by Harlan Coben
“What kind of monster would continue to protect his source in this situation?”
“I know plenty.”
“We spoke to the victims’ families. They swore they never spoke to him.”
“They could be lying. Maybe the kidnapper told them to say that.”
“Okay, then why hasn’t Gibbs done more to defend himself against the charges of plagiarism? He could have fought them. He could have even provided some detail that would have proved he was telling the truth. But no, instead he goes silent. Why?”
“You think it’s because he’s the kidnapper? The moth flew too close to the flame and is licking his wounds in darkness?”
“Do you have a better explanation?”
Myron said nothing.
“Lastly, there’s the murder of his mistress, Melina Garston.”
“What about it?”
“Think it through, Myron. We put the screws to him. Maybe he expected that, maybe he didn’t. Either way, the courts don’t see everything his way. You don’t know about the court findings, do you?”
“Not really, no.”
“That’s because they were sealed. In part, the judge demanded that Gibbs show some proof he had been in contact with the killer. He finally said that Melina Garston would back him.”
“And she did, right?”
“Yes. She claimed to have met the subject of his story.”
“I still don’t understand. If she backed him up, why would he kill her?”
“The day before Melina Garston died, she called her father. She told him that she lied.”
Myron sat back, tried to take it all in.
Eric Ford said, “He’s back now, Myron. Stan Gibbs has finally surfaced. While he was gone, the Sow the Seeds kidnapper was gone too. But this brand of psycho never stops on his own. He’s going to strike again and soon. So before that happens, you better talk to us. Why were you at his condominium?”
Myron thought about it but not for long. “I was looking for someone.”
“Who?”
“A missing bone marrow donor. He could save a child’s life.”
Ford looked at him steadily. “I assume that Jeremy Downing is the child in question.”
So much for being vague, but Myron was not surprised. Phone records probably. Or maybe there had indeed been a tail when he visited Emily’s. “Yes. And before I go on, I want your word that you will keep me in the loop.”
Kimberly Green said, “You’re not a part of this investigation.”
“I’m not interested in your kidnapper. I’m interested in my donor. You help me find him, I’ll tell you what I know.”
“We agree,” Ford said, waving Kimberly Green silent. “So how does Stan Gibbs fit in with your donor?”
Myron reviewed it for them. He started with Davis Taylor and then moved on to Dennis Lex and then the cryptic phone call. They kept their faces steady, Green and Peck scratching on their pads, but there was a definite jolt when he mentioned the Lex family.
They asked a few follow-up questions, like why he got involved in the first place. He said that Emily was an old friend. He wasn’t about to go into the patrimony issue. Myron could see Green getting antsy. He had served his purpose. She was anxious to get out and start tracking things down.
A few minutes later, the feds snapped their pads closed and rose. “We’re on it,” Ford said. He looked straight at Myron. “And we’ll find your donor. You stay out.”
Myron nodded and wondered if he could. After they left, Win took a seat in front of Myron’s desk.
“Why do I feel like I was picked up at a bar and now it’s the next morning and the guy just handed me the ‘I’ll call you’ line?” Myron asked.
“Because that’s precisely what you are,” Win said. “Slut.”
“Think they’re holding something back?”
“Without question.”
“Something big?”
“Gargantuan,” Win said.
“Not much we can do about it now.”
“Nope,” Win said. “Nothing at all.”
24
Myron’s mom met him at the front door.
“I’m picking up the takeout,” Mom said.
“You?”
She put her hands on her hips and shot him her best wither. “There a problem with that?”
“No, it’s just …” He decided to drop it. “Nothing.”
Mom kissed his cheek and fished through her purse for the car keys. “I’ll be back in a half hour. Your father is in the back.” She gave him the imploring eyes. “Alone.”
“Okay,” he said.
“No one else is here.”
“Uh-huh.”
“If you catch my drift.”
“It’s caught.”
“You’ll be alone.”
“Caught, Mom. Caught.”
