The Irish Cottage Murder (10 page)

“I know,” the woman said, “I recognized you. From Castle Moore. I’m Janet, the senior maid. Senior above Rose. There’s just the two of us right now. Mr. Desmond wasn’t free with money for service.” She glanced down at the item about Torrey Tunet. “I saw all that on this morning’s television. What a laugh!”

“A laugh?”

“Ah, for sure!” Her tone was ironic. “Who was that king who sold his kingdom for a mess of pottage? No, in the Bible. That boy. Sold his soul.”

“His birthright.”

“Right, his birthright. Anyway, so did
she,
this American, Ms. Tunet. Except it was her body she was selling, but same thing.”

“How you mean, a mess of pottage?”

“Just a minute, I want some coffee and a bun. The coffee at this morning’s meeting was swill.” She ordered coffee and a sugared raspberry bun. When they came, she took a long draught of the coffee. “Got to get my blood stirring before getting back to Castle Moore.”

Then, eating the bun and sipping the hot coffee, she told him about the mess of pottage.

29

In the small, square room at Pearse Street Garda Station, Torrey looked in amazement at the aluminum tray with the breakfast the female garda placed before her: orange juice, a bowl of hot porridge, a plate of scrambled eggs with three plump sausages, thick-sliced bacon, and broiled tomato. There was a basket of brown bread and white toast, a slab of butter, and a pot of hot coffee.

“An Irish breakfast!” She looked questioningly at the garda. “How come?”

The garda folded her arms. “And if you don’t like it, you can order from outside. We’re wanting no more complaints from prisoners about being too ill-fed to think straight under arraignment.”

Torrey laughed. She couldn’t help it. Besides, she was hungry, even ravenous. She dug into the breakfast, meanwhile concentrating on the incredible facts: the murder of Desmond Moore and herself suspected of killing him.

Unbelievable. And unbelievable to awaken here. Her navy suit was crumpled; she’d slept in it. The Dublin Metropolitan area comprised Dublin city and the greater part of the county and portions of county Kildare and Wicklow. Castle Moore was in that portion of Wicklow, so here she was, detained at the Pearse Street Garda Station in Dublin. Detained.

“Detained.” From Middle English,
deteynen.
From Middle French,
detenir.
The Latin? She couldn’t remember. Anyway, meaning “hold.”
Tenir.
Held in custody.

“You want to see the paper?” The garda held out
The Irish Independent,
folded so that Torrey could see her picture on the front page. There she was, aged fourteen, in the North Hawk courtroom, blue dress, short hair combed smooth. And there sat her mother, so vulnerable, so shamed, in one of the varnished courtroom chairs. Torrey had ached so for her mother.

“No, thanks, I don’t need to see it. I was there, after all.” She couldn’t help the spurt of zany humor; she’d never been able to be wholly serious. Even with the awfulness of her situation here in Dublin, some inner laughter, okay, a despairing laughter, bubbled up. Or was it hysteria?

The garda gone, Torrey sipped coffee and tried to ward off despair. She wondered how Oscar Wilde had felt in prison, though now she couldn’t remember where he’d been imprisoned—oh, yes, Reading Gaol, that would be England, not Ireland, though he was Irish;
gaol
was the British variation of the American “jail,” but what was it called in Ireland?
Gaol,
too? Likely. Old French was
jaiole,
from “cage”; then all the way back to Late Latin,
caveola,
equivalent to Latin
cave,
“an enclosure.”

She bit her lips. She knew what she was doing by playing with words: escaping from remembering. Her whole life, since North Hawk, had become words. Words were her refuge.

North Hawk, population 3,040. The nearest big town was Keene, New Hampshire, eight miles away across the state line. There was the North Hawk post office, the two pharmacies, the health food store, the small supermarket. A handful of North Hawk business people commuted to Boston and Keene. Most houses were substantial, Victorian, not suburban; there were tree-shaded streets with sidewalks where children roller-skated or drew pictures with colored chalk or played hopscotch. There were enough handymen and carpenters with pick-up trucks; there were plenty of gardeners so people didn’t always have to clip their own hedges. The town had everything it needed, including two dentists and two internists. And one highly respected psychoanalyst. Dr. James Willinger.

*   *   *

Thursday afternoon, September 12, 1980. “Mrs. Willinger wants to know if you can baby-sit Joshua on Saturday night,” Torrey’s mother asked her when she got home from school. “Two dollars an hour. It’s bound to be four or five hours—they’re going to Keene, Dr. Willinger’s receiving some kind of award.”

