Addie Combo

by Watson, Tareka

  “I called him, told him how grateful I was about what he’d done, putting his house up and everything.” I’m chilled just to recall the clumsy phone conversation. “He just grunted once or twice, hardly said a thing.”

  “Really.” Quinton gives it a little thought, mouth in a considered frown. “I don’t think he’ll ever be published in The New Yorker, but I found your father to be quite ... not erudite, but articulate at least.”

  I can hardly believe what I’m hearing. My father and I barely shared more than twenty words my whole life, of which fifteen passed between us while my mother was still alive. And while I always did attribute it to her death, I look back and realize that even in the years before, I was lucky to get more than a grunt out of him.

  “Y’know, Addie, a lot of men ... they just can’t relate to women well. It’s not that they don’t like them, or love them, or entertain the full spectrum of feelings for them. But they just have a block of some kind, keeps them from reaching out, making contact.”

  I sit in the silent wake of his summary, reflecting on sad scenes and long nights of isolation and disquiet, a festering sorrow I couldn’t shake even in my happiest moments. I can’t shake them now. But I may understand them, at least a little better.

  “If he felt that way before Mom died,” I reason out loud, “no wonder he found it even harder to relate to me after.”

  “It’s good of you to be so sympathetic to him,” Quinton says with a smile that shows his true admiration, not merely his desire. “A lot of people would hate him for the way he treated you.”

  “And I -” But I stop myself; unwilling to say it, much less believe it, or abide it, or live with the burden of it. “And I did, for a long time. But he’s risking everything now to save me, I ... I know it’s not that he doesn’t love me, that he never loved me. I guess he just didn’t know how to show it.”

  We sit in the sad calm of my realization; it brings no joy, but it does relieve some sorrow. And at least I manage to extract some bittersweet amusement from the irony it conveys. “Funny thing is, I think Randolph has more-orless the same relationship with his own mother.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Well, I guess we all feel this way to a certain extent, but there was a weird kind of tension in the room when we visited, an energy I found kind of disconcerting. Looking back, I guess they were just having one of those moments. Hard to tell, with that Scottish accent, I couldn’t make out most of what she was saying.”

  “Scottish?”

  “Yeah, I’m pretty sure.” I sit, watching Quinton roll it over in his mind. “What?”

  He says, “Nothing, but ... he’s about mid-thirties, that would make her about mid-fifties, maybe sixty.”

  “So?”

  Quinton can only shrug. “First generation immigrant from Scotland, circa 1970s or so, and she didn’t grow up speaking English?”

  I give it some thought for the first time. It’s true, that is kind of strange; but there are immigrants from all over who speak their native language. Besides, “She might have been speaking in Scottish so she could talk to Randolph about me without me knowing.”

  “Scots, they speak Scots.”

  “Who, the Scottish?”

  “No, Scots.”

  “The Scots.”

  “Yes.”

  “They speak Scottish?”

  “No, Scots,”Quinton says. “The people and the language, both called Scots.”

  I have to look at him sideways for a moment. “How do you know so much about it?”

  “I’m Scottish myself ... Scots, Abbie; Quinton James ... ?”

  Something else to which I’d given absolutely no thought at all. I don’t see people that way; I judge the person, not their race or ancestry.

  But it’s not just an insider’s view of Scottish history (or Scots history, or ... Scots-ish?) that Quinton is alluding to. “I wonder if she wouldn’t mind having a little chat.”

  “You can speak ... that language, Scots?”

  “A bit ... enough, I think. She’d probably be thrilled just to knock the mother tongue a round a little bit. Y’never know.” After a moment, in which Quinton seems to be assessing the possibilities, he adds, “She might even be willing to flip, give us something that’ll settle this once and for all.”

  “You really think she’d rat out her own son?”

  “You know how people treat the elderly in this country,” Quinton says with a wry smile. “You remember where she lives?”

  “I do. Shall we make an offer?”

