Chain of Fools

22

It was close to one a.m. when Timmy and I returned to Maple Street, and while the rest of the neighborhood was dark, the Osborne house was ablaze with light. A police patrol car was parked in front of the house, with two officers visible in the front seat, their foam coffee cups on the dashboard.

Inside the house, I was relieved to find that Mrs. Osborne was safe and had gone to bed, and that Janet and Dale were safe and still up; I wanted to recruit them for an expedition early the next morning to visit the three square miles of mountainside west of Edensburg where I was certain we would find Dan Osborne combing the woods for the $16 million worth of jewels, and where we could use our knowledge of Dan's aiding and abetting a felony to extract from him answers to questions about the sale of the Herald, Eric's murder, and Dan's hypersensitive stomach.

Janet and Dale, however, were not alone on the back porch. "Don, Timmy, I want you to meet Lee Ann Stasiowski," Janet said, and introduced us to the woman who had stuck her head in Janet's office door with a message from Dale the day before. Lee Ann was a tiny, hazel-eyed middle-aged woman with a gray-blond pixie cut, a reporter's notebook in one hand and a bottle of Sam Adams in the other. She was the Herald's reporter, Janet told us, who had once covered police and the courts and now wrote about business. Lee Ann had been reporting in recent months-in a circumspect way-on the Herald's own financial difficulties and impending sale to a chain.

"And now," Janet said, "it's time for Lee Ann to prepare a story on the latest developments in the situation-that is, attempts on the lives of pro-Griscomb family members and a developing connection between the sale of the paper and Eric's murder."

Lee Ann said, "I'm amazed to hear about all this wild stuff. Well, I'm amazed and I'm not so amazed."

This exercise in aggressive good journalism struck me as premature and maybe reckless. I said, "I don't know. Is this for Sunday's paper or Monday's?"

"It's for later," Janet said. "It'll run sometime next week, or the week after-whenever Lee Ann's got the entire story, including who's been arrested for murder and/or attempted murder."

"What I'm gathering right now," Lee Ann said, "is background, most of which I'm getting from Janet and Dale. I'm also-on Janet's excellent suggestion-using your involvement in the case, Don, as an excuse to grill Osborne family members on Eric's murder. I'm telling any Osborne I talk to that since a private detective is investigating them, I'm reporting on his activities as much as I am any possible family connection to Eric's death. That way they'can vent about you-and, believe me, they do, they do-and at the same time I can ask them, almost in passing, where they were on the morning Eric was murdered, and do they have an alibi, should they need one."

Dale said, "Cagey, huh?"

"Very clever," Timmy said. "Good for you, Janet."

"It was Dale's idea," Janet said. "Chester and June are both fuming, naturally. And Stu Torkildson called me a couple of hours ago and said he would never dream of interfering in the editorial side of the paper, and if he did, at least three Osbornes would be spinning in their graves. But wasn't it likely, Stu suggested in his oleaginous, vaguely threatening way, that Lee Ann's investigation at this point might spook Info-Com or Griscomb or any other potential buyer, and the family might get left in the lurch altogether?"

"Torkildson took that line with me too," I said. "What did you tell him?"

"That the news is the news," Janet said, "and the Herald reports the news. Stu didn't see it that way, but it's not my impression that when Lee Ann's story is set, Stu will hurl himself bodily into the presses to sabotage the run. That's not the way he operates."

"How does he operate?" I said.

"Legally. He's greedy and he's cunning, but Stu comes from a Glens

Falls family that's produced judges and brain surgeons and even some honest politicians, and his name and reputation mean as much to him as money does. So I don't think he'll interfere. But Stu will bear watching, of course," Janet said, and we all agreed solemnly with that.

I asked Lee Ann which Osbornes she had interviewed and what she had learned.

"I just got started around five this afternoon," she said, "so I've only seen three so far. June and Dick Puderbaugh had plenty of opinions- about the Herald's editorial page, about the paper's future ownership, and about you, Don-but nothing that sounded to me especially useful in the murder investigation. They both had alibis that could easily be checked out. Dick spent the morning, he said, in his office with his secretary and bookkeeper, as he does every weekday morning. And June was at the art museum with Parson and Evangeline Bates helping hang the canoes-at-sunrise show.

"I had trouble getting Chester to talk to me at all. I called his home, and he answered, and I described to him as best I could the story I was working on. But he kept interrupting and telling me how irresponsible it would be for me to be quoting slanderous statements from family members and from people he called 'outsiders.' My conversation with Chester was also confusing and hard to sort out because all the time Chester was talking, I could hear Pauline yelling at him and carrying on something awful in the background."

