by Dan Flanigan
And that was how he had disposed of Otto, the Boss’s most recent mistake. Most recent. The whole thing with Lenny Parker and the mink farm had been a mistake from beginning to end. Creativity got you nowhere. Stick to the old ways, the tried and the true. If you could. You did have to change with the times sometimes. The Boss did have some gray matter left. The idea of O’Keefe leading them to the Parkers seemed smart enough. They had no real way to find the Parkers otherwise. It wasn’t like they were the cops or the FBI, with every conceivable resource at their disposal.
Watching O’Keefe might not be easy. The man was a snooper by profession, which might make him more sensitive than most people to the possibility of being snooped on himself. But it was not the target itself that usually noticed you. It was usually somebody else, some other snooper, the amateur kind, who would watch you watching and somehow blow the whistle on you.
But O’Keefe turned out to be surprisingly easy to keep track of. After a day or two, he hardly ever even traveled to his office, hardly ever even left his apartment. When he did go out, it was almost always to a bar. The guy was some kind of a flake or a drunk or both. After more than a week of that, he could only pray that the Boss would lose patience and let him kill this goofy bastard, who wasn’t going to lead them anywhere except maybe eventually to that street down in the bottoms where all the winos hung out.
CHAPTER 16
WINTER SEEMED TO have come already, far too early, even before Halloween. Cold winter nights without snow made her feel lonely and sometimes scared. She stood in the darkness in the living room and stared out the big bay window, clutching her overnight bag to her chest, waiting, waiting like her mom had waited through so many nights in the old days. Late, almost an hour late. Maybe he wouldn’t come tonight at all. She had tried to make time move along faster by counting the cars driving by, but there had been no cars for quite a while. The whole world seemed to have been abandoned, left alone with nothing to do.
A man in a dark ski jacket came walking down the street. When he reached the front of her house, he looked up, right at her. She wondered if he could see her standing there in the window in the darkness. The man hesitated, looked as if he might come up to the house but then strolled on down the street out of sight. She had not been able to make out his face to know whether he was neighbor or stranger. She wondered if he had really been thinking of walking up to the house. “That’s just your imagination,” her mother always told her when she voiced her fears.
Something moved in the bushes outside. “Mom!” she yelled and darted away from the window. She heard the ceiling creak above her, her mother’s footsteps responding to her call. The footsteps stopped at the top of the stairway. She could see the bottom of her mother’s white terrycloth bathrobe and the tennis socks covering her feet.
“What is it?”
“I saw something moving in the bushes outside.”
“Turn a light on down there. And turn the front porch light on. Stare out into the dark long enough and anybody would start seeing things.”
The tennis socks walked away from the top of the stairs. Kelly peeked out the window at the bushes and had to admit that there was probably nobody there. She switched on a lamp in the living room and walked to the front entry hall to turn on the front porch light. She avoided looking at the small, diamond-shaped pane of glass built into the front door for fear of seeing there, in her imagination or otherwise, some horrible face. Which made her think of the door that led from the basement to the kitchen. She ran back to the kitchen to make sure that door was locked. It wasn’t. Her mother was so careless. And Kelly was certain she heard something behind the door. She stood there listening, frozen in place a few feet from the unlocked door, trying to screw up the courage to make one quick movement to the door to lock it. But what if someone opened the door just as she reached for it? She could turn and run as fast as she could to the stairway and up the stairs to her mother, who would only tell her again to stop imagining things.
She only needed to take a couple of steps, reach out and turn the lock, and she would have been able to, had she not heard again, she would swear, that shuffling sound behind the door . . .
Another sound made her jump. The blare of a horn. Out front. Her dad. At last. She quickly ran to the door, turned the lock, yelled goodbye to her mom, and was soon tearing across the front lawn toward the headlights of the van waiting for her in the driveway.
“Dad, where have you been?” she reproached him as she struggled up into the front seat of the van.
“Sorry. My meeting lasted longer than I thought it would.”
“You could have called.”
He knew where she had heard that line before. A hundred times before probably.
