I’d never had the slightest interest in Mai, not as a woman, not to act on.
I stood up and turned off the lamps. With the lamps off, I could see the green, groomed golf course, even in the dark. I could see the flag at the ninth hole.
“Did you tell Mai’s story to Graham Garcia?”
“I … what? Did I … who?” His voice sounded frightened in the dark room.
“Did you sit here in the dark and see Mai leave through the back gate to meet her lover? Did you see them embrace? Did you go out there to confront them together?”
I tried to picture the scene in my mind.
“No,” I said. “You wouldn’t have done that because Mai isn’t strong enough for confrontation, is she? And you were trying to protect her. You were trying to keep your promise.”
Fallon stumbled to his desk and poured himself water. The glass rattled against the carafe, and I heard the glass click against his teeth when Fallon lifted it to drink. He fell back into the chair behind his desk.
I stood before Fallon at his desk.
“You waited until she came back in, didn’t you? Then you went to find the man.”
“Not to kill him. I didn’t go out there to kill him.” Fallon whispered the words.
Fallon’s face glowed white in the dark room. He had his hands braced against his desk as if he needed the barrier between us.
I said, “You didn’t go out there to kill Graham Garcia, but you killed him all the same, didn’t you?”
Now Fallon yelled at me, roaring, “I told him the story! I knew if I explained, if I could make him understand what Mai had been through … why he had to leave her alone. I told him everything I told you!” Fallon shouted.
He started shoving stuff around on his desk, yanking drawers open and knocking papers to the floor, as if somewhere on his desk he could find the proof that he had acted in good faith, the certificate that would vindicate him. I was afraid he would work himself into a heart attack.
I held my hands wide and took a step toward him in the darkened room.
“Take it easy, Dr. Fallon, take it easy.” My words had no effect.
“He wouldn’t listen to me. He said it was too late. He had a family, did you know that? Just like you do, but here you are, sniffing for another woman!”
“No, Dr. Fallon.”
“You deny it! You deny it just like him! You take my daughter to a bar in the middle of the afternoon—”
“No!”
I could not get through to this guy; he kept on as if he couldn’t hear me.
“You pour liquor down her throat, you play on her weaknesses—”
“I did not!”
I pulled my phone from my pocket and scrolled for Wanderley’s number, grateful for the lighted screen.
“Because you’re the same as he was … you want what you want and …”
I looked up from my phone.
“You killed him.” I said it quietly, and somehow through his mental static, he heard me.
“No. No. I didn’t.” His voice was calm and quiet, rational, and for a second, I thought I had gotten it wrong.
Then Fallon went on, “I didn’t mean to. It was an accident. We were sitting out on the golf course, and I was explaining. I was telling him Mai’s story and he was listening and asking good questions and nodding his head and I thought he understood, I thought we were on the same page, two gentlemen.”
Fallon’s dark profile was turned up to mine. I couldn’t see his expression, but there was pleading in his voice.
“I used his golf club to help me stand up,” Fallon said. “Sitting out there in the damp, I’d gotten stiff, and I said, I said, ‘Then, Graham, we agree and you won’t see Mai anymore, I’ll let her know, you don’t need to …’ and there he was, shaking his head no, and he said, ‘Dr. Fallon, I’m sorry, but I can’t do that. You don’t understand, it’s too late for that, what you’re asking is impossible.’ So then I hit him.”
Fallon sounded stunned; he still couldn’t believe he had done what he was telling me.
“I didn’t mean to.” His voice broke. “It happened. I had the club in my hand and I hit him and he fell down.”
I said, “You left him there.”
“He was dead!”
“No, he wasn’t,” I said. “He didn’t die for some time. I don’t know if he could have been saved if you had called for help, but I know you didn’t make that call.”
“He was dead!” Fallon roared.
“Dr. Fallon,” I said, “you are a medical doctor. You had wartime experience. You knew very well that Graham Garcia was not dead, yet you left him to die. Hitting him might have been an accident, but you chose to walk away.”
There was silence from the form hunched behind the desk.
