The Dreaming Tree

by Matthew Mather

  “Can’t be specific,” Angel replied as he pulled a card from his pocket, “but always follow the money. That’s my motto. So no forensics exam on the car?”

  “Nobody died.” She handed him her card and took his.

  “Somebody did die,” Angel said softly.

  “Who?”

  “Who is Roy attached to? Ever think about that?”

  28

  “Your own mother said you’ve always been a monster?” Angel said.

  They were back in the private eye’s loft on Third Street in Spanish Harlem, back in the jungle of hanging plants and potted eucalyptus trees. The windows were closed against the cold, the sky outside dark, with a faint reddish glow from the city lights below.

  Charlie had just made a round of vanilla Earl Grey. He sat staring at two large computer monitors balanced on the dining room table. For the past two days, he had called in sick and stayed home sifting through the raw files from Brixton. Being a veterinarian made him the closest thing on their team to someone with a medical background.

  “Those were her words,” Roy replied to Angel. She refused to explain the lawsuits. She’d been drunk.

  He had frightened himself at his mother’s. He barely managed to contain his rage at her words, even knowing that they were designed to cut and inflict damage. Usually, he would just let her comments slide, but something was different this time.

  “Did your mother hit you?” Angel asked. His expression was hard to read.

  “At the house? When I was just there?” No, but I wanted to hit her.

  “I mean when you were a kid.”

  “Never.”

  “And you’re upset because she called you a monster? Dog, my abuelita would beat us with a stick if we just looked at her the wrong way. Being called a monster would be like her being nice to us. You güeros gotta thicken that skin some.”

  Roy and Angel also had computer monitors in front of them.

  Three nights ago, Brixton had relented and given them the full list of past donors—a whole year’s worth from before the accident. More than ten thousand people. They’d narrowed the list to those between eighteen and thirty-five years old, male, and Caucasian.

  That brought it down to 1,820 names.

  Beyond that, they had to search each record manually for cause of death—only some kind of head trauma, with minimal damage to the rest of the body.

  “But … she meant it, like, literally,” Roy tried to explain. “That I was literally a monster.”

  Angel said, “Have you looked in the mirror? I mean really looked … in … that … mirror?”

  “Be nice,” Charlie whispered from across the room.

  “Because,” Angel continued, “you got a whole huge red scar all the way around your neck. You’re attached to someone else’s body, and you got metal studs sticking out of your head. You are a bit of an oddity, my friend, and I say that with love. I know you been through a lot, but your mother has, too.”

  “Sometimes, you have all the tact of a scorpion on a wedding cake,” Charlie said to his boyfriend.

  Angel replied, “You can’t always sugarcoat. You gotta face things head-on.”

  “Look who’s talking,” Charlie said. Then he said to Roy, “You’re still letting her keep the house? Your mother?”

  Roy’s rage had dissipated as fast as it came on. “It’s just money. Yes.”

  Angel snorted at that.

  But it was just money. Maybe he had hoped he could win some love from her with the gesture. One thing was certain: he would earn her undying hatred if he took the house. She had lived in it for thirty years, helped rebuild it with his father. From his mother’s point of view, he was an unlovable child who grew into an unlovable adult. But then, money overcame most obstacles—at least until his father died. And Roy hadn’t been any help, had been just as destructive as she was, living up to her terrible expectations.

  “I’m looking more into your mother,” Angel said. “She’s always on Page Six, yeah? Got forty years of celeb pictures on digital microfilm at New York Library on Fourth. I’m going down tomorrow.”

  “Hey, look at this one,” Charlie said.

  He and Angel were going through the raw files from Brixton. When they found possible matches, they sent over pictures and images they found on the web. Anything to get more images and information.

  An email