51
Kendra pressed her palms to her eyes, trying to keep herself from crying again. She could not believe this was happening. She never should have agreed to do this television show. The Bells were going to continue to hate her and fight with her, no matter what she did, so why had she bothered trying to please them?
Now the floodgates had opened to her worst nightmare. She had promised that man she would make no mention of him, but Laurie Moran had now seen them together with her own two eyes. Kendra had no choice now but to appeal to this woman as a fellow single mother. She had to trust her with a truth Kendra had never spoken to anyone.
“You asked me before about whether I had ever made any friends in bars back then,” Kendra said. “I knew what you were getting at.”
“The Beehive,” Laurie said. “I met Deb the bartender. She remembered you fondly.”
Kendra smiled wistfully. “She’s a tough broad, that one. I started going there as a little escape from the house, and for a while, it became kind of a habit. Not as if they’d yell ‘Norm!’ when I walked in like on Cheers or anything, but—”
Laurie nodded that she understood the point.
“Anyway, I was mixing alcohol and pills, and I’m sure that I was the messy drunk at the end of the bar, and that’s saying something at that place. I remember feeling embarrassed when customers would move to a table to get away from me.” Kendra rubbed her eyes. Over the years, during meetings with her AA group, she had referred elusively to some of her darker moments, but talking about her former self to a total stranger was harder than she’d expected. “Then one guy seemed to have sympathy for me. Or maybe I just thought he was a fellow drunk willing to tolerate my stories for a night.”
“So who is he?” Laurie asked.
Kendra shook her head, hoping Laurie would believe her. She had only a vague recollection of so many of her days from back then. How could she possibly convince anyone of a truth that she herself did not quite understand? “I have no idea. I think he began talking to me one night when I was alone at the bar. Once I started complaining about Martin, I couldn’t stop. He’d let me drone on about Martin and how miserable he made me. He’d even egg me on with ‘what a jerk’ and that kind of thing. In retrospect, he was pretending to act as volunteer counselor. He’s a grifter, and I was his mark. Still am, as you saw tonight.”
She could tell from the confusion on Laurie’s face that she’d lost her.
“You didn’t hire him?” Laurie asked.
“No!” Her voice was louder than she’d expected, echoing against the concrete and metal of the empty garage. She had donated Martin’s car to charity after he was shot inside of it and never bought another one. “Sorry, it took me a while to understand his plan, too. About a week after Martin died—when the tabloid headlines were really doing a number on me—he was waiting for me outside Bobby’s school at pickup time. He pulled a little digital recorder from his pocket and began playing it. I didn’t even recognize my own voice at first, but it was definitely me. He had spooled together excerpts of our conversations.”
“Which he recorded at the Beehive,” Laurie said. “Your complaints about Martin.”
Kendra nodded. “They were nothing to be proud of anyway, but given Martin’s death? They were . . . horrific. He told me it would be ‘such a shame’ if the police or my in-laws heard the recordings. He demanded cash for his silence.”
She could hear her slurred, slow voice in her head: I just want out! My father died of a heart attack not much older than he is. Maybe that will happen to him. And, echoing what she had said to Caroline the night of Martin’s murder: What I wouldn’t do to be free of him.
“He’s been blackmailing you all this time?” Laurie asked.
“Not on a schedule. That would make it too easy to set up some kind of trap for him. He disappeared for nearly eleven months once, but he always comes back. He knows I’ll keep paying. In fact, he threatened to expose me—or even harm me or my kids—if I agreed to do your show. I managed to convince him that it was in his interest for me to cooperate. I think he’s smart enough to realize that if I lose my kids, I lose access to the trust, and then what good would I be to him?” She could hear the bitterness and anger in her own voice. “I swore to him that I would never reveal his existence—not to the police, and not to you. And now here we are.”
Kendra searched Laurie’s eyes for some clue of how she was going to handle the information that had just been dropped on her.
“Didn’t it ever dawn on you that this man—this blackmailer—might have been the one to kill Martin?”
“At first, yes. And I was going to go to the police—even if it meant that I’d be arrested, too. But he told me that he made the recordings with a plan to sell them to Martin. I guess in my haze I had told him that Martin wanted to leave me and take the kids, so he figured Martin would pay good money to make that happen. But then Martin’s death ruined his plan, and now I’m the one who has to pay.”
“And you believed him?” Laurie asked.
“Yes, absolutely.” Her voice was strong and confident, but how many times had Kendra wondered? She had temporarily become a different, darker, more desperate person, steered by a foggy, drug-addled haze. After all, she couldn’t even remember the conversations that the man recorded at the Beehive, and living with Martin had driven her to the brink of insanity. Was it possible she had planted the seed in this dangerous stranger’s head? Might she have even paid him to pull the trigger? Even now, she couldn’t swear to having clean hands.
Laurie was staring off into the distance, as if she were struggling to weave together various threads of information. “It’s possible that he’s been following me, too,” Laurie said. “Someone even stole my case notes on Monday night.”
Kendra shook her head. “I mean, I guess it’s possible. He’s always three steps ahead of me, but he didn’t say anything about it tonight. He was, however, very curious about what you knew and has been insistent that I keep him in the loop.”
“You really have no idea who this man actually is?” Laurie asked.
This time, Kendra could tell the unvarnished truth. “Not at all. He calls me from blocked numbers and always meets me on foot, so I don’t even have a license plate to track down. All I have is a burner number and this.”
She pulled her cell phone from the back pocket of her jeans and scrolled to a photograph that she had looked at too many times. It was slightly blurry, and she hadn’t been able to use a flash, but she’d used the tricks on her phone to sharpen the edges and add some light. It wasn’t exactly magazine-ready, but anyone who knew this man should recognize him from this shot. “I pretended once to be checking my messages as I walked to one of our meet-ups. It’s blurry because I was shaking with fear that he’d catch me.”
Laurie looked at the screen. It was a pretty good image under the circumstances. “Can you send that to me?” she asked.
“I have your email address,” Kendra said as she uploaded the picture and hit send.
“So now what?” Kendra asked.
Laurie paused, looking around the garage as if she might spot the answer. “I don’t know.”
“But you believe me?”
Laurie opened her mouth to speak, but then stopped. “We’ll figure something out. In the meantime, be careful.”
As Kendra watched Laurie walk west toward Sixth Avenue, she thought it was possible that someone might finally believe she was innocent—not of everything, but at least of Martin’s murder.