Laura Lippman - What The Dead Know

He rose, and Infante was already calculating the dynamic of what was about to happen. Willoughby was going to insist on carrying the box, and robust and healthy as the older man looked, Infante should figure out a way to do it for him without insulting him. He had seen this with his own father, when he was still in the house in Massapequa, his insistence on trying to grab his son’s suitcase out of the trunk of the car. He followed the man to the den. But, sure enough, Willoughby hoisted the box in his arms before Infante could figure a way around it, grunting and grimacing a bit before he placed it on the Oriental rug in the living room.

“The obituary’s on top,” he said. “I’m sure of that.”

Infante opened the lid of the cardboard box and saw a clipping from the Beacon-Light : “Roy Pincharelli, 58, longtime teacher.” As it often happened with obits, the photo was from a much earlier time, perhaps even twenty years earlier. The strange vanity of the dead , Infante thought. The guy had dark eyes and hair, a dense cloud in the black-and-white photo, and he held himself as if he thought himself quite the dreamboat. On first glance he was okay. But study the photo for more than a second and the flaws revealed themselves-the weak chin, the slightly hooked nose.

“Complications from pneumonia,” Willoughby recited from memory. “That’s often a code for AIDS.”

“So he was gay? How does that track with the disappearance of the Bethany sisters?”

“As the article says, he was a longtime band teacher in the city and county school systems. In 1975 he was teaching at Rock Glen Junior High, where Sunny was one of his students. On weekends he had a part-time gig-selling organs at Jordan Kitt’s Music Store. In Security Square Mall.”

“Man, teachers and cops and their part-time jobs. We do the heavy lifting for society, and we still need OT gigs. Nothing ever changes, does it?”

Willoughby’s look was blank, uncomprehending, and Infante recalled that the man was rich, that he had never known what it was like trying to make ends meet on a police’s salary. How nice for you .

“Did you talk to him at the time?”

“Of course. And, in fact, he said he noticed Heather early that afternoon. She was in the crowd, watching him play Easter songs.”

“You said he taught Sunny. How did he know Heather?”

“The family had attended school concerts and the like. The Bethanys were very big on family solidarity. Well, Dave Bethany was big on it, to be precise. Anyway, Pincharelli said he saw Heather in the crowd that day. A man, maybe in his twenties, grabbed her arm, began to yell at her, then just as quickly walked away.”

“And he notices all this while he’s banging on his organ?”

Willoughby smiled and nodded. “Exactly. A mall on a Saturday is a busy, antic place. Why would you notice that one encounter? Unless-”

“Unless you were already fixated on the girl. But he was gay.”

“That’s my inference.” It killed Infante the way this guy talked, using two-dollar words without even a hint of irony or self-mockery. He must have been a good police beneath the bullshit, or the others would have torn him down in no time.

“So why does a gay guy care about two girls?”

“First of all, the crime wasn’t necessarily sexual in nature. That’s an obvious conclusion, but it’s not the only one. We had a case in Baltimore County, a few years before the Bethany girls, where a man flipped and killed a young girl because something in her manner reminded him of his mother, whom he loathed. That said, I’ve often wondered if Heather saw something that day, something that she didn’t realize she saw, but which terrified the teacher. If he was gay, he most certainly was closeted at the time and probably feared losing his job if discovered.”

“So how do both girls end up missing?”

Willoughby sighed. “It always comes back to that. Why two? How do you even get two ? But if it was the teacher and he grabbed Heather first and stashed her somewhere-the back of his van, for example-and then found Sunny, he would have had a huge advantage. He was her teacher, someone she knew and trusted. If he told her to come with him, she would have done it automatically.”

“Did you ever break him down, get him to change his story?”

“No. He was consistent, albeit in the way that liars are consistent. Maybe he was getting a blow job in the mall bathroom that afternoon from some teenage boy and feared that getting out. At any rate, he never changed his story, and now he’s dead.”

“I’m assuming you checked out the parents?”

“Parents, neighbors, friends. You’ll find it all in there. And there were extortion calls, too, claims from people who said they had the girls. Nothing ever checked out. It was almost enough to make you believe in the supernatural or alien abductions.”

“Given that you read the obituaries so closely-”

“You will, too, one day.” Willoughby had a way of smiling, a kind of double-edged superiority. Irritating as hell. “Sooner than you think.”

“I guess you know whether the parents are alive? I didn’t get any hits on them.”

“Dave passed away the year I retired, 1989. Miriam moved to Texas, then Mexico. She sent me Christmas cards for a while…”

He got up and went to a highly polished piece of furniture that Infante thought of as a ladies’ desk, because it was small and impractical, with dozens of little drawers and a tiny, slanted writing surface that couldn’t even hold a computer. The old cop may have needed reminding that he had the Bethany file, but he knew exactly where that Christmas card was. Jesus , Infante thought, I don’t care what Lenhardt says. I hope I never have a case like this .

Then he remembered that he did, that he was sitting with a cardboard legacy at his feet. He saw himself thirty years in the future, passing the box along to another detective, telling the story of the Jane Doe and how she’d hoaxed them for a couple of days, then turned out to be a fake. Once you got inside something like the Bethany case, did you ever really get out?

“The envelope’s long gone, so if there was a return address, I couldn’t tell you what it was. But I remember the town-San Miguel de Allende. See? She mentions it here.”

Infante inspected the card, a lacy green cutout of a dove overlaid on a heavy piece of vellum. Inside, FELIZ NAVIDAD had been printed in red ink, and a few lines had been scrawled beneath it. Hope this finds you well. San Miguel de Allende seems to be my home now, for better or worse .

“When was this?”

“At least five years ago.”

Infante jumped on the date. “The twenty-fifth year of their disappearance.”

“In Miriam’s case that was probably subconscious. She was very intent on pushing the memories down, trying to move on. Dave was the exact opposite. Every day he lived was a conscious tribute to those girls.”

“And that’s when she moved, after he died?”

“When-Oh, no. My mistake. Speaking from what my wife called ‘deep context,’ as if everything known to me is known to you. Even more unforgivable, when one has been hoarding the context. Miriam and Dave separated a little more than a year after the girls disappeared, and she went back to using her maiden name, Toles. It wasn’t a happy marriage, even before. I liked Dave. In fact, I considered him a friend. But he didn’t appreciate what he had in Miriam.”

Infante fingered the card, studying the older man’s face. But you did, didn’t you ? It wasn’t just the sense of a job undone that had led Willoughby to file this card in a place he remembered so readily. Infante wondered what the mother looked like, if she was a sunny little blonde like the daughters. A certain kind of police-a guy like this Willoughby -he’d be a sucker for a good-looking woman in distress.