The Path of Silence

by Edita A. Petrick

  “Like what?” I sat in the chair as Kane talked but I felt as tired as if I had run a marathon. Listening to his story was emotionally draining and worrisome.

  “She had escaped at night and roamed the corridors. That’s how she saw Johnny, in a chauffeur’s uniform again, pushing a gurney—with a dead body. I’m not sure whether it was Johnny but I’m sure about the dead body. She had lifted the sheet. The chest looked as if it had exploded. The word ‘exploded’ came from her. I don’t know whether she’d heard it or made it up. I didn’t see her for two days after that. Then I asked about her—and she returned—blank stare, very responsive to her control phrase—Patti, Patti, Patti. When I approached her, she spoke rapidly, hatefully, with focus, “The clerks. The foreigners. Black men. Bishops. Blank monsters. They push. They pull. They stick needles.

  “Two weeks later, I signed myself out of the facility.” He leaned back into his chair. Then he lifted his head and stared at us.

  We sat there for a long time, silent and reflective. We’d heard a lot but could we act on it? Was it safe for Patricia, for us, for Kane?

  “Mr. Kane,” I motioned at the monitor, “if necessary, would you be able to write this down and send a file to the FBI?”

  Once again I saw the flat planes of his face crease in a smile. “Certainly, Detective. But would it be safe?”

  Chapter 23

  The three o’clock meeting was cancelled. The FBI had not returned from their visit to the IMF.

  Ken phoned the lab to get an update on his Malibu. The lab told him that in another day or two, his brown vehicle would be released.

  “I’m sure Marci was just teasing you,” I told him when I drove him home. “You know our lab doesn’t conduct destructive tests on cars—or any other material they have to analyze.”

  “It won’t be silver metallic gray anymore,” he murmured. He was so distraught that I had to remind him that I was already parked in front of his house.

  When I walked into the kitchen I could smell the excitement. My daughter was roaring through her homework.

  “It’ll be a nice change, for both of you,” the housekeeper was saying. She left without explaining her mysterious comment.

  “Hi, Jazz.”

  “I’m almost done. You can check it. No mistakes,” she rattled off.

  “That’s fine. I’m happy to see you working so hard—and so fast—but what’s going on?”

  “We’re going out to dinner at Portofino’s.”

  “Really?” That was not my plan tonight. It wasn’t in my budget. Portofino’s was an upscale steak house where pirates served dinner while jugglers and minstrels entertained. Underneath a dozen lucky plates, the patrons would find a genuine reproduction of a golden Spanish doubloon. An average bill for two, without drinks, could come to two hundred dollars. They didn’t have a children’s menu.

  Jazz finished scribbling in her notebook and lifted her head. “Field called. He’s taking us out.”

  “Really?” I managed to choke out.

  “Yep. I’ve got to go get dressed.” Before I had time to blink, she vanished.

  “No way are we going…” I was saying to her disappearing backside when the doorbell rang.

  “I phoned and left a message on your cell phone,” he said when I opened the door.

  “I didn’t have time to check and you didn’t bother waiting for my reply.”

  “Jazz replied.”

  “Field!”

  “I’ll brief you on the day’s developments. We didn’t get back until half an hour ago.”

  My expression must have given me away.

  “Don’t look so trapped,” he said. “It’s only dinner. I’ll make it into a work session.”

  “Is that supposed to make me happy?”

  “Judging from your look, another murder would be about the only thing that would make you happy right now.”

  “Yours.”

  “That’s what I figured. Portofino’s serves excellent Irish Coffee. Can I come in?”

  “Don’t you have two people working with you? Shouldn’t you, as their boss, set a good example and go have dinner with them—so you can continue working?”

  “They’re still working. I’m here.”

  “That doesn’t reflect very well on you.”

  “I’ve spent years working with partners I never saw again once we clocked off work.”

  “I guess the FBI is not into teamwork,” I grumbled.

  “Sure we are. Can I come in or do you want me to wait out here? Your neighbors might be interested in our little parlay.”

  I looked at him. Whatever else I had wanted to say stuck in my throat. When we were still dating, he used to say, “Leave the back door unlatched.” He’d enter quietly but my roommate, Nellie, would be awake and checking out any suspicious behavior.

  Times had changed. Had the man changed? Had I changed? I let him in.

  “I could have knocked on your side door,” he remarked.

  “No memories tonight, Field,” I cautioned.

  “I’ve lived ten years on memories.” I heard his quiet comment as he headed down the hallway. I’ve lived the years trying to forget them, I thought.

  When Jazz came out, I made a mental note to take her shopping for clothes—soon. The white sweater with bunnies was cute—three years ago. On a young lady of ten it was outdated.

  I changed into a plum colored suit and a white blouse and we set out for a night on the town.

  “This is progress,” I murmured, when we were seated at a table and told that there was a video arcade for young diners. There was also pirate cove and mini golf. I remembered Portofino’s for their upscale adult dining. It didn’t use to be a family restaurant.

  Jazz hadn’t spoken much to me these last six months. When she did, most of her words were angry. Tonight, however, she was talkative. I learned more about her school, friends and hobbies in one hour of her irrepressible chatter than I had in years. I also learned more about her father than I knew ten years ago when I said, “I do.”

