While Melendez was transported to wherever — I still don’t know if he was taken to Manhattan, Staten Island or Nassau — Jackson, Diver, Stapleton and I went back to Island Downs, pretty much under my leadership.
Once we got there we split up, with Jackson going with me to find Benjamin Hopkins. We found him in his office.
“Mr. Hopkins, we have some news for you,” Jackson told him as we entered his office. Jackson had specifically asked me to allow him to do the talking early.
I had explained my theory to the three of them on the way, and I felt that when Melendez talked, he would substantiate that theory. In any case, the three of them bought it.
“You’ve arrested him?” Hopkins asked hopefully.
“Arrested who, sir?” Jackson asked.
“Why, Lassiter, of course,” Hopkins answered. “It was pretty obvious all along that he killed her, I’m just surprised that you professionals took so long to realize it,” he added, with contempt.
The door was still open and from outside came a voice saying, “You’re crazy Benny.”
It was Lassiter.
While Jackson and I had gone directly to Hopkins’ office, Diver and Stapleton went to get Lassiter. Now we had them both in the same room and the sparks were threatening to fly.
You could feel the hatred hanging thick in the air.
“I didn’t kill Penny, you old fool. I didn’t even care about her, why would I kill her?” he demanded.
“You killed her, you bastard, just to keep her from coming back to me! Murderer!” Hopkins screamed.
“Hold it, both of you!” Diver shouted angrily “Po, here, wants to explain something to you. If it was up to me, I’d just kick the shit out of both — ”
“How dare you — ” Hopkins began.
“Who do you think — ” Lassiter started.
“Shut up!” Stapleton shouted as loud as he could, shocking Jackson as well as Hopkins and Lassiter.
“Go ahead, Hank,” Diver told me.
I addressed both men, father and possible lover, a point which was still unclear.
“You’re both pretty pathetic excuses for human beings, you know that?” I asked, starting slowly — but that was okay. Pretty soon I was really going to get rolling.
“All that girl wanted from either one of you bastards was a little love, but all she was to you was something else to fight over, to compete for. You never once thought about her feelings, her welfare. I’ve been saying this all along: you’re both sick!”
“I told you — ” Hopkins tried to say, but I gave him no chance to talk. He didn’t deserve one.
“I know what you told me!” I snapped. “You told me a big sob story about how your wife died in childbirth and you, big man, big-shot trainer, you blamed an infant girl for that, so you haven’t had any feelings for her since then.
“Now, I know that Penny had some problems, emotionally and possibly even mentally. Perhaps it was a result of that guilt that you heaped on her. She may not have been retarded, not in the true sense of the word, but she was perpetually a little girl, naive, even gullible. Psychiatric help might have corrected that, but you didn’t care so you just let it go. She deluded herself that you both loved her and that it was her fault that you were enemies. She was just too … too simple to see it any other way. That didn’t help her mental state either.”
I stepped closer to Hopkins and asked, “Did you even think about taking her to a doctor?”
He just shook his head, slowly.
“No, you figured, let it be part of her punishment.”
Now I turned to Lassiter.
“You, big lover, you went to bed with her, didn’t you? Kept her around because she was good in the sack?”
He straightened up, looked at Hopkins, and said spitefully, “Yes, that’s right.” Then he decided to play at being magnanimous and added, “But let’s not get embarr — ”
“Embarrassing?” I interrupted him. “You want to be embarrassed, big man?” I asked. “How about explaining how you could take anyone to bed when you’ve been impotent for the past two years?”
He looked like I had just kicked him in the balls. It took some time for him to recover, and then he made some lame attempts at denying it.
“Don’t bother,” I cut him off in the midst of his protestations, “we don’t even care about that, or the fact that you’ve taken to beating women to satisfy your need to feel like a man.”
Again, he looked like I had hit him in the groin.
“You treated her like one of your horses, never showed her any affection, but simple as she was she believed that you loved her, probably because you had told her as much, just to try to ‘win’ her from her father.”
Now I addressed both men again.
