Sweet Dreams, Irene (8 page)

“Frank.”

“Hmmm.”

“I missed you.”

His answer wasn’t verbal, but I didn’t mind. Not at all.

HE FELL ASLEEP
holding me. I stayed awake for a while, listening to him breathe, and wondering how I had come to feel such a need for the man. I had been so fiercely independent for so long, it was frightening to realize what a hold he had on me. Not that I was a simpering wimp or anything—I smiled thinking of some of the tests of wills Frank and I had experienced in the last few months. And I knew that if it didn’t work out, I would go on with my life. But I didn’t want to think of what life without Frank would be like.

Still, his behavior since Mrs. Fremont’s death had been odd; I hadn’t seen this side of Frank before now. I knew he could brood at times, but there was an intensity in his current mood that was unsettling. He had come back across some of the distance he had put between us last night, but something in his manner clearly said he didn’t want me asking him a lot of questions. And as much as my curious nature rebelled against that, somehow I knew not to force the issue.

We still had a lot to learn about each other, Frank and I.

Cody jumped up on the bed and situated himself in the curve behind Frank’s knees. I laced my fingers into Frank’s hand, and fell asleep.

I
WAS ALONE
in bed when I woke up the next morning. Frank had awakened a couple of times during the night; his sleep had been troubled. I supposed that at some point he had given up on it. I stretched and got out of bed. Maybe he had already left for work. I looked at the clock and realized that I had almost slept until noon. I didn’t feel as if it were a case of sloth, though. Just catching up on my sleep.

I went into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator, finding evidence that Frank had not only been up before me but had also been to the store and back. I was quite pleased that I would not have to test the “seven-day freshness” guarantee on the older milk carton.

There was some fresh bread as well, so I made a grilled cheese sandwich for myself. When I got to the table with my plate and milk, I saw the note he had left for me.

“Irene—Thanks. Please be patient. Frank.”

Please be patient. Translation: Please don’t ask me what’s wrong, please be ready for me at the drop of a hat, please put up with my moodiness. The damnable thing was, I would try to do just that.

He had also brought the paper in, and I was fortunate he didn’t leave it in the kitchen, or I probably would have lost my appetite. The front page was splashed with the Fremont murder story, and the headline made my stomach tighten. “Shelter Founder Murdered by Satanists?” A question mark to cover a multitude of reporting sins. The byline was given to Dorothy Bliss. In the newsroom, our private saying was, “Bliss is ignorance.”

Although the story itself was couched in careful terms that as much as admitted this was a guess based on the drawing of the goat on the door, by the end of the day most of Las Piernas would undoubtedly be convinced by the headline. While I wasn’t sure Mrs. Fremont hadn’t been murdered by Satanists, somehow seeing it in print brought about a reaction in me, making me want to find the flaws in the assertion.

Mark’s story on Jerry Tanner and the harbor shooting didn’t get the play it deserved, but it was reasoned, clear, and balanced. It’s a good thing I saw it, because the next story I laid eyes on didn’t make me feel any pride in working for the
Express.

Not two inches away from the Fremont story, another headline proclaimed “Henderson Denies Son is Satanist.” It was my story all right, but the part that best defended Jacob was cut down to nothing and buried in the back half of the first section. I hadn’t expected any of it to go page one and saw that being placed as it was would only make Henderson appear to be defending against a connection to the murder.

Damn Wrigley’s miserable hide. This had his signature all over it.

I got dressed and made the most of what was left of Friday by working until about midnight, covering speeches and setting up interviews. Frank got off work about the same time I did, and stayed the night with me.

Saturday and Sunday were twin days. With the election so close, there was no such thing as a day off. There was a lot of work to be done, and Stacee actually proved to be of help. She and I ran around between various campaigns and political organizations, putting in long hours. Brian Henderson staunchly defended Jacob, but slid down in the polls as if they were greased.

Next to the Satanism charges, the big news was that definite physical evidence had been found in Tanner’s home to link him to the murder of the Gillespie child. I thought that might have made a difference in Frank, but it didn’t.

Sammy didn’t call back.

I came home exhausted each night, fed Cody, and crawled into bed with Frank, who still hadn’t said more than ten words to me. But he held me close, and I was too tired to need more. At least he was sleeping better.

On Sunday night—or technically, Monday morning—I lay asleep in his arms when the phone rang just after one o’clock. It was Pete. I handed the phone over to a drowsy Frank. He had the phone in his hand about five seconds when he yelled “What?!” and sat up in bed, moving his feet to the floor. He ran a hand through his hair. Every one of his muscles tensed. After a minute he said, “Why?” He listened in silence to the reply. He thanked Pete for calling and hung up.

I was sitting up by now. He was facing away from me. He sighed and said, “Monty Montgomery’s daughter walked in a couple of hours ago and confessed to murdering Mrs. Fremont. Pete just found out about it.”

