“In the first place, Alex—”
“Don’t do the finger thing.”
“What?”
“You aren’t counting off sermon points. Talk to me. Don’t preach at me. I hate that finger thing even when you do it from the pulpit. It makes you sound like you’re talking to a first grade class.”
Big breath as I tucked that away to consider later. I put my hands on my knees.
“Not in one million years would I call Jo a whore or a cheat or allow a man to continue to stand if he did.”
Alex opened his mouth and I held my hand up.
“However, I take your point about being more careful about my words. I’ll do that. I’ll try, okay?”
He nodded.
“If Jo let’s you do her work for her—”
“I don’t do her work for her! Excuse me, Mr. Wells, but get a freaking clue!” Alex slammed the pile of books down on his desk. “I read her assignments to her; I do a lot of her writing. I mean like, I take dictation. All the thoughts, all the words, those are Jo’s.”
“Then what does she need you for?”
“She can’t read the books! Can’t you get that? She’s dyslexic! Do you think Jo’s stupid? Because if she’s not dyslexic, if there isn’t something different about the way her brain works, then why can’t your kid read?”
“She can read!”
“Have you heard her? When’s the last time you heard Jo read? She sounds like a fourth grader—like a slooooow fourth grader. How do you think that makes her feel at school? Especially with Miss Merrie Hotshit and her straight A’s blazing trails through Clements ahead of her.”
I felt my face grow hot.
“If Jo needed some extra help with her schoolwork, she could get that at home. For crying out loud, her mom designs lessons,” I said.
Alex turned his desk chair around and sat on it backward, straddling the back, his arms crossed over the top of the chair back.
“Oh, yeah?” he said. “Jo said the last time she got her mom to read to her, you came bursting into her room and told Mrs. Wells to stop treating Jo like a baby, and ‘let her get on with it.’”
I spread my fingers across my knees again, trying to keep my voice level.
“Alex, Jo’s not going to be able to get through college if she has to have someone do all her reading for her.”
“You think?” Alex’s tone implied that I had made a miraculous observation. “Mr. Wells,” he continued, “Jo’s not going to get through high school unless someone does all her reading for her, and if that someone is me, then I’m screwed. Because there’s no way she’s going to stay with me if she can’t break up with me.”
“Okay, I think I missed something … run that by me again?”
Alex waved off my objection. “It’s like, if Jo was blind, you’d get her Braille books or audio books or you would read all her school stuff to her, you and her mom. But because you can’t see what’s wrong with Jo, you don’t believe anything is, so you don’t help her and you won’t let Mrs. Wells, either. Or you know what I think? Maybe if you’ve got a kid who’s not perfect, maybe that means God’s favorite quarterback isn’t perfect, either. What do you think?”
“I was a lineman,” I said.
“What-freaking-ever. You know what? I start reading to her, not that much at first, but it makes this huge difference in her grades—you’ve noticed that, right? The more I read to her, the better her grades get, and Jo looooves that. You think she doesn’t care about her grades? That is so wrong. You completely don’t know your own kid. Jo is mortified …” Alex stopped and checked the word in his head. “No, I’m right, ‘mortified’ is not too strong a word. Jo is mortified when she gets lousy grades. She acts like it’s no big deal, but damn, she is red from here”—Alex touched his hairline—“to here.” He put a hand at the neck of his shirt. “Even her ears go all red.
“So I’m reading to her and she gets better grades and that makes Jo all happy, so I’m happy, too, because, I’m in love with her, man, I really, really am. But we’ll have a fight over something stupid, just nothing, and in the middle of the fight, Jo will go all still and get quiet and then she’ll apologize, even when I know she’s not sorry, even when I know I’m the one who’s in the wrong.
“And I finally figured it out. Jo is afraid to make me mad because she needs me to read to her.” Alex shook his head, exasperated. “Well, I don’t want her to need me that way. I want Jo to love me back; I don’t want her to be grateful to me.”
He said “grateful” as if it were a curse. There will be a day in his future when he’ll be looking for gratitude from the women in his life, but I got his point. I think I did.
