“You mean after that, right?”
Dr. Calvin didn’t say anything.
“You mean how come I’m still clean,” Dooley said. “I guess because I’m tired of being fucked up. I don’t want to be like her—like she was.” He thought maybe Beth was a reason, too. And his uncle. But mostly it was because he was tired of being fucked up and of everyone expecting nothing from him except attitude and trouble. “You think maybe Lorraine was trying to change?”
“She was your mother. What do you think?”
Lorraine and change—in Dooley’s experience, the two didn’t go together. He’d felt like he’d been sucker-punched when he’d come out of school and seen her standing there on the sidewalk. His knees had gone weak; he’d almost crumpled. She hadn’t look anything like he remembered. She was thin, but not all sallow skin and sharp bones like she used to be. She had a nice shape to her. Her hair was nice—short but perky, with some color in it to lighten it up, and a real shine to it, not brittle and dull the way it had been when she was at her worst. Her face looked good. She didn’t look dragged out; she didn’t have dark circles under her eyes. No, she looked pinkish and healthy. Well rested. Her teeth were whiter than he remembered and she’d ditched the red lipstick she usually wore, the stuff that always made Dooley think of blood. If she was wearing anything, it was light and natural, like the kind Beth wore. He hated to admit it, but she’d looked great, even if she was his mother.
“But why all of a sudden?” Dooley said. “I mean, she was the way she was for maybe twenty years.”
“Well, that is the question, Dooley,” Dr. Calvin said. He finished his tea and stretched.
Dooley set down his own mug, untouched.
“There’s probably no way to know, huh?” he said. “And even if I did find out, it’s too late. Right?”
“That depends on what you’re after,” Dr. Calvin said. “If what you want is to establish or re-establish a relationship with your mother, then, yes, it’s a little late. If, on the other hand, you want to understand something about the woman who gave birth to you, then I’d say, no, it’s not too late.”
Why had she shown up all of a sudden? Why had she decided to seek him out after all those years? Why had she invited him to come to her place? Why had she told him that she wanted to talk to him? What did they even have to talk about?
Dooley glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece and was shocked at the time.
“I’m sorry for keeping you up,” he said. “I should go.” He stood. Dr. Calvin stood. Dooley realized that’s what he liked about Dr. Calvin; it was why he was here: Dr. Calvin didn’t bullshit. The fact that he wasn’t objecting meant that he was agreeing—yes, it was late. But he wasn’t bitching about it. You came to my house, I let you in, I listened, and, yes, it’s late.
Dr. Calvin walked him to the door.
“I’m sorry about your mother,” he said.
It was quiet in the house when Dooley got home. He looked in on Teresa. She was sound asleep. He hesitated as he passed the door to his uncle’s study. What if Jeannie had woken up? What if she had checked on him? He felt the urge to confess everything to her. Then he looked at his watch. It was nearly two. Jeannie had a job. She had her own stores to look after in addition to his uncle’s business. She needed her sleep. He went down the hall to his own room and crawled into bed.
Seventeen
Jeannie was putting a plate of scrambled eggs on a tray together with a glass of orange juice, a mug of tea, and a couple of slices of toast.
“How’s Teresa?” Dooley said.
“She says she’s hungry, so I guess that’s good,” Jeannie said. “I’m going to take this up to her. After she eats, I’m taking her to my G.P., who also happens to be a close personal friend.”
“Thanks, Jeannie,” Dooley said. She was doing far more than she should. She didn’t even know Teresa.
“After that, I’m taking her home. I don’t mind looking in on her, Dooley, but I don’t feel comfortable having her stay here. It’s your uncle’s house.”
“It’s okay,” Dooley said. “I’ll check on her. I promise.”
“I’ll have to lend her something for now. But she wants to know if you can go and get her some clean clothes to go home in.” She put a key and a piece of paper on the table in front of him. “You know where she lives?”
Dooley nodded.
