“No. Just do the usual.”
He made a note. “Cremate. Spread the ashes?”
I nodded.
“Check,” Wally said.
“What about effects?” I asked.
“He had a few things. He already said he wanted them sent to Laura. Do you have her address handy?”
“Is the box ready?”
He nodded. “He packed it himself. But I found some bits and pieces under his cot, and I didn’t want to throw anything away, so I threw it in and sealed the box.”
“Give me the box. That letter he wrote last night. Was it for her?”
“I don’t know, I don’t remember seeing a letter.” He sounded apologetic. “I got him to shave this morning. A little pride, you know? He looked good.”
The gurney was passing by on its way to take Marcus off the table. I stopped one of the guys, who looked fairly upbeat compared to the rest of us, as if his main thought was that he was glad it wasn’t him in there. I said, “Do me a favor, guys, hold it right there until I get someone out of the witness chamber.”
Laura and I walked out of the darkened room into a night ablaze with the lights surrounding the media circus. Will had been snagged before he could get away, and we heard him saying to three cameras, “… a travesty of justice. The state executed this man before we were able to prove his innocence so that it wouldn’t be forced to pay him reparation for his fifteen years in prison. And so people wouldn’t look bad. You tell it, you hear me? It was all about politics and money.”
Laura cringed at the sight of the knot of reporters around Will.
“I can do what I have to do, but I can’t do this. The media thing,” she said. She had the shaking somewhat under control, but in the way she spoke I could tell her teeth were still chattering.
We kept a slow pace going to the parking lot so we wouldn’t draw attention. The night in the middle of the state was airless, hot, and humid, and I felt trickles of perspiration before we were halfway to the car. And then we saw Alison Samuels leaning against hers, a couple of spaces away from mine, and it felt like someone had turned up the heat.
Laura saw her but had no words in her. I couldn’t stop myself from saying something. “I guess you already gave them a line, right?”
Alison didn’t answer that, just looked at, no, examined Laura’s face with something like curiosity before finally saying, “Yeah, it was the justice is served blah blah blah line. But I didn’t come for the publicity. I wanted to make sure the family was represented. I stood in for them.” Her voice shook not a little, and I got the feeling it took much effort to sound that heartless. She cocked her head at the news vans, and at the reporters who were still clustered around Will Hench. They’d keep the cameras rolling and the questions coming, hoping to later harvest a good fifteen seconds of raw emotion. “Aren’t you going to say something passionate for the cameras?”
“Were you there? Did you see it?” Laura asked, and she said it without harshness, but with some kind of puzzlement that Alison could be this cold.
Alison’s eyebrow raised slightly. “I came in once he was strapped down and left right after they declared him dead. But hey, I’m not vengeful. I just wanted to make sure justice was done. Like I said.”
I got the sense that Laura wanted to go and wanted to stay in equal measure, to say something to make Samuels feel some part of what she was feeling. That rage you feel when you’re in pain and someone doesn’t honor it.
“We could have exonerated him. We might have even been able to find out the real killer. But you,” Laura spat. “It’s people like you who caused the death of an innocent man.”
“Poor Mr. Creighton,” Alison said.
At the sarcasm Laura sprang forward, and I thought she would surely pummel Alison Samuels. I gripped her arm, not firmly enough to stop her but hard enough to get her attention on what she was about to do. “Careful, the sharks can smell blood, Laura,” I said, and to Alison, hoping to shame her into ceasing her cruelty, “This isn’t necessary.”
Laura caught herself and said, her voice shaking again with the effort of not attacking, “You didn’t know this man.”
“I didn’t know the man?” Alison laughed, or maybe coughed. At least she was back in control. I got the sense that, like me, she was well practiced at it. “Shit, at the end of the day my biggest problem is that I’ve known too many of him.” With that she was finished with Laura. She got in her car first and drove away.
We followed, and as we pulled through the front gates that opened before us, I thought about the call Laura had received at the precise moment that Creighton stood facing her.
