The Killing Club Read online

  “Make it a honeymoon, you got a deal.Promise.You.Me.Ocean.

  Hotel.Wine.Good.” He held up his hand, looking so much like an Indian agreeing to a treaty in a John Wayne movie that he made me laugh out loud.

  7 0

  T H E K I L L I N G C L U B

  Like always, the Ironworks was crowded with human complications, the way small towns are.Coming in, I saw the widow Megan Tymosz and her lover, Sam Deklerk, having dinner with Father Connie, who was in a sports jacket but wearing his collar and who actually had a little black missal on the table next to his scotch as if he were going to lead them in prayer.The adulterers were talking in fast urgent whispers; he was nodding sympathetically.Sort of a surf-and-turf confessional, I suppose.

  On the way to our table, two different couples spoke to me about seeing me at Ben’s funeral, how nice it had been.Would his family be all right?

  It turns out his family would be fine.Ben had no retirement savings, but he had taken out a very nice life insurance policy on himself, as one might expect of an insurance agent (fortunately, well before he’d been diagnosed with terminal cancer); it paid off double on accidents.Rod and I talked briefly about the possibility that Megan (with or without the help of her lover, Sam) had strung a trip wire across the top of her basement steps, pushed her husband down them and then set fire to the house in order to collect that insurance.

  “I don’t see it happening,” I admitted.“Even if she’d known he might be dying anyhow, and figured she’d get double the money if she killed him.I don’t think she’d do it.”

  Rod nodded.“You started all this.”

  “I started that somebody killed him.I don’t see it’s Megan.Cheating on Ben was bad enough.She’s gained ten pounds.”

  Rod set down his coffee cup in order to follow my logic.The man drank coffee day and night; it seemed to have no effect on his even temperament.“Okay.From guilt about the affair?”

  7 1

  T H E K I L L I N G C L U B

  “Look at her over there.She’s eating a hot fudge sundae.”

  “Couldn’t she be eating a sundae because she did kill him?”

  “Go ahead.Make fun, Wolenski.How many homicides have there been in Gloria since I got promoted? Who closed every single one of them but the third one? And I still swear to God, Arthur Fishton killed his wife.”

  “We didn’t prove it....Okay, then Megan’s out.She was with Sam Deklerk, just like he said.”

  Your lover’s word was not much of an alibi, admittedly.On the other hand, Sam’s condo neighbor had been nosy enough to notice Sam kissing Megan at his door at 6:15 P.M.that night, and then kissing her good-bye in the entryway again at 9:40.You have to be a lot more vigilant than they were to carry off a private affair in a town no larger than Gloria.

  And speaking of adulteresses (or so I’d always supposed), Amanda Morgan (whom I hadn’t seen for months and now couldn’t seem to escape) came into the Ironworks with her husband, Jim, the retired CEO, just as we were leaving.She wore a sable coat that dropped in furry waves almost to her feet.That kind of coat takes guts these days.It stood out more because her husband and she were both so tan.They said they’d been on their boat in Naples, Florida.Hands jammed in his blazer, Jim gave us a long description of his birdie on the seventeenth hole of some golf course down there.Amanda looked patiently bored; she certainly had to be used to it.

  “Nice to see Garth back.” She smiled at me.

  “Isn’t it?”

  Then she turned around so Rod could help her off with her sable, as her husband had made no effort to do it.He must have retired from Amanda as well as Kind Lady and anything else in his life besides golf.

  7 2

  T H E K I L L I N G C L U B

  Rod had the height and quick reflexes to keep the heavy coat from dropping to the floor.

  “So, Jamie ...” Her smile was worth twenty thousand dollars; I’d gotten the estimate from Martha the dentist.“I hear you think somebody’s killing the Killing Club.Maybe we should get in touch with Jeremy and ...what was her name?”

  “Wendy.Wendy Schumacher.I did.I tracked them down.One’s in Portland, one’s in Atlanta.They haven’t killed anybody and nobody’s killed them.Or so they say.” I smiled back.It was cheaper, but all mine.

  BACK HOME, my dad was watching the Yankees beat the Red Sox on ESPN Classic in some game that had been won years ago.He likes the past better; he wasn’t in a wheelchair.He hit mute to ask me if I was still playing the homicide angle on Ben’s house fire.I told him I wasn’t sure anymore, that Rod had told me to drop it.

