Gretchen asked, “Do you have children?”
“Two. Lane’s taking care of them. He has them in a daycare, like when we were both working. School starts tomorrow.”
Janet slapped her head. “Oh, jeeze, that’s right. It’s Labor Day today and tomorrow the world goes into spin cycle. No more summer.”
Mrs. Lane was loosening up, finally, relaxing a little. “Helluva summer, all this.”
“Ain’t it the truth.” Tommy and I just got married, and Joe and Bridgid just got married, and Joe and Jerry got slapped with subpoenas, and people are dropping dead like flies. Gretchen had pretty much decided what they’d do. “We asked if Lane was coming back and the subject got changed. Is he?”
“After the kids go to bed in a couple hours. He dropped some sandwiches off for me just now and tonight he’s bringing pizza or something. He and the kids are having pizza tonight.”
Gretchen nodded. “We told you we’re not arresting you, and that’s the truth. But we’re afraid to let you stay here. If we found you, others can find you. You’re in grave danger. Besides, we think you can help a colleague of ours, Meg Cozynski, solve several puzzles. We want to take you into protective custody.”
“No! You can’t! Please don’t!”
“Why not?” Janet’s tone of voice sounded curious rather than challenging. “You’ll be much safer than you are now.”
“No.”
Gretchen applied the screws. “Just until this helluva summer is straightened out. We don’t want your children to lose their mother.”
She was going to protest, you could see it on her face; she even opened her mouth. She closed it again. “I don’t want them to either.”
Dear Gilbert, Declan, Da, and Mum,
I promised to write when we got settled. I am using the computer here in Joe’s apartment. I correct myself: this is now our apartment.
Your cheery birthday greetings were awaiting me when we returned. Thank you so much! In our absence the children had set up a surprise birthday party in my honour with humourous little token gifts. Apparently this is a family tradition. Joe explained that parents give children proper parties, often at the zoo, and children give parents funny parties, usually with homemade gifts. In short, they try not to miss a chance to celebrate.
I thought the first half of our honeymoon, touring Ireland, was quite nice, and Joe was much taken. We were blessed with fine weather throughout. The only little stumble, if you will, was the Skelligs. We took a seven-metre chartered inboard-outboard out to the Skelligs. The trip out went all right and Joe said he was honoured to climb those holy steps that the monks had cut into the rock. Twas the trip back that was a bit rough. The sea was heavier with the afternoon breeze, and the currents jumbled. You know how confused the seas can be inside the Skelligs. Joe is no seaman, Arizona being landlocked. He lost everything, and the soles of his feet were the next to come up when finally we reached the pier. I felt so badly for him, he was so very ill. Indeed, even ashore he could not cease dry heaving. Rather than continuing down to Cashel, we took a room in an inn nearby where he rested, and by suppertime he was recovered. He insists that the wonder of exploring the monastic ruins was worth the misery of the return. He had no idea we have so rich and varied a history. And he loved the Giants Causeway. He says he had read of it and seen pictures when he was quite young.
Oh, but the second half of our honeymoon here in the US! We have just returned from the Grand Canyon—yes, the Grand Canyon! From our apartment in the city it is a five-hour drive. He had reserved the honeymoon suite in the El Tovar, an historic inn on the very rim, with vistas of the canyon stretching out in all directions. Breathtaking, and wonderfully romantic. Then we hiked to the floor of the canyon! The very bottom, to the river. There we stayed in a tiny stone house in Phantom Ranch and ate steak dinners at a communal table in the mess hall. The trail we walked is seven miles long and takes you a vertical mile down. We came back up by a different trail that is nine miles long, a little easier. Still, it was most taxing. But oh so gorgeous! Indescribable. I can say only that no photograph begins to do justice to the grandeur.
The day before we left for the Grand Canyon, Joe’s homicide division gave us a wedding reception, since only Tommy and Gretchen had attended the wedding. Tommy had been back but for a few days; still, he managed to convert some of my wedding photos into slides; I’ve no idea how he did that; but he had a slide show of sorts repeating on a monitor in one corner of the room. He says the reception had nothing to do with custom, social tradition, or propriety. Rather, they all were muckle curious to see what I looked like and why Joe should be so—I am using Tommy’s phrasing here—ridiculously lovestruck. That said, Joe’s workmates are such a lovely and caring crew. They take care of each other.
