“Oh, it’s straight out of TV. A man’s framed and the only way out is to solve the crime.”
“Like O.J.,” he said, “searching all the golf courses in Florida for the real killer.”
“I told you it was silly. Would you even know where to start?”
“Maybe a graveyard.”
“You think he’s dead?”
“I think Al’s a believer in playing it safe, and that would be the safest way to play it. He used me as the fall guy, because he knew there was no trail that could lead back from me to him. But the actual shooter would know somebody, Al or somebody who worked for Al, so there’d be some linkage there.”
“But no one would be looking for it because everybody would think you were the real shooter.”
“Right. And meanwhile, just to guard against the possibility of anybody finding out what really happened, or the chance the shooter would brag about what he’d done, because he was drunk or to increase his chances of getting laid—”
“Would that work?”
“I suppose it might, with a certain sort of woman. The point is, once the governor was dead, the shooter made the jump from asset to liability. If I had to guess, I’d say he took his last breath within forty-eight hours of the assassination.”
“So he’s not playing golf with O.J.”
“Not a chance. But he might be sharing peanut butter and banana sandwiches with Elvis.”
That Thursday they ran into a plumbing problem at work. It demanded a higher level of expertise than Donny’s, so they knocked off early and left the field to a master plumber from Metairie. Keller came straight home so he could tell Lucille to take the rest of the day off, but found Julia on the front porch. He could tell she’d been crying.
The first thing she said was that there was coffee in the kitchen, and he went there and filled two cups to give her a minute to compose herself. He brought them to the porch, and by then she’d freshened up a little.
“He almost died this morning,” she said. “Lucille’s not an RN but she’s had some training. His heart stopped, and either it started up again on its own or she got it going. She called the school where I was working and I came home, and by then she’d called the doctor, and he was here when I got here.”
“You said almost died. He’s all right?”
“He’s alive. Is that what you meant?”
“I guess so.”
“He had a small stroke. It affected his speech, but it’s not too bad. He’s just a little harder to understand, but he made himself very clear when the doctor wanted to take him to a hospital.”
“He didn’t want that?”
“He said he’d rather die first, and the doctor’s a crusty old bastard himself, and said that’s what it would probably come to. Daddy shot back that he was going to die anyway, and so was the damn doctor, and what was so bad about dying? Then the doctor gave him a shot so he could get some rest, but I think maybe it was just to shut him up, and then he told me that the thing to do now was get him to the hospital.”
“What did you say?”
“That my father was a grown man who had the right to decide what bed he was going to die in. Oh, he didn’t want to hear that from me, and he laid such a good guilt trip on me that he could teach a course on the subject, if they were to add it to the med school curriculum. Assuming it’s not already there.”
“You held your ground?”
“I did,” she said, “and it may have been the hardest thing I’ve ever done, and do you know what was the hardest part?”
“Questioning your own judgment?”
“Yes! Standing firm and arguing, and all the while a little voice in my own head is yammering away. Where do I come off thinking I know more than the doctors, and am I just doing this because I want him to die, and am I being brave with the doctor because I haven’t got the courage to stand up to my own father? There was a whole committee holding a meeting in my head, all of them pounding the table and hollering.”
“He’s resting now?”
“Asleep, last I looked. Are you going in there? If he’s awake, he may not know you. The doctor told me to expect some gaps in his memory.”
“I won’t take it personally.”
“And there’ll be more strokes, he told me that, too. They’d have him on blood thinners if it wasn’t for the cancer. Of course, if he was in the damn hospital they could monitor the blood thinners, balancing the level every hour so he wouldn’t bleed out or stroke out, and — Nicholas, did I do the right thing?”
“You honored the man’s wishes,” he said. “What’s more important than that?”
He went into the sitting room, and the sickroom smell was worse than usual, or maybe it was his imagination. At first he couldn’t detect the old man’s breathing, and thought the end had come, but then the breathing resumed. He stood there, wondering how to feel, what to think.
The old man’s eyes opened, fixed on Keller. “Oh, it’s you,” he said, his voice thickened but otherwise clear as a bell. Then his eyes closed and he was gone again.
When Keller got to work the next morning, he took Donny aside and handed him a ten-dollar bill. “You gave me too much yesterday,” he said. “Sixty dollars, and we only worked five hours.”
Donny pushed the bill back at him. “Gave you a raise,” he said. “Twelve dollars an hour. I didn’t want to say anything in front of the others.” Meaning Luis and a fourth man, Dwayne. “You’re worth it, buddy. Don’t want you looking for the grass to be greener somewhere else.” He winked. “Nice to know you’re an honest man, though.”
He waited until after dinner to tell Julia, and accepted her congratulations. “But I’m not surprised,” she said. “Patsy’s mother didn’t have any stupid children. He’s right about that, you’re worth it, and he’s smart not to chance losing you.”
“Next thing I know,” he said, “you’ll be telling me I’ve got a future in this business.”
“It may not look like it. I don’t suppose the pay amounts to much, compared to what you used to get.”
“I used to spend most of my time waiting for the phone to ring. When I worked I got paid okay, but you can’t compare it. It was a different life.”
“I can imagine. Or maybe I can’t. Do you miss it?”
“God, no. Why would I?”
“I don’t know. I just thought this might be boring, after the life you were used to.”
He thought about it. “What was interesting,” he said, “and not all the time, but sometimes, was the aspect of having a problem and solving it. You rip out a dropped ceiling and you’ll find all the problems any man can ask for, and you can solve them without anybody getting hurt.”
She was silent for a long moment, and then she said, “I think we’d better see about getting you a new car. What’s so funny?”
“Dot used to complain that I’d go off on tangents. Master of the Non Sequitur, she called me.”
“So you want to know how I got there?”
“It’s not important. It just struck me funny, that’s all.”
“How I got there,” she said, “is I was thinking it sounds as if you might want to hang around for a while. And the one thing that could screw things up is that car of yours. The license tags may be a dead end, but if you got pulled over and they asked to see the registration—”
“I’d have the papers that were in the glove box when I switched plates at the airport. I thought of doctoring them, substituting my name and address for what’s on there.”
“Would that work?”
“It might get past a quick glance, but not a long hard look. And it’s an Iowa registration for a car with Tennessee tags being driven by a damn fool with a Louisiana license. So no, I’d have to say it wouldn’t work. That’s why I haven’t bothered to try.”