“Who’s the stupid idiot who called your cell phone?” I asked.
“It was a recorded message from the service provider.” Laura started to laugh at the absurdity of it, then made a sound that reminded me of some small animal. “I’m an idiot to have imagined a stay of execution would come to my phone.” She held up her hands and watched them shake. “I feel nauseated. It’s like that time when you and I—”
“It’s the adrenaline aftermath. You’ll be all right,” I said. Some people cry. Some people curse. Some people just fold up their hearts, at least at first.
Laura crossed her arms over her stomach and did none of those things. When she turned to look at me, her voice had a little envy and a little despair. “Oh yeah. Brigid Quinn. The rock.”
I closed my eyes at her, and when I opened them I was relieved that they weren’t even damp. “It’s not easy being a rock, Coleman. And you have to be very cautious, because sometimes you might want to not be a rock anymore, but you find out after a while you can’t be not rock.”
Twenty-nine
It was one A.M. in Arizona, four A.M. in Florida. Everybody I knew was sleeping, and that sounded wonderful. Back at my hotel before sunrise I fell onto the bed still clothed, intending to fall asleep at will like a good soldier. By five A.M. I admitted failure and eyed the sleeping pill on my bedside table next to the bottle of wine. That would be really stupid to take a sleeping pill right now, I thought. Then I popped the pill, and with the bottle silently toasted the action character I most admired before taking a slug. More power to ya, Reacher.
It was noon by the time I could fight my way back from oblivion. To get rid of a chemical hangover, I took a long shower and put on fresh clothes. That had only a minimal effect, so I called Todd first to ask how Dad was because I couldn’t take any surprises just then. Todd said he didn’t know what was going on.
“Todd. I just got back from Creighton’s execution. Laura Coleman was a mess.” I didn’t mention that I was a little messed up, too.
“Brigid. I can’t take sick people anymore. I can take them alive or dead, but not in between. You want to be there for Dad, more power to you.”
FaceTiming with Carlo was a little better. He seemed to understand my delay in contacting him better than I did. If he had been worried, he didn’t put it on me. I couldn’t remember when we’d spoken last or what message I’d left on the home phone, so I covered it all. “Creighton’s dead. Laura’s emotionally wasted. Dad’s in ICU because his condition worsened. I’m so tired my bones hurt. And I’ve spent most of the last five days either in a hospital room or the inside of a car. And have I mentioned I’m tired of driving?”
He didn’t offer any platitudes or comfort, just observed, “I can see you’re holding on tight, O’Hari.”
“Sorry to whine. I can take it,” I said.
“I know you can. For once I wish you would stop taking it. You look like you could use a good cry. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you cry.”
“I cried about a year ago when I thought I was going to lose you. You weren’t there to see it, but I got good and drunk, and I had a great case of the whisky remorses.”
“Did it feel good?”
“No, it sucked. I’d rather just tamp all this down. From now on I plan to do that until I’m around ninety and then implode.”
I made him la
ugh. One good thing in the day.
I tried reaching Laura on and off. She wasn’t answering her phone. Then I spent the rest of the day at the hospital, making up for all the times I hadn’t been there for my parents. Not just this go-round, but all the times. Mom was right when she said I’d left a long time ago. I’m talking years. Just because your parents aren’t the Cleavers doesn’t mean you don’t feel guilty. Dad was still not out of danger, but he didn’t seem to be getting worse. In a way, that described Mom, too. There was the same listless hospital patter, how are you feeling Dad did they say whether he’s responding to the antibiotics did you eat are they walking him does he get respiratory therapy in ICU did you sleep last night Mom have any lunch can I get you something (please say yes and give me a reason to get out of this room!) anything good on TV? But then as I watched Dad I thought about, no matter how fragile his hold on life, how much better it was than seeing Marcus Creighton’s corpse. Second good thing in the day.
