The Last Dead Girl Page 15

  “Maybe someone altered the records.”

  Emily Beal kept her expression neutral. “In that case, you’re into conspiracy territory,” she said. “Good luck. But if you ask me, it’s not likely. Gary Pruett isn’t worth conspiring over.”

  I traced a circle with my finger on the linen tablecloth. “I get the sense you don’t like him very much.”

  “I try not to think in those terms,” she said. “When you defend these people, it’s best not to make personal judgments about them. You don’t want to ask yourself if they deserve defending. But to be honest, no, I don’t like him. Never mind whether he killed his wife. Think about Angela Reese, the girl he had an affair with. She was only eighteen. He was her teacher. You can say it wasn’t illegal. Fine. But it was out-of-bounds. I have a daughter her age. I pray to God she stays away from men like Gary Pruett.”

  Her neutral expression had gone away, replaced by contempt. It occurred to me that a lot of people would feel that way about Pruett. Especially parents.

  “Does Frank Moretti have a daughter?” I asked.

  Emily Beal reached for the pen she’d been using on the crossword. “I believe he has an ex-wife, and a son in college somewhere down south. But no daughter.” She tapped the pen idly on her newspaper. “You shouldn’t get too hung up on Moretti,” she said. “His reputation’s solid. I looked for dirt on him and couldn’t find any: no drug addiction, no gambling problem, no violent temper. The worst I heard is that perhaps he gets too close to certain crime victims.”

  “What does that mean? Which victims?”

  “The female ones, especially if they’re attractive,” she said. “If a man gets killed and leaves a pretty widow behind, Moretti might take it on himself to comfort her. And by ‘comfort her’ I mean exactly what you think I mean.”

  “I see.”

  “So there’s that,” she said, waving the hand that held the pen. “Detective Moretti has his faults, but they don’t seem to involve framing people or suborning perjury.”

  • • •

  That night I fell asleep in Jana Fletcher’s bed with the window open. I woke in the cold, with the clock reading 3:58. The numbers green in the dark.

  I got up to close the window and remembered the green folder. Jana’s folder, her notes on the Cathy Pruett case. I went to her desk and turned on the lamp. Opened the file drawer and found the folder—right where I’d seen it last. It had been thick with papers then; now it was empty.

  I sat at the desk with a pencil and a legal pad and wrote a list of possibilities:

  Moretti took Jana’s notes because he thought they might help him discover who killed her. Or Moretti took the notes to cover up what Jana knew.

  Gary Pruett killed his wife, Cathy. Or Luke and Eli Daw killed her. Or someone else.

  Napoleon Washburn told the truth about Pruett’s confession. Or he lied.

  He lied on his own initiative. Or Frank Moretti put him up to it.

  Moretti knew Pruett was innocent. Or knew he was guilty. Or wasn’t sure.

  Moretti framed an innocent man. Or he framed a guilty man, to ensure he’d go to prison.

  Moretti’s intentions were bad. Or they were good.

  Too many possibilities. I dropped the pencil on the desk and drifted over to the fireplace. The mantel looked barren without the wooden board that Jana had used as a candleholder. The police had taken it away as evidence. Nothing on the mantel now but the clay bowl and the coin. Jana’s quarter. I picked it up, touched my thumb to the edge where it was worn down to a point. I had never asked her how it got that way.

  One more thing I didn’t know.

  I returned the coin to the bowl, switched off the lamp, and went back to bed.

  • • •

  On Saturday I could have gone to see Frank Moretti. I could have confronted him with wild accusations, just to see how he’d respond.

  I paid a visit to Angela Reese instead.

  She lived in an apartment on the margins of Bellamy University, a third-floor walk-up she shared with two other women—a place with character, if character meant cramped rooms with low ceilings, floors of scarred linoleum, appliances from the 1960s.

  Her roommates were enrolled at the university, but Angela didn’t believe in formal education. “Too much structure,” she told me. “Sometimes I sit in on classes, but I don’t need the rest of it. Assignments and grades. That’s not the way I learn.”

  She was an artist, a painter. She showed me where she worked, in the apartment’s largest bedroom, which wasn’t saying much. It had good light, though, from two north-facing windows. She had a narrow bed pushed up against one wall and an easel set up where it would catch the light.

  There were samples of her work here and there around the room, small canvases, eleven by fourteen. They were done in acrylics and they followed a pattern: a black line running vertically down the center, with a solid block of color on either side. Yellow and blue. Red and orange. Violet and gray.

  “They’re about duality,” Angela told me.

  “I can see that,” I said.

  “Because we’re all more than one thing. None of us are just one way.”

  She went on for a while about duality, about how we start as one thing and turn into another, about how we carry the seeds of change within us. It got to be a little New Agey, which was not what I’d expected. I thought I’d find someone less self-possessed, someone damaged by her time with Gary Pruett. But Angela Reese seemed whole.

  I could guess why Pruett might have pursued her. She had a kind of wholesome beauty, fair-skinned and brown-haired. She reminded me of girls I’d grown up with. She would never be a fashion model, but if you saw her on the street you wouldn’t look away.

