by Jan Burke
“What do you do for a living now, Uncle Gerald?”
“Oh, a long time ago, your father loaned me some money to start my own business,” he said. “I buy old houses, fix ‘em up and sell them. I’ve done well for myself, and I paid your daddy back. He wasn’t going to let me, but I did. I think he felt like I took good care of him, so…” His eyes clouded up, and he left the sentence unfinished.
He seemed to struggle with himself, then said, “I never did like the way he carried on with your mother. There, I’ve said it. I thought he was throwing his whole life away, and after Papa DeMont had been so good to us, I just figured your father had shamed our family. It was dishonest, really, and hurtful to someone who had never hurt him. Then he was mad at me, because I guess he did love you and your mother so much, and there were hard, hard words between us after Gwen was killed. We never spoke again.”
Travis slowly turned the pages of the photo album back, until the front cover was closed. “Do you think he killed her?” he asked.
“No,” Gerald answered without hesitation. “That wasn’t your daddy’s way. Never think that, not for one second.”
I looked at my watch. “We have to be going,” I said, to Gerald’s dismay and Deeny’s too-obvious relief.
“Can’t you stay a little longer?” Gerald asked.
Travis’s cellular phone rang, and he answered it, then said, “Yes, just a moment.” He handed it to me. “It’s for you, it’s Detective Collins.”
I took the phone, and said, “Hi, can I call you back in a few minutes?”
“Sure,” he said. “No privacy?”
“No.”
We hung up.
“A friend of my husband’s,” I explained to the Spannings, giving the phone back to Travis.
“We’d better go,” Travis said.
When we reached the van, Gerald gave Travis another hug, and this time, Travis returned it easily.
“Come over again,” Gerald said. “We have a lot of catching up to do.”
“I will,” Travis said. “Thanks for showing me the photos.”
“I’ll have some copies made for you,” he said.
“Thank you,” Travis said.
“How can I get ahold of you?” he asked.
Travis glanced over at me. “I’m staying with Irene.”
“You could stay here if you like,” Gerald said. “We’ve got plenty of room.”
Even without looking over at Deeny, who was pouting so openly she was shading her chin with her lower lip, Travis shook his head. “That’s kind of you, but I’ve got some other people to see in Las Piernas, so I might as well stay there. Maybe I’ll visit you after things settle down a little.”
“Sure,” Gerald said. “That’s fine.”
Travis gave Gerald his cell phone number. Gerald thanked him. “I’ve worked on a lot of places in Las Piernas,” he said to me. “What part of town do you live in?”
“We’re near the beach,” I said.
“You should see their garden,” Travis said.
Gerald smiled. “I’d like that. But mostly I’d like to see you again.”
Reed’s call was just a warning that Frank had already heard about today’s trouble. “But not from me,” he swore to me. “You know how it is around here; something this dramatic, the whole office is talking about it. He called in today before I could warn everybody to keep it quiet.”
I thanked him for the call and hung up.
The rest of the ride home was in silence.
“Why don’t you like him?” Travis asked as we pulled up at my house.
“Who are you talking about?”
“My uncle.”
“Your uncle appears to be a charming man. I have no reason to dislike him.”
There was a stubborn set to his jaw, but he didn’t argue.
Rachel pulled up as we were getting out of the van. She carried two big envelopes.
“Ah, just one big happy family,” she said as she reached us. I’ve never doubted her powers of observation.
“Anything interesting in the files?” I asked.
“Oh, yes,” she said. “I’ve read through them once, but they deserve some real study.”
She quickly coaxed Travis into telling her about our adventures in the trailer park, and his mood lightened. He was a storyteller, and he told this one well.
As he went on and on about his uncle, I realized that for him, this was a vital connection—that Gerald Spanning was someone who could tell him about a group of people his father had been too young to know— grandparents and other relations. He now had a family to identify himself with, a family denied to a bastard child.
I felt the paper folded in my back pocket and found myself wishing I hadn’t seen it, wanting to be rid of it, hoping it wasn’t important.
In the end, literally, the dogs betrayed me.
23
I walked into the house first, listening to Travis say to Rachel—for perhaps the third time—“You’d really like him.” Deke and Dunk came forward to greet us but never moved on to Travis and Rachel, becoming quite fascinated with my rear pocket.
Their intense sniffing of one of my ass cheeks, even as I turned from them and tried to shoo them off, did not go unnoticed by my companions.
“They want whatever that is in your back pocket,” Travis said, laughing. “What is it?”
