Once Upon a Lie (16 page)

The niceties aside, she cut to the chase as she poured a cup of coffee for a jittery commuter who was itching to get out the door so much so that rather than take his change, he left her a dollar seventy-five tip. That’s how it was with commuters: they were always running behind and could barely wait for their order to be filled, never mind wait for their change. She often made out like a bandit on particularly busy mornings because most people didn’t leave themselves enough time to catch their trains but wouldn’t sacrifice a hot scone and a delicious cup of coffee on their way to work. “Can you go to Buena del Sol a few minutes early and make sure that he looks okay?” she asked, harkening back to the image of him in two different socks at Sean’s ash scattering. Or the shower sandals on Saturday when he was on his way to dinner. When Cal said he would, she turned away from the counter so that the three people milling in the front part of the store wouldn’t hear what she had to say. “And thanks, Cal. I really can’t thank you enough,” she said, swallowing her pride and trying to sound as sincere as possible.

“You’re welcome.”

She waited until everyone was out of the store to get to the real reason she had called. “You don’t possibly think that they consider Jack a serious suspect?” she asked, something she had asked him before and something that she thought about constantly. In her mind, it just didn’t make any sense, but she wasn’t a detective trying to close a case, so she was self-aware enough to realize that she might be just a wee bit biased.

“I don’t know,” Cal said. In the background, she heard the baby crying and hoped his mother could attend to him so Cal could tell her what she wanted to hear. “I have to prepare you for this, Maeve. They may hold him if they feel like they have enough on him.”

The jingling of the bell atop the front door was the only thing that kept her from going to her knees. She grabbed hold of the edge of the counter, smiling at the woman who had walked through the door for her usual order of a chocolate-chip scone and a large coffee, half-caf/half-decaf, light, and sweet. Maeve had the order ready, knowing that she came in every morning at the same time, and handed her the bag. The woman mouthed to Maeve, “Thank you. Everything okay?”

Maeve asked Cal to hold. “Everything’s fine,” she said.

“You’re as white as a ghost,” the woman said, handing Maeve exact change and giving her a curious look before leaving.

Maeve went back to her phone call. “They wouldn’t possibly put an eighty-year-old man in jail,” she said.

“They would,” Cal said. “Jack is looking more and more like someone who either had a hand in this or knows more than he’s letting on. I’m thinking we should have him evaluated by a psychiatrist, Maeve.”

“What?”

“A psychiatrist. Do you remember Vinnie the Chin?” he asked.

She wasn’t sure she’d heard him correctly.

“Guy was in the Mob. Big case a few years back. Wore his robe to court every day trying to get the jury to think he was crazy,” Cal said. “He was crazy. Crazy like a fox. It almost worked.”

“Are you saying that the police don’t think Jack is really suffering from dementia?” she asked.

“What I am saying, Maeve, is that we need to cover all of our bases.”

The words hung in the space between them as she held the phone to her head, not hearing the sounds of cars driving by or the blare of the train whistle signaling the arrival of the Poughkeepsie train and the departure of the one to Grand Central. Outside, the parking lot was beginning to fill up again, and in a few seconds, she would have a store full of people clamoring for coffee, crumb cake, and muffins. “Keep me posted, okay?” she said, words that sounded less fraught than they should have, given the situation.

She wondered if Detective Poole had found Mr. Moriarty yet, or his connection to Jack. He was the only guy Jack knew who had driving privileges, and she had been able to suss him out by spending only a minute or two thinking about it. Had Poole and his colleagues figured out Moriarty’s link to this yet?

As she waited on the myriad customers who came in that morning, some regulars, some just passing by on their way south on the adjacent highway, she wondered if Jack had it in him to kill anyone and if the NYPD saw something in him that she didn’t see herself. Did he give off the impression that he was cold-blooded enough to kill someone in a park, at night, and walk off, with no one the wiser? She kept returning to the same fact, and that was that an eighty-year-old with Jack’s failing faculties could not have pulled off something so sinister and so perfect. They would have to know that. Anyone with half a brain would know that.

