The Ever

by Marcia Muller

  “McCone, what’s happening? I tried your cell several times yesterday, but it was turned off. If you check this machine for messages, call me.”

  I’d turned the phone on after landing at O’Hare yesterday, but switched it off again when I met Bob Cleary for breakfast, and also left it off while I interviewed RKI’s employees. After that . . . well, weariness and another long plane flight had prevented me from even thinking about it.

  I called the RKI condo in La Jolla where Hy was staying. Another machine. When I dialed his cellular, he picked up on the first ring.

  “Where are you?” he asked.

  “San Francisco, the safe house. I got in very late. Where are you?”

  “Headquarters. Been here all night. That situation in South America that I mentioned is defused, and I’m about to head back to the condo to get some sleep. You certainly made a quick trip. What did you find out back there?”

  I summarized the high points for him, then added, “I think you should have an audit conducted of your branch offices’ expense reports and billing. According to what one person told me, Bob Cleary pads expenses and overbills clients. And apparently he’s not the only manager who does that.”

  “Shit. I wonder why Dan didn’t pick up on it? He was a good administrator.” Pause. “Well, an audit’ll be necessary anyway, now that he’s dead.”

  “Has Renshaw surfaced?”

  “No. I’m kind of overwhelmed here, might’ve caved in entirely if I didn’t know you were handling things back in Chicago. Dan’s assistant—you met him, Brent Chavez—has been out sick, but he’s due back tomorrow. He’ll be a big help, even though he’s relatively new to the operation.”

  “Well, it’s good you’ll have some support there.”

  “You sound as tired as I feel.”

  “I’m okay. You’re the one who needs rest.”

  “Yeah, I know. I’m practically out the door.”

  “Oh, Ripinsky, before you go, there’re a couple of things I want to ask you: I know the company owns our plane and the Citations and the Jet Rangers, but do they have title to a beat-up old Piper that Dan occasionally flew?”

  “Never heard of it. We reviewed the aircraft inventory a year ago, sold off a couple that weren’t necessary, and there wasn’t anything like that on the list. Why?”

  Interesting. Instead of answering his question, I asked, “Also, do you and Dan and Gage have keyman insurance on your lives?”

  “Gage and I do. Dan didn’t. Couldn’t get it without exorbitant premiums. Bad heart.”

  “But he was still flying. Wouldn’t his FAA medical review have shown that?” Licensed pilots with commercial ratings are required to have medical exams with certain agency-approved doctors every year.

  “I never knew Dan to pilot, at least not since I’ve been with the firm. He always took the right seat. Besides, you and I know there’re a lot of people flying who shouldn’t be. And a lot of docs who can be fooled or bought. Why the interest in the keyman policies?”

  I explained what I suspected about the individual bequests in Dan’s will.

  “Yeah, that was how we decided to deal with the problem; he’d will us money in the amount of our insurance. Look, in Gage’s absence I guess you’ll be reporting to me. That okay?”

  “Has to be. Let’s just try not to wreck our marriage.”

  “I couldn’t wreck anything at the moment. I’m dead on my feet.”

  “Sleep well, Ripinsky.”

  “I will—but hopefully not till I get to the condo.”

  I was grinding coffee beans when the phone rang again. This time it was Mick.

  “How’d it go in Chicago?” he asked.

  “Inconclusive. But I think I spotted our perp near the bombed-out building.”

  “See him clearly?”

  “More clearly than any of the other witnesses have. He made a mistake revisiting the scene.”

  “I thought they only did that on TV or in mystery novels.”

  “Well, the concept has to have some basis in fact. I understand you want to talk with me in person about what you’ve come up with on the background checks.”

  “Yeah, I do. Face to face, in private.” His tone had become subdued, cautious.

  “Why not come here, then. I’ll make breakfast.”

  “Oh, God, please don’t do that!” Mick has a low opinion of my culinary expertise, and in the case of breakfast, he’s probably right.

  “Coffee, then.”

  “Coffee’s good. And Shar . . .”

