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By Root 808 0

’t,” I said. “I tried to get him to, but he didn’t give you up. But let me see if I can guess how the rest of this goes. One night, Clayton and Patricia and Todd, they disappear off the face of the earth, nobody knows what happened to them, not even you. Then one day, a year later, maybe a few years later, you get a call. It’s Clayton. Quid pro quo time. He covered up for you, for killing Connie Gormley, now he wanted you to do something for him. Be a courier, basically. Deliver money. He’d send it to you, maybe to a postal box or something. And then you’d slip it to Tess, drop it in her car, hide it in her newspaper, whatever.”

Rolly stared at me.

“Yeah,” he said. “That’s more or less what happened.”

“And then, like an idiot,” I said, “I told you what Tess had revealed to me. When we had lunch. About getting the money. About how she still had the envelopes and the letter, the one warning her never to try to find out where the money came from, to never tell anyone about it. How, after all these years, she’d saved them.”

Now Rolly had nothing to say.

I came at him from another direction. “Do you think a man who was prepared to murder two people to please his mother would lie to her about whether he’d ever killed anyone before?”

“What? What the hell are you talking about?”

“I’m kind of thinking out loud here. I don’t think he would. I think a man who was about to kill for his mother, I don’t think he’d mind admitting to her if he’d already killed before.” I paused. “And the thing is, up until the moment the man said it, I was convinced that he’d already killed two people.”

“I have no idea what you’re driving at,” Rolly said.

“I’m talking about Jeremy Sloan. Clayton’s son, from the other marriage, with the other woman, Enid. But I suspect you know about them. Clayton would have probably explained it when he started sending you money to deliver to Tess. I figured Jeremy had killed Tess. And I figured he’d killed Abagnall. But now, I’m not so sure about that anymore.”

Rolly swallowed.

“Did you go see Tess after I told you what she had told me?” I asked. “Were you afraid that maybe she’d figured it out? Were you worried that maybe the letter she still had, the envelopes, that maybe they might still carry some forensic evidence linking them to you? And that if that happened, then you’d be linked to Clayton, and he wouldn’t be obliged to keep your secret any longer?”

“I didn’t want to kill her,” Rolly said.

“You did a pretty good job of it, though,” I said.

“But I thought she was dying anyway. It wasn’t like I’d be stealing that much time from her. And then, later, after I’d done it, you told me about the new tests. About how she wasn’t dying after all.”

“Rolly…”

“She’d given the letter and the envelopes to the detective,” he said.

“And you took his business card from the bulletin board,” I said.

“I called him, arranged a meeting, in the parking garage.”

“You killed him and took his briefcase with the papers inside,” I said.

Rolly cocked his head a bit to the left. “What do you think? Do you think my fingerprints would still have been on those envelopes after all these years? Saliva traces, maybe, when I sealed them?”

I shrugged. “Who knows,” I said. “I’m just an English teacher.”

“I got rid of them just the same,” Rolly said.

I looked down at the floor. I wasn’t just in pain. I felt a tremendous sadness. “Rolly,” I said, “you’ve been such a good friend for so many years. I don’t know, maybe even I’d be willing to keep my mouth shut about a horrible lapse in judgment more than twenty-five years ago. You probably never meant to kill Connie Gormley, it was just one of those things. It’d be hard to live with, covering that up for you, but for a friend, maybe.”

He eyed me warily.

“But Tess. You killed my wife’s aunt. Wonderful, sweet Tess. And you didn’t stop with her. There’s no way I can let that go.”

He reached into the pocket of the long coat and pulled out a gun. I wondered if it could be the one he’d found in the schoolyard, among the beer bottles and crack pipes.

“For crying out loud, Rolly.”

“Go upstairs,