The Killing Club Read online

  “Lock up,” he told me.“Turn off the lights and the tree and be sure you get Sam in.” Our big gray cat, Sam (named by my dad for Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon), was a night prowler when he got the chance.

  “’Night, Dad.”

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  I walked back to the green pine kitchen table where my father’s pill bottles (for high blood pressure, for high cholesterol, for half a dozen other problems that worried me) sat neatly on the painted wood lazy Su-san, along with salt and pepper shakers, olive oil and vinegar.At this table, Dad had sat us down to tell us Mom had to go somewhere and that she’d be gone for a long time.I was six.Gina was eight.She cried.I told him I hated my mother.Dino just smiled and drooled on me.He was eleven months old.Joe Jr.was seventeen.He said she was a whore and he didn’t care what she did.Dad knocked him into the refrigerator.It was the only time, as far as I know, he ever hit any of us.

  My dad had a rough time for a while, and a worse one when we lost Gina, and started searching in a bottle for answers that weren’t there.I think it was like losing my mother again.Gina looked like her and had tried in a way to make up for her by offering domestic gifts to my dad—

  flowers and candles on the table, cakes baked, towels and sheets beautifully folded.Her relationship with our father was mostly nonverbal (unlike mine) but so close that he would let her gunk up his hair with gel and comb it into different styles.Her death hit him harder than anything else in his life.The priest at Immaculate Conception, to which we’d belonged but hardly ever gone, Father Cooke, a good man, reached out for my father like he was hauling him out of the ocean, with Dad kicking at him the whole way.For months in a long, awful summer, Father Cooke came by our house almost every night, always bringing some of the beautiful roses he grew in the church garden.He just sat there with my dad, sometimes watching TV with him.Slowly the priest replaced the Scotch with his kindness.

  Later on, Joe Jr.told me our mother had run off with a guy in the 3 6

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  record business.In the years to come, I used to look for her albums in stores, but I never saw any.She had a beautiful voice.As our dad kept reminding us.

  THE SHRIEK OF THE TELEPHONE scared me awake.The heavy hardcover book I had been reading fell off the bed onto the oak floor and scared me again.

  “Hello?”

  “Jamie? Hey, sorry.I woke you up.”

  “Who is this?” I don’t know why I said it.I knew who it was.

  “Is this Jamie Ferrara?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sorry.This is Garth McBride.You left me a message about Ben Tymosz? About the fire?”

  “Yes.” I slid down out of the high bed, paced around it. “Pudge said to call you.”

  After a decade, it wasn’t an easy conversation.We didn’t know each other.I’d seen Garth a few times on the news after Martha (the woman his sister, Katie, lived with) pointed out his picture in a news ad in TV

  Guide in her dentist’s office.But I wasn’t sure now whether he really already had been told by his sister that I was a detective with the GPD and that I was engaged or he was just pretending he knew.

  We agreed it was weird that we hadn’t run into each other even once, because Garth said he took the train down to Gloria every few months, quick visits to Katie and her partner, Sweets, Martha’s nickname.As for my bumping into him in New York, it wouldn’t happen.On big nights 3 7

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  Rod and I go to Philly, where he knows good places to eat and listen to music and dance.

  We agreed it was weirder still that Ben should die by fire.“Lyall by water,” Garth said.I’d always wondered if he had blamed himself for losing Lyall, for not knowing how far into despair his friend must have fallen.But we’d never talked about it.

  I said, “That’s three.Lyall.Ben.And Shawn.” I told him how a few summers ago Shawn Tarrini had gone into the embankment on an expressway ramp, totaled his car, died at the scene.How he’d been alone, on the way home from A.C., apparently having had too much to drink.

  “That must have been tough on Amanda,” Garth said.

  It was amazing.My muscles tightened with a body-memory of when I’d learned he was steadily dating Amanda Kean.Garth and I had always spent plenty of time together (I’d grown up in his house, at least five afternoons a week, after all), but the summer and fall before that, before Lyall had died, we’d actually gone out on what I’d thought of as dates—

  two movies, three jazz clubs, one outdoor rock concert and half a dozen coffeehouse talks—plus there’d been several sessions of mild-to-heavy petting in his car.But clearly none of it had meant as much, or had meant something else, to him.