I said, “I’m going to turn on the light.”
He said, “No!” and I heard a click and I absolutely knew, and could not believe, what that click meant.
I said, “Dr. Fallon, if you shoot me, is that going to be an accident?”
There was a banging of the knocker on the front door, and I felt my knees go weak with relief. Wanderley to the rescue. Someone to the rescue. I took a step back.
Fallon said, “Don’t you dare move. You came to my house, looking to violate a woman you had made helpless with alcohol—”
I yelled, “No!”
The front door opened and I was expecting to hear an authoritative voice say, “Freeze!” but instead I heard the worst thing on earth:
“Daddy?” The voice was thin and frightened, and quavered up a scale on the one word spoken.
And it was Jo’s.
I heard Baby Bear’s deep rumble.
Jo said, “Hush, Baby.”
Baby Bear’s tags rattled as if Jo’s grip on his collar was unsteady.
I said, making my voice as firm as I could, “Josephine, sweetheart, I want you to turn around and go out of this house right this second. I’m busy, Jo; this is private. It’s church business. Go home, sweetie. Obey me, Jo.”
Praying she would, just this once, obey me. Please, God, please, God, please, God.
Baby Bear growled and his toenails scrabbled on the marble floor. I heard Jo’s tentative steps toward the study.
“Daddy?” Jo’s voice trembled.
I said, “Jo. Please.” And it was a prayer.
From upstairs Mai’s sleepy voice called, “Dad? Daddy?”
I saw Fallon’s face tilt up in the dark, and I threw myself across the desk at him. There was a shot and I heard Jo screaming as I had never heard my baby, my baby, my baby girl screaming and screaming and screaming and screaming.
Thirty-three
Graham Garcia was teeing off at the ninth hole, and I was explaining to him that he couldn’t see Jo anymore, it wasn’t right, she was too young, and he shook his head sadly and said, “I’m sorry, Bear, but it’s too late. I promised.”
Jo sat next to me in Alex Garcia’s bedroom, her hair a dark tent around her. She was holding a book upside down and reading to me backward and I said, “I don’t understand, Jo, read it again.” She said, “If you’d only try,” and she slammed the book shut. Then Jo looked down at her hands and they were filled with blood and she screamed and screamed.
I was walking down the hospital hall on my way to see Miss Lily. I was humming, “Can you count the stars of evening …” Wanderley walked next to me, holding my hand, saying, “Well, Father Brown, do you have anything to tell me? Do you have anything to tell me?”
When I awoke, Annie Laurie sat next to my bed with Sing Them Home on her lap, her reading glasses askew on the end of her elegant nose. She was asleep, her head back against one of those awful vinyl upholstered hospital chairs. In back of her were banks of flowers. Banks of them. Balloons, too. Nearly blocked the window; I couldn’t see a thing out of it.
What a waste of money. Annie Laurie should have told everyone to donate to the Fort Bend Women’s Shelter or the church’s food pantry. Or something.
There was a tube down my throat and it hurt. I was thirsty. I wanted Jo. I wanted to cry. I never cry.
It was morning or afternoon. I don’t know. Merrie sat in the corner, working a sudoku. In ink. The sun was shining over her fair hair and through all those flowers. It was kind of nice having people think of you, send you flowers. They were pretty. They smelled good. Wait. No, they didn’t smell that good. One of those vases needed a water change.
The tube was gone. Annie Laurie was bending over me. I could see the tender round tops of her breasts. Her breath smelled like coffee and mints. Her skin smelled like Annie. A good smell.
Annie Laurie said, “Bear?”
I asked, “Jo?”
It didn’t sound like me. I sounded like an old beach ball, deflated and crusty with salt and sand. I sounded like a geriatric.
Annie smiled. It was the best smile. It was a warm, safe, happy smile; it touched her whole face. Annie’s smile.
Annie said, “Hon, your baby girl saved your life, you know that?”
I felt myself seal over in coldness and stubbornness.
“No, she didn’t,” I croaked. “What she did was nearly get herself killed.”
My heart tightened at the words.
