Promissory Payback (8 page)

Jane shifted in her chair. Laura's attention was still remote, drifting and detached. Jane eyed Joe. “You and Charley carried Carolyn upstairs, followed by Laura, and went about the job at hand. I'm sure the hog-tying was Charley's idea. He loved that figure-eight knot, and he'd probably been fantasizing about ways to incorporate it into this event. Everybody wore gloves, expect for you, Laura. I mean, why bother, right? You're there all the time doing Carolyn's bidding. Watering plants . . . picking up her mail . . . dusting ... It made sense that your prints would be all over the place. I'm not certain, though, whose idea it was to stuff her mouth with shredded promissory notes and tape it shut—”

“Mine,” Laura said, suddenly reconnecting with the conversation. “That was my idea.”

Joe looked at Laura aghast. “Laura? What are you doing?”

She patted his hand in a reassuring manner. “It's all right, Joe. I was prepared for this to happen.” Laura looked at Jane. “I stuffed her mouth. I taped it shut.” Her voice was cool and casual, as if she were ordering take-out.
“And then I saw the lipstick and I just
couldn't
resist.” She shrugged her shoulders and smiled like a little pixie—a twisted pixie, but a pixie nonetheless. “Karma
is
a bitch,” Laura stated. “And so was Carolyn.” She sighed with relief. “It feels
good
to get this off my shoulders. I forgot to take the lipstick container when I left. Silly me.”

“And when you left, neither Joe or Charley were there,” Jane added. “At least Joe wasn't there. He had to get to DIA to make his eight o'clock flight on Colorado Mountain Airlines.” Beads of sweat formed on Joe's brow. “It's that damn video again, Joe. As much as you tried to obscure yourself, I still picked you out of the short line boarding that eight o'clock flight. Not to mention, a clear view of you speeding through the security checkpoint at 7:35.”

“I'm the one who killed Carolyn, Detective,” Laura declared with a proud cadence. “I'm the one who pulled up that chair and watched her die. I made her look at me. Right in the eye.”

Jane recalled sitting in that same chair just days before, strangely feeling a close, yet intangible connection to the posterior of the person who watched Carolyn suffer. Back at Carolyn's house, Jane felt like whoever committed the crime was still watching Handel suffer the anguish they'd dealt. And Jane was right. Because, at that time, Laura Abernathy was seated behind her wearing her pretty pink dress with the matching purse and flirting with the nice policeman, while sneaking glances at her murderous handiwork on the bed.

“Waiting.” Jane added. “How long did you wait?”

“Hour and a half,” Laura recalled. “Maybe a little longer. She'd go in and out of consciousness in the beginning.
Oh, it wasn't like we didn't talk during that time. Well, I was doing the talking. She was doing the grunting.”

“What did you talk about?” Jane asked.

“I told her that she was going to die and that she just had to accept it. I told her that those people she stole money from needed their money back desperately. And the fact that she didn't care or feel any compassion for their struggles was the reason it had ended up like this. But I looked in her eyes, and I could see that even with death approaching, she had no remorse for what she'd done.”

“How about you? Do you have remorse for what
you
did?”

“None,” Laura offered. “If she'd just . . .”

“Just what?”

“If she'd just been more grateful in her life for what people did for her . . . I saved her life, Detective. She would have died on that playground slide when we were children. She would have hung herself on her book bag if I hadn't run up the slide and unhooked her strap and freed her.” Laura cocked her head with a mystified gaze. “She never said ‘thank you.'
Never.
”

“You killed her because she never said ‘thank you'?” Jane asked.

“In a nutshell, I guess I did. I figured she was alive only because of
me
. So, if anyone was going to take her out of this world, it should be
me.
Completes the circle, so to speak.”

So to speak,
Jane thought. “How did it finally end?”

“She was unconscious for a while. And I was getting a little sleepy myself. So, I figured I'd just put the tape over her nose. She was dead in a matter of minutes.” Laura stroked the felt belt on her robe. “Remember that program I told you about, Detective? ‘Sharing of the Heart?' I did
see it somewhere a long time ago. And it always stuck with me. People traveling the world finding what needs to be fixed or changed and making that happen. I could be on that show. I found what needed to be fixed and changed and made it happen.”

It had been a while since Jane interviewed a criminal that was as cold and calculating as little Laura Abernathy, this fragile, physically weak, rapidly aging woman. Jane stood up and pushed her chair against the table. She glanced at Joe who hadn't said a word for some time or moved a muscle. “I get it. Really I do. Carolyn was a capital
C
. A narcissist who only thought of herself and lived off the sweat of others. But you don't kill those types of people. You turn them in. You get the authorities involved.”

“Oh, Jesus! Give me a break,” Joe muttered, ending his self-imposed silence. “Trust me. I looked into it! The authorities aren't interested in cases like hers unless you can
prove
she siphoned millions. Ever since Bernie Madoff, they only want the big guns. Not the small-timers like my Aunt Carolyn. And I don't know for sure, but I think she knew that. Fifty thousand here, fifty there ... stay under the radar—”

Jane ran her fingers through her hair. “You
still
don't kill someone like that—”

“She was going to the next level, detective,” Laura interjected. “I heard her running her spiel on the phone to a charity in Arizona. They help families with hearing-impaired children who can't afford the devices they need.”

