The Poisoned Rose (19 page)

Chapter Eleven

 

Marie’s car was a Saab with shiny black paint. We rode in it to a cottage on the shore of Fort Pond Bay in Montauk, not far from the train station at the edge of the village.

Marie pulled to the side of the narrow road and parked on the edge of the yard. We sat together in silence, watching the solitary cottage for a while. Its dark windows reflected the endless night around us, and an unsettling stillness hung over the place, like maybe no one had been there for a very long time.

I could see the waves of the bay beyond the cottage moving toward shore like layers folding over layers. It was the only motion that my eye could detect in the dark night.

Marie seemed preoccupied as she stared at the place. She had told me as we made the ride east that she had not heard from Scully since yesterday. She had driven by here several times but never saw any sign of him. She had a key but was afraid to go in by herself. She wanted me to check things out for her.

I sized the place up, took the key from Marie and crossed the overgrown front lawn to the door. But before I was even halfway there something caught my eye.

Scully’s pickup was parked in the driveway, on the other side of the cottage. We hadn’t seen it from Marie’s car. The truck’s door was open, its interior light on and burning brightly. I went around to the driveway and saw that someone was lying half in and half out of the truck door—legs were still in the cab, head and torso on the pavement. I looked back at Marie quickly, then rushed to the truck.

I saw the blood first, a pool of it. It was still spreading. Then I saw Scully’s face. He was on his back. He’d been beaten. His eyes were opened wide. He looked both weary and surprised. I could see two gunshot wounds in his head.

There was no point in taking his pulse. I knelt, though, and looked closely at him. Some of the cuts on his face had begun to heal while others appeared to be fresh. I thought about what Jean-Marc had said about negotiating with someone who could bring them to Marie. Could this—trying to beat the information out of Scully—be what he had meant? If so, was Scully taking his licks while Bishop, Long and I were having our chat on Bishop’s back patio?

I looked at the blood and knew by the way it was still spreading that Scully’s murder had occurred not too long ago, possibly even just minutes. I also knew not to stand around and attempt to make any sense of all this.

Scully was dead, and this was all I needed to know. I would pass this news along to Augie when I next saw him in person, and that would be that.

With this clear in my mind, I stood and turned to leave.

But then something on the pavement caught my eye and I stopped dead.

It was almost directly below me, almost underfoot. I looked down at it for a bit before finally moving closer for a better look.

There were two bullet casings on the pavement. I knew just by looking at them that they were .32s. I studied both casings closely, then searched for more. But there were only the two. I stayed there and thought about a lot of things before I finally picked them up, using the cuff of my shirt sleeve like a glove. I stuffed the casings one at a time into my back pocket, then stood and turned again to leave.

This time I was stopped by the sight of Marie Bishop. She was standing just behind me, looking past me toward the truck.

I knew that from where she was standing she couldn’t see Scully’s face. She took a few uncertain steps forward, but I went to her quickly and stopped her. She looked at me without expression and said, “It’s him.”

“Yes.”

“He’s dead?”

“Yes.”

She nodded but said nothing.

There wasn’t time for any of this. We had to get out of there, fast. The killer could still be around.

I told Marie this. She looked at Scully’s body, then back at me.

“We need to go somewhere safe, Marie. Somewhere no one will find us.”

“Okay,” was all she said.

I led her across the lawn and back to her car. I drove this time, and it wasn’t till we had pulled away and were heading back toward the village that I asked her where we were going.

She looked straight ahead, through the windshield. In a flat voice she gave me a Montauk address and asked me if I knew where that was.

“Yeah. But what’s there?”

“My place. No one knows about it. Well, no one who’s alive, anyway. We’ll be safe there.”

Her apartment was a large studio above a pharmacy in the only two-story building in all of Montauk Village. Her bed was on the far side of the room and stood between two floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooked Main Street. We entered and she went straight to the bed and sat with her hands folded in her lap. She looked out one of the windows and kept perfectly still, breathing gently, her back straight and shoulders stiff.

I stood by the door and watched her for a while, then eventually looked around the apartment. There was her bed and a bureau, a television, small couch and steamer trunk. That was it, that was all she owned. The rest of the apartment was open space. There was a small walk-in kitchen and a bathroom by the door. The ceilings were high, and two electric fans hung from them, one above the bed, the other not far from where I was standing by the door. Marie hadn’t turned on any lights; she didn’t need to. The red and blue glow of the neon pharmacy sign outside her windows filled the room with a kind of perpetual twilight.

