She looked past Philomena at him, and he saw alarm in her eyes. He didn’t mean to scare her. It was just . . .
He held up the photograph in front of him. He could barely take his eyes off it.
“What is it?”
He lowered his hand, the picture pinched between his fingers, and tried to sound light, upbeat. “Can I talk to her?”
“Of course.” Sloane looked worried. She looked at the photo at his side. Then, perhaps sensing something, she affected her own propriety. “You can call her ‘Mena.’ That’s what everyone calls her.”
“Okay. Great.” He put on his second, big, Irish-sweepstakes smile since arriving at Laurel Grove and crouched down by the old woman.
“Mena?”
She turned and looked at him. He could smell cinnamon on her, and realized she had a candy in her mouth which she was slowly pushing around with her tongue. Something clouded her sea-blue eyes, perhaps glaucoma. The folds of her bronze skin and the creases lining her face gave her a look of benign wisdom. But Brendan never for a moment felt that the woman in the wheelchair wasn’t as tough as her brother – maybe, in ways, she was even tougher. It was just something you sensed. He even imagined her taking care of Argon at some point – perhaps after they had lost their parents young. The pictures on the bureau were very old and their parents had been in their late twenties, early thirties at best; there was nothing more recent. But the picture he had in his hand was certainly more recent.
“I’d like to ask you a couple of questions,” Brendan began.
She looked back at him impassively. She moved the cinnamon candy around in her mouth. A Cinnamon Oddfellow, perhaps – Argon had sucked those during nights on road patrol. Or Berwick Cockles – those big oblong candies striped like tiny white watermelons. Brendan couldn’t stand them. Argon always had a bag of them clattering around in his pocket.
She opened her mouth and said something. Brendan though he understood, but glanced over at Sloane for verification.
“She said, ‘get on with it.’”
“When did your parents die?”
He could understand Mena’s response this time.
“1982.”
Brendan did a quick search of his mental database and tried to attach some significance to the year; but he was no history buff.
Mena was still talking. Sloane continued to translate, through Brendan was starting to get a little bit better at interpreting the old Scottish woman.
“‘Coldest winter in Scottish history,’” related Sloane. “I’m pretty sure she said ‘January.’”
Brendan nodded.
“She also said something about the Falklands Conflict, their father was in the army, and Britain went to war with Argentina to get its little South Atlantic colony back.”
Brendan looked past Mena at Sloane.
“I think she’s telling us it was a bad year.”
Now he returned his gaze to the older woman. “One more question, Mena. I’m sorry. How do you know this man?”
He brought the picture up in front of her face, held it so that Sloane, who quickly crowded close, could see it too. A picture of Mena, standing and smiling next to a handsome man in a nice suit.
Gerard Healy, Brendan’s father.
Seeing the image seemed to dispel whatever anxiety the earlier questions had caused Mena. She looked over calmly at Brendan. He needed no translation for her answer.
“My doctor.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT / Monday, 1:44 PM
They stopped for coffee and sandwiches at a diner in Elmwood. He watched her pick at the fries she’d ordered with her BLT. They hadn’t said much of anything while they waited for the food. Outside on Dobbs Ferry Road, traffic rushed by in a wet hustle. Sloane stirred the syrupy soft drink their waitress had brought over.
“So,” she said.
“Tell me more about Mena. Some wild pictures in her little room; looks like her father was in the Royal Marines, maybe?”
“Her parents were political refugees,” Sloane said right away. “Yeah, the father was in the Royal Marines. That’s how he operated.”
Brendan sipped his coffee, which he took on the sweet side. “Probably he fought in the Falklands Conflict. The Marines helped recapture the Falkland Islands in 1982, which is the same year he died. Makes sense. And the mother died the same year?”
“That’s the story I’ve got. She didn’t last long after he went.”
“So when did Argon and Philomena come to America?”
