Campion had good hearing. He turned to watch me coming while I was still ten feet off.
“Mr. Campion,” I said. “My name is Sarah Pribek,” I said. “I’m a friend of Marlinchen Hennessy.”
“Marlinchen?” he said, surprised. “Then you know Hugh?” he said.
“Not exactly,” I said. “I’d like to talk to you.”
“You’ve been waiting for me here?” he asked.
I acknowledged it. “You’re hard to track down otherwise. I tried to find you through your publisher and phone listings, but I didn’t have any luck.”
Campion watched a pair of squirrels fight over a perch high in a tree. “That seems like a lot of planning just to meet me,” he said, slowly. “You’re not here to talk about Vedic references in Turning Shadow, are you?”
“No,” I said. “I’m not.”
“So how is it that you know Marlinchen, but not Hugh?” he said.
“I met Marlinchen only recently,” I explained. “Hugh had a serious stroke two months ago.”
“I didn’t read about that,” he said.
“It wasn’t in the news,” I said.
“How bad is it?” Campion said.
If I satisfied his curiosity right here, I’d give up an incentive for him to talk with me. “I’ll tell you all about it,” I said, “but I was hoping we could talk someplace more”-private wasn’t the word, as no one was within earshot-“comfortable.”
Campion didn’t bite right away. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but I don’t really understand who you are.”
“I’m a Hennepin County Sheriff’s detective,” I said, “but this isn’t an official investigation. I’m helping Marlinchen with a family situation.” I looked down the hill, to where I’d parked. “Like I said, I’d like to talk to you about it, but this might not be the place.”
“Maybe not,” Campion said. “Would you have a problem with a bar?”
I’d been curious what sort of drink a poet might order in a bar. The answer wasn’t very exciting: Budweiser. I had a Heineken to keep him company. We sat at a table near the back of the bar, next to a pair of unoccupied pool tables.
In my line of work, you usually have the luxury of saying, I’m asking the questions here, even if you don’t have to say it in so many words. Either you’re interrogating suspects who are under arrest, or you’re interviewing witnesses who are intimidated by the gravity of the situation they’ve gotten involved in. In those situations, the answers generally flow one way, toward you.
With Campion, I had to give information to get information. It wasn’t that he was unfriendly. But he hadn’t been in contact with the Hennessy family for nearly fifteen years. He wouldn’t even understand the questions I was asking until I explained a few things about the Hennessys’ situation. Nor, I thought, would he be inclined to. He didn’t know me, and he only had my word that I was here on Marlinchen’s behalf.
I told Campion about Hugh’s stroke, Marlinchen’s quest to find her brother, and Aidan’s return, keeping quiet only about Hugh’s child abuse. When I was done, Campion said, “It’s been fourteen years. I don’t know what I can tell you that’ll help.”
“Tell me about fourteen years ago.” I drank a little of my Heineken. “What’d you and Hugh Hennessy fight about?”
“I don’t know,” Campion told me.
“Of course you know,” I said levelly. Campion didn’t seem the type to be offended by straight talk. “Friendships don’t break up permanently for no reason.”
“You’ll have to ask Hugh, when he’s better,” Campion said. “I know how it sounds, but to this day, I don’t know what he was so angry about.”
“Tell me how it happened,” I said.
He settled back in his chair. “I was on the road a lot back then. Minnesota was like a home base for me, because Hugh and Elisabeth were here.” He drank. “One night, I got into town late and went by their place. I hadn’t seen them in about four months. When I got there, Hugh wouldn’t let me in.” Campion shook his head, as if freshly baffled. “He said I was a bad influence on his kids, I’d always been jealous of his success, and he didn’t want me coming around anymore. Then he shut the door and didn’t open it again.”
“And then what?” I asked.
“I left,” Campion said. “I wasn’t going to mope at the door, like a dog who’d been bad. I called him a few days later, to see if he’d gotten over whatever it was. He told me not to call again, and hung up on me.”
“Did you ever talk to Elisabeth?” I asked.
“No. I tried, but she never answered the phone. It was always Hugh.”
“Do you think Elisabeth was at the root of Hugh’s anger?” I asked. “Was he jealous?”
Campion stiffened, as if about to take offense. Then he relaxed a little. “I guess when a guy’s bringing flowers to a woman’s grave ten years after she died, it’s not a big secret he’s hung up on her,” he admitted. “But Elisabeth made her choice, and I respected that. And she would never have been unfaithful to him. Hugh knew that.”
Campion shook his head again, as if letting go of a mystery that would never be solved. He drained the last of his beer.
After getting us another round, I asked, “If it wasn’t about Elisabeth, could it have been about her sister?”
“Brigitte?” Campion said. “What about her?”
“You had a relationship with Brigitte, didn’t you?”
“It didn’t last, but yeah, I did.”
“Hugh didn’t seem to like her. She never visited the family or vice versa.”
Campion tilted his head, thinking. “You have to understand,” he said slowly, “that Hugh was a rigid guy. Morally rigid. Brigitte did some drugs; she did some guys. Hugh didn’t like that. In contrast, he and Elisabeth were married at 19. That was almost medieval, for the times.”
“I know,” I said. “If Hugh disapproved of her so much, why do you suppose he’d send Aidan to live with her?”
Campion frowned. “I have no idea,” he said. “You’re asking me to make a guess, and I’ve already proven I don’t understand what makes Hugh Hennessy tick.” He watched as a woman in her early twenties, with brilliant coppery hair, half jumped onto the bar and kissed the bartender hello, supporting herself with the heels of her hands. “I’m more surprised that Gitte would have taken the kid in. She never had much money, and she was a single mother herself by then.”
I had been lifting my glass toward my mouth, and stopped midway. “Really?” I said. Aidan hadn’t mentioned living with a cousin.
Campion nodded. “She let me stay at her place once, several years after we had our quick, flame-out affair. She had- it’s a dated term, but I thought of this guy as her common-law husband.”
It was an old-fashioned term, one that some of the grizzled veterans used around the squad room, as common in its day as baby mama is now. Generally, it was used in describing the affairs of slum dwellers whose idea of couples counseling involved frying pans or screaming matches. Campion didn’t sound like he meant it that way.
“You know how some people are really together, even when they’re not married? You can just tell it’s a serious thing?” he said.
I nodded.
“That was her and Paul. I forget his last name. Something French. They were obviously good for each other.”
“Well, they couldn’t have been that good together,” I pointed out, “if she was a single mother years later.”