THE RIGHT TIME TO DIE (11 page)

Over the years Leland had become resigned to Helen’s physical disposition and the resulting confinement, in time encouraged to view her disability as a gift, allowing for a guilt-free transfer of responsibility for her care to an emotionally disinterested third party. Though still robust, Leland was himself approaching seventy-seven years of age and unable to cook, clean and tend to the most intimate and shameless of her bodily needs. In truth, he had never been sufficiently inclined. The marriage was never a happy one. What had compelled him at the age of almost thirty to mindlessly and impetuously marry the compliant sixteen year-old? Leland couldn’t say or wouldn’t admit (though in his most private moments, fist wrapped tight around his swollen penis, thumbing through early black-and-white photographs he had taken of Helen as a very young girl, he was able to recall).

Initially, Helen’s father was despairing at the notion of this
older man
wedding his little girl, relenting only under pressure from Helen’s mother, who claimed her daughter could do worse, and would likely be hard pressed to do better. Stalwart that he was, Leland upheld his vow of marriage, if not fidelity, for over fifty years, in his mind one having little to do with the other. In the early years, he consented to remain
for the children
, a decision over which he expressed no regret.

For a man lacking formal education, Leland McMaster had done well. For a man who had started out in used car sales with a local dealership—eventually acquiring the dealership itself—Leland had done especially well. After returning from Korea in nineteen fifty-three, he’d taken a small inheritance and with it purchased over five hundred acres of farmland, forest and rolling hill north of the Hudson River, five miles from town; some called it folly, Leland called it foresight. If, as he suspected one day it must, residential development ever breached the beachhead of the river and moved north, he would make out like Croesus. Over the next twenty years, Leland sold off the land in parcels to developers and private interests, keeping one hundred-fifty acres in abeyance for his own use—a home and what eventually would become a one hundred acre commercial and retail complex. The builders stripped the native vegetation to construct the houses located on the ridge below McMaster’s property, leaving him with a clear view south to the river, east to the Adirondacks, and north to the Tongue Mountains. The development and sale allowed Leland to become,
unarguably
, the wealthiest man in Warren County.

“Shall I telephone someone?” It was the nurse speaking to him. Having retrieved the phone from Helen it appeared she now was seeking relief. “She’s not completely incoherent, sir, but almost. From what I gather, there’s been a death?”

“Our granddaughter,” Leland said.

“I’m so sorry,” Sandy said. Unasked, Leland explained the circumstances. “She’ll need someone to be with her after I leave, sir. She shouldn’t be alone.” Though who, the nurse could not imagine. In the three years since attending to the needs of Helen McMaster the woman had received few telephone calls and even fewer visits from her children.

“I won’t be home before nine, Sandy. Clean her, feed her and put her to bed. A pill and a stiff shot will keep her sedated. Don’t worry; she’ll be fine.”

Though uneasy with the prospect of leaving the disabled woman alone, Sandy had other commitments. For three hours each week she tended to the needs of Luba Dojcsak, allowing the child’s mother respite from her daughter’s unrelenting and terminal condition. Sandy wasn’t scheduled, but tonight she could drop by the house unannounced. Though Ed wouldn’t talk, perhaps Rena would be willing to reveal a tit-bit of insider information with which Sandy could regale her family and friends? Sandy Belak could only
hope
. (Not that Sandy was a gossip, simply a means of communication.)

After speaking with his wife, McMaster went about his business, arranging for the disposition of sales personal, for the complimentary beverage service and snacks, balloons for the children, key chains for the adults. No detail was too small or overlooked. Later, he completed a requisition to replace inventory, which owing to the attractive financing and lease rates being offered would encourage vehicles to move from the lot and into the community. Leland took an early dinner at Rascal’s Café, one of the many fine food emporiums that had sprouted in response to a surge in tourism along the river. Though tourists didn’t buy vehicles, the influx enhanced the financial status of the service industry workers and local entrepreneurs who did.

