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CHAPTER 39
April 8 - May 28, 1979
At ten the next morning, Pryce called into the station. Laura put the phone to her shoulder and shouted, “Special Agent Pryce calling you Dean.”
Dean nodded and waved to have her transfer him to the line. They spoke briefly as they had arranged, with Dean saying “Yeah,” “Uh-huh,” and “Thank you.” He hung up the phone and walked to Guthrie’s desk, who looked up from the typewriter, tapped his cigarette in the brown-glass ashtray. “So?”
“They’ve got all the evidence processing now. The guns will be the quickest, but even they’ll be a couple of weeks at best. Sam’ll be cooperative, but nothing’s going to happen until all the evidence is sewn up tight. The good news is they’ve arrested him for drug possession and distribution, so he’ll be waiting in jail.”
Guthrie grabbed his cigarette and inhaled deeply. Through the smoke coming out of his mouth, he said, “Why not just test the M16 first? That’s the gun.”
Ballsy fucker, thought Dean. He shrugged. “I don’t know. Being thorough I guess. Hell, they’re the Feds. They’ve got plenty of money for tests. Maybe they don’t believe me that it was an M16. Or they want to see if they get any hits on the other guns.”
“Sure.”
“Look, we spent yesterday calling hospitals. Let’s hit a few today and flash Billy’s picture around. See if anyone recognizes him. And did you call George Littlefield?”
“I did. He moved to Boston in November. Hasn’t been back since.”
“He provide alibis to prove he was in Boston the night Billy walked into those woods?”
Guthrie nodded and handed the handwritten list with phone numbers to Dean, who handed them to Zach and asked if he could call the numbers and verify Littlefield’s alibi.
Dean—acting his very best as if nothing was different and wishing he had participated in the high school drama club—and Guthrie drove south to Plattsburgh and traced threads of possible return routes to Zion, pausing at the hospitals, and speaking to emergency room staff. They left their cards and photos of Billy with every hospital, asking that if anyone recognized him to call the Zion PD. Then they would see what came about.
Over cheeseburgers and fries at a place in West Chazy, Guthrie expounded on his theories of the Nimitz murder. To avoid talking, Dean let him. Guthrie liked the upset girlfriend or jealous Alex line of reasoning. Sarah Esposito was angry that Billy could not buy her everything she wanted—even though she seemed to get everything she wanted. They argued. She shot him.
Guthrie’s other theory was that Alex Smith was jealous. All the talk about Alex and Billy having a falling out was true and it was around Sarah. They knew it. Alex and Sarah had slept together. Two boys liked one girl. One boy shot the other.
What troubled Dean about those two theories had remained unchanged. The money in the closet. To him, that was the central fact of importance in the case. Unless the theory of the crime could explain that money, the theory had too big of a hole. He could dismiss The Communist Manifesto except for the new information from Billy’s cousin, Tim. Was the murder of Billy politically motivated? But the cash?
For the first time, Dean wondered if Billy’s murder would go unsolved. It would not be the first time in his career. Several of his old NYPD homicides were still open. Straight up whodunits with evidence but no person to tie it to. In 1977, his last year working in New York, there had been almost two thousand murders, leaving several hundred open cases. But the idea of having this single homicide remain open was a devastating thought. He could not untangle whether he felt this way because he was less drunk than he had been in New York, because Zion had so few murders compared to the much larger city south of them, or if age and remembering Stitch and the open question of who killed him—knowing that it will never be solved.
They paid and continued their path back to Zion, leaving photos and cards and questions behind. Once back in Zion, they waited.
* * *
The Pratts celebrated every Memorial Day as if it were the biggest holiday of the year. In reality, they believed too much in the sanctity of Christmas and Easter to treat them other than the religious observances they had once started out being. Memorial Day, however, was the start of summer and deserved a grand party of a kick off. This year, Cindy, Jenny, and Spencer drove up to the Pratt farm to spend the weekend, have a cookout, and do some fishing in the stream that ran through their property.
Cindy called a week ahead and invited Dean, who was shocked. He knew he would be keeping Jenny for the week, but being invited to the cookout was unexpected. When she recommended he bring his mother and father along, he was flabbergasted. For the entire week, he contemplated if he should expect some major news. Cindy had sounded normal, but it had been years since she had asked him—let alone his parents—to do anything social with her or her family.
Eric drove them to the farm in the late afternoon. As the chief was fond of reminding everyone, summer officially would begin a few weeks later in June. As if acceding to his technical demands, the air was pleasant, still spring. But the sky was clear and that soft blue associated with delightful photos featuring the sky. Wayne Pratt had the grill already cranking at the front of the house on the lawn under the big oak tree, whose leaves had yet to reach full maturity for the season.
Smoke poured out the grill’s vents. The smell of charcoal and hickory wafting over the yard. Two picnic tables covered with red-and-white checkered tablecloths, one of which was piled with paper plates, utensils, and baskets of breads, fruits, vegetables, bags of potato chips and pretzels, and containers of potato and macaroni salads. A blue ten-gallon cooler sat next to the table, full of ice and soda and beer.
As Dean stepped out of the car, Jenny ran up to him, screaming “Daddy,” and they hugged. The jeans that had touched the tops of her ankles in January were now capris. She hugged her grandparents and then grabbed Dean’s hand and dragged him to play a game of yard darts. The badminton net and croquet field were set up for later that day.
