“Why the fuck you shoot him?” Merrill yelled. No one had an answer for that.
Someone yelled, “Get a ladder from maintenance down here.
Now.”
It
would
take too long, do Hahn no good.
Helpless.
Powerless.
Frustration and
futility.
Unable to do anything else, I stood beneath Hahn, looking up at
her.
And I stayed that
way.
Long after anything could be done, long after she was dead, I still stood there, being with her mortal remains, being with
my
guilt.
I had been unable to
save her,
unable to prevent her death. I had failed
her.
Now all I could do was stand, stay here with her as long as what was left of her was here. All I could do was be present, bear witness, watch
over,
grieve, and feel
guilty.
“H
e was killed
over
money?” Cheryl
Jacobs
said. “Not even—but to
cover
up the fact that someone else was being killed for
money.”
I frowned and nodded.
We
were standing under the gazebo extending out
over
St.
Joseph’s
Bay.
I had just told her all I knew and guessed about her
son’s
death.
“How do I
live
with that?”
“I’m not
sure.”
It was
day’s
end, and beyond the
bay,
the entire, expansive horizon glowed a vibrant coral beneath a clear blue
sky,
both of which reflected on the gently bobbing surface of the bay waters
below.
I thought about Hahn.
“There’re things I
can’t
live
with,” I said, “but I
do.”
She turned to me, her hurting, glistening eyes penetrating.
“You
ever lost a child?”
I shook my head. She was right. What did I know?
We
were quiet for a long moment, the breeze coming in off the bay stinging our eyes, but not enough to account for the volume of water they were producing.
I had been unable to do anything for Hahn. I
was
unable to do anything for Cheryl. Except maybe just to be with
her,
silently suffering alongside
her.
Wasn’t
much, but it was something.
“This is all so
fucked,”
she said. I nodded.
“Yes
it
is.”
We
stood there long after the glow of the horizon turned from coral to salmon to apricot to the charcoal gray of dusk.
Before us now the bay was growing black, a glass darkly reflecting the lights of the small town on either side of
us.
I would stand with her for as long as she wanted, this childless mother, this stricken, inconsolable
woman,
weeping with those who
weep,
mourning with those who mourn, grieving with those who grieve.
I
was sad.
For
Cheryl.
For
Hahn.
For
my mom.
For
myself. It was a little later that evening, dusk edging into darkness, and I was sitting in an uncomfortable
wooden
chair down by the
river
behind my trailer.
Thinking.
Feeling.
Processing.
No bottle.
Nobody.
Just me and my mind––my sometime
enemy,
sometime friend.
Guilt.
I could’ve saved Hahn. Should
have.
I had been too distracted, too divided, too scattered.
Between my new relationship with Anna, dealing with
Mom’s
dying and death, the murder at
Potter
Farm, the Suicide Kings, the warden wanting my
job,
and Andy
Bearden’s
body being found in the
woods,
I had not focused to the extent I should
have.
I
wasn’t
blaming anything I had going on––only my approach, only my management.
I had been given enough time to keep Hahn from dying, but I had failed.
I had been given the grace of time to repair my relationship with my mom but I had not taken full advantage of it, had done only part of the
work.
I had not devoted enough time and energy to finding out who killed the young woman propped up on the prison fence and had barely begun to investigate what really happened to Andy Bearden.
Well,
I could do it
now.
With nothing left to do in the Suicide Kings case, I could put aside
my
mourning for my mom for the moment and concentrate completely on the
Potter
Farm victim.
Sitting up and taking three deep breaths and letting each one out
slowly,
I opened more than just my mind to what I knew and what I
didn’t
know.
I had something earlier, when I got the little jangling inside about real motive for Brent
Allen’s
murder.
Something. What was it?
Money.
Life insurance
policies.
Last will and testaments. Greed. Subterfuge. Black market organs. Blackmail. Money
motive.
Blackmail. That was it. Private blackmail. Private humiliation and coercion, not public, not political.
Private.
Why was she at the
farm
that night? What was her real motive for being there?
Had she really not gone into the house?
Who had killed her? Why? Why stage her body against the fence at the prison? Why steal her body? Had the killer stolen the body?
Was
it even related? I thought about when it had happened and where. I thought again about what the driver had said.
What secret did her body hold? Why take the risk of stealing her like that?
I thought about Judge
Cox’s
crazy proclamation that it was part of the gay agenda and Don Stockton saying everything ultimately came back to the money
motive.
Ralph Long was in the closet. He was also as motivated by money as anyone I
knew.
Names.
Faces.
Andrew Sullivan. Chris
Taunton.
Deacon
Jones.
Hugh Glenn. Donnie
Foster.
Dad.
Hugh wanted to embarrass Dad. Who else wanted to embarrass any of the other candidates?
I thought about possible motives for
murder.
Money.
Greed.
Jealousy.
Rage.
Revenge. Sociopathy.
Power.
To
silence.
To
cover another crime.
To––
That was it.
