Feeling trapped by the storm shutters, the driving rain, and my own thoughts, I wandered aimlessly through the apartment. I clicked the TV on and clicked it off. I picked up a book and read a few pages, then put it down. I went in the bedroom where Christy’s Tickle Me Elmo was propped against the pillow on my bed, the only toy of hers that I had kept. I sat on the side of the bed and stroked Elmo’s red fur, hearing Christy’s laughter bubbling, that sound of pure joy that made everybody within earshot smile. On my bedside table, Christy and Todd smiled at me from a photograph taken shortly before they were killed. Christy sat in Todd’s lap, both his arms encircling her like a ring of safety. I picked the photo up and ran my fingertips over the glass.
Christy would be six years old now. She would be excited about starting first grade, and we would be shopping for number-two yellow pencils, crayons, scissors, and Elmer’s glue. We would be debating which backpack to buy, whether it should have cartoon characters on it or be more plain and grown-up. We would be getting school clothes ready and making sure her vaccinations were current.
Todd would be thirty-five. Maybe he would have decided to work toward making lieutenant with the sheriff’s department, maybe he would have been happy to stay a sergeant. I was now the age Todd was when he died. He will stay thirty-two while I grow older. He and Christy are like astronauts who stop aging when they leave earth’s gravity. Perhaps death is actually a different kind of space travel, leaving behind one’s body sleeve and moving into another space-time dimension in which there is no such thing as age or death. Or maybe they have moved into another dimension in which they continue to grow and have different lives. Who knows what happens after death? All I knew was that they weren’t in my world any longer and never would be.
I put the photograph down and picked up Tickle Me Elmo. I hugged him tight to my chest and kissed the red fur on his head. I carried him down the hall and put him inside a clean pillowcase and laid him on the top shelf of my linen closet. Then I closed the door.
The air was charged, continuously vibrating with massive air quakes. The wind had picked up, moaning and shrieking with primeval urgency. It was the kind of storm that floods canals and swimming pools, topples ornamental trees, and spawns tornadoes. I raised the metal shutters and peered through the French doors. The sky was purple as a bad bruise. Down on the shore, rolls of dark bulimic swells were vomiting strings of seaweed.
I opened the doors and stepped outside. The wind was so strong that horizontal rain slammed under the porch overhang and drenched me. I leaned over the railing and let the wind whip my hair around my face, let it offer my mind escape from its jail. After a while I went downstairs and slogged through wet sand and quivering thunder to the shore. Bracing against the howling wind, I faced the sea and raised my arms, spread-eagled to take the rain’s hardest force.
Then I looked directly into the great maw of churning sea and raging wind and gave it back my own sound: my fury and hatred, my despair and hopelessness, the rage and heartbreak trapped inside since Todd and Christy died. Howled it from my toes and guts and lungs and heart. Howled like women have howled since the beginning of time and maybe before, sending a woman’s demand to the ends of the universe to bring it into balance.
I don’t know how long I stood raging into that dark storm, but long enough. When I was empty, I felt a door closing with a gentle click somewhere in my brain, while another door opened. Part of me wanted to put them back the way they’d been, another part of me knew that would be an act of cowardice. My husband and my child were dead, my capacity for love was not. Staying in the safe darkness of memory and yearning is easy. Going forward to the light of possibility takes courage.
As I trudged back through the downpour, I saw Michael’s silhouette in his bedroom window and knew he had been keeping watch.
I left my sodden clothes in a heap on the porch floor and went inside and took a long warm shower. Then I crawled into bed and slept deeply and dreamlessly for the first time in three years.
24
The sky was pale and washed clear when I backed out of the carport next morning, and the air had a clean salty taste. A few early cranes were gathering goodies washed in on the tide, and songbirds were beginning to practice scales. If it hadn’t been for the sure and certain knowledge that a killer was out to get me, I would have felt downright contented.
