The Survivors (8 page)

“Mrs. Cataldo,” Scottie said. “I remember.”

“Then what is this?” I shook the form at him as if any mistakes were his fault.

“Here, look.” He spread out four bank statements from my parents' account—May, June, July, and August of that year. On the first he'd marked a deposit of $1,966.40. There was a deposit of the same amount in June. They stopped there. No similar amounts for July or August.

He took the Unemployment Division form from me. “This says she was terminated from Braeder on—”

“June 16,” I said. My father worked as a consultant. The money he earned didn't come in on a regular basis. The nineteen hundred dollar deposits must have been my mother's last two paychecks.

This was a new picture for me. The work my mother did involved writing patent applications. As a boy, I never understood exactly what that meant, but I knew she loved it. She brought work home almost every night and would sit for hours at the dining room table shuffling through papers and blueprints. One of the clearest memories I have of her is coming into the dining room to say good night after taking my bath. I would have been five or six years old. She pulled me onto her lap and showed me what she was working on, some new telescope system. I barely understood a word, but she seemed so happy it didn't matter.

The unemployment filing, no more paychecks. Without her job, I could only imagine the tailspin she'd gone into. Obviously, with a bank account that slim, she and my father needed the money. And she needed the challenge of the work. Jim and Renee had told me that after college, she'd been accepted into several PhD programs, but she couldn't afford to go. Drafting patent applications was the best substitute she could find. And when she lost the job, she still got dressed for work every morning, packed her lunch, and went—where? The public library? A museum in the District? I wondered if she even told my father, or if he only found out when he realized her paychecks had stopped. Was that why they fought those last weeks?

It had been a long time since I thought about any of this. Jim and Renee told me only good things about my mother. In their stories, she was always smart and happy and totally devoted to my father and my brothers and me. When I asked why she did it—and I did ask, point-blank—they didn't really have an answer. “Sometimes people get sick, and the world doesn't make sense to them anymore,” Renee said. “They do things nobody can understand.”

That was enough to buy me off when I was a teenager. Later, in college, I turned up some old articles from the
Washington Post
. The reporter had picked up on the Damascus gossip: marriage troubles and depression. One of my great uncles had been a suicide victim. Maybe there was bad blood in the family. I came away not believing any of it.

Gradually I developed an explanation of my own, one that fit my vague memories and the things I was picking up in my psych courses. She had some undiagnosed condition, a hormone imbalance or a tumor that the medical examiner didn't find. One day it got to be too much. She snapped, went for the gun. It was a clean story, one that left her free of guilt.

Scottie touched my arm. “Are you all right?”

I cleared my throat. “Yeah, fine.” My wrist was tingling where I'd been scratching it.

“You sure as hell weren't listening to what I was saying.” He sat back slowly. “Could your aunt and uncle have known about this? We could talk to them.”

“No. I'm sure they told me everything they knew. That's why this is hard for me to wrap my head around. Nobody said anything about it when I was young, and later . . . this isn't how I imagined it was. Her last days must have been awful. Worse because nobody knew what was happening to her.”

“I guess so,” he said, still eyeing me. “Anyway, take a look at this again.” He got the telephone bill and tapped the three entries he'd marked. “We were shot on October 3rd. The first two phone calls to Russo were on a Saturday, twelve days before that. The last call was—”

“October 3,” I said, reading from the bill, “6:05 p.m.” It was around seven o'clock that evening when we started the game of hide-and-seek.

“Only an hour before it happened,” Scottie said. “That's why I need to talk to him.”

“Talk to who?”

“The lawyer—who do you think?”

“You mean Russo?”

“Yes.” He was annoyed I was so dense.

“You went to see him?” I said.

“No, I phoned him, but he wouldn't talk to me.”

“So what happened?” I asked.

“I talked to a man named Griffin O'Shea. He works with Russo.”

“What did O'Shea say?”

“He asked Russo about those phone calls from your mother. Russo said he didn't remember ever knowing anyone by her name.”

Something clicked for me, the link I'd been missing. “Russo is the one the FBI says you threatened.”

“I told you, I didn't threaten anybody.” He put the papers back in the pile.

“Russo works for the government now?”

“He's Acting US Attorney for the District of Columbia.”

I whistled softly. “That's why they're all worked up. What did you say to him?”

“I never talked to him. I just said that.”

“Scottie, level with me.”

“I sent Russo a couple of e-mails. They were nothing.”

“Can I see them?”

For a moment, I thought he was going to say no. Then he reached into his backpack for his tablet computer. Once he had the program open, his hands flew over the screen. He passed it to me.

There were three messages, and it was clear that politeness wasn't one of Scottie's talents. In the first message, he introduced himself and went straight on to demand a meeting with Russo to talk about Braeder Design Systems. When Russo didn't reply, Scottie ramped it up. He said Russo was a public servant and damn well better answer his questions; he accused Russo of lying about knowing my mother; he ended with another demand that they meet. The third message was the shortest: “I have evidence you knew Denise Oakes. You'll talk to me about her whether you want to or not.” That was followed by an address in northwest DC.

“This isn't Russo's home address is it?”

He glanced away. “Yeah, I guess it is.”

“It's no wonder the FBI was brought into this. Anybody would see it as a threat.”

“It's not right the way he acted. I only need to talk to him.”

“You can't
do
things like this.”

“That's just the way you always were when we were kids,” he said. He snatched the tablet from me and grabbed the papers off the table.

