Last to Know: A Novel(29)

Rossetti was waiting at the station. It was a busy night, cops in uniform filling out paperwork, detectives conferring in corners over cold coffee, a smell of pizza over all. Divon was quickly processed. He already had a rap sheet; arrests for drugs, juvenile probation, no violence. Social services had had their hands on him early, but once he was sixteen he’d eluded them and gone his own way, dealing small time on street corners.

“Until I met that woman,” Divon told them.

*

They were in a small interrogation room. Jemima had taken Squeeze for a walk. Harry was sitting opposite Divon at the bare table. Rossetti fetched coffee and set it in front of the young man, who was now without the cuffs.

“Drink it, son,” Rossetti said. “You’ll feel better.”

“I’ll never feel better,” Divon blurted suddenly. “Not with this hanging over my head. I don’t do murder,” he said, panic sending his voice higher. “I tell you it wasn’t me…”

“Why not start by telling us how you knew Lacey Havnel,” Harry suggested. “She wasn’t the kind of woman who’d hang in your hood.”

“I didn’t find her. She found me. You guys know me, you know all about me,” he said, suddenly quieter. “You know I dealt, small time. One day she just drove up the street, she spotted me on the corner, she was looking for cocaine, Oxycontin, heroin, whatever. She told me to get in her car, we needed to talk, she said she would use me as her only dealer, she’d pay me well if I could keep quiet.”

“So?” Harry said. “Did you become Mrs. Havnel’s dealer?”

“Yes, sir, I did. And she paid me well. And I didn’t ask for none of the sexual favors she was offering either,” he added, angrily. “She was what good women call a cheap bitch, even if she did have money to burn. Always in short skirts and sneakers and her blond hair in a fluffy ponytail pulled through that visor she always wore, pretending like she was a young tennis player or sump’n.”

There was a knock at the door and a cop entered with a file marked “Lacey Havnel,” which he gave to Harry, who opened it and quickly read the two pages it contained. He raised his eyebrows and handed the pages over to Rossetti.

The info on Lacey Havnel was spotty: she had moved around a lot, born in a small town in Idaho to a single mom. Her name was then Carrie Murphy. She had dropped out of school at sixteen. No known family. Resurfaced age eighteen in Florida, where she got work as a waitress. They had that information because she had lost her social security card and applied for a new one.

The next time her name surfaced officially was for a marriage license, to a Florida man, in his sixties. The time after that was a year later, for a death certificate. The husband was out in his backyard, chopping logs for the house. The ax slipped and he cut right through an artery. The police report was consistent with an accident.

Lacey was left comfortably off and also left the area. She surfaced officially again with a second marriage several years later. This time the husband died of a heart attack. Again Lacey inherited, though this time not without a fight from his distraught family. Again, she left town. Neither of the husbands was named Havnel. If there had been a Mr. Havnel, which Bea claimed there had not, then he had been in one door and out the other, and the presumably pregnant Lacey was left holding the baby. There was no official birth certificate for Bea, which seemed to mean Lacey had failed to register her birth, and had been using faked documents. She and the kid moved to Boston where she started a new life as a merry widow and party girl.

It was Harry’s guess that Lacey had been running out of funds. She had needed a new business. He guessed there had been no willing new wealthy suitors waiting in line for her to say yes. She had found drugs an easier way. And had died because of it. There was no doubt in his mind that Divon had supplied the necessary, if simple, ingredients to manufacture methamphetamine on a large scale.

Rossetti brought more coffee. He said to Divon, “So, tell us, son, were you at the lake house that night?”

Divon’s eyes flashed panic. “I wasn’t sir, no, no … not me…”

“Come on, Divon,” Harry said. “Wasn’t that you rowing over to the island?” He just threw out the question, thinking of Wally Osborne, and maybe Len. But it could have been Divon on the lake that night.

“I never rowed, I don’t like water, I can’t swim, it scares me, that lake…”

“Bullshit.” Rossetti was losing patience. “You were there and you know it.”

There was a long silence. Divon did not drink the coffee.

Finally, “It wasn’t me,” he said, in that same shrill, scared voice. “It was him. That writer.”

Harry flashed a glance at Rossetti then back at Divon. He said calmly, “Which writer would that be?”

“The famous one. He was at the house after I left, I saw him coming when I was getting into my car.”

“What car was that, Divon?”

“The old Corolla I’d bought so I could access her at the lake house, bring her the stuff. He—that writer—came rowing over, I saw him and so did she and she told me to get lost, so I did.”

“Was he in the house when you left?” Thinking about Rose Osborne, Harry almost didn’t want to hear Divon’s answer.

“He was rowin’ up, like I said.”