At four that afternoon the restaurant was near deserted. What few eyeballs there were seemed focused uncomfortably at Leland:
Fuck-em,
he thought, it’s a small town. Except for the server, he wasn’t approached. Leland consumed his meal in silence, adopting the look of a man both stricken, aggrieved and, most importantly, unapproachable.

Returning to his office, McMaster telephoned Seamus Mcteer. “I spend a lot of money with you, Seamus. In fact, considering ad count, I’d say the dealership is what keeps your newspaper in business.”

Seamus was obsequious. “I understand, Leland. I appreciate the trade. But there’s my journalistic integrity to consider.”

Mcteer had as much integrity, journalistic or otherwise McMaster thought, as a watery turd. “Anything you print about my granddaughter or my family, you run by me first.”

“You can’t expect me to agree. Besides, tomorrow’s edition is near put to bed.”

“You’re a practical man, Mcteer. Anything you print regarding my family or the investigation, you clear with me first. I won’t have you turn this into a sideshow. Anything you learn, you bring to me first. You don’t and I
will
pull the plug. Besides, that black boy Drew Bitson has a son of his own, doesn’t he? Surely to Christ, he could be responsible.”

By nine-thirty that evening, with half a dozen transactions in the book and Leland preparing to leave, the telephone rang. He was alone, with the switchboard on auto-answer. Never one to whiff at the opportunity of a potential sale, Leland depressed the button for the incoming line. He answered. The voice was male, gruff, but to Leland sounding contrived: a boy playing at being a man. Alternately, the caller threatened the proprietor of McMaster Chev-Olds with one thing or another, chiefly among them, extortion.

Leland shouted him down. “Make up your mind; which is it and what makes you believe you can blackmail
me
?”

Lacking sufficient disclosure from the calling party and unwilling to negotiate blind, (he hadn’t become the county’s most successful horse-trader by prematurely revealing his cards, had he?) Leland replaced the receiver, effectively walking from the “deal”. He set the alarm, locked the door behind him and with an uncharacteristic tremor inserted the key into the ignition of his Cadillac de Ville before pulling from the lot toward home.

CHAPTER EIGHT

ABBEY FRIEDMAN DRANK
coffee from the ceramic mug purchased as a stocking stuffer last Christmas by her daughter. On it was a picture of a glib rabbit chewing carrots, inquiring, “
What’s up Doc?
”

Friedman hadn’t slept well. Not since returning home after being summoned from bed to inspect the murder scene and the body of the dead child. A forty-minute drive through dense fog and an hour at the location—standing in the damp, waiting in the rain—ruined her appetite for sleep and would probably leave her with a bout of the flu. She had tossed and turned until the flashing red digits on her bedside clock urged her body from between the sheets and to wake.

Abby pondered the mug. As Jews, the Friedmans didn’t keep Christmas but were compelled, at the insistence of their only child, to honor the occasion with a tree, fireside stockings and gifts. Since moving to Albany from Israel six years previous, Abby and Harry Friedman had struggled to ease the trauma of dislocation for their little girl by indulging her.

“If I don’t have Christmas, my friends will talk. We’re in America, mom, not Israel. I’m as much an American as I am a Jew,” she had complained in perfect Hebrew, an irony that, if lost on the child, was not lost on her parents. “You know how cruel kids are, Daddy,” she reasoned as if espousing a uniquely American observation gleaned from the sound bite psychology of daytime, talk-TV. “You wouldn’t want me to be damaged, would you?”

For Martha Friedman, what the suicide bombers of Hezbollah and Hamas could not achieve, the influence from her American peers would, Martha coercing from her parents a grudging acceptance of her gradual but inexorable transition to things gentile, from Jew.

Dismissing the accumulation of paper on her desk, Friedman refilled her coffee cup, steadying her
nerves against the onslaught of caffeine with which she would face the coming day
. Her mind focused on Martha, an upcoming bat Mitzvah, a gift, and a visit to the Cloverdale Mall. Her thoughts were far from the scheduled autopsy at ten.

