by G. M. Ford
“You can’t be serious,” she said.
“Why’s that?”
“You’re going back there?”
“I’ve got a client.”
“All you had to do was say no.”
“I didn’t want to say no.”
“Claudia I can understand. She’s about to come into a great deal of money. She wants to know what happened to her husband. But you? You’ve still got over two hundred stitches in your leg. The front of your head looks like the Frankenstein monster…and you’re thinking of going back there. For what? You heard what Billy said about the case. There’s nothing to investigate.”
Billy was Captain William Heffernen of the Washington State Police, a twenty-year veteran of the force and a close friend of Rebecca’s. Whenever he needed better pathology work than the state provided, he called Rebecca. Over the past ten years, she had become the forensic witness of choice for the Washington State Police. At her request, he’d sent a pair of investigators to Stevens Falls. Two days and they were back. They reported that the likelihood that J.D. Springer’s killer could be brought to justice was about nil.
“Why?” she demanded.
“It’s what I do.”
“It’s more than that. It’s more like who you are.”
“Thank you, Dr. Laura.”
“What you do is dabble at being a private detective until you come into your trust fund. What you are is a perpetual adolescent.”
“What? This is suddenly news to you?” I said in mock surprise. “I’ve never made any bones about not being either the most ambitious or the most mature guy in the world. Excuse me, but I always figured that was more or less a given.”
She waved her good arm around. “There are no givens,”
she yelled. To the best of my recollection that was the first time she’d ever raised her voice to me, and she wasn’t through. “Whatever givens there were went over that damn cliff with us.” She put her hand to her throat, as if to contain her voice. When she opened her mouth, her tone was tight, but under control. “I don’t know whether you’ll understand this or not, Leo…maybe you’re so used to that kind of thing that what happened to us doesn’t have an effect on you, but…”
“But what?”
She thought it over. “But everything’s different now,” she said finally. “This thing you do that’s so important to you…”
She took a deep breath. “I’m not sure it’s okay with me anymore.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Just what it says.” She searched for a phrase. “It’s not a job…it’s like some sort of quest with you. Some game you play at so you don’t have to get a real job.”
“Like yours.”
“Yes, dammit, like mine.” Yelling again.
“I’ll pass, thanks.”
She threw the wet towels into the bag and then rifled the roll in on top. When you only have one usable arm, you consolidate. Moving quickly now, she picked up the bag, strode to the door and disappeared into the kitchen. The air in the room was heavy and still. So what else was new? Things had been heavy ever since we got back from Stevens Falls. Instead of staging a party for the boys, we’d suffered through nine days of doctor appointments, hospitals, and surgery. At first I attributed the air of tension to the severity of our injuries. Rebecca’s arm had required three hours of surgery and four steel pins and was now encased in plaster from shoulder to wrist. Not only was she still in considerable pain from the arm, but she’d been having migraine headaches from the blow she took to the head.
As for me, I was never going to look good in shorts again. I’d left a big hunk of shin meat somewhere on the floor of the Explorer. They’d taken two-hundred-some-odd stitches, and done the best they could, but there was no way to replace the divot. They said I’d probably have the scab for a year. My head…well, it was like she said. I had another forty stitches about an inch back in my hairline. At least in what used to be my hairline before they shaved it back into its present mental-patient cut. So as not to scare small children, I’d taken to wearing a baseball cap at all times. Funny how people respond to things. I hadn’t necessarily expected Rebecca to treat me like a hero or anything. I’m a firm believer that people do what they have to, but I sure as hell hadn’t expected her to blame me for the incident, either. Go figure.
I can practically smell something unsaid. I grew up on it. It was my pabulum. Whatever had torn my parents apart had hung like Spanish moss in this house for most of my childhood, so I knew what was going on between Rebecca and me. It’s just that I didn’t have any idea what to do about it. So we’d canceled all of our holiday plans and limped our way through the last week and a half, making and keeping our separate appointments and allowing the curtain of antagonism that hung between us to go unacknowledged. And then Claudia Springer showed up this morning, on the day before Christmas, with some good news, an armload of presents and the straw that broke the camel’s back.
“Guess what? I got an attorney,” she said. “And the city of Stevens Falls has made me the same offer for the property that they made Mr. Bendixon. It closes the seventeenth of January.”
I was happy for her. It not only cleaned up her legal problems, it made her a wealthy young woman. She jumped to her feet to administer hugs. We ooohed and aaahed and directed her to those portions of our anatomies that could safely be fondled.
Rebecca, of course, immediately began to tender investment advice, which inadvertently segued into the subject of today’s escalation of hostilities. When Rebecca mentioned the need to be conservative and not go hog wild just because you’ve come into the better part of eight large, Claudia’d agreed wholeheartedly.
“Right now, there’s only one thing I’m going to spend some money on.”
“What’s that?” Rebecca asked.
