The April Fools' Day Murder (22 page)

“Was the boy belted in?”

“I’m pretty sure he was. I think they cut the belt to get him out.”

“What kind of investigation did you carry out?”

“Well, I didn’t carry it out, ma’am. But I think they were pretty thorough. There was a death. They take that very seriously.”

“And no one thought there might have been another car involved or a pedestrian trying to cross the road?”

“No evidence of that.”

“Exactly when did that accident happen?”

“Five years ago this past February.”

“I guess that’s it then. Thank you very much for coming.”

I watched him drive away. Joe Fox must have suggested he come to the house. I was grateful for it, but I hadn’t learned anything new.

The phone rang a few minutes later, and when I answered, it was Toni Cutler. “Hi, Chris, how are you?” she said cheerily, and my guard went up.

“Just fine. Have a good flight home?” I am notoriously poor at small talk and consider it a waste of time.

“Oh, yes. Good to get back to the family. I hear you and Mom took a drive together.”

“Yes, we did. She’s doing fine. I think she’ll have her confidence up very soon.”

“I’m really relieved to hear that. If she can get herself around, she can be her usual independent self.”

I wondered where all this was going. “Yes,” I said, not wanting to prolong the agony.

“You know, I’ve been thinking. You were so extremely helpful to us, Chris. We want to do something to show our appreciation.”

So there it was, the bribe to keep me quiet about the will. “I didn’t do much, Toni, and I was happy to do it. I know you appreciated the little I dug up. I’m glad I could do something.”

“No, no, really. Mom came up with a super idea. She’d like to make you a present of an acre of land on the hill.”

I was stunned. People don’t go around giving away half-million dollar presents, and they certainly don’t give them to me. When I caught my breath I said, “Thank you, Toni. I couldn’t accept it. It’s very kind of your family, but believe me, I couldn’t accept it under any circumstances. And we’re very happy living where we are.”

“You think about it,” she said, still using the light tone of voice that contrasted with the more down-to-earth one I had heard when she was in Oakwood.

“As long as we’re on the phone, can you tell me approximately when Mr. Vitale tried to buy the land from your father?”

“Let’s see. It was quite a long time ago, nine or ten years at least. It could even have been longer.”

I made a note on a scrap of paper on the counter. “And the date of the second will that you found last Saturday?”

There was a pause. Then she said, “There’s no second will, Chris. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

So Winnie had gotten to her. “Did Roger call you today?”

“I talk to my brother all the time.”

“Did you talk to him today?” I asked.

“He called, yes.” The voice was coming back down to earth.

“It’s really important that I know the date of the will.”

“The original will—that is, the only will Dad left—was written a long time ago. Mom knows when. They didn’t talk about it much except to say that their affairs were in order.”

“And Roger didn’t benefit.”

“That’s because of their relationship. We’ve told you all about that.”

“It’s the second will I’m interested in,” I said. “I want to know whether it was written before or after the terrible accident.”

“There’s only one will and there’s my doorbell. Got to go. Think about what I said. Mom really wants you to have that land.” She hung up.

I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. I picked up the phone, called Jack and said, “You’re not going to believe what the Platts just offered me.”

Joseph had been right, as she usually is, in suggesting that I find out the dates that important events occurred, and that included the new will. I knew I couldn’t ask Winnie, so it looked as though the only other person who might be able to tell me was Roger. Did he know? I wondered.
Had his sister effectively stifled all discussion of the will by convincing him that it didn’t exist?

When Eddie got up, we had our afternoon snack and then got in the car. There was a chance Roger might be home, working there instead of at his office. He wouldn’t be happy to see me, but the only other way I could reach him was to go through Doris, and she had seemed pretty reluctant the last time I asked.

“Who are we visiting?” Eddie asked as we went inside the building.

“A man named Mr. Platt.”

“Is he Mrs. Platt’s boy?”

“Yes he is. He’s her son, but he’s a grown man.”

