by Greg Iles
“Jenny-”
“And you have a little girl,” she says excitedly. “I mean, I could have a sister.”
Primal fear grips my heart. “Jenny, we’ve got to take this one step at a time. You-”
“I know. I didn’t mean to be pushy. I don’t want to crash in on your life or anything. I’d never do that. I’ve just felt so alone my whole life.” In an instant her face seems to collapse in upon itself. “You don’t know the things that have happened to me, Mr. Cage.”
“I can guess. Look, the first thing I should do is talk to Livy.”
“She won’t talk about it.”
“She’ll talk to me.”
Jenny is wringing her hands again. “I heard a rumor last night. Someone in the restaurant said you were seeing her again. They saw you out driving. I’ve been so weirded out by that. I thought you had a thing for the publisher of the newspaper.”
“Jenny… Livy may have been cruel to you, but she’s not a monster.”
“I’m telling you, she’s not rational about this.”
“Does Leo Marston know about you?”
“Oh, yeah.” She nods slowly. “I talked to him once. He heard me out, then told me that he had to honor his daughter’s wishes regarding me, and he expected me to do the same.”
“I’ll bet he offered you fifty grand to disappear.”
“Ha. He told me it probably would have been better if I hadn’t been born, but that I had been, so I had to do the best I could. Life is tough, he said. You believe that? Like his life was ever tough. That son of a bitch. But he scared me. He told me if I tried to make any public scandal, he’d have to take steps to ‘resolve the situation.’ And he wasn’t talking about legal steps. God, I wish I’d taped that conversation. I’d seen mob guys in Lacour’s office in New Orleans. They were basically okay guys, most of them. But Leo Marston… he’s not a nice guy. He made me feel like I’d be doing the world a service if I slit my wrists.”
“I’m sorry, Jenny. That’s all I can say right now.” Though I probably shouldn’t, I walk to her and take her hands in mine. They’re alarmingly cold. “I don’t know what the truth is. I honestly don’t. But if I am your father, I’ll take care of you. It’s too late for me to be a father in the real sense. But you won’t want for anything, and you won’t be alone.”
To see a grown woman break into a child is a terrible thing, and I will not speak of it here.
The Examiner building is humming like a beehive, but I see no sign of Caitlin as I pass through the newsroom. I go straight to the conference room, which at the moment contains two female reporters poring over the Marston files, patiently separating wheat from chaff.
“Ladies, could I have the room for a few minutes?”
They look up at me like graduate students disturbed in their library carrels, then blink and look at each other.
“Uh, sure,” says the one wearing glasses.
As soon as the door closes, I tear through the stacks of paper on the table, looking for something that seemed trivial only two days ago: the scrawled note listing the income Marston realized from private adoptions. Yesterday it was just another scrap of paper among thousands. Now it’s my personal Rosetta stone.
It’s not on the table.
I drop to my knees and start working through the carefully stacked piles on the floor, shoving aside page after page, letting them fall where they will. In five minutes the room is awash in paper, and sweat is running down my face. In ten I am trying to suppress the furious panic of an Alzheimer’s patient who sets down his car keys and can’t find them five seconds later.
And then I am holding the damn thing.
One sheet of yellow legal paper, with a column of years beginning in 1972 and continuing to the present. Some years aren’t listed, but beside each that is, an amount of money is noted. The highest figures correspond to the 1980s, and some of these are followed by a one-digit number in parentheses, which probably indicates the number of adoptions handled in that year. Beside the year 1978 is written the figure $35,000.
Jenny Doe is telling the truth.
The weight of this knowledge is staggering, but before I can begin to absorb it, the door to the conference room opens a crack, and Caitlin walks in, her face flushed with excitement.
“I just heard you were here. Listen to this. My father called twenty minutes ago. He found out why Dwight Stone won’t testify for us.”
I fold the scrap of legal paper and slip it into my pocket. “Why?”
“Stone has a daughter.”