Billy Elliot was waiting for me in Tom’s dark apartment, and he and I went downstairs and ran hard for thirty minutes around the parking lot. Nobody tried to run me down. Nobody jumped out and shot a poisoned dart at me.
So far, so good.
When we got upstairs, lights were on in Tom’s apartment. I could smell coffee brewing and hear the TV. I knelt to unclip Billy Elliot’s leash from his collar, and heard a newscaster’s voice say Leo Brossi’s name.
I yelled, “Tom? Okay if I come in?”
He rolled himself into the hall from the kitchen. “Of course. Want some coffee?”
“Did I just hear something about Leo Brossi?”
“Yeah, come watch.”
He zipped back into the kitchen and I trotted after him in time to see a live scene of several handcuffed men being herded into a police van. The announcer’s voice sounded young and excited, repeating several times that the men were charged with operating a massive racketeering, bribery, and money-laundering scheme headquartered at All-Call. He said the operation was far-reaching, involving more than the few men currently under arrest, and that it had been cracked through the combined efforts of federal and county law-enforcement officers. Leo Brossi’s attorney had already issued a statement saying Brossi was completely innocent, and if any unlawful operation had been going on at his call center it had been without his knowledge.
I scanned the television screen for a glimpse of Paco, but he wasn’t there. He had probably melted away the moment the arrests began.
I said, “Have they mentioned identity theft?”
“This is a lot bigger than identity theft. Sounds like they were laundering drug money. Moving it in and out of shell accounts.”
The TV station broke for a commercial, and Tom muted the sound.
I said, “I don’t understand how money laundering works. I mean, I know it starts out dirty and comes out clean, but I’m fuzzy about what happens in between.”
“Okay, say you’re a drug trafficker, and you’ve just sold some cocaine for a hundred thousand dollars. Drug sales are always in cash, and banks report cash deposits of more than ten thousand dollars, so you need to get the cash converted. There are several ways to do that. You can pay cash for things like antiques or gold or motorcycles or classic cars, and sell them to people who pay you with a cashier’s check or a money order. You can go to your neighborhood Wal-Mart and pay cash for a bunch of TVs and VCRs and CD players and then sell them on eBay. A more fun way is to go to a casino, buy a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of chips, gamble for an hour or two, and then cash in your chips. The casino will pay you with a cashier’s check as if you were a big winner. Your drug money has now been laundered, and you can deposit it in a bank.”
“But those guys at All-Call weren’t buying and selling things.”
“Say instead of a hundred thousand, your cocaine sold for a million, and say you get that much cash every week. You don’t have time to go through all the rigmarole of the small-time dealer. So you find a friendly banker or savings-and-loan officer who will take your cash deposits without reporting them to the government. Pay the friendly banker a nice bribe, a million here, a million there, and your money becomes nice and clean.”
I thought about the banker playing golf with Denton Ferrelli and Leo Brossi when Conrad was killed. Had he been getting bribes?
Tom said, “Now here’s where the people at All-Call come in. Once you have the cash in a bank account, you can make wire transfers to accounts in offshore banks. With just a few strokes on a computer keyboard you can move currency around the world with complete anonymity. Move it often enough, and t
he tracks become so crisscrossed that nobody can trace them.”
“Telemarketing firms have computers that can do that?”
“Are you kidding? For every ten people put in jail for money laundering, five of them are probably telemarketers.”
“Hunh.”
Tom’s brow furrowed like a worried hound’s. “Honest people think money laundering doesn’t have anything to do with them, but drug sales finance terrorism. It affects all of us.”
I said, “I wonder why they didn’t arrest Brossi.”
“Guess he wasn’t there when they made the bust. But somebody infiltrated the operation and taped conversations. They’ve got weeks and weeks of proof. I don’t think Brossi will be able to wiggle out of this one, not even with all his political connections.”
I felt a tingle of pride. I knew who had infiltrated that ring and got the tapes. I wondered if Michael had known all along that last night was bust night, and if he had lain awake all night worrying about what might happen to Paco when the bust was made.
