‘Did you know what?’
Graham shook his head. ‘When we first got back together, we’d talked a little about having to put him in a home someday. Back then he’d gotten lost a few times, but the disease wasn’t very advanced. He was functioning pretty well. I think he went to see somebody, some doctor, to get diagnosed, but chickened out before they could run all the tests. He didn’t want to know for sure, didn’t want to face that he had it. But he knew.’
‘And what did he think about being in a home?’
‘There was no way. He wasn’t going to end his life as a vegetable. He made me promise I’d kill him first.’
‘And did you do that? Promise that?’
Cerrone leaned forward. ‘Graham?’
The trance was broken. Momentarily. ‘What?’
‘I’m sure the sergeant meant to inform you that you don’t have to answer any of this. That you can have your lawyer here.’
The alcohol was a definite if subtle presence. Graham reached over and patted the reporter on the arm. ‘Hey, it’s cool, Mike. It’s cool. Sarah’s not here to bust me’ – he turned to her – ‘are you?’
Their eyes met, held. Finally Sarah broke it off. ‘I’m just trying to get to the truth, Graham. I’m trying to find out what happened. You just told me you promised your dad you would kill him…?’
‘If.’ Graham held up a finger. ‘There was a big if.’
‘And what was that?’
‘If the Alzheimer’s snuck up on him, and suddenly his brain wasn’t there. That was when I was going to do it.’
‘How?’
‘I don’t know. I hadn’t figured that yet. Or even if I was really going to. We hadn’t got there. He was still functioning. But then he started getting the headaches and we found out about the tumor…’
‘How did you find out about that?’
Graham’s eyes went to Cerrone for a moment, then to Sarah. ‘This is starting to sound like an interrogation, you know that?’
Sarah tried to bluff it. ‘We’re just talking, Graham.’
He motioned to the tape recorder. ‘With that thing running? You’re telling me you won’t use anything on there?’
She shook her head. ‘No, I can’t tell you that.’
‘So this is an official visit after all?’
Again, the eyes. ‘What else would it be?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘A guy can hope.’ He paused for a longish moment. ‘Sure, Sal went to a doctor, I guess.’
‘Do you know who?’
Another pause, longer this time. Graham sighed heavily and lowered his head, shaking it like a tired dog. ‘You want to go off the record?’
She considered, then shook her head. ‘I can’t do that. I’m investigating your father’s death, Graham. If you know something about it, you can tell me. Do you know the doctor your father consulted or not?’
Graham’s eyes moved to the tape recorder. ‘On the record I don’t know. He went alone. I didn’t live with him, you know. He had a life.’
‘Did he tell you how he paid for this doctor? Didn’t you talk about money?’
Graham shrugged. ‘He told me about the cancer, that they couldn’t operate, it was going to kill him. Then the whole question of putting him in a home kind of became moot. He wasn’t going to get old as some shell in a wheelchair. He wasn’t going to get old at all.’
The simple truth of this fact struck them all dumb. The CD even chose this moment to pause between cuts. Finally, Graham shrugged. ‘Anyway, as I said, the last couple of weeks it got worse.’
But Sarah, now, wasn’t quite ready to move on. Something else was eating at her. ‘The last time we talked on the record,’ she said, ‘you didn’t know what was causing your father all this pain. Now you did know. Do I have that right?’
‘Yeah. I knew. It was the cancer, the tumor.’
‘But you didn’t tell me then?’
Bad though it sounded, the rationale was obvious enough to Graham. ‘I also told you we didn’t see much of each other.’ He broke a grin. ‘Come on, Sarah, I was trying to be consistent and you caught me anyway.’
‘And you still say you don’t know where the morphine came from?’
‘That’s right.’ He pushed his chair back. ‘Hey, can we stop this already? I’m going to open some more wine. You want a little wine? A glass of beer? Mike?’
Sarah declined, and Mike said he had to go. He had a plane at an obscene hour the next morning. The three of them walked to the door, and Graham opened it, shook Mike’s hand, told him good luck. Sarah hung back as Mike crossed the street and started walking downhill toward his car.
Sarah stood crammed next to Graham in the doorway. It seemed to her that every cell in her body was attuned to his proximity. Yet it also felt as though he was daring her not to move. He put an arm on the doorsill just over her shoulder, then put some weight on the arm – all but leaning on her. ‘Are you really leaving?’ he asked her.
She told herself that he wasn’t completely sober. His inhibitions were lowered and, okay, he found her attractive. For the moment he’d forgotten that she was a cop. That was all it was. And she would be damned if she was going to duck away. Raising her head, she was looking up into his eyes.
Bad idea. Whether or not it betrayed her true feelings, she’d better blink. Otherwise, their superficially professional relationship was about to develop an overt new element. And if she thought she had troubles up to now…
She swung under his arm, outside onto the driveway. ‘All right, Graham,’ she said, ‘if you’ll just answer three quick questions, I promise I won’t bother you anymore.’ She broke a conciliatory smile. ‘Tonight.’
‘Then afterward you’ll have a glass of wine with me?’
She shook her head. ‘I can’t. I’m on duty.’
‘So go off duty,’ he said. ‘Ask your three questions, then declare your workday over.’ His eyes never left her face.
This time she met his gaze. ‘First, I want to be clear. You did, in fact, give your father morphine shots from time to time?’
He nodded. ‘I said that.’
Actually, he hadn’t said that, Sarah knew, but he’d been speaking so freely and he’d had enough to drink that she wasn’t surprised that he didn’t remember exactly what he had admitted. But he was telling the truth now. ‘How often?’
‘Is that the second question?’
She thought about it, and decided it could be. ‘Yeah.’
‘Couple of times a week, if I was there. He didn’t like to shoot himself up. Okay, what’s the third question?’
‘After the two calls on Friday morning, when your dad called you in great pain, why didn’t you go over there to help him?’
This last hurdle didn’t slow Graham at all. He brought his arm down off the door, took a step toward her. ‘Well, tell you the truth, that’s what I did.’ Spreading his hands, he grinned sheepishly. ‘And guess what?’ he asked. ‘The old fart had gone out. He wasn’t even there.’
Shaken with the import of what she’d heard – not only had Graham been at Sal’s on Friday, he had often administered morphine to his father – she was nearly back to her car when she stopped herself up short and swore.
Her tape recorder was still on Graham’s table!
She’d gotten up with the two guys to make sure Michael Cerrone of Time was good and gone before she attempted to ask her half-drunk suspect her last three questions. Then she’d ducked outside to escape the awful chemistry, asked her questions, and all but run away.
What a fool she was.