Bluebird Rising

by John Decure

  Dale seemed to sense our bad vibe, because he stood up quickly and said, “J., you mentioned Detective Perry, how he gave you his cell number. Didn’t he say you could still call him?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, why don’t you call him and tell him about those flyers?”

  Why not try Tamango Perry again? I had nothing to lose.

  “Good idea. I’ll call him later.” I looked at my watch, which was at almost three. “Does Rudy know his daughter’s coming for him today?”

  Carmen said yes, she’d already packed his things this morning.

  “Thank God they didn’t get to him this morning,” Dale said.

  The doorbell rang, and the three of us exchanged frozen stares. Max began to bark, rushing down the side yard for a peek through the fence at the front yard.

  Dale said, “What do we do if it’s them?”

  I wasn’t sure what Angie and Carlito were capable of, but this morning in the beach parking lot hadn’t been too encouraging.

  “Stay by the phone,” I told Carmen. “We’ll call the police if we need to, I promise.”

  Carmen lowered her eyes. “Okay.”

  I went outside, called Max over, hooked him onto the choke chain, and led him in through the kitchen. The doorbell rang again and he barked low and throaty, his stub tail wagging like a twitching thumb. “Be cool,” I told him, petting him between the shoulders, where the muscle was as dense as bedrock. Then I directed Dale to go be with Rudy and Albert in the living room, to keep them away from the front entry hall. “Sit, Max,” I commanded. Sucking in my breath, I jerked open the front door.

  She was a tall teenaged girl in torn blue jeans and an oversize gray sweatshirt with a surfwear logo in red across the front. She jumped a little at the sight of my pet Rottweiler, cheeks red from sun and her face still a little chubby. I recognized something in the set of her straight nose and green eyes, the even cheekbones.

  “It’s not Angie,” I said over my shoulder. Carmen came away from the kitchen, stepping up behind me. “Max, stay.” My dog dropped to the floor and relaxed.

  “You’re him,” the girl said, standing back even more.

  “Do I know you?” I said.

  “You’re the guy who put Kurt into the hospital.”

  “Kurt who?”

  Still eyeing my dog, but gaining confidence, the girl said, “My boyfriend. And now his friends are getting picked up by the cops for fighting, when it was you again. They didn’t even do anything, and they’re getting hassled. They’re still down there, and it’s three o’clock. Jim and Riley, they gotta go to work. I had to move the van, got kicked out of the parking lot.”

  She nodded behind her at the dirty white delivery van, the one with the heavy-metal logo, parked out on Porpoise Way.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Last week, someone punched my future brother-in-law, for no good reason. When I tried to ask your friends—”

  “Don’t even try to justify it,” she said. “I was in the van. I heard everything.”

  “Then you heard what the fat guy called—”

  “They were scared of you. It’s your beach, you’re the big local guy, and we’re not part of that.” She swallowed. “That’s pretty obvious.”

  “Look,” I said.

  “No, you look! I just came here to say one thing, and since I’m a girl I figured you wouldn’t beat me up or something.” She took another step back, one foot on the lower brick step now. “Just leave us alone. Just leave us the f-” She stopped in midsentence, and her face went pale. “Daddy?”

  Dale stood behind me at the door. “Leanne? Honey?” Expectant, his eyes watering.

  “Please, come in,” I said to her, opening the door wider.

  Leanne glared at her father. “You’re with him?”

  Dale stepped by me. “Honey, can you come in a minute and talk. We need to—”

  But Dale’s daughter let out a shriek and retreated, running, down my front walk, losing a yellow rubber sandal as she banged through the gate, not bothering to come back and get it. Max trailed behind her curiously and sniffed at the sandal. Dale followed her out to the street but let her go. He stood there, frozen, as the blue smoke from the van’s exhaust floated back to him. Then he looked at Carmen and me with that same hangdog face he would wear when he stared out my living-room window at night.

  “Better get him inside before a car comes,” Carmen said. “I’ll take Max.”

  She was giving me a subtle I-told-you-so look, which, to me, was not at all well timed.

  “Know what I could really use right now?” I said. “A little support.”

  Carmen paused before she spoke. “I said I would take Max.”

