Shakespeare's Counselor

Page 26

"And?" If I didn't try to say too much, it came out okay. My legs were slowly feeling a little more functional. Cliff was moving a little more. She'd bound his hands in front, which wasn't too competent. He was picking at the duct tape across his mouth.
"We moved once, in the Cleveland area, after I found a snake nailed to the door. Moving didn't help. Then, as I've come to realize these past few days, Cliff stretched his fun out a little too long. Charles, my patient, died in a bar fight. Cliff had to stop. Of course, I didn't put two and two together then." Her face became blank, her eyes opaque. "I really thought Cliff suggested this move to Shakespeare because he was concerned about me. He gave up his business and everything to move south with me, and I believed we would be happy here. I didn't put Charles's death together with the end of the persecution, the end of the horrible messages on the answering machine. But Cliff told me just a few minutes ago that the police up there did make the connection, did mention - to Cliff - the possibility of my stalker being Charles. They would've wondered if the calls had kept coming. So here we are, and we get settled, and I think everything is going so good, and I start getting the calls again. The house is entered. There's... poop... smeared on the door."
Cliff had succeeded in ungagging himself. "Lily," he said in a weak voice, "don't let her kill me."
I didn't even glance at him. "Yeah?" I said to Tamsin, to encourage her to talk. The longer she talked, the more time I had to recover.
"So we decided the police had been wrong. That someone else had followed me down here. It still didn't occur to me to suspect the most obvious person." She shook her head at her own naiveté. "We figured - that is, I figured, and Cliff pretended to - that since the calls only came when Cliff was gone, that meant the guy was watching me, knew when I was alone. That made it more scary. Notes slid under the door, notes in my clothes - oh, God!" She shuddered and wept.
My sympathy would have been deeper if I hadn't been sitting there in wet pants.
"Lily," Cliff said, "I didn't do those things. I love my wife... even though she planted the stake in the step for me to get hurt on. If you'll just let me go, we can work this out." He was plucking awkwardly at the duct tape around his wrists, but that was going to be much harder.
I said, "Tamsin, why'd you call me here?"
"Because you can kill him."
I shook my head.
"You can kill him," she repeated persuasively. "You killed a man before. This one deserves it, too. Think of what he's done to me. He shouldn't live!" Her face grew crafty. "What if he gets off and does this to someone else? I know from our therapy group that you have a sense of justice."
Unhampered by the rules of law, she meant.
"You could kill him for me. We'd all be safer."
She had condensed Cliff into every man who'd hurt a woman.
"Please do this for me! My mind is too fragile, too delicate, to sustain killing him." She made it sound like her mind was made out of old lace. "I just don't have the guts, the determination. I need you to do this favor for another woman." The empty hand touched her chest. "Help your sister out."
"You - stunned me."
"I was afraid you'd run away before I could talk to you if I didn't do something," she told me, and her voice was so reasonable that I winced. "I know you, from the group. You wouldn't sit and listen to me unless I made you. Would you? Just think about it, Lily. You have to understand this. I loved him more than anyone else in the world. He took everything away from me. I think he did something to make me lose the baby. I don't believe in anything any more."
And she should have made him unconscious, because he was eyeing me frantically, shaking his head to deny what she was telling me. "Lily, Tamsin has just lost her mind. Don't cater to her when she's clearly off her rocker. I love my wife, and I've done everything I can to help her through this. Please don't let her do something worse than this." I noticed he was making progress on loosening the duct tape binding his wrists. It was difficult, but he was managing. The next time I wanted to secure someone, I wouldn't call Tamsin to do the securing.
Tamsin went on enumerating her wrongs. Since I was still too weak to move, I had plenty of time to think. I thought it was pretty lucky their baby hadn't been born, whatever had caused the miscarriage. What if what Tamsin was telling me wasn't true? She was deeply disturbed. She might be mistaken, and she might just be a liar. What if she just wanted an excuse to kill Cliff, with a reasonable chance of an acquittal, or at the most a light sentence? Pretending he'd confessed his long persecution of her, pretending he'd told her he'd killed Saralynn and Gerry McClanahan, would provide an excellent story to tell a jury.
