Redemption Street (26 page)

“But I noticed that Andrea was always flush with cash, and her station wasn’t a whole lot better than mine. I asked her about it. She said there were a lot of ways to make money up here besides waiting tables.”

“You were curious?”

“I was real curious,” she admitted. “Like I said, waitressing sucked and I needed money.”

“There’s no such thing as easy money, Karen,”

“I was a kid. I didn’t know that. All money looks easy to a kid.”

“What’s the catch?”

For the first time, she hesitated. “We had to a … we had to date guys that worked at other hotels in the area and find stuff out.”

“Stuff! What kind of stuff?”

“When we were out with the guys from the other hotels, all we had to do was find out if there were any guests at those hotels throwing a lot of cash around or flashing lots of jewelry. That’s all. We got twenty-five bucks a date, and sometimes we’d get an extra fifty. What’s the matter? You look disappointed.”

Karen found something about what she’d said very funny and began to make a sort of suffocated giggle. Then she grabbed her side and sat quickly down on the bed.

“Did you ever ask why?”

“Just give me a second…. Yes, Andrea asked. Someone was running a big-stakes card game and was interested in recruiting high rollers. They couldn’t exactly advertise it in the local paper.”

“And you believed that, this story about the high-stakes card game?”

“I believed the money. Yeah, I believed it. Why not? It made sense, and I didn’t see the harm in it.”

“You said you believed at first,” I repeated. “Something must’ve changed your mind.”

“Something did.”

A siren went off in my head. “The burglaries!”

“Very good.” Karen applauded weakly. “Judas said you were some kind of cop.”

“How’d you figure it out, about it not being for a card game?”

“Andrea did. I think she was a little more suspicious than me, but we sort of enjoyed the illicit nature of what we were doing. It
was
kind of exciting.” The years seemed to disappear from Karen’s face, an innocently mischievous smile spreading across her yellowy skin. For the first time she almost resembled the girl with the Siamese cat in her lap. “The money was great, and as long as we couldn’t see anybody getting hurt, we figured, What the hell. Then …”

“Then what?”

“Then,” Karen said, the years returning to her face, “the stories about the burglaries started appearing in the local paper and on the radio. It didn’t take us long to match the names of the victims to the names we’d gotten out of some pimply-faced pool boy or horny bellhop.”

“Did Andrea want to stop?”

“That’s rich! No, Moe, she didn’t want to stop. She didn’t want to get caught. Those are two different things, just in case you’re keeping score. I wanted to stop, but Her Royal Highness had developed a taste for danger. Andrea told me that as long as I kept my mouth shut she’d still throw some more money my way.”

“You took the money.”

“Why not?” Karen stood, pushing herself off the bed with quite a bit of effort. “No one was getting hurt, not really. So what if some old ladies were getting their rings stolen? The hotels were insured. We were kids having a lark. And now I was getting paid for doing nothing.”

Then it occurred to me what went wrong. “This was all working out great for you, I guess, until that guy got beaten unconscious, huh?”

“How’d you know about that?”

“I’m some kinda cop, remember? But,” I confessed, “I still don’t see what this had to do with the fire.”

“When that guy got knocked unconscious, Andrea panicked. She said she was going to the cops, but that she’d leave my name out of it.”

“You didn’t believe her.”

Karen bowed her head. “The funny part is, I did. I suppose I was always a little jealous of Andrea. I think every girl in Lincoln was jealous of her, and maybe getting involved with her the way I did back then made me see her in a different light. I guess I grew to not like her so much, but she could keep a secret. I trusted her.”

“But Sam didn’t. He couldn’t afford to. The stakes were bigger for him.”

Her jaw nearly hit the top of my shoes. “Sam! You know about Sam?”

“Yeah, I know about him, good old Sudden Sam. But why don’t you tell me about him anyway?”

“I told Sam about Andrea,” she confessed. “It was stupid, I know. Even though I trusted Andrea, I was afraid. I mean, I had stopped doing this shit for him weeks before, but …” Tears began rolling down Karen’s cheeks. “He told me to talk Andrea out of going to the cops. He told me that if he was going down he’d take me and Andrea with him. He held a razor to me and threatened to carve up my face if I didn’t get Andrea to change her mind. He said he had a friend on the cops who would know if Andrea turned herself in. ‘I might not be able to get to her, my
shaineh maideleh
, but I’ll get to you,’ “ Karen imitated Sam’s lilt perfectly, dragging a skeletally thin finger across her wet face. “He sliced open my cheek.”

