Somebody Else's Music(143)
“She said she didn’t know,” Kyle said. “She said that at the time. She had no idea whose voice it was. They all said that at the time.”
“I know,” Gregor said. “But the rest of them knew—Belinda, Emma, Maris, Nancy, and Chris. They all knew who it was. And Liz Toliver was certain. She just lied.”
“You just said she didn’t know,” Kyle said. “You make less and less sense every time I talk to you.”
“I said she didn’t realize who it was,” Gregor said. “But that’s not the same thing as saying she didn’t think she knew. She thought she knew. She thought it was Maris Coleman’s voice. And she didn’t even consider the possibility of Stu having anything to do with it. What she thought was that Maris had committed the murder, gotten caught up in some kind of group hysteria, and done something she didn’t intend to do that was threatening to ruin her whole life. Liz Toliver’s relationship with Maris Coleman has always been as dysfunctional—to use a wholly inadequate word—as Peggy Smith’s with Stu Kennedy.”
“Even if we could verify all of this,” Kyle said, “we couldn’t use it. It might not even help us. I mean, juries don’t tend to believe in lots of different murderers for one murder. If you know what I mean. They’re going to think it was Stu who killed Chris Inglerod. And what I don’t get is, why wasn’t it? Why was it Peggy? Why didn’t Stu just do it the way he had before, assuming he had done it before?”
“He had no reason to think he needed to,” Gregor said. “Haven’t you got the least bit of curiosity as to why this has all started up now that Liz Toliver has come home and not before now? After all, if Chris Inglerod was a danger to Stu Kennedy, he had thirty years of pretty decent access to her right here in Hollman.”
2
Bennis Hannaford showed up wet. Outside, it had started to rain again, steadily and hard, and to thunder and lightning, too. Gregor found it significant that he hadn’t noticed it. All day, he’d been thinking of nothing but how much rain there was. He’d been listening to drops pounding on roofs and in gutters. He’d been feeling the thunder roll through him every time it passed. Now he watched Bennis maneuver past the little clutch of reporters sitting in the police department’s narrow waiting area and thought at first that she must have been drenched in somebody’s lawn sprinkler. It was only after she’d said something to a much drier woman who did stringer service for the Washington Post that he’d realized the weather must have gone back again. When he went to the window to look out, he saw another steady fall of water and sharp snaking electrical lights in the sky.
“They want to know if they can leave,” Bennis said, wedging herself into what room was left in Kyle Borden’s office. There wasn’t much. “You did say you were arresting someone else. You can hardly blame her.”
“As far as I’m concerned, she can leave anytime she wants,” Gregor said. “But I’m not the person in charge here. She wants to go back to Connecticut?”
“No, they want to go to Paris. It’s all very romantic. They’re finally getting married. And she’s behaving very oddly. She said she wants to know if you’re really going to arrest only Peggy Smith. And that’s how she put it. Only. Is there any coffee in this place?”
“Not any that you’d want to drink,” one of the state troopers said.
Kyle Borden looked frustrated. “She can go all the way to the moon as far as I’m concerned,” he said. “According to your Mr. Demarkian here, we ought to be out arresting Stuart Kennedy, except not. Does he usually make this little sense when he talks?”
The state trooper who had warned Bennis off the coffee now handed her some in a tall foam cup. She took it, sipped it, and got up to put serious amounts of milk and sugar in it, except the milk was that nondairy creamer in little plastic tubs that you got at very low-rent diners, served up to you in heavy ceramic saucers that were never quite as white as they should have been. Bennis took another sip and made a face. She sat down again.
“So,” she said. “What have you been telling these people to confuse them?”
Gregor sighed. He hated drinking coffee in foam cups. He thought it tasted funny. “There’s nothing at all confusing about it,” he said. “There are a few loose ends, but the point of a police investigation is to clean up the loose ends. To recap what I’ve told them already: you start with that night in 1969 when the girls nailed Liz Toliver into the outhouse and Michael Houseman was killed. None of the girls, including Peggy Smith, was intending to kill anybody, although what they did to Liz Toliver might have killed her. People don’t take phobias seriously. They should. But they only went there to do that. They weren’t intending to do anything else. So they nailed Liz Toliver into the outhouse, and then they retreated to the trees a little ways off to see what would happen.”