“I said I was sorry.”
That tone of voice, that guilty defensiveness, a slight slurring in his words, the drink he held in the plastic cup in his hand, all told her that he was lying. There had been no meeting, or if there had been a meeting, it had been more about drinking than business. And she sensed that he did not even really mean her to believe the lie, that the lie and the threatening voice he told it in were just his way of escaping, of moving the conversation on to something else, that he did not really expect her to believe but to accept it anyway, to act as if he had done nothing to hurt her until he could make it up to her somehow.
They rode on in silence for many seconds, the lie choking off the possibility of communication. She knew he hoped she would speak first, but she did not intend to give him that satisfaction.
“Well” he said, finally, “what would you like to do tonight?”
“I don’t care. Whatever you want.”
“Well, what I’d like to do is rent a movie and buy a pizza to eat while we watch the movie.”
She knew he did not care that much for pizza, or movies either. He was trying to make it up to her. She decided she would let him.
“How about two movies?” she said. “And popcorn during the second one?”
He laughed. A deal.
YES, HE HAD lied to her. But it could have been so much worse. He could still be sitting there in the bar alone, so close to severing the line, cutting the cord, even the cord that linked him to Kelly. The other day, on waking with an excruciating hangover, he had considered finding some cocaine to cure it.
The night they arrived back in town, Harrigan had wanted to keep on going, run the bars for old time’s sake, but O’Keefe had declined. It wasn’t that he was tired or sick anymore—in fact, he was drunk all over again. But the idea had kept building in him all the way home that, when he walked around the side of the house toward the front door of his apartment, she would be sitting on the stairs waiting for him. When he turned the corner and beheld the stairs—empty stairs—he instantly convinced himself that she had gotten inside his apartment somehow, that she would be sleeping, exhausted, on the couch, or curled up in his bed, hair wet and body fresh from the shower. That didn’t happen either. Surely then she would call him from wherever she was hiding. He even bought a telephone-answering machine in case she called when he wasn’t home, but her voice had not graced his telephone line.
She must have been terrified when she had run away that night in the fire and smoke and the fog-painted darkness, having abandoned any hope that he, her supposed protector, would be strong enough or cunning enough to save her from Mr. Canada’s men, the fiercest of warriors, like the little men in the black pajamas on the other side of the globe. He had lost that war too. He tried to accept the fact that she might be dead by now. If not, then death must be stalking her always. He waited for some notice from someone, an obituary perhaps, that would end the waiting and push him into another phase of his grief.
He had considered another possibility—that she had ensnared and deceived him, used him to keep the cops at bay for a while until she could make good her escape.
Harrigan had called him on Thursday about the indictment.
“They handed it down this morning. I ha
ve to surrender you on Monday morning. The bail hearing is set for early Monday afternoon. I’ve chartered a small plane. We’ll fly down Monday morning and be back Monday evening. You’ll only be locked up for a couple of hours, until the bail hearing.”
“Sounds too easy. You find a soft spot in the old Sheriff’s heart or what?”
“Not a chance of that. I hired local counsel down there. A guy named Hugh Carruthers. He’s one of the most respected guys in the area. He worked it out with the county attorney. The Sheriff didn’t like it one bit. He wanted to come up here and grab you himself.”
“So what’s the prognosis?”
“Hard to say. The Sheriff’s pretty powerful down there, more powerful than the county attorney, so the county attorney can’t afford to tell the Sheriff to go to hell. So we probably won’t be able to talk him into a dismissal. But he’ll cut us some slack along the way. Like maybe give us a little time, and time usually favors the defendant. I’m preparing half a dozen motions to try to get the judge to dismiss the case, but why should he go out of his way to do anything for us? If it goes to the jury, I’ve got a story to tell them, but the other side’s got a story too.”
“Great system, huh?”
“Don’t tell me that comes as news to you. You’ve worked in it long enough to know.”
“Yeah, but it seems different when it’s my nuts in the vise.”
