Now or never: “Mom, why do you reunite birth families? You’re an incredible investigator. Why not go after perps?”
She jerked her hand over and flipped the cylinder home and handed him the gun, barrel away. “They may call this the Bear Minimum, but if it’s a grizzly I think you’d better hit him in the head.” She walked across the turnaround and set up the line of cans.
“Why not perps?” Hank said. “I should think it’d be more of a rush.”
“It’s not. I tried it once, and I thought it was sad.”
“Sad?”
“You don’t remember the case? It was the one I did for the FBI when I was just starting out.”
“Vaguely. Do you want to shoot again?”
“You go, I’ll coach you. Just a sec.” She went to the bus and came back with two packets of Mack’s foam earplugs. “Here. You might want to hear your child’s first utterance.” She screwed one into her right ear. “Like this, good”—raising her voice—“now take them out! I want to tell you a story.”
He took the earplugs out and they sat on a moss-covered boulder. She took out her gum and stuck it behind her ear for later. It was a fifties bebop gesture Hank thought he had seen in a Gidget movie.
“It was bank fraud,” she said. “A lot of money, really a lot. The man was from a good Hartford family—you remember the Brainards—and the bureau needed someone who could blend in and make some calls. Well, it took about twenty minutes. His aunt had a house next to Tauntie’s at Woodstock and they all played tennis together. She was so glad to hear from me. ‘Why on earth do you want to get in touch with Franklin after so long?’ the aunt said, a bit suspicious. I told her that I was embarrassed to ask, but that he was an old beau, one of those a girl never forgets—she twittered and said something like, ‘I have one or two of those, dear,’ and I said that I had been packing up my desk for a move to Newport and found his old dog tags from the Tenth and I thought I better return them, and did she have an address. I’d done my research. He’d been in the Tenth Mountain Division with your uncle George. ‘Oh, he’ll be thrilled,’ she said. ‘Best years of his life, I’m sure of it. To tell you the truth, he’s in a bit of a funk, a rough patch, I’m sure it’ll lift his spirits,’ and she gave me an address in Old Greenwich. So I felt like a shit to begin with.”
His mother told him how she had not gotten her kit together yet for stakeouts and had to use a pair of opera glasses. Celine got in her old Volvo wagon and drove up to Connecticut and spied on the place from a hill—it was a fancy horse property with barns and white rail fencing—and she said she was proud of herself when a warbler landed on her shoulder. Finally Franklin emerged from the house. It was him all right, the felon and fugitive. Matched the photo in her dossier. He didn’t look like a hardened criminal, he looked like a rather sad man in early middle age wearing a light cotton Lacoste sweater, navy blue. He got into a Mercedes and she followed him through the genteel back roads of Greenwich. At some point he must have realized he was being followed because he goosed it and they had a “high-speed” chase through the well-kept countryside, Celine clinging to his taillights for all she was worth—“I must’ve nearly rolled that clunker three or four times”—until the man was just overcome with curiosity: Who the hell was that well-coiffed lady in the Volvo who could barely see over the steering wheel?
“He pulled over and got out looking confused and perplexed and a little scared. I walked up to him and I said I was Marybell Hampson’s niece and I had been engaged by the FBI to bring him in and that what he was doing was simply wrong. ‘What you are doing is just wrong, Franklin. You need to make this right. It will be best for everyone. You’re a decent man and you need to behave with decency.’” Hank could just see petite Celine. The moral certainty she had inherited from her mother. The poor man didn’t stand a chance. She brought him in. She said, “Let’s take your car back to the house and you come with me to the City. We’ll have a good talk on the way.”
He followed her like a puppy and she drove him to the bank where they met the branch manager and several agents. “The way he looked at me when they put the cuffs on him. Like a beaten dog, Hank. I never want to see that expression again.” She breathed out a long sigh. “On second thought, let me have that gun.” She took it from him along with the six bullets he had in his hand and she thumbed them in swiftly without thought, her mind on something else, and she blew the six cans away in six of the fastest shots he had ever seen.
It’s a wonderful thing to be in awe of one’s mother, but she had not put him off the scent. She seemed distracted by memory, maybe vulnerable, so he said, “Whoa. Nice. So no perps any more, but why birth families? I was thinking maybe once you had a baby—”
She whirled around. Her breathing was labored, maybe from her incipient emphysema, maybe from emotion.
“I’d like you to never mention that again. Okay?”
“But if I had an older brother or a sister—”
She compressed her lips and her breathing quickened. Her eyes were big and bright and they were wet and he shrunk from her pain. He nodded. “Okay, sure.”
But it wasn’t really okay. For days, weeks, years he couldn’t put out of his mind the certainty that he had an older sibling. He got more of it later from his aunt Bobby right before she died, but that would not be for twenty-two more years.
SIX
A road trip frees the mind, revitalizes the spirit, and infuses the body with Dr Pepper and teriyaki jerky. That’s what Celine had always found, and what could be better? She and Pete drove around the hulk of Denver’s football stadium and pulled onto Interstate 25 and headed north. Celine drove. She was a very good driver. Pete had given up cars when he moved to New York City as a young man. His license had expired and he’d never renewed it. Pete liked to imagine his mind as the interior of a great house, one in a constant renewal of design, and he found that not driving somehow freed up a lot of mental square footage. They had a road atlas and gazetteers with detailed topographic maps for both Wyoming and Montana. These blood-red atlases were wonderful and indispensable as they showed every ridge and creek and old logging road. As they passed the Downtown Aquarium, Celine motioned to the sign and said, “Did you know that the aquarium was bought by a seafood restaurant chain?”
“Why am I not surprised,” Pete said.
“It’s true,” she said. “Imagine! You can view all those fish while you eat their cousins. Seems to me it would be nerve-racking for the permanent residents, don’t you think? Here.” She wormed a hand into the bag between them on the front seat and pulled out a plastic cylinder filled with strips of beef jerky. “Could you hand me one, please? Pete?”
Jerky was her favorite road-trip food. Maybe her favorite staple, period. If she had to live on jerky and marzipan she’d be totally happy.
Pete asked her if she’d like him to figure out the navigation screen on the dash of the truck and Celine waved her hand no. “They make me nervous,” she said.
“Really?”
She bit off a hunk of dried beef. “I think it’s a terrible invention. Nobody knows how to read a map anymore. You chase down a blue line but you have no idea where you are in the world. Like a rat in a maze. How do I ever know where I am in relation to Pikes Peak, or the South Platte? Or God?”