◆◆◆◆◆
They repeated it all for the detectives. An hour later, Stuckey, looking more resigned now than sullen, waited as Rivera stepped into the elevator. The doors closed, and the car started down.
“Anyway, I got a retirement watch,” he said.
“So, you caught it.” Stuckey didn’t answer. That meant the colander had worked. He had brought one with him, along with the movies. At some point during the night, Dennis had defecated into the colander to make sure he saved the watch.
“Most people have to work thirty years for a watch like that,” Rivera said.
“Yeah, I got mine in like thirty-six hours.”
Neither spoke again until they had exited the basement garage. Several elderly couples stood in a group on Pelican Bay Boulevard. One man was pointing up at Le Bonheur with a putter. Rivera angled left and drove slowly east. It was not yet nine-thirty, but sun fell bright on the asphalt. It was the dry season now, making the trees and hedges look bleached.
“The watch isn’t for retirement,” he said. “You’re not fired. That was for Buddy, to give him something.”
“He’s a prick,” Stuckey said. “Treating me like I offed the guy.”
“He’s doing his job, that’s all,” Rivera told him. “But it’s psychology. Someone died, someone must be responsible. If I fire you in front of him, he thinks I share his opinion of you. We give a nice annual contribution to the Police Officers’ Benevolent Society. If he likes us, Buddy will do what he can to keep All Hands on Deck out of the paper.”
Stuckey nodded. “But I know these cracker cops, man,” he said. “Just like the movies. They beat up on anyone with tats or piercings. Black or white, it doesn’t matter, they’re fucking bigots. If he takes the call next time I’m there, game over. I can see it. Three or four of them beating on me. Using cattle prods, all that shit.”
“You won’t be working with clients,” Rivera told him. “Not for a while. We had two people die. It’s not your fault, but I don’t want any hassle from Immigration. We’ll just let it go away, then you’ll be back.”
“Rubber hoses,” Stuckey said. “Clipping batteries to your balls.”
“That’s in Latin America.”
“Yeah, well, here too, man. They hate anyone like me. Anyone different.”
They reached 41. By now, the nearest access road to the Interstate would be bumper-to-bumper with paver and steel haulers, cement trucks and lumber deliveries. Rivera turned south and took Pine Ridge. When they stopped for a light, he looked over. “Was Mrs. Fenton with you when you caught it?” he asked.
“Yeah, right. Like I let her hold the colander. It kept perfect time,” Stuckey said. “Three-twenty, just after The Empire Strikes Back.”
9:20 a.m.
She listened a third time to Charlie’s voice. It sounded guarded to her. More distant. No, Brenda thought. You just hear it that way.
The beep sounded. “It’s me again,” she said. “As soon as you get in, please call me. We need to talk. If you’re already back, if you’re listening, Charlie, please pick up. Even if you don’t want to, we have to talk. In the same room, not like this. I wish you were here, Charlie, I was wrong.”
She pushed the button and felt disgusted with herself. Wish you were here, Charlie—exactly, Brenda thought. He wasn’t here, so that makes him responsible for what happened.
And if he did call, what then? Seated at the kitchen table, Brenda set her phone next to the laptop. Fully awake by five and feeling agitated, she’d taken a Valium. Added to last night’s drinking, the pill was keeping her groggy, but she had to stay busy. She was inside at the kitchen table, drinking coffee and typing notes she’d titled “family values.” Ray Colon’s family, followed by the woman in the road and her sad, bizarre elderly parents.
Music floated from next door. Tammy Wynette’s “I Fall to Pieces.” For the first time today, Brenda thought of Rayette Peticore. Maybe Rayette already knew everything. Maybe the club had security cameras up in the trees. She and Sweeney could be on local-access cable.
