by Linda Barnes
“Gloria can find me someplace—”
“Gloria? As in Gloria who’s being watched because they found Gianelli’s Jag in her garage?”
When Moon came back, there was a light in his eye. He scooted into the booth and spoke to Roz.
“You checked the car the guy was driving. ‘Ken’?”
“Couldn’t get past the stolen plates. Off a Mercury. Mercury owner was an old goat who’d lost the car years ago, didn’t know the plates were still on the road.”
Moon turned to me. “Wilder’s missing Volvo is silver.”
It was another link between “Ken” and Kyle. I liked it, but I didn’t think it accounted for the glint in Moon’s eye.
“Look, Roz,” he said hurriedly, “can you get on the Web or the phone or whatever, find out about a Senate hearing in D.C.? The subject is organized crime and Indian tribes. See if the names of witnesses are published in the minutes.”
“My senator owes me,” Roz said smoothly.
I raised an eyebrow. Far as I know, Roz supports total anarchy.
Again, Mooney told Roz what a great job she’d done on the files. I realized he was trying to get rid of her. I’m not sure she did.
“What’s up?” I asked as soon as Roz had cleared out.
“Thurlow, the cop from Nausett I was telling you about, called. Remember I said he took me to see Julie Farmer’s grandfather, the tribal high muckymuck? The old guy who was so upset.”
“Yeah, well, I ran over his granddaughter. Why not be upset?”
“He wanted to speak to Thurlow privately.”
“About?”
“We don’t know; he had a heart attack this afternoon. Minor one, if anything happens to a guy that old can be minor. His daughter called Thurlow, wants him to come by the hospital. Thurlow thought I might want to be there, too.”
“The feds all but rode you out of town on a rail.”
“They aren’t invited. We won’t stay long.”
“We?”
“You go home, you’ve got trouble.”
“Moon, I’m running on empty. Not food. Sleep.”
“You’ll sleep on the way down.” He stood expectantly and when I’d put on my jacket and hefted the guitar, he took my other hand and tucked it around the bicep of his right arm.
THIRTY-THREE
I positioned the Gibson carefully on the floor of the Buick’s backseat and said, “Moon, I don’t know. I’m pretty exhausted.”
“Just keep me company,” he replied easily. “You sleep. I’ll drive.”
“Can we even get there before the end of visiting hours?”
“You think I can’t badge my way into a hospital? With the local police on my team? And you can’t go home. Or register in a hotel under your own name or—”
“Moon,” I said, “let me put it this way: I don’t want to corrupt you—”
“Be my guest. Corrupt away.”
“What I mean is, I don’t want you losing your job because of—”
“Go to sleep,” he said.
I couldn’t sleep, not at first. I closed my eyes, but the Buick’s engine whined and I couldn’t find a comfortable spot in the passenger seat no matter how I tilted it. I replayed Mooney’s tale of the time he’d spent in Nausett like it was an old movie on late-night TV, kept coming back to the DNA evidence. If I could talk to Sam, he might be able to clear things up. Maybe Eddie Nardo knew where he was, how to find him.
I didn’t want to think about Sam or Las Vegas. Sam had asked me to marry him, then gone straight to Solange. It didn’t bear thinking about.
I woke when Mooney touched my shoulder.
“Christ,” I said, “I hope I didn’t snore.”
He smiled suggestively.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Just all the times the guys on the team assumed you were sleeping with me, I’d say sure, you fell asleep sometimes in the unit.”
“You didn’t righteously deny it?”
“I kept hoping it would happen.”
“You didn’t do anything to make it happen.”
“Damn straight. Harassment charges staring me in the face.”
“And after?”
“After you quit? I felt like all I did was bring up bad memories. You’d gotten too close, like a sister or something.”
“Hey, bro.”
“I don’t feel that way now.”
The car’s whiny engine was still. Outside the passenger window, two gulls fought over an unsavory morsel in an empty parking slot. I could barely see a sliver of gray ocean to the southeast. There had been moments in this car, I remembered, when we’d looked at each other and the heat had risen till I’d been surprised the windows hadn’t fogged. But nothing had come of it.
