“Sure,” he said. “Especially if he targets older seniors, the ones who aren’t as clear-headed or ones not as skeptical of telephone calls. A caller with an authoritative voice is very effective with older people. Try sending them a letter with a fake letterhead and they’re toast. They have no idea how easily something like letterheads can be faked.” He thumbed through the files again. “There are literally hundreds of names in here. Does he have a copier?”
“Yes.”
“Well, let’s make a few copies. Don’t need to do them all. Just enough records to be persuasive.”
But who were we going to be persuasive with?
Jason and I pieced together what must have been going on in department stores too and showed up at Daddy’s house a few days later.
“She met someone with a greater vision,” he said, when I’d finished telling him about the trips to department stores. “That’s always been a concern. I didn’t worry about Mickey too much—he was satisfied with his lot. But Bud…”
The box of cheap bracelets in the basement persuaded us she was buying expensive jewelry, but returning low-priced things for a refund. Choose a busy clerk and how attentive would they be to the quality of a bracelet or sweater or handbag if a price tag was attached. It’d taken me, the fount of suspicion, a minute or two to realize the gold on the bracelets was paint. Some were brass. Not hard to imagine she’d pulled the same stunt with cashmere sweaters, alligator shoes, and who knew what else.
When we’d gone through the entire battery of bad deeds we’d come across in the basement and at Bud’s office, we sat back, giving Daddy a minute or two to take it in.
“I knew about a lot of the early stuff. Saved her ass more than once.” There was a tinge of pride in his voice you couldn’t mistake.
“But a lot of this stuff’s new to you, right? You never heard about it before?” I sensed a certain bristling going on from Jason’s corner. He’d told me more than once he couldn’t understand why my father had tolerated so much. It was hard for him to understand the different sort of pressures Daddy had—the expectations placed on him by his parents. His primary responsibility as far as they were concerned was to make his wife behave. And if that failed, to keep her misdeeds under wraps. My mother had brought so much disgrace to his family Daddy was reluctant to allow any more to surface.
“It’s gonna come out, Daddy,” I told him. “She’s bound to get caught. I don’t know how deep she’s into this Medicare fraud, but the department stores are sure to get wise. She and Bud have so many balls in the air, one’s bound to crash.”
“So what do you want me to do?” Daddy asked. “Go to the cops? Confront her myself? I’m not sure what you’re asking. How many times do I have to bail her out?”
I was a bit taken aback by this coolly delivered reply. I’d expected rage. What I got instead was a tepid and largely unsurprised response coupled with a limp self-defense. He wasn’t her husband anymore, but her deeds predated his escape. Did he expect me to overlook all the evidence we placed at his feet because it might be inconvenient to him?
“I think you should ask your attorney how to handle it. Let him advise you—us,” I said. Jason was nodding in the background—this had, in fact, been his idea.
Daddy shook his head. “As an officer of the court, he’d be obliged to report it. We have to be sure what we want to happen before I approach him. Be certain we want her to go to jail—for perhaps as much as a decade. Look, you’re out of it, aren’t you? Move into a dorm—I’ll give you the money. Put some distance between you.”
Move into a dorm? This was his response? I realized it was how he’d handled it over the years. Send her off to her mother’s house. Slap her in a hospital, find her a place to live well out of his orbit. Let his sister take care of things. Let his daughter. He’d written letters to get her jobs he knew she was ill-suited for. Bribed—who knew how many people?
Well, did I want to see my mother in jail? If it meant getting Ryan out from under her influence, the answer was yes. I went in with my big guns next.
“She killed Jerry Santini,” I said, tears in my eyes. Jason moved quickly, covering my hands with his. “I might as well tell you this too, Daddy. She shot him while I was sleeping in the next room.” I stopped to catch my breath. “She was the one who pulled the trigger and then made me take the blame. Shouldn’t a murderess be in prison?”
