The Killing Club Read online

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  closed its eyes.Deklerk’s blinked its lights too, but that was because the neon sign had a sputter.The two decapitated Santa Claus heads floating in the bar window turned Barclay a dangerous red as he passed them.

  Tossing his keys again, he stood at the intersection, but didn’t cross when the light changed.He waited there impatiently through another whole sequence of lights.

  I waited too, back under the awning of Talbot and Jenkins, Antiques, so he couldn’t see me.Not that he ever looked back.

  Suddenly a new blue Jaguar smoothly braked right beside him.As the light turned green, Barclay jumped avidly into the passenger seat and the coupe roared away, accelerating fast.I couldn’t see the license plate except to notice that it was one of the special “preserve our natural re-sources” plates with trees and ducks on it.But then I didn’t need to see the plate.I knew it was Amanda’s car.

  Compared to the Saturday night crowd, Deklerk’s was nearly empty now.My great-aunt Betty Wurtz stood waiting to use the pay phone, passing the time by throwing darts at a round board about ten inches away.She was so short she had to throw high over her head.She did pretty well.The man on the phone kept an eye on her.On the jukebox, the Screaming Blue Messiahs played a punk cover of a Hank Williams song but they weren’t screaming very loudly because a small row of middle-aged men at the bar had the Giants-Cowboys game on the television.It was a big TV, swinging out into the room above the wall-mounted blue marlin that Sam Deklerk had caught ten years ago on a vacation to the Florida Keys.That marlin had made Sam think life was a Jimmy Buffett song; ever since, he’d worn shorts and flip-flops behind his bar all summer long.

  “Where’s Sam?” I asked his sister, Debbie.

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  Her pale face scrunched in a frown as she poured me an amaretto on the rocks without asking if I wanted it.“What? Now you’re in love with Sam? Last night you asked me the same thing.How should I know where Sam is? Not here.”

  Tonight Debbie showed off her cleavage in a scoop-necked black T-shirt.There was more of her to show off than there used to be.You could see the elastic of her panties through her black jeans.Her eyes looked bloodshot, the skin beneath them bruised a pale purple version of her fingernails.While I watched her pull two drafts, then slide the big beer mugs to the men at the bar, I told her that she looked tired.

  “Whose fault is that? I haven’t slept since Ben died and you and Pudge decided goddamn psycho Michael Myers was running around loose in Gloria, killing off the Killing Club.”

  I shrugged at her, mock-sheepish.“Yeah, well, maybe I’m wrong.One thing’s for sure, Megan didn’t do it.She was off screwing your brother.”

  “You asked me, I could have told you that.”

  I let it go.“Maybe Ben just died by stupid accident.”

  But, as always, Debbie refused to accept the reassurance she’d asked for.“What if he didn’t? What if life really is just a cheesy horror movie like I always suspected?” Since childhood she had dreaded, expected and taken satisfaction in the inevitable arrival of the worst.“Anyhow, if we don’t get murdered, there’s the future, so why not just step into the chain-saw?” She pointed at Betty Wurtz, who was sticking the extra darts into the floppy red wool hat she wore perched above her pink hair.

  Aunt Betty thought Debbie was waving at her and came over to ask us to make the man get off the pay phone.“He’s been on that telephone, for no reason, eleven and a half minutes.”

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  “Hang on, Mrs.Wurtz,” Debbie told her.

  “Where’s that boyfriend of yours? You ought to get married.My husband, God rest his soul, Isaac Wurtz, no legs but a good man.In his day that man sold a lot of houses.Low-end but a lot.In one day he sold five.

  Why don’t you marry that man?”

  I pointed at my chest, assuming she was talking to me.“Rod Wolenski? We’re engaged.” I showed her the ring.

  “Never heard of him.I mean the tall one in the cemetery.”

  Debbie wondered who that might be.Aunt Betty couldn’t tell her, just that he was putting roses on graves and he needed to get his hair cut.

  Just then the man hung up the pay phone, turning to give my great-aunt a cupped palm gesture with a raised arm that she apparently didn’t understand since she told us, “At least he’s apologizing.”

  After she left, Debbie said, “She mean Garth? What’s the matter with you?”

