‘If you would,’ he said, ‘but we don’t have long.’
The lieutenant ordered a buffalo burger; I settled for a catfish po’ boy and a pint of Breckenridge. We had them served on the outdoor patio area; it was set up for music, but happily there was none. I knew what it would have been and I wasn’t in Merle Haggard mode.
I quizzed him as we ate on the purpose of the expedition, but he wouldn’t tell me a thing. ‘I want you to see for yourself,’ was all he said. He asked me a few things, about Prim and about her problem. I repeated the story, but this time I added the bit about how they’d met at Gleneagles, when he’d been playing the part of the jilted broker finding consolation on the golf course.
That amused him. ‘My brother and golf have never been compatible,’ he said. ‘If you’d asked him about Tiger Woods, he’d have thought it was a jungle full of fierce creatures.’
We skipped the coffee; I waved to the waitress for the tab but John insisted on picking it up. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Where we’re going isn’t far from here. We have to be there for one o’clock. That’s when the rest hour begins; they don’t like visitors after that.’
‘Yes, but you’re a cop.’
‘Not here.’
‘Okay, then: I’m a movie star.’
‘That won’t cut any ice either, not with these people.’
‘I’ve got a driver waiting,’ I told him. ‘We can go by car.’
‘Trust me, we’re quicker walking.’ He set off at a brisk pace along South Guadalupe. I had no option; I caught him up.
In no time at all we’d reached the Santa Fe River, which is actually more of a stream in the summer. We crossed the bridge, then turned right into West Almeda Street, and took a left turn a few hundred yards along. Almost immediately John stopped in front of a three-storey stucco building that covered half a block. There was a sign over the dark brown entrance door, reading ‘The Blessed Sisters’.
‘What the hell is this?’
‘You’ll see.’ The big detective turned the heavy metal handle and led the way into a cool shaded hallway. In a corner, there was what looked like a reception desk, only there was nobody receiving. He stepped up to it and rang a hand bell. It made hardly a sound, but it did the job: in seconds a blue-habited nun appeared through a door.
‘Lieutenant,’ she said softly, then looked at me. ‘Is this your friend?’ Her Irish accent sounded wildly incongruous in the state capital of New Mexico, except. . a convent’s a convent wherever it is. ‘You’re just in time. If you go on through, he’s been made ready for you.’
For the first time, I realised what was happening.
The big guy led the way out of the foyer and into a long corridor. All the doors off had opaque glass panels, which helped to light it. He stopped at the third on the right, opened it and went in.
There was a bed in the room, but it was empty; the man who, I assumed, was its usual occupant was sitting in a wheelchair by the window, wearing pyjamas and with a light rug over his knees. It had a view over the trickling river; he was looking out, but I could tell at once that he wasn’t seeing anything. He was stick thin, with lank dark hair, and he had the pallor of a man who hadn’t been in the sun for a while. His eyes were unblinking and his mouth hung open slightly, a trickle of saliva coming from one corner.
John took the handles of the chair and turned it towards me. ‘Oz,’ he said. ‘I’d like you to meet my older brother, Paul Wallinger.’
Chapter 26
The man I’d been hunting had a permanent smile on his face; whatever was going on inside his head, it looked as if it was happy. I found myself smiling back at him.
‘He can’t see you,’ John told me. ‘His vision went with the stroke, along with just about everything else.’
‘How long have you known he was here?’
‘For a couple of days, that’s all. There’s one thing you can’t run away from in America, Oz, and that’s your social-security number, if you have one. After we had our talk on Wednesday, I contacted the SSA and told them I had a missing-person enquiry. They came back to me on Friday, and told me he was here. I flew down as soon as I could, and got here yesterday.’
‘What is this place?’
‘It’s a charity nursing home, run by the Blessed Sisters of Our Lord. It’s ironic that he should wind up here, since he spent half his life laughing at my beliefs and at those of our parents.’
‘What happened to him?’
‘As I said, he had a stroke, a cerebral haemorrhage.’
‘Here in Santa Fe?’
‘No. He was in Albuquerque at the time; he was appearing in a play in a local theatre, and rooming in a boarding house with the rest of the cast. As near as I can piece together he collapsed during a performance, on stage. They rushed him to hospital, where his condition was stabilised, but there was no hope of recovery. The hospital kept him for as long as they had to, then found this place. The sisters agreed to accept him, and he’s been here ever since.’
‘Ever since when?’
John looked at me; his sombre expression was in contrast to his brother’s permanent goofy grin. ‘He’s been here for over two years,’ he replied.
Two years? I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, but the evidence was in the chair before me. The man’s body looked completely wasted.
‘So how come this is the first you’ve heard of it? Didn’t they try to trace his family?’
‘His social-security card was in the name of Paul Patrick Walls. The listed address was somewhere in Palo Alto, but that was long out of date.’
‘What about the theatre company? Couldn’t they have helped?’
‘The play was almost at the end of its run when Paul took ill. At first all the hospital staff cared about was saving his life: when it came time to ask who he was, the company had all left town.’
‘What about Roscoe?’
‘Who?’
‘Roscoe Brown; he was your brother’s agent.’
‘I think they tried that, but there was nothing in his records that led back to us.’
‘Hell, man, my detective was able to trace him on the Internet in ten minutes.’
‘Sure, starting with the name Wallinger. Not so easy if you don’t have that.’
I wasn’t sure that was true; I guessed that someone hadn’t tried that hard.
‘What you have to realise, Oz,’ John continued, ‘is that when he was transferred here, Paul brought nothing with him. He had no papers, only his social-security card. He must have had some effects at the boarding house, but either they stayed there or another cast member took them. What you have to realise also is that nobody at our end was looking for him. Paul was an outcast from our family. His lack of respect for our values, his, forgive me, but his choice of profession, they drove a wedge between him and my father and me. When you add in his gayness. .’
‘He’s gay?’
‘Since high school. My father was a career soldier, Oz, until he was invalided out. He had pretty inflexible views on that sort of thing; I have to admit that he passed them on to me.’
‘What about your mother?’
‘Paul never had anything but contempt for our mother. That’s why the idea of him going to her for help was preposterous to me.’
He was hitting me with a lot of information: the way it was coming across, Prim had been conned even more spectacularly than she’d realised. She’d had a child by someone, had lived with someone without knowing not just what he was but who he was.
John must have keyed into my thoughts. ‘This guy,’ he asked. ‘What do you know about him?’
‘I know that he fixed it for Prim and me to be sharing a room in Minneapolis, then bugged it and took some candid photographs of her in her skin. I know that he sent them by e-mail to my wife, which does not make me her favourite husband at the moment. I know that he did fly from London to Minneapolis with Prim’s kid, and that he was there at the same time as us. I know that he diverted her money to a Canadian bank, to this side of the Atlantic, set up so that she can use it to buy Tom back from him. There’s only one thing I don’t know about him.’