My father’s mouth started to form words, but then he hesitated. “You mean… for not stopping… you, right?” Hadn’t he heard what I said? He was looking everywhere but at me as he broke into a sweat.
I realized it then. He knew the whole story and had known since it happened. Had let me go through with my lies, let me make my appearance in that judge’s chambers, spend the year in therapy, and never blinked. That was his method for dealing with his wife. Or ex-wife. Hand her off to his daughter.
“You knew, Daddy! You knew! I don’t know why I didn’t realize it before now.” Or had I? Had I been as eager as he was to obscure the truth?
He was staring at his feet.
“Why didn’t you do anything?” I asked him. “Daddy?”
“My attorney, one I no longer use by the way, talked it over with the fellow she used for her legal woes. Sid… something.”
I didn’t bother to fill in the right name. Both of my parents forgot names that proved embarrassing.
“Well anyway, the two of them talked over the various scenarios. Eve would’ve gone to jail for years if she confessed. Maybe for life. Or gone back into a facility, at the very least. If you took the blame—they figured—and rightly as it turned out, the judge would do exactly what he did. He’d come down easy on a kid. Almost think of your action as heroic—trying to save your mother.” He cleared his throat. “We thought it was a better plan all around. You would’ve lost your mother.” His voice was defensive, whiney. “You forget how attached you were to her in those days. Those first years—you two were inseparable. She couldn’t keep her hands off of you.” He looked up. “More than once, I was jealous. Jealous of my own kid.”
“That’s not it at all,” I said, shaking his pap off. “That’s not why you went along with it. Your family would’ve been affected by Mother’s conviction. Been disgraced again. It might’ve hurt the business. Got you booted from some boards, your clubs.”
It was a wonder his eyes hadn’t burned a hole in the floor. “With me as the murderer of record, it all got covered up.”
I hated him—even more than I hated my mother, who was clearly a sick woman. He was a coward. A coward who’d never once put me first.
He cleared his throat. “Maybe if you tell Eve all the things you know, she’d stop. If you lay it on the…”
I could tell he didn’t believe this. Both of us knew she was powerless to give up her junk: anything else, including me, came in second.
“So what are you going to do?” he asked.
I didn’t answer. I wondered if I’d have anything to say to him again. Suddenly a new thought popped into my head. “What about Grandmother Hobart?” I asked. “Did she know about me as the sacrificial calf too?” Had she gone along with it all too—never saying a thing about it? Where was her Christianity?
“Absolutely not,” he said. “We never considered telling her the truth. She didn’t enter into it at all.”
He looked me straight in the eye, and I believed him. At least there was that then. One person had believed me to be a murderer but didn’t abandon me.
Jason and I drove home, neither of us saying much. I couldn’t help but wonder if he was regretting what he’d gotten himself into with me. I would have.
My mother was paging through a magazine when I came into the house carrying the same attaché I’d taken to my father’s a few days before. She was probably the only person in the world searching for the ads rather than the articles in a magazine. The little slap each turning page made was sickening in the state I was in. She didn’t look at me, didn’t notice the attaché, prob
ably mistaking it for my usual book bag.
Earlier that day, and somewhat unconsciously, I’d decided this was the right time. Life had come to a complete standstill. I couldn’t study or think of anything else. The newly spawned hatred of my father was eating away at me. I wanted to be done with both of them—done with the two people who were supposed to care for me but hadn’t.
Jason gave me little prods as well, telling me putting the confrontation off was not the way to go.
“Get it over with,” he said. “You’ll feel much better. No matter what the outcome.”
The outcome. I could hardly imagine an end to it all—hardly think of a life without the burden of my mother dogging my every step. What would it be like not to expect horrific things to happen whenever the doorbell or the telephone rang. How would it feel not to expect the police car on the street to be heading our way?
“She’s a parasite,” Jason told me.
But was I too? We’d lived off each other for so long.
“Who died?” Mother asked now as our eyes met across the room. My face must have betrayed my apprehension.
