“She deserved more of a service than that,” Derry said.
We were seated on plastic seats in the corner of a fast-food restaurant, a plastic table between us. Behind Derry, on the other side of the restaurant’s plate-glass wall, was a playground for younger customers. It was also plastic, each of its tubes and slides and ladders a different unsubtle color. Against that background, the retired cop looked even older than he had at the cemetery. That impression was reinforced by the way he sat. When he’d been standing, his stature had been cut down by a bent back and rounded shoulders. His sitting posture was worse. In addition to bending forward, Derry leaned to his left, resting his weight on his elbow. The resulting pressure pushed his left shoulder up, and his head was inclined a little toward it, giving him the look of a man poised for a nap.
“She deserved more of a life than that,” he said.
“You knew her?” I asked.
“No. We never met. Unless you count seeing her twenty years ago when she was a baby. I only meant that nobody deserves to die that young.”
He ran a hand beneath his broad, red nose. He had very dark brown eyes with discolored whites, large eyes with wrinkled lids. He wore his iron gray hair extremely short, except in the very front, where the hair stood straight up. The hair of his eyebrows was the longest on his head. The brows curled out and upward like a pair of miniature horns.
“I’m sorry I didn’t get back to you after you left that note on my door,” he said. “I don’t talk to reporters. A reporter from the Post came by a few weeks back. A woman. I sent her packing, pronto.”
“I’m not a reporter.”
Derry raised his head a little. “Johnny said you were. John Ruba. I called him when I found your note. Surprised the hell out of him. I figured you’d been to see him, too. Johnny described you; that’s how I was able to pick you out at the cemetery. And he told me you were from the Post.”
“There was a little misunderstanding about that,” I said. “I work for the Post, but I was up at Lake Trevlac on my own.”
“Johnny said it was because Barbara Lambert wanted the case reopened.”
“Right. But the paper wasn’t interested. I was poking around on my own time.”
“So you weren’t after a story?”
“No.”
“What then?”
“Answers. Barbara Lambert wanted to know who killed her family. That’s not right, exactly. She wanted to know that someone definite had killed them for a definite reason. She was frightened by the idea that it had been a random act.”
Derry passed his hand beneath his nose again. “Poor kid. I wish now I’d called you. Maybe I could have given her a little peace of mind.”
“How did you happen to be at the cemetery?” I asked.
“How did I hear about the accident? I’m a customer of yours. Of the Post’s, I mean. I’m probably your only subscriber west of the Delaware. Comes in the mail a day or two late. It was just yesterday morning I read about the accident. I did some calling around and found out I hadn’t missed the funeral. So I drove down. Least I could do.”
“Why do you get the Post?”
“It’s a cheap way to stay in touch with this area. A way of keeping my eye on things. You never know when something might turn up.”
“Something to do with the Lambert murders?”
He winked at me. Without an accompanying smile, the wink resembled a nervous tic. “Exactly.”
“John Ruba told me you’d solved the murders.”
“He should know better than that. We only got half the job done. We knew who did it and why: Russell Conti to bail himself out financially. But that’s only half the job for a cop. A cop has to prove who did it. We never managed that.
“Not that we didn’t put our souls into trying. Between Johnny and me and the state police, we damn near took that cabin apart looking for physical evidence. We went over that rock-choked forest of a lot like it was a parlor rug. Sent state police divers into the lake. Sent rookie troopers down into that old well they had. Hell, I went down in there myself just to make sure. We never found a thing.” He sipped noisily at his coffee. “What else did Johnny tell you?”
“That you couldn’t put the Lambert case behind you. That it ended your career.”
Derry didn’t take offense. “He’s more than half right about that. Going into the Lambert case I was a damn good cop. I don’t know what I was coming out. A pain in the ass at least. Now I’m a silly old geezer with a bee in his bonnet. A comical character. Except instead of being obsessed with commies or fluoride in the water, I’m all hepped up over a murder case nobody cares about.
“I’d already carried a badge for twenty years when the Lamberts were murdered. My only break had been a stretch in the army. I thought I’d seen it all, and I had seen too damn much. But nothing had hit me like what we found in the Lambert cabin. Not Korea. Not anything. A whole family wiped out. Or almost wiped out. It was a big story for months and months. If the murders happened again tomorrow, it might not even make the front page of the Philly Inquirer. That’s how much the world has changed, God help us. The Post’s anniversary article pointed that out. But it stopped short of saying what I sometimes think, which is that the world changed because of the Lambert case. Because we didn’t solve it, I mean.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Not worth understanding, probably. Just my feeling that our failure to bring the killer to justice opened the door for all the evil that’s happened since. I told you I’m a crazy old geezer.”
“Sheriff Ruba said you were frustrated by Conti’s suicide.”
“Did he? That’s putting it politely. I was poleaxed. Not by Conti’s death. That was okay by me. With the little circumstantial evidence we had, we’d have been lucky to get a conviction. A death sentence, which Conti deserved if any man ever did, would have been way too much to hope for.
“What blasted me was that damn note. The last big lie of the case. If it hadn’t been for that, we could have closed the damn thing. I could have closed it. In my gut, I mean. I could have moved on.”
“Ruba moved on.”
“He was younger. And he had a family to worry about. That might have made the difference; I don’t know. I used to think of myself as Russell Conti’s last victim, when I was feeling particularly sorry for myself. Now it turns out that the last one was Barbara Lambert.”
