The Long Fall

by Daniel Quentin Steele

  As she lay there trying to keep expelling the vomit and the foul tasting mix of vomit and piss, she heard them standing around her and laughing.

  “God, what a pig. I think I’ll take a piss, too.”

  And then there were twin rivers of hot piss pouring down on her hair and face and breasts and legs. And finally it was almost over. And one of them very carefully placed the toe of his shoe on one fat breast and ground it down hard. The nova burst of pain like nothing she’d ever felt drove her mind into the darkness.

  She came to on the floor of her bedroom. She could still smell the piss and the taste was strong and bitter in her mouth. As she remembered how she’d thrown up, she felt her stomach rumbling. Somehow she made it to the toilet bowl before bitter bile and vomit erupted out of her.

  She lay against the cool porcelain and kept spitting up drool and bile after there was nothing more solid inside her to expel.

  How had she forgotten that night? WHEN had she forgotten that night? It was impossible. Nobody could forget something like that. But she had. Just as she should have told Bill. He would have killed them. Even if she had remembered that night with their marriage in tatters, he would have hunted them down. But she hadn’t. She had just forgotten.

  The next morning she woke up and remembered that she had been sick. She lay in bed for hours, somehow unable to get the strength to roll out of bed. What a day. Her marriage ended and some bug hitting her in the middle of the night.

  She thought some trace of it must still linger, because her stomach continued to twinge. And worse than that, there was something in the back of her mind. She remembered having a nightmare, but for the life of her couldn’t remember exactly what it had been about.

  Something terrible. So terrible that she didn’t even try to bring it to her conscious mind. She had nowhere to go on a Saturday and so went back to sleep. And there was no one in the house to hear her moans and cries.

  Saturday, August 20– 11 A.M.

  I had been unable to sleep later than 9 a.m. so I got up and went by Hurly’s Gym and spent nearly two hours driving my body to exhaustion. Despite the fact that I felt like my arms and legs were attached to my body by rubber bands, the workout made me feel better.

  Physical conditioning was a part of my new life. I had been fat, truly happy and a blind idiot when I had been married to Debbie. Now I was getting trimmer, I was fairly miserable and I figured I probably had a more realistic outlook on life.

  I might never be truly happy again, but I could enjoy sex if the opportunity ever arose and I was doing what I was good at. If Teller had been correct, I had sacrificed my happiness to the greater good. Now that my happiness was lost forever, I might as well make the best of the time I had left.

  So I was in my office putting the finishing touches on the killer granny case which I had taken for my own. Cheryl and most of the staff was gone, but there were a few ambitious go-getters and loners without a life like me who came in when the office was empty to get work done.

  So I had nobody to screen my calls. Despite the distractions I picked up the phone anytime it rang.

  “Would this be Mr. William Maitland? With the District Attorney’s office in Jacksonville, Florida?”

  The voice had an Irish brogue that reminded me of Father Dunleavy, but the voice on the other end of the line was well spoken, if a little brusque. I picked up irritation. Not going to be a friendly call.

  “Yes. To whom do I have the pleasure...?”

  “I’m Conor O’Collins. I’m calling politely to ask you to leave me the hell alone, and leave my family the hell alone.”

  I waited a minute to see if he was going to hang up, but he stayed on the other end without speaking.

  “I didn’t mean to harass you or your family, Mr. O’Collins.”

  “The hell you didn’t. I didn’t take your calls at my place of business and somehow you found my home number and when I wouldn’t take your calls on that line you somehow talked to friends of our family who work in and for the office of the Director of Public Prosecutions here in Dublin to intercede. I’ve been asked by three of my friends in that office and an old boyfriend of my wife to talk to you.

  “I don’t know what kind of strings you’re pulling, but my family is fairly powerful in the Republic of Ireland and public officials usually don’t care to irritate us, but you must have called in some very large markers. They’ve told me that they can’t call you off and you’ll just keep stirring up trouble until I talk to you. I don’t want to talk to you.”

  “Mr. O’Collins, I am not trying to stir up trouble for you. And I can give you my word that if you’ll talk to me for a few minutes today, I will never bother you or your family again. On my honor.”

  There was another long silence on the other end of the line.

  “I was referred to a Philippe Archambault in Paris. I was told by my friends in the Director of Public Prosecutions that he knew of you and about you. I called him and we talked and he said you were an honest, hardheaded prosecutor and that I could not buy or scare you off. He said it would be easier just to talk to you. So, talk.”

  “You know I’m calling about your father, Eagen Dunleavy.”

  “That’s our problem. He’s not my father and I have no interest in talking about him, Mr. Maitland. I have no idea why you’ve made this a personal crusade, but the man abandoned my mother when she was pregnant, and his betrayal led her to take her own life. He chose his career with the Vatican over my mother and me. He never made any attempt to contact me as a child. I never was even aware of his existence until I was a grown man.

  “For some reason, maybe his conscience got to him eventually, he finally contacted me. I told him then, as I’m telling you now, that he never wanted me in his life, and I have no need of him now. Your attempts to call me make no sense anyway, because he’s dead. What difference can anything you have to say make now?”