Since Deke showed every sign of being willing to pull the bulletin out of my pocket if I didn’t, I reached back and removed it, holding it high and snapping an irritable command at them to get down as I kept moving toward the kitchen.
They obeyed, skulking off with tails down, but casting reproachful looks back at me—making me believe the guilt trip was not, after all, a human invention.
There was a noticeable silence in their wake. Both Travis and Rachel were staring at me. I made myself unfold the coffee-stained paper enough to see that the date on it was the same as the one on the bulletin I had found among Briana’s possessions. I suddenly felt tired.
Rachel said, “Che cosa e?,” but Travis was closer and he took it from my hand.
“A church bulletin from St. Anthony’s?” he said, and I heard Rachel’s quick intake of breath.
“Where did you find it?” she asked.
“In the trash can under the Spannings’ sink.”
“What were you doing looking through their trash?” he asked sharply.
I didn’t answer. I went into the living room and tried to make peace with the dogs.
“Travis,” Rachel said, “open it up. Read through the announcements.”
He stared at her for a moment, then slowly obeyed. All the color left his face. She put an arm around his shoulders, took the bulletin from him, and led him to where I was sitting, putting him between us on the couch. He was looking at me in confusion.
“It announced my father’s funeral Mass,” he said.
“Yes. Your uncle already knew your father was dead.”
“But that means—oh, God!” he said miserably. “It means he was just putting on an act! That goddamned—” But as he said it he looked at me, and I was much handier than Gerald. “You knew!” he said angrily. “You knew that he was faking grief for my father, and you didn’t say anything to me! I asked why you didn’t like him and you said, ”Your uncle appears to be a charming man. I have no reason to dislike him!“”
This last was repeated in a mincing la-de-da tone that I have never used in my life. I ignored that, and the anger. “I saw the bulletin in their trash when I was getting rid of the beer cans. It looked like the one I found when I was going through your mom’s papers, but Gerald and Deeny came back out into the living room before I could do more than stuff it in my back pocket. I didn’t have time to check the date on it. Until just now, for all I knew, that bulletin could have been from a year ago.”
“But in the car…” He looked away from me. “Never mind, I understand.”
“I’m sorry, Travis,” I said.
“For wh
at? Sorry that the Spannings are a pack of liars? Christ, there must be something in the DNA. A beguiler’s gene.”
Rachel laughed, surprising him into smiling back at her. “I do a good job of feeling sorry for myself, don’t I?” he said.
“Not especially,” she replied easily. “Most people I know, if they had the kind of weekend you’re having, they’d be throwing tantrums or getting drunk or locking themselves up in dark rooms for a good long cry.”
“All of those ideas sound great to me right now.”
“Nobody would blame you. How’s the hand?” she asked.
He shrugged. “If I’m distracted, it doesn’t bother me. When I was pretending I was someone else at the mobile home park, or looking at the photos…”
“You want a pain pill?”
“No,” he said. “A distraction.”
“Well, I’ve got the murder files, but are you really up to that?”
He hesitated, then said, “Sure.”
She looked over at me and said, “What about you? You’re looking a little worn down.”
“I’ll get a couple of aspirins. I’ll be all right.”
“I’ll get them for you,” she said, standing.
Travis turned to me and said, “I’m sorry I snapped at you.”
“It’s okay. And by the way, I think there are plenty of people to be proud of on the Spanning side of your family.”
For a moment I thought that little bit of understanding was going to be his undoing. I saw his eyes tear up, but he struggled to pull himself back under control. I got up to check my answering machine, just to give him a minute to himself. There was a message from Margot, saying she was back home and asking me to stop picking on Harold Richmond. Rachel, overhearing it, rolled her eyes.
“I guess I hadn’t really expected her to stay away from him,” I said.
There were two messages from McCain, requests to give him a call— polite as usual. Rachel just shook her head at those. I took the aspirin.
Travis was still thinking about Gerald. When we sat back down on the couch, he said, “Why? Why would he lie about something like knowing my father was dead?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe he just wanted a chance to leave the room with Deeny, to talk to her out of earshot. When we first came in, I caught her giving him surprised looks a couple of times. Something was going on there, I’m just not sure what.”
“Or he wanted me to believe he really missed my dad, wanted the two of us to share sympathy—have something that would bring us together.”
“I don’t know. He could have done that without the lie.” I thought for a moment while Rachel, who had ignored two empty chairs to sit down on the floor in front of us, began pulling copies out of envelopes. The envelopes made me think of the DeMont inheritance. “I hate to ask this, Travis, but have you made a will?”