  “What?”

  “Even though it’s early, you might want to make it Irish coffee.”

  Mick said, “I’ll start at the beginning of my deep-backgrounding on Renshaw.” He was sitting in the other leather chair in front of the fireplace, his right foot tapping the floor the way it always does when he’s nervous.

  “I’m assuming that what you came up with on Gage leads to something on Hy.”

  “Uh . . . well . . .”

  “Just get on with it.”

  He nodded, took a sip of coffee, and made a face. “Shar—”

  “I know: my coffee takes the enamel off your teeth. If I’d thought of that I’d’ve suggested we meet at Starbucks for a latte.”

  My tone had been sharper than I’d intended. Mick blinked, but clearly understood why. “Sorry. It’s just that I don’t know how—”

  “As you said, start at the beginning.”

  “Okay, when we last talked, the trail on Renshaw ended when CENTAC was disbanded and he quit the DEA. I remembered you once told me that he’d disappeared into Thailand.”

  “Did I? Oh, right—when I first met Renshaw, I asked the investigator I trained under about him, and that was what he told me.”

  “Well, he didn’t disappear into Thailand. I can’t tell you how I accessed this information or from whom. You’d probably fire me on the spot if I did. But Renshaw was in the Middle East, arranging for shipments of illegal arms and explosives, and making a fortune. He was based in Azad.”

  Arab emirate, formerly progressive, but now embroiled in a bitter civil war. Hank and Anne-Marie’s adopted daughter, Habiba Hamid, was the granddaughter of the now-deceased San Francisco consul from that country.

  I said, “I suppose in those days it was one of the safer places to live over there.”

  “Right.”

  I could feel the tension rising in the three feet between Mick and me. “Go on.”

  “Shar, I don’t want to upset you . . .”

  And then I remembered a story Hy had once told me, could practically hear his voice: “One of our hotdog pilots, name of Ralston, got his ass thrown in jail in Qatar. The son of a bitch was importing alcohol into an Arab country on the side . . . When he got caught, it was a potential life sentence. Dan and I flew in, delivered a load of pipe fittings to the oil fields, spread a lot of US dollars around to the jailers. When we left we had Ralston in the skin of the plane.”

  Meaning dressed in thermals and hidden in the space between the plane’s outer body and inner cabin. Hy had told me K Air frequently delivered supplies to the Middle East oil fields. And Qatar was very near Azad.

  But what else had they delivered?

  Mick saw my expression and realized I’d figured out what he’d come to tell me.

  “Illegal arms and explosives,” I said flatly.

  He nodded and stood. Set a file on the table between us. “I’ll leave this for you to read.”

  “You bastard!” I yelled.

  Hy jerked awake and sat up in the king-size bed in RKI’s La Jolla condo. I’d entered quietly, and he’d been sleeping so deeply he had no inkling I was there. Out of habit, he slid his hand under the other pillow for his .45, then withdrew it quickly when he recognized my voice.

  “What . . . ?” He raised his arm, shielded his eyes from the overhead light I’d turned on. Because operatives frequently used the condo to sleep at odd hours, the windows were fitted with black blinds that made it appear to be
the middle of the night—even now, at three in the afternoon.

  “Try illegal arms and explosives. Renshaw directing sales from Azad. You and Dan flying into Qatar and God knows what other places. Compared to that, the massacre of those Cambodians you were involved in sounds like a mercy killing!”

  He stared at me. Shook his head.

  I added, “A lot of things about your past I can accept. If you’d told me about this when you supposedly came clean, I would’ve accepted it, too. But not now. Not years later, when I find out you withheld the truth from me!”

  “Shar, calm down—”

  I took Mick’s report—that I’d read so many times on my flight down I had it memorized—and flung it at him. It smacked his forehead and fell to the floor.

  “Read this, you son of a bitch! And then explain why you hid a major detail of your criminal career from me. Tell me about the other stuff you’ve withheld. And then try to convince me why I should trust another word out of your mouth. Or remain married to you!”

