The Girl Who Ran Off With Daddy (14 page)

“You was chumping them down’s what you was doing,” Slawski said with frosty disapproval. “Except you picked the wrong bunch. Half of them just got laid off over at Electric Boat and they’re itching to get in a knuck game with someone. I’m in a serious avoidance mode regarding this particular situation, Mr. Gibbs.” The man was positively fluent in cop-speak. Most impressive. “Folks in town don’t want to see them awake. And I don’t want to see you in here again, either of you. I hear you are, I’ll throw your sagging gray butts in jail. Understood?”

“My sagging butt happens to be pink,” I pointed out defensively.

“Understood?” he repeated, louder.

I said I understood. “Any chance you could keep Thor’s name out of your report, Trooper? He’s trying to keep a low profile.”

“He’s got a funny way of showing it,” Slawski snarled. “You got somebody can drive you home?”

“I can drive,” I assured him. “I only had one beer.”

“And one conk on the head,” Slawski reminded me. “No way.”

“I’ll run ’em home,” Dwayne offered, hitching up his sagging jeans. “I didn’t have nothing to drink.”

The trooper eyed Dwayne’s stitched-up face and torn shirt dubiously, Dwayne growing more and more resentful the longer the lawman scrutinized him. Slawski went over to him and sniffed his breath. Grudgingly, he said okay. Then he put his hat back on, straightened his shoulders and started toward the gang in the doorway. They backed inside, cowed.

We piled into Dwayne’s pickup, brimming with testosterone, and took off around Rogers Lake for home. The truck rode very high and bouncy. The interior was strewn with beer cans, junk food wrappers and dirty laundry. It was as if the kid lived, ate and slept in the damned thing. Thor rode in the middle, clutching his broken tooth in his big hand. Lulu got to ride in back with the scrap lumber and tools just like a real country dog, one of those big retrievers named Travis or Justin that chase Frisbees and have no allergies. It was a real thrill for her, almost enough to make up for Klaus blowing her off. But not quite. Trust me, a father knows these things.

“Good thing you stepped in when you did, Dwayne,” Thor declared. “No telling when I might have hurt someone.”

Dwayne’s eyes flickered across him at me, then back out at the road. “I got no use for them dumb shits.”

“Still, it wasn’t your fight,” I put in.

“Anytime Kirk and them are involved it’s my fight,” Dwayne said, his jaw muscles hardening. “Been mixing it up with them guys since I’m ten years old. They’re ignorant and close-minded and mean. Gave me hell over my mom. If I was you I’d watch out for ’em. They hold a grudge. And they smoke that shit, that illy.”

“Illy?” Thor asked.

“It’s new,” I answered. “Marijuana soaked in embalming fluid.”

“Good Lord,” gasped Thor. “That sounds …
great.
”

“It’s not,” warned Dwayne. “It’s bad, dangerous shit. Makes you crazy—violent crazy. Like getting dusted, only worse.”

“You’ve tried it?” I asked him.

He glanced at me uneasily. I was, after all, his employer. “Maybe once or twice.”

“Good man,” Thor said approvingly. “You should try everything in this world once or twice.”

“Do they buy it around here?” I wondered.

“No way, Mr. H,” Dwayne replied. “Not as long as Slawski’s around. He can spot a dealer a mile away. Have to go to New Haven you want illy.” He punched his cigarette lighter, fished a bent Camel out of his shirt pocket and lit it. “Wasting your breath on them boys, Mr. Gibbs, you want my opinion. All they care about’s their next paycheck. Give ’em six cold ones and some wet pussy on Saturday night and they’re happy.”

“No, they’re not, boy,” Thor countered. “They think they are, but they’re not.”

Dwayne furrowed his brow thoughtfully. “I guess maybe they don’t realize they have the power to reach for more, like you say.”

“And so,” Thor added somberly, “they gulp their beers in sullen silence and they drug themselves and every once in a while they erupt in spasms of frustrated violence. Because they are men, and deep down in their wild selves, they cannot accept limits. Cannot accept unhappiness. Men must act, Dwayne. It is in our nature to act.”

“To act,” Dwayne recited, as if he were trying to memorize it. “To act.”

Merilee was working in the garden when we pulled up, Tracy next to her in her buggy. Clethra was sprawled in an Adirondack chair looking supremely bored. Merilee gave me her fiercest stare when she saw my bloody nose. It was practically enough to turn me into a pillar of salt.

