A Measure of Blood (33 page)

“Yeah. Good.”

Then he calls Christie. “All is well. Suspect in custody. We'll be at Headquarters in fifteen. Anything on your end?”

“Oh. Messing up a few lives.”

“That's our job.”

Later, when Dolan gets to Headquarters he puts Nadal into a room and leaves him alone while he waits for his partner, Potocki. When, not much later, Potocki is there, Dolan tells him, “We have Nadal's backpack. There's a ton of money and nothing else of interest in it except the computer. That's gonna have something we want. You up for it?”

“Yes. What's he like?”

“Quiet son of a bitch. Bad posture. I'm going to get to know him better.” Dolan winks.

COLLEEN GETS A
MOMENT
aside with Zacour. Colleen likes the expressions that cross his face, moment to moment. They stand in the lobby of the ER before she is about to accompany the whole party back to Pittsburgh. “I'm glad you came,” she says.

“I am, too.”

“I thought maybe your fiancée would come, too.”

“I called her. She's on her way, but they had another kind of emergency at her work. She's very responsible.”

“She sounds like a person who would make a good doctor.”

“Utterly.”

Utterly,
she thinks.
Utterly.
Wonderful word. “Will you see Matt again?”

“I arranged to visit on the weekend.”

“Next weekend?”

“Yes. They were kind.” He tips his head toward where the parents are taking Matt to the car. Matt is turning back looking at him. Ziad claps a hand to his mouth, then turns it into a kiss to his fingertips, followed by a hand up. Matt waves back.

“It's a shame he won't see Kate.”

“She'll come with me on the weekend.”

“Oh. Good. That sounds … right.” She smiles.

“Tomorrow we're driving to Virginia to get married.”

“Oh?”

“There's a place there—Winchester—you don't need anything. Just show some ID and get married.” He smiles ruefully. “We're like movie stars getting married after the pregnancy.”

Colleen laughs. “They only made it fashionable. It was the way of the world for a long time. But I have to tell you, I don't agree with that as the reason to get married.”

“I don't either.”

“But you're doing it?”

“I've been trying for a year to marry her. Maybe longer. Maybe since I met her.”

“Oh. Well, then. They're waving for me to come. I hope you'll have a wonderful day tomorrow.”

Winchester, she thinks. Not that far.

THE WAY IT
HAPPENS
is that Nadal thinks, no, more or less
feels
, that if he remains silent, this arrest, this nightmare will go away. And the man who arrests him allows him to be silent. For what seems like two hours, he sits in a room, alone, except for when the man comes in to ask him if he needs anything—coffee, cookie, sandwich, ice cream, anything. He shakes his head no to everything, but nods when the menu gets to Coke. Later the man brings him a sandwich and a Coke.

His cuffs have been removed, his leg secured to the floor. He tries to think of nothing. He eats. If there were only a bed, he could lie down here and sleep. That would be all right.

After a long time, the man who rode in with him comes in and sits across from him. “I'm glad to see you ate something. You must be very, very tired. Now, I can understand you don't want to say anything much right now, everything being new, but I'm leaving the paper here in case you want to write out what happened. I mean I
think
I know. Well, I know the possibilities. If you say you did the things you are accused of, it gets pretty simple, pretty quick. No big trial, no reporters, just a jury thinking what would be the proper punishment. But my thought is the whole thing from the beginning is complicated and you want to explain all of that part, but man, it's a lot to explain. I'm not trying to put words into your mouth. I just want to tell you what I think I see. I mean, you knew this woman Maggie such a long time ago, and you were trying to live your life, and things … happened. Am I saying too much? I mean, my job is to make this … easy for you and at the same time to serve the law and justice.”

Nadal looks at the clock on the wall, startled. “I need for someone to contact my mother.”

“We've found her. She's a very nice woman, my people tell me, salt of the earth. You
do
get one phone call. You are permitted to call an attorney if you wish, or you could call your mother.”

“Can I talk to her here?”

“Sorry. Not yet. It's just not allowed. She loves you. Some people aren't that lucky. You have a good mother.”

Nadal stares at his hands. He hasn't looked at them for a long time. They don't look like his. He doesn't know what to think of this man, Dolan. He keeps expecting him to yell or shout questions or hit him, but Detective Dolan doesn't do any of those things.

“I think there are going to be mitigating circumstances,” Dolan says in an almost whisper.

Nadal looks up at the small, neat man who arrested him. He would like to look away, but the man's deep-brown eyes almost mesmerize him.

