by Matt Coyle
She hung up.
Moira was smart. Smarter than me. That didn’t surprise me. But the fact that she cared did. I couldn’t shrug off the warmth that tingled along my spine. But as much as I valued Moira’s abilities, I had to tackle the mysteries of my father’s past alone.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I MET KIM at her office at Parker Real Estate at one p.m. the next day. The receptionist led me through a lobby that was shiny white and blue with a slight colonial vibe, into a large open room with a covey of fifteen wood and glass cubicles in the middle. Eight or ten real estate agents in the cubes talked on the phone or studied computer monitors. White-wood paneled glass offices circled around the perimeter. Kim’s office was in the back-left corner. She pointed me toward a chair and closed the door.
“Thanks for meeting me here.” She sat behind her desk. Blazer, slacks, white blouse. Professional, beautiful, but tired. The circles under her eyes I’d seen the other day had nested a little deeper and hued darker purple.
“Sure, but I don’t understand why we couldn’t meet at Muldoon’s.” I looked through her glass wall out into the covey of cubicles. Heads whipped back to their computer screens. “Word will get back to your husband that I was here.”
“I don’t care anymore.” She pushed a piece of paper across the desk in front of me.
It was a contract for a 10 percent partnership in Parker Real Estate. The new partner’s name, Sophia Domingo. The date of the contract was two days ago. The day Jeffrey Parker met with Sophia in her hotel room at The Pacific Terrace Hotel.
“Hmm.”
“You’re damn right, ‘hmm.’” Kim snatched the contract and put it in a desk drawer. “I don’t even own ten percent.”
“How did you find the contract?”
“I snooped around in Jeffrey’s office. It was in a locked drawer in his desk. I found his extra set of keys in his assistant’s desk early this morning before anyone else was in. Now I know why I don’t have keys to his desk.”
“Did you talk to him about it?” I asked.
“No. He can talk to my lawyer when he gets back. My divorce lawyer.”
“This may not be for the reasons you think.”
“What are you talking about?”
I handed her a manila folder like the one she’d just slid across the table at me. This one contained everything I’d learned about Sophia Domingo. The lunch with Dina Dergan, the woman she kissed on the mouth who owns the Coastal Commission lobbying firm, Peter Stone and the Green Builders Alliance of San Diego, and about the commission’s vote yesterday at the San Diego County Administration Center.
She read the report and then looked up at me.
“So you’re telling me a lesbian screwed my husband?”
“I don’t know whether she screwed him or not. I think their meeting might have had more to do with the Coastal Commission’s vote than sex.”
“You think that’s why he gave her ten percent of the company?” Her cheeks flushed red beneath the purple circles under her eyes.
“It would make sense if she got Jeffrey partnered with Stone in the Scripps development. Did he mention it to you?”
“No. But he’s been pretty buttoned up lately about the business. We just talk about our individual home sales and not the big picture. He spent a lot of money opening up offices in Del Mar and Rancho Santa Fe, and they haven’t done well. We’re losing money in both areas and are stuck with five-year leases on the offices. The people who live in those towns are very proprietary. They’re not very open to outsiders.”
“The Scripps development would more than offset any losses Parker Real Estate is having with the rest of the business.”
“Yes, it would, but none of that matters to me anymore.” Kim opened a desk drawer and pulled out a checkbook and scribbled on a check. “I’m paying you with a company check. Double your normal fees. Jeffrey can discuss this with my divorce lawyer if he has a problem with it.”
Kim held onto the anger, but I saw cracks around her eyes. The wall was about to come down and tears would follow. I didn’t want to see her cry. I’ve made her cry before on my own. She deserved better. Better than Jeffrey Parker. Better than me.
I stood up and she came around the desk and hugged me. Hard and long. I hugged her back and regretted how good it felt and how it reminded me of everything I’d lost. We separated and tears pooled in the bottom of Kim’s eyes. The selfish part of me wondered if she felt the same way I did.
“Thank you, Rick.” She kissed me on the cheek. “I know this has been hard for you, too. Maybe it wasn’t fair to ask you to help me. But you were the only person I could really trust. I knew you’d look out for me.”
I nodded and left her office. Glad to be done with the case. Sad to be done with Kim. Now wasn’t the time to see if a path between us could be reopened. There might never be a time. You can’t always correct your mistakes from the past.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE CROSS ATOP Mount Soledad National Veterans Memorial rises forty-three feet above the highest point in La Jolla. The memorial has a panoramic view of La Jolla eight-hundred feet below, the Pacific Ocean, San Diego, and even Mexico beyond.
I liked the view, but I went up there to look into the past. My father used to take me to The Cross to honor veterans. He had me read the plaques of men he’d served with and those of veterans of long-ago wars. The Cross was special to him. It had been special to me, too. When I was young and believed in my father. I still went to the Cross after I stopped believing in him. To face my own truths and decipher the past.
I sat in my car and looked out over La Jolla. The sun danced off the ocean far below, and a gentle breeze slowly pushed scattered clouds around the blue sky. Idyllic. Paradise. But always just out of reach.
