by Jan Burke
“In the treasure room, where we hid.”
“Upstairs?”
“In here,” he said impatiently, as if I really did not know a thing.
I stood up and went to the closet.
I shined the flashlight in it. There was a shelf in the closet. On the shelf was a big cardboard box.
I brought it out into the room.
“That’s it!” he said. “In there, with the magic spells from the Holy Bible.”
“Magic spells?” I said, and lifted the lid.
On top of papers full of facts and figures I doubted he would ever understand, Two Toes had stored two other items taken from Lucas. Dress socks and a leather belt. I pulled them out of the box and Two Toes smiled.
“Those are clean!” he said.
Clean socks. No wonder he called it the treasure room.
I used them as a bandage, the belt to hold them and put pressure on the wound.
“Why do you call them magic spells?” I asked, trying to distract him as I picked up the gun again. But he had little interest in the weapon now.
“The Prof kept them in the altar. He hid them there.”
“He wasn’t a professor!” Lisa said angrily.
“I don’t like you!” he said, just as angrily.
“You know what, Lisa? I don’t like you much, either,” I said, moving to the window. Sooner or later that security guard would have to cruise by again. I didn’t want to leave Two Toes with Lisa, so I would need to signal the guard from here. Taking Two Toes down the stairs with me was out of the question; it would be asking too much of a bandage made of socks and a belt.
“He was a professor!” Two Toes insisted, still glowering at her.
“Oh, what do you know!” she said.
“The Selmans know all kinds of things, don’t they? Three post-graduate degrees in the family, and at least two murderers.”
“Just two,” she said. “Leave Jerry out of this.”
“So you do know,” I said.
“About Nadine? Let’s say I’ve had a strong suspicion for years. It doesn’t matter, really. I was cleaning up after Andre’s other transgressions—cheating the public. I wish Lucas had just left things as they were. I didn’t want to have to silence him. I really didn’t. But I guess it was going to come to that, anyway. Until I took a look at that fax ribbon, I didn’t even know he suspected the truth about Nadine.”
I was stunned. This was too much to take in. “I’ve learned some horrible things about your father today, but the idea of him using you to help—”
“Using me? Using me to help?” She laughed hysterically.
“She’s crazy,” Two Toes said.
“Andre doesn’t even suspect that I know about his bogus statistics! Oh God! All those years I spent in that attic, that furnace vent like an intercom—and the brilliant Dr. Selman still has no idea what I know about him. That’s how smart he is!”
Two Toes acted like he wanted to smack her one again.
“You’d better rest,” I said to him. “You’re hurt.”
“I’m hurt, too,” she said. “He hit me hard. And my wrists hurt. Could you loosen these straps a little?”
“You really don’t have much respect for my intelligence, do you?”
“That’s not true.”
We were silent. Two Toes started humming a melody I couldn’t place at first, then I realized I had heard it outside St. Anthony’s. The “Our Father.”
I watched for the security guard.
My pager went off again.
“I’ll get it!” Two Toes said, stumbling to his feet.
“Be careful!” I said, but he was already on his way into the bathroom.
“You made a mess in there!” he said to Lisa, as he came back out wearing my purse. He plopped down against the wall, still clutching the purse. He busied himself looking through it.
“Gimme the light,” he said. “I need it.” At his sullen look, I added, “There’s a little light on my keychain. Use that.”
Good enough.
“You wouldn’t understand,” I heard Lisa say.
“As I said before, you don’t have much respect for my intelligence. I’ll admit I don’t understand this. I thought you were trying to pin Lucas’s murder on your father. But this isn’t about Andre, is it? Not about loving or hating him.”
“I don’t love him.” She stated it as fact. “He never gave me any love, I never gave him any. He doesn’t love anyone. And hate? I don’t feel enough for him to do that, either. This isn’t about what Andre is, or how I feel about him. It’s about what people—certain people—believe him to be.”