He’d been the boss. I wasn’t about to offer myself up to the sneers of coworkers and I wasn’t about to quit my job. That was part of it, but had I resented his steady march upward through the ranks?
“Hey, I know,” Mooney said, “you’re engaged. I shouldn’t run my mouth. I shouldn’t—”
“Are we in Falmouth or Hyannis?” I said, interrupting because I didn’t want him to apologize. Christ, he didn’t need to apologize.
“Hyannis gets the emergencies.” He got out and turned away, facing the ocean, shoving his hands deep in the pockets of his pants. I clambered across the console and we walked toward the swinging glass doors, his shoes kicking gravel, mine silent.
Inside the hospital, we didn’t need to show any badges. The two of us strolled unchallenged to a central bank of elevators, the cranberry-jacketed desk attendant recognizing and accepting us as people who knew where they were headed. Signs on the walls cautioned us not to talk about our patients in public spaces. Moon hit the button for the fifth floor. The elevator smelled like a hospital elevator, pungent with disinfectant.
The doors opened and I recognized the officer pacing the hallway as the man who’d failed to identify my photo of “Ken.”
“Big trouble,” he said as he hurried over. “Mitch just went into some kind of shock. They hauled him into the operating room. Catch the elevator door and let’s beat it down to three.”
“They won’t let us in the OR,” I said.
“She’s a friend,” Mooney said. “She used to be on the force.”
“We’ve met.” Thurlow’s voice was cool. “I think I might have asked if you knew her?”
“I don’t think you did.”
Thurlow shifted his dark eyes between the two of us. “Whatever. Looks like I brought you down here on a goose chase, so that makes us even. Damn, but I wish I knew the old man’s daughter better. Julie’s mom.”
Moon said, “You think she knows what the old man wanted to tell you?”
“Alma won’t talk to me. She’s pretty near hysterical, lost her daughter, maybe gonna lose her father, too.”
“Is she on three?” I asked.
He nodded. “You want to take a run at her, be my guest.”
Mooney said, “Has she talked to the feds? BPD?”
“My guess is no.”
The elevator door opened on an overlit corridor. Thurlow nodded us to the right-hand branch of the hallway.
“Waiting room,” he said.
I said, “What does she know about Julie’s death?”
“Hit and run. Nothing more than that.”
Shaded lamps in the waiting room made a circular pattern on blue gray carpeting and the lighting felt restful after the fluorescent glare of the hallway. The furniture looked like it had been donated by an elderly recluse with a passion for floral upholstery and overstuffed pillows. I didn’t have to ask who Mitch Farmer’s daughter was, because there was only one pretender to the throne. Even if there had been ten other women in the room, I wouldn’t have had to ask. If Roz had taken her drawing of Julie and aged it twenty years, that would have been the mother.
Her dark head was bowed and her lips moved as though she were praying. An elegant white-haired man held both her ha
nds in his. If his clothing had been less expensive, I’d have pegged him for a clergyman.
Mooney murmured, “Brad Hastings, tribe’s lawyer.”
When the woman heard our footsteps, she glanced up like a startled gazelle. “How is—?”
“We can’t tell you anything about Mitch,” Thurlow said. “I’m sure they’re doing everything they can. Brad, you heard?”
The white-haired man said, “Terrible. I got here as soon as I could.”
Thurlow introduced us. He gave Alma a last name, Montero, for which I was grateful. She looked like she needed every shred of dignity she might be offered. Her dark skirt had gray smudges on one side, as though she had leaned against a dirty wall. A trail of crumbs was caught in the wool of her off-white sweater. Her eyes looked wild and I wondered whether she’d been drinking before this latest crisis broke over her head, or since. When Thurlow said Mooney was with the Boston police, the lawyer’s gray eyes narrowed.
“Julie,” Alma Montero whispered.
Thurlow said, “We’d like to ask you some questions.”
“Now?” The lawyer’s single word was a sober protest.