  “Nothing.I happened to see him at Lyall’s grave.”

  “You happened to leave here with him last night.Were you two going back to the cemetery?”

  I brushed the whole thing aside with a wave and took my drink over to a booth to think things through.Not busy, Debbie followed.As she sat down across from me, I told her, “Something’s going on that’s got something to do with Garth and Connie and Barclay.”

  “That’s a little vague.Like what?” By force of habit, she pulled napkins from the holder, wiped down the tabletop.

  “I don’t know.” I started cleaning the table too, then stopped myself.

  “They’re really worried about something.”

  Her laugh was a loud parodic “Ha!,” her head bobbing up and 9 6

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  down, bouncing the gold chains in her cleavage.“Like maybe dying?”

  “Debbie, you know what I just saw? Amanda picked up Barclay in her car at the intersection here.” I clicked my engagement ring against the side of my glass, emphasizing the sequence as I described it.“I’m at his house, he tells his wife and mother he’s going to work, on a Sunday night.

  I follow him.Instead he comes here, parks down the block, waits, Amanda’s Jaguar pulls up on York, zip, they’re gone.”

  Debbie’s wide face narrowed as she puckered her lips and crossed her eyes.What she said was, “Duh.”

  “Still? Barclay and Amanda?”

  “More like ‘again’ than ‘still.’ ” Then one of the TV watchers called to her from the bar for another round.She yelled back at him, “You want fast? Go to Dante’s,” but she stood up.Leaning over, she squeezed my chin affectionately.“Let me get this straight: You’re a trained detective?

  That’s what you do for a living?”

  I jerked my head away, smiling.“I’m a specialist.Homicide.Adultery is a whole different division.”

  With a fluff of her spiked hair, she laughed as she turned to go.“It’s gotta be a big division in Gloria.Adultery squad, that’s about half the force.See ya.”

  But I followed her back to the bar.“I don’t get it.He’s an asshole, a smug, mean, conceited prick.”

  “I don’t get it either, but it’s clear some women disagree with us.And that guy’d fuck a rubber duck in his bathtub.You’re the one told me he was cheating on Gina the whole time she was in ICU.” I must have flinched because Debbie reached out for my hand.“Sorry.” She squeezed so hard the cheap rings on her fingers pinched mine.

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  “Yeah,” I said.“He cheated on Gina.He’s cheating on Tricia.I bet that’s why she joined the Catholic Church.”

  Debbie laughed.“Well, sex is sure why I left it.” She took an order for a double scotch from someone who didn’t need it.When she came back, she said, “Listen, Amanda and Barclay, it’s a game.They play ‘Password,’

  they’re not going to get that word monogamy.Neither one of them.”

  “The way Barclay’s face turned purple when she left Ben’s reception with Garth, didn’t look like he thought it was a game.” But it was the Amanda part of the affair that didn’t make sense to me.“Amanda’s about money.Always has been.”

  Amanda and Debbie had once been pretty good friends, and while Amanda had long ago left Debbie behind in the dust of Deklerk’s Bar, Debbie continued to stick up for her in a wry, half-hearted sort of way.

  Now she shrugged.“Who knows.Maybe sh
e’s lonely.She’s a golf widow.I got a friend works in ob/gyn at St.Anthony’s, says Amanda’s in there a lot, doing all this fertility stuff.”

  “Jesus, remind me to pick another hospital if I want to keep my health a secret around this town.”

  “Hey, you want to drop dead a stranger, move to New York.Sounds like she really wants a baby.”

  “I don’t think she married Jim Morgan for a baby.I think she married him for money.”

  Debbie swept up the tips, dumped them into the big cheap snifter on the counter.“I don’t think so.I think it was social clout.She had plenty of money even before she bagged Jim on the eighteenth hole.Ol’ Jim was just new icing on the old cake.”

  This fact surprised me.Amanda Kean had grown up in a North Gloria 9 8

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  trailer park.All she had going for her was looks and willpower.It turned out to be enough.But the climb had taken her a while.Guys had slept with her, but they hadn’t proposed.Not until an elderly minor executive at Kind Lady stepped up to the altar.But that man hadn’t been all that rich.And her second husband, Shawn Tarrini, a sales manager at the same factory, had boasted about losing all of his savings playing the market.

