Better Off Dead (39 page)

About this same time, the rumors of Lyman
Carroll as hero conveniently intensified. He had confronted
Brookhouse about the study, people whispered, then it had escalated
into an argument involving charges of murder and rape. Brookhouse
had fired a gun at Carroll and, with his last dying breath, Carroll
had blown Brookhouse away with a shotgun.

This was preposterous nonsense not fit for a
B movie. But I had to learn to live with it. People need heroes in
this world. They don't need more criminals. So sometimes we create
heroes out of the bad guys. Lyman Carroll rode in on this tide. The
schmuck in life became the savior in death.

It galled me, but what could I say?
Especially when I figured out that this was a fiction Duke
University encouraged. Its reputation required it.

Very few people knew the truth: that Lyman
Carroll had been an accomplice to it all and, most probably, the
one who had started to spiral out of control, killing the coed as
well as the woman who had been on her way to see me.

I knew Lyman Carroll was guilty. My friends
knew he was guilty. And Detective Angel Ferrar damn sure knew: he
uncovered videos, journals that recounted the attacks in loving
detail, more Polaroid’s of each rape and murder, plus mementos like
scarves, panties, jewelry and locks of hair neatly stored in hidden
cabinets built into Carroll's basement. This evidence proved his
presence at the scene of each and every crime. He had been at the
rapes to record them for posterity on Brookhouse's behalf; he had
been at the murders, solo it seemed, for his own gratification or
when the necessity of silencing witnesses had demanded it.

Eventually, Lyman Carroll made more of a
mark in his field than he ever got the chance to realize, when it
was generally decided by the experts brought into the case by
Ferrar that Carroll suffered from a psychosis not yet detailed in
the textbooks he prized so highly: Carroll had been Boswell to
Brookhouse's Johnson. While David Brookhouse had undeniably been
the perpetrator of the rapes as a way of exerting his control and
protecting the drug study, Carroll had been his biographer,
meticulously chronicling each action the two men took. Apparently,
Carroll had taken peculiar pleasure in recording it all in
exhaustive detail. Every scrap of evidence was carefully preserved,
so the two men could review their crimes over and over, reliving
their roles as player and spectator. Psychopathic Peeping Toms. How
mankind has evolved.

The only crime unmentioned in Carroll's
journals was what happened to Candace Goodnight. She was declared
officially missing and merited three inches in the local newspaper
before being relegated to the old news column.

If the truth about Carroll was a closely
guarded secret successfully kept from the press, even fewer people
knew I'd had anything to do with the bloody scene in the basement
of the psychopathology building. And absolutely no one knew who the
hell had saved my ass, including me.

It made no sense. Especially since Helen had
been returned home without harm. She was discovered, sleeping, back
in her own bed. Burly swore he had not seen how it happened.

"I was stuck in the van," he explained when
I called him from the police station where Ferrar was holding me
for questioning. I was frantic about Helen's whereabouts. "I don't
know who brought her back or why," Burly said. "But she's back in
bed, asleep."

"What are you talking about?" I demanded.
"How did you get stuck in your van?"

"I remembered I had a car phone in the van
and that the back doors were unlocked," he said. "I didn't want to
wait for the sheriff to come to tell him where you had gone, so I
wheeled out to the van and got the back doors opened and crawled
through to the front seat and called him. He sent the Durham cops
to Lyman Carroll's house."

At Carroll's house, the Durham cops had
found a pair of uniformed cops already on the scene who had been
summoned by the crazy old coot next door, some nut who was babbling
about race cars and trucks and old men waving shotguns. No one,
including me, knew what the hell he was talking about beyond the
race car, which had to be my Porsche. Together, this band of merry
uniformed men had discovered and deciphered the lipsticked note on
the front door of Carroll's house. Someone had finally called
Ferrar and he had responded immediately, although too late,
arriving most decidedly after the nick of time.

So who was the hero?

"You're telling me you got stuck on the
floor of your van for over an hour?" I asked Burly after he related
his stranded story.

"Yes," Burly insisted. "Killer bumped into
my wheelchair and it rolled down the driveway incline. It was a
comedy of errors. Hugo found me when he came back from his wild
goose chase."

