I just looked at him.
“And the shopping spree in Dallas that Shawnie won… She didn’t really win it, did she? I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if that entity you control sponsored the ‘contest.’ Stroke of genius, actually. Under normal circumstances, it would have been a surefire way to get Shawnie out of the house. You just didn’t know about the doctor.”
I eased myself onto the low stone wall that bordered the deck.
“You set it up so Mary Shawn would be home alone that evening. You snuck into town and went to the house. Mary Shawn was already drunk, of course—she was always drunk by sundown. You got her up to the second floor somehow. You pushed her down the stairs so it looked like an accident. You snuck out of the house, out of town, back to whatever airport you used. You flew back to La Jolla without anyone being the wiser. You joined your running buddies the next morning just like you’d never left town. That’s your style, Robert. Clean and simple.”
I took a deep breath, then let it out. “Jimmy, that’s ridic—”
“Drunk woman home alone falls down a flight of stairs, breaks her neck, dies. It’s the kind of tragic accident that happens every day. No one thinks anything about it.”
I just shook my head.
“Shawnie coming back unexpected like that, her getting me over to the house and knocking me out and setting the place on fire, it really threw a wrench in the simplicity of your plan, didn’t it?”
I let out a laugh. “You have one fertile imagination, Jimmy Hicks! Maybe you should use your new computer to write mystery novels.” I stood and headed toward the kitchen. “Want some more coffee before we go to breakfast?”
“A man spends five years in prison, even an innocent man, he’s bound to learn a lot about the criminal mind.”
I stopped in the doorway and turned to face him.
“The thing is, some things are so obvious, a really smart criminal might not notice them.”
My knees were suddenly weak.
“You know how I first started figuring it out?”
I leaned against the doorframe.
“You knew Mary Shawn was already dead when Shawnie reached the house.”
I fought to stay standing.
“You never once mentioned the possibility that Shawnie might have killed Mary Shawn, even accidentally.” Jimmy set down his coffee mug, leaned forward, and clasped his hands underneath his chin. “If she was going to try to kill me, why did you never for a moment think that she might have killed Mary Shawn, too?”
There was nothing I could do or say. It would have been pointless to try to deny it. I just looked at him.
“Your knowing Mary Shawn was already dead didn’t really prove anything, of course. But it did get me to thinking. So I took my new computer and did a little poking around on the Internet. I found something real interesting. Mary Shawn died three years after Elizabeth and Riley got killed in that wreck. Three years to the day.”
I drained the last of my coffee. It was cold and bitter.
“What’d Mary Shawn do?”
I looked out over the ocean and thought about the last morning Elizabeth, Riley, and I had had breakfast here on this deck. Water welled in my eyes. I could have said nothing. I probably should have said nothing. But Jimmy was the only family I had left.
I walked halfway to where my brother sat. I clasped my hands on top of my head. “A few months after you’d left Mary Shawn and moved into your apartment, she started calling me at the office asking for money. I kept saying no. While I was up in San Francisco working on a case, she called my cell phone. I’d had the number a long time, so I didn’t think anything of her calling me on it—a lot of people I didn’t want having the number had it. I expected her to ask for money again, but this time she threatened to blackmail me. She said she was going to call Elizabeth and tell her that I’d forced myself on her that night you turned yourself in to the sheriff. Mary Shawn said she was going to tell Elizabeth that Shawnie was my daughter, and that the time had come for me to make things right. It was all a lie, of course, but we both know that never stopped Mary Shawn.” I lowered my arms to my sides. “Elizabeth and I had just changed our unlisted phone at the house, Elizabeth’s cell, all our e-mail addresses, things like that. I just laughed and told Mary Shawn to go right ahead. I was going home that night, so I knew I’d be there before any letter would have time to reach her.”
Jimmy half-stood, then he sat again. “But…”
“Mary Shawn called back a few minutes later. She told me she’d carried out her threat. I didn’t believe her, but then she recited our new number. She said she’d only tell Elizabeth the truth if I wired a million dollars into her account.”
“Oh God.” Jimmy clamped his hands around the back of his neck.