“Yes. I provided for my mother,” he said, and again I saw him struggle for self-control. After a minute he said, “I guess I’ll have to make a new one. I’ll talk to Mr. Brennan. I—I wanted to talk to him anyway, about setting up an endowment in my father’s memory, something for local adult literacy programs.”
“That’s a good cause,” Rachel said absently. “I had an aunt—came here from the old country. She learned to read from one of those programs—adult school, at night.”
“Irene didn’t tell you?” Travis asked.
“I wanted to respect your confidences—” I began.
“Yes,” he interrupted, “and I appreciate it.”
“Tell me what?”
“My father was illiterate.”
“Really?” She took a moment to absorb this information, then said, “He did so well for himself—your father must have been quite a man.”
“Yes, he was. Charming, resourceful and bright. A bigamist, a liar and—well, let’s look at the file. You worked in homicide, Rachel. Maybe you can tell me if my father was also a murderer.”
24
“I’m not sure,” she said. “But I can definitely tell you that you shouldn’t hire Mr. Richmond to do any detective work for you.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“Oh, he may not be bad at tracking people down, but he should have handed this homicide investigation over to people who knew what they were doing. He sure as hell didn’t.”
“What did he do wrong?”
“Well, the scene was obviously unnecessarily disturbed before the coroner got there—lots of people moving in and out of the room, touching things they shouldn’t have been handling—Richmond, too. Looks like some of that started before he got there, though, so he can’t take all the blame.
“The worst thing he did was to break rule one—he had an easy suspect and he worked backwards from there, instead of keeping an open mind while he looked at the evidence. Once he had your dad figured for this, Travis, he wasn’t going to budge from that position. He’s still defensive about it.”
“Why am I not surprised?” Travis said, sighing.
“So tell us what you think,” I said.
“Well, let’s start with the basics. She was stabbed to death. Someone placed a pillow over her head—apparently not pressing down hard enough to suffocate her, but enough to keep her quiet—and went at her with a knife. No weapon left at the scene, but they could tell it was a knife both from the wounds and because a small piece of the tip of the knife broke off when it struck a bone.
“There were no prints. Arthur’s prints were in the house, all right, but not anywhere unexpected. Killer was wearing gloves.”
“Wait!” I said, as she was about to go on. “Are you sure?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, are you certain the killer wore gloves?”
She picked up one of the stacks of paper and flipped through it. She read one page for a moment, then said, “Yes. There was a lot of blood, and they found bloodstained prints of gloved hands on some of the surfaces in the bedroom.
“Then his hand…” Travis said.
Rachel looked sharply at him. “What are you talking about?”
Travis told her what he had told me on the beach—but in slightly more detail, telling of seeing his father approach the house, and touch the glass—that Arthur’s hand was bloody, but not his clothing.
“Why didn’t you say something about this before?” she asked angrily.
“Can’t you guess why he didn’t?” I said.
She calmed down a little. “Which hand? Which hand had the blood on it?”
He closed his eyes. “His left hand.”
“You’re sure?”
He nodded.
“A few drops of blood, lots of blood, what?”
“It—it coated his palm. When he put it on the glass, it made a hand print. A red hand print. That’s what I drove my own fist through.”
“How far did you live from the DeMont farm?”
He shrugged. “About fifteen minutes away.”
“Less if someone were in a hurry,” I said. “And at that time of night, there wouldn’t be much traffic.”
“Did your dad ever tell you how his hand ended up coated in blood?” she asked.
“He said he had gone into her room. The lights were out, but the room wasn’t completely dark. He could make out her shape on the bed. But she wouldn’t answer when he called to her, and there was a smell— he said it was an awful smell. He said he leaned his left hand on the mattress as he reached with his right to turn on the lamp near her bed.” He stood and demonstrated, using the couch as a stand-in for the mattress, placing his weight on his left hand as he reached out with his right. “It felt damp. When the light was on, he saw that his hand was in a pool of blood, Gwendolyn’s blood. He could tell that she was dead. He became frightened and turned out the light, then left. He panicked, he said, and the first person he thought of turning to was my mother, so he drove to our house, but then he realized that it wasn’t really his home anymore, and that he had no right to be there. He also felt sure that his own life was
in danger, that he would be accused of murder.”
“He talked about it that night?”
“What I’ve just told you I learned later, when I talked to him about the handprint on the window. I know he talked about it with my mother that night—she came downstairs and asked what had happened, and I told her I had cut my hand. He was only worried about me then, but she asked him what he was doing there—it wasn’t asked in an angry way. And he said, ”We have to get him to a hospital.“ She asked again why he was there, and he said, ”Because I need my family.“