. The first uniform on the scene got a description from the owner. He realized it might be your guy. You’re the only ones we’ve called.Your D.A.’s here, though.”

“Who called him?”

Thibodeaux shrugged. “Not us. Like I said—”

“Thanks.”

Ruth entered the unit through its sliding glass door, McGrath behind her. They had driven up together. Moscone, who had followed in his own car, was at their heels. Wherever Moscone had been, he’d arrived at the scene quickly after Lawry tracked him down.

The little motel room was shabby and cold. Even with the door closed, the baseboard heating was no match for a New Hampshire spring. The picture window at the back of the room framed a view of the bulrushes in the bay and the lights on the towers of the Seabrook nuclear power plant beyond. Solitary and enormous, Seabrook loomed like an evil castle against the night sky.

Ruth scanned the room, careful not to touch anything. Two lab guys worked in opposite corners of the outside wall, bright lights trained on their respective sections. Off to one side, Baines stood, his mouth to the ear of the young pathologist from the medical examiner’s office in Concord. They were in an intense, whispered conversation. Baines gestured toward the corpse.

Ruth steeled herself and did what she’d been avoiding. Whatever revulsion she felt at seeing Baines, she knew it was nothing compared to what would come next. She looked directly at the corpse. Her swift glance confirmed that reality can be even worse than imagination. The gun’s charge had decapitated Pace. His body, covered in blood from the stump of the neck down, sat blown back in the unit’s desk chair, palms spread out, facing upward. The gun stood butt-end on the floor between his legs, barrel resting against his left knee. Ruth gulped and looked back at where the men were working, admitting what her psyche had denied the first time. The texture of the wall was a bas-relief of blood and brains and skull fragments. Behind Ruth, Moscone made a strange noise in his throat. McGrath was silent.

“And he was such a handsome man,” Ruth said to no one in particular.

She introduced herself to the assistant medical examiner, ignoring Baines. “Got an estimated time of death?”

“Late last night or early, early this morning, but don’t hold me to it.”

“No one heard the shot?”

“The officers are still checking, but it seems unlikely. He was the only guest registered and the owner lives off premises. The houses on either side are closed up for the season.”

Ruth took another look around the room. “Will you do the autopsy soon?”

“It’s obviously suicide.” Baines spoke full voice for the first time.

“Obviously?”

“Likely,” the M.E. corrected. “District Attorney Baines was just explaining this man is a suspect in a homicide.”

“I guess he couldn’t take the guilt,” Baines said sadly.

Outside, Ruth headed back to Lieutenant Thibodeaux, who hadn’t moved from the front walk.

“So you like him for a murder,” Thibodeaux commented.

“He’s a strong suspect in a homicide.”

“Think he killed himself out of remorse?”

Ruth shook her head. “I don’t know.”

Thibodeaux’s eyes moved under heavy lids. “Looks that way to me. And to your D.A.”

“Was the door locked from the inside?”

“No. Thoughtful type. Probably didn’t want the owner to go to all the trouble of kicking it in.”

“Not very thoughtful leaving your brains all over the wallboard.” Ruth’s tone was neutral. “This may be a bit more complicated than you’re thinking.”

Thibodeaux grunted. “I don’t like complicated.” He turned and walked away.

Baines approached across the lawn. “A word?” he asked politely. “Over there.” He pointed to a place beyond the parked cruisers.

“You got lucky with this one,” he said, as soon as they were out of earshot. “Don’t pretend you didn’t.”

“Funny, I don’t think Mrs. Pace is going to feel that way.”

“Whatever. It’s over now. Let’s put this one behind us and move on, Chief.”

Ruth noted the “Chief” instead of his trademark, “dear.” The public nature of their “feud” probably wasn’t helping him, either. “We can’t put it behind us yet,” she responded. “We’ve found two five-thousand dollar cash payments to Pace, one on the day Tracey Kendall died. Pace wasn’t acting alone. Someone paid him to kill her.”

“God dammit!” Baines yelled so loud the cops at the crime scene fifty yards away turned to stare. Baines lowered his voice to a hoarse, but menacing whisper. “Are you insane? Prosecuting Pace would have been impossible. The idea of prosecuting someone else, now that Pace is dead, is a joke. A cash payment? You have no witnesses, no paper trail. My God, are you crazy?”

Baines took a moment to catch his breath and then moved back into conciliatory mode. “Chief Murphy. Be smart. This case is terrible for both of us. It ends here. Leave it alone and I’ll—”

“And you’ll what?”

“And I’ll make some calls,” was all he said, but Ruth knew what he meant. He would call the mayor and the aldermen he had spoken to and undo the damage he had done to her appointment.

She didn’t respond. Baines stuck his hand out, but Ruth wasn’t ready to shake.

“Think about it,” Baines urged. “I’m sure you’ll see the sense in what I’ve said.” He turned and walked away.

The New Derby contingent stayed in New Hampshire two more hours, listening to Baines spin and respin the suicide tale for the young pathologist and an eager Lieutenant Thibodeaux. “He couldn’t handle the guilt,” Baines kept saying. “He whacked his girlfriend, but he couldn’t stick. He took off, then he killed himself. Your classic murder-suicide, just delayed by a few days.”

Ruth listened and said nothing. Beside her, Moscone and McGrath said nothing either, following her lead. Murder-suicide. The mayor would be thrilled, Ruth thought grimly. The case was solved. There would be no trial. It would go away, just as he had ordered.

