“You come here to accuse me of unspeakable behavior and you bring a gun?” The door was open a couple of inches but it needn’t have been. It was easy to hear.
Fran picked herself slowly off the floor. Her eyes were red and puffy.
“Were you going to shoot me with this?” Alex sounded amazed.
“I don’t know what I was going to do with it.”
“This is very difficult to understand. Do you hear your daughter, Lena?”
Lena seemed beyond hearing. Her mouth open, she was breathing with shallow panting breaths. She looked from Hirsh to Fran and back again.
“That’s right, Father.” The word oozed off Fran’s tongue like foultasting oil. “Another thing you spent your life hiding, lying about. I’m not even your fucking daughter.”
Hirsh’s eyes narrowed and, for a moment, his hand trembled. “So you met him.”
“A while ago. And paid him. Up to the very end protecting my Daddy. Or maybe I was protecting Mom, or me, I don’t know. Only now I’m done protecting anyone. My sick dreams had to do with you, not me. Had to do with our midnight walks.
“I don’t know what’s more amazing—that I could forget or that I can remember. I even remember your forgetting game too, Daddy.” Her voice parodied a child’s tone as she accented “Daddy,” then the rage began to spill. “You bastard, you loved me all right”—tears started a silent journey down her face and I thought about rushing into the room, but I was rooted to my spot by the intensity of the moment and the horror in Fran’s voice. Hirsh stood rigid.
“You loved me so well that I couldn’t stay faithful for more than five minutes, despite marrying someone I adored. I had to debase and abuse myself. You loved me well.” Her tears had stopped and she stood breathing convulsively.
I was shocked to hear the raw hatred in Alex’s response.
“No, Fran, the whore that you are comes from the whore who birthed you. An apple doesn’t roll far from its tree. If you became a slut, thank her.” He nodded derisively toward Lena and lifted the gun. “The one you came to shoot is the one you should be thanking.” He leaned toward Fran and I prepared to rush in again, but he placed the gun on the desk and spat, “You should be on the damn ground kissing my feet with thanks. I took care of you even though you are the living reminder of the fool that bitch made of me.” He snarled his last words at Lena, but Lena didn’t notice, she had her eyes closed.
“I worked every minute of the day to make her life decent, while she whored with scum. Do you know how hard it is for someone to make all this from nothing? My parents didn’t help me, my mother hated that I was born.” He looked at Fran. “What have you ever begged for? Nothing!” His voice sank to a hoarse whisper. “And now you come here with this disgusting story about incest.”
Fran said in a flat monotone, “You really hate me. You always have. Every compliment was a lie. Every gift a smokescreen for what you really felt.
“And Mom, you must have known what he really felt. If not toward me, then toward you.” She shook her head and I could see the rush of truth wash over her. She shivered, despite the heat and humidity of the indoor Eden.
“You’re right about your mother. She deserves everything she got.” His contempt was palpable but just as quickly his distaste dissipated and he looked puzzled. His voice filled with wonder, his words a singsong. “Hate you, you don’t understand, I love you. You were my doll. It didn’t matter to me that you weren’t my child. I was free to love you more than if you were. You make my love into filth. You insult all my work, all my love. You were all I loved. I worked for you, Fran. For you.”
“And killed for yourself, Alex.” I opened the door the rest of the way and stepped into the room. Three pairs of eyes turned and stared at me. Only one pair was my concern.
I looked directly at Fran and tried to be as gentle as I could, though it made me nervous to take my eyes off Hirsh. “Gloria James asked me to find you. We are concerned for your safety. Alex has killed someone. I think you know who Joe Starring was.”
I heard a moan escape from Lena’s lips. She seemed so comatose I was startled she had a voice.
Fran said to me, “I’m surprised to see you here.” The words were automatic, and her eyes darted anxiously around the room while she struggled to compose herself. “How much of our conversation did you overhear?”
“I already knew everything.”
“You seem to know more than everyone else,” Alex said, his voice calm and relaxed. I turned toward him and was relieved to find his hands empty. My presence relaxed him. Put him, once again, a man among men.
