Sullivan's Justice (24 page)

Carolyn’s hand involuntarily opened and the police report floated to the floor. In most instances, suicides were not publicized unless they involved a crime. The only one who’d known the truth was her mother. Why hadn’t she told them? Carolyn pushed the plastic box off her lap onto the table, leaning over at the waist. She feared she was going to vomit. What had driven her father to kill himself? He’d been the most gentle, loving man she’d ever known. He wasn’t a talkative man, but when he did speak, he generally said something worthwhile.

After his retirement, he had drifted into a world of his own. Her mother was still teaching chemistry at Ventura Junior College. She quit after her husband’s death.

Carolyn brought forth the last memory of her father. She’d moved back in with her parents for a brief period after filing for divorce from Frank. Once she got a court order giving her possession of the house, she and the kids had returned to their home in Ventura. This was several months before her father’s death.

Awakening at four in the morning, she’d gone to the kitchen for a glass of milk. Her father was working at the table, stacks of papers in front of him, all covered with complex equations. He used to concentrate so intently that when she and Neil were kids, they made a game out of trying to distract him. They would blast the radio, even stand in front of him and scream that someone was breaking into the house. He would continue working as if no one was in the room with him.

On this particular morning, Carolyn had been surprised when her father had dropped his pencil, removed his glasses, and asked her to sit down so they could talk. “You don’t sleep much, do you?” When she admitted that she suffered from bouts of insomnia, he asked her, “Does it bother you?”

“Well, yes,” she told him, surprised he was speaking on such a personal subject.

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” Carolyn had said, smiling. “I don’t want to be tired the next day, I guess. Besides, everyone else is asleep.”

“Are you tired the next day?”

“Not really,” she replied, never having thought about it.

“Neither am I,” her father said. “People sleep their lives away. I sleep three, maybe four hours. You’d be surprised what you can accomplish at night. No interruptions. No noise. It’s nice, you know. Stop trying to make yourself into a common mortal. You have a fine mind and an energetic body. My mother was like that. She used to do crossword puzzles all night, then work a ten-hour day.”

Carolyn put the papers back, then went to her mother’s bedroom. She found her sitting in a maple rocking chair, with cranberry-colored cushions, her hands folded neatly in her lap.

A picture of Neil was sitting on the bureau. No wonder he’d left in the middle of the night. His breakdown carried more significance now. If the police found out, and they probably would, it could lend credence to their suspicions that he was a murderer. They would also find out he had served time in a mental institution to avoid prosecution for assault.

Carolyn rested her back against the doorway. “I’m sorry, Mother,” she said. “This must have been a terrible burden for you to carry. But why would Dad kill himself over a barking dog? When he concentrated, he shut everything else out.”

“After he stopped teaching,” Mrs. Sullivan explained, “Peter became convinced that he was on the verge of solving the Riemann hypothesis, a famous mathematical puzzle. He’d been awake for days. On numerous occasions, he’d asked Mr. DiMaio to do something about his dog. DiMaio was a large man with a nasty temper. When Peter went over there to speak to him that night, Mr. DiMaio knocked him to the ground and threatened to kill him. Your father came back to the house and got his shotgun. I grabbed his papers and tore them into pieces, screaming at him to stop wasting his life over a problem he’d never be able to solve. He slapped me, then he ran out the door with the gun.” She placed her hands over her face, her shoulders shaking as she sobbed. “I couldn’t let him shoot someone. I had to do something. Maybe if I hadn’t torn up his papers he wouldn’t have done it. I always thought we’d be reunited in heaven when I died.”

She must have lost her Catholic ideology along the way, Carolyn thought. According to the church, her father would have gone to hell. Eventually he would go to purgatory. After eons had passed, he might be admitted to heaven. Suicide was a cardinal sin. “Dad may have been thinking about killing himself for some time. When they retire, especially men from Dad’s generation, they sometimes feel useless, decide their life is over. Most people don’t just shoot themselves, even in heated situations. You couldn’t have prevented what happened, Mother.”

