by Ang Pompano
“What the hell are you running for? We had a meeting,” I said.
“You set me up. That car almost killed me. Of course, I took off.” His voice was shrill and his face pinched with fear.
“I was almost killed, too. Think about it. Someone doesn’t want me to ask questions about who whacked Andy Keller and Roscoe Hicks. I know Georg Gerber was your father.”
He laughed.
“You see, that’s where you’re an asshat. I didn’t kill anyone. Keller was going to help me clear my father’s name.”
“You mean you were okay with Keller digging up the past?”
“I was angry that he wasn’t doing more,” Tanner said.
“Ha! He called you asshat!” The voice was all too familiar.
I know that the real inheritance I’m going to receive from my father isn’t a detective agency but the dementia he had already started to exhibit. At that moment, I thought maybe I had already lost my mind. But I wasn’t hallucinating as I watched my old man climb like a crab over the rocks from the other side of the jetty. Damned, freaking, aggravating, obnoxious, frustrating old fart. First, he went missing and then he decided to show up at the worst possible moment. This was no time for a family reunion.
“Where the hell have you been?” I gave him a hand to get off of the rocks.
“To tell you the truth, I don’t recall.”
I would have said he was playing head games, but the people at the Palms House assured me that the lapses were real and would get worse with time.
“You don’t recall. Yet, you show up way out here on a beach that even I didn’t know I would be on.”
“You were in that stupid little car. I followed. I’m a better detective than you. Good thing you didn’t have to go over the big bridge to get here.” He would never win any awards as Mr. Personality. That was for sure.
“That you remember! Well, I have news for you. I’m over that.”
“You don’t have to yell at the old guy,” Tanner said.
I was about to tell the ear jacker to butt out, when Hicks’ girlfriend Marnee climbed over the jetty. I guess it was reunion time after all. The party was getting bigger. And uglier.
“Who the hell are you?” Tanner’s eyes were fixed on a gun in Marnee’s hand.
“My friend is with me,” Big Al said. “We’re going fishing.”
“She’s not taking you fishing today, Pop.”
“Sure, she is. She’s my friend from the station.”
“Yeah, but no fishing with your friend today.”
Who was I to question my father’s reality? To him, she was Marnee, his friend from The Palms, who snuck him out early in the morning to take him fishing. It was a better reality than mine who saw her as the danger she was.
“Who are you?” Tanner asked again.
Talk about renewing old acquaintances.
“Mr. Tanner or Gerber, whatever you want to be called, I’d like you to meet Marnee Wharton, the grownup version of the kidnapped girl, Christmas Granville.” I said.
Tanner’s jaw dropped. “Granville. Are you shitting me? My father went to jail because of you.” I thought Tanner was going to go after her but he didn’t.
Marnee squinted her Cleopatra eyes. “Yeah, well, life sucks. It hasn’t been a picnic for me either being sent off to live with relatives in England who changed my name and didn’t tell me who my real parents were. So, don’t tell me your troubles.”
I don’t know about Tanner, but I understood about being abandoned. “Well, I get it. Parents can do a head job on their kids. But at some point, you have to take responsibility for your actions and stop blaming your upbringing.”
“What would you know?”
“I know you resented that Jill was born as the replacement child for you. You came back to Savannah to befriend her. Then you took up with her husband and killed her, all out of resentment.”
“I thought Jill was killed in a car accident,” Tanner said.
“Jill’s body was found in her submerged car but it wasn’t an accident.”
“What do you mean?” I think Tanner needed a scorecard to keep up. I tried to explain.
“I couldn’t understand why Jill’s car would crash into the canal. She wasn’t impaired, the weather was good that night, and no other cars were involved. I read speculation in the newspaper report that she may have been texting, but Hicks gave Jill’s phone to Estelle. Jill had forgotten it at home when she went out, so she couldn’t have been texting. Then it struck me that we don’t drive cars any more. We drive computers. Anyone with the technical skill can hack into a car and control all kinds of things, including acceleration and braking.”
“That’s science fiction,” Tanner said.
“It’s not. Car manufactures remotely update vehicle software all of the time. All someone needs are a laptop and the know-how.”
“You make it sound easy,” Marnee said.
“Ah, there you go again. From day one, you couldn’t resist bragging how you were taking an online computer course from Stanford.”
“A lot of people take online courses,” Tanner said.
I don’t know why the guy was sticking up for Marnee. Maybe he empathized with the underdog. Although, judging by that heater in her hand, we were the underdogs.
“But only extremely intelligent people take courses in advanced computer security,” I said.
“You mean they teach you how to kill people by taking over their cars?” Tanner didn’t get it.
“The course is designed to protect networks and prevent attacks, but that isn’t the way Marnee used it. She used it to cause Jill’s accident.”
