4 Angel Among Us

by Chaz McGee

  Adrian Calvano, it turns out, really was a romantic.

  I was not the only one who thought that.

  That night, long after the media had left, long after Lamont Carter had been taken into custody and a psychiatrist called to attend to Dakota Wylie, when the crime scene crew was still deep below, processing the cave, and the moon above was giving way to dawn, Calvano stood alone on the edge of the great lawn, looking out over the grounds, perhaps wondering what was going to happen to his dream girl now.

  Alice Hernandez had seen him walk out by himself to the edge of the lawn. She joined him there, in the shadows, with the smell of roses all around them.

  ‘That was a very kind thing you did back there,’ Alice told him. ‘I confess I was impressed.’

  ‘I didn’t do it to impress anyone,’ Calvano said gruffly. He jammed his hands into his pants pockets and would not look at her. Somewhere close by, a night bird trilled.

  ‘I know you didn’t, that’s why I was impressed.’

  ‘Don’t mess with me, Hernandez,’ Calvano said. ‘I just don’t have the energy tonight.’

  Alice put her hands on his arms and turned him to her. Her voice was soft and she dropped all pretense of being the tough cop who liked to tease him. ‘Adrian, there is nothing in this world that I would like better than to go out with you. OK? Just the two of us. And if you will agree to do that, to go out and be just you and me, then I promise you I won’t make a single smart-ass remark all night. Not one. I mean it. I think we should try.’

  ‘You mean it, Hernandez?’ Calvano asked, a goofy smile spreading over his face.

  ‘I mean it,’ she promised. ‘Do you want me to prove it to you now?’

  ‘Sure,’ he said, reaching for her.

  Oh, to be alive.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Not everyone thought Dakota Wylie deserved rescuing. Especially not after the man and woman I had seen cruising the Delmonte House in a beat-up Chevy with Alabama plates stepped forward as exclusive guests on Lindsey Stanford’s cable show. Turns out they were Dakota Wylie’s parents – and Lamont Carter was not just her manager, he was also her brother. Their real names were Lonnie and Dixie Earle.

  According to their parents, Lonnie and Dixie were ingrates who had turned their backs on a loving but poor family and traded Sundays at church for the money and bright lights of Hollywood, then left their parents to poverty once they found fame.

  Not a lot of people bought it. Those two had hungry eyes and they couldn’t quite keep the greed from their voices as they talked about their daughter’s wealth. I know I didn’t buy it. I thought back to the father snatching handfuls of cash from Lamont Carter and the mother whining about how ungrateful Carter was. Somehow I doubted they were the upstanding people Lindsey Stanford tried to present them as on her show. Besides, I had seen the way that Lamont Carter slept, enfolding his sister to keep her safe, coiled as if ready to do battle against the entire world. He had grown up protecting her from someone and I was pretty sure it was those two. No one was born that hard or that angry. Life had made Carter that way.

  I didn’t know what would happen to Dakota Wylie without her brother around to protect her. I think he was the only person in the entire world who loved her, not for who she had been on the screen, but truly for herself.

  Lamont Carter proved his love for his sister when he pled guilty to avoid her being forced to testify. It was with no small satisfaction that everyone involved in the case realized that his plea had also robbed Lindsey Stanford and her peers of the opportunity to wallow in the sordid details of the case.

  Within months, Carter was to be in a prison outside Philadelphia, where he was initially kept in solitary confinement until his fame cooled down. His sister visited him often, arriving in a limousine and trailing a parade of cameras behind her as she marched in, dripping in diamonds and decked out in all the brand names that Lamont Carter could no longer have. She was a walking reminder of the life he had fought so hard to win and then had lost. But she was, of course, oblivious to what she was doing to her brother each time she visited, as well as oblivious to the difference in the way the world had treated her compared to him. And it had treated her very differently indeed.

  Dakota Wylie was never charged in connection with Arcelia Gallagher’s kidnapping. She insisted that she thought her brother had arranged a legitimate adoption and that she had simply been waiting for that baby to be born. Her helplessness and her insistence that she never paid attention to complicated legal affairs like adoption agreements convinced the grand jury not to indict her.

  To be fair, she paid a price nonetheless. She cried for weeks after her brother was arrested, both for the loss of him and for the loss of the baby she had been promised, perhaps never once quite understanding what her brother was willing to do to get it for her. Or maybe she was just putting on the performance of her life? It was hard to say. She still seemed to have no awareness as to how she looked, and that required a real break from reality. She sat behind her brother in court, dabbing her ruined face with a Kleenex and reapplying lipstick to her misshapen lips for the cameras without a clue as to how she was now seen. Perhaps it was better that way. She had lost everything she had in the world: her looks, her career, her brother and even her husband, for Enrique Romero did not stand by her, not even for a day. In fact, he never returned to the Delmonte House again.

  Dakota Wylie did not, however, lose her wealth. Someone – and my money was on Calvano – got her a very good divorce lawyer indeed. A lawyer who somehow knew to subpoena the photographs Gonzalez had stored away of her husband cheating on her in California. That was enough to invalidate the prenuptial agreement and make Dakota Wylie a very, very rich woman. She would never work again, not after what she had done to her face, but she would have enough money to live like a queen for the rest of her life. People would still photograph her, not because she was beautiful, but because she was a freak with an inconceivable amount of money. I’m not sure she could tell the difference, or if she would even care if she knew. She just needed the cameras trained on her. Without them, I suspected, she believed that she didn’t exist.

