“I was trying to protect her from what people would think.”
“You were trying to protect yourself from what people would think.”
“Jim—”
“Just admit it. That’s the least you can do.”
Virginia’s gnarled hands spread and closed upon her legs, looking for something to hold besides each other. “Yes,” she said quietly. “But also, I believed I was doing right. I consider the whole chapter the most... the great shame of my life. When I took away Ann’s son, I had no idea I was taking away the only child she’d ever have, the only thing that might have prevented all this from happening. I thought it was best. I truly believed it was the right thing to do.”
In the quiet that followed, Jim listened to his mother’s hesitant breathing, to the water lapping outside, to the steady, slow throbbing of his own heart.
Joseph, staring at his feet, then told about his correspondence courses in genealogy — taken while an inmate at the state hospital — his growing curiosities about his own beginnings, his fateful glance at his hospital file one afternoon while a disturbance took all the orderlies away for a few minutes, his final confirmation of what he had suspected all along — that he had never seen his actual parents. Then his burglary of the Los Angeles law offices referred to in his file, and later, his hours with library microfiche, finding out all he could about Virginia Weir and Blake Cantrell of Newport Beach — whose signatures were indelibly fixed in his mind from the law firm’s adoption records of 1967. Joseph’s voice changed as he told about first seeing Ann, playing with the toddlers at work. A strange urgency came into it, an edge that suggested unresolvable intensities. “I’m still not sure why,” Joseph said. “But I couldn’t go up to her. I wasn’t sure what to say, if she’d believe me, or if I might be doing something to hurt her by telling her who I was. So I followed her and watched her and took pictures. I talked to her only once. I asked her what time it was. She said quarter ’til ten. That was all we got to say to each other in twenty-four years. ‘What time is it?’ ‘Quarter ’til ten.’ I was so nervous, I could feel my feet sweating in my shoes. The next thing I knew, she was dead.” Joseph clutched the top of his backpack and looked down at his hands. He turned up his palms and looked at those, too. He said that there was something about the way she died that he “understood.” It took him a few days to try to see his father. But Cantrell wasn’t available by phone; his security guards wouldn’t even let Joseph onto the floor where his offices were; and he had so many homes in the south county that Joseph could never figure out in which one he really lived. So he wrote the letter on Mrs. Fostes’s word processor and proposed the meeting in the cemetery.
Joseph said that Cantrell had showed up as planned, and offered him sanctuary in a big home overlooking the water in Laguna. A man named Dale was assigned to help him get what he needed, but Joseph had quickly surmised that Dale was more his keeper than his butler. “Today about ten in the morning,” he said, “Dale showed up without... without my father and said that he was arranging for me to see my grandmother — Virginia.”
Virginia leaned forward on the sofa. “When I’d confirmed what I suspected about Joseph, it wasn’t hard to figure he’d be in contact with Cantrell. David denied it, but I traced Joseph to one of his houses. But by the time I got there, Cantrell was gone and Blodgett wasn’t exactly going to hand Joseph over,” she said. “The situation was that Blodgett knew the toxic-spill investigation would lead to him sooner or later — Becky’s press conference told him as much. He came right out and told me that he and Louis Braga were dumping in the ocean. I was to prevail upon Becky to drop that angle, and give Blodgett fifty thousand dollars in cash to bring Joseph to me. Otherwise, he’d kill him.” She shook her head at Blodgett’s apparent stupidity.
“Well, what did you do?” asked Jim.
Virginia looked at him, then at Joseph, then back to Jim. “I agreed to everything, left, and told Blodgett I had put the money out on one of the light beacons at the end of the jetty, so to hand over my grandson and I’d tell him which one. He said he didn’t believe me, which is just what I thought he’d say. He took me along for the ride, which is just what I thought he’d do. Joseph was on the boat, too, of course — Blodgett guessed the cops would be all over Cantrell’s properties sooner than later. Out in the middle of the bay, there was this accident that involved a gaff and the back of Dale Blodgett’s idiot head. Later, some matches got mixed up with the fuel. Joseph and I were lucky to get overboard and swim back to my car. We ditched our life jackets and sat with Mackie Ruff in his little ghetto while the police buzzed and the Harbor Patrol put out the fire. Mackie had some blankets and rum and a fire to dry our clothes. Mackie said he was a reserve cop now. By the time it was over, we just kind of drove away. That’s the only time I’ll tell that story — I’ll never tell it again. I will answer no questions, entertain no discussion. It had to be done and I will talk about it no further. Joseph has the definitive version.”
Joseph studied his hands again, then turned his clear blue eyes to Jim. “Your mother and I were... reunited by Mr. Blodgett, down at the dock. He went to go get the money and his boat blew up. We swam out to help if we could — but we couldn’t find him.”
“You forgot something,” said Virginia, in much the same tone with which she had drilled Jim on multiplication tables when he was ten.
“Later,” he said, “we took a rental boat out of the locker and got the money off the beacon.”
Jim had to admit it was a pretty tidy package. With all the other action for Dennison to cover, the whereabouts of Virginia Weir would be far down on the list. When Marge sang to the grand jury, Braga would be the only one left standing to take the fall — or, would he?
“So Blodgett was doing the dumping all along?”
“He was proud of it. It’s been going on for years — way before he volunteered to be the one-man Toxic Waste patrol. He’d been doing ‘personal security’ work for Cantrell off and on for a decade. Cantrell was using plenty of TCE to paint all his new condos and houses. He was using Cheverton money to pay Blodgett and Braga to handle the disposal. That was just to keep PacifiCo out of the loop, in case someone like Becky or I wanted to make something of it — Cantrell could just say he handled his own waste. It was supposed to be by the book — permits and licenses, a thousand each for Dale and Braga to transport it to a Long Beach company every other month for disposal. Well, Dale and Braga just split the seven thousand that was supposed to go to the Long Beach people, and dumped the stuff ten miles out instead of transporting it to Long Beach. Everything was fine until Annie and I started finding trace. Things got bad when Duty Free threw a rod in the harbor and they either had to jettison the solvent or take it back to Cheverton. They panicked and dumped it.”
Weir tried to figure. “Who were they scared of? If Blodgett was the Toxic Waste patrol, who was left to watch him?”
“Cantrell,” said Virginia. “Annie had seen them loading drums at Cheverton, and she must have told him. Cantrell thought everything was legal. He never knew until Ann found out, then he landed on Blodgett and Braga.”
“Why did Blodgett tell you all this?”
“Because he was going to kill us after he got the money,” said Joseph. He looked down, blushing, and clasped his hands together. In a quiet voice, he added, “I could tell by the way he was moving.”
“What about Dennison?” asked Becky. “Can we sink him?”
“He didn’t know what Blodgett was up to, either. He was too busy rising to the top to worry about what all his men were doing. And of course Dale was bringing him whatever Brian could use about what we were doing politically — and in the bay. When Dale told you he’d seen Sea Urchin that night, he’d already told Dennison, too. That’s why Brian was so worried. He thought we were dumping to make a campaign issue out of it, but he couldn’t prove it. I don’t see how he can save his public face now — with one of his men confessed to murder and the other dumping toxins into the bay. By the time the press gets done with cover-up speculations and Marge Buzzard talks to the grand jury, Dennison will be finished. He knows that. I think he’ll withdraw. Congratulations, Mayor Flynn.”