"What "was she yelling?" I asked. "Could you make it out?"

"Not much of it," Lee Ann said. "Sometimes she just seemed to be screaming uncontrollably. But I could decipher a word or sentence now and then. I caught, 'She's your fucking mother!' and something about 'fucking muddy feet!' And once I'm sure she yelled, 'I ought to get another gun and blow your fucking brains out!' My impression was, Pauline had had a few drinks."

I said, "Chester must have taken the gun she waved at me away from her. Which was a good idea. So you were only able to interview Chester on the phone?"

Lee Ann chugged from her beer bottle and said, "No, he actually agreed to meet me. He said his nephew was visiting and the television was on loud at his place-as if he lived in a studio apartment-so he said he'd meet me at nine at the Herald, which he did. He sounded real rattled, and I kept remembering all those stories about Chester's violent temper, which I've never seen. But he showed up on time, and we talked in the conference room after he shut the door with a do not disturb sign he wrote and taped on the outside."

"Who would the nephew be?" I asked Janet. She looked back at me blankly.

"My impression was that was just a line," Lee Ann said. "The 'noisy television' was Pauline hollering, and Chester wanted to get the hell out of there. And I think also that he wanted to get me alone, in the flesh, so he could make a lot of veiled and unveiled threats that would make me back off the story."

"Physical threats?" Timmy asked.

"No, just legal. But Chester can get himself worked up into a state. Everybody in town knows that. I was glad there were people right outside the door in the newsroom. Anyway, he gave me his whole Info-Com pitch-which we all know by heart by now-and next to nothing on the attacks on Janet and Dan, which he claims are either imagined or contrived. And as for Eric's murder, the very idea of family involvement is slanderous if spoken, Chester warned me, and libelous if the Herald prints it.

"The one possibly useful piece of information I got from Chester is this: He may not have an alibi for the time of the murder. He went into a three-alarm swivet when I asked him where he was on the morning of May fifteenth, and when I seemed to be calmly noting his hotheaded unresponsiveness, he made an effort to settle down, and he said, well, he was in his office. I asked him if I-or the police-could verify that with witnesses and appointment records, and then he totally lost it. He jumped up, and he was shaking and towering over me and yelling that I could just goddamn well accept his word for where he was if I valued my job. When I eased out of my chair and opened the door to the newsroom, Chester shoved his way past me and stormed out of the place. I really thought the next thing would be the sound of his Lexus doing a couple of donuts in the parking lot before he peeled out. But I guess that's not Chester's style. He just drove away normally."

I said, "All this is extremely helpful, Lee Ann. Who do you plan on interviewing next?"

"Tidy in the morning, if he'll talk to me, and-for the record-Dale and Skeeter McCaslin. I don't plan to be bound by conventional notions of family."

"Thank you, Lee Ann," Dale said. "I'll cooperate fully with your investigation."

"After that," Lee Ann said, "I'll talk to nonfamily peripheral people like Stu Torkildson and Parson Bates. I might also drive out to Attica and visit Craig Osborne. Janet filled me in on the jewel-robbery angle. It all sounds like a pretty wacky way to try to save the Herald. But the fourth generation of Osbornes produced some extremely wacky people, so-hey, why not?"

Janet asked me if Skeeter had been able to verify that in April Eric had spirited away his father's remains from the urn on Ruth Osborne's mantel, and I said Skeeter had. I told Janet, Dale, and Lee Ann that Skeeter, Eric, and the charter pilot had all remarked at the time on how glittery the falling ashes were, and I explained how Dan had later sought out the pilot wanting to learn where the ashes had settled to earth.

"So that must be where Dan is now!" Janet said. "Do you have the directions?"

I said I did and held up my map. "My guess is, he's out there sifting one more time through several square miles of wilderness that I'll bet he's combed a hundred times since April. He'd like to find the diamonds and make a last-ditch attempt to save the Herald for the Osbornes. And, I'm sure, Dan wants desperately to be able to tell Craig he recovered the jewels. He knows Craig is mad as hell and is starting to talk to people, foremost among them me."

"God," Janet said, "Dan is such a nitwit!"

"The robbery was bad enough," Dale said. "But you'd think he'd have had enough sense to stash the loot in a safe-deposit box."

We all speculated for some minutes on the practical, Freudian, and other reasons Dan might have had for mixing the stolen gems with his father's ashes in an urn on his mother's mantel.