“Julie?”

He turned and gave me a piercing look.

“Frank, she didn’t do it. She’s trying to protect someone.”

The look didn’t waver.

“It’s true, Frank, she talked to me Thursday. Not about the murder, but about her boyfriend.”

“What?”

I struggled for a moment with the problem of breaking Julie’s confidence, but decided if she was going to do something as stupid as confess to a murder to help Jacob, I would face the consequences of telling Frank what I knew.

“She and Jacob Henderson are seeing one another. Secretly. She’s been agonizing over the flyer her father sent out saying Jacob is a Satanist. She’s doing this to get back at her father or clear Jacob or both.”

“Pete says she claims that she’s a Satanist. That she was given the mission of killing—” His voice broke and he looked away.

I waited. I resisted the urge to touch him. “She didn’t do it,” I said calmly.

“I’ve got to call Pete.”

He made the call, telling Pete all I had told him. On a hunch, I caught Frank’s attention and said, “Ask him if there was anyone from the
Express
there when she confessed.”

He did, then waited while Pete asked one of the detectives who had been there. Frank listened, then said, “Mark Baker was there fifteen minutes before she showed up. He said he got an anonymous tip that there was going to be a big break in the case, that someone was going to confess. She walked in and announced her confession in a loud voice as soon as she laid eyes on him.”

“How long ago did Mark leave?”

He asked Pete, then said, “He was gone about two hours ago.”

I looked at the clock. “Shit. It will be in the paper tomorrow. She planned this. She confessed in time to get a late chase in, but not early enough to give Mark time to follow up much. If she’s released, it won’t be in time to counteract the damage on her father’s campaign.”

Pete and Frank talked for a few minutes more, then Frank hung up.

I called the paper, but anyone who could have made a difference was long gone. I realized that by now the story was in print and on its way to being distributed. Nothing could be done about it. As I put the phone down, I noticed Frank was sitting with his head in his hands.

I turned the light out. There was still enough light from the moon and streetlights to make out his features in the dark. I got in bed behind him, and reached up and rubbed his neck and shoulders. It was killing me not to ask him the five hundred or so questions that I had been gathering together for the last three days. He started to relax a little, and reached up and took my hands. He pulled them around his chest and lay back down. He wouldn’t look at me. I moved a hand up into his hair and stroked it gently.

“Frank?”

“What?” A whisper.

“I was there on Thursday, at the harbor.”

He turned toward me suddenly. “What?” Not a whisper.

“I was there when—”

“Oh God, Irene.” He sighed and turned on to his back, looking up at the ceiling. I waited, but he didn’t say more. After a while, he took hold of my hand again and held it between his. “Now you really know what it’s like, don’t you?”

“What?”

“Being with a cop.”

I thought about this for a minute. “No, Frank, that’s not the problem. Yes, I’m afraid for your safety. I’m going to worry about you, but I can live with that. It’s much more difficult to feel distant from you.”

He was quiet for a long time. When he spoke, his voice was strained. “I just can’t talk about it now.”

I watched him lying there, tense and troubled.

Neither one of us slept much that night.

M
ANIPULATED
by a sixteen-year-old kid. I’m about to become known as the man who changed the course of politics in Las Piernas county on a setup by a teenager.” Mark Baker, usually one of the more easygoing members of the staff, was in a foul mood the next morning.

“You wrote it as fairly as you could.” Even as I said the words, I knew they would be little consolation.

“I waited around as long as possible, and they were still questioning her when we hit drop-dead deadline. I had no reason to believe she’d be released. I never said she was charged. I was careful, Irene. But you know no one reads anything as carefully as you write it.”

“Forget it, Mark. Every reporter has had something like this happen to them at least once.”

“Aw, crap, I should have known. But nobody here wanted to wait on it.”

“Understandable. Her timing was impeccable. She must have found out from somebody what time we …” An awful feeling came over me. I picked up the phone on Mark’s desk and called down to Danny Coburn. Sure enough, she’d asked him about deadlines and printing schedules when she was here on Thursday.

Mark, who had heard only my side of the conversation, was furious. “You saw her here on Thursday? And you didn’t say anything?”

“Hold on, hold on. I talked to her
after
I talked to you. And she wasn’t confessing to murder then. That surprised me as much as it did you. And I sure as hell didn’t know she had talked to Danny about our deadlines.”

He wasn’t completely mollified, but I didn’t have time to smooth his ruffled feathers. I went back to my desk and started working on election stories, which had now been made vastly more interesting by a couple of high school students. I thought about Julie. Monty Montgomery must have wanted to throttle her. In Jacob’s case, he could go to his father saying he was wrongly accused. Julie was responsible for her own predicament; I couldn’t picture her father being very understanding.

Not an hour had gone by when the phone rang. It was Pete, sounding frantic.

