Galileo

by Ann McMan

  “Okay.” Evan nodded. “Thanks, Dan.”

  “Don’t thank me,” he said. “I’m sorry I got you into this mess.”

  “There was no way for you to know what we’d uncover.”

  “Yeah,” he said morosely. “But that doesn’t make the stench of it any easier to bear.”

  “No. It doesn’t.”

  “Come on.” He put an arm around her shoulders. “Let’s go see if that kid of ours is ready to go.”

  She leaned into him, and they left her office to go find Stevie.

  ◊ ◊ ◊

  Evan was exiting I-95 onto South Columbus Boulevard, driving as fast as she could without risking an accident.

  Come on, Tim. Pick up. Pick up.

  She’d been calling his cell phone repeatedly since finding his voicemail message after Dan left.

  No dice. He’d obviously already left to head to the DoubleTree. He’d called her back while she was walking Dan and Stevie out. As soon as she got back inside and listened to his message, she did a quick LexisNexis search on “Mike Duffy, Phoenix.” There were only four hits, and three of those she was able to eliminate immediately because of their ages. The fourth, Michael Joseph Duffy, was age appropriate and had lived briefly in Philadelphia in the ’90s, but he was deceased. Evan found his obituary listed at the site of the Whitney & Murphy Funeral Home in Phoenix. Mike Duffy had been active in the St. Catherine of Siena Roman Catholic Church, and was survived by his wife, Gloria, three children and four siblings. The family requested that memorial contributions be made to the Fight Colorectal Cancer Fund and Solace Hospice of Maricopa County.

  Son of a bitch.

  Maya’s warning was right. This meeting was a setup, and Tim was on his way to an ambush.

  She thought about calling J.C. Ortiz. But what could she tell him? It would take more time than she had to convince him about why she was persuaded that Tim was in danger.

  No. All she could do was get to the DoubleTree as fast as possible and pray she could head Tim off before he went inside.

  She tried Tim’s phone again. No dice.

  Shit.

  She knew he had his phone turned off. He always did when he was driving. He was such a damn stickler for driving safely—a nerdy godsend when it came to his patience teaching Stevie the rules of the road, but a total pain in the ass right now.

  The exit for Washington Street was right ahead. Then it was a straight shot to South Broad and the entrance to the DoubleTree. Evan checked the clock on her dash. 5:58 p.m.

  Maybe he’s only just getting there? He’d hit worse traffic getting up here from St. Rita’s. Maybe I can still catch him before he goes inside . . .

  She floored it to make the next two intersections before the lights changed, and took the turn onto South Broad Street on two wheels.

  Jesus, if I don’t lose my fucking license it’s gonna be a miracle.

  She turned into the entrance to the DoubleTree Parking garage and stopped to grab a ticket from the automated kiosk. The Standing O bar was located in the lobby, so she needed to grab the first parking space she could find.

  Level One was a write-off. There was nothing.

  Level Two wasn’t looking much better and she’d just about determined to ditch her car and damn the consequences. Then she saw Tim’s Subaru, parked in a space near the entrance to the elevators.

  Fuck.

  That had to mean he was already inside . . . or wherever else the bogus Mike Duffy chose to take him.

  She parked her car behind his and prepared to head inside.

  That’s when she heard the gunshot and saw the back window of a nearby SUV explode.

  Jesus Christ!

  She threw open her door and stood up on the rocker panel. Then she saw him. Tim was running like hell, ducking in and out between cars, heading for the exit ramp. There was another man chasing him—and he was gaining fast. Evan reflexively laid on her horn—then started shouting at the top of her lungs.

  “Hey? Asshole? Over here you worthless piece of shit!” She blew the horn again. “That’s right—I see you! Come and get me, fuck stick!”

  Her taunts worked. The man stopped and looked right at her. Evan dropped down behind her car door as he fired again. The bullet hit a support column directly behind her car.

  “Tim!” She yelled from her crouch. “Hit the deck! Stay down!”

