Professor Palace slept on the sofa, unable to go up there and deal with the fact of my mother’s absence from the bed, with going through her closet full of things. I did all that. I packed up her dresses.
The other thing I did was hang around the police station a lot, asked the young detective leading the investigation to please let me know how it was going, and Culverson did: he called me when they had analyzed the footprints lifted from the gravel of the T.J. Maxx parking lot; he called when they located the vehicle identified by witnesses, a silver Toyota Tercel subsequently abandoned in Montpelier. When the suspect was in custody, Detective Culverson stopped by the house, laid out the files for me on the kitchen table and walked me through the case, the chain of evidence. He let me see everything except the photographs of the corpse.
“Thank you, sir,” I said to Culverson, my father leaning in the doorway of the kitchen, pale, tired, mumbling “thank you” also. In my memory Culverson says, “Just doing my job,” but I have my doubts whether he really would have said something so cliché. My memory is cloudy—it was a difficult time.
On June 10 of that same year they found my father’s body in his office at St. Anselm’s, where he had hung himself with the window cord.
I should have told Naomi the whole story, about my parents, the truth of it, but I didn’t, and now she’s dead and I never will.
5.
It’s a beautiful morning, and there’s something galling about it, how suddenly, just like that, the winter ends and springtime begins—rivulets of snowmelt and twists of green grass pushing up from under the rapidly thinning layer of snow in the farmland outside my kitchen window. This is going to be trouble, just in terms of law enforcement. It will work like black magic on the public spirit, this new season, the dawn of the last springtime we’re going to get. We can expect a ratcheting up of desperation, fresh waves of anxiety and terror and anticipatory grief.
Fenton said that if she could pull it off, she would call me at nine o’clock with her report. It’s 8:54.
I don’t really need Fenton’s report. Don’t need the confirmation, I mean. I’m right, and I know I’m right. I know that I’ve got it. It’ll help though. It’ll be necessary in court.
I watch one perfect white cloud drift across the blue of the morning, and then, thank God, the phone rings, and I snatch it up and say hello.
No answer. “Fenton?”
There’s a long silence, a rumbling of deep breathing, and I hold my breath. It’s him. It’s the killer. He knows. He’s toying with me. Holy moly.
“Hello?” I say.
“I hope you’re happy, Officer—excuse me, Detective.” There’s a noisy cough, a tinkling noise, ice in a glass of gin, and I look up at the ceiling and exhale.
“Mr. Gompers. This is not a good time.”
“I found the claims,” he says, as if he hadn’t heard me. “The mysterious missing claims you wanted me to find. I found them.”
“Sir.” But he’s not going to stop, and anyway I did tell him he had twenty-four hours, and here he is, reporting in, the poor bastard. I can’t just hang up. “Right,” I say.
“I went to the overnight cabinet, and I pulled that stretch of case numbers. There’s only one in the bunch with Zell’s name on it. That’s what you wanted to know, right?”
“That’s right.”
His voice sloshes with drunken sarcasm. “Hope so. Because it’s all going to happen, just like I said it was. Just like I said.”
I’m looking at the clock. 8:59. What Gompers is telling me doesn’t matter anymore. It never mattered in the first place. This case was never about insurance fraud.
“I’m in the conference room in Boston, digging through the overnights, and who sidles in but Marvin Kessel. Do you know who that is?”
“No, sir. I appreciate your help, Mr. Gompers.”
It was never about insurance fraud. Not even for one second.
“Marvin Kessel, for your information, is the assistant regional manager for the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast regions, and he was awfully interested in what the heck is going on up in Concord. And so now he knows, and now Omaha knows, we’ve got missing files, we’ve got suicides. We’ve got it all!” He sounds like my dad: Because it’s Concord!
“And so now I am going to lose my job, and everybody in this branch, they’re going to lose their jobs, too. And we’ll all be out on the street. So, I hope you have a pen handy, Detective, because I’ve got the information.”
I do have a pen, and Gompers gives me the information. The claim that Peter was working on when he died was filed in mid-November by a Ms. V. R. Jones, a director of the Open Vista Institute, a nonprofit corporation registered in the state of New Hampshire. Its headquarters are in New Castle, which is on the coast, near Portsmouth. It was a comprehensive life-insurance policy on the executive director, Mr. Bernard Talley, and Mr. Talley committed suicide in March, and Merrimack Life and Fire was exercising its right to investigate.
I write it all down, old habit, but it doesn’t matter and it never mattered, not even for a second.
Gompers is done and I say, “Thanks,” looking at the clock, it’s 9:02—any minute Fenton will call, she’ll give me the confirmation I need, and I’ll get in the car and go get the killer.
“Mr. Gompers, I recognize that you have made a sacrifice. But this is a murder investigation. It’s important.”
“You have no idea, young man,” he says morosely, “You have no idea what’s important.”
He hangs up, and I almost call him back. I swear to God, with all that’s going on, I almost get up and go over there. Because he’s not—he’s not going to make it.
But then the landline rings again, and I snatch it up again, and now it is Fenton, and she says, “Well, detective, how did you know?”
I take a breath, close my eyes, and listen to my heart pounding for a second, two seconds.
“Palace? Are you there?”
“I’m here,” I say, slowly. “Please tell me exactly what you’ve found.”
“Why certainly. I’d be happy to. And then at some point you are going to buy me a steak dinner.”
“Yep.” I say, opening my eyes now, peering at the crisp blue sky just beyond the kitchen window. “Just tell me what you’ve found.”
“You’re a lunatic,” she says. “MassSpec on the blood of Naomi Eddes confirms presence of morphine sulfate.”
“Right,” I say.
“This does not come as a surprise to you.”
“No, ma’am,” I say. No, it does not.
“Cause of death is unchanged. Massive craniocerebral trauma from gunshot wound in mid-forehead. But the victim of this gunshot had ingested a morphine derivative within the six- to eight-hour period prior to her death.”
It does not surprise me at all.
I close my eyes again, and I can picture Naomi leaving my house in her red dress in the middle of the night and going home to get high as a satellite. She must have been getting toward the end of her stash, too, must have been getting anxious about that, because now her dealer was dead. McGully had shot him. My fault.
Oh, Naomi. You could have told me.
I pull out my SIG Sauer from its holster and lay it on the kitchen table, open the magazine, empty out and count the dozen .357 bullets.
In the Somerset Diner, a week before, Naomi eating French fries, telling me that she had to help Peter Zell when she saw that he was suffering, that he was in withdrawal. She had to help him, she said, looked down, looked away.