“So? I have a daughter too.” Maybe two.
“Your daughter’s not an FBI agent.”
The scrap of paper is momentarily forgotten. “Dwight Stone has a daughter in the FBI?”
A triumphant smile lights Caitlin’s face. “Ten years in. John Portman can ruin her career with a single reassignment, and he can make it the same way.”
It had to be something like this. In Colorado I had gotten such an impression of integrity from Dwight Stone that I couldn’t fathom what would keep him from helping me expose the truth of what happened here in 1968. But children make us all vulnerable. They’re hostages to fortune, as the poet said.
“Hostages to fortune?” says Caitlin.
I must have spoken aloud. “Nothing. It doesn’t matter.”
“Penn, what’s the matter? You looked zoned out.”
“I’m fine.”
“Bullshit. You look terrible.” She glances around the room, which is strewn with loose pages like leaves on a forest floor. “What happened in here? What are you looking for?”
“I already found it.”
“What?”
“Something personal. Nothing to do with our case.”
Caitlin goes to the table and picks up a few pages, straightens them into a stack, and sets them back down. Then she turns those remarkable green eyes on me and speaks in a voice raw with hurt. “It’s Livy Marston, isn’t it? Nothing else would get you so worked up.”
“It has to do with Livy, yes.”
“You can’t tell me what it is?”
“Not yet. Not until I know something for sure. Right now I need a telephone.”
She waves her hand with disgust. “Take any one you want.”
“It has to be private.”
“You can use my office.” There is something like pity in her eyes.
She escorts me through the newsroom, shrugging at Kelly on the way. As soon as she shuts the door behind me, I dial Tuscany. Thankfully, Livy answers.
“This is Penn.”
“What do you want?”
“We need to talk.”
“You haven’t thought so for the past three days.”
“I do now. It’s important.”
“Important.” There’s a long pause, but I don’t jump to fill it. “All right,” she says finally. “Where?”
I close my eyes. “I haven’t eaten. I was thinking of getting a bite at Biscuits and Blues. That sound okay to you?”
Silence.
“Livy?”
“I’m not really hungry.”
“You could watch me eat,” I say, pushing it.
“Why don’t we take a ride instead? It’s nice outside.”
Sure, and why don’t we ask our daughter to come along? “Is your father home?”
“No. He’s at his office with Blake Sims, preparing for the trial.”
“I’ll pick you up in five minutes.”
“Five minutes?”
“It’s important.”
“All right. I may look ghastly, but I’ll be waiting on the gallery.”
Livy Marston has never looked ghastly in her life. “Just have the gate open.”
I hang up and start through the newsroom, heading for the front of the building. Caitlin and Kelly are talking quietly in a corner. When she sees me, she breaks away from him and physically bars the door.
“Penn, you’ve got to tell me what’s going on.”
“It’s nothing t
o do with you. It’s personal.”
She looks around the newsroom and realizes that her employees are staring at her. Taking my wrist, she speaks in a quieter voice. “I consider your personal life personal to me.”
I have no response to this. Caitlin matters to me, but right now there is a motor spinning in my chest, driving me irresistibly toward Tuscany, the only place where the truth of my life can be found. “It could be, someday. But it’s not now. Let me by, Caitlin.”
She hesitates, then drops my wrist and moves aside.
Kelly starts to fall into step with me.
“Stay here,” I tell him. “I don’t need you for this.”
He stops, but before the main door closes behind me, I hear Caitlin say, “Go with him.”
Tuscany is a magnificent mansion, but it would look incomplete without the indelible image of Livy standing on the gallery. She’s wearing a royal blue sun dress, belted at the waist and falling just below her knees. The air is cool beneath the trees, and the freshly fallen leaves have been gathered into random piles by the wind. The scene looks staged, like a rich color shot from an ad in Architectural Digest. Who is that beauty waiting for? you wonder as you flip past it. If only she was waiting for me.
