by Ray Daniel
My mother shook her head. “Why are you so careless?” Then to Lee, “He was always a clumsy boy.”
I said to Lee, “I’m especially clumsy when I ask a lot of questions.”
My mother ignored me. “Tucker, you’re being rude. Introduce this young woman.”
“I was going to, but we were having so much fun with my clumsiness that I didn’t get a chance.” My mother had, once again, transformed me into a petulant teenager. “This is Jael Navas. Jael, my mother, Angelina Tucker, and Lieutenant Lee of the Boston Police.
Lee asked, “Is she your legal counsel?”
I said, “She’s my muscle.”
“We’re in police headquarters. I don’t think there will be violence.”
I looked at my mother. “You never know.”
Jael said, “It is a pleasure to meet you, Mrs. Tucker.”
My mother said, “Jael is such a pretty name. Is it Gallic?”
Jael said, “It is from the Bible.”
Lieutenant Lee said, “It’s from Judges. Chapter Four.”
Jael cocked an eyebrow at Lee. She said, “Very few people know the reference.”
Lee said, “Very few people know their Bible.”
My mother said, “Even so, it’s a very pretty name.”
We started walking to a conference room. As we reached the elevators, I asked Lee, “Did I miss anything before we arrived?”
Lee said, “We were talking about the other night.”
My mother said, “Yes. I was apologizing for my outburst.”
And an apology for the slap? I waited. Nope, apparently not.
Lee said, “I didn’t want to be the one to tell her.”
“Yes, Tucker,” said my mother, “Lieutenant Lee says that you should have told me.”
I said, “I would have told you, but I didn’t get a chance. I was having trouble finding the right way to say, ‘Dad was porking the babysitter.’”
“Aloysius Tucker! I will not listen to that language!”
“Here it comes,” I said.
“Don’t you give me your smart mouth. Especially not in public.”
Lee said, “Tucker, remember the fifth commandment.”
I said, “What’s the fifth commandment?”
Jael said, “Honor your father and mother.”
I said to Jael, “I thought you were on my side.”
“It says what it says.”
Lee opened the door to a conference room and said, “Let’s sit in here.”
The conference room held a small round table. We milled about, looking for appropriate seating. When the music stopped, Lee was sitting next to my mother, who was sitting next to Jael. I wound up across from my mother—the fighting chair.
Lee said to my mother, “Let me recap. John Tucker, also known as Little John or JT, was found murdered in front of your son’s house. It turns out that JT’s parents were Cathy Byrd and your husband. Cathy Byrd was murdered two days ago.”
My mother said, “I don’t see what this has to do with me.”
“You are more than an innocent bystander in all this.”
My mother folded her hands in front of her. “That’s not true. I didn’t know that my husband was having an affair.”
“He had more than an affair. He had built a parallel life in Pittsfield.”
I watched my mother’s knuckles whiten as she clenched her folded hands. She said, “That’s ridiculous. I would have known.”
Lee said, “How would you have known?”
“A woman knows these things.”
Lee looked at me. I gestured. Please, go on. You’re doing so well.
“Mrs. Tucker, your husband led a double life. Cathy Byrd owned a house in Pittsfield, and she lived there with your husband. Her neighbors thought that Pittsfield was his primary—”
“Really?” my mother interrupted. “With what money?”
“Excuse me?”
“Cathy Byrd was a little girl with no job and my husband was an engineer. I paid all our bills and I did all our taxes. I saw his W-2 form every year. I tracked every penny in our bank account and balanced that checkbook every month. How did he buy a house?”
“Did he have money before you got married?”
“We got married when we were twenty-two. We didn’t have any money. All the money in our marriage passed through my hands.”
Lieutenant Lee asked, “How old were you when Tucker was born?”
“I was thirty-two.”
“You waited ten years?”
My mother reddened. “We had problems conceiving. We didn’t use birth control, but—”
I had reddened as well. I asked, “Is there a point to this?”
Lee said, “I’m trying to get a complete picture. The same gun was used to kill Cathy Bird and JT. There has to be some connection.”
My mother said, “I don’t see how dragging up all these filthy memories is helping. My husband did not have the money for a second house!”
“He must have. He bought it with cash.”
“Cash? How would he have that much cash? He worked a full-time job, and he didn’t gamble. He didn’t even buy a lottery ticket.”
“He must have kept some records of his activity,” said Lee.
I had been sitting in my chair, leaning it back on two legs, arms crossed, frown etched across my face. If I had any brains, if I had the smallest piece of common sense, I would have maintained that position. I would have watched Lee and my mother go back and forth, I would have placed little mental side bets as to how long it could go on. I would have looked toward Jael and rolled my eyes.
Sadly, I did not. My brains were overridden by an urge to tilt my chair down, engage in the conversation, and try to be helpful. If God had been so kind as to give us a chance to press an Undo button once in our lives, I would have used mine to take back what I said next.