  Dale asked for a drink as soon as we got him inside. I knew what he meant but told him we had some iced tea in the fridge and started getting it without missing a beat. Whatever we’d just seen with his daughter, I felt sure alcohol wasn’t going to help sort it out. Carmen sat him down gently at the dining table, guiding him by the elbow. Rudy and Albert had fallen asleep in the living room. The People’s Court had given way to a Kung Fu rerun. When I walked in to shut off the tube, Caine was trying to leave a mining town peacefully, but a trio of company thugs wasn’t going to let it happen. Caine bowed his head, got his hat knocked off, and went into the beautiful centered stance you see before he starts beating someone senseless. By the time I found the remote and switched it off, the quiet priest had splattered two bodies in a dirt road in poetic slow motion.

  Dale took a sip of his tea and said, “What can I say?”

  “Whatever you haven’t said so far,” I suggested.

  It wasn’t exactly a life story for Dale, but it could have been one for Leanne.

  “Only child,” he said. “After my wife, Georgette, and I had tried to conceive for so long we’d lost track. Leanne came along quite by surprise; a solid decade after Georgette had gone off the pill. We’d forgotten about birth control altogether. She was a big baby, nine pounds and change, grew up into a happy, pink-cheeked little kid that could do no wrong at home or in school.”

  “What happened that changed her?” I asked.

  Dale sipped his iced tea, then waited. “Fast-forward to age fifteen. Leanne was still a straight-A student, but quieter, developing more of an interior life, I supposed, taking on a Gothic look, a lot of black clothes, a long overcoat she wore day and night, even when the weather was hot. And Jesus, the eyeliner, like some kind of ghoul. Just an adolescent phase, we figured. Then Georgette gets the call.”

  “The call?”

  Dale stared at me, nodding. “One morning, phone rings. It’s the school vice principal. He says Leanne was truant fifteen times last month alone, picked up with an off-campus boy this morning, smelling of marijuana, a crack pipe in the young man’s pants pocket. I was arguing against a motion to suppress that morning, had to rush to school as soon as the judge took it under submission. Georgette was already there, semihysterical, saying I don’t understand this, I don’t understand this, the man says my baby won’t even talk to me, won’t talk to us.” His eyes moved to a stoic Carmen, then back to me. “That man being the psychologist the district brought in to talk to Leanne, a social worker in there with her now, interviewing her about something.”

  “Carmen’s a social worker,” I said, trying to be conversational at exactly the wrong time.

  “Is that right,” Dale said, politely handling the intrusion on his narrative.

  I exchanged a glance with Carmen, an Are you thinking what I’m thinking? look. She and I met in juvenile dependency court, where county social workers bring in cases by the truckload involving minors who have been harmed or are at risk of harm, that harm typically being physical and sexual abuse in the home. Dale sipped his tea again. So far, nothing I knew about the man’s easygoing nature suggested he was a wife or kid beater, and besides, teens are too old for corporal punishment. By that age they can fight back or run away, or at least tell a cop or a schoolteac
her that they’re being hit. That meant sexual abuse was the most likely punch line here. Immediately I thought of his conviction for wienie wagging. Christ. Dale sucked a long breath as if he were gathering wind to push on. Carmen’s face I couldn’t read. She’s always better than I am at hearing someone out, withholding judgment. Not me; my mind was leaping.

  So this was my role model, my image of a great attorney, what I had wanted to aspire to all those years.

  “So it was the social worker who talked to us,” Dale said, “not the psychologist. Georgette first, alone for five minutes, the girl’s VP offering me coffee in the meantime, nervous as hell, which meant that she was in on the secret already, whatever it was. Next thing, the door swings open, and Georgette is being restrained, cursing her head off—a woman who wouldn’t say crap if her mouth was full of it, you have to understand—railing against ‘that lying, disgusting little slut’ … confusing the hell out of me until I realized she was talking about our daughter. Then Georgette’s free, and yanking me out of my chair, saying, ‘Get up, get up now!’ I’m saying, ‘Why?’ ‘Because we’re leaving,’ she says, ‘that’s why!’ Threatening to sue the school, the county, and the whole district. Shrieking at the poor VP, ‘You think that little liar is at risk, then take her, take her!’”

