“Yeah,” I said, “he’s a smart kid. Maybe he can do both our jobs now that we’re out of the picture.”
“Fine,” said Glen. “Anyway, the codes were just a distribution system, to let anyone in the city who was in Orlando’s underground know when a new shipment was coming in.”
“In the pot handles?”
Glen sighed. “In the pot handles.”
“And why couldn’t they use a phone tree or e-mail to let people know?”
“Too traceable,” I guess.
“And was Quentin paid for his part in this?”
“He was,” said Glen. “And with Claire keeping him on a short string, the cash came in handy. Plus, he liked having access to the bonus—hash on hand, whenever he wanted it. He was covering all his bases. Even with all the precautions he took, Quentin must have worried he’d turn up HIV-positive one day.”
We sat in silence and listened to the fog horns. The water was rising little by little.
“Glen,” I said, “maybe Orlando will drown before he wakes up.”
“I wouldn’t be going to the races on it—he’s face up.”
“And you,” I said, “what did you get out of it?”
“Nothing—yet,” he said.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I just supported the system because I wanted it to be there when I needed it.”
I swallowed. “You’re HIV-positive?” I asked.
“I am,” he said. “And I will do—would have done—anything, anything to stay alive for Corinne and the little ones.”
“And that’s why you killed Quentin?”
“It is. He finally began to understand the scope of the thing Orlando had going—and that people were spending their last pennies for these drugs. He was putting you and that young photographer on it to break the story.”
“And you didn’t want him to?”
“Absolutely not. I went to his flat to try to talk to him. He was cold as ice to me. He really had nothing to lose. He could claim to be an innocent dupe, and he’d bring the whole structure crashing down—and look like an investigative hero.” Glen’s voice broke.
“I begged him to think it over. And he refused. I didn’t mean to kill him, but he turned back to his desk, ignoring me, getting his notes in order for you, so I picked up the walking stick and just smashed at him.”
“You connected,” I said. “Beginner’s luck.”
“Christ, that’s not funny a bit, Maggie.”
“I know, I’m sorry. It’s gallows humor. Quentin stopped being a hero to me long ago, but of course, he didn’t deserve to die.”
“No, he didn’t. But neither do I.”
“And that’s how you saw it—life or death? People live for years now, with the drugs that are available.”
“Some do,” said Glen. “But I saw Quentin doing just what he did at Oxford all those years ago—walking away from a mess he’d had a hand in.”
“Then what?”
“I went crazy after I hit him. I knew he was dead. But I remembered that he kept a few cylinders of the latest drug around, and I thought I’d better find it. I went in the kitchen and began rummaging in the pots and pans.”
“Making a terrible noise,” I said.
“Right,” said Glen. “So I just hit the play button on the stereo and some of Stuart’s dreadful metal music came on and I hoped it would completely drown out what I was doing.”
“I knew it,” I said. “I knew Quentin wouldn’t listen to that stuff.”
Orlando groaned, and Glen and I both stiffened. He fell silent again, and I let my breath out.
“The water’s getting higher,” said Glen.
I started to reply, when faintly, I heard the most magical sound on earth, someone calling my name.
“Listen,” I said to Glen. And then, I began to shout, “We’re here, we’re over here.” The sound of a barking dog and heavy boots clomping in and out of the muck came closer, and in a minute, my own beloved Raider, German Shepherd extraordinaire, was covering my face with dog kisses.
In a minute, Michael was there, shouting, kneeling at my side, and crying, with John Moon and a bunch of other cops right behind him.
“See what I told you?” I said to Glen, as Michael hugged me, mud, blood, tears, and all. “Italian men are so emotional.”
31
A Nice Long Run
I thought I might ask the guy at the Alta Bates Hospital parking garage for a discount. After all, it was my second trip of the evening. But Michael insisted on screeching up to the emergency entrance so that Glen and I could get checked out. John Moon arrived half an hour later, looking ready to arrest anyone who crossed his path.