  He added, “I always figured Shawn was the one Amanda had a real thing for.”

  “Maybe.Shawn was her second husband.She’s on her third.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.She’s got a kind of plant loyalty to her though.Like her own little union shop.All three of her husbands worked at Kind Lady.Well, the current one owns it.”

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  “You never liked Amanda.”

  “Well, certainly not as much as you did.” Why was I even talking about this? Calling Garth was stupid.Pudge’s idea about Ben’s death and the Killing Club was stupid.I was stupid.

  Garth surprised me.“I’m coming home to see Katie.You call me as soon as you get some details about Ben’s funeral.And look at the book.”

  “What book?”

  “Shawn killed somebody with a car.I think he was imagining it was me.You know, because of Amanda.Have you still got the Death Books?”

  “Yes.”

  “I figured.You always kept everything.”

  “Except for the stuff people stole from me, like my jazz albums.”

  He ignored the old accusation.“Look in the second book.Or maybe it’s the third, the blue one.” He’d always had an amazing memory—for some things.“See you in Gloria.Will I recognize you?”

  There was a full-length mirror on a mahogany swivel stand in a corner—another of my mother’s left-behinds.I checked myself out.

  White sleeveless T-shirt, white bikini underpants.I’ve always had great skin and I was in the best shape of my life.I weighed twenty-two pounds less than the last time he’d seen me.Since Garth had left Gloria for good, I’d gone to college and the police academy and had solved a dozen homicides.I’d had seven years of training in Tae Kwon Do, and in ten seconds I could put five shots from a .45 caliber pistol pretty close to a bull’s-eye at twenty-five yards.“I doubt it,” I said.

  “Then carry a sign.’Bye, Jamie Ferrara.”

  He was gone.The way he always had been gone.Vanished behind the 3 9

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  locked door of his bedroom, around the corner of the Hart High hallway, out of town and into the crowded limitless world.

  WHEN I COULDN’T sleep, I felt my way back downstairs to the kitchen, where I’d left the old spiral notebooks on the green table.The one labeled “III” was blue.Garth had been right.Shawn’s last “murder”

  before we disbanded was a hit-and-run.In his entry, he’d described how he could hot-wire a car from Fair Deal Autos, run the car over the guy who was sleeping with his girlfriend, then steer the stolen vehicle off the steep incline at the top of Boar’s Head Turnpike and walk home.As a crime, it wasn’t bad.And it was so unlike the simple car crash that had really happened to Shawn that it seemed far-fetched of Garth to try to connect them.The realization made me more sympathetic to my dad’s and Rod’s skeptical responses to the idea that Ben Tymosz’s dying in a house fire had to be connected to an imaginary fire in a club’s “Death Book.”

  I heard tires squeal, then a long blast of a car horn, then the doorbell rang. Bingbong, bingbong, bingbong, bingbong, bingbong.It was two A.M.It had to be Dino, who could never remember his keys.One of his friends had dropped him off. I tr
ied to get to the door before he hit the doorbell again and Dad started yelling from his bedroom.

  I swatted Dino’s outstretched finger away just in time.“Be quiet!

  You’re going to wake up Dad!”

  “Sleep of the dead.Doan worry ’bout it.”

  Our cat, Sam, scooted around my legs, shot through the open door 4 0

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  and bolted down the street.He’d come back in the morning, probably with a squirrel.

  “Damn it, Dino, where are your fuckin’ keys?”

  “Doan know.” He grinned that goofy smile he’d had as an infant. I was a sucker for it.Dino looks like a stoned angel smeared with black machine oil.Tall, slim, neon blue eyes, tight bronze-colored curls that he sprinkles gold glitter on when he performs.“It makes me stand out in the light,” he tried to explain to our father.Under his parka he wore his vin-tage KEEP ON TRUCKIN’ T-shirt with dirty cut-up jeans.He had on a Led Zeppelin cap, his whole outfit an ad for seventies rock.His brightly painted guitar case leaned against the iron stoop rail.

