She nodded.
They embraced.
She was crying again.
“I don’t know what we’ll do without him,” he said, and clutched her to him. She nodded into his shoulder, the tears flowing freely down her face. “Call me if you need anything,” he said, holding her at arm’s length now, looking down into her tearful face. “All right?”
“Yes,” she said. “Thank you, Jeff.”
“Call me,” he said again, and patted her hand, and then nodded to Kling in farewell, and worked his way through the crowd of mourners to the front door.
“My husband’s partner,” she said. “Jeff Colbert. I don’t know what I’d have done without him. He’s been marvelous.”
“Mrs. Wilkins,” Kling said, “I’ll say the same thing he said. Call me. If you think of anything, however unimportant it may seem, call me.” He took out his wallet, found a card, handed it to her. “Any time of the day or night,” he said. “The message will get to me.”
“Thank you,” she said.
“Either my partner or I will stay in touch,” he said, and wondered where the hell Parker was.
TEDDY HADN’T SEEN eileen Burke since she’d begun therapy, and the change in her now was virtually miraculous. Where earlier there had been a troubled police detective who couldn’t seem to reconcile her professional life with her personal life, there was now a woman who seemed in complete control of both. Wearing blue jeans and a green blazer that matched the color of her eyes, Eileen sat opposite her in the Chinese restaurant they’d chosen, her hands flashing across the table. She had learned to sign a little.
For you, she signed.Because we’re friends .
The signing was shaky, but well intentioned. Moreover, like many people learning a foreign language—which, in a sense, signing was—Eileen could understand it better than she could speak it. Teddy was grateful for that; she had a lot to tell her.
The two women would have attracted attention even if they hadn’t been signing. Neither of them would ever have thought this of herself, but each was startlingly beautiful in her own Irish way, Eileen with her fair complexion and fiery red hair, Teddy with her dark eyes and black hair. But the fact that they were signing to each other across the table, their fingers excitedly flying—well, Eileen’s weren’t quite soaring, but she was trying—captured the interest of the largely Chinese clientele lunching here.
Teddy was telling her what had happened outside the clinic yesterday. Eileen watched her fingers. She was signing more slowly than she might have with her husband or her children, but the fire in her eyes conveyed the excitement she felt in recalling the incident. Teddy was saying that the people planning the clinic defense had briefed them against engaging in any physical or verbal dialogue, or any other conduct that would escalate the potential for violence. She signed the words now:Verbal dialogue .
The irony had not been lost on her, nor was it lost on Eileen now. Teddy could not have answered the taunts hurled at her even if she’d chosen to.
I stood there with the blood running down my face,she signed…
…running down her neck and her shoulders and into the crew neck of the T-shirt, her eyes locked with the priest’s eyes for he was the one leading the verbal assault, he was the one directing the chanting as though conducting a church choir, seeing the hurtful words on his lips, the contorted faces of the others, the sheer volume of the attack lost on her, but this they did not know. Their words were literally falling on deaf ears.
She would neither yield nor bend.
The men and women who had come here today to defend the clinic stood shoulder to shoulder with her, and turned their smoldering eyes onto the nine whose frenzy seemed to rise in direct proportion to the silence Teddy would have kept in any event, but which she was incapable of breaking then or any other time. Her gaze fixed, her mouth set, she stared directly into the face of the priest who’d thrown the blood. Behind him, the sky was bluer than any there’d been so far this spring—“Murderers, give the children life! Murderers , give the children…”
“The sons of bitches,” Eileen said, and tried to sign it, but Teddy had already read her lips.
Her own fingers were moving again.
For twenty minutes they…
…tried to provoke a response from her, nine of them in a tight semicircle, raping her with their taunting shouts while the blood caked around her eyes and in the curves and ridges of her unhearing ears and at the corners of her mouth. The PRO-CHOICE shirt was sticky with blood, its blue turned purple from the infusion of red.
She kept staring into the priest’s dark eyes.
It was such a beautiful spring day, she signed now.
Eileen looked at her. Green eyes wide in expectation.
So?she signed.
This she knew how to sign.
Simple word.
So?
Teddy opened her eyes as wide as Eileen’s, and raised her eyebrows and her shoulders in remembered surprise.
They simplyleft! she signed.
“Good,” Eileen whispered, and nodded. She clumsily signed You did it, girl , and reached across the table to take Teddy’s hands in her own.
Teddy smiled.
Yep, the smile said.
She didn’t even have to sign it.
THE WOMAN who opened the door of the white clapboard house on Merriwether Lane was in her seventies, Budd guessed. White-haired and stooped, wearing absurdly large eyeglasses whose frames glittered with what appeared to be sequins, she peered at his detective shield and I.D. card, and then said, “Yes, sir, how can I help you?”
“This is my partner,” he said, “Detective Dellarosa.”
“Yes?”
Somewhat impatiently. Seventy fuckin years old, Budd thought, in a big hurry to go someplace.
“May we come in, please?” he asked.
“What’s this about?” she asked.
“Does a man named Rubin Shanks live here?”
“He does.”
“We’d like to ask him a few questions, please.”
“My husband isn’t fit to answer any questions,” she said.
“Can you tell me your name, ma’am?”
“Margaret Shanks.”
“Mrs. Shanks, we’ve been talking to the man runs the Shell station downtown on Laker? He says he gave your husband a lift back here two days ago….”
“Yes?”
“Did he?”
“What’s this about?” she said again.
“It’s about your husband leaving a blue 1987 Acura Legend coupe at that Shell station yesterday.”
“I don’t know anything about that,” she said.
“Man there says the car was pushed in cause your husband couldn’t get it started. He left it there with his keys and the man drove him home. Is that right, ma’am?”
“We don’t own a blue car.”
“What kind of car do you own, ma’am?”
“A black one.”
“What year and make, ma’am?”
“I don’t know what this is all about.”
“What year and make, ma’am?”
“A 1987 Acura.”
“Would it be a Legend, ma’am?”
“Yes.”
“A coupe?”
“Yes.”
“Can you tell me where that car is now?”
“Right here in the garage.”
“Ma’am, we’d really like to talk to your husband, if that’s okay with you.”
“I told you, my husband isn’t…”
“Who’s that, Meg?”
The detectives looked past her to where a white-haired, balding man appeared behind her left shoulder. He, too, was wearing eyeglasses. He seemed older than the woman, closer to eighty, Budd guessed.