“Alas, I do.”
“And your dearest hope doesn’t jibe with you putting my card in Carrie Dell’s purse. If Don hadn’t found it, I would be in Florence right now waiting for the drop.”
“Oh, I knew he’d rescue you. The discovery was meant to put you on the trail, and you would find the things that might incriminate me. Which you did and were kind enough to leave on the top of your desk so I could dispose of them.”
“Why
not investigate it yourself?”
“Oh, too risky. The girls knew me, and it wouldn’t do for me to go poking around at the college.”
“Her father and Zoogie Boogie?”
“I had to get what they knew. If they knew my name.”
“And Jack Hunter in prison?”
“I was lucky enough to intercept that note he sent you at headquarters. I don’t know what he wanted to tell you. But why take the chance? I sent word to a stoolie at Florence who owed me.”
“You murdered four people. It’s hard to believe.”
“It’s easier to get sucked in and keep killing than I ever realized. First, I had to kill my Baby Girl. That was the hardest. Afterward, covering my tracks was paramount and the killing was easier. Old man Dell, Zoogie, they saw me, knew my face and name. At the least, I’d lose my job and family. At the worst, I’d swing.”
“Big Cat.”
“That’s what she called me.”
“But why kill her and do it that way?”
When he silently smoked, I made a try.
“I think you were her protector and then her lover. Older man, young woman, however confident you are, you can’t believe how lucky you were to have this goddess in your bed. With the powerful people involved with Summer Tours, you had blackmail material to make you a very wealthy man. But she had the power, and you didn’t like it. She bent men to her will. You felt emasculated and yet you couldn’t stop wanting her. She was the itch you couldn’t scratch. It was a fun summer, but then she was ready to move on. And you couldn’t have that. She made threats. You sure as hell couldn’t have those. The breaking point was when she told you she was pregnant.”
“Keep going.”
“Then you killed her with the blackjack. Maybe you didn’t even mean to do it. Maybe she hit you first and you hit back, hard. Then your blood was up. You couldn’t leave it at that, drop her body in an abandoned mine in the desert. More than your blood was up. Real evil took over. You’d seen so many ways people kill each other. And it got to you, taught you. You dismembered her, dressed her in the fine clothes she favored, displayed her just inside the city limits. After you calmed down, you hoped it would either be written off as a train suicide or brushed under the rug because the city didn’t want another sensational crime. Another lust murder, like the University Park Strangler. As the final backup, you put my card in her purse and set it against the tree, in case the cops didn’t pursue the killing as a homicide, which they didn’t. That way I’d blaze the trail so you could do some cleaning up.”
He sighed. “You turned into a hell of a detective.”
“And now I have your prints.”
After a long silence punctuated by the locomotive whistling ahead, the familiar brogue resumed. “I never figured you’d get that far, lad. But you did, and so you might say this rendezvous between the two of us was inevitable.”
Muldoon pointed at a vast shimmering body of water off to the west. “That’s the Salton Sea. Sits below sea level. Happened by accident, you know, when a canal broke and the Colorado River poured water in here for two years. It was never meant to happen. But there it is. Surprising but inevitable.”
“Here’s the piece I don’t understand, Turk. The gold pocket watch. How did that end up at an Okie camp east of town?”
“Baby Girl gave it to me as a gift in better times. Later… Well, I knew it was too risky to keep it, so I gave it to a drifter. He looked like he could use some luck, move out of town, and nobody would ever find the watch.”
“But I did find it. You taught me well, Liam.”
He tossed the nail over the observation car’s three-foot-high brass railing and it flew out into the night like a red comet. “I miss those good times, lad, the ones with you and me. Catching the strangler. I’d admit to feeling a bit jealous of what a smart and capable detective you’d turned out to be, and so quickly.”
“But why would you kill your child?”
“She wasn’t pregnant. That was a ruse to manipulate me.”
“She was pregnant. Don had a postmortem carried out.” I took a risk and continued. “She made her lovers use rubbers, but you refused. Only you could have been the father.”