“It’ll be an opportunity—”
“Mom.”
She put her hands up. “Okay, okay, I’m going.”
He walked around the side of the house, past the garbage cans and recycling bins, and found Dad on the deck. The deck was sanded redwood with built-in benches and resin furniture and a Weber 500 barbecue, all brought to being during the famed Kitchen Expansion of 1994. Dad was bent over a railing with a screwdriver in his hand. For a moment, Myron fell back to those “weekend projects” with Dad, some of which lasted almost an entire hour. They would go out with toolbox in tow, Dad bent over like he was now, muttering obscenities under his breath. Myron’s sole task consisted of handing Dad tools like a scrub nurse in the operating room, the whole exercise boring as hell, shuffling his feet in the sun, sighing heavily, finding new angles from which to stand.
“Hey,” Myron said.
Dad looked up, smiled, put down the tool. “Screw loose,” he said. “But let’s not talk about your mother.”
Myron laughed. They found molded-resin chairs around a table impaled by a blue umbrella. In front of them lay Bolitar Stadium, a small patch of green-to-brown grass that had hosted countless, oft-solo football games, baseball games, soccer games, Wiffle ball games (probably the most popular sport at Bolitar Stadium), rugby scrums, badminton, kickball, and that favorite pastime for the future sadist, bombardment. Myron spotted Mom’s former vegetable garden—the word vegetable here being used to describe three annual soggy tomatoes and two flaccid zucchinis; it was now slightly more overgrown than a Cambodian rice paddy. To their right were the rusted remnants of their old tetherball pole. Tetherball. Now, there was a really dumb game.
Myron cleared his throat and put his hands on the table. “How you feeling?”
Dad gave a big nod. “Good. You?”
“Good.”
The silence floated down, puffy and relaxed. Silence with a father can be like that. You drift back and you’re young and you’re safe, safe in that all-encompassing way only a child can be with his father. You still see him hovering in your darkened doorway, the silent sentinel to your adolescence, and you sleep the sleep of the naive, the innocent, the unformed. When you get older, you realize that this safety was just an illusion, another child’s perception, like the size of your backyard.
Or maybe, if you’re lucky, you don’t.
Dad looked older today, the flesh on his face more sagged, the once-knotted biceps spongy under the T-shirt, starting to waste. Myron wondered how to start. Dad closed his eyes for a three count, opened them, and said, “Don’t.”
“What?”
“Your mother is about as subtle as a White House press release,” Dad said. “I mean, when was the last time she picked up the takeout instead of me?”
“Has she ever?”
“Once,” Dad said. “When I had a fever of a hundred and four. And even then she whined about it.”
“Where’s she going?”
“She has me on a special diet now, you know. Because of the chest pains.” Chest pains. Euphemism for heart attack.
“Yeah, I figured that.”
“She’s even tried cooking a little. She to
ld you?”
Myron nodded. “She baked something for me yesterday.”
Dad’s body went stiff. “By God,” he said. “Her own son?”
“It was pretty scary.”
“The woman has many, many talents, but they could airdrop that stuff into starving African nations and no one would eat it.”
“So where’s she going?”
“Your mother is high on some crazy Middle Eastern health food place. Just opened in West Orange. Get this, it’s called Ayatollah Granola.”
Myron gave him flat eyes.
“Hand to God, that’s the name. Food is almost as dry as that Thanksgiving turkey your mother made when you were eight. You remember that?”
“At night,” Myron said. “It still haunts my sleep.”
Dad looked off again. “She left us alone so we could talk, right?”
“Right.”
He made a face. “I hate when she does stuff like that. She means well, your mother. We both know that. But let’s not do it, okay?”
Myron shrugged. “You say so.”
“She thinks I don’t like growing old. News flash: No one does. My friend Herschel Diamond—you remember Heshy?”
“Sure.”