“Because she wouldn’t obey me,” I said. “I told her to leave, Annie Laurie, I told her to take Baby Bear and get out of that damn house, and I couldn’t make her go. She wouldn’t—”
I couldn’t speak. I didn’t dare try to say another word.
“Oh, Bear.” Annie stroked the hair behind my ears with her cool, smooth fingertips. “Would you have left? Other way around, would you have left Jo in there by herself?”
I held it for a while, trying to hold my place. But I couldn’t. I shook my head, “No,” and the cold flooded out of me.
“She’s her daddy’s girl, Bear,” Annie said, her lips inches from my ear. “She’s your girl, all over.”
There was a tickle on my ear. I jerked my head away. The tickle came again. I opened my eyes and Jo was standing over me, a twist of her dark, fragrant hair brushing my ear. She smelled like fruity shampoo and salt.
I said, “Jo,” and I tried to hug her but I couldn’t. My arms were taped to the railings of the bed and to tubes and bells and whistles, and when I tried to move, my arm hair got yanked. Jo put her silky arms around me and I cried for a long time, Jo saying, “Daddy, don’t, Daddy, don’t.”
I woke up and Detective James Wanderley was standing at the foot of my bed.
Wanderley said, “‘Lucy, you got some ’splaining to do.’”
I said, “Could you get me a drink?”
Wanderley patted his jacket pockets.
“I got nothing, Bear; I haven’t reached that stage yet.”
“Water, Wanderley, would be fine.”
“Oh! Right.”
Wanderley fumbled about till he found a tan plastic pitcher encased in Styrofoam and filled with ice water. He held a glass with a straw to my lips and I drank cold, stale hospital water and it was mango-cherry—Heaven’s own nectar. It was delicious.
Wanderley was wearing one of his good forty-year-old tweed blazers. I couldn’t see his feet, so I don’t know whether he had on those cool boots.
I said, “How does your grandmother feel about you wearing your dead grandfather’s clothes?”
Wanderley smiled and took a purple guitar pick out of his mouth.
“She can’t decide if it’s sweet or disturbing,” he said.
“What about your dad? What does he think, seeing you dressed in his dad’s clothes?”
Wanderley’s smile broadened. “It pisses him off good and proper, preacher.”
I thought that answered lots of questions.
I said, “Am I in trouble?”
“You are with me,” Wanderley said. “Everybody else thinks you’re a cross between Lassie and the Coast Guard. I can’t decide whether you saved Jo’s life or nearly got her killed.”
“What happened?” I said.
Wanderley said, “We got a call about a possible gunshot.”
“I called you,” I interrupted.
Wanderley rubbed the base of his nose vigorously. “Yeah. Sorry. I didn’t get that call. Molly dropped my phone in the toilet.”
Okay, I could see that. I’ve wanted to drown mine a time or two.
“So, anyway, some neighbor calls about a possible gunshot. Then we got a nearly incoherent call from a frantic and slightly drugged Mai Dinh saying there was a dead man and a crazy girl and a wild dog in her house.
“When the officers arrived, just ahead of the fire engine and the ambulance, they found a small Asian woman trying to pull a teenage girl off a recumbent old white man who was in the process of having his ankle worried off by a giant, black hellhound. The old man had a gun in his hand, which cooled the officers’ sympathies precipitately. Good thing or they would have shot your dog. You were in a back room trying to bleed to death. You nearly succeeded. That’s what happens when amateurs play pro.”
“About that, Wanderley, see, I had promised—”
Wanderley shook his head. “No, Bear. Don’t give me that promise crap.” He made quote marks with his fingers when he said “promise.” “It won’t do,” he said. “You didn’t have any right to make that promise and you sure as hell didn’t have the right to keep it.”
I opened my mouth to explain but Wanderley shook his head.
“Don’t worry. I’m not going to ask you to tell it to me now. Mainly because I think I’ve put it together from what Annie Laurie told me and what I got out of Mai Dinh. And also because Annie Laurie made me swear on my grandfather’s grave that I wouldn’t bring it up with you until you were out of here. You make sure she knows you brought it up, not me, okay? You live with some fierce women, Bear, you know that?”