“You both pushed and pulled at her until finally you tore her apart. Do you know who killed that girl?” I asked them. “I’ll tell you who killed her.” I pointed to Lassiter and said, “You did, “and then, before either of them could comment, pointed to Hopkins and added, “And you did. You both killed her.”
“That’s preposterous!” Hopkins snapped.
“Ridiculous!” Lassiter added.
I didn’t bother explaining to them about the movie, but this was where it came in. In the film, the young girl had been killed as the result of an accident, thereby bringing the two men in her life together, to share their grief.
Well, gullible Penny figured, why not bring her two men together that way? If she were to die, she thought, they would have nothing to fight over, would be brought together by their mutual grief.
So she went to Louie for help. As a member of a gun club, he could get her a gun, and with that gun —
“She shot herself,” I told them.
“What?” they exclaimed, almost in unison.
“You heard me, you bastards. That girl killed herself hoping that with her dead the two of you would quit fighting and maybe even grieve together.”
They remained silent for a few moments, and then Lassiter broke it.
“She was crazy,” he said, and I stepped in and hit him harder than I can ever remember hitting anyone. He went over Hopkins’ desk backwards and nobody bothered to try and help him up.
“Do you feel the same way?” I asked Hopkins. He stepped back, hands raised in front of him, but made no attempt to answer.
My guess was this: Louis agreed to help Penny by getting her the gun, in return for which she would sleep with him at his apartment, hence the condom that was left on the bed. He knew he’d never have a chance otherwise, and though he loved her — or thought he loved her — he gave her his gun and went out to the meadow with her. Now maybe he was supposed to do it and couldn’t, or maybe he really didn’t realize what she was up to until she started to turn the gun on herself. There was probably a struggle as he tried to take the gun away from her, and it went off, or fell to the ground and went off. Either way, Penny’s goal was accomplished.
At that point he panicked, realizing that she was dead, killed with his gun. He buried her, just the opposite of what she wanted. That was the reason he was so dirty when Ray the bartender saw him in the lounge. He had just come from burying her, was confused, even to the point of ordering a drink he badly needed, in Spanish. Once he drank the booze and looked around him he panicked again and ran from the lounge and right into hiding.
He didn’t kill her, but he was still an accessory, and was still guilty of tampering.
with the evidence. He would still have to go to trial, in the eyes of the law as guilty as if he had pulled that trigger.
The real killers, on the other hand, the two bastards who drove Penny Hopkins to do what she did, drove her to what she thought was the only way to solve her problem, would get off free.
Lassiter worked his way back to his feet, bleeding from the mouth. His jaw might have been broken, from the looks of it, but I didn’t really give a shit at that point.
“You two are the real murderers,” I told them in disgust, “and the law can’t touch you. I hope you’re both very proud of yourselves today, because I’m going to see to it that the word is spread, I’m going to do what I can to see that, in some way, you pay for what you did to that girl. You have to pay, you can’t be allowed to get away with this.”
“You are all witnesses,” Hopkins shouted at the three police officers. “This man is threatening me.”
He was indignant! I couldn’t believe it. If Lassiter had been able to speak — and by this time I was pretty sure that his jaw was indeed broken — he might have expressed the same indignation.
“Threat?” Diver said, turning to his colleagues. “Did you guys hear a threat?”
“I didn’t hear anything,” Stapleton answered, looking at Jackson. “Did you?”
Jackson was confused, but went along with it, shaking his head.
“I think we had better get this one to the hospital,” Diver said, indicating Lassiter, who was staring at me murderously, unable to speak. He was supporting himself with both hands flat on Hopkins’ desk.
“Sure, that was a nasty fall he just took,” Stapleton added. “He might have seriously hurt himself.”
“He should be more careful,” Jackson added, getting into the swing of things.
I walked out quickly, because at that point I was very eager to have Hopkins accompany them to the hospital — as a patient.
I caught myself thinking of a chessboard as I walked away.
Penny had thought of herself as the queen on their board.
I was glad she had never discovered that she was just another pawn.