She absently shuffled a slide journal from her desk to an adjoining bookcase, rattling the glass panels loosely confined within the four corners of a plastic rack. A toxicology analysis was due any day now, as it had been any day now since she first submitted the tissue samples over two weeks ago. Unnatural death, accident, suicide, murder: it was one and not the others. Imposed, self-inflicted, fortuitous. The Medical Examiner suspected, but in this case would not conclusively determine until the toxicology report arrived.

Friedman telephoned the dry cleaner, hoping to retrieve her husband’s laundry this afternoon. On Monday, the cleaner locked its door to business at three. Barring complications, Abby would conclude the examination by two, allowing ample time to finish and afterward to collect her husband’s linen. He needed the shirts. Tomorrow, he would fly to Chicago to address a symposium of Chartered Public Accountants, scheduled to debate the impact of a projected federal budget deficit on future tax policy, and how that tax policy might affect the granting of foreign aid. Harry was concerned the current Administration might waffle on the issue of financial support to Israel, as much as they had done recently with political. (Damn that Benjamin Netanyahu, Abby thought privately.)

After speaking with the laundry, Abby spoke with her mother. She was ill. All this mild weather after such cold, she explained, requesting from her daughter a prescription. The child suggested an appointment with her family doctor. The mother refused, as Abby knew she would. Friedman, the physician, relented, promising to supply something this evening, a harmless and sterile placebo to ease the old woman’s mind and that of Abby, permitting her mother to sleep.

At precisely nine-thirty, the Medical Examiner returned her telephone to its cradle, poured fresh coffee and moved from her office to the autopsy room across the hall.

CHAPTER NINE

CASSIE MCMASTER WAS
perceptive enough to appreciate the impact the murder of her niece would have on the community at large. Any murder, let alone that of a child, is an invitation to meddle, for complete strangers to strip the veneer from the apparently placid surface of otherwise troubled lives. In the coming weeks dirty linen would be laundered, revealing it to be irredeemably soiled.

Cassie awaited the arrival of the police, her thoughts wandering to the bedroom window overlooking the front yard. She was relieved to see her small garden sprout to life in a rainbow bouquet of color; orange, purple, red and, what she believed to be but wasn’t quite sure, mustard yellow. Tulips, crocuses and daffodils, attractively if inexpertly planted in a spurt of nervous energy the weekend prior to Thanksgiving, less than forty-eight hours before the first snowfall. Throughout those long days, as the snow fell and settled first in drifts at the base of the red maple, later moving like a wave to the flowering hedgerow which framed her small lawn, Cassie had worried over the health of a garden which prior to this past year she had given scant consideration.

Her concern was more than symbolic she decided one blustery day, rushing from her home in a fit of uncontrolled anxiety, foraging through a foot of powder to retrieve a single bulb in an effort to reassure herself that they hadn’t all succumbed to the storm. Her precipitous behavior had doomed the plant, she knew, but Cassie was encouraged in the realization the others would probably survive, despite the burden of their unforgiving circumstances.

Cassie had occupied the rectory since returning to Church Falls, more than a decade after first leaving to take a degree in Religious Studies at Virginia’s William and Mary College. While supportive of Cassie’s decision at twenty-three to return to school and attend the university, Leland McMaster was less enthusiastic over her choice of major, hoping she might choose a degree in business with the intent, eventually, of becoming involved with the family automobile dealership. To her father’s dismay, Cassie had expressed little interest.

“You belong here,” he’d said to her at the time. “I need you to reconsider.”

“I won’t, dad,” she’d replied. “I need away from here. This place is like a crypt.”

If her demons hadn’t capitulated upon leaving home, for Cassie, they retreated to a place in her mind she considered manageable, if only marginally more bearable. For Cassie, her studies, the historic William and Mary campus, and the proximity of nearby Colonial Williamsburg proved the ideal salve with which to sooth what she had already defined to herself as the “scorched earth” landscape of her troubled past. Leland McMaster, she decided, raised children like Donald Rumsfeld waged war; like the city of Baghdad, Cassie remained permanently scarred.

