A Twist of the Knife

by Becky Masterman

  Sunrise Boulevard, where my family went to the beach. Every summer was greeted by the first sunburn, giving me and my brother and sister a back full of blisters the way crocuses announce the spring.

  Oakland Park Boulevard, with the Wellman Building that showcased the largest selection of prostitutes in the state from its restaurant on the seventeenth floor. The two-story sex paraphernalia shop on the same block is a much later addition.

  Commercial Boulevard, with the Denny’s that had been there for more than forty years. It had first been a Mother Butler’s that had more choices of pie than Howard Johnson had flavors of ice cream. I ordered the cherry pie there with a molesting scumbag just before I nailed him.

  Also at that exit was St. Luke’s Hospital, where my mother had spent eighteen hours in excruciating labor giving birth to me. There had been blood everywhere. Once Mom suspected I knew where babies came from, she would recount the story every year on my birthday, during the cake, as part of the celebration. By the time I turned eighteen I sort of looked forward to hearing the story.

  St. Luke’s was where Dad was now. That’s where I was headed.

  And if I kept going north this way I’d finally get to Raiford Penitentiary, where Marcus Creighton was one of four hundred men on death row awaiting execution, many for more than twenty years. The system wants to be real careful that they don’t get it wrong.

  Tourists see Disney World, Epcot, the Miami Dolphins football team, and Key West, but this is my Florida, the part where men kill their families.

  Here ends the Quinn memories portion of our tour.

  * * *

  As I pulled in to the hospital parking lot, I have to admit, I wasn’t all that worried about Dad. Maybe when you don’t see a person face-to-face it’s hard to picture what they’ll look like sick. Instead, I was thinking about the big issues—Marcus Creighton, and whether Laura’s instincts were as good as they used to be. Now I’d have to switch gears to the quality of the hospital food and why I didn’t call more often.

  Mom stood and walked toward me when I got to the door of Dad’s private room on the third floor. There was the usual repelling force as of same-pole magnets between us, but I fought it and hugged her anyway. She was a little shorter than I remembered, and felt thinner, too. After the age of ten or so I could never remember her willingly touching any of us. All my memories of her involved cooking, sewing, cleaning, driving, those things that are meant to indicate that parents care when their absence would only indicate neglect.

  She turned back into the room and I followed her to where she stood at the foot of the hospital bed. The television mounted on the wall was on loud and when I glanced at it I could tell from Alex Trebek’s lapels that it was an old rerun of Jeopardy! Then I saw Dad lying with his back slightly raised, an IV attached to one hand and the television remote nestled under the other. Rather than shouting the answers as he usually did, he was listlessly hacking up his lungs.

  At the full sight of him, my breath caught in the middle of an intake. Unpleasant little electric jolts ran down the surface of my skin from my sides to my legs. Physiologically, it was the same reaction I’d had the first time I walked in on the aftermath of a multiple homicide with an axe. But I’d never thought before now how perfect was the word “shock.”

  My father lived in my head as a roosterish sort of fellow, always ready to boost me into the air for a dive into the pool, or to teach me how to break an attacker’s collarbone. People freeze in time that way. Now, bald head protruding from a body that didn’t raise the sheets as much as one would expect, he not only didn’t look like himself, he looked like something not quite human.

  I felt bad that during the whole trip over here I’d been thinking about a case rather than him.

  Mom ignored the coughing and shouted over the television, “Look, Fergus. Brigid is here.”

  Note: Dad has excellent hearing. He just pretends to need us to shout when the TV is on. Mom doesn’t argue with this.

  Spent from the coughing, he hardly opened his eyes as he turned his head in my direction. I couldn’t even be sure he recognized me. “Hi ya, Toots,” he rasped generically, still trying to play the tough guy. Dad had retired from the Fort Lauderdale Police Department about thirty years before, but never stopped thinking of himself as a cop. We were all cops, of one kind or another. Except Mom.

  Dad always let me get away with stuff that Mom couldn’t get away with. So once I got my lungs going again I moved to the side of the bed, took the remote out of his hand, and pressed the mute button because I don’t play that game. After that I didn’t know what to do.