"Why didn't you call someone for help?" I
asked.

"Call who?" Burly countered. "All the lines
to Helen's house had been cut and I knew someone would be home
soon."

"Where's Killer right now?" I demanded.

"You care more about the dog than me?" Burly
asked, incredulous.

"I care about the dog," I answered. "And I
don't believe you. Something's going on."

"Excuse me for being paralyzed," he shot
back. "I got stuck, okay? Let it drop."

"Don't pull that 'poor me' crap," I told
him. "I know you had something to do with this."

"Have it your way," Burly said abruptly.
"Killer is sleeping on the bed next to Helen, by the way." Then he
hung up on me.

It was nice to know he cared.

I filed his story away for future reference
and went to tell Ferrar that Helen had been found safe and sound at
home.

He looked as startled as I was at the
news.

As it turned out, the drugs Brookhouse and
Carroll had given Helen protected her from the entire episode. She
remembered nothing at all. This was a fair trade-off, I thought,
given the horrors she was already sentenced to remember.

I wasn't much more help than Helen when it
came to who had really killed Carroll and Brookhouse. I told Ferrar
everything I knew, every nuance and detail—except my suspicions
about Burly, of course. But I could not help Ferrar with the
identity of the mystery man wielding a shotgun.

I'm not sure he believed me. I'm also not
sure he cared. I think we were both just relieved that I was out as
a suspect: I had been bound and handcuffed when he found me, so
there was no way I had fired either one of those guns. My hands
were tested for powder residue anyway and came back clean. So
Ferrar gave me a walk. I gave him an IOU. I know he'll call it in
one day.

In the end, I think I was the only one who
really cared who had killed the two men. And, to be truthful, I
only cared for my own personal reasons, reasons that had nothing to
do with the loss of two lives such as theirs.

By the end of the week after their deaths,
Ferrar had determined that all of the rape and murder victims were
connected, albeit unknowingly, to Brookhouse's drug protocol in
some way. Two had been in the study and complained of episodic
violent tendencies. One was a roommate of a drug study volunteer.
She had noticed a change in her roommate and approached Brookhouse
with her concerns when the roommate denied there was a problem. One
of the other victims had been a girlfriend of a boy in the study.
She, too, had tried to tell Brookhouse that her loved one had
changed and, worse, refused to acknowledge that a problem existed.
A few other victims had inadvertently uncovered potentially
damaging evidence through their jobs as lab assistants or
administrative help. The woman who had been on her way to see me,
it was thought and never proved, had perhaps learned too much in
the course of an old-fashioned extramarital affair with Brookhouse,
an affair that went bad. She had been killed by one or both men to
keep her from telling me what she knew. Ferrar also discovered that
the murdered coed had recently spurned Carroll's advances,
according to a girlfriend of the victim. This, it was thought, had
triggered her killing by an increasingly out-of-control Lyman
Carroll.

As for Helen, no one would ever know whether
Brookhouse had raped her in anger over being dumped or whether she
had stumbled on information that might harm the drug study. I am
sure that the exact reason was immaterial to Helen. At this point,
only the lingering damage really mattered.

In short, all of the wounded and dead had
been deemed disposable by Brookhouse and Carroll, then nominated
for participation in their own sick study of the destruction of the
human spirit.

The next big crime is always just around the
corner. It didn't take long for everyone but me to get on with
their lives. Within days after the deaths of the two professors,
the newspapers had moved on to other headlines, Ferrar had moved on
to a new case—but I was still stuck in the same old rut wondering,
"Who the hell had come to my rescue?"

I don't like being beholden to anyone. But
someone had saved my life, and Helen's, too, then ended the lives
of two killers with the efficiency of an experienced hunter—and
gotten away with it all.

Who was it? Not Burly. At least not alone.
Unless a genuine miracle had occurred, there was no way it was his
footsteps I had heard moving through that interview room the night
Carroll and Brookhouse had been killed.

It could not have been Bobby D. who came to
my rescue, either. He had spent several anxious hours at the
hospital with Fanny, sans car and any hard information, wondering
what the hell was going on.

