The meeting was rather confused. The local law had instructions from Gant-Ag to arrest me for trespassing and destruction of private property—namely their jet. After I reported the musketeers’ plans to kill Conrad the locals had to back down in the face of Bobby Mallory’s fury. The county might still have insisted it was just my word against Gantner’s—and whose was heavier?—if not for Murray’s tapes: everyone had watched those by now.
Unfortunately the debate among the musketeers about what to do with Conrad was not on film; that had occurred while I was lurking outside the hangar and Murray was fetching help. No one, not even the state troopers, was about to arrest Alec Gantner on my say-so alone. On the other hand, Conrad had a bullet in his shoulder, and Anton had made a statement. Gant-Ag had hired him, as he put it, “to shoot that bad black man sneaking onto their land in the dark.” So the locals backed off, although with enough dirty looks to make me feel I needed to wash my clothes after the meeting.
I finally got them to tell me what had happened to the men in the plane. One of the mechanics had escaped through the tail as the machine turned over. He had second-degree burns on his face and arms, but had a good prospect for recovery. Blakely and the other mechanic had died in the wreckage. Anton was in the same hospital as Conrad, recovering from a bullet in the groin. Lucky shot—it hadn’t been possible to aim under the circumstances.
Chicago planned to charge Anton with assault against Conrad as soon as he could leave the hospital. They were deliberating charging him with Deirdre’s murder. Anton, fighting back, was apparently implicating not just Charpentier, but Heccomb as well. To cover their butts the Gant-Ag people claimed that Conrad had been lurking around the premises for no reason. Despite my contrary testimony they claimed Anton shot him as he was sneaking into the place. The whole discussion ended in a dull stalemate: no one was going to obey Gant-Ag’s command to charge me, but they didn’t want to tackle Gantner without more hard evidence than Murray and I had gathered.
Bobby wanted at least to bring in Gantner and Heccomb for questioning, but Kajmowicz overruled him. Bobby had to retire in a few years, but Kajmowicz was only fifty. He didn’t want the rest of his career ruined by a vengeful U.S. senator.
Two days later Conrad was strong enough to travel back to Chicago. Lotty admitted him to Beth Israel, where they had vast experience with bullet-shattered bones.
Terry waited out the operation with Mrs. Rawlings, Conrad’s four sisters, and me. Even Janice, the neurology resident, was there—she flew in from Atlanta to make sure Chicago doctors treated her brother right. It was a four-hour ordeal, but at the end the surgeon brought a happy report. The main joint in the shoulder had been spared; he’d been able to rebuild the damaged clavicle.
Mrs. Rawlings was so relieved at the news that she let me share in the first family visits to her son. Conrad took my hand in a feeble clasp but went straight back to sleep.
As Conrad’s strength returned, though, he began to withdraw from me. I tried to ignore the signs, continuing my daily visits, trying to build a smoother relationship with his mother. Camilla preached optimism, but on the day of his discharge Conrad sent his mother and sisters outside so he could speak with me alone.
He sat on the edge of the bed, his dark eyes somber. “Vic, I owe my life to you. I know that. But my life would never have been in danger if you hadn’t gone headlong out to Morris without talking to me about what you planned to do.”
I squeezed my eyes shut. I couldn’t blow my last chance by shouting out that Murray and I would have slid out of the cornfields as easily as we came in if Conrad hadn’t galloped to the rescue.
“I thought if I talked to you about it you’d give me another lecture on the Fourth Amendment.” I tried to speak lightly but my words sounded petulant.
“You could be right about that.” Conrad took my hand with his sound one. “I think you and I need to cool things off for a while. The last month has taken a real toll on my love for you. You don’t have enough room in your breast for compromise.”
“But Conrad, Terry was going to arrest Emily Messenger. If I hadn’t brought back that tape recording of Gantner and Blakely’s conversation, the state’s attorney might never have vacated the warrant.”
