I picked up her earlier narrative. “The night of the robbery, you and Sean were with David.”
“Yes-he wanted us along for protection; it was a lot of money-almost a million and a half dollars. We had guns, but Sean and I still looked at it almost as a game. I was twenty-three at the time, and Sean was twenty-two, but we were more like teenagers. Dumb as dirt.
“We drove in a closed van to the stockyard district, picked up the money at the drop-off point, and were about to leave when these guys came out of nowhere and tried to hold us up. David went crazy. He had one of the guns-an M-16-and started firing before anyone knew what was happening. He killed one guy; Sean killed another in self-defense; and the other two took off.”
“Was that when David got hit in the knee?”
“Yes. The man he killed shot him.”
“Did you know who they were?”
“Not then. David told us later.”
“What happened?”
“David was badly hurt. The knee was almost gone and he was in agony. Sean had fallen apart. He was crying hysterically. We got David into the van and to the nearest hospital we could think of. That’s where he found this doctor who agreed to fix him up fast and not tell the police.”
I interrupted her to keep up the pressure-a calculated risk. “I talked with that same doctor last week-just before Shattuck tortured him to death.”
She stopped dead, and I worried I’d overdone it. “So David paid off the doctor with some of the cash?”
Her voice was slightly hesitant again. “Yes. We had two bagfuls. David kept a handful with him, just in case. He was ice-cold through it all. Once he’d paid off the doctor, he told us to disappear until he came to fetch us. We weren’t to call anyone, see anyone, or go anywhere where people might recognize us. We left town, found a motel, and called him at the hospital so he’d know where to find us.”
“Did you know what he was up to yet?”
“No. He told us after he escaped from the hospital. That’s when he explained who those people were, and by then, he said, both Bob and the Chicago Eight people thought we’d stolen the money. If we came clean, either the Outfit or Bob would take us out. We didn’t have a choice anymore, according to David. We had to keep running…”
“How did the mob find out about the money in the first place? Did he know?”
“David figured either Bob had crossed him or the Outfit had heard about the transfer some other way and had decided to kill two birds with one stone-cripple the radical left and get a bunch of money in the bargain. But we never knew for sure.”
I had a feeling I did know. Shattuck’s reaction to the Outfit’s involvement-assuming he hadn’t been setting me up-indicated that Tommy Salierno, always hungry for the independent score, had somehow caught wind of the money coming in and had acted on his own. “So you came to Vermont,” I resumed.
“Eventually.”
“Billie, why did you stick together? Your brother had lied to you, betrayed your ideals, gotten you involved in murder and theft.”
She came to a full stop, refusing to answer. It was clear I had entered an emotional mine field. I decided my best route now was the most direct one. “How did David die, Billie?”
“I’ve got to go.”
I gave it up. “All right-never mind about David. You’re the important one here, Billie. Let’s get you under protection. I don’t want you hurt.”
There was some background noise from her end of the line, as if she were moving around. When she came back on, her voice was hard and bitter. “You bastard.”
The phone went dead in my hand.
32
The state police unit missed Susan Pendergast by seconds. They arrived at the address we’d traced-a general store in a village north of Rutland-and found the phone still warm. But there was no sign of Billie. They quickly checked the area around the store, called in extra units for a wider search, and came up empty-handed.
Two hours later, I was standing in Tony Brandt’s office, staring out the window while he finished listening to the tape of my phone conversation with Billie.
He hit the off button on the recorder and sat back in his chair. “Well, that explains at least half of this case.”
“Not the half that got us involved.”
He thought back a moment. “Yeah. Must’ve hit a nerve, unless she just got distracted by the state police rolling up.”
“I think something happened between her brother and Sean, and she still has a tough time dealing with it. Either that or she’s guilty of more than just tagging along with a couple of bad boys.”
“You mean she might’ve killed her own brother?”
“It’s possible. Suppose David begins pushing his weight around, demanding all the money. Things fall apart, and blam-he shoots Sean-maybe Sean pulled a gun on him. Who knows? Susan implied things went sour between them. Anyway, Susan grabs a gun and shoots David. Susan buries her brother because Sean’s too badly hurt to help; she hangs around to nurse Sean back to health; and then, unable to deal with all the guilt and emotional baggage between them, she and Sean split up-she to be reborn as Billie Lucas and he to become a hermit.”
He shrugged. “It still doesn’t tell us where she is now.”
I thought about Susan being reborn, and about her not counting on us to save her from Shattuck. She had described David and Shattuck analyzing ways to blend into the local population. It occurred to me that although she’d been gone several days, she’d called us from near Rutland, only seventy miles away.
“I’ve got an idea,” I told Brandt. “I think Susan-or Billie, or whatever the hell she’s calling herself now-has a backup plan, another identity she’s been saving for a rainy day. She was worried about the Mob and Shattuck on the phone, but she didn’t seem that worried about us, and she’d obviously planned an escape from that general store beforehand. This is not a woman running blind, Tony. I want to check the records again at the town clerk’s.”
The same clerk’s assistant who’d helped us the day before watched me come through the door with obvious dismay. I remembered we’d caused her to stay open way past normal closing hours. “Sorry we loused you up yesterday.”
Her eyes dropped to the counter. “It’s okay.”
I made my way back to the same oversized books we’d searched before. “This shouldn’t take too long.”
She followed me back and gave me a weak smile. “Would you like some help?”
I didn’t want to pull in my people from the field, who were still out checking leads to Susan’s whereabouts; accepting her offer might both speed things up and make her feel a little better about having her office invaded again. She also knew the records intimately.
I put her to work on the death records, while I combed the birth certificates. One by one, I called out the names of female children born in the mid-1940s, and she checked if there were any corresponding death dates. Each time there was, I gave the name to Brandt over the phone and he typed it into his computer, which was linked to the Department of Motor Vehicles. I was hoping we could conjure up another fifty-year-old ghost with an up-to-date driver’s license.
An hour later, we struck gold with the name Marie Benoit.
It had been a long shot, and for a moment, I had difficulty accepting my luck. “You’re shitting me. Where does she live?”
“Wheelock, Vermont-the Northeast Kingdom. I know that area; it’s northwest of Lyndonville.”
“Damn.” I slammed down the phone, thanked the assistant clerk profusely, and ran back to Brandt’s office.
With success came concern that we might lose our advantage. Neither one of us had forgotten what had happened to Gary Schenk, whom Shattuck had obviously found by putting a tail on either Dennis or me. Now that we were hoping we’d located Susan Pendergast, we didn’t want to make the same mistake twice, nor did we want to involve another police department.