These stories were backed up and verified by multiple persons who would have no reason to lie.
Helen was the exception. She didn’t have an ironclad alibi for Friday night. She’d gone home sick from work at noon on Friday—a fact verified by her administrative assistant—and stayed home the rest of the evening, she said. She wasn’t seen again until the next morning at 9, when she bought a cappuccino at her local Starbucks. The barista remembered her because she was a regular: showing up promptly at 6:30 AM on weekdays, and 9 AM on weekends for the same drink. “She always gives a two-dollar tip,” he told me. Yet between noon on Friday and 9 AM on Saturday certainly left enough time for Helen to get on the plane for an hour and a half flight to San Francisco, rent a car, and get to the Westin in time to inject John Taylor with potassium chloride. In fact, she’s the most likely candidate to have known about the effects of a potassium overdose, and to have had access to a supply of it. Hell, she could even have driven from LA to San Francisco and back in that time.
I’ll have to make the rounds of the airlines and car rental companies. I’ll enlist Mollie for that. Yet Helen is so small. Could she have caused such bruising? And then her personality: so cool, so level and logical. Would she really be capable of murder? And what would be her motive?
Yet it’s MJ’s name that remains underscored in my notebook. There was something skittish about her in our most recent interview that went beyond what I thought was her typical scattiness. And the brother, this Thomas. I didn’t like the sound of him, not one bit. And there was a weak link in MJ’s alibi: a gap of approximately two hours between her coming home from work and being seen at Trader Joe’s.
So with the possible exception of Deborah, the wives remain in the running. I still have lots of work to do.
22
MJ
YOU CAN’T GROW UP IN Gatlinburg, Tennessee, and be unappreciative of either beauty or the grotesque. We’re the self-proclaimed Gateway to the Great Smoky Mountains, and have the very special distinction of being home to one of the oldest Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Odditoriums in the country. I was six years old when it opened in 1970, but long gone by the time of the Great Fire of 1992 that destroyed the mummified cat and Abraham Lincoln’s death mask, and the other wonderful and terrible objects of my childhood.
My brother and I were entranced by that Lincoln death mask. One hot summer day when we were bored, we decided to make our own. We oiled our faces with Crisco, and slathered them with plaster bandages we’d saved up our allowances to get from the Buy-Rite pharmacy on Main. I was thirteen, Thomas was eleven, and we were astounded to see from the masks that without my long blond and his short dark hair, our different clothes, and other superficial distractions, our faces were almost identical. Mine was perhaps constructed on a slightly larger scale, but we shared the same long cheekbones, the same bump in the nose, the same heart-shaped face.
Shortly after that, I lost him to the parish priest. We were close, but I was no match for the pot and pornography that could be found every night at the rectory. I was the one who blew the whistle, after Thomas broke down and confessed what went on there. My mother was furious at me for spreading lies. “My cow died last night, so I don’t need your bull,” is what she said when I told her,. Eventually she grew to believe me, and wrote to the diocese headquarters. Eventually the priest was transferred without punishment. But not before a generation of Gatlinburg boys had been ruined.