Things settled into a quiet hum after the commuter traffic departed, and that was when Maeve caught up on her baking. Today, after putting three dozen cupcakes into the oven to bake and knowing she had exactly fourteen minutes until they needed to be pulled out, she opened the kitchen door so she could hear any foot traffic coming into the store and waited in the kitchen, a plan hatching in her head that was beautiful in its simplicity but maybe a little harder to execute than it seemed at first blush. She drummed her fingers on the countertop until the buzzer on the oven went off and she pulled the cupcakes out, putting them in a metal rack by the refrigerator to cool.

She went into the store and turned the
OPEN
sign to
CLOSED
. “Back in fifteen minutes,” she scrawled on a Post-it note before going out the back door, locking everything up tight, and heading the few short blocks to her house.

The kids would be at school for another four hours, but she didn’t need that much time. She went directly up to Heather’s room, the one with the door with the scuff mark on it from the time Maeve had gotten so angry at her younger daughter that she had kicked it open, leaving a mark that was wide and black and didn’t adequately do her ire justice at the time. She had been mad enough—but not big enough—to break the door in two. Sure, she could have painted over it, but she liked Heather to see it every time she entered her room, thinking that maybe she had just had the worst luck in the world to be born to a mother with an insane streak.

Maeve pushed open the door and went to work. For the first time ever, she was happy that Heather was a pack rat, saving every scrap of paper, every memento, and every McDonald’s Happy Meal toy she had ever come into contact with. They had had countless arguments about the state of her room, Maeve pointing to tidy Rebecca’s room as proof that just because you were a teenage girl you didn’t have to be a slob. The room had a distinct odor, one borne of decaying food stuck on plates under the bed, dirty clothes piled in the corner intermingled with the clean ones, and a variety of potions and sprays and creams that adorned the dresser top and were half-empty, their contents dripping down the sides of their canisters. One whole wall was covered with concert posters—Arcade Fire, Death Cab for Cutie, Adele—and Maeve wondered why she had bothered to spend close to eight hundred dollars getting the room painted a special-order shade of lilac to please her Oscar Madison of a kid. Maeve held her breath and looked at the mirror over the dresser, the one that held assorted ticket stubs and programs from the various sporting events and Broadway shows that her daughter had been to, searching for the ticket to the Yankees game that had serendipitously taken place the same night that Sean Donovan had met his Maker. Heather had gone with a friend from school, an outing that Maeve had approved because the parents were taking the girls on the train and would be with them the whole time. The family had also invited Rebecca, a nice touch. She scanned each and every piece of paper she came across, coming up empty.

This was not like her daughter. Maeve stood in the middle of the room, her hands on her hips, trying to get into the mind-set of a fifteen-year-old with an attitude. She pulled open the top dresser drawer, the one where Heather kept her underwear, and riffled through an assortment of tangled bras and panties, a few mateless socks, and, not surprisingly, a bag of joints, three in all, which Maeve stuck in her pocket.

This yoga thing wasn’t doing anything to calm her down. Maybe marijuana was the ticket.

Underneath an athletic sock that had seen better days, a hole in the big toe area and a brown spot on the bottom, was the golden ticket, so to speak, a stub from the game. Something exciting in Yankees history had happened that night, but Maeve couldn’t recall what it was; all she knew was that she needed that stub and now she had it.

Finding the stub had been the easy part. Convincing Jack that it was his would be more challenging, but not impossible.

She hoped he had forgotten that he was a Mets’ fan.

CHAPTER 21

When she thought about it, Maeve realized she wasn’t a pothead and never would be. But she knew someone who was. She threw the bag of joints on the trunk in front of Jo’s sofa and watched her friend’s eyes grow wide. Maeve didn’t mention that between the gun and the joints, she was a walking class A or B misdemeanor; her knowledge of the penal code in New York wasn’t comprehensive enough to know which it might be.

“Help yourself,” Maeve said. “They’re all yours.”

“Do I want to know where you got them?” Jo asked, reaching for the bag.

“Nope.”

“Thank you,” she said, pocketing the bag. “If this is your way of enticing me back to work, you really don’t know much about smoking pot. Once you smoke a joint this size, you don’t really care that you have a job—if, that is, you remember you have a job.”

