“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.”
Campion shook his head at my assumption. “Paul never left her. He died.” His voice dropped a little lower. “I was there.”
I wasn’t prompting him at all, by this point. There was a story inside him that wanted to come out.
“Paul wasn’t threatened by an old flame, so when I came to visit, I planned to stay for a week,” Campion said. “They’d been living together for three years. Gitte was happy. Paul did something in construction. God, he was a big guy. Maybe six-four, and tough. But a good guy. Thought the world of Gitte and the kid. Their son, Jacob, was two years old.
“Toward the end of the week, I went out drinking with Paul. We went to this bar he liked, a real bucket of blood. I’ve been in some bars in my day, and even so, I was glad to have Paul at my side. We were fine until Gitte’s neighbors came in. These guys- I don’t use this kind of language lightly, but trust me, I’m a wordsmith- these guys were douche bags.”
I smiled to let him know I wasn’t offended.
“Gitte’s neighbors raised pit bulls to fight,” Campion said. “The dogs scared the hell out of Gitte, not just for her sake, but for Jacob’s. She wanted the neighbors to pay their share of a better fence between the two yards, but these guys’ attitude was ‘You want the fence, you pay the whole nickel.’
“Paul was willing to ignore them that afternoon, but they starting getting in his face, making remarks about Gitte. Then it was on. Half the bar jumped into the fight. Me included. I’m not much of a fighter, but Paul was my drinking buddy at the time. Them’s the rules, you know?”
“I know,” I said.
“I got my clock cleaned fairly early, but Paul… I’ve never seen anyone fight quite like that. The thing is, he looked happy. Incandescent.” Campion shook his head, remembering. “It took four cops to subdue him and get him into the squad car. I walked outside after them. They left Paul to sit there while they mopped up the rest of the fight. But as soon as Paul was in the backseat, he put his head down, against the window, and closed his eyes, like all the fight had gone out of him. Like he was at peace.” Campion paused. “The cops didn’t question it either.”
“Question what?” I said.
“He was dead,” Campion said. “When they got to the police station, he didn’t have a pulse. It was one of those rare, undetected heart conditions, the kind that sometimes makes an athlete drop right after a race. Some lawyers called Gitte afterward, talking about a negligence suit against the cops, but it wasn’t the cops’ fault, and she knew it.” Campion sipped a little more beer. “I stayed around another month afterward, with her and the little boy, Jacob. I wanted to help out. But I wasn’t Paul, and Gitte and I weren’t suited for each other. We’d been down that road before. I moved on.” He shook his head. “I’ll never forget that afternoon, though. I remember walking out of the bar after Paul and the cops, and the sun was setting, and I was standing in that dirt parking lot, and Paul just laid his head down and died. I’ve always wanted to write about it, but I’ve never been able to.”
32
At eight-thirty Monday morning, I was waiting outside Christian Kilander’s office. It was my day off, and I’d dressed for it, in old Levi’s and a loose cream-colored shirt that belonged to Shiloh. Seeing me at his door so early, Kilander arched an eyebrow. “To what do I owe this honor?” he said.
“I already owe you a favor,” I told him, “but I need another one. You did law school and your first clerk’s job in Illinois, right?”
“I knew putting my résumé on file was a bad idea,” he said, balancing coffee and his briefcase in the same hand while he unlocked his door.
I followed him inside. “You’ve still got contacts down there, right?” Kilander was a master networker; I doubted he’d let any useful association grow too much moss.
He set his briefcase down on the credenza and his coffee on the desk. “I see where this is going,” he said. “What do you need, and from whom?”
“Vital records, from Rockford,” I said.
“You know those are public,” Kilander said. “You don’t need to pull strings. Just call and ask.”
“Or I could just call Dial-a-Prayer,” I said.
Government records- birth and death certificates, marriage licenses and decrees of divorce, property records, school enrollments- are documents of public record. They also frequently get misfiled. Or names are misspelled. Or the computer is down. It’s best if you can hunt for what you need in person, taking your time and employing all your patience.