The Most Dangerous Thing

by Laura Lippman

  Clem has thought of them. He thinks about them constantly. Yet he still cannot persuade himself that these potential crimes entitled Tim Halloran to murder the man. And it makes him nervous that Doris knows. She was not there; her husband is dead. Clem has long lost track of Rick. Doris has little to lose by telling others what happened. Clem’s entire life could be taken from him retroactively. Everything he has done and accomplished—the career, the children, the grandchildren—would be wiped out by the fact that a man was murdered in front of him and he kept his silence for sheer convenience’s sake. Why? Because he knew the man in the woods didn’t count, that no one would miss him. It was the coldest, most inhumane calculation of his life. He can never make it right.

  “And then I got on Boo and he ran and ran and ran—”

  “Galloped,” he corrects gently. “Horses gallop. Or canter. But you can say run, too.”

  “I want to ride horses. Daddy says it’s too dangerous.” Annabelle curls into his side, looking up through her lashes. That is Gwen’s look, Gwen’s wheedling tone, Gwen’s feminine confidence.

  “Well, daddies get to decide such things. Daddies know a lot about danger.”

  Father knows best. If they’re telling stories, he might as well go whole hog.

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Tim is surprised and pleased when Gwen calls out of the blue and asks to meet him for lunch. It’s as if she has picked up on his own desire to talk about the past, about Go-Go. He asks her to meet him at the Towson Diner, in part because he likes it, but also because it’s bright and shiny, the kind of place where friends meet. He is sensitive to appearances, especially since he has begun toying with the idea of vying for state’s attorney in the next election, or maybe positioning himself for a judgeship. Gwen is a good-looking woman, and if Baltimore is a small town masquerading as a city, then Towson, the county seat, is smaller still. He never goes out for lunch or runs an errand without seeing someone from the courthouse or the police department.

  Here in the Towson Diner today, he spots two homicide cops, good guys, not like the lunkheads who have handed him his latest loser of a case. Although, of course, it’s his boss who determines the assignments. He wonders if his ambition is showing. He would not run against the sitting county attorney, not unless there was a major fuck-up to exploit. That would be idiotic. Unfortunately, the time to run was probably four years ago, when his previous boss stepped down. Why didn’t he go for it then? But Tim’s late-blooming ambition has been fueled by watching someone no smarter than he is do the job. Now he knows he can do it. He doubted himself before.

  Tim has often doubted himself, and although he hates the whole blame-your-parents school of thought, especially since he is now a parent, he can’t help thinking it would have been nice if his father and mother had been a little more rah-rah on his behalf. He was once doing something idiotic, and his father called him stupid. Doris, parroting advice gleaned from a woman’s magazine or daytime talk show, said: “They say you should never call children stupid, but say that their actions are stupid.” Tim Senior took his oldest son’s full measure with his eyes and said: “This is a stupid child.”

  Of course, Tim was tough-skinned, a good foil. Go-Go was so crazed that a statement like that wouldn’t land as a joke. And Tim has never doubted it was a joke. His old man had his moments, dry and inappropriate as his humor might have been. If his father had been around for the Twitter generation, he definitely could have been the hero of Shit My Dad Says. He was anti-PC before there was PC.

  Sean, for all his confidence, was a sensitive little shit, could not stand for the joke to be on him. So it fell to Tim to be the butt of most family punch lines. Tim and Doris, to be fair. They all ganged up on her. She was the odd woman out, the spokeswoman for cleanliness and sanity and don’t-play-ball-in-the-house. Tim loves his daughters, but he wouldn’t have minded one son, if only so that there would be someone in the household he actually understood on a regular basis.

  Gwen breezes through the door and catches almost everyone’s gaze, especially the younger homicide cop, a total hound of a guy. Tim has logged a lot of hours in courthouse corridors, passing time by listening to this guy’s exploits, as his sergeant likes to call the guy’s one-night stands. “Tell us about your latest exploit.”

  The stories were funnier before Tim’s daughters started growing up.