  “Well, maybe you don’t argue with the boss?”

  “Why not? Didn’t I argue with you?” I gave his white hair a quick rub.“Didn’t I drive you crazy arguing with you?”

  He grinned.“You were a pistol.Gina cried.You got mad.Here’s an idea.” It had occurred to my father that those cut-out letters in the envelope spelling out the line from Halloween had belonged to my brother Dino.Had I asked him about them? No, I hadn’t seen Dino in days.I’d assumed the message from the movie had been left for me, because we’d used that line almost like a catchphrase in the Killing Club.But maybe Dino had heard the phrase on his own, and had copied it out because he was getting a stencil made for a T-shirt.He liked anything retro.

  7 3

  T H E K I L L I N G C L U B

  Dad told me Dino was subbing somewhere here in town tonight.As to where, all he could come up with was the name of a German airship.

  When I got him to the words Graf Zeppelin, I knew what to do. I called around town and learned that Deklerk’s Bar had Dino doing Led Zeppelin covers solo because their band had bailed on them.

  After changing my clothes, I drove over there around ten, taking with me a Xeroxed copy of the anonymous note.It was only five blocks from our house to Deklerk’s, and as it turned out, maybe I should have walked.

  SURE ENOUGH, I spotted Dino behind his double-fretted metal guitar up on a small black dais that was strung with chili pepper Christmas lights.In bell-bottoms, with his smooth, thin, bare chest exposed under a jacket embroidered with sequined flowers and birds, my brother looked about fifteen.I had to wait for his solo to end.It looked to me as if most of the other patrons at Deklerk’s were doing the same thing, even though poor Dino was tamped way down on the amplifier.His long curls bouncing and sparkling with glitter, his eyes rolled back in a hazy stare, I guessed he was pretending to be Jimmy Page and in Gloria he could almost get away with it.

  “Jamie, you came to hear me, that’s so cool! This is my sister.” He showed me off to two guys at a table near the dais; they were around his age, dressed like him, and appeared to be just as stoned.“She’s a big-time cop, I swear.Don’t do blow around her, she’ll bust you, I swear!” They all three laughed crazily together.

  Dino loved the cut-out message, “Death has come to your little town, 7 4

  T H E K I L L I N G C L U B

  Sheriff,” but he said he’d never heard it before.He hadn’t noticed the envelope lying on the stoop, nor did he remember my ever talking to him about the Killing Club.

  “Cool.I could put that for you know like my logo on my jacket here.

  I’ll tell you one thing, this is a little town! I gotta go.I got another gig in A.C.This place sucks.I love you.” He rubbed his curls in my face the way he had at three years old.A few little gold glitter specks stuck to my cheek.

  Debbie Deklerk was working the bar.She had smart pale gray eyes in a wide Polish face.Just like at Hart High, Debbie wore a stud in her nose, her purplish black hair in a spiky comb-up, her nails the color of her hair and six rings in her left ear.Solid and shapely, she showed off her breasts in a tight low-cut apple-green pullover.Three gold necklaces fell into her cleavage.I asked her where her brother, Sam, was.In fact, I knew where he was (he’d left the Ironworks with Megan), but I just wanted to see what she would say.

  “No idea,” she said, preoccupied.“Jamie, I want you to stop all this Killing Club crap.It�
��s creeping me out.You got everybody doing it now.”

  She pointed me toward a back booth.

  It was certainly my night for old club feelings.Hunched over mugs of beer in the booth, Garth sat with Connie, who was now wearing a sweater and jeans and had lost the missal.The two men looked intensely unhappy and I wondered if they were carrying on their argument from the church steps the day before.They’d never really gotten along.They’d both loved movies and never liked the same ones.They’d each thought they were smarter.

  Debbie gave a long mock sigh.“That’s a lot of prime beef to keep off the shelves.”

  7 5

  T H E K I L L I N G C L U B

  “Father Connie?”