  “Have you seen Todd?” Mom asked. Which was to say, Todd hadn’t been to visit. Mom never said what she meant. It all had to be translated by the listener.

  “Not yet. I just arrived and came straight here from the airport,” I said. “How are you feeling, Dad? Mom said you just had bronchitis. Next thing, here you are with pneumonia.”

  In response he wrapped his arms around himself, holding his torso as tightly as he could, and had another coughing jag.

  “That sounds terrible,” I said to Mom. “What does the doctor say about this?”

  “He’s on an antibiotic,” Mom said, her eyes darting around the room, as if expecting to find there what she should be doing.

  I started to get up to get him a glass of water, but he gasped for air, coughed again, got it up this time, swallowed. I got him a glass of water anyway, and he took a good belt, swishing it before swallowing again. Recovered, he seemed to summon more of his old self for my sake. “Don’t like water.” He took a breath and wheezed his old W. C. Fields line, “Fish fuck in it.”

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw Mom flinch like she was counting the days he’d spend in purgatory for uttering that word. Dad started to hand me the glass, but lifting was hard and the glass settled on its own by his side and started to tip. I took it from him. “Could use bourbon,” he said, and turned his head to wipe the side of his face on the pillow. I realized where I got my own bravado from.

  I glanced at Mom to see if she had any reaction to that one. Having recovered from the F-bomb, her face was again as bland as I’d always known it to be, and when she spoke she was participating in a different conversation.

  “Todd doesn’t come to visit us much. He’s busy,” Mom said in more of her Mom Code. What that meant was We’re not as important as whatever else he’s doing.

  “’Scuse me a sec,” I said. I went out into the hall and called Laura Coleman to cancel. But she wasn’t answering. I left a message for her to call me, and then went to the nurses’ station to find out what the hell was happening with my father. Finding no one there, I came back into the room.

  Not wanting to be put in the same too-busy category as my brother, I didn’t mention the Creighton case, or that I was going to meet Laura Coleman when I left the hospital unless she called back to reschedule. Instead, Mom and I talked over the bed, over Dad, the way people do when patients are very ill. Uselessly, we talked about everything but Dad: Carlo and the weather in Arizona, life at Weeping Willow Retirement Home when Dad wasn’t sick, the possible whereabouts of Ariel, my sister, who we never heard from because she was in the CIA. I wondered aloud how we’d ever reach Ariel if something happened. Mom didn’t know.

  A nurse came in, checked the fluids, took Dad’s temperature. I looked at the board on the wall where the names of the health care providers were listed. “Dettie?” I said.

  “Short for Bernadette,” she said, and smiled warmly enough. I introduced myself and shook her hand. Asked for details to put her on notice that someone had Mr. Quinn’s back. With a glance at Mom, Dettie responded with what she knew, elevated temperature, chest x-ray showing bacterial pneumonia, nothing else. I managed to drag out of her that Dad was stable. She left, and I tried to seize on the comfort that she was acting like business as usual, wasn’t calling code blue. Wasn’t mentioning hospice.

  To try to rouse Dad a bit, I did ask if he
remembered anything about Marcus Creighton and the murder of his family. Usually keen to talk any kind of crime, Dad failed to be roused this time, only said he couldn’t remember it. This lack of interest in death, more than anything, told me how sick he really was.

  “Have you eaten lately?” I asked Mom, thinking I’d take her somewhere, bring her something. In our family food is the answer to so many questions.

  “Yes” was all she said.

  Dad felt for the volume button on his remote and pressed it with no effect because the mute was still on. Pressing and pressing, he said, “Dinner was supposed to be here at four. The service is bad.”

  Him speaking in complete sentences was a small thing, but I felt a sense of hope. I stood, feeling antsy and wanting to do something useful, anything. “Should I go hustle up someone for you, Dad?”

