Till the End of Tom (20 page)

She held the phone to her chest with both hands, protecting it from me. “I can’t. I’m in trouble, and I need this job!”

She wasn’t moving, and yet she was spinning, working herself into a frenzy about the phone and the danger it presented to her. I wondered if there was any validity to the old movie technique of a slap on the face.

“I don’t have anybody in the world, and I need to work!” Her voice was high and close to keening.

So there was no Mr. Wiggins. I couldn’t blame him for cutting out. Nor could I comprehend why he’d ever cut in.

“So let me, let me!”

And then instead of merely facing her, or worse, facing her down, I actually looked at her, saw her, a doughy woman of indeterminate age clutching a phone to her bosom, terrified that I was destroying her livelihood. I knew she had gotten this job because the term had already begun and all the superior secretaries were elsewhere. Nobody wanted the job, which was as underpaid as were all the positions at Philly Prep, except for Mrs. Wiggins, who desperately needed it.

I was ashamed of myself. Yes, Zachary was having an emergency, but I had the sense that Mrs. Wiggins’s entire life was lived in a state of emergency—frightened, confused, and unfathomably desperate. That didn’t make for a good school secretary, but it did suggest that a measure of compassion was called for.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “You can dial. Please do. Hand me the phone when you reach her, if that’s all right.”

She stood frozen for a moment of thought. “I think it would be,” she eventually whispered, and then she dialed. She listened. She frowned. “Oh, dear,” she said. “An answering machine. She must not be home.” She was halfway to hanging up when I reached for the receiver.

“Please,” I said. “A message?”

Her mouth opened slightly, then she nodded, as if this were a new and amazing concept. I spoke quickly. “Zachary needs to be in touch with you, Mrs. Wallenberg. He’s at police headquarters. He—he—he apparently has confessed to killing Tomas Severin. He needs a lawyer and probably more than that. Call me if you can.” I left my cell phone number.

Mrs. Wiggins never looked robust or vigorous, but she now looked ashen, as if all her blood had sunk to her feet. She took back the receiver with her mouth half open and I feared she was having a stroke.

“Are you all right? Mrs. Wiggins?”

She took a sharp breath. “Yes,” she said, “I’m—but that boy! He said he killed him?”

I nodded.

“How?”

“Pushed him down the stairs. You remember.” Of course, Zachary had skipped over that part, but I was willing to bet he wouldn’t when he talked to the police. In any case, she knew how Tom Severin had died, and surely she didn’t have to be told that part of it. “Do you have a work number for his mother?”

She didn’t seem able to focus on two things at once, and she still looked numb. “He—why would he?”

“Do such a thing? Or say he’d done such a thing? I don’t know. I’m as baffled as you are, and as upset as you seem. Now, the emergency number, or her cell phone? I think she works and goes to school. There might be . . .” She still looked glazed. “What is it?” I asked quietly.

“Why would he lie? Say he’d done such a thing? He’s a nice boy. He was sometimes the aide in here, and he had such good plans and was very polite to everyone.”

“That’s why we have to get him out of . . . Mrs. Wiggins, if you saw something that day, something that didn’t seem important at first, or you didn’t remember it for a while, it could matter, even if it doesn’t make particular sense to us. I don’t think Zachary did it. His story is full of holes, but I’m afraid the police are going to believe him. It’d be easier than looking for somebody else because he’s confessing. So if you saw something, anything—”

“No!” she said. “How could I? I was in the bathroom. I told you that! I told the police that! What are you saying?”

I put my hands up in a position of surrender. “Nothing—I only hoped that you said that about lying because you knew something, saw someone leave, had an idea that might help.”

She held her head high, but she didn’t meet my glance. “I would have said so if I had.”

“You aren’t afraid of anything, are you?”

“Me? Why would I be? Of what?” Her skin was putty colored so that she looked no more than half alive. How could I have asked that general a question? Mrs. Wiggins was afraid of everything. Including me.

“I meant—nobody’s frightening you, are they? Telling you what you can say and what you can’t?”

“Oh.” She took a deep breath. “That. No. No. Who would? Why would anybody?”