  “Both of them.And don’t start thinking otherwise, Jamie.” Leaning over the bar, she tapped down hard on my hand with her square purple nails.“Look at me.Look at me! You know how they flash all those lights and clang those bells at an intersection when a train’s coming?” She cupped her pale ear with its half dozen stud earrings, turning it in my direction.“That’s what you’re hearing, Sergeant Ferrara. Clang clang clang! ”

  I showed her my engagement ring.

  “Hey, I’ll take it!” She sighed.“I’m ready.”

  I interrupted Garth and Connie in their booth, giving a significant look at the young priest.“Hi, guys.What are you arguing about now?”

  They said, “Nothing,” and didn’t ask me to join them.

  I did anyhow.“So, Connie, I just saw you a little while ago at the Ironworks.With Megan and Sam.”

  The priest sidestepped me.“Rod’s birthday, wasn’t it? You two looked like you were having fun.”

  “Always.So now you’re here at Deklerk’s.Real night on the town for you.”

  Connie remained noncommittal.“For you too, I guess.”

  I asked them again what they’d been talking about so seriously.They told me, just politics.“Pro-Church and anti-State,” Garth said.

  Connie finished his beer quickly and slid out of the booth.He had to go; he had early Mass.Did Garth want that ride home to his sister’s now?

  Garth gave me the smile I used to live for.“How about you give me a lift, Jamie? That okay?”

  Was I going to tell him no? That I didn’t want to be enclosed in a small space with him even if the space was moving? I said, “Sure.”

  7 6

  T H E K I L L I N G C L U B

  Both men were very attractive; Connie was better built, Garth had better features.Both men were hiding something from me.“So, guys.” I tried again.“Who do you think murdered Ben?”

  Simultaneously Connie said, “Nobody,” and Garth said, “Maybe whoever killed Shawn Tarrini.Maybe Shawn was murdered.

  ” He

  shrugged in a take-it-or-leave-it way.

  “Nobody killed Shawn Tarrini,” Connie insisted.“What’s wrong with you people? It was a car accident.See you around.”

  “Or not,” Garth said.

  A woman at the bar, looking for love and drunk enough to grab it as it passed her, hit on Connie.He brushed her off with a practiced kindly maneuver and walked out.

  Garth wondered if our “priest buddy” ever succumbed to temptation.

  I shrugged.“It’s none of our business.”

  “Whoa.What’s your problem? I just think the diocese ought to encourage him; take the press off messing up little boys.” I didn’t answer. Finally, pointing at the dais, he added, “Your brother’s not very good, is he?”

  “Dino? He’s perfectly fine.” Nobody was going to trash Dino but me.

  On the table, about six plastic straws had been intricately twisted into Celtic-looking designs, I assumed by Connie.“What’s really going on with you and Connie? You two and Barclay in a huddle.You don’t like Barclay.Is it something about Ben?”

  Garth twisted his head back and forth a while, as if he had a crick in it.“No.Guy stuff.Like you say, none of your business.”

  “Fine.” I looked at him for a minute. “Onto the next question. What did you mean, you came back early for me? What was that supposed to mean?”

  7 7

  T H E K I L L I N G C L U B

  He grinned.“I wanted to see you.See what you look like.You look great.” I slid out of the booth, away from him. “Where’re you going, Jamie?”

  “You want that ride to Katie’s now?”

  “Looks like it’s now or never.” He said it to my back, as I was halfway to the door by then.

  GARTH’S LESBIAN SISTER, Katie,had been my sister’s best friend.

  In retrospect I wondered if Katie had ever been in love with Gina.I know she was upset Gina had married Barclay.But then so was I.Gina and Katie were always sketching and painting and sculpting together.They went to a small fine arts college nearby, though Gina quit after a year, when Clay was born.Now Katie teaches junior high art in town.After my sister died, Katie gave me a watercolor she’d painted of Gina standing in a blue forest.I had it on the wall of my bedroom.

  For eight years now Katie has lived with Martha, a divorced dentist, who’s a little bit older.They live down a dirt road in the woods west of town.When Garth and I got there (and we got there fast), the white pickup truck and white Volvo parked side by side meant both women were home.Behind a garden of staked teepees that in summer held up tomatoes and peas, a pyramid-shaped garage served as Katie’s studio.

  Now it was bordered in white Christmas icicle lights.Katie’s glazed psy-chedelic papier-mâché sculptures of nudes stood around the yard like an Amazon army at ease.

