I didn’t say anything. In my mouth was a taste like ashes and bile. “An accident, a freak accident,” Twining said. “But who’d believe it? She’d marked me, it happened in her house... I was scared. Scared and not thinking straight. At first I just wanted to get out of there, run like hell, but I couldn’t do that with my gold chain all over the floor, my fingerprints Christ knew where... and suppose somebody’d seen me drive in? And I’d talked to Mack Judson about her, his office is next to mine and she’d called him about putting her house up for sale. That’s why I went out to see her, I figured it was my last chance...” Headshake. “I couldn’t just leave her there. I had to do something.”
“So you cleaned up the kitchen and took her body away.”
“What else could I do? It was the only thing I could think to do. I wrapped her up in some sheets and put her in the trunk of my car. I had her purse, her keys... I locked up the house, turned on the alarm system. Her car was in the garage but there wasn’t anything I could do about that, I had to leave it where it was...”
“The body, Twining. What’d you do with it?”
Another headshake. He didn’t want to talk about that.
“Buried her somewhere, is that what you did?”
No answer.
“Took her up here and buried her,” I said. “Right here on this isolated property of yours.”
A guess, but the right one. He twitched a little, looked away, looked back at me. “I didn’t want to risk going anywhere else,” in a hoarse whisper. “Rack in the trees—”
“Don’t tell me. Save if for the police.”
“Police.” The word produced a shudder. He sat there for a few seconds, abruptly tried to got up and then sank back down as if he had no strength. “Listen,” he said, “I’ve got money, about thirty thousand in liquid assets and I can raise another hundred or so, more if I sell my house. It’s yours, every penny, if you—”
“You can’t buy my silence, Twining. You couldn’t buy it for ten million dollars. Two women are dead and a little girl is an orphan because of you, and you’re not going to pay for that with money.”
“Two women? No,” he said, “you’re wrong. Sheila Hunter, yeah, it was self-defense, I panicked, but nobody else...”
“Dale Cooney. Her you killed in cold blood.”
“No! You can’t pin that on me. She was a lush, she drove home drunk and passed out in her garage with the engine running... another accident, that’s what everybody’s saying...”
“Murder. Your murder.”
“For Chrissake, why would I kill Dale Cooney?”
“I think she showed up at the Hunter house after Sheila Hunter died, while you were still there. Fortified with booze, mourning her lover, and looking to tell his widow what she thought of her. I think she saw you and your car, the scratches on your neck, maybe even you putting the body in the trunk.”
“No.”
“I think you used that glib, bullshit charm of yours to convince her nothing was wrong, get her to leave. But you were still in a panic, afraid she’d change her mind and contact the police. So you followed her home. Either she told you her husband was away for the weekend or you knew it some other way. Nobody else on the premises made it easy to hit her with something, arrange things to look like she’d passed out with the engine running. But you screwed up with the Scotch. She was a gin drinker, martinis. If you’d remembered that, you could’ve used her house key and gotten a bottle of her Bombay gin, but you wanted out of there and it was quicker to use the Speyburn — your brand of single malt, a bottle from your car. Might have one of your fingerprints on it, even if you did try to wipe it clean. Premeditated, first-degree murder.”
“I didn’t do any of that! I never saw Dale Cooney that day! I tell you I didn’t kill her, I didn’t have anything to do with it!”
Lies. I knew it and he knew I knew it, but he was not going to budge. I could almost see the wheels turning inside his head, the protective shell he was trying desperately to hold tight around himself. He’d admitted what happened with Sheila Hunter, but in his mind it was an accident, self-defense, not his fault, and nobody would ever convince him otherwise. He’d moved and buried her body, he was probably going to prison, but maybe a judge and jury would be inclined to leniency; he was a pillar of the community, he’d made a mistake and he was sorry and willing to pay for it, he’d throw himself on the mercy of the court.
But Dale Cooney’s death was just what I’d said it was — coldblooded murder. Admit that, and he’d go to prison for the rest of his life, possibly even wind up on death row. Admit the truth, and it made him into something he couldn’t face up to in either the public eye or his own eyes — it made him a kind of monster. So he’d deny it and he’d keep on denying it, the way the famous football player turned actor had denied guilt all through his trial and ever since. Nobody’d ever shake the truth out of Richard Twining, no matter what.
But he knew what he’d done. He’d have to live with the knowledge for the rest of his life, and even if the law couldn’t find enough evidence to convict him of Dale Cooney’s murder, he wouldn’t escape punishment for it. He’d be punished plenty, sorry bastard that he was, in the cold, sleepless dark of the nights to come.
I’d had enough of him: I’d had too much of too many people like him who refused to accept responsibility for their actions. I said, “All right. Put on the rest of your clothes. It’s time for the police.”
“Listen,” he said, “please, isn’t there any way—?”
“Not with me. Get dressed. Now.”
He got slowly to his feet, reached out an unsteady hand for his shirt. Not looking at me, he said, “Sheila Hunter... honest to God, it was an accident. You tell the police that.”
“Tell them yourself what you did or didn’t do.”
“I never saw Dale Cooney that day, I hadn’t seen her in weeks, I didn’t have anything to do with her dying. They have to believe me. They have to!”
I quit listening to him. Quit thinking about him. What I thought about, standing there waiting for him to finish dressing was Emily and what I would have to say to her pretty soon, the terrible things I would have to say to that little girl.
23
It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do.
Kerry was there for moral support, but that did not make if any easier. I still had to say the words, and to look into those sad, lost eyes as I said them. Omitting the more sordid details didn’t help, either. Nor did using softened phrasing and clichés and half-truths like “Your mom and dad did a bad thing once but they weren’t had people” and “What happened to your mom wasn’t her fault; the man who killed her is sick, as sick as the one who hurt her before you were born.” Kerry tried, too, in the same vein. “She loved you, she’d never have abandoned you” and “Your parents didn’t tell you the truth because they wanted to protect you.” Awkward, hitter, empty, comfortless words, every one.
Emily sat there and listened to them with no outward emotion, without even flinching much — and maybe without really believing the clichés and half-truths. Her only reaction, when I broke the news about her mother, was to squeeze her eyes shut and say, “I knew she was dead.” She spoke little after that. And when it was over I was the one who sat tense and sweating; her body was slack, her face and eyes clear and dry. She had already done most of her weeping, I thought, and if there were any more tears she would shed them quietly and alone. Her outward appearance was a child’s protective armor. Inside, she had to be a mass of bruises — stoned and hurting from all those awkward, bitter, empty, comfortless words.