I left Tom and Billy Elliot in the kitchen and let myself out. Downstairs in the parking lot, more people had come out to exercise their dogs. The horizon was beginning to go blue around the edges, and steam was crawling off all the wet vegetation. Across town, Paco was probably doing high fives with the other officers who’d been in on the operation. I hoped he was feeling as much pride as he deserved.
To make up for the abbreviated time I’d given them yesterday, I spent a few extra minutes with each of the other dogs on my schedule. They all got fed and brushed and exercised. They all got smooched and petted and told how brilliant and beautiful they were. They all beamed and stretched and agreed with me. That’s the great thing about animals. No false modesty with them. They don’t puff themselves up with snooty grandiosity, but they don’t turn down compliments either.
The morning sky was shading from coconut to apricot when I got to Mame’s house. It was going to be a beautiful day. Mame wasn’t watching for me at the glass by the front door, and when I went inside and called to her, she didn’t come.
I found her in Judge Powell’s study, her back legs splayed out in an awkward flattened way. A large oval on the rug beneath her was wet, and an acrid odor of urine filled the room. She raised her head and looked up at me with shamed eyes.
I knelt beside her and stroked her head. “What’s wrong, Mame?”
She licked my hand and sighed. Her eyes said that I knew perfectly well what was wrong and not to play games. It was time, and we both knew it.
I got my client book from my backpack and looked up her vet’s number. The difference between animal doctors and human doctors is that animal doctors assume you really need them when you call, so they talk to you.
I said, “I’m Dixie Hemingway. I’m taking care of Judge and Mrs. Powell’s dog while they’re in Europe, and—”
“I know. I’ve been expecting your call. Bring her to the office.”
I scooped Mame into my arms and carried her to the padded cage in the back of my Bronco, wedging rolled towels around her so she wouldn’t slide with the car’s movement. She put her head down and closed her eyes. At the vet’s office, there were only two other cars in the parking lot. Mame raised her head and smiled at me when I went to the back to pick her up, and I took a second to stroke her head and tell her what a beautiful girl she was.
The vet’s assistant saw me coming and ran to hold the glass door open for me. She motioned to the door leading to the examining rooms. “You can take her on back. Dr. Layton is waiting for you.”
The vet, a comfortably plump African-American woman with a mass of glossy black curls, got my immediate respect by ignoring me. When I put Mame on the examining table, the vet greeted her like an old friend.
“Hello, my lovely Mame. What a beautiful girl you are. But you’re in pain, aren’t you?” She was stroking Mame as she spoke, listening to her body through her fingers.
She said, “I tried to get the Powells to take care of this before they left, but they just couldn’t.”
“They knew?”
“Mame has several malignant tumors that are growing larger every day. They’re pressing on her spine, and now it looks as if they’ve affected nerves to her legs.”
I felt a flash of anger. How dare the Powells go off at a time like this and leave Mame with somebody who wasn’t family? After a lifetime of love and devotion, Mame deserved better.
As if she read my mind, the vet said, “No two people handle death the same way. They just couldn’t face it.”
“It won’t be any easier for them when they come back.”
Softly, she said, “I’m not sure they’re coming back. Before they left, they made a point of telling me they were members of the Hemlock Society, and that they’d always wanted to end their days in Italy. I think they were telling me they’d made plans to die there.”
Our eyes met, and then we quickly looked away, both of us too young to want to dwell on the question we would ultimately face. Personally, I plan on dying the way my grandparents did. Both of them dropped dead in the midst of active lives, vital one minute and gone the next. But back in some forbidden recess of my mind is the awful knowledge that not everybody is so lucky. If I’m not one of the lucky ones, will I try to hang on to youth like the man who killed Todd and Christy because he refused to quit driving, or will I take the way of the Powells? I don’t know. Like Scarlett O’Hara, I’ll think about that tomorrow.
