Purgatory Chasm: A Mystery (33 page)

I said, “By the time Bobby Marx died, you were set to go to … Clemson, was it?”

She nodded, then told it. Talked about college, her career, moving from newspaper to newspaper, climbing the ladder. She kept her eyes on the table while she spoke, tracing the wood grain with a blood-red fingernail.

I knew the story already but heard her out, letting her tell it her way. By the time she got to the part about working for
The Globe,
the shade had worked around to our table.

“You met Phigg a year and a half ago when you wrote the story about dying cities,” I said, as it all clicked into place. “You knew by then he was your father.”

She hesitated, then nodded.

“Was the whole story a setup? A pretext to meet him?”

“Yes.”

“You hit him with it. You told the poor guy he was your father.”

“Yes.” She whispered it.

“How’d he react?”

“He sat on a log and said it couldn’t be true.”

“You convinced him.”

“I told him some things about my mother that would be difficult for a stranger to learn,” she said. “To seal the deal, I showed him a photo.”

“A photo he took back in the New York days.”

“Yes.”

“Of your mother.”

“Yes.”

“And?”

“He cried,” she said. “He said he should have been with me the whole time. He wanted to know everything about my life and my mother’s.”

“Did you tell him about Bobby Marx?”

“God, no. Why would I?” But I’d seen the hitch in her fingernail tracing before she answered. Huh.

We sat quiet awhile.

“Talk about Josh Whipple,” Randall finally said, and turned to me. “This is key.”

“I met Josh while I was researching my father.”

“Researching him?” Randall said. “Before, you called it stalking.”

“I was joking, for Christ’s sake.” She fake-laughed and touched Randall’s arm, then looked at me. “During my research, my stalking”—she rolled her eyes—“I followed Tander to Motorenwerk, where he shot the breeze for a good long time. It piqued my curiosity. Who spends forty-five minutes at a garage when they’re not having a car fixed?”

“He was having a car restored,” I said.

“Of course, but I didn’t know that. So when Josh took his lunch break, I managed to stumble into him and start a conversation.”

“You pumped him for info.”

“Josh was … an opportunist.” Randall and I glanced at each other, read each other’s minds:
He wasn’t the only one
. “He smelled money at Motorenwerk,” she said, “and he wanted a slice. I could respect that.”

“You started seeing him.”

“He was intimidated by me, a black woman nearly old enough to be his mother, but I got him past that. I was the third black person he ever spoke with in his life. Yes, the
third
. He remembered precisely.”

I said, “When did you realize Josh was something other than a garden-variety country bumpkin?”

“Once he got past the ‘aw shucks’ stuff, I saw he was a lot smarter than he let on. And he never talked about his upbringing.”

“So?”

“I talked about
mine,
” she said. “Including the Bobby Marx part. Josh and I spent a lot of time staring up at ceilings, side by side, do you see? I opened up to this kid, unloaded all this baggage, and he gave me nothing in return.”

“You got curious,” I said. “You
researched
him.” Same way she’d researched Phigg.

Her skin was darker than Randall’s, but I saw her blush.

“You bet I did. And got my money’s worth.”

I waited.

“Only child, raised by his mother, never knew his father,” Patty said. She was leaning in now, elbows on the table. The storyteller side of her had taken over, and she knew she had a doozy going. “So the mother died when Josh was nine. Fell down the basement stairs, broke her neck. Josh bounced over to an aunt and uncle in White River Junction. They had two girls. One night, their propane tank exploded. Aunt, uncle, and girls, all dead. Josh was at a middle-school basketball game. He was twelve.”

“Holy shit,” I said. “Is this going where I think it’s going?”

Patty raised an index finger to shush me. “The only other family was a grandmother near Utica. So Josh bounced
there
. The morning of his seventeenth birthday, he called the cops and said he was worried about granny, she’d locked herself in her room.”

She paused to sip water, extending a pinky. She’d chosen the right line of work. I was holding my breath, knowing what came next, dying to hear it anyway. Patty knew that, relished it.

“So the cops showed up and broke through the door. Which Josh could easily have done himself, by the way.” She screwed the cap on her water. “
Apparently,
Granny had tied one end of a pair of pantyhose around her neck, then the other around her iron bed’s headboard. Then she’d just rolled off the side.”

“Apparently,” I said.

We all went quiet.

Three sets of killings. But the first one came when Josh Whipple was nine. Who suspects a nine-year-old? And the others were spread across a couple of states, in rural counties.

“The nearest anybody came to tying it all together,” Patty said, guessing my thoughts, “was a feature story in a little Vermont paper. ‘The Tragic Life of Joshua Whipple,’ orphaned at nine, et cetera. Whoever wrote the piece was a sap. Had all the pieces laid out in front of him, but couldn’t get past the Josh-as-victim angle. By then he was homeless, panhandling and riding the rails. He said after the article ran, some social-services do-gooders tracked him down and set him up for mechanic training. He eventually wound up working for Ollie.”

We were quiet awhile.

“You think?” Randall finally said to me. “Nine years old?”

“What do
you
think?” I said to Patty.

She shrugged. “In light of recent events.”

A semi Jake-braked past on Route 62, trimming speed as he neared Berlin’s tiny downtown. I needed to press, needed to throw Patty Marx off balance. When the noise died I said, “So when were you and Phigg going to cross the border?”

Her double blink told me I’d nailed her. Randall straightened, too: This was new to him.

“I told you Josh tried to kill me not two hours ago,” I said. “Guess I forgot to tell you we had time to chat. So I know Phigg was cashing out to run to Canada with you, devoted daughter. Live the artsy-fartsy life forever and ever.”

“Complete and utter bullshit,” she said.

