Shedrow (20 page)

“Life and death,” he said. “And five million dollars in insurance money.”

She felt the thin manila envelope. “In here?”

“Not the money, just the explanation,” he said.

“Whoa, wait a second now; we better sit down and talk.”

“That’s why I picked a quiet time,” he said.

“Get you a coffee?” she asked.

He nodded and took a seat on a round, swivel stool at the counter. She brought him black coffee and pulled up her own bench seat, facing him from the opposite side of the counter. She touched her beehive hairdo then folded her hands on the counter and looked directly into his deep blue eyes.

He began, “In that envelope is the culmination of the last two years of my life, and my confession to a master crime. It has been a little more than two years since Sarah died. I committed the crime to avenge her death.”

Her hands were on her chin now, and her eyes were still fixed on the old-looking man. “Crime?” she asked.

“Do you remember when I told you about her rare lung disease?”

“Of course,” she said. “And you told me the bastards at the insurance company wouldn’t pay for her surgery.”

“Exactly. She needed a lung transplant. She had...it’s called pulmonary fibrosis. That surgery was her only chance. So I saved every penny I could. I owned some race horses in the old days… before I chucked it all. One of them was doing quite well. I sold a major interest in that horse to this guy from New Jersey, some big construction guy. Only thing is, I never got the money like I was supposed to.”

“Wait,” she said. “There were two guys in here asking about you a while back. One of them said his wife was your long lost friend, trying to track you down and all.”

“Anyone who tried to track me down in the last few months was surely not a friend. Someone tried to burn down my shack this week. They nearly destroyed it and the few possessions I still call mine. Last night I had to stay in the motel down by the Mountain Parkway.” He looked down at the file folder stuffed with magazine articles, opened it and began to thumb through its contents.

“The story is all in here,” he said, “but let me tell you why I helped them kill that big, powerful horse. I did it knowing that I would eventually confess and end up in jail. There’s no one left in my life that I can tell, no one else that I can entrust with this envelope. I have no children, no relatives at all except for my sister Janice. There was only Sarah.”

He pulled out a magazine article that featured a photograph of Chester Pawlek, profiling his success in the thoroughbred business. “This is the bastard who swindled me out of a modest fortune. I’m a geneticist, not a businessman. I understand horse pedigrees and I
understand science. But I ended up losing every penny that I had saved for my Sarah’s lung surgery.”

“My God, I’m so sorry,” she said.

“I signed over my ownership in a world class race horse and the bastard never paid me. So I tried to hire one of the best lawyers in Lexington to get my money back. Next thing I know, I’m threatened by some hired thug from New Jersey, and my lawyer suddenly gets cold feet and says he can’t help me.” He pounded his fist on the table several times, hitting the photograph of Chester Pawlek. “She died two months later. That’s when I made my vow.”

“Your vow?” she asked.

He pulled another article from his folder. “This is another horse called Chiefly Endeavor. It was the pride and joy of that bastard.” He pointed back and again pounded the photograph of Chester Pawlek. And my dear sister and her husband were part owners in this one, until the horse was retired to stud.”

He screamed as he spoke now, “Retired at the age of three!” He pulled out another article that was at least ten pages long. “The thoroughbred horse has been destroyed by the commercial breeders. A horse wins a few races, goes lame, they retire him and he goes on to produce more very fast but inherently unsound babies.”

She appeared somewhat frightened by the rage in his voice as he continued to speak, more to himself than to the waitress now. “So Chester Pawlek had to pay, and what better way than to destroy his weakling stallion, Chiefly Endeavor. But I went one step further. I found a way to destroy his horse and to see to it that he would never see a penny of the insurance money.”

He looked up at the ceiling. “My fickle sister Janice thought it
was all about hatred for Chester Pawlek and my crazy obsession with the evils of commercial breeding, but it was so much more. It was really about avenging the death of my wife. No one will benefit from the stallion’s death, because it was an act of fraud that killed the horse. I conspired in it, and now I must confess to complete the scheme.”

“You’ll go to jail,” she said.

