Beacon Street Mourning (32 page)

HIS SHOT went wide; he hadn't aimed but had fired his gun in a reflex action. I had my revolver in hand beneath my cloak, and I was fairly certain I could see him better than he could see me—though behind my heavy black veil it was like seeing through a glass darkly.

I could have fired back but I didn't want to, for a lot of reasons. They all raced through my mind: with a small gun I should shoot to kill or not at all; my first shot would give away my location and if I missed I'd be sorry I'd given myself away; I didn't want to kill Larry Bingham. The cloak was voluminous, it relied on its many folds to keep the wearer warm and had only one point of closure, at the collar. I held the revolver ready with my finger on the trigger. A revolver has no safety, and with one sweep of my arm, the cloak would fall back. Yes, I could wait.

"Where are you?" Larry called out in a hoarse voice. "I didn't mean to shoot! Honest, I didn't mean it."

Something in the quality of his voice rang like a warning bell in my mind. I didn't move.

"I know you didn't mean to shoot," I said, injecting warmth into my voice, although it is difficult to feel truly warm toward someone when you are holding guns on one another.

"Show yourself!" he pleaded—and I thought: Ah! So he cannot see me after all.

"Please," he said, "let me see you."

"Soon," I said, "you'll see me soon. You know your mother's dead, Larry?"

"Dead! Yes, dead. I know. I did it, I know! I did it did it did it!"

"You shot your mother?" I took a step forward. I hadn't meant to move, it was involuntary, I was drawn by his confession, not wanting to believe it, hoping I'd misunderstood what he said.

Larry didn't reply. He stood on the back steps, the arm with the gun still raised, out in front of his body, in the dim light looking like a dark cutout of a man up against a dark cutout of a tall house with doors and windows. Everything was outlines and shadows.

I took another step, encouraged by his silence and wanting to be able to see the expression on his face so that I could use that as a clue to how I might proceed.

"Why?" I asked. "Why did you do it?"

He raised the arm with the gun higher, though it trembled visibly, and pointed it at me.
"You
know why," he said. "Because you're evil, you had to die. You're a thing from hell now, you stay away from me!"

Omigod! In a flash I understood: To Larry I loomed like a specter in that huge black cloak, for I am a tall woman; with the hat and the long black veil, coming out of the dark of night, I must have seemed a terror to behold. He thought he was seeing the black, vengeful ghost of his mother.

I said no more. I stood stock-still perhaps twelve feet away. I was afraid if I spoke or moved even a fraction of an inch, he would empty all his shots into me, even if he did think I was a dark ghost.

"I'm not doing it anymore, you understand, you got that?"

Larry was weeping desperately. "All my life, that's all I was good for. I was a boy, I could do all the dirty things, the nasty things. You taught me, you know you did, you made me do it. I stole for you, I hurt people for you, I
killed
for you, I even went to
jail
for you, and did you care? No, you didn't, you just said I'd get out in a couple of years because I was a kid. I got out all right, but you don't know—"

Larry broke off, sobbing. The arm with the gun had begun to droop, and as he swiped at his streaming eyes with his other hand I tensed my muscles, wondering if I could run at him, catch him off balance, bring him down.

But then I remembered why I had my gun—I couldn't run anymore, my legs weren't strong enough yet.

"You don't know!" Larry's voice rose to a scream. "What they do to you in jail, it's horrible, they
hurt
you!" Now his voice came back down to a normal pitch, and was somehow all the more eerie for its seeming normality. "They hurt you like you hurt me, like you made me hurt other people. I didn't want to do it anymore when I got out."

He noticed his gun was dropping and he brought it back up, stood taller, seemed to gather himself—then slowly he moved his gun arm straight out to his side. "I got that poison for you the one time. The one
last
time, because you said it was so important and I wanted to do it for you. But then I made a mistake, one lousy mistake, and you treated me like dirt.

"Maybe I am dirt," he said firmly, "but you're not going to haunt me for the rest of my life."