As Tommy explained at the reception, we have two homes. Fel calls this small apartment in Phoenix a honeymoon nest, and we will reside here until I begin classes at Arizona State in January. Then we will live full time in Tempe. The house in Tempe, where the children all live, has a second-storey bedroom for Fel and a second-storey bedroom for Joe and me. Both rooms have a nice little balcony out over the back yard. If Joe stays in the Phoenix apartment, Fel stays in the Tempe house and vice versa. That way the children, Fel’s three and Joe’s two, always have one of them at hand. You have met their nanny, Inez Melton. Joe is supposed to have a Phoenix address since he works for the city police department, and the apartment serves that purpose regardless who is staying there.
Before the wedding I made careful plans, lots of plans, so that I would be able to work full time and still get the housework done and put meals on the table timely. What a silly goose I was! Housework? I can clean this little two-bedroom apartment in Phoenix in less than two hours. Whoever gets up first makes the coffee and the other makes the bed. I try always to prepare a full Irish breakfast. Joe loves them so and is so appreciative. Then one of us puts meat, potatoes, and vegetables in the slow cooker and sets it on low. When we get home from work at night, a most tasty, aromatic dinner is waiting. The first one home prepares cocktails, sets the table, and, if time permits, tosses salads. We sit and relax and unwind sipping something (perhaps a mojito or margarita, sometimes a Guinness). We talk about our day, about inconsequential things and important things. We enjoy dinner, then put the dirty dishes in the dishwasher. Done.
Laundry is just as simple. When the washbasket is full, someone does a load. Two, actually—one white, one coloured. The washer and a dryer are right here in a closet in the apartment. I want to erect one of those carousel type clotheslines out on the deck, but we’ve not got to it yet.
Most of the year the weather is so perfect that we eat breakfast or dinner or both outside on our private deck at the rear of the apartment. All of the apartments’ decks back onto a greenbelt, a broad swath of drainage ditch with exotic vegetation including palm trees. Wonderful scenery and very quiet. After dark one night we heard wild javelinas come through. In downtown Phoenix! Gambel quail come by often, delightful birds with silly little cockades. Joe put up a simple hummingbird feeder for me and now we have three different kinds of hummingbirds visiting. There are no such in Europe, of course, but here they are common. Tiny, tiny breathtaking jewels that zip about. And they are surprisingly belligerent.
Weekends and sometimes during the week we stay at our room in the house in Tempe with the children. They are doing well in school. When little Gloria told her teacher she would be a bridesmaid, her teacher corrected her. No, she would be a flower girl. So she took our wedding pictures and a note from me to school for a daily event called show and tell. She even took her bridesmaid’s dress (on a hanger; she did not wear it). See? An actual bridesmaid! I didn’t think a child so winsome could be so smug.
It is now definite. I will begin work with the fire department as a paramedic on seventeen September. I passed all their tests, including backing up the hook and ladder, and officially signed a work agreement. I now have a heavy equipment endorsement on my Ameri
can driver’s licence. I so look forward to this!
If all this sounds idyllic, yes, it is. We both have extremely tense, demanding jobs that are often life or death. Talking about the day with someone who truly understands the pressures helps immensely to deal with the horrors. The best part is that we will both be doing a very important service that few others can do.
I miss you all very much, of course, but I am extremely happy here.
Love and blessings,
Your Bridgid
This was getting downright depressing, this visiting soup kitchens. One would not have guessed how many there are in Phoenix, but just today, the first day of their quest, Joe and Tommy had checked out three and they still had at least four to go. None of the managers had seen the sullen girl whose picture they showed him. Joe had a strong feeling that they were chasing wild geese and that if Alicia Bowerman was not dead like her cohorts, she was shacked up somewhere, or perhaps no longer in the state.