Clethra, however, lit up. “I’m, like, what’d you guys
do?
” she squealed, jumping excitedly to her feet.

“Kicked some butt, girl,” Thor boasted, offering her his tooth like it was a trophy cup.

She took it, thrilled. He went inside to wash up.

I asked her if she’d mind driving back to Slim Jim’s with Dwayne to fetch the Land Rover. No problem. She hopped in and I tossed her the keys and off the two of them went down the driveway, music thumping from his stereo. Dwayne had not, I realized, played it when we were with him. This made me feel even creakier than I already did.

I went upstairs and climbed into a hot tub, which I seemed to be doing a lot of on this particular non-assignment. Merilee came up a few minutes later with an ice pack for my nose and a brandy and soda for the rest of me.

Plus a few choice words: “Look at you.”

“I’d really rather not,” I said.

“You know what you look like?”

“I’d really rather not.”

“An aging patrician club fighter who’s taken one punch too many.”

“Looks are not deceiving.”

“What is this, some kind of
guy
thing?”

“Some kind.”

“Are you happy now?”

“I’m not unhappy.”

“And why is Lulu acting so weird?”

“Weird how?”

“She just growled at me from under the bed.”

“Oh. She may have met someone, that’s all.”

“Do you suppose it’s for real this time?”

“I doubt it. He’s a cop.”

“Oh, dear.”

I shifted my ice pack and had a sip of the brandy. “I thought we’d go to Essex tomorrow.”

Merilee froze, startled. “Essex?”

“We may have to make one or two stops along the way, if you don’t mind.”

“I don’t mind,” she said carefully.

We were silent a moment. She was gazing at me, her green eyes brimming with tears.

“What is it, Merilee?”

“Nothing, darling,” she sniffled, swiping at them.

“Tomorrow
is
Sunday, isn’t it?”

“Yes, darling,” she said gently, squeezing my hand with hers. “Tomorrow is Sunday.”

W
E CROSSED THE CONNECTICUT
River at Hadlyme on the little car ferry that steamed back and forth there in the shadow of Gillette’s Castle, that immense, storybook rock pile built by William Gillette, the actor who popularized Sherlock Holmes on the Broadway stage at the turn of the century. From there it was a short jog down to Essex, which was the prettiest village in the area, and my least favorite. Too quaint, too precious, too much. Clethra rode next to me in the front seat of the Woody with her sunglasses on, even though the morning was gray and drizzly. She was tapping her foot, wringing her hands, dying for a cigarette. But this was a no-smoking car—Tracy was riding directly behind her in her baby seat, Merilee next to her. Lulu was behind them in back, grumbling sourly. She hates the whole suburban dog thing. Hates it.

We drove in tense silence. This was Sunday, a day for deception, for intrigue, for treachery. A day for family, in other words. First, I’d had to arrange the clandestine meeting between Clethra and Arvin. This had meant taking Barry into my confidence and keeping Ruth completely in the dark—Clethra did not, repeat not, wish to see Ruth. Barry’s assignment was to take Arvin out with him to buy the Sunday papers. On their way back, they would decide to stop for breakfast at Debbie’s Diner, which would explain why they were gone for an hour or more. We would drop Clethra there on our way to my own personal hell. She and Arvin would have breakfast together. Barry would get lost. And Marco, who was in on the plot, would feed and entertain Ruth back at Barry’s house. Barry would then pick up Arvin and take him back home, and we would do the same with Clethra on our own way back home.

It was airtight, provided no one at Debbie’s recognized Clethra and notified the media. But I was willing to take that chance—Sunday mornings in Essex nearly everyone was in church or hung over or both.

The deception didn’t end there, though. Because there was Thor to consider. And Arvin did not, repeat not, want to see Thor. So we’d needed a credible reason for taking Clethra with us and leaving Thor behind. Merilee came up with it: Clethra had volunteered to look after the baby for us. Feeb city, but Thor bought it. Mostly because he was up for some solitude. Said he wanted to go for a swim in Crescent Moon Pond and do some meditating and communing with his wild self.

Me, I envied him.

