by David Bishop
“If you believe that, sis, you’re a bigger fool than I think you are. He took us in and kept us only as a favor to one of his buddies. Then, being stuck with us, he used Mother Chantal to raise us. Later, as we grew, he used us as hired help. Oh, sure, he paid us well, but that’s all we were, hired help. He was scum.”
“He loved you, Charlie. And I love you. You and I are the only real family either of us has, that we know about.”
Charles huffed before mumbling something indecipherable.
I stepped into the door, but stayed on the balcony. “Sure you got a bad turn, but don’t forget that without that arrangement, you and Susan would have been killed as infants.”
“Papa didn’t step in to save us. For all he cared, Hussein could have smashed our heads against a rock and thrown us in an unmarked grave. Everyone knows there were plenty of those in Iraq. It was the Frenchman who didn’t want us killed. He paid Papa to protect his own conscience. And Papa took us for money and raised us to make the Frenchman beholding to him. It was about business, not family.”
“We all have some kind of baggage,” I said. “Life is not about whether we have it, or what it is, but how we carry it. This stuff is all your father’s shortcomings, not Susan’s and not yours. It’s time to get on with your life.” I then faded back into the darker balcony.
“That’s right, Charlie,” Susan said, “Matt’s right about that. I love you, Bro.”
“Oh, sis, if you only knew. What if I told you that when Papa called me that night he said he was dumping us from his will, leaving all the money to his bimbo wife? What if I told you that?”
“Are you telling me that?”
Listening to them from beyond the doorway, I realized the voice from the parking garage, the one that left early, had been Charles. He had set up the beating. He had deepened his voice, but listening now without seeing him, I could tell. The proof came when I inadvertently slid my hand into my jacket pocket. I felt a piece of paper and opened it from curiosity to find the cell phone statement I had taken from Charles the first time I visited him in his apartment. There it was, right in front of me. I had been carrying the answer around in my pocket. The statement showed his cell phone number to be the one I had found in the list of recent calls in the biker’s cell phone. The number the biker had called twice the day I was beaten. The phone number assigned to Charles Talmadge.
At that moment, all the remaining pieces rushed into place.
“Yeah, I’m telling ya that,” Charles was saying to answer Susan when I again focused on listening to the two of them. “Papa called me to say he was dropping us and leaving our money to her.” Then Charles took a few steps toward me on the balcony. “Even you didn’t know that part, Kile.”
I spoke through the doorway. “That’s not exactly the way it happened, is it Charles?”
“What do you mean by that crack?”
“I meant just what I said. Your father didn’t call to get your advice about dropping Clarice from his will, and he didn’t call to tell you he was dropping you and your sister. Did he?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Kile.”
“Your father never called you for advice or to talk over decisions he was considering. He went to Susan, not you. He would have called Susan to see what she thought about dropping Clarice from the will.”
“He wouldn’t have asked sis. He knew she would tell him that wasn’t the right thing to do. I love you, sis, but you’re soft. Papa wouldn’t have talked to you about that.”
“Charles, Garson wouldn’t have dropped Susan. Garson loved your sister and respected her opinions. Whenever he got around to you, it was only to tell you what decision he had made.”
“So what? Papa mostly liked the way sis talked him through things. But this time he decided on his own. Like I told you, sis would have tried to talk him out of it.”
“You always got left in the corner when the time came to make decisions, didn’t you?”
“Are you trying to make me out to be jealous of my sister’s relationship with Papa?”
“Weren’t you?”
“Maybe a little, but that was Papa’s fault, not sis’s.”
I had the ball now, and I kept running toward the end zone. “So, let’s get back to when Garson called you the night he died. I agree, he called you because he had made a decision. What did he really tell you that night?”
“That he was cutting Clarice down to their prenup. Just like I’ve been saying.”
“That’s not what you just told Susan.”
“I lied to Susan. Remember, I said, ‘what if I told you.’ I said it like that.”
“Okay. Let that go for now. Garson’s letter, found at his attorney’s office, contradicts what you’re saying now.”
“Okay, Kile, you’re the smart guy, at least in your own mind. What do you think happened?”
“I think Garson called to tell you he was cutting you out. Only you! He was leaving it all to Clarice and Susan. I could see him doing that.”
His face went white. Charles Talmadge just stood there. Still, as if I had reached out and slapped him, hard. I had played around with the thought that Garson had decided to leave it all to the women in his life, and nothing to the son he saw as a disappointment. Now I was certain.
Charles’s entire body slumped as if he were an inflatable that had sprung a leak. The truth had been spoken. It was out. And in all his drunken confusion, the look on his face was one of relief.
“Oh, my God,” Susan said. “It’s true, isn’t it, Charlie?” Her brother said nothing. Susan stepped in close to her brother, and she slapped him for real. And she stayed right there. Right in his face and stared. Then she repeated her question. “It’s true, isn’t it, Charlie? You lied to me and lied to the cops. Your lie could have helped convict Clarice. Put her in prison.”
