when you knew that there was only one way out of your business with Derek. How did you get into it in the first place?”
“I said no questions.”
“Well, it will come out. I can think of several ways you might cross paths. The Justice Department and the FBI, his collection of antiques and your job hunting them. It looks like he paid you a lot of money. And then, after the auction, you showed up at my shop. You were just following leads. One of them was that I asked Edmund Cane some pointed questions about who he was representing. It was just the next morning that you arrived. Just like with Patrick White, you wanted to be close to know what was happening. Looking back, I remember you following me in that one morning, and standing there as I turned off the alarm.
“I don’t know what you said to John, to get him to come with you to my shop, to recover the papers. Maybe you even told him you were with the FBI and you needed his help? I know that you gained my confidence, Mr. Kelly. I’m sure you could gain everyone else’s.
“I’m rambling, I’m sorry. As I said, I’m very tired. I guess that once you saw that the Patrick White scandal was getting out of hand, you saw the danger of Derek being exposed as the source. And, if Derek would do that to Mr. White, could you trust him yourself? So you ran a quick series of burglaries to camouflage your attack on Derek. Was it a rotten feeling for him, Mr. Kelly, when he saw you? Or did he not see you?”
“Just. Keep. Talking.”
“I’m almost finished. You went through such efforts to hide yourself. All those burglaries, that was really lots of effort, and risky, although you must have a lot of useful skills and you surely know how burglaries are done. But also keeping Patrick White so close that you could kill him if you needed to, and getting John Borchard to the bookstore.
“I also suppose that was you following us to the train station, after Edmund Cane called to tell you we were coming to New York. We had that suitcase of books, so you would have assumed we were packed for the night, and there wouldn’t be anyone in the building. You might really have been successful with making those all look like accidents.
“And now, I don’t know what you were planning next. You claim that you recovered the things stolen from Derek’s house and you’ve tried to involve Angelo, of all people. I think you were setting up the next death, where Angelo would kill me, but die himself somehow. And Norman? That was ridiculous. You recovered those stolen items from your own attic, and there wasn’t any DNA on them. Certainly not any that was months old. That was ridiculous, too.
“But at least it gave me a way to get you here for this conversation. So now I do have some questions, and you need to answer them.”
“I don’t need to do anything.”
“But you’ve been exposed now, Mr. Kelly. It’s over.”
“I don’t think so.” Frank Kelly tapped his fingers on the packing bench beside him. “I don’t think so, because it’s just the two of us sitting here. You could have taken this whole thing to Watts and D.C. Homicide yourself. So why are we just sitting here together?”
“I wanted to be sure.”
“It’s more than that. What papers did you have in that book, anyway?”
“Karen Liu’s checks, John Borchard’s overturned convictions, Patrick White’s law school paper, the list of payments to you, and Galen Jones’s drug connection. And one other.”
“Sounds like the top-sellers, there,” Frank said. “Borchard knew about Bastien’s secret drawer and so did I, so he couldn’t keep those first four papers there. Jones knew about the drawer, too. I think I know what the last one was. You looked through the papers that Borchard got from the desk. What were you looking for?” He waited, but Charles didn’t answer. “You wanted to know what he had on you.”
“I didn’t find anything.”
“You already had it. That one other paper.”
“I was afraid so,” Charles said. “I’d hoped it wasn’t.”
“That’s straight from the files at the orphanage, the FitzRobert place.” Frank Kelly folded his arms. “Let’s say I let you out of here alive. If this goes to trial, all that stuff will come out. Karen Liu is going to sink like a stone. But your main problem is that you’ve got homicidal maniacs in your family tree. Hey, sorry to be blunt, but that’s the clinical name. How’s your Dorothy going to feel when she finds out her mother was crazy, and that her son inherited it right down the line?”
Charles didn’t answer.
“So here’s a deal. We just walk away. You don’t tell anyone about me, and I don’t tell anyone everything I know. Just pretend we never had this conversation.”
“I don’t think I’d feel very safe about that.”
“You can make some arrangements. Write the whole long story and put it in a safe place where it goes to the newspaper if anything ever happens to you. I admit it’s messy but I don’t see any alternative.”
“You would have killed three people and nothing would happen to you?”
“They were not nice people. Right?”
“That doesn’t matter.”
“I think it does. You could almost say they got what they deserved.”
“And would you get what you deserve? You’ve killed two people in the last two days. What kind of homicidal maniac have you become?”
“Hey, watch it,” Frank said. “Did your man Angelo get what he deserved? Aren’t you all about second chances, Beale? Why didn’t you drop those papers in the police department’s inbox the day you found them? Because you didn’t want Borchard or Liu to get shoved out the same window that poor Patrick did. I’ve been reading you like a book.”
“I think at this point, Karen Liu is ready to face her charges.”
“You should worry more about yourself.”
“It would be very hard on Dorothy to know the truth,” Charles said. “But we’ll get past it.”
“Get past it? I think you’re underestimating what this will do to her. She’s going to realize that your William killed himself because he inherited a defective mind from his mother. Think about something like that long enough and you might go crazy.”
“How did you get that paper?” Charles asked.
“I looked in her file at the orphanage.”
“Then you’ve made a mistake,” Charles said. “We’ve seen her file. Her mother never killed anyone. She and Dorothy’s father were missionaries in China. They died there when she was an infant.”
“This was a separate file. It was marked closed. You never saw it.”
“I know what file you mean. We never did see what was in it. But it wasn’t Dorothy’s. It was William’s. Didn’t you know that we adopted him?”
The telephone in his pocket rang again. He reached for it, but even faster Mr. Kelly had his hand inside his jacket.
“Don’t touch it.”
Charles put his hand down. “My wife is getting very worried. She doesn’t know where I am.”
“Who does?”
“No one.”
Mr. Kelly shook his head. “Then there’s something else going on here. Why would you walk into this room if you knew you were never coming out? You should at least have kept Highberg in here.”
“I wanted him away from danger.”
“Where’s the paper you talked about? The list of money Derek Bastien paid me?”
“I have it with me. I didn’t want it found before I talked to you. You see, it’s part of the reason I didn’t give the papers to the police either. I can’t save you from your punishment, Mr. Kelly, and I wouldn’t. But I was hoping there was something I could do to rescue you. Something.” He sighed. “You’re right. I am all about second chances.”
“Then you’re all about being a complete idiot. You’re going to save other people and you can’t even save yourself?”
“For whatever you’ve done to me,” Charles said, “I forgive you.”