Ruth returned alone to McGrath’s car and sat in the passenger seat watching the diffuse dawn light seep through the clouds over the ocean. Baines was right. The case against Al Pace would’ve been a difficult one. Now that Pace was dead, it would very likely be impossible to convict his accomplice. Even if Ruth arrested someone, which she couldn’t without Baines issuing a warrant, the case would probably never go to trial. Pace’s apparent suicide brought the opportunity to close the book on Tracey Kendall’s death and move on.

Ruth was still turning this over in her mind when McGrath and Moscone walked over to the cars. Moscone got into his own car and McGrath climbed into the driver’s seat next to Ruth. Moscone’s car swung out from behind them and sped away, disappearing down Route 1A.

“The Pace house?” McGrath asked. When Ruth nodded yes, McGrath said, “Indeed.” He started the car and drove off down the road, the medical examiner’s van growing smaller in the rearview mirror.

Riding along in the silent car, Ruth found herself thinking about the moment ten years before when her relationship with Baines had gone sideways. She considered what she could have done to prevent it, how she should have reacted when Pezzoli offered to perjure himself.

At first, she’d stood her ground, insisting, “That’s not what I saw.”

Baines’s gaze met her own. “No one’s going to ask you what you saw.”

Ruth hadn’t replied. It was one thing to refuse to support another cop’s lie. It was quite another to call a brother cop a liar. In fact, it was impossible. Ruth was a woman, on a new force where she wasn’t known, in a new county where she wouldn’t be believed. To make any charge against Pezzoli was to kiss her career good-bye. And each of the three people in the room knew it.

“Good. I’m glad we understand each other.” Baines flipped his litigation bag closed, shook Pezzoli’s hand, and walked out the door.

Ruth and Pezzoli walked back to headquarters. The boys’ parents had arrived. Kvitnitsky’s father, bald and bearlike, was angry—angry at the police, angry at this new culture, but mostly angry at his big, dark-haired son with two prior convictions.

Goubanov’s mother was bewildered, frightened. She dabbed her glistening eyes with a pale pink hanky. She was an old mother for such a young son, late fifties or better, her hair steel gray. Her English wasn’t good enough to keep up with the booking sergeant’s. Her son translated the charges for her. When it was done, they wrapped their arms around each other and walked away.

The Goubanov boy might be guilty. He also could be innocent, a lonely boy, ditching school who stopped to get a little taste of home by chatting with a countryman. The charges against him were serious.

Pezzoli went upstairs and typed up their report nice and neat, listing what the charges would be. Ruth took a little comfort in that. A good defense attorney would smell a rat, know they’d been to the D.A. before writing it up. Ruth clung to the idea that the boy could save himself, because she couldn’t save him. But what had the chances really been?

Ruth could see now that despite his misconduct, Baines was not the problem. For Baines, it had been a business transaction quickly forgotten. She was the one for whom it was a festering boil. In her eagerness to keep her new job, she had violated her own beliefs. The incident disgusted her. She was disgusted with herself for not standing up to Baines and Pezzoli, not living what she believed in. Then she had turned the hatred outward, blaming Baines, not for what he’d done to the boy, but for what he’d made her do to herself.

“So, murder-suicide,” McGrath said neutrally, bringing her back to the problem at hand. “All tied up nice and neat.”

Ruth said nothing. They drove a few more miles in the early morning light. Finally, Ruth spoke. “We know it isn’t.”

McGrath nodded. “The ten thousand dollars.”

Ruth closed her eyes and saw the space where Pace’s handsome head should have been. “It isn’t over,” she said quietly.

McGrath kept his eyes trained ahead. “No matter how much you want it to be.”

Ruth cradled her forehead in her palm.

“The M. E. seems like an okay guy,” McGrath said, “but kinda young, inexperienced.”

“Impressionable,” Ruth finished for him. She had made her decision. “Turn around, Detective. I need to go back to talk to him. Point out a few things he should be looking for.”

When Ruth got back into the car after talking to the young medical examiner, McGrath took off again down Route 1A. On a cloudy Sunday just past dawn, the road was mostly deserted. They passed an occasional diner, fully lit, feeding fishermen their coffee.

Ruth and McGrath said nothing. They had known each other too long to pick apart the meaningful moments in their lives. It’d been their practice not to talk about the important things from the moment they had met, when McGrath had rescued Ruth from Detective First Class Arthur Pezzoli.

Ruth knew there were whispers around the station house about what had happened. Pezzoli had probably told the story himself, playing her up as the fool. The day after the Goubanov boy was arraigned, John McGrath stopped Ruth in the hall. Ruth knew him vaguely. The New Derby detective force was small and she had a passing knowledge of everyone on the shift, but it wasn’t her job to hang around the office and she hadn’t yet found a place on the grapevine.

“How ya doin’, Lieutenant?” McGrath asked, sticking out his hand.

“Fine,” Ruth answered, her guard up. She held her breath. McGrath pulled her closer, his grip still tight on her hand. “I’ve been noticing lately that you seem to know your way around here pretty well.” He paused while Ruth wondered what he was getting at. “It seems to me that someone who knows her way around as well as you do, shouldn’t really be in training anymore. Is that true?”

“Oh, yes.” Ruth felt the color heighten in her face. “I think I’m really ready to assume full duty now.”

McGrath let her hand go and looked at his fingernails. “I thought so. Tell you what, I’ll have a word with the captain. I need a new partner, you know.”

Ruth felt a wave of gratitude that stung behind her eyes, not just because McGrath had rescued her from Pezzoli, but because he’d restored her faith in the place where she worked. McGrath knew the score. He knew she wouldn’t be called to testify in the Goubanov case, he probably knew why, and he was offering his support. “Thank you,” Ruth said. “I’d like that.”