Glen cleaned up quite nicely, and after a very good-looking young doctor (Indian, recommended a new Berkeley source for papadam, that crispy bread my kids love) stitched up the little tear in my arm created by Orlando’s misfire, I was just fine also. When I stopped babbling long enough to let Michael get a word in, he explained how they’d tracked me down. Turned out that Joe Connolly was feeling so great he’d called the house to thank the kids for the plant. Michael answered, knew when I’d left Alta Bates, and began to worry when I didn’t turn up. Especially after Anya started leaking the news about the poison bouquet. He called Moon, whose office paged him and dispatched a Berkeley black and white to Alta Bates to begin retracing my trip home.
“I knew if the traffic was heavy, you’d sneak off to that frontage road, even though I’ve told you a thousand times I think it’s dangerous to drive it at night by yourself,” said Michael.
“It never occurred to me that she’d actually listen to you,” Moon weighed in. And then they discovered the car.
“But how did you find us?” I asked.
Moon said, “And that’s why you leave detecting to the police. It was clear you’d left the car in a hurry; your handbag was on the front seat. The officers simply found the tracks left by the van and followed them off the road.” He gave me a grudging smile. “We are, after all, detectives.”
“If you’d been better detectives,” I retorted, “I wouldn’t have been in that mess.”
“Oh, we’re fine detectives,” said Moon, “just a few minutes behind the nosy girl sleuth.”
“What do you mean?”
“Did you really think you were the only one who would consider removing the handles from the pots?” he asked. “We did the same thing, but we were trying to tie up some loose ends before we made an arrest.”
I sniffed, “Well, one of your loose ends almost killed me.”
Moon sighed and turned to Michael. “Isn’t there some nice convent where you can take her and keep her locked up?”
It was clearly time to change the subject, “And Raider?” I asked.
“I brought him along for company,” said Michael. “I was frantic and didn’t want to say anything to the kids. Raider was there to keep me calm.”
“The dog must have scented you,” said Moon.
“Anyway,” continued Michael, “He led us directly to you.”
An emergency room nurse walked in, a collection of pill bottles in hand.
“These for pain, these to knock out any infection, these to sleep, in case you need them.”
Suddenly, a wave of exhaustion swept me, head to toe, and I thought I might slip right off the table. “I won’t need anything to sleep,” I said.
“Good,” she said. “If you can pry your little friend away from Dr. Singh, you can all go home.”
Disregarding Michael’s advice, Anya had arrived at the hospital with the boys, and true to form, was flirting with the ER doc while the boys roamed around the waiting room bragging to anyone who would listen that their mom was involved in a shootout.
Over the next several days, Michael threatened, begged, bribed, and otherwise pressured me to confess to the error of my ways. I did, more or less. He led the boys in a little cheer every morning at breakfast: “No more detecting! No more detecting!” Josh and Za
ch thought it was hysterical. I more or less promised. After all, how many dead bodies are likely to turn up in the life of a suburban housewife, or even the life of a media mogul? It’s not as if I were a reporter on the police beat, after all.
And the moral test I thought I’d have to face, to tell or not to tell about Glen’s confession, never even came up. Glen spilled the beans to John Moon that night in the emergency room. His remorse began to melt both my fury at him for endangering me and my family and my horror at what he had done. In a way, Quentin’s chilly focus on looking out for himself is what doomed him.
I talked with Glen after he was out on bail.
“Here’s what I don’t get,” I said.
Glen snorted. “Hard to believe there’s much you missed, Maggie.”
I persisted. “Why set up this elaborate charade—sending Calvin and me out on this fake story?”
“It wasn’t a charade,” he said. “If Quentin had called the police on Rowland, he’d still have been in it up to his neck. But commissioning the story gave him a great cover; he could claim he’d played along just to expose the scam, and then assigned the story to gather investigative evidence.”
“He was using me like that?” I said indignantly.
Glen laughed. “Quentin used everybody, Maggie, surely you figured that out. This way, he got the financial benefit of playing along and the glory when he exposed the whole mess.”
