Sixty-two
“It was a lovely party, Mrs. Moffitt. I hope I’ll get to visit again in the daytime, when I can see a little better.”
“You’re quite welcome, Detective Stancik. Maybe you can come back when Paula returns to advise us on where to place another sculpture. We’ve decided to purchase a second piece.”
Jensen wheeled his employer away to bid good night to the last stragglers. Few had noticed a disturbance earlier in the evening. And when police cars and an ambulance arrived, they were quite ready to believe as they’d been told that one of the older guests had suffered heart palpitations and was being looked after. Not exactly true. Wrentham and his daughter were on the way to hospital.
“When did you know it was Shepard?” I asked.
“We looked through your show directory and checked out all the people on the dog-eared page. Reiger had had some shady dealings but Shepard was a flat-out fruitcake. Mrs. Shepard gave us an earful when she wasn’t going on about the dragon she saw.”
It wasn’t the first time Marty had started a business, based on nothing more than a slim premise and a catchy baseball name. The Shepard basement was littered with promotional merchandise from failed ventures, including the Batter-Up Cookie Company. He’d refused to listen when Lorraine told him cookies were made from dough, not batter. Besides, cookies in the shape of bats weren’t as appetizing as those that looked like balls, bases, or even catchers’ mitts. They looked like exclamation points, and Lorraine drew the line at Marty’s suggestion to put
And it was labor intensive. The list of reasons not to do it went on and on, but Marty wouldn’t be deterred. She wanted to be supportive, so they compromised on the words
“After the cookie company, there was the Sacrifice Fly Swatter,” Stancik said. Lorraine had wisely resisted the urge to tell her husband a rolled-up magazine worked just as well. Cartons of the flyswatters were in Shepard’s basement, too, but he could never make them cheaply enough for the numbers to work.
Then somebody else came out a few years later with the Talking Fly Swatter, and that sent Shepard over the edge. He drank for an entire weekend and stayed in the car whenever they went to Walgreens that summer, refusing to go inside and see their mountainous display of flyswatters that mocked him by repeating things like “Gotcha! and “No fly zone!”
“Don’t you understand?” he’d said. “It was my idea and someone else is making millions.” It was nothing like his flyswatter, but there was no reasoning with Marty. Lorraine Shepard was a patient woman, but she was close to telling Marty it was three strikes and you’re out.
At a farmers market Marty saw a kid selling unlabelled pest repellent from the back of his truck. Marty saw him the next week. And the next. The fourth time, he bought all Garland’s inventory and made a deal to purchase whatever the kid could get him.
For two years he cultivated the boy and tried to figure out himself what the hell was in the noxious mix. Then one day out of the blue Garland offered to sell him the formula for $250,000. Marty said yes, even though he didn’t have the money. He got a third mortgage, but it wasn’t enough. He dragged his feet for months until he was able to convince a laboratory on Route 1 to analyze the mixture. They came to within 90 percent of its ingredients, and that was good enough for Marty. He told Garland to take a hike.
He sank a big chunk of what would have been Garland’s money into prototypes of packaging, test marketing, and a trip to Minnesota to pitch it to a distribution company, but they blew him off when he’d arrived for the meeting. He’d fix them. He’d sell it himself, then they’d be sorry.
Marty spat nails when he saw the SlugFest booth right near them at the show. He’d already been looking ahead to the next item in the product line and had been toying around with the word
“Shepard never knew who made the original formula,” the cop said. “When Garland told him it was a renowned scientist and he’d pull the plug on Bambi-no once the boy confessed his involvement, Shepard decided to kill him. It might be years before the scientist realized it was his formula on the market. By then Shepard would have already gotten rich and disappeared.”
“Wouldn’t Garland be incriminating himself by confessing to Wrentham?” Lucy asked.
“You didn’t meet this kid,” I said. “He was charm personified. He probably thought Wrentham would send him away with a slap on the wrist. What happened next?”
“They saw Garland on Wednesday and arranged to meet later that night. Shepard’s not saying anything without his lawyer present but we think they met in the convention center because the Shepards assumed it would be deserted. One of them struck him from behind with a large heavy object.”
“This may sound crazy,” I said, “but could it have been a two-pound jar of honey?”
“A two-pound anything can kill you if it lands in the right spot.”
“One blow?”
“There were more. I didn’t want to get too graphic the other night. They put his body in the garbage tub to get it out of the building. Otis Randolph must have come along while doing his rounds.”
“That was when Jamal heard him muttering and moving the tub?”
“Right. Now the Shepards had another problem. It wouldn’t take long before Otis wondered what the hell was so heavy in that tub. We think they killed him when he realized what was in the cart. Now they had two bodies to dispose of. They staged Otis’s body to make it look like an accident. Shepard even poured Scotch over it to make it seem as if Otis had gotten drunk and fell off the escalator.”
“That was handy,” Lucy said, “having a bottle of Scotch?”
I explained that alcoholic beverages were the currency of choice if you wanted to sneak into the convention center at night.
“They took Garland’s body down to the loading dock and threw him in the back of their SUV. Then they dumped him in the river.”
We were joined by a motley group of people coming out of the woods on the Moffitt property. While the local police were searching for us and for the Wrenthams, they also stumbled upon Guy Anzalone, battered and scratched but refusing a doctor’s care. He was walking sheepishly behind his wife and Rolanda Knox, who had found him practicing frog noises in the gazebo near Horse Pond. He had not yet turned into a prince.
Epilogue
Marty and Lorraine Shepard are awaiting trial for the murders of Garland Bleimeister and Otis Cleveland Randolph. They have separate attorneys, each of whom is claiming that his client is innocent. Marty searched the entire convention center—including the bag found in Nikki’s sarcophagus—looking for the flash drive that Garland claimed to have. It was never found. The Shepards, whose grip on reality slipped quite a bit, continue to refer to this chapter of their lives as the Curse of the Bambino.
Emma Franklin and Lincoln Wrentham have reconciled. She is nursing him back to health on his farm in New Jersey. No charges were ever filed against her. He continues to test his formula, but as of this writing there is no foolproof pest repellent.
Kristi Reynolds lost her job with the Big Apple Flower Show when it was learned she was responsible for the Javits Curse, which she staged in the hopes of moving the show to a larger facility. Civil charges have been filed and criminal proceedings will likely follow.
Scott Reiger stumbled upon Kristi Reynolds as she was holding a blow dryer to Connie Anzalone’s veronicas. She convinced him to help her with the Javits Curse the same way women have been convincing men to do things
