by R.J. Ellory
“Sure, Vincent, sure.”
55
LOVE CIRCUS
Madigan went down to Evidence and took a half dozen empty bags. Then he headed home. There was one other thing he had to arrange.
Isabella was at the front door even as Madigan opened it.
“You get any word on Melissa for me?”
“I didn’t,” Madigan said. “I had to handle some things. I can call now if you want?”
“Could you? I’ve been sick with worry all day. I don’t know how much longer I can go without seeing her.”
“I told you, she’s going to be fine,” Madigan said. “Seriously. She’s out of ICU. They’ve got her all fixed up. They’ve just told her she can’t have visitors because of the potential for infection. She’s none the wiser.”
“But I am,” Isabella replied. “Please can you call the hospital?”
“Sure,” Madigan said. “I’ll do it now.”
Isabella looked frayed at the edges, worn-out and stressed.
In that moment he felt nothing but empathy for her. He wanted to sit with her. He wanted to tell what he had done, that he was sorry—more sorry than she could ever imagine, and that he wanted to make it right, make it good, have it all be the way it was before . . .
Madigan ignored his own thoughts. He went in front and made the call. He was back within minutes.
“She’s on solids, is eating well, sleeping well, making great progress. They think she’ll be out within seventy-two hours. They’re just keeping her monitored for any possible complications, infections, usual stuff . . .”
“Infections . . . what infections? What complications could there be?”
“Hey, hey, hey . . . enough of this,” Madigan said. He took her hand, sat her down at the kitchen table.
“Your daughter was shot,” he said. “She’s a little girl and she was shot with a big bullet. There was some internal damage. They’ve fixed it all up. She has to heal fully, she has to recuperate, and while she’s doing that they have to keep watch for anything that might be a problem. Would be the same if she’d broken her leg or had her appendix out—”
“But she didn’t,” Isabella said. “She was shot.”
“She was, yes.”
“Kind of person would shoot a little girl?”
“The kind of person who didn’t know she was there, Isabella. You know that.”
“And that excuses them?”
“No, of course not, but you know how it is around Sandià. You’ve been aware of what’s going on for as long as you’ve been in this neighborhood. What happened with your sister, what happened with David . . . This is what happens around Sandià. The war was going on long before you got here, and it will go on long afterward. And if it isn’t Sandià’s war, it’ll be someone else’s. Melissa just happened to be an unfortunate casualty of that war. And I’ll tell you something . . . The robbery of Sandià’s house resulted in the death of seven men, and maybe some more are going to wind up dead before this thing has run its course.”
“It’s all so senseless, so meaningless,” she said.
Madigan lit a cigarette for her. For the first time in a day or so he really wanted a drink. He took a couple of glasses from the shelf, a bottle from the cupboard. He fetched ice, poured both glasses, set one in front of her.
She held the glass in her hand, swirled the ice. She took a good sip, closed her eyes as she swallowed.
“It’s meaningless to everyone but them,” Madigan said. “It’s the same wherever you go. People do what they think is best. People do what they believe is the greatest good. Even when people do terrible, terrible things they’re doing them because of some misguided belief that they are in the right . . .”
“Not everyone, surely?”
Madigan smiled. “Oh yes, everyone. Even the crazies. Even the psychos, the serial murderers, the sex killers. They have some notion somewhere that what they’re doing is solving some important problem somewhere.”
“That’s just crazy.”
“Sure it is, and that’s why they’re called crazy.”
She tried to smile.
Madigan took a drink. He felt the liquor fill his chest with warmth. It was good. Too good. Then he reached out and took her hand. It felt cold.
She did not flinch. She did not withdraw. She just looked back at him with such wide-eyed trust and faith that he couldn’t help but feel like the very worst liar in the world. It had never bothered him. He had never cared a great deal for what people thought. But now? With this woman? What the hell was going on? Something had changed, and he knew that such a change did not bode well.
Was he falling for her? Was it something like that, or did he feel propitiative toward her because of what had happened to Melissa? Did he now feel that he had to make amends? Had she now become representative of all those he had wronged?
His thoughts were jumbled, his feelings new and unstable, and he did not like it.
Other people could not be trusted, for sure. You never knew what other people were going to say or do, and thus you always anticipated the worst and made appropriate arrangements. But himself? Was he now incapable of determining his own thoughts and feelings?
“What?” Isabella asked. “You are somewhere else all of a sudden.”
Madigan gripped her hand a little tighter. “I’m here,” he said. “I’m just tired.”
“You hungry?”
“Some, yeah,” he replied. “I’m going to take a shower,” he said. “Get changed.”
“Do that, then I’ll make us something to eat.”
Madigan went upstairs, and before he turned on the shower he went beneath the carpet and the floorboards and removed two hundred and thirty grand. He put a hundred grand in each of two evidence bags, thirty in another, and zipped them up. All three bags went in a duffel in his bedroom. He pushed the duffel beneath the bed.
Madigan took a shower, put on some jeans and a T-shirt. He needed to shave, and he needed a haircut. Right now such things were the least of his priorities.