Sloane grimaced and shook her head. “I don’t know exactly. Seamus didn’t talk about that a lot. She’s older – five or six years, I think. This is what I get from Mena, I mean, you heard her; she jumps around a little bit. The stroke messed with her mind. She might be talking about her grandparents dying in the cold, or whatever. Who dies in the cold in 1982? The Dutch famine in 1944, okay, I can see that, Hunger Baby Syndrome and what have you. You know that human beings are being shaped by their environment while they’re still in the womb? Hungry mothers, hungry babies, and the babies learn to store fat and sugar – then these same babies grow up to be adults who can become overweight and diabetic because their bodies are programmed to hoard fat and sugar.”
Brendan watched her, impressed by her like he’d been by the old woman. It almost made him forget the shock he’d had, seeing his eleven-years-gone father smiling in a picture with Philomena Argon. Almost.
For the moment, he focused on Sloane’s interest in environmental impacts on fetal development, surely something borne out of a need to reconcile her own situation. She seemed to be grappling with the issue of the photograph in Philomena’s room almost as much as he was.
“Anyway, from what I’ve put together, their parents died, and Mena and Argon came to the U.S. although maybe they came before that, like for their safety or something. I get the impression she left because she didn’t really like what was going on in their country. I mean, there’s no question where Argon got his revolutionary spirit from. You know what I mean? He’s got that flatscreen TV and I think the only things he ever watched on it was Braveheart and Rob Roy.”
She looked away for a second, and Brendan saw her nervous tension.
He wanted to tell her everything. But the implications were major – if Philomena knew his father, then Seamus Argon probably did too. So Argon knew who Brendan was when he showed up and pulled him from the roiling carbon monoxide in his garage. It made more sense of this guardian angel. It also reinforced the idea that maybe he’d had prior knowledge of ‘Baby Sloane,’ too; maybe that was how he operated.
“So,” she said, looking around for a moment, and then fixing him with a calm gaze. “Your pops was Philomena’s doctor, eh? Small world or what?” Her words were light-hearted, but her expression was grave, making her look older. “What kind of doctor?”
“That’s just it. My father, Gerard, was a cardiothoracic surgeon. He worked at a couple of different hospitals. One in the city, and one up here, Westchester Medical.”
“Makes sense then.”
“Did Philomena have heart trouble before her stroke?”
Sloane sipped her soda and nodded. “That’s what I understand. She had clogged arteries. That sort of thing. I didn’t know she ever had any surgery.”
“Maybe she didn’t. Towards the end of his career, my father was moving away from surgery. He’d still do emergency surgery, you know, car accidents, gunshots, stabbings. Once he ligated a bleeding coronary artery using a thoracotomy.”
“Right . . .”
Brendan smiled. It felt genuine. “But towards the end of his career, he changed. I was . . . you know, not around much. He was doing consultations. Writing a lot. Getting into preventative care. And he did a lot of volunteer work.”
“Sounds like a good guy.”
“He was. My mother died soon after he did. They were separated. Never divorced. They still loved each other. When they separated you know, that was when he started getting into the preventative care.
And then, you know, he died. It was unexpected. And it was eight months later that the accident happened. With my wife and daughter. Rough few years.”
As he spoke, he saw her glancing at the scar on his face. But she absorbed all the information, her hands on the table in front of her, palms down, like a gunslinger with her gun in her lap.
“So,” he said, feeling uncomfortable, “the whole reason I came here – aside from paying my respects – was to find something that Argon supposedly had hidden. I’m wondering if that was it. I just don’t know why. And what it has to do with Taber.”
“Taber?”
“Yeah. My ex-boss. Sheriff in Oneida County. I told you about him.”
“You told me your ex-boss sent you down here. You didn’t say his name.”
Now he saw a change in her as she slid her hands off the table, sat back, and acted more casually. He was coming to know it as her defensive side, she got angry or aloof. She ate some fries. “I know the name.”
Brendan felt something pinwheel up through him, right through the center of his body.
