“You are threatening me,” he said in a shocked voice.
I remembered the name I’d read in Buddy’s private document collection. “Who was Cheryl Jacobson?”
He didn’t actually stiffen, but I felt as if he’d suddenly turned to cement.
I waited and finally put my hand on the door handle.
“She was a student of mine.” His voice was a monotone.
I arrested my faked exit. “When?”
“Many years ago.”
I remembered the scuttlebutt I’d heard from Ron at our meeting at the Quality Inn. “You got her in trouble?”
He nodded.
“And you were being blackmailed.”
Again, he nodded.
“You know by who?”
He sighed. “I thought I did.”
My mind flashed back to last night, his pistol instinctively aimed at Pierre Lavoie’s chest. “Fred McDermott?” I tried to keep the incredulity out of my voice.
“Yes.”
“Why him?”
“Recently, we talked a couple of times on the phone. He disguised his voice, but there were certain mannerisms, turns of phrase I’d heard before. It didn’t click until I heard you were sniffing around McDermott, that he’d been at the murder scene on Horton Place. Then I knew who it was…”
“How long ago did this start?”
“Over a year.”
“You said you spoke on the phone recently. How were communications handled before?”
“By letter, always.”
Of course, I thought. Buddy held off implicating Fred until he was good and ready. “And last night at the high school? Were you gunning for Fred?”
He moved for the first time since we began talking, twisting his body around to face me. “I didn’t go there to kill him. I only wanted to talk.”
Presumably, Buddy had needed Jackson’s money both to finance his criminal ambitions-buying listening devices, for instance-and to implicate Fred McDermott, whom he resented for busting up his parents’ marriage. That done, what better conclusion than to have Jackson shoot McDermott? Jackson would be ruined, and McDermott’s slush fund would surface to sully his good name. A nice double play and a monument to Buddy’s late mother.
Jackson let out a deep sigh and looked out the side window at the darkness, not realizing how lucky he was. Still, I felt most of the bluster had gone out of him. “Come on, Jackson, don’t make me pull it out of you word by word. Let’s have it all. Now.”
He rubbed his forehead. “All right.” But he remained silent.
Exasperated, I hit the door handle and swung half out of the car, stopped only by his anguished cry. “I’m trying, all right? It’s hard. I’ve carried this son of a bitch around inside me for decades.”
I relented, moved by the unprecedented intensity of his emotion. I had no problem imagining how the burden of his secret had worn him down over the years. Nevertheless, I left the car door open as a warning.
The fresh air seemed to wash the rest of his reserve away. “She died trying to self-abort. She literally used a coat hanger, like in some bad melodrama. She left a note, naming me, blaming me even, for what she’d done to herself. I couldn’t believe it. Her mother was a conniving old bitch; got hold of the school, put on the pressure. I had to settle with her just to keep my job.”
“They didn’t fire you?” I asked.
“They had no grounds. She backed off after I paid her; told them it was a mistake, that her daughter had been a hysteric with a long history of blaming her problems on people she didn’t like. I’ll give the bitch that much: She was convincing. Still, I was under a microscope for quite some time. It was hell, and it became hell again.”
“How did the blackmail start?”
“There was a warning-a note-telling me ‘the shit was going to hit the fan,’ a phrase I’ve always despised, and that if I didn’t mind my p’s and q’s all this ancient history would be given to the press.”
“What were you supposed to do?”
He laughed shortly. “Pay, of course.”
“How much?”
“Damn near everything I had; about seventy thousand dollars overall.” He softly hit the back of the driver’s seat with his open hand, an oddly effeminate gesture. “Talk about a nightmare. When I finally figured out who it was, I wanted to tear his head off.”
Or shoot him in cold blood, I thought. “You mentioned you figured out it was McDermott from his slips of the tongue. But how did you know where to find him that night? Somebody must have told you.”
He hesitated just enough that I knew he was about to lie. “I had an informant.”
“Who?”
He gave me his superior look; he was starting to pull back, trying to cut his losses. “Sorry, Lieutenant, I have to protect my sources, too.”
“You’ve been played for a complete sucker, Jackson: blackmailed on the one hand, and set after us like an attack dog on the other. Your ‘informant’ used some of your money to fake a slush fund in McDermott’s name.”
Jackson stared at me, his mouth partly open.
“He also told you the blackmailer was going to be at the high school that night. You never wondered how he knew that? Maybe you thought he was a cop, privy to everything. But you took off, gun in hand, to lay your personal devil in his grave. He made a fool out of you, and you cooperated every step of the way. You screwed yourself by paying him off, and you fucked us over by getting in the way.”
His cheeks flushed red. “Now just a minute. You can’t…”
“The hell I can’t. How many times did you listen to your informant, so greedy for the shit he was doling out, you never once wondered how true it might be?”
“I don’t…”
“Even while you were being blackmailed, you never guessed the information you were fed came from the very man who was sucking you dry. What’s it like being that vain, Luman?”
I got out of the car and leaned back in. “This’ll all come out, one way or the other, and I hope like hell they ride you out of town on a rail.” He began to speak, but I quieted him with an abrupt hand gesture. “And if you throw that I’ll-sue-you crap at me again, I’ll make sure that rail is labeled with Cheryl Jacobson’s name.”
I slammed the door and left him with his mouth open.
38
It was four in the morning. I was alone in my office. The window was open, the suddenly chilly predawn air actually lifting goose bumps across my bare forearm. I was filled with the exhaustion that follows hard, rewarding manual labor, content in the knowledge that, while Buddy Schultz was still on the lam, his being so was the only loose thread of the case.
Under Judge Harrowsmith’s demanding judicial guidance, we had gathered enough evidence to satisfy even James Dunn. The work had been painstaking and tedious, however, and I had finally told everyone to go home for a few hours’ sleep. Not that I was going to be alone for long; Ron Klesczewski had called to say that he couldn’t sleep, didn’t want to miss out on the kill, and that his leg would be perfectly content propped in a neighboring chair while he pitched in on the paperwork.
I took advantage of the lull, therefore, to make a phone call.
“Where have you been?” She didn’t even sound sleepy.
I put my feet up on my desk and leaned back in my chair. The weather, and Gail’s voice, was like the calm after the storm.
“I’ve been crossing t’s and dotting i’s.”
My satisfaction was obviously bordering on gloating. She laughed uncertainly. “You mean it’s over?”
“Not over over, but we know who’s behind it all. We have to hospital-tuck the corners and actually put our hands on the guy, but at least we know which way is up now.”
She hesitated slightly before asking, “Can you say who the killer is?”
“Deep background? Buddy Schultz, our night janitor.”
There was a stunned silence, as if I’d invoked the butler instead of the janitor. “You’re kidding.”
“Nope. Pretty driven guy. Lot of hate, lot of envy, a long memory, and sharp as a tack. Bad combination.”