Especially with a witness like me.
She could have no serious hope that I would take the bait and do Cliff in, but she could provide a good case for herself if I was there to witness her frenzy and her anguish, even if she had to immobilize me to make me watch it. I was pretty sure Tamsin was not quite as crazy as she was making out; I was pretty sure she was making a case for temporary insanity.
But I wasn't completely sure.
The only certainty I had was that I hated Tamsin, my counselor, who was twisting what she'd extracted from our therapy sessions to serve her own ends: my disregard for the letter of the law, my strong sense of justice. She'd ignored other things about me that were just as important, like my absolute and total hatred of people who made me feel helpless, my loathing of being physically unclean, and my dislike of being bested.
"What happened in your office when Saralynn was killed?" I asked. My speech was better, too.
"I swear to God, exactly what I told the police," Tamsin said.
"You knew I was there," Cliff said, his voice ragged. "You knew someone was killing Saralynn. And you hid. I wondered the whole time, does she even care enough to come out? If she'll come out, if she'll be brave, I won't finish... and she yelled for you, Tamsin. You heard her. And you stayed shut in that conference room, doing nothing."
"Lily, he's trying to take you in just like he took me!" She was all but wailing, rocking back and forth, the stun gun still in her hand.
"You knew she was being killed," Cliff repeated, "and you knew it was me."
Tamsin was breathing like she'd been running, and she was pale and sweating.
"I hear what you're saying," I said, unable to stop myself from registering that Tamsin wasn't the only one who had had a sad disillusionment here.
I was feeling stronger by the minute. I was going to take that stun gun away from her if I had to beat her senseless to do it. In fact, that was starting to sound very appealing.
"I'll help you out, Tamsin," I said, staring into Cliff's eyes. I noticed, as I pulled myself up to my knees, that Cliff had made great progress unwrapping his wrists. In a minute, he would be much more of a factor than he was right now. I gripped the arm of a couch, and pushed myself up. I thought my muscles would all work. Upright had never felt so good.
Cliff began rolling around on the open floor like a giant bowling pin. He had given up plucking subtly at his wrist bindings. His fingers were tearing at the last wraparound of the silver tape, yanking so hard they sometimes broke his skin.
Tamsin, standing in the open doorway, looked absolutely crazed. "Kill him, Lily!" she shrieked. "Kill him kill him kill him!"
They were both using up valuable oxygen, as far as I was concerned. While Tamsin had been enumerating her woes earlier, I'd been learning the room. A sofa and an armchair divided by a small table, a television on an oak stand, and my cleaning caddy; and in it, my cell phone. It was awfully close to Tamsin, too close, I'd decided. I wouldn't willingly get within range of that stun gun again. Somewhat closer, there was a telephone on the table between the couch and the chair.
I snatched up the phone and hit nine one one before Cliff crashed into me from behind. I went sprawling on the couch, rapping my nose sharply on the edge of the wooden arm. Suddenly there was blood everywhere, and a blinding pain.
I scrambled up as quickly as the pain permitted. Tamsin was shrieking and darting at Cliff with the stun gun, only to dodge away when he got near enough to kick at her. Seeing Cliff still rolling on the floor, his hands still bound, I realized that he was looking for something to roll up against, to provide stability so he might be able to struggle upright. I brought back my foot and kicked him as hard as I could, just as he ripped his bonds apart. I didn't have time to choose, but my foot connected with his lower back. The jolt ran all the way up to my face and made my nose hurt even more. He bellowed in pain, and I very nearly joined him.
"That's it, Lily! Kick the son of a bitch!" yelled Tamsin, delighted. She actually had her arms up in the air in a cheerleader gesture. No way she could get the stun gun down in time. I hoped fervently that I'd recovered enough strength to finish this. I took two strides, drew back my fist and hit her in the pit of her stomach as hard as I've ever hit anyone in my life. To my intense pleasure, Tamsin finally shut up. I stood swaying on my feet, watching her gag.
