“What if it’s two people?” she’d said. “The one who killed him a stranger, the one tormenting us someone we know.”
He couldn’t credit that at all. Too much coincidence, too little motivation. Cassie didn’t really believe it any more than he did. The same person was responsible, for whatever reason; and it had to be someone known to them, perhaps not intimately as he’d first believed, but well enough to have formed and nurtured an irrational hatred.
Not Gabe. Definitely not Gabe.
But the poisonous seed of doubt was still there.
Goddamn it, he thought, I can get rid of it. I don’t need the antidote for that. Just suck it up and spit it out.
He went back out front. Mannix was on the phone; he waited until the conversation ended and then said, “Let’s take a walk.”
“Walk? What for?”
“I need to talk to you.”
“So talk. It’s cold outside and I’ve got a lunch in fifteen minutes—”
“This won’t take long. And it’s important.”
He pulled his overcoat off the rack, slipped it on as he pushed through the door. Mannix followed him, scowling, a few seconds later. They walked across the grass strip that separated their building from the River House, down past the restaurant’s outdoor patio and along the seawall toward the turning basin. The wind was sharp enough so that they had to hunch their bodies against it.
“Freeze our asses off out here,” Mannix grumbled. “What’s so important?”
“David Rakubian.
“What about him?”
“What do you think happened to him?”
“We know what happened. He disappeared.”
“How? Why?”
“What the hell is this, Bernard?”
“Is he dead? What’s your take on that?”
“Sure he’s dead. If he wasn’t, he’d’ve shown up by now and started making everybody’s life miserable again.”
“How do you suppose he died?”
“Somebody killed him. A hero, in my book.”
“Who?”
“Listen,” Gabe began, and stopped, and then said, “Oh, for Christ’s sake, let’s quit all this pussyfooting around. What’re you trying to get me to say, that I think you bumped the son of a bitch off?”
“Is that what you think?”
“Come on, man. It doesn’t make a damn bit of difference who killed him, just so long as he’s dead.”
“It makes a difference to me.”
“All right, then. Yes, I think you did the deed. I also think you deserve a medal for it. Satisfied?”
“I didn’t kill him,” Hollis said. “I planned to, I even convinced myself I had the guts to go through with it — not once but twice. Somebody beat me to it.”
“No shit?”
“You, Gabe?”
“... What?”
“Was it you?”
Mannix stopped walking, turned to gape at him. Then he threw his head back, let loose a bray of laughter that swiveled heads on the sailboat that had just tied up at one of the floats. He kept right on chuckling, his eyes wind-reddened slits in the rough plane of his face.
“What’s so funny?”
“You. Me. A couple of big clowns.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“Sure I did — you weren’t listening. That’s what’s so funny, Bernard. I thought you offed Rakubian, you’ve been thinking I did it, and we both kept our suspicions to ourselves and we’re both dead wrong.”
“Are we?”
“Dead wrong.” Mannix laughed again. “You want me to swear my innocence on a Bible?”
Hollis blew out his breath; it made a gusty sound, like the wind. He didn’t say anything.
“There was a time,” Gabe said, “a week or so before he disappeared, that I considered it. I mean really considered it. I didn’t think you were capable of it, not then, and I couldn’t stand the thought of that bastard hurting Angela. I guess you know how I feel about her.”
“Well enough.”
“Pathetically obvious, right? My best friend’s daughter, and half my age to boot. But I’ve never done anything about it and I never will. You believe that?”
“I believe it.”
“Good. It’s the truth. Okay, so I had a little scenario all worked out. But when push came to shove I couldn’t go through with it. Bullshitted you that I could, bullshitted myself, but I don’t have the balls for a thing like that. I could probably blow somebody like Rakubian away in self-defense, if I had enough Dutch courage in me, but in cold blood, eye-to-eye? No way.”
“No way,” Hollis echoed.
“Like that for you, too?”
“Pretty much. I got closer than you, right up to a time and place, waiting for him with a loaded gun, but even if he’d shown up I doubt now that I’d’ve been able to go through with it. Enough nerve to reach that point but no more. Not even to save my daughter’s life.”
“Clowns and gutless wonders, a pair.”
“No. A couple of average guys incapable of crossing the line.”
“Maybe so,” Mannix admitted. “So who did have the guts to cross it? Any idea?”
“Not anymore.”
“Well, we were wrong about each other. Could be we’re wrong about him being dead.”
“He’s dead, all right.”
“That sounds definite.”
“It is. I found his body, at his house two days before Angela went away. Head smashed in. At the time I believed Eric did it, so I erased the evidence and took the body away and buried it.”
“Jesus,” Gabe said softly.
“I won’t tell you where. That’s between me and my conscience.”
“I don’t want to know. It wasn’t Eric? You’re sure of that now?”
“Positive. But that’s not all. It isn’t over yet — I didn’t get away with what I did. Things are almost as bad as they were when Rakubian was alive.”
And he told his partner, his friend the rest of it. Sucking up and spitting out the last of the poisonous seed. One long look into Mannix’s eyes when he was done, and even the bitter aftertaste disappeared.
Tuesday Afternoon
Stan Otaki said, “It’s too early to tell yet if the antiandrogens are shrinking the tumor. There’s still plenty of room for optimism.”
“But,” Hollis said.
“There’s always a ‘but’ in prostate cases. As we’ve discussed before, no two are exactly alike — it’s a predictable disease in some respects, unpredictable in others. In case the hormone treatments don’t do the job, I think you need to start considering the remaining options.”
“Surgery and what else? Or is there anything else?”
“A clinical trial of new techniques in radiation therapy. Other clinical trials.”
“Such as?”
“Hormonal ablation, for one. Chemical castration.”
Terrific. Chemical castration translated to mean radical hormone-block treatments that deprive the tumor of the testosterone it needed to grow. Reversible if the patient stops the treatment, but stopping it meant that the cancer was likely to recur... if the growth process were arrested in the first place. Catch-22. The best-case scenario was a permanently limp dick. Along with the usual splendid array of potential side effects, such as weakened bones, loss of muscle, and personality changes.
“Normally,” Otaki was saying, “that’s a radical procedure implemented after the prostate has been surgically removed and there are indications that the cancer is still metastasizing. In such cases the patient is five times more likely to survive.”
“And without surgery?”
“The jury’s still out.”
“Uh-huh. Would you recommend that option?”