  “Mr. O’Collins, I met your father on a cruise we took together on the French ship Bonne Chance. I...I won’t give you details but I think we became friends. He helped me with a personal problem I had. In the course of the week we spent on the ship, he confided in me about your mother and yourself.

  “I believe he told me the truth, although I have no way of ever knowing for sure. But as a prosecutor, I’ve talked to a lot of people over the years and I think I have a pretty good idea when people are telling the truth. He told me he agonized over leaving your mother, but he had a calling to become a priest.

  “He told me he didn’t know your mother had committed suicide and I’m sure he would have gone to her to try to help her if he’d known his leaving her had devastated her enough to take her own life. I believe he regretted his choice, even though he knew it was the right thing to do in terms of his life. And when he found out he had a son, he tried to contact you. He said your uncles beat him up and they used their power to block him from ever seeing or contacting you.”

  “A very pretty story, Mr. Maitland. And you just believed him? Not a very professional stance from a man used to questioning people. I don’t believe my uncles and my grandfather would have lied to me. They said he never attempted to contact me, never had any interest in me or my mother after he walked away.”

  “I have no way of knowing for sure, but I know he carried your mother’s laminated photo in his wallet. And he found a newspaper picture of you receiving some type of award and he carried that. He said he always carried them with him, and I believe that.”

  “Why?”

  ‘I contacted some friends in Interpol and in the French prosecutor’s office immediately after the crash and asked to be notified of anything they found in a search of the crash site. I got a call the next day that they had recovered his wallet. His body – remained intact – when the plane went down and was thrown clear of the wreckage. His wallet was still on him.”

  I walked with the phone in my ear to a fax machine in the office and asked him what his fax number was.

  “Why?”


  “I want to fax you something. I assume you have fax capabilities at your home. Is that where you are?”

  He gave me the number and I faxed several items to him.

  He was standing by the machine and told me the pictures were coming through.

  “I’ve got them, Mr. Maitland.”

  Then he stopped talking.

  “The picture was your mother taken several years before her death when they were planning to marry. And the picture of you was-“

  “Taken when I received an award for my family’s charitable activities among the poor of Dublin. I was 26. But, these could have been taken-“

  “Those are the photos he showed me on the Bonne Chance. He carried them with him, I’m told by colleagues, at all times. And he was carrying them with him when he died. Why a man would carry photos of two people he cared nothing about is somewhat of a mystery to me.”

  After another moment, I said, “Talk to your grandfather, and your uncles. Time has gone by. Your mother and father are both gone. I think you deserve the truth about who your father was. If they love you, I think they’ll stop lying to you.”

  His voice had roughened.

  “What good will it do now, Mr. Maitland, to stir up old memories and old hurts. He’s gone.”

  “You’re married and I understand have two teenage children. If I’m right, don’t you think they have a right to know where you came from, that they are the grandchildren of a famous and a good man? He’s part of your story, as much as your mother. And I just think – he would like to know that the breach between you two has finally been closed.”

  “He must have made – a very great impression on you, Mr. Maitland, to have gone to all this trouble.”

  “He made a very big impression, Mr. O’Collins. But in every important way, he was a very big man.

  “Now it’s up to you. You do what you think best. I hope...well, I hope you seek out the truth. But I made a promise and I won’t be bothering you again. Thank you for calling.”

  I hung up and leaned back in my chair. I reached into a left-hand drawer and pulled out an IPOD I’d bought for Kelly before her then-current boyfriend had bought an identical one for her. I’d kept it and put a few tunes on it that I liked. I leaned back in the chair, closed my eyes and listened to the words of a tune I liked.

  And as the last words rang in my ears, “If tomorrow never comes...” I thanked Father Dunleavy again for reminding me of what is important in this life. If I died today, the two people I loved the most would never question my love for them. In spite of all the crap I had waded through over the past five months, that made it all worthwhile.

  CHAPTER 15: STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND

  Monday, August 22, 2005 -- 9 A.M.

  My name is William Maitland. I was married, mostly happily, for 18 years to a beautiful woman who I had realized long ago was out of my league. Reality finally caught up with me nearly five months ago when she bounced my ass out of our happy home to take a young stud professor to her bed.

  She proceeded to file for divorce and then to bedevil me with attempts to talk about things that it didn’t help to talk about.

  Once you know your dick isn’t big enough to satisfy your wife, know that you leave her cold in bed and the one time you take the bull by the horns, so to speak, take your wife and make her cum with the use of hands, mouth, dick and vibrator, she winds up lying beside you crying in the night, there really isn’t much left worth talking about.

  Today I am a free man. I’m still living in my postage stamp of a condo not far from the courthouse and the State Attorney’s Office where I’m the number two prosecutor. I haven’t found a woman to replace my wife in my heart or in my bed. But I have mended fences with my 18-year-old daughter and 14-year-old son, my head is on straight professionally, and I am about to try to send an evil woman to the death chamber.

  I walked into the courtroom of Circuit Judge Leonard Pizarro with Jessica Stephens beside me. Pizarro nodded at me. At 70, he was the oldest actively practicing judge on this bench. He was crotchety and a minor tyrant in his domain, but he wasn’t a bad judge.