“That’s not true,” Mrs. Sullivan said, reaching for a tissue to blow her nose. “I called the police. I’m certain he wouldn’t have shot himself if I hadn’t made that call.”

“In a situation like this, nothing is certain. Things may have ended up the same no matter what you did.”

Mrs. Sullivan stared across the room as the events of that night played out in her mind. “I was only a few steps away when he did it. When he saw the police officers, he looked straight at me. I could tell from his eyes that he thought I’d betrayed him. Then he put the barrel of the gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.” She stopped and took a breath. “He was the only man I ever loved. I was drenched in his blood. His brain was . . . Oh, God, it was so awful.”

Carolyn walked over and dropped down on her knees, tenderly stroking her mother’s arm. “It’s all right, Mother. You don’t have to talk about it anymore.”

“Yes, I do,” she said, reaching under the chair and pulling out an envelope. “Even in death, I cheated him.”

“I don’t understand.”

“He solved it!” Marie Sullivan said. “I taped the papers back together that I took from him. He only had one more step, which I completed from his notes. Your father solved the Riemann hypothesis, the most important unsolved problem in mathematics. If I hadn’t done what I did, he would have won the Fields Medal.”

“You must be mistaken, Mother,” she said. “Have you shown Dad’s work to anyone? People all over the world are trying to solve that problem. Some people say it’s unsolvable.”

Mrs. Sullivan leaned forward, her mouth set in defiance. “He solved it, Carolyn. It’s right here. Don’t pass me off as an old fool because I’m not. Your math skills aren’t good enough to comprehend it, but it’s undeniable. How can I go public with your father’s accomplishment? I would have to tell the world that I stole this from my husband, then pushed him to commit suicide. Here,” she said, handing her a key.

“His papers are in the safe at the bank. After I die, you can show them to everyone. I’m sure your physicist friend can confirm what I’ve told you. Unless someone else solves it in the next few years, you and your brother can split the money.”

Carolyn handed the safe-deposit key back to her, kissed her on the cheek, then stood to leave. Her thoughts were scattered—first Neil, then Paul, then Brad, now this. She knew what happened when a man put a shotgun to his head. She saw her father’s kind face, but then another grotesque image appeared. This was a new death. She felt the same as she did the day her mother called her at work and told her he’d suffered a fatal heart attack, as if she needed to start shopping for a coffin, call all the relatives. She would have to grieve again. “I’m not interested in money or mathematics, Mother. Right now, I’m trying to make certain you don’t have more articles to add to your box of secrets. If you hear from Neil, tell him I need to see him. The police may issue a warrant for his arrest if he skips town. In addition, he’ll appear guilty. He’s got enough going against him as it is.”

“Merry Christmas,” her mother said despondently. “I didn’t mean to ruin it for you.”

Carolyn forced a smile. “Christmas was yesterday,” she said. “Anyway, someone else made a mess of it long before you. Will you be okay here by yourself? Do you want to stay with us for a few days? We have the extra room, you know.”

“No, no,” she said. “Take care of Neil, darling. He’s terribly fragile. Great artists have delicate temperaments. The only person he’ll listen to is you. Be strong for him.”

“Haven’t I always?” Carolyn tossed her sweater over her shoulder as she headed out the front door. One of the reasons Neil was so screwed up was her mother. She’d tried to push him into science and math when all he had ever been interested in was art. When he began reaping money and acclaim from his paintings, she’d started telling her friends he was the contemporary Michelangelo. Before, her mother had treated him like a failure.

Her poor father. If what her mother had told her was true, he’d worked all his life for nothing. How could Marie have torn up his papers? Faced with the same situation, though, she might have done the same thing. Even if she could have chosen a different set of parents, Carolyn knew she would want things to be just as they had been, with the exception of her father’s tragic end. She thought of John and Rebecca, reminding herself to look under the surface, make certain there weren’t problems she was missing. In today’s world, though, young people faced a myriad of dangers and parents were often inattentive. How could she be everything to everyone? She could sleep less, but look at what had happened to her father. Was lack of sleep a factor? From what her mother said, it had been. Everything she knew about her father had changed in a few hours. Now she would spend endless hours replaying their moments together, analyzing and wondering. Underneath his quiet demeanor, her father had been a complex and tormented man.

