The Bluest Blood (22 page)

“She called me,” his mother said. “She just called me.”

“Just?”

“No. Not just. An hour, two, three ago. I don’t know.”

“What about?”

“The
police
!” Betsy had finally registered what her son had said. “For God’s sake—you were
arrested
?”

He shook his head. “Not really.” Through repeated practice, I assumed, he’d become expert at answering scattershot questions, at running a story through a fragmented field.

“He was reprimanded,” I said.

Jake’s voice took on more heat. “Which I didn’t deserve at all, since I wasn’t even there.” Too late, he realized his mistake.

“Then, where were you?” Betsy sounded close to an actual, thinking mother.

“Griffin was upset because they were sending him away.”

“But where were you?”

“Around. Driving around.”

“They don’t know where he is now,” she said. “He left his own party. Why would anybody leave his own party?”

“He’s…leaving,” Jake said.

“Running away,” Mackenzie suggested.

Neither of us pointed out that Jake, too, had been driving around, and that he lacked his own car in which to do so, so he’d been another runaway.

“But he called here!” Betsy Spiers said. “Griffin wanted to talk, except he wouldn’t say why or what.”

“Probably wanted to know what happened to me,” Jake said. “We were kind of not getting along when he dropped me off.”

“What are you talking about?” Betsy said.

Jake shrugged. “Did he say how I could reach him?”

“I’m so frazzled, I wouldn’t remember if he did!”

“Mom!”

“I was rattled by phone calls before it was even light out, and the worry about you. I’m not Superwoman, Jake, and you know how I get when things—”

Nothing improved in this family. Nothing was resolved. Nothing changed.

“You’re killing me with your crazy ways!” Betsy’s voice approached a register only dogs can hear.

“Mom, please, don’t be so—” Jake was interrupted by the doorbell.

“Oh, my God, now what?” Betsy said.

Jake, Mackenzie, and I all looked at each other. Betsy was apparently paralyzed, it seemed presumptuous for either C. K. or me to answer the door, and the remaining alternative was not one Jake seemed to relish. I got the sense that each one of us in the room was remembering that Betsy Spiers had said the police had called, and had never gotten around to saying why.

The bell rang again.

After nervously tapping his fingers on his knee, Jake walked to his front door like an automaton.

Betsy whimpered, her face in her hands, but she peeped through her fingers.

Jake opened the door, and from where I sat on the sofa, I saw his jaw drop.

Betsy Spiers uncovered her eyes and shrieked. For real, and not for effect, this time.

A tall blond man stood in the entry with a garment bag slung over one shoulder. “Going to invite me in?” he asked. “Been a while, I know, but…”

“Dad,” Jake whispered, as if he were afraid the image would disappear if he spoke too loudly. “Dad.”

Fifteen

Loren Ulrich, newspaper chronicler of mortgage rates and new home starts, confirmed my every prejudicial expectation. A good-looking, well-maintained man, he dropped the leather and canvas overnighter that had been over his shoulder, more carefully deposited a computer case next to it, and stood in a casual pose. He was dressed in white hunter–foreign correspondent clichés: cottony beige garments that would be perfect for a café in Zimbabwe.

Toronto real estate must be wild.

On second impression, he lost some of his slick preposterousness. He halted uncertainly before he entered the living room.

Perhaps that was nothing more than travel fatigue—if The Father of Jake permitted himself such a mundane malaise. So on third impression, my prejudices were back in place.

Betsy Spiers held her hands up like shields against her ex-husband. “What do you want with us?” she said, her voice hoarse. “Why are you here?”

“I said I was coming,” he said. “Didn’t you tell her, Jake?”

His son lowered his eyes and shrugged. A graceful way of assuming blame instead of reminding Loren Ulrich that he’d made similar promises many times. Why should he have trusted or believed this one?

“Jake e-mailed me about Harvey,” Ulrich continued. “I was and am concerned.”

“You’re lying,” Betsy said. “You hated Harvey.”

