The Killing Club Read online

  “It got us through some tough times.”

  “I guess.The suicide.Why’d he throw himself in Deep Port River?”

  “Lyall? I don’t know.I think drugs were involved.Kids do it.How many times have you seen it?”

  I knew Rod had seen it too often.He’d been the one telling the parents while they sat there trying to take it in.

  He slid the evidence bag toward me across the big table.“The note’s a problem.Most likely somebody’s just got a sick sense of humor.But talk to your ‘club’ members.Find out which one did it.And why.Tell them it’s not funny ...What you and Danny got open on the board today?”

  “Nothing much.” Homicide is supposedly my specialty (at least I’ve been the primary investigator on local murders since my promotion to 4 7

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  detective).But then, we’ve averaged only two homicides in Gloria a year.

  So usually I work a more general caseload.

  “I’ll talk to Pudge and the rest about the note,” I promised Rod.

  We kissed good-bye.He slid onto my desk edge and pulled me between his legs.We were kissing when Danny Ventura made loud porno moaning noises at the door.“Excuse me? Who’s always saying ‘This is a police station, no personal business’?”

  Rod looked at him, his arm around me.“This isn’t business.”

  Stepping away, I gave Danny the finger.

  “You do that a lot.It’s vulgar.”

  “Not as vulgar as you, Danny.”

  I waved good-bye to Rod.“I’m still going to look into Ben’s death,” I called to him as I headed out to take the note back down to the forensics lab.

  He grinned.“No fooling.”

  IT WAS A QUIET AFTERNOON in the squad room.Together, Sergeant Danny Ventura and I make up the whole Investigative Division of the Detective Bureau of GPD.We investigate anything that could be a felony—robbery, domestic violence, narcotics, whatever happens in Gloria that’s worse than a misdemeanor.Today we arrested two twenty-year-olds who’d run off with the Salvation Army Christmas bucket from in front of Sam’s Club.Lucky for us, they’d sat in their truck in the parking lot to divide the money.Nothing much else was happening to distract me from a possible homicide.

  I spoke again to the five other members of the Killing Club who still lived in Gloria.They all felt bad for Ben and were all coming to his 4 8

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  funeral next week.They all denied sticking an anonymous note behind my screen door with a quote pasted on it from the movie Halloween.

  The sky cleared and the afternoon was one of those brilliant winter days of blue sky, white clouds and sun.After I logged out at GPD, I decided to take a jog before getting ready for my date with Rod.It wasn’t that cold and I was feeling a weird sort of restlessness coming out of a past I hadn’t thought about much in a long time.I ran along Schumacher Creek, the tributary that wound beside the town cemetery, and then started up the hill.The light slanted across crooked tombstones and crosses.Near the path, my great-aunt Betty Wurtz, in her eighties, was kneeling on her green plastic gardener’s knee-rest, brushing snow off the grass at a graveside.I didn’t know Betty well; she was from my mother’s side, the DiMauros, and my mother, as ought to be obvious, hadn’t been much of a family person.

  “Hey, Aunt Betty.”

  “Hey, sweetheart.” I had no idea if she really knew who I was, or called everybody my age and younger “sweetheart.”

  I stopped beside her.“Were you close to Sam Lorenzo?”

  “Never heard of him.” She gasped, short of breath from her labor, and wiped her hands on her slacks.Her thin hair was as pink as cotton candy, and it matched her rubber boots.

  I pointed at “LORENZO” engraved in the stone.“Well, it’s nice of you to take such good care of his grave.”

  The small old woman scooted closer, pulling her plastic knee-rest with her.She stared through thick lenses at the letters.“Shit!”

  I tugged her to her feet and, shaking her head, she made her way down the slope to the next row of graves, where her husband Isaac Wurtz 4 9

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  was buried.I’d been told by my dad that Elizabeth DiMauro had been

  “thrown out of her family” for marrying a Jew.My mother had married an Italian but then had “abandoned” him, so she’d been “thrown out” of the DiMauros as well.As a child, I wasn’t sure what being “thrown out”

  meant, but I recall that I’d agreed with the DiMauros’ turning on my mother for deserting us, but had thought they’d been wrong to reject Aunt Betty for marrying Mr.Wurtz, even though, when I met him, the couple was already living at Harbor House, the extended-care center, and he had no legs and was very crabby.

