The Killing Club Read online

  It was even more crowded in the kitchen, where Pudge was also working the bar; in shirtsleeves, his tie tight on his neck, his cheeks flushed and sweaty, he was opening wine bottles with a graceful speed, one after another.

  A solemn reminder of the occasion in his black suit and shirt with his starched priest’s collar, Connie offered me a glass of Chianti and re-filled his own.We clinked our glasses.“Great eulogy.”

  “Thanks.”

  “To Ben.”

  “To Ben,” he said and toasted the ceiling.Connie’s body was so trim and muscular (like a gymnast’s) that his prematurely gray close-cropped hair looked like a strange style decision.“I feel bad for his poor girls.He was a great dad.”

  “Yes.” I nodded. “Seems odd he was doing so badly.”

  “Badly?”

  “In business.” I gestured. “If only half the people in this house had bought insurance from Ben, why was his business failing?”

  Connie shook his head.“It’s easier to come to a funeral.”

  “Isn’t that kind of cynical for a priest?”

  “Who better?” He smiled.“But there’s always salvation, Giovanna Ferrara.There’s always the Church.Every Sunday.Eight, nine thirty and eleven A.M.It’s just sitting there, waiting for you.”

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  “Don’t start, Connie.I haven’t been to Mass in five years.”

  He laughed.“You’re telling me?”

  “It’s just a struggle to get Dad there in the chair.And the whole thing for him was, no offense, sort of personal.He was close to Father Cooke.”

  “A wonderful man,” Connie said, frowning at the memory of his sweet-hearted predecessor at Immaculate Conception.

  We talked a while about Ben.Connie wouldn’t say when he’d learned that Ben had been diagnosed with cancer, or whether he’d known if Ben and Megan were happy.A few years back there’d been another priest at Immaculate Conception, who had been a notorious gossip.Because this man’s name was Weatherall, he’d been known as Father Tell-it-all.After Father Cooke died of his heart attack, the church had gotten rid of Weatherall, his presumed successor, and promoted Connie to pastor instead.Maybe that was why it was impossible to get anything out of Connie now.Keeping secrets was good for your career.

  “Well, come on, Connie, at least tell me what you were arguing about afterward.You and Barclay and Garth? That argument after the service.” I didn’t tell him I’d followed them into the garden.

  “Argument? We weren’t arguing.” He blinked, kept blinking. Probably wasn’t aware he was doing it.Lying can’t be easy on priests.

  “What were you talking about?”

  “Oh, I don’t remember.” He shrugged. “Just Ben, I guess. How hard it’ll be on his kids and Megan.There was no argument.” He blinked again.“Death’s a part of life, but Ben was too young.”

  “Twenty-nine’s young,” I agreed.“Sometimes it doesn’t feel that way.

  Like, look, you’ve got gray hair.”

  He rubbed his short gray cut.“Yeah, one of the parishioners pointed 6 0

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  that out.I looked in the mirror.I couldn’t believe it.” He gestured at the food.“Really nice of Pudge.And all those roses at the funeral.”

  Debbie stepped up to us.“Those pink roses? Pudge told me he gets them wholesale from South America and they don’t have any smell.”

  I said, “I’ll tell you who had beautiful roses.Father Cooke, right, Connie? He always brought my dad some.”

  He smiled.“Come to church this summer; they’ll be there.So, Garth’s back for a while?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Yeah,” Debbie said.

  We both looked over at Garth.He was standing beside Amanda.

  Okay, she was one of those perfect Grace Kelly blondes, somebody Cary Grant might call by the nickname Slim in one of the old movies my dad gets me to watch with him on cable.Both of them wore loose black jackets, as if they’d coordinated beforehand.They stood just outside the sunroom, leaning against the side of the double slider door, indifferent to the cold, shading their eyes with sunglasses in the hard December light.

  Rod arrived late from his budget meeting with the chief, apologizing with a kiss.When I pointed Garth and Amanda out to him, he said, “So that’s Garth.”

  “Yep.And Amanda.”

  “They look like they’re posing for a Beemer ad.”

  I laughed.“You’re right.BMWs or maybe an expensive cruise to Bar-bados?”