  “Plenty of money from where? Shawn didn’t have a cent.”

  Debbie snickered derisively at me again.“Shawn Tarrini? He had a million-dollar life insurance policy.”

  That took me aback.“Amanda collected a million dollars?”

  “She sure as shit did.Almost put Ben Tymosz’s father-in-law out of business.Ben’s the one that wrote it up for O’Brian’s six months before Shawn died.” Debbie took my glass from me. “Shawn hits the ramp rail on the turnpike at seventy miles an hour and Amanda’s rich.Except she’s miserable ’cause her husband’s dead.Is life ironic or what?” She refused my twenty.“Don’t try to pay me.I may need a favor.”

  “You never need a favor.”

  “You don’t know.The Killing Club killer could be chasing me with an ax, and I’ll hit speed dial Jamie Ferrara, and there you’ll be!”

  I patted her small veiny hand.“That’s true, Debbie.There I’ll be.”

  “I know it’s true.Unless he got you first.” She always had to have the last word.

  BACK HOME IN BED, the past kept circling closer: Shawn,Amanda and Ben were all members of the Killing Club.Ben dies the way Pudge had told him to write a murder in the Death Book.A shadow moves 9 9

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  across Ben’s living room window the morning after he died.Was the person there taking the wire and nails out of the door jamb and I scared him or her off? That night somebody leaves me a quote from a horror movie, letters cut out of magazine ads, letting me know that death is coming to my little town.

  Amanda has Ben write up a huge insurance policy on her second husband, Shawn Tarrini.Shawn makes up a story for the Killing Club about someone who gets away with murdering his rival by passing the homicide off as a hit-and-run car accident.Shawn dies in a car accident.

  Barclay is in his car outside Ben’s house the night of the fire.Barclay’s car keys glint as he tosses them in the air on the terrace at River Bend.He lies to his wife.The blue Jaguar speeds away with Barclay and Amanda inside.

  The night of that championship football game, I’d stood in the parking lot with Debbie Deklerk, who’d come to the stadium, she said, to score some pot.I was steamed about Amanda, who was getting into Barclay’s car with Garth, and I said to Debbie, “That goddamn fucking bitch.”

  “Hey, that fucking bitch is my friend.” Debbie grinned.

  Amanda, Garth and Lyall crowded into the backseat of the car.Ben and Connie were in the front with Barclay.The next day, when Lyall was missing, all four of them had told the police, who’d interviewed them, that they’d all been “just hanging around talking” for most of the night at the Pine Barrens Playhouse, to which Ben had a key.(They didn’t say we all had keys and were there all the time having meetings of the Killing Club.) They said that Lyall had wandered off and they’d figured he’d hitchhiked home.They’d never seen him again.Their stories were consistent.Lyall’s 1 0 0

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  suicide note was found on one of the nearby derelict warehouse docks.

  Ben’s father was furious and changed the lock on the empty playhouse.

  Now eleven years later Connie, Barclay and Garth were arguing on the church steps after Ben’s funeral.Garth and Connie were arguing in the booth at Deklerk’s.What were they hiding from me? Maybe it had absolutely nothing to do with Ben and the past.Maybe one of them had given the others a bad stock tip.Maybe anything.Lives had gone in their own very different directions.

  But Garth was at Lyall’s grave.Garth was back in Gloria.Not, he said, for Ben.Or Lyall.“I think I came back early for you.” But then he’d left the funeral reception with Amanda.Barclay hadn’t liked that at all.Amanda got a million dollars when Shawn died.Ben wrote up the policy for her.

  Amanda and Shawn and Ben.

  I pushed my way back to a memory that was hard to bring into focus.Same town cemetery.Shawn Tarrini’s funeral.Pudge stood next to me in the churchyard beside the raw open grave.It was raining.Connie was there but not officially.It was a secular funeral home service, with friends speaking instead of ministers.Only Shawn’s brother spoke at the graveside.Pudge offered me space under his umbrella.“Ben’s taking this hard.” He sighed. I looked over, across the casket, at Ben and his wife, Megan.Ben’s face was frozen.

