Sudden Death - By David Rosenfelt Page 0,96
watch you for all these years and not know what was going on? How stupid do you think I am?”
With no need to keep the secret from Tanya anymore, the story pours out. Kenny had a brief affair with Teri back when they were graduating high school; he thinks it was not long after the all-American weekend, but he can’t be sure. Teri was planning to marry Bobby at the time and went ahead with it.
“When did she tell you that you were the father?” I ask.
“Maybe six months after Bobby’s accident. I had just met Tanya. I’ve helped support Jason ever since.” He looks at Tanya. “Teri insisted that I keep it a secret, or she would cut me off from Jason. I didn’t want that to happen. I’m so sorry.”
“Did Teri want to leave Bobby for you?”
He nods. “Yeah, at first. But that was years ago. Why do you need to know all this?”
“Unless I’m very wrong, Teri Pollard killed Troy Preston. She killed her husband. She killed all of them.”
SHE ASKED ME TO come over tomorrow night.” It’s the first sentence Kenny can manage to say after he processes what I’ve just told him.
“Why?” I ask.
“She said she was going through Bobby’s stuff, and she needed some help, and that there might be some things I’d want to keep for myself. I told her I’d be there at eight.”
“You’re not going,” Tanya says.
Kenny looks to me for guidance. “Don’t say anything to Teri right now,” I say. “Let me think about this for a while. We have until tomorrow night.”
I promise to get back to them later today. I leave to be on time for my twelve-fifteen session with Carlotta, which has just changed in content and increased in importance.
Carlotta’s door opens at exactly twelve-fifteen, not one minute sooner or later. This would be true if we were sitting just below an erupting volcano, with hot lava raining down on us, or if we were in Baghdad dodging cruise missiles. I suspect that punctuality is a trait common to all shrinks, but it is nonetheless amazing.
Once I’m seated in the chair opposite her, Carlotta asks, “So, Andy, why are you here?”
“Laurie left and I’m in such pain that sometimes I think I can’t breathe,” I say. “But that’s not what I want to talk to you about.”
She laughs. “Of course not. Why would it be?”
She’s familiar with the case, having testified, but I proceed to tell her everything that I have just learned about Teri Pollard and Kenny Schilling, stopping frequently to answer her questions. Finally, I say, “I know it’s hard for you to judge people from a distance, but if you can enlighten me at all, I’d appreciate it.”
“Well,” she says, “assuming Teri is the murderer, we can also assume two other things. One is that she is terribly unstable, in layman’s terms a wacko. Such people only flirt with rationality, and it’s not always helpful to try and predict their actions using logic. Two is that she took the pact that those young men made that weekend very seriously, maybe even more seriously than her husband did. When he had his accident, she thought she could rely on that pact, that the others would support her husband, and by extension her, in the manner in which they had promised. When they didn’t, she exacted her revenge. She was possibly taking out on them her anger at her husband for failing her.”
“But why commit the other killings in secret and Preston’s so publicly? And why frame Kenny? Why not kill him also?”
“I think she would have felt that Kenny deserved a special kind of demise, of torture, compared to the others. He loved her, at least in a physical sense, and then abandoned her and her child. Plus, he succeeded dramatically in the NFL, which in her eyes made him the most guilty of nonsupport.”
“But he provided support,” I say. “He made sure her husband was employed, and gave her money to raise the child.”
Carlotta shakes her head. “Not enough. In her eyes not nearly enough. She wanted to be married to a star, and instead in her eyes she thought she was living with a cripple.”
“Why now? Why would she wait and then choose to go after Kenny now?”
She shrugs. “That’s beyond my range of knowledge. Did anything significant happen in Kenny’s football career recently? Any special achievement?”
There it is; I can’t believe I hadn’t seen it. “He just signed a fourteen-million-dollar, three-year deal,