This beauty is waiting for me. Only she has no idea what a dreadful gift I bring. The last thing she wants to receive. A demand for the truth, and the means to compel her to speak it.
I park beside the Negro lawn jockeys and remain in the car. Livy comes down the steps, her tread light, her movements graceful. Her eyes are curious as they take me in. She walks around to the passenger door, clearly wondering why I haven’t scurried around to open it for her. Unable to wait for the pretense of a drive to speak to her, I get out and address her over the gleaming black roof of the car.
“Do you know a girl named Jenny Doe?”
She freezes with her hand on the passenger door. Behind those eyes I know so well, have dreamed of for years, another pair of eyes is looking out. Frightened, hunted eyes.
“Who have you been talking to?” she asks, her voice oddly devoid of emotion.
“Does it matter? I want to know if you were pregnant in 1978.”
“That’s none of your business.”
“Not my business. Is that girl our daughter, Livy?”
She takes a deep breath, recovering her composure with remarkable resilience. “No,” she says simply.
“No, she’s not my daughter? Or no, she’s not yours either?”
She purses her lips, as though calculating the impact of various replies. “Stay out of this, Penn. It’s none of your affair.”
“Were you sleeping with someone besides me in the spring of seventy-eight?”
Her eyes flash. “Weren’t you?”
My heart feels suddenly cold. “No. But if you were, how do you know for certain who the father was?”
“Maybe I don’t care who it was.”
The steel in her voice cannot mask the fear and anguish in her face. “Livy-”
“Listen to me, Penn. You are not that girl’s father. I know that with absolute certainty. And if you thought hard about it, you would too.”
“What the hell does that mean? I worked out the months from her birth certificate. I could easily be her father. You got pregnant right before you disappeared.”
She studies me with cold objectivity, as though taking some life-altering decision. “If you ever mention what I’m about to say, I’ll deny I said it. Jenny Doe is my daughter. But she is not yours. She’s twenty years old now, and I have no legal responsibility to care for her. As far as I’m concerned, she doesn’t exist. Since she’s not your child, you have no say whatever in the matter, and you should never mention it to me again.”
“Livy, where is this coming from? How can you be so cruel to this girl?”
“You’re so naive. You don’t know anything. You-”
She stops as the low purr of an engine murmurs through the trees. I assume it’s Kelly until Leo Marston’s silver Lincoln Town Car rounds the bend by the azalea bushes.
“Get out of here,” Livy says in a taut voice. “Go. And don’t come back. I was stupid to think we could ever make it work.”
I don’t move. I can’t.
Leo’s face is masked by the glare of the sun on his windshield as he parks behind the BMW. When he gets out, his face is not mottled red with fury, as I expect, but calm. A smug smile curls his lips as he walks toward me. When he stops three feet away, I see that his upper cheeks are flushed, and when he speaks I smell the sweet odor of bourbon.
“Livy?” he drawls, glancing at her over the roof of the BMW. “Does this person have your permission to be on our property?”
“He was just leaving.”
“That doesn’t answer my question. I asked if he’s a guest, or if he’s a trespasser, like the other night.”
Livy looks at me with pleading eyes, the familiar eyes I once knew. “He’s my guest, but he’s leaving. Let’s go inside.”
“In a minute, in a minute.” Leo is grinning like a six-year-old boy with a secret. “I’m glad I ran into you, Cage. I’ve got some news you’ll be interested in.”
“Is that right?”
“You’re damn right that’s right. A friend of yours was just arrested in the Hoover Building in Washington, D.C.”
Fear and guilt for Peter Lutjens clench my stomach.
“Seems this fellow was attempting to steal a file,” Leo drones on. “A file sealed on national security grounds. He had a funny name. Foreign name. Dutch maybe. There’s some question of treason, I believe. John Portman is personally investigating the situation.”
He turns to Livy. “This boy’s got no case, Livy. None at all.” He turns back to me, laughter rumbling low and deep in his chest. “When Wednesday gets here, you’re gonna wish you never opened your mouth about me. You’re gonna rue the goddamn day you decided to fuck with Leo Marston.”
