Betrayers

16

Everett Belasco was doing some repair work on his front stoop: down on one knee, a trowel in his right hand and a tray of wet cement beside him. As soon as he saw Helen Alvarez and me coming up his front walk, he put the trowel down and got slowly to his feet.

He looked at me, at Mrs. Alvarez, back at me. “Back again so soon? How come?”

“I’ve been out talking to Charley Doyle,” I said.

“Doyle? Why?”

“I caught him in a lie. About Mrs. Abbott’s alleged ghost.”

“You mean what happened last night? You don’t think Charley-?”

“No, he wasn’t the man in the sheet. But he knew of her fancy about her dead husband’s ghost when I questioned him two days ago. She only had the notion Monday night, and he hadn’t talked to her since he fixed her broken window. Somebody else had to tell him about it.”

“Who? Helen?”

“No, not me,” she said. I hadn’t told her why we were going to see Belasco-I wanted her along as a witness-but she was smart, a lot smarter than Doyle. Or Belasco, for that matter. From the hostile look she was directing at him, she’d already put two and two together. “I wouldn’t give that idiot the time of day.”

I said, “Only one other person besides Mrs. Alvarez and me knew. You, Belasco. She mentioned it when we saw you in your garden Tuesday afternoon.”

“Me? What about Leonard?”

“I didn’t tell him until this morning,” Mrs. Alvarez said, “after that sheet nonsense. Or anyone else. Only you.”

“And you think I told Charley Doyle? Why would I? I haven’t seen or talked to him in weeks.”

I said, “When I got here this morning, you were on Mrs. Abbott’s porch. Did you go inside the house?”

The sudden shift in questions bewildered Belasco. “Why do you want to know that?”

“Just answer the question. Were you inside her house this morning?”

Mrs. Alvarez answered it for him. “No, he wasn’t. Not while I was here.”

“Wasn’t any reason for me to go in,” he said.

“The last time you were in there was when?”

“I don’t remember exactly.”

“More than a few days?”

“A lot longer than that.”

“Do you own a cat?”

“A cat?” Now I really had him off balance. “What’s a cat got to do with anything?”

“Oh, quite a bit. You don’t own one, do you?”

“No. I don’t like cats.”

“Are you left-handed, Mr. Belasco?”

“… What?

“You heard me. Left-handed.”

“No. Right-handed. What the hell-?”

“That bandage on your right hand. This morning you said you cut yourself slicing bacon.”

“That’s right. So what?”

“When you’re doing something like that and the knife slips, the cut is almost always on the other hand, the one you’re holding the bacon with. Since when does a right-handed man slice a slab of bacon with the knife in his left hand?”

Belasco was sweating now, in spite of the cold. “So maybe I’m ambidextrous. What’re you trying to imply?”

“I’m not implying anything. I’m saying that what’s under that bandage isn’t a knife cut; it’s a bite.” I held out my hand, palm down, so he had a clear look at the shallow iodine-daubed punctures on the webbing between thumb and forefinger. “A cat bite, just like this one.”

“No, no, you’re wrong-”

“Take off the bandage and prove it to us.”

“No!”

“Doesn’t matter, I don’t need to see it to know it’s a fresh bite, not more than twelve hours old. From the same cat that bit me-Mrs. Abbott’s Spike.”

Belasco shook his head mutely.

“Spike is an indoor cat, never allowed outside. And he likes to nip strangers when they aren’t expecting it. Somebody comes into his house in the middle of the night, he goes to investigate; and if the somebody doesn’t like cats, he senses it and does more than just nip the intruder’s hand-he gives it a good chomp. Mrs. Abbott was woken up by Spike yowling and she thought it was because the intruder stepped on him. But the real reason he yowled so loud was you swatting or kicking him after he bit you.”

“A poor defenseless animal,” Mrs. Alvarez said. “You ought to be kicked yourself, Ev Belasco, in a place that’ll do the most damage.”

He ignored her. “Even if I was bitten by a cat, you can’t prove it was Spike. A neighborhood stray-”

“Spike,” I said, “and the police lab can prove it. Test the bites on my hand and yours, match them to Spike’s teeth and saliva. Cat DNA doesn’t lie any more than human DNA does.”

Belasco shook his head again, but not in denial. He knew he was caught; he’d have to be an idiot like Charley Doyle not to know it.

“You’re not only the man in the sheet last night,” I said. “You’re the one who’s been harassing Mrs. Abbott all along. You live right here next door. Easiest thing in the world for you to slip over onto her property in the middle of the night. Hardly any risk at all.”