It took me a while to discover the
truth.

Our Thanksgiving Day dinner had been
rescheduled, seeing as how I was in the pokey being questioned by
Ferrar, Helen was too groggy to get out of bed, Fanny refused to
leave Luke's bedside, where she was keeping fresh vigil with his
father, and Burly was no longer speaking to me. Only Bobby D.
seemed in the mood to celebrate the strange turn of events with a
massive meal, and when is Bobby ever not in the mood for a massive
meal?

It was just as well we canceled the dinner:
in the midst of the madness, as it turned out, my grandfather
phoned and left a message on Helen's voice mail system. On
Thanksgiving Day, when I had recovered sufficiently to wonder where
the hell he was, Burly called the voice mail retrieval center on
his cell phone, then reported back that my grandfather had phoned
the night before to say he could not come, the irrigation system
was on the fritz. It was a bad time to leave his crops. I was
disappointed when Burly relayed the news. But I knew I'd see my
grandfather one day soon.

Meanwhile, we slowly returned to our regular
lives. Fanny went back to her North Raleigh home with a newfound
appreciation of solitude. Bobby and I headed back to our office in
Raleigh, ready to track down the landlady and demand repairs on our
still-soggy quarters. We finally found her in Myrtle Beach,
overdosing on bingo and romancing some over-the-hill Romeo whose
urgings shamed her into returning with us to take care of the mess.
Only Burly and Killer stayed behind with Helen. We all agreed that
suddenly being left alone with her mother was too abrupt, given
Helen's fragile state, and Burly's schedule could accommodate the
extra days.

“This way I can keep making plans for
Thanksgiving Day dinner," Burly said.

I was just glad he had started speaking to
me again, though he was still very pissed at me for taking his car
keys and doubting his story. I was pretty sure he'd stay pissed for
a long time to come.

The delayed dinner had been set for a Sunday
afternoon two weeks after Thanksgiving. Luke could not come, he was
still in the hospital. But he had survived the second attack on his
life and would one day recover. The doctor even said that if he
worked hard, he could be back to school by the next fall semester.
He was young, he was healthy, he would recuperate with six to nine
months of physical therapy.

He would also, in all probability, never
remember much of that night in Duke Gardens or of the afternoon
before it— including the time he and I had spent in our spot among
the bushes, discussing love, liberty and the pursuit of
happiness.

I was sad he did not remember how close I
had come to giving in to his entreaties. I was not sad enough to
remind him. We lived in different worlds, not to mention different
eras. But he did remember that I was his friend, and that he'd had
a crush on me. It was sweet. And it would have to be enough. His
father made plans to move him back to New Jersey as soon as he was
able to travel. Luke would be out of my life, it seemed, sometime
after Christmas. But he'd always be in my thoughts.

Luke was not the only no-show at our belated
Thanksgiving dinner. Weasel Walters and his new trailer-trash
girlfriend called in their regrets. They were going down to South
Carolina to get married instead. We all wished them well and said a
few silent prayers that they'd not pop up on the Jerry Springer
Show by this time next year.

The rest of the motley crew promised to
arrive in full force on the designated day. Helen was going to
serve as hostess. She had been fine once the effects of the
sedatives she'd been given wore off. But the doctor who came to
check her out—perhaps the only man left in the state who made house
calls—would not take no for an answer when he suggested she speak
to a therapist about her agoraphobia. With Brookhouse dead, it
seemed like the right time. She made the phone call, and then
another one.

By the day of the delayed Thanksgiving
dinner, Helen was, at least, two phone calls closer to leaving her
house eventually. It was a start.

That Sunday afternoon, Marcus arrived for
the dinner with his boyfriend, Robert—a civil engineer given to
buzzed haircuts and attire so incredibly clean-cut he looked
perpetually fresh from the Marines. Which, once upon a time, he had
been. They carried in a vat of cherry cobbler prepared by Marcus's
mother—who was no doubt thanking me in her own special way for the
promotion her son had received a few days before. They also offered
a basket of corn sticks that made my mouth water. Boy, how my
grandfather would have gone for those.