‘Just keep an open mind,’ he says.
‘You might do the same,’ I tell him.
‘I understand the kids were with you the night Melanie was murdered,’ he says. ‘Until this is over I’d like you to stay away from them. I think you can understand. I don’t want them in the middle.’ This from the man who had his two children on the discount rack at the custody mart.
‘Whatever you say, Jack.’
‘I knew you’d understand.’ It is all very civil, what you would expect from Jack once he’s had time to collect himself and find the direction of advantage. He will no doubt be trying to plan Laurel’s defense with me if she is arrested and charged. Anything that is short and sweet and leads to a long stretch will do.
He pushes forward and rises from his chair. The button of his coat catches on the edge of the desk. It tears the fabric and pops across the room like a rivet in an earthquake.
‘Damn,’ he says. A stupid smile, like look at me in my ruined thousand-dollar suit. With nothing to be done, he shrugs and reaches across the desk to shake my hand, leaving his jacket to flop open. In his mind I think Jack’s view is that we have buried some mythical hatchet. If he had a peace pipe at this moment he would offer me a smoke.
His is a big, affable smile.
‘Like I said the other day. We all have to do what we have to do.’ He ushers me to the door, one hand on my shoulder, renewing the vows of brotherhood.
He pats me on the shoulder one last time, bids farewell, and closes his door. I wander through the warren of offices like Moses after the promised land, any way to get out. With each step I weigh frantically every word spoken during our meeting against a single question in my mind.
Why was Jack Vega wearing a wire?
‘Guess who’s here?’ she says. Sarah has a big grin. She’s just answered the doorbell, and she knows I don’t have a clue.
‘Danny.’ She is jubilant.
‘Oh.’
My daughter dotes on her cousin. Everything that a seven-year-old girl can think about a teenager, the gamut from love to simple fascination. She looks up at him with oval eyes and a painted-on smile, stuttering as the words can’t come out fast enough.
She’s tugging on one of his hands, dragging him over to look at a picture she’s just finished in crayon, yammering about school and a book she is learning to read. She has plans to corral him on the couch while she struggles with the words.
‘Uncle Paul.’ Danny’s hat is in his hand. He’s wearing a black Raiders jacket that gives his body more bulk than it warrants.
I’m working over the stove, what passes for cooking in this house. I ask him if he’s hungry. Is the Pope Catholic? His eyes are looking in the pot as it steams. Nothing he recognizes, I’m sure, but then Danny is a risk-taker.
‘Does your dad know you’re here?’ I ask.
‘I’m out with Julie tonight,’ he says. ‘Took her to her boyfriend’s. Suppose to pick her up in an hour.’
I shudder. Plenty of time for the pointed little sperms to wiggle their way upstream. In his own evasive way, Danny has answered my question. His father doesn’t know he is here.
‘We had a talk today,’ I tell him. ‘Your dad thinks it’s best, for the time being, if we don’t see each other.’
‘’Cuz you’re helping Mom,’ he says. Just like that, the kid has put it all together. ‘I know. He told me,’ he says. He shrugs his shoulders. ‘I didn’t think you’d mind.’
Sarah is fuming, a bundle about to explode. Enough talk between grown-ups. She wants Danny in the other room, and she is not subtle. Sarah has him by a thumb and one finger, pulling with all her weight, about to commit an act of dislocation.
Sarah wants to ride around the block behind Danny on the little Vespa motor scooter, but I scotch this. She has no helmet, and besides it is beginning to get dark. He cons me with requests to stay just for a few minutes. Then looks at me doe-eyed.
‘I guess I could sit outside her friend’s house.’
I give a sigh and a look of concession. ‘For a few minutes,’ I say.
They head for the living room as I slice carrots into a pot.
Nikki left me a small binder of recipes, a part of her legacy of love. In her dying days she took hours penning these out in longhand, things that even I could prepare without burning the bottom out of some pan. I watched in amazement as she went about this, pulling together these handwritten pages, a nutritional map for survival. She did it without a thought, almost cavalier, in the same way that she would have once plunked TV dinners into the freezer for me before leaving for a week to visit her mother. My wife had a selfless penchant for the practical.
Sarah’s talking up a storm in the other room. Danny’s taken to the tube in defense, the disconnected jabber of some quick and dirty channel-surfing. He settles on something, a dull monotone I cannot make out.
More carrots, a little parsley, a spoon of butter, and stir. Something’s tugging at the back of my pants. I turn. It is Sarah. Her face is filled with agitation. A wagging finger, she has me bend low for some secret.
‘Danny is crying,’ she whispers.
I wipe my hands and head for the other room.
The kid is hunched in a corner of the couch, knees drawn up, as close to a fetal position as is possible for someone six feet tall. He’s staring at the screen, tears streaming down his face.
There on the television, in living color, pictures of Laurel, her hands cuffed behind her, being pulled toward a squad car — a black-and-white with a door shield I do not recognize. Laurel’s head is pushed down as she’s deposited in the backseat. I can see only the silhouette of her head through the rear window as the car pulls away from the curb. I reach for the controls and boost the sound just in time to hear: ‘This is Norm Kendal reporting from Reno.’
I stand in a daze, mesmerized by the stench of incinerated carrots and the thought that I finally know where ‘up here’ is.
Chapter 5
It is just after noon, and the customary crowd of the tattered and vagrant wander in front of the Capital County jail, waiting for friends or relations to be turned out on bail.
Laurel has waived extradition from Nevada. Lama and his crew have wasted no time in bringing her back to Capital City.
I wait in a small interrogation room on the ground floor of the jail. Apart from minor children I am the nearest relative. So I have retained myself to represent her, something that has raised eyebrows among the jailers, unsure whether they should admit me.
In the hallway outside I can see Laurel through a window as she is led in. One of the female deputies has her by the arm. Laurel is wearing no makeup. Her face is drawn and tired. She has aged ten years in the last two.
I remember her in those halcyon years of my own marriage. She was happy and seemed always to move at single speed, in corksoled sandals. She wore waistless dresses with a backpack, the latter filled with Danny in diapers, the former beginning to show the bulge of his sister.
This was the late seventies. My generation was busy slithering through the corporate jungle, trying to shed its social conscience. The Mercedes hood ornament had replaced the peace symbol as the icon of the moment.
It is said that timing in life is everything. Laurel, it seems, foundered under a bad star, having missed the Age of Aquarius. She was a natural hippy.
When she first met Jack, she was a year out of Berkeley. He was older. Sporting hair halfway to his ass, he talked a dialect of liberal gibberish that tickled the cockles of altruism. Jack, who was then working in the Capitol, one of the lackeys-in-waiting, was honing the skills that would make him a politician. He was telling Laurel what he thought she wanted to hear, the prelude to a marriage made in hell.
Whenever we discussed the weighty topics of our time, my impression was always of Laurel searching her soul, agonizing for some ultimate truth while Jack paid lip service, what some speech writer had crafted in ten minutes at a typewriter. He was too busy enjoying the perks to examine the policy. At home and abroad, Jack was always a ship sailing under false colors. My guess is that from the start, he had been schlepping his mast into other ports. It took Laurel a time to figure this out, and a little while longer to immerse the problem in a bottle.