“No, Alex, you know as much as me. Except you don’t know how crazy you are.”
Fran interrupted. “How do you know he killed Joe?”
“Because Alex has a bigshot policeman working for him who, since this began, has done nothing but make certain Dr. James’ records would never be read again. And that included the person who’d already read them. Starring.”
“Starring didn’t show me any records when we met. He didn’t say anything about records.”
I was curious about her encounters with Starring. I wondered what her meeting with him felt like, but this was no time to press on raw hurts. “You were just the appetizer.” I wanted to cement Fran’s and my alliance. “How much did you give him?”
“Twenty-five thousand.” She didn’t sound angry about it. “He had information about my real father. The information was worth the cost. At least the financial cost.” She jerked her head toward Hirsh.
Alex intervened. The conversation between Fran and me had allowed him to regain some of his authority. “I really don’t know what you are doing here.” He looked pointedly from me to Fran. “Either of you.”
“Let me be clear, pervert.” My voice was a growl; I felt like hurting him. I started to use my words as if they were rocks. To wipe away his corporate smugness. “Starring blackmailed Fran about her parentage, then got hold of Gloria’s records and blackmailed you about your perversions. The kid was just smart and greedy enough to get himself killed. Abused himself, maybe it was easy for him to spot an abuser. And you are an abuser, aren’t you? Well, you killed the kid for nothing. Everyone is going to know just how sick you are.”
His eyes glittered with hatred and the mask dropped a little further. His voice trembled along with his upper body. “Who are you calling sick? I didn’t kill anyone. Why should I? I could buy off ten blackmailers. You are the sick one. You break into my house and eavesdrop on private conversations. You rub your face in the soiled underwear of peoples’ lives, smelling for the worst. Your own friends, no less.”
I moved slowly across the room, away from Fran. Alex rocked back and forth on his feet. It reminded me of old religious Jews in prayer.
“Goddamnit, don’t move!” he shouted. I stood still, about a foot away from a heavy mahogany chair. Illogically, I thought it looked out of place in a flower room. Alex’s hand gripped the side of the desk.
I kept badgering him. “How far would you have gone, Alex? Would you have killed Dr. James? You moved too quickly on that one, didn’t you? You or your bull. I think it was you, though, who had James beaten, the bull would have done a better job. The hack you hired was very sloppy. It’s not going to take long to trace the connection between you and the security firm, is it?”
Fran looked at Alex like he had just crawled out of the sewer. He was sweating so profusely I could smell him. The humidity was stifling even with the door open. I was sweating too. There was a wet shimmer to my vision.
Fran turned to me. “Did he really kill Joe and hurt Gloria?” There was little question in her tone, certainly no surprise. Nothing Hirsh did was unbelievable. She was past caring.
“Him or his hired hands.”
Hirsh exploded. “I killed no one, Jacob, no one. You little nobody, I wipe my ass with shits like you. You know nothing about me or my life or what it takes to be somebody.” The veneer was gone. Fran and I talking as if he weren’t the
re was the insult that pulled the plug on his kind of civilized. He turned to her. “You don’t know anything either, you take my love and sacrifice and turn them into a dirty word …”
I stayed on him like a tick. “How many people would Alex Hirsh kill to keep his good name intact? That’s all you killed for, your fucking reputation. Did you know that it wasn’t even Starring’s kid that you killed? It was Starring’s stepkid. What were you going to do when Fran finally remembered? Were you going to kill her too? Or maybe you hoped she would think that fooling with a five-year-old wasn’t slime but beauty, pageantry, ecstasy. You sick fuck.”
I finished my words in a rush as a torrent of hatred and anger blew out of me. When I wiped the water from my eyes I was looking into the mouth of his gun.
“She was a living timebomb for me.” Alex waved the gun in Fran’s direction. “Her very existence left me open to shame and humiliation, and I lived with it my whole life.” His eyes burned into mine. “Of course I was worried that she might remember. She had pigshit in her blood, her genes.” He wiped his sweaty face. “But I never hurt her, Matthew. Yes, I touched her. I wanted to kill her, to close a breathing wound, but instead I touched her. I was gentle, and I would whisper to her all the while, and the hatred would seep out of me when I held her. Seep out of me like this sweat.”