Larry Bingham crooked his elbow, bringing the gun to his temple, and shot himself through the head.

TWO DAYS LATER Michael returned from New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut with a whole briefcase full of information about Augusta nee Bingham—for that was her maiden
name—Simmons Jones. He was obliged to share the material with Detectives McLaughlin and O'Neal without delay, for it illuminated and confirmed Larry Bingham's disjointed confession, which I had written down for them in all the detail I could recall.

As it happened, the detectives themselves had begun to look into Augusta's past, for as they went around our Beacon Hill and Back Bay community on their interviews, not a soul had had much good to say about "the new Mrs. Jones," and this made them suspicious. They surmised she might have made an enemy here or there, but like me, they had not suspected her son.

The only bad part about Michael having dug up all this information was that he had to tell the detectives about our private investigation agency, so that they could understand not only why Michael and I had taken so much on ourselves but also how he'd had the expertise to pull it all together. Of course, Michael didn't say anything about having the names and addresses of all Augusta's relatives, which had made everything a good deal easier. That, along with public records and newspaper archives in the towns concerned, had done the job.

Augusta Bingham had two sons out of wedlock at an early age, possibly incestuously. Her one and only advantage was that she was from a "good" family determined to cover up their sins, and part of the cover-up was to act as if nothing unusual had happened, Augusta continued with her lessons and so on. The family arranged to have the older boy raised by an aunt and uncle and passed off as their son, her nephew. (Presumably this was the nephew I rather narrowly escaped being forced to marry—though nothing could make me believe Father would really have forced me if it had ever come to that.)

But when the younger boy was born, Augusta had refused to part with him; instead she ran away from her home in New Jersey and went to live in a small coastal town in Connecticut,
taking her baby with her. This baby grew up to be Larry Bingham. Whether Larry Bingham would have been different if he had been raised, like his older brother, by someone other than his mother is impossible to know.

What is known from reports of the Simmons family (into which Augusta married when Larry was eight years old) was that Larry was always a peculiar child. He had few playmates, animals shied away from him, he was the sort to pull the wings off flies and legs off beetles and to delight in their deformity, and so on. He got in trouble at school. He stole; often he stole the way a cat kills, to take the prize home to Mother. When he was sixteen years old he was sentenced to prison for having set fire to an abandoned house. Unfortunately, a man had been in the house and burned to death; Larry claimed he didn't know the man was in the house and so had received the minimum sentence.

Also around this time, Mr. Simmons died after a lingering illness.

After Detectives McLaughlin and O'Neal made note of that, and remarked on my father's also having had a lingering illness, Michael told them about the benzene.

The chemical analysis of that bottle of Dr. Zahray's Hercules Tonic for Males came back the same day Michael returned from his trip. The chemical that was present without authorization, as it were, in the tonic was benzene. It just so happened that the "cleaning fluid" in that large brown bottle I'd found in Augusta's room was also benzene. Father's symptoms were consistent with long, slow poisoning by benzene.

A maliciously clever woman, she had put it in the tonic that Father had consumed by the truckload in his futile attempt to please her sexually. Only God knew what else she had put it in—other than his food at the hospital.

The Simmons children in Connecticut subsequently had their father's body exhumed and examined. He had died of
arsenic, probably from rat poison, also in a long-drawn-out manner.

I never told anyone, not even Michael, about Sarah Kirk and the digitoxin. I said I was satisfied to know about the benzene and did not want Father's rest disturbed. There was no need to take it further.

In April, Dr. Searles Cosgrove began quietly to close down his practice. In May, he left Boston. Martha Henderson told me that Anna Bates went with him as a private nurse in charge of the semi-invalid Mrs. Cosgrove. Some people never learn; I suppose that is because it does seem there are always some people who get away with it.

Then again, some do get caught; and that is where Michael and I are continuing to make our contribution. We are still the J&K
Agency ... we are still partners. But still I have not married him.