Opening the car door and sliding behind the wheel of the Infiniti, Carolyn stared out the window. Her windshield was filthy. Why hadn’t she noticed it before? She got out and rubbed the spots away with her sweater.

How could her father be dispatched to hell when he’d never done an immoral or cruel thing in his life? The teachings of the church suddenly seemed barbaric, she thought, tossing her sweater in the backseat and driving off. It was idiotic to believe that hell even existed. As far as she was concerned, they were already living in it.

Carolyn vowed to remember her father for his brilliance—in time she’d manage to set aside his suicide—but she had learned a bitter lesson. After almost forty years of marriage, her mother had not known her father. If she had, she would have never torn up his papers. Carolyn could not allow herself to make the same mistake with her brother.

What didn’t she know about Neil?

 

 

 

 

 

H
ank didn’t have anything to do at home, so he dialed Charley Young’s home number. Mrs. Young answered and said her husband had gone to work. During the holidays, the coroner’s office was always jammed. Seldom did a Christmas pass without at least one suicide. The number of homicides generally went up as well. They were deluged this year, the body count reaching into the double digits. While the rest of the world enjoyed the long weekend, police officers, firemen, coroners, and the people who kept the county running were at work.

Rather than call Charley, the detective decided to go in person. Phone calls were frequently ignored, even ones from police officers. It was harder to say no to a person standing in front of you. Besides, he and Charley were pals.

Since no one was present at the reception desk, Hank went to the phone mounted on the wall by the door and punched in Charley’s extension. When no one answered, he sat down in a chair in the lobby, hoping he hadn’t made the drive for nothing. A few minutes later, Charley appeared.

“Come with me,” the small Korean man said, peering up at the detective through thick glasses. “Good timing. I’ve been working on the Goodwin case this morning. I just went out to pick up some lunch.”

They walked side by side down a long corridor. Hank looked through the glass at the autopsy rooms. “Looks like’s you’ve got a full house today.”

“It’s been a nightmare,” Charley said, unlocking the door to his room. “We had to cache some bodies at a local funeral home. We haven’t run out of space since the millenium.”

Hank stared at Laurel Goodwin’s naked body on the stainless-steel table. She looked as if she’d been gutted. “What’s that?” he said, gesturing to some organs on the scales.

“Lungs,” the pathologist said, putting on a cap with a clear plastic shield that covered his eyes and mouth. “I found evidence of pulmonary edema. In the classic wet drowning, white or hemorrhagic edema fluid is present in the nostrils, mouth, and airways. Compression of the chest causes it to flow out. Pulmonary edema is nonspecific, though. An individual dying of a drug overdose can also have pulmonary edema.”

“And that’s what happened here?”

“Let me explain something,” Charley said, lifting up his face shield. “Drowning is a diagnosis of exclusion. The first thing we have to do is rule out all other causes of death. Even then, we can’t be certain. Look at her hands. That’s called washerwoman appearance.”

“Then she drowned, right?”

“All it means is that the body was in water for longer than one to two hours. By the look of the hands, I’d estimate three to six.”

“Back up a minute,” the detective said, his deep voice bouncing off the walls. “You know we have two homicides. Time of death is going to be crucial. On the stand, vague statements like that can result in an acquittal.”

The pathologist placed his hands on his hips. “Have you ever handled a drowning before?”

“One,” Hank said. “Some old guy took too many pills and drowned in his bathtub. We had no choice but to work it as a homicide. Waste of time.”

“Let me explain more clearly,” Charley said. “In most instances, all we can honestly say is we
assume
the person drowned. And the only way we do that is by means of exclusion, ruling out any other possible causes. If this lady drowned, we know it wasn’t an accident. CSI sent the toxicology over. It’s on the table behind you.”