  “He ate,” Mom said, and pointed at a tray on a sliding table against the wall on the other side of the room. I walked over and picked up the reddish brown lid, revealing some sort of chop suey thing, a plastic cup of fruit cocktail, and too much of it left over.

  “Are you staying at our place?” Mom asked.

  I tried not to sound like a guilty child. “Mom, all you’ve got is the couch, and the one time I slept on it I couldn’t move the next day because of my back. I got a room close. I’m, I’m really tired from the trip over, so I’m going to go check in now. But did you drive over? Do you need a ride home?”

  “I have the car. I’ll be leaving in a while. Are you coming back?” Mom asked, struggling to keep the question light, the I don’t care if you come back tone at just the right pitch.

  I leaned over the bed and over her chair so she wouldn’t have to stand up, and kissed both of them on the side of the face as I had been taught to do. My own pitch off a bit, with more of a bite in my own tone than I intended, I said, “Of course I’ll be back. That’s why I’m here. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  Four

  I took the newer image of Dad with me over to the Howard Johnson’s on the beach in Deerfield. How pitiful he was, how weak, how in and out of himself. Todd didn’t care. I wasn’t even sure Mom did. Or if she did, how she could handle the health care maze.

  Did I care? Somebody needed to care. It was the right thing to do, coming here. I might not have felt like the best daughter at that point, but at least I felt righteous. I reminded myself to find out who his doctor was and get in touch first thing in the morning in case some Quinn attitude was necessary.

  I had regretted agreeing to meet Laura Coleman, and I felt torn. But there she was, punctual as ever, standing on the sidewalk in front of the hotel waiting for me. In her left hand she held the case that contained my weapon of choice, the snub-nosed FBI revolver, that I had overnighted to her address. Her right hand almost made a fist. Her stance looked like she was preparing to get punched in the gut with a log. She hadn’t changed a bit, other than appearing more tense, more level nine than her usual level six.

  I gave her a hug instead of shaking hands and then, stepping back to take a better look at her, said, “It’s good to see you. You look healthy. But tense.”

  She had hugged me back, but her first words were, “I just got a call from Will Hench. The defense attorney? He wanted to make sure I was coming into the office first thing tomorrow. He sounded like he was trying not to be upset but didn’t say why, like he didn’t want me to lose sleep. So I’m a little stressed.”

  “What you heard in the attorney’s voice might not even have to do with this case,” I said.

  I got my roller bag out of the trunk and balanced on it the case she handed to me. As always, the closer I got to my loaded weapon, the better I felt.

  She walked in with me to register. While the reception clerk took my credit card and handed me a plastic key card for a room on the second floor, I examined Laura in my peripheral vision. She had cut her hair shorter than I remembered it. Now the tight curls clung to her skull, making her head look like a Persian lamb coat my mother used to have. She had gotten buff, too. Even her forearms were defined.

  “You been working out?” I asked.

  “Nothing better to do while I was taking time off.”

  When we turned away from the counter and walked to the elevator I could feel rather than see her limp, not pronounced, but there. The result of her wounds. But even with the limp she walked like someone you better not mess with, her shoulders purposeful, committed to forward movement even if the route was over your corpse. I didn’t remember her quite this way.

  “How long are you here?” Laura asked as we walked.

  “About a week. I hope.”

  “Did you read what I sent you?”

  Half my mind was still at the hospital, and I was a bit testy. “I’m fine, thanks for asking.”

  “So what did you think?”

  “I think you’re not listening.”

  Laura stopped walking and stared at me, realizing finally we were on different pages and neither of us the kind who turned them easily.

  In a second I remembered how much and how little I knew Laura’s story. Daughter of Mormons who had uncustomarily stopped at two children. Happy childhood, probably. Ballet lessons and tutus. Learning how to be a homemaker. Groomed to be a good wife. So she goes into the FBI instead. What was it with that? Who was she really? Did she know?

  She touched her fingertips to her upper lip as if stopping the words. She said, “I’m sorry. I’ve got that call from Will on my mind.” She forced herself off her own track and onto mine. “How is your father?”

