Richard Stevenson - Death Vows

She sighed and made her neck do something and said, “Beats me, kiddo. I wish I could help you out, but I can’t. You… you have to understand.”

“Bill Moore told me you’re one of Barry’s best friends in the Berkshires. A true friend in your situation would put Barry in touch with his most ardent advocate and protector. And that’s the job I’ve been hired to do.”

“It’s a fact,” she said, “that Barry and I are pals. I’m retiring next year – not because I want to or have to but because the SOBs who own this place are heaving me out the side door when I hit ninety. I don’t know what they expect me to do. Dr. Greene, the dentist, who was twenty-six years older than I was, died while enjoying a full plate of rice, beans and ropa vieja in 1974. So what the hell am I supposed to do next? I’m married to this movie theater, and it’s what keeps me going. Otherwise, what’s the point? But Barry’s in line for my job, and he’s a good kid, and I hope he’ll at least allow me to clean the johns, ya know?”

Greene’s story was sad and all too familiar, but I wasn’t sure whether she was telling it because it was what was on her mind or to stay off the subject of Barry Fields as long as she could get away with it. I guessed both.

I said, “Where do you live, Myra? Is Barry hiding out in your home?”

She rose an inch off her seat and fell back again. “Well, you’ve got balls of brass!”

“Yeah, and you know what? I think you do, too.”

She gave me a faint smile now. “So, Donald. Does this mean you’re going to send me over? I’m going to have to take the fall? Is it twenty to life in San Quentin for Myra?”

I said, “That’s right, Myra. I’m not going to play the sap for you and I’m sending you over. But you’re an angel. I’ll wait for you. And if they hang you I’ll always remember you.”

Greene grinned. “Sam Spade and Brigid O’Shaughnessy. Bogart and Mary Astor. The movie words are right from the book,” she said. “Huston told his secretary to type up the Hammett dialogue, and he pretty much wrote the screenplay from that transcript.”

I looked at her and asked it again. “So, Myra, is Fields hiding in your house?”

“Nah.”

“He couldn’t have gone far. The police are looking for his car.”

“ Ce n’est pas mon affaire. ”

“Do you live here in town?”

“I live in a lean-to out behind the theater. It’s handy, ya see?”

“Like William Powell in My Man Godfrey. ”

“Or the squatters in Tsotsi. But I do it by choice.”

She wasn’t going to budge, so I would have to learn elsewhere where Greene lived and then check the place out – not that the police wouldn’t have been there first.

I said, “ Myra, what do you know about Barry’s personal history? Where’s he from, anyway? I haven’t been able to pick up much background on him.”

“Oh,” she said, “Barry never talked much about his life before he came to the Berkshires. Barry is not someone to be a slave to the past. He’s a kid who’s always looking ahead.”

“But you’re his friend. Aren’t you curious?”

“Oh, sure, curious! But I’m a respecter of anybody’s privacy. And Barry never wanted to talk about certain things.”

She was being so evasive that I could only conclude that Greene was in on the big secret, too. She knew it. Moore knew it. Probably Bud Radziwill, since he may have shared the secret. And they all claimed – or likely would claim – that Fields’ secret had nothing to do with Jim Sturdivant’s murder. I was getting nowhere.

I said, “What do you know about Bud Radziwill?”

“Why do you ask? He’s Barry’s chum.”

“He has an unknown past. Maybe he’s an escaped criminal. That kid with a Texas twang can’t possibly be named Radziwill. What does anybody really know about this guy?”

With a straight face, Greene said, “Bud is a Kennedy cousin. He spends holidays at the compound at Hyannis Port. ”

“Which holidays? Battle of the Alamo Day? Laura Bush’s birthday? Come on.”

She looked at me out of those dark eyes and tried to make a little shrug, but her neck misbehaved again and she grimaced.

“And Bill Moore,” I said. “What do you know about Bill? Your friend Barry’s going to marry the guy, after all.”

“Isn’t it wonderful?” Greene said. “Who’d’ve thought I’d live to see the day when gays could marry in the United States. I can remember when most people didn’t even know what gay was. I had a cousin, Gabe Yellin, who lived for sixty years with a man named Amos, a plumber from New Rochelle, and people called them confirmed bachelors.”

“Yes, but what about Moore? Is he a good match for Barry? Barry’s so much younger, for one thing.”

Greene grew somber. “It’s not the age difference. I was twenty-six years younger than Dr. Greene, and I had no complaints and neither did he.”

“Uh huh.”

She said, “Isn’t Bill your employer in this? You said he hired you to get Barry off the hook.”

“True. I’m just trying to get a picture of Barry’s life. It will be easier to convince others that he could not have killed Jim Sturdivant once I have convinced myself of this and fully understand the reasons for which I have come to believe absolutely in Barry’s innocence. Myra, Bill Moore is Barry’s fiancé, and you seem to have some reservations about him.”

Her face crinkled up, and she looked her age more than ever. She said, “I don’t know about Bill. I suppose he’s fine if Barry says he is. But… I don’t know.”

“Why not?”

She hesitated, and said, “Maybe Bill killed somebody once. More than one person.”

What was this? “What makes you think so?”

She looked over my shoulder, puzzling it out. “Bill always seemed depressive to me.”

“Depressive?”

“He gets this haunted look. Especially after he’s had a few beers.

I waited.

“He was drinking over at Twenty Railroad with Hal Stackmeyer one night, and he told Hal he had killed people and it was eating him alive. That’s how he phrased it, Hal told me, ‘eating him alive.’ Hal was so shocked, he didn’t ask any questions. And Bill didn’t say any more. Just that he knew what it was like to take human lives and he didn’t like the feeling. So I think Bill is not a happy person and maybe he can’t ever be a truly happy person. And I sometimes wonder if Barry isn’t making a mistake by hooking up with this depressed man. And Bill is even more depressed when he drinks. Which maybe he does too often. That’s never a good sign.”

I said, “ Moore didn’t give any indication of the circumstances of these murders?”

“Hal said no.”

“Not whether or not it was work-related – military or law enforcement?”

“No.”

“ Myra, have you ever heard that Bill worked in law enforcement before he came to the Berkshires?”

“He’s a computer guy. I thought that’s what he did for the government.” Then she thought about it and said, “Maybe CIA or something, and had to assassinate people. In Afghanistan or somewhere.”

“Maybe,” I said. “Though the timing isn’t quite right for that. Unless it was pre-nine-eleven.”

“Or maybe he killed people… like a criminal and he’s wanted. Or he served time in prison and now he’s out.”

“Possibly.”

“Or maybe he was drunk and he just made the whole thing up.”

“Any of the above,” I said.

The police found Barry Fields not in Myra Greene’s house – which, being competent, they had had under surveillance since the night before – but in a summer house on nearby Lake Buel that was owned by a friend of Greene’s and for which she had a key. A neighbor had spotted Fields moving his car into the garage just after dawn – as a Triplex employee, he had a familiar face around town – and when word got out that Fields was wanted in a murder investigation, the neighbor did his duty and called the cops. Fields was taken to the Great Barrington police lockup, pending a bail hearing at his arraignment the next morning.