Once Upon a Lie (32 page)

She opened the trunk and used the time inside of the back of the car to collect her thoughts, to slow her breathing. When she emerged with the two baked goods, he was right beside her, a ten and a twenty in his hand. They exchanged what each was holding.

“I owe you change,” she said.

“You don’t owe me anything,” he said. In the dark, his eyes looked even sadder, his face more drawn. “I know this is a little out of the ordinary, but is there anywhere we could go to talk?”

It was out of the ordinary. It was also concerning.

Seeing the look on her face, he held up his hands, surrendering. “Off the record,” he said.

She thought for a moment. “My house?”

He considered that for a moment before nodding. “Okay. Your house.”

She knew that he knew where it was. He was attentive to detail that way.

She made it there before he did, turning on every light in the downstairs of the Colonial before he arrived. She opened the bottle of Cabernet and set out two glasses. She didn’t care if he didn’t want a drink or if it broke some kind of police procedure; she would offer him one nonetheless. He rang the front doorbell a few minutes later, and she stripped out of her Carhartt overalls and down to her leggings before letting him in and taking his coat, which she hung in the hall closet.

He followed her into the kitchen. “Glass of wine?” she asked. “This was given to me after I catered an event at the Longwood Country Club, so I know it’s better than anything I would normally buy.”

He smiled. “I don’t drink.”

“Because you’re still on the clock?”

“Because I’m an alcoholic,” he said, pulling out a chair from underneath the white pine kitchen table. “But you go ahead. There’s nothing I enjoy more than watching someone enjoy a fine Cab. And that’s a fine Cab,” he said, taking the bottle from her and looking at the label. A glimmer of the old Rodney, the one she had met at the speed-dating event, the one who told her—who lied to her—that they would soon share a bottle of Côtes du Rhône, peeked out for a second.

She took the bottle back from him and poured herself a healthy glass, leaning against the counter. “I’ve got seltzer, diet soda, and juice. Pick your poison.”

“I’m good,” he said. Even though it was her house and she should have been inviting him to sit, he was already seated and beckoning her to join him. She pulled up a chair. The only sound as they sat there was the lonely call of a train whistle down by the river and the distant sound of cars traversing the main thoroughfare that headed north.

“Cheese?” she asked. “Crackers?” The silence between them was discomfiting, and it occurred to her that all she really knew how to do was feed people.

And kill them.

“No,” he said. “Thanks.”

She took another sip of her wine and rolled her head around to loosen the tight muscles that came with standing all day in the cold. She put a hand to the back of her neck and rubbed it, feeling the knot that was always there and that would never loosen, no matter what she tried. “You’re welcome to stay as long as you like, Detective,” she said, “but I’m guessing you probably want to get home to start celebrating the holiday with your family.”

“Call me Rodney.”

“Okay. Rodney.” She took in the bags under his eyes and the sad-sack expression that seemed to have gotten progressively sadder the longer she knew him. “I’m alone tomorrow,” she confessed. “Just me and the rest of this wine. I told my ex I was going to the parade so he wouldn’t feel sorry for me, but the truth is I’m staying home. All day. By myself.”

He listened as she continued, telling him about her plans for the quiche and how his buying the bread meant she would have to start a new batch from scratch so that she had something to go with the egg dish. After listening for a few minutes, he stopped her. “I was ten the first time.”

She stopped talking, midsentence, and let him continue.

“First, it was roughhousing. Then, it became something else. He was my stepfather. Meaner than a junkyard dog, just like the song said.” He looked down at his hands. “Did you think it was your fault?”

She couldn’t answer. She had turned to stone.

“I thought so. Takes a long time to shake that feeling, if at all,” he said.

She pushed the wine aside, the sight of it making her nauseated.

“So I drank. A little at first. Then, a lot.” He leaned in conspiratorially. “There were some drugs, too. Don’t tell the PD. Or Colletti.” He smiled. “She seems tough and loose, but she’s a Catholic schoolgirl all the way. Very ingrained sense of right and wrong.”

