by Allen Eskens
“Mr. Talbert, I’m Sheriff Kimball,” said the man in the white shirt. “This is Deputy Nathan Calder.” He pointed at the big guy. “And this is Deputy Jeb Lewis.” They all three sat down, with Kimball directly across the table from me. “You wouldn’t happen to have a driver’s license on you?”
“I would,” I said.
Kimball waited for me to pull out my wallet, but I remained still.
“Could I take a look at it?” he said finally.
“Am I free to leave?”
Kimball looked at Calder, who gave a slight shrug. Then Kimball said, “Of course you can leave. You’re not under arrest. We’re just a little curious about something. I have a card here that gives your name as Joseph Talbert. I would like to confirm that you are who this card says you are. Is that okay?”
I reached into my pocket and pulled out my driver’s license, handing it to Sheriff Kimball. He looked at it, compared the picture to my face, then handed my license and AP card to Deputy Lewis, who stood up and left the room with them.
Kimball said to me, “You told Nathan here that you’re looking into the murder of Toke Talbert. You know his real name don’t you?”
“I do,” I said.
Through the glass I could see Deputy Jeb sitting at one of the desks, probably running my driver’s license information.
“You have the same name as him,” Kimball continued. “Is that a coincidence or are you possibly related?”
I looked at Calder, then back at Kimball and said, “I have reason to believe that Toke Talbert is my father.”
“Reason to believe?”
“I never met the man,” I said. “He got my mom pregnant, and when she refused to abort me, he punched her in the stomach and left town—at least that’s what I’ve been able to piece together from the police reports.”
“And yet your mother seemed to think enough of Joe Talbert Senior to give you the man’s name.”
“My mom has a strange sense of humor,” I said. “So tell me, Sheriff, was my father murdered?”
“Where were you the night before last, say around midnight or so?”
I cocked my head back, caught off guard by the question. “What are you talking about?”
“Just need to button a couple things up. You understand.”
“No, I don’t understand. You think that I—”
“We don’t think anything,” Kimball said. “But you have to admit, it’s a little strange. Toke turns up dead and then, boom, all these relatives start showing up.”
“Relatives—plural?” I asked.
Deputy Jeb reentered the conference room, handed my driver’s license to me, and then handed some papers to Kimball. Jeb took the seat farthest away, his eyes studying me with quiet curiosity. Nathan Calder, on the other hand, stared at me like I was an overdue lunch.
“I would also like to know how Angel is doing. I’m her brother and—”
“Hold on a second,” Sheriff Kimball said. “We don’t know that you’re related to anyone here.”
“If I’m Toke’s son, then…”
“If—if you’re Toke’s kid. We need to know that you are an actual relative before we can pass out anything as private as medical information. We wouldn’t be doing our jobs if we gave information like that to a reporter just because he claims to be related. If it turns out that you’re her brother, then you can get in line with any other relatives and we can go from there.”
“What other relatives are you talking about?”
“While you’re here, can you give me your whereabouts two nights ago?”
“You can’t think that I killed Toke? I didn’t even know that the guy was alive until I saw the press release yesterday.”
“He ran out on your mother, didn’t he? Something like that might cause resentment.”
“Everybody runs out on my mother—even me,” I said. “I can’t hold that against him.”
“And he punched your mother in the gut when she was pregnant with you. Sounds like he tried to abort you. What about that?”
“And don’t forget about the inheritance,” Calder added.
Kimball gave the deputy a look that caused Calder to slump back into his chair.
“What inheritance?” I asked.
“Look, son,” Kimball leaned in, “I don’t think you’re involved here. But I’ve got a job to do, and I aim to do it. You understand. I just need to know if you were in the area two nights ago. That’s not asking too much is it?”
The word inheritance threw me off my game. I wanted to ask Calder what he was talking about, but the scolding glance Kimball had thrown him told me that I’d get nothing, so I answered Kimball’s question.
“Two nights ago, I was in my apartment, asleep. My girlfriend can verify that.”
Kimball slid a piece of paper and a pen to me. “Can you give us her contact information?”
I wrote Lila’s name and phone number on the paper and slid it back to the sheriff. “Now tell me, was Toke murdered?”
Kimball leaned back in his chair and rubbed the loose skin on his neck with the back of his hand. “We’re going to do an updated press release this afternoon. That release will confirm that Toke Talbert was the subject of a homicide.”
“How was he killed?”
“Can’t tell you.”
“Is there a suspect—besides me, of course?”
“Can’t say.”
“Is his daughter a suspect?”
Kimball looked at his deputies. Then he stood and hitched his pants up. “You know I can’t answer any of those questions, Mr. Talbert.”
“I’d appreciate it if you called me Joe.”
“Okay, Joe. And I would appreciate it if you’d be so kind as to voluntarily give us a sample of your DNA.”
“My DNA? Why?”
“Whether or not you have Toke’s blood running through you may be of interest to the investigation. Just buttoning things up. You understand.”