  She stayed low and crept away from her car, trying to work her way around behind the gunman by weaving in and around parked vehicles. When she thought she could, she risked taking a peek at him. He was scanning the area where she’d been and was slowly backing his way toward her still-running car.

  He was only about thirty feet away from her now.

  Evan ducked down again. Shit. I need something—anything—to hit him with. She inched backward to move farther away, but her foot connected with an empty Diet Coke can and sent it clattering.

  Shit. He had her now.

  He shifted direction and headed straight for her.

  “Come on out, Reed,” he yelled. “Lemme see your pretty face before I fucking waste you.”

  Okay . . . this guy was a talker. Maybe she could leverage that?

  It was worth the risk. She slowly stood up with her hands held high in the air.

  “I think it would be rude for you to kill me before introducing yourself.” She said. “Don’t you?”

  He actually laughed. “Pleased to meet you,” he said, as he trained his weapon on her. “You can call me Billy.”

  What happened next was a blur. Evan saw a swirling flash of bright red, and suddenly Billy was lying flat on his back in a puddle of motor oil.

  Evan’s jaw dropped.

  Someone else had joined their party . . .

  Maya Jindal was bending over Billy’s unconscious body, retrieving his firearm . . . her firearm, no doubt. This, of course, was after she’d appeared out of no-fucking-where and nailed Billy with a perfectly placed roundhouse kick.

  “Oh, my,” she cooed at him, waving her Tokarev back and forth in front of his unseeing eyes. “What a bad boy you’ve been, playing with Maya’s gun. Marcus should’ve known better than to give you such a grown-up toy. Pity you have to find out the hard way how dangerous these old relics can be.”

  Evan walked toward them.

  “Why, hello.” Maya straightened up and faced her. “We do seem fated to keep running into each other, don’t we?”

  “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “Now, is that any way to express gratitude? I did just save your life—again.”

  “I’ll be sure to add your name to my Christmas card list.”

  “Dear Evangeline. I do seem to keep cleaning up your messes, don’t I?”

  “Don’t feel you have to do me any favors.”

  “Oh, the pleasure is all mine. Unfortunately, it seems this cretin just broke my heel with his face.”

  Maya calmly trained her gun on Billy, and shot him between the eyes.

  Evan lurched backward and stared, stupefied, as Maya bent down and methodically set about relieving Billy of his wallet and car keys.

  “You killed him,” Evan muttered. “You just fucking killed him.”

  “What a bright girl you are.” Maya got to her feet. “Oh, look,” she made an oblique gesture with Billy’s wallet, “here comes Father Dowling.”

  Evan looked over her shoulder to see Tim running toward them. When he reached them and saw the dead man, he dropped to his knees.

  “What . . .” he panted. “What . . . happened?”

  “She shot him,” Evan said, simply. There was no reason to belabor the point.

  Tim looked anxiously up at Maya, then back at Billy. He swayed for a moment, but managed to remain upright. Then he crawled over to Billy, took hold of his hand, and began to pray. “May you rest in the arms of the Lord who formed you from the dust of the earth . . .”

  Maya gave Evan a quizzical look. “Whatever is he doing?”

  “Praying.”
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br />   “How very singular. Well. As much as I’d love to stay and watch this fascinating demonstration, I have another small errand to take care of. And thanks to dear Billy, I now have to go and change my shoes.”

  She removed her heels with practiced ease, as if she were standing near a rack in Ferragamo’s, instead of beside the body of a dead man in a parking garage.

  “Gotta dash now, Evangeline.” She cut her eyes at Tim. “I suggest you two do likewise.”

  “Trust me,” Evan told her. “It’s next up on the itinerary.”

  Maya gave Evan a coquettish smile, followed by a royal wave. “Tutty byes.”

  She walked briskly away. Seconds later, Evan heard a car start, followed by the screech of tires as she left the parking garage.

  Evan knew they only had seconds to follow suit. She stepped closer to Tim and laid a hand on his shoulder.