“You do?”
“Uh-huh.”
A new idea was taking shape, crackling through his thoughts. There had been more to the Taber-Argon connection all along, just as he’d suspected. It’s how he would crack this thing.
“I want to ask you a question, okay? It’s delicate, and I don’t want you to . . .”
“My father is named Lawrence Taber,” she said. “Argon told me, about a week before he died.”
Brendan’s mouth, hanging open a bit since he had been in mid-sentence, closed. He stared at Sloane. He caught a strong whiff of pancakes and syrup and fried potatoes as an order came up in the kitchen window and the cook slapped the bell with the palm of a raw, scrubbed hand.
* * *
Sloane poked at her food with a finger. She didn’t paint her nails – they were plain, a bit ragged, as if she bit them.
Brendan felt like something in the earth had shifted. Or as if the diner itself had been lifted up and then dropped back to the ground. Everything, but the insides of his own body, remained in place and settled.
He didn’t have any words. He’d been circling around this thought, or something like it, for a little while, but it still came as a shock to hear.
Sloane dragged a bundle of fries through ketchup and then lifted them into the air in front of her, examining them as if they were some exotic species. For a moment, he thought she was going to eat them, but she dropped them back onto her plate. She pushed herself back from the table and leaned against the leather bench seatback of the booth.
“I’m full.”
At last she met his gaze. Her eyes were half-lidded, as if disinterested, or bored. But, he knew better. The information she had just shared was critical. She was not only processing the discovery of her biological father, but dealing with the grief of another man’s death – the man who had been her true father, from what it seemed – saving her life as a premature infant, and then years later from self-destruction.
“I’m sorry,” was all Brendan managed.
“That I’m full? Don’t be.” She attempted a grin that looked awful on her young face. He looked into her eyes until she turned away and stared out the window. He regarded the shape of her nose, her lips. She had those idiosyncrasies which sometimes came from premature birth – the malformation of something in the sinus cavities, which had affected her hearing, and parts of her brain – the frontal lobe, most likely the Broca’s area – which had contributed to her speech abnormalities, making her sound a little bit like a deaf person. He tried to see Taber in her features, but instead he felt more understanding of the girl’s fondness for Philomena, how patient and compassionate she had been with the older woman. Sloane and Mena had something in common. They were survivors. They had their scars.
Not to mention the ominous parallels Brendan had with the girl. It was suddenly a saga of fathers, his and hers. And it was their fathers’ connection to Argon, which would complete the picture.
“Can you tell me a little bit about Argon and Taber? Did Argon tell you how they knew each other?”
She glanced at him. She knew he was checking her information.
“Taber’s younger than Argon. He was in college at John Jay when he met Argon, who was already on the force, or whatever. They were friends for a couple of years, then Taber made the sudden move away out of White Plains up to where-the-fuck-ever, Central New York. He gets elected Sheriff years later; he was the youngest ever – so Argon said, anyway.”
Brendan watched this young woman describe a father she had never met, as if reciting a history lesson from a textbook. It was painful to witness, but Sloane just kept her eyes on the traffic out the window.
“Married, and he has a son who’s a big athlete; baseball and football and the whole Star-Spangled Banner. Thing is, Taber had been a shoe-in to get a job in White Plains as a city cop, and be with his friend Seamus Argon.”
She turned to face Brendan. Her eyes were ice cold.
“But he left instead.”
Brendan’s mind raced. Taber had had an affair with a woman that had resulted in an unplanned pregnancy. The woman had then attempted to abort that child.
And Argon came in and rescued the infant girl from death.
How had he known? It stood to reason that if Argon had known, then Taber had known. Of course, it was always possible that Argon had known the mother, too, and known of her plans even if Taber hadn’t.
It was, admittedly, hard to reconcile this new information with the man Brendan had come to know, the sheriff who had always seemed so straight-laced.