Downstairs again, he sat on the couch.
“You’re not driving anywhere tonight?” she asked, as if a few shots would have made any difference to Madigan.
“No,” he said. “I’m not planning on going anywhere.”
She turned and half-smiled. “You have a music system in this house?” she asked. “I found some CDs, some blues and jazz and stuff, but I couldn’t find anywhere to play them.”
“The DVD player plays them through the TV,” Madigan said. “It ain’t great, but it’s better than nothing.”
“So put some music on,” she said.
“Music?”
“Sure, let’s have a glass of wine and listen to some music.”
Madigan shrugged. His manner was offhand, distracted, but Isabella seemed to be making an effort to introduce some normality into things. It was a pretense, a charade, but Madigan understood precisely why she was doing it and he humored her.
“Let’s try and pretend we’re regular people, eh?” she said, as if she could hear Madigan’s thoughts. “Just for a little while, let’s pretend that we’re not hiding out from people who want to see us dead . . .” She laughed awkwardly. She was trying her best to make light of her present circumstances. It didn’t work.
Madigan got up. He went to the CDs without thinking, looked through Art Tatum, Gil Evans, Wes Montgomery, chose Kenny Burrell Live at the Village Vanguard. He put it on low. It was strange to be doing this—playing music in the house, having a drink with someone. How long since he’d had music here? He couldn’t remember. In the car sure, out of his head on something, listening to Tom Waits as he drove out to some crime scene, as he returned to the precinct, as one day blurred seamlessly into the next and he struggled to remember his own name.
But not now. Now things had changed.
“That’s nice . . .” she said.
Madigan stood there with the CD case in his hand.
He felt it then, the rush
in his chest, the almost overwhelming sense of guilt.
It was me.
Isabella, it was me.
I did this thing.
I robbed that house.
I was there when your daughter was shot. I didn’t even know she was there. And then I drove a few miles and I killed three men and took the money, and that money is in a duffel under my bed.
Right here above our heads.
Nearly a quarter of a million dollars in a duffel, another hundred grand under the floor.
It was me.
He closed his eyes. He felt his fingers tighten on the CD case, and he set it down before he broke it.
He took several deep breaths. He wanted another drink, but he knew he shouldn’t.
He walked back through to the kitchen. He put a couple of inches of whiskey into a glass, drank it, poured another couple, raised it to his lips, and then he was aware of Isabella right behind him.
“Open a bottle of wine,” she said, and then she was beside him, her hand around the glass, lifting it out of his grip, almost as if to say, Enough of that, Vincent . . . Enough already . . .
He let her take it.
Madigan fetched the wine bottle from the top of the refrigerator. He took down glasses, poured both half full, gave one to her. His nerves were shredded. His hands shook.
“Thank you,” she said, and she was smiling at him through the blurred edges of his whiskey-influenced vision, and once again he felt a sudden rush of emotion toward her, something primal almost, something that made him want to hide her from the world forever.
He drank some wine. The taste was strange and uncomfortable in his mouth.
He swallowed.
She drank too.
“Not bad,” she said, “for someone who only ever buys Jack Daniel’s.”
Madigan drank some more. He sat down at the table, not because he wanted to sit, but because he wanted to be beneath her, wanted to look up at her, wanted to be away from the temptation to just grab her and kiss her.
It was a strong temptation. It was instinctual. It was about sex and lust and remedying the profound sense of loneliness and isolation that had become so much a part of himself. It was about making himself believe that he wasn’t as evil as Sandià. Making himself believe that he was still the same person who had fathered Cassie, who had loved his wives, who had been loved by them in return. He hurt—emotionally, mentally, spiritually. Like his heart was crying somewhere in a dark room, and he could only ever hear it, never see it, never reach it, never do anything to make it stop.
Isabella sat down. She put her hand over his again. She had done it before. He didn’t want to stop her, but at the same time it simply reinforced what he was now feeling toward her.
“Vincent . . .”
He looked at her.
“You don’t know how much . . .”
Madigan smiled awkwardly. “Isabella . . . seriously, I’m just doing my job as best I can . . .”
“No, you’re not. I don’t believe you. I don’t want to hear that. I don’t want to think that that’s the only reason I’m here. I want to think that I’m here because you actually care for people . . .”
“I don’t care for people . . . not in the way you think,” he replied.
“How can you care for people any other way—”
“You can pretend to care for people,” he said. “You can make people believe you care for them because that way you can control them. You can care for people just because there’s something they have that you want from them . . .”
“I don’t have anything that you could want—”
He withdrew his hand from beneath hers and picked up his glass. “You have Sandià.”
She frowned. “I have Sandià? What do you mean, I have Sandià?”
“You can put him away. You can put him in a jail cell for the rest of his life. That’s what you can do, and that’s what I need you for.”
“You want me to testify against him?”
“Perhaps,” Madigan said. “If he’s not dead by the time we’re done.”
