Again, Allyson sat quietly, as if she understood her father perfectly.
In a moment, the boy returned and sat down in the same place. “Momma said to tell you it’s Pinky and the Brain.”
“I do remember that,” Allyson said. “Pinky’s always trying to take over the world, right?”
The boy nodded. Worthy looked over at the boy, whose back was straight despite the soft couch. He remembered what Bales had whispered to Henderson, driving him over the edge: “You look like a guy who needs shock therapy.”
“What the hell is this?” Henderson said, coming through the door with a white bag in his hand. Worthy could read the name of the pharmacy on the side of it.
“Carn, don’t,” his wife pleaded, carrying a tray into the room. “They’re guests.”
“They?”
“This is my daughter, Allyson,” Worthy said, starting to rise.
“Hi,” Allyson offered weakly.
“Can we talk somewhere in private?” Worthy asked.
Henderson handed the bag to his wife and walked down the hallway. Worthy followed him into the study, where a computer screen was on. On the walls were more photos like those he’d observed on his earlier visit—Henderson as a young basketball player.
Worthy walked over and stood in front of one. “So you played at Michigan State.”
Henderson went over and switched off the screen. He turned around and remained standing. “Two years until my knee blew out,” he said tightly. “That was a long time ago.”
“You were on scholarship?”
“Like I said, until my knee blew out. They took the money back, so I finished up at Grand Valley State.”
“And was that where you met your wife?”
“You out for a drive with your daughter and decide you wanted to find out my life story?”
“No. Something else. May I sit down?”
“No one’s stopping you.”
“I don’t know if you know my daughter’s story. She ran away a while back. That just about scared me to death.”
Henderson remained standing, eyeing Worthy. “That right? It looks like she’s back.”
“Yeah, she’s back. But she never told us why. It still scares me … and my ex-wife.”
Henderson sat down. “That’s right, you’re divorced.”
“Yeah, that happened over a year before she ran away. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out the two are connected.”
Henderson pulled at his socks. “So, why you telling me this?”
Worthy took a deep breath. “I know why you laid into Bales.”
Henderson glared up at Worthy. “So? We already went through that. Over and done.”
Worthy’s voice was barely louder than a whisper. “I don’t think so. I know what Bales whispered, and I’m pretty sure that I know about Jamie.”
Henderson rose from his chair and stood over Worthy. Here’s where he uses my head for a basketball, Worthy thought.
“I know I made it clear that you should mind your own business. You think your daughter is going to keep me from throwing you out? You think you’re some goddamned genius. You don’t know shit!”
Worthy shook his head slowly, trying to see another way forward. “You take off early because your wife needs you here … with your son.”
Henderson didn’t move. “That’s nothing to do with the case. Let me remind you who found the damned book. So leave my family out of it, and I’ll do the same with you. I don’t give a rat’s ass about your daughter, okay?”
He turned and walked back to the desk. Picking up a coat off the back of the chair, he reached in and pulled out his badge. He gazed at it for a moment, then brought it over and dropped it into Worthy’s lap. “Fuck you, fuck the police department, and fuck Detroit. Take that back to the captain. Now, get the hell out.”
“No, I’m not going to do that,” Worthy said, his own voice tight in his throat. “Is this what you want to do for your wife and son—spend the rest of your life punching people?”
Henderson swayed as he hovered over Worthy. He turned slowly and slumped in his chair, head cradled in his hands.
Worthy rose and walked to the window. “The case threw me for a loop today.”
Henderson remained silent.
“I thought I had it all figured out,” Worthy continued. “I was sure that the diary made it all clear. I thought your problems and mine with my daughter didn’t matter because we’d have the killer. You and I would go our separate ways, and that would be that. But now, I’m not sure I know anything. And I can’t go on alone. I’ll drown.”
“You wouldn’t understand if I told you.” Henderson’s voice was slow as if he were dragging a weight up from a deep hole.
Worthy turned and faced his partner. “You’ll have to try me.”
Henderson sat in silence for a moment, studying the floor between glances at Worthy. “Last year, the school asked for a conference,” he began in a very tired voice. “The counselor looked us straight in the face and asked if Jamie used drugs. An eleven-year-old kid. ‘No way,’ I said.” His voice started to shake. “But we both knew something was up. Jamie’s never been social, but then I’m not either.”
“I noticed,” Worthy said.
Henderson nodded, as if he deserved that. “But with Jamie, it’s that he only likes to watch cartoons.”
Worthy looked to a side table that held a series of family photos of the three of them. With each passing year, Jamie stood more off by himself, his mother’s arm failing to draw him in. “Did you have him tested?”
“Yeah. I thought he might be depressed, but the psychologist started using some other big words. Scary words. I had to look them up on the Internet.”
“Like what?”
“Like borderline personality disorder. Then they focused on us and asked that we get tested. Know what schizophrenogenic is?”
“No.”
Henderson twisted one hand in the other. “It means you’re the kind of parent who makes your kid schizophrenic. Nice, huh?”
