by Sarah Graves
“If the engine cut out and I’d lost power brakes and steering on Washington Street, I’d have gone right into the boat basin.”
He still didn’t quite buy it. “Wouldn’t you have seen a gas puddle that size? Out at the lake? Smelled it there, too?”
“Not if somebody came prepared,” I said. “Listen, I’m going back.”
He lifted the two-gallon gas can he’d brought, began transferring the contents to my tank. “How about I follow you? Be on the safe side.”
After what I’d been through, the safe side sounded good to me. He stopped traffic while I backed gingerly onto the pavement. Ten minutes later we were back on the Golding Road, pulled up behind my earlier tire marks on the soft, sandy shoulder.
No huge puddle of gasoline was in evidence, not that I’d expected any. I got down on my knees, peering and sniffing. There wouldn’t be much….
“Here.” A few round, shallow depressions like raindrops in the sand, smelling of gas.
I got up, waiting while Bob came over, crouched, and got up again looking thoughtful.
“I grew up poor,” I said. “I know how to siphon gas.”
“You don’t,” Bob agreed, “want to get it in your mouth. I’ve dragged a few kids to the hospital on that score. You can breathe it in.”
“Clear plastic tube, suck on it till the gas rises, drop the end low but before you taste it, it keeps running into your gas can. Or whatever.”
“Couple of drops,” Bob said, “will always get spilled.”
He looked down at the raindrop marks, toed the sand by the road. “So how do you want to play this? File a complaint?”
“No. Actually, I’d appreciate it if you kept it quiet.”
“Sure you know what you’re doing?”
“Nope. I just know I’ve got a lot more questions to ask, and I don’t want to do anything to change what’s going on while I’m still trying to figure out what it is. That’s all.”
Somebody wanted to play it subtle; I could, too. He blew out a breath, settling himself behind the wheel of his squad car.
“Jacobia,” he began unhappily.
Suddenly I was glad he didn’t have X-ray vision; the little .25 semiauto was in my sweater pocket.
“I won’t do anything rash,” I told Bob Arnold earnestly.
Hoping it was true.
That afternoon, we got the call I hadn’t wanted: Sam was to be questioned by representatives of the district attorney’s office, but not by the police. The whole thing had simply become a prosecution matter. Also, the meeting was to happen ASAP.
Sam took the news badly, his face mulish, shoulders hunched. He’d just gotten home from work at the boatyard and was grubby and irritable. “Let them put me in jail if they want to. I’m not going to do it.”
“Sam, it’s not as if you’ll tell something new. Your dad has spoken with them, they already know what you’ll say.”
I could be present, I’d been told, but could not communicate with Sam or assist him while he was giving his statement.
“Are you going to do it?” he demanded. “Talk to them?”
“They haven’t asked me.” They weren’t saying why about that, but for now, they didn’t want any of the rest of us.
Only Sam. “Great. I get to be the traitor.”
Because he was the one with firsthand knowledge of Victor’s being in the cemetery that night. But there was no reason to act as if we had something to hide; I’d called Bennet and he’d agreed with me.
“Look, why don’t we just go down there and get it over with. Refusing to cooperate might only make things worse.”
He looked up miserably, hands clenched on the kitchen table. His nails were grimy, his fingers battered and banged up as usual from the physical work he did. “How?”
“Sam, if you won’t talk to them, they’ll think you know more than your father has said. And obviously you wouldn’t be trying to keep quiet about something good, would you? Doesn’t that make sense?”
“I guess so.” He got up reluctantly. “So, did they say they want me now?”
“Now.” I traded my sweater for a jacket and ran downstairs to put the .25 into the lockbox, feeling that carrying a weapon into Bob Arnold’s office went a little far. Sam went as he was: boots, sweatshirt, and beat-up jeans full of paint smears and oil stains.
“Tommy’s got something for you,” he said as we drove down to Water Street.
“Yeah?” I glanced at him. His face was set in the look it wore when he was going to the dentist. “Some papers. His mother found them at the library, said you might want ’em. You’re sure this isn’t going to hurt Dad?”