I was quiet for a minute, letting go of the last of my feelings for Quentin.
“Still,” said Glen, “I did the unforgivable. And then it just got worse and worse. Every day at work, there you were nosing around and coming closer to the truth.”
I couldn’t help but feel pleased. “Yes, I was, wasn’t I? And all those threatening pranks? My car? The bouquet?”
“Teamwork, I’m afraid,” said Glen. “Greg Bender, Joe Connolly, John Orlando; all of us were collaborators. Until the end, when Orlando thought I was going to crack. Then he just wanted to get rid of you—and me. He’d already grabbed me when he talked to Joe Connolly in the hospital and knew where you were.”
“You’ve got lousy taste in co-conspirators,” I said.
In the end, I couldn’t help but see Glen as a guy who had a lot in common with me. He’d made a terrible mistake. I figure it takes a sinner to help a sinner—or maybe it takes a sinner’s husband. So I put Michael to work on his behalf. Fortunately, though Michael himself wasn’t spectacularly useful in the whole criminal law arena, he had plenty of friends who were. I’m a little troubled by how easily a serious crime can begin to seem less serious in the hands of a highly skilled attorney, but since it was Glen’s life involved, I was willing to suppress those trepidations.
According to Michael, we’re already down to manslaughter and, in his words, with Edgar the Invincible on the case, “we’ve not yet begun to fight.”
“We?” I inquired archly, beginning to clear the breakfast dishes. “Are you planning to threaten the DA’s office with a closely held trust or something?”
Michael reached out as I walked past and pulled me on to his lap. “I happen to be offering some counsel of worth, Miss Know-it-all,” he said.
“I know,” I said brightly. “I invited that nice Edgar out to lunch the other day. He brought me up to date.”
Michael tightened his hold on me. “Maggie,” he said, “don’t you have enough to do at that damn magazine?” I did. I said so.
As for the story Quentin had planned for Calvin and me, we’re working on it. Calvin’s still feeling really annoyed he wasn’t in on, as he calls it, “the big climax,” so he’s looking for opportunities to get into more mischief.
Orlando’s in the clinker, awaiting trial. They found a passport and a one-way ticket to Belize City in his jacket, so the judge decided he was too much of a flight risk for bail. The other Skunkworks principals are under investigation. Much to my disappointment, it turned out Claire was a more or less innocent party in the whole deal. She was simply society do-gooding, and had no idea what Skunkworks was really up to. Stuart didn’t know anything either, so he’s in the clear. The remaining vials of BZT were retrieved and shipped over to the lab at the University of California, San Francisco med school for analysis. The pieces of the story are coming together, and we’re hoping to run it in Small Town right after the New Year.
At Michael’s firm, they invited him back on the executive committee. He turned them down.
“I think I like having a little more spare time for the kids,” he said.
“How about for me?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he countered, “more time to keep you under high-level surveillance.” Things seem better between us, still a little fragile, but despite Michael’s jokes about surveillance, I’m hoping he thinks I’m redeemable.
At least, that’s what I reported to John Moon. We were having a drink at the silly, chichi martini bar that replaced Cock of the Walk.
“Redeemable,” he said. “I don’t know. If I were Michael, I think I’d be looking for a little more repentance. What about that?”
“Oh, I’ve repented,” I said grimly. “Every day. I have no idea what possessed me.…”
“To go detecting?” asked Moon.
“Oh, no, that was fun,” I confessed. “I mean—”
“The affair?” he finished my sentence.
I nodded glumly. We fell silent.
Moon cleared his throat. “Well, look at me,” he said, “asking nosy, personal questions, just like the infamous Maggie Fiori.”
“Maybe it’s catching,” I said. “John,” I hesitated. “You’re a guy. Is Michael ever going to forgive me?”
He shrugged. “Remember my theory, Maggie. All marriages are puzzle boxes. Only you know that.”
“Swell,” I said.