“Yes, it’s true. That son of a bitch was cutting me loose. He was a cold, heartless man to the end. As for Clarice, she wasn’t entitled to his money. We were. I lied for both of us.”
“So, what did you do after that?” I asked, leaning back against the balcony railing. “You stewed a while in your own juices, didn’t you? Then you went over there, didn’t you? You went over to confront him, didn’t you? You were determined not to let him bully you again. You used your key and went in, didn’t you? Clarice was down at my place. You two argued, didn’t you? You both got mad, didn’t you? He told you something like not only was he cutting you out of his will, but that he never wanted to see you again. Your papa was throwing you out like yesterday’s garbage.”
It was a hard message, and I had delivered it as cruelly as I could. You need to get a person real angry if you want them to spill their own beans. Then I added the final blow.
“The only compassionate part being that your papa didn’t call you any names.”
I figured Garson had, and so my saying it this way was turning the knife.
Charles stood there. His arms limp at his sides. The air drained from his bravado.
“Oh, you think not. He called me every vile thing he could think of.” His spoke in a low voice, barely a whisper. “He told me I was soft, that I was of no use to him, that I was a failure as an enforcer. That I couldn’t handle a really tough man … Well, he thought he was a really tough man, and I showed him.”
“Charlie? You didn’t—?” Susan couldn’t even finish her question, but she didn’t need to. She knew the answer. Her brother had killed papa.
“He had it coming.” Charles was talking now, looking for that validation that all guilty people one day look for. “You always loved him,” he said, again facing his sister. “He treated you with respect. He listened to you. He sought your advice. Since we came to America, he made few decisions without consulting you.”
Charles had lived through a hard upbringing, but I had no good feelings for the guy. He had wallowed in the mistreatment, letting it rot him from the inside. Maybe I felt a little pity, but damn little. Life is choices an
d Charles had chosen to stay where he shouldn’t. When his hopes for future riches were yanked away, he boiled over for lack of more precise description.
We had picked the scab off Charles’s hurt, and he wasn’t through letting it bleed. I switched to sounding understanding. “But you were still there for him, helping him with his weapons deals,” I said. “That should have counted.”
“It should have counted, but it didn’t. While I was helping, Susan kept trying to get him to stop. Telling him he had plenty of money. And eventually he did stop.”
“Only after America invaded Iraq,” I said.
“After that,” Charles said, “Susan kept pushing Papa to keep give me money to go to college and get a profession. Make your way without Papa, she kept saying.”
“Did you?”
“I didn’t need a profession. Papa would die eventually, and then we’d be set, Susan and me.”
“But your sister went to law school.”
“That’s what I wanted you to do too, Charlie. Not necessarily law school. Whatever you wanted, but have something of your own, so you could be self-reliant.”
“So you graduated. Big deal. You did nothing with it, so what good did it do you? Right, Kile? What good did her damn law degree do for her anyway?”
“She got a good job and started a worthwhile career.”
“Oh?” Charles said in a mocking tone. “I didn’t know you needed a law degree to give lap dances.”
“That was part of her front. I was speaking of her career with the FBI.” It was a guess somewhat based on Clarice having followed Susan until she lost track of her up near the FBI office in Los Angeles. Not far from where Susan had gone to law school. It takes years to get through law school, and only those who really want it make it through. I had checked Susan had graduated with honors.
Susan came close and put her hand on my arm. “How did you know about the FBI, Matt?”
“It’s a long story. For now, let’s just say it was a guess.”
I didn’t want to go into it with Charles standing there, but it was all part of the best explanations of a few points. Why was the FBI so interested in Garson Talmadge? He was still doing an occasional weapons deal. Why did Charles make various trips to Europe? He was the liaison between Garson and his cohorts in Europe. How did the FBI learn I was going to France? I told Susan, she likely told Charles, but he wouldn’t have contact with the FBI. The only others that knew were Brad Fisher and Clarice, and it would not have been in their interest to report my going. No other peg fit that hole. Susan had to have told the FBI.
“Well, sis,” Charlie said accusatorially, “so you, too, struck back at Papa.”
“But you killed him,” she screamed. Then after standing still for a minute with her eyes closed, she tried to explain it to her brother. “I read about the American FBI when I was a girl and knew that’s what I wanted to be. When Papa decided to bring us to America, I started believing it might be possible. It’s why I went to law school. I hated the weapons deals, the corruption and violence. I wanted it all stopped, not just Papa’s deals, although by then Papa had cut way back. The FBI was working with the French authorities. I made the Bureau realize, given my role in those deals, what I knew was rather limited. I didn’t know enough about the violent part of it and the inner workings, the higher ups. I just about had the Bureau convinced they should put you and Papa in the witness protection program. Papa could identify the ones at the top of it all. After that, you and Papa could both leave it all behind you. You could live like a law-abiding citizen, and Papa would have a clean finish for his life. But you ruined all that, for yourself as well as for Papa. Alone, you didn’t know enough to warrant the Bureau offering you the program, but I was still trying to make it happen.”