Who knew – maybe his whole life had become a penance? Certainly he’d run from White Plains to escape what had happened. But he could have kept a lower profile if he hadn’t been elected Sheriff. That was a public office, a visible position. Brendan imagined that Taber had done it because he felt he could do the most good that way, and make up for the sins of his past.
It was only one, tendentious, theory. There was another, darker scenario. Brendan had suspected for a while that Taber had inside information about Rebecca Heilshorn, things he withheld from the investigation – at least, and that his hands had been guided, or forced.
Alexander Heilshorn had shown up, and had conducted his own investigation.
Though he could have had ulterior motives. He could have been rearranging things to suit his purpose.
What purpose?
One thing Brendan could now see clearly, thanks to the startling photograph, was that Argon had known Brendan’s father, Gerard Healy. And Alexander Heilshorn had known Brendan’s father, too. Heilshorn had said so himself, two years ago, when he’d tried to persuade Brendan to drop the case, warning him not to go after Reginald Forrester, pleading with him that doing so would only cost more lives.
Had it been a genuine concern for innocent people caught in the sordid web? Or had it been a ruse, a way of keeping his own involvement a secret?
It was all starting to connect. At least, the relationships were showing up, the dots were being joined up.
Sloane started to slide out of the booth.
Brendan must have shown alarm because she frowned and said, “Relax, I’m just going to the bathroom.”
Brendan watched her walk across the diner. He could scarcely imagine what she was going through – what she had been going through most of her life. But he felt like he could identify with the anger she must have been feeling over the years, the frustration.
And he felt something loosen inside of himself. He wasn’t sure what it was, but a strange and unfamiliar sensation washed through him.
He took advantage of her absence and pulled his cell phone out. The nightclub owned by the one witness to Argon’s death was located not far from here, a stop he’d planned making after Philomena, but first he needed to try Jennifer Aiken again.
He was starting to wonder why she wasn’t picking up her phone, or calling him back.
The phone rang, and once more, he got her voicemail.
He didn’t leave a message. Instead, as he ended the call, he found himself marveling that it was Taber himself who had passed on to Brendan that the Justice Department prosecutor was trying to reach him.
Brendan had asked Taber if he was under duress. To give him a sign, if he could.
Maybe that was the sign right there, he’d already waved the flag.
Had Taber known Brendan would eventually figure out that it wasn’t some document or name or phone number or some other evidence that he would find? It was Sloane. She was the secret that Argon had been keeping. A secret made of flesh and bone. But was Taber hoping that Brendan would find her so that she could be kept quiet? Paid off? Or something else? Why had Argon told her the truth about Taber? Had Argon and Taber been at odds over something in Argon’s final days? Could Taber be trusted at all?
As much as it revealed, Brendan realized Sloane’s disclosure opened the door to more questions. He now knew that his own father was involved, and he could make an educated guess that this connected Argon to Heilshorn, forming a kind of triangle. Gerard Healy was Philomena’s heart doctor, and Argon would have known that. He’d known who Brendan was the day he pulled him out of the garage. And Gerard Healy had been a colleague of Heilshorn’s. The two surgeons had sat on a Board of Directors together, attended many of the same functions, traveled in the same circles. But what exactly did the connection mean?
Then there was Argon’s relationship to Taber, which appeared to be more than an acquaintanceship as the layers were peeled away. And Philip Largo; Brendan would have to look into Largo and find out, once and for all, how he fitted in.
Brendan found himself thinking about XList. Argon had known about XList, which he’d said also went by the street-name ‘The Company.’ Was there a scenario that not only included Taber and Argon, but Philip Largo, too? A scenario in which a politician with a bright future solicits an escort, leading to his ruin?
He wondered if Argon had made the connections that revealed the whole picture, and gotten him killed. Brendan was getting close, very close now; he felt sure there was some vital piece of information necessary to make it all come clear. He wondered what the cost of his understanding would be.
SURVIVORS (crime thriller books) Page 18