“I’m sure,” I told him, though I wasn’t really. I just knew what Bennet and I had decided: that the alternative could be worse. And since Victor had already spilled his guts, as Bennet had put it, there seemed little to lose.
The Eastport Police Station was a two-story frame storefront furnished with metal desks and office chairs. Inside, the state ADA was a civil, serious-looking young man in suit and tie.
Bob Arnold wasn’t there. The young man looked spiffy, and a bit taken aback at Sam’s appearance. But he stepped manfully up to the task of conversing with someone so clearly of a lower economic stratum than himself, and of course I did not swat the patronizing smile off his peach-fuzzy face.
So it all went reasonably well, at first. After the introductions, Sam told the same story he’d told before. But then they got to the part about Victor in the cemetery.
The young man frowned. “I’m not sure I understand. You rode right by, even though you knew your father was sitting there?”
Probably his own father was one of those nurturing types you see on the network TV dramas. Wise expression, steadying hand on the shoulder, stern but fair. Hey, somebody’s got to have one.
“That’s what I said.” Sam’s face was stoic.
“You didn’t stop. Ask him what he was doing there. See if he was all right.”
“No. I didn’t.”
“Why not?”
“He saw me. If he’d wanted to talk, he’d have spoken.”
“Did you think then that something might be wrong?”
A fair question, but I could see where he was going.
“I thought … I thought there might be,” Sam conceded. “My father was sitting in a cemetery in the middle of the night.”
“He wasn’t in the habit of doing that,” the young man said. “So you thought it might indicate something unusual.”
“That’s right.” Sam’s voice was a monotone.
Still, that Victor’s actions might indicate an unusual state of mind was no great revelation. And Victor’s mind was frequently unusual, as many could testify.
Then came the curveball. “One last question: Have you ever seen your father strike anyone in anger?”
Sam hesitated. Then, in a low voice: “Yes.”
“Whom did he strike?
“My—” He swallowed hard. “My mother. But that was …”
A long time ago. I sat horrified. How had they learned that? No one even knew about it except …
And then I realized: Somehow they’d gotten Victor to admit the incident, and now they were using it: This is what we’ll make your son say in public if you don’t play ball with us.
This and more: all the dirt from the divorce. They wanted a confession and were using Sam to try to get one.
“The interview,” I announced, “is over.”
The civil young man in the neat suit and tie didn’t bat an eyelash. “So your dad’s capable of physical violence.”
“He only got angry that one time,” Sam protested.
“Sam. Stop talking right now.” I crossed the room and got in front of him. “Go out to the car.”
The young man looked up at me as if I were a housefly and my buzzing annoyed him. “I’m nearly finished.”
His tone of strained patience was what did me in. I reached down, wrapped my fingers around his Windsor knot,
and yanked hard on it.
“My son’s a minor. The interview is over when I say it is. Got it?”
I let go. His eyes were big as pie plates. “I’m going to take into account the fact that you are upset,” he spluttered as I turned away from him.
“Do that. And from now on if you want to talk to my family, bring a court order.” I seized Sam’s arm, propelled him out ahead of me, letting the door slam.
“Sam, I apologize.” I got into the car beside him. “I had no idea he would know enough to try to discuss that.”
Bennet either, apparently, and so much for following any more of his advice.
“It really sucked,” Sam said, slouched beside me. He looked shell-shocked.
He’d been ten when the incident happened: Victor and I so hideously angry at each other, we hadn’t even known he was in the room. Victor said later he’d have sat there and let me beat him bloody, if only he could have wiped the look of fright off Sam’s face.
It was the closest to an apology I ever got from Victor. But nothing like that had ever occurred again, and I hadn’t brought it up in the divorce.
“You were pretty good in there, though,” he said at last.
I glanced cautiously at him. “Thanks. I hope when that punk thinks it over, he won’t decide to have me charged with battery. Sam, about your dad and me …”
His shoulders moved impatiently. “I guess somebody must’ve scared Dad, or he wouldn’t have mentioned it.”