  Though others disagreed – most loudly, Lindsey Stanford, who called for her arrest nightly for awhile – I preferred to think of Dakota Wylie as an innocent. To do otherwise was impossible. It was simply too much for me to acknowledge that she might, instead, be a perfect storm of self-absorption meeting need and denial; a confluence created by poverty and covetousness, turned into a dangerous monster by the power her beauty gave her.

  No, I told myself, Dakota Wylie had known nothing about Arcelia Gallagher’s kidnapping. She had simply asked for what she wanted, as she had grown used to doing, and then waited for her brother to provide it, as he had long done.

  Three months after entering prison, at his own behest, Lamont Carter was released into the general population. I figured he would thrive there. His hard outer shell and his capacity for violence would serve him well. But the very day he first joined the other inmates in the outside exercise area, he was stabbed sixteen times by a member of a Mexican prison gang who shouted the name of a well-known drug cartel leader as he plunged his home-made knife into Lamont Carter again and again. Carter died before the guards ever reached him.

  No one could understand what had prompted the attack. Carter had not been in contact with the other prisoners long enough to make enemies. But I thought I knew. Deep beneath the earth, while fighting for her life, Arcelia Gallagher had told Carter, ‘They will find you and they will kill you.’

  I thought I understood who the ‘they’ had been. And with that realization, I also understood that there was more to Arcelia Gallagher’s past in Mexico than her husband would ever know. She had paid a terrible price for Danny Gallagher’s love. She had given up someone for Danny and the fallout had been those scars I once glimpsed on her body, long before she was even pregnant with their child. Those scars were from a spurned lover, a man used to violence and a man used
to getting exactly what he wanted. It was not a miracle she had survived them, nor an accident the torture had been confined to hidden parts of her body. The man she had left for Danny had still loved her – or at least loved her beauty – enough to spare both her life and her face.

  Perhaps he loved her still, for who else would have had the power to reach deep inside the prison walls and avenge her kidnapping?

  I think Maggie understood what had happened as well. Shortly after Lamont Carter died, she took a brown folder from her desk drawer – the one that had arrived from her friend in the FBI – and shredded its contents in the squad room one night when no one else was around. If she knew the details of Arcelia’s past, she was going to keep them to herself. She would let the beloved preschool teacher continue on with her new life.

  And continue on she did. Arcelia Gallagher had a gift. She had learned to forget the past and to appreciate what she had.

  In the months following her rescue, she fell into a routine that would seem mundane to most, but enchanted me. Each day, she would rise early and tenderly feed and clothe her little girl, without hurry, then make breakfast for her husband. After he left for the fields, she would often take a trip into town with her daughter – they had named her Angela – to visit the children who had been in her preschool class. They always loved a visit from their Seely and seemed to view Angela as the best toy ever invented. Arcelia would then pick up a few items from town and she was still as picky as ever when it came to what she was willing to buy. The Korean grocer who owned her favorite fruit stand seemed to consider her rescue a miracle of sorts and always pressed a special fruit on her as his gift. She would take it, knowing it made him happy. She would then return home, bundle her daughter against her in a sling and march out to the fields to find her husband so that they could share a lunch together beneath a wide open sky that was lifetimes away from the dark hole where she had been held. Her strength was breathtaking. Many afternoons, she would transform the sling into a papoose and stay in the fields to help her husband, bending and picking with the baby strapped to her back, just as her ancestors had done for thousands of years. Later, she and Angela would take a nap together on a blanket spread in the shade while Danny worked nearby, stopping often to check that they were safe.

  I didn’t know if they would always stay that close. I didn’t know what dreams or fears the future held for her. But I did know that Arcelia was happy for now and that her baby would grow up much loved.

  To me, the Delmonte House had been as much a part of this case as any person living in it. I roamed its halls soon after Lamont Carter was taken away. If the house felt rejected by yet another owner decamping from it, it didn’t seem to care. It was bigger than any of its owners had ever been.

  When Enrique Romero decided that the photo opportunity-rich life he had envisioned in the Delmonte House was never going to materialize, he ended up donating it to the Catholic Church as a publicity stunt that more than mitigated his connection to the seedy family his wife had brought to the table. His generosity, however motivated, allowed Father Sojak to successfully lobby that it be turned into a retirement home for priests and nuns. I’m guessing the old priest I saw snoring in the rectory’s library was one of the first to move in.

  The nuns, it was decided, would manage the property. Rodrigo stayed on as the gardener. Early one evening in late summer, he joined Father Sojak on the final walkabout of the house. Despite the nuns’ protestations, Father Sojak was determined to clear the house and bring it peace. He carried a thurible of incense and a container of holy water. He stopped to say prayers every few steps and to sprinkle holy water around the mansion’s perimeters. When he was done with the house, he and Rodrigo blessed the lawn above the underground room where Arcelia had been held. A man’s skeleton had indeed been found beneath its floor and removed, then the cavern itself had been filled in forever. But Father Sojak blessed it and declared it consecrated ground just in case. He wasn’t taking any chances.