“I’m concerned about what you’ll do now. I understand the Moral Ecologists want this house back. So I’m worried about both of you, but particularly Jake.” I heard the source of Jake’s soft-spoken calming technique. His father used precisely the same modulation and tempo, and it came so naturally, he must have used it back in the Toronto days. For how long had Betsy tottered precariously near the edge?

“You want to take him away from me, don’t you?” she screamed. “It’s been your plan all along, and now when that harlot is throwing us out into the street, you think you can—but you can’t! I won’t let you corrupt him, ruin him! I’m staying and he’s staying!”

“Betsy—”

“Mom!”

I could not recall a situation in which I had felt less comfortable, but making a reasonably polite exit through the battling trio at the doorway seemed daunting. I cleared my throat. “Excuse—” I was drowned out.

“I can’t take this, Loren. Not today, not after all that’s already happened, not since—”

“What? What happened? Did something else happen since Harvey? What?”

“Dad, you know how Mom—”

“The police, Jake missing, his friend a runaway—that’s
some
of what’s been happening, just
today,
let alone every other day—and you weren’t here, so what right do you have to say anything about any of it? You were
never
here and now you barge in and want to—”

“Excuse us—”

“He didn’t say that, Mom. He really hasn’t had a chance to say much of—why don’t we let Dad—”

“Dad!
Dad!
As if he was ever a proper father to you. And then, when Harvey tried to fill in, to make up for the missing pieces, you
hated
him, treated him like—”

“Mom!”

“Betsy!”

“Excuse me!”

I wasn’t the only one to gasp. Everyone wheeled in the direction of The Voice.

Mackenzie didn’t often employ that I-am-the-law-and-must-be-obeyed tone, which had the power to realign reality. It belonged in a comic book as a magic attribute of the normally soft-spoken Southern fellow, and had to be used with care. But it worked—even with the Ulrich-Spier clan.

“Your issues are personal, private.” His voice was back to its soft-edged melodic self. All three of their mouths hung slightly agape, listening intently. “This’s a family thing you three should deal with on your own, without spectators. Therefore, we are takin’ our leave. You have that?”

“Who
are
you?” Loren Ulrich demanded.

His question dispelled the Mackenzie magic, restarted Betsy’s static and squeaks, delayed our leave-taking and implied that we, not he, were interlopers, that he knew everyone involved in Jake’s life, except for us.

“This is Miss Pepper,” Jake said. “She’s head of journalism class, the newspaper. You know, the columns I send you? And this is her…ah…”

My
ah
extended his hand. “C. K. Mackenzie,” he said.

“He’s a policeman!” Betsy’s voice had reshaped itself into a pointed wire that pierced soft tissue. “A
detective
!”

Loren Ulrich looked from Mackenzie to his son and back again, waiting for an explanation. Mackenzie provided none.

“We have to leave,” I said.

“Wait!” Jake said. “Can’t we—couldn’t we all sit down again and talk? I would like you to meet my father. Couldn’t we have a normal kind of time?” He flashed a look at his mother that combined pleading and fear.

She pursed her lips.
Normal
was obviously a distasteful concept to her.

“What did he do, Detective?” Loren Ulrich asked. “My son—you brought him here because…? Did he do something wrong? He’s not involved in this…” He shook his head. He wasn’t going to finish the thought.

“I didn’t do anything,” Jake said. That wasn’t quite the truth. “Dad, we have to—”

Loren Ulrich shushed his son by putting both of his hands, palms forward, at chest height, then fanning them from side to side like out-of-synch windshield wipers. He was taking charge and he wanted no input except what he requested, as he requested it. I wondered whether Jake found his actions as offensive as I did.

Which led me to wonder whether Betsy Ulrich Spiers had always been an hysteric, or whether it had taken the combination of her overconfident first husband and fanatical second to produce the mess she now was.

I’d always worried why clever Jane Eyre never questioned what had made Bertha Rochester insane. Rochester wouldn’t have married a raving lunatic, so the question was the same as it was with Betsy Spiers—did the husbands do it? For the first time, I considered Betsy and Loren with interest.