“Ryan in bed?” I asked, hanging my jacket, my back to her. I could sense her nod, imagine her licking her finger to turn the page. “Keep him out all day again? He should apply for working papers.”
I couldn’t manage to keep my mouth shut about what were now inconsequential things. Nerves were doing that to me, and my voice sounded edgy to my ears.
“He spent the day with your grandmother.” Slap, slap. “Bud and I went to see his accountant.”
I could tell she regretted admitting as much immediately and her voice tapered off.
She invented an elaboration—one of those quick lies she usually excelled at. But this time it carried no heft. “We had some mutual business matters to discuss.” She slammed the magazine down and stood up, stretching.
Mother probably would’ve liked to slap more than the pages of LOOK magazine. But having done it the week before, it seemed like a stale idea. I could imagine her sorting through the ways I’d failed her in recent months, figuring out what had caused the change, and blaming both my enrollment in that fancy college and my relationship with Jason for it. I’m sure she considered the time I spent with my father and grandmother as sources of friction too. How she would’ve loved to know that those days with Daddy had ended.
“Have you noticed things aren’t as close between us as they were a year or two ago,” she said, reading my mind. “Is it because of Bud?” She’d spotted the truth immediately. “Because he took me under his wing in various… deals? Well look, sweetie, he made our lives a lot easier. You might think about that fact before you roll those eyes again, before you accuse me of whatever it is you have in mind.”
Her voice had risen in volume, and we both heard Ryan stirring in the next room. She continued in a more subdued voice. “We’re living a lot better now than we have any right to—after what happened with Mickey. And it’s mostly thanks to him. To Bud,” she said, as if it needed clarification. Her voice sounded reverential almost. “It’s not like your father—or Mickey—is helping us out. It always falls on me.” I could see her weighing whether to include me on the list of unhelpful people too.
Whine, whine, whine. Blame, blame, blame.
Now I did roll my eyes, but Mother sunk in her own pity pit didn’t catch me.
“Look, Mother, getting back to what you said about mutual business matters—deals between you and Bud—I saw a lot of paperwork at Grandmother’s. You know, in the boxes in the cellar.”
Her eyes flashed a warning, but I ignored it. There’d be no turning back. “I was working on a project for school.” I decided to use that story again, “and I ran across a lot of documents that looked—well, strange. Letters, police and school reports, deeds, titles, diaries. Perhaps I misunderstood some of them,” I added to quiet her.
“How dare you go through my papers. What business is it of yours?” Mother began to pace the room, her heels clicking on the bare floor, quieting when she reached the carpet, and then clicking as she turned.
“Some people might say it became my business when you forced me to say I shot Jerry Santini,” I told her, preparing to open the attaché. “The day you had me sit in a judges’ chamber and lie. When you made me lie to the police, to my father, to my grandparents, to everyone.” I paused a minute to collect myself, struggling to control my voice. Any detection of weakness wouldn’t help me.
“I’ve been expecting this moment for years,” my mother said, sounding unsurprised at what I’d said. “The moment when you’d claim such a thing.” She dabbed at her dry eyes. “Oh, the doctors warned me you’d want to disown the incident at some point. You were in such a fugue state that night—you must hardly remember what happened.” Her voice took on a soothing quality—as if she was dealing with someone mentally disturbed.
“I remember it well,” I told her. “But I needn’t have. I wrote everything down, in fact. All the details of our ruse. Our little plot to get you off.”
Mother drew herself in. “Something written years after the fact is worthless,” she said, coming to stand behind me. “Maybe you don’t understand. Both legally and personally worthless. You might as well be writing fiction.” She started to reach for me, stopping as I stiffened.
“I didn’t write it years later.” I lied—but a lie I’d worked on for days— running it by Jason for practice. “I wrote it a few months after it happened. Cy Granholm— that wretched attorney who crafted the story— advised you to keep a record, I overheard him— and I thought it’d be a good idea if I did the same. So I wrote it all down and eventually left it at Grandmother’s house—in a box of my own.” I patted the attaché. “I guess even then I realized I needed something to protect myself. Even if I was only a child.”