Belasco said, “What reason would I have for hassling an old lady like Margaret?”

“The obvious one-money. A cut of the proceeds from the sale of her property after she was dead or declared incompetent.”

“That don’t make sense. I’m not a relative of hers-”

“No, but Doyle is,” I said. “And you and Charley are buddies, play poker together regularly, have a few private drinks together. He’s not very bright and just as greedy as you are. Your brainchild, wasn’t it, Belasco? Inspired by that auction fiasco. ‘Hey, Charley, why wait until your aunt dies of natural causes-that might take years. Suppose we give her a heart attack, or drive her into an institution… either way you get immediate control of her property, then sell it to the Pattersons or some other real estate speculator for a nice fat profit. And I earn my cut by doing all the dirty work while you work up alibis to keep yourself in the clear.’ ”

“Bastard!” Mrs. Alvarez said fiercely. “Dirty swine!”

A trapped look had come into Belasco’s eyes. He stood poised and rigid now, massaging his bandaged hand with the other, as if he were thinking of breaking into a blind run. I hoped he would; I wouldn’t have minded popping him for Margaret Abbott’s sake.

But he didn’t do it. After a few seconds he went all loose and saggy, as if somebody had cut his strings. He took a stumbling step backward, tripped over the lowest of the stairs, and sat down jarringly on the next one above. Then he put his head in his hands.

“I never done anything wrong before in my life,” he said. “Never. But the bills been piling up, it’s so goddamn hard to live these days, and they been talking about laying people off where I work and I was afraid I’d lose my house… ah, God, I don’t know. I don’t know.”

Derisive snort from Helen Alvarez. Nothing from me. I’d heard that kind of self-pitying, self-justifying explanation for criminal behavior too many times before.

Belasco lifted his head, aimed a moist, beseeching look at my client. “I never meant for Margaret to die, Helen. You got to believe that. Just force her out of there so Charley could take over the house, that’s all. I like her, she’s been a good neighbor. I never meant to hurt her.”

Mrs. Alvarez wasn’t buying any of that. She called him a couple more names, one of which surprised me and made him cringe. He hid his face in his hands again.

Another small mind at work. Half-wits and knaves, fools and assholes-more of each than ever before, proliferating like weeds in what had started out as a pristine garden. It’s a hell of a world we live in, I thought. A hell of a mess we’re making of the garden.

Helen Alvarez and I left Belasco sitting there on his stoop-he wasn’t going anywhere; he had no place to go and he knew it-and went in to gently break the news to Margaret Abbott. I thought it might be a difficult job, that she’d be shocked and upset hearing that her nephew and a longtime neighbor had both betrayed her trust, but she took it better than I’d expected. I guess maybe you get philosophical about most things, even the evils in the world, when you’re eighty-five. Mrs. Alvarez had been and still was considerably more outraged than Mrs. Abbott.

While we were talking, Spike came into the room and hopped up on Mrs. Abbott’s lap. She said, stroking him, “You’re a hero, dear. Yes, you are.” Then she sighed and asked me, “Will both Charley and Everett go to prison?”

“If you press charges against them, they’ll probably get some jail time.”

“For how long?”

“Breaking and entering, trespassing, malicious destruction of property, intent to defraud, intent to inflict bodily harm… with a strict judge, they could each get three years or more.”

“Oh. That seems like a long time.”

“Not long enough, if you ask me,” Helen Alvarez said. “Not nearly long enough.”

“Do I have to press charges against them?”

The question surprised Mrs. Alvarez. She said, “Of course you do, Margaret. After what they put you through? How could you not press charges?”

“I don’t know. Three years behind bars…”

“Margaret, listen to me; you can’t just let them walk away from this. What if they try something like it again? They could, you know. They’re just stupid and venal enough, both of them.”

“I suppose you’re right. But still…”

My cell phone, with its burbling ringtone, interrupted the discussion. Inconvenient as usual, but at least this time I wasn’t in the car driving.

Tamara. “I’ve got that name you asked for this morning. Z.U. at Whitney Middle School.”

“Hold on a minute.” I excused myself, went out onto the front porch. “Okay, go ahead.”

“Zachary Ullman. He’s the only Z.U. at the school.”

“What’s his record like?”

“Clean,” she said. “Never been in trouble. Not even so much as a parking ticket.”

“Parking ticket? A middle school student can’t be old enough to drive.”

“He’s not a student. Is that what you thought?”

“What is he, then?”

“He’s a teacher,” Tamara said. “History and social studies. Been at Whitney eleven years.”

My God. The tin box, the cocaine… one of Emily’s teachers!