Done for a Dime (30 page)

“Sure.”

“I felt jealous.”

That seemed to please him, but from the look on his face, the pleasure was a kind of heartbreak. “No need. I see much the same thing between you and Toby.”

Is that a compliment, she wondered, or a curse? “Can I tell you another secret?”

He studied her. “Of course.”

“I’m afraid.” She shook her head. “I’ll say this badly. I’m afraid, yes. Afraid … I might die. Before I can make it up to him. Toby.” She winced. “It sounds so stupid—”

He reached out for her hand. Please don’t tell me I’m not going to die, she thought. Don’t patronize me.

“You can’t make it up to him. I mean, I should probably tell you there’s nothing to make up, but I know how guilt can work on your head. Trust me on this, okay? You did all you could. Knowing what you know now, you’d do better, but you don’t get those kinds of second chances.”

She looked at her hand in his. “I’m afraid of what his mother, the rest of his family, think. I hear them, in my head I mean, I hear them saying something like, ‘This is the white girl who didn’t see a thing.’”

Toby appeared on the porch, waving them inside. Dan squeezed her hand one last time. “Try to focus on the things you can control, not the things you can’t.”

He got out, opened her door, and walked at her elbow up the steps. It seemed the whole neighborhood came to a halt. Nadya could feel their eyes on her back.

Inside, the heater had warmed the old house with the dense, slightly ticklish smell so similar to that in Toby’s father’s home. Needlework sat everywhere—Nadya recognized Gobelin and
tramé
patterns on a pair of sofa cushions. A candy dish filled with butter creams rested on a maple veneer end table, and a sweating tumbler of ice water sat beside the candy dish.

Francis’s aunt wore a belted black knee-length dress with white lace trim at the neck. Elegant and small, the old woman came forward, silver hair combed flat to her head and held fast with pins. She wore eyeglasses mended with tape and took both Nadya’s hands in her own.

“Well, look at us,” she said, her fingers dry and cold. “Two tiny women.”

Murchison didn’t go straight home. He detoured toward downtown, then stopped at Tina Navigato’s office. Bad move, he knew, even as he got out, strode from the car through the gate and up the walk beneath the trees. He rang the bell like he’d knock the door down if it didn’t open, and shortly a petite, dimpled Filipina stood there, eyes the size of quarters behind gold-rimmed glasses.

“Miss Navigato, she here?”

“Yes.” The voice fit the face. Murchison wasn’t fooled. He knew enough Filipino families to know how tough the women could be, how hard they worked to hide that from outsiders.

“Tell her Detective Murchison is here.” As an afterthought: “Please.”

He stepped inside before the woman could close the door on him. He waited in the entry, surveying the decor. Luxuriant but subtle, he thought, white plaster and wood with strangely mannish furniture—Morris chairs with leather cushions, a matching settee, and library tables. A lawyer thing, he supposed, or a dyke thing. The floors were pegged white oak, and watercolors provided color along the walls. Joan, who had an eye for such things, would kill to have a place like this.

Tina appeared, and again he felt caught like a boy in her stark blue eyes. The Filipina trailed behind with a pinched face, not so angelic now. Something charged the air between them, a concern that went beyond business. Stluka had it right after all, Murchison thought. Jesus, what a sap you can be.

“Your client lied. Or his mother did. But you know that already.”

Tina studied him, thinking. Behind her, the Filipina twisted her head brusquely toward Tina, toward Murchison, back and forth.

“You mean the birth certificate.”

“Don’t forget the divorce papers.”

She gestured for him to calm down. “A birth certificate does not establish paternity. It’s not under oath.”

Murchison laughed. Lawyers, he thought. “But the petition for child support is.”

“Detective—”

“So you knew about it?”

“I’ll say it again, the issue of paternity is irrelevant to the issue of who murdered—”

“That’s touching. Your concern for the murder victim. Must be a family trait. I hear the men in your family are known for their soft hearts.”

The Filipina leaned forward, whispered something urgent in Tagalog. Tina cut her off.

“The men in my family?”

“I heard—”

“I haven’t seen my father since I was six. I was estranged from my brother for almost twenty years, but that’s over now. It was hard, but we worked at it. I’m glad he’s in my life again. Beyond that, my family has nothing to do—”

“Know how I found out? My partner, he’s the one, actually, got the tip. From a lawyer in town. Gay woman. That surprise you? My partner, for all his faults, he has very good instincts about some things.”