I pulled out my phone and googled Antoinette King, the woman who had a joint checking account with my father at Windsor Bank that funded the rental of his safe deposit box. I scrolled through the listings. Most had links to Facebook or Twitter. None that I could tell had any connection to my father, or even La Jolla, or San Diego. I went onto a people finder pay website and couldn’t find a single Antoinette King listed in San Diego.
The Antoinette King I needed to find was a ghost.
I dialed the phone number my sister, Beth, had texted me earlier that day. She and I talked on the phone once a year. She called me every Christmas morning. Told me how her two sons were doing in sports. Occasionally, she made one of them get on the phone with me. They were in their early teens now. I couldn’t remember what they looked like. They could barely remember who I was. Still, I looked forward to the yearly call.
The last time I called the number my sister gave me, it had been on a landline—iPhones hadn’t been invented yet. The number was written down in an address book I’d thrown away long ago.
“Hello?” The voice hadn’t changed in eighteen years. Young when she was forty-six. Young at sixty-four.
“Lila, it’s Rick.” Five seconds of silence. I broke it. “Cahill.”
“I know.”
“Maybe I shouldn’t have called.”
“Maybe you should have answered when I called you for two straight years after your father died.” Anger I’d never heard in her voice as a kid.
“You’re right. I apologize.”
“Why are you calling now?”
Aunt Lila had been a free spirit when my sister and I were kids. She’d play football with us in the backyard and laugh the whole time. I couldn’t wait until she’d come down from Bakersfield and visit every summer. She once told me that if she ever had a son, she hoped he would be just like me.
She had three girls, but I think by now she’d changed her opinion about me as a son.
“I need a death certificate for my father.”
“Don’t you mean, ‘Dad’?”
“Yeah. Dad.”
“He’s been dead eighteen years. Why do you need a death certificate now?” She took a deep breath. Could have been a dra
g off a cigarette. Or a joint. She’d done both back in the day. “You didn’t seem to care too much about Charlie’s death when he died. Why the interest now?”
She was wrong about that. I’d cried in private for days after my dad died. But never in front of anyone else. I’d truly been my father’s son at his funeral. Stone-faced, emotions hidden.
“Turns out Charlie had a safe deposit box at Windsor Bank that nobody knew about. At least, I don’t think anyone knew about it. You were the executor of his estate. Did you know about the box? Was it somehow overlooked when you were putting together all the paperwork?”
“No. How did you find out about it?”
“The people who bought the old Parkview Drive house tore it down and found a hidden wall safe in Dad’s den.” I wasn’t ready to talk about the fifteen grand and the gun. Not until I discovered the truth about them. And maybe not even then.
“Did Elizabeth know there was a safe in the den?”
Elizabeth. My mother. Another subject I didn’t want to broach.
“No. And she doesn’t want anything to do with it. Neither does Beth.”
“I’m not surprised.” She spit the words at me. “Your mother quit on Charlie when there was still time to save him.”
“He quit on himself.” Lila was right, but my mother was blood. “Do you know a woman named Antoinette King?”
“No. Who is she?”
“She and Charlie had a joint checking account that has been paying for the rental of this safety deposit box all these years. He never mentioned her during that last visit with you?”
“I just told you I never heard of her. Do you think he was having an affair with this woman?”
“I have no idea. I know as much about her as you now do. I couldn’t find anything online. Nothing on social media. It’s as if she doesn’t exist.”
“As far as I know, he was loyal to your mother until the end. Unlike her. She gave up on your father and found herself a sugar daddy.”
“She loves the guy.” I’d give her that much. “They’ve been married for seventeen years.”
“Seventeen and a half. She couldn’t even wait a full year after your father died to make it official.”
“She stayed with Dad longer than anyone else would have.” I’d tried to separate myself from his memory sooner than that. Tried. “Are you going to send me a copy of the death certificate?”
“What’s your address?”
I gave it to her.
“You sure the letter with the death certificate won’t come back to me unopened like all the other letters I sent you after Charlie died?”
“Yeah. I’m sorry about the letters, too.”
“Even the one I sent to you after your wife died came back unopened.”
“I should have read that one. That was wrong.” I even knew that at the time. “I could have handled things differently, but I didn’t want to hear about what a great guy my dad had really been. I’d lived with him for eight years after he got kicked off the force. I knew who he was.”
“See, that’s where you’re wrong. If you’d read the letters I sent you, you’d know that.” Her voice didn’t sound young anymore. It sounded old and broken. “It was hard enough trying to stop my brother from drinking himself to death and then watching him die. I lost my husband because of it. But that’s fine, I made a choice. My first family came first. What wasn’t fair was losing my brother, my husband, and then my favorite nephew. I don’t know if you blamed me for your dad’s death or you just didn’t want to be reminded of it. Either way, it was fucking unfair. I’ll put the death certificate in the mail today.”
She hung up.
I couldn’t blame her. If I’d been her, I would have hung up as soon as I heard my voice. I treated Lila horribly after my father died. I’d only thought of myself and tried to pretend that my father had never existed. Lila hadn’t done anything wrong. In fact, she’d done everything right. She’d taken care of Dad and tried to get him straight after my mother turned her back on him. After I did, too. Aunt Lila was my father’s sister. A reminder of the man I’d sworn to forget. It had never crossed my mind that Lila was losing me, too.