Harrigan laughed. “I know it’s not funny, but if I didn’t laugh, I’d cry, and I wouldn’t be much good to you then, would I? Maybe we are swimming in a shithole like you say, but then we’d better be the best God-damned swimmers around.”
“What about the murder case?”
“Nobody seems to be getting anywhere. The county attorney issued warrants for Lenny and Tag as possible material witnesses, but that doesn’t mean shit, especially if they’ve left the state.”
“How about the FBI?”
“They won’t come in unless the Sheriff calls them in, and he doesn’t seem to be willing to do that, at least not yet.”
“The Sheriff seems to be more interested in putting me away than in catching those killers.”
“Catching those killers would be too much like work. You’re in his net already. He doesn’t even have to bend down to pick you up.”
“How about Anderson and Lufkin?”
“Case closed. The old misers didn’t like spending the money in the first place, and now they’re scared shitless to boot. They told me to turn the thing over to the state and federal securities people. Which I did. Which means they’ll just put it on the bottom of the pile underneath all the other con schemes and rip-offs that hit their desk before this one did.”
“I wonder if I ought to call Anderson. Maybe he’d want me to find his daughter. Maybe I’d do it for nothing.”
Harrigan hesitated, then sighed and said, “My gut tells me this is a snakebit deal for you all the way. Let it go. Let the whole damn thing go. Go back to work and let me do the rest.”
“It’s not so simple.”
“I know that, but, for once, let’s try and make something simple.”
“I haven’t done a decent hour’s work since I got back in town. I don’t think I give a crap about it anymore. I’m not sure I ever did.”
“Well, all you’ve got to do is stay thinking that way for a few weeks, and there won’t be any business there to give a crap about anyway. Unfortunately, we’re both in the service business, and we don’t have much capital to keep us going while we indulge our manic-depressive tendencies.”
“I’ve turned a lot of things over to Jarvis this week.”
“Did you tell him this indictment was coming down?”
“Yep.”
“Better watch out. He’ll be looking for another nest to roost in.”
“Maybe not. I hinted I might sell him the agency on pretty good terms.”
“And what then? Retire? I don’t think that business of yours is worth all that much.”
“I’d be happy just to get out from under the debt. You know how much cash I have to collect every month just to keep these doors open? And for what? I don’t even like what I’m doing.”
“I don’t remember you ever liking anything you did.”
O’Keefe’s jaw clenched in anger. Harrigan, the archer, barbs of truth in his quiver.
“Maybe that’s it. Or maybe it’s wanting to live for something besides cash flow. Maybe I haven’t forgotten what we wanted to be when we were in high school, Mike.”
“What was that? Seekers of the true way? Knights of the Grail?”
“Something like that. To be real. To do something worth doing, to be something worth being.”
“‘Real.’ What the fuck is that? It’s time to grow up, Pete.”
“Yeah, that’s what I’ve been telling myself for years, but it isn’t working for me anymore. I feel like I’ve amortized my life. I’ve pledged it to pay for something I didn’t even really want in the first place.”
“You know what I think, Pete? I think you’re slipping back into the asshole of the world again. ‘Turn on, tune in, drop out,’ and all that shit.” Harrigan’s voice had caught, had nearly broken. O’Keefe wondered if there were tears building behind his friend’s eyes and who it was that he wanted to weep for. “All I can tell you is to keep going. Keep going, and maybe something will happen to make you want to keep going.”
“And what if we’re going in the wrong direction? What about that?”
“I’ll see you at the airport Monday morning,” Harrigan said and hung up the phone.
KELLY LOADED THE first movie into the VCR, then skipped to the kitchen to help him cut the pizza and pour the drinks, Coke for her and beer for him. She frowned when she saw that he had already drunk two beers at the apartment. His face was flushed, and whenever he moved, he lurched a little bit as if he had to concentrate very hard to make his body do what his brain intended.
“I thought you were gonna buy me a bicycle this week.”
“I forgot. I’m so sorry. Maybe tomorrow.”