  I wasn’t so sure about her future as a painter. She was, after all, basically filling in rectangles. I might have let my skepticism show in my face.

  “You think they’re all the same,” she said.

  “No, no,” I said.

  “It’s okay. Everybody says that. Sandy and Ginny make fun of me. I don’t care. I’m doing what I want, and the paintings sell.”

  “They do?”

  She laughed. “Don’t look so surprised. There’s a place downtown that sells them. I don’t make a fortune, but I get by.” She found a business card and gave it to me: THE WOODMERE GALLERY.

  “But you didn’t come to look at paintings,” she said. “You want to talk about Gary.”

  That was true, as far as it went. I was also here because Jana had been here once—something I’d learned earlier, when I called Angela to ask if she would meet with me.

  “I saw Gary yesterday at Dannemora,” I said. “Have you ever been there?”

  “No. I made a break with him. I was naïve when we were together, but not blind. When he got arrested for killing his wife, I figured the universe was sending me a message. Time to try something else.”

  She led me to a painting on the wall between the windows. “It’s all right there,” she told me. “All you need to know.” The canvas was painted in two shades of red. On the left side of the black line, the red was muted and muddy; on the right, it was rich and vibrant.

  “This represents Gary?” I said.

  “It represents my life with him, and my life after. After has been better.”

  “How did things start between you, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  Angela lingered by one of the windows, sunlight falling on the fair skin of her face. Motes of white dust floated in the light.

  “It’s like you’re twins,” she said.

  A strange remark. It floated in the air with the dust.

  “Who? Me and Gary?”

  “God, no,” she said, laughing. “You and Jana. She stood right where you’re standing and asked me the same thing, in the same delicate way. Like I might break if I had to talk a
bout it—my miserable childhood and my father’s abuse and how it drove me into a relationship with a man more than twice my age.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Oh god, relax. None of that happened. My father drank, but he never touched me. He died in a car wreck when I was twelve. Which, I know, probably had something to do with me getting involved with Gary. Looking for a father figure. I’m not an idiot. I’ve seen a therapist. But with me and Gary, it was nothing creepy. He didn’t make me wear my hair in pigtails or put on a cheerleader uniform or anything. It started in the most ordinary way, one day after school when it was raining. He offered me a ride home.”

  “So it started before you graduated?”

  “Near the end of senior year. But if you want to get technical, the physical part didn’t start until after graduation. Gary wanted to wait. Of course, he only had to wait a few weeks. If he’d had to wait longer, he might not have been so virtuous.”

  “Did he ever talk to you about his wife?” I asked.

  “He told me they weren’t happy together,” Angela said. “But I sort of knew that already, or else what would he be doing with me?”

  “He never talked about leaving her?”

  “No, and it’s not like he would have left her for me. We knew we weren’t serious. We were just having fun.” She stepped away from the window toward the easel, which held a canvas. She’d drawn a black line down the middle, but the rest was white.

  “I know it was wrong,” she said. “I think I knew it then. I think Gary knew. When Jana came here, she asked me if he was a good person. I told her he was. Good and bad both. We’re all more than one thing. He never made me do anything I didn’t want to do. He was kind to me. He told me I was beautiful, and talented. Maybe he only did that so he could get what he wanted from me. But I didn’t think so at the time, and I still don’t.”

  She shifted the canvas a little on the easel. “And then there’s the other Gary, the one who cheated on his wife. Lied to her. That’s true too. I can’t deny it.”

  “Do you think he killed her?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. The funny thing is, I’ve never talked to him about it. He sent me a note once, through his lawyer. It said he wanted me to know he was innocent. But really, what else would he say? I never answered him. Early on, I worried about it. I thought I needed to know, one way or the other. But Gary Pruett’s not my problem. I have my own life. I’m not responsible for him, whether he’s innocent or guilty. Maybe that sounds harsh.”

  “It sounds about right to me.”

  She left the easel and sat at the foot of the bed. “What about you? Do you think he’s innocent?”

  I perched on the ledge of one of the windows. “That’s a big question. He’s still claiming he is. He thinks he knows who really did it, but I can’t decide whether to believe him. He says it was a couple of cousins named Luke and Eli Daw.”

  I watched her expression darken.

  “Do you know them?” I asked.

  “I know enough,” she said. “We overlapped for a year in high school. They were seniors when I was a freshman.”

  “I understand they had a reputation. Something happened with a girl in a boiler room.”

  Angela nodded. “I heard about that. And other things too. I remember being warned about them—about Luke especially.”

  “Warned?”

  “I was told to stay away from him. Luke liked to bring a girl to a football game on a Friday night and sneak away with her under the bleachers. And if you went with him—well, he considered that consent.”

  “Sounds charming.”

  Her eyes met mine. “I never went with him under the bleachers. Thank God. But I was in a class with him—an art class.”

  “Really?”

  “And strangely enough I found him charming. He was friendly. He would compliment your work if he liked it.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Was he any good, as an artist?”

  “He could draw, in pencil or charcoal,” she said. “I was never impressed with his painting—I don’t think he had a sense of color. I remember he used to make models, though.”

  “What kind of models?”