  “So how long is this thing going on here? Almost over?”

  Rod didn’t like to stand around indoors.Cocktail parties, receptions, banquets—he didn’t enjoy them.He preferred to be “doing something.”

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  It was one of the things we had in common.“I’d rather knock open a hor-nets’ nest in a tool shed,” he told me the day we met at a buffet at Chief Waige’s.It wasn’t that he was impatient; one of his hobbies was tying fly-fishing lures.He’d bring his kit over and work on a Davy’s Caddis while I was keeping my dad company at the television.And on a stakeout Rod could sit without moving for hours.But ten minutes in this kind of crush of chatter and canapés, and he was inching toward the door.

  Garth and Amanda finally came back inside.

  “I guess Jim couldn’t make it,” Rod said to me.

  I smiled, swinging an imaginary golf club at him.“Guess not.” Jim Morgan was Amanda’s third husband; he was retired from running Kind Lady and now compulsively devoted himself to improving his drive or his putt, or whatever golf flaw he was obsessing about whenever anyone asked him how he was doing.Either that, or he’d died suddenly, like Amanda’s other two husbands.

  “You want to meet Garth?”

  Rod shook his head.“All I want’s for that guy to go back to New York City.” He brushed his lips across my hair. “You ready to go?”

  “Just about.”

  The reception was pretty much over.But as we started out, Rod got snagged by the head of the Industrial Commission, a group of Gloria boosters eager to sell town property to developers.This man was a serious bore; I was slowly backing away from the conversation (to Rod’s amusement) when I heard a bottle smash loudly off in the kitchen.It was an excuse to leave.

  I pushed my way through the crush.Megan Tymosz was screaming,

  “Shut up, Pudge! Just shut the stupid hell up!”

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  Ben’s widow stood staring down at the broken glass on the floor as if it made no sense to her, though clearly she’d either thrown it or dropped it.Three different people bent over quickly to pick up the pieces of glass.

  Clay watched them all with the contemptuous boredom with which teenagers view adults.Pudge tried to apologize but Megan would hear nothing of it.

  “My girls are right here.They could hear you!” She pointed at her daughters, who were playing a soft uninspired duet on the white spinet in the living room, and couldn’t possibly have heard Pudge.Megan wobbled fast on her stiletto heels past us out of the kitchen.Because of her recent weight gain, she was starting to look, it struck me, like a fun-house mirror version of Amanda’s blond perfection—her body shortened, wider; her face and hair distorted, badly colored.

  Sam Deklerk, divorced co-owner with his sister Debbie of Deklerk’s Bar, hurried out of the room after Megan.I leaned around the corner, watched him follow her down the carpeted hall and into a room at the end of the house.He closed the door behind him.That was odd.

  I went back to see Pudge.Barclay and Connie stood around him now.“What’s Megan’s problem?” I asked.They all gave me a look.“That’s stupid.I mean, I know.But why is she yelling at you, Pudge?”

  He wiped his rosy face on a large cloth napkin with the Dante’s D on it.“Because I told her somebody murdered Ben and she shouldn’t let you guys in the police just drop the ball.”

  “For God’
s sake, why’d you do that? It’s the funeral reception!”

  “Because it’s true! We’ve got to do something!”

  Obviously Pudge had already shared his opinion with the other old members of the Killing Club, because neither Connie nor Barclay looked 6 3

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  at all shocked by his accusation, although neither appeared to take it seriously.Barclay in fact laughed.“Pudge, drop this stupid idea.”

  Connie nodded.“It’ll just upset her.”

  Even I told him, “Leave it alone for now.Why freak her out?”

  Pudge shook his head at us, disappointed.“What’s upsetting her is he’s dead! Come on, Jamie, you read the Death Book.We’re going to leave it alone that a friend of ours was maybe murdered?”

  “No one but you thinks he was.” Connie spoke with a calm reasonableness, even if already a little slurred of speech.His eyes were slightly bloodshot.Oddly I recalled a girl at Hart High calling him Kurt Cobain for a while because his eyes, she said, were so sad and blue.Now he’d added a decade of drink and his eyes had little pouches that hadn’t been there before.Not enough drink to hurt his career.From everything I heard, he was headed big places in the Church.