But she knew it would not be tomorrow. He would sleep late tomorrow and probably be lazy and crabby the rest of the day. She wished she could make him happy. He was unhappy so much of the time. She wondered why she couldn’t be enough for him. He was enough for her, he and the movies and the pizza and the evening. She thought of what her mom always said about him. “He’ll never be happy. Nothing’s ever good enough for him. There’s always gonna be something better over the next hill.”
“Dad?”
He must have sensed what she was thinking from her tone of voice. He looked at her furtively, as if he were an animal and she were hunting him down.
“What’s wrong, Dad?”
He shook his head as if trying to shake off her question. “Nothing,” he said. “At least nothing I know how to explain.”
“Couldn’t you try?”
He looked down, like a schoolboy who had been caught doing something wrong. No, he could not, not in a way so that she would understand. Even trying to form an answer for her made him feel ashamed of himself.
Kelly fell asleep during the second movie, and he decided to go to bed himself before he ended up too drunk to rise up from the couch at all. It seemed too much trouble to make her take her clothes off, so he just put a pillow under her head and laid a blanket over her. For a long time he sat on the edge of his bed, drinking beer, smoking cigarettes, and looking out into the night. The door to his exercise room had stayed closed all week and would stay closed again tomorrow. The last few days had been one long, bleak hangover, and he seemed to be drinking now for no other reason than to keep the hangover going. He had still trudged dutifully to the office each day, but he just sat there, letting the phone messages pile up on his desk, postponing or canceling appointments, delegating everything, whether the person he delegated it to could handle it properly or not, avoiding Sara’s gaze so he would not have to answer the fierce question mark flashing in those dark eyes. Days of tortu
re, of minutes seeming like hours as he resolved each minute to plunge himself into the work but being held back by an invisible yet mighty opposing force, a mental force but too powerful for him all the same.
Meanwhile, the walls kept closing in. The licensing people notified him that they had initiated an investigation of the mink-farm incident, which they told him in the official notice they mailed to him, could lead to the suspension or revocation of his license or other “appropriate action.” Harrigan promptly threatened the licensing board with a lawsuit, warning them that they had better have the most solid of grounds before they undertook any adverse action against his client.
O’Keefe discovered that he could still laugh when the constable served Preston’s suit papers on him. Preston’s lawsuit advanced the theory that O’Keefe and his employee Sara had invaded Preston’s privacy in the hotel room that day. The suit named Sara as a codefendant, which added more guilt to all the other guilt.
“Preston’s really grasping at straws now,” Harrigan said. “Take those papers home and use them for toilet paper.” Still, his liability insurance company presented a problem. Another claim would surely cause the company to cancel his policy. So he considered not making the claim. He would pay for the defense himself. But even if he did not make the claim, the policy required him to report the claim. When the claim was reported, the company might cancel the policy anyway.
The crisis in his life that he had long been expecting, perhaps even perversely hoping for, had crashed down upon him. He had gone along for years playing the business game, negotiating his dreams away in driblets, always hoping for some kind of rescue, some kind of escape, some marvelous epiphany that would infuse him with the knowledge and the courage to do such things as he needed to do to be his truer self instead of stumbling about on the stage of his life playing some poorly conceived role in a script he had neither written nor even deliberately chosen.
He thought of Kelly. What did he owe that little girl sleeping in there on the couch? Did he owe her the standard of affluence to which she’d become accustomed, to which he had accustomed her? But it was another man’s daughter—the girl who had wanted to climb into that Jag and roll herself away—that he thought most about, and he cursed himself for that too, but he could not seem to avoid it. Still, every circumstance of his present situation told him it was folly to pursue her. He had no idea where even to begin the search for her. And even if he found her, what would he find—was she Rapunzel, as he had imagined that day as he stood outside her house, gazing up at the forbidding slabs of dark-tinted glass, or was she really Rapunzel’s witch mother deceitfully cloaked in Rapunzel’s exquisite form? And there was an indictment to be defended against, a licensing investigation to be faced, a business to run, employees to care for, amends to make, Jane’s and Roy’s murders to be avenged, a daughter to father.