  It does feel a little desperate, but I guess that makes it all the more appropriate too. And I’m glad to be out, moving forward instead of merely around in circles, getting nowhere in that little living room.

  We drive down to her apartment and ring the bell, but there’s nobody home. Quinton takes a look at the directory. “Name’s MacLeish, right?” Without waiting for me to ask, he says, “Unit 1?”

  “Yeah, right in front here.”

  “And you’re sure this is the right building?”

  I think about it for a minute, not sure whether to be confused and embarrassed or offended and self-righteous. Instead, I simply wait and he explains, “Name’s not right on the directory, that’s all.”

  Hhhmmm, I think, really? Well ...

  “Maybe she remarried at some point.”

  Quinton looks around. “Maybe.” We cross back to his car and climb in.

  “Now what?”

  With a long, tired sigh, Quinton scrunches down in the driver’s seat and peaks out at the apartment across the street. “Now, we wait.”

  I can’t deny that I’m a little excited. I’ve never been on a stakeout before, and the suspense is really quite thrilling. The longer it takes, the more suspense accumulates, ratcheted up tighter and tighter, right to the breaking point and then just a little bit beyond it.

  A royal blue Honda Accord rolls up as the subterranean garage gates open. A woman is behind the wheel. I slip down just a bit.

  “That her?” Quinton asks.

  I have to shake my head. “Don’t think so, hard to tell.”

  The gate closes behind the door as it disappears into the dark of the parking lot. We wait, the sound of our breaths the only distraction. I see her walking through the interior of the complex, past several apartment doors from the rear and straight toward the unit in front.

  “You’re sure you went into that front apartment?”

  “I am, Quinton; yes, I’m sure.”

  The woman approaches the apartment and puts the keys in, taking just a few seconds to get herself in. She’ s not unattractive; in her mid-thirties, I’d guess, with red hair and a shapely figure.

  “And that’s not her?”

  “Look at her, Quinton, does that look like a sixty-yearold hag?”

  Quinton looks at her, then at me. “Well then?”

  I think about it, running through the possibilities in my head. Different name on the intercom, different-looking woman, same apartment. Rudolph’s mother’s maid or caretaker?

  No, dummy ...

  “She’s an actress,” I say.

  Quinton cranks the key and the engine turns over, growling and ready for action. “Plenty of ways to find out.”

  We head back across town to the apartment. Quinton gets on the internet, running quick checks on the name listed on the intercom for that apartment and address (Lawrence is the last name), then searching that name and the name of Margaret MacLeish. It doesn’t take long.

  “She’s in the IMDb,” he says, reading my confused expression. “Internet Movie Database. Caroline Lawrence was on an episode of Gossip Girl, as a TV reporter, and an unaired American pilot of the English sitcom Black Books.”

  “You’re kidding me,” I mutter, long past the possibility of being shocked by anything this cad could do. And yet, he manages to outdo himself! Maybe it’s my sad experiences with my own mother, and how he used that to manipulate me; even with everything else he’s pulled, it
just makes me sick. My blood feels like it’s boiling in my veins, my skin prickling with a thousand angry needles.

  Until Quinton says, “We finally caught a break!”

  CHAPTER NINE

  My preliminary hearing comes just a week or so later. The question is whether there is enough evidence to take my case to trial, not my ultimate guilt or innocence. Other than that, it’s very much like a trial, with witnesses both for andagainst me. The idea here, I’m told, is to analyze evidence, weigh the credibility of witnesses, and resolve factual conflicts.

  And no prosecutor wants to prosecute an innocent person, or a case they can’t win. So Quinton assures me it won’t be a terribly uphill battle; we’re simply outgunned and outnumbered.

  And for the State to prove that there is probable cause for a trial, which is all California needs to do in this case, is not going to be too challenging.

  They do this all the time, I figure as I sit, waiting for my turn on the chopping block.

