didn’t and he asked what it was in a way that indicated he really didn’t want to know the answer. Jendrek and I just kept looking at Liz. She was the one who raised the ugly specter. She was the one who could explain it.
Liz shifted sideways on the couch, facing Ed, and said, “Felony murder is a special kind of murder. It’s an accident that gets treated like first degree murder.”
Ed nodded along, reaching across the table for the bottle. He poured more whiskey in his glass, adding it to the shot already there.
“There’s a short list of crimes that are deemed so dangerous,” Liz explained, “that if you kill someone in the process of committing those crimes, even if it’s an accident, it’s treated like first degree murder. Burglary is one. Robbery is another.” Liz cleared her throat and added, “And arson is another.”
“So what’s that mean?” Ed shook his head, “Accidentally? An accident is an accident. How do you call it something else?” He put the glass to his lips and drank. There was so much Wild Turkey in the glass that he had to take two swallows to drain it all. The sight of it turned my stomach, sent shivers through me. I saw Jendrek grimace as he watched it.
Liz waited for Ed to focus again, and said, “It goes like this. If I break into your house at night to burglarize it and you find me there, and I push you down the stairs while I’m trying to get away and you break your neck and die, that’s felony murder. I didn’t intend to kill you, I was just trying to get away. But I was committing a burglary at the time, and so any accidental death I cause is treated as a murder, just like I intended to kill you.”
“The same goes for arson,” Jendrek said. “If I burn down my motel to collect the insurance money and I accidentally kill two people in the fire, that’s felony murder. In fact, that’s two murders. That’s life in prison,” Jendrek said. “Or worse.”
“Worse?” Ed’s voice was taking on a naïve, vaguely childlike quality, as if pretending not to understand might stop it from being real. No one mentioned the electric chair or the gas chamber, but I could tell everyone was thinking about it. Even Ed. His father may have been a killer. His family fortune built on the backs of those deaths.
“So the payments are what?” I said, rhetorically. “Blackmail? Pete is threatening to turn Don in on the motel fire if he doesn’t pay them?”
Jendrek said, “But does that make sense? Pete’s been coming and going for years. Every time he shows up, Don helps him out. And eventually Pete gets in trouble again and disappears. And in any event, Pete’s on the hook for the murders too. So he’s not going to go to the cops. So why now? Why, all the sudden, would Pete start to threaten Don? It’s got to be because someone is making him.”
“Tiffany. It’s that fucking whore,” Ed said, reaching for the pages he’d spread across the table, gathering them up with exaggerated, drunken movements. “She’s got these fucking pictures. It was her parents that were killed. Fucking Christ, man. This whole thing. She’s been planning this the whole time. Since the day she met him, it’s all been a fucking scam to rip us off.” Ed held several of the pictures up for us to see, as though we weren’t familiar with them, as though the truth were written on them, plain as day.
“We don’t know that for sure,” Jendrek said, shaking his head. “She could have gotten those pictures somewhere else and was just using them. If it was her parents if she really was planning this scam the whole time, then why wait ten years? That seems like an awful lot of patience. And why now?”
Ed stared up at him, peering out through his hazy eyeballs, glazed over with liquor and rage. He was no longer following anything Jendrek was saying. All he could say was, “But this fucking bitch is trying to steal everything from us. She’s down there right now, down at Stanton’s office trying to figure out how to sell everything as fast as possible.”
“But it isn’t like she can just sell the business in a day,” Jendrek said. “There’s no way she can do it that fast. It takes time to find buyers, to do all the paperwork.”
“But she can