“You went to talk to Andrea.”

“I waited until everyone was asleep, but she wouldn’t listen to me. I showed her where Sam had cut me, but Andrea had made up her mind. When she wouldn’t listen, I guess I just lost it. I was crying and shaking with fear of what Sam would do to me. I guess Andrea was coming to put her arm around me and … I … I pushed her away.” Karen doubled over, again grabbing her side.

“So you pushed her,” I prompted. “So what?”

“But she tripped. She fell back against her cot. I was still so furious with her. I started taunting her, telling her about what Sam was going to do to us, but she didn’t move. Andrea never moved. She wasn’t breathing. She had no pulse. She must have fallen awkwardly and snapped her neck.”

“You panicked.”

“I panicked. I didn’t know what to do. I was a stupid seventeen-year-old girl.”

I hung my head, knowing finally how the fire had started. “You lit her bed on fire to cover it up. How stupid could you be?”

“No! I mean I did, but not then, not right away. First, I ran to the only other person I thought I could go to.”

“Sam.” It all made a kind of horrible sense now, I thought, balling my good hand into a fist. “What happened when you went to him?”

“He helped me. He told me to stay outside while he went to make sure Andrea was dead. When he was sure, he brought me back into the workers’ quarters and told me to light her bed on fire to cover up the evidence. He’d put her back on the bed. He told me to use a cigarette to light up the bed and spray a little lighter fluid onto the fire once it started. I told him I couldn’t do it. I knew she was dead, but I just couldn’t do it.”

“But you did do it, didn’t you?”

Her tears came in waves now. “Yes, yes, I did it. Sam smacked me in the mouth so hard he knocked my front teeth out. He told me he’d kill me if I didn’t do as he said. After I was done, I was to meet him in the employee parking lot.”

“The fire spread so fast, though, Karen. What really happened?”

“I was too frightened to wait until the cigarette caught on the mattress, so I … I doused her with lighter fluid and threw a match on her. I couldn’t believe how fast it spread. So I grabbed Andrea’s journal and ran. That stupid journal, it meant so much to her. By the time I got out, it … the … it was an inferno.” Karen clapped her hands over her ears. “They were screaming, screaming. When I shut my eyes I can still hear them screaming.”

“How’d you get away?”

“Before the fire trucks came, we were already on our way.”

“To where?” I asked.

“Sam kept a little cabin not too far away from Monticello Raceway. When things quieted down, he got my teeth fixed and smuggled me over the border to Canada. He was happy to be rid of me.”

“Until …”

Karen explained that she had drifted around Canada for a few years, working as a waitress mostly, but the fire and her victims were never far from her thoughts. Though she tried to stay away, the guilt over what she’d done kept pulling her back east. She said she felt compelled to find a way to deal with what she’d done. Then, in Toronto, outside an old synagogue, a man approached her and asked her the same question I’d been asked: Are you a proud Jew? It was an epiphany of sorts. From the second she heard Judas Wannsee speak that night, Karen Rosen knew what she would do with the rest of her life. Eventually, Wannsee bought the old bungalow colony. To Karen’s way of thinking, it was meant to be.

“It was perfect.” Karen seemed almost joyful. “I didn’t have to run anymore, and I could deal with what I’d done where I’d done it. The world thought I was dead. No one knew me up here, and I thought Sam had probably gone.”

“But he hadn’t gone,” I reminded her.

“No, he was still here. I got really sick one winter and I had to go see the doctor in town.”

“Sam spotted you.”

“Just my luck,” she said sadly. “But he didn’t confront me, not then. He came to a meeting like you did, and he handed me a note giving me a time and place to meet him.”

“Knowing Sam,” I said, “he probably tried to blackmail you first.”

“He was down on his luck.” She seemed to defend him out of habit. “He hadn’t worked in a long time. Anyway, I didn’t have any money to give him, and he was smart enough to know my parents’ pockets weren’t very deep. And what would turning me in to the cops do except make more trouble for himself in the end? He’d have to explain his part in all of it.”

“But you had the diary.”

