Wilde Lake(91)
“You asked Rudy—”
“No. No. I told him what was happening. That’s all.”
“But, AJ, you had to know what he would do—I mean, the fact that you paid for his defense—”
“I knew he needed a good attorney who would plead him out to not criminally responsible. I chose Howard & Howard because it’s one of the best law firms in the state. I couldn’t know that Fred had landed there or that this stupid case would become some f*cking battle between the two of you. Your stupid, stupid pride, Lu. Why couldn’t you just settle?”
“My pride, AJ? You’re going to blame this on my pride?”
He drops his head into his hands, still in a crouch before her. Some part of Lu’s mind detaches, wonders at her brother’s knees, his ability to hold this pose so long. “What are we going to do, sis? What are we going to do?”
She wraps her arms around his neck, an atypical display of filial affection. “It’s a long weekend. Let’s just get through it, and then we’ll sift through all the implications of what you’ve told me come Monday, OK? Rudy is dead and if you tell me he acted on his own, without anyone encouraging him to go after Nita Flood, I have to believe you. Come to the house tomorrow, watch the fireworks, eat some barbecue. We don’t have to solve it now.”
“It’s going to kill Dad. If any part of this comes out. He’s always tried so hard to do the right thing. Even when he was wrong, he never knew it. Whatever he’s had to live with, he’s never been in doubt. Whereas I’ve lived my whole life, knowing I’m a fake and nothing I’ve done—nothing—can make up for that. When I told Rudy about Nita, I never dreamed—I guess I am Ajax the lesser.”
“Shhh,” she says “Shhh.” She can’t bear to know anymore.
That night, about an hour after paramedics are called to AJ’s home—there is a hideous comedy involving the address, with the EMTs trying to gain access through the wrong doors as Lauranne wails inside, not that it matters in the end—Lu and her father receive the courtesy of a personal visit from Mike Hunt, who has been informed by a detective he knows in the Southwestern District that AJ is dead. He waited until Lauranne went to bed, then apparently drank two more bottles of his nice Italian wine, chased it with a handful of pills, and walked into his own swimming pool, tying a metal drum of tomato plants to his ankle to ensure he could not change his mind.
Lu sees her father’s knees buckle—the phrase makes sense to Lu for the first time, and the next image that comes to her mind, crazily, is one of the towers on 9/11, that seeming moment of hesitation as it swayed, then collapsed—and she realizes that her own pain and anger and sorrow will have to wait, possibly forever, certainly for the rest of her father’s life.
She grabs him by his elbow, pilots him to a chair with Mike Hunt’s help.
“Why?” Andrew Jackson Brant keeps asking. “Why?”
But that is the one thing she must never tell him.
MIGUEL DE CERVANTES IS CALLED TO THE INQUISITION, OR THE FINAL SHOE DROPS
My father became old overnight. Maybe he was old all along and I willed myself not to notice it. Other friends have told me that they watched their parents sail through their eighties, only to age suddenly at ninety, and my father was getting close to that milestone. At any rate, he is increasingly frail. He doesn’t eat enough, subsists on cold cereal and bananas. He no longer walks around the lake. His hearing seems to be going, or maybe he just doesn’t want to answer the questions put to him, simple as they are. His practice had been a charade for years, albeit a charade that seemed to keep him alert, active, happy. Now I barely trust him to drive a car to the grocery store. He has stopped reading books and it takes him much of a day to make his way through the Beacon-Light, slender as it is. The television is on almost all day. MSNBC and, much to my amusement, endless repeats of Law & Order. It is the one thing that seems to get a rise out of him, those Law & Order episodes. He finds all the lawyers wanting, in acumen and strategy. But, come the end of the hour, at least you know everything. That’s one luxury I will never have.
Suicides take their secrets with them. Was Rudy wily enough to kill Mary McNally as a warning to Nita Flood, or did he make a mistake that night? Fred said he saw the faded “R” and “L” on his wrists a week after he was arrested. A mistake might explain that trace of DNA. Was he excited about what he was about to do? Or was he sitting on the bed he presumed to be Nita Flood’s, thinking about another cold night, in which he hid in the trees and watched boys come and go in a room where a girl appeared to be sleeping. What did you see, Rudy? What do you know? But his loyalty, to the very end, was to AJ; and if my brother were my client, I would have no problem presenting a plausible case in which he had no knowledge of what Rudy intended to do. And paying for someone’s attorney does not prove conspiracy. Nor does telling your sister a life-changing secret at the very moment she is closing in on this fact. Give AJ this: he was very good at derailing me. That lovely Saturday lunch we had to discuss surrogacy—he was milking me about the case, trying to figure out what I knew, realizing that Rudy would need a better attorney.
As for his break with Noel—only Noel and AJ know what happened between them. I remain convinced that AJ left out some essential details, as was his wont. Never lying, but frequently omitting. Maybe Bash knows, but I don’t see Bash anymore, and I never really talked to him. He assumes our breakup has something to do with my grief over AJ, but I don’t want to be with a man who would screw a knothole. Or a blacked-out girl. I have no reason to doubt AJ on this part of the story, as he didn’t know I would care. Now when I think about Bash showing up at my open house last Christmas, I wonder where he and AJ were that night. Was Nita Flood still making noise, threatening them? Had they met with Davey, discussed strategy? Almost every detail in my life is up for grabs now, full of new meanings.