The Last Word

by Lisa Lutz

  I contracted the five-minute flu from Robbie’s last words to me and remained paralyzed in the elevator until I could get my gag reflex under control. When the silver blades shut in front of me, I saw my reflection split in two. I’m sure I could draw some kind of boring metaphor out of that, but I was too tired and sick to think of one.

  * * *

  1. Unlike the one about how you should wear clean socks every day.

  2. To any maybe computer geeks out there: My representation of Robbie is in no way meant to disparage your entire demographic. And just you wait. Robbie really pulls through. But he could still work on his table manners.

  3. Actually, yes, I was. Robbie had me on the ropes once before. It would never happen again.

  CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE

  Imagine a rotating door on Dad’s hospital room. When one Spellman went in, another went out. You never knew who you’d find at one time or another. Funny thing about Mom, though. She was at the hospital plenty, don’t get me wrong. But when she wasn’t there, she was incredibly hard to track down.

  I found the room empty when I arrived the next morning. It was rare to get a moment alone with Dad.

  “You just missed your mom,” Dad said. I had a funny feeling he was lying.

  I sat down in the chair next to his bed.

  “How are you doing?” I asked, using that soft, sympathetic hospital voice.

  “What?! I can’t hear you!” Dad shouted to mock me.

  “How are you doing?” I bellowed back at him to be sure he understood I got the message.

  Tralina dipped her head in and said, “If you need me, use the button.”

  “That was the television,” Dad said.

  “I don’ tink so. Be back in a half hour for our program, okay?” she said.

  “Bring the electric razor,” Dad said.

  “Okay,” Tralina said.

  “I’m going Telly Savalas. Do you think your mom will dig that look on me?”

  “I think if Mom likes your current look, she’s going to be cool with almost any look.”

  “Was that an insult? Because, you should know, you’re my only child who actually resembles me.”

  “Please stop reminding me of that. How are you feeling?”

  “Today wasn’t as bad as yesterday.”

  “If you have the slightest premonition that you might puke, please let me know,” I said, waving the plastic receptacle in his eye line.

  “I promise I won’t puke on you unless it’s absolutely necessary.”

  “Thanks, Dad. You’re the best.”

  We sat silently watching a terrifying talk show involving a woman who had cheated on her boyfriend with his son and then his son’s best friend. Oddly, the most enraged party to this scandal was the son’s best friend. When the dire state of humanity or fake television got to be too much for Dad, he turned off the TV.

  “I’m not going to die, you know.”

  “Ever?” I asked.

  “I am not going to die from this.”

  “I didn’t think so. I always figured it would be Colonel Mustard with the candlestick in the library.”

  “I’m trying to have a moment.”

  “So am I. And my moment seems way better than your moment.”

  Dad then pinched my cheek.

  “You were always my favorite,” he said.

  “Stop saying that. It doesn’t mean anything when you tell your other children the exact same thing.”

  “Right now. You’re my favorite.”

  • • •

  Since Maggie had scolded all of us about not informing Grammy of Dad’s illness, the family convened to come up with a plan. Rae suggested we draw straws to determine who would tell her. Mom drew the short straw and demanded a redraw, in which she would not participate. Rae suggested we send Grammy a text message and offered to do it herself.

  “A text message?” David asked incredulously.

  Rae, thinking David was balking because Grammy was a Luddite, said, “I showed her how to text ages ago. I thought the less we had to hear her voice, the better.”

  And that was coming from Grammy’s favorite.

  Even Mom admitted that a text message seemed cruelly impersonal. Yet I heard her mumble something about a telegram under her breath. David, the most dignified, humane, and responsible of us all, made the phone call. And then he even sacrificed himself to pick her up and bring her to the hospital. He timed it so she would arrive just a half hour before the end of visiting hours and made sure that no doctor visit was planned during that time frame.

  “How do I look?” Dad said, rubbing his hand over his newly bald head.

  “Like a cancer patient,” Rae replied.

  To her credit, when Grammy S. entered the hospital room and saw her son in bed with needles in his hand and monitors tracking every beat of his heart and his blood pressure, and with almost no hair except the shadow of his stubborn brows, she had that universal maternal look of concern. She approached his bed, straightened his sheets, gently touched his brow, and kissed him on the forehead. Then she stepped back and looked him over carefully.

  “Look on the bright side,” she said. “You’ve lost weight.”

  I squeezed my mother’s shoulders. To a stranger it would have looked like a massage, but I was actually holding her down. Meanwhile, David managed to usher Grammy out of the hospital at breakneck speed.

  “You can come visit tomorrow or maybe the next day,” he said. “We’re not supposed to have too many people in the room at once.”

  Grammy made protests, which David knocked down, and when they were eventually out of earshot, I released my mom, kind of the way you let go of a dog that’s stopped barking at a threat. Mom slumped in her chair.

  “Bitch,” she said.

  Dad laughed. “When I get out of this place, you are buying me the best steak dinner in town.”

  • • •

  The next day, while David and Mom were keeping Dad company in his room, I was stuck with Grammy and Rae in the waiting room. Rae purchased every health and diet magazine at the gift shop to occupy Grammy while we both worked on our laptops. Gruber phoned me after he completed his investigation on Evelyn Glade.

