Point Blank

Warnecki here? Helen didn’t even know her last Saturday. That makes no sense, Dix.”
    “No, Helen didn’t hire them to kill Ruth. She hired them to kill Erin.”
    “What did you say? Kill Erin? That’s crazy. Why would Helen do such an insane thing? No, I was thinking it was that boy lover of Marian’s, Sam Moraga. I heard he wanted Erin but she didn’t want him.
    ” He stopped dead, stared at them. “Wait a minute, here, Dix. This means you no longer think I killed Erin? You think I’m innocent?”
    Dix said, “We know you didn’t hire them, Gordon. Our apologies for believing you did.”
    “We also know Sam Moraga had nothing to do with Erin’s murder, either,” Ruth said.
    “So you’re blaming Helen? I don’t understand any of this, Dix.” He leaned heavily against the grand piano.
    Dix said, “We’re cops, Gordon. It’s our job to keep asking questions until all the pieces fit together. And for a while there, all the pieces pointed right at you. But in the end, they didn’t fit when it came to your killing Erin and Walt. Truth be told, Gordon, we think you really loved Erin.”
    “Yes, yes, of course I did, Dix. She was filled with light, filled with love.” For a moment, they were afraid he would burst into tears. He got hold of himself and managed to look contemptuous. “So you’ve been going down the list. Very well. Tell me what you think Helen had to do with it.”
    “Ruth and I spent the afternoon combing through Helen’s bank records. We found three large withdrawals she made in the past three weeks, in cash. We’ve been through her telephone records as well. She called Richmond twice, Tommy Dempsey’s number specifically. There was one call from Dempsey’s number to hers, last Thursday. Helen may have been a good receptionist, but she wasn’t an experienced criminal. She left a trail.”
    “She hired those men to murder my Erin? But that can’t be right, Dix. She always supported me, helped me. I think she loved me. Why would she do such a thing?”
    Ruth said, “It’s not so hard to figure out, is it, Gordon? Helen saw that Erin Bushnell wasn’t like the other students you took as lovers. She realized that Erin was the first woman you really loved, the one who might be with you for the long term, not just until she graduated. Helen had made herself accept that you turned her away because of your infirmity—that’s what she called it—your need for stimulation and even inspiration from those talented young women. So Helen was able to accept them, because they were temporary. Only she was a constant.
    “But then you met Erin and everything changed.”
    Gordon gulped down brandy, coughed, wiped his brimming eyes. “I would have given Erin anything. Anything.”
    “Yes, we know, and so did Helen. And she couldn’t live with that. She snapped.”
    “I still can’t believe it. How could someone like Helen find two criminals?”
    Ruth said, “We called Helen’s brother, Dave Rafferty. We asked him if Helen ever mentioned either of the men. He’s a high-school teacher, and he remembered he’d had Dempsey’s younger brother in a class. He was a troubled kid whose older brother was in and out of prison. Dave thought he’d probably talked to Helen about him. So she must have tracked the older Dempsey down.”
    Dix continued, “We think it was Helen who told them about Winkel’s Cave, as a good place to hide Erin
    ’s body. Otherwise, they would have had no way of knowing about it. Did you or Chappy ever take Helen there?”
    Gordon said, “I don’t remember. Maybe Chappy took her there. I never liked that cave when we were boys, it was Chappy’s place.”
    “Helen knew about that entrance, she knew about the cave chamber. We think they chose how to kill Erin all on their own, though. Did you know they used a hallucinogenic drug to disable her, and after they killed her, they embalmed her and posed her? Did you know that, Gordon?”
    He looked like he was going to faint. “They embalmed her? Like morticians do?”
    Ruth nodded. “Morticians and insane people. We know that Dempsey’s stepfather worked in a funeral home. He must have hung around the place, watched the process. So Dempsey did something to really confuse things. He and Slater embalmed her, and as a final touch, posed her to make it look like a ritual killing rather than a contract killing, in case she was found too soon. And that part of it worked like a charm. It was an excellent