It was what I thought, too, that the prosecutors had taken a sworn statement, asked him about violence in his past. And Victor couldn’t very well not tell the truth about the incident, because I might.
“Sam,” I tried again, “if you could just explain to me …”
Why this bothered him so much. After all, he had gotten over other things, ones that hurt me worse than a single, never-to-be-repeated face slap.
He blew out a breath. “Okay, look. After the divorce was over you forgave him, or whatever you did, so that I could have a dad. And that meant I had to step up to the plate, and be a son.”
“I never meant to obligate you to …”
“That’s okay,” he went on impatiently, “it worked out okay. Only once in a while I’d be getting along with him all right, and suddenly it would pop into my head that I ought to be punching his lights out. For what he did.”
He turned to me. “I mean, that smack he gave you, that was just the cherry on the cake. There was so much more, but I was a little kid, it was what I could understand.”
So it represented something to him. “Okay. And now?”
Sam sighed heavily. “Now we’ve … I don’t know. Built around it, or something. And I guess it’s not such a huge deal, to talk about him in court. Like you said, he’s already told them stuff. But, Mom, he’s so weird. And with the school thing going on, too, like maybe not wanting to go … I’m afraid he’ll decide I’m doing it all to punish him. School, court, everything.”
He gazed at me in youthful appeal. “Like, that I’ve been saving it, like it was my big guns, you know? And now I’m taking my chance to hit back at him any way I can.”
Which for Victor was not only possible, it was likely. “Not because it makes any logical sense, but …”
Sam nodded energetically. “He thinks he deserves it. I know he does. That trauma-center thing means a lot to him ’cause it’s a way to make something decent work out with you. Mom, I think he’d marry you again if he could. I bet that’s what he was sitting out there thinking about, in the cemetery.”
Now there was an idea right out of my absolute worst nightmare. “You do know it’s not going to happen,” I said evenly.
“Yeah, yeah. Don’t worry, Mom, if that ever started looking possible I’d tie you up and smuggle you out of here on one of the fishing boats. Or Wade would.”
He managed a laugh, sobered instantly. “It’s like he’s been on this shaky little raft, though. And now it’s sinking, and he might think I’m, like, secretly glad, like I think it serves him right. And you know Dad: if he feels bad …”
Right. He would find a way to make you feel bad too. He was, as Sam said, so weird.
“And then it’ll all get messed up again,” Sam finished. “The whole Dad thing. Like a boat you’ve been working so hard building and then it gets smashed.”
“Sam, I’m going to do my very best to try to prevent that,” I told him as we pulled into our driveway. “Really.”
“Yeah. I know you are.”
He smiled weakly at me. But he didn’t sound at all convinced that I would be successful, and at the moment neither was I.
Inside, Sam went upstairs and stayed there while I checked on Monday, whose nose was healing nicely. I gave her a liver biscuit, which she took delicately, carrying it under the dining-room table to gloat over it before she ate it.
Then I called Bennet. “Listen, Mr. Hot-Shot Attorney,” I began when his secretary put him on. “I don’t know what you were thinking when you said it was okay to—”
“I know,” Bennet cut in tiredly. “Jacobia, I’m sorry. I just found out myself. This is what happens when you’re in one state and your client is in jail in another.”
“Right, a state of confusion, and by that I mean both of you. What happened to the criminal lawyer you were supposed to be lining up? Where’s the skilled, on-top-of-it-all defense he’s supposed to be getting, preferably from someone who has seen an actual copy of the criminal codes and is in the same area code as Victor?”
Bennet let me rant on this way a little longer, until I ran out of breath. Then:
“Jacobia, he’s demanding to interview them.” Bennet sounded very discouraged. “Wants to make sure he feels they’re competent, he says.”
“Competent? Bennet, he’s the one who needs …”
A competency hearing, I was about to say. Then I realized that Bennet’s glum tone wasn’t only the result of my being angry with him; during the divorce, he had absorbed the equivalent of white-hot lava and had never lost his chipper, we’ll-get-through-this professional attitude.