“I don’t know a lot about smoking pot and I’m going to keep it that way,” Maeve said. “How’s the head?”

Jo instinctively fingered the bald spot where the stitches held her scalp together. “Better. Hey, will you take me to get my stitches out on Saturday?”

It was the least she could do. “Of course. Maybe we can do dinner afterwards?” When Jo didn’t respond, she added, “My treat?”

“Sounds good,” Jo said. “Do you want something to drink?” she asked. “Eat?”

Maeve looked at her watch. “Can’t. I have to go see Jack,” she said. “But Saturday, definitely, okay?” She leaned over and kissed Jo’s head, the part where there was still hair and no stitches. The quick glance she got at the wound showed that it was healing nicely despite still looking angry and red.

Earlier that day, after their visit to the police station, Cal had dropped Jack off at Buena del Sol and come straight to the store. The store should have been busier than it was at that time of day, but the lack of customers allowed them to talk for a long time. Cal looked more concerned than Maeve was anticipating, something that troubled her. He wasn’t quite so flippant about this visit as he had been with the last one, and he had sounded concerned before they had gone. From the look on his face when he walked in the store, Maeve finishing up at the counter with a customer, she knew that things were about to get more complicated.

“Can we go in the back?” he asked, not wanting to have the conversation in the front of the store, with the chance that someone could walk in. Behind the counter, he made himself a cup of coffee and grabbed a muffin from the glass case.

Maeve grabbed a stool and pulled it up to the big table in the back. Cal stood, taking the wrapper off his muffin and eating a few bites before he began to tell her the saga of their visit.

“Did Jack go all Vinnie the Chin on them?” Maeve asked, sounding as though she were making light of the situation, when in actuality she knew just how bad this could be.

“And then some,” Cal said. “At one point he’s telling them exactly where he was and what he was doing on the night Sean was killed, down to what he ate for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and then he’s saying that he can’t remember what the year is. Does that sound normal to you?”

“Normal for my dad.”

“Do you have any idea why they might be looking at Jack for this murder, of all things?”

Her first thought was: Because he wanted to protect me. But then she realized that he was far too late for that, and would know it, even in his state of mind. Unless he was giving it one last shot.

Cal knew she was holding back. “You need to tell me everything, Maeve.”

“There’s nothing to tell,” she said, trying to sound definitive but ending up defiant. “There’s nothing. Nothing at all. Sean was my cousin and Jack’s nephew and that’s it. Jack had no reason to want to see him dead.” She laughed, but it was sad. “As a matter of fact, I don’t think Jack even knows that he’s dead.”

“Oh, he knows he’s dead,” Cal said. “He thinks he succumbed to Dutch elm disease. Now why would he think that?”

“He’s just pulling your leg, Cal. He doesn’t really think that.” But she wasn’t sure. Between protesting that he read the paper daily and knew what was going on and asking all his questions regarding Sean’s demise, she wasn’t sure what he thought exactly, what in his mind was real and what wasn’t. It also depended on when you asked him, and Maeve wasn’t quite sure why that was. “They’re done with him, right?”

Cal shrugged. “That’s anyone’s guess. I can’t help feeling that they’re using him,” he said.

Maeve got a chill but refused to shiver, holding herself perfectly erect. “Using him?”

Cal shrugged again. “Forget it. It’s nothing. I don’t think they’re serious about him, but I’m not entirely sure and that’s what’s bothering me.” He took another swig of his coffee. “Listen, I’m sorry about the other night.” When she didn’t respond, he added more detail; he had let her down on numerous occasions, so he was going to have to be more specific. “Heather? The party?”

“Oh, that,” Maeve said, reaching into her jeans pocket and pulling out the bag of joints. “And we now have this.”

Cal wasn’t as shocked as Maeve would have expected. A simple “Oh” was all she got.

“‘Oh’?” she repeated.

He quickly rearranged his features into something approximating concern and horror. “We have to deal with that.”

“And this is why, Cal,” Maeve said deliberately, so that there was no misinterpreting her feelings on the subject, “we have to crack down on Heather. She’s headed for trouble, and I’m not content to sit back and watch.”