“Better dying through technology,” Marnee said. The callousness of her remark made me realize how sick she was.
If you Googled an image of sad, it would come up with a picture of my old man at that moment. He stepped forward between Marnee and me.
“My wife had an accident?”
“Not your wife, your daughter did, Dad. Yes, Jill had an accident.” The funny thing was that he was right when he said Hicks was his son-in-law. I wondered if that came out of his confusion, or if in a lucid moment he remembered who Hicks was.
He shook his head. I gave him time to process it on his own. I had a more immediate problem to deal with. I wanted to be sure that the woman with the gun processed it as well. From the look of realization on her face, Marnee got it right away.
“That’s right. Jill was my father’s daughter. When Estelle dies, your father’s estate would be yours for the claiming. You didn’t have to kill Jill or go through the elaborate charade.”
“It wasn’t only about money.”
Her voice had a chilling flat affect, but somehow, I understood exactly what she was talking about. The feeling of being abandoned leaves a lasting impression on a kid.
“You blame everyone who had anything to do with the kidnapping for your screwed-up childhood. That’s why you tormented Estelle by sending her money and the candy, making her think Jill might still be alive.”
“If that woman didn’t come along, my father would have stayed with my mother and I wouldn’t have been sent away. I wanted her to know what it felt like to be abandoned, to not know for sure if your family is alive or dead. I knew about the chocolate kisses from Jill. I thought it was a nice touch.”
I knew that Big Al couldn’t tell you what he had for breakfast, but his long-term recall was amazing. I wondered if he was on the ball enough to shed some light.
“Big Al, listen to me. You remember Martin Granville?”
“The race car driver. Yeah. The bastard married one of my secretaries.”
“Yes, Estelle. How did he know her?”
“He met her when he hired me to find his daughter.”
I studied Marnee’s face. I think she understood that Estelle didn’t h
ook up with Martin Granville until after he divorced his wife. But it was too late to undo all that had been done.
“There you go,” Tanner said. “Keller must have discovered that she was alive and in Savannah, so she killed him before she could be connected to Jill’s murder. And she must have killed Hicks, too. Now she’s going to kill us all and make it look like a deranged old man murdered two people and then killed himself.”
Marnee looked at Tanner as if he were an idiot. She started to say something, but Big Al’s hero instinct kicked in at that moment. As Johnson had said, the disease doesn’t change what’s inside of a person.
“Holy shit, holy shit,” my father said as he jumped in front of me. “You’re not killing my friend.” He reached for her gun and it went off. My father fell at my feet.
“No!” Marnee screamed when she realized what happened. I think she genuinely had a soft spot for Big Al and that was why she used to bring him on outings.
Seconds later, Johnson appeared with Max beside him. He shot his firearm and Christmas/Marnee fell. The little beach was beginning to look like a slaughterhouse.
I ripped his shirt and applied pressure to a gaping wound in Big Al’s shoulder.
“Max, what are you doing here?” I managed to choke out.
“Johnson showed up at the accident scene, and I told him you went chasing the pedicab driver. We followed you.”
Little did I know I had been leading a parade with everyone following in on the chase.
“I’m glad you did.” I could hear Johnson calling in for medical assistance. I kept the pressure on my father’s wound. He was breathing, but wasn’t conscious.
Max went over to Marnee and checked for a pulse.
“Nothing,” she said.
48
MAX LEFT TO GET GREENLEAF. I rode in the back of the ambulance with Big Al. The old man took a bullet for me. That shouldn’t be confused with my old man took a bullet for me. Big Al was protecting his friend, not his son. But it didn’t matter anymore. He was a hero, no question about it.
From what the emergency responders told me, Big Al had a good chance of making it. I felt bad that Marnee wasn’t so lucky, but Johnson couldn’t take the chance that Marnee would shoot anyone else. He had no choice but to kill her.
*****
When we got out of the ambulance, I ran alongside the gurney as they wheeled my father toward a swinging door. A hospital guard stopped me and pointed toward a counter in the waiting room. “You have to check in over there. They need information.”
I watched as they pushed the gurney through the door and it swung shut. The guard stood in front of the door and gestured toward the reception area, as if I couldn’t figure out where I had to go for myself.
From Big Al’s previous visits to the emergency room, they already had his name and other essential billing information.
“Has his insurance changed?” seemed to be the biggest concern of the woman behind the desk.
I was going to give her a hard time and ask if they were going to deny treatment if he wasn’t insured. As far as I knew, that was against the law and the Hippocratic Oath as well. Instead, I decided that being an asshole wasn’t going to help Big Al, so I lied and said everything was the same as it had been. For all I knew, it was.
“Can I go back there with my father?”