We were about to make a plan for heading out to find Dan in the morning when headlights suddenly arched across the backyard and a car screeched to a halt in the driveway. The cop car must have pulled in directly behind the visitor, for three car doors slammed and then there were raised voices, one female.

While Timmy was reaching for his crutches, the rest of us moved fast. Dale barricaded herself at the foot of the stairs leading to the second floor, where Mrs. Osborne was sleeping, and Janet, Lee Ann, and

I trotted out into the muggy night and found the two Edensburg cops attempting to subdue Pauline Osborne. Chester's wife was unarmed, as far as we could see, but she was unsteady on her feet and flailing at the two cops physically and verbally.

"What the hell are you gorillas bothering me for, when it's my husband who's a criminal! You want to arrest a criminal, arrest Chester Osborne-Chester Osborne, the big murderer! Why don't you go up there and arrest him right now? I'll testify! I'll go to court! I'll swear on a stack of Bibles that the day Chester's brother Eric was murdered, Chester came home covered with leaves and mud!"

The two cops, both young, baby-faced, and portly, were listening to this recitation with obvious interest while at the same time making occasional perfunctory grabs for the tanned and braceleted arms Pauline was waving around. In peach-colored slacks and a white halter top, Pauline was elegantly put together and nicely limber. But her mascara and green eye shadow had run down over cheeks that were flushed from alcohol and excitement, and her face looked disconcertingly like a summer storm system moving across the radar screen on the Weather Channel.

"Pauline, why don't you come in for some coffee?" Janet said. Then, maybe realizing that this casual invitation sounded too inane for the occasion, she added, "Or you could come in and suck down another half bottle of whatever's got you skunked, and then sleep it off under the kitchen table. Either way, we should talk."

The cops had been barking out things like "Hey, missus! Hey-hey, missus!" and they seemed to know that they should be taking matters in hand-there were murder accusations and drunk driving at a minimum here-but they also had figured out that this raving woman was Mrs. Chester Osborne, and this fact also must have carried weight with them.

I said, "I think you officers can see that Mrs. Osborne would do well to get off the highway, and we'd be happy to keep her car keys overnight and make sure she's safe-"

"No! No!" Pauline snarled. "I will not get off the highway-I will not rest until somebody arrests Chester Osborne for murder! That man is a killer, and I'll bet your bottom dollar Tacker Puderbaugh was in on it too! They're in cahoots-why else would Tacker be up at our house? He's supposed to be out of the country on his surfboard. Chester was covered with mud the day Eric got killed, and Tacker was in on it! Hey, I'm for bringin' in the bucks But I draw the line at murdering nice people like Eric. Chester and Tacker Puderbaugh have to be arrested right now! I demand it! As a taxpayer, I demand that you arrest my husband, who's that goddamn big murderer Chester Osborne!"

It was at this point that the other Osborne shiny Lexus, the black one, cruised noiselessly into the driveway, and Chester got out and walked over to us. His posture wasn't up to standard, the sweat on his big Osborne face glistened, and in shirtsleeves and no tie he looked vulnerable and a little desperate.

Chester said to all of us, "I can just imagine what kind of b.s. my wife has been spreading down here, and I'm here to tell you, it's goddamn not true. Pauline is inebriated, I'm goddamn sorry to say, and she's confused in the head. My attorney, Morton Bond, is on his way over here now. I just got off the phone with him. And if you officers will get somebody over here from the DA's office"-Chester glared at his wife bitterly now-"I'm prepared to make a statement"

"A statement about what?" Janet said, her face darkening. "A statement about Eric's murder'"

"Hell, no," Chester said, "not about Eric's murder, goddamn it! Do you really think I'd kill my own brother, Janet, even if he was some fruitcake eco-Nazi! Jesus Christ, Janet! No, I'll make a statement about Tacker Puderbaugh, my idiotic nephew, who was supposed to-to just do a couple of mischievous things to scare you and Dan into possibly changing your vote on the sale of the paper. But I'm goddamn sorry to say that Tacker Puderbaugh is out of control. He went way too far tonight, and he tried to involve me in what he did tonight, and I'm here to tell you I did not-did not — give Tacker an okay on that."

"What did Tacker do?" Janet said.

Chester shook his head and said grimly, "He burned your house down, Janet. It was totally uncalled for."

That's when the phone began to ring inside the house. The distraction was brief, but it was just long enough for us to miss grabbing Pauline before she walked over to Chester and got him by the neck and began to scream and squeeze.