  Nearer the water, sunlight reddened the fifteen-foot marble obelisk that had been erected by the great-grandchildren of the town’s founder, Captain Ricks.(They had the money to do it after razing the primeval forests of New Jersey.) Some tall guy in a long loose coat was stretching his leg on the side of the obelisk.It seemed a little disrespectful; not that Captain Ricks had anything going for him worth respecting, except that he’d been around for a couple of centuries.

  I trotted up the hill toward him, then dug in my heels on the gravel path when the man suddenly turned, saw me and took off the sunglasses.

  His coat was cashmere, like his turtleneck (trust me, Italians know good fabric), and his blue jeans fit with the same rumpled easy perfection that Garth McBride had always managed.

  “Jamie? Jamie Ferrara?”

  Here’s what’s ridiculous.My first thought: I may be freezing but at least I’m wearing Spandex, not a sweat suit.My second thought: The weirdness of my breathing pattern is easily attributable to a long jog, not the sight of an old boyfriend who hadn’t even realized he was a boyfriend.

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  “What are you doing here, Garth? The funeral’s not till next week.”

  He laughed.“Yep.Jamie Ferrara.You want to say hello?”

  He was always telling me I forgot to be polite.“Sorry.Hi.How are you, Garth? It’s been a long time.Happy to see you.What brings you to town? Long time no see.”

  “Okay.Okay.I’m on vacation.” He ruffled his hair, an old gesture I recognized.“You look great.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Life’s good?” He seemed really to want to know.

  “Life’s good.”

  He folded his arms.“I guess so.You’re a detective, you’re engaged, you look great.”

  “That sums it up.” Glancing off to the side, I noticed that near the water’s edge, beneath the weeping cherry, leafless now, there was a large spray of roses leaning against Lyall’s granite cenotaph, a headstone his parents had put there even though searchers had never found the body.

  Silent, we walked toward the headstone.I think the last time Garth and I had been in this cemetery together was at Lyall’s memorial service.

  I wondered if he was there blaming himself for not guessing what his best friend’s problem was, for not fixing it.

  It was right after Lyall died that Amanda Kean had made her major move on Garth.And he just let her.But I’d seen it coming.I’d seen them all leave together the night of that state championship football game.

  Garth and Amanda, with Lyall tagging along as usual, all shoving into the backseat of Barclay’s car.Already married with a child, Barclay hung out with the old crew to be around Amanda.Or so I figured.Ben was squeezed in beside Barclay next to Connie, who was to be ordained into 5 1

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  the priesthood six years later.Connie, still in his football jersey, leaned yelling out the shotgun window, “Fuck the fucking world!!!!”

  LYA L L H I L L I E R

  1974–1992

  Beloved Son

  I straightened the dark red roses, brushed some old snow off the rough ledge of the gravestone.

  I said, “Lyall’s been dead e
leven years.That seems very strange, doesn’t it? Eleven years.”

  “He missed out on a lot of crap.”

  We looked for a moment at the engraved name and dates.Then Garth finally shrugged, turning toward me.He was even better looking than he’d been in high school, his hair longer, his face leaner.

  His eyes hadn’t changed.I avoided them, studied the roses, almost black against the white granite.“So,” I asked him after another silence.“You come back early to spend the holidays with Katie and Sweets? They talk about you all the time.I saw Sweets a few weeks ago.Broken filling.She showed me an interview with you in some New York paper.Pretty ironic.”

  “Ironic times.” He just kept looking at me.

  I said, “What are you looking at?”

  He smiled.“You.”

  “Me? Why, what’s the matter?”

  “Nothing.I think I came back early to see you.”

  Anybody who’s ever sat in the first car going over a steep drop on a big roller coaster knows what I felt like.

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  My next mistake was looking straight back in his eyes.Then “Shit!” I told myself, sounding just like Elizabeth DiMauro Wurtz.