  There is a moment of awkwardness when Tim and Gwen greet each other. At Go-Go’s funeral, an embrace had been the proper thing, but here—she starts to shake his hand, then almost kisses his cheek, only to pull back, lets him kiss her cheek.

  “Not a very diet-friendly menu,” she says, studying the laminated place mats.

  “You don’t have to worry about that,” Tim says. If anything, he thinks that she should put on a few pounds. Her slenderness looks a little rough, the result of stress. He doesn’t think Gwen was really meant to be thin.

  “I’ve been worrying about my weight for most of my life. If I stop, I won’t know what to do with myself. Cottage cheese and a pear! I love that. Did I enter a time machine?”

  Tim knows she’s making fun of the diner, not him, yet he feels a little mocked. So it’s not tapas or sushi, or whatever the fuck she eats most days. It’s good, honest food.

  “What the hell, I’ll have an open-face turkey sandwich with mashed potatoes, gravy, and a fountain Coke. What’s the point of coming to a diner if one doesn’t eat diner food? Seize the day. One never knows—” Her voice trails off, and Tim doesn’t have to ask where her train of thought is headed.

  “What’s the point?” he echoes. “And what’s the point of this meeting? You promised it wasn’t work related. You know my office doesn’t do the glory hog thing. I’m not going to talk about my current case.”

  “No, although if you did want to talk—” She gives him a mischievous smile. “It is awfully interesting. If you ever do decide to spill the beans, I expect you to honor your old friend with the story.”

  “Are we old friends, or once-upon-a-time friends? We haven’t really stayed in touch.”

  Gwen shrugs. “When you’re friends as kids, it never really ends, does it?”

  “Sure it does. Childhood friendships end all the time. I see it with my girls. Friendships end, romances end, half of all marriages end. Family’s the only thing that’s forever, and I’m not even sure about that sometimes.”

  “I’m here about family, actually. Your family.” She studies the photo of the open-face sandwich on the menu, as if she might not recognize it when it arrives. “Did you know that a private investigator tried to get in touch with Go-Go earlier this year?”

  Tim, by dint of his profession, is used to treating conversations as poker games. Surprised by Gwen’s information, he automatically reverts to state’s attorney’s mode, guarding his emotions. “Where did you hear that?” It’s a calculated phrase. He’s not admitting that Gwen knows something he doesn’t and he wants to find out more before he commits himself.

  “I ran into his ex-wife, and she told me. It’s why she threw him out. A PI kept calling, saying she needed to talk to him, that someone from his past needed him. But he wouldn’t talk to the PI and he wouldn’t tell Lori what was going on. She decided he must be cheating on her and threw him out.”

  “That’s her story.”

  “Well—yes.”

  Tim has enough information now to stake out his territory. Some would say he’s being the devil’s advocate, but as he sees it, he’s standing up for his brother, who isn’t here to defend himself. “Did it ever occur to you that Lori wants to revise their history? She threw him out, he started drinking again, he ended up dead. She doesn’t want to be responsible.”

  “Yes, but why confide in me?”

  “Because here you are, sharing it with his brother. She saw you at the funeral, she knows there’s some connection. She’s trying to get back on my mother’s good side.”

  “Why?”

  “What?”

  “Why
does she need to be on your mother’s good side?”

  “For one thing, my mother essentially owns the house she lives in. She loaned Go-Go the money to buy it. She could call in the note.”

  “Grandmothers don’t do that to their grandchildren, no matter how they feel about their daughters-in-law. Lori is the one who has the power in this situation. She could sell the house and move away. She can keep your mom from seeing the girls. Anyway, I assume you know your sister-in-law better than I do, but that strikes me as way too devious for her. She’s pretty direct.”

  Tim is ready to counter—to say he does, in fact, know Lori better than Gwen, to ask who she is to presume to tell him about his family, his sister-in-law—but he starts to laugh instead.

  “What?”

  “It’s like we’re kids again. This is how we argued then.”

  Gwen laughs, too. “So maybe we are still friends.”

