Third Degree (23 page)

He was clear. “Go to Mass regularly. Attend Holy Day of Obligation Masses on campus when school is in session. Volunteer with our campus God Squad.”

I held up a hand and ticked a finger off for each request. Going to Mass regularly was a choice I had yet to make and I wasn’t going to have him dictate how often I would go. Same for Holy Days of Obligation. As for volunteering with the God Squad, spending thirty or so hours a week with teens and young adults was about all I could handle realistically. They were also an extremely conservative organization given to protesting things on campus that I supported wholeheartedly, like the Gay-Lesbian-Transgender Alliance. It seemed obvious: having me volunteer with the God Squad wouldn’t be a good fit; was I the only person who thought so? I gave him a stern stare. “No. No. And no.” Fortunately, his response was muted by the ringing of my office phone. I looked down and saw that it was a call from Westchester County based on the area code that flashed on my caller ID. I picked up the phone and asked the caller to hang on without bothering to find out who it was. I put my hand over the receiver and asked Father Dwyer if we were done.

“No, we’re not done,” he said.

“Actually, we are,” I said, and opened the office door. “If you’ll excuse me? I have to take this call.”

Yes, I was going to burn in hell. But be pushed around by some puppet of Etheridge’s? That wasn’t going to happen. I sat back down behind my desk and picked up the phone. “Thank you for holding. This is Dr. Bergeron.”

“Alison? This is Mac.”

I had been expecting that the caller was a student who had yet to arrive at school but who had a question about the curriculum. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I’d be having more contact with the county medical examiner. It had been my fervent hope and wish that I would never hear from him again, despite the fact that I found him charming. “Hello, Mac. What can I do for you?” A call from the ME never signaled good news, in my experience.

“This is highly irregular, to say the least,” he started. “But what the hell? I’m already in a pile of shit, thanks to you and your sleuthing skills.” He said it in the kindest way possible and I could picture the rueful smile on his face. “You can’t share this with anyone. Got it?”

He sounded serious. “Got it.”

“Here’s the thing. Your friend Carter?”

“Not my friend.”

“Just a figure of speech. Don’t get your panties in a wad.” He chuckled, presumably thinking about my panties and the uncomfortable wedgie that would result from them being in a wad. “Did you know that he had early-stage ALS?”

“ALS?”

“Lou Gehrig’s disease. It’s a degenerative disorder. Because we had missed the poisoning in the initial autopsy, I decided to go back and test the remaining tissue for every possible outcome. And I got ALS.”

“I know what ALS is,” I said.

“So you know that it is most probably fatal. And that before it is fatal, it’s an extremely debilitating disease.”

I did know that. I didn’t know a lot about the disease, but I did know that it was one that caused much pain and discomfort before it took your life. “Why are you telling me this?”

He laughed. “Why? Because it’s germane to the case. And nobody else who’s involved seems to give a good goddamn about this new development, certainly not the village police for one. You seem more interested in what happened to Carter Wilmott than anyone else. I wanted to test a theory on you. Do you think that Wilmott could have poisoned himself? You know, to avoid what was ahead?”

I gave that some thought. I guessed it was possible, but probable? Not likely. I told Mac what I thought.

“I guess you’re right. Although I wasn’t a huge fan of Ginny Miller, I just didn’t see ‘killer’ written on her face. Maybe I’m getting long in the tooth. Maybe I’m losing my edge,” he said sadly.

“I don’t think you are, Mac. It’s just hard to imagine anyone who saves lives for a living taking someone else’s.”

“True enough, Alison. When all was said and done, though, he was a goner, plain and simple. Despite everything that transpired. And that’s just sad to me.”

I bid him good-bye and hung up the phone. Maybe that had been her motive all along: she just didn’t want Carter to suffer and had slowly poisoned him in the most humane way possible to spare him what lay ahead for him.

It didn’t matter, ultimately. Two people were dead, and whether one of them had met his maker because the other had good, albeit twisted, intentions was no longer an issue.

I sat down at the dining room table with Kevin and Queen and dug into the linguine. “Hey, this is good! Who made this?”

Kevin, whose head was bowed over his plate in a silent grace, looked up. “It was a joint effort.” He unfolded his napkin and put it on his plate. “And don’t so sound surprised.”

“I’m not,” I said. “It’s just that it tastes way better than anything I could make.”

Queen sat in silence, picking at her dinner. Although we hadn’t spent a lot of time together, even I was perceptive enough to discern that something was wrong. I asked her if there was something she wanted to talk about.

Kevin gave her a meaningful look but continued eating his dinner.

“What?” I asked. “What’s going on?”

“I’m going to move back home,” she said.

That didn’t seem like bad news to me but I played along. “Back to your parents’ home?” Without makeup, she looked young enough to still live at her childhood home so I assumed that she didn’t have her own place. I also knew that you would have to work a lot of Hooters shifts to pay for your own apartment in this area.

“No, with my husband.”

“You have a husband?” I blurted out, a piece of pasta leaving my mouth.

“And a dog,” she added.

“A husband and a dog?” I asked. “Then why are you staying here?” I realized before the words were out of my mouth that that was a question that didn’t need to be asked. If she could have stayed with her husband (and her dog), she would have. She had to get out of her home for some reason, and I guessed that if she felt that she had to get out, the reason must have been pretty darn good. Kevin shot me a look that instructed me to shut up. I did so by forking some more linguine into my mouth. Trixie settled at my feet hoping for more pasta to fly from my mouth directly into hers.

Queen looked down, tracing the pattern on my everyday dishes with the point of her knife. “Things weren’t so good there.” She looked at Kevin. “But I talked to Father McManus and I decided that I need to go back.”