Thurlow stared at his shoes, rebuked. “We know it’s not the best time.”
“Alma, honey,” the lawyer said gently, “if you don’t feel up to this right now, and I can’t see how you would, you tell them. They know it’s not a good time.”
“Good time?” The dark woman got jerkily to her feet, like a puppet whose strings had been yanked. “What does it matter, Bradley, good time, bad time? The question is, what good will it do? What earthly good?”
“Now, Alma—”
“Did any of you see her? Did you see my baby?”
Outside the window, gulls shrilled and called.
I took a step forward. “Yes. I did.”
She raked me with those wild eyes and my throat tightened.
“I helped the police identify her. I saw her before she died—and after.”
“You’re a doctor? Did she suffer, did she say anything, did she know—?”
“Mrs. Montero, what I mean is she came to me for help. Before she died.”
Her penetrating gaze narrowed. “Then why didn’t you help her? If she came for help? Why?”
It took an effort to meet those accusing eyes. “If Julie had been honest with me, I might have been able to help her, but she wasn’t. She didn’t trust me, but I don’t know why. I thought you might be able to help me find out.”
“It’s my fault.” Her voice wavered and broke. She repeated herself once, then again. Then she couldn’t stop saying it. “It’s my fault.”
Thurlow made a noise. “Now, Alma, I’m sure—”
She turned on him, regret changing to fury in a flash. “What the hell do you know about anything? Have you ever borne a child? Nursed a child? Raised a child?”
“Calm down now, Alma. Just calm yourself. Maybe you shouldn’t deal with this right now.” The elderly lawyer tried to catch hold of her hands again, but she wasn’t having any.
The more Thurlow and Hastings told her to calm down, the more distraught she got. I thought it was likely she’d smack Thurlow’s face. When she turned on Mooney, demanding to know whether he had children, whether he’d “borne them, nursed them, raised them,” he, at least, recognized the futility of rational response, raising both hands in surrender and shaking his head.
And I heard myself say, as if from a long distance away, “I had a child, Mrs. Montero. I gave birth to a child and I lost her.” I barely recognized the distant voice as my own. It sounded like I was speaking from the far end of a long tunnel, my voice as hoarse as the call of one of the screeching gulls. My neck and back ached from sleeping in the cramped car, from trying to sleep on the plane. “Mrs. Montero, please—”
“I’ll talk to her,” Alma Montero whispered through tears. “Just to her. You men, you go away. You get the hell away.”
THIRTY-FOUR
“You okay?”
It seemed like days had passed instead of hours. Mooney and I were pulling out of the hospital parking lot in the inky darkness. The air felt damp and fog swirled under the streetlamps. Even the gulls were quiet.
I nodded.
“And that’s it? That’s all she knew?”
“You heard what I told Thurlow,” I said.
“I thought you might have held something back. The lawyer being there, and—”
“No.” I twisted in the passenger seat and stared out the blank window. Alma hadn’t been observant enough to help us catch the killer of her child.
She’d heard them talking, her only child and her father, who were “thick as those thieves you hear about,” united in their love of all things having to do with the Nausett nation. Alma, a woman who had grown up wanting only a “normal American life” like the lives she saw on TV, who had married a “regular American guy,” who avoided anything remotely Native American, had felt completely excluded.
I’d edged her back to the comment she had made, that it was “all her fault.”
“It’s my fault because I’m the one made Julie live with him,” she’d told me. “She didn’t want to, but he was getting so feeble, so old. He couldn’t stay in the house alone, so I told her it was her duty. I convinced her, and then she got so involved in all that tribal business, and I thought that’s okay then, my father will forgive me, for Julie’s sake. She already had his last name. I gave her that, did that for my father, slighted my own husband, when she was born, but it wasn’t enough for him. He wanted her and I let him have her. It’s my fault because I didn’t want to take care of my father, not after the way he treated me. I should have, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t live there, like a child again, like a failure of a woman. And if Julie hadn’t gotten so involved with the tribe and that—”
A woman in a white coat had peeked into the waiting room and interrupted. There was no news about Mr. Farmer, but if we’d like some coffee, there was a cafeteria on Level One. I’d shooed her away and tried my hardest to restart Mrs. Montero’s monologue.