  I had ex-in-laws in North Carolina. Field’s father owned a trucking company. His wife worked for his firm as a bookkeeper. I had two ex-sisters and one ex-brother-in-law, scattered across the country, all married and raising families. With the numbers on both sides, Jazz had enough cousins to fill out five family trees. Inspector Weston had a pilot’s license. If necessary, he could even fly a jet. He’d raced speedboats in California, crashed one on to a reef and lived to laugh about it. He’d gone to Europe several times and loved Paris in the spring. His most difficult assignment was two weeks on the New York Stock Exchange. After that assignment LA freeway traffic noise had seemed almost soothing. He’d surfed in Hawaii and fished in the Bahamas. He’d nearly stepped on a rattlesnake in the Arizona desert and a coyote had walked up to him as he was filling up at a gas station on Van Buren Street, in Phoenix.

  Judging by her expression as she listened, Jazz was happy.

  I sipped Irish Coffee and tried to remember whether Washington restaurants made it as strong as this one. I also wondered when she would begin putting him through the third degree.

  Suddenly, she leaned back, wiped the chocolate drizzle smudges from her face on to napkin and asked. “Are you married now?”

  “No,” he replied with an amused twitch.

  I sighed, raised my hand and made a rapid circle, indicating refill.

  She continued, “How many ex-wives do you have?”

  I pursed my lips in appreciation. Her techniques were getting more sophisticated. The last time she’d served this question to one of my dates, it was, “How many times were you married?”

  He arched his brows.

  “Don’t you know?” she asked with an exasperated groan.

  “One ex-wife.”

  “When did you get a divorce?”

  I hid my smile in the whipped cream. She had vastly improved her method.

  “Ten years ago.”

  “That’s the last time you wer
e married?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t you marry any of your girlfriends?”

  “What makes you think I had girlfriends?”

  “All guys have girlfriends, tons of them.”

  “Why would you think that? And how?”

  “Jenny’s father is still married to her mother and he’s on his twelfth girlfriend. Her mother thinks it’s only the fifth but Jenny knows about all the others. Melissa’s dad has been in prison three times. She says he’s had several boyfriends there. Her mom doesn’t pick him up any more when they let him out on parole. One of his girlfriends does it. Kristin’s mom travels a lot. She’s a sales rep. When she’s out of town, her dad brings his girlfriend to sleep over. Kris said that once he brought over two. They were hookers. Amy lives with her dad. She’s on her fourth stepmother. Do you have any kids?”

  “One,” he said carefully. I could see that he was rattled by the barrage of information and Jazz’s update on the standards and morals of today’s society. I thought it was strange, considering he’d spent eight years in California.

  “Male, female?”

  “Daughter.”

  “Age?”

  “About your age.”

  “Does she live with you?”

  “No. She lives with her mother.”

  “Is she yours?”

  “Which one of your friends’ fathers is wondering about that?”

  “All of them. They don’t want to pay child support. Do you pay child support?”

  He looked at me, trapped. Momentarily, I felt sorry for him but after two Irish Coffees, I could only grin.

  “No but that’s because I only found out recently that I had a daughter.”

  “Every time Melissa’s father gets out of jail, he forgets her name. That’s pretty normal. Why did you split up with your wife?”

  He took a deep breath, held it and then let it out slowly. “I don’t know.”

  “Did she cheat on you or did you cheat on her?”

  “Neither.”

  “They why did you split up?”

  “It was a misunderstanding.”

  I saw that he wanted to stop this line of questioning but didn’t know what to do—talk his way out or shut up.

  “Every time the cops arrest Melissa’s dad because he’s packing guns or drugs, he tells his lawyer that it’s a misunderstanding.” She shook her head.

  Field tried again. “All right. Let’s see if I can summarize it. I fell in love, married the girl. She was going to have a baby. I was working, on assignment. Something went wrong. I got hurt. A message was passed on to me. I believed it to be true. It said that my wife no longer wanted to be married. She left. I never saw her again—or my daughter. That was ten years ago. I went out with women but never with anyone long enough to call her a girlfriend. How’s that?”

  “Pretty unbelievable,” she said, shaking her head with a frown. “No drugs, no hookers, no domestic violence, no gambling, no grand theft, no prison—it’s just not real.”

  I shook with laughter, halfway hoping Field would work his way out of this.

  “I work for the FBI. I put people like your friends’ fathers in prison. If I did any of those things that are so real to you, I wouldn’t be sitting here,” he said, chuckling.

  “Jenny’s father told the vice squad that he was an undercover CIA agent investigating prostitution rings,” she finished with a grin. She turned to me and announced that she wanted to play the arcades.

  “What kind of school does she go to?” Field asked when she left.

  “A normal, middle-class neighborhood community school. What she put you through is a general quiz that her girlfriends learned when listening to their mothers talking to lawyers, parole officers or giving statements at the police station. It’s sad but reality.”

  His eyes skipped over the table and settled on my hands. “Did you keep your wedding band?”

