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“I hate to break it to you, but this world is already a very dangerous place.”
There wasn’t much to say after that.
27
April 20, 1996
Saturday
Saturday, after pretending to sleep half the day, I pretended to go to work. I left at the normal time, even though Ronnie wasn’t there to see it. He was off somewhere working, but still… I didn’t want to take the chance that Junior might mention I left late. Of course, there was no guarantee he wouldn’t show up at The Hawk, but he’d tried that the night before. I doubted he’d do it two nights in a row.
And… I had no place to go. I thought up a couple of useful things to do. Stopping by the Bennett house and paying my rent for the use of the garage. Going out to the airport and paying my rental car bill in cash so it wouldn’t show up on Ronnie’s credit card—well, my credit card, I guess. Either way, I didn’t want to leave him stuck with the bill.
Since I was out that far, I went to an Italian restaurant at the Lakewood Mall. The mall was in the center of a giant parking lot with a few buildings at the edges. One of them was Manfredi’s. I sat at the bar and had chicken penne in pesto. The gimmick at Manfredi’s was that you order one pasta dish, you get two. Both are big enough to feed an army.
That meant I had a fettuccini alfredo I didn’t know what to do with. I couldn’t bring it home without an explanation. So what did I do with it? I was paying the check, when I remembered there was a tiny refrigerator at The Freedom Agenda. The kind of thing you bought a teenager when you wanted them to go to their room on a semipermanent basis. Also, it was only seven-thirty. I could do some work. Take a nap. Drink some lousy coffee. Kill time until I could go home at 2 a.m.
When I got there, I parked the rental a couple streets away and walked down the alley to let myself into the back. I could have gone in the front but there were streetlights, and I couldn’t be sure Hamlet Gilbody wasn’t lurking about somewhere.
I turned on as few lights as possible and put the fettuccini alfredo into the refrigerator; I’d have it for lunch on Monday. Before I sat down, I did some stretching. My stomach was stiff and I was tempted to do everything bent over. That meant I had to do the opposite. I arched my back to stretch my stomach and groin muscles.
The bruise was coming in strong and was tender when I poked at it. I might have been poking at it too much. Also, I didn’t know exactly what I was looking for, so the fact that I kept poking it was kind of dumb. I had hoped John would be home so I could ask him to take a look, but I’d managed to miss him.
I could have just started reading letters but decided to organize Larry Wilkes file and then put it away. The file was not especially thick, which made me feel like I hadn’t done a lot. There were the news stories about the murder, addresses Karen had gotten me, notes from all my meetings, including those with Larry himself—well, the first meeting. I did need to take a few minutes and write up notes on our final meeting. There were the copies of photos that had appeared in the sports section of the paper. Photos that showed Coach Carrier and Pete.
I flipped back to the very first things in the file. The newspaper articles about the murder. I read through them again. I couldn’t help it. I knew what was there but, hey, I didn’t have much else to do. I turned them over and was about to skim through all the addresses Karen had given me, when I realized something was wrong. I went back to the articles. One of them contained this line:
“No motive has been given for the murder, though a source suggests that the victim had recently become engaged.”
There was something wrong with the timing. The article was dated September 20, 1976. Pete was killed on the eighteenth. Larry had been arrested immediately. Anne would not have been able to visit him in jail until after the article came out. There literally wasn’t time for her to have visited Larry so he could tell her to pretend to be Pete’s fiancé before the article came out. So who was the source the article referred to?
I decided I ought to verify this with Anne. She might know something I wasn’t seeing. I picked up the phone and called her—her number was also in the file.
“You need to leave me alone,” she said, after I identified myself.
“Just a quick question. When did Larry tell you to pretend you were Pete’s fiancé?”
“I don’t remember. Why does it matter?”
“One of the first stories about Pete’s death mentions an engagement. It was published two days after his death.”
“Okay, well, I don’t know anything about that. I don’t think I went to see Larry until about a week or so after he was arrested. He called and begged me to come and see him. We were still friends, so I did.”
“So, you have no idea why the article would say something like this?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Do you think Larry got the idea from the article?”
“Maybe. I don’t know—Oh shit!”
I thought for a moment she was remembering something. “What?”
“Baby just kicked my liver. I have to go.”
And then she hung up.
I considered tracking down the reporter who’d written the article mentioning the love triangle but decided that would be pointless. Most journalists were a bit more ethical than Richland Keswick and actually protected their sources.