I said, “Son, don’t you think you and Jo are a little young to be tossing around a word like ‘love’?”
Alex gave me a hard stare and then dropped his head to his folded forearms—very dramatically, I thought. Had some of his mother’s genes.
“Uh, Mr. Wells? Did you hear anything I said?”
I shifted in the chair. Baby Bear was doing more waiting than I had expected him to have to.
“Alex, I heard you. But I don’t want to talk to you about Jo right now. Or maybe ever. I do promise I’ll discuss with her mother what you’ve shared with me. That will have to do for now, right?”
He gave an eloquent shrug.
“Alex, remember what you told me about your dad meeting a young girl? A girl you thought was Jo?” I said.
Alex shot his head up.
“I want to tell you what I’ve found out.”
And then I told him. I didn’t give him names, and I didn’t tell him how the affair had started; mainly I wanted to communicate that he had seen a woman with his dad, not a girl, not Jo.
Alex listened stone-faced until I’d finished. Once I had, he covered his stricken face with his hands and wept silently, his shoulders shaking. I got up and went to the bathroom that opened off his bedroom, found a clean washcloth (with a flag appliquéd to a corner), wet it, wrung it out, and then went back and handed it to the kid. He scrubbed his face violently. I laid my hand on the back of his neck for a moment, and then I sat on the end of his bed.
“This is what I want to do now, Alex,” I said. “Tomorrow I’d like you to tell Detective Wanderley what you saw the night your father was killed.”
Alex jerked.
“Not that I’m saying I think this woman had anything to do with his death”—I didn’t want the kid getting all vigilante on me—“but she may well have been one of the last people to see your dad, and I think Wanderley needs that information.”
“No freaking way,” Alex said. His words were measured and decisive.
“What?” I said.
“You’re doing that a lot, ‘What?’ You heard me. No. I mean, yeah, it’s better than if Dad was having an affair with a girl, and …” Alex teared up again. He swallowed, his throat making a clicking sound, and he took some time to control himself. “But Mom doesn’t know anything was going on at all, and that’s how I want it to stay. It’s not as if this is going to be good news to her. And what about Jenasy? We’re not real close—she can be a total ass. But she’s my sister. She doesn’t even know Mom and Dad have been fighting! She’s been at school!”
Alex stood suddenly and his desk chair went over backward. He leaned over me, his fists clenched tightly by his side. His eyes were slits and he was talking through his teeth.
“You think my mom needs to deal with something like that right now? My dad having an affair with another woman? Your promise still stands, man; you gave me your word.” The cords on the kid’s neck were as prominent as a weight lifter’s.
I stood up from my chair and Alex took a step back. If he hadn’t, the top of my head would have cracked his chin—that’s how close he was standing to me.
I haven’t felt physically intimidated since I gave up football; I’m a big man, and I spent years getting pounded by some of the best. A good number of the guys I came up against went on to
play pro ball. That this half-a-glass of skim milk thought he could loom over me was a joke. The expression on his face, however, was not funny. It was creepy.
I kept my voice gentle.
“Sit your butt back down, Alex, and that little bit of business you just tried? You want to wait four or five years and fifty-plus pounds before you even think to work that one again, you hear me?”
Alex backed into his easy chair—the intensity in his face and muscles releasing at once. He looked flustered and embarrassed.
“I’m only telling you—” he started.
“You’ll find most people can hear what you’re telling them without you pulling that psycho-on-the-edge crap. You don’t have to remind me of my promise. I’m over here talking to you, right? I didn’t go all 911 on you, did I?”
“No, sir.” Alex sounded like a different kid.
“Here’s the thing, Alex. This business with another woman? That’s going to come out. Detective Wanderley isn’t a fool. The only reason I know about this before he does is because I fell into it, understand? Wanderley is going to find out, and so are your mom and Jenasy. You have to release me from my promise, Alex. It’s time.”
He wouldn’t, though. He was just as set as ever. I wasted another half an hour trying to argue him out of his position. He wasn’t having it.