“What kind of detective are you?” Loren Ulrich’s eyes had never left Mackenzie.

“Homicide.”

“Jesus.” Ulrich’s glance shot to his son and stayed there, and his bravado dissipated. Then his expression brightened. He had puzzled something through and he was in charge again. “I’ve got it,” he said. “You’re just asking questions, eh? About Harvey, his murder. Awful thing that was. Hideous way to go. Where are you with the case?”

“Not anywhere. That happened out in Radnor, not in the city. I’m with the Phila—”

“Terrible thing,” Loren said. He didn’t listen well. Luckily his beat was concrete, brick, and steel. He spread his arms wide, embracing the room and its contents. “But you don’t, you can’t, no matter how…grating Harvey was, you can’t imagine anyone here had anything to do with it, can you?”

Which made it apparent that he thought either his ex-wife or his son had. And wanted Mackenzie to know that. I wondered which he suspected, and if the idea pained him at all.

“You hate me, don’t you?” Betsy screeched. “You’ve hated me since the day I left, and you want me to go to the gas chamber! How could you suggest that
I
killed Harvey—I’m too weak!”

“Of course you are,” he said, his eyes wide. He looked at Mackenzie and me, searching for a sympathetic glance. “No matter how you felt, what he did to you or what you may have said, you are simply too…insufficiently…
linear
to arrange something that heinous.”

Betsy, as well she might, looked stymied.

Was he saying that Betsy couldn’t think in a straight line and therefore couldn’t contrive a murder? A damnably weak defense, and more like a barbed accusation—as he well knew.

“Are you saying I could have done it?” Betsy screamed. “
Nobody
thinks that except you, because you always act as if I’m insane, but it’s you who’s crazy! The police questioned me and went away. And how could I have done it? He was too heavy. Besides, everybody knows I never went to those bonfires.”

The bonfires the Moral Ecologists said they didn’t start, right? Someday we’d have to pursue that line.

“I was here, alone, all night,” she went on. “When the police came, they knew—I was here alone. They have the harlot—she did it and they know it.”

“Mom,” Jake said, “nobody accused you of anything. You don’t have to explain where you—”

“Besides, it’s impossible. I couldn’t lift him.”

I wondered why she said she hadn’t had the opportunity or muscle to kill her husband, not that she
wouldn’t
have, wouldn’t have wanted to. Possibly because her son knew the reality, must have been here for countless hysterical rants against Harvey Spiers. And it was interesting to know that the police had considered—or still did consider—her a suspect.

But it wasn’t sufficiently interesting to convince me to waste more of my day in this unhappy household. “So!” I said. “We’ll just be on our—”

“Did I ever once say I thought you’d killed Harvey?” Loren asked mildly, ignoring me completely. “I didn’t, wouldn’t, couldn’t entertain the idea.”

Each word was uttered with so little sincerity, it seemed custom-designed to evoke another outburst, further proof of Betsy’s instability. But for once, she kept a near silence, broken only by snuffles.

Ulrich turned back to Mackenzie. “You didn’t answer me. What’s happening with the case? What’s your relationship with my son?”

Mackenzie’s mouth compressed with annoyance. “Mr. Ulrich,” he said, speaking even more slowly than is the norm for him, “it’s a waste of my breath to answer people who don’t listen.” He paused. “You ready to hear me now?”

Loren nodded.

“Miss Pepper and I, we brought Jake here this morning. The reason behind this is simple and has nothing to do with any investigations. The reason is that Jake does not have a car and I do. I was accompanyin’ Miss Pepper, and she was accompanyin’ Jake, who is her student. Therefore, my presence has nothing whatsoever to do with my professional role. Which fact I tried tellin’ you. Furthermore, even in my professional role, I am not involved in the murder of Harvey Spiers because it happened out beyond City Line, which, as you might suspect, defines the edge of the city. I am part of the Philadelphia Police Department. I work on homicides that happen inside this city. Have I made myself entirely clear? Is the geography or anything else about that still confusin’ you?”