“Like hell,” I said. “I got you. I can read it in your eyes. But it’s not enough. It doesn’t fit.”

“Do tell.”

“You sold him the idea, didn’t you?” I was figuring it out as I went along. “You wouldn’t last six months carving ducks in a freezing cabin, any jackass can see that. You got Phigg to convert everything to cash because you were going to separate him from it, and sooner rather than later.”

Patty Marx said nothing, looked hate-rays at me instead. I knew I’d scored. But there was another piece, a keystone that held it all together—and I couldn’t find it. So we had a stare-down.

Finally Randall cleared his throat. “Shall we turn to practical matters? Patty, you know what’s prudent and right.”

“Turn state’s evidence.”

He nodded.

“I wasn’t consulted and I wasn’t present,” she said. “Can we be absolutely clear on that? As far as I know, the Dufresne tragedy was a murder-suicide, even though…” She trailed off.

“Even though?” Randall said.

Patty locked eyes with him, and for the first time in ten minutes I saw no trace of journalist bullshit or legal-beagle bullshit. “Josh was in such a fine mood when he got back from Vermont,” she said. “He chuckled to himself and sort of skipped around. When the news broke about Ollie and his mother, Josh explained how something like that might, just
might,
have happened.” She swallowed, obviously scared even now as she recalled it. “The way he talked … the
detail,
for God’s sake … things became pretty clear.”

He took her hand in his. We sat quietly.

“So you weren’t an accessory before the fact,” Randall finally said. “All the more reason to hop over to the good guys’ side. The sooner the better.”

“I know that’s the smart move,” she said, patting his hand. “Still…” She looked at me, evaluating, and I knew what she was thinking.

Money changes people.

“Big picture!” Randall said, knuckle-rapping the table. “You are involved, in several senses of the word, with a man who kills anybody who looks at him crossways. No sum of money will improve your lot if he hangs you with your own panty hose.”

Patty cut her eyes from him to me to him, still trying to see her way around to a big payday. Jesus, money makes people stupid.

I sighed, pulled my cell. “One button dials Josh,” I said. “If you don’t promise to dime him out, here’s what’ll happen. I’ll punch you in the face while Randall takes your keys. I’ll tell Josh exactly where you are. Randall and I will drive away, leave you here on foot. How long will it take Josh to find you?”

Patty touched her right jeans pocket.

Randall held up a set of car keys. “You left them in the ignition.” He smiled. “That wasn’t smart.”

“Congratulations,” I said. “Now I don’t have to punch you in the face.”

“Fucking assholes,” she said, but her eyes clicked acceptance and she rose, arched her back, stretched. She’d tried her best, had played every card. She’d lost the trick, and she knew it. But she was still in the game.

What an operator. You could almost like her.

Almost.

“What are you going to do about Josh?” she said after a while.

I thought about Montreal and muscle man, the death sentence I’d laid on them. Was I prepared to take out Josh Whipple the same way? What if I was wrong again? My eyes met Randall’s. He was thinking the same thing. “I want to give Trey a heads-up and find my father,” I said. “Let the cops take care of Josh.”

*   *   *

We headed for Framingham. The all-news radio station said state cops and FBI had swarmed “Motorworks”—they screw everything up—in Rourke, New Hampshire. An FBI spokeswoman confirmed the search had to do with the deaths of garage owner Oliver Dufresne and his mother. FBI wouldn’t say more, wouldn’t comment on why drug-sniffing dogs were part of the show.

I thought about calling the Framingham cops or the staties but couldn’t see how I’d do it without getting hauled in myself. Got an idea, texted McCord:
Tell MA cops look 4 josh whipple, beige altima/taurus, sutton area, last seen purg chasm

I hoped McCord got something good out of this mess. But had a feeling he wouldn’t.

When we pulled up at my house, Trey’s rented Dodge wasn’t in the driveway. Inside, Kieu pidgined that he was gone and that Myna Roper was napping in a bedroom. Kieu tried to explain where Trey was, but I couldn’t understand. About the time we both got good and frustrated, she rubbed her belly and pointed at me with a question on her face. I nodded like crazy. She got a bunch of stuff from the fridge and started making a batch of the shrimp-and-noodles thing I loved.

Randall helped Kieu cook. Patty Marx, who according to Randall hadn’t said a word on the ride down, wanted her laptop. I said no goddamn way, and took her cell to boot. “So the deal is I’m a virtual prisoner?” she said.

“Yes,” I said.

I motioned Tuan to follow me to the second-floor apartment. I had propped the door open so the cats had the run of the house, but I suspected they mostly stayed upstairs. Both cats had been smacked around some before I got them and were stranger-wary.

I freshened their food and water, cleaned their box. Tuan said something in Vietnamese that ended in a question. After a few tries I figured he wanted to know the cats’ names. “This one’s Dale,” I said. “Dale Earnhardt Senior. Died February 18, 2001, at Daytona.” I pointed toward the food dish. “That’s Davey over there. Davey Allison died July 13, 1993, in a helicopter wreck. I beat him a couple times in Busch races. He was about my age.”

Then Kieu barked something up the stairs and Tuan pulled my sleeve.

I said, “Food ready?” Rubbed my belly.

Tuan smiled and nodded and buzzed downstairs before I could stand.

Kieu had piled a serving platter with shrimp and noodles. We all dug in.

We were mostly finished when Trey stepped in the kitchen door. He must have kicked off his sneakers on the deck, because he stood in damp white socks and the lower six inches of his pant legs were wet.

After introducing Patty, I motioned Trey out to the deck. “Where you been?” I said, closing the kitchen door behind me.

“You advised me to stash the money.”

“I was thinking about a safe-deposit box,” I said, looking at his wet pant legs.

“I thought of a better place. No key required.”