“Mary Shawn had gotten the number somehow. I knew you weren’t talking to her then. Best I can figure, Shawnie got the number off your cell phone and gave it to Mary Shawn.”
Jimmy closed his eyes. “Oh Jesus. Robert, I had no—”
“A simple blood test would have proven Mary Shawn was lying, but that would take time, and then there was the issue of Shawnie’s paternity. None of us wanted Shawnie to know who her real father was. I guess Mary Shawn was banking on that. She probably thought it was worth a million dollars to me to have her tell Elizabeth the truth and get it over quickly.”
Jimmy sat there. His face twitched.
“I never told you this, but Elizabeth was always jealous of how pretty Mary Shawn was. She thought I pretended to hate Mary Shawn because I was secretly attracted to her. No matter what I said, Elizabeth was always suspicious that something had happened between Mary Shawn and me. Then Mary Shawn called saying those things and…”
Jimmy stood and walked toward me.
“I knew Elizabeth would be upset, so I hung up and called the house. There was no answer. I tried Elizabeth’s cell, but it went straight to voice mail. I flew home. The police were there waiting for me.”
“Oh Jesus, God, Robert.” Jimmy was standing just in front of me. “Oh Jesus, God.”
“If Mary Shawn hadn’t called and told that horrible lie, Elizabeth wouldn’t have taken Riley and left the house. They wouldn’t have been driving on that road. If Mary Shawn hadn’t called, Elizabeth and Riley would still be…” I buried my face in my hands. I cried so hard, I could barely get the words out. “Mary Shawn killed my wife and my little boy. I wasn’t going to let her kill you, too. You’re the only family I’ve got left.”
Jimmy caught me when my legs gave out. He helped me over to the bench at the seaside edge of the deck. We sat there together looking out over the ocean. A lone wave washed in and out over the rocks below. Neither of us spoke for a long time.
I swallowed hard and wiped the tears from my cheeks. “I’ll fly back tomorrow and turn myself in.”
Jimmy gave me a hard look. “You never told Shawnie who her real father was, did you?”
I shook my head. “Some truths are too horrible to be told.”
He turned his gaze back toward the ocean. “There at the end, Mary Shawn had been threatening to tell her. I know she would have eventually. It was just a matter of time.”
I looked at my brother.
His eyes seemed to be fixed on a point far out at sea. “Seems to me, what you did, that’s another one of those truths better left untold.”
THE FLASHLIGHT GAME
BY DIANA HANSEN-YOUNG
Dad. Dad. Stop. I can’t get involved. You know that,” I said, twirling the flashlight. “I can’t practice law, give you advice, write letters, file your lawsuits, or help you with your pro se schemes while I’m clerking for a federal appeals judge. I just can’t.”
“Think of this as a hypothetical,” he said.
“Dad, we’ve had this conversation a hundred times.”
“An anonymous hypothetical. I won’t use any names.”
I put my cell phone on speaker and listened to Dad while I played the flashlight game with Jaws. My cat spun
around in a tight circle, a furry blur, chasing the beam faster and faster until he was so dizzy he staggered. I switched directions.
“It’s pretty simple,” Dad said, and I knew that it was a long, complicated story. Jaws loved long, complicated calls from Dad; they meant a really long flashlight game. “Someone like you with a mind like a steel trap will get this one immediately.”
In reality, he was the one with a mind like a steel trap, an electronics engineer who studied math with Feynman at Cal Tech and had become an expert solving the problems created by his corporation’s crappy telephone circuit boards, rushed too soon to market. He worked from home, mostly by e-mail and phone, because his boss recognized he was both invaluable and “a little rough around the edges,” an epiphany that came after a dispute between Dad and an office co-worker over recycled paper towels. Now Dad sat at home every day, computer on, wearing only his Hawaiian surf shorts, waiting for bad news. This arrangement gave him time to make calls and write letters of complaint, for example, to Mega Office about a rude deliveryman, or to Verizon, who regularly turned off his service because he regularly paid at the last minute to punish them for turning off his service.