Eventually I took a few steps toward Marie. She gave no indication as I approached that she was aware of me. I knew she was in shock, and I didn’t want to disturb her, but there were things that we needed to talk about, and time was ticking away.

I reached the foot of the bed and watched her for a moment, then looked past her to the nightstand on the other side of it. There was clock on it, a half-filled glass of water, and a prescription bottle.

I thought of what Jean-Marc had said about her actions being common for someone with her disorder.

I looked back at Marie and tried to think of how to say what I needed to say. In the end, it was she who spoke first.

Her voice was monotone, grave. She didn’t take her eyes from the view outside her window.

“You said it wasn’t safe for us back there,” she said. “Why?”

“I saw things I didn’t like.”

“What did you see?”

“Two .32 caliber bullet casings. The gun that killed Tim Carter was a .32. Your brother gave that gun to me as a show of good faith. Or at least he claimed it was that gun.”

“You think now it wasn’t.”

I nodded. “He gave me it this morning. Scully had been killed very recently.”

“There’s more than one .32 caliber gun in the world, right?”

“Yes, but I’ve become a lot less intolerant of coincidences lately.”

She thought about that, then said, “What did they do to him?”

“Scully?”

“Yes.”

I didn’t answer.

“What did they do to him, Mac?” she repeated calmly.

I told her that from what I could tell he’d been shot twice in the head.

“Was he beat up?”

“Yeah.”

“Bad?”

I nodded.

“Why would they do that?” Again, her tone was calm, she was simply gathering facts.

“If whoever did that worked for your brother, they were probably trying to find out where you were.”

“They were trying to make him talk.”

“Yes.”

“And if he had told them, they would have been here by now, right? They would have been waiting for us, or we would have come in just now and found my place ransacked. Right?”

“Yeah.”

“So that means he didn’t tell them. They beat him and he said nothing.”

“Maybe.”

Marie nodded in a way that made me think that she was convincing herself of something. “I’d say definitely.”

I glanced out the windows. Montauk Village was quiet, the parking spots along Main Street empty. If anyone had been waiting for us, we wouldn’t have made it out of her vehicle, never mind up to her place.

“So he died protecting me,” Marie concluded.

I nodded. “I guess, yeah.”

“It’s important that we know that. It’s important that we remember it. We’re all that’s left to remember these kinds of things. You and I, we’re all that’s left. It’s important to keep these facts straight, don’t you agree?”

She was still in shock, I could tell, but we were out of time. I took a step toward her bed and said, “What’s going on, Marie? Why is Jean-Marc looking for you? Why is he killing everyone close to you?”

“Do I look anything like the girl you remember, Mac?”

I shrugged. “Maybe, a little. What does this have to do—”

“They had to rebuild my jaw. That was one surgery. Then later they had to rebuild my nose and one of my cheekbones. I look at pictures of me as a little girl and I feel so sad. It’s like that little girl has just disappeared. It’s like she never grew up to be who she was supposed to be. She grew up to be a stranger to herself.” She paused. “It’s funny, but I go out of my way to avoid my own reflection. When I do catch it, I don’t see myself, only what I’ve become. I know that probably doesn’t make sense. I know it probably sounds crazy to you. It sounds crazy to me.”

I said nothing to that.

“Anyway, my brother tells everyone that I had plastic surgery because of my vanity. Because I didn’t like the way I looked.”

“But that wasn’t the reason,” I said.

She shook her head. “He doesn’t like it when he can’t control me. He never has.”

“He hit you.”

She nodded, then said, “For starters.”

I felt a wave a dread move through my gut. “Your father let this happen?”

“My father didn’t know.”

“How could he not know?”

“He was away on business half the time. Out of the country for weeks at a time. Plenty of time for bruises to heal. And anyway, my brother knows how to keep his secrets.”

“Why didn’t you get help? Why didn’t you leave?”

Marie laughed, though not because what I’d just said had struck her as funny. She was shaking her head in disbelief. “I can’t believe, of all people, that you’re asking me that.”

She looked at me, her smile—her angry smile—gone now. “Why didn’t you?”