  “We need to meet,” Gruber said.

  “Are you sure?” I said. “Because neither of us actually enjoys being in the other person’s company.”

  “I’m sure.”

  Gruber had always maintained a distantly friendly relationship with my father, so he agreed to meet me at the hospital. He even brought my dad a bag of salt-and-vinegar chips from the gift shop with a Get Well Soon card attached.

  Robbie and I spoke in the hospital corridor.

  “Evelyn has the IQ of a prom dress.”

  “Finally, we agree on something,” I said.

  “She keeps all of her passwords on her computer in a spreadsheet called ‘Passwords.’ The spreadsheet isn’t even password protected. Anyway, her PayPal account information was right there, so I took a look-see.”

  Robbie then took a long drag on his caffeinated smoothie, either because he was thirsty or for dramatic effect.

  “And?”

  Robbie passed me a spreadsheet with highlighted transfers and arrows pointing to the money trail.

  “She has had five transfers in denominations of ten thousand dollars from PayPal over the last month. The same time frame as your suspicious funds.”

  “Did they come from an account in the Cayman Islands?”

  “No. They came from another PayPal account, with the screen name loyalservant47.”

  “And who is that?”

  “Rufus Harding, Evelyn’s boyfriend. Through their communications I got access to Harding’s computer and then access to his PayPal account. His spreadsheet was password protected, but there’s a back door, because what are you going to do if someone has forgotten the password to a document that holds the formula for the polio vaccine?”

  “Surely someone has memorized it by now.”

 
“Shall I go on?”

  “Please.”

  “Harding’s PayPal account had much more action. There were transfers coming in from a Cayman Islands account, and some of the funds were transferred to his personal account and some to his girlfriend’s account.”

  Robbie pointed out the flow of transfers. They also occurred during the same time frame, but the transferring account was different from the original one that incriminated me. However, I would have bet Robbie’s entire Star Wars memorabilia collection on the trail of transfers leading back to that one offshore account under GLD Inc.

  “How is it that the FBI can’t figure this shit out, but one computer nerd can?” I asked.

  “For one thing,” Robbie said, “the FBI still has to work within the confines of the law. Me, I work around it. I haven’t found a system I couldn’t hack. Although I haven’t yet tried the FBI.”

  “I owe you, Robbie, even with all that crap you pulled with our computers.”

  “Speaking of that, here’s your bill.”

  Robbie handed me an envelope. I cracked the seal, just to see what I was in for.

  Balance due: $0.00

  “This one’s on the house,” Robbie said.

  • • •

  Later that night, I drove to Evelyn Glade’s apartment. She lived only a mile or so from the Spellman compound, in a three-unit building in Russian Hill. I rang her doorbell and heard footsteps approach. I could sense an aerobic organism on the other side of the door, probably looking through the peephole. I smiled cheerily.

  “Just open up, Evelyn. We can hash this out here or at the office.”

  Evelyn opened the door. It was past eight. She was in a nightgown and a silk robe fit for a gentleman caller.

  “Are you expecting company?” I asked.

  “No,” she said. “Why are you asking?”

  So, some women dress like that when no one’s looking?

  “No reason.”

  “Have a seat,” Evelyn said with less enthusiasm than anyone has ever used in offering me a place to plant my ass.

  “Nice couch,” I said as I took a seat. This wouldn’t take long, but I wanted her to think it would.

  “What can I do for you, Isabel?” Ms. Glade said as she reclined on an antique fainting couch.

  “Thanks for the cash. What’s the occasion? It wasn’t my birthday.”

  I gave Evelyn 50 percent credit for her poker face; the other 50 percent went to Botox.

  “I can only assume,” I said, “that your boyfriend helped mastermind the plan. But the jig is up. I have the trail of funds leading from Slayter Industries to GLD Inc. in the Cayman Islands to another offshore account in the name of HRD Inc., then Rufus Harding’s PayPal account and then your bank account. You guys got really creative with your corporate names.”

  I dropped the file folder on her coffee table.

  “Another copy is on its way to the FBI right now.”

  Evelyn went to her bar and poured herself a drink out of a crystal decanter. She looked to me and silently asked if I wanted one.

  “How do I know you won’t roofie me?”

  This time the poker face was even better.

  “You don’t,” she said.

  “Whatever. Yeah, I’ll have a drink.”

  What? I was thirsty.

  Evelyn poured us both a drink from the same bottle and sat back down.

  “Why did you do it?” I asked.

  “Because I’m forty-five years old and I answer phones for a living and now I have a mother with a broken hip, and one day I will be sixty-five years old and answering phones for a living and maybe then I’ll fall down and break a hip, but there won’t be anyone to take care of me and I’ll be counting cans of tuna fish until the next Social Security check and spending my Sundays cutting coupons and scraping by while I fantasize about the life I never had. I’ve already disappointed myself enough. I don’t want to compound that by being desperate. It’s just enough to make the rest of my life bearable. It’s not like they’d even miss it.”