“Right now, they are evaluating the situation. Take a seat and I’ll call you as soon as you can go in.”
The woman pointed to the waiting room, which was crowded with people whose concern about their own loved ones was certainly as major a deal to them as Big Al’s dilemma was to me. Loved one: now that was not a term I ever thought I’d use in the same sentence with the name Big Al.
I was irritated, but I think that was because I knew I had to have a conversation with Greenleaf which I did not want to do. I knew Max would tell her what had happened, but I felt she should hear it from me. I went old school and gave a call instead of texting her.
She was pretty upset and I realized why texting is so much better than talking on the phone. If I had texted Greenleaf, I wouldn’t have had to deal with emotions—hers or mine.
Through her sobs Greenleaf kept asking, “What about you? Are you okay? What about you?”
On my end, I kept mumbling, “I’m fine.”
“As soon as Max gets here, I’m coming down,” she said.
I saw Johnson walking my way, and I had the excuse I needed to tell her that I had to go.
Johnson stood over me and put a hand on my shoulder. I slapped my hand on the stained seat next to me.
“May as well sit down,” I said.
“How’s he doing?”
“They’re not telling me anything.”
“From what I saw back there at the beach, at least the bullet missed his heart,” Johnson said.
“Yeah, small target. Right?”
Johnson didn’t seem impressed by the gallows humor. Maybe I should have said it caught him in his shoulder and left it at that.
“That was the Al I remember. He’d take a bullet for a friend any day.” He pointed to his head. “This may go, but what’s in here...” He made a fist and tapped it against his chest. “What is in here stays with you always. No disease can change a man’s character.”
“Yeah.” I didn’t agree with him as far as my father’s moral qualities, but I wasn’t going to argue. It didn’t matter if Johnson’s perception of my father’s character was the same as mine or not.
“What about you?” Like Greenleaf, Johnson felt it necessary to ask. And I answered him the same way I answered her.
“I’m fine.”
Unlike with Greenleaf, my answer sufficed for him.
I got up and went to the reception desk.
“Can I see Mr. Al DeSantis?”
All that got me was a polite, “We’ll call you as soon as you can go in. Please have a seat.”
“Can you at least tell me how he is doing?”
“I’m afraid I don’t have any information. Please take a seat and we will get right to you.”
Apparently making a pest of myself wasn’t going to move things along any faster. I went back to sit next to Johnson. He was sitting slouched over with his elbows on his spread knees and his hands on his head. I thought he might be praying.
“It’s ironic, isn’t it? I had to kill the girl that your father and I thought we had lost twenty-five years ago.”
So that was it. The old cop needed a little sympathy for himself.
A few minutes later, Johnson hopped out of the seat. “At least it’s over.”
“Is it?”
“Damned right, it’s over. I have the motive, I have the means, and I have the confession. Case closed.”
So that’s how it was in his mind. I was waiting for him to acknowledge that I handed him all of those things, but it didn’t happen. Something told me it was the same thing twenty-five years before when my father handed Gerber over to him. Johnson took the credit.
“Case closed,” I said.
“Damned right!” He said it strong and loud enough for everyone in the room to look our way.
“As soon as they get Big Al back to new and settled in The Palms, we got to go fishing. I know this spot on the Ogeechee River where the striper run twenty pounds.”
“I don’t think he’s going back to the home. They don’t want him. He’s too hard to handle.”
“Who said that?”
“Maryann, the care coordinator at The Palms.”
“You stay here and worry about your daddy. I have to talk to someone.”
Johnson walked off into the bowels of the hospital, and I waited for word on Big Al. I was going stir crazy, so to fill my time, I played solitaire on my phone. It was better than trying to watch the endless court shows on the TV that hung on the wall with its
volume off. About a half hour later, I spotted Max and Greenleaf at the reception desk. I was never so happy to see two friendly faces. I went up and tapped Max on the shoulder. She turned and realizing it was me, threw her arms around me.
“I guess I ran off on you again,” I said. Something about the hug told me that everything was good between us. I held on to her, taking in the delicious smell of her hair. It beats me what it reminded me of, but it was good, and thankfully, it wasn’t the scent of Irish Spring. If she paid a Pink Tax to smell that good, it was money well spent. I made the hug last as long as I could before I let go.
“How is he?”
“They said we could go in to see him in about five minutes,” Greenleaf said before I could answer. “I told them I was his wife.”
It wouldn’t have surprised me if she was his wife, too. At that point, nothing at all would have surprised me.
Finally, a nurse called us and led us down a hall lined with patients in beds waiting to be seen.
“He’s under sedation,” she said.
When we got to his cubicle, I let Greenleaf and Max go in first. I took a breath and followed.
Al’s eyes were closed and he had no color.
“Is… he dead?”
Greenleaf glared at me.