“I had the diary. It didn’t take Sam long to figure what to do from there. Like I said, Sam’s a smart man—he’s been blackmailing Andrea’s brother for years—but I’m no fool either. I never actually gave the book to Sam. I kept it as a kind of insurance. I just give him a poem every now and then, when he needs money. Now,” she said, gesturing up at me, “you have the book. It would have ended soon enough anyway.”

“Why?”

“Do you think I’m this lovely shade of yellow just to match the star on my blouse?” she snickered. “My oncologist tells me I’ve got a few weeks at most to get things in order. It’s my liver. It’s spread into my spine, and soon my brain. What shall you do with me, Moe?” she asked, seeming to enjoy my predicament. “It’s a dilemma, no?”

There was no dilemma, not really. I just didn’t see any point in hauling her in to die in the midst of a media circus. And the media would have made her out to be the victim here. I couldn’t have stomached that. I couldn’t dishonor the dead. This wouldn’t be the first time innocent people had paid someone else’s guilty debt with their lives. It wouldn’t be the last. In any case, I got the sense that the closer she got to death the less serene Karen would be. Her bill was coming due.

“You can stay here and die in peace. Your secrets and Andrea’s are safe with me.”

She stood and made a move as if to hug me. “Thank you. You can’t imagine how relieved I am.”

“Just out of curiosity,” I began, turning away from her approach, “when Arthur came looking for Andrea and joined your group, where did you—”

She answered my question with a question. “Where do you think?”

“The Swan Song.”

“Yes, Sam was very accommodating to his cash cow.”

“Arthur’s dead. He killed himself. I’d thought you’d want to know.”

I might just have told her I’d run over a squirrel. “He was never at peace, so horribly depressed, even when we were kids. If he hadn’t latched on to me as a cause, he would have found something else.”

I hadn’t known her well in high school, but I couldn’t imagine she had been so cruel, not the girl with the pajamas and Siamese cat. Murder changes you. I decided to leave before I let it change me.

“Thank you again, but don’t go just yet.”

I was terse: “What is it?”

“Can’t you say you forgive me, just a little bit? Please? I get a lot of support around here, but forgiveness isn’t on the menu.”

“I’ll keep your secret, but I’m not in the forgiveness business. As far as I can see, there are no vacancies for you on Redemption Street. Maybe you can find what you’re looking for in hell.”

“We don’t believe in hell, Moe. You know that.”

“It’s not really important if you believe in hell, if hell believes in you.”

I quickly closed the door behind me and walked into the daylight. The air outside was cold and fresh, but the stink of her decay stayed with me. It wasn’t necessarily the smell of the cancer eating away at her flesh that I couldn’t escape. It was the rotting of her soul, I think.

A cop buddy of mine, Ferguson May, was our precinct philosopher. Every precinct’s got one. With a few beers in him, Fergy fancied himself the black Aristotle. It was funny that I would think of Ferguson now. I hadn’t thought of him in years. His favorite bit of wisdom had to do with falling from high places. You don’t realize how fast you’re going, he’d say, until you get close to the ground. That’s when you realize it’s a little too late to start praying. Ferguson May got stabbed through the eye trying to break up a domestic dispute. I wondered how comforting his own philosophy had been in the seconds before they pronounced him dead at the scene. I wondered if Karen realized just how profoundly fast she was traveling in relationship to the ground.

I sat in the lot outside Town Hall trying to compose myself. I had been hard on Karen—too hard, I thought. All those years ago, she was a kid, a sad, lonely kid who got in so far over her head that the heat of a match felt like the sun. What if it had been Katy or, worse still, Sarah? What was I like at seventeen? I was an irresponsible jerk who thought he knew everything about everything, but knew nothing about anything. Still, she hadn’t batted an eye when I told her about her brother’s suicide. I guess I hadn’t had enough time to distinguish between what Karen was then and what she was now.

I was angry. I was angry that I’d gotten it wrong and disappointed that Andrea wasn’t alive. I looked at her diary on the seat next to me and wondered if I would have been more charitable if it had been her waiting to die in Bungalow 8. Teenage crushes, I realized, can survive almost anything, arson and murder notwithstanding. God, how petty and stupid. I was tired enough of the lies and secrets surrounding Patrick’s disappearance. There were times, especially around Katy’s family, they weighed me down so that I felt myself being crushed. My legs weren’t strong enough to carry the weight of sixteen innocent bodies. I could already feel them pressing down on me.