“What do you mean?”
“Come on, Mr. Keane. Give me some credit for brains. It isn’t hard to figure why the girl was in Absecon. On Bannon Street. I’m not likely to forget that street. She was there to see Grace Conti, wasn’t she?”
“Yes.”
“Was it a social call or did Lambert have something definite to ask her?”
“It was because of something I’d told her.” Catherine Lambert had been in no condition to condemn me for my part in her niece’s death, but Derry might provide the service. “Mrs. Conti claimed to have proof that her husband was innocent. She wouldn’t tell me what the proof was. She wanted the Post to promise to print a story exonerating her husband on the strength of his suicide. Then she’d tell. I mentioned the offer to Barbara on the night she died. I’d intended to talk her into dropping the investigation. Instead, I got her excited about the Conti lead.”
Derry nodded, his yellowed eyes focused on the table. “That’s what she was looking at when she stepped into the path of that car. She had her answers in sight.” He almost sounded envious. “Of course,” he added, “it was a false lead.”
“How do you know?”
“Because it came from Grace Conti. She’s as unreliable a source as you could ask for. Always was. A little hysterical by nature and as obsessed as I am in her own way. Only her fixation is her husband’s innocence. No martyr ever went to the stake with more conviction than that woman has. She wouldn’t believe the evidence of his guilt if you held it under her nose. She wouldn’t even recognize it.
“Sometimes I think that might really have happened. She might really have seen the truth and blanked it out. It would have been hard for Conti to hide his guilt from his wife. Impossible almost. He must have given her a thousand little signs. But she suppressed the evidence mentally. And maybe not just mentally.”
“What do you mean?”
Derry shrugged. “One of my crazier theories. When you spend as much time alone as I do, thinking about the same thing year in and year out, you can come up with some pips. One day I thought to myself, suppose the suicide note found with Conti’s body wasn’t the one he wrote. The one we were handed was typed and unsigned, remember. Suppose it was a ringer.”
“Written by Grace Conti?”
“Who else? She found the body. She called the police. She had the opportunity. She could have destroyed her husband’s real note, his confession, and substituted the one I’ve had to live with.”
“Why?”
“To protect his name. Her name. So she could live out her life a wronged widow instead of the wife of a monster. Or because she was already so nutty on the subject of his innocence that she couldn’t believe his guilt when she held the proof of it in her hands.”
“What about this evidence she claims to have clearing her husband?”
“That will turn out to be nothing more than a feeling in her heart that he couldn’t have done it. That’s a wife’s evidence. And it would be true in a way. Because that’s the truth she needs.”
We sat without speaking for a while, Derry sipping at his neglected coffee. He seemed worn out by his pitch. I wondered if I was the first one he’d ever told it to. I’d proposed equally unlikely solutions myself at the end of other investigations, solutions I’d been just as sure of as Derry seemed to be of his. And I’d been sure for the same reason. It was the reason the old cop had given for Mrs. Conti’s faithfulness to her husband’s innocence. Each crazy solution had been the truth I’d needed at the time.
I watched the children on the plastic playground behind Derry. A little boy was seated on the top of a yellow sliding board. A line of children had formed on the ladder behind him and more were gathered at the foot of the slide, all encouraging him to loosen his death grip on the rails. Think it over, I told him telepathically.
“Mind if I ask you a question, Mr. Keane?”
“No.”
“How did you get involved in all of this? I know why Miss Lambert came to the Post—I read the anniversary article, like I said. But how did you get custody of her?”
“An editor pointed her my way. He knew I like to solve mysteries.”
“For fun?”
“Not for fun.”
“Why then?”
On the day I’d toured Lake Trevlac, Patrick Derry’s cabin had reminded me of the Pine Barrens shack where I’d first met the storyteller Jim Skiles. Now Derry reminded me of the hermit himself. They weren’t much alike physically; Skiles, though older, had been unbent and full of energy. But the bent and tired Derry was showing signs of Skiles’s old talent for seeing through me.
“I like to know the answers,” I said.
“Like to or need to?” When I didn’t answer, he said, “Let me put it this way. Why were you at the funeral this morning? Was it to say good-bye to Miss Lambert? Or to get a crack at questioning her aunt?”
“Or both?” I asked back.
It occurred to me that Derry’s sudden resemblance to Skiles might have been a product of my imagination. I might have been projecting Skiles’s qualities onto Derry because I missed having someone older and wiser who could listen to my troubles and say the sage, comforting thing. If it was my imagination, it was doing a great job.
“I won’t pretend to know what’s driving you, Mr. Keane, because I’m not sharp enough to carry it off. But I do know that you’re a driven man. I can see that plainly enough. I’ve had a certain amount of experience in that line. You’re not going to drop this thing. Barbara Lambert has her answers now, God rest her, but you don’t. You’re going on.”
He took out a pen and wrote a phone number on his napkin. “If I can be of any help, even if it’s just to listen, call me. If you need someone to cover your back, call me.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“I want you to do something for me in exchange. I want you to think about these answers you’re after. I’m not talking about the Lambert solution now. I’m talking about your answers. Ask yourself if they’re things you’re ever likely to know. If they’re not, you may want to consider another way of spending your free time. Otherwise, you could end up like me, an eaten-out husk of a man who’s no damn use to anyone.”
He’d given me his napkin, so he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand before standing up. “It’s good advice.”
“It always has been,” I said to his empty chair.