Saturday night, six-thirty, sweet smell of honeysuckle, soft evening air. Torrey brought her game of Monopoly in her shoulder bag. And she brought twelve-year-old Donna. “I’ll pay you fifty cents an hour, we’ll play Monopoly and have fun,” she told Donna. After, Dr. Willinger would drop Donna off when he brought Torrey home. And Mrs. Willinger was leaving ice cream and cookies. Both chocolate. Their favorite.

Joshua Willinger was seven, angelic, and slept like a rag doll. “He’s played out from playing,” pretty Mrs. Willinger giggled. “He won’t wake up, you lucky girls.” She was all dressed up. She had shoulder-length blonde hair and didn’t look old enough to be the mother of Luke Willinger, who was off at college. Dr. Willinger was shorter than his wife, but handsome in a keen-eyed, unsmiling way that chilled Torrey a little.

She and Donna got bored with Monopoly after an hour. They wandered around, looking at the furniture, the pictures on the walls, turning over books. In the kitchen they got the chocolate ice cream from the freezer and ate it with the cookies at the kitchen table.

They wandered finally into the Willingers’ bedroom. Torrey opened a closet door and looked at Mrs. Willinger’s dresses and shorts and jeans. “Boring.” She made a face and closed the closet door. She pulled open Dr. Willinger’s closet door.

That’s how it started.

That’s when Torrey said, “Dress up! Let’s!” Mischievous, laughing, daring, she pulled a pair of Dr. Willinger’s pants off a hanger. She was tall for a fourteen-year-old, already five feet six. Dr. Willinger was not much taller. Dressed in Dr. Willinger’s well-cut charcoal gray suit and striped tie, Torrey strutted around the room. Donna, in the doctor’s rolled-up trousers, fell down laughing. They pulled out vests and pants and ties and dressed and undressed, laughing and posturing. They reached up and yanked boxes of the doctor’s winter clothes down from the closet shelves and, finally, the suitcase.

The suitcase.

They sat on the floor, staring at the money.

*   *   *

“What do you mean, scared? Don’t be a baby, Donna!”

“Oh, my!” Awed. “Where’d he get all that money, Torrey?”

“Stole it, silly. That’s why he hid it in the closet.”

“
Stole
it? Why would he do that? How can you say he stole it, Torrey?”

Torrey said, “There must be a billion dollars here. Or at least a million. Anyway,
thousands.
” The money was all jumbled up, fifty-dollar bills, and tens and twenties in bunches with rubber bands around them, just thrown into the suitcase. They counted the money; it took an hour. Two hundred and twenty thousand dollars. They stared at each other.

“Maybe it’s
her
money,” Donna said, “Mrs. Willinger’s. Maybe
she
stole it.”

“No, because people pay him. Patients. You’re supposed to give a share to the government, that’s taxes. Like that dentist in Keene didn’t do last year? He went to jail.”

“Jail…,” breathed Donna, eyes wide. “Dr. Willinger!”

Torrey picked up an inch-thick bundle of bills. “If this were ours, we could hire a limousine and go to Boston and maybe hear the Grateful Dead.”

“… and I could have a big birthday party with a cake from Miss Pringle’s…”

“… buy Golo boots … And Wrangler jeans. Oshkosh overalls.”

“Take an airplane to New York and go to Radio City…”

“Just
some
of this money could buy you that set of drums in Robbins’s Music Store window. You’ll never learn on those dumb old drums the Smiths threw out. You
deserve
some good ones. You
deserve
them. Do you hear me?”

“Oh, Torrey!” Donna’s voice quavered; she clasped her hands and gazed at the bundles of money in the suitcase. “But we can’t take any; it’s not ours.”

“It’s not his either! It isn’t
his
money. He’s cheating the government. He
deserves
to have us take it! A little of it, anyway. We could take just a little.”

“Torrey!”

“Well?… Besides, we could give some to the government. Send it anonymously. Maybe a thousand dollars. Or ten thousand. To help cancer. And ten thousand to help polio. All kinds of diseases. Things like that.” She yanked at her ragged short hair that she’d cut herself. “I’d have my hair cut at Grace’s Salon. And a real manicure.”

“Torrey!”

