17
Peralta had already driven away when I saw the FedEx package leaning neatly against the front door. It was letter-sized. Too small to contain a head; eyeballs or ears, maybe. Anthrax or a small explosive, definitely. I asked Robin if she was expecting anything-neither was I. On the long walk up to the door, I thought about calling the police. I scanned the dark sidewalks, seeing nothing, not even a car parked on the street. But I was so damned tired, had seen so much death that night, that I just picked it up and unlocked the door.
Once the alarm was disarmed, I took the envelope into the study and zipped it open, keeping the opening away from my face. Inside were some Xerox copies of old newspaper clippings and a five-thousand-dollar check drawn on the account of Judson Lee, Attorney at Law. It wasn’t signed. He had included a note: “My offer still stands.”
“He wants you pretty bad,” Robin said.
“But I don’t want him.”
“It might do you some good. Get outside yourself for a while. I know you can use the money.”
“Peralta wants to rope me into being a P.I.”
“A private dick, huh?” Her eyes gleamed merrily. She undid her bun and shook out her hair across her shoulders. It gleamed with colors ranging from light brown to gold. “I’ll help you. I’m a good researcher-a curator has to have those skills. This would be a healthy break from trying to keep track of all these cartels and gangs. It can be the return of the History Shamus.”
That had been Lindsey’s nickname for me, but I didn’t mind that Robin used it. It actually felt good. My eye wandered to the photo on the desk. It showed me, Lindsey and Robin last summer in Flagstaff. The weather was gentle in the high country and our smiles genuine and joyous. Robin was the only other person who knew that Lindsey was pregnant, and this drew them even closer together. We decided we would wait until Lindsey passed the three-month mark to tell anyone else.
Our new reality was only beginning to settle in. Much of our conversations revolved around the kind of parents we wouldn’t be. We wouldn’t call our child a kid, which is a goat. We wouldn’t take a newborn into the Sheriff’s Office and parade it around like some consumer product bought at Walmart. Our child would be raised in a real neighborhood with front porches and neighbors who knew each other, in a house with books, music, and ideas, a doting aunt who would teach her about art, and most of all, a house of love. She would go to a public school, just as we had done. I called the baby a she, and Lindsey was convinced it would be a son. We laughed over it and agreed to let God surprise us.
Robin picked up the photo, studied it, and replaced it on the desk. She sat on the blotter and looked down at me.
“When we were growing up, there was such…chaos.” Robin searched for that last word. “Linda had Lindsey Faith when she was sixteen. So you can imagine the sexual competition between the two, when Lindsey was sixteen and luminous, and Linda was an attractive woman in her early thirties.” She smiled. “I paid good money to therapists to learn all this shit. Lindsey Faith was the peacemaker, my protector. She kept the family together through it all.”
“Why do you call her Lindsey Faith?”
“Because it’s a beautiful name.”
“What’s your middle name?”
“Someday I’ll tell you.”
“You were the teenage rebel,” I said.
“How’d you guess? We moved every couple of years. There was always a new boyfriend and most of them were creeps who wanted to sleep with Lindsey or me. Seriously. This was what we grew up in. Our mom wasn’t a bad person. She was just very creative and very overwhelmed by life. She wanted to be an artist and she ended up working as a cocktail waitress.”
“Lindsey said she had schizophrenia. That’s why she had always said she didn’t want children. And it was all right with me.”
Robin tilted her head, closed her eyes, summoning a past both sisters would rather forget. “My bet is Linda was bipolar and it was aggravated by drugs and anger and heartbreak in her life, but what do I know?”
“And Lindsey lived her life to not become her mother.”
“Yes. And I think it was a struggle for her. Mother and daughter were very alike when I think back on it. I was the foundling. She fought to be normal and stable. She had her devils, always hearing Linda’s voice in her head, that she wasn’t good enough, that she was a screw-up. I used to joke with her and say, ‘Turn off your Linda Unit’-that critical voice she heard in her head. She never did. She just kept those devils chained up.”
“Don’t we all?”
“I suppose. Every family has its skeletons. Ours was a skeleton festival.” She said it without humor. “I don’t know how we survived.”
I said, “Lindsey blames me for what happened.”
She rubbed her hands gently on her jeans. “That’s not true, David. You blame yourself. She blames herself. She wanted so much to give you a child, so your DNA could carry on in the world.”
“And hers.”
After a long silence, Robin said, “I remember after we first met, we went out one night. I think I put the moves on you. Tall, smart men always get me going.”
“Sexual competition again?”
“Oh, I’m a free spirit, David. I make no apologies. But I do remember telling you that Lindsey had a baby when she was in high school.”
I did remember, all of it.
“You just thought I was messing with you. But it’s the truth. She got pregnant. The father was one of the high-school hoods, but she had a crush on him, and was so naive. And she got pregnant. Now I think it was a cry for help, as they say. Anyway, Linda wouldn’t let her keep the baby. She put it up for adoption. Lindsey Faith never got over that. So in her mind, she’s lost two babies.”
I fought the tightness in my throat.
“It’s been an awful night,” Robin said. “I’ve never seen anyone killed before. I was so afraid for you. Let’s go to bed.”
I looked at the photo again.
“I can’t call her to say we’re okay, can I?”
“No,” Robin said.
“Because she won’t talk to me, or because she’s not even at her apartment?” She’s not wearing her wedding band.
Robin gave me a look, her eyes sleepy and her mouth in something like a half-smile. Then she looked away. “David, you’ve given me a great gift. You’ve brought out a gentle side I never knew I had. You’ve watched out for me. With all that happened tonight, I felt safe and taken care of. When you covered me with your body, you were willing to die in order to save me.” She reached down and mussed my hair. “It’s so much more than that. You’ve let me into you. I would never betray that trust.”
Now it was my turn to look away. I felt so sad and strange. And so suddenly aware of how dependent I had become on protecting Robin, on being the knight in, well, tarnished armor, and, yes, I had let her in. Dr. Sharon wouldn’t approve.
Robin hadn’t given me a straight answer about Lindsey. But, of course, she had.
18
I started on the case the next day. Case? No, a research project. I was not a deputy any longer, not a private investigator. I was just a guy at loose ends.
We had a long lunch with Judson Lee at the Phoenician, poolside at the Oasis Bar & Grill. The dismal economy seemed far away, but like nearby Scottsdale, the resort had a dull falseness to it. Miami depended on tourists, too. But it was sexy, edgy, and authentic. Phoenix just had a lot of people, and in the places where most people lived, no soul. Nobody would ever do “CSI Phoenix” for television.
The server, an attractive brunette in her twenties, seemed to know him well and he flirted relentlessly with her. The posh surroundings were a shock when compared with our recent sojourns. The clientele were all white, all rich. Add in all the people in Maricopa County who were white, poor, and desperately looking for someone, anyone, to blame for their straits-a substantial demographic-and this was the constituency of the new sheriff. I tried to set the thought aside.