Worthy started to say he was sorry, sorry for Henderson’s problem, and sorry he’d had to ask. But Henderson cut him off. “This is going to come out better if you don’t say a damn thing.” He paused before continuing. “I’ve always made a point of taking what life gives me and making the best of it. You know, letting it motivate me ….” His voice trailed off. “That’s not working this time.”
The room was deadly quiet until Henderson roused himself and asked, “You remember how high I was right after I found the book?”
“Sure.”
“Then I pulled back. Right?”
“Yeah, that you did.”
“My wife called me. She said she noticed a mark on Jamie’s arm after school. Jamie didn’t say anything, but when she rolled up his sleeve there were these marks up and down his arm.” His eyes brimmed with tears as he looked down at his own arm. “My boy has been rubbing his skin off with a pencil eraser at school. Can you believe that?”
“Yes, I saw it once.”
He watched his partner fold his hands behind his head and stare at the ceiling. Henderson’s jaw muscles clamped and released over and over again. “Where was that?”
“I had a job one summer during college. It was in a halfway house.”
“For nutcases, right?”
“No. For kids trying to figure things out.”
“Fucking nuts.”
Henderson’s wife poked her head in. “Everything okay in here?” Worthy could tell that she’d been crying and guessed that she’d been listening as well. What is Allyson thinking? he thought.
“Fine, baby. Jamie okay?”
“He’s okay. Allyson is reading him a story. He’s probably already asleep.” She offered Worthy a feeble smile and closed the door behind her.
“I told the doctor that I’d seen psychotics before in my job. I told him Jamie was definitely not that. Do you know what he told me? He said that Jamie may not have had an episode yet, but h
e was probably hallucinating at school. Maybe even while watching TV.”
Worthy sat silently, heavy with the vision of what he knew was likely in store for Henderson and his wife. There would be trips to treatment facilities with their smiling staff members. There would be hope held out for new drugs and treatments, as well as tantalizing stories of amazing recoveries. Meanwhile, their eleven-year-old would become a teenager and then an adult, curled up in a bed somewhere.
“So, when Bales whispered about shock therapy—”
Henderson sat forward in his chair. “Why’d he do that? I mean, it was like he was reading my mind.” He looked up at Worthy with sad yet hopeful eyes.
Worthy wanted to tell him not to expect any wisdom from him. His wife had divorced him and his daughter had run away, and he understood neither. But then a memory came back from his summer in college.
“There was this guy at the halfway house. Really wired, a lot like Bales. When I’d come into work, he’d be right in my face, pulling his hair, and then he’d say something right out of my life.” Worthy could feel Henderson hanging on his every word. All he had was a story that offered little or nothing. “So anyway, we’d just hired this new college kid. He had a girlfriend in town, someone he’d met at a bar. She used to drop him off at work in her convertible, sometimes wearing a bikini top. So one day, the new college boy comes into work ten minutes late and has to thread his way through the clients to get to the nursing station. That’s where we gave out meds. Suddenly, this guy grabs the new kid and looks him right in the eye. ‘Backseat rodeo, backseat rodeo,’ he keeps saying. ‘You told her not to stop, told her to ride the bronco until you got done.’ ”
“So what happened?”
Worthy shrugged and looked down at Henderson. “The trainee just stared at the kid, got white all over, turned, and walked out. Just quit. That’s what Bales is like. They just know things.”
Henderson sat back in his chair, his brow furrowed. “Maybe that’s what happened. The day before the doctor said that Jamie might need to be hospitalized for observation …. I don’t remember anyone talking about shock treatments, but who knows? I know I wanted to hit somebody. Man, that Bales. I wanted to pull my gun and kill the son of a bitch.”
“But you didn’t,” Worthy reminded him. “You need to tell your story to the new captain. She’s not like Spicer.”
“I don’t want sympathy,” Henderson protested.
“Sure you do. We all do.” Worthy walked to the door. “See you tomorrow?”
Henderson offered a feeble nod. “You know I can’t promise anything. I got to take care of my family first.”
“Yeah, I think I’m beginning to understand that.”
Chapter Sixteen
Worthy sat across the booth from Allyson, watching her cut the cinnamon roll into equal pieces. He found it hard to accept it had been only a week since she’d sat across from him at the restaurant up north and quizzed him about Henderson.
“Jamie’s in bad shape, isn’t he?” she said, offering her father a wedge of the roll.
Though hunger was the furthest thing from his mind, he took it and rested it on the edge of his coffee saucer. “Yeah. It doesn’t look good.”
“Can’t they give him pills or something?”
“They already have, Ally. Some things are hard to fix.”
She paused in mid-chew. “He’ll never get better?”
He shrugged. “I honestly don’t know. It’s tearing his folks apart.”
“You mean they’ll divorce?”
He felt his face redden. “No, no, nothing like that. Well, I guess it’s possible, but I think they’ll go through whatever happens together.” He waited for her to say it, to ask why Henderson and his wife would hold on to each other, when her mother and father couldn’t.
He cleared his throat and stared at the untouched piece of roll on his plate. “I want to tell you why I asked you to come with me.”
“I think I know.”
“Oh?”