Debbie’s Diner was attached to a drugstore directly across the road from E. E. Dickinson, where they’ve been making witch hazel since 1866. Barry’s canary-yellow bug-eyed Sprite was parked out front with its top down and no one in it. Clethra took a deep breath, hopped out and started inside. Through the plate glass window I could see Arvin jump up from a table and run toward her. They hugged tightly next to the muffin case. She gave Barry a hug, too, and then she and Arvin sat together and Barry came sauntering out, looking a bit frail and worn. He had on a baggy navy blue turtleneck, stained white duck trousers and tattered deck shoes. He paused at the Sprite to recover a beer mug that was half full of what looked to be a Bloody Mary. He came over to us, swigging from it.

“I’m soo glad we decided to do this thing, Hoagy,” he purred, after he’d said hullo-hullo-hullo to Merilee and given me a dead fish handshake, along with a whiff of his morning breath. A Bloody, all right. “I’m driving over to the Black Seal now to chat up a fellow who’s interested in the Sprite.” He arched an eyebrow at me, or tried to. “Shall we synchronize our watches?”

“Let’s not,” I replied. “And say we did.”

We drove on, the Woody heavy and smooth, Lulu grunting at me from the back. She wanted to ride shotgun now that Clethra had split. But we weren’t going far.

They were living that season in a two-bedroom condo in Essex Meadows, an ultra-posh Q-Tip colony tucked discreetly into several hundred acres of woods off Bokum Road. You could mistake Essex Meadows for a country club if you didn’t know better. There was a nine-hole golf course. There were tennis courts, indoor and outdoor pools, a health spa, an elegant dining room, library, billiard room. There were 189 luxury apartment units with gourmet kitchens and air-conditioning, a full-time staff of gardeners, plumbers and electricians all of whom were polite and efficient and spoke English. It cost several hundred thousand to get in. And there was a hell of a waiting list, too. You could mistake it for a country club, like I said. Except for this one dirty little secret—no one got out of Essex Meadows alive. They’d all been tried, convicted and sentenced, with no hope of a reprieve. This was death row with white shag carpeting, complete with twenty-four-hour nursing care. Exit Meadows, I called it. And, personally, I’d rather get run over by a bus tomorrow than end up there thirty years from now.

Mother was gamely digging away in the narrow flower bed that edged their patio, a brave smile set firmly on her face despite all the pain and the fear. Or maybe because of it. This was her role, after all—to be cheerful and supportive and to let no one know what she was really feeling. They had taught it to her at Miss Porter’s School, just as they had taught it to Merilee a generation later. Although Merilee, I’m happy to say, had rebelled in her own quiet, tasteful way. Mother was seventy now, still straight and trim and vigorous. Swam for an hour every day. She’d broken down only once so far—in front of Merilee, not me. Never in front of me.

He sat under the overhang in his wheelchair with his nurse next to him and a blanket over him, his long, narrow face as familiar as my own. In fact, it was my own. Except the nose seemed longer and bonier now. The teeth stuck out more, his dry, chalky lips pulling back from them in a grimace. And his expression was different, too. It was as if the muscles had been pulled and stretched like soft, wet clay.

Plus somebody had turned out the light in his eyes.

He sat there staring straight ahead like he had ever since it happened—the stroke, that is. A right hemiplegia, they called it. His right arm and leg were paralyzed, his memory was like Swiss cheese. He could see some, though he had double vision, and he could speak, only it was slow and halting, as if he were trying to communicate in some new, unfamiliar language. Sometimes he was with you. Sometimes he was unreachable. Sometimes he’d start sobbing weakly and for no apparent reason, aside from the most obvious one.

This was not my father. My father had been icy and rigid and dictatorial. My father had been decisive and strong. He had inspired terror in me and he had inspired hate. This man I didn’t know. This man was a stranger.

Mother made a big fuss over Tracy and hugged Merilee and oohed and aahed over the black hollyhock she’d brought her from her garden. She paid zero attention to Lulu, which peeved Lulu to no end.

Actually, I thought she’d forgotten about me, too, until she finally came into my arms and kissed me. “Thank you so much for coming, Stewart,” Mother murmured softly in my ear, the way she used to when I’d come running to her after some bully had knocked me off my bicycle. “Seeing you, even for a little while, makes his day so special.”

“Now there’s a depressing thought.”

“Don’t you be churlish,” she commanded sternly. “You’re his only child, Stewart. He has no one else he cares about. And very little to look forward to.”

Just his own exit, which might come tomorrow or in a few months or even a few years. No one knew. In the meantime he was on blood thinners and physical therapy. In the meantime he was a turnip in a wheelchair. He wasn’t even aware that we were there.