I looked at Mame again. I thought of the fatal drug in Conrad’s body. I thought of Mame chewing on Conrad’s finger. Guilt tightened its fingers around my throat and made my voice tight.
“Just a few days ago, Mame went for a walk and ran into the woods. She was frisky as a pup.”
The vet smiled down at Mame and stroked her neck. “Had a good last run, did you? Good for you.”
“Could it have been too much for her?”
She looked up at me and shook her head. “This has been coming for a long time.”
“Can I stay with her while … ?”
“Of course. You can hold her and talk to her while she goes to sleep.”
She unbuckled Mame’s collar and handed it to me. I sat on the examining table with Mame cradled in my arms, while the vet slipped a needle into a vein. The vet stepped out of the room, and Mame looked into my face with clear eyes, unafraid and perhaps relieved.
Softly, I sang, “Put the blame on Mame, boys, put the blame on Mame.”
I sang the same words over and over until Mame’s eyes closed. Then I sang them a few more times just in case her spirit was hovering around listening.
The vet came in and took Mame from me. “The Powells made arrangements before they left,” she said. “You don’t have to do anything else.”
I slid off the table, tears streaming down my face. “She was a sweet little dog.”
“She was.”
I stopped at the receptionist’s counter long enough to fill out one of the blank checks Judge Powell had signed for emergencies. I knew he had loved Mame dearly, and so had Mrs. Powell, but I didn’t think they had been fair to her at the end.
I was still leaking tears when I opened the front door and collided blindly with a man coming in with a cat. I muttered a quick apology and slipped past him to the parking lot. As I opened the Bronco’s door, Ethan Crane’s voice sounded behind me.
“Dixie? Sorry I didn’t recognize you back there, I was concentrating on my cat. Had to leave her to get her toenails clipped.”
I wiped ineffectually at my streaming eyes. “I didn’t recognize you either. Had something in my eye.”
He touched my shoulder. “Is something wrong?”
The next thing I knew I was bawling and babbling while Ethan had an arm around my shoulder and was patting me and making soothing noises.
“The vet said she would have died anyway but she doesn’t know about her chewing on Conrad’s finger … it had that drug in it that kills in just seconds, and maybe Mame broke
the skin … I don’t know, she could have … I didn’t look, I should have looked … maybe she got some of the drug in her system, maybe that’s what really killed her … I shouldn’t have left her at home alone … the Powells were going to go off and kill themselves anyway … I should have paid somebody to stay with her and they would never have known … it’s just plain mean and selfish to do that, you know?”
Ethan pointed to a Starbucks at the edge of the parking lot. “Dixie, you need coffee.”
With his arm still around my shoulders, he guided me across the blacktop and put me at a minuscule table outside the Starbucks front door. He ducked inside, and by the time he came back with two coffees, I had got myself under control. He spilled a handful of cream and sugar containers on the table and took the other chair. For a minute or two we were busy with the coffees, and then we were stuck in one of those awkward moments when nobody can think of what to say next.
I said, “Sorry to disintegrate on you like that.”
“No problem. I’m sorry about your dog.”
“She wasn’t mine, actually. I was taking care of her.”
“I’m still sorry.”
I looked directly at him for the first time. No doubt about it, he was extraordinarily handsome, but his face wore a new look of tension.
I said, “I guess you’ve heard about the arrests at Leo Brossi’s call center.”
He huffed a mirthless laugh. “Brossi’s not the big fish. Denton Ferrelli’s the one they should be after.”
“You didn’t say that when we talked before.”
Humility obviously wasn’t Ethan Crane’s long suit. He gave me a long hard look that seemed to be contemplating whether he could get away with lying.
“I didn’t know then what I know now.”
“Now that you have new information, could you share it with me?”
I thought I did very well to keep the acid off my tongue when I said that. I guess he thought so too, because he gave me a hint of an approving grin.
Duplicity Dogged the Dachshund Page 20