Ah, yes, I did know that. Fierce women. I really liked that. Fierce women.
“You ready for the rest of the story?”
I nodded and crunched ice.
Wanderley glanced around and found the chair hidden under a couple of flower arrangements. He moved the flowers to the floor and took a second to look over all the flowers and balloons and cards.
He said, “Jeez, what a waste,” sotto voce, and dragged the chair closer to my bed and planted himself.
“When I got there,” he said, “I found a hysterical Jo in the front yard being constrained by an officer who was anxious not to have any charges of sexual harassment or undue violence placed on his record, which made constraining your Jo quite a task indeed. Fortunately for all of us, Jo recognized me as the detective who had been with her dad Tuesday night and I was able to get her to calm down. I had her call your wife. Then I had her tell me her story.
“Seems she was walking home from a friend’s house, a …” He shifted his butt and pulled a notepad out of his back pocket, flipped through some pages.
I said, “Cara Phelps.”
Wanderley found the name and nodded. “Cara Phelps, and she sees your car, Jo, I mean, Jo sees your car, dash light on, parked in front of an unfamiliar house and your car windows are down. But Baby Bear—did you name that dog after yourself, Bear? Because that’s seriously bent if you did—isn’t in the car as she would expect him to be, he’s standing on the front porch and he’s growling and pawing the door.
“Evidently your namesake isn’t known for growling and that puts Jo on alert. The dog won’t come when Jo calls him and that spooks her, too. She goes to the front door to get the dog and she can hear raised voices and she recognizes yours.
“She said she knocked, but no one came so she tried the door and it wasn’t locked. She walked in, and that in itself was pretty ballsy, if you ask me, and you told her to leave and then there was a shot.”
Wanderley put a foot on my bed to shove his chair back and stood up again. There wasn’t enough space in the room for him to pace, but he did this sort of rocking stand, one foot to th
e other, back and forth. Wanderley was as jittery as a cat with wayward kittens—the boy was never going to get fat.
“If I understand Ms. Dinh’s account, she came downstairs to find the Hound of the Baskervilles and a strange girl trying to kill a Dr. Malcolm Fallon, Dinh’s father. All teeth and nails, from what I hear, and I’m not at all certain it wasn’t Jo using her teeth. All the while, Fallon was holding a loaded gun, which, interestingly, and most fortunately, he did not use.”
“Again,” I said.
“What?” Wanderley said; and used the break to take the pick out of his mouth and turn it in and out of his fingers like a cardsharp.
“He didn’t use the gun again. He used it once anyway.”
There was Wanderley’s easy grin. That grin gave you a glimpse of the kid he had once been, smart, maybe too smart, all cool confidence on top, uncertainty underneath. Of course, I was on drugs, so I could have been reading too much into it.
“Right,” he said, “I wasn’t counting that.” The pick went into the breast pocket of his shirt and I could see the purple through the thin white cloth—I could see a blue pick in there, too, and maybe a yellow one, if that wasn’t a slip of paper.
“Imagine my surprise,” I said. “You know what I want? I want some real food. I’m thinking Goode Company Barbeque, their sliced link sandwich. Extra sauce, jalapeños, and onions. And a great big piece of their pecan pie, better make it two pieces.”
“Yeah, that sounds good. Nearest Goode Company is on Kirby, and the Sugar Land Police don’t do deliveries. So you want to hear the rest or what?” Wanderley asked, his eyebrow doing Groucho tricks. I nodded.
“So we’ve got firemen and cops littering the sidewalk, neighbors torn between being offended at this clear violation of neighborhood restrictions and being titillated by an honest-to-God Human Drama right on their own overpriced turf lined up three deep in the street, and every teenager from a mile’s diameter trying to get video footage for YouTube while medics do their best to stuff you in the back of their ambulance, and all the while your horse-sized mutt is running circles as if someone put menthol oil on his bung hole.”
Faithful Unto Death Page 28