“She wrote down what she wanted.”
“I’ll go now,” he said.
“Also, Annette called,” Jeannie said. “She says she’ll pick you up here at three.”
Dooley did a rough calculation. He’d already got someone to cover the early part of his shift. Alicia’s party was at one. He didn’t have to be at work until six. Yeah, he could handle it.
After Jeannie went upstairs, Dooley gulped down some coffee and headed for the door. He made a quick call and ended up having to leave a message. Then he headed to Jeffie’s.
He let himself in with the key Teresa had given Jeannie and went straight to the bedroom to go through the closet and the dresser with all the makeup and framed pictures on it, which he figured—it was a no-brainer—belonged to Teresa. He found everything she wanted—even underwear. He was surprised it didn’t bother her, the thought of a guy she hardly knew going through that particular drawer. He dug a bag out from under the sink in the kitchen and put the stuff in it. Then he went back into the bedroom and looked at the other dresser, this one taller, not so long, with a bottle of men’s cologne on it and a package of disposable razors. Jeffie’s dresser. The cops had probably been here already. They’d probably gone through Jeffie’s things and had removed anything they thought might help them nail whoever had killed him. But Dooley opened the top drawer anyway. It was crammed with stuff—packages of rubbers, handfuls of change, pennies and nickels and dimes, old bills that had been paid (at least, Dooley assumed they had), underwear, socks that looked to Dooley like they didn’t match, a couple of pairs of sunglasses, a pair of black leather gloves, a couple of packs of cigarettes, a crumpled scrap of paper torn from the newspaper—Dooley smoothed it out—with four numbers scrawled on it, a bunch of cheap ballpoint pens, a couple of disposable lighters, a dozen or so matchbooks with some or most of the matches gone.
Junk.
On the bright side: There was nothing to indicate that Jeffie had been in touch with Dooley’s uncle. On the not-so-bright side: If there had been anything like that, the cops had already found it. He hadn’t been surprised when Randall had asked: Did you kill Jeffrey Eccles? He’d been expecting that. But he hadn’t been expecting the next question: Did your uncle kill him? It had shaken him.
His uncle knew Jeffie. He’d said he’d busted him a couple of times. And Lorraine had died of an overdose. There were bruises. Maybe someone had forced her. Someone with drugs and the whole kit. Maybe his uncle. He couldn’t see it. No way. But it was what Randall was kicking around. That and the blood in his car were why his uncle had been arrested.
Dooley wished now that he’d said more down there in that ravine when Jeffie had mentioned his cop uncle. Maybe if he had said his uncle’s name, Jeffie would have reacted—that’s your uncle? No shit. He could have pushed Jeffie on it—what did he mean, did he know his uncle? It could have led somewhere. As it was, back when they’d hung out together, Jeffie had been no wiser about the existence of an uncle than Dooley himself had been—forget knowing his uncle’s name. Hell, Jeffie had never even met Lorraine.
In the rest of Jeffie’s drawers, clothes: T-shirts and sweaters, jeans and chinos, socks and more underwear. None of it special.
He poked around the rest of the apartment, but most of the stuff looked like it was Teresa’s, not Jeffie’s. Besides the furniture, there were a lot of photographs in frames, almost all of them showing Teresa and Jeffie together. There was a pile of stuffed animals in the window seat of the window that overlooked the street, some dried flowers in a vase on one of the end tables, a bunch of celebrity magazines on the coffee table, an
d hundreds of CDs—Dooley scanned them. Half looked like they might be Jeffie’s, the other half definitely did not. He also saw half a dozen word search puzzle books, most of them with the puzzles all done. That had to be Teresa. Jeffie had enough trouble reading words when the letters were going in the right direction. There was only one real book in the whole place—no surprise there; Dooley couldn’t recall ever seeing Jeffie read. It was a book of baby names. Dooley thought about throwing it out, sparing Teresa’s having to look at it. Then he thought, maybe she’d still want it, maybe it meant something to her, so he left it where it was, on top of the big-screen TV.