  Pudge, himself one of Connie’s great admirers, now turned angrily to the priest.“Did you ever stop to think that this is only the beginning?

  That maybe we’re all in danger? Somebody put an anonymous note in Jamie’s door.What do you think it means? ‘Death has come to your little town, Sheriff ’?”

  Barclay laughed again.“I think it’s a joke.That stupid club was back in high school! Why would somebody kill Ben now?”

  “I don’t know!” Pudge yanked the plastic wrap off a huge antipasto platter.“That’s what the police are for!” Hoisting the tray over his head, above the crowd, he wove his way into the sunroom.

  And Pudge hadn’t even been told about the new nail holes I’d found in the Tymosz basement entrance.The truth was, I thought he was right.

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  Ben had been murdered.But I was the only other person who seemed to think so.

  Garth and Amanda joined us as I was talking to Debbie Deklerk, still a good friend of mine.Amanda and I hugged without meaning it.I asked how her husband was.She smiled coolly.

  Clay, who’d stood alone at the food table, eating pieces of cheese, came over beside us while Barclay was boasting to Garth about how extensively he’d managed to travel the world without ever getting jet lag because of intelligent planning and the comforts of first class.Barclay paused in his self-congratulation to improve Clay’s posture by pulling on his arm.Then he told his son that his shoes were untied and that he shouldn’t be wearing sneakers to a funeral anyhow.Into his teens, Clay’s complexion had stayed flawless, like Gina’s, but now his father’s insults turned it a horrible mottled purple.Barclay didn’t seem to notice as he turned back to tell Garth that he had accumulated two hundred thousand frequent flyer miles but was too busy to use them.Clay walked away.A few minutes later, I saw him out in the yard, smoking pot and taking photos with the small digital camera he carried everywhere.

  For a while the group talked about the club, about Pudge’s theory that Ben’s death had been caused by some psychopath who’d gotten hold of copies of the old Death Books.Garth liked the idea, but admitted it was because he was in the business of selling the news and that it was a hot headline.No one else thought it made sense.I kept my mouth shut.

  Most people had left the reception by then.Amanda offered Garth a ride to his sister Katie’s.He accepted.The fact that they were leaving together appeared to annoy the hell out of Barclay, who stomped out looking for 6 5

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  Clay.Rod left right after Garth did.I said I’d meet him later.Megan and Sam were still missing, off in that room at the end of the hall, and I wanted to ask her some questions.

  Barclay took Ben’s mother into the living room, where they sat together talking on the couch.He did most of the talking while she nodded.Finally he slid a checkbook out of his jacket pocket and wrote her a check.She nodded numbly.I assumed the check was to help with the funeral expenses.

  Finally the last guests wandered away, including all the members of the Killing Club who’d come together after eleven years because of the death of Ben Tymosz, whom no one but Pudge had really cared about all that much.

  “EVERYBODY LOVED Ben.You know that, Jamie! What enemies?

  He didn’t have any enemies.There wasn’t a mean bone in his body.People walked all over him.” Megan sat on the fake French provincial couch in Ben’s mother’s living room.Her girls watched television in the sunroom.

  I’d waited out Sam Deklerk.After he’d left the bedroom at the end of the hall, I’d knocked on the door, telling Megan I needed to talk to her.

  She explained that she’d been “overcome,” and that Sam, a friend of Ben’s, was “trying to help.”

  I asked her about Ben’s past membership in the Killing Club.Today was the first time she’d ever heard of it.

  “Pudge is crazy.I love him but he’s crazy.” Megan moved to a gas fireplace of plastic logs, pulled aside the chain curtain and blew the smoke from her long mentholated cigarette up the chimney.“I can’t 6 6

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  smoke in his mom’s house,” she explained.“You don’t go for this stupid idea, do you? Somebody killed Ben?”

