When the stupid phone rang again, it jerked me so hard that my neck twanged with whiplash. The clock read 5:10, the room still so dark that the three-inch clock numerals could be read without trifocals. In a moment, I found the side table, and then the phone.
“Gastner.” I relaxed back, eyes closed, phone tight to my ear. The connection was silent-no voice, nothing in the background, not even the click of circuits or automatic dialers. Thinking it a repeat of the midnight call, I was about to hang up. But then a voice broke the silence, and it was almost a whisper.
Chapter Thirty-four
“What’s going to happen?”
I lay motionless, letting the words sink in, giving my foggy brain time to spool up. There was no point in sputtering a bunch of noise. I knew the voice, and I could guess the mix of emotions behind it.
“Are you awake?”
“Yes, I’m awake,” I replied.
“I need to talk to you,” Maggie Payton Borman said. “Can I do that?”
“Here we are.”
The line was quiet for so long that I could have gotten up, put on the coffee, and returned to bed. But I remained quiet in the companionable silence, concentrating on listening for background noises, wondering where Maggie was, what she was doing.
“She’s not going to give up, is she.”
I could have asked for an explanation, for a repetition, but that wasn’t necessary. I knew exactly what-and who-Maggie meant.
“No, she’s not,” I said. I didn’t add that Undersheriff Estelle Reyes-Guzman would be conferring with the district attorney later this morning. The phone went silent as Maggie gave me plenty of time to be forthcoming, but I outwaited her.
“Did you know just how ill Dad was?” she asked.
“I think I did.”
“His prostate cancer had metastasized, Bill. More than we had thought. Dr. Perrone said that he should be on morphine, but dad refused. Did you know that?”
“No.” I could not imagine crusty, garrulous old George doubled over, whimpering with agony. I heard a long, shuddering sigh from his daughter.
“You know, that wasn’t his greatest fear, Bill. Not the pain.”
“I don’t think your father was afraid of anything,” I said.
“Oh, he was. He was.” Maggie laughed, but it was a sad sound, a hopeless little chuckle. She lowered her voice and the growled imitation of George Payton was pretty accurate. “’I’m going to end up in goddamn diapers,’ he’d say.”
“It’s not easy,” I said.
“The past two weeks have been really hard, Bill. Just awful.”
I didn’t know what I was supposed to say. I would have understood if George had selected a favorite gun from his diminishing collection and put an end to the agony. But that would have been his choice, a choice that he was free to make. Evidence didn’t suggest that George had dosed his own wine with histamine diphosphate, and he never would have chosen that route anyway.
“Will you tell me what you think?”
“What I think doesn’t matter at this point.”
“I need to know, Bill. I want to know what you think.”
“What I think. Well, on several occasions, your father said what mattered to him most was cleaning up his mess. Not leaving a tangle behind that someone else-no doubt you-would have to clean up.”
“He talked with you about that sort of thing?”
“Oh, yes. Two old geezers, gumming away. He might not have been especially demonstrative about it, but he cared about you, Maggie. He was proud of you. He didn’t want to leave something behind that someone else would have to unsnarl.”
“That’s dad,” Maggie agreed. “Very neat, very organized in some ways.”
“Yep. He had a lot of different properties, as you are well aware. He was in the process of giving them all away…well, I don’t know that. He was in the process of giving some of them away. To Herb Torrance, to the county, maybe others.”
“And you think…”
“Yes. I do.” Hell, why not. We’d jumped into the deep water. “You’re used to making a profit, Maggie. That’s what you do. If your father left a will behind, I have no doubt that he left his estate to you, not that it’s any of my business.”
“He didn’t leave a will. That’s one of the things he kept saying that he was going to do.”
“Well, regardless. What do I think? I think that you convinced yourself that if bringing on the inevitable would stop the loss of property from his estate, even if you had to wait for probate, then there you go.”
“You agree with her, then.” Her.
“You’re referring to the undersheriff, I suppose.”
“You know I am.”
“Using her name is difficult for you?”
Silence greeted that remark. “No,” Maggie said, sounding like a little kid. “I feel hunted. I can’t sleep, I can’t tend to business, I can’t imagine what’s going to happen now. Everything I worked for…”
“A bunch of choices,” I said. “Where are you now?”
“I’m…” and she hesitated. “Are you going to call in? Do you have one of those pager things that alerts the department?”
“I’m retired,” I said. “You’ve got the edge. Where are you, Maggie?”
“I can’t do this,” she said, as if talking to someone else.
“Is Phil there with you?”
She laughed. “Dear Phil. No, he’s not. He’s home, sound asleep. I don’t know how he does it. Are you recording this now?”
“No.”
“You’ll testify, though.”
“Yes.”
“Will you tell me how these things work?”
“These things take time,” I said. “If the district attorney wants to go the grand jury route, you’ll be notified. The target of the investigation always is. You have the opportunity to testify on your own behalf during a grand jury hearing if you wish. You aren’t required to. You aren’t even required to attend. If the grand jury indicts you, you’ll be taken into custody, the judge will set bail, and a trial date will be set. That could be early next year. These things don’t exactly move at the goddamn speed of light.”
“My God,” she whispered. “They really think I did this?”
“They don’t have to think anything, Maggie. All a grand jury does is determine that sufficient question, sufficient evidence, exists to warrant a trial. They decide whether or not a petit jury will hear the case to decide innocence or guilt. That’s my version of Justice System 101.” I reached out, turned on the bedside light, and found my glasses. The little cell phone, with all its nifty features that Estelle had programmed for me, that I’d learned to carry most of the time, rested out on the kitchen counter. The undersheriff was one click away.
“What if they don’t think that?”
“Don’t think what?” I pulled the blanket up around my shoulders.
“That I killed my father. What if the evidence…”
“Then you’re free to continue your life.”
“But she’ll make sure there’s evidence, won’t she,” Maggie whispered.
“That’s her job, Maggie.”
“And she’s very, very good at it,” Maggie added, and I heard more resignation than bitterness. “What do you think, Bill?”
I sighed. “Are we going into rewind here? I told you what I think.”
“You think I killed my father so he wouldn’t give away his properties? So I could make a profit on them?”
“What I think at this point doesn’t matter.”
“It matters to me, Bill.”
I took a deep breath and pulled the blanket a little more snuggly around my neck. “All right. Yes, that’s what I think happened.” She started to say something, but interrupted herself. “I think you got too clever, Maggie. That’s what I think. Now, why? Well, we humans have this goddamn wonderful capacity not to recognize slippery slopes when we’re standing on the brink. We don’t remember how momentum works once we stumble over the edge, once we take that one step too far. You thought that we all would just accept on face value that your father had the expected seizure. You didn’t give us much credit.” Not us, I thought. Her.