49

I tried to find Pix on the way back to my car. Couldn’t.

I urged Thea/Susan to confide in me all the way to South Boston. Nada.

I ushered her in the front door of the D Street station house. No camouflage beyond her hat. No cameras. Who would link her to a woman dead twenty-four years? Under the harsh fluorescents, I could see the lines age had dealt her. She held herself beautifully erect, walked with a measured tread dominated by a statue-like passivity. To me, she seemed like a figure in a Greek tragedy—all parts played, all oracles read, all actions come full circle. Clytemnestra, having dealt the inevitable blow, waiting, waiting, waiting for Orestes.

No choice, ho choice, everything about her seemed to echo. No choice. I followed my path. I did it well. It led me here. Inevitably here.

I willed her to run, rail, curse, do anything but walk like a sheep toward slaughter.

Thea Janis, child prodigy, returned runaway, marched into the interrogation room, sized Mooney up with a single cool glance before sinking into a chair. She tapped her foot while I brought him up to date.

“Do you wish to confer with an attorney?” he asked immediately.

“Where’s my son?” she said.

“Do you want an attorney? You can call your own lawyer, or we can provide you with one.”

“No.”

“Are you aware that anything you say may be used against you in a court of law?”

“I expect it to be.”

“You waive your right to an attorney.”

“I waive all rights. I’ve killed two men. I wish to clear my conscience and my soul.”

“Conscience” and “soul” made Mooney uncomfortable. I could tell by looking at him.

“Can a matron search her?” I asked quietly.

“Why?”

“Look, Mooney, I don’t want anything else to happen tonight. She could have a knife, pills, a gun.”

“You didn’t search her on the way in?”

“I wanted it strictly legal.”

“Okay.”

As we waited for a female officer, Mooney rummaged through a pile of papers. I glanced at them. MacAvoy’s spidery handwriting was familiar from Thea’s file. Page after page in MacAvoy’s hand fluttered past. Had he left a secret legacy?

Thea seemed eager to begin. “Do you use a stenographer or a tape recorder?”

“You should confer with an attorney,” Mooney said.

“I don’t agree. I killed Alonso Nueves on April 8, 1971. That’s the day Thea died. I remember it well.”

Mooney flicked the tape recorder on, gave his name and mine, the date and time. For the record, he repeated his question concerning an attorney. Thea affirmed her decision to speak without counsel.

She glanced at the tape recorder with affection before beginning, a storyteller at heart.

“My name is Dorothy Cameron. I once wrote a book under the name Thea Janis. Thea, Dorothea, was my own name, but Janis I chose deliberately, because of the two-faced life I already led. My name proved prophetic. I have lived for the past twenty-four years as ‘Susan Gordon.’ I believe I made up the name although I may have known a Suzanne Gordon when I was a child. I don’t recall.”

“Would you like something to eat or drink?” Mooney asked.

“No. On April 8, 1971, I had an argument with Alonso. He was a traditional man, an older man. He thought he owned me. He didn’t know I was seeing others, sleeping with others. He thought because I was young, I was inexperienced. I was anything but inexperienced.

“I told him I was pregnant, and that I planned to abort the fetus because I was uncertain of the father’s identity. At first he didn’t believe me. I showed him the suitcase I’d packed. My doctor’s appointment card. Told him about the trick I’d played on my family to get time, at least one night away from home to recover. He went berserk. He hit me. Ironic, really: He hit me so hard he could have caused the very thing he most wished to prevent, but, well, I find people to be unpredictable except for the ones I write about, the characters who exist in my head. He hit me and I hit him back, which surprised him. I think it shocked both of us. We were in the greenhouse behind the Dover estate. I’d met him first at Avon Hill. I helped him get a job at the Weston Institute when he had trouble at the school. It was my fault, you see. He was fooling around with an underaged student. That was me. I had certain contacts. I used them, and I kept seeing him and several other boys and men as well. Teachers. Gardeners. Psychiatrists.”

“Like Dr. Manley,” I asked.

“Never Dr. Manley,”. she said. “Not in that sense. Please, don’t interrupt. I thought the boys could teach me, I suppose. I had a lot to learn. Every boy, every man I slept with was so different, secretive, bold, tentative, proud, worried that I wouldn’t be satisfied, positive I’d beg for more. And yet, in the moment of passion, they were all the same. Released. Abandoned. I thought I’d study them, learn everything I could. I was analytical, in control. I was not passionate. I saw it as a job, to learn these things. I didn’t think of myself as wanton or wild or wicked. I was a recorder, a camera, a writer.

“I knew Alonso had not been faithful to me. He talked of seducing girls at the institute, how easy it would be. Possibly my own sister, who sometimes stayed there overnight, even then. When he was asked to leave the institute, without telling Daddy, I arranged for Alonso to move into the empty apartment over our garage. It was extremely convenient. I felt I’d done so much for him.

“When Alonso hit me, something snapped. That’s the only way I can describe it. A flood of anger opened up, a rip in the universe filled with blood and smut and fog. I’d never been hit before. Never. There’d been rough sex, yes. But I always knew what was coming after the first time, and his violence astounded me, frightened me. There were tools in the shed and I hit him with a trowel, with anything I could reach, but I specifically remember the trowel. It was sharp, triangular. He didn’t move. I kept hitting him. Then I knew I’d killed him—and that my father would never be Senator Cameron and my mother would never forgive me. And it seemed to me that keeping my mother and father from realizing their ambition was a worse sin than killing Alonso, because he’d hit me. He’d hit me.”

She seemed angry and outraged all over again.

Mooney turned off the tape recorder.

“What are you doing? I have more to say.”

“I need to get another cassette.”

“I want to talk about Manley now. He should have helped me all those years ago, but all he cared about was sidling up to my mother, seducing, screwing my mother. He never cared about Beryl or me. I’m not sorry I killed Drew Manley.”

“There’s a technical problem,” Mooney said smoothly. “Don’t worry, we’ll let you confess to your heart’s content. Carlotta, can I see you outside?”

“May I keep talking?” Thea asked, almost desperately, as though the sound of her voice was the most important thing in the universe, as though once she’d started, she couldn’t stop. She grabbed the recorder. “Maybe there’s still a little room on this tape.”

“Go ahead,” Mooney said with a shrug. “Here. Here’s paper. Why don’t you write what you need to say?”

Thea seemed grateful, but I knew something was wrong. That’s definitely not the way the interrogation game is played.

“What is it, Moon?” I asked as soon as he’d closed the soundproof door.

“MacAvoy left a trunkful of papers at his place. In the attic. Fancied himself another writer, a true-crime novelist, the next Joe McGinniss, who knows?”

“Do you believe her?”

“I don’t know what to believe. According to MacAvoy, Alonso Nueves was strangled. Bludgeoned as well, messy. But for cause of death, MacAvoy insists he was strangled.”

“Was there an autopsy? I don’t understand.”

“No autopsy,” Mooney said. “Just observation.”

“Observations from a dead man,” I said.

“Worth a lot,” Mooney observed, tongue firmly in cheek.

I said, “There could still be an autopsy.”

“How?” he asked.

“Thea might help,” I said.

“Ah. Then let’s ask the dead woman,” he said.

I stared at him, wondering how he’d read my mind. For the first time, she was the dead woman to me. Not Thea, not the vibrant girl of fourteen, the collective wet dream of Avon Hill. I thought about skin cells and how quickly we lose and renew them. I thought about snakes, growing larger, leaving their shed skins behind. I thought about myself and who I’d been at fourteen and fifteen.

Was any of that part of me left?

Any residue of Thea?

Perhaps in the young Alonso. Wherever he might be.