My first reaction was to object to Kimball’s request. I knew that they couldn’t take my DNA without a search warrant. But it occurred to me that Toke might not be my father. I mean, I only had my mother’s word on the matter. This might be my only chance to settle that question for good. In the end, the curiosity of it all won out, and I agreed to give a DNA sample.
Kimball assigned the task to Jeb, the quiet deputy. All three left the room together, and Jeb returned with a swab kit. He leaned against the side of the table as he opened the package.
I said, “That other deputy, Nathan, said something about Talberts coming out of the woodwork. What’d he mean by that?”
“Just that you’re the second Talbert to drop by today.”
“Who’s the other one?” I asked.
Jeb stuck the long-stemmed cotton swab into my mouth and swirled the tip against my cheek. “Charlie. Toke’s brother. He dropped by this morning wanting to know what happened to Toke.”
I waited for Jeb to finish scraping my cheek, then said, “Did you question him about where he was two nights ago?”
“You ask a lot of questions.”
“I’m a reporter.”
“We’ve got it under control.”
“So, you know who killed Toke?”
“I think everyone in town knows who killed Toke.”
“Who?”
He smiled. “I’m one of the few people who can’t say. We have a suspect, but that’s about all I can tell you.” His eyes lifted to the camera mounted on the ceiling in the corner of the room. “Buckley’s a small town, Joe. Most folks have a pretty good idea of what happened to Toke.”
“So, why take my DNA if you have this wrapped up?”
“Because if you are Toke’s son, that could change the math.” He slid the stick with my cheek cells in it into a sleeve and sealed it. “Who knows,” he said with a sly grin. “We might be looking at this all wrong.”
Chapter 8
I had no trouble finding the Caspen Inn. It was, as the receptionist had said, a
couple of blocks down the street she waved at. I didn’t expect too much in the way of accommodations, and those expectations were barely met: one level, ten rooms on each side, back-to-back, with an exterior painted bright yellow to distract from the overall decrepitude of the place. Room number eight, my room, had water stains in the ceiling and chips of grout missing from the bathroom tile. The one window to the outside—to the extent you could see around the air conditioner—gave a grand view of the gravel parking lot and looked as though it hadn’t been washed since the Ford administration. But the room had two comfortable beds, and that was more than I needed.
I lay on one of the beds, and my thoughts immediately walked back to the Sheriff’s Office, to Deputy Calder and a word he used—inheritance, a word that seemed out of place in any discussion of my family. Nothing I’d come across so far suggested that Toke Talbert would die with more than a month’s rent in his pocket. And then there was his brother Charlie, who I’d never even heard of. If Toke was my father, it meant that I had an uncle wandering around town. Maybe he’d be able to fill me in on what kind of man my dad had been.
The Caspen Inn didn’t have Wi-Fi, so I turned on my phone, with the intention of looking up what I could about Charlie Talbert, and saw that I had missed a call from Lila.
I contemplated whether to call her back, a hesitation I’d never had before. I didn’t know if I was ready to open that discussion again. How could she have read that letter from my mother? I had drawn a single line in the sand: no contact with Kathy Nelson. A simple rule, easy to follow. We don’t give her our phone numbers. We don’t open her letters. We give her no chance to worm her way back into our lives. Did Lila forget the extortion? The meth-induced ravings? Did she forget how Kathy let her shit-eating boyfriend hit Jeremy? I didn’t forget the bruises, and I sure as hell didn’t forget Larry.
The first time I saw a bruise, it was a thin line on Jeremy’s back. I gave Larry a stern warning to never touch my brother again; and with me being a bouncer back then, it seemed fitting that my warning came with an abrasion to Larry’s nose. But to be fair, things would not have become physical had Larry not gotten in my face. He actually poked at me for addressing him in my chosen tone. The way I saw it, I had no choice but to take him to the ground and pressed his face into the grit of the sidewalk.
That should have been the end of it, but apparently Larry was a slow learner. The night that I took Jeremy away—kidnapped him, as my mom told the judge at the guardianship hearing—Larry had punched Jeremy in the face, causing a bruise that nearly swelled my brother’s eye shut. That night, as Lila and I drove to Austin, we never actually discussed what we would do. I think we both just knew.
I stormed into my mother’s apartment without saying a word to her, or to Larry. Once in Jeremy’s room, I threw some of his clothing into a pillowcase and was leading him out of the house when Larry stepped in front of me. I saw what was happening, so I sent Jeremy outside, where Lila was waiting for him.
My mother made a show of her token resistance, screaming at me and crying that Larry didn’t mean to hurt Jeremy. I ignored her ranting and focused on Larry. We both knew that this had nothing to do with him wanting to keep Jeremy around and everything to do with having a second go at me, repayment for the raspberry I gave him. Larry raised his fists, arms jutting out, knuckles pointing up. I probably had other options, but I didn’t wait for those thoughts to find a footing. Instead, I gave Larry a quick kick to the side of his knee, sending him to the floor howling through the pain of a torn ACL.
We’ve had Jeremy ever since then, and there hasn’t been a day when he wasn’t protected and cared for. He was safe because Kathy was out of our lives. She could never touch him unless we slipped up and let that trouble find us again. That’s why we had the rule. Lila, who doted on my brother like he was her own, should have known that better than anyone. She had let her guard down, that’s all. We could fix that.