My dad, the dispute collector, was thrilled when I went to law school. He was ecstatic when I graduated summa cum laude. When I came home to Brooklyn to study for the bar exam, he installed a second office chair and meticulously copied practice questions onto flash cards. We studied together twelve hours a day, seven days a week. Unfortunately, because the answers were on the back of every flash card, Dad memorized every one. I took breaks only when some new circuit board broke. Once, I had four days off when Dad had to work on-site in Beijing. He came back with a picture of himself on a yak and a fresh list of complaints against the Chinese airline and Beijing hotel, neither of which answered his international certified letters.
After “we” passed the bar, his appetite for disputes became insatiable. Armed with his flash-card law degree, he followed up letters with pro se suits. His brokerage house was his first. They refused to let him use “F*** You” as his online password to view his 401(k) account. “First amendment,” Dad said, and sued.
Dad was charming and courteous, even in his disputes. He became a regular in Civil Court, where the clerks knew him by name, loved him, and thought his teeny-tiny personality disorder was kinda cute. While I agreed with him that filing pro se lawsuits was a good way to get out of the house, I suggested other social activities, whereupon he started dating a sixty-year-old process server named Maria López who worked for the sheriff in the basement of Civil Court. I hadn’t met her, so I kept my mouth shut, glad that he’d finally had a date, some twenty years after Mom died of breast cancer.
I heard Dad’s papers rustle over the speaker phone. “Say someone has health insurance with prescription coverage filled by mail by Speedy Scripts. One day that person receives an e-mail telling him his warfarin pills are delayed.”
“Coumadin, Dad. Warfarin is rat poison.” I spun the flashlight at warp speed.
“Same thing,” he said. “Anyway, this person wants to know why it’s delayed, but this person can’t find the prescription customer service number.”
Jaws staggered to a halt and barfed.
“He has his dental card, so he is forced to call dental customer service, which of course has been outsourced to India.”
The barf was mostly wheatgrass from the farmers’ market, fairly easy to clean up. Dad abandoned the hypothetical while I got paper towels.
“Now, India has no idea why my prescription is delayed. I ask to speak to a supervisor. I get a Houston number. A Houston supervisor tells me they had to check the prescription with my doctor. What? What? Check what? Since when has warfarin been a controlled substance? He insisted the drug’s name was Coumadin. I told him how wrong he was, and he hung up on me. I called my doctor. The receptionist cited FIRPA laws and refused to speak to me because she couldn’t verify that I’m me. I demanded to speak to the doctor. He’s on jury duty. I insisted she page him. Do you know what she said to me?”
“I can’t begin to guess.” I shot a little 409 on the barf and wiped it up.
“She told me that if I needed Coumadin, go buy some rat poison at the hardware store and thin it out with a little orange juice. Why would she say something like that?”
“Were you shouting at her?”
“Never mind shouting, I want to file a class action against Speedy Scripts for callous disregard of my life by outsourcing critical medication customer service calls. I could die without my warfarin.”
“Do you have any left?”
“Just a three-month supply. Do you think I would actually trust those people to send it on time?”
“Dad, then you weren’t damaged.”
“I can sue the doctor for being on jury duty. He has an obligation to do no harm.”
“The Hippocratic Oath is not legally binding,” I said. “You have enough Coumadin to kill all the rodents on the Q line.” I turned on the flashlight beam. Jaws yowled with happiness.
“Are you driving the cat crazy again with that darn flashlight game?”
“No,” I lied. “Dad, let it go. Send an e-mail to Lou Dobbs.”
“Well, maybe,” he said. “It is Sunday. But before I go to bed, I’ll just run the Hippocratic Oath through LexisNexis.”
LexisNexis. That had been a big fat Father’s Day present mistake. “What am I going to do with you, Dad?”
“Lighten up, sweetheart. It’s fun to be an attorney.”
____
MONDAY AFTERNOON I was sitting in the judge’s office. We’d finished going over oral arguments. The judge was telling me about a dispute she was having with a neighbor over a tree gone wild on the property line.