Irene Hayden’s lemon chiffon pie was long-past history before I gave up on getting Alex to do the right thing. Cruz had tucked away a few of Gina Redman’s white rolls for me and had filled them with slices of honey-baked ham, ubiquitous at Texas funerals. I thanked her, made my good-byes, and left, frustrated in spite of the ham-filled rolls.
Baby Bear sat in the driver’s seat, front paws against the dash on either side of the steering wheel. He looked like a large black bear in a circus act. He was terrifically glad to see me. He would have acted the same if I’d been gone ten minutes instead of over an hour. The dog has no sense of time. But twilight had turned to evening while I was in the Garcias’ home, and Baby Bear doesn’t like being left alone in the dark. I let him out to water the azaleas, which he did with the professional ardor he always gives to the task. After Baby Bear finished his business and I finished wiping the pool of drool off my seat, I gave him one of the ham-filled rolls. I ate the other two.
I was uneasy. The Jekyll and Hyde turn Alex had done had thrown me. I mean, the kid needs to put some weight on, but he’s tall enough and strong enough to swing a Big Bertha, no question.
Alex had seen his father passionately kissing a strange woman. Alex thought it was Jo, and he thought he was in love with Jo. He was protective of his mother and Jenasy, even though Jenasy seemed to think he was useless. Could such a sight push a tightly strung teen over the edge? If you watch the news, you know a lot less can undo some people. According to Wanderley, unironed sheets could do the trick. Who the heck irons sheets anyway?
I had given my word to Alex that I wouldn’t disclose what he had told me. Now I’d gotten the information from another source, but it was, essentially, still the information Alex had given me. I was tied by my promise.
One of my lawyer friends told me to never, ever make a promise without having a lawyer look at it—that verbal contracts were binding in Texas unless they involved real property. I don’t know why I hardly ever take lawyers’ advice. Almost all the lawyers I know are good and intelligent people and they are always right.
But what was I supposed to have done at the time—tell Alex to wait a minute while I got my lawyer on the phone so the lawyer could explain the possible ramifications of my promise?
There wasn’t any escaping that Wanderley needed the information I had. It might be possible to convince Mai to speak to Wanderley on her own. If I explained that Alex was under suspicion, she might tell Wanderley that she had been with Graham after Alex left—but since she never knew Alex was there, it didn’t make sense to hope she could clear the kid. The very fact that Mai was still keeping their affair a secret after Graham had been murdered seemed suspicious to me.
On impulse I turned left off Alcorn Oaks, toward Mai’s house.
Thirty-two
The sixth house from the corner was a large redbrick vaguely traditional something. By which I mean that, as with almost every house in First Colony, it was not any specific architectural style. Early-Executive, maybe.
The yard was perfectly groomed by one of the many companies owned by second-generation Mexicans, operated by their college-educated sons and labored at by newly arrived Mexicans. The house had elaborate landscape lighting, which made it glow like a theater set in the early evening. I parked in front of the house, rolled the Volvo’s windows down, and refilled Baby Bear’s water bowl. I left a console light on to keep Baby Bear company.
The porch had one of those carriage lanterns with a flickering electric bulb that is supposed to simulate a gas lamp. There wasn’t a doorbell next to the door. Instead, on the door, there was a well-polished brass knocker in the shape of a pineapple. The pineapple is a symbol of hospitality—who knows why. Pineapple sets my teeth on edge.
The door knocker gave a nice, resounding “Bang!” when I whacked it, and before long, I could hear someone making their way to the door, their shoes shloping across the floor. The door was opened by Dr. Malcolm Fallon, pages of the Houston Chronicle clasped in one hand, backless black leather slippers on his feet. His eyebrows went up and I’m pretty sure I looked surprised, too. I tried not to look like a salesman or a Jehovah’s Witness. How had I gotten the house wrong? Sixth house from the corner … wasn’t this the sixth house from the corner?
I said, “Well, hey, Dr. Fallon!”