Confused images fire through the synapses of my brain. My father on the floor of his bedroom, felled by a heart attack. My mother in tears, unable to cope with the stress of the malpractice trial. Jenny Doe describing her meeting with the man who stands before me now, the man who made her feel she’d be doing the world a favor by committing suicide. Peter Lutjens being handcuffed while his wife and children wait for him at home in a clutter of U-Haul boxes.
Victory is written on Leo’s face like blood after a hunt, and the wolfish blue eyes are laughing. I have not struck another human being in anger since I was fifteen years old, but my knee rises into his groin with preternatural speed and force. The air explodes from his lungs. As he doubles over, my elbow crashes into the side of his head, just the way a Houston police detective once taught me.
“Stop it!” Livy screams. “Penn, stop!”
She is running around the car to get between us. Some part of my brain knows I should stop, but I’m still moving forward, pursuing Leo as he staggers back. He shakes his head and raises his big left hand to his jaw. I draw back my fist, then freeze as a silver derringer appears before my nose as though by magic. He must have had it palmed all along, a little nickel-plated gambler’s special.
“Go ahead, you little pissant,” he snarls. “Go ahead.”
“Daddy?” Livy stands two feet behind her father, her voice riding a current of hysteria.
“Go inside, baby. You don’t want to see this.”
“Daddy, I love him.”
This simple declaration hits Leo like an arrow. He actually flinches, like a bear struck between the ribs, and an expression of pure hatred comes over his face. “Go inside, Livy! This boy’s forgotten his place. He assaulted me on my property.”
But Livy doesn’t go. The three of us remain locked in our positions, a pathetic standoff on the edge of tragedy that lasts until Daniel Kelly’s rented Taurus rolls slowly up the drive.
Kelly parks alongside the cars, five feet from us, and rolls down his window like a tourist asking for directions. But what comes through his window is
not a map but a Browning Hi-Power pistol, which he points at Leo’s head.
“Please go inside the house, sir,” he says.
“Who the hell are you?” Leo asks, keeping the derringer in my face.
Kelly’s suntanned face remains calm, as though he were listening to a soothing piece of music. “I’m the man who’s going to end your life unless you take that gun in the house.”
“Bullshit,” Leo grunts. “Get the fuck off my property.”
“I’m here to do a job, sir,” Kelly says in the same lazy voice. “Don’t make yourself part of it.”
At last Leo really looks at Kelly, and the muscles in his jaw tighten. He has vastly multiplied his family fortune by accurately judging men’s characters. And whatever he sees in Daniel Kelly’s eyes convinces him that today is the wrong day to tempt fate. He lowers the derringer.
“You just made yourself part of my job, sonny.” He raises two fingers in a little toodle-loo gesture, then turns and walks up the broad steps of his mansion.
“Livy,” he says without turning around. “Your mother needs you.”
“I’m coming.” She steps toward me and tries to take my hand, but I pull it away. “Make a public apology, Penn,” she pleads. “Please. Do that, and I’ll convince Daddy to drop the suit.”
“It’s too late for that.”
She looks at me sadly. “You can’t play my father’s game and win. Not in this town. Not in this state. Nobody can. You could lose everything you have.”
“You’ve got a short memory, Livy. Your father lost his case against mine twenty years ago, and he’s going to lose this one.”
“That was different. It was a weak case to start with.”
“Then why did he take it?”
Unreadable emotion flares in her eyes. “I don’t know. But I do know you nearly fainted when he told you that man had been arrested. He was your last hope, wasn’t he? He was your case. If you walk into that courtroom Wednesday, you’ll be like a lamb going to slaughter.”
I step back from her, trying not to think of Peter Lutjens. “That’s my problem. Your problem is a lot bigger than that. Your whole life is built around some secret tragedy whose real victim is a girl crying alone in a room three miles from here. What are you going to do about that?”