  I whirled and left the room.

  I heard him jump out of bed and follow me, but I kept going across the living room and wrenched the front door open.

  “Where’ll you be?” he called.

  “I don’t know. You can reach me on my cellular when—and if—you come up with what you consider a convincing enough story.”

  I went home. Well, not exactly home—John’s house. When I let myself in, I found he wasn’t there; neither were the boys. I left my purse and carry-on bag in the kitchen and went to the family room. Opened the door to the deck and stepped outside.

  Quiet, warmish late afternoon. Wind rustling through the trees and plants in the canyon. Somewhere far away a dog barked and, closer by, another answered. Then all was still again.

  I walked across to the deck’s railing. There was a new little gate near the place where Pa had built the steps that led into the canyon. I went through it, found the moss-slicked top stone, and felt my way down, batting away the encroaching vegetation. Nobody had come this way in a long time. John’s boys were into iPods and text messaging, not treehouses.

  It was still there, though, nestled in the branches of a giant oak. The oak had prospered, and so had the treehouse. Someone—presumably the interim owners of the house, who’d had kids—had rebuilt it. Not well, but it was whole again, with wooden footholds nailed to the tree’s trunk. As it was, I scarcely needed them; the little structure was set low, and I’d grown tall since the days when I played there. I climbed up, sat down cross-legged on the floor, and recalled the last time I’d been there.

  A wild, grief-soaked night years ago, when I’d been told that a body had been discovered in a burned-out adobe in nearby San Ysidro—a body whose description matched Hy’s. I’d assumed the worst. So I came here, to my childhood refuge, to vent my sorrow and rage.

  This afternoon I felt only rage.

  Yes, I’d always known, as one of the RKI employees in Chicago had remarked, that Hy was a very dangerous man. He’d done things he wasn’t proud of. He’d killed several people—but only to save his own life. And for years he’d suffered before he made an uneasy peace with his actions.

  I was not one to preach. I wasn’t proud of some of the things I’d done. I’d killed, too—but only to save my own life and those of people I cared about. And, like Hy, I still had the occasional painful flashback or nightmare.

  But we’d admitted all the bad stuff to each other years ago. Or so I’d thought. I’d regarded our relationship as one based on mutual trust and honesty.

  But now I’d found out Hy had sold arms and explosives to warring factions in troubled nations. Weapons and devices that could kill thousands and thousands of innocent people. Perhaps even materials for weapons of mass destruction. Mythical as they’d turned out to be in Iraq, they did exist elsewhere.

  He must have thought it monstrous, because he hadn’t admitted it to me. He hadn’t trusted me enough to forgive him and go on loving him.

  I put my hands to my face. They were sweating and shaking. Anger rose like bile in my throat.

  When I took my hands away and looked up, the first thing I saw was a loose board on one side of the treehouse. I crawled over there, pulled it free, began to smash at the other boards. When I had destroyed that wall, I took on another. Then I began punching shingles from the roof.

  It must have been late when I finished my one-woman demolition derby, because dusk had crept into the canyon, but I couldn’t tell the time. In my frenzy I’d somehow broken my watch. Only the roof beams and corner studs and part of one wall remained.

  I lay on my back, looking up through the branches of the oak. My hands were bloodied, my rage spent. It felt as if another, irrational woman had taken possession of my body after I’d read Mick’s report. Why? Had Hy really done something so terrible in withholding a shameful chapter of his past? Didn’t we all have places like that where we didn’t want to go, much less take someone else to?

  I recalled my conversation with Hank the day he’d brought me lunch and comforted me about the Green Street explosion.

  “You’ve been in dicey situations before, and come through them pretty damn well.”

  “This time is different. It’s really unnerved me . . . Ever since that night, I’ve been going on crying jags and throwing up, and I can’t articulate my feelings, even to Hy, because I don’t know what or why . . .”

  “Post-traumatic stress, kid. And you’re feeling your own mortality.”

  “The mortality concept isn’t exactly foreign to me.”