“Right. Never mind. But about that alternate number, do you have one?” Every one of her responses was half a step off point, as if she were actually answering an entirely different set of questions, as if my words were translated into a new language before they reached her ears. I did not, however, have any idea what to do about that without frightening her still more.

“It’s just that he wrote that lovely article in the paper—I saw it, even though I wasn’t working here last month. And once, he was office aide and there wasn’t much to do, and he told me about the book you were reading—
East of Eden,
isn’t it, and about how the father liked one of his children more than the other, and—well, it was so sad I started to cry.” She looked down and away and I was afraid she might be about to cry again. “And then he said he knew how that could be, and I cried even more. I felt like he was a friend. Do I sound silly? It was terrible, but he was nice to me. Kind. I mean . . . I must have looked pretty foolish, but he was . . .” She looked up at me again. “He isn’t the type to lie, Miss Pepper.”

“Amanda.”

She blinked several times, then stared at me.

“Call me by my given name,” I said. “We’re colleagues, after all.”

I had dumbfounded her, but she didn’t respond in kind, and so Mrs. Wiggins she remained and, I, Miss Pepper. She obviously felt safer hiding behind the formality of surnames. Or simply basking in the memory of when there’d been a Mr. Wiggins.

She scuttled back to her desk, and opened a file drawer, but I saw her pause a second to put her hand on her heart and take a breath. I wished I had a way—a gentle, humane way—to find out why I was now terrifying her along with Dr. Havermeyer. He was holding her job over her head, but what was the weapon she envisioned me carrying?

She dialed another number and listened. “Her cell phone, I think. She’s a student at Penn, did you know that? She told me.” She listened, frowning, as it rang, then suddenly rushed to the divider and passed the phone to me. “She’s answering!” The tinge of hysteria had returned to her voice.

I took the phone. Carole Wallenberg panicked immediately, and my first job was to reassure her that Zachary had not been hurt.

“Then—did he—are you calling because he did something?”

I knew she meant a minor offense: insulting a teacher, failing to hand in an assignment. She most assuredly did not mean that he’d announced he was a murderer. “He did something stupid, I’m afraid,” I said. “He called the police and confessed to the murder of Tomas Severin.”

I heard small and not so small explosions, staccato bundles of words that imploded one on the other and didn’t make sense except for their emotional freight, which was clear enough. “How could he!” she said. “He’s so—he’s—I know why he did that—I know! He’s so—” And then she was crying with small hiccupped sobs, so I waited again, watching Mrs. Wiggins’s basset-hound eyes as she tried to comprehend what was going on.

“Do you have a lawyer? Know a good criminal lawyer?” I asked.

“He’s doing this to spare
me,
” she said in such a low, rushed voice I wasn’t sure I’d heard correctly.

“Did you say to spare you?”

“To—to protect me. Yes. He’s a kid, he has a code of gallantry, he—”

“Mrs. Wallenberg, do you have a lawyer? Because I’d suggest you call him right now.”

More verbal explosions. “Oh, God, the only one I know was from my divorce, but no, she’s not a—I’ll find out—oh God.”

“I think it would be good, if you can leave work—”

“School. I’m here at school, cleaning the lab. My grant hinges on my doing this.”

“Can you leave?”

“I—yes. Of course. Soon. Why not? This stupid job—he’s where?”

I told her again. “Would you like me to meet you there?”

“He—I . . . No, thank you. I need to, I want to talk with my son. I need to be with him. Do you think they’d believe him? No, never mind. I—he—thank you, but no. I’ll—I’ll—can we talk later?”

I thought we needed to talk right now, but my opinion wasn’t going to carry the day. “Of course,” I said. “I have some appointments first, but I’ll be at the office later on—maybe five
P
.
M
.?”

“That detective place. Yes,” she said. “I saw it in the paper. Zach told me, too.”

“We’re on Market Street, but you can reach me through my cell phone—”

“Fine,” she said and hung up before I was able to tell her the address, the cell phone number, or even say that both were on her home answering machine. I’d been dismissed, except emotionally. I still felt very much entwined in whatever was going on. I handed the phone back to Mrs. Wiggins.

Not a piece of it made sense or, worse, it did make sense and I didn’t because I was so prejudiced in Zachary’s favor. I didn’t want to believe, in fact felt nauseated by the thought that Zachary, no matter how understandably furious with his father, would push him to his death. And why would his mother think he was doing this for her benefit? To spare her what?