  “How awful,” Carmen said.

  Dale acknowledged her with a tiny nod. “Georgette was the homemaker, so I was used to deferring to her judgment on domestic matters, but I was scared by her flip-out, lemme tell you. It was the first time I’d ever seen that kind of an outburst. Hell, she was calmer during childbirth.”

  “What did you do?” I said.

  “Tried to smooth her out, pretty unsuccessfully. But I also knew I had to go back in there to find out for myself what was going on. Georgette, she was already rushing to her car, saying, ‘If you’re going back for that little slut, then you better not come home either, Daddy!’ Spitting the words at me.”

  “You went back,” Carmen said.

  Dale rubbed the stubble on his face. He probably hadn’t shaved that morning.

  “Talked to the social worker. Nice lady, Spanish accent. Chose her words carefully. I appreciated it, believe you me.” He grinned a little, obliging us to grin back a little. “What the nice lady told me was that she understood Leanne had been going back to visit relatives during the summer, two weeks at the end of August, right before school started back, for the last seven years. Visiting Leanne’s mother’s family in Schaumburg, Illinois, outside Chicago. All true, I told her. That was Aunt Jenny and Uncle Pat; their two boys, Mark and Danny; and a girl of their own, Mary Kate. Nice people, big swimming pool in the backyard, lived not far from that mall, Woodfield or Whitfield, one they said was the biggest in the world. ‘What else do you know about them?’ the social worker wanted to know. ‘Any serious problems?’ Not really, I said, but two years ago they did suffer a terrible tragedy. Mary Kate, who was roughly Leanne’s age, had died accidentally, suffocating when her head got caught in some of that gauzy plastic they wrap your dry cleaning in. Well, the social worker got pretty interested in Mary Kate’s death, based on what Leanne had said happened to her each trip.” His voice got snagged on something. “What her uncle Pat would do to her when Aunt Jenny and the kids weren’t around.”

  “Oh my god,” Carmen said quietly.

  “Yeah,” Dale said. “You guessed it, sweetie. I was practically numb when the nice social worker laid the progression of specific terms on me, terms I knew vaguely from the penal code. Digital penetration, penetration with a foreign object, oral cop’ on the perpetrator, by force or fear. Vaginal intercourse. Sodomy. The cops showed a little later and said of course they would have to contact the authorities in Illinois, since it cast a new light on Mary Kate’s accidental death. Not to mention, Uncle Pat could be criminally prosecuted if Leanne was willing to testify. But honestly, I didn’t hear much more of what anyone was saying that day. I was too angry. My first thought was to board a plane for Chicago, go back there and take a machete to the motherfucker’s genitals, hack them off and stuff them up his …” His hands were both fists now, and his breathing came heavier. “I was mad. But I knew I couldn’t murder the guy, even if I wanted to. I stayed mad. Still am. Then my analytical mind clicked on, and this deep, deep confusion set in, like a fog. And I thought, why had Georgette reacted so strongly to the news, so viciously against … of all people, Leanne? Her little girl, the victim in all of this. Unless …” He stopped, and Carmen and I waited without moving.

  “Dale,” I said. “You don’t have to be telling us all this. It’s none of our business.”

  He looked at Carmen, then at me, his face calm, the way it had been the first time, when he’d put Thelma Ruffo away.

  “You kidding? The way you look at me all the time, like I just spoiled a party I didn’t even know I was invited to?”

  “Dale,” I said.

  “Dale nothing!” he snapped. “Just let me say my piece, will you? And don’t act like you don’t want to know, because you do.”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  He played with his glass of tea, rolling the bottom edges like it was a spinning top wobbling down.

  “I thought of my sex life with my wife. Her, uh, detached manner. The way she’d always refused to wear the lingerie I gave her for Valentine’s Day, or maybe our anniversary.” He shrugged at Carmen as if embarrassed about the topic, but went on. “The joyless way she’d go about it between the sheets, slowly cutting back once we had Leanne, until about three years ago, when we stopped having sex altogether. Georgette was acting as if she’d done her share for the marriage by then, not wanting to discuss it. Even inviting me, when I complained, to go and ‘get serviced’ by someone else, if that’s what I wanted. I’d always wondered before why there seemed to be this huge physical barrier between Georgette and me.”