  I don’t know if anything had lingered in the house after my fellow traveler left, but I do know that I could feel a peace settling over the house, as if all the greed and dissatisfaction that had filled it for over one hundred years was finally being put to rest. It is a beautiful thing to be satisfied with what you have, and truly the residents getting ready to move into the Delmonte House were more than grateful to be there.

  The old butler and his wife were invited to stay on at the mansion as guests. The old man, who never quite recovered from that night on the great lawn, would never have to work again. He was free to look after his wife, who could wander the house at will as there were plenty of nuns to gently guide her to the right rooms.

  As for Aldo Flores – held in jail on suspicion of Arcelia Gallagher’s murder for nearly a week while in despair about his wife and child – Immigration came to question him at the jail, only to find an empty cell and Aldo long gone. Someone had checked him out late the night before. The handwriting on the visitor’s log was indecipherable, the security cameras had mysteriously malfunctioned, the guard had been in the bathroom and the desk sergeant had no memory of who might have checked Flores out. Aldo Flores was gone for good. He disappeared into the underground world of illegal immigrants and was likely fast on his way to finding his wife and child by the time the morning sun rose.

  Whether it had been Maggie or Calvano who made it possible for Aldo to join his family, or even someone else, was anyone’s guess. But the fact that they never once discussed the disappearance of Flores between them made me believe that, perhaps, they’d both had a hand in his freedom.

  Commander Gonzalez let the discrepancy go. He had been horribly wrong about Aldo Flores, and while he would never admit it, he was not willing to punish someone else for his mistake. Besides, he found a new object for his self-hatred. Enrique Romero’s donation of the Delmonte House to the Catholic Church had provided an opportunity for publicity that the bishop could not ignore. Romero was honored at a lavish ceremony, along with four other prominent Latino leaders from the eastern states. Commander Gonzales was not among them, nor was he invited to the event.

  He sat alone in his study watching the gala on television, a glass of scotch and a plate of brie beside him. A few rooms away, his wife and children laughed and teased each other over a table full of homemade tamales and a stew that smelled heavenly. How sad to think of what Gonzales was giving up each time he turned his back on who he was. Instead of being with his family, he stared at the screen, filled with resentment that his rival was being celebrated while he was being ignored. I almost felt sorry for him.

  As for the people who worked for Gonzales – this case had moved their lives forward, albeit in very different ways. Calvano and Alice Hernandez were in love, though no one else knew it, a subterfuge that told me both were taking the relationship very seriously indeed. I found myself wishing my self-appointed rival well. Adrian Calvano had proved that he believed in love. It was nice he had now found it. Especially with someone who would kick his ass when he needed it, as Calvano always would.

  While Calvano found love, Maggie buried hers. Or at least she buried a stand-in for it. Skip Bostwick, now firmly one of the pack, followed the other reporters to a new crime scene. From what I could tell, he did not contact her before he left. She had outlived her usefulness to him. And that was OK. Maggie was ready to forgive herself for marrying him and move on. She had a new cause in her life. When the bones that been found in the underground room with Arcelia Gallagher were analyzed, specialists reported back that they were likely over 150 years old and had belonged to a male of African descent. That was not enough for Maggie. She wanted a name. She began to spend her free evenings poring through the records of slave purchases, escape notices and even death announcements, in search of the man whose remains they had found.

  If Maggie chose to spend her evenings with the dead instead of the living, who was I to judge? In truth, perhaps I should be flattered. Besides, I don’t think Maggie was qui
te ready to embark on the future when it came to love. I think she still needed time to bury the past. The bones in the cave gave her that chance, even if they didn’t belong to Skip Bostwick. Last time I caught up with her late at night in front of her computer screen, she had been at it for months, trying to find the identity of my fellow traveler, and she showed no signs of stopping. I had no doubt she would find out his name one day. Maggie never gave up.

  As for me, I found a new home. No one ever discovered the room full of immigrants below St Raphael’s and I checked in on them each evening on my rounds. I told myself it was an excuse to feel what it was like to be among the living. I told myself that what I really wanted was their hunger, their passion, their joy and their sorrows. But I knew I was only telling myself that to avoid the truth. For I had twice tasted the glory of what I hoped awaited me one day during the course of the Arcelia Gallagher case. Once while sitting in St Raphael’s, when I had been filled with grace, and again when my fellow traveler allowed me to take his first steps into eternity with him.

  Was that what it was going to be like when the day finally came that I was allowed to move on? If so, how could I get there sooner? What could I do to prove myself worthy?

  I still did not know, but I did finally come to realize that it was time for me to make a choice. To find some meaning in my afterlife. There was little I could do for most people in my current state, but there was a lot I could do for Father Sojak. Just as I suspected that I fed on the life force of others, I thought that, perhaps, I had the power to relieve Father Sojak of part of his burden. His gift had a dark side. I thought that all the pain and suffering he kept stored within him was too much for a human being to bear. I would help him. I would take away some of his darkness.