Murchison himself detected the vulgar pitch creeping into his voice. The Filipina stared at him like he’d just zipped down his fly.

“Detective,” Tina said, “I really think it would be best if you left now.”

“Where’s your client?”

“He’s in town, with friends. If you need to speak with him you can do so through me.”

Murchison wondered if it would be too much to ask if he could sit down. His head swam. Muscles aching with weariness. “I need to speak with him.”

“No. Not now. I meant what I said, Detective. Please leave.”

Murchison lived in one of the newer developments on a hill overlooking the old salt evaporation ponds. The homes had been built by Bob Craugh’s company, known for its below-market pricing and bottom money down, financing its own mortgages, like Jameson Carswell had done in the Black community decades before. Carswell had built to last. These houses were crap—a decade old and falling apart. Worse, the city had to raid the general fund to service the construction bond, because tax assessments had stagnated. It meant no raises for cops or firemen in the foreseeable future.

He removed his service piece, tucked it in the vault he kept in the garage, and locked it up. Joan had become increasingly paranoiac since reading about how an Indiana state trooper’s boy had blown off the top of his head with his father’s side arm. Murchison saw the point, though he’d resented the tone she’d used when she pressed it.

Sun streamed through the kitchen window, reflecting thousands of dust motes suspended in the downward slant of light. A musty stench of old clothes and sitting garbage hung in the air, too. Joan prized her job, she could dress to the nines when called upon, and she had the knack for motherhood, too. But her disdain for homemaking was absolute. She could be at times the most inspired slob one could imagine. The girls adored her for it.

She stood at the sink with her back to the door, washing dishes. She did them by hand. The dishwasher leaked. She wore just her bra and a wool skirt, stockings but no shoes, caught in transition between dressed up for mass and dressed down for her weekly trip with the girls to Granite Bay to see her parents.

Despite his recent urge for Tina Navigato, made all the more halfassed by his pushiness at her office, he felt instantly aroused by the sight of the smooth whiteness of his wife’s back, the elasticized cotton of her bra pinching her skin. The three moles above her waist he knew well. And the scar acquired at the age of eight, when she’d slipped on a diving board at Girl Scout camp and bled into the pool. One of those stories women tell you.

Beyond a slight stir, nothing moved below his belt line. Sometimes hard-ons do have a conscience, he guessed. He already knew they possessed a memory. Once before when he’d come upon her like this, put his arms around her, and tried to kiss her neck, she’d cut him short with, “What is it about a woman with her back turned, hands stuck in grimy water, that invariably gets guys horny?”

Sensing him behind her, she glanced over her shoulder. “You look tired.”

It was not a statement of sympathy, just an observation. “Yeah,” he admitted. Trying for humor, he added, “I’m two steps from a snooze.”

Upstairs, the girls thundered up and down the hallway, giggling. The sound, it seemed a universe away.

Turning back to the sink, Joan said, “Your mother called. I think you better go over.”

She might as well have handed him a sack of stones. “Sound that bad?”

“You really have to ask that?”

“She say why—”

“She didn’t say anything, Dennis. She never does. Not to me.”

She rinsed a plate and racked it, probing the washtub for the next one. What is it, he wanted to ask. Tell me. But he knew he’d never say such things. He’d gone inward, like his old man.

“You’ll probably be at church by the time I get back. Girls need money for the basket?”

“I’ve got it,” Joan said, still not facing him.

•    •    •

His parents lived down the hill in one of the bungalow-style homes built during the war for the influx of shipyard workers. Sixty years old, these houses were small, plain, sometimes dreary, but seldom junk like Murchison’s.

He let himself in and found his mother sitting in her bathrobe, smoking a cigarette in the living room, her hair uncombed. On the mantle above her, a triptych told the family story: his parents on their wedding day; Willy in his Special Forces uniform, frozen for all time at age twenty, his portrait bearing a small black ribbon; Dennis as he appeared in the program for Homecoming senior year, number 29, San Diego State Aztecs.