  “Maybe.” He can’t go that far. As Gwen said, it’s like entering a time machine. They went into the past there for a moment. But they can’t stay there. He doesn’t want to stay there.

  “Look, Tim, the reason I called you is because—this private detective. What if she was hired by his family?”

  He is confused by the pronoun. “Go-Go’s? My mom, you mean?”

  “No.” She lowers her voice and leans toward him. He wishes she wouldn’t. Her posture is a secret personified. He leans back, crosses his arms. “His. Him. From the woods.”

  It takes another second to process. “He didn’t have any family.”

  “That we know of. But he would disappear, remember? Why did he disappear? I never really thought about it, but chances are that a family member would intervene from time to time, if his health was jeopardized. They’d get a judge to put him in a hospital for his own good, but then he would sign himself out. I know it was easier to institutionalize people then, but if he was considered sane, he couldn’t be kept anywhere against his will.”

  “OK, so maybe he had family. So what? He fell down in the woods, he hit his head, and bled out or drowned. It was an accident. Mickey didn’t mean to—well, you know. It was just easier not to explain that part, or to tell our parents how well we knew him, how we created the circumstances that ended up with Go-Go being assaulted. Those omissions don’t change the basic facts.”

  “I know. I was there. And if we had told the full story at the time, it wouldn’t have made a difference. But if it were your relative, if he was found in the woods without his guitar, his single most precious object, a day or so after a horrible hurricane, based on an anonymous call—would you think it was an accident?”

  “He had the guitar.”

  “When we saw him. My father told me he hiked back to make sure if the EMTs had found him and there was no body—and no guitar.”

  “Paramedics probably stole it. Besides, why wait thirty years to pursue it? Why now?”

  “I don’t know. But who else from Go-Go’s childhood would think he could do him a favor?”

  “You said ‘need,’ not a favor.”

  “Yeah, well, a smart private investigator isn’t going to say, ‘Hey, I’m looking into a suspicious death of which you might have knowledge.’ She’s going to set you up to think it’s something good, then lower the boom.”

  Their food arrives, but the gyro, which Tim had been looking forward to with almost pathetic anticipation, is tasteless. If the guy does have family, if there are suspicions—well, there goes any chance of political office. He’ll be lucky to keep the job he has. But how would anyone know to look for Go-Go? Someone else would have blabbed. Not him. Not Sean. Not McKey. Gwen? She’s a journalist, and they’re a little too free with information in Tim’s experience. It’s their currency, they can’t help it.

  Then he thinks of Go-Go, on a bender. Not the most recent one, but a year or so ago, the next-to-last time he fell off the wagon. Go-Go was not good with secrets, and his feelings about Chicken George would have been understandably confused. No one had shown him greater kindness. No one had betrayed him more thoroughly. Go-Go drunk was capable of saying anything to anyone. And now he’s dead.

  “So what do we do?” he asks Gwen.

  “That’s why I called you. You’re a prosecutor. Can’t you make the PI talk to you? I mean, I have no standing, but you’re his brother and an officer of the court—”

  He shakes his head. “Gwen, that would be a horrible violation of my office. And, by the way, PIs, if retained through legal counsel, can’t be forced to give up information about their clients. They enjoy almost the same privileges as lawyers. I mean, yeah, if you subpoena someone, but—no, no way. Even if this PI would talk to me, I don’t want to put us in play. Does he still call Lori? Has he called you?”

  “She,” Gwen says. “The PI is a she. And, no, there’s no evidence she’s tried to get in touch with anyone else.”

  “So drop it.”

  “But—”

  “Drop it, Gwen. You’re overthinking this. I understand the impulse. I’m on intimate terms with it. You’re worried that something’s going on, something you can’t control. You want to get out in front of it. You can’t. Leave it alone. Let me tell you this much: Among the three of us, the brothers? We never spoke of it. Neither did my parents. They thought it was for the best. It probably wasn’t, and maybe Go-Go ended up telling someone he shouldn’t. But there’s nothing we can do about it, and the minute you start poking around, you’re more apt to stir things up.”