  “Well, for God’s sake, use the key under the brick like Clay does.

  Okay? Don’t wake people up!”

  “I forgot.Merry Christmas Merry Christmas.We got anything good to eat?” He pretended to be skateboarding down the ramp built on the side of the porch stoop for our father’s wheelchair.

  “Dino!” It was important to say his name firmly in order to get his focus.He’d been that way since he was a baby.“Where’d you get that new black truck you were riding around in with Clay, and what were you doing with Clay anyhow?”

  “Clay? Oh that was earlier, yeah.He needed a lift from a bud’s.” He slipped backward, caught himself on the rail.“That’s Ramon’s truck.You know Ramon, works with me at Jonesy’s?”

  “Yeah, I know him.”

  “I love you.” He tried the grin again.

  “I love you too.And I hope Ramon told you you could borrow his 4 1

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  truck.I hope I’m not going to see your ass hauled into the station again.”

  I pushed him ahead of me back into the house.

  “Jamie, doan be so mean, ’cause I love you so much.” He turned to hug me, smelling of pizza, marijuana and beer.

  “Listen to me, Dino.I don’t want you speeding around town with Clay.Especially when you’re ‘borrowing’ a car from a ‘friend.’ And don’t ever let me find out you’re giving him beer and pot.”

  “Me? He’s the one with the money.I get it from him.”

  “He’s thirteen!”

  “Yeah? That’s what you think.”

  I was about to close the door when I noticed a manila envelope lying on the doormat.It must have fallen from inside the screen.Maybe it was what Dino had slipped on; he’d left the heavy tread of his hightops across it.There was no address on the envelope.Inside there was a single piece of cheap lined paper, torn from a spiral notebook.The words looked as if they’d been cut (some letter by letter) from a magazine and pasted on: death has come to your little

  town, sheriff

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  R O D

  NEXT MORNING,beforebreakfastwithRod,Idroveover to Glen Valley.On a gray, drizzly December morning, at seven-thirty, it was still fairly dark, but in first light Ben’s gutted house looked spooky, rising in the mist behind the yellow police tape.

  Inside the house I thought I saw a silhouette move past a window.I found a flashlight in the glove compartment of my Mustang, and crawled in through a side window.

  “Anybody in here?”

  Listening hard, I eased the .380 out of the shoulder holster I was wearing beneath my parka.Every morning at breakfast Rod asks me,

  “Got your gun?” (When I mentioned that Rod believed in accidents, I should have added that he believed you had to be ready for them.) I always have the gun.I was a cop’s daughter.This pistol was a BF10

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  Olympic Magnum that my dad had given me.In a cop family, even an Italian girl can get a single-action snub-nose for Christmas.

  “Police! Anybody here?”

  Moving slowly through the Tymosz house, trying not to make noise, I listened hard but heard nothing.Maybe the shadow had just been the odd half-light of dawn coming.The rooms that hadn’t already been boarded up with plywood were empty now.They stank of charred damp carpets.Megan’s brother, who owned a local moving company, had come over last night with a truck and a crew, carted away anything that might have been worth stealing and piled the rest like a funeral pyre in the driveway.

  I’d come to check out the entry to the basement.

  The door itself had been removed; crossed one-by-fours had been nailed over the empty space.Down on my knees, I checked the blackened residue on the doorjambs.About six inches up from the floor, there was an almost undetectable pinhole of raw wood.Above the spot, I could feel a slight forked indentation, as if someone had used a hammer against the wood to pry out a nail.At the same level, on the opposite jamb, a nail was still visible, bent and broken, its head gone, but new.The nail was where it would have been if a wire had been stretched across the top of the stairs in order to trip someone.Like the wire in Ben’s story.