I stepped back from the porch far enough so that I could count the houses to the end of the street. This was the sixth house. I looked back at Dr. Fallon, who stood, unsmiling, in his doorway.
I said, pretty sure I was looking as foolish as I felt, “Uh, hey! Do you know a Mai Dinh?”
Something flickered over Fallon’s face. The man stood there for a long, uncomfortable moment, taking me in, and then stepped to the side.
“Come in,” he said, and I stepped into the two-story foyer (every two-story house in First Colony has a two-story foyer—they may look grand, but they’re a waste of space and makes it impossible to heat or cool these houses with any kind of efficiency).
The man shut the front door and I followed him through a dimly lit hall back to a masculine study, all hardwoods and leather upholstery and sepia prints of golf courses on the walls. He clicked on lamps with amber shades that gave the room a soft, golden glow. The large plate glass window looked out on a postage stamp pool surrounded by a terrazzo patio, and beyond, the ninth hole of the Bridgewater Country Club golf course.
The man said, “Have a seat, Mr. Wells.”
I sat on one of his overstuffed leather chairs near the big window, and then, still not answering my question, the man took the seat across from me.
Fallon’s head of thick, wavy hair reminded me of meringue it was so white and shiny. Like I’ve said, Fallon was trim and conditioned for an old guy, on the rangy side, nearly as tall as me, but looking gray and old and ill. He wore expensive-looking dress slacks, a white business shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and those soft-looking leather slippers. Even his old feet looked frail.
Fallon said, “I’m Mai’s father.” He leaned back in his chair, his hands resting loosely on the arms of the chair.
I said, “Is that right?” trying to hide my surprise. I mean, I’d been picturing a short, slim, dark-skinned, a, well … someone who looked Asian. I tried to recover. “I’ve never seen her at church. She’s come to live with you then? Left California for good?”
I was trying to put all the puzzle pieces together: Fallon’s California daughter who had finally gotten him running; Mai telling Graham, “My dad will take care of me,” because her dad was, in fact, a doctor.
“How long have you and Mai known each other?” Fallon asked without responding to my question.
“Oh! We met today. We, uh, we shared a glass of wine at the Vineyard.” I couldn’t mention that Mai had been at the funeral—I didn’t know if her father knew about her and Graham, and I didn’t have to be sworn to secrecy to know that it wasn’t my place to be telling the old gent that story.
He nodded his head. “A glass of wine, I think you said?” He put special emphasis on the “A.”
I colored. “I had a glass of wine. Mai may have had, ah …”
He nodded in a confirming sort of way. “Yes,” he said, “she may have. I presume you bought the wine?”
I nodded. This is Texas. Men still pay. At least, guys my age do.
“Tell me, Mr. Wells, is that a wedding ring you’re wearing on your finger?”
I looked down at what was obviously a gold wedding band on the ring finger of my left hand.
I said stupidly, “Yeah.”
I did not see where this was going, which means that the college IQ test I took may have been seriously skewed in favor of big dumb linemen. I mean, Fallon knew Annie Laurie; everyone knows Annie Laurie …
“So you’re still a married man? I haven’t missed an announcement in the church bulletin?”
“Oh! No, I’m married, I—”
“But I suppose, in this day and time, it’s archaic of me to expect that ring, or that marriage, to mean anything to you?”
“Gosh, no! I—”
“Mr. Wells.” Dr. Fallon steepled his fingers in a way my UT coach would when he was sitting across his desk from you, preparing to give you one of his “The game of football is like the game of life” speeches. “Mr. Wells, I’d like to tell you a story. May I tell you a story?”
The situation I found myself in was ludicrous; we’re going to have a good laugh over this, me and Dr. Fallon, I thought. Might could work it into a sermon, kind of a funny preacher story. People would get a kick out of it, seeing their preacher so wrong-footed.
“Dr. Fallon,” I began, smiling at him so he wouldn’t think he had offended me. I hated to embarrass the old guy. I thought his being so fatherly with a woman around my age was kind of touching. “Let me explain …”
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