“Ma,” I said, “didn’t Dad have a bunch of engineering notebooks?”
An iron silence gripped the room.
My mother said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I’m sure there must have been warning signs: pursed lips, pinched eyes, knuckles whitening on her purse. I’m sure there must have been a way that she was trying to communicate to me that she didn’t want to talk about the notebooks. Unfortunately, I had slipped into the tactless, fact-based, argumentative world of engineering problem-solving. If there were signs, I missed them.
I said, “You know. The ones with the brown covers and the green graph paper.”
Lee said, “Yes. That’s exactly the sort of thing. Did he use them as a diary?”
I said, “I think so.”
My mother said, “Those are private documents.”
“Yeah, but Ma, they’re not going to publicize them. They’re just going to look through them.”
“I’m sure I don’t have them. I think they were lost.”
I shook my head. “Lost? How could they be lost? You keep every—”
“Aloysius Tucker, I told you that they are lost! Are you calling me a liar?”
“No, but—”
“No buts! They are lost. You cannot see them.”
Lee asked, “Which is it, Mrs. Tucker? Are they lost or are we not allowed to see them?”
My mother aimed her gaze at Lee. “They are lost.”
Lee leaned forward. Reached out for my mother’s hand. She drew back. Lee said, “We could help you search.”
“No. You cannot search my house.”
“We would be respectful, Mrs. Tucker. We’re trying to solve a murder.”
“No! I said no!”
“But, why—?”
I said, “Because my moth—”
My mother pointed at me from across the table and looked daggers into my e
yes. I felt her finger jabbing me in the back of the brain. “Not a word from you. Not a word! You’ve done enough.”
Jael looked from me to my mother and back with increased interest.
Lee said, “We could get a search warrant, you know.”
My mother rose. “I haven’t done anything. You cannot search my house!” She moved to leave the conference room.
“We’re not done here, Mrs. Tucker.”
“I want to leave.”
I asked, “Is she under arrest, Lee?”
“No,” he said. “She is not under arrest.”
“Then I’m leaving.” My mother opened the conference room door and was gone.
Thirty-Five
“My God,” said Lee. “What just happened?”
I said, “I ask that question every time I see her.”
“Why did she get so upset?”
“My mother is a hoarder.”
Lee shook his head. “That’s a terrible thing to say about your own mother. It might have been true of your father, but not your mother.”
“What? No! Not whore. Hoarder. Hoar-DER! She hoards things.”
“What kinds of things?”
“Paper things. She’s saved every scrap of paper that she’s come across since my dad died. Her house is almost completely full of paper.”
“Well then, she should have the notebooks.”
“She might have them, but you’ll never find them.”
“Why not?”
I shifted in my chair. Jael and Lee were sitting across the table from me. Jael, as always, listened. Lee had a notebook out, his hand poised over the paper with a pen. The pen had a little crucifix on it.
I said, “There are two reasons. First, the information you want is old. Her house is like an archeological dig. The oldest information is at the bottom of the pile. So you’ll have to dig through mountains of paper to find something about my dad.”
“What’s the second reason?”
I paused. I hated talking about my mother’s mental illness. People’s responses range from judgment (what kind of son lets this happen?) to pity (that must be terrible). The worst response is the instinctive recoil (is it catching?). I wasn’t interested in encouraging any of them, so I just didn’t talk about my crazy mother and her paper dungeon.
Lee repeated, “And the second reason?”
I asked, “Lee, do your parents live around here?”
“Sure.”
“Do you have a key to their house?”
“Of course I do.”
“I don’t.”
“You don’t have a key to your mother’s house?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because she doesn’t trust me. She’s afraid that I’ll come into her house and move a scrap of paper. I’m not exaggerating. I can’t move anything. She has a mental map of the place and she thinks that she knows where everything is. If someone moves anything, she feels like she’ll never find it. It’s as bad as throwing it away, and she never throws anything away.”
“So a search would mess up the house.”
“Yes.”
“But it’s worthless scraps.”
I pointed at Lee’s pen and asked, “How much do you want for that pen?”
Lee looked at the pen, then back at me. “It’s not for sale.”
“Oh, come on. It doesn’t look very expensive. I’ll give you two hundred dollars for it and you can buy a nicer pen.”
“I said it’s not for sale.”
“Okay. Five hundred dollars and not a penny more. Wait. I’ll negotiate against myself and give you six hundred.”
“I will not sell you this pen.”
“Why not?”
“My church gave it to me when I accepted Jesus Christ as my personal savior.”
“It’s just a pen.”
“It’s not just a pen.”
“And my mother’s papers are not just worthless scraps. She’s attached every one of them to my dad and her memory of him. If she loses a piece of paper, she’ll feel like she lost a piece of him.”
“So if we had her house cleaned out—” Lee started.
“She’d probably kill herself.”
Jael was looking at me in a way I’d never seen before. Her eyes had softened, and her perpetually thin lips were a little fuller, a little less pinched. She was falling into the pity camp. I didn’t like it.