“Maybe something I said the other night wasn’t completely wrong … about the way you do your job, I mean.”
He nodded but didn’t look up. “The thing is, I wanted you to be so wrong, and I was sure you were. Henderson was just my partner, and not a very good one most of the time. I thought, to hell with him. I probably thought the same about what you laid on me too. But then ….”
“But then what?”
“Then the proof I had that you were all wrong—my new captain who asked me to help him out, Henderson with his secret, and you—well, that proof turned into smoke. I don’t know where we are in this case, and it won’t be too long before the media and my boss get wind of that.”
“So why are we here?”
He looked up, puzzled. “What?”
“Mom used to tell Amy and me not to bother you sometimes. It always seemed funny to me, because it was when you weren’t home much at all. Some case was tough, I guess, and we’d never see you. And then when we did see you, Mom told us not to bother you.”
A pain shot through his head as he heard his mother saying the same to his sister and himself. “Your mom never told me that.”
“I guess she did the same thing herself. But you didn’t answer my question. If things are going bad on this case, why are we here?”
“Where should we be?”
“I’d have thought you’d want to be alone. You know,” she tapped her temple, “to concentrate.”
“Yeah. Well, someone told me to let the dead bury the dead.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
He picked up the wedge of roll and put it into his mouth. The caramel stuck to his fingers, then to his teeth. “I suppose it means I don’t know what you want from me, Ally, especially after you came back, so I can’t be sure I can give you anything. Do you remember what you said when I brought back that toy horse for Amy from New Mexico?”
“No.”
“You sneered and said that’s what I do as a dad. I go on trips and bring back junk.” He paused, trying to find the right words. “I’ve been thinking a lot about what you said the other night, that I prefer being with dead people. I can’t tell you how badly I wanted you to be wrong, and I thought my theory on this case would prove that. But then, when my house of cards collapsed, I realized something. I may not know—not yet, anyway—what you want from me, Ally,” he said, looking up to see tears in his daughter’s eyes, “but I knew what Henderson needed. I wanted you to see that … that I’m trying. That’s why we’re here.”
“Mind if I have a word with you, Father?” The cheery voice over the phone broke Father Fortis’ concentration on the church bulletin. Yes, I do mind, he thought, what with this being Saturday, the day before Sunday’s memorial and the flowers not yet delivered and the bulletin not yet completed.
“Who is this?” he asked.
“Kenna McCarty. We spoke earlier.”
Good Lord, he wondered, is this woman a psychic or just a vulture? “You’ve caught me at a very bad time, Mrs. McCarty.”
“It’s Ms. McCarty, Father. It won’t take more than a moment. I’m writing an article on the memorial service for Father Spiro and wanted to know if you’d like to comment.”
He relaxed in his chair, feeling a bit guilty for his quick judgment of the reporter. “Yes, certainly. This is a very considerate gesture. I’m sure the parishioners will be most grateful.”
“It’s a compelling story, Father. Detroit hasn’t forgotten about your tragedy.”
“No, I’m sure not. How can I be of help?” He wrote a note to himself to call the metropolitan again to make sure about his part in the service.
“I’m trying to imagine what my readers want to know. I suspect not many of them will understand what the service is about.”
“Yes, of course. A forty-day memorial service is offered for any Orthodox Christian by family and friends. Forty days remembers that Our Lord ascended into heaven forty days after his resurrection. In the service, we pr
ay that the soul of the departed will be with our ascended Lord.”
“Excellent, Father. You’re a reporter’s dream, the way you explain things so clearly. So this service marks the end of the parish’s mourning—officially, I mean.”
“Oh no, not at all. St. Cosmas will have another memorial service on the anniversary of his death, and every year after that on the nearest Sunday to the date.”
“Really? For how long?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, will there be one in ten years, for example, or twenty?”
“Very likely, and maybe for twenty years after that. You see, Ms. McCarty, we pray in the service that the memory of the departed soul—not just the departed soul itself—will be eternal. These services are our way of doing our part to answer that prayer.”
“My readers are going to love this, Father,” Kenna McCarty said with real relish. “Yes, that’s very touching. Now, who will participate?”
“We expect the metropolitan to officiate as well as other priests besides myself. And the choir, of course, and our chanter will play big roles. The memorial service will be at the close of our Divine Liturgy, and I know for a fact that the parish council president, Mr. George Margolis, will be offering the epistle reading.”
“What a marvelous service. Of course, once the article comes out tomorrow, some people will want to know if they can be present. I know you probably have numerous things to attend to, so I don’t want them calling the church. What should I say in my article about visitors?”
Father Fortis paused. He hadn’t thought of that. The sanctuary would be packed in any case. “Please let people know that St. Cosmas is always open to visitors, but this Sunday is a special moment in the parish’s life.”
The reporter repeated the words as if she were writing them down. “Perfect, Father. Just one more question. Do you expect anyone else to be there?”
Who else? he thought. “I don’t understand your question.”
“I mean the police. Do you expect them to be there?”
Yes, he did expect Worthy to be there, but that was none of her business. He felt a tightening in his chest.
Let the Dead Bury the Dead Page 20