“If you were my son, I'd advise you to tell everything and let the system and people start to take care of you. I'd say, ‘Rest, you're pushing too hard. Just turn it over.' I know, I sound like a preacher saying, ‘Turn it over to God.' But it is sort of the same thing, turning things over to some other system.”

Nadal thinks, No, I don't want to talk.

The man asks, “Did you mean to hurt Maggie Brown?”

“No.” The answer comes so quickly, Nadal isn't sure he heard the question.

“That's what I thought. That's what the blood evidence showed. If you don't feel like writing, can you tell me … just maybe in three or four words, what happened.”

“She had a knife. I got scared.”

“You fought?”

“She was yelling things at me, that kind of fighting.”

The detective snaps to attention. “Insulted you? Were they insults?”

“Yes.”

“That makes sense. And what? You grabbed the knife? Or … knocked her down or …”

“I don't want to talk.”

“All right. I'm just trying to picture it. If you knocked her down—”

“I never knocked her down. All I know is the knife was in her hand and then I was turning it around and then she fell and there was blood.”

“Which part of this is right: You were talking, she insulted you, you got angry, she had a knife, she was going to use it—was she going to use it?”

“I guess.”

“You thought she might use it?”

“Yeah.”

“And you were scared, of course. Angry?”

“Yes.”

“I understand.” The detective frowns. “If I were your father, I'd have to tell you you have to step up and admit you lost control.” He shrugs. “That's what it sounds like to me.”

Nadal closes his eyes. He did lose control. He knows he did. And he ran.

“There is nothing that can't be explained if you have patience. I can think of things, lots of things, but I need for you to say them. That's what this is about. The law. You have to do right. If you did something, you have to make it right.”

“How?”

“By explaining.”

“I just wanted my son.”

“I think we're getting somewhere. If you're saying you never intended to kill her, you didn't go there with that in mind. You wanted your son, you wanted to be a guy pulling his family together, doing right, but she fought with you, and you lost control when she had a knife. Is that at all correct? Tell me if it isn't.”

“It's correct.”

“Now we have your computer. You work with computers, right. And we saw you looked up this place called Peabody Institute. On your computer.”

“I didn't look it up.”

“But the page comes up several times.”

“My … Matthew looked it up. I let him play with the computer.”

“Do you know why he looked it up?”

“No.”

“Oh. You let him keep bringing the page up?”

“No. I looked again to see what he was looking at.”

“Makes sense. You have to keep after kids with computers. Did he tell you why?”

“He thought some guy who wrote a letter about being his father was there.”

“Ziad Zacour.”

They know the name. How—?

“We don't have the DNA back but we're virtually certain from other evidence that Zacour is the biological father.”

Nadal puts his head down on the table. He wants to weep for days, weeks, months, just to be left alone to weep. Everything he does is wrong. Everything.

“One thing I find interesting. You kind of took Matthew there. Close anyway. You got him close to Peabody.”

Nadal keeps his head down. “It wasn't on purpose.”

“You ever heard of ‘accidentally on purpose'? The mind does tricks.”

Nadal lifts his head.

The man's eyes are kind, not mean.

BY THE TIME
CHRISTIE GETS THERE
, Dolan is able to say, “Got him. Getting him anyway. Not death row ‘got him.' He'll do time, probably in the psych prison once a defender sees his history. He's messed up.” Dolan sighs. “He's writing it down.”

“You didn't force it?”

“No. I pretended I was his father.”

FELIX IS ECSTATIC
to see Matt again. It seems strange that certain things will happen normally now—normal seems strange. Jan and Arthur will teach tomorrow and the next day, Jan will hold rehearsals those days—this time with Arthur sitting next to Matt the
whole
time he is not onstage even though the danger is over. Matt will go to school. But this family, this new family, is temporary, as temporary as a play. In just the way a cast gathers together, lives a fictional life together, and then parts, this adventure will be over one day soon, with only photographs or digital recordings to show it happened. And memory of course.

Jan and Arthur put their son to bed. The dog sits at the bedroom door as if guarding. The dog won't be enough to hold him.

Jan knows that. She is already the good mother in the Solomon story.

“We've lost him,” she says, closing the bedroom door.

“I know,” Arthur says.

Friday

THE NEWLY MARRIED COUPLE,
those two people who sit in the auditorium at rehearsal, have a glow and glitter about them. Everybody looks at them as they lean forward to watch the stage.

Matt swells. He can't stand still. He looks and looks and then walks offstage in the middle of a scene. He walks right down to the auditorium. Everybody stops rehearsing to watch the other play unfolding. Even Jan. She can't help it. It's like magic—the words are only partly audible. But she can read the bodies. “This is Katie, my wife. She wants to know you. She's a doctor.”