  “Buildings, like the Parthenon or Monticello. He made them out of balsa wood. They were really detailed. He could have been an architect. He tried to do the Coliseum once.”

  “Huh.”

  She shook her head suddenly. “Not balsa wood. What am I thinking of? He made them out of popsicle sticks.”

  22

  Interlude:

  June 1996

  Jana Fletcher drove east on the New York Thruway in her grandmother’s Buick LeSabre. She had an air freshener hanging from the rearview mirror, a little tree that was supposed to make the car smell like a pine forest, but she could still make out the smell of her grandmother underneath: stale cigarettes and old-lady perfume.

  So far she had gone less than twenty miles, but she felt better already, more alive. She’d left Geneva at nine in the evening with three suitcases and a few hundred dollars. She had a map she hadn’t looked at yet and the address of a youth hostel in Brooklyn. She guessed the trip would take six hours, which would put her there around three in the morning. So maybe not the smartest planning ever, but still. She was on her way.

  She cracked the window beside her to let in the night air. Drew a deep breath. She could still smell the cigarettes and perfume, but she didn’t mind. There were worse things. She’d spent a year dealing with her grandmother’s smells, helping her bathe herself, helping her to the bathroom. And in the last weeks of her grandmother’s life, when the woman could no longer rise from her bed, when she couldn’t feed herself, Jana had done everything for her, everything you can do for another person.

  So she could take the smell of cigarettes and perfume.

  • • •

  Jana pulled off the Thruway at the Port Byron service plaza, because the LeSabre’s tank was low and she needed coffee. Inside, she wove through a motley crowd—young families, bikers in leather, retirees, a troop of Cub Scouts—and stood in line for McDonald’s. The girl behind the counter looked half asleep. She passed Jana her coffee and mumbled the total. One twenty-four. Jana had a single ready. She pulled a quarter from her pocket, but just before she dropped it in the girl’s palm she drew it back. She dug through her purse for another single instead.

  The quarter had come from her mother. Jana had never told her what she meant to do until today, even though she’d been thinking about it ever since her grandmother’s funeral. But today she’d been sure: she wouldn’t go to Cornell Law School in the fall. She would go to New York, right now. No more waiting. She wanted to be an actress.

  The news had sent Lydia Fletcher through the five stages of grief: Denial (This is a whim. You’ll get halfway there and come back). Anger (You’re throwing your future away). Bargaining (Try Cornell for a year. If you don’t like it, you can do something else). Depression (I give up. You never listen to me). Acceptance (Fine. If you’re going, at least let me help you. I’ll give you some money).

  The last one wasn’t really acceptance—maybe grudging acceptance. Jana could have taken the money; it would have made her mother happy. But she was angry too, angry at having to play the good daughter for such a long time.

  So she refused. But just before she left, her mother slipped a quarter into her hand.

  “So you’ll remember to call me,” Lydia Fletcher said.

  A token gesture. You couldn’t call anyone for a quarter, not long-distance. Yet it was a peace offering too, and Jana should have thanked her for it. Instead, she stuffed it in her jacket pocket and drove away.

  Now she moved it to a back pocket of her jeans so she wouldn’t spend it accidentally. She took her coffee to a table and got her road map from her purse. Chaos reigned around her: bearded bikers laughing, a toddler crying, a Cub Scout chasing a ru
bber ball he’d bought from a vending machine. Across the room, a guy in an orange T-shirt was using his table as a drum, tapping away at it with a pair of real drumsticks. Jana didn’t know the tune, but it sounded familiar, like something a marching band would play at halftime. A second guy in a second T-shirt sat across from him, shaking his head in mock disapproval.

  Jana spread the map over her table, drank her coffee, tried to figure out her route. If she followed the Thruway it would take her to New York City eventually, but she would have to go all the way to Albany first. It seemed like a waste. She thought she could get there more directly if she left the Thruway at Syracuse and got onto I-81. Follow that south to Scranton, Pennsylvania, switch over to 380, then 80, then 280—a whole lot of eighties—and that would take her to New York.

  As she refolded the map she heard a voice say, “Where you headed?”

  She looked up to see the drummer in the orange T-shirt. He’d brought his food tray to the trash, left his drumsticks behind. He was tall and lean, with tousled black hair and an easy smile.

  “Syracuse,” she said. “Then south from there.”

  “We are too,” said the guy in the orange T-shirt. “We’ve got a gig tomorrow night in Binghamton. Me and my idiot friend.”

  He pointed across the room at his companion, who had picked up the drumsticks and was trying to tap something out on the table. It sounded like hail on a roof.

  “You’re in a band?” Jana said.

  “Yup. We’re meeting up with the others tomorrow. If you’re in Binghamton, you should come.”

  “Thanks, but I won’t be.”

  “After that, we’re in Newark,” he said, with more of that easy smile. “Then a club in Boston next weekend. Stop me if you’re going to be in any of these places.”

  She smiled back at him. He was cute. And Binghamton was on her way. She started to think she could afford to spend a day there. Why not?

  Across the room, the idiot friend left off drumming and tried to spin one of the sticks around his finger. The stick went flying.