  “But maybe it wasn’t as real before.”

  “So why is it more real now?”

  “Because your life has changed. You’re married. You’ve made that ultimate commitment. In theory, since you and Hy have been together a long time, it shouldn’t make a difference. But take it from one who knows: it does.”

  Well, of course. Ever since I accepted this case, I’d been walking through an emotional minefield—worrying about what it might do to my marriage, traumatized by nearly being blown up in the Green Street explosion, viewing the destruction in Chicago. And the mine I’d stepped on was the file Mick had handed me that morning.

  Well, I couldn’t put the pieces of the treehouse back together. But maybe I could mend the pieces of my marriage.

  Thursday

  MARCH 2

  I woke to the alarm in my old bedroom, which John had turned into a guest room. Seven o’clock, and my head hurt. He and I had taken the boys out for burgers the night before, then sat up very late, drinking and talking. Hy didn’t call my cellular, and I finally turned it off when I crawled into bed at one-thirty.

  I’d confided to John what I’d found out about Hy, although not the havoc I’d wreaked upon the treehouse; in retrospect, it seemed like a childish tantrum, and I hoped if he discovered it, he’d assume it was the work of teenage vandals. John counseled that I proceed cautiously, hear Hy out before making any judgments. This coming from my brother, who had once been the hottest-headed bar fighter in San Diego County.

  “But the evidence is all there in Mick’s report,” I said. “And we know he’s got great sources and checks everything twice. K Air was importing illegal arms, explosives, and God knows what else into the Middle East.”

  “They may have been, but unless you can get access to their records you can’t know for sure if Hy made those trips, or knew what he was transporting.”

  “Hy would’ve been captain on those flights; he was senior pilot, and even Kessell took the right seat when they flew together. The captain always knows what’s aboard. Besides, the records were probably destroyed years ago.”

  “Well, I still think you should give him the benefit of the doubt, listen to what the man has to say.”

  “I’ll listen to him, yes. But how am I going to tell if it’s a lie?”

  “Shar, has Hy ever actually lied to you?”

  That gave me pause. “No. What he employs is silence. When we were first together, he
was totally mum about his past, but he made no secret that there were things in it that he didn’t want to talk about. When he was ready—when he was sure of our relationship—he explained everything. Or so I thought.”

  “But you say he told you the story of flying into Qatar and rescuing that hotdog pilot in an offhand way.”

  “Yes.”

  “And when you were working on that case involving the bombing of the Azadi consulate, did he ever say anything about Renshaw having lived in Azad?”

  “. . . No. But that could mean he didn’t want to open up that particular can of worms.”

  “Then why would he have talked about Qatar?”

  “Slip of the tongue, because the story was interesting.”

  John shook his head. “Guys like Ripinsky don’t make slips. They’ve got too much to lose.”

  Too much to lose—me, our life together.

  John added, “Just think about it.”

  “I’ll think about it.” I drank more wine, even though I knew I’d regret it in the morning.

  And now I did regret it. My eyeballs felt as if they’d been sandpapered and there was a dull pounding in the vicinity of my sinuses that had nothing to do with allergens. But as I lay in bed, listening to John and the boys get ready for work and school, I made a decision.

  I was going to see this case through. I’d signed a contract, accepted a retainer, and was committed to delivering a solution. Since Renshaw had not yet reappeared, I’d report to my husband—in a professional, unemotional manner.

  Until the case was concluded we would not speak any more about the arms dealing. Then I’d hear him out and decide if I could live with whatever he told me.

  I took my cellular off the nightstand, turned it on, and listened again to my voice mail messages. They’d all come in yesterday, when the phone was in my purse in John’s kitchen and I was in the canyon wrecking the treehouse; after that I hadn’t been in any shape to return the calls.

  Mick: “Shar, are you okay? Let me know. Also, I’ve come up with stuff on Kessell’s tour of duty with the Special Forces, and his hospital stay in the Philippines. Still can’t get any leads on where he got the bucks to start his aviation service.”