Afraid of the Dark

by James Grippando

  “How long have you lived here?” asked Jack.

  “Moved in after Shada passed away,” Mays said.

  Jack had, of course, heard about his wife’s suicide. Lose a daughter, then a wife, and who could give a rat’s ass about decorating a new house?

  Jack followed him toward the kitchen. Mays offered him a barstool at the granite counter and went to the refrigerator.

  “You want a beer?”

  It was not yet noon, but pointing that out to a guy like Mays would have probably earned Jack a major wedgie.

  “Sure,” he said.

  Mays popped open two cans and put one in front of Jack. “Cheers,” he said, and then he guzzled down most of it. Jack half expected him to start burping out the entire Mays alphabet: fucking-A, fucking-B. . .

  “I didn’t used to drink, you know,” said Mays.

  Jack knew what he was saying. “I hear you.”

  Mays had a little beer foam on his mustache. He took care of it with a backhand swipe of the wristband.

  “Your client called me from jail the other night,” said Mays.

  “I heard about that in court yesterday,” said Jack.

  “Told me where he was when McKenna was murdered.”

  Jack wasn’t sure how to respond, so he let Mays keep talking.

  “I’ve been giving his story a lot of thought,” said Mays.

  “I know it must sound hard to believe,” said Jack.

  Mays locked eyes with him, and for a moment Jack wondered if he was going to reach over the counter and slug him. Finally, Mays stepped away, took a file from a stack of papers on the kitchen table, and laid it on the countertop in front of Jack.

  “What’s this?” asked Jack.

  “Payroll records for my company. It’s from three years ago, when Jamal worked for me.”

  Jack opened the file and found his client’s name on the list of employees.

  Mays said, “We had automatic deposit for Jamal’s paychecks to go to his bank every week.”

  Jack glanced at the transaction dates on the ledger. “So is it a coincidence that he was off the payroll for the two pay periods before your daughter was murdered?”

  “Jamal stopped showing up for work. So I stopped paying him. Tried calling him, got no answer. Went to his apartment. Nobody there. Called his mother in Minnesota. No idea where he was. She even filed a missing person report.”

  Jack looked at him, confused. “All that actually supports Jamal’s claim that he was abducted before the crime.”

  “I realize that,” he said.

  Jack studied his expression. The guy was no easy read. “Why would you help me defend the man accused of killing your daughter?”

  Mays drained the last of his beer, then crushed the empty aluminum can in his bare hand. “Jamal Wakefield was sitting in Gitmo for three years.”

  “Well, nominally at least it was Khaled al-Jawar.”

  “That’s exactly my problem,” said Mays. “Those fuckers knew they had Jamal. But no one told me. They just let me go on thinking for three years that the man who killed my daughter was still on the loose, never going to be brought to justice.”

  “I can see where you’d be angry.”

  “This isn’t about anger. I’m just saying they have a different agenda, and I understand that. They think Jamal’s a terrorist, and they want to keep him locked up.”

  “The Justice Department did take an unusual position in court yesterday,” said Jack.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Normally, when a criminal defendant wants access to classified information, the feds make him jump through all the hoops under the Confidential Information Protection Act. The government doesn’t care how long it takes. But in Jamal’s case, they’re suddenly all concerned about the swift administration of justice.”

  “You see what I’m saying?” said Mays. “It doesn’t really matter if he killed McKenna. So long as he ends up behind bars, it works out either way for them.”

  “But it matters for you.”

  “I just want the truth. I think you do, too, which is why you’re on the fence about taking this case to trial.”

  “Who told you that I was on the fence?”

  He shook his head, as if Jack were naïve. “My supercomputers can search eight billion files in an instant, tell me where you lived when you were in college, and pull up the Social Security number of every man, woman, and child who ever lived in the same zip code. Give me another minute and I can do the same thing for two hundred seventy million other folks, and not a single one will have the slightest idea that he was being checked out. Then, if you like, we can compile a complete personal dossier for every high-school graduate who earns six figures, smokes Marlboros, uses the name of his childhood pet as his preferred online password, and has a landlord named Bob.”