  “It’s locked up with my memories, Field. I didn’t expect my world to crack in the middle of an investigation. We’re working a tough case. Two murders. If Joe’s right, there might be more. Let’s carry on with work. I don’t have the energy to work on two levels.”

  I was confused and exhausted. Work had drained my energy and Jazz was siphoning my emotions. Seeing Brick’s dead body sprawled across the hood of Ken’s Malibu, had rocked me. I had to repopulate my realm with solid shapes that resembled a realistic future. Portofino’s was not the place to do it.

  “I love you. I never stopped,” he said in a reflective voice, tinged with emotion. “I spent five years working, trying not to think about you. One morning I woke up in a hotel room. I stared into the mirror and talked to you. Then one day, I opened my briefcase in a meeting. I flipped through the memos, case files and reference material and noticed paragraphs, written notes. I wasn’t aware that in my meetings I was writing letters to you. Even my phone bill had a long note scribbled on the back of it. I wanted to find you—talk to you.”

  After two Irish Coffees, my emotions were as mellow as butter taffy. I wanted to believe that there was a better road ahead. But what if it was just wishful thinking?

  “Fielding—” I began.

  He cut me off. “I asked to be assigned to the Washington office. I went to the Freer Gallery every week. Mr. Greenjeans is still there. I’d bring my work along so people wouldn’t think I was crazy if they noticed how often I was there. I needed to find you—and myself. The part that left with you.”

  “What would you have done if I were married?”

  “Same thing I did two days ago.”

  I laughed.

  “Why didn’t you marry?” he asked.

  “I didn’t know I was divorced. Or that my marriage was annulled.”

  “If you thought you were still married, why didn’t you look for me?”

  “It hurt. We were going out to dinner. You never came home. I put up a wall and went ahead with my life.”

  “Is that why you never told Jazz about me?”

  “What could I say? I didn’t understand what happened myself.”

  He picked up his napkin. He folded and refolded it.

  I used the pause to study his features, to pick out those he had passed on to his daughter. They shared wood-green eyes, sandy hair and the same smile. His nose quivered with emotion, his daughter’s twitched. I tried to pick out the feature that I loved the most but decided that I’d fallen in love with the whole package.

  “Meg,” he said, lifting his head. When he saw me looking at him, he sank his hand beneath his shirt and pulled out something. It was his wedding band, on a gold chain. He rubbed it between his fingers. “Do you remember what’s engraved inside?”

  “I remember the entire sentence. It has four words. I got the first two. You have the rest.”

  “Is there a chance for that sentence to be whole again?”

  I closed my eyes and the words sculpted in my memory, “I love—you forever.” They stood alone but also belonged together. I opened my eyes and found him staring at me.

  I relaxed my mouth into a smile. I was about to reply, when my cell phone whirred.

  Chapter 24

  “Where is he?” Field asked when I paused, listening to Ken’s instructions.

  “Go down Waterston. Make a right at Marcy. Go east for about a block. There’s a little plaza.”

  We were on duty.

  Field scooped his daughter out of the pirate’s cave and carried the protesting treasure hunter to the front entrance where he put her down. He paid cash because the credit card lines were too busy. I ran to the table to leave a tip. He grinned when I came back. I just shook my head.

  My partner had gone out to dinner too. When he’d called, I heard Brenda telling the waiter to keep the change. I panicked when I realized that I needed to make arrangements for Jazz. Getting a hold of Mrs. Tavalho would take time. We had to stay downtown. Driving Jazz home would take an hour.

  Ken offered a solution. Brenda was off work for the ne
xt three days. She’d served four consecutive shifts, two in the emergency room. Nothing short of a plague that threatened to circle the Earth in twenty-four hours would see her back on duty. Those were her boss’s orders. She would take Jazz, while Ken would transfer to ride with us. We arranged to meet in the little plaza on Marcy.

  Jazz was upset but Field promised to take her and her girlfriends to Laserquest on the weekend.

  “Why can’t you bribe me when you want me to do something?” she asked as we drove to pick up Ken.

  “I’m your mother. I’m the authority. Authorities don’t bribe.”

  “I like being bribed. It’s fun,” she mumbled.

  We made the switch. Ken swallowed his surprise when he saw my companion and gave me his report.

  “His name was Felix Kim, age twenty-seven, Oriental. He was an analyst and programmer with Tavistock First National. Now, he’s just someone with a hole in his chest,” he summed up.

  I glanced at the dashboard clock. “It’s ten o’clock. Was it normal for him to work this late?”

  Field answered. “He was one of the five people working on the system at the Baltimore branch. We went to see the IMF this morning. We didn’t get anything useful from the records. It’s shocking that an organization like that doesn’t have better business practices. It’s possible that Brick and Martin removed files. In the afternoon, we met with the team. They were apprehensive and frightened. None of them wanted to continue working on the project. Your…” He caught himself and continued, “The Chairman was told of this. He came to talk to them. People were scared. The media had used every gruesome metaphor to describe the explosions. In the end, we settled on an interim solution. All the team members would undergo detailed medical tests to assure them that there was nothing wrong. The bank’s staff physician was going to start tomorrow. The team agreed to return to work. The meeting took all afternoon. They would have worked late to catch up.”