“I don’t believe you.”
But I knew she did. I knew she could imagine me writing away at my desk, wishing she’d supervised me more closely. Wrongly thinking that driving me to the shrink was enough supervision. Wondering if he’d been in on it too. That getting into my head earlier would’ve been a good idea.
She looked at the attaché curiously. “That bag’s awfully thick. What else do you have in there?” Her voice had lost some of its coolness. Her hand started to reach for it.
I held it tighter, shrugging. “About a million pieces of paper documenting your life. Records going all the way back to childhood indiscretions. Accounts of things that happened to you as far back as middle school. You kept careful records and what a help it was.”
She made an overt grab for the briefcase.
“It doesn’t matter, Mother. These are all copies. Copies of report cards, letters from the parents of children you played with, police records, car sales, department store purchases, stays in hospitals, phony Medicare claims. I can’t begin to enumerate the entire history of your activities. It took us hours to make the copies.”
“Us?” Mother turned on her heel and walked over to the closet, opened it and made to reach for her coat. “Do you mean Jason or your father?”
“Are you running away, Mother? Leaving Ryan and me to ourselves?”
This was one scenario I’d envisioned. The best one too. I held my breath. But I was still a fool, still didn’t know the depths of her wickedness.
Her voice was muffled. I stifled a scream as she came out of the closet holding a gun. It wasn’t poised for shooting, but it wasn’t slack in her hands.
I hadn’t thought of this though I should have. A gun had solved things for her once. The penalty for its use had been so slight she was bound to try it again.
“Is that the same gun you used on Santini or did Bud rearm you?” I asked, straining to keep calm.
I didn’t think she’d use it, but I knew there wasn’t much she wouldn’t do to protect herself. I girded myself and began to think about how to get it out of her hands. Did it occur to her that her other child was twelve feet behind her—through wallboard only inches thick
? Would she ask him to take the fall after she killed me? Say she caught him playing with her gun after it was too late. Of course, she would. I could almost see the story forming in her head.
She was talking again, telling me her plan. “This is what I’ll tell them—these people you plan to go to—whoever you have in mind,” Mother said, aiming the gun. “I’ll say you were going through something tonight—sort of reliving the night it happened. Bud was here too, and you were ready to kill him—kept calling him Jerry.” She paused, needing a minute to catch up with her own story. “He’ll back me up. I’ve heard of such things—people reliving a terrible moment. Unfortunately—there was no choice—and we had to shoot you. Maybe Ryan came out of his room and saw it. Or maybe there was a struggle and the gun discharged. Something like that anyway. Bud can be here in five minutes. He’ll help me make a plan.”
She said this smugly. As if it solved all of her problems. Had she forgotten I wasn’t alone in the world anymore? Chances were both Jason and Daddy would know why I was here. She had no way of knowing Daddy has disowned all my actions.
“You don’t think it’ll look suspicious. Another body found dead on your living room floor.” It was ludicrous. “And anyway, Jason knows. Daddy knows—has always known.” I didn’t mention my father’s lack of support. “It’s too late, Mother.”
“Your father?” Mother lowered the gun incrementally. “Cy told me he knew what happened, but I didn’t believe him. Said he’d keep quiet.” She bit her lip. “I guess he did. What did he say about me?”
“He said he’d back me up,” I lied. “Whatever I decided to do with this—stuff— was okay with him.” I waved the case at her.
“And you decided to come to me first rather than go straight to the cops? Why, I wonder?”
“It seemed fair.”
“You expected me to take off after you told me, didn’t you?” The gun was waving in the air, shaking with her anger. “Leaving Ryan to your tender care. Some people might call it incestuous—the strange love you have for him. I remember when you insisted on him sleeping in your room the day he came home from the hospital.”
Concrete Angel Page 27