“But I’ll tell you how things seem to me. Michael is a much happier guy than he was six months ago.”
“You mean he’s not trying to kill people on the ice?”
“Oh, we’re all trying to kill people on the ice,” he said. “But I don’t worry about what’s going to happen off the ice any more.”
I remembered Moon’s questions about Michael’s temper and felt remorseful all over again. I took a gulp of my drink.
“What is that odd thing you’re drinking?” he asked.
“It’s a theme martini,” I said. “A hot tamale-tini. The olives are stuffed with hot peppers.”
I deftly removed both olives from the toothpick with my tongue and felt my mouth catch fire. I chewed and swallowed quickly. “You know what they say,” I managed to croak. “Marriage can be murder.”
Moon snorted. “Being married to you could be murder,” he countered.
Meanwhile, Joe Connolly is back at school, Andrea has invited Calvin home to Connecticut for Christmas, Jorge turned in his first story, and I’ve still got my job. Anya’s dating that nice young doc from the ER. Uncle Alf’s at yet another drying-out spa, so I figure my employment is secure until he’s completely clean and sober. I’m hoping it will be a nice long run.
Epilogue:
Hat Trick
It was Family Night at Skate Oakland, and there we were, the whole mishpucha—Michael, Josh and Zach, Anya, her new beau, and me. Even Stuart had joined us. Anya looked lighter than air, freed of her clunky Doc Martens and gliding on the ice. Dr. Singh was slipping and sliding, and stopping to cling to the side rail every so often, following Anya like a duckling, ready to imprint. Stuart was spending more time off than on the ice, chatting up the cute guy who drives the Zamboni. Michael and Josh were streaking along the ice while I helped Zach get rid of the ankle-wobbles.
The lights blinked over the rink, and a disembodied voice came over the speaker.
“Hello, skaters,” it said. “Time to dim the lights and invite all the romantics onto the ice. Moms and dads, come on down!”
Anya, Dr. Singh, Stuart, Zach, and I glided off the ice and reassembled in the bleachers. Josh and Michael sped up with a flourish and a little ca
scade of ice chips in the air.
“Mom, did you see me?” asked Josh. “Did you see how fast I was skating?”
“Like the wind,” I said. “But even the wind’s got to rest once in a while. Come sit for a few minutes.”
Michael stayed on the ice, leaning on the rail. He dug into his back pocket and brought out his wallet.
“Who wants hot chocolate?”
I reached out my hand for the twenty-dollar bill he was waving. He handed it to Anya and looked back at me.
“Anya will get it, cara,” he said. “I believe this dance is mine.”
As if on cue, the lights dimmed and the sound system started up. The first notes of “The Skater’s Waltz” tinkled out of the raspy speakers.
I joined Michael on the ice. He took my hand and led me slowly along the rail. Suddenly, my ankles felt almost as wobbly as Zach’s. He slipped his arm around my waist and pulled me closer. “Relax. Longer glides,” he urged. I leaned into him, caught his rhythm, and my ankles felt more secure. We picked up a little speed. We made a turn around the rink, and I began to enjoy myself.
“This is fun,” I said.
“Ready to waltz?” he asked.
“Oh, I don’t know,” I protested, but in the time it took the words to get out of my mouth, he had pulled me into dance position and we were moving over the ice.
“Michael,” I faltered.
“You’re doing fine,” he said.
“No, I want to ask you something.”
“Just a second,” he said. As we danced past Anya, Dr. Singh, Stuart, and the kids in the bleachers, he twirled me out and back again. I nearly stumbled, but recovered enough to come back to dance position and wave at the kids over his shoulders.
Josh gave me a thumbs-up.
“You’re getting back in the swing,” said Michael. “Now what do you want to ask me?”
“Do you think marriages are like puzzle boxes? That’s what John Moon says.”
“What do you mean?”
“That there’s some secret way to make them work, and only the two people inside the marriage can figure it out.”
Michael laughed. “That’s one way to put it,” he said. “Ready for a dip?”
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