The same time
RANNIE HAD SCRABBLED TO THE WATER TOWER ON ALL FOURS, LIKE AN animal, panting. She ripped off the duct tape, more tears pricking her eyes. “Help!” she whispered raggedly. Was he dead? She heard the sound of frantic footfalls thudding up the stairs. Then she heard Nate.
“Don’t come up here!” she tried to warn Nate, but the words were barely audible even to herself.
In the next instant, she heard a man shouting her name. Nate reached her and flung himself on her, the funky, familiar smell of him suddenly the best smell in the world, and she was being told by an extremely good-looking black guy with dreadlocks that it was all over, Marshall was dead.
Somehow she found herself in the elevator with Nate—was the other man with them? The next moment she was in her living room. Her sense of time and what people told her was jumpy, out of order. Olivia Werner was there. The black guy was a cop. Peratta was there. Then Olivia wasn’t. One detail didn’t escape Rannie’s notice, however—the vibe between Nate and Olivia. Sexual, teenage lust.
“Ma, you killed him!” Nate was shaking his head now in disbelief. The last time she’d heard admiration like this in his voice was when he’d discovered she could burp on command.
A cup of hot tea appeared. Rannie felt her head clearing bit by bit. Had she honestly ended another person’s life? Jem Marshall would never draw another breath, eat another morsel, have a sleepless night because of her? It was a park bench cliché, albeit a true one, every mother’s declaration of how she would kill for her child, but Rannie had killed for herself. She was horrified. She was glad.
Cupping the tea in both hands, more for its warmth than anything else, Rannie told the cops what had happened on the roof.
“A pencil! You definitely knew where to aim!”
“A self-defense class. But it was mostly luck,” Rannie admitted modestly to Peratta.
The cops filled her in too. Or tried to. She was having trouble following. In the afternoon Peratta had brought in Armand Hammer for questioning. The dead billionaire art collector? But, no. It wasn’t Armand Hammer but Arm and Hammer, evidently a nickname for the two drug dealers who used to hang around Turtle Park. They confessed that Jem Marshall had approached them the day of Tut’s murder. “He bought some GHB and roofies,” Peratta said, “and paid them a few hundred bucks extra to shut up and relocate.”
After their confession, Peratta had gone to Chaps to arrest Marshall, but he wasn’t there. Another car was dispatched to the Ross River’s End. Meanwhile, a plainclothes cop in a parked car—the good-looking black guy—was keeping watch on Dolores Court, making sure Olivia and Nate stayed put, as they’d been told. The cop said, “I see a man approach the building and enter the same time as a delivery guy with flowers. But I didn’t think anything of it. It didn’t look like Marshall—the clothes fooled me. I see you go in a minute later. I’m thinking everything’s fine until the sergeant calls in saying nobody knows where Marshall is—he’s not at school, not at his apartment and I figure I better check things out in your apartment.”
“Did he tell you anything?” Sergeant Peratta asked Rannie.
“Plenty. He confessed to killing both Mr. Tut and Ms. Hollins. He kept insisting that he hadn’t wanted to murder anyone, that he had no choice.” Rannie explained about Marshall’s true identity. She produced the piece of duct tape from the pocket of her jacket, the adhesive side now covered with lint and hair, the “kiss” mark on the smooth side still visible. “He was trying to make it look like a S.W.A.K. murder. To throw off the police.”
Peratta smirked and lifted his eyebrows. “No chance of that. We nailed the right guy. Confession, evidence, the works.”
“He thought he was his twin? I don’t get it,” Nate said. “And Mr. Tut found out?”
Rannie recounted her phone call with the admissions officer at Stanford.
“Ma, so if Mr. Tut hadn’t called to put in a good word for me, maybe he’d still be alive!”
“Nate, Jem Marshall was nuts. He was willing to do anything to keep his crazy charade going.”
Then she heard the frustrated wail of an ambulance below in the street.
“That’ll be the ME guys,” Peratta said.
“I want to see the body.” Rannie put down the tea and stood, her legs still wobbly.
“You don’t, Ms. Bookman,” Peratta said. “Believe me.”
“Listen to him, Ma.”
But she insisted.
By the time the elevator emerged on ten and she made it to the rooftop she could see all manner of law enforcement people outside. Guys with cameras. Guys maneuvering a stretcher. She watched them carefully lift a body and begin shimmying a black plastic bag up over it. For an instant, she caught Jem Marshall’s face. I did that?
I had to.