  “I understand, believe me,” I said. “Tell you what, how about you let me put my bag in my room first. Get a little something to unwind. Seeing Dad in the hospital was weird; he’s always been so robust.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said again, and I knew she meant it.

  Laura left me at the elevator. I got to my room and dropped my bag, knowing enough not to push my advantage by stopping to unpack it but at least taking the time for a quick pit stop and washup after the flight. I unlocked the case, drew out my pistol, and loaded it with some rounds that I’d sent in my checked baggage. I put the gun in my sizable tote bag, thick canvas with a plastic bottom so you couldn’t see it sag too much where the gun rested. Slung the tote over my shoulder. Better and better.

  When I came back down Laura was waiting at the elevator, leaning against a chrome and glass table with a monstrous turquoise ceramic vase holding those foofy things that aren’t found in nature.

  “I haven’t taken a look at the ocean in a while,” I said. “Care to walk out onto the pier?”

  We stopped at the outside bar, where music blasted louder than I ever remembered. We got our drinks in plastic cups, me a Scotch over ice and her a lemonade.

  “I thought you were a vodka drinker,” she said.

  “You’re not an alcoholic if you like variety,” I said.

  “All due respect,” she said, “bullshit.”

  The entrance to the pier was just fifty feet or so north of the hotel. We took our drinks there, and I paid the three-dollar fee to a guy at a counter behind which hung light fishing tackle in case you forgot anything. We went through the turnstile and walked over the rough wooden boardwalk on pilings that had miraculously survived every hurricane for as long as I’d been around. The pier extended straight over the water a good football-field in length. Benches as rough as the pier itself were placed in the center at equal distances, and a two-slatted railing ran on both sides, splattered with pelican poop and fish guts. Dingy pelicans with beaks down to their bellies waiting around for handouts completed the scene.

  Laura pointed to one of the benches now and then as a good place to sit, but I made us walk all the way to the end and stopped to smell and feel the salty onshore breeze, more noticeable here than when I first arrived. I put my tote bag safely between my feet and leaned on the rough wood armrest grooved by tropical storms and bugs. I looked down at the incoming tide that nibbled at the barnacle-covered pilings. The sun was
setting at our backs, and the breeze finally felt a little cooler, a little dryer.

  I thought about how Dad used to bring the three of us to this spot to fish. No matter how grouchy he was at home, he always seemed relaxed and jovial out here, and it didn’t even matter whether we caught anything. Just letting him teach us how to cut the mullet and double-punch it on the hook so the fish couldn’t take it easily was a fine thing. He didn’t get angry if we did it wrong. In later life I wondered if it was getting away from Mom that made him feel better.

  Then I pointed to her ankles. “Is there much residual pain?” I asked.

  “Some,” she said. “Come on, I thought we were here to talk about the case.”

  “It’s only been a year, Laura. Someone your age thinks a year is a long time, but it’s not.”

  “You’re doing that condescending thing,” she said, but not like she wanted to pick a fight or anything. It was just a friendly observation like Oh, you changed your hair. Maybe she really was okay.

  I said, “All right. On point. How’d you get involved with all this?”

  “Will told me he got a letter from Creighton, who found out online he does pro bono work. At first I thought the way you do. But do you know Tracy Mack?”

  “Old Dick Tracy?” Some nicknames make more sense than others. “The fingerprint examiner. I saw him mentioned in the trial transcript.”

  “Is that what they called him? Well, he had the leading piece of physical evidence in Marcus’s case, and he was indicted a month ago on multiple charges of erroneous, and likely fraudulent, findings.”

  “Shit. We always knew he was a little confused about his role in the criminal justice process. He fancied himself as a crime fighter more than a scientist. How many cases are they looking at?”

  “Thousands.”

  “Good God.”

  “Yeah. The Florida Innocence Project has been flooded with letters from inmates Mack put away. Creighton sent them a letter, too, but they didn’t answer, they’re so overwhelmed. Will wants to get ahead of them, at least get a stay of execution so we can recheck the evidence, and follow up on things that weren’t used in the trial.”