Bella’s statement was like a detailed roadmap of the entire conspiracy. She literally knew where the body was buried. In this case, Evan Updike’s. Jesse put in a call to the New York State Police and gave them a location near Saratoga Springs where they might find the buried remains of a white male, approximately thirty-five years of age, and five feet eight inches tall. Three hours later Jesse got a call back. The trooper on the other end said, “He’s there, Chief Stone, right where you said he’d be.”
Bella only fudged one part of her statement, but Jesse expected that she would. People have a hard time implicating themselves in murder. According to her, it had been Roscoe’s idea to kill Bascom and to keep the money. “I attempted several times to talk him out of it and thought I had convinced him not to do it. Only after he went through with it and took the money did he call me to tell me what he had done. I told him I wanted nothing to do with him after that.” Jesse had read that section of her statement aloud to make certain Roscoe Niles got an earful.
Stan White was sitting alone by the pool, a bottle of vodka at his side and a .38 Smith & Wesson in his lap. When he heard Jesse’s footsteps, he raised the .38 and pressed the muzzle into the bag of flesh that hung beneath his jaw.
“I’ve been expecting you, Jesse,” White said.
“I can see that. Can we talk?”
“Sure, as long as you don’t come any closer to me than right there, we can talk until the cows come home or until The Hangman’s Sonnet comes out on iTunes.” White laughed, but tears rolled down his cheeks. “They say you can’t laugh and cry at the same time. Shows you what ‘they’ know, huh?”
“I’ve never been a big fan of ‘they’ myself.”
“I knew it was going to shit when I couldn’t get hold of anybody today. It’s horrible to be alone in the world. That’s why I did all this, to stop Terry from being alone. I could have just abandoned him to the state a long time ago, but I owed everything I ever had to Terry. I couldn’t abandon him.”
“Tell me about it.”
Stan laughed a joyless laugh. “We really meant to make the album. We really did, but Terry had a complete breakdown before we got started. Meanwhile, the label had already paid us an enormous advance. So I tried stringing it out until Terry got better, but he never got better.” White grabbed the bottle with his free hand and took a slug. As he did, Jesse inched closer. “Where was I? Oh, so I thought up a scheme to keep the money.”
“You created the myth of the album, leaked the names of the musicians who played on the recording, and then faked the theft of the master tape.”
“Just like that, Jesse. Exactly. But I created two monsters: the myth itself and—”
“Evan Updike.”
“That blackmailing little bastard. I needed someone who could give credibility to the myth other than me. He came cheap at first. Ten grand. That was nothing to me and Terry back then. But as the myth grew, Updike kept coming back for more and more, threatening to expose the truth. I couldn’t afford that because the myth had taken on a life of its own. The myth became the engine behind Terry’s sales. Every few years I would get the rumors going again and Terry’s sales would spike.”
“But you killed Updike.”
“With my bare hands,” White said, voice full of pride. “I strangled the life out of that weasel as soon as the lawsuits were settled. Otherwise, he would have kept soaking us. Terry’s care cost so much money.”
“But why this? Why now?” Jesse asked. “That’s the one thing Roscoe and Bella couldn’t tell me.”
“Because I got word Terry’s going to be dead in a few months. Leukemia.” White’s tears were flowing again. “I needed to finally cash out and use the myth one last time to do it.”
“How’d you get Bascom on board?”
White laughed. “He was easy. He had gambling debts up the wazoo. He’d already blown most of his pension. And who can say no to Bella besides you? Bascom knew all the wrong people, which is what I needed. I planted the safety-deposit box key in the old lady’s house a few months ago under the guise of a prospective buyer. It was my mother’s key. She kept it like that, taped to an index card. Then I needed someone to discover the key and get the whole thing going. Bascom hired those two idiots. We didn’t figure on the old lady dying. I’m sorry about that and the delivery guy.”
“Too late for sorrow now, Stan. And killing Curnutt?”
White shrugged. “He became like another Updike. Once he figured out what was going on, he wanted a lot of money. We didn’t have it. We had used almost every dime we had to set it all up, so what choice did we have? Besides, it gave us an opportunity to get the press involved. That was smart of you, Jesse, trying to force our hand by keeping the press starved for facts. We didn’t count on you being so sharp. Roscoe said you were a drunk and lost after your fiancée’s... you know.”
“He was right, Stan.”
“So where does this leave us, Jesse?” White took another big pull on the vodka bottle. Jesse edged a little closer. “I don’t suppose there’s any wiggle room for me here.”
“Not an inch.”
Jesse had hoped that might cause White to go for the vodka bottle again, but instead he went for the .38. Not even Ozzie Smith in his prime could have made up the distance between them and prevented Stan White from beating Terry Jester into the next life.