“What?”

“Yelling at me even when I'm right.”

He put the tablet in his backpack and started to jam in the papers. I pulled his hands away. It was time for us to take a step back. “How did you get into all this? Going to see that woman writer, all this research, calling Russo. I don't understand.”

“Of course you don't.” He shook free of my hands and zipped the backpack closed. “You've got this nice place to live. A great job. All the way through school to a doctor's degree. And me? I started college three times and never finished a semester. I only made it out of high school because I was in a special ed. program. I wasn't always that way. I could do things.” He tapped his head. “My parents had me tested. I was smart.
Really
smart. I was going to go to a special summer school and everything, in Pittsburgh, with Carnegie Mellon. Full scholarship and I was only a kid.” He hit his head again. “But it's gone. Sure, I can still figure things out. I'm not really dumb. Things just . . . it's like a flood sometimes. I get so confused and mad. People treat me like a freak.”

He couldn't bear to look at me, so he moved over to his bicycle. “You've let it go, and good for you. I can't. I never did a thing to your mother—to any of you. Why did she do it? What did she have against me?”

I stepped over and put my hand on his shoulder. “Scottie, that night she wouldn't have had any idea what she was doing. That's the way it is with suicides. You were there, that's all. The wrong place at the—”

“
Don't you tell me that!
” He flung my arm away so hard I stumbled and almost fell over. Shocked, he looked at his hands, then turned away from me again. “Sorry.” I'd kicked one of the beer bottles over, and he set it back up. “I shouldn't really drink that stuff.”

Beer or no beer, I wondered how often his temper blew like that. Too often, I was sure. I sat down on the end of the coffee table. “Why has all this come up now? Because you've been thinking about the anniversary?”

The outburst had calmed him. “Twenty-five years. I never paid attention to it, but every October 3rd my mom had a celebration. Lit candles around the house, a trip to church. Everything but a visit to my grave. Pretty creepy, huh?”

I shrugged. Scottie had been high-strung as a kid, but he'd been nothing compared with his mother, who'd always reminded me of Dorothy's wicked witch. “How is she?” I had a good idea what the answer would be.

“Died four months ago—overdose. It was a lot for her, with my dad gone and what had happened to me. She'd taken Valium for years, then that slipped over to OxyContin. I don't know how she found the doctors to write the prescriptions. She said it was the only way she could stop worrying about me.”

“I'm sorry, Scottie.” I motioned for him to sit down. “Really, I am.”

“Yeah.” He didn't sit, but he gave me a sly look. “Jerkwad.”

We laughed. That was one of his favorite words from way back when. He played with the straps on the backpack. “I only want to talk to Russo. I don't have any reason to hurt him.”

“What do you think he can tell you?”

“Your mom wasn't working for Braeder anymore. Why was she talking to the company lawyer? I just feel like I've got to find out everything I can about that night. Like it's a puzzle I've got to put together. What she was thinking. Why it happened. They talked only an hour before. He's got to remember. It was on television, in all the papers. People don't forget something like that.”

He was getting worked up again, so I was as gentle as I could be. “We don't forget, Scottie, but the rest of the world moves on.”

“Believe that if you want. I won't.”

“I don't have any answers for you. I doubt anybody else will either.”

“I'll find that out when I talk to Russo. And if he can't help there are others, people who worked at Braeder, friends of your parents. I've been in touch with a few of them. They can tell me things.” He slipped the backpack over his shoulders. “I need to go. Thanks for dinner.”

“You shouldn't go home tonight, Scottie.”

“What do you mean?”

“I drove by your house earlier, looking for you. The FBI had the place staked out. They'll take you in if you go back there. You can ask your landlady. She saw them too.”

“Arrest me because of a few e-mails?” His voice had gone nasal and whiny.

“They said they only wanted to talk to you, but I'm not sure I trust them.”

His eyes were unsettled, the timid Scottie of twenty-five years ago. “I don't want to talk to them. They've got no right to bother me.” He slumped down in his chair.

“You can stay here tonight. Tomorrow, we'll work something out. If you have to talk to them, I'll go with you.” He didn't look up, but he nodded. “Come on, it's late. Let's get some sleep. You can have the guest room.”

“That little room I saw off the hallway? I'd rather sleep here on the sofa.” He gave a jittery smile. “I almost died in a closet. I don't do well in small spaces.”

Add claustrophobia to the list. He was a walking textbook.

Scottie asked if I had an extra toothbrush and dental floss. He was in the bathroom for a long time. Going through his rituals, I figured. After I got him a blanket and pillow, I checked the lock on the door and turned down the lights.

He'd left his backpack in the middle of the floor, and I moved it out of the way. It was much heavier than I expected. I might have let it go, but rummaging around in people's lives is my home territory. I unzipped the front pocket and the barrel of a gun popped out. I was so surprised, I nearly dropped the whole thing.

I lifted it out, a revolver with a worn grip and battered nickel-plate finish. It was loaded, and the safety was off. I gave a loud curse.

Behind me, the floor squeaked. Scottie said, “I ride a bicycle in the District. Sometimes I get out of work late. I need the protection.”

I put the gun away without saying anything. I didn't mention the tourist map I'd seen in the pocket, folded into a tight square centered on the neighborhood where Eric Russo lived.

My friend Tim was a lawyer. I'd have to call him in the morning. Any conversation Scottie had with the FBI was going to be a disaster.