“You asked the right questions, Jenny.”
“Thank you, but then why don’t we have all the answers?”
“Because this raises still more questions.” And she ticked them off on her fingers. “Was this the first time Clemmons was violent with Judy?”
“Yes, I think it was.”
“Okay, then what made him go off like that?”
“The stress of losing his job?”
“No, no, he hurt her first and then he got fired.”
“Right.” Wearily, I put my confused head in my hands. “Right.”
“Why did she leave Ron in the first place?” Lee asked, pointing to a third of her fingers, going down her list, “we still don’t know that, and why did she go back to him in the second place?”
“Financial security? She needed a home, food, a father for David?”
“Could be any of those, yes.”
“What else?”
“I don’t know.” Suddenly she was moving on her feet, looking down at me. “I’m going back down to the station to check Clemmons’s arrest and conviction record one more time, you want to come with me? No, what am I thinking of, you have to stay with him.” She pointed to the ceiling where Geof had slept all the tune I’d been gone.
“I’m exhausted anyway.”
Lee smiled sympathetically at me. “I know. You did great. I’m sorry, this is all my fault, all of it, if I’d done a better job with the first investigation, you wouldn’t be in this mess now.”
I shook my head but didn’t have the oomph to argue with her.
“You’ll be all right alone?” she asked me.
“Lee, if he was going to hurt me, he would have hurt me.”
David, I meant, because that’s who she suspected now.
She nodded, looking momentarily valiant “Nobody’s going to hurt either of you.”
Too late, I thought but refrained from saying.
An hour and a half later, she woke me up, calling from the station, sounding jubilant. Beside me, Geof slept through the ringing of the telephone.
“Jenny, I’ve got it. Listen to this! Dennis Clemmons attacked Judy after he was arrested. Jenny, it was his first arrest for burglary. I think that’s the stress that put him over the edge. But why pick on her? I asked myself. Just because the wife is the usual target? Maybe or maybe not … and so I got to thinking about what that neighbor said to you and Geof, how Clemmons beat her with the telephone, remember that?”
“Yes …”
“Why a phone, Jenny? Pretty weird weapon when he could have used his fists or a dozen other things. But a phone? What did a phone have to do with it?”
“Her answering service …”
“Bingo. Yes. I checked the address of the house where Clemmons was arrested against the list of Judy’s clients, and guess what, Jenny? The house where Dennis Clemmons was picked up for burglary that night was owned by one of Judy’s telephone answering service clients.”
“And so … she was supplying him with his targets?”
“Yes, whether she was aware of it or not—”
“In her taped confession, Lee! She called herself a thief!”
“Ah. She’d always know when her clients were going to be away, wouldn’t she, because she was taking their messages for them?”
“That’s no reason to beat her, though.”
“She turned him in, Jenny.”
“Oh, my God.”
“And he knew it or guessed it, or she confessed it, and he beat her up with the frigging symbolic telephone, no less.”
“Is that in your files, that she turned him in?”
“No.” I heard a sad, satisfied note in the sergeant’s voice. “It only says, ‘Anonymous tip, woman caller.’ The anonymous woman caller gave us the exact address of a burglary in progress.”
“Lee, do you think that Dennis Clemmons killed Ron and Judy Mayer?”
I could feel my heart beating in dreadful anticipation of the solution of the murder of David’s parents. I waited for Lee to say the word yes.
“No …”
“No!”
“He was alibied, Jenny … you’re forgetting.”
“But …”
“He didn’t do it, he couldn’t have.”
“Well, why not?” I yelled and nearly threw my own phone across the room in my frustration and disappointment. If it wasn’t him, it had to be David, which was horrible, or David’s uncles, which was nearly as horrible because it would put Geof back in their path again. “I want him to have done it, Lee! He was a monster! Why can’t he have been the one?”
“Jenny, we’re getting there.”
“We’re not, we’re not!”
“We are. Listen to me. We are closer now.”
But I didn’t want to be any closer to the darkness. Please, I thought despairingly as I hung up. Please, no closer.
I wanted to slide closer in bed to my husband, though, to slip into his embrace, to get our arms protectively around each other. But I couldn’t. I didn’t dare touch him.
I fell asleep about the time the sun was coming up. When I awoke again, it was eventually to discover that I was closer than I knew, both to the darkness and to the answer.
32
FOR THE NEXT THREE DAYS, GEOF STAYED home from work, barely moving on Tuesday except to pop painkillers, getting gingerly out of bed on Wednesday, and almost back to normal movement by Thursday. He would have gone into the station then, except that he was still terrified of somebody slapping him on his back or grabbing one of his shoulders in a lock grip, as his own police chief was famous for doing when he wanted somebody’s full attention. He could picture himself going to his knees if that happened. So we told them he was ill with a flu virus, and I collected his messages for him.
He rested, he healed, we talked and talked.
Among those telephone messages from his office on Monday was a call from Mrs. Ronald Mayer, Sr. I did not pass it on to my husband, although I knew I probably should have. But for that first day I couldn’t bear it, not any more contact between him and any of them. On Tuesday, when the same woman called the station and left a similar message for him, I felt honor bound to inform him.