“And you couldn’t trust the courts to sort it out? You’re a sorry excuse for a lawyer, you know that, Ms. W.?” He was trying to joke, but the words had a real sting.
When I didn’t try to respond he added, “As it turned out, you were right about almost everything—except that Fabian didn’t kill his wife, the way you hoped. But I can’t go through another episode like this, Vic. It isn’t that I resent you for being right. It’s not even the bullet in my shoulder. It’s watching you plunge ahead without regard for anything or anyone except your own private version of justice.”
I was crying so hard when I left the room that I couldn’t see. Camilla sprang from a chair to escort me to a bathroom. I stayed there, alone, until I was sure Conrad and his family had left the hospital.
After that it was hard for me to take great interest in the vicissitudes of the case, except as they affected Emily Messenger. While Conrad was still in Morris I had started badgering the state’s attorney to vacate the warrant against her. Terry helped. He was angry with me for Conrad’s injuries, as well as embarrassed at being shown up, but he was a just cop.
The day I knew Emily was clear I drove to Arcadia House. “I’m hoping Mary Louise Neely brought Emily Messenger to you,” I said to Marilyn Lieberman.
She gave a crooked smile. “You know we can’t reveal the identity of our residents, Vic.”
“Don’t spin me around, Lieberman. I didn’t come near you, not even with a letter, let alone a phone call, as long as I thought there was any chance I would bring trouble to Emily. The state’s attorney has vacated her arrest warrant. The guy who tried to kill her is in the Grundy County Hospital with a hole in his groin. He’s never going to be the same he-man he used to be. Donald Blakely has joined that great money laundry in the sky.
“Emily can surface now. She can go back to school and figure out what she wants to do with her life. Is she here? Or do I have to dismantle this city down to the tunnels to find her?”
Marilyn grinned at me and nodded. I’d been certain, a hundred percent certain, that Neely had brought her to Marilyn. But I needed to hear it before I could relax.
“What about her old man?” Marilyn asked. “She’s a minor; we aren’t about to acknowledge her existence if she has to go back to him.”
“Fabian? I think I can fix him. But first I’d like to know what her own desires for the future are.”
Marilyn summoned Eva Kuhn. I explained the change in Emily’s most-wanted status; Eva reported on Emily’s emotional progress.
“This isn’t Hollywood, Vic—she’s only been here two weeks. She needs a structured environment, lots of support, and some long-term therapy. More than I can provide her. But she’s a fundamentally healthy girl, with a lot of gifts. With the right kind of help she should make it. I’d like her to stay here for another month or so, until she feels strong enough to move out. But where she’ll go then is a major question mark.”
When she took me to see Emily I was amazed at the change in her. Maybe it wasn’t a miracle ending, but she already looked younger than I had ever seen her. She had on jeans that fit her and a bold turquoise T-shirt that proclaimed “Our Bodies, Our Lives.” Someone—one of the mothers staying there, Marilyn told me later—had braided her frizzy mop into cornrows, complete with multicolored beads.
Emily looked at me with her usual solemnity, but her face relaxed into a grin when Eva said, “Vic thinks she’s tough, but she’s never beaten me on a fast break. Don’t let her talk you into anything you don’t like, kid.”
“You shooting baskets with Eva?” I asked. “Her elbows are registered weapons—don’t go near ’em.”
I told her the history of the last few days, who had killed her mother and why, and why she didn’t need to worr
y that anyone else would try to hurt her.
“I saw the plane burning up on television. Was that you?” she said in her shy little voice.
“They were trying to run over me, so I shot the tires out.” As she looked at me in awe I added, “I’ve never been so scared in my whole life, believe me.”
“And you really know for sure it was that man in the hospital who killed Mother? You’re not saying it to make me feel better?”
“To make you feel ... oh. You mean that line Dr. Zeitner laid on you, that you had amnesia about killing her yourself. No, sweetie. I’m afraid my vocabulary doesn’t run to telling lies just to cheer people up.” Maybe I’d be better off if it did, but it was too late in the game to change that now.