He locked up and took the bag of Teresa’s clothes and toiletries back to his uncle’s house. Teresa wasn’t there. Neither was Jeannie. He left the bag on the table in the front hall and headed for the coffee shop a couple of blocks away to wait.
Randall was alone, thank God. He got out of his car, glanced around, then trotted across the street and into the coffee shop. He didn’t even glance at Dooley. Instead, he went straight to the counter and placed an order. Then he stood there, looking everywhere but at Dooley, until the girl behind the counter handed him his coffee. Randall chatted with her while she made change. Only then did he come over to Dooley’s table. He dropped down opposite Dooley, blew on his coffee, took a sip, and said, “What’s on your mind, Ryan?”
“You’ve been asking people about my uncle and Lorraine.”
Randall took another sip of his coffee.
“I want to know why,” Dooley said.
Randall shook his head. “You have some information for me, Ryan, I’m all ears,” he said. “You think I’m going to sit here and give you the lowdown on my investigation, you’re out of luck.”
He started to get up.
“She was my mother,” Dooley said.
“Your mother who you weren’t close to,” Randall reminded him.
Dooley hesitated. He wasn’t about to tell Randall anything he might not already know. But he needed to get a fix on what was going on.
“You asked about rumors, about why she left home, about my uncle.”
Randall settled back down in his chair and studied Dooley for a moment.
“She never talked about him?”
Dooley shook his head.
“Never mentioned him?”
“I told you, I didn’t even know I had an uncle. I didn’t know anything. Then you showed me that picture.”
“You talk to your uncle about that?”
“Yeah.”
“And?”
“He told me some stuff.”
Randall waited.
“He told me she was adopted. He told me about his other sister—and about how his mother died. He said that’s why he and Lorraine weren’t … why they never talked.”
“I see.”
He saw? Dooley watched him take another sip of coffee. What did he mean, he saw?
“Is that what you meant? Is that the weird shit you’ve been asking about?”
Randall stared at him for another full minute. Dooley hated that. He hated the way cops always acted like they were holding all the cards. He especially hated it when they were.
“Here’s a mystery for you, Ryan,” Randall said at last. “A seventeen-year-old adopted girl gets pregnant, leaves home, severs all ties with her family. There’s no contact between her and her big brother—who isn’t really her brother—for, what, fourteen, fifteen years? Then the kid, her son, drops himself in the crapper and, all of a sudden, out of the blue, this respectable retired cop and all-round good citizen big brother steps up to the plate and takes responsibility for the kid.” And pays her a thousand dollars a month each and every month, Dooley thought. He bet Randall knew about that. He bet that’s what the subpoena for the bank records had been all about. “What do you suppose that’s all about, Ryan? Why would your uncle all of a sudden step into your life?” And pay for the privilege, Dooley thought. Jesus, had Lorraine been blackmailing him? Did she have some kind of leverage? But what? What could she possibly …
Jesus. No way.
He stared at Randall. Randall looked blandly back at him.
“Are you saying …? You don’t think …?”
Randall seemed to soften in that instant. Or maybe it was all an act. Maybe he wanted to see how Dooley would react.
“We talked to some of your grandparents’ old neighbors. One of them remembers overhearing a fight at your grandparents’ house one night. She says your mother … well, she made certain accusations.” Accusations?
“This neighbor called the police, who asked your mother about it. She refused to talk to them. She said she’d been angry at your uncle. He never mentioned that?”
“No. What are you—”
“Did your mother ever tell you who your father was, Ryan?”
What? Where did that question come from?
“Some guy,” Dooley said. “Some guy named Dooley.”
“You know him?”