He was as surprised as I was.
“Did she leave her number?”
“The message is, she’ll call back.”
“Then I won’t call her.” He yawned, started to stretch, then quickly changed his mind. “I’ll play hard to get.”
“I would like it better if you played impossible to get.”
“Can’t do that.”
“Can.”
“Won’t.”
“Will you come get this soup, or do I throw it at you?”
On Friday, he went back to work, with a new sheepskin pad against his back on the driver’s side of the Jeep and an unlikely story of getting sunburned the day before, a lie meant to discourage anyone who might be so inclined from throwing an arm around his shoulders or giving him a friendly pat. Fortunately, the clouds had broken long enough the day before to make the story just barely possible if not very plausible. He was going to tell them he’d been recuperating from the flu on a chaise longue in the yard, and he’d fallen asleep on his stomach.
“Yeah, right,” I said, always the supportive spouse.
“I’m very convincing when I lie,” he claimed, a boast to which I should have paid more attention.
When she called the police station again on Friday and learned that Lieutenant Bushfield was there, she asked to speak to him.
“I hope you are feeling well,” she had the gall to say to him.
He said nothing.
“I would like to make an appointment with you,” she said, all chilly formality and reserve. And so they set it up for that afternoon. “She doesn’t sound like she’s in any hurry to see me,” he told me when he called home to satisfy my curiosity, “but there’s something very set and determined about the way she talks to me. The word implacable comes to mind.”
“
Great,” I said, suppressing a shudder. I really hated these people now; Hardy’s sermons about vengeance notwithstanding, I wanted them punished for what they did to Geof. Hanging by their-thumbs in hell for eternity would not have seemed gratuitous to me at that point. Implacable? Yeah, me, too. “What great news, honey.”
He responded by telling me he’d seen an article in the newspaper that morning about a woman in New Hampshire who had choked to death on her own sarcasm.
“The story said they tried CPR, but they couldn’t dislodge the snide comments from her throat. Really tragic, huh?”
“You’re right,” I snapped, “you are a great liar.”
Sergeant Meredith—Lee—told me later that she saw Mrs. Ronald Mayer, Sr., enter Geof’s office dressed all in white or tones that were nearly that light: a long-sleeved white silk shirtdress with a nubby white silk jacket, pale hose, bone-colored shoes. Lee didn’t know what happened next, until she listened to the tape recording of it, because Geof shut the door. But through the glass, Lee watched Geof offer Mrs. Mayer a seat in a steel-gray armless chair. She observed as David’s grandmother slowly sat down, crossed her legs at her ankles, folded her hands in her lap, while Geof walked around to the other side of his desk and sat down, facing her with an unreadable expression. Lee told me afterward that it was fascinating, like being deaf and watching a scene in a play unfold and trying to guess only from the faces and the body language of the actors what was going on. She fervently wished she could overhear the dialogue, though, because both players were all too experienced at keeping their faces frozen, their bodies immobile, giving nothing away, no hints or clues to their curious audience.
Outside Geof’s office, Lee watched as Mrs. Mayer began to speak, but it was only afterward that any of the rest of us learned from the tape and from his memory what it was they said to each other:
“Lieutenant Bushfield.” Her first words sounded formal, even memorized. “I am here to do something very difficult. I hope you will comprehend how difficult it is and that I am convinced that I have to do it. I will not waste your time, but I will get right to the truth. Which is that my son Matthew, my second eldest child, is responsible for the death of Mr. Dennis Clemmons.” (At this point, almost everyone who has heard this interview stops breathing for an instant. Including Geof, he claims, at that moment in his office.)
She seemed to be, as he had intuited, implacable in her need to get the words said. She continued without stopping and, at least at first, without any sign of the deep emotion she had revealed during Geof’s first visit to her home.
“Let me be clear: I am saying that Matthew killed the man on purpose, murdered him with malice aforethought, whatever the legal parlance is. I will tell you how this happened and how he did it. On Tuesday evening, two weeks ago, my grandson David went to Matthew’s home. David was very angry, and he demanded that Matthew give to him all videotapes of confessions or penances related to Ron and Judy and Dennis. When Matthew asked why, David said it was because he wanted to turn them over to a policeman. We assume he meant you.
“Of course, Matthew refused. David attacked Matthew then, no doubt out of frustration, and Matthew was forced to strike back in self-defense.”
For the first time, she paused as if she had run out of script.
Or maybe it was the scene she was replaying in her mind that actually gave her pause: her son hitting her grandson and the implausibility of a huge grown man feeling forced to defend himself against a skinny kid and with sufficient violence to blacken the kid’s eye. She took a breath—you can hear it on the tape—and suddenly emotion was seeping into her voice. Geof found himself watching with a rather cold and detached fascination as the elderly woman disintegrated right in front of him. The quality of his mercy, as he coolly observed her, felt decidedly … strained. Every time he moved, every twinge of his healing back, reminded him of her family and especially of Matthew, who had wielded the strap.