“Especially Barton Sawyer.”
She was quiet, then said, “Yes, especially Barton. Don’t you understand? Who was I when Barton first met me?”
“A young campaigner.”
“No, that’s not all. I was the daughter of a great social science statistician. A man who was making a big splash as an expert in the field of urban populations in transition. That’s the Andre the public policy-makers know. There’s quite a bit of truth to that. Just not enough truth.”
“Lucas Monroe was about to prove Andre to be an academic fraud, and perhaps a murderer,” I said. “Neither of which makes good press for a future assemblywoman.”
“Do you think anyone would trust someone whose father bilked the public the way Andre has?”
“You keep talking as if that’s his big sin, not the murder of a woman who was younger than you are now. I’ll tell you the truth, Lisa. If Nadine’s murder didn’t come to light, I’m not sure the studies would matter much. I don’t think very many people would understand how they had been cheated. Most don’t care enough about the poor to worry about whether they’ve lost their housing.”
“Barton Sawyer would understand it. It would matter to him.”
“Oh, and there goes your money.”
“More than money!” she said fiercely.
“Oh?”
“Barton would never have anything to do with me. I couldn’t stand that. He thinks I’m like he is. I’ve tried to be, but it’s not enough. He prides himself on trying to clean up politics. Do you think he’d be associated with the daughter of a murderer? Even if I withdrew my candidacy, he wouldn’t keep me on staff. The daughter of a man who falsified redevelopment studies for his own gain? Don’t you understand? If Andre’s reputation was ruined, mine would be ruined, too. I couldn’t let those papers be made public. I had to make sure you never had a chance to study them. Now—oh God, don’t you see how disappointed Barton will be?”
“Yes,” I said. “I think I know exactly how disappointed he’ll be.”
She didn’t answer.
“You know what, Lisa?” I said after a moment. “To some extent, reputations are like statistics. They stand for something larger. They aren’t necessarily the facts, they’re just a way to represent the facts. Poor samples, faulty methods of correlation—they all apply, don’t they? Sometimes, you think you know someone, but you’ve based your judgments on small, carefully displayed samples of their behavior. The whole person may be different. You, for example. I’ve never really known who you are.”
“What I said upstairs,” she said, “was true. This wasn’t about you and me. I didn’t like hurting Roberta or Lucas. And you—you did so much for me. Try to believe that much of me, that I regret what I’ve done.”
For once, I kept control of my temper. I actually thought before I opened my mouth.
“Prove it,” I said.
“What?”
“Tell what you know to the police.”
“About what?”
“Everything. Nadine, Lucas’s degree, the studies. Everything.”
“I don’t know all of it,” she said slowly.
“Your political reputation is shot. You’re going to go to prison for what you did to Lucas and Roberta. If you don’t want the entire focus of the publicity to be on what a little shit you are, then turn in that father you claim not t
o love. Turn in Andre. Maybe Barton will come to forgive you.”
“He’ll never forgive me.”
“All right, then, suppose he doesn’t. He’s not God, Lisa. There are other people who’ve cared about you, too. Maybe later you might feel as if you did something for someone other than yourself. Maybe your mother might come to believe she had some influence on you, that you didn’t turn out to be just like Andre.”
“I’m not like him!”
“God help Marcy when she hears what you’ve done.”
She started crying. “Leave my mother out of this.”
“That’s what you’ve done. You should have gone to her a long time ago. Maybe Lucas wouldn’t have ended up on the streets if you had told her what you suspected. Maybe none of this would have been necessary.”
She cried louder now. I thought of June Monroe and didn’t care how hard Lisa cried.
“Are these your dogs?” Two Toes asked, apparently equally unmoved. He was going through my wallet.
“Yes,” I said, wondering if I’d ever get it back. “Do you like dogs?”
“Do they bite?”
“No.”
“I like them. What are their names?” he asked.
“Deke and Dunk.”