“But who did I see, then? That night in your office, I mean. I saw Daddy there.”
I grimaced. “Dr. Zeitner was right about one thing: our memories aren’t very reliable. If we’re convinced that we saw something, that’s what we remember. You saw a man’s feet, and you were sure they were Fabian’s. But think about it logically: you know he was home that night until after you went to bed, because you were waiting up, hoping he would go to bed first. And after he attacked you he went to his own room. He was there when you left the house.
“When you got downtown your mother was already dead. Your dad physically could not have gotten downtown, killed your mother, and left my office before you got there. Even if he came by car while you went by bus.”
As she thought it over the pinched look returned to her face. “So does that mean he’s right, that I made up ... made up the other stuff? That I remember—him—doing that to me because I want to?”
“Do you think so, Emily?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she whispered. “Sometimes I think I must be crazy and that I imagined it all.”
“I know you’re not crazy, Emily, not after all the talking you and I have done this week, and how I’ve seen you behave with other people,” Eva said, sounding in her assurance like the voice of God. “I don’t know your father, but I’ve met a lot of fathers who are so ashamed of what they’ve done to their wives and daughters that they pretend it never happened. They get angry, they tell lies, and they try to blame their daughters for what they themselves did.”
We let Emily digest that for a few minutes before I spoke. “The question, Emily, is what do you want to do next? Eva and Marilyn and I think it would be good if you stayed here another month or so. Then we’d like to find a place you could live where you’d get the respect you need. And where you could see a good therapist—someone like Eva, but with more time. You need to think about that, about whether you want to go back to your old school in the fall, all those kinds of things.”
“I can’t abandon the boys,” she whispered.
“I’m not asking you to abandon them. I’m only saying you need your own life, and that we need to find a better place for you to live than with Fabian. You have rights, Emily, not just duties. You have the right to a peaceful night’s sleep.”
She started to cry. “If I move out he’ll never let me see them again. He’ll be so angry with me. I can’t—”
“You leave that to me. I will make sure that you get to see your brothers as often as you want to. Don’t worry about your dad’s anger. I’ll take care of that too. Believe me.”
“But where would I go?” she wailed.
“We’ll work on that together,” Eva said. “We won’t ask you to leave Arcadia House until we have a good home for you to go to.”
Eva signaled to me to leave, asking me to wait in Marilyn’s office for a word with her before I went home. As I got up something occurred to me.
“Are you still writing, Emily?”
She kept her head bent over her lap, but shook it so vigorously that the colored beads bounced in all directions.
“I think you should start again. Keep a journal. Write more poems. Your poems will tell you the right thing to do.”
She looked up at that, her face alert in a way I’d never seen it. That was the face that had written “A Mouse Between Two Cats.” I found myself smiling on my way to Marilyn’s office.
61
Mal du Père
Eva joined me in Marilyn’s office about ten minutes later. “We have a real problem in what to do with Emily. She mustn’t go back to that dreadful father. And he shouldn’t keep custody of the kids, either. But if we lodge a formal complaint with DCFS, we’ll only generate a host of new problems. If they believe us, they’ll whisk the kids into foster care, probably separately. If they don’t, we face lengthy proceedings to establish our case. Either way, given Fabian’s standing in the community, the overwhelming probability is that the kids will end up back with him.”
“There’s a grandmother,” I said. “Could they go to her? Or are there other relatives?”
Marilyn shook her head. “None that Emily knows at all well. Deirdre had one sister, about ten years older, living near Los Angeles, but she and Deirdre hadn’t spoken in years. Fabian has a sister in Baltimore, but I won’t trust anyone in that family sight unseen.”
I whistled a little under my breath. “Say I can get Fabian to agree to let go of the kids—is it better or worse for Emily to have her brothers with her? She’s been their minder for so long, would it give her a chance to grow up if she didn’t have to have them around for a while?”