  I’d already asked Megan if she’d really known nothing, as she’d told Rod, about Ben’s illness.No; it had been a complete shock.She’d known that his cholesterol and blood pressure were through the roof, but he’d kept from her that he’d had tests done and had something as awful as pancreatic cancer.I asked her about their finances.They were fine—no, they were in terrible debt and business wasn’t good.As for their happiness together, they were fine; they were fine, everything was fine.Except he hadn’t told her he had cancer.

  She edged away from me when I asked her more details about the last day of Ben’s life.Was there anything out of the ordinary going on?

  Nothing.They’d had coffee and cereal for breakfast.Ben yelled at the dog.Kristie was crying because she wanted to wear her pink jeans and they were still wet in the washing machine.Megan drove the girls to the school bus stop at the end of the street.Ben went (she assumed) to his office downtown.C.R.O’Brian Insurance.(C.R.O’Brian was Megan’s father.) She had called him at the office just before noon. He’d said he was having lunch with Barclay Ober, to discuss increasing Barclay’s personal insurance.He was happy about that, but Megan could give no other details.Ben didn’t talk with her much about work.

  She saw her husband around five thirty that evening, but only in the driveway.He was driving up as she was leaving to take the girls to their friend’s birthday party.The last she saw of Ben, he had called to her to wait at the curb so Kathie and Kristie could watch the house and yard light up when he plugged in the garage outlet.He waved to them, pointing up at the reindeer rocking along the roof ledge.

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  Tearing up, Megan put out the cigarette in the saucer on her lap.

  “And then you went to exercise at the new gym in Appleton Mall?”

  “Yes.” She looked furtive. “I mean, I didn’t take a class or anything, just by myself.”

  “No, you didn’t take a class.I checked.”

  Now Megan looked scared and indignant both; it confused her facial muscles.“You checked?”

  I waited.It had turned dark outside.Ben’s mother came sadly to the door, asked if we wanted anything.Christmas lights came on in the houses across the street.“Well, you didn’t look to me like you’d come from a gym workout.You looked pretty dressed up.” I kept waiting.Sometimes all you have to do is wait; it was a good lesson my dad had taught me about police work.

  I could see guilt and the desire to give up already in her face, fighting against the secret.Sometimes you have to help.“S
o, how long have you and Sam Deklerk been seeing each other?”

  She gave denial a try, but couldn’t hang on to it for more than ten minutes of my questioning her.They’d been having an affair since the end of the summer.“It’s only been a few months,” she kept insisting, as if that brevity somehow made it less a betrayal of Ben.She loved Ben.I believed her when she said it.But life was too stressed and too strapped, and Sam was nice to her, and Ben was so unhappy and withdrawn and secretive (and now she knew why) and Sam was fun.And finally she admitted that she’d been with Sam at his apartment that night.She was having sex with another man at the very moment Ben died.That (curiously certain) fact was going to haunt her for the rest of her life! If she’d just come back home when she was supposed to, if she’d never gone to see her lover 6 8

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  because he’d begged her to, her children would still have their father on Christmas morning.She flung herself on the couch beside me, whispering harshly.“Don’t tell anyone, Jamie.Please, don’t let my kids find out I was cheating on Ben.”

  Her daughters were six and seven years old.“Jesus, Megan, I’m not going to tell your kids.But I do have to check it out.”

  Either her confession or this news let loose in Megan a keening so loud that her little girls ran into the living room, flinging their arms around her, crying too, shoving me to the edge of the couch as they embraced their mother.

  I left them to comfort her, and drove over to Deklerk’s Bar, where Sam protected Megan’s reputation a lot longer than she had herself.

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  C O N N I E

  THE NEXT NIGHTRod and I finally made it to the Ironworks Inn for his birthday dinner.He had what he always orders on special occasions: shrimp cocktail.Porterhouse steak, rare.

  The waiters put a candle in his mud pie and sang “Happy Birthday” to him.We each had a glass of champagne and toasted the holiday season.I gave him his present: tickets for the two of us to Baja, scuba diving, photographing sharks and whales, kayaking, drinking wine.We’d done two diving trips to the Caribbean already, but had never been to the West Coast.“Okay, Wolenski.Promise me, you’re going to take this vacation.In the spring.No more postponements?”