Joel Goldman - No way out

“When Lilly told Roni to take care of her mother, Roni bristled. Lilly runs the show, and Roni may have had all of that she can take. I watched her with her mother. She loves her and resents her, which is par for the course when the child becomes the parent.”

“And Lilly?”

“She’s a very strong woman who is short on patience and can’t stand weakness. You remember how Ellen Koch showed contempt for Peggy Martin? That’s the way Lilly looked at Roni.”

“What about Terry Walker? How did Lilly look at him?”

“That was a puzzle. She hasn’t seen him in fifty years, but one minute she’s mad as hell at him and the next she’s all gaga and dewy-eyed.”

“Any idea how he feels about her?”

“He’s pretty distant. I’m not sure he has much feeling about anybody.”

“I hope Lucy is having a better day than we are,” Kate said.

“I don’t know. It will be hard for her to top two dead bodies and one fractured family.”

“Don’t say that. You could be describing the Martins.”

She was right, but the Martin family wasn’t the only one to which that description applied. Frank and Marie Crenshaw were dead, their children orphaned, and, depending on what happened to Brett Staley, the description could fit his family as well. It was as if someone had singled out these three families for destruction.

In a world where chaos and randomness held more sway than five-year plans, such misfortune could be nothing more than a commentary on harsh reality. But these families were too closely connected for their pain and suffering to be dismissed as a run of bad luck. The Crenshaws and Staleys were joined by blood and marriage, while Nick Staley and Jimmy Martin had grown up together, gone to war together, and come home together.

“Not just the Martins, all of them, the Martins, the Staleys, and the Crenshaws,” I said, running down the list of missing, dead, and damaged. “There must be something else that ties them together, something that would explain all of that.”

“Why? Remember what I said about looking for a theory of everything. It’s like when there’s a cluster of brain cancer cases in one small community and right away people start claiming they’re all victims of a corporate conspiracy to pollute the water supply, only it turns out that the cluster is just one series of random events among billions of random events. We live in a world governed by physical laws we can’t control or change, and bad things just happen.”

“And that world is populated by people with free will who screw up, go nuts, and make a hell of lot of those bad things possible. These three families had one other thing in common. They were all on the ropes financially,” I said.

“What difference does that make? Almost one in ten people in this country are out of work, and we’re in the worst recession since the Great Depression.”

“It could make all the difference depending on what they decided to do about it.”

“Okay,” Kate said. “Start with Jimmy Martin. He stole five thousand dollars worth of copper tubing, but it was worthless to him unless could sell it to someone. Frank Crenshaw was in the scrap business. He could have parceled the copper out with other scrap and split the money with Jimmy. It may not have been enough money to keep them both above water, but it was a start.”

“Which could explain why Frank wanted a gun. Selling stolen property may have made him nervous. And, just before he shot Marie, he told her something that really set her off. That could have been it.”

“But that leaves out Nick Staley. Where does he fit in?”

“Hey, aren’t you the one who said I should quit looking for a theory of everything?”

“No. I’m the one who told you never to remind me of what I just said. I could be wrong. Maybe we need to look at it another way.”

I thought for a minute, charting the permutations in my head, a light going on. “Maybe Nick Staley isn’t the one who doesn’t fit in. He and Frank Crenshaw are both dead, which could make Jimmy Martin the odd man out because he’s still alive.”

Kate grinned. “A theory of everything after all.”

“Almost everything. What about Evan and Cara Martin? No matter what Frank, Nick, and Jimmy were into, I don’t see how that puts Jimmy’s kids in the mix.”

“It doesn’t have to,” Kate said. “Think of the two cases like circles that touch at a single point but don’t overlap. One circle is Staley, Crenshaw, and Martin, and the other circle is Evan and Cara. Jimmy Martin is the point of contact between the two circles, but that doesn’t mean one has anything to do with the other. Don’t forget that there are lots of other circles, including one with Adam Koch’s name on it, and his circle definitely overlaps Evan and Cara’s.”

“I’ll give you that. Adam is a lot easier to sell on the kidnapping than Jimmy Martin.”

“Which means I’m right and the order of the universe is restored,” she said.

“And I’m hungry. It’s after one o’clock. I need a burger, and I know where I’m going to get one.”

“Where? I only ask because I’m driving. I can circle the block while you eat if you prefer,” she said, giving me a gentle poke in my ribs, her eyes bright and filled with mischief.

She was at her most irresistible when she was alive like this, at turns funny, indignant, insistent, and brilliant, enriching her beauty, masking her fears and insecurities, making me forget about mine and the flaws in our relationship. It was a moment filled with promise and pain and one that I had to let pass.

“Westport Flea Market. Best burger in town. I’ll call Lucy and Simon and tell them to meet us there.”

It took twenty minutes to get to Westport, a midtown collection of bars and restaurants, some more downscale than others. The Flea Market was the only one that counted a serial killer as one of its vendors back when it was just a flea market. Bob Berdella, who kidnapped, tortured, and killed at least six men in the mid-eighties, sold trinkets at the flea market. He died in prison of a heart attack, the Flea Market switched from trinkets to burgers, and the world became a better place.

The restorative power of the Flea Market’s cheeseburgers, fries, and rings may never be documented in a double-blind, peer-reviewed study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, but that’s only because the editors do not understand that holistic nutrition means eating the whole thing. While stuffing our faces, we traded notes.

“Ellen Koch is a mess,” Lucy said. “She alternates between blaming herself for what Adam did and insisting that she had no way of knowing there was anything wrong with him and that, if there was, it was all her ex-husband’s fault.”

“Besides playing dodgeball with her, did you learn anything we didn’t already know?” I asked.

“Nope. I had a hard time getting her to focus. I pushed her as hard as I could about the morning the kids disappeared. She finally admitted that she suspected Adam had spent that night at Peggy’s. She said she woke up during the night and couldn’t get back to sleep. She checked on Adam to make sure he was home. He was gone, but his truck was in the driveway. It wasn’t hard for her to figure out where he was.”

“Did she see him come home?”

“She says she didn’t. Says she tried to wait up for him but fell asleep and didn’t see him come in.”

“What about Peggy? Did you talk to her?”

“I tried. She hasn’t stopped drinking since she found out about Adam, and she’s not a clear-thinking drunk. She won’t be any help until she sobers up and dries out. While I was at her house, the doorbell rang. It was a couple of the neighbors that had contributed to the fund Ellen started to raise money to hire me. They wanted Peggy to give them their money back.”