Spencer and Wayne worked the grill. The former, dressed in dark blue jeans and a long-sleeved yellow button up shirt, leaning in and pointing and nodding to the latter’s queries. Dot hung nearby, panting and looking between the spatula in Wayne’s hand and the grill. The Pratt boys played basketball in the driveway while Cindy, Dean’s parents, and Eileen sat on lawn chairs, each with a can of Budweiser in their hands or on the ground beside them.
After three games of yard darts, Jenny ran off to play with the boys, and Dean walked up to the grill. Spencer nodded his hello, and Wayne asked him how he thought the burgers looked. Dean looked down. They looked too crisp for his taste, but he said they looked delicious.
Spencer stepped away from the grill when Dean did and walked alongside him toward Dean’s parents and Cindy. Spencer put his hand on Dean’s lower arm and stopped. “She’s really growing up, isn’t she?”
Dean looked at his daughter defending Cole, who towered over her. But she had, indeed, grown and was growing up. “She is.”
“This is probably the last year she’ll be able to spend weeks with you up here, so far from home.”
Dean looked down, stuffed his hands in his pockets, and toed the grass with his shoe. And thus the reason for the invitation, with parents as a stand-by to keep him calm.
“Cindy didn’t want to tell you, but with Jenny’s friends and stuff, she’s spending more and more time with them. Next year, she probably won’t want to spend time with any adults.” A thin smile crept across Spencer’s face.
Dean nodded slowly. “Maybe. Maybe. Eventually for certain. I figure when Jenny doesn’t want to visit, she’ll let me know.”
“Well, she might not. That’s why I’m alerting you.”
“I see. Well, thanks for the public service announcement.”
Spencer patted Dean’s shoulder. “Ah, don’t take it like that. Just prepping you for the future.”
“Sure. Sure.” Desperate to change the subject, Dean said, “So you been up here all weekend?”
Spencer started walking toward the cooler. “Not all, no. Came up on Saturday afternoon. We’ll leave tomorrow morning. Took the day off from the office.”
After all these years, Dean still could not remember what Spencer did for a living. Something that paid well he knew. He thought about asking, but he did not care enough to ask, so he walked past him, opened the cooler, pulled out two Budweisers, and gave one to Spencer. They both raised the can and saluted it in the air.
Dean ate a hot dog and burger, which ended up tasting better than their appearance might have suggested, and a substantial volume of mustard potato salad and carrots. The adults played croquet. Eric mastered the field the quickest and won handily, which true to form he gloated over the other players. Then the kids took on the adults in a badminton tournament. Mike, the middle Pratt boy, won in the end, beating Cindy in a sibling duel.
The kids returned to the basketball goal and the adults to their chairs and beer. Somewhere along the way, Wayne had started a fire in the fire pit, which they huddled around. Fireflies blinked away along the edge of the woods. The crackle of wood in the fire, the sound of the basketball hitting the pavement or the goal, and occasional cheers or claps from the kids wafted in and out of the conversation. The evening transitioned to night without any particular notice. During one of Spencer’s trips to the house’s bathroom, Cindy caught Dean’s eye and gestured with a head nod to the darkness and woods away from the house—a gesture Dean understood immediately to be a request for him to walk with her.
They strolled in silence across the grassy hill to the edge of the woods. She wore tight blue jeans and a button-up blouse that hugged her figure. He wondered how she had been able to keep so trim while the rest of the world aged around her. She showed her years only at the edges of her eyes. As their vision adjusted to the darkness, the edges of the leaves caught what little moonlight there was. Dean slapped a mosquito biting into the back of his neck, breaking the silence.
Cindy slipped her hands into her pockets. “I wanted to talk to you about Jenny.”
“I think Spencer already did.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, something about her not wanting to be around adults much longer and probably not wanting to visit me so much anymore.”
“Yeah, that’s the gist. I just wanted to prepare you. To let you know, it’s not about not wanting to visit you. It’s about wanting to be with her friends.”
Dean smiled though Cindy did not see it in the darkness. “I know that. We were kids one time a long time ago.”
“Ass.” Cindy laughed. “Not that long ago.”
But to Dean it felt like lifetimes. They walked in silence along the very edge of the woods. Cindy reached out her hand and grabbed the leaves.
“Look,” said Dean, “I get it with Jenny. But over the past few months, I’ve realized—well—I always realized I think but not like now. So—”
“Spit it out,” said Cindy in a kind tone that Dean long ago understood to be her form of encouragement.
“Well, I’m sorry about what happened to us. I’m sorry I couldn’t give you the life you wanted.”
The pause was so long, Dean wondered if she was going to ignore him. She said, “You don’t have to apologize. I don’t know what happened over there—not really. But I do know it changed you. Changed us in ways we can’t and won’t understand. In ways we couldn’t have predicted. How could it not? You needed a better wife.” He was going to interject, but she raised her hand. “Hold on. And I needed a different husband. At that time. We were both so young. We didn’t know what to do. I just wanted a corner of life. I wasn’t ambitious. Just a space, a place to call mine.”
Dean hesitated in saying anything, fearing he would cut her off. So he waited and when it was clear she was not going to say anything more, he said, “I’m glad you found that space.”
She stopped and looked at him. Fireflies flashed behind her. One landed on her shoulder. “Oh Dean.” She stepped up and embraced him. “I’m sorry I wasn’t able to help you. I’m so sorry.”
“Forgive me.”
“I forgive us.”
He returned her embrace and cried for the first time in a long time.