  But I don’t have to face the block alone. Of all the witnesses, surely the most amazing to me, and the most startling I think to everyone present, is my father, Archibald Compo. I’ve almost never seen him in a suit before, accept for my mother’s funeral. And if I’m not mistaken he’s wearing the same suit now he wore then. But he’s here, I tell myself, his shaggy, graying hair nicely trimmed, my brothers with him and also well dressed and respectful. Even with a growing business to see to, they’ve come to support me. This is a feeling that I haven’t known since my mother was alive; that we are a family, a single unit that nobody and nothing can tear apart. The feeling of family is like no other; a sense of security, of belonging, of being in tune with the vibration of the people around you. It may sound hokey, but that’s what family feels like to me. Blood knows its own. And no matter how this hearing or my future goes, I’ll be grateful to have that feeling once again; even if it comes too late, and for the last time.

  My father gives his name and expresses his understanding that he’s under oath to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but. He swears to God that he will.

  The prosecuting attorney, the familiar, pouchy Sabrina Jerome, seems very friendly to my father, welcoming him to California and extending all kinds of courteous well-wishes.

  Smiling like a crocodile, I think to myself as she sets him up for a fatal strike.

  She finally gets around to the question of my life in Colorado before moving to Los Angeles.

  “So you would describe your daughter as a happy little girl,” Miss Jerome says, “well adjusted after her mother’s death?”

  My dad clears his throat, pulling his chin away from his collar a bit, loosening its grip around his neck. “I’m afraid I could not say that, much as I would like to be able to. And ... and it was my fault that she wasn’t happy, her brothers and I ... ” I glance at my brothers, Jared and Jesse, too sheepish in their shame to face me. But I’m not angry with them now; and I wish I could tell them that I don’t mind what kind of life I had then, that it’s in the past and not important.

  My dad goes on to say, “We worked her like a slave, cooking and cleaning for us, all the while going to school and holding down a job at the little bakery. No wonder she wanted to get away, live her own life -”

  “And do you think that, given those circumstances, she would be likely to try something desperate, something illegal -?”

  “Objection,” Quinton says, “leading the witness. Your honor, is this the kind of case we’re going to have to fight? There’s no evidence against my client in this testimony -”

  “Overruled,” the Honorable Yoshi Takimara says, “I’m going to let the witness continue.”

  My dad looks at the judge, who gives him a nod. “Well,” my dad goes on, “to answer the question, I can tell you my daughter would not have done anything illegal. We hadn’t driven her that far over the brink. I’d say we made her angry at us, but not a t the whole world. For that, she deserves the credit; but I’m the one who’s grateful.”

  “And we’re all very impressed with her work ethic,” Miss Jerome says.

  My dad nods as he seems to think about it. “It’s all in the records; school full-time, worked more’n thirty hours a week at the shop. Either o’ my boys’ll tell you she spent at least a few hours a day cooking and cleaning. That doesn’t even count the time she spent studying. She had a high grade average, three-pointfive! You don’t get that without putting some time in with the books.”

  I can hardly believe what I’m hearing. He knows what my G.P.A. was in college! I didn’t even think he knew I was in college!

  Miss Jerome says, “So your contention would be that your daughter really wouldn’t have h ad the time to put something like this together before leaving Colorado.”

  “I don’t see how.”

  “But it’s true that she was away from the house for hours every day, and you truly cannot say one way or another what she was doing during those times, who she was meeting or making plans with while outside the home. Can you?”

  Daddy sits in the growing disquiet of her questions, and of his answers. “No, he says, “I don’t suppose I can say with absolute certainty.”

  “There could have been people on campus, students with radical ideas, maybe with siblings or parents in the military, formerly with the military, with fresh ties to drug sources in the Middle East, in Afghanistan, for example -”

  “I guess with a stretch of the imagination there could have been,” Daddy says.