  A friend of theirs had designed the house for them and they’d named it Chelsea Morning for the Joni Mitchell song.It was once considered experimental.Now it looks dated, more dated, ironically, than the 7 8

  T H E K I L L I N G C L U B

  eighteenth-century saltboxes on Front Street.But they loved it.Everything was built of red and orange woods.There were solar heat panels on the roof, and a long side room with nothing but a pool in it that was called, for tax purposes, a “thermal storage unit.” The bedroom was a geo-desic dome with a free-form stone chimney in its middle.There was too much furniture and half a dozen cats sleeping on it.

  Katie hugged me, shushing me with a finger.Martha, who had one of the cats in her lap, lay asleep on the couch in front of a crackling log fire.

  Enya was singing softly from the stereo.

  “Sweets works so hard,” Katie explained.“She just conks out.”

  I don’t know why everyone calls Martha, who is thin, Sweets.Maybe because she tells her patients not to eat candy.True, she had her hands in other people’s mouths ten hours a day, and that had to wear you out.

  More so than teaching teenagers to glue together collages the way Katie did? Hard to say.

  Three years can make a big difference when you’re two and someone else is five.One of my first memories is of five-year-old Katie lugging me around in her arms; another is of her teaching me how to make a J for Jamie.So I still felt about Katie McBride the way most of her students had for ten years.Even Clay told me she “wasn’t too bad.”

  She led us back into the large, round, cinnamon-smelling kitchen.

  She wore big furry sheepskin boots and a red oversized handwoven sweater with a Christmas tree on it as green as her eyes.“So, the Prince formerly known as Garth got you to drive him all the way out here?”

  “No trouble.I was hoping you’d still be up.”

  “I’m always up.He’s a celebrity.Why doesn’t he rent a car? Why do we have to drive him places?”

  7 9

  T H E K I L L I N G C L U B

  Garth said that talking about the news late at night didn’t make you a celebrity.Ask ten people in the supermarket; none of them would have heard of him.A celebrity was somebody people knew about in the supermarket.

  “In Gloria, they know you in the supermarket,” Katie assured him.

  “And in the dentist’s office too.”

  He hugged her till she broke loose.“Okay, in Gloria I’m a celebri
ty.”

  Katie told him that his girlfriend, Ashley, had called and wanted him to turn on his cell phone.I could see that Katie didn’t like Ashley.When Garth went back to the guest room to call her, she said so.“I don’t like that Ashley.I liked the last one.This one I don’t like.” Then, alternating hands as if she were firing two guns, she shook her forefingers at me.“Do not, do not, let him get to you.”

  “Don’t be stupid, Katie.” I held up my left fist to show her the engagement ring I wore, but I admit it looked more like I was going to sock her for giving me a warning I needed.

  Garth came back to the kitchen accompanied by Sweets, who claimed she was wide-awake now, but then, yawning, drifted off to their bedroom ten minutes later, after asking me how my new filling was doing.

  The three of us left shared a glass of wine together, catching up, rem-iniscing about Gloria, going back to our day-care days.A few years ago, Garth and Katie’s mother had died of emphysema.“She smoked,” Katie said, pointing at Garth.“Don’t.”

  “I don’t.” He shrugged at me.

  “Yes, you do.They fell out.I was doing your laundry.”

  “What are you doing my laundry for, Katie? Good God.”

  Taking my glass over to the big soapstone sink, where a Christmas 8 0

  T H E K I L L I N G C L U B

  cactus was soaking, I was about to announce my departure—I was a third wheel in their sibling spats, and could go have my own, especially with Joe Jr., whom I don’t even like. Then I noticed two paper collages held by magnets of Botticelli’s Venus to the refrigerator door; one of them had letters in it.

  “Would you look at this for me?” I showed Katie the copy of the anonymous message that I’d stuffed in the pocket of my jeans.“Somebody left this at my front door.”

  “That’s sick.What does it mean?”

  “I don’t know.I think it’s about the Killing Club.Remember? Our old club.”

  Garth came over to look at the piece of paper.“It’s our slogan.”

  Rolling his eyes, he dropped his voice to a rumble.“Death has come to your little town, Sheriff.”