Wearing a sport coat and tie in surroundings such as these would invite suspicion if not open hostility. So they both dressed down. Joe was not a fashionista by any means, but he did like to keep his wellies polished. Today he was in the clothes he wore to mow the lawn, weed Fel’s flowerbeds, and change the oil in the van. He had on his old running shoes with the mesh worn through at the toes. Tommy did none of those things, including running, so his rattiest clothes were hardly ratty. In fact that redhead’s facial hair was so fair you couldn’t tell he had not shaved. But bless his heart, he tried his best to look down-at-the-heels.
They entered the basement of the southside American Legion hall through the service entrance. The usual mayhem was churning as men and women hauled large pots about, stacked bowls, laid out handfuls of spoons, and otherwise prepared for their guests. It was, if you could call it that, an orderly chaos.
But it was also a most profitable one. They paused at the door to determine who was in charge, walked over and showed him Alicia’s graduation photo, and he nodded. “Hang around a few minutes. She usually comes.”
So they picked up bowls and spoons and got in line.
They made it all the way to the front, and Joe felt a little guilty taking their soup when he had eaten one of Bridgid’s magnificent full Irish breakfasts this morning. Just about every day she complained that none of the stores carried pudding. To her, pudding was not a packet of Jello, it was a black lump of cooked, congealed blood. Joe was quite happy to do without pudding. They settled near the end of a table where they could watch the entrance.
“Y’r off on one of y’r thinking sprees, I see.” Tommy hunched over his soup the way they noticed just about everyone else doing.
“Yeah, Bridgid as usual. I think it’s going to take me a while to get past the mindset that I don’t have to moon about her anymore; I have the real thing. That’s gotta be a special kind of crazy.”
“And why so? Not the least surprising. Have ye not heard the phrase ‘crazy in love’?”
Joe was hunching over his soup as well. Were they to seem too cheerful, their cover would be blown. No one in this soup kitchen appeared cheerful.
“Meself talked to Uncle Seamus yesterday; just, to say hello and assure him all be well. He seems genuinely delighted with the course of things so far.”
“How is Maeve handling it?”
“Not so well. She be certain as ever that Bridgid ought to’ve stayed in Ireland and married locally so that Maeve might dandle grandchildren on her knee. She blamed Bridgid’s favourite teacher in school, she blamed Uncle Seamus, and now she’s blaming poor Gilbert. Tis not a happy home.”
“Bridgid is barren. Doesn’t she know that?”
“Eh, the doctors be wrong, of course. Maeve shall have her grandchild.”
“I guess that figures.” Joe thought about Bridgid and about Alicia Bowerman, two women, such different trajectories.
And there she was, coming in the door. She seemed comfortable in this venue, in this situation. One of the last to enter, she paused in the doorway, greeting no one, and no one greeted her. With a practiced touch she scooped up a bowl and spoon.
The manager glanced at Joe, a questioning look. Joe nodded subtly. When her back was turned, Joe and Tommy picked up their bowls and fell into line behind her. A grey-haired lady ladled soup into her bowl. Miss Bowerman did not thank her. Joe got his second helping of soup and guilt. They followed her to a table and when she sat down seated themselves to either side of her.
She got a panicked look and started to stand up.
Tommy laid the Irish accent on extra thick. “Please stay and chat with us, Miss Bowerman. We were sore afraid ye’d been murdered like y’r associates, and we be muckle glad to see ye alive and well.”
She stared at him open-mouthed for several long seconds. She stared at Joe. He tried to look pleasant but harmless. “Who the hell are you two?”
Joe laid his badge case out in front of her. “I knew your father at the raceway twenty years ago. I’m sorry that he died. Lung cancer, I heard. Please accept my sympathy.”
She stared and stared at his credentials. She was going to bolt and now they were going to make a major scene keeping her from bolting. And if she got away, they’d never see her again.
But she didn’t.
A good ten seconds later she looked him right in the eye and said with heartfelt vitriol, “I hate your guts.” She returned her attention to her soup.
Joe really had to work to line his ducks back up. How to handle this? He sipped his soup. “Wow. Usually the girl doesn’t say that to me until after I bought her dinner and drinks. How’d you get there so fast?”
