The Big Kahuna (Fox and O'Hare #6)(93)

With both hands, I grabbed the metal bars of the cell. “What did you just say to me?”

Silence. He was waiting for me to leave.

“Hey. I’m talking to you.”

When he sensed that I was still standing at the cell door, he shifted on his cot again and sat up to face me. He spoke slowly and clearly, enunciating each word. “I said—I’m not talking to a fucking nigger. Did you hear me this time?”

My hands tightened on the bars. I thought about what Nora Guerraoui had told me, and what I had said in return: that what happened to her in high school many years ago wasn’t relevant to the hit-and-run case. But I’d been wrong. The present could never be untethered from the past, you couldn’t understand one without the other. “I heard,” I said, and turned around and left. At the front office, I asked Lomeli to give me a little time, because I needed to look into something.

Twenty minutes later, when I pulled up to the house on Sunnyslope Drive, I found Helen Baker outside, pulling up the red flag on her mailbox. She was a tall woman, with thin lips untouched by makeup and graying hair that she wore in a high ponytail, like a gym teacher. With her hand, she shielded her eyes from the sun as she watched me step out of the cruiser and walk up to her. Her dogs, a pair of collies, stood at her feet, panting heavily in the heat. “Afternoon, Mrs. Baker,” I said. I put out my hand, and right away the two collies came to smell it. “Such handsome dogs. What are their names?”

“This one here is Loyal,” she said, almost reluctantly. Her tremors seemed worse than the other time I had seen her, when I’d come to interview her husband about the hit-and-run. “And that one is Royal.”

“My son’s been asking me for a dog, but I wasn’t sure what breed would be best.”

“Well, you can’t go wrong with collies.”

“So you recommend them?” I rubbed Royal’s chin—or was it Loyal?—and it stretched its neck with obvious pleasure. The other dog let out a plaintive yelp. “Trouble is, my son is really set on having a chocolate lab. You know how boys are. They get an idea in their heads, and it’s impossible to get it out.”

“What’s this about?” she asked.

I looked beyond her at the house, baking in the afternoon heat. The garage door was open, and the spaces inside were empty. “Does your son have a car, Mrs. Baker?”

“Not right now,” she said after a moment of hesitation. “Why do you ask?”

“I was just wondering, you know. I didn’t see any bus stops on the way over here. If A.J. doesn’t have a car, how does he get around? Does he borrow yours?”

She put her hand on the mailbox, as if to steady herself. One of her dogs nuzzled up to her, asking to be petted, but she ignored it. She was watching me, trying to decide what she should say next.

“Maybe he borrowed your husband’s car, too. Back in April.”

“It was just an accident,” she pleaded. “That’s all it was.”

We were both mothers, she seemed to be saying, didn’t I understand how natural it was to want to protect a son? I scratched the scar on my eyebrow with a thumbnail, an old habit I fell back into from time to time. In my head, I’d arranged the pieces of this case one way, but I saw clearly now that they fit together in a different way. Of course, it was natural for Mrs. Baker to want to protect her son. But who would protect others from him?





Anderson




I became a father late in life. I’d always wanted to have a son, and when it finally happened, after fifteen years, I was surprised by how different it was from what I expected. It was even better than in my wildest dreams. I remember the summer A.J. was born, how I would sit on the couch with him curled up on my chest, sleeping, drooling all over my shirt. He was a happy baby, an easy baby. Slept through the night by the time he was three months old, got through his teething without too much fuss or trouble. Every time I try to unspool the past and pick out the specific moment when things went wrong for him, I fail. I can never find it. Maybe it was when Helen started coddling him, and I didn’t put my foot down. Maybe it was when he was on the playground, and stuck to himself instead of playing with the other kids. Or maybe it was years later, in high school, when he turned into a bully. It’s hard to love a bully, but Lord knows I did, with all my heart.

I tried to help him. He didn’t listen to me, though, at least not when it mattered. Like when he wanted to start his doggie-daycare business, I told him straightaway that the timing wasn’t right, what with the recession and all, but he thought I was just stingy, that I didn’t want to lend him the $50,000 he was asking for, and he got his mom to pressure me into giving it to him. He lost it all, of course. I think that caused him a lot of embarrassment. And some anger, too, because of the way he lost it. He would get into nasty fights with his wife, and go out drinking, which is how he ended up with a DUI. We never talked back then; I found out about all this later, from his mother. So when he called me late one night, I was shocked. I’d just come home from work, and I was cracking open a beer when my phone rang. “What’s wrong?” I asked. I thought it was an emergency—that’s how unusual it was for me to hear from him directly.

“Nothing’s wrong, Dad.”

He didn’t say anything else, didn’t ask how I was doing, or why he was calling. Maybe he had tried to reach Helen, but she was in Kansas City that weekend for her niece’s funeral. Whenever she was away from home, she would leave me instructions on the fridge about what I should eat and how to heat it up. She wrote in beautiful cursive, and I remember staring at the plans she had for me that night. Tuesday: baked ziti. Set oven to 350 and heat for 15 minutes. I walked out of the kitchen and crossed the living room, where the collies were sleeping, and stepped out into the backyard with my beer. It was a clear night. “The stars are out tonight,” I said, just to fill the silence.