After graduation, Cassie accepted a placement with the Youth Section of the City of Washington’s Department of Social and Human Services, thinking her own past could help to initiate the healing process in others.
Physician heal thy-self
was never truer than when applied to this abortive effort. Less than a year after leaving William and Mary, Cassie returned to the security of school, receiving her Doctorate in Psychology and high praise for her dissertation, “Maladaptive Behavioral Conduct In The Nuclear Family Unit”.

By this time in her life, Cassie had become more attuned to the greater concept of a world with higher purpose, than with the notion of simple, human failing. After leaving William and Mary for the final time, Cassie sought to be ordained as clergy to the Episcopalian Church. She understood that in doing so her decision to remain single would go unchallenged, and that the teachings of two thousand years of catholic and apostolic tradition, wrapped as it was in the cloak of the Anglican Communion, would present to her constituents a more palatable alternative than her own twisted definition on the state of how things are, and the reasons for them being that way. At almost forty years of age, Cassie was big on emotional abdication, if not spiritual, though the irony of being referred to as
Mother
was not lost on her.

Upon reflection and contrary to her better instinct, Cassie returned inevitably to her roots. Living at the rectory on the south side of a river that in the spring ran too high, in the fall too low, which in winter sometimes froze over and during the summer into which fishermen dipped their poles, sometime during her thirty-fifth year Cassie McMaster concluded that in order to claim her future, inevitably she must re-claim her past.

Inspecting her image a final time in a full-length bedside mirror, Cassie decided she was satisfied, though not entirely pleased, with her appearance. She had learned yesterday of her niece’s disappearance, assisted in the search and had later that evening been informed of the child’s death. Cassie had not returned to sleep after receiving her sister’s anguished call, had driven instead the short distance to Maggie’s home, hoping to be of comfort.

On arriving, she moved to embrace Maggie. Her sister stepped back, raising her hand as if she were a traffic cop and said, “
Don’t
. Don’t you
dare
tell me this is God’s will. Don’t you dare tell me it’s part of His plan, or that she’s at
peace
and gone on to a better place.
Don’t you try to rationalize this, Cassie McMaster
; don’t you
dare
.” Maggie pulled at her hair with both hands, as if hoping to remove it entirely from her scalp. “This isn’t
God’s
will; this has nothing to do with
Him
. This is the work of
people
.
Vile, stupid, venal, perverted, disgusting, bastard, fucking
…” Maggie barked obscenities as if she were suffering from Tourette Syndrome. Seemingly having run out of superlatives, she spat, “
People!”
as if simple emphasis was now enough.

Cassie moved to her sister; this time Maggie permitted an embrace, though she did not return the gesture. The State Trooper who had delivered home Eugene said, “Is there anything we can do…?”

“Can you bring back my daughter?” Maggie snapped. The Trooper averted his gaze. “Then no. You may as well go.”

Alone, Maggie confessed to her sister, “This is my fault, Cassie.”

“You’re a good mother, Mag; you did what you could.” A platitude, but what else had she to offer?

“Not enough.”

“You couldn’t have done more.” Ditto.

Maggie was silent a moment before saying to her sister, “It’s what mother tells herself, you know. I’ve never forgiven her that excuse.”

Cassie now blinked away tears. Since early morning a savage web of irritated vessels had appeared, staining red the white of her normally clear eyes. Deep furrows pocked her skin. Despite a liberal application of foundation, Cassie’s complexion remained sallow; dull and lifeless, like wax. The persistent case of eczema—that for months had been held in abeyance with a variety of potions, lotions, ointments and creams—had returned, setting her fingers and knuckles ablaze. A navy blouse with high white collar and dark slacks concealed her ample bosom and long shapely legs, and were appropriate to the occasion, she concluded.

The sound of an automobile pulling from the street into her drive, the closing of a car door, and the brittle snap of gravel under heel alerted Cassie to the arrival of Christopher Burke, the officer who had telephoned early that morning, requesting permission to interview the murder victim’s aunt, as if consent would hereinafter be required or could be denied.

Passing a brush one final time through her waist length dark hair, Cassie moved purposefully from the bedroom to the foyer, to receive the police.