‘Some things change; some things are best left alone,’ the man said.
April was crossing the dining room toward him. She looked worried.
‘Want to know what I know?’ the man asked.
‘Sure,’ Mac said, watching April. No doubt, something was wrong.
The man mumbled something Mac didn’t hear over the clatter of the other diners.
April got to the booth. ‘The vent fan again…’
She didn’t have to finish. The circuit to the exhaust fan had blown. The kitchen would fill with smoke, activating the alarms, emptying the restaurant and summoning the fire department. Between skipped checks and the fire department’s charge, the evening would be a thousand-dollar disaster.
Only sometimes could Mac jiggle the circuit breaker in time.
‘1982,’ the man said meaninglessly.
‘Absolutely,’ Mac said just as meaninglessly, and left to hurry after April through the dining room.
He ran down the stairs to the labyrinth of small rooms beneath the restaurant. The original building had been built in the late 1800s and had been expanded over the years. Each time, new foundations had been made, first of fieldstone, then of block and, finally, of poured concrete. The result was a basement warren of dank little rooms. The smallest of them was especially creepy to April and Maggie. It contained a raised cement platform, pitched to a center drain, and stained a dark, rust color. ‘The blood-letting room, for slaughter,’ the previous owner had joked when he’d first given Mac a tour of the building. It had been the place where whole carcasses had been butchered for meat, decades earlier. Mac had tried to scrub away the old blood, but even Muriatic acid couldn’t remove it. Maggie Day refused to go in the room. She said it contained bad spirits that chilled her bones.
The fuse box was in that room. He turned on his flashlight and jiggled the switch to the kitchen fan. Luckily, on that night of live baseball and two hundred and seventy-three paying customers, the fuse reoriented itself, and the big vent fan clattered back into life above his head. Disaster had been staved off once again.
On his way back up, he remembered there was something he wanted to ask Maggie, but the baseball game was playing, the cash register was ringing, and the thought flashed away in an instant. He spent the next two hours hanging out in the bar, enjoying the sounds of paying patrons.
The game ended at nine-fifteen. Ten minutes later, the bar was empty except for Farris Hobbs and his two friends.
‘Dining room is empty-’ Maggie Day said, finding Mac in the kitchen twenty minutes later.
He remembered what he’d wanted to ask her about: her friend, Abigail Beech, the psychic who’d been mentioned in the old articles about Betty Jo Dean.
‘-except for one guy sitting in that hidden booth the teenagers like,’ Maggie went on. ‘He finally ordered a hamburger, and he’s been stretching it. It’s like he’s killing time, waiting for a train.’
‘Thin guy in a green sport coat?’ Mac remembered the man.
Maggie smiled. ‘Shiny hair, stuck to his skull.’
‘1982,’ the man had called after him, as Mac raced for the breaker box. He’d said it like it was supposed to mean something.
It did, Mac now realized. It meant murder, two, three, four, maybe even five times over.
He picked up one of the pitchers of Coke the waitresses used for refills and walked into the dining room.
‘Was the burger OK?’ he asked the man in the back booth. The table had been cleared except for his glass. Mac refilled it and sat down.
‘Very, very good. Exceptionally good. I haven’t been in this place since it was the Wren House.’
‘We’ve been careful to not change too much,’ he said.
‘You removed the bird pictures. I liked them. They were pretty.’
They’d been ripped calendar pages. ‘They were in bad shape,’ Mac said.
‘My name’s Randall White,’ the man said. ‘That mean anything to you?’
It sounded familiar, but Mac couldn’t place it. ‘No.’
‘Folks call me Randy.’
It came then, in a fiery instant. Randy White had been Doc Farmont’s assistant. Someone had said White had been at Wiley’s funeral home the day Pribilski had been brought in and likely for Betty Jo Dean as well.
White smiled at the recognition he now saw on Mac’s face. ‘I understand you’ve become interested in the murder of Betty Jo Dean.’
‘How did you hear that?’
‘From Farris Hobbs, and others. You’ve brought considerable attention to yourself.’
‘How may I help you?’
‘It’s me who can help you.’
Mac tried to keep his voice even. ‘How?’
‘I know who killed Betty Jo Dean.’
FORTY-THREE
Mac waited until the man appeared satisfied that he’d shocked him.
‘You know who killed Betty Jo Dean?’
‘Sure,’ White said.
‘Others know, too?’
‘Some. Not many.’
‘Doc Farmont knows?’
‘I’m only telling you this because it would be a real tragedy if all this gets stirred up again.’
‘For the town?’
‘For the family,’ White said. ‘See, Doc made up his mind the family should suffer no more, so he swore me to secrecy. I’m not saying he told no one else. He might have told some, to shut down troublesome inquiries. But until this moment, I’ve never breathed a word. I’ll ask you to be just as discreet.’
‘About what?’
‘Doc Farmont’s a crusty old sort, but he took care of the people in this town, yes sir. And he knew how to keep his mouth shut.’
‘Abortions,’ Mac said, impatient to speed up the man’s leisurely pace.
‘Like I said, Doc always had everyone’s well-being at heart. It was four years after the killings. One day, Fred Junior came to see the doc.’
‘Fred Dean, Junior? Betty Jo’s older brother?’
‘By six years,’ White said. ‘I was Doc’s assistant, back then. Nothing legally medical, you understand, since I had no licensed training. But I assisted in procedures where it wouldn’t technically be illegal, when a situation called for an extra pair of hands.’
‘And in that capacity you became aware of something Fred Dean, Junior consulted Doctor Farmont about?’
‘I was never invited to sit in on a consultation, you understand, but Doc’s office had thin walls, and on occasion, in spite of my every effort to allow privacy, I’d overhear things. And so it was on the day young Fred came in with concerns.’
‘Concerns, Mr White?’
‘About genital warts. Seemed he’d sprung one or two on his privates.’ White smiled slyly. ‘Pinktown boys often engaged with Pinktown girls. And Fred Junior did belong to a group of young hellions who used to orgy up the river a piece.’
‘Orgy?’
‘Young Roosters, they called themselves, frolicking about in the woods with young women, local and imported. They thought it perfectly normal, their goings-on. They were a bunch of sick-minded young men. Now and again, one of the Roosters would come in to see Doc about a result of their excesses. Usually it was the drips.’
‘A sexually transmitted disease?’
‘If that’s what you want to call it, sure. There were all kinds. Anyway, Young Fred’s concern was about warts, and about the exact nature of the procedure that would be used to remove those, ah… things. In particular, he wanted to know about the type of anesthetic Doc would administer during the procedure. He’d heard the knockout was sodium pentothal.’
‘Truth serum?’
‘Exacto-mente,’ White said. ‘He didn’t want to be put under, unless he was sure that Doc was obligated like a lawyer to keep anything he heard during the surgery confidential.’
‘What did the good doctor tell him?’
‘Doc said he always kept his mouth shut, no matter what.’
‘What about you?’