Murder, She Wrote--Murder in Red Page 20

  “Got an ID on the suspect?” I asked Mort.

  “I do indeed, Mrs. Fletcher. But it’s better if you see for yourself.”

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  The single dedicated interview room in the Cabot Cove Sheriff’s Department headquarters was a windowless, converted supply closet in the back, longer than it was wide, so the table had to be placed lengthwise instead of horizontally, which made for an awkward squeeze on those occasions when suspects or witnesses needed to be interviewed. The building itself was located in one of the last truly rustic sections of town, halfway between Main Street and the coast, rimmed by woods that were an extension of the same forest grounds that made up the back of Hill House. I’ve taken any number of walks in those woods and spot something new every time I stroll there.

  The department’s interview room, understandably, didn’t feature two-way mirrors with blackout glass, and the recording equipment still made use of old VHS tapes. I seem to remember that the money for a new system had been allocated in the last budget, but Mort must’ve needed it for something more important. Beyond that, given the strains the summer season placed on the department space-wise, keeping the interview room tasked for that purpose was a feat unto itself.

  “Now that we’re here, care to give me a hint as to who the suspect is?” I asked Mort, when he was about to open the door accessing the former supply closet.

  “His name is John Jessup. Ring any bells?”

  “Tripp Van Dorn’s father?”

  “Ding-ding!”

  * * *

  • • •

  I’d never met John Jessup and had glimpsed only a single picture of him, in the company of Mimi and Tripp as a toddler, after it slipped out of a box I was hauling out to the trash for Mimi when she was still getting settled in her Cabot Cove home.

  As soon as Mort opened the door to the interview room, I was struck by the drastic and dramatic change in the appearance of the man seated at the table under a patrolman’s watchful eye. I studied John Jessup closer when the patrolman took his leave. He’d been a hedge fund manager, successful enough to build Mimi her life in Marblehead. Trim and proper, with a big smile and a head of thick black hair.

  That was before he discovered drugs, cocaine foremost among them, which destroyed his life and either ate all his money or emboldened the bad decision making that contributed to his financial collapse. There’d been some violent episodes in the end that had resulted in arrest and prosecution, which ended with probation on the condition he have no further contact with either his wife or his young son, who’d been named as the victims of his increasingly violent, drug-fueled behavior. I recalled Mimi telling me John had disappeared and never come back. She went as far as to claim she had no idea where he was and believed he might have been dead.

  The John Jessup of today had lighter, thinning hair and had gained a lot of weight. His ruddy complexion lined with sun-wrought furrows and lines suggested a man who worked outside, while his calloused hands and chipped nails with grime-coated beds made me think he might be a carpenter or landscaper. The gleaming smile he’d flashed in the few family photos I’d glimpsed had been replaced by the yellow-brown teeth of a habitual smoker, and the scent of stale cigarette smoke lifted from his work clothes as I drew closer.

  “We’ve never met, Mr. Jessup,” I said, extending my hand after Mort had introduced himself. “But I was a good friend of your wife’s.”

  He took my hand in cursory fashion, still wearing handcuffs, trying to size me up while questioning my presence in the room.

  “Is that why you’re here, because you were a friend of Mimi?”

  “Mrs. Fletcher assists us in our investigations from time to time,” Mort explained, leaving it there. “This is one of those times.”

  Jessup didn’t press the matter further, eyeing me closer. “You were at the hotel, standing near that son of a B Archibald.”

  “You could have shot me instead.”

  “I couldn’t even hit him. Guess my aim is a bit rusty.”

  “I find it interesting,” I said, taking the chair opposite his at the table squeezed into the renovated supply closet, “that you took potshots at the two men the sheriff and I believe are somehow implicated in your wife’s death.”

  “Ex-wife,” Jessup corrected. “Guess I won’t be going to her funeral now, my son’s either.”

  “You’ve got no one to blame for that but yourself,” Mort chimed in.

  “Just wish I had better aim. Won some trophies for marksmanship in my day.”

  Mort pretended to be impressed. “You don’t say.”

  “How about you, Sheriff? You pretty good with a gun?”

  “I try not to be.”

  “I’m curious as to how you learned of the potential involvement of Jeffrey Archibald and Charles Clifton in your wife’s death, Mr. Jessup,” I told him.

  “You know the whole business they preach in Alcoholics Anonymous about making peace with your past?”

  “I do.”

  “Well, I’ve made peace with the bunch of years that were pretty much a black hole in mine, Mrs. Fletcher, with one glaring exception: my wife and son. Losing that chance almost sent me back to the bottle and worse.”

  “So you opted for a rifle instead,” I concluded.

  He flirted with a smile. “I’d rather be a guest of the state than a prisoner of the drugs and booze again. And a part of me figured if I couldn’t make it up to Mimi and Tripp while they were alive, I had to do the best I could with the little I had left.”

  “When was the last time you saw your son?” Mort asked him.

  “The day I left Marblehead for the last time, Sheriff. I wrote him out of my life because I wasn’t man enough to have a son. I blew it and figured it was best for him to never see me again.”

  “Even after the accident?” I wondered.