  Gwen sips her Coke. For all her big talk about seizing the day with an open-face turkey sandwich, she’s barely touched her food, only moved it around on her plate, a trick he knows from his daughters.

  “It’s not just this. My father—”

  “How is he?”

  “He’s doing okay, all things considered. Breaking a hip at his age is no small thing. Anyway, the day he fell? He claimed it was because he saw a chicken on the stairs.”

  Tim can’t help himself. He laughs, an all-out guffaw. Gwen looks genuinely hurt.

  “I’m sorry, Gwen, but—what do you think this is, some horror movie, where a relative bent on revenge stalks us and our parents? Hires a PI to pressure Go-Go, then surreptitiously places a chicken on your father’s steps? Forces Go-Go to drive into the barricade? What about you, Gwen, do you hear steel guitars in the night? I mean, come on.”

  She tries to act as if she’s in on the joke, but he can tell she’s not entirely persuaded. “OK, I’m a little paranoid. Go-Go’s accident, then my father’s accident—”

  “Gwen, it’s fucking middle age. Parents die. People die. I lost my dad fifteen years ago, you lost your mother before that.”

  “She wasn’t even fifty, and I was in college. There was nothing middle-aged about that.”

  “My dad went young, too. I’m just saying—we’re in our forties, and this is when the bullshit begins to mount. Just when you think you’ve got things figured out—boom, boom, boom. We start losing our parents, then we start losing our friends. Your father fell down the steps? He’s in his eighties. I’m even less surprised that Go-Go’s gone. The shocker there was that he made forty. Look, my brother broke my heart. You don’t think I haven’t asked myself again and again if a more open, touchy-feely family would have been better equipped to deal with what happened to him? You don’t think I suggested psychiatrists, even offered to pay if that’s what it took? I found that AA meeting for him. Sean tried, too. So sure, I’m racked with guilt, but about that. Not about that monster dying in an accident.”

  Gwen stares out the window at York Road, and Tim follows her gaze. It’s one of those places that seem to have changed very little over the years. It’s ugly now, but it was always ugly.

  “I’m going to go talk to her.”

  “Her?”

  “The PI.”

  Tim shakes his head. “Don’t. This is about my family, not yours, Gwen.”

  “It’s about all of us. There’s no hierarchy.”

  “Really? Were you sex
ually molested in the woods? I mean, nonconsensually?”

  She blushes. “That’s a little crude, Tim. Even for you.”

  “Sorry, I don’t mean to take the bloom off your first love, the tender memories of dry-humping and second base.”

  He has been too specific. She shoots him a look. “I always thought you watched us.”

  “Only once,” he admits. “And not out there. In the basement.”

  She looks down at her plate. “That summer, when Chicken—when he—disappeared that last time, Sean and I started using the cabin. Only a few times. It smelled so bad. I felt dirty there.”

  “And not in the good way.”

  “Tim.”

  God, they are their young selves again, him teasing Gwen because he’s so insanely jealous of his brother, having a willing girlfriend when Tim can’t find one. It’s not that he wants her, or ever really wanted her. It’s that his brother leapfrogged ahead of him. Later, Go-Go got more pussy than the two of them combined. You don’t have to be Sigmund Freud to figure that one out.

  “Did you ever go back?” she asks. “After?”

  She doesn’t have to specify back to where. “No.”

  “My dad did. He went back again and again. He doesn’t know I know this. He would set out for these long walks on weekends and he wouldn’t invite me, the way he used to. I’m sure that’s where he went.”

  “He probably thought you had no interest. You were a teenager by then. Trust me, teenage girls have very little use for their fathers. Their fathers’ wallets, but not their fathers.”

  “My dad and I got along well. Then and now. Yet we can’t talk about this.”

  “Gwen, let it go. This isn’t about you.”

  Gwen glances around the table, in search of something. She grabs a napkin, rummages in her purse, finds a pen. A much-chewed pen, Tim observes, the one thing about Gwen that is not put together, polished. She draws a star in the way that grade-schoolers are taught, with five slashing lines.