Dooley shook his head. He remembered Lorraine used to talk about the guy sometimes. Half the time she’d be crying over him: He was the best guy, ever, Dooley. He was so fine, you would have liked him. The other half the time she was throwing stuff, saying what a jerk he was, how he’d left her like that with a baby on her hands, what an asshole, and, big surprise, the way Dooley acted half the time, he was just like his father, and that’s no compliment, Dooley, just so you know.
“You don’t remember him? You don’t remember anything about him?”
“She said he took off when I was a baby.”
“He took off?”
Dooley looked at Randall. What was he getting at?
“Did you know that she didn’t list a father on your birth registration?”
No, he didn’t know that.
“Why do you think she left his name off?”
“I don’t know.”
Randall contemplated him again.
“You could ask your uncle,” he said finally. “And there are tests. DNA tests. You can find out for sure.”
Find out what?
“It would explain a lot,” Randall said.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Dooley said.
“That’s the other mystery, Ryan,” Randall said. “Either you know exactly what I’m talking about, or you don’t. If you don’t, then think about it. Think about why your uncle suddenly dropped into your life after all those years. Or maybe you know exactly what I’m talking about, in which case … well, your uncle isn’t the only one who knew Jeffie and what he did for a living.”
They were fishing on that one, Dooley thought. They already know where he was that night. If they had anything to connect him with what had happened to either Jeffie or Lorraine, he’d be sweating it out in an interview room. He stood up.
“Thanks for meeting with me,” he said.
Randall sat with his coffee while Dooley left. He went straight to Warren’s house where he smiled through chocolate ice-cream cake with Alicia, her mother, Warren, and some of the kids Alicia went to school with. She was thrilled with the DVDs Dooley gave her—some new stuff, all of them about animals, that he’d special-ordered for her. At ten to three, he hugged her and wished her many happy returns.
“Thanks for coming,” Warren said. “She talked about you all morning.”
“No problem,” Dooley said.
Warren peered at him.
“Are you okay?” he said.
“Yeah. See you Monday, okay, Warren?”
He got home just as Annette Girondin’s car pulled up at the curb.
An hour later, Dooley found himself talking to his uncle under conditions he never could have imagined. His uncle looked tense; his skin was gray; his eyes were tight and watchful.
“You okay?” Dooley said.
“I’ll live,” his uncle said.
“I just wanted to tell you,” Dooley said. “I didn’t tell them anything.”
His uncle didn’t say anything.
�
�All that stuff you told me that night,” Dooley said. “I kept it to myself.”
His uncle didn’t react the way he had expected. Instead, he leaned forward a little and said, “If they subpoena you and make you testify, do everyone a favor, Ryan. Tell the truth. Okay?”
“If they subpoena me?” Dooley said. “You’re going to get off, right?”
“I sure as hell hope so,” his uncle said. “But it’s complicated.”
One-thousand-dollars-a-month complicated. Not-brother-and-sister complicated.
“What do you mean?” Dooley said.
“This isn’t a good place to go into it, Ryan. You got something else you want to talk about, go for it. Otherwise—”
Dooley couldn’t believe it—his uncle actually stood up, making it clear what he would discuss and what he wouldn’t, still assuming the in-charge position.
“Okay,” Dooley said. “Can I ask you something?”
His uncle, wary, dropped back into his chair.
“How did she seem when she came by the house?” Dooley said.
“Who?”
“Lorraine. I know she came by. How did she seem? Was she clean? Was she high? What?”
He hadn’t told his uncle he knew about the visit, so he was expecting his uncle to be at least a little taken back or, possibly, embarrassed. He was neither.
“She was a pain in the ass,” his uncle said. “She was all smiles until she found out you weren’t home, and then she got pissy.”
Dooley sincerely hoped that his uncle hadn’t taken that attitude with the cops.
“Besides that,” he said.
“To tell you the truth, she looked pretty good.” His uncle sounded surprised as he said it, like he still couldn’t believe it. “Not her usual trashy self, you know what I mean? She told me she was clean, and she looked it.”
“Did she tell you why she did it?”
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