The surge of feeling in me made everything seem wet and slow. Hirsh looked like he was in a trance, and I went for my gun. I thought I heard a woman scream but it sounded far away. All I saw was Alex’s gun sneer, his trembling hand jerk, then felt the hot sear of a bullet snake across the top of my head.
The blood exploded in front of my eyes, and my slow wet world suddenly accelerated like a knife slash. While the red washed my eyes I felt myself fall forward and crack my head on the arm of the chair. I finally squeezed the metal trigger, heard the roar next to my ear, and squeezed again. I wiped blood from my face. Hirsh’s body wobbled but remained upright. At the same time I felt something pierce the top of my thigh. My leg was on fire, but I squeezed the trigger again. I tried to sit up and smashed my head on the leg of the chair.
The next time I opened my eyes I was on a rolling stretcher in the hall. I could see a crowd in the conservatory, but all I could hear was a roar in my head. I shut my eyes and concentrated on hearing the voices but I couldn’t get past the roar. I reopened my eyes but everything was starting to blur, when into my field of vision walked Washington Clifford. Staring right at me. I tried to scream but all I did was push myself back into a world peopled by everyone who had ever frightened me.
Nearly a week later I was discharged from City Hospital. The doctors had explained that the head wound would leave just a hidden scar. The most discomforting aspect—the itch and tightness as my hair and scalp grew back. There were too many bad jokes about barbershop quartets. The doctors also explained why they left the bullet in my leg and what I might expect over the course of my unnatural life.
But everyone refused to discuss what had occurred after I was shot, other than to say that no one else had been hurt and, unfortunately, I hadn’t been able to prevent Hirsh’s suicide.
The head shot hadn’t scrambled my brains, so I thought it prudent not to confess to a murder no one accused me of.
I might have left sooner but fear of Washington Clifford, who I assumed was responsible for the cover-up, was the only feeling that penetrated my depression. It didn’t help my nerves that the gun and holster were absent from my pile of personal possessions. I was in no rush to go anywhere.
I had refused all visitors while I was in the hospital, so I wasn’t entirely surprised to see a welcome party after I struggled out of the cab and gimped into my apartment. Charles, Richard, Mrs. Sullivan, and Gloria were sitting around the kitchen table with a bottle of champagne resting in a silver bucket. I figured they knew my release time before I did.
It was pleasant to see everyone, especially since most of Gloria’s face had returned to normal. After a quiet drink, though, people accurately read my mood and left. No one brought up the shooting and neither did I, though I had to convince Mrs. S. I could stay in my apartment and care for myself. I wasn’t in the mood to be a returning hero. I didn’t feel like one. I just wanted to be alone.
After everyone left I noticed a stack of newspapers piled neatly in the corner. I rolled a joint, smoked, and leafed through them, though I didn’t learn anything new or revealing. I was a friend of the Roth/Hirsh family who valiantly tried to prevent Alex’s suicide. There was no mention of anyone else getting hurt. For a moment I was sorry that I hadn’t heard from Simon or Fran. I felt forlorn and thought about calling Boots—but I had nothing to say.
I ransacked my stash, swallowed some codeine, and flicked on the tube. It felt comfortable to be home. I lay on the couch and reviewed for the thousandth time how blind I had been, and another thousand times how it felt squeezing the trigger. At least I had been spared seeing anyone’s blood other than my own. I kept wondering why I’d taunted Alex, pushing him past his breaking point. Who did I want dead? Him or me? It wasn’t a question I could answer.
Sleep mercifully arrived and, though I rocked with dreams of fire in my leg and head, I didn’t wake up screaming. I slept for almost twenty-four hours, though I didn’t feel very rested when I finally dragged myself awake.