“So will Chester Pawlek, and my sister and her publisher friend. For them it will be hell. For me, jail won’t be all that different from my solitary existence the last two years. I expect it will be a low security prison. I can read. I can think, and write. You know something, Millie, I don’t even miss the money now that it’s gone. Without health, and family, it means nothing. Most of all, I can take comfort that I have once and for all avenged her death.”

He reached for another group of articles. “Equine herpes virus,” he said. “It’s a deadly disease in a susceptible animal. It’s also highly contagious. A nasal swab from an infected horse is all it takes.”

“So that’s how you did it? A swab from one horse to another?”

“No, I did try to follow the outbreaks in Kentucky for some time, thinking that’s how we would do it. But in the end, I devised an even more surefire method. I used some of my old contacts at the university to obtain live virus from the research lab. Of course, that did require a sizable cash payment, provided quite readily by my sister and her crooked publisher friend.”

“So you all worked together then?”

“They thought we were working together, but I had my own agenda all along. They certainly never expected that I would turn around and confess, and turn them in at the same time.”

“I didn’t think you were talking to anyone lately, Wayne.”

“Only when I had to. I do keep a PO box, you know, and I still have contacts. I have my ways.”

“What about the fire?” she said “Someone must know what you’re up to.”

“I expect so,” he said, “and that is precisely why you must promise me that if I don’t get to the authorities, then at least this envelope will.”

“So you were the one who actually swabbed the horse and killed him?”

“Not at all. I just arranged it.”

“So then who actually did it?”

“It’s all in the sealed envelope. Better you don’t know who else is involved until I get to the office of the U.S. Marshall in Lexington.”

“How are you getting there?” she asked.

He pointed to the bicycle outside the window.

“All the way to Lexington?” she said.

“No bus service around here and I don’t think I’ll hop the freight train dressed like this. I’ve been riding my bike to Lexington a couple times a month for the last two years. I go to the general store near Midway, and then I get all my reading material from the recycling center at the landfill.” He thumbed the folder with nails that were still caked with dirt despite his recent sprucing.

“I’ll drive you,” she said. “I’d like to see you get there alive.”

“If you drive me then we have to entrust the envelope to someone else. We could both get killed, you know. I’ll just ride my bike.”

“No. I’ll leave the envelope at home with my sister. I can leave work as soon as the boss comes in at eleven. Put the bike in the back,
I want to drive you there.”

“Okay,” he said. He walked towards the door to retrieve his bike. He opened the front door, then turned his head, looking back at Millie. “You know, everyone has secrets, Millie.”

“I reckon they do,” she said. “I reckon so.”

Chester Pawlek climbed the open wooden staircase to Carla Highet’s second floor apartment. Perspiring and breathing heavily, his 230 pound frame caused each stair to flex slightly under his leather work boots. His faded, baggy dungarees were held up by his signature red suspenders.

As he climbed the stairs, he didn’t know that Highet had called the police and that minutes later, the state of Kentucky would be one solid roadblock. He didn’t know that Highet and Gianni had already assumed that he had murdered the gatekeeper at Midway. Chet had become so thoughtless, he didn’t even consider that Highet would have alerted his daughter, or told her to leave her apartment.

Had Chet known any of that, he might have left Carla Highet alone. All he knew was that he had to stop Steven Highet’s investigation of Chiefly Endeavor. Chet would collect the insurance money, pay off Catroni, and keep some for himself. Maybe he’d even throw Brad Hill a few bucks, though he was far more concerned with
getting Catroni off his back. The little preppy pussy would just have to wait a while, he supposed, because the lien Brad thought he held on the insurance policy was, in fact, totally bogus.

Chet wasn’t even sure what he would do to Carla as he neared the top of the stairs. She was simply the next stop on his list. He would sometimes change his method of assault on a whim, like the time he met a foe in the bowels of Penn Station, where the hobos slept. He planned a single gunshot to the head. Then he noticed hoards of huge rats scurrying around the filthy caverns. So he shot the man in the leg, barely wounding him. Then he found some old rope, bound the man’s hands and feet, and dragged him into a dark cavern. He left him for the rats to eat, describing for the man how they would slowly devour his flesh, bite by bite.