And she almost smiled.
Finally she sat up straight, her soup gone. “Who were dad’s friends?”
“Johnny Paredes, Leroy Mason; that is, Bubba; a couple others, but I wouldn’t really call them friends. They never opened up to each other. They just hung out and talked about cars.”
“Did he ever talk about me?”
“Not a peep. However, I was gone to college and the academy a year or two after you were born, but I kept up with Johnny and Bubba. We recently surmised he might be your father, but we weren’t certain until just now.” Joe paused. “Why do you hate me so much?”
“So he never talked about me. Yeah, I believe it. Every time I made lousy grades, he’d throw you in my face. ’Joe Rodriguez made great grades. He applied himself.’ ‘He talked nice about his mother; you quit sassin’. ‘Joe Rodriguez was driving on the track when he was fourteen, and you get kicked off the bus.’ ‘He’s a big shot in the police department now, and you don’t even have a job.’” She scowled at him. “You were so perfect, and I was a total screw-up.”
“I’m sorry. I really am. What a lousy, stinkin’ thing to do to a kid.”
“Dammit, there you go again, Rodriguez, being perfect.” She glanced at his face and explained, “’Cause you care.”
Chapter 7 Karl Steiffel
Hugh stopped by Joe’s desk. “Seen any good movies lately?”
“Not since ‘Gone with the Wind.’” Joe sat back from pecking away at his latest supplemental. “Any recommendations?”
“Yeah. I have the security tapes from the Steiffel place. They’ll keep you on the edge of your seat.”
“I thought you already went through them.”
Hugh nodded. “I have. Twice. There’s gotta be something there. I was thinking a second pair of eyes.”
Joe saved his work and shoved the keyboard tray in. “I happen to have a couple eyes I can lend you.” Anything was better than working on supplemental reports. Or any reports, for that matter.
They took the stack of tapes downstairs to Henrietta Nieswonger’s bailiwick, her computer lab.
Henrietta greeted them by grinding out her latest cigarette and showing them the computer she had just built. Not purchased. Built. Her expertise just plain cowed Joe, for whom computers were foreign territory akin to the Antarctic mainland.
She had made one corner of h
er computer-crowded room into a security-tape viewing station with the tape player and a huge monitor. With that set-up you could practically count the pores on a teenager’s nose. Hugh settled into the comfy armchair provided for security-tape viewers. Joe pulled up a chair beside Hugh’s as Hugh slid the first tape into the slot.
The security system in the Steiffel home was so sophisticated that it fired off a shot every five seconds and kept a running clock and calendar in the lower right corner. No one passed, no one came or went. Zip.
Hugh popped that cartridge and inserted the next. “So much for that one. I knew I could enthrall you. This is the other relevant tape of the back door.”
At 1:19 the back door opened. A maid stuck a dustmop out the door, shook it, and pulled it back in. The door closed.
“See?” Hugh waved a hand. “I told you you’d be fascinated. It’s the only action on the whole—”
“Wait. Back it up.”
Hugh stopped it and ran it backwards to where the door was opening.
“Frame by frame.”
Hugh slowed it way down.
“Freeze it.”
Hugh called, “Hey, Henny? How do I make this larger?”
Impatiently, Henny took over the mouse and did things with it. “You shoulda sent Meghan down. She’s a whiz at this.”
The view enlarged until the door nearly filled the screen.
Hugh took it frame by frame.
“There. Stop.” Joe pointed. “That’s not the maid, Hugh. That’s Alicia Bowerman.”
Deep in the bowels of Phoenix police headquarters lies the Torture Chamber. Tastefully decorated with armchairs and a sofa, the interrogation room is done up in soft salmon-pink with cream and dark-wood accents. It is designed to provide a homey atmosphere for the extraction of information from suspects who are lulled by the homey-ness into spilling their guts.
“This protective custody thing ain’t too bad.” Miss Bowerman settled herself in an armchair in the Torture Chamber. “Free TV and three squares a day. And nobody asks me to pay for it with sex.” She looked at Joe, seated on a corner of the sofa. “Hi.”
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