  “Most molesters were violated themselves, when they were kids,” Carmen said.

  Dale agreed. “I didn’t know that at the time. I do now. Georgette and Pat had grown up in the same house with a father she’d never said so much as two words about.”

  So that was it. Georgette’s father was the original perpetrator. “That must have been a hard secret for your wife to hold in all that time,” I said.

  Dale’s face was almost too calm. “I think it was just too much for Georgette to face at once, the secret she’d repressed for all those years finally out. Her shame over what had happened to her, what it had done to her marriage, her brother’s ruined life.”

  “You called the authorities,” I said.

  “Did they prosecute him?” Carmen asked.

  Dale shook his head. “Never had a chance. He was driving home from work a week after they arrested him. There was this railroad crossing he’d pass on the way every day. Train was coming. They said he tried to beat it across the tracks and didn’t make it. I don’t believe that for a second. He was a goddamned coward, all the way to the end.”

  Dale went silent for a time. Max barked twice in the yard at something, then apparently lost interest.

  “What happened with Georgette?” I asked Dale.

  “The whole awful history of it just crept up on her and sort of swallowed her, I think. Pat’s death, Mary Kate’s likely suicide, Georgette’s guilt over Leanne’s victimization, the way she’d sent the kid back there every year as if she couldn’t have known this might happen. But old ways die hard, I guess. Georgette held her ground, wouldn’t budge.”

  “She disowned Leanne,” Carmen said. In dependency court, where Carmen and I had met, we’d both seen plenty of mothers wed to child molesters do precisely the same thing.

  “That’s right,” Dale said. “Leanne promptly ran away. Georgette threatened me with divorce, started flying into a rage over God knows what whenever I was around, really changed her ways. Started keeping the shades down, draperies shut. Letting the house she’d spent the past eighteen years beautifying go straight to hell. Spiking everything she put to her lips w
ith a double shot of vodka.”

  “Major depression,” Carmen said.

  “Right again,” Dale said. “Eventually, I got around to drinking, too. It was the only thing that could numb the pain. I’d lost the two most important people in my life in about a week’s time.” His eyes looked swollen, and he closed them for a time, but he kept talking. “When I was ripped, we’d fight, and the anger I’d feel toward her, for being such a … a weakling … God, it was so strong, it was like lightning passing right through me. Scared me, what I might do. Nights like that, I’d stagger outside and sleep on the patio furniture to stay away.” His chest heaved quietly with slow, deep breathing, and we waited again.

  “What happened to Leanne?” I said after a time.

  “Leanne was gone for six months without a word. Every time I’d announce that we had to do something more than just report it and wait for word, because Christ, we were her parents, weren’t we? We’d both just drink and wind up having another battle royal. I started drinking during the daytime—to calm my nerves, I’d tell myself. My concentration at work went to pot. For a time, I was getting by on my reputation alone, but pretty soon other people in the office started getting the tougher cases. Next thing, I find myself without any real caseload, doing the goddamned arraignment calendar, mornings, three days a week. That’s what the newbies to the office usually got, a stack of arraignments each day, their first assignment. The other two days a week I’d do traffic court, misdemeanor trials the city attorney should have been handling anyway. Afternoons, I took some pretty long lunches. Sit in the Regal and get blasted.”

  “I’m sorry, Dale,” I said.

  “I did not flash those girls,” he said quickly, pointing a finger at me. “Know that.”

  He drummed his fingers on the table, staring at the empty space across the kitchen. “I was drinking beer that afternoon, needed to relieve myself like you wouldn’t believe. There was this hillside dropping off the edge of the cul-de-sac where I was parked. No trees or cover. So I thought I’d be discreet, climb down the hillside a few feet, at least below belt level, ‘fore I did my business.” He blushed. With the light coming in the side window, his rough whiskers cast an uneven blue shadow across his face. “The hill had this thick green stuff growing all over it, with these little purple flowers.”