Was it possible I wasn’t being any more rational than Carole Wallenberg, and that I couldn’t bear to think of Zach as guilty because I believed he was my gold-star pupil, my vindication, my personal triumph?

How does a possibly irrational person establish whether or not she’s rational?

Looking for Nina Severin’s wayward brother seemed at best a detour at the moment, but at least it would allow time for talk with Mackenzie.

Mrs. Wiggins regarded me with a tight smile. I must have been standing there, inert, distracted, for too long. “Sorry,” I said. “Sorry. I just . . . I was lost in thought.”

“A lot to think about,” she agreed, nodding.

“Are you sure he’s lying?”

She nodded again.

“Would you be willing to say so to the police?”

She backed away from the center divider, her hands slightly raised, as if I’d trapped her. “Ohhh—no. I’d be too . . . I’m not good with words, I couldn’t—”

“Not even to help him? A character witness? Something?”

“No. No. What would I say?”

“You’d say why you’re sure he didn’t push his father down the stairs.”

“No,” she said again. “I couldn’t. Please, Miss Pepper, don’t make me—don’t—no.”

I hadn’t expected her to, but I’d been hoping that in the middle of her denials, she’d slip and say something more concrete about why she was sure Zachary hadn’t pushed Tom Severin.

“It’s a feeling, that’s all.” She said it while looking down at the floor. “It’s just a—he’s too nice,” she continued, eyes still averted. “He isn’t the type, but a person can’t say that to the police. They would laugh at me.”

She was right, but I was convinced she was leaving other things unsaid. I had no choice but to thank her for the use of the phone and get ready to leave. I wrote down the phone number at Ozzie’s, and the address. “In case Carole Wallenberg calls back, okay?”

She took the paper carefully, nodding, and then she read it and looked surprised and pleased. It was a weak form of joy, but still, it was the jolliest expression I remembered seeing on her. “I know just where this is,” she said with such delight that I feared she usually didn’t know where she was. “I could walk them there!”

“There’s no need,” I murmured.

She let out a sound that was close to a chuckle. Amazing.

“Is there—what’s so—did I say—”

“I didn’t—I wasn’t making fun of you,” she said, back to her worried expression. “It’s just that I live right next door!”

I thought of the neighborhood, which was commercial, not residential, of the apartments above second-rate first-floor stores. I couldn’t imagine where they found light, or air, but I could imagine how lonely they would be at night when the lights went out on all the first floors.

“I—I don’t mean this badly,” she said, “but I had no idea you were a dance instructor, too! Do you put on a ballgown when you get there, too, like the other lady?”

“Oh, no—I’m not there.” I thought about the dance studio that never seemed populated, and the instructors in their sad worn tuxedo and ratty ballgown.

“But I live next door. Right next door. So I know there’s a dance—” Then she did a double take, and I witnessed one of life’s few actual jaw drops. “You’re a detective? Miss Pepper—a detective?” Her habitual expression of fright had returned.

“I do clerical work to earn a little extra money. This school doesn’t exactly pay well, and . . . you understand. I do the same things you do here.”

“The detective agency.” Her voice was dreamy, lazy. “I’ve wondered so much about what goes on in that place.”

“Are you a fan of mysteries?”

She nodded. “I guess I shouldn’t say that in front of an English teacher, should I?”

I couldn’t tell if we were bantering, and this was all to be taken lightly, in the manner of normal people, or if she was now honestly nervous about having admitted her literary tastes. I took the safe and literal road. “I’m a fan myself. But my advice is to stick with the books, not real life. They’re much more exciting.”

She didn’t look convinced.

“Stop by some time and see for yourself.”

“Really? You’d . . . you’d show me?”

“Everything.” I wondered what I meant by that—there was almost nothing to see. A large, drab room with desks, a wall, Ozzie’s door, computers. But the idea made her happy. Maybe we’d bonded and she wouldn’t be as afraid of me anymore. “I promise.”

“Do I have to, should I phone you first, make an appointment?”

I shrugged. “If you want to check with me, that’d be good—only so you’ll know if I’m planning to be there or not. But no appointment’s necessary. Come whenever you have the time.”