Then there was nothing else to talk about. It made me sad to guess that there never had been. Remembering how awful it was to sit there with them, nobody speaking, as if we were watching over the corpse laid out at home, I had brought the photo albums with me that I’d taken from their apartment and left in the car.
As with most families, most of the pictures were of me because I was the eldest, and the frequency of photos lessened with each child, until for Todd there were damn few. I asked Mom some questions about the pictures, about the ones I couldn’t remember. Then I got to the end of the second book and saw the photographs of Christmas. So many of them were Christmas, that silver tree with the plastic disc rotating in front of a light that changed the color of the tree. You could say we weren’t classy, but we weren’t the only family who had that silver tree.
I remembered that Christmas. Dad got us all our own fishing rods and tackle boxes, filled with hooks and sinkers. Even little Todd, aged six, got one. We were pretty excited.
I turned the page of the album and that was it. A couple of dozen blank pages. No more photographs after I turned ten. I’d never thought about that before. I started to ask Mom, but she had dozed off. She looked like she was too exhausted for the doze to do any good.
Then I dozed off, too. When I woke I felt like the effects of the early-morning sleeping pill had finally lifted. I woke Mom up and, feeling more tender about the living for some reason I couldn’t fathom, insisted on driving her home. I even put her to bed.
It wasn’t late, and my body clock was now royally screwed. I left Mom a detailed note about how her car was at the hospital, and she should rest until I returned the next day. Then I left to pick up a bottle of vodka and a pizza. I kicked at Laura’s door while I balanced the bottle, the pizza, and the box of Marcus Creighton’s effects.
When she finally answered my kicks I took a look at her face. “You should have a good cry,” I said.
“Here’s how it’s going to be,” Laura said, not opening the door all the way. “You can come in if you say are you okay, and then I say I’m fine. I’m not up for jokes,” she said. “If you say a single snarky thing I’ll shoot you.”
“Aw, Coleman,” I answered. “Am I that bad?”
She stood her ground. The things I was carrying felt heavier. “No jokes,” I said. I felt an urge to hold up two fingers in a Girl Scout pledge gesture, but even that felt too close to a joke.
Laura opened the door and let me in. I put the vodka and pizza on the kitchen counter and placed the box on her desk. I noticed that the photograph album Creighton had given her during our visit was there and open to a picture of the family on a boat, all the kids in those clumsy orange life preservers, with grins showing baby-tooth gaps that could likely be matched to the jaws they found.
Laura folded up at one end of the couch, picking holes in a crocheted yarn pillow that looked like her mother might have made it. Her computer was on, running what seemed like a continuous loop of the news reports of Creighton’s execution, the finding of the bodies, the history of the case, and on and on and on. Her thousand-yard stare was fixed on something beyond the computer screen.
“Drink?” I asked.
She came back long enough to shake her head.
“Pizza?” I pressed. “It’s got anchovies.”
Nothing.
In the airplane safety talk, they always tell you to put on your own oxygen mask before helping the person next to you. So I walked into the little kitchen and went through the cupboards to find what could almost double as a cocktail glass. I wasn’t particular. I’ve used bud vases more than once. I opened the freezer door and took some ice from the automatic ice cube maker with my left hand. Opened the vodka and poured a decent shot. Stirred the ice around in the glass with my index finger. I wiped my finger on a towel lying on the counter and wandered back into her living room area. I could feel the sadness in the room so strongly I didn’t want to sit down and let it get on me.
“So how’s your father doing?” Laura asked, her fingers still picking at the yarn pillow.
Even without crying, she looked like she was starting to develop those little running cracks like in a cartoon character who gets hit by a dropping anvil just before she falls to pieces. I wanted to say I told you so. I wanted to remind her that when I first arrived I told her she was rushing it, that it takes more than a year to get over the kind of trauma she had experienced in Tucson before jumping into a case where an innocent man’s life hung in the balance and her heart was at stake.