We went up to the third floor and down the hall. I rang the bell and waited. There was noise inside, someone coming toward the door.

“Who’s there?”

“Chris Brooks.”

He pulled the door open, ready to say something, but stopped himself when he saw Eddie. “Come in. You can only stay a minute. I’m working and I can’t take much time away from it.”

“I have only one question. Do you know the date of the second will?”

He shook his head. “This is getting very involved and unpleasant. I owe you an apology.”

“Don’t bother. I know what it’s about.” But the fact that he said it meant that he had extracted the truth from his sister. He knew there was a second will.

“I asked Toni that very same question. She didn’t have the exact date, but it was several months after my son—after the accident. But for the record, there isn’t
any second will and never was. That’s the way my mother wants it.”

I ignored the last statement. “What favor did you do to earn half your father’s estate?”

“I don’t want to discuss this with you.”

“Were you intending to sue for the loss of your son?”

“It crossed my mind, but I never took the first step. It was too—my gut wouldn’t let me. How do you put a price on your child?” He looked toward Eddie, who was quietly going through a magazine on a coffee table.

“I don’t know,” I said, feeling tearful. “I couldn’t. But I know it’s done.”

“Well I didn’t do it.”

“When did you leave your wife?”

“Around that time. Everything just piled up and it became too much for me.”

We were standing there in his living room, facing each other a few feet apart, two strangers linked by a murder and all the detritus that had surfaced in its wake. He had to know what the key was, and if he didn’t tell me, no one else would. Toni and Winnie had locked the gate. It was the family against the rest of the world. “You still see your wife, don’t you?”

“Yes. I have nothing against her. I just don’t seem able to live with anyone anymore, not since my boy died. I need to be alone. I need to be responsible for only one person.” He sat down in the nearest chair, as though he no longer had the strength to stand. The conversation was enervating him. “And I couldn’t live in that house anymore with my son gone. He was the most wonderful child, smart, loving, good-natured. He was the child I tried to be for my father when I was young except I never did
anything right. How could he have thought that money would make a difference to me?” He looked up.

“He didn’t know you,” I said softly.

“That’s the truth. He never tried. All I ever wanted from him was his love and approval, and they were the two things he didn’t give me—couldn’t give me, because he didn’t love me and didn’t approve of me. I was an April Fools’ Day joke to him. That’s when I was born, did you know? And when he was murdered, I was out having a drink with a friend to celebrate.”

“Then you have an alibi,” I said.

“Probably not. I think we actually got started a little later in the day. I even turned my cell phone off so I could enjoy the moment.”

Which was why his wife hadn’t been able to reach him. “I see.”

“You know, my life is easier now with my father gone. If I want to see my mother, I can just go over there. I don’t have to ask whether it’ll inconvenience him or annoy him. I’m glad he’s gone. He was a thorn in my side and it’s been pulled now and the wound is mending. If you think I’m confessing to something, I’m not. I’m just being honest. My life is easier and I’m glad he’s gone.”

“Thank you.”

“Do you intend to tell the police about the second will?”

“Not unless I’m asked, and I can’t see that they’ll ask me.”

“Did you ever see it?”

“No. Toni called and told me about it.”

“Well …” He stood. “Thanks.” He held out his hand and we shook.

“Come on, Eddie,” I said.

“No. I wanna look at the pictures.”

“We have magazines at home. Let’s go.”

He waited a moment, looking at a double-page spread of a red car, then came over to me. I said goodbye and we left.

25

Driving home I wondered if I cared anymore who had killed Willard Platt. Roger had suffered enough in his life, most recently because of the death of his son. I could understand his feelings, his urge to get out of the house after that death. The boy had been a young teenager. He would have made noise, laughed, talked, argued, played music. The absence of the sound must have been chilling. The emptiness for the parents must have been unbearable. I looked in the car mirror and checked my little boy, looking out the window as we neared home. I could not imagine my life without him, with the knowledge that this young life had ended. And for Roger Platt there were all those other emotions stemming from his relationship with his father.