  Jack hesitated, but he knew Mays wasn’t kidding. “You can’t click a mouse and know how I feel about a case.”

  “No, I’m not quite there . . . yet,” Mays said with a smile. Then he turned serious. “But I do know this: You wouldn’t be anywhere near this case if something wasn’t telling you that Jamal is innocent.”

  Jack didn’t respond.

  “Vince Paulo is a friend of mine,” said Mays. “I know he’s one of your personal heroes. And why shouldn’t he be? He was the lead hostage negotiator who stopped a raving lunatic from killing your best friend.”

  Jack couldn’t deny the facts.

  Mays said, “You’d have to be one incredibly cold and ungrateful son of a bitch to defend the guy who blinded him.”

  “It’s a tough one,” said Jack.

  “Damn right it is. But we both know one thing.”

  “What?”

  “If Jamal is innocent, that means the man who murdered my daughter and took Paulo’s eyesight is still out there, a free man. That’s why you’re on this case, isn’t it?”

  “I’m not comfortable having this conversation,” said Jack.

  Mays grabbed him by the wrist, his move lightning quick. “I couldn’t care less about your comfort.”

  “Let go of my arm.”

  Mays squeezed harder, his bicep bulging. “I need to know if they’ve got the wrong guy. I have the right to know.”

  “Mr. Mays, let go of my arm.”

  “Tell me the truth. Would you be in this case if you really thought Jamal did it?”

  They were locked in a stare down. Mays’ eyes were like lasers, but it was the kind of question Jack would never answer.

  “I’m giving you one last chance,” said Jack. “Let go of my arm. Now.”

  Mays had the grip of a mountain climber, not a computer genius. His eyes narrowed with anger and then, finally, he released Jack.

  “Get out of my house,” said Mays.

  Jack flexed his wrist, got the blood flowing, then walked straight to the foyer and opened the front door.

  “Swyteck,” Mays called out, his voice booming down the hallway.

  Jack stopped in the open doorway, but he didn’t answer. He didn’t even glance back.

  “Defend him if you want,” said Mays. “But if he’s guilty and you get him off, I’ll kill you. That’s not a threat. That’s just the way it is.”

  Jack stepped out. Behind him the door closed with an echo that traveled beyond the bare walls of the big, empty house.

  Chapter Twelve

  P.O., no, no!”

  Jack recognized his grandfather’s shouting the moment he entered the Alzheimer’s wing. It was coming from inside his room at the end of the hallway—that same pointless rant against the post office that Jack had heard many times before.

  “P.O., NO, NO!”

  The thought of his grandfather swatting at nothing and shouting nonsense made Jack want to rush to his side, but Saturday lunch was a peak visiting hour at Sunny Gardens. The hallway was clogged with clusters of residents and guests, many using wheelchairs or walkers. Merely the wind from his sprint could have knocked over most of them, and J
ack had more sense than to run through an Alzheimer’s nursing home anyway. He hurried as quickly and as safely as he could to the open doorway.

  “It’s okay, Grandpa,” he said as he entered the room.

  His grandfather didn’t seem to notice him, but thankfully the shouting had ceased. He was sitting up in the mechanical bed, quietly staring up at an elderly woman who was standing at his bedside.

  “That’s my bubbala,” she said in a soft voice of praise. She was holding his hand and stroking his forehead. Jack didn’t recognize her, and instead of the blue uniform of a Sunny Gardens employee, she was wearing a green cotton dress with a thin white sweater. Her hair was done in the classic style of a fading generation that went to the beauty parlor every Saturday morning. Jack wasn’t sure if Grandpa recognized her either, but she had an undeniably calming effect on him. They couldn’t seem to take their eyes off each other.

  “Who are you?” asked Jack.