“I can’t testify against Sandià. Jesus, Vincent, is that what you thought I’d do? Is that why you’ve kept me here . . . Vincent Madigan’s own little Witness Protection Program?” Her voice carried an angry edge, an edge he had heard before. She was sounding him out. She was determining whether or not the anger she was feeling was justified, whether she should let him have it right now or give him another half chance to explain himself.
“Not the only reason,” he said, and he spoke the truth. He had protected her out of guilt, a halfhearted attempt at making amends for some of what he had done. A halfhearted attempt to balance out the fact that her daughter had been damned near killed because of him.
“What’s the other reason?”
“Reasons.”
“Reasons then . . . Tell me the other reasons I am here.”
He sighed audibly. He wanted more whiskey. He finished the wine in his glass and reached for the bottle. Her hand stopped his.
“No,” she said. “Talk to me first. Get drunk later.”
“You are not my wife . . . You are not my mother . . .”
“No, I am not your wife or your mother or anyone else important . . . Oh, except for someone who wants to stay alive, and the idea of being protected by a drunk isn’t so appealing right now. You’ve had enough for now. Talk to me. Explain what you mean. Then you can drink yourself stupid for the rest of the night, for all I care.”
It enraged him—not the denial, not the way she stopped him drinking more wine, but the fact that she said those words. Then you can drink yourself stupid for the rest of the night, for all I care. For all I care . . .
Is this what it had finally come down to? The only person in the world who actually gave a damn about Vincent Madigan was Isabella Arias? No one else had ever told him, No, Vincent, no more booze. No one had ever said that to him.
“We’re screwed,” Madigan said. “Both of us. You’re alone. There’s no one there for you. You get your daughter out of the hospital, you’re gonna need to leave the city, leave the state preferably. Me? I’ve got nothing either. No one here for me. That’s not me sounding sorry for myself. That’s me being real and honest. I’m a drunk. I take downers, uppers, anything I can get my hands on, for Christ’s sake. I don’t know what freaking day it is most of the time. I’m doing my best to handle this mess, but I don’t know that my best is going to be good enough. Truth of the matter is that both of us might wind up dead. In all honesty, I don’t think I ever took the idea of you testifying against Sandià seriously. Why? Because I don’t think either of us is ever going to get that far . . .”
“You think I don’t know this? You think I don’t understand the situation I am in? And you think I don’t see you for who you are, Vincent? Sure, you’re a drunk. Sure, you screwed up your marriages, your kids, your job, everything. Same as me. Same as most of us. It isn’t about being perfect. It isn’t about always telling the truth and making everything happen the way you want it to. Hell, if that was the way it was, then none of us would ever get into trouble and I sure as hell wouldn’t need someone like you to help bail me out.” She reached for his hand again, took it, then the other, and she was holding both of them, the sensation of her skin against his almost electric.
“Look at me,” she said, and Madigan did so.
“I am who I am. I have no hidden agenda here. I am scared for my own life, for the life of my daughter . . . And you’ve even gotten me scared for you too. We can’t just quit now. I can’t just walk away from here. Sandià will kill me. He thinks I’m a witness to what he did to David Valderas, and he will kill you for harboring me from him, and that’ll be the end of it. And if he finds it in his heart not to kill Melissa, then she will go to Child Services, and somewhere up the line they’ll find someone who’ll take her on or she’ll be a ward of the state until she’s eighteen. And then she’ll come back here and turn tricks for crack and die before she’s twenty-
five. That’s what I have, Vincent. Those are the choices . . . All except for one. I can work with you. I can fix this thing with you. Or I can at least give it the best I’ve got. I just believe one thing, Vincent . . . That you and I could actually work together on this thing. I can help you somehow, surely? There has to be something I can do to help fix this fucking disaster . . .”
“There’s nothing you can do,” Madigan said. “Everything is in place. In the next twenty-four, forty-eight hours this thing will end well, or it will not. We will walk away from this thing or we won’t . . .”
“You think I’m not capable, is that it? You think I’m not tough enough?”
Madigan laughed. “Christ no, Isabella, it’s not that—”
“So it’s because you don’t want to put me in any danger, right? You know Sandià is after me and you want to make sure he doesn’t get me?”
“Yes,” Madigan said. “That’s right.”
“And is that because you want me to testify against Sandià, or because you actually give a damn about me?”
“Jesus,” Madigan said. “How the hell do you do that? How the hell do women do that? They can take anything you say, anything at all, and somehow turn it around and make it personal.”
“Everything’s personal, Vincent . . . Everything in life is personal. If it has something to do with people, then it’s personal. So answer up. You want me to testify, or do you actually give a damn about what happens to me and my daughter?”
Madigan looked at the fire in her eyes. He couldn’t lie to her—not about this.
“I care,” he said.
“Sorry?”
“I care, Isabella, I actually do care, and though it might not seem like it, it means a great deal to me . . .”
“Then why is it so goddamned hard for you to say what you think, to say what you feel?”
He smiled. “Because I’m a man, and we don’t do all that crap about thoughts and feelings. That kinda thing is just for you girls.”
“I keep telling you, but you won’t believe me. You are a good person, Vincent Madigan—”