  “Tim. C’mon. We have to go . . . now.”

  He continued to pray. “May Christ who was crucified for you, bring you freedom and peace.”

  “Tim? I’m not kidding, man. I need you to do the expedited version of this. We gotta go. Now.”

  Tim still didn’t budge. It was clear he was going to finish his errand.

  Evan’s frustration reached apocalyptic proportions. “I don’t know why the fuck you ever doubted whether or not you should stay a priest. If this doesn’t answer that question for you, nothing ever fucking will. Now come on!”

  “May Christ who died for you admit you into his garden of paradise.” Tim made the sign of the cross and struggled to his feet. His face was ashen.

  Evan took hold of his arm and hauled him over to her Forester, which was still running.

  “Get in,” she commanded.

  Once she had him safely stowed, she hurried around to climb into the driver’s seat.

  They’d be able to return and retrieve his car any time. Right then, what they needed was to put some fast distance between them and what remained of “Billy.”

  The exit kiosk was unattended when they approached it. To avoid having a time stamp applied to her parking ticket, Evan crashed through some blaze orange cones that blocked off a service vehicle lane and turned out of the garage onto South Broad Street, and made a beeline for The Twisted Tail.

  She knew Tim wouldn’t be going back to St. Rita’s that night.

  The other thing she knew with certainty was that they both needed some time, some space, and some goddamn good bourbon before making the fifty-minute drive back to Chadds Ford.

  ◊ ◊ ◊

  Julia embraced one of her mother’s parting suggestions, and took a shower.

  She stood beneath the spray until the hot water scalded her skin. Only when she couldn’t stand the heat any longer did she turn the taps off and remain riveted in place until the steam evaporated and her body grew cold. That was when she stepped from the shower, wrapped herself in several thick towels, and curled up on the bed in her mother’s guest room until her shivering stopped.

  The experiment worked.

  She’d needed to feel something. Anything. Just to know she was alive, and could still recognize the difference between pain and pleasure.

  There was nothing left for her in Paris. There was nothing left for her at all—not in this apartment, not at her grandmother’s house in Philadelphia, not at Donne & Hale, and not anywhere else connected to this part of her life or history.

  Her mother had made the choice clear for her. It was uncomplicated. There were no variables. There were no avenues for negotiation. No compromises. It was binary. Black and white. One and done.

  No . . . one and undone.

  Julia understood it all now. It was why she had come here, after all. To learn where the parameters lay that divided love and truth from fealty to self-interest.

  It was shocking how simple it had been. With a few declarative sentences, her mother had managed to lay waste to all of Julia’s carefully crafted paradigms for the ways they could persevere, could recover, could go forward and salvage something from the carnage that would soon overtake their lives.

  That had already claimed hers . . .

  There was a kind of giddy release that came with acknowledging the epic scope of her failure.

  Julia felt like a character from a Charles Dickens novel.

  She was Miss Flite, the half-delusional, faded spinster in Bleak House, who wasted her life awaiting judgment in the Court of Chancery. After scores of years, when her verdict was finally returned, Miss Flite released her captive birds from their cages—the same creatures that had been her constant companions and spiritual guardians. Julia had memorized all of their names: Hope, Joy, Youth, Peace, Rest, Life, Dust, Ashes, Waste, Want, Ruin, Despair, Madness, Death, Cunning, Folly, Words, Wigs, Rags, Sheepskin, Plunder, Precedent, Jargon, Gammon, and Spinach.

  Judgment had at last arrived for Julia, too—and the time had come to set her own disappointed hopes free.

  She dressed and wandered aimlessly through the apartment, looking for anything familiar.

  There wasn’t much to find.

  L’Étranger. She had become the stranger.

  She hesitated at the doorway to her father’s study—the one room that had always been his private sanctum—whether located here, or in any other of their houses.