  Her gaze remained fixed on the older Swyteck, and she answered in the same soothing tone. “Who am I?” she asked, smiling at Jack’s grandfather. “I’m Ruth, of course. Bubbala’s main squeeze.”

  Grandpa has a girlfriend?

  Jack watched them. Ruth was singing to him now, too soft for Jack to hear the words, but the tune was familiar and pleasant enough, even if it was in an older voice that cracked now and then. Grandpa’s eyes were closing, and in a matter of minutes, he was sound asleep. Ruth kissed him gently on the forehead.

  “I love you,” she whispered, and then she stepped away from the safety rail.

  Jack tried not to appear too shocked. His grandfather had been a widower for twenty years, and Jack had no idea that he’d even dated since.

  “I’m Ruth Rosenstein,” she said, offering her hand.

  Jack shook it and started to introduce himself.

  “You’re Jack, I know,” she said. “Bubbala’s told me all about you before . . .” She glanced toward the bed and smiled sadly. “Well, before.”

  “How long have you two you known each other?”

  “Oh, it’s been about five years now.”

  Jack suddenly felt small. He was in his thirties when his maternal grandmother had finally come over from Cuba, and he’d spent countless hours building a relationship with her, making up for lost time. Grandpa Swyteck had lived most of his life just a plane ride away in Chicago, yet Jack knew so little about his father’s father. Jack saw him on holidays and at important family events, but the relationship was never deep. It was more like the obligatory grandson visits, even after he retired to Florida. Even after he went into the facility.

  “Do you have time for a cup of coffee with me in the cafeteria?”

  “I’d like that,” said Jack.

  An old Irving Berlin tune—“I’ll Be Loving You . . . Always”—played softly over the intercom system as they walked together down the hallway and found a table by the window. The coffee wasn’t good, but Jack didn’t really notice as Ruth told him how she’d met his grandfather, the kind of things they used to do together, the close relationship they had forged.

  “Last year at Passover he even joined me at the seder,” she said, suddenly wistful. “That was one of his last really good days.”

  Jack smiled a little. “He thinks we’re Jewish, you know.”

  She drank from her cup, and then her expression turned very serious. “What do you think, Jack?”

  Her response was not at all what Jack had expected. “Excuse me?”

  “Oh, never mind.”

  “No, please don’t say ‘never mind.’ Did my grandfather tell you something I should know?”

  She measured her words and said, “I think the best way to put it is that there is some confusion about that.”

  “With Alzheimer’s there’s confusion about everything.”

  “True,” she said. She put her cup and saucer aside. “Let me just share one little story with you.”

  She was using that very calm tone again, but it made Jack’s heart race. “All right,” he said.

  “Two years ago your grandfather and I went to see a play called Edgardo Mine. It’s a true story about a little boy named Edgardo Mortara. Do you know it?”

  “Mmm, no.”

  “Edgardo was the son of a Jewish merchant in Bologna, one of eight children raised in an observant Jewish home in the 1850s. When he was an infant, he was very sick with fever, and the family’s Catholic serving girl secretly baptized him because she didn’t want him to be excluded from heaven. Happily, Edgardo survived his illness.”

  “Something tells me there’s not a happy ending.”

  “Hardly,” said Ruth. “Nineteenth-century Bologna was part of the Papal States. Under church law, a child who was baptized could not reside in a Jewish home. It’s not clear how, but whispers about Edgardo’s secret reached all the way to the pope. One night the constabulary showed up at the Mortara house and took him away.”

  “This is a true story?”

  “Absolutely. The church’s position was that Edgardo could return to his parents if they converted to Christianity. Needless to say, Edgardo never came home. It was a huge international incident, but the pope wouldn’t budge. The boy even lived with him in the Vatican for a while. Edgardo ended up a Catholic priest, one of the protégés of Pio Nono.”

  “Pio Nono?”

  “That was the Italian name for Pope Pius IX.”