I picked up my phone and returned the call.
“Hi, Joe.” Lila spoke in a soft, hesitant voice.
“Hi.”
I waited for her to talk, giving her the opportunity to offer up an explanation or maybe even an apology. Instead, I got a long, silent pause. Then she said, “That was a shitty thing you did today.”
“What I did?” I couldn’t stop my tone from turning hot. “What do you mean, ‘what I did’?”
“You walked away. You turned your back on me and walked away. You didn’t even give me a chance to explain.”
“What’s to explain? You lied to me.”
“I didn’t lie.”
“You opened a letter from my mother. We had an agreement.”
“No, we had a rule—a rule that you made without asking me. There was no agreement.”
“She’s my mother. I’m the one she screwed over. You don’t get a vote on that.”
“Is that how it is? You make the rules, and I shut up and do as I’m told? Is that how you see me?”
“No, Lila. That’s not how I see you. You know better than that.”
“When it comes to your mother, I’m not sure I do.”
“You’re playing right into her hands. Give one inch, and before you know it, she’ll be calling me to bail her out again, or she’ll find some way to extort money. My mother’s a lost cause.”
“There’s no such thing as a lost cause.”
“Yes, there is. My mother is one.”
“People can change, Joe.”
“Not Kathy. I’ve known her all my life. The only changing she did was to get worse. People like her don’t change. She’s a drunk—an addict. She’s mentally unstable. A combination like that doesn’t change. They may hide it for a while, but the monster always comes back. That’s just a fact.”
The phone went silent, and I waited for Lila to speak. The silence went on long enough that I glanced at the face of my phone to see that we were still connected. Then she said, “Is that what you think of me?”
“You? No, that’s not—”
“Did you forget that I’m a drunk? I’m mentally unstable. Remember? I have the scars to prove it. Did you forget that I used to cut myself?”
I had seen her scars on our first date, tiny striations descending off her shoulder in neat rows. In time, I would learn about her high school days, how she fell into drinking and partying and how that led to promiscuity and blackouts and cutting her arms to deal with the pain. But there was another demon, one that had opened the gate for all the rest, one that she kept hidden from everyone except me. I understood why she had once sought to numb her pain with alcohol, how the sting of a razor blade against her skin could feel like a salve. I understood the hurt that twisted its tendrils around every bad decision she’d ever made.
But I also understood that Lila faced her demons and beat them. My mother was not Lila. Where Lila had built a wall to keep out the beast, my mother laid down a welcome mat. But what I said just now could have applied to Lila as easily as it did to my mother. Christ, I was an idiot.
“You’re not my mother,” I said. “You were a kid—a teenager. You pulled yourself out of it. You haven’t touched a drop of alcohol in what…eight years now?”
“But it’s a part of who I am, Joe.”
“You wanted to change. My mother has never wanted to change, and she never will.”
“I am the same person, you understand that, don’t you? You act like there’s some kind of baptismal font that we drunks can walk through to change who we are—wretched on one side, but saved on the other. That’s not how it works.”
“You’re not a drunk, Lila. You’re not—”
“Why is it so hard for you to think that maybe your mother can change?”
“I know my mother.”
“You haven’t spoken to her in years. How do you know?”
“What makes you think she is capable of change?” I said. “One letter?”
“No, not just one letter.”
Now it was my turn to pause as I tried to deci
pher what that meant. Then I asked, “Are there more…letters?”
“No.”
“What then?”
“I talked to her…on the phone.”
“She called you? How did she get your number?”
“I called her after I read her letter.”
“You…called her?”
“I did.”
I let my phone drop away from my ear. For seven months, Lila had been living with me as though nothing had changed: eating with me, laughing with me, sleeping with me, all the while hiding this secret. I felt like I had no idea who my girlfriend was anymore.
I looked down to find my phone resting in my lap, and I pressed the red dot to end the call.
Chapter 9
Lila spoke to my mother. I should have asked how many times, but why would that matter? The damage was done; Kathy had discovered a crack in our wall, and she would work it open with that same slow force that weeds use to split stones. She would sink her roots deeper and deeper into our lives until the tiny cracks became fissures and then chasms too wide to cross. She would find angles and traps. She would create havoc and start fights, while always painting herself as the victim. My mother never missed a trick.
In truth, I never actually intended to seek guardianship of Jeremy after we rescued him. I guess I thought that Kathy might leave us alone if we took Jeremy but not his social security money. I mean, what more could she want? I took the burden and left behind all the benefits. She should have been happy. She should have left us alone. But that was asking too much, I guess.
When I kicked Larry in the knee that night, I thought I broke it. I didn’t care at the time, but I should have known that Kathy would use it against me. I found out that it was an ACL tear when I received a letter from my mother telling me how lucky I was that they didn’t bring in the cops. But in exchange for her and Larry’s silence, she wanted me to pay cash for what I did to him. She framed it in terms of reimbursement for his medical expenses, but she did little to hide the extortion: pay her money whenever she demanded, and this matter won’t go to the police.