Charles seemed unaffected by what he had just heard. “I had that money coming, sis. We both did. We earned it. And we would have gotten it. Everything would have worked just fine if it hadn’t been for this bastard.”
Charles lunged at me with his arms out, his hands against my chest. In reaction, I spun fast to one side and brought my arm up strongly into his armpit. Unsteady from drinking, his unspent forward motion along with my leverage under his arm carried him over the balcony rail.
Susan rushed to the edge. We looked down. Charles had hit the decking just short of the pool. He lay still. From the eighth floor, he would lay still. I held Susan. Her face pressed against my shirt, her tears blotting on the fabric.
Charles Talmadge hadn’t been a strong man, not in any way that mattered. His papa had handed him more baggage than he was able to carry.
Garson Talmadge could be summed up as a cruel man in a disgusting business. He had no friends, no true family, and the romantics would say no heart. The only woman who ever really loved him lived in an urn on a mantel in her sister’s modest Paris apartment. The sister who wanted more than anything to one day spit on the grave of that worthless man.
I decided right then I would fly Camille over here so she could do just that. She had never seen America and her spitting on Garson’s grave seemed the most fitting way to say: the end.
Epilogue
Camille did spit on Garson’s grave, twice actually. She also rekindled her relationship with Susan Talmadge, her niece in a way. The two of them felt that bond, and that was all that mattered.
Susan and Clarice continued to get along, although they never really were at odds except when Charles’ skullduggery caused Susan to think Clarice had murdered her papa.
Two weeks later, the FBI reassigned Susan to their New York office where she would work in a major unit formed to combat illegal weapons deals. She took along the audio tapes Clarice had made of Garson telling the details of his long and inglorious career in that illicit trade. When Clarice learned of Susan’s FBI career and why she had gone to law school, Clarice agreed to turn the audio tapes over to Susan and the FBI. Clarice would make no money in a splashy book deal. Instead, the information on those tapes would be secretly used by Susan’s task force to build a case against those in French industry and government who had conspired to sell the weapons.
The assignment to New York was just what Susan needed. She welcomed the change of scenery. She was strong and a solid thinker, but in the short run, a new locale would ease her emotional healing. We promised to stay in touch, and she invited me to visit her there whenever I wanted. I could do a lot of book signings in the New York area. From the time we spent together the last two weeks before she left, I knew I wanted to go and that I would be treated well while visiting.
Susan was quite a woman given what she had been through. My lust for her was equaled by my admiration for her.
Clarice was an enigma. It’s so hard sometimes to figure out which people are wearing the good-guy white hats and which are wearing the black, bad-guy hats. Clarice, for one, clearly wore a gray hat. I, for one, still liked her.
As for me, I went back to writing about such things rather than trying to live through them. Before she left for New York, Susan said, “We’ll be a couple thousand miles apart so we need to be practical. I’ll be seeing other men in New York, so why shouldn’t you see other women here? Besides, Clarice and I are not blood relatives.” I decided if they saw no problem with it, why should I.
I also hoped to see a bit more of my ex-wife. The few hours I occasionally spent with my ex and our daughters were still my whipped cream and cherry.
I also went before the parole board and made a formal offer of employment for my ex-cellmate, Axel. The parole board implied that he could be out soon. I was looking forward to helping Axel adjust to life on the outside.
THE END
Note to Readers
I would love to hear from you now that you have finishing reading the story. I can be reached by email at [email protected]. Please, no attachments, I won’t open them. For those of you who write or who aspire to write, I encourage you to continue writing until your prose lives on the pages the way it lives in your mind. I pro
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Bonus Content:
An excerpt from the next Matt Kile Mystery, The Original Alibi begins on the following page. For a list of David’s other novels and their release dates, please see the front of this book.
Chapter 1
“ I believe that’s your phone, dear,” the woman’s husband said. She stopped walking and fished her cell from the pocket of her windbreaker.
“Hello, Mrs. Yarbrough,” said a voice into her ear. “I see you are enjoying your first early evening walk on the beach with your new puppy. How lovely. Have you and Mr. Yarbrough named the pooch?”
“Who is this?”
“It doesn’t matter. What matters is that you stay on the line after what is about to happen.”
“What are you talking about?” Mrs. Yarbrough demands, “Who are you?”
Right then the leash Mrs. Yarbrough held went limp, her white poodle falling to the sand. “Robbie, what happened? Snookie is, I don’t know, she’s just … down.” Mrs. Yarbrough held her cell phone as if she no longer knew she had it in her hand.
Robert, her husband, bent down. His knees displaced the sand next to Snookie. “She’s dead, Mel. I think Snookie’s been shot.”
Melanie Yarbrough began bouncing on her toes, frantically waving her hands. She dropped her phone onto the beach, bent down to Snookie and began to cry. She went to her husband; he held her.
Several minutes later, Robert Yarbrough picked up his wife’s cell phone, shook off the sand, and started to close the top when he heard a loud voice. He held the phone to his ear. “Hello?”