“I don’t know—”

“Yes,” he said. “You do. You know all about it. Remember? You told me.”

She tried not to let anything show on her face, but she knew it was impossible. This man, someone she had met under strange circumstances that had just become even stranger, could see into her soul. Even if she hadn’t told him, he would have known what had happened because it had happened to him, too. Just the way she knew what had happened to Tina Lorenzo and what was going to happen to Tiffany at some point until Maeve did something to stop it.

“I thought if we went after your father, you would crack. But you’re good at acting and even better at lying, and I could never get to you.” He leaned back in the chair again. “I think I’ll take some of that cheese you were offering.”

She stood on shaky legs and walked to the refrigerator, the act of making a simple plate of cheese and crackers with some pear slices in the middle steadying her. Her mind went on autopilot.
I’m doing what I know how to do. I’m making food. I’m going to serve a plate of cheese and crackers to this very nice man, the one who understands me better than anyone ever has. The one who knows me better than anyone ever has even though he only met me a little while ago. He’s going to eat the cheese and tell me what he knows and then he’s going to leave. He’s going to let me live my life.

She was sure of that.

She put the plate on the table. “The whitish yellow one is Jarlsberg and the soft one is a St. André brie. Very rich. I hope your gallbladder is working properly,” she said, letting out a little laugh.

He spread some of the brie on a cracker and took a bite. “Rich,” he agreed, before changing gears so rapidly that Maeve wasn’t sure what they were talking about anymore. “It was torture. Every day. Am I right?”

She figured the less she said, the better off she was.

“I couldn’t believe that even after we threatened to throw Jack in jail, you wouldn’t budge. I felt like I was playing the most competitive game of chicken ever,” he said, the admiration for her steely nature evident. “Or the most intense game of chess.”

“My father had nothing to do with this,” she said when she found her voice. It wasn’t the first time Poole had heard her say it, but it was going to be the last.

“You win.”

“I win?”

“Yep,” he said. “You win. I got nothing. I don’t have a gun, I don’t have a witness, and although you have the worst alibi in the world, I still can’t pin it on you even with the long blond hair we found in the car. You’re the only blonde in the family, Maeve. I noticed that at the wake.”

“You were there?” she asked, remembering a couple of cops but not him.

“In the parking lot. Not inside.” He smiled. “Don’t worry. No hair root.”

She didn’t know what that meant, but it was clearly significant. “And speed dating? Why were you there?”

He looked at her, nothing to say.

“Me,” she said.

“We were following you,” Poole said matter-of-factly and without emotion. “Just a hunch on my part.” He chuckled. “I was working with Doug that day. You should have seen his face when you got to the hotel. Speed dating,” he said, laughing again. “Took some fast talking to get us into the queue of daters but we’re creative like that.”

Unlike Poole, she didn’t find any of it funny at all. Rather, she felt weak at the thought that she had been followed and never knew. She wondered about other times—when they were, where she had been—but she didn’t ask.

“It was always a crime of passion to me,” he said, changing the subject. “This wasn’t a random killing. Too much violence behind the murder. If you know what I mean.”

She did, but she wasn’t going to let on.

He closed his eyes and took a few deep breaths. “I still can’t pin it on you, though,” he said again. “Not that I’d want to even if I could.” He chuckled. “Watching Food Network,” he said, shaking his head at her flimsy alibi.

He was right. She had motive. She had opportunity. But there was nothing he could do to prove that she had done it. And now that he had revealed their bond, the one she had with a countless number of nameless, faceless strangers walking the earth alongside her, he was loath to make her pay.

“Your going to the ash scattering was inspired,” Poole said, obviously an unidentified voyeur at the event she had attended begrudgingly. “Not too many people have the stones to do something like that.”

She didn’t know why she needed to tell him, but she did. It came out in a sob-filled croak that surprised both of them. “He killed my mother. Sean. He hit her with his car and left her to die on the street.”

Poole took a break from eating the food that Maeve had put in front of him to look at her, confused by what she said. “No, he didn’t.”