What a strange man Willard Platt had been. I remembered the day at Prince’s when Eddie nearly ran him down with the cart and I had seen the cane lying on the floor. He had no murderous enemies, hadn’t had them for decades. He didn’t need to carry a concealed weapon to protect himself. He used a cane because it set him apart from other people, called attention to himself, perhaps made
people act deferentially toward him. That was what he wanted, deference, something his son had never given him.

I have often wondered where anger comes from. There are people who seem to respond to situations with anger when evenhandedness would be more appropriate and accomplish more. Among the nuns I have known at St. Stephen’s, there have been women with such good hearts, women who would help you before they were asked. Yet I never wondered why they were so good, as I now wondered why someone like Willard Platt was filled with so much anger. The woman who had stopped to talk to me at Prince’s had said he was famous for suing people. It wasn’t a reputation I would want for myself. Perhaps it padded his ego, made him feel powerful. And yet this same man lay down on the grass in front of his house and waited for teams of high school students to locate him so they could share in a treasure hunt.

A strange man. And now his wife and his daughter, and his son too, it appeared, had been drawn into a deception that even I was marginally involved in. I felt deeply conflicted. I possessed information, the existence of which I could not prove, but which was material to a homicide. If I told the police what I knew, they might arrest Roger and they would surely give Winnie a hard time. If I kept it to myself, I had my conscience to live with. But if the second will no longer existed, if the police could not find it and Winnie denied its existence, how could it have any effect on the case?

I could not believe that Roger had killed his father. I thought it more likely that Winnie had. Here it was her son’s birthday, and her husband, instead of doing something nice for their son, was playing games with other
people’s children. Maybe she sat in the sunny windowed room at the back of her beautiful home and thought about it, stewed about it, eventually exploded with anger over it. It occurred to me that she might actually have heard my cries and the banging on the front door and refused to answer for her own reasons, but the frantic sounds could have started her thinking about how badly her husband had treated their son. What if I hadn’t driven up the hill that afternoon? Would Willard Platt still be alive?

At home, Eddie jumped down onto the driveway and ran to the back door. I followed more slowly. I had a feeling I had accumulated all the information about this case that I was likely to find, and I still had nothing convincing. Somewhere in that collection of information had to be the answer or answers that would finger a killer.

We went inside and I started cooking dinner, handing Eddie small pieces of raw vegetables to eat with his apple juice. I did all my tasks automatically, my mind trying to sift through the facts, the events, to find the thing that was wrong or the thing that should have rung a bell.

What if Harry had lied to me about the ownership of the gun? Suppose it was Harry’s, not Willard’s. Where did that leave me? Nowhere, I thought. It made little difference whose gun it had been. What if he had kept it for half a century, not tossed it in the river? I shrugged as I peeled potatoes. It made no difference. All I had learned from that story was that there was a reason Willard Platt began to carry a cane, even a reason why he carried canes that were weapons. It didn’t give me a clue to his killer.

Amelia was gone and she hadn’t killed Willard. I didn’t think Harry had either. Vitale was still a good suspect, a man simmering with hatred for many years.

And how could Winnie have thought she could buy me off with a gift of land? Did I come across as the kind of person who would lie for money? That troubled me. I put down my scraper, pulled out a kitchen chair and sat down, leaning my face in my hands. Let’s think about this, Kix, I instructed myself silently. Suppose you and Jack had the money to build a house on a piece of property worth almost half a million dollars. Would you have been more receptive to the bribe? OK, don’t call it a bribe; call it an offer. Might you have said you wanted to think about it rather than turning it down immediately?

How can anyone know what one would do if circumstances were different? I believed—I wanted to believe—that whenever such an offer came to me, whatever the circumstances of my life, I would have turned it down as quickly and firmly as I had done today.

“Mommy?”

I looked up, almost surprised to see my little son in front of me. “What, sweetheart?” I said.