Seeing him enter, his mother neither waved nor smiled. “He’s killing me, you know that? I’m worn out. I can’t cope.” She stubbed out her butt in the ashtray. “And when I’m dead, when he’s driven me to my goddamn grave, then what? Ask him that for me, will you, please?” She immediately reached for her cigarette pack, prepared to light another. “Not like I care, though, right? I’ll be dead. God willing.”

“He’s where?”

She flicked her hands toward the back of the house. “The yard. Out where the whole damn world can see.”

He went through the kitchen and out the back, found his father sitting naked at the white metal patio table, watching a portable TV connected by a long extension cord to an outlet beneath the deck. His knees were scrabbled with mulch and dirt from crawling under there and back. He was smoking, coughing with each inhalation.

A face looked down from a neighbor’s window. Murchison drew up a chair beside his father, who took no notice of his arrival. His hands, age-spotted and knobby from arthritis, were still thick and callused. Wisps of white hair floated atop his freckled scalp.

“Pop. You need some duds.”

His father grimaced and snarled as though to continue an argument he’d been conducting inside his head for days. Then, just as suddenly, the expression faded, his eyelids fluttered, and he took another drag from his cigarette, after which he once again convulsed into a coughing jag.

Regaining his breath, he nodded toward the TV screen. “That coulda been you, ya know.” It was one of those NFL Films programs put on for football junkies suffering the first throes of postseason withdrawal, full of slow-motion clips, thundering music.

“I’m gonna go back inside, get you something to wear.”

“Don’t bother.” His voice was oddly detached. As though it wasn’t really him speaking, wasn’t really his son there to hear it, the subject wasn’t his nudity. Some other bother, buried in the past, not to be troubled with.

He said, “It was Halburton’s turn to go down.”

“Sit tight. I’ll be right back.”

Inside the house again, Murchison said to his mother, “It would have been nice, going out the first time, knowing he needed clothes.”

His mother said nothing.

He made his way up the stairs to their room. A strong smell of disinfectant filled the air. He went to their closet and withdrew a pair of dungarees and a sweatshirt. The closet was in chaos. His mother had been a patron saint of tidiness once. Now, his father’s succession of small strokes, the overwhelming burden of new chores, and his escalating incontinence—not to mention the dementia, his meanness—it had swallowed up any impulse to care. It was all she could do to keep the bathroom sanitary. The rest could go to hell.

Rummaging through the bureau for some socks, Murchison reflected on his father’s bringing up the name Halburton. It was one more symptom of the way his brain was turning to sand. Thirty-eight years he’d worked as a welder on the ships. Never a word about anything wrong, any accidents. Then, after the strokes began, little things started popping out. The name Halburton, for one. Murchison had prodded his dad for a little more information, but it all came out in cryptic asides: “Underwater job.… The hull breaks, the thing caves in, it’s the suction, see? … We took turns. Everybody did.” When Murchison had enough of these disconnected bits to put the question to his mother, she just stared at him. “Honestly, you think he ever told me anything?”

Outside, it took almost ten minutes to get his father into his pants, and Murchison gave up on the sweatshirt. The profanities were vicious and oddball. He finally just tossed the pair of socks into the old man’s lap and said, “Enjoy your program.”

Back inside, Murchison took a moment in the kitchen to gather his thoughts. For some reason, Toby Marchand came to mind. In particular, the way he’d cared for his father after surgery, only to see him start up drinking again. Still no hard suspect in that shooting, Murchison reminded himself. And if there was anything he could understand at that moment, it was wanting to kill your old man.

He walked out to the living room, sat down across from his mother, who now nursed a tumbler full of orange juice that looked suspiciously thin. Vodka, he guessed.

“I thought you guys had nursing care coverage.”

His mother laughed acidly. “He won’t go. Says I’ll have to kill him first.” Eyeing the service piece in its holster at her son’s waist, she added, “Leave that behind, I’ll put it to good use.”

“You get the doctor involved?”

She grimaced with disgust. “Which doctor? The one this last visit or the one before that? Or the one before him? It’s like a merry-go-round. ‘Let’s do an MRI. Let’s get a CAT scan. Tests? What tests? Better do them all over again.’ Then they just end up saying the same damn thing. ‘Alzheimer’s-like symptoms.’ What the hell does that mean? What do I do? Nobody has a clue.” She lifted her glass to drink. “Why should they care? It’s not like they have to cure him to get paid.”