  WE WERE WALKING OUT of the cemetery when we passed Aunt Betty headed for her car.She was offended when I asked her if she still had her driver’s license.“You’re the one needs a license.A marriage license.Why don’t you marry this man here?” She poked at Garth with her plastic knee-rest.I introduced them.

  She pointed back up the hill.“My husband, Isaac Wurtz, is up there.

  He was in real estate.He got a great deal on our plots.”

  Garth laughed.

  “Laugh now,” she told him.

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  B E N

  GLORIA IS A SMALL TOWNbut it has four Catholic churches.The following week Ben Tymosz’s funeral took place at Immaculate Conception, the biggest and oldest—a block’s worth of double-spired massive gray stones rising straight up from the sidewalk atop an incline on the other side of Etten Green from Dante’s, catty-corner to the town hall.

  I saw Father Keith Connor’s name listed on the glassed-in announcement board to the side of the doors, now the pastor at Immaculate with two priests under him.He’d be the one leading Ben’s funeral mass.Except for the very slight and I suppose stereotypic ruddiness of his drinker’s face, Father Connie still had the Irish good looks and buff body that had made girls at Hart envy Mary Beth O’Faolain, with whom he’d gone steady halfway through Georgetown, at which point he’d left her to join the priesthood—to the surprise of everyone who knew him, except 5 4

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  presumably Mary Beth.I didn’t see him much, not being a churchgoer, though my dad had become a regular in the Father Cooke days.

  Police business nearly made me late to the service.When I tiptoed inside, blinded after the winter light, Connie’s homily about Ben’s virtues was almost over.Big as it was, its vaulted roof so high and smoky with in-cense that you couldn’t see the ceiling, Immaculate Conception was filled to capacity that morning.In the only Escada suit I ever saw at the local discount mall (was I wearing it for Ben, or for Garth?), I slipped into a side pew near the door as Connie was telling the congregation that the lavish way Ben decorated his house at Christmas, the way he played Santa Claus at the Rotarian igloo in the mall, all spoke to the generosity of his heart.The fact that Ben had carried on with both, knowing how ill he was—though he’d told no one else of his cancer—spoke to a courage that his wife Megan wanted acknowledged here today.The same courage he’d once shown on the football field of Hart High, when it had been Connie’s honor to play that game with Ben.And then there we were, back at that famous game, which the whole town seemed to misremember as a victory in the state championship.

  After his homily, Megan’s cousin, Father Connie’s old girlfriend Mary Beth, married twice since, and possibly unaware that she was still in love with a priest, sang “My Heart Will Go On.” She stood in front of the casket, which was heaped with hundreds of long-stemmed pink roses that must have cost Pudge a fortune.The church itself was simply decorated for Advent, with white candles and plain green pine wreaths, and in contrast the vividness of the floral displays was like a reminder of what an extravagant waste death could be.

  Ben’s widow sobbed herself hoarse in her brother’s arms.Her two 5 5

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  little girls looked at her, puzzled.Ben’s mother, herself a widow, reached out to embrace them.

  I couldn’t find Garth in the crowd.It had been four days since our meeting near Lyall’s grave, and I wondered if he hadn’t hung around for the funeral after all, but had instead gone back to New York.Since he’d made that stomach-churning remark to me in the cemetery (“I think I came back early to see you”), I hadn’t heard from him.He’d just smiled and walked away—the way he always had.

  There were dozens of Rotarians seated in one cluster of the old wood pews.In another, near the front, sat what looked like a reunion of the surviving members of the Killing Club: Pudge, with his whole extended family, was close to Megan.Not far from Pudge I saw Amanda and Debbie—a study in contrasts: Amanda wore a sable hat and Debbie had spiked purple-black hair.Seated behind Amanda, and periodically leaning forward to whisper to her, sat my rich, perfectly dressed former brother-in-law, Barclay.He was having a rough time with his son, Clay.My nephew has my sister’s eyes; that may be why I always feel a surge of affection whenever I see him.Clay had grown four inches from age twelve to thirteen; he’d gone from chunky child to thin teenager and was now as tall as his father.He was making it clear he didn’t want to be at the funeral.