But I didn’t say any of those things.
I said, “I think the first time it hit me like this wasn’t when I was in mortal danger. My first time was more like the Marcus Creighton business. I was taken to watch a man being executed in the electric chair at Raiford. I didn’t feel about him the way you felt about Creighton, but there’s something about just sitting there, doing nothing, while a man dies. You want to react but you don’t. Everything in your brain says stop it, but you hold in check all those muscles that want to react. You just tamp it all down, and you don’t realize the effort that goes into it. The tamping stays with you your whole life. It doesn’t start from square one the next time; it all has a way of stacking up, one on top of the other, so it doesn’t get any better, only worse. You try to protect yourself from this. You keep working out, and when that doesn’t work anymore, you try yoga. You go to movies. You drink. You find what will protect the human being in your core, and you do that. Because if you leave yourself vulnerable, it will kill you.”
“The rock, huh?”
“A granite callus on your soul. I don’t recommend living this life.”
I took a sip and put my glass on the coffee table. I knew things were bad then because she didn’t get me a coaster.
“What do you mean, how I felt?” she asked.
“Felt?”
“About Marcus. What do you mean, how I felt?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe that business about being too emotionally involved with a case.”
“That’s not what you meant. You meant I was in love with him. Didn’t you?”
I could feel her ire rising. I said, “I thought we were going to keep this easy.” Maybe I was still a little disoriented from lack of sleep, feeling cranky. “You wanna pick a fight? Is that how you want to handle this? Who would think I’d forget that option?”
“Didn’t you?”
If that was how she wanted to go … “Remember that married prosecutor you were having an affair with in Tucson? You’ve got a pattern, Coleman, of falling for men you can’t have. I don’t know why that is, but you need to come to terms with it.”
Laura got up from the couch and, with her fists clenched, looking ready to take the argument to the next level, began to pace the room. “What do you want me to do right now, Brigid? Do you want me to fall to my knees and shriek Why God why?” She laughed at the melodrama of it. “Would that work for you?”
“It’s nothing to be ashamed of. We’ve all been there, when love rears its
ugly head. Just admit you were in love with Marcus Creighton. And consider. Even if you never told him, maybe he knew. Maybe he played you. Maybe he was so desperate he let you think whatever you wanted.”
“You’re still trying to prove to me he was guilty?” She stopped pacing. “You can be incredibly cruel, you know that?”
“This is news?”
Laura’s eyes darted around the living room until they came to rest on the medicine ball placed neatly next to the elliptical trainer. She picked up the ball and, in a rage I’d never known from her, threw it at my head. With my feint that would have made Mom proud, she missed, and left a crater in the drywall an inch deep. We both stared at the crater as bits of gypsum drifted to the carpet.
“How about that?” she asked with a quaking voice.
“Not bad for a beginner,” I said, trying not to let my voice shake with its own anger at nearly having taken a fifteen-pound projectile in my face.
Her fury unspent, she picked up my glass from the coffee table and threw that at the same wall where the medicine ball hit. Shards of glass splattered with the remaining vodka.
As for myself, watching the violence, I felt a perverse mix of compassion for her pain and satisfaction that I was right. It was like a parent telling a child she was sure to break her favorite doll if she continued to play with it that way, and then seeing it come to pass. And it reminded me a little of home. “Welcome to my world,” I said, standing my ground for her sake.
But disgusted at the outburst, both with me and with herself, she went into her bedroom, presumably for some tissue to blow her nose loudly enough for me to hear from the living room.
In her absence I went to her desk, where I had put the box of Marcus Creighton’s personal effects. In the top drawer of her desk was a box cutter. I knew Laura would have a box cutter specifically for opening boxes. I used it. We might as well hurt all the way tonight, for I doubted I would have another chance to get behind the person Coleman showed the world. Right on top was that letter, the one Wally said he hadn’t seen. Odd.
A Twist of the Knife Page 18