I figured a new car. A house in the ’burbs. Nope.
“I want to hire Leo to find out who killed J.D.”
Rebecca’s first reaction was to laugh. “Oh…Leo can’t possibly—”
“Why?” I asked Claudia.
“Why do I want to hire you?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
She sat back on the couch and ran it through her circuits.
“What am I going to tell the kids?” she asked after a moment. “When they ask me what happened to their daddy, what am I going to say? That he was killed by person or persons unknown? That I don’t know what happened to him? And that I just, like…let it go at that?”
“Four out of ten homicides are never solved,” I said. She wasn’t going for it. “Somebody knows,” she said.
“Somewhere in that valley, somebody knows who did that to J.D.”
Rebecca moved slowly toward the stairs. “If you’ll excuse me,” was all she said, but the vibe hung in the air like the smell of blood. Claudia picked up on it.
“Oh…,” she stammered “I’m sorry; I didn’t mean to—”
I held up a hand, and we watched in silence as, with great deliberation, Rebecca mounted the stairs and disappeared from sight.
“Have you thought this through?” I asked Claudia, before she got a chance to start apologizing again. “Neither the local law nor the state police think there’s any chance of apprehending J.D.’s killer. You could end up spending a lot of money and not know any more than you know now.”
Her jaw was set. “Is that what you think?” she asked.
“I think that from their standpoint that’s probably true. I don’t think conventional investigation techniques will do a darn thing,” I said.
“I thought you of all people would—”
“I didn’t say it couldn’t be done,” I interrupted.
“You just said—”
“I said it couldn’t be done by conventional means.”
“But you think it could be done…I guess, then, by unconventional means.”
“Yes, I do.”
“Like what?”
I shook my head. “From your standpoint as t
he client, it’s better that you don’t know the specifics. If what I’ve got in mind somehow goes haywire, you’re going to need to be able to say that you merely hired me to do the job and that the specifics were a complete mystery to you.”
“I can live with that,” she said. “I don’t suppose this is very nice, but I really don’t care how you do it.”
Something about the last line sounded a bit too cavalier for the earnest girl I’d known, so I pressed her. “What else?”
Her first instinct was to go ditzy. “I don’t understand…whatever do you…?”
I waited patiently until she was finished. “You through?”
I asked.
Her big blue eyes filled with tears. “At the end…the last few months…J.D. was distant…it was like he wasn’t there.”
“He had a lot going on,” I said.
She closed her eyes and nodded. I used my thumb to wipe at a tear that ran down her cheek. “I didn’t want to say anything,” she whispered. She squeezed her eyes harder and spit it out like a chicken bone. “I thought there…for a while I thought that…maybe he had…he was seeing another woman. Something in me just knew it.” She swallowed a sob and began to shake.
I stifled the urge to say something.
“I don’t know where to hold him in my heart, Leo,” she said. “I’m not sure what to feel.” She put her head in her lap and began to cry like she was never going to stop. I mentally auditioned a couple dozen soothing phrases but settled for rubbing her shoulder while she worked it out of her system. After that, we’d cut a deal. My fee plus expenses. I told her the truth: It was likely to cost quite a bit. She made it a point not to ask what for, just wrote me a check for ten grand and hugged me Merry Christmas in the doorway. I told her to give Adam a hug for me, and she said she would.
“I’m sorry if I…I mean you and Rebecca…,” she said before leaving.
“This doesn’t have anything to do with you,” I assured her.
It was true. Rebecca and I had been living alone together ever since we got back from the peninsula, so the rest of the afternoon was pretty much status quo. I made the obligatory attempts at conversation and was rewarded with a couple of amazingly unresponsive monosyllables. So I unplugged the downstairs phones and settled into the den with a six-pack of Rolling Rock, a large can of cashews and an unending succession of college football games.
Around seven, I heard a horn in the driveway. Got up to check. A cab. She was going to her mother’s for Christmas Eve. Yeah, Merry Christmas to you, too. On the way back to the den, I snagged the afghan from the couch.
18
JED HELD A BOTTLE OF RÉMY MARTIN LOUIS XIII. COMESin a crystal decanter at a mere thirteen hundred bucks a fifth.
“A drink?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said. “Why not?”
He crossed the room to the built-in bar and poured us each a hundred bucks worth.
Around ten, I’d gone for a drive. The streets had been deserted. Nobody out but me and the losers with no place to go. Around eleven-thirty, without consciously willing it so, I’d found myself parked in Jed’s driveway, so I’d figured, what the hell…might as well knock on the door. The maid answered. “Oh,” was all she’d said. Jed appeared over her shoulder. “Leo,” he said, taking the door from her hand.
“Come in.”