  That was true, in the scheme of things, in this greedy world we live in. It wasn’t that much money, and I would have genuinely felt something for Evelyn if she hadn’t tried to frame me and my boss.

  “And what was the point of transferring funds into my account?”

  “My boyfriend said we needed a fall guy. He asked me to pick someone. You pissed me off that day with your stupid parking-validation scam. And you always had Edward in the palm of your hand.”

  “Did it ever occur to you that using a private investigator as your patsy wasn’t the smartest move?”

  “Later, it did.”

  “Edward trusted you. If you had talked to him, asked for a raise, maybe he would have helped.”

  “And maybe he wouldn’t have. There’s always someone younger and prettier who knows more.”

  “Twenty years ago this plan might have worked,” I said.

  “Twenty years ago, I would have married the boring engineer I was dating.”

  “Worth millions now, I take it?”

  “What happens next?” Evelyn asked.

  “First you need to tell me who you’re working with, aside from that genius boyfriend of yours. Arthur, I assume. And how you arranged Edward’s public indignities.”

  Evelyn finished her drink and gazed at me like a cat in repose.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You are one of the best liars I’ve ever met.”

  “All I did was trick Arthur into giving me the bank routing numbers. And steal a little money. I had nothing to do with Edward’s recent difficulties.”

  “Now would be the time to come clean,” I said as a warning.

  “I swear, Isabel. I thought Edward had a drinking problem.”

  I pressed Evelyn again, but she held firm. Knowing that she’d have the full weight of an FBI investigation on her, it seemed unlikely she’d hang on to this final lie. I left her apartment with the heavy knowledge that my work wasn’t done.

  I remember a time when my mind wouldn’t have been able to shut down, the cases churning so relentlessly that I could barely see the person standing right in front of me. I remember when it had to be me who solved the case, who figured out the riddle. Now I didn’t care who did it, how it came about, just as long as it was over. I’m tired of seeing all the rotten things one person does to another person. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not going to open a flower shop. But this is my dream: One day, I leave my job at the office and it doesn’t follow me home and haunt in me in my sleep. Another dream: I don’t live in my brother’s basement apartment. After everything I’ve seen and done and mused about endlessly, I’m convinced of one thing: There’s more to life than this, and sometimes when I picture more, it looks like something so simple, like so much less.

  After my meeting with Evelyn, I drove home to my basement apartment and called the hospital to check on Dad. The nurse said he was asleep. Mom was camped out on the chair by his bed. I took two aspirins and went straight to bed. And I didn’t care if I woke up the next morning with any of the answers.

  Well, maybe I cared a little.

  ONE ANSWER

  I didn’t have the answers, but other people did, and for once, I didn’t mind. I dropped by the hospital first thing in the morning. My father looked like someone who’d had his guts turned inside out and then just tucked them back in. He was out cold. Mom, however, had clearly been up all night. When she wasn’t tending to Dad, she was working. Her laptop, a messy stack of folders, and several Styrofoam cups sat on the windowsill.

  “You’ve been busy,” I said.

  “Couldn’t sleep,” said Mom.

  “Coffee probably didn’t help.”

  “There was nothing to read so I started looking over some of the open cases. Are you still working on Divine Strategies for Mr. Slayter?” Mom asked.

  “Not exactly,” I said. “He advised his clients not to invest and told me to let the case go. I kept looking into it,
but I’m going to stop now.”

  “Good idea,” Mom said, rubbing sleep out of her eyes.

  “But you know something, don’t you?” Dropping the case is one thing, but if the answer is sitting right in front of me, I’m going to ask.

  “I don’t know anything. I have a hunch. I gave you the wrong lead with the sexual harassment suit. There’s a one-year statute of limitations on sexual harassment. There’s no way a single woman could hold that kind of leverage for more than ten years.”

  “What are you thinking?”

  “One-year statute of limitations on sexual harassment. No statute of limitations on rape.”

  Maureen Stevens’s maiden name was Maureen Clyde. She had one sister. Naomi Clyde. Naomi hadn’t held a full-time job since 2004, when she worked at Divine Strategies in its infancy, with Brad Gillman and Bryan Lincoln. She had a few employment markers on her report up until 2005, when she virtually dropped off the face of the credit world. There’s one credit card to her name and the address listed for her is Maureen’s.

  Something happened in 2004, and it probably involved the police. What people don’t know is that police files are not public record; only court files are. For the sake of argument, let’s say you know a police officer intimately, one who might feel guilty about getting a certain woman pregnant and planning a wedding not six months after you broke up. You’d have a good shot at looking at a case file.

  I called to make sure Henry was in and drove to his office at 850 Bryant Street. They know me there, so I didn’t have to sweet-talk anyone at the front desk. I was buzzed into the back room and worked my way through the maze of desks until I found Henry’s. I probably should have called him first, because he looked like I was a thug in a ski mask accosting him with a knife in a back alley.

  “Hi,” I said to ease the tension. Surely there are better ways to ease the tension.

  “You are the last person I expected to see,” he said.

  “Not Morgan Freeman?”

  I took a seat on the edge of his desk.

  “How are you?” he asked.

  “Okay.”