11th hour

Chapter 94

Constance Kerr sat with Conklin and me in a very small room at County Jail Number 2 on Seventh Street, only a couple of blocks from the Hall. Connie looked pitiful in her orange jumpsuit, her blondish-gray hair frizzed around her head like Frankenstein’s bride’s.

“This is a terrible place,” she said. “Horrid. The screaming. The language. It’s too much.”

I felt bad for her. I really did.

“What did you want to tell me?” Conklin asked her.

“I have to get out of here,” she said to my partner. “Tell me what I have to say to get out of here.”

“Tell us what you know about those heads, Connie, and this time let’s get on the path to truth. I’ll get you started,” I said. She switched her eyes to me as though she’d just realized I was there.

“I’ve spoken to Harry Chandler.”

“Yes? How is Harry?”

“He says you were never his girlfriend.”

Her laugh was the small feeble cousin of the long guffaws she’d let out previously.

“He says you stalked him, Connie, stalked him for years.”

“No.”

“So he can’t be a character reference for you, I’m sorry, and he said he wouldn’t be surprised if you’d killed his wife.”

“Oh, no, no, he can’t be serious.”

“It’s all serious. This is a homicide investigation.”

I had her attention now, and I knew when to shut up.

I folded my hands and watched Connie Kerr think it all through, how she could go from being a trespasser to being a murder suspect with a movie star willing to testify against her.

“I did see someone in the garden,” she blurted out.

“Don’t make anything up,” Conklin said.

“It’s true. I spied on the garden. It’s black as a damned soul in there at night, but every once in a silver moon, I’d see someone doing nighttime gardening — with a shovel. It looked more like a shadow than an actual person. The shadow would bury something, then put down a rock to mark the spot.”

Tears spurted, made tracks down her cheeks.

“I did suspect foul play, but I couldn’t tell anyone. I was afraid Harry would put me out on the street. Although I did want to know what was buried under those stones.

“That’s why I did what I did.”

“What did you do exactly?” Conklin asked.

“One night, when the lights were out in the house… Excuse me, I need to blow my nose.”

I had a packet of tissues in my jacket pocket; I gave them to Connie, waited for her to speak again.

“I took my hammer and went around to the front gate and I broke the lock,” she said. “Mercy. That’s breaking and entering.”

Conklin and I just kept up a steady gaze.

“I knew where the gardener kept his tools,” Connie said. “So I went around back to where the walls meet and there’s the toolshed. It wasn’t locked.”

“Okay.”

“I borrowed a shovel and gardening gloves and went to one of the stones — and I dug a hole. I didn’t have to go very deep.

“I found that old skull, and when I brushed it off, an idea came to me. That’s how it happens when you write, you know. Sometimes an idea just arrives fully dressed when you didn’t even know it was there.”

Connie Kerr seemed sane to me. Cracked, yes; loony enough to dig up skulls in a garden while thinking she was creating fiction. But I wasn’t picking up stark raving cuckoo. And I wasn’t feeling her as a murderer.

“What happened after you dug up that skull, Connie?”

“Well. I dug up another one.”