“She got the name from my list of charities that she found on the Internet,” Joe added. “She was
relentless
. She went behind my back and, acting like
I
approved of it, she asked them for
half a million
! These were my people she was fucking with!
My people!
And they were very close to
giving her the money!
Thank God
Laura told me about it so I could put a stop to it!”

Yeah. It was a ponzi scheme, Jane mused. Get half a mil from the next “investor,” pay off the last group and use the rest for . . . ”What was she was going to use the extra two hundred grand for?”

“She had it all figured out,” Laura replied. “She told me she was going on a long trip. A two-month, first-class, cruise on the Mediterranean. Even though Joe put a stop to her stealing from the charity, I knew she'd find someone else to rob. No one ever told Carolyn ‘no.'” Laura looked at Jane with pleading eyes. “Don't you see, Detective? She could go away on her cruise and never come home! And she would repeat the same criminal activities with someone else, in some other country.
Guaranteed.
”

“She basically needed to die. Is that what you're telling me.”

“I think that's an excellent way to put it.”

“Well,” Jane said, “the guys back at DH are not going to believe this report when I write it up. It's not a whodunit. It's a who-didn't-do-it.”

Laura stood up, supporting herself on the kitchen table. “
I did it
! I put the drugs in her drink! I wrote on her with the lipstick! I put those shredded promissory notes in her mouth and taped it shut! And I finished her off by taping up her nose! I killed Carolyn Handel! Arrest
me
!”

“Did you think that's how it was going to work when all of you conceived this promissory payback kill? Let Laura take the fall?” Jane looked at Joe. “That's not how it works, buddy. Everyone involved in this, including poor little Travis Wilde, is looking at conspiracy charges to commit murder. When a jury finds out that you're the sole beneficiary of your aunt's life insurance policy—” Joe suddenly stood
up, reaching into his inside jacket pocket. Jane released her Glock and extended it toward Joe. “Hey!” Jane yelled. “Take your hand outta there!”

“I don't have a gun!” Joe screamed. “It's an envelope! You need to see it!”

Still training the Glock on Joe, Jane nodded. “Move slowly and toss the envelope to me.”

He did as she requested, revealing a letter-sized white envelope. Jane recovered it, holstering her Glock. She opened the envelope and found three signed checks on Joe's personal account with no dates. There was one to Jacque Wilde, Charley P. Hall and Raymond Honeycutt, all for the amount of one hundred thousand dollars. “What in the hell?” Jane muttered.

“My aunt was worth three hundred grand dead. Exactly what she owed her investors. Somehow, I find that—”

“Ironic?” Jane suggested.

“Yeah. That's for real, Detective. And that was my altruistic intention from the very beginning. Now . . . how do
you
think a jury is going to feel about that one?” Joe's tenacious idealism suddenly reemerged. “And how about this: You have a twenty-eight-year-old guy who's dying from a heart defect, a down-on-his-luck, Vietnam vet who's a former P.O.W and a tortured man whose diabetes is literally eating him alive! Instead of being victims, they united against the oppressive tyranny and fought back! Oh, I think the jury is going to love that too! We're living in strange times, Detective.
Strange times
, indeed. The canyon between the haves and the have-nots is so wide, and it's growing. The natives have grown restless! You can smell revolution in the air. The old rules don't apply any more.” He took a second and really looked at Jane. “And
I think you know that. I think you
truly
understand what I'm saying.”

Jane couldn't argue with the guy. If he wasn't running a charity, he could have been a lawyer. Or a politician. Or the head of a commune. She couldn't argue but she still made all the arrests. The tentacles of revolution may be spreading, but they hadn't wrapped their limbs around this case. Not yet, at least.

A week later, about ten o'clock at night, she got a call from Sergeant Weyler that Laura had been admitted to the hospital. She was informed that the woman who looked so old was dying of Stage IV cancer and would likely be dead within three months, long before any trial took place. One more thing to move the jury; one more irony for Jane to add to the list. Jane figured it was all part of the bigger plan—have Laura do the actual killing because if she got caught, what did it matter? She would find her freedom in death: both her own and that of her best friend.

But her freedom would come at the cost of vengeance. Vengeance is an odd bedfellow—at once, quietly cunning and then unflinchingly aggressive, fulfilling its duty to destroy that which it sees as a threat. Jane knew the beast. How many nights did she lie awake and plot the death of the one who tried to destroy her? How many times had she murdered him in her dreams? And what if she had actually shot him when she had the opportunity over twenty
years ago? On that winter night, she was so close to pulling the fucking trigger. Would she have found a sympathetic jury who would cradle her and set her free or would she endure the harsh judgment of those who never experienced true evil at the hands of another?

“Evil requires the sanction of the victim,”
she thought again. He crept back into her consciousness. Jane lit her fourth cigarette of the hour and lay back on her bed while the darkness wrapped its familiar arms around her. She'd still be in its embrace when the sun rose.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and
incidents either are the product of the author's imagination
or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual
events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead, is
entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the
author or the publisher.

 

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Copyright © 2009 by Laurel Dewey

 

 

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First Story Plant Paperback Printing: July 2011