“Big guy, right? Played semipro football when we were young. So Heshy, he calls me and he says now that I’m retired, I can do tai chi with him. I mean, tai chi? What the hell is that anyway? If I want to move slowly, I have to drive down to the Y to do it with a bunch of old yentas? I mean, what’s that about? I tell him no. So then Heshy, this great athlete, Myron, he could hit a softball a country mile, this marvelous big ox, he tells me we can walk together. Walk. At the mall. Speed-walk, he calls it. At the mall, for chrissake. Heshy always hated the place—now he wants us to trot around like a bunch of jackasses in matching sweatsuits and expensive walking shoes. Pump our arms with these little faigelah barbells. Walking shoes, he calls them. What the hell is that anyway? I never had a pair of shoes I couldn’t walk in, am I right?”
He waited for an answer. Myron said, “As rain.”
Dad stood up. He grabbed a screwdriver and feigned working. “So now, because I don’t want to move like an old Chinaman or walk around a godforsaken mall in overpriced sneakers, your mother thinks I’m not adjusting. You hear what I’m saying?”
“Yes.”
Dad stayed bent, fiddling a little more with the railing. In the distance, Myron heard children playing. A bike bell rang. Someone laughed. A lawn mower purred. Dad’s voice, when he finally spoke again, was surprisingly soft. “You know what your mother really wants us to do?” he said.
“What?”
“She wants you and I to reverse roles.” Dad finally looked up through his heavy-lidded eyes. “I don’t want to reverse roles, Myron. I’m the father. I like being the father. Let me stay that, okay?”
Myron found it hard to speak. “Sure, Dad.”
His father put his head back down, the gray wisps upright in the humidity, his breathing tool-work heavy, and Myron again felt something open up his chest and grab hold of his heart. He looked at this man he’d loved for so long, who’d gone without complaint to that damn muggy warehouse in Newark for more than thirty years, and Myron realized that he didn’t know him. He didn’t know what his father dreamed about, what he wanted to be when he was a kid, what he thought about his own life.
Dad kept working on the screw. Myron watched him.
Promise me you won’t die, okay? Just promise me that.
He almost said it out loud.
Dad straightened himself out and studied his handiwork. Satisfied, he sat back down. They started talking about the Knicks and the recent Kevin Costner movie and the new Nelson DeMille book. They put away the toolbox. They had some iced tea. They lounged side by side in matching molded-resin chaises. An hour passed. They fell into a comfortable silence. Myron fingered the condensation on his glass. He could hear his father’s breathing, moderately wheezy. Dusk had settled in, bruising the sky purple, the trees going a burnt orange.
Myron closed his eyes and said, “I got a hypothetical for you.”
“Oh?”
“What would you do if you found out you weren’t my real father?”
Dad’s eyebrows went skyward. “You trying to tell me something?”
“Just a hypothetical. Suppose you found out right now that I wasn’t your biological son. How would you react?”
“Depends,” Dad said.
“On?”
“How you reacted.”
“It wouldn’t make a difference to me,” Myron said.
Dad smiled.
“What?” Myron said.
“Easy for both of us to say it wouldn’t matter. But news like that is a bombshell. You can’t predict what someone will do when a bomb lands. When I was in Korea—” Dad stopped, Myron sat up. “Well, you never knew how someone would react …” His voice tailed off. He coughed into his fist and then started up again. “Guys you were sure would be heroes completely lost it—and vice versa. That’s why you can’t ask stuff like this as a hypothetical.”
Myron looked at his father. His father kept his eyes on the grass, taking another deep sip. “You never talk about Korea,” Myron said.
“I do,” Dad said.
“Not with me.”
“No, not with you.”
“Why not?”
“It’s what I fought for. So we wouldn’t have to talk about it.”
It didn’t make sense and Myron understood.
“There a reason you raised this particular hypothetical?” Dad asked.
“No.”
Dad nodded. He knew it was a lie, but he wouldn’t push it. They settled back and watched the familiar surroundings.