“You see,” she said next, sounding tremulous, old, “Matthew realized that if David brought police attention to his stepfather, eventually you would be bound to find out that it was my sons who exacted that first terrible penance on Dennis.”
Geof’s voice, efficient, unemotional: “Your boys crippled him?”
“When he was released from prison. They took Dennis out to the farm. They beat him until he was … permanently injured.”
“And Matthew didn’t want anyone to know about that …”
“Of course, he didn’t! It would have been terrible, you would have investigated us, you would have pried into all of our … lives.”
“And so you’re saying he killed Dennis so that … ?”
“So that … he could never tell you who … beat him.”
Geof said nothing.
She said, “Matthew was protecting us, you see?”
“The beating. Was that your sons’ idea, Mrs. Mayer?”
“No, they only did what their father told them to do. It is their father who decides penances. The boys merely exact them.”
“Merely,” Geof echoed after a moment. Quickly he added, “Why did they wait until he was out of prison?”
“So it wouldn’t appear to be related to Judy’s injuries.”
Sergeant Meredith says that through the glass she could see Mrs. Mayer begin to cry, but on the tape, all you can hear is a voice that curiously combines qualities of imperiousness and pleading, rather like an empress begging for understanding from her enemies: “Matthew killed Dennis the night that David came to see him.”
No response from Geof, just a waiting silence.
“He climbed the ramp that he and his brothers had made, and he sabotaged it as only one of them could do.”
With that simple declaration, she sounded finished, her task completed.
“Mrs. Mayer, will you sign a statement to that effect, and will you agree to testify to what you know in court?”
“Yes.” It was a whisper, but then in a stronger, more determined-sounding voice, she added, “Yes, I will.”
“Does your husband know you came here?”
“Of course. They all know, Lieutenant.”
You can’t hear Geof’s indrawn breath on the tape, but he swears he sucked it in. Would these people, he wondered, never lose their ability to shock him?
“They allowed you to come and tell me this?”
“It is his penance,” she whispered.
“What? I didn’t hear what you said.”
She looked at him out of brimming eyes that he would never forget. He wondered, as he stared into her eyes, if they taped her confessions; he wondered if they beat her, her own sons. He thought of her thin bare back under the delicate silk, but his mind skittered away from the image. She said, “Matthew made his confession of killing one of God’s children. That is the one sin for which we do not feel delegated by God either to punish or to forgive. The family decided that his earthly penance must be exacted in the way that Dennis Gemmons paid for the illegal acts he committed.”
“By going to prison?”
“Yes.”
“But why did they make you the messenger, his own mother?”
“I volunteered,” she said, her voice a dying fall.
Geof stared at her and thought, Penance.
“Why did you volunteer?” he asked point-blank.
There is the sound of sniffing, then her voice grows stronger, nearly passionate. “I want you to see for yourself that I tell the truth about my sons! If I confess this terrible truth to you about Matthew, then you simply have to believe that I am also telling you the truth about Ron when I tell you that he didn’t kill Judy and himself! He didn’t, he couldn’t, no matter what my husband or anyone else says! My grandson”—she emphasized the word—“is right!”
“I still don’t understand why, Mrs. Mayer.”
“But you knew him!”
“Not that well, we were just guys passing in the halls.”
A lesser woman might have made a bitter crack about
how much better Geof had known Judy than he had known Ron, but Mrs. Mayer didn’t. Instead, her voice softened again, and a deep sadness crept into it. “Then let me tell you about him.”
Yes, Geof thought, tell me about this man who was capable of looking a child in its eyes and striking it while it cried in pain, tell me about this man who could then hug that child as if he loved it Please do explain that monster to me.
“Ronnie was the dearest of my children,” she began. “Or maybe it only seemed that way to me because he was my first, and he was also my only child for a long time. I suppose as a result, he was more sheltered than my other sons, he stayed a little boy much longer than any of them did …
“Do you remember what a sweet boy he was, Lieutenant?”
“He seemed like a nice guy, I guess.”
“There was something innocent about Ronnie,” she asserted. “He always had a little boy’s willingness to take people exactly as they presented themselves to him. Just look at how he accepted Judy! After all the ways she betrayed him!”
“Did he know … What did he know about her?”
“That she was a whore? Do you think she would ever confess that to him? Of course not. Any other man would have guessed the truth, but not—” her voice trembled—“not my son. But then, that’s what I’m telling you—that’s the sweet, accepting person he was. He was … susceptible. He was … naive. When people were friendly to him, he liked them; if they weren’t, he avoided them. He was such a good child, always obedient to his father and to me, and he remained that way, always respectful—” Her voice tightened as if some prick of conscience had prompted a moment’s pain. “And that is why I know he could never have done what you think he did, because it would have defied his father, both his earthly father and his Father in Heaven.”
Geof thought then of Ginger. Their affair, no matter how brief or superficial, suggested that Ron Mayer—when pressed hard enough by circumstances or by his own unhappiness—could defy the faith of both of those fathers.