“If we took just a little, like a couple of bundles, Dr. Willinger wouldn’t even notice. It’s such a
mess.
” Torrey looked at Donna’s frightened, yearning face. Donna’s bangs, skimpy and blonde and damp with perspiration, were falling into her eyes. Torrey suddenly pulled two twenty-dollar bills from a bundle. She shoved them into the pocket of Donna’s old, worn shirt that had been passed down from her brother. “You have to get the
feel
of being rich. Don’t you dare spend this. Just get the
feel
of it. There’s a whole thing about how you feel about things, that if you
feel
rich you
are
rich. Some minister said that. It was in a sermon.”

Donna covered her pocket with a trembling hand. “We can always put it back, can’t we?… Next time you baby-sit Josh?”

“Of course.” Torrey eyed the money in the suitcase; then abruptly she reached out and delicately twitched a hundred-dollar bill from under a rubber band. “I’ll just take this. Just because.” She didn’t herself know why. She was not going to spend it, after all, not even to have Grace give her an expensive haircut. But it was something she somehow had to do, to be equally involved, to be fair to Donna.

“Because what?”

Torrey shrugged. “Anyway, we don’t have to decide what to do right now. And we don’t have to take tons of money now. The suitcase can be our bank. We can come to it when we need money. Like for emergencies.”

Before they left the Willingers’ bedroom, they carefully hung up Dr. Willinger’s clothes and put everything to rights. For the rest of the evening they sat on the living room couch, talking excitedly and shivering a little though the hall thermostat was set at seventy-five and the evening was warm.

*   *   *

It was Mrs. Sam Olmstead, shopping for cassettes in Robbins’s Music Store, who was responsible for the exposure of Dr. James Willinger. All that the elderly Carl Robbins did was question Donna Lefebvre in puzzlement when she tried to buy the set of snare drums in the window for forty dollars down and a promise of the other six hundred the following month, and Donna had abruptly collapsed into a pool of hysterical tears, hiccuping and finally babbling about a suitcase of hundreds of thousands of dollars in Dr. James Willinger’s closet.

Mrs. Sam Olmstead’s son, Horace, was one of the two reporters on the
North Hawk Weekly.
Mrs. Olmstead telephoned Horace at the paper and told him what she’d overheard in Robbins’s Music Store.

Horace was young, eager, ambitious, thorough. It was he who circumspectly learned from one of Dr. Willinger’s patients that Dr. Willinger, as part of his therapy approach, insisted on his patients paying him in cash, telling them not to be afraid of touching money; money was not dirty. He even, the patient told Horace, “made me take the cash out of the envelope and hand him the bills, touch them, not be ashamed of loving money: ‘It is all right to love money.’”

It was Horace who did all the groundwork: He spent an hour with Torrey Tunet, sitting in his car in front of her house and talking with her, and it was Horace to whom she finally gave the hundred-dollar bill she had taken from Dr. Willinger’s suitcase. Yes, she and Donna had counted the cache of money. The amount? Torrey sighed. “Two hundred and twenty thousand dollars.” Horace’s eyebrows went up.

An hour later, Horace, back at his desk at the
North Hawk Weekly
office, made a phone call to the IRS. Then, having leaked his information to where it counted, he roughed out a sensational scoop for the
Weekly,
meanwhile keeping an eye on the Willinger household.

That same week, on Thursday, Dr. James Willinger was named as a potential director of the prestigious American Psychoanalytic Association, the “esteemed national organization,” as it was described. Dr. Willinger was consequently photographed for the
Weekly,
standing smiling with his wife and two sons, Joshua, aged eight, and Luke, aged eighteen; Luke was home from Harvard for the weekend.

*   *   *

The two government men who arrived at the Willinger front door at ten o’clock on Tuesday three weeks later, departed at ten-thirty with the suitcase, leaving Mrs. Willinger ashen-faced, in shock. Horace Olmstead, who got out of his car as the dark-suited government men departed the Willinger home, was turned away at the door by the daily maid. But before he left, he heard Mrs. Willinger on the hall phone speaking to her husband’s office.

*   *   *

Dr. Willinger never returned home from his office.

No one knew where he got the gun. It was a Smith & Wesson .38, a snub-nosed little revolver. The
Weekly
speculated later that Dr. Willinger kept the gun in case of attempted robbery or the like. Or even for protection against a disturbed patient.

In any event, after receiving the telephone call from his wife, Dr. Willinger took the gun from the drawer, put it to his temple, and squeezed the trigger. In Horace Olmstead’s opinion, Dr. Willinger had a suppressed desire for drama. Surely a psychoanalyst could have prescribed himself a lethal drug, could have chosen a less messy demise? “‘Ours not to wonder why,’” Horace quoted Kipling to his mother, “‘Ours but to do and die.’”