This was apparently very funny to a guardian angel.
“Be careful, you don’t want that wound to bleed too much,” I warned.
I looked out at Las Piernas. I angled myself for the slim view of the water. The Pacific usually soothes my soul, but it was too dark to see much of it now. I could see the lights of an oil island. I thought back to days when, on a student budget, I took Lisa to the beach or to parks or any place that offered student discounts—the zoo or the local skating rink. The beach was always a favorite with both of us, though. We both loved the ocean. Did she still love it, or had that changed, too? We talked of sailing away from Las Piernas. I remembered going out on the pier and feeding a quarter to the telescopes to look out at Catalina Island and the ships leaving the breakwater.
Ships and islands. Two sets of three numbers. Longitude and latitude.
“Say that prayer again,” Two Toes said. When I finished, he said, “Amen.” We were quiet for a time.
“ROLAND HILL WAS THERE,” Lisa said into the silence.
I glanced back at her. “Who else?”
“Just Roland and my father. But Allan knew about it. He took the others away. Booter Hodges gave some sort of signal to them, but he didn’t know what was going on. Not really. They wrapped a chain around her and threw her overboard. I don’t know much more. Allan bought the chain. Roland was angry with him, because he paid by credit card. That’s how I know. I heard my dad laughing about it when Roland told him.”
“Andre, Allan, and Roland knew for a certainty that she was killed.”
“Yes.”
“You’ll tell the police?”
“Yes, I promise,” she said, then added quickly, “That probably doesn’t mean anything to you.”
“You might be surprised,” I said.
A FEW MINUTES LATER, I saw the security guard cruiser coming up the far side of the street.
I didn’t have a chance to get his attention before another car sped from the other direction. Keene Dage’s Mercedes. He wasn’t at the curb before Frank got out of the passenger side, frantic. He was looking up at the building. I flashed the flashlight. He spotted it, pointed. The security guard was fumbling with the gate. I could hear sirens. I had to let Frank know that we were okay.
“Can I have this?” Two Toes was saying behind me.
“Have what?” I asked, trying to get the window open.
“This thing that beeps.”
“It’s all yours,” I said, using the butt end of the flashlight to strike the pane.
I was going to owe Keene for another window. If I got my wallet back, I’d pay him for it.
38
TWO TOES KEPT MY PAGER. The policy at the paper changed by the next afternoon, so I didn’t order a new one. It had gone off because Frank had tried to get in touch with me again and again, finally contacting one of Keene Dage’s kids. Keene had just left, heading back to Fallbrook after a family dinner, but his son had reached him on the car phone. When Keene heard that I hadn’t come home yet, he doubled back and picked up Frank. They called in reinforcements on the way.
Lisa left with the police. I used Keene’s cell phone to call Marcy and told her that Lisa had just been arrested, and that she might want to be at the police station when they brought her in. I told her that I thought it best that someone else give her the details. She wasn’t happy with me about it, but I told her I had to go, I needed to take someone to the hospital.
Two Toes was afraid of the ambulance, so Keene took him to St. Anne’s in the Mercedes. Frank and I rode with them. On the way, I got all of my belongings back, with the exception of the pager and the picture of the dogs. Once there, I introduced him to a favorite nun of mine, and she convinced him that St. Anne’s would never mistreat a guardian angel. When we left, he was trying to trade my pager for her rosary.
ROBERTA CAME OUT of her coma. She was having trouble speaking and couldn’t walk. But no one was giving up yet, least of all Roberta. Time would tell. I was only one of many friends who were determined to help her out in any way we could.
Some of those women, Marcy included, would probably never speak to me again. They blamed me for Lisa’s being in jail, and there wasn’t any point in trying to get them to see it any other way. Alicia Penderson-Duggin, of all people, was my biggest defender.