“What do you mean?”

“The things your adoptive father did to you, the way he treated you. You were more like hired help than family. You used to come over to my house close to tears. He was just so…cruel. Why didn’t you get help, Mac? Why didn’t you leave?”

I said nothing.

After a moment Marie settled down and said, “Most of the time I was afraid. When I finally stopped being afraid, when I was finally able to leave, he convinced our father that I wasn’t well and had me locked-up in a hospital in Westchester. And if he finds me now, that’s where I’ll be headed again.”

“He can’t just have you locked-up. There are laws. It’s not like that anymore.”

“He can’t, but his doctors can. The thing of it is, he really thinks I’m crazy. He always has. He used to tease me when we were kids. He used to say that the dog that bit me had poisoned me and that’s why I was crazy. To him, anyone who doesn’t do exactly what he wants them to do is crazy. Anyone who doesn’t think the way he thinks has to be out of their mind. Or stupid. Or both.”

“He has doctors that will lie for him?”

“Of course. Christ, he tells doctors what to prescribe me, what drugs he thinks I need. He has a copy of the
PDR
by his bed. You should see the thing. It’s had the shit read out of it. The doctors cut him all the scripts he tells them to.”

“And your father knew nothing about this?”

“My father has been ill for a long time. My brother runs everything. People do what he says.”

“Not everyone.”

“I’m not going back to either place, Mac, that’s all there is to it. I’m not going back to that house, and I’m not going back to that hospital. I just want to be left alone. I just want to live my life. You can understand that, can’t you?”

I said, simply, “Yes.” I waited a moment, then said, “What’s behind all this, Marie?”

“What do you mean?”

“There’s more you’re not telling me.”

“There isn’t.”

I looked at her, saying nothing.

“Can’t you just help me, no questions asked?” she said softly.

“I can’t make any more bad deals on good faith, Marie. You’re not telling me everything. Your brother is having people killed. The Chief got an animal out of jail and put him on your trail. If you want me to help you, I need to know everything, I need to understand.”

“I can’t,” she said. “Everyone I’ve told the truth to is dead. Carter, Scully, everyone. You’re better off not knowing.”

“Your brother set me up, Marie. One way or the other, my life is over. So telling me the truth can’t make things any worse than they already are.”

“I can’t talk about it. Okay? I just…can’t.”

“I can’t help you then.”

“Please, Mac.”

“Why does your brother want to lock you up?”

“Please. I can’t…”

“You know something, is that it? You know something that could ruin him and he wants to keep you silent.”

“You don’t understand.”

“Then make me understand.”

“He doesn’t think that what he did was wrong. He doesn’t think anything he could do is wrong. He’s the crazy one. He’s the sociopath. He can’t see the wrong in anything he does. Anything.”

“What did he do, Marie?”

“It was a long time ago.”

I sought out her eyes and held them. They looked wild, panicked.

“What did he do, Marie?” I said.

She took a breath, let it out, then took another. I waited, saying nothing.

“He used our father against me, to keep me quiet,” she said finally. “He knew I would never tell anyone out of fear of it getting back to our father. I would never tell anyone what Jean-Marc did because I couldn’t bear the thought of our father knowing, of what he might think of me. So I kept it all in. I kept the secret. And when our father got sick, Jean-Marc realized there would be nothing holding me back once he was dead. He knew all kinds of hell would break loose. What I knew about him was enough to get him sent to prison for a long time.”

She paused, then continued. “He got nervous and became even more paranoid than usual. He took over everything. The family business, the house, he was running it all like a dictator. He had the doctors confine my father and wouldn’t allow anyone to visit him. The man was helpless, shut off from the world, and he saw for the first time the monster he had created. He had always wanted my brother to be a leader, groomed him to be a captain of industry. You saw how he treated him, you remember that, right? Jean-Marc was entitled to anything and everything he wanted. He was the Golden Boy. But when my father became weak, Jean-Marc…changed. He showed no compassion at all for the man who’d given him everything. He became ruthless. Even the way he talked to our father was different. It was like Jekyll and Hyde. After Jean-Marc started showing his real self, that’s when my father told me to run and hide. I think he was afraid Jean-Marc might have me killed so he could have all the money and the power for himself. He didn’t know the real reason why I was in so much danger. He didn’t have a clue.”