The right key inserted, the pins aligned in the tumbler, rotation of the plug, and everything began to fall into place.
Unlocked. Opened.
“Y
ou had sex with the victim at the
farm
that
night,”
I said.
He started to deny it.
“I’m just telling you what I think,” I said. “But if I’m right,
there’s
evidence to back up everything I
say.”
Somehow without acknowledging or agreeing with anything
I’d
said so far, he indicated for me to
go
on.
“You
had a little more to drink than you normally
do,”
I said.
“I
shouldn’t’ve
had anything,” he said. “I rarely ever
do.”
It
wasn’t
late but it was dark outside and seemed later than it
was.
We
were in Judge Richard
Cox’s
home office. Just the
two
of
us,
in an otherwise very still, very quiet house.
“But you did drink and your inhibitions were down. Melanie Sagal told me what you like, what you want to do that your wife
won’t
do.
And the blonde, who never went inside––Carla
Jean
said she never let anyone in––came on to you in the parking area, near your car, after most everyone was gone.”
He nodded.
“Offered to
give
you what you
wanted,”
I said. “Said she had always been attracted to me, to my wisdom and the
way
I used
my
power.
Said she wanted nothin’ more in the
world
than for me to fuck her in the
ass.
She was so assertive, so in charge, and I was so turned
on.”
“So y’all got in your big black car and had anal sex.”
“The best sex of my
life,”
he said. “I’ve never . . . it was . . . so good.”
“And
when you were done . . . there was a revelation,” I said. “Did you make the discovery or––”
“
No,”
he said. “I was still . . . enraptured.”
“The reveal came because the whole encounter was a
setup.”
He nodded.
“You
had just had sex––according to you, the best sex of your life––with a man.”
“I
didn’t
believe her at first,” he said. “See, I still call her a
her
. She actually had to pull her panties aside and show me her penis before
I’d
believe
her.”
“Someone had decided to teach you a lesson,” I said.
“To
make you question your sexual assumptions and your homophobic
rhetoric.”
He nodded. “She said as
much.”
“Which is why you proclaimed this to be a part of a gay agenda at the debate the other night.”
He nodded again.
“And
when she showed you her penis?” I asked. “When you looked down there and saw it lying there right
above
where you had just been . .
.”
“I lost
it,”
he said. “I hit
her.
I’m old and not very strong, but I was on top of him and I used my weight to hold him there and I hit him. And hit him. And hit
him.”
“But you
didn’t
kill
him,”
I said.
“You’re
old and weak and were tired and drunk and spent. The most
you
did was daze him a little.”
“I
didn’t
kill
anybody,”
he said. “I
couldn’t.
But how do you know?”
“After
you went inside to call your daughter and wait for her to pick you up––something you did because you were too shaken up to
drive,
not because you thought you had too much to drink––a witness saw her stumbling toward the barn.
You
didn’t
kill her because she was beaten to death and because she had run––actually, been chased for a long
way
right before she was murdered, and she fought
too,
put up a hell of a struggle, which is why rigor mortis set in as fast as it did and the killer was able to prop her up against the prison
fence.”
“But why do that?” he asked. “Why take her to the prison? Why prop her up?”
“He chased her through the
woods
between
Potter
Farm and the
prison,”
I said. “Probably killed her somewhere near where the
woods
end on the other side. Saw the prison. Thought it
would
be a
way
to
remove
suspicion from the farm.”
“I
couldn’t
believe it when I heard where she
was,”
he said.
“And
you
panicked,”
I said.
“You
thought if the ME did an autopsy
he’d
see she was really a guy dressed as a girl and eventually the whole
world
would know that the anti-gay ‘marriage is between one man and one
woman’
judge had had sex with a man.”
He nodded.
“So you grabbed a Halloween mask and a shotgun and followed the funeral home hearse on the
way
to the morgue, ran him off the road, and stole the
body.
You
then drove to the first dirt road you came
to,
raced down it until you saw the trailer––”
“I saw a tree stand first, but when I got out I saw the trailer and . .
.”
“You
carried him into the trailer, took all the clothes and makeup and jewelry and wig off of him, then shot a dead man in the head with the shotgun to
try
to cover up the beating he had taken, the other
wounds,
and his
identity.”
“I did. I did all that, but I
didn’t
kill him. I
wouldn’t.
I
couldn’t.
So who did?”
“Think about the
motive,”
I said.
“You
thought it was a gay agenda.”
“Yeah?”
“It was an agenda, but a personal not a public
one.”
“
Huh?”
“Richie,”
I said. “This was about a son sick of hearing his dad condemn him every time he opened his mouth. He wanted to––”
“Show you how ignorant you
were,”
Richie said, stepping into the room. “How wrong you were about
us,
about me. I thought if you had sex with Andy
you’d
understand.”
“Andy?”
“The guy you fucked,
Dad,”
he said.
“He’s––was
a friend of mine. He was in my last
play.
We
hung
out.”