Lee said, “So what do we do?”
I said, “I don’t know what to tell you.”
“Look, Tucker, I sympathize with your mother’s condition, but I have a murder to solve. Your half brother was killed in front of your house and his mother was killed the next day with the same gun. These events are related and they intersect at your father and the house in Pittsfield. How did your father buy a second house without your mother knowing about it? I suspect he gave a pile of cash to Cathy Byrd so she could buy a house. The source must be written in his notebooks.”
“You’re probably right, but there’s not much else you can do.”
“There is. Today, I’m going to get a search warrant for that house, and tomorrow I’m going to search it as carefully as possible, hopefully with your mother’s help, so we can find something about your father and his second family.”
“She won’t let you do that,” I said.
“That’s your job. If you bring me those notebooks by tomorrow, I won’t have to search the house.”
“And if I don’t?”
“Then tomorrow, your mother is going to have a very bad day.”
Thirty-Six
Sal was sitting in his usual spot in Cafe Vittoria when Jael and I popped into his window. I waved. He grimaced and gestured us in. As Jael seated herself, he gave her an appraising top-to-bottom inspection. There was nothing covert in his glance, but there was nothing overtly lascivious. While most men look at a beautiful woman the way they look at a sports car, with acquisitive intensity, Sal looked at Jael as if she were a bottle of fine wine. Something to be appreciated but not opened.
He said, “So, Jael. Long time no see. You look good.”
Jael said, “Thank you.”
I said, “You two know each other?”
Jael said, “I know Sal from my work.”
He waved at the barista to bring us coffee and looked at my stitches. “What the fuck happened to your face?”
“Some guy beat me up in the men’s room at Faneuil Hall.”
“Who?”
After my mother’s encounter with Lee, Jael had driven back to my house and had parked her SUV there. Upstairs, Jael had sipped tea in the living room while I sat next to Click and Clack and inspected my laptop.
Oscar’s picture was there. It had downloaded before I had snapped the laptop shut. I copied the picture, cropped it, and synced the photos to my Droid. Then Jael and I had taken the train to Haymarket to visit with Sal. If I had needed to talk to Sal about Dad’s money, I needed to talk to him about this picture even more.
Sal repeated his question: “Who beat you up?”
In response I took out my Droid and opened the cropped picture and showed it to Sal. It was a picture of Teardrop with his bald head, yellow teeth, and teardrop tattoo bleeding out of one eye. He was laughing.
I said, “This guy.”
Sal glanced away from the picture. “Never saw him before.”
I hadn’t expected it, the bald-faced lie right to my face. I had expected dissembling. I had expected promises to look into it. I had expected an I-told-you-so. A small part of me had even expected a name, the truth. I hadn’t expected this, and because I hadn’t expected it, I did something stupid.
I said, “You’re a fucking liar.”
The air froze. Sal turned, his brow furrowing into a mask of concentrated rage, his hand
leaving the tabletop and his fingers extending, his shoulders turning, one dipping down away from me, the other twisting toward me as his arm extended and his big fingers seized my shirt front and yanked me from the chair. Suddenly I was ten years old, and my older cousin was bullying me.
Sal raged, “Don’t you ever call me a liar!”
The bottle of familial rage that I kept in my chest exploded. Black vapors fumed out and spread through me, darkening my vision, focusing me on violence.
I screamed back, “Liar! You’re a big fat fucking liar!”
Sal twisted the T-shirt in his paw and drew back his hand.
I slapped at his grip on my shirt and cried, “Go ahead, you fat fucking liar! Go ahead!”
Sal’s weight shifted as he turned his shoulder into the coming punch.
“Enough!” Jael’s voice cut through the air. She stood, pointing at Sal, violence in her eyes.
Sal grunted. His shoulder relaxed. His fist unclenched. He looked at Jael and said, “What? You gonna shoot me?”
“Let him go,” said Jael. Sal let go of my shirt. I sagged into the chair, covering my face and hiding the shame of my tears. Hiccups broke through as I worked to master myself. I felt Sal’s bulk disappear. Then it was back. Sal nudged my hand away from my face. He was holding a shot glass full of clear liquid.
“Wha—” I took a deep breath. “What’s this?”
Sal rested his hand on my back. “It’s grappa. It’s good. Shoot it down.”
I knocked back the grappa. Its warmth splashed into my belly and filled my head. My breathing slowed.
Sal raised his glass, drank some grappa. “Why would you call me a liar?”
I looked across the floor and saw my Droid sitting in the corner. Its rubber phone-condom had protected it from the fall. I crawled under the table, my arms unsteady from the combination of adrenaline and grappa, grabbed my Droid, and sat next to Sal. The picture of Teardrop was still there.
I said, “This is a cropped picture. I also have the original.”
I flicked the picture to the original and Sal said, “Fuck me.”
Thirty-Seven
“Where did you get this?” asked Sal.