  “I didn’t even know about that for a long, long time. I only recently moved back to the area after stretches in both Colorado and Oregon, with a few places sprinkled in between. I found a lot of solace in not laying down roots, Mrs. Fletcher. That hadn’t worked for me the first time I tried it. It was only last year, ten months ago, I came back and settled in Appleton.”

  The town where I’d first met my husband, Frank, I reflected, and where we’d lived before moving to Cabot Cove.

  “To be close to Mimi, I presume.”

  Jessup nodded. “But I was never able to work up the courage to see her again, to ask for her forgiveness. I thought I could when I moved back.” His expression sank and he looked down at the Formica surface of the table. “Then I found out what happened to Tripp. That set me back to square one, close to doing even worse. I almost moved away again, but ended up sticking it out and actually came to Cabot Cove the day of that lady’s funeral.”

  Jean O’Neil, I almost told him.

  “I saw Mimi outside after it ended. Sat in my Jeep looking right at her, hand on the door. But I couldn’t open it, couldn’t move. I looked at her, saw my past, and knew I wasn’t ready and screeched out of there as fast as I could.”

  And then it hit me: John Jessup had been driving the old Jeep missing its front license plate that had almost run Mimi down!

  “You weren’t trying to kill her at all, were you?”

  “I hit the gas pedal instead of the brake. Because of you.”

  “Me?”

  “I saw you talking to her, Mrs. Fletcher, and truth be told, I knew who you were right away. When you spend as much time alone as I have, you make friends with a lot of books. I don’t fancy mysteries much, but I recognized you from your book covers at the library. You’ve built quite a reputation.”

  “Hasn’t she ever?” Mort added.

  “So after Mimi died, and then Tripp, I started doing some nosing around town, getting the lay of the land.”

  I held Jessup’s s
tare. “You followed me, didn’t you?” I asked him, recalling that strange feeling I’d articulated to Harry McGraw when we’d driven down to Rhode Island to see Jeffrey Archibald at the headquarters of LGX Pharmaceuticals. “You followed me to Rhode Island, then back to Cabot Cove. You must have glimpsed that confrontation I had the other night with Charles Clifton, before I called Mort.”

  Jessup nodded. “I saw enough to put things together for myself. I didn’t care what happened to me. Like I said, I just wanted to make up for the fact that I’d never had the guts to make amends with my wife and son. Kept telling myself there would be more time and then bought that rifle when it turned out there wasn’t going to be any more.”

  I could sense his genuine heartache and self-loathing. John Jessup had traveled across the country to flee his past, only to find that the past is a state of mind, not a place. And that realization had brought him back to Mimi for what would likely have been a strained, fruitless meeting. But at least Jessup could rest easier that he’d made the effort at an apology, if not a reconciliation. How ironic that in finding himself unable to approach Mimi, he’d almost run her over in the process of tearing off, and now he was bent on bringing those responsible for her death to justice.

  He’d been relying on me to effectively point them out to him and had ultimately painted crosshairs on Jeffrey Archibald and Charles Clifton as a result. His desperation had led him to form assumptions that might just as easily have been mistaken. William Faulkner said, upon receiving the Nobel Prize, that all stories are about the human heart at war with itself. I think what he was getting at was encapsulated in the lives and fates of men like John Jessup. Figures who go from hopeless to tragic with little in the middle.

  “Can we talk about Tripp?” I asked him.

  Jessup swallowed hard, then nodded. “Probably be a short conversation, Mrs. Fletcher. I don’t know a thing about him.”

  “This pertains to something else, specifically some oddities that have turned up in the course of this investigation.”

  “Oddities,” he repeated. “You mean, besides me?”

  I didn’t want to prolong this any more than I had to, but needed to ascertain how exactly it was that Tripp and his mother didn’t share the same blood type. “He was adopted, wasn’t he?”

  “Who?”

  “Your son, Tripp.”

  “Adopted?”

  “Was he the result of an affair you had with another woman?” I asked John Jessup, fitting together the pieces wrought by my imagination. “Did Mimi agree to raise him as her own?”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about, Mrs. Fletcher.”

  “Mr. Jessup, Tripp might have been your son, but he wasn’t Mimi’s. I know that for a fact.”

  “Well, you’re wrong. I might’ve been a lousy husband in those days, married more to money and coming home only when I had to. But I made it a point to be around when Tripp was born.”

  I tried to make sense of what I was hearing, reconcile it with what I knew to be the case. I fought to rein in my imagination as I continued, sticking to what I knew to be true.

  “Then how can you explain how your ex-wife couldn’t be your son’s mother?”

  “I can’t, because she was Tripp’s mother,” Jessup insisted. “I was in the delivery room when he was born, Mrs. Fletcher. Believe me when I tell you he’s Mimi’s son, too.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Which made no sense, of course, none at all.

  “Mort,” I said after he’d closed the interview room door behind us, “I need you to rush a DNA test on something. And first thing tomorrow, we’re going for a drive.”

  “Where?”

  “Back to Rhode Island to visit Big Al McCandless. After a stop at Cabot Cove Hospital.”

  “What for?”

  “To look at some more of those security tapes.”