“Look, something’s happened to Frank.”

I let out a little cry, and he immediately knew what I was thinking.

“No, no, no—God, Irene—no, he’s not hurt or anything. I’m sorry. Bad choice of words. But look, something’s wrong with him.”

“I know, but he won’t talk about it.”

“Damn. I was hoping he was talking to you. He seemed to be doing better until this morning.”

“What happened?”

“He’s been suspended.”

“What?!”

“Bredloe suspended him for a couple of days.”

“Why?”

“Well, he sort of punched somebody out.”

“Sort of punched somebody out?”

“The guy had it coming. We’re sitting around this morning and Frank walks in, and Bob Thompson makes a crack and Frank punches him.” Pete laughed. “Knocked old Thompson flat on his ass. We had to hold them to keep them from going at it.”

“Frank punched somebody? Another detective?” I was having trouble getting all of this to sink in. Frank is not someone who goes around punching people.

“Yeah,” said Pete, more subdued.

“You said Thompson made a crack. What kind of crack did he make?”

“A wisecrack.”

“Pete. Don’t.”

“Okay, okay. The guy made a crack about
you.
Satisfied? Some stupid remark about the paper not getting to bed on time.”

“Oh no.”

“Oh yes. And Frank would probably have let it pass any other day, but I’m telling you, since this Fremont thing, he’s been impossible. Impossible. He’s a powder keg. That’s why Bredloe suspended him.”

“Pete, why was Bredloe so angry down at the harbor?”

There was silence for a moment.

“Shit, Irene, don’t tell me you were there.”

“I was there.”

“You poor kid. Damn, that shook
me
up. Bredloe wasn’t really angry, just concerned. He knows Frank isn’t happy with Carlson, but he keeps hoping they’ll work things out. Besides, Frank hasn’t been himself lately.”

“No, he hasn’t.”

“You can’t really blame him. It would be too much for anybody. He’s been bothered by the Gillespie case; he’s let it get to him. I don’t know if he told you, but he’s done almost all the contact with the little girl’s parents. Kid’s father just sits in front of the TV, watching videotapes of her, crying. Hit Frank hard, I guess.

“And back on Halloween night, when Mrs. Fremont died, he was losing it—Carlson picked up on it and told Frank he knew her too well to work on the case, and that he had enough on his plate with the Gillespie case. So that was bad, but Frank seemed to take it okay.”

“Not really.”

“Well, he seemed like he took it okay at the time. The next morning he was a wreck. That’s when the call came in about Tanner. He moved a little fast on that, but I understood—no telling how long Tanner was going to hang around. Besides, at that point, we just thought we were going to be questioning someone who had been in the park; we didn’t have much at all on the guy. We didn’t expect him to be armed, but you always kind of have that in the back of your mind. The guy started shooting before we got anywhere near him. Carlson thought we had put a bunch of civilians in danger.

“Anyway, I told Carlson off about that. There wasn’t anybody else in the room—Tanner took off running, pulled out a gun, and everybody else ran outside. We didn’t fire on him until he fired on us, and we were the only ones in the building by then. Frank did pull a stunt so that I could get out, but I’ll be damned if I was going to tell that to Carlson. I’m telling you, Irene, Frank scared the living hell out of me in there.”

I couldn’t say anything.

“Sorry—I shouldn’t be telling you all of this.” He sighed. “The job might not even be what’s eating at him. It’s November, and that’s Frank’s bad month anyway.”

“What do you mean?”

“You don’t know?”

“Pete! Would I ask you if I did?”

“No need to get nasty, Irene.”

“Sorry. Just tell me why November is a bad month.”

“His dad died in November. Thanksgiving.”

I thought back to what Frank had told me about his dad’s death. I knew he had died about three years ago, from a heart attack.

“Frank has been upset every year in November for the last three years?”

“Well, it’s always hard on him, but this year is the worst I’ve seen him. Maybe just too many other things happening. I don’t know. I think he blames himself for his dad’s death.”

“What? I thought his dad had a heart attack.”

“Yeah, well, I guess Frank had been talking to his dad, then he went outside to play with his sister’s kid. He was only out there a minute when his mom started screaming. Frank ran in, and his dad was on the floor, clutching his chest. Frank did CPR, but his dad died anyway.”

“Jesus.”

“You know how many times I’ve told him there was nothing he could have done if he had stayed in that room talking to his dad?”

I sat there, suddenly not caring a damn about the election, the newspaper, or anything else. Except Frank.

“Where is he now, Pete?”

“Home, I guess. He won’t talk to me. Could you try?”

“Sure. I don’t know if it will do any good, but I’ll try. Thanks for telling me all of this.”

I found Lydia and asked her to call me at Frank’s if anybody needed me. Then I located Stacee.