  I HATE THE new Gloria police station; I think I’m the only one there who does.Maybe those who moved over from the old station are right; if I’d ever had to work squeezed in with forty other cops on a single cramped drafty floor of the old town hall, with its loud clanky radiators 4 4

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  and its flaky plaster, I too would, as Rod says, appreciate the upgrade.“I like not having to stick a curtain rod in a window to keep it from falling down on my fingers.I like doorknobs that don’t come off in my hands.I like a urinal that doesn’t come loose from the wall.I like—”

  “Okay okay.” So I don’t argue with him. But the fact is, the very modern new Dixon Police Building is hideous.It’s even more horrible that they squeezed this monstrosity in between the 1872 town hall (stone, neo-Gothic) and the 1834 County Courthouse (white frame, Federal).“Well, baby, you’re just a weird history buff,” Rod says and kisses me.Hey, if it hadn’t been for weird history buffs, the Liberty Bell would be gone too.

  Gloria’s town hall is still where the hall of records is, rows of tall, musty, flaky leather boxes I used to look through, waiting for my dad.

  Even now sometimes I go there on a rainy day off.That’s how I was the one who found the original London Company charter, stuck in a nineteenth-century tax assessment ledger, authorizing Captain Thomas Ricks in 1741 to strip the forests bordering Deep Port in order to build ships from the virgin oak and pine.Everyone made a fortune.While the woods are pretty much gone, the town’s still here.The charter I’d found now hung in the foyer under an oil painting of Captain Ricks that Barclay’s mother had commissioned of her distant relative.There was absolutely no way to know what the man had actually looked like, but that hadn’t stopped Mrs.Ober.Nothing did.Except maybe, for a while, Gina.

  In the new police station’s detective bureau we all have our own cubicles with our own computers, and the squad room is big and sunny with comfortable office chairs on rollers.I spun one of these chairs around in a circle because Rod was shaking his head at me.He slid my digital printouts back across the desk.I hadn’t said anything to him till 4 5

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  I’d gotten the blowups made and now I’d made my case.But I could tell it was going to be a hard sell.

  He dutifully studied the magnified image of the nail hole in Ben’s doorjamb.“This is why you were late to breakfast?”

  “That nail was pulled out after the fire.Look at the coloration on the wood.And the nail still in there looks brand-new.Why would it be like that?”

  Rod frowned.“Earlier today you were talking suicide for the insurance.I checked it out.It was a million-dollar accidental death policy.”

  “...Okay.”
r />   “But now you’re off in a different direction.Somebody trip-wired Ben, poured gasoline on him and torched his house to cover up a murder?”

  “I’m just saying it’s possible.”

  “Sure.Anything is.

  ” Rod had been curious about my story, but seemed more focused on our long-ended Killing Club meetings at the Pine Barrens Playhouse than my theory that Ben’s death might have been a homicide.Apparently he shared my dad’s view that the members of that club had had too much time on their hands.Especially the time I’d spent with Garth.

  He asked me a little more about the club members.Pudge, Debbie and Barclay he knew pretty well because we ate at Dante’s and Deklerk’s, and Barclay was not only the richest guy in town, but an up-and-coming power in local politics.Amanda he’d met.Plus she was in The Gloria Gazette a lot, doing worthy things for the environment, and winning equestrian prizes.

  Garth, he’d heard of.And not just from me.(Even if you’d never seen a television, Garth’s sister’s partner, Martha, boasted about him all the time, and Martha had the biggest dental practice in Gloria.) 4 6

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  “So this guy Garth, the one you used to go out with?”

  I shrugged.“Briefly.”

  “The one that dumped you for Amanda Morgan.”

  “Well, to be fair, I don’t think he saw it that way.I don’t think he figured there was anything to dump.She was Amanda Kean then.Then Bryce, Tarrini, Morgan.But yeah, that Amanda.”

  “What a stupid guy.” It wasn’t meant as a compliment. It was just, in his view, the truth.There were reasons why I was engaged to Rod Wolenski.His saying things like that was one of them.“You tell your old friend Garth about this threatening note on your front stoop?”

  “I didn’t get it till after I’d talked to him.”

  He held up the cut-and-pasted page of letters, now encased in plastic. Death has come to your little town, Sheriff.“This guy Garth had you thinking dreaming up murders was fun?”