As he reached the top step and turned to walk down the open deck towards Carla’s apartment, she emerged from her door carrying a backpack over one shoulder. She froze when she saw the huge man blocking her path at the top of the stairway.

“What’s your h-h-hurry, sweetheart,” Chet said.

“I need to get to work,” she said. “I’m already late. They’re expecting me.”

Chet saw the terror in her eyes. He smiled with that wicked grin, an expression that could be at once terrifying and disarming. He pulled his gun. “Let’s go back inside, honey. Turn around and g-go back inside. I don’t want to hurt you.”

She opened the door to her apartment. Chet forced her inside, grabbed the door handle and closed it behind them.

“Have a seat over there,” he said, pointing to a recliner chair. He was enjoying the terror in her eyes now. He watched her sit rigidly
on the edge of the well-worn recliner. As he approached the chair, he thought he smelled perfume. He bent over and smelled her freshly shampooed hair, her loose curls still wet from the shower.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” he said. “I think I want something else.” He still held the revolver in one hand, and with his other meaty hand he began to touch her face.

She started to cry and pleaded, “Stop. Please, just stop.”

He set the gun on a table alongside the recliner, then pushed the table behind him, out of their reach. “If you’re good then I won’t need that,” he said, pointing to the gun. He stood in front of her, released the suspenders off his shoulders, and unbuckled his trousers. He grabbed her face with his huge hands. She instinctively tried to resist, but her petite physique was no match for his bull force.

He hadn’t intended this, just as he hadn’t intended to tie up the man alongside the tracks under Penn Station. He was just reacting. He just did it, and he was so wrapped up in the moment that he did something else he virtually never did. He stood in front of Carla with his back to the door.

The door opened but Chet didn’t hear it. His head was tilted back, his eyes closed, a sickening smile on his face. He didn’t hear the slow approach of footsteps either. The sound of a familiar voice distracted him. “God damn you,” it said. By the time he heard the pop of the gunshot he had already felt the sudden piercing pain at the back of his head. He slumped forward onto the recliner where Carla still sat. Then everything turned to blackness.

Carla screamed and stood up, pushing him back with her folded arms. He tumbled backwards, falling over the table where his gun still sat, then onto the floor. His eyes and mouth were wide open. Blood
trickled from one side of his mouth and onto his cheek.

A separate puddle of blood began to form around his head. His countenance was now a blank stare.

Dr. Gianni left the island of St. Lucia four days early. He had worked longer days than most of the other volunteer surgeons, finishing a huge backlog of surgical cases. Dr. Bond had been a skilled partner as well as an intriguing diversion, and while he had managed to deflect her advances, she occupied a good portion of his musings on the plane ride home. He expected they might meet again.

Thoughts of Alice Bond could not diminish his growing anxiety surrounding Chiefly Endeavor, his friend Highet, and Chester Pawlek. After their last contact, he had tried to reach Highet again, first on a cell phone he had bought on the island, and later by instant messaging. The phone went dead minutes after he bought it, and Highet had apparently not been at his computer to receive the instant messages.

Gianni was anxiously awaiting his landing in Miami, en route to JFK International. He could use his own cell phone there, first to call Highet, then Janice. He turned on the phone and dialed as soon
as the wheels touched down.

Damn, his voice mail.
“Steven, it’s Anthony. I just landed in Miami and I have an hour or so before I fly to JFK. Call me, for God’s sake.”

He retrieved and dialed Highet’s home number…voice mail there, too. He keyed the number for the Equine Clinic next.

“Dr. Highet is off this weekend,” the operator for the answering service told him. Can one of the on-call doctors help you?”

“Is there
any
way to get in touch with him before Monday?” Gianni said.

“Well, I can leave a message on his cell phone.”

“No, I already have,” he said.

He called his own home number. Janice sounded cold, and hung over, he thought.

“So how’s the missionary?” she asked.

“Fine. It was a wonderful trip. What’s new at home?”