Marilyn and I both looked at Eva, who thought it over for a minute before answering. “The three are pretty attached. If we could get them in the right kind of placement, with a foster parent who took over the parenting, and let the three of them learn how to be brothers and sister, I’d say keep them together. Besides, even if Fabian isn’t going to rape his sons, I don’t think he should be trusted with their care. But getting him to agree to let them go is a pretty big if: the guy’s a control freak.”
“I’ll take care of Fabian. You figure out where to put the kids.” I got up to go.
“What are you going to do?” Marilyn demanded. “You can’t shoot him.”
“You’re starting to sound like Lotty,” I said. “Don’t ask. You’ll be happier not knowing.”
Mary Louise Neely got out of her car as I came down the steps. “Emily must be in good shape, from the look on your face,” she said as she passed me.
“She’ll do.” As I climbed into my car I realized I was still whistling under my breath—“Se vuol ballare” from The Marriage of Figaro.
When I spoke to Fabian on Saturday, the conversation was actually more tiresome than difficult. His responses ranged from angry bluster, through denial that anything had ever gone amiss between him and Emily, to a characterization of her as a very sick girl badly in need of help.
“That’s where our minds meet,” I said. “We’re going to get her help. Here’s the deal: We will put Emily, Joshua, and Nathan in foster care together. You will support a good day-care program for your sons where they meet and play with other children. You’ll pay Emily’s school fees and her psychotherapy. And Tamar Hawkings—the woman who helped Emily survive for a week in the tunnels—you pay for her stay in a top-quality residential facility where she can keep her children and receive proper help. In exchange for this you get to keep your job.”
“How dare you?” His cheeks quivered in fury. “How dare you interfere with my children? I’ll have you arrested if you go near them again. Now get out of my house!”
I leaned back in my chair and waited for his shouts to subside. When he’d finished, after a good—or bad—twenty minutes, my ears were ringing.
“You don’t get it, Fabian. My goodwill toward your children is the only thing standing between you and an ugly meeting with the state bar association, not to mention the dean of the law school.”
As he started another tiresome litany I spelled it out for him. I told him I had taped evidence that he had collaborated with Alec Gantner, not only in his knowledge of the money-laundering scam, but in trying to get me murdered. Of course, that was stretching the t
ruth—I didn’t have any of his complicity on tape—but as I’d told Fabian earlier, the Marquess of Queensberry hadn’t hung out in my South Side highschool.
I would be willing to publish those tapes, I warned Fabian, as well as his involvement with Gant-Ag’s violation of the embargo against Iraq. And, if he proved really obdurate, I would help Emily through the process of testifying against him in a child-molestation suit.
“Maybe your tenure appointment will survive all that. It could be an interesting year for you if you wanted to slug it out in court. I’ve put our agreement in a document for you. Actually, I got Manfred Yeo to write it up—I’ve never done enough contracts to know how to write all that stuff down in a cast-iron way.”
“You went to Manfred?” Fabian was stricken.
I nodded, smiling seraphically, and held out a copy of a ten-page document our old professor had drafted. I’d gone to him right after leaving Arcadia House on Tuesday. It seemed appropriate that he help finish the story, since it had all begun at Fabian’s farewell party for him.
Manfred had been grieved but not shocked by my recital. Of course, he’d been following the Gantner end of the tale in the press, but nothing had appeared about Fabian. Manfred agreed that it was in Emily’s best interest to keep her from going through a difficult court case with her father, and promised to draw up a document.
“Fabian was one of my most brilliant students,” he told me at the end of our session. “I supported his faculty appointment. But an incident occurred early in his tenure that troubled me. He tried a case—a big antitrust suit—where the legal expenses ran to twenty million dollars. The case was selected for review in the Harvard Law School journal, and they gave it to a jury of very distinguished trial lawyers—all in private practice—who criticized the conduct of the case. They didn’t think he had committed misconduct, mind you, but thought sloppy work had led to the high fees involved. They held it up as a typical example of how remote academic lawyers have become from the realities of courtroom life.
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