Lucas had a big funeral. A dead hero of the common man has a lot of political appeal, I found. There was lots of media coverage, and politicians and college administrators were anxious to be associated with his memory. The Express had taken my story and turned it into something that I probably should have been happy with, but wasn’t—a big front-page tribute to him. Maybe it bothered me because they couldn’t spare two lines for him a week before, and now he was selling their papers.
During the funeral, I stayed off in a corner of the cemetery, sitting on a fence with Blue, Rooster, Decker, and Beans. I don’t know what was said at his graveside, and I don’t really care. Like just about everybody else at that funeral—except Lucas’s mother and his brother—the preacher didn’t know him. Maybe I just wasn’t ready to say good-bye to him. I’m not sure, even now.
Charles Monroe stayed at the grave long after everyone else had gone. He saw me sitting on the fence and nodded. I nodded back. I left after that.
I didn’t see his mother until the next day. She was in Joshua Burrows’ room at Las Piernas General. They must have been talking about Lucas, because she was smiling. When she saw me, the smile got bigger.
“Hello, June,” I said.
“Good to see you,” she said. “Corky—I’m sorry, I should call you by your right name.”
“Corky’s fine,” he said. He looked very different from the last time I had seen him. He was clean, the bruises were fading, and although he wasn’t the picture of health, the antibiotics were obviously doing some good.
“How are you doing?” I asked.
“Just taking it a day at a time,” he said.
“Good for you,” June said. “That’s the way to recover from anything.”
He smiled. “She’s subtle, isn’t she?”
“Oh, I didn’t come in here to lecture you, and you know it,” she said. She looked over to me. “I’ve about worn him out talking about Lucas.”
“I wish I could have been at the funeral,” Joshua said.
“Your father was there for you,” June said. “Lucas would understand. Besides, it doesn’t matter so much what you do for a person after they’re dead. You were his friend when he was alive.”
It hit me like a slap, although I knew she wasn’t aiming the remark at me. “She’s right,” I said. “Excuse me. I’ll be back later.”
I hurried out of the room.
She was right, of course. I walked around t
he corner, found an elevator, and took it to the top floor. There’s a little solarium there, and I needed someplace to sit, someplace where there was light.
I realized that whatever little good I had done by telling Lucas’s story, his name would be forgotten. Once those of us who knew him were gone, who would remember him? The poor who had been forced to move because of Andre’s crooked study wouldn’t have their homes back. Redevelopment, with all its mixed results, would continue apace. New studies had been demanded, and Ray Aiken would undoubtedly allow better oversight of future projects.
The elevator opened and I stepped out into the sunlight.
I tried to look at things differently. Nadine’s brother was sad but relieved. I learned he had filed a missing person’s report on her, but in the six months that had passed since her death, Hill made certain loose ends had been tidied up, and she was thought to have left the area. The coordinates Jeff McCutchen guessed at from his quarter’s worth of viewing turned out to be in the water near an oil island. Lots of diving and some underwater metal detectors finally turned up the chain. It was still around the canvas bag. The bag, which had been firmly anchored by the chain and sheltered to some degree by the island, was carefully raised and opened. A largely intact adult female skeleton was found within. The teeth, a bracelet, and an old fracture on the crooked left little finger were enough to identify the remains as those of Nadine Preston. No one had expected to find so much of her, the coroner had confided.
Stop it, I told myself.
Keene Dage, who probably would have been able to completely avoid the risk of criminal prosecution, instead had come forward. He was being offered immunity from prosecution in exchange for his testimony in several investigations, as was Corbin Tyler. The last time I had seen him, he was tired but happy. “My kids are behind me one hundred percent,” he said. “That’s all that matters to me.”
“You’ll have to recarve the faces of the angels on the Angelus,” I told him, and he laughed.
Roland Hill and Allan Moffett were probably going to prison. Booter Hodges was looking for another job. And although I didn’t know it that day when I stood in the solarium, Andre Selman would cheat the hangman. He never left the hospital. Heart failure. Perhaps there was some justice in that after all.