“Bad news,” I guessed aloud, and he sighed heavily.
“Victor took advantage of the attorney-client privilege a little while ago,” he said quietly, “on the phone to me. Right after he told me that the war of words you two had for a marriage escalated to more than words. And he’d told the cops about it.”
“He slapped me on one occasion. One only, Bennet, and that was …”
“Drugs they found in Reuben’s system,” Bennet said, ignoring me. “Sedative drugs. Ever wonder where he got them?”
“Well, it could be anywhere,” I said, nonplussed. It was, I’d thought, the hardest part about it all to nail down. “How would I know where … Oh. Oh, Bennet, you don’t mean …”
Thanks for that other thing, Reuben had said to Victor on his way out of La Sardina.
“Victor prescribed them for him,” Bennet confirmed. “Tate was pushing him around and one of the things he demanded was drugs. A pick-me-up, Victor says Tate called it.”
“But these were—”
“Yeah. Victor got the bright idea that what this guy really needed was a tranquilizer. So he wrote him a ’scrip, but not with a brand name that Tate would have recognized. He used the drug’s generic name, the chemical name. And he knows Tate filled it from the local pharmacy, ’cause the druggist called him, checking to make sure it really was a legitimate prescription. Tate being the kind of guy, I guess, who everyone knew would steal prescription pads if he got a chance. But this time he hadn’t.”
“Oh, hell,” I said, sinking onto the chair in the telephone alcove. “He didn’t look sedated in the bar.”
“Just got the ’scrip that afternoon. Took some after you saw him, maybe. Victor says on top of alcohol, the stuff would really knock you for a loop.”
“So it could look like Victor was setting him up to kill him. Has Victor told anyone else about this, Bennet?”
The attorney let out an
exasperated breath. “No. This is the thing he’s really worried about. I can’t seem to make him see it, that it’s nothing compared to his real troubles. That he wrote a prescription that wasn’t warranted …”
But it was precisely the kind of thing that Victor would get his britches in a twist over: his precious medical integrity.
“… And it’s what he was doing out there in the graveyard,” Bennet finished. “Agonizing about it.”
“And now he’s sitting down there in a cell without any legal counsel. What did you tell him?”
“To stop being a damned idiot. That he’s as able to judge the competence of attorneys as I am to judge brain surgeons. To get off the dime, pick a lawyer from the list I faxed up, and do what the lawyer tells him. Think it’ll work?” He laughed.
The advantage of dealing with the attorney who handled your bitter, go-for-the jugular divorce is a shared appreciation for black humor; the chances of Victor’s putting his trust in a lawyer he’d picked from a list was about the same as his dialing 1-800-SHYSTER and throwing himself on the mercy of whoever answered.
“Okay, Bennet,” I said. “Keep on keeping on, please. I know you’re doing your best. And hey, it could be worse.”
I told him what Sam had said about Victor sitting out there maybe thinking about remarrying me.
Bennet laughed again. “You two ever tried that, I’d come up there and murder you both myself. It’d be a mercy killing.”
Soon after, we hung up, Bennet because his day had made him thirsty for a vodka gimlet, and me because the kitchen had that bright, clean-as-a-whistle look that meant it must be time to start dirtying it up again, by cooking dinner.
I thought it might cheer Sam up, too, but he didn’t appear downstairs. I’d made fish and potatoes, a hearty, strengthening meal, but Sam’s portion had gotten all shriveled and dried in the warming oven by the time Tommy Daigle came over at around eight o’clock, went upstairs, and stayed for a couple of hours.
Later, when I saw him coming down again, his freckled face looked troubled.
“So, what have the two of you been up to?” I asked lightly.
But Tommy wasn’t fooled; he had a mother himself, and knew all the information-getting tricks. “Oh, nothin’. Doing the Morse thing, gettin’ decent at that. And fooling around with the Ouija board. Man, but isn’t that thing some wicked strange, though.”