“Tai chi isn’t so bad,” Myron said. “It’s a martial art. Like tae kwon do. I’ve been thinking of taking it up myself.”
Dad took another sip. Myron sneaked a glance. Something on his father’s face began to quiver. Was Dad indeed getting smaller, more fragile—or was it like the backyard and safety, again the shifting perception of a child turned adult?
“Dad …?”
“Let’s go inside,” his father said, standing. “We stay out much longer, one of us is going to get misty and say, ‘Wanna play catch?’ ”
Myron bit off a laugh and followed him inside. Mom came home not long after that, lugging two bags of food as though they were stone tablets. “Everybody hungry?” she called out.
“Starving,” Dad said. “I’m so hungry I could eat a vegetarian.”
“Very funny, Al.”
“Or even your cooking …”
“Ha-ha,” Mom said.
“… though I’d prefer the vegetarian.”
“Stop it, Al, I’m going to phlegm up, you keep making me laugh like this.” Mom dropped the bags onto the kitchen counter. “See, Myron? It’s a good thing your mother is shallow.”
“Shallow?” Myron asked.
“If I judged a man on brains or sense of humor,” Mom continued, “you’d have never been born.”
“Right-o,” Dad said with a hearty smile. “But one look at your old man in a bathing suit and whammo—all mine.”
“Oh please,” Mom said.
“Yes,” Myron said. “Please.”
They both looked at him. Mom cleared her throat. “So did you two, uh, have a nice talk?”
“We talked,” Dad said. “It was very life-affirming. I see the errors of my ways.”
“I’m being serious.”
“So am I. I see everything differently now.”
She put her arms around his waist and nuzzled him. “So you’ll call Heshy?”
“I’ll call Heshy,” he said.
“Promise.”
“Yes, Ellen, I promise.”
“You’ll go to the Y and do jai alai with him?”
“Tai chi,” Dad corrected.
“What?”
“It’s called tai chi, not jai alai.”
“I thought it was jai alai.”
“Tai chi. Jai alai is the game with the curved rackets down in Florida.”
“That’s shuffleboard, Al.”
“Not shuffleboard. The other thing with the sticks. And the gambling.”
“Tai chi?” Mom said, testing it for sound. “Are you sure?”
“I think so.”
“But you’re not positive?”
“No, I’m not positive,” Dad said. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe it is called jai alai.”
The name debate continued for a while. Myron didn’t bother correcting them. Never cut in on that strange dance known as marital discourse. They ate the health food. It was indeed nasty. They laughed a lot. His parents must have said “You don’t know what you’re talking about” to each other fifty times; maybe it was a euphemism for “I love you.”
Eventually Myron said good night. Mom kissed his cheek and made herself scarce. Dad walked him to the car. The night was silent save a lone dribbling basketball somewhere on Darby Road or maybe Coddington Terrace. A nice sound. When he hugged his father good-bye, Myron again noticed that his father felt smaller, less substantial. Myron held on a little longer than usual. For the first time he felt like the bigger man, the stronger man, and he suddenly remembered what Dad had said about reversing roles. So he held on in the dark. Time passed. Dad patted his back. Myron kept his eyes closed and held on tighter. Dad stroked his hair and shushed him. Just for a little while. Just until the roles reversed themselves again, returning both of them to where they belonged.
25
Granite Man was waiting outside the Dakota. Myron spotted him from his car. He picked up the cell phone and called Win. “I have company.”
“A rather large gentleman, yes,” Win said. “Two cohorts are parked across the street in a corporate vehicle owned by the Lex family.”
“I’ll leave the cell phone on.”
“They confiscated it last time,” Win said.
“Yes.”
“Likely they’ll do the same.”
“We’ll improvise.”
“Your funeral,” Win said, and hung up.
Myron parked in the lot and approached Granite Man.
“Mrs. Lex would like to see you,” Granite Man said.
“Do you know what she wants?” Myron asked.
Granite Man ignored the question.