  Amanda, beautifully outfitted in black—from umbrella and raincoat to suit and shoes and gloves—stood in the midst of Shawn’s family.She was trembling.I recall overhearing Barclay, who was standing next to me whispering to someone, but I can’t remember who, “Christ almighty, she’s fucking gorgeous,” and I thought how he might have said the same tacky thing about another woman at his own wife’s—my sister’s—funeral.

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  Then Amanda walked over to Ben.Megan moved aside to let Ben give Amanda a kiss on the cheek.Amanda’s arms suddenly went around Ben’s neck and stayed there until Debbie moved next to them and tapped Ben’s shoulder.Then Ben pulled Amanda’s arms down, turned her into Debbie’s embrace and hurried away from the small crowd.Debbie seemed to be holding Amanda up, as if she were dead weight.

  I remember that Connie followed Ben, comforting him, though Ben tried to pull away.They were walking ...where? The memory wouldn’t come.I slipped out of bed, stood in my bay window, looked up at the hard December stars, thought back to that moment, made myself see it again.

  Connie hurried after Ben along the gravel path and down the slope to the river’s bank to Lyall Hillier’s empty grave.When Amanda tried to follow them, Connie saw her and gestured to Barclay, who took her aside, putting his arm around her, hugging her to him.

  A car noise outside broke into my thoughts.I heard a clatter at the door, then Dino fumbling for the light switch, banging his guitar case into the hall table, cursing.I ran down the hall stairs, whispering loudly,

  “Dino, be quiet.Dad’s going to tear your head off!”

  My brother was holding a manila envelope.“Hey, this was on the stoop, like the other one.” Before I could stop him he’d pulled out the piece of paper with the letters pasted on it.They said, “Was that the bogeyman?

  As a matter of fact ...it was.” Another quote from the same horror movie.

  I was sure.I’d rented the video of Halloween and watched it twice.

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  MONDAY MORNING,early,everybody wanted to give me breakfast.Well, not everybody.Dino, who worked afternoons at Jonesy’s Marina so he could play bad rock and roll all night, would sleep till noon.But my dad—and it was amazing, the speed with which he negotiated the kitchen in his wheelchair—scrambled some eggs with chopped peppers and scooped them into fried bologna halves.“Two Jamie Deluxes!” he called to me cheerfully.I couldn’t resist them.My dad
wasn’t a bad cook, but he stuck to simple recipes inherited from his grandmother half a century ago—so, lots of 1950s chicken Parmesan.I am, I’ve been told, a really good cook, but I have my suspicions of the motives of the people who have told me so.

  I filled my father in on my investigation into Ben’s death.

  Listening, he poured me more coffee.His coffee, which he warmed up in the microwave, was I think the worst coffee ever made by a 1 0 3

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  first-generation Italian.“It comes down to this, sweetheart.If somebody killed Ben, and then sent you those notes, it’s one of two reasons why.”

  I cut the egg-filled bologna into tiny squares.Sam, our cat, hopped on the table to try to get to my plate.My father was shocked that Sam would do such a thing—as he was always shocked, even though Sam did it all the time, probably because occasionally when he was alone my father fed him from the table.He shoved Sam onto the floor.I said, “One, the homicide’s about the Killing Club.Two, it’s not about the Killing Club, but somebody wants me to think it is. Because it’s not.”

  “That’s it.Choose.Or, three, could be somebody’s yanking your chain and your imagination’s running away with you.” Dad poured more orange drink.“Drink your juice.”

  “It’s not juice, Dad.It’s carbonated cane syrup.”

  “It’s orange.Drink it.” He shoved The Gloria Gazette at me.Under Land Transactions, there was a mention of the purchase of the Pine Barrens Playhouse.Sellers: Mrs.William Tymosz and Mrs.Benjamin Tymosz.Buyer: Ober Land Development and Realty Company.Price: $225,400.

  My father said, “That place is falling down.I guess Barclay’s just trying to help them out.Maybe he’s not so bad as we always thought, huh?”

  “Maybe ...”

  ROD WAS WAITING FOR ME with a plate of sticky buns at Broad Street Bakery.“You know you’re not supposed to tempt me.”

  Rod sighed.“For Christ sake, if anything, you’re underweight.”

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