On my way through the house I had found a package on the table. It contained a large and varied supply of dope. There wasn’t a note, and I left it while I retreated to the bathroom to change my dressings. It was difficult to do myself and took all of my concentration. When I finished I looked in the mirror, didn’t like what I saw, and limped toward my package, then pulled up short. Washington Clifford sat at the table rummaging through the bag. He looked up when he noticed me standing in the hall.
“I didn’t hear you leave the bathroom.”
I forced myself to speak. “If I’d known you were here I wouldn’t have come out.”
A tight smile skipped across his face. “Why is that?”
“We both know why.” My leg hurt and the part in my head throbbed.
“Why don’t you explain it to me?”
A rush of anger found a path through my fear. I walked over to the other side of the table. “Fuck you,” I waved toward the dope. “Go ahead and bust me, or are you going to do me too?”
He ignored my intensity. “Do you? Why would I want to do you?”
The anger and fear merged. “Look, cut the crap. We both know you worked for Hirsh and tried to protect him. It just happened that protecting him included killing Joe Starring. Why the flick do you need to lie now? You worked for him, beat me up for him, and killed Starring for him.”
Clifford’s lips barely moved. “Hirsh is dead.”
“And I’m next, right?”
“You are a living fool, shamus. Why don’t you sit down and take the weight off your leg? Maybe it will help you think.”
“Are you going to cook me a Last Supper?” But I pulled the chair out and sat down. Might as well be killed in a comfortable position; I couldn’t run anywhere. I dumped the contents of Julie’s package on the table, found some painkillers, and dry-mouthed them.
Clifford shook his head and wore a disgusted look. “Didn’t the hospital give you any legal ones?”
“I’m like you. Why be legal when there are other alternatives?”
He didn’t say anything so I reached over to the shelf, grabbed my rolling papers, and rolled a joint. I couldn’t think of a reason not to. I lit it and offered it to him.
He waved it off. “I didn’t kill Starring.”
“Right. And I didn’t kill Alex.”
Another humorless smile flashed across his face. “As far as people are concerned, you didn’t.”
“But I did. And you know that too.”
He nodded. “Yes, I know that but, between me and your buddy Simon, it’s all been arranged.”
I was caught off-guard to hear him mention Simon, but it didn’t stop me. “You’re good at arrang
ing things, aren’t you?”
He surprised me again. “Yes. I’m real good at it and so is he. His wife called him immediately following the incident and it was a good thing she did.” He reached under the table and pulled up my holster and gun. I must have shrunk in my seat because he put it on the table and took both his hands away.
“Are you going to shoot me with my own gun?” My words sounded lame, the last sputtering of fear and anger.
“I told you I didn’t kill Starring. If you try to be a little less stupid you might learn something.” He shook his head. “You are a hardheaded son of a bitch, but I already knew that.”
I sat there, confused and quiet.
“According to the story I heard from the daughter and wife, you put most of it together. Most, but not all. I was hired to protect Hirsh by containing the records, though I had no idea what was in them. I created a buffer around Starring to prevent any incidental leaking of the shrink’s files, but I wasn’t going to cover for a murder. You just beat me to the punch. I was going to do it legally. There is a difference between a rogue cop and a bad one.”
“Sounds like a pretty thin line.”
“No thinner than between a suicide and murder.”
Stalemate. It didn’t matter whether I believed him or not. The message was clear; he was going to leave me alone and I was going to return the favor. For an instant I felt the same burning rage I had felt in Hirsh’s house. I thought about grabbing my gun, but I’d used up my quotient of self-destructiveness for the week. At least I didn’t have to be afraid. Who knew, Clifford might even be telling the truth.
He read my mind, because he took a deep breath and rose. “We understand each other, don’t we, shamus?”
“Unfortunately, too well.”
“Good. If it eases you any, I didn’t kill Starring.”
“So you keep telling me.”
He grimaced and shrugged. “Maybe this will help”—he reached inside his jacket pocket, and I wondered whether he’d set me up and was about to shoot me. It bothered me that I didn’t seem to care, but all he did was pull out a fat envelope and toss it on the table. While I reached for it he let himself out the kitchen door.
The Complete Matt Jacob Series Page 28
