“Screw it, let him come in.” A male voice, young, despondent.
“You sure, honey?”
“Am I sure? Of course I’m not sure. I’m not sure of a thing right now. But you might as well let him in.” Hard to know which was the dominant tone, the fear or the self-pity.
“He didn’t kill anybody, Mr. Conrad. He really didn’t.”
I followed her into a room that was a coffin of old griefs and old fears, the sort of place the human animal goes to hide out like any other animal that is being chased by yesterday. The room was painted mustard yellow. There was a double bed that appeared to slant from both ends into the middle. The ugly brown bedspread once had merry nubs on it. Most of the nubs were gone. There was a bathroom. The doorknob was missing, so all that remained was a hole. The tiles on the room floor curled upward in places. I couldn’t be sure, but tiny pieces on the floor looked like rat droppings.
Bobby Flaherty sat in the only chair, a beaten armchair with so many stains they looked like part of the design. He was a handsome kid in a sullen way. He wore a black sweatshirt, jeans, and blue running shoes. Gwen closed the door behind me. “You be nice to him, Bobby. He wants to help us.”
Bobby added to the haze of smoke in the room by tamping out another cigarette from the pack on his lap. He dug out a long blue plastic lighter and snicked it into flame. He blew out enough smoke to hide behind. He just watched me, animal-alert, assessing a potential enemy.
“You call the police before you came over here?”
“No. I wanted to talk to you.”
“You be nice,” Gwen snapped. She might have been talking to her snarling dog. “Tell him you appreciate how he’s helped me. You promised you would.”
He laughed but in a tender way. “Honey, I do appreciate it. But I want to make sure he didn’t call the cops. Is that all right?”
“He said he didn’t call the police. And I believe him.”
He stared at me through the blue haze. “All right, I believe him.” Then: “I didn’t kill anybody.”
“All right. But you were seen running from Monica Davies’s room. And there’s a witness who said you’ve had several fistfights with your father.”
“Heather,” he said. “He could really pick ’em.”
The east wall hummed with TV dialogue from the room next door. I sat on the edge of the bed.
“How did your father get back in touch with you?”
“Why?”
“Because your mother is very worried about you. And so is Jim Shapiro and so am I. You’ve got to face this, Bobby. I’m trying real hard to believe you’re innocent, but I have to know what happened, starting with your father coming back into your life.”
“If you don’t tell him, Bobby, I will. You need to let him help us.”
Bobby’s glance met hers. He sighed and looked back at me. “I got adopted out to the Flahertys when I was little, that’s where I picked up the name. I didn’t know anything about my old man until a year ago. He managed to track me down.” The smile was bitter. “He was a con man. Did some time in Joliet for running a scam in Chicago, so he wouldn’t have had much trouble getting through the adoption system and finding out where I lived. He gave them a bullshit story that they went for. He was very good at bullshit.” There was nothing but contempt in his voice for his father. “But I’m probably being hypocritical. I did a little time in county myself. The six longest months of my life. Got drunk and got into a fight and beat the guy up pretty bad. By then the Flahertys didn’t want me around anymore and I couldn’t blame them. I’d been in trouble a lot in school and they just couldn’t deal with me anymore. All the time I was in county I kept thinking of how good they’d been to me and how I’d hurt them. I was a real asshole.”
“But you’re not anymore, honey.”
This smile was warm. “She’s my number-one fan.”
“What did your father say to you when he found you?”
He fired up another cigarette. As a card-carrying liberal I should have whipped out my CD about the dangers of secondhand smoke, especially around pregnant women, but I decided I’d be selfish and push him for more information instead.
“He gave me a line of crap about how sorry he was he’d never contacted me and how he wanted to make it all up to me and how he’d had some rough times — the way he told it, he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time and he’d made the mistake of hanging around the wrong kind of people and he’d had a bad childhood, all the usual bullshit — and that he wanted to help me make some money so I could get the chance in life that he’d never had. I just sort of watched him — I actually thought it was kind of funny. The way he was trying to work me, I mean. I think he actually thought I believed everything he was saying about wanting to be my old man now and how we’d hang together the rest of our lives.”
“He scared me. There was just something about him.” Gwen had her hands pressed protectively against her stomach as she said this. “And I hated what he got Bobby involved in.”
Bobby’s shrug hinted at my reaction to her words. Bobby was smart. Bobby was tough. Nobody involved him in anything — he involved himself.
“The blackmail?”
“Yeah.”
“His idea was to present you as proof that you were his son with Susan Cooper?”
“Right. We were going to make a lot of money. And the way he figured it, we’d keep on making money as long as she kept running for office.”
“I was totally against it,” Gwen said. “By that time I hated that man. And now look what’s happened.”
“Why did you go to Monica’s room?”
His eyes found his wife’s. “I was going to tell her to forget it. That I didn’t want any part of what she and my old man were up to. I wasn’t getting anywhere with my old man, so I thought I’d try Monica. Gwen really leaned on me about it. She said that she didn’t want to bring our baby into the world this way. When I got there Monica was already dead. I ran and that’s when somebody saw me. And as soon as Mr. Shapiro got me out of jail, I went to my old man’s to tell him the same thing — that I didn’t want my name mixed up in it, that I was going to have a kid now. He didn’t care.”
“How did Larson get involved in this? He said that Monica worked this by herself.”
“I don’t know. He just started showing up and one day we got into it. All I knew was that the money was coming from Natalie. And Monica was handling that. Larson wanted to know all the details.”
“Bobby, do you have any idea who killed Donovan and Monica?”
He ran a rough hand across his face. “No. When that Indian detective was firing questions at me, I kept wishing that I knew a name to give her. But I don’t.”
“You need to turn yourself in, Bobby.”
He glared at Gwen. “I told you that he’d say this.” His gaze on me was no less harsh. “No way, man. We can raise our baby in Mexico. Start a life there.”
“You read much about Mexico lately, Bobby?”
“You mean all the drug gangs? I know how to handle myself. And I know how to stay out of trouble.”
At any other time I would have smiled. The life he’d described as his own had been nothing but trouble, ending in this motel room wanted for two murders.
Gwen said, “I don’t want to move to Mexico. But I don’t want Bobby to give himself up, either. I might never see him again.” She put her head down and started crying softly. Bobby got up and went over and sat next to her on the bed. He held her and I felt good for both of them. He was troubled and half crazed, but he knew enough to care for the one person in his life whose love was clean and true.
I made an effort to sound gentle. “You can’t run, Bobby. There’s no place to go. And I doubt you have any money.”