Sarah, the girls, the hubbys and the new granddaughter were all tucked in their beds, presumably experiencing those visionary sugar plums of song and story. Jed ushered me into the den, while Marie headed back for the kitchen. I stuck my nose in the oversized snifter and took a tendollar whiff. A golden chain pulsed across the surface of the rich amber liquid. I looked around. The table on my right held one of those clocks in a glass dome. The golden balls twirling silently in one direction and then stopping and twirling back the other.
The den was Jed’s domain and, as such, had been spared the holiday treatment. He used the long butane lighter to get the gas fireplace going. We all used gas these days. Hell, these days, you had to drive seventy-five miles to get somewhere you could cut wood. Not to mention that none of us even knew anybody with a pickup truck anymore. He retrieved his brandy from the mantel.
“Everything okay?” he asked.
“Oh yeah,” I said. “I just happened to be in the neighborhood.” I checked my watch. “At eleven-forty-five on Christmas Eve.”
“That’s what I figured. Nice to see you getting out, though, by the way.”
“Wouldn’t want to get mansion fever.”
“Certainly not,” he agreed.
I took a sip of the cognac and looked around the sumptuous room. “You ever wonder about all of this?” I asked. “I mean, like who we were when we first met and who we are now, and like how in hell we got here?”
“No more than a dozen times a day,” he said.
“I mean, you and I are sitting here drinking liquor that costs more than the cars we were driving when we first met.”
He raised his glass in salute. “Viva la France,” he said. We’d known each other for more than twenty years. When I’d first met him, he was fresh from New York and a job as the ACLU’s top litigator. We’d met in jail, where he was cooling his heels on a contempt charge and I was looking at an assault rap, for defending myself against an irate transit cop on whom I’d served a subpoena. In those days, Jed drove a beige Gremlin and worked out of a ratty little office on Third Avenue, right where the new symphony hall stands today. He’d taken on every lost cause that walked in the door and won most of them, until he’d become the bane of the DA’s office. Well-known judges took unexpected fishing vacations when Jed James’s name appeared on their dockets. Now, James, Junkin, Rose and Smith occupied the whole thirty-eighth floor of the Rainier Building, which in Seattle was about as uptown as things get. It costs five grand to sit down and discuss fees with him, and he was talking with the local Democratic party about running for King County judge whenever Wendel Woods either stepped down or dropped dead. He sat in the brown leather chair opposite me and began rolling the snifter between his palms.
“So…Leo, I’m going to draw upon my years of legal training and go out on a limb here and figure that, it being Christmas Eve and all, this is probably about you and Rebecca?”
I thought about telling him that was how come he was making the big bucks, but swallowed it instead. “I don’t think living together is turning out to be what either of us imagined.”
“How long has it been?”
“Just over a year.”
“That would sound just about right for having some second thoughts.”
“It’s not the little things, either. It’s deeper than that.”
“Like what?”
“It’s like all of a sudden, she wishes I was a CPA.”
“Instead of…”
“What did she say I do?…Oh yeah…I dabble at being a private detective until my trust fund comes due.” I threw up my hand. “I always thought she liked what I did. Now all of a sudden—”
“That’s the cliché isn’t it?”
“What?
“The same stuff they used to love about you ends up being exactly what drives them crazy?”
“Yeah. I guess it is.”
Jed retrieved the cognac, gave me one more finger than he’d given me the first time and then did the same for himself.
“In your defense, Leo…”
“I was hoping we’d get to that part.”
“I don’t think you’ve ever been shy about your plan to move directly from adolescence to retirement. And I don’t think you dabble. I don’t know anyone more committed to what they’re doing than you are, but that’s not the point, now, is it?”
“What do you mean?”
“You really think whatever is going on between you two is about what you do for a living?”
“No,” I admitted. It was more than that. I told him about how it wasn’t even a question of where we were going but more of how we were going to get there. How, late
ly, I kept finding myself at dinner with other couples our age whose exclusive subject of conversation was the state of the stock market in general and their own 1(k) plans in particular. I raved about how it seems like you can’t turn on the tube without some mutual fund reminding you that sleeping under a bridge is just around the corner, and about how all of it absolutely bored the shit out of me.
“That’s the rub, then, isn’t it?”
“What?”
“You’re not traveling the same path as most of your peers.”
“Have I ever been?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
“I feel like when I married my first wife Annette. I married into this huge Sicilian family. First non-Italian to marry in. Her father always called me desgratiado. It means the disgrace.”
“Because you weren’t Italian.”
“No…not really. Actually he and I got along pretty good. What he held against me was that I didn’t wish I was Italian. Heredity, he was willing to forgive me. My attitude about it, he was not.”
“So you’re saying…”
I thought it over. “Let me ask you a question. Suppose I didn’t have my trust fund looming on the horizon. You think I’d be doing what everybody else is doing and planning for my retirement?”
No hesitation. “Absolutely not,” he said. “You’d be doing exactly what you’re doing now. It’s what I love about you.”
“Me, too,” I said.