  Barclay kept hauling him out of a slouch so deep you couldn’t see his head from the rear of the pew.Clay kept slowly sinking again out of view.It was an old family war.There’d been a time when Barclay had slugged it out with his mother, Gloria’s grand dame Meredith Etten Ober, in even more dramatic ways—like marrying Gina—but they’d long since called a truce.

  Mrs.Ober hadn’t had to push her son into local politics; he’d flung himself there as if across the tape at a finish line.His almost clichéd good looks 5 6

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  (like a cross between Christopher Reeve and a Ken doll), with his toothy smile and jutting chin, could be seen in the local paper at least once a week.It was obvious to me that some party was going to run him for some office sooner or later.Sooner, if his mother had her way.

  After Connie swung the thurible over Ben’s casket, the pallbearers gathered to hoist it by its shiny brass rails.That’s when I saw Garth.He was one of the pallbearers, bent to the labor of lifting the heavy box, standing between Barclay and Pudge.Once they’d maneuvered the coffin into the hearse, Garth surprised me by crossing over to Connie, moving him away from the crowd the priest was greeting as they left.I could see that some people had recognized Garth and were pointing him out to each other. Alone at the edge of the steps, the two men fell into an intense whispered argument.It looked intimate, which also surprised me.I wouldn’t have thought they’d have anything to say to each other.Barclay left off shaking hands with everyone who passed him, as if he were host-ing a fund-raiser, in order to join Garth and Connie, pushing his way between them.

  A kind of competitive shoving match had always gone on between Barclay and Garth back at Hart High.Garth had brains, Barclay had money.For a while they were wrestling over Amanda Kean; neither one of them had kept her for long.Garth took Manhattan instead.Barclay had already married my sister, having gotten her pregnant, which none of us knew at the time of the wedding, when he inherited the family business.

  And Amanda married an executive at Kind Lady Cosmetics who was twice her age and who died of a heart attack within a year (I confess I did not stop myself from joining in the jokes about him at Deklerk’s bar).

  The birth of Barclay (Clay) Ober, Jr., was a Gloria scandal at the 5 7

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  time; here was Barclay, heir to the Ober money and the Etten heritage, just graduated high school, marrying a cop’s pregnant daughter, breaking his mother’s heart.“You ruined his college experience, if not his entire future,” Mrs.Ober often told my sister after Barclay flunked out of Princeton and had to go to a local college.After Gina died, Barclay married Patricia Hunt, the Philadelphia deb his mom had picked out for him in the first place.“You can’t fight city hall,” Pudge said of the news.

  Connie led Garth and Barclay back inside the church, and I slipped through the huge doors behind them, followed them quietly as they moved along a side aisle and out the chancel door.It led to a little cloistered rose garden, now put to bed for winter.There was not much left of what had once been old Father Cooke’s obsessive pride (his “vanity fair,” he’d called it): dozens of different varieties of roses of all colors.It was where the priest had been found dead of a heart attack, and now it was dedicated to his memory.I cracked the door enough to peek through.On a wooden bench beside a now frozen birdbath, Garth sat studying his stretched-out legs.

  Barclay and Connie stood close by, both talking at once, arguing with Garth.They were too far away for me to hear what they were saying.

  We all went from the cemetery to the reception at Ben’s mother’s house.Christmas was only a few weeks away and there were lots of Christmas cards strung on red yarn between the sunroom and the kitchen.In the living room, a large tree stood completely bare.News of Ben’s death had stopped the decorating.The tree actually looked pretty with nothing on it.

  From the large sliders of their sunroom, you could see the white Georgian front of the Ober estate across the river, on the eastern—the society—side of the banks.The Obers, apart from Barclay and Clay, were not attending this event.There was no room for them anyhow.Certainly not around the 5 8

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  food, two long tables full of it, everything (like the tables themselves, like the signature pink roses) from Dante’s, donated by Pudge, and served by his waiters, though he kept coming back himself to make sure the heating pans stayed heaped with lasagna, cacciatore, marsala and the dozen other dishes, platters and Crock-Pots.