“Your daughter was upset about something having to do with the tribe?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know. It was about that girl who got killed, Danielle Wilder. Something Danielle had told Julie or given to Julie.”
“You heard your daughter and your father talking about this?”
“Yes. Talking. Arguing.”
“Was this before or after Danielle’s death?”
“After. After, and my Julie said she needed to do something, and my father begged her to wait until after the election. He said if people knew, the proposition would never pass, and there would be no way to save the tribe.”
“And what was it?” I’d said gently. “The something she had to do?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t hear. But Julie was so determined. To do it.”
“Was it going to the police?”
“She never said police. I would have remembered police.”
“The FBI? Did you ask her? Later on?”
“You don’t understand.”
I’d waited while she walked to the window, tilted the blinds, and stared out at the parking lot. “What don’t I understand?”
She hadn’t looked at me, just peered through the tilted blinds. I hadn’t said anything. Either she would go on talking or she would stare out the window forever, or at least until a doctor came in and gave her news about her father, one way or the other, favorable or unfavorable, life or death. Minutes had passed. I’d listened for the gulls, but couldn’t hear them. Maybe they’d been flying out over the dark ocean. Maybe, I’d thought, I’d still be here when they shrilled out a harsh greeting to the dawn.
“I was drunk.” Alma Montero had spoken so softly, I’d held my breath to hear her better. “I’m a drunk. I drink and then I forget. I forget and then it comes back to me in a haze, so I don’t even know now if I really heard it or if it’s true. I drink.” She’d turned to face me, taken a single step toward me, and sunk on
her knees to the floor. “What kind of a mother drinks and lets her daughter die? And now, look what I’ve done.”
“What? You can tell me. It’s okay to tell.” I kept my voice low and gentle, unthreatening, but still I got no answer. “Did you argue with your father? Did you try to find out what was going on between him and Julie?”
Tears leaked from her eyes and ran down her cheeks. “Yesterday. I went after my dad. I yelled at him and he’s so old. I told him he had to tell me why Julie died—and look what’s happened, look what’s happening, look what’s—”
“Calm down. Relax. You didn’t mean anything bad to happen. You didn’t know this would happen.”
She’d nodded faintly.
“Was he at home when he passed out?”
“In Julie’s room, in her bedroom. He kept going there, just sitting in her chair, on her bed. I drove him to it. I said such terrible things—”
I’d stayed with her. I’d patted her hands. I’d brought her coffee. But she didn’t know. She had no idea why Julie would have come to me under a fake name, pretending to be somebody else, although Alma stressed that her Julie had always been a fine little actress, a girl who starred in all the high school plays, a talented girl who could laugh or cry on request.
Mom wasn’t overstating the girl’s talent, I’d thought. Even knowing, as I did, that Jessie/Julie’s story about her fiancé had been a total lie, I still believed in her basic premise, that it was somehow crucial to the girl that I follow “Ken” on that Friday night, follow him and report back on where he’d gone and whom he’d seen.
A pink-cheeked doctor eventually came by and said Mr. Farmer had suffered a “minor ischemic episode.” When Mrs. Montero looked at him blankly, he translated: a stroke. She hung on the word minor. He said they would know more in the morning. He seemed hopeful. Yes, she could stay with her father for a while. His vital signs were stable.
Alma had grabbed my hand like a lifeline. In the stifling room, the sound of the old man’s breathing was raspy and hard. It took Mooney’s help to transfer her grip from my arm to a nurse’s arm.
All that, all that, and maybe I had been talking to the wrong person, coaxing the wrong person, and who knew if the right one, Mitch Franklin, would ever be able to recall what his granddaughter had told him before she died? The stroke certainly could have impaired his memory. Dammit, if I hadn’t been going on no sleep and coffee fumes, I might have gotten more from Alma, steered the conversation down more productive paths.