“Can you stay?”

“For a while. This weekend. We'll be back.”

“Can I come see you?”

“Anytime. We want that.”

And so a new life is made and another one disappears.

CHRISTIE MAKES TWO
VISITS
before the week is out. The first is to the Philips kids. Laurie seems a little less afraid of him when he comes to the door this time. In fact, she invites him in, even though she asks, “Is anything wrong? Or just checking in?”

“Nope. Just checking in. Where's everybody?”

“Alison and Meg are at work, Joel is reading, and Susannah is folding clothes. They're just upstairs. Hey, guys,” she calls, “visitor.”

“I just wanted to come by and tell you all the good news. Matthew Brown was found.”

“We
know
,” Laurie says. “Meg was always watching. We even looked it up on computer.”

“What time does Meg get home?”

“Couple minutes after seven.”

“Hm. I'll say hello to her over at Doug's Market, right, she still works there?”

They tell him yes and he drives the few blocks to Doug's.

Meg is behind the counter helping an old woman count out her coins. She smiles at him. Her smile means, “I heard the good news.” When she can speak to him, she says those very words.

“I was just thinking if you could do the babysitting as much as possible. I'm going to tell you a secret. It's a secret, a serious secret between us. Matt's birth father has been located, and he appears to be coming into the picture. If I had to take bets, I'd say it's a matter of months at most. Ziad Zacour is going to want the boy and vice versa. So Matt is going through a lot, a whole lot, not to mention what he went through, and Jan Gabriel needs a babysitter for rehearsal, not to use any of the people in the play because they have other functions. And Professor Morris, Arthur, really has a lot of work to do. Now of course Matt doesn't think he needs anyone, but we all want to make sure he, oh, I don't know, sits still, doesn't wander off. So how much of that do you think you could do?”

“A couple of nights a week?”

“That would be great.”

“Would I be allowed to do homework?”

“Oh, yes. Yes. And another thing. Eventually the parents are going to be very sad when they lose Matt. They already understand it will probably happen. They already
are
sad. Give them a little attention. Talk to them when you can.”

“When Dr. Morris drove me home, I could tell he needed to talk about his book he was writing, so I asked him questions. I drew him out.”

Christie pauses, almost freezes. “Right, right. I'll let them know I talked to you.”

When he leaves he laughs at his denseness. Of course, of course. Not to say it won't happen if the stars align—this other new family of his making. But who's taking care of whom? She
drew him out
. Of course.

He gets into his car and he drives out of Pittsburgh, out of everything Pittsburgh, to Ohio.

The next visit happens the next day. It's to the hospital in Akron.

An old man named Richard Christie lies in white sheets with oxygen tubes going into his nose. He has not been shaved, his hair is thin, white.

“He's not aware,” the nurse said moments ago in the hallway. “We feed him intravenously. He's been out.”

“Do you know anything about him?”

She looked at him curiously. He had told her he was the son.

“I didn't know him, not after the age of seven,” Christie explained. “I just found out he was alive.” They both almost laughed and said
not very
.
“I'm catching up. As well as I can.”

The nurse said, “I don't know much. A couple of people from the nursing home—the residence section—came here to see him a week or more ago. They said they'd liked him. They said he was quiet, minded his own business.”

“And his illness?”

“His insides are a wreck. Liver. Everything, really. He was an alcoholic.”

“They liked him?”

“A couple of people did.” She backed up. “I'm sorry we had no way of contacting you.”

“Nobody could have known how. I wasn't aware.”

Now he sits next to the bed. Aware. A lie. Somewhere underneath what isn't known, all is known. He believes that. He believes Nadal let Matt go near Baltimore because he knew what he didn't want to know.

“Hello. Dad, can you hear me?”

There is no movement at all.

“I'm Richard. I'm your son. I just found out about you.”

Nothing moves. The guy doesn't want him. Never did. Still doesn't.

But a nice man, pleasant, there's that.

He remembers a little. Images come to him of a sad, yes, quiet man. Never angry. Often … wobbly. Sedated. Didn't want to climb up out of it.

How does that happen to people?

He feels no anger at all, only puzzlement and sorrow that he's late.

He touches his father's hand. It's not cold but there is no reaction. “Well, I came here,” he says. “Better late than never.”

It won't be long now, the nurse told him in the hallway.

He has the day off, two days if he needs them. Somebody ought to be here when it happens.