  “That’s what Grandpa shouts from his bed. I thought he was railing against the post office.”

  “Pio Nono is actually the main character in the play. Your grandfather was very moved by the story.”

  “Who wouldn’t be?”

  “I mean it really impacted him,” she said. “Much more than I expected.”

  Jack waited for her to say more, but she fell silent. “Because . . . he’s Jewish?”

  “Honestly? I don’t know. Maybe something inside me made me want to think he was. Look at me,” she said, laughing at herself, “I’m eighty-three years old and still trying to please my mother. Oy vey.”

  Jack smiled. It was easy to see how his grandfather had enjoyed her company.

  His cell phone rang. Jack didn’t recognize the number, so he didn’t answer.

  “I’m not saying it’s so,” said Ruth, “and the last thing I want to do is create an identity crisis for you. But I have heard of people literally on their deathbed, telling their children or grandchildren the truth about their ancestry. And you can’t always dismiss as crazy everything that comes out of the mouth of someone with Alzheimer’s.”

  Jack’s phone chimed with an incoming text message. He glanced at it, then froze.

  “It’s Pio Nono,” it read. “Call me. NOW!”

  “Is something wrong?” asked Ruth.

  Jack shook off the chills. “Will you excuse me one minute?”

  Ruth seemed concerned, as if she might have said something to anger him, but Jack had no time to explain.

  He hurried out of the cafeteria and found a quiet place to return the call from a dead pope.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Jack ran to his grandfather’s room.

  It was creepy the way the message had referenced Pio Nono, and Jack feared it was a threat—aimed not just at him, but also at the man who had been shouting those words at the top of his voice.

  “Are you okay?” he asked as he rushed toward the bed.

  Grandpa was breathing but was out like a light, his mouth wide open. Ativan, Jack presumed—one of the anti-anxiety medications made famous by the Michael Jackson homicide, better known in nursing homes as the day-shift relief drug: Load up the patient at lunchtime, chart him as “nonresponsive” through sunset, and let the night shift deal with him. Jack would have a word with the prescribing doctor later.

  He pulled up a chair beside the bed, retrieved the number from his cell history, and returned the call. After two rings there was a voice on the line.

  “Got your attention, I see.”

  “Who is this?” ask
ed Jack.

  “Someone you need to talk to.”

  “How did you know I was in the middle of a conversation about Pio Nono when you texted me?”

  “I heard you,” the man said, his scoff crackling over the line. “Is there any other way?”

  For all the concern over confused residents wandering out of the building, Sunny Gardens wasn’t nearly vigilant enough about checking visitors. “Are you in the building?”

  “That’s enough questions. Just shut up, relax, and listen. I’m not calling to threaten you or blackmail you. I’m calling to help.”

  “Help me what?”

  “Defend Jamal Wakefield.”

  An aide knocked and entered to clear away Grandpa’s lunch tray, making enough noise to wake anyone who wasn’t overmedicated. Jack stepped into the bathroom for privacy, closed the door, and turned on the exhaust fan to cover his voice.

  “How are you going to help?” asked Jack.

  “I know things.”

  “What kind of things?”

  The man paused, then said, “I know where Jamal was when McKenna Mays was murdered.”

  Jack gripped the phone even tighter. “Where?”

  “Exactly where he said he was.”

  Yesterday’s court hearing had been closed, so the alleged black site in the Czech Republic was not yet public information. Jack wasn’t going to supply the answer for him. “And where would that be?” he asked.

  “Prague,” the man said. “In a warehouse two kilometers from the airport, to be exact.”

  It was the kind of detail that added credibility; not even Jamal had known the exact location. “Are you telling me that my client was in a detention facility at the time of the murder?”

  Silence. But Jack could tell that he was still there. “How do you know where Jamal was?” asked Jack.

  There was another stretch of silence, and Jack wasn’t sure if he had a liar, a crank, or just a reluctant witness.