  “There’s no stretch of the imagination required, Mr. Compo. There are over one hundred, twenty-nine thousand veterans of the Gulf War alone in the fine state of Colorado; another hundred and forty thousand from the Vietnam era, and thousands more from recent tours in the Middle East. That’s roughly seven percent of the entire state population. And these are people who would leave no trace necessarily, conversations in person that couldn’t be verified. It’s not outside of the realm of possibility, isit?”

  My dad squirms in his seat. “Not impossible, I guess.”

  “And your daughter’s a smart girl, isn’t she? Bright enough to see the possibilities in such a set up? She did earn a three-pointfive G.P.A., after all.”

  “She’s smart, I can’t testify against that,” my dad says. “Smart enough to do one thing or another, I really can’t say. I’d say she’s too smart to get involved with such things.”

  “She majored in business,” Miss Jerome says, “so that would give her enough information to put such an economic structure together, to understand how it would work. Yet she came out to Los Angeles with little more than an offer to sublet a room; no solid job opportunities, no real career plan -”

  “We drove her to that,” he says. “She just wanted to get away, as fast as she could, as far as she could. And we understand that; even if it took us a while to get used to it, to our own part in it.”

  Quinton asks no questions of my dad and lets him step down. Reading my nervous confusion, he leans very close to me and explains, “He’s already said everything we need.”

  Emily is called to the stand, and my imagination scrambles to find anything she might be able to contribute to the prosecution. I don’t have to wonder about it for too long.

  “She came into town acting all innocent,” Emily tells Miss Jerome, and the rest of us. “But I always suspected she had something in mind.”

  “Please be more specific,” Miss Jerome instructs her.

  Emily goes on to say, “Well, first of all, she started flirting with my boyfriend right away, I knew she was attracted to him. I just didn’t know what she was capable of at the time.”

  “Objection,” Quinton says, “conjecture.”

  “Sustained,” the judge says.

  Miss Jerome says to Emily, “You were telling us about your suspicions of Miss Compo’s behavior.”

  Emily nods, scrunching up her little face, eyes going beady and cold. “She kept asking Quinton what kind of law he practiced, like she wanted to use h
im as part of some overall strategy.”

  “Conjecture!”

  “Sustained.”

  Emily adds, “She said she was interested in buying investment property, but I guess that’s the line she gave everyone.”

  A litany of objections and reactions follow as Emily twists and reinterprets everything I ever said to her, and things I don’t even recall saying. My blood starts to rush a bit, my breath becoming short. But as I look at Quinton with glances of increasing desperation, he sets his hand on mine to calm me, a slow blink relaxing my growing anxiety just a bit.

  Which isn’t much.

  “She comes into town with no money,” Emily says at one point, “suddenly she’s driving around in a BMW, has all kinds of new clothes. She says she’s got some guy to pay for it all, but ... who’s he anyway? None of it ever sat right with me ... ”

  “Objection,” Quinton says, “hearsay.”

  “Sustained.”

  I can’t believe what I’m hearing! After all the encouragement she slammed down my throat about taking advantage of Randolph, getting the most out of it all; she’s turning it completely around on me and there doesn’t seem to be anything I can do about it.

  Yet.

  “Once, on the beach,” Emily says a few moments later, “Addie said that she had a secret life, that she wanted to keep it personal and that it was hard for her to keep things in balance. I didn’t want to ask too much, she was starting to frighten me a little bit. That’s when our friendship started to corrode.”

  “Erode?” Miss Jerome asks, “do you mean erode?”

  “When things fall apart,” Emily confirms. Reading the prosecutor’s nod, Emily adds, “That’s corrode, isn’t it? Anyway, she said how nervous she was about things, I could tell that the pressure was starting to get to her after a while.”

  Quinton repeats, “Objection, conjecture and hearsay!”

  “Sustained,” the judge repeats.

  My mind is spinning and my heart pounding.

  I -- ? I said that about moving too fast with Randolph, not -

  “After a while she mentioned that she had plenty of money saved up,” Emily says, “and that she was getting ready for a big move. I wondered what she meant, and how she had so much cash ... ”