  Judy Johansen was already sitting at the defendant’s table along with her attorney. I nodded to Lew Walters. As I settled in, he got up to walk over to me and Jessica. He held his hand out and I took it.

  “I’d say may the best man win, but that would be gloating,” Lew said with a shit-eating grin. “So I’ll just say, may justice prevail. Which means my innocent client will walk away with her innocence and her freedom confirmed.”

  “You really think she’s innocent?”

  He looked around to see that no one except Jessica was close enough to hear and said, “Who cares? I’m being paid to defend her and that’s what counts. And with me representing her, and your case, she’s as good as acquitted.”

  I couldn’t help smiling.

  “You don’t have any fears at all that the Angel of Death will swoop down and nail your murderous harpy?”

  “Come on, Bill. You know the way this is going to go down. You’re the grizzled old gunfighter in your last glory days, and I’m the rising young gunfighter. I’m going to shoot your eyes out and walk off in a blaze of glory. It’s my time. Maybe you ought to think about moving over to corporate, or handle wills and estates. Leave the courtroom battles to the young, swift and the strong.”

  His grin took the sting out of his words, and we’d exchanged smack talk plenty of times before as we faced off, but I thought I was going to take particular pleasure if this case went the way I thought it would. He was very good, but he needed to be taken down a peg or two once in awhile for humility’s sake. Otherwise, nobody would be able to stand being around him.

  “Let’s just see who winds up standing, young Luke,” I said with our friendly Star Wars badinage.

  He just laughed and said, “The Old Folks Home for Retired Jedi Masters has a room waiting, Master Obi-Wan-Kenobi.”

  “As always, humility is your greatest strength.”

  He laughed and walked back to his client. Judy Johansen was a 67-year-old who could pass easily for a 45-year-old. About 5-foot-four inches tall, she had a 38-26-38 inch body that wasn’t Miss America shape, but plenty hot for a granny. She was dressed demurely in a pink blouse and dress that went down to her ankles. Very little skin showing and the blouse, while not a potato sack, showed very little curves.

  Lew knew what was coming and didn’t want to give the jury a chance to look at his client as a sexual creature.

  The case slowly started rolling and we trotted out the basics of our case, spelling out to the jury the facts. Judy Johansen was a three-time previously married divorcee when she had met Clark Carroll in 2000. She wasn’t poor, but wasn’t wealthy either. Carroll, a 78-year-old snowbird who had left behind a chain of profitable neighborhood grocery stores across the Midwest, was worth approximately $50 million.

  They had met at a dance at the gated retirement community where Carroll had moved after his wife of 50 years had died the previous year. One thing led to another and they were living together in a month and married in two months and in six months Carroll had changed his will to leave the bulk of his estate to his new wife. He left each of his two grown children roughly $10 million. That left Judy ONLY $30 million.

  Clark Carroll suffered from a variety of ailments, but it was an enlarged heart that had killed him a year ago in their Orlando mansion where they had moved after they married. I explained to the jury that we would prove with expert testimony that Carroll received an overdose of a heart medicine and it was this that killed him.

  I told the jury we would also prove that Judy Johansen was the only person who could have given him the overdose. She had the means to kill him. She had 30 million monetary reasons to kill him. And, most importantly, she had one overriding emotional reason to kill him. That was in the form of a 6-foot-3, 40-year-old boyfriend she had been carrying on an affair with for more than a year before her husband’s death.

  Lew
held his fire during our presentation, waiting for the actual case to begin. He made a brief opening statement to the seven man, five-woman jury, to the general effect that Judy Johansen had been tried in the tabloid press and convicted of making a human error, a layman’s error, in administering her husband’s medicine that killed him.

  He confidently stated that the prosecution would never convince them beyond a shadow of a doubt that Johansen had deliberately taken her husband’s life.

  Our first witnesses, most of them officials from the Orlando area where publicity had swirled so strongly that court officials had decided the case would have to be moved, laid the groundwork.

  Dr. Eugenio Amparo had been Carroll’s personal physician and testified that although his enlarged heart was a problem, it was a reaction to one of the medications he was taking that actually provoked the heart attack that killed him. Judy Johansen had been the only person in the house when the medicine was taken and she had admitted administering it to her husband.

  Then it was Lew’s turn at bat. He got Amparo to concede that Carroll had been a very sick man and his care givers were basically balancing a stew of drugs, any one of which could have killed him.

  “But as long as Mrs. Carroll had followed the instructions I provided her, there is no reason she should have gotten confused enough to make such a drastic mistake,” Amparo said in a strong Filipino accent.

  “But you’re a professional, Dr. Amparo. My client is a lay person. Isn’t it possible that under the stress of confusing or strong emotions, she might have gotten confused?”

  “Possible, but she had been caring for her husband for nearly five years. It would be out of the ordinary for her to have gotten confused after being a caregiver for so long.”

  Lew gave him a funny look, then looked back at me and I knew he was getting ready to carve up Amparo, and by extension myself.

  “How long have you been a physician, Dr. Amparo?”

  “24 years.”

  “And you practiced in the Philippines for ten years before coming to this country?”