The moment of silence was as refreshing as a cool shower, but it ended when Jack dashed in. He stood in the doorway panting, his face dripping with sweat. "You didn't call. How are you? Your nose is broken." I nodded. He surveyed the floor, and looked at me. "Well, which one of them did it?"
"Hell if I know," I said, and called the police.
Because he is a good and merciful man, Claude let Alicia Stokes interview Tamsin. "If you're smart," he told Alicia in his deep, rumbly voice, "you'll learn more about being a cop in the next two hours than you have in the last year." Jack and I were sitting in the designated waiting chairs as they came through on their way to the interview rooms. Alicia gave me a long, thoughtful look as she went into one interview room.
Claude was in charge of Cliff, whom the hospital had treated and released.
The only part I had left to play was that of incidental victim. My misery and my trembling muscles were the byproduct of the secret war between Tamsin and Cliff. They were victims of each other; at least, that's how I figured it. How a man and a woman who both set out to do good, at least by their choices of professions, could have gone so far into the red zone of human torment is not something I care to understand.
I had gone to the hospital to have a nose X ray, and then home to shower, before I was due at the police station. I was still shaky and felt very much like some other person who bore only a distant relationship to Lily Bard. Jack made it clear I wasn't going anywhere without him. I gave him no argument when he said he was going to drive me to the police station.
I was feeling much more like myself by the time Alicia and Claude sat down with me to go over what Tamsin had said before Jack came in like the cavalry. From the direction their questions took, I pieced together the public line they would take in their prosecution.
Claude believed that most of what Tamsin had said was true. But he thought that Tamsin must have realized Cliff's intentions earlier than she alleged. In fact, he thought the move to Shakespeare had been conceived by Tamsin, who believed a small town's less experienced and sophisticated police department would not be able to solve any crimes committed on its turf, provided the criminal was clever. Well, as Claude put it, the hell with her.
On one level, their marriage had proceeded at a predictable pace. They made love, worked, fought sometimes, and each made their own plans. On another level, they were engaged in a life-and-death struggle.
"I don't know what happened in their early marriage, but Cliff's deep problems with his wife seem to have started because of the miscarriage. Tamsin seemed to enjoy the sympathy it earned her, to a real suspicious extent," Claude said, recrossing his ankles. His feet were propped up on the edge of his desk in his favorite pose.
"Tamsin said she thought he wanted to collect on her insurance money, too," I said.
Claude shook his head. "I just don't see money as an important part of this, and I guess it's the first time I ever said that."
I shrugged.
"But somehow, at some point, he decided to make a game out of retaliation. Tamsin was fun to scare. She had more education than Cliff, more pretensions; he enjoyed getting the edge back."
"Cliff upped the ante when he killed Saralynn," Alicia Stokes said. She'd been sweating. Her skin gleamed like highly polished mahogany. "Tamsin admitted to herself, then, that she suspected her husband. Maybe his footsteps in the hall were too familiar for her to block the knowledge from herself."
"She told you that?" I asked.
Stokes nodded, slowly and deliberately. "Yes, she figured Cliff had access to her keys to the building, knew its layout and her routine, and also knew she was meeting a new group member early."
"Janet's appearance was a real shock." The chief of police resumed his part of the narrative. After all these months of silent struggle, talking must have been a relief to both Tamsin and Cliff. I would have called a lawyer, myself, and clammed up, but that was not as much a stretch for me as for most people. "And the fact that Tamsin stayed in the conference room. I think he'd looked forward to her reaction to finding the body; he'd planned on at least listening to the sound effects from out in the lobby. But she stayed low, and he had to leave. He knew the members of the group would be arriving soon. He went out the front door and to his car, which he'd parked at Shakespeare Pharmacy about half a block away. He didn't think anyone would particularly remember his car at the pharmacy, and he was right. Then he showed up at the health center. He expected his wife to completely collapse. But she bore up under it pretty well. Cliff's reaction, in the parking lot, you remember how upset he seemed? He really was."