I was my father’s son.
The last few years, Dad had slept in my sister’s room while she was in college up at Berkeley. I remember the last time I put him to bed in that room. My mom was in the master bedroom. Door closed and locked, like it was every night for the final three years of my father’s life. I’d walked the old man over to the twin bed, keeping him upright with my shoulder. I dropped him more than set him down onto the bed. I pulled off his boots, and his pants, and his shirt, and rolled him under the covers. He smelled of all-day whiskey and three days without a shower. I’d put him to bed, but I wouldn’t bathe him. That would have been too much of an indignity for both of us.
I thought he was already unconscious in a boozy sleep, but he grabbed my wrist when I straightened up over the bed.
“People will disappoint you, Son.” The words thick on his tongue. He’d long ago forgotten the meaning of irony. He looked up at me through half-closed, watery bloodshot eyes, “But you have to forgive them. Otherwise it will eat you up. Destroy your soul. I’ve forgiven them. And I’ve forgiven myself, but it’s too late. Too late.”
My father’s eyes closed all the way and he fell into a whiskey sleep, already snoring with the first jagged intake of air. The next day, the last day of summer, I drove him to the Greyhound bus station in downtown San Diego and put him on a bus to Bakersfield. For the last time. Five months later, Aunt Lila flew his body back to San Diego in the cargo hold of an airplane.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
FEDEX DELIVERED MY father’s death certificate to my house at eight thirty the next morning. I didn’t know what point Aunt Lila was trying to make, but I was glad she’d spent the money on Next Day Saturday A.M. delivery. I wanted to solve the mystery of my old man’s hidden safe and secret safe deposit box as soon as possible and put it behind me. Put my father behind me forever. If I found another fifteen grand in my dad’s safe deposit box, I’d send Lila a check for the postage. I might even send her the whole fifteen grand.
Jules Windsor and Gloria Nakamura met me at the customer service cubicle at Windsor Bank and Trust. Windsor looked like he’d aged double the four years since I’d last seen him at the arraignment for the woman accused of murdering his son. The death of a child can do that no matter how odious the child had been. His gray hair had receded further back on his head, and his face was a bit more red. He wore the classic three-piece blue pinstripe banker suit. Nakamura wore a smart business dress and trim jacket. No necklace today. Maybe Windsor didn’t approve.
I’d called her at the bank earlier to tell her I’d be coming in with my father’s death certificate and that I wanted to see the contents of his safe deposit box. She hadn’t told me that the bank’s namesake and president would be there. Either my father’s safe deposit box rated his presence or I did. I wasn’t sure what to think about either. Except that, whatever the reason, it probably wasn’t one beneficial to me.
Neither Nakamura nor Windsor smiled upon greeting me. No hands were extended to shake. I guessed a bro-hug would have been out of the question. Nakamura led me over to the same desk she had the other day. Windsor walked into the bank vault without a word.
“May I review the death certificate?” Nakamura held out her hand.
I pulled it out of my jacket pocket and handed it to her. She examined the death certificate like it was a fake driver’s license and I was an eighteen-year-old kid holding a six-pack of beer. Finally, she handed it back to me. “Follow me, please.”
Nakamura led me past the open, round, three-foot-thick steel vault door and into the vault. Windsor was waiting in front of a wall of safe deposit boxes. Silent as death.
The doors to the lock boxes where Windsor stood looked to be about three by five inches, the smallest safe deposit boxes in the vault. I wondered how many envelopes of fifty- and hundred-dollar
bills could fit in a box that size. Or how many handguns.
“Mr. Cahill, may I have your key so I can open the safe deposit box?” Nakamura asked.
I handed her my key. She put it into one of the two locks on the safe deposit box, then stuck another key in the other lock. She turned each key and opened the little door and pulled out the thin two-foot-long metal box that was inside. Windsor studied me as Nakamura tucked the container under one arm and removed both keys from the door. I didn’t know what he was looking for, but I gave him nothing. Nakamura handed me back my key and stuck the other one in the pocket of her blazer.
“Now we’ll all proceed to a viewing room and examine the contents of the box,” she said.
She carried the box in front of her in two hands and waited for Windsor to open a door next to a bank of safe deposit boxes. He opened the door and we followed Nakamura in. She set the box down onto a thin table in the middle of the small, narrow room and pulled open the box, which had a hinge about three inches from the back.
A small manila coin envelope sat in the safe deposit box. Nothing else. I looked at Windsor, then at Nakamura. She spoke first.
“You may open the envelope and examine its contents, but you can’t remove anything from the bank. As we discussed, if you find a will, you can take it with you after we make a copy.”
“Yes, I remember what I can and can’t do with my father’s last earthly belongings.”
I took out the coin envelope and felt the outline of two small cylindrical objects with my fingers.
I set the envelope back down into the safe deposit box.
“You’re not going to open it, Mr. Cahill?” Nakamura asked.
“No.”
“Well, now that the box has been opened, the bank needs an inventory of its contents.” She reached around me for the envelope. I put my hand on her arm to stop her.