  She crossed the threshold into the immaculate space. It was clear that her mother kept it up exactly as it had been. The shelves that lined two walls were filled with books. Reference books. Histories. Biographies. The Classics. There was even an entire section devoted to books published by Donne & Hale—all of them from his era, or that of his father, or his father’s father. None from hers.

  She wasn’t surprised by the omission.

  He had an elaborate desk covered with a leather blotter and a vintage brass lamp with a black shade. There was a caddy containing the routine things a businessman would need: a letter opener, a small stapler, paper clips, a book of postage stamps. Julia picked those up. They featured tiny portraits of Catherine De Médici.

  Strangely appropriate . . .

  Her father also had a small box containing sticks of blue sealing wax and a heavy brass embosser with his monogram, JLD. The thing had a soft patina. It had seen a lot of use.

  She gazed down at his chair. It occurred to her that she’d never dared to sit on it—not this one, and not any of the chairs at his offices in New York or in Philadelphia—not even after he’d retired, and she took over the firm.

  She had no desire to sit in it now, either.

  Instead, she chose a wing chair upholstered in dark green leather that sat in the corner of the room, near a floor-to-ceiling window overlooking the Seine. There were some books stacked on a low table beside the chair. The top volume had a bookmark in it. She picked it up. The Decameron. She returned it to the stack, regretting her impulse to look at it.

  It would remain unfinished. Evidence of a life interrupted.

  The room was quiet, except for the subtle click, click, click of a Limoges porcelain clock sitting atop a Louis XIV chest near the door. Julia watched its second hand make its slow but measured progress around the painted numbers. She watched it for a long time.

  There were several paintings in the room, all perfectly displayed on the boiserie-paneled walls. Most could have been exact replicas of the artwork they saw on display last night in the dining room at his club. Hunting scenes. She found his taste for those odd, since, as far as she knew, her father had never hunted for anything—except upstart smaller presses that he could gobble up and make disappear.

  There was another painting, only partly visible behind the carved door that led to his bedroom. The edge of its gilded frame flashed in the sunlight streaming in from a nearby window.

  Julia didn’t recall that painting, probably because the door to his bedroom was rarely open.

  Her curiosity was piqued. She crossed the room and inspected it. What she saw when she closed the door stopped her heart.

  The painting was a smaller vers
ion of “Snap the Whip.”

  She reached out with shaking fingers to touch the canvas. It was authentic. She was certain of it. Homer had signed and dated it “1872.”

  Homer painted quite a few of these as studies,Evan had said. There were many practice paintings, but only one original—the original that had been on display at the Galileo Club.

  “Little stars,” she quoted.

  She ran her fingers across the faces of the boys in the painting.

  On impulse, she took hold of the frame and lowered the painting so she could inspect its back for any telltale gallery markings or inventory data that might suggest where her father had acquired it. She was surprised to discover a fat, booklet-sized envelope attached to the back of the frame with clips.

  What on earth?

  She carefully detached the envelope and propped the painting against the wall, then held the envelope for a few moments without opening it. It was thick. Heavy. It was clear that it contained many sheets of paper or folded documents.

  She began to feel wary.

  Maybe she shouldn’t open it?

  It had been hidden for a reason. Wasn’t this trespassing? What if it contained things that belonged to her mother? Secret things? Letters from a lover? Things she wouldn’t want Julia to know about.

  Things Julia didn’t want to know about . . .

  What right did she have to look inside?

  She looked down at the painting again.

  Little stars . . .

  She returned to her chair and sat down with the envelope on her lap. She opened its flap and withdrew a thick stack of . . . photographs—scores of them in various sizes and orientations. They were starkly lighted, graphic images—all in black and white. Julia began flipping through them robotically before her tired mind could process the horror of what she was seeing.

  Once it did, she recoiled from the photographs in revulsion. They fluttered to the floor and spread out around her feet like a dark wave.

  Her breathing became ragged. Blood hammered in her temples. The room began to spin. She knew she was going to be sick.

  She clapped her hands to her mouth and stumbled over the images as she fled.