My cell phone vibrated. I peeked at the screen. Dad. The judge was my boss. Dad would have to wait.
“The roots destroyed their driveway. So okay, it had to come down. They said it was my tree so I should pay. I had the trunk surveyed,” she said. “It was precisely half in their yard, half in mine. I said I would go fifty-fifty. They hired an ultrasound guy who did a calculation of root mass and found that there was six percent more on my side. So they claimed that the preponderance of the tree belonged to me, thus I should pay one hundred percent.”
My cell phone vibrated again. Unknown caller flashed on the screen. Probably Dad turning off caller ID to see if I’d pick it up if I didn’t know who it was.
“I said no and offered to pay 56 percent. They refused, sued me in small-claims court, and called Judge Judy. The show called me. A federal appeals judge on Judge Judy? I don’t think so.”
Vibrate. Text. Call Benny Bail Bonds asap. Oh crap. My stomach flip-flopped.
“Frankly,” the judge said, “I don’t know what to do next. Doesn’t your dad have some experience with disputes?” She noticed my face. “What’s wrong?”
“A call from Dad,” I said, “then a call from Benny Bail Bonds in Brooklyn.”
“Doesn’t sound like good news.” She leaned forward. “Take three days off. Straighten it out.” She paused. “But before you go, can you just run Establishment of Tree Ownership through LexisNexis?”
____
IT WAS ELEVEN before my plane landed at JFK. Benny was waiting at the curb. He rolled his eyes when I slid the cat carrier into the backseat. Jaws farted.
“It always happens when he flies,” I said. I rolled down the window. “Change in cabin air pressure.” I buckled my seat belt.
“The police responded to an anonymous nine-one-one around noon,” Benny, the Law & Order rerun junkie, said. “The caller, female, said she heard shots in an apartment in Carroll Gardens. She thought the perp was still there.” Benny shot through three red lights on Conduit and swerved onto Atlantic. “The officer who responded saw your father on the stoop with blood on his Hawaiian shorts and a gun in his hand. They brought him in.”
“He called you?”
“No,” he said. “Maria was driving by the Eighty
-seventh and she saw him being taken in. He made her promise not to call you, so she called me, and I called you.”
“Benny, watch it!”
Benny slowed to the speed limit and ran twenty red lights in a row before the twenty-first light turned green. “They don’t synchronize the lights until midnight,” he said. “Besides, there’s no traffic.”
____
BENNY, MY SECOND dad, ran a bail-bond business across from Civil Court in Brooklyn. His daughter Jessica and I had been best friends from second grade through NYU. We split up when I went to University of Chicago Law School and she went to Georgetown. Now she practices criminal law in New York. When I’m in town, we have drinks and swap horror stories about our dads.
Benny parked in the bus zone and insisted that he walk me to my dad’s apartment. He checked each room. “All clear,” he said. “See you in the morning.”
I filled Jaws’s litter box from a bag under the sink, then set him free from his carrier. He streaked for the clay while I filled up a water bowl and opened tuna from Dad’s three-year supply of canned goods. I pressed the tuna dribbles into his food dish, found whole grain and mayo in the fridge, and made myself a sandwich.
I rummaged for coffee. It was likely to be a long night. For whatever reason, Dad had nothing but bags of Yerba Maté. While I waited for the water to boil, I clicked on the local news and caught a grainy video of police marching Dad into the 87th Precinct. He looked like a Hawaiian ax murderer in handcuffs. “A sixty-five-year-old man is being held for questioning in the murder of Alfred Frattelli, thirty-six, a former deliveryman at Mega Office.”
A Mega Office deliveryman? Cat crap! I vaguely remembered him telling me about some dispute with a Mega deliveryman. The kettle whistled. I had a bad feeling. Had Dad’s disputes escalated to this? Nonsense. Dad was incapable of physical violence. “Fratelli leaves behind a wife.” A picture of a happy couple flashed on the screen as the anchor signed off.
I needed to look in Dad’s dispute files and read the Mega Office folder.
Mystery Writers of America Presents the Prosecution Rests Page 18