“Something’s come up, Stacee, and I have to leave. Lydia knows how to get in touch with me.” I listed some of the things I had planned to do that morning; she was excited to take on the responsibility. I was a little afraid to give her so much, but that Monday night would be busier than the day, with the last of election eve to deal with. The next night would be endless.

I raced down to Frank’s house. He didn’t answer the doorbell, but his car was in the driveway, so I pulled out my key and let myself in. I called to him as I opened the door, but there was no response. I kept calling all the way through the house, then saw he was sitting out on the back patio. A bottle of scotch sat next to him.

“A little early in the day, isn’t it?” I said as I walked out into the backyard.

He didn’t answer me or look at me.

I moved around to where I could see his face. He looked like hell.

I sat down next to him.

“If you’re gong to defend my questionable honor with your bare knuckles, the least you can do is look me in the eye.”

“Pete has a goddamned big mouth,” he spat, but at least he looked at me.

“How long do you think this would have been a secret, anyway?”

“With that bunch of hens, not long.”

“Pete’s just worried about you. So am I.”

“I’m fine.”

“Sure you are.”

Silence.

“Look,” he said angrily, “I don’t need you to hold my hand every time I have a problem at work. Don’t you have an election to cover?”

“A problem at work? Is that what this is? Face it, Frank. Something’s really wrong and you know it.”

“It’s my problem.”

“Our problem.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“Goddamn it, Irene, do you always have to have the last fucking word!?”

“When it matters, yes.”

More silence.

“Go back to work.”

“Talk to me.”

He threw his glass against the wall of the house. I jumped, but I wasn’t going to back down.

“Break every last piece of glass in the house if it makes you feel better. But talk to me, Frank.”

“I told you, I can’t.”

“Bullshit. You won’t.”

He got up and walked into the house. I followed.

“Give me my key back,” he shouted.

“No way.”

“I don’t want to be with you anymore, Irene. It’s not working. Go on, get out.”

“You are a lousy liar, Harriman. And I don’t take orders from you.”

“Goddamn it, get out of my house.”

“Like I said, I don’t take orders.”

He drew his hand back and took a step toward me, but the action seemed to startle even Frank. He backed down immediately and sank to the couch, as if defeated. I sat next to him.

I lowered my voice, trying to ease things down a notch. “Wednesday morning, when I saw Mrs. Fremont, I told her you had invited me to Thanksgiving.”

He put his head back and looked up at the ceiling. His jaw flexed with tension. I hated seeing him feeling like this, but not enough to let things stay as they were.

“I was worried about meeting your mother, feeling afraid that she wouldn’t like me. Mrs. Fremont asked me if we loved each other.”

He swallowed, but didn’t say anything.

“You know, even though we’ve never said it to one another, I told her yes. Maybe I presumed something. Anyway, she said that if we did, then we had everything we needed in life, with or without your mother’s approval.”

I took his hand. He didn’t pull back, but he let it lie lifelessly in my own, not responding.

“Was I wrong, Frank?”

He looked at me then, and after a moment he whispered, “No.”

“Then let me hold you.”

He did. I held his head against my shoulder, stroking his hair, not talking. He seemed to relax, and after a while I wondered if he was falling asleep.

“If I had listened to you, she wouldn’t be dead,” he said in a low voice.

“What?”

“You wanted to come here that night. I insisted on going out.”

“And you think she wouldn’t have been killed anyway?”

“I would have been here. I would have heard her.”

“Frank, three other neighbors were home, they didn’t hear a thing. And if we had been here, we probably wouldn’t have noticed anything was wrong until the next morning. Because we went out, you were able to get an investigation started within a couple of hours of the murder.”

“Lot of good it did her to live next to a cop.”

“You’re not God, Frank. You can’t be everywhere, watching over everybody. And besides, it did do her a lot of good to live next to you. She was crazy about you. Bragged on you all the time. I saw her earlier that same day, and she showed me what you did for the shelter. She told me you were a ‘keeper.’”

“A what?”

“A keeper, you know, a fish you don’t want to throw back.”

Unbelievably, a small, fleeting grin crossed his face. But in the next moment, his eyes clouded up. “She was one of a kind.”

I laughed. “I’ll never forget the first day she asked me to go running with her. Here I am expecting to jog-walk, and I end up winded before she’s even warmed up.”

In spite of himself, he laughed, too. We sat quietly for a while, remembering Mrs. Fremont.

“God, I’m tired,” Frank said. Maybe he was commenting on his life in general.

“Come on, I’ll tuck you in.”

That earned another small smile. He washed his face, then met me in the bedroom. I undressed him and pulled back the covers. He crawled in, then turned and reached up, taking the nape of my neck in his hand and pulling me to him gently. He kissed me, then said, “What, no bedtime story?”

What the hell. My ass was in a sling at work anyway. I undressed and lay down beside him.

Like Mrs. Fremont said, we had everything we needed in life.