I put my fork down. “ ‘Weren’t so good’ how?” When she didn’t answer, I looked at Kevin. “ ‘Weren’t so good’ how?”

“That’s for Queen to discuss with you. I can’t say,” Kevin said. Sometimes it really sucks having a priest for a friend; his vow of confidentiality usually gets in the way of providing necessary information.

Queen took a long drink from her wineglass. “Sometimes Jake wasn’t very nice to me …” she started.

Kevin threw a glance toward Queen’s upper arm, and I noticed the blue-black marks of a handprint that stood out in bas relief against her cocoa-colored skin, which somehow I had missed before. Even if I had noticed, I probably would have attributed her bruises to her strenuous and dangerous work as a private investigator charged with kicking cheater ass. The long-sleeved sweatshirt she had worn on the hot August night earlier should have been a dead giveaway, but as we’ve established, sometimes I’m dense. Without saying a word, Kevin told me exactly what I needed to know: this young woman was a victim of abuse and needed a place to stay. Max could have been more descriptive in her explanation of why she was leaving Queen here, but had chosen to remain mute on the topic. I hadn’t needed to know everything, but just an idea of why she was homeless would have been helpful. Plus, how was I to know that the abuser wasn’t out there looking for her and following her nightly to my humble abode? Just another thing to talk to Max about once I got through wringing her neck.

“Then you’re not going back there,” I interjected. “You’ll stay here until you can get on your feet.”

“I can’t do that,” she said. “I’ve overstayed my welcome already. And Jake’s a really nice guy. He’s just under a lot of stress.”

Kevin was nervously tapping his knife against his plate and I reached across the table to silence him. Queen hadn’t really revealed anything with her description of Jake but I had been around the block a few times; she didn’t have to. She was living with an abuser and couldn’t go back. That much was clear. “Listen, Queen,” I said. “If I’ve learned one thing in my life, it’s that men who don’t handle stress well act out in a bunch of different ways. And they don’t change. You need to move out until Jake gets some help.”

“I have nowhere to go,” she said, her eyes filling with tears. Trixie whimpered in sympathy.

It only took me a minute to arrive at the decision. “Then you’ll stay here.”

She shook her head sadly. “You know I can’t. You live by yourself. You don’t need me here. It was already getting tight with just me, and now you have one more person,” she said and looked at Kevin. “Sorry, Father,” she whispered. “There’s no way we can make this work. Father needs the room more than I do.”

She was right. I didn’t know how long Kevin was going to stay and my allegiance was to him. And I wasn’t in a position to put an addition on my house for displaced Hooters waitresses and AWOL priests. But I also knew that I wasn’t letting her go back to stressed-out Jake and whatever he was capable of. There was just no way that was going to happen. I stared at the white wine swirling around in my glass and contemplated the situation. It only took me a second to figure out what I was going to do.

“I’ll be back,” I said, and pushed my chair away from the table. I stopped in the front hallway and pulled the big telephone book from the shelf in the closet, flipping until I found the number I was looking for. I recited the last four digits to myself as I climbed the stairs to my bedroom, the other digits being consistent for all local numbers. Once in my room, I dialed the number and settled back on my pillows while waiting for Lydia Wilmott to answer.

She was surprised to hear from me. “And I’m surprised to be calling you. But I need your help. Were you serious about the things that WIMP can do to help women in need of assistance in leaving abusers?”

“Of course I was,” she said, sounding indignant. Apparently, my not accepting her help had been a slight and a blemish on our nonexistent relationship.

“Here’s the thing,” I said, and I outlined the situation with Queen. At the end of my recitation of the facts, Lydia was quiet, which led me to believe that perhaps she wasn’t on board with what I had outlined. I knew she had a lot of money, so even if Queen didn’t go through the whole WIMP thing, I figured I could blackmail Lydia into paying for her new apartment for at least a few months until she got on her feet. “Listen, you’ve two choices. One, you help me, no questions asked. Or two, I go to the police and finger Clark for assault and battery. Oh, and kidnapping,” I added. “Don’t forget the kidnapping.”

That got her attention. “Of course I want to help your
friend,
Alison. I was just formulating a plan in my head,” she said. Liar.

“And don’t think this is a veiled request to help me, Lydia. I am not now, nor was I ever, an abused woman. This is for a friend who is young and really at a loss as to how to disengage from her situation.”

“Fine.”

“Good. Where do you want to meet?”

You could have blown me over with a feather when Lydia suggested Beans, Beans. She explained her choice. “Nobody will expect to see me there and anybody who does see me there will probably leave once I get there. I’m getting tired of the staring, Alison.”

I hadn’t been there in a few days and I was feeling guilty. I didn’t think Lydia would ever want to go back there, but who was I to question her judgment? I thought of Greg and his doughy “guns” and decided that it was as good a place as any, as long as Lydia was comfortable with it. I went back downstairs and sat at the table. Kevin and Queen were still picking at their food. “We’ve got a plan,” I said to Queen, and told her that come hell or high water, we were going to Beans, Beans tomorrow at five, her shift at Hooters or her filming of Dicks with Tits be damned.

She gave it a moment’s thought. “Fortunately, I’m free,” she said.

“Good,” I said. “We’ll get together tomorrow and work this whole thing out.” I pointed my fork at her to get her full attention. “But listen to me. Executing this plan requires that you follow my directions. Do that and everything will be just fine.” She blanched, knowing that that meant leaving her old life behind. “I’m not kidding, Queen. If Jake is as ‘stressed out’ as you claim, he’s not going to be happy that you’ve left. But you need to get out. And get up again,” I said, reciting WIMP’s credo. Kevin looked at me as if I were crazy and I guess I was. “Now, who wants some more wine?”