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Big Al was seated in the very chair where I’d left him, the lounge at Briarcliff Gardens empty save for him again as well.

  “Remember me, Chief?” I asked him.

  “Nope,” he said, without regarding me. “My show’s on. Talk to me later.”

  Hawaii Five-0 was playing on the flat-screen this time, the original version starring Jack Lord. The show had just started and McCandless was humming along with the classic theme song. Then the screen cut to a commercial, giving me three minutes or so to get his attention.

  “I was here the other day,” I said, positioned to make sure he could see me.

  His eyes flashed recognition. “Oh yeah, I remember now. You sold me Girl Scout cookies.”

  “I stopped in to see if you wanted to order any more boxes.”

  “Just the mint ones. I love the mint ones.”

  “How many boxes?”

  Big Al’s expression blanked for a moment. “How many did I get last time?”

  “Six.”

  “Then I’ll take six again! Six!”

  “Done. While I’m here, could I ask you a few questions?”

  He peered around me to make sure the commercial was still playing. “Six boxes,” he repeated. “Six.”

  “Do you remember Mimi Van Dorn, Chief?”

  “Does she like Girl Scout cookies?”

  “Only the mint ones.”

  “Explains why we got along so well.” He lowered his still strong voice, as Mort drew near enough to listen in. “You’re not going to tell anyone about us, are you?”

  “Wouldn’t think of it.”

  Big Al seemed to notice Mort for the first time, eyes bulging as he thrust a finger forward. “Who’s he? You didn’t tell him about Mimi and me, did you?”

  “This is Mort Metzger, Chief. He’s sheriff of the town where I live in Maine.”

  “I like Maine.”

  “So do I.”

  “And I like sheriffs. Sounds better than ‘police chief.’ I wish they’d called me sheriff.”

  Mort had positioned himself next to me to further block the flat-screen’s picture, hoping Alvin McCandless would forget he’d been watching it for a few more minutes.

  “We were talking about Mimi,” I prompted.

  “We were?”

  I nodded. “Remember the last time you saw her?”

  Big Al seemed to think for a moment before beaming with certainty. “Yesterday! I saw her yesterday!”

  “Did the two of you talk about Tripp?”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Her son.”

  “She had a son?”

  “He was in that terrible car wreck, remember?”

  He didn’t think for as long this time. “No, I don’t remember.”

  “You did a favor for Mimi that night. Do you remember what it was?”

  “I’d do it differently if I had it to do again. You make mistakes. People get hurt. But people had already been hurt. Didn’t see the harm.”

  That was virtually the same thing he’d said the other day, as if he’d committed it to memory. More likely, he’d lived with what he’d done that night for so long that this particular memory clung to his consciousness like few others were able to. Embedded into his very psyche because of what he’d done in the wake of the accident that had turned Tripp Van Dorn into a quadriplegic.

  “Two lives were ruined that night,” I said, recalling something else McCandless had told me. “Weren’t they, Chief?”

  “I can’t see the television.”

  “Were two lives ruined that night?” I repeated.

  “I can’t see the television.” His eyes found Mort again, seeming to relish the sight of his uniform. “You’re a policeman.”

  “A sheriff.”

  “I used to be a policeman.”

  “You were a chief,” Mort told him.

  “I was?”

>   “In Marblehead, Massachusetts,” I picked up. “Do you remember Marblehead?”

  Big Al’s gaze darted between Mort and me, as if trying to decipher who we were again.

  “Of course I do,” he said suddenly.

  Mort’s turn. “Do you remember that rainy night the accident took place?”

  “I called her myself.”

  My turn now. “Mimi?”

  “Had to tell her what had happened. She told me what I should do.”

  “About Tripp?”

  “Who’s Tripp?”

  “Mimi’s son. He was driving the car, Chief.”

  Big Al seemed to have forgotten all about Hawaii Five-0. “She told me what to do.”

  “You had a long conversation with her on the phone,” I prompted next, thinking back to what Tom Grimes had told me about driving Mimi Van Dorn to Mass General, the fact that she’d been talking to someone on her cell phone almost the whole time. “Do you remember what she told you to do?”

  “No.”

  “Do you remember anything, anything at all about what she talked about?”

  “We had to protect him,” he said, looking more between us than toward either Mort or myself.

  “Tripp?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “You had to protect Mimi’s son.”

  He finally regarded me again. “I just said that, didn’t I? Damage has already been done. Two lives ruined. Can’t ruin them twice.”

  Something else he’d said the last time, almost verbatim. I didn’t want to risk him losing his train of thought again by hesitating, so I resumed immediately.

  “What two lives, Chief? You mean, Tripp and Mimi?”

  “Who’s Tripp?”

  “Her son. Mimi was his mother.”

  “No.”

  I thought I might be on to something, the very issue I’d come back here with Mort in tow to probe. “Mimi wasn’t Tripp’s mother?”

  “Everyone has a mother, Girl Scout lady.”

  “Yes, Chief, they do.”

  “And the answer’s no.”

  But I didn’t know which question he was belatedly answering. “It wasn’t Tripp and Mimi’s lives that were ruined?”