His mouth was stretched open in a wide yowl of surprise, his lips the primrose pink of her lipstick. It was not a becoming color on him. His left eye, at least the little that was left of it, looked like a mush of red jelly. Sticking out of the corner, right by his nose, was the last inch of her blue pencil, capped in a bright yellow eraser “helmet.”
Making a mental note to buy new lipstick at the first opportunity, Rannie doubled over and threw up, blowing chunks of half-digested peanut butter sandwich and watery tea all over the fake grass.
Daily News
Saturday morning
PENCIL-PACKIN’ MAMA ERASES PREP SCHOOL KILLER
AM New York
COPY EDITOR DELETES COPYCAT KILLER
New York Post
PREP SCHOOL MURDERS SOLVED:
OOPS! IT’S THE HEADMASTER
October 24—He had a six-inch kitchen knife. All she had was a six-inch pencil. But last night at six P.M. on the rooftop of a West Side apartment building, a plucky and resourceful copy editor fatally stabbed her attacker, the headmaster of the exclusive Chapel School who, according to sources in the NYPD, is guilty of two recent murders there. Jeremy Marshall, 42, was pronounced dead at the scene.
“He was making it look like some sort of copycat S.W.A.K. murder. So there’d be no connection to the murders at the school. But she got him good, the pencil went in his left eye, straight to his brain,” said Sergeant Thomas Peratta, referring to Miranda Bookman, 43, the quick-thinking grammar guru whose son attends Chapel School. Sergeant Peratta would not comment but sources close to the investigation confirm that the deceased murdered both A. Lawrence Tutwiler and Augusta Hollins, two longtime Chapel School teachers.
Headmaster Jeremy Elliot Marshall came with an impressive résumé. The only problem—he wasn’t who he said he was. Marshall had been masquerading as his twin since his brother’s death in a plane crash in 1986. At that time, Jeremy Marshall was a patient at a psychiatric hospital in Los Angeles, California.
Reached by telephone, a spokeswoman from Carruthers Hospital would say only that Marshall was released in September of 1987.
Mary Ellen Chase of Palo Alto, California, attended junior high and high school with the Marshall twins. In a telephone interview, she remembered, “Jem Marshall was always strange—a math whiz but very withdrawn, no friends; the only thing that got him excited were role-playing games, you know, like ‘Dungeons and Dragons.’ And the only person he related to was his brother. John-o was a terrific guy, a born leader.
“Right after Christmas sophomore year, Jem didn’t return to school. The story, according to the family, was he transferred to a boarding school but word got out—he’d tried to kill himself and was in a nut house.”
Dr. Henry Brandt, a psychiatrist and author of
Almost the Death of Me: Grief in Identical Twins had this to say: “I have no prior knowledge of this particular case. However, a twin with a marginal, unstable personality, someone who depends on his sibling as his guide in the everyday world, would feel defenseless without his brother, utterly abandoned. So, yes, I can imagine an emotionally disturbed twin ‘becoming’ his dead brother as a way of coping. It’s not that different from people with multiple personalities. When being oneself is unbearable, a person may slip into someone else.”
Marshall’s first victim, A. Lawrence Tutwiler, who died twelve days ago, discovered Marshall’s true identity accidentally from an admissions director at Stanford University where Marshall claimed to have gone. When confronted, Jeremy Marshall poisoned the 83-year-old college advisor with GHB, a so-called date rape drug. It is believed that Marshall’s second victim, Augusta Hollins, an English teacher who was pushed off the roof of a school building Tuesday night, stumbled on information implicating Marshall in the first murder.
Last night, speaking in front of the West Side apartment house where he and his mother live and where the attack occurred, Nathan Lorimer, 18, told reporters that his mother had independently uncovered Marshall’s true identity earlier in the day. “He attacked her in our elevator and took her up to the roof to kill her. He’s a big guy and she’s like almost a midget. But my mother nailed him!”
Miranda Bookman was taken to St. Luke’s Hospital where she was treated for minor bruises and released.
Two days ago, Howard Rechsler, a salesman at a Staples supplies store, was arrested in connection with the three S.W.A.K. homicides. When asked if there was any chance that the wrong man was in custody, Sergeant Peratta responded, “Zero chance. There are DNA matches on Rechsler for each murder. His confession included details kept from the public, and lipsticks belonging to the victims were lined up, like trophies, on a shelf. Jeremy Marshall was trying to throw us off the school murders by staging a copycat killing.”