“Yes, he did.” She was crying openly; the memory of being told that her mother, the one who left her to watch Soupy Sales while she went to get milk and cigarettes, was dead, that a red car had hit her and taken her life, was too much. She didn’t care what she revealed to Rodney Poole, only that he know that whatever Sean Donovan had done to her, what he had done to her mother had been much worse.

“A man named Marty Haggerty killed your mother.”

Marty Haggerty was Dolores Donovan’s and Margie Haggerty’s father. He was a bartender at the Dew Drop Inn in Yonkers and a drunk. He was that horrible type of addict that was always mean, sober or soused, and the kids in the neighborhood stayed away from him, giving him a wide berth on the street when he parked his bright red Rambler after a night at the bar and sauntered on home to scream at his wife and two daughters in their Bronx row house. Maeve had always cut Dolores the slimmest of slack because of her life with Marty Haggerty and his drunken, booming voice calling her a fat cow in the middle of the day at the height of summer when all of the windows were open and everyone could hear. Maeve didn’t like Dolores but she did feel sorry for her.

Maeve realized her mouth was open and that she was trying to speak but no words were coming out. She closed her mouth slowly and let the impact of Poole’s words sink in like a heavy shroud that was cutting off the light and eventually the air. She rested her chin on her hand, letting her fingers cover her mouth. In her mind, her voice screamed that even in death, Sean was still controlling her, still controlling the lies. He had let her believe, year after year, that if she told, the only other person she loved as much as her mother—Jack—would be dead, too, and that he would get away with it again. Her stunted mind, the one that held on to this and believed him, had become more twisted with each passing year, and the fire, the one that she thought she had lost, burned anew, her grief stoking it until it could no longer be ignored.

Poole was looking at her, his eyes a mix of sorrow and understanding. He ate some more cheese as if it were the most normal thing in the world to be doing and chewed thoughtfully. “I’m guessing they kept that from you.”

She nodded slowly.

“It was all in the file when I got it. A detective named…”

“Pepe Pollizzi.”

He tried not to look surprised but couldn’t help himself. “Right. Pepe Pollizzi.”

“He told me a few weeks ago that they never figured it out.”

“They didn’t want you to know.” He gave a little shrug. “Deathbed confession. Told your dad, of all people. Always suspected, never proven until the day he died. Guy got away with murder.”

More lies. Lies on top of lies. She wondered where the truth began and ended and when the lies would stop. If they would ever stop. It would be no use asking Jack; he didn’t even remember where he was right now, never mind when he was finally back at Buena del Sol, if he ever got there. This last transgression, the one that landed him in the hospital, may have effectively ended his days at the assisted-living facility. She stared at Poole, the realization of what this new development meant sinking in. She let the thoughts run through her head and ended up at the same conclusion: Whether he had killed her mother or not, Sean Donovan had deserved to die.

“Funny,” he said. “It was right after Haggerty died your father beat the stuffing out of Sean Donovan. I wonder what else the old guy told your dad?” Rodney looked at her as if she would know. She didn’t.

But she could manage a guess. The timing of the beating, which she finally put together with a black eye she had observed years ago at a family christening, had coincided with a protectiveness that Jack had started to exhibit even though she was no longer a child by that time. Like a good Irishman, he had never brought it up, preferring instead to do what he thought he knew how to do best: take care of her. Beating Sean for whatever he thought had happened was the first thing he saw to. The next came in increasingly incessant phone calls and “check-ins,” as he liked to call them, the drop-by when he still drove. She caught him looking at her occasionally with a sadness that she could never figure out, and she wondered if she had started to remind him of her mother. Now, with all of the pieces in place, she knew why his gazes had turned apologetic and morose; he knew what had happened, or had an idea, and he would never feel the same again.

Forgetting the past, even if the memories came back every now and again, was a gift that had been given to Jack, in her opinion. He just didn’t know it.

Maeve could only wonder. Did Marty Haggerty know something about Sean that no one else did? Maeve turned that over in her mind. If he had, why did he let Dolores go with Sean, a cruel and depraved individual? Was it like Margie said? Was it just all about the money and nothing else?