Country western wasn’t something she would choose for herself, but Tammy Wynette’s voice was full of conviction. Keyboard jazz was her own preference. Bill Evans, Oscar Peterson, Dave Brubeck. Once she was grown, she had come to love all the great jazz musicians from the late fifties and sixties. Chet Baker and Miles Davis on trumpet, Charlie Parker and Paul Desmond on alto sax. It had been her father’s taste. He had hated rock ’n’ roll, and so, as a matter of principle, Brenda had loved rock. She remembered playing it loud on purpose, turning up the volume in her room until the door opened. There he was, looking at her sprawled on her bed. Are you seriously interested in being put up for adoption? Brenda smiled at the memory. Always she had known her father wasn’t really angry. She could imagine Sweeney being that way with his grandchildren. Faking surprise, then fake anger, making faces for them so they knew grandpa was joking.
She focused on the kitchen table. It was butcher block, like the table in Sweeney’s kitchen.
“Yoo hoo—” Movement blinked outside the window’s plantation shutters.
The screen door slapped shut. Brenda stood as Rayette entered from the deck. “Here I go again, bothering you,” Rayette said and stepped into the kitchen. “I didn’t know if you had today’s paper. There’s an obituary for the man that died here Friday.” She handed Brenda the Naples Daily News. “Sorry I missed you last night,” she said. “A group of us went out to eat.” She looked down at the laptop.
“You aren’t interrupting anything,” Brenda said. “I’m just killing time.”
“No, you’re working.”
“Not really.”
“I’m reading your book,” Rayette said. “I got it from the hospital library. It’s a page turner, and I’m going back to it so you can keep working on the next one.”
Without waiting, she left. Brenda sat again. Rayette had folded the paper to death notices and circled one with yellow Magic Marker. Chester Ivy, born in Ypsilanti, Michigan, 1916. After graduating from the University of Michigan in 1938 with a degree in mechanical engineering, he had gone to work for GM. He had served in the Army during the war, then married Ellen Heubler in ’48. Rising through the ranks, Ivy had made his career at GM by designing innovations for Chevrolet. He had developed twenty-nine patents for the company. Under GM’s mandatory provision, he had retired in 1985. He had died at the age of eighty-four, survived by one son, George, and two grandchildren, born to George Ivy and his first wife.
Brenda leafed quickly through the rest of the section. She tossed it on the table, but then picked it up. She reopened the paper and leafed slowly from the back. Not sure why, she scanned the pages.
“Marco Resident Takes Life.”
Hilda Frieslander. Quickly, Brenda read the short article, noting details told to her by the elderly resident and the lobby guard. Hilda Frieslander had been found late Friday night. It all fit with other details—strokes the previous year, diabetes, going blind from macular degeneration. Dead at seventy-nine, survived by a niece somewhere in Europe. No other family.
Sweeney had dismissed her suspicions. What would he say now? She remembered James Rivera lifting her suitcase out of his van. Minutes later, he had driven a few hundred yards to see about a dead client. Things happen. It goes with the territory—
Brenda felt guilty and selfish now about Sweeney, but she wanted his opinion. Maybe, though, it wouldn’t be necessary to actually see him.
She turned to her laptop and typed his full name. Patrick and Sweeney were both common Irish names, so she added “lobbyist.” The point was to gain a link to his email. She clicked and now studied the first of seven screens related to Patrick Sweeney.
It was no surprise. As a lobbyist, he had been involved with politicians and high-profile industries. She scrolled down the list. Not just big construction, but big oil, big tobacco. Brenda shook her head. Pfizer, Global Marine, Pulte. But the most recent entries suggested that late in the game, Pat
rick Sweeney had gotten religion. “Influence with a conscience: Sweeney says yes to Nader.” He had also gone to bat for migrant farm workers in Michigan. Then for Common Cause.
“Lobbyist’s Wife Takes Own Life.” There it was, with separate photos of Patrick and Teresa Sweeney. The date was September 9, 2003. Brenda didn’t want to read it, not now, and clicked “next” for the second screen.
“Holocaust on I-94, Seven Dead.”
The story was from the Detroit Free Press, dated two years earlier, Thursday, September 13, 2001. She clicked the link.
“A family of four and two school friends died Tuesday when a tanker truck loaded with diesel fuel jackknifed on I-75, just north of Monroe, Michigan.
“A witness reported seeing the truck’s right front tire explode and the rig out of control. Moments later, the truck struck a bridge abutment, killing the driver and overturning the tanker as a Dodge minivan, driven by Keith Shay, attempted to stop. The van failed to brake in time and struck the tanker. Police believe sparks from the impact ignited fuel seeping—”
“That’s why she killed herself—”
She didn’t want to know. Brenda pushed back her chair, stiffened her arms on the table. But now she read. Constance Shay, daughter of lobbyist Patrick Sweeney, her husband, her two children, and two friends of the girls, all four children students at Shrine School in Royal Oak had been returning from a late-summer trip to Naples, Florida…
Brenda lowered the laptop’s screen. She stood and walked. She was crying, seeing Patrick Sweeney leaning next to her on the plane. His hand with a tan line on his ring finger was resting on the tray table, he was sitting on the grass beside her, teeing up another ball. Doing his best, she thought, walking, crying. Trying his best.
She mustn’t stop, and moved now outside to the deck. She circled the pool. The surface was dancing with morning sun. All wrong, she thought, marching. So beautiful. Sky and clouds were mirrored in water, and gorgeous flowers bloomed outside the pool cage. All of it heartless.
“Everything just cooking along…” She kept walking, holding herself. “Everything smooth sailing…blue skies coming your way—”
“Brenda?”
She couldn’t answer, walking, marching, sure she would lose it if she stopped. There could be no response. No, there was nothing anyone could ever say to Pat Sweeney or do for him. Pat Sweeney, who had somehow managed to pull himself together, to come back from all that death two years before. But in that time, Teresa Sweeney had not been able to come back.
The cage door squeaked. “You all right?” Rayette stepped in. “You were talking, I heard—”
She couldn’t remember. Her brain seemed stuck. The only way to move or think was to face it again. Wiping her eyes, Brenda walked quickly around the pool, into the house, and to the kitchen. She re-opened the laptop. The story still glowed on the screen. She sat slowly and scrolled up.
September 13. The crash had taken place on 9/11, with no story the following day. Because of the World Trade Center, Brenda thought. And the Pentagon, and the plane crash in Pennsylvania. It confused her. She wanted the two disasters to mean something.
They don’t, she thought, looking at the date. That day, Patrick and Teresa Sweeney had lived with it all by themselves. That’s what it meant, Pat and Terri sitting on a couch, trying to comprehend total loss, while all the world watched replay on replay of the Trade Towers coming down. And one year later, all of it over again. And a year after that—
Rayette sucked air. “My God—” She was standing behind, reading. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph.”
Brenda pushed back and stood. She couldn’t stay here. Couldn’t know this and stay here. At the same time, the thought of going alone to Sweeney made her frightened. If he had wanted her to know, he’d have told her. She remembered the list on his kitchen table, the photos. Children and daughter and son-in-law and wife, all laid out on butcher block, with a list of his assets.
Don’t worry about the phone ringing. You know what he’s down here for, she thought. Why he’s cleaning up.
Why stop him?
It shocked her, how quickly the question came to her. Having an answer seemed in the next seconds of great importance. Because, she thought, searching. He adds to the world, all by himself. He adds to it as Charlie Schmidt does. And Tina Bostwick and Marion Ross. Just by being, by loving life. By knowing how good it is.
But didn’t suffering draw from the same well? Hilda Frieslander had suffered, too. Why stop her?
Rayette stepped out. In white shorts and yellow polo, she was holding herself. She seemed small and lost, so tan she looked African. Seeing her, Brenda felt sure she knew what Rayette Peticore was thinking. After that, what woman could mean anything to Pat Sweeney?
“I was there last night,” Brenda said. “I asked if he wanted to go to dinner. We had some drinks and carry-out.”
“Maybe you went because of what I told you.”
“Maybe. I don’t know anyone here. It didn’t seem pushy.”
“Well, no,” Rayette said. She came down the step and walked along the pool’s edge. “Why not?” She shrugged and walked, holding herself, looking down. “Who wants to eat alone? I met up with some people, after they finished their game. I came over to ask you to join us, but you were gone.”
“I’m worried about him.”
Rayette stopped in front of her, holding herself. “You think he might hurt himself?”
“He spent all day cleaning out his house. He had people in to clean his pool.”
Rayette thought about it. “I don’t know,” she said. “That could be a good sign. When I’m depressed, I get out of it by cleaning.”
“I can’t think what to say to him,” Brenda said. “But I have to go there, and I want you to come with me. You know him. You knew his wife.”
“And the daughter,” Rayette said. “God. Connie was the light of his life, I can tell you that. Let me get some shoes.”
◆◆◆◆◆
Brenda followed the access road, stopping at crossing points for golf carts. The players waved, bounced past. She reached Sweeney’s cul-de-sac and turned.
“Nobody does that—” Rayette pointed ahead to the house. “Leaves the garage door open. People just don’t do it here. You end up with bugs and raccoons.”
“Maybe he just got back from running an errand.”
They pulled up, got out and approached the front door. Blurt it out, Brenda thought. We’re here because we know about the wreck, we came to be with you, we had to. She stepped up the stoop. An envelope was taped to the door. Good, it was something she could deliver, a purpose. She pulled it free and knocked.
“I’ll check the mailbox.”
Rayette jogged back down the drive as Brenda waited. For some reason, she felt better. Maybe it was having no choice, feeling compelled. Things were better that way, when there was no choice. She knocked again. “Patrick? It’s Brenda Contay—”
Rayette came back, mail in both hands. “Some of this is ten days old,” she said. “They must be delivering, then sending it up to Michigan.” Brenda knocked again. “Try the door.” She worked the knob, and the door opened.
“Patrick?”
She stepped in, Rayette behind. At the far end, the living room’s slider stood open. She moved through the hall, past rooms she’d never been in—a bedroom, a den, the dining room table where Sweeney had set his clubs. In the living room, she saw through the open slider that the swimming pool was flooding out over the deck.
“Uh oh.” Rayette stepped next to her. “He’s adding water and forgot. I’ve done that.”
“Check in there—”
Rayette went into the master bedroom as Brenda crossed to the kitchen. On the table rested a desk lamp shining down pointlessly in a room flooded with morning sun. The lamp hadn’t been on last night. That meant Sweeney had walked her to her car, come back and turned on the lamp before going out to clean up. Still open on the table was his notebook. At the end of the list, he ha
d added BRENDA CONTAY in block print, with an arrow to CALLOWAY GOLF CLUBS, COMPLETE SET.
“Brenda!”
She turned away and crossed to the master bedroom. At the far end Rayette stood looking into a lighted walk-in. You had to come here, Brenda thought. Quickly she crossed, ready for what must be waiting. It made sense, who could say it didn’t? She stepped next to Rayette and looked in.
Like a pop art still-life, a shotgun rested on a kitchen chair. Under the chair and shaped to the walls was one of the heavy blue plastic pool blankets. It had been shoved into the corners and tacked to the walls. The small, chalk-white room had been stripped. Brenda smelled Sweeney’s cologne. But he hadn’t done it. He’d cleaned, sorted, gotten everything ready. But hadn’t done it.
“All her things are still here,” Rayette said. “It’s like a shrine.”
Brenda backed out and stepped next to Rayette. In the brightly lighted second walk-in, wire shelves held stacks of neatly folded tops and underwear. The rod was crowded with good-looking blouses and skirts, the floor ranked with pairs of shoes. Like Charlie, Sweeney had not been able to do the practical thing, had not been able to shove his wife’s things in trash-can liners and call a charity. When she visited Charlie in Milwaukee, Lillie Schmidt’s things still hung untouched in her closet.
She turned away. Rayette was now standing beside the bed. It was mounded with men’s clothes, all his things. Shoes in neat pairs were lined up on the floor. On the bed lay suits, sports jackets and slacks still on hangers, two stacks of knitted shirts, one of laundered dress shirts. Brenda reached down and lifted off the top of a shoebox. It held another pair of golf shoes, never worn.
Rayette picked up a sheet of paper. “It’s directions,” she said. “Everything’s supposed to go to the Hospice resale store, or to Goodwill.”
Brenda felt the envelope clutched in her hand, the one taped to the front door. She opened the flap and took out two sheets of paper.
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