Bombshell

“And so he did. He brutally murdered Tommy for the world to see. I’ll bet he walked away smiling, the monster, and now he’s enjoying all the media outrage at him. If Tommy had at least been one of the bankers who’d worked with Palmer, I’d bet there would be some chortling behind people’s hands, some jokes that he probably deserved it.

“But not with Tommy. They can’t chortle, since it was Tommy.”

She started to say more, but she seemed tired of talking. She sat with her head down, staring into the coffee and letting its hot scent waft up into her face. A lone tear streaked down her cheek, but she didn’t make a sound. Sherlock stretched out her hand and lightly placed it on her forearm. “We don’t yet know if Tommy’s murder was an act of revenge, but we will find out, I promise you that.”

Her head came up fast. She dashed away the tear. “Not if I catch this monster before you do. I’d disembowel him and hang him naked by his ankles from the front gate at Palmer Cronin’s house, with a sign around his neck—I WISH I’D KILLED YOU—see what the media thinks of that.”

Whoa. How raw was that pain?

Sherlock said smoothly, “In that case, Ms. Lodge, we’d best keep any information we have from you. I certainly don’t want to have to arrest you for murder.”

Lodge gave a bitter laugh. “Tommy’s girlfriend, Melissa Ivy, called me yesterday, bawling her eyes out, wanting to come over. Real tears? Maybe, since she saw Tommy as her meal ticket. She told me, stuttering through her tears, that she had to talk to someone and I was closest to Tommy. I told her I didn’t want to see her. I told her she was a user, a little social climber, and that’s what I’d told Tommy about her.” She paused, frowned at a fingernail and began picking at it. “When she heard that she hung up on me. Dreadful girl.

“I did tell Tommy what I thought of her shortly before Christmas, when he wanted me to be on his side and against his grandparents. But I agreed with them. He was really angry at me, yelled I was just like the old relics—that’s what he called his grandparents when they made him angry, which was nearly every time he saw them. I remember he walked out, drove back to Magdalene, he told me, but I’ll bet he went to see Melissa.

“He didn’t come to his grandparents’ house on Christmas Eve. He stopped by here on Christmas Day, but he stayed only ten minutes, long enough to give presents to his sisters and give me a nasty look. He ignored the presents I got him and left, told me he was going to spend Christmas with someone he loved and who understood him.”

Marian Lodge raised pain-filled eyes. “I never saw him again. The entire month before he died was filled with his anger toward me.”

She was breathing hard by the time she got that all out. Sherlock and Savich waited to see if she would say anything more, but she didn’t. She picked up her coffee mug and sipped, staring out the back kitchen windows at the white backyard with the sun glistening down on the white trees. She said, “I had Christmas lights in the backyard trees, too. I took them down early this morning, couldn’t bear to look at them any longer.”

Savich said, “You said you disapproved of Melissa Ivy as much as the Cronins.”

“Yes, it surprised me to agree with them, my step-in-laws, I guess you’d call them now that I’m their granddaughters’ legal guardian. After Barbara’s—my sister—funeral, I saw what a mess her kids were, saw their father was next to useless, and I moved here to take care of them. I remember it was a couple of weeks after that before the Cronins finally let me know, all benign and condescending, that I could call them Palmer and Avilla.

“Well, they’re not condescending now. With Tommy’s murder they’re even more devastated than they were when their own son, my sister’s husband, Palmer Junior, died in that bloody ridiculous Ferrari of his last year.”

“I take it you didn’t care for your brother-in-law, Ms. Lodge?” Sherlock asked her, studying her mobile face and thinking that Marion Lodge would always lose at poker.

“I called him JP—Junior Palmer. As you can imagine, he really didn’t like that. He’d say he wasn’t like his father. But the fact is Junior and Senior Palmer were like two peas in a pod, completely consumed by their careers. Only JP was deep in the financial muck his father was supposed to be regulating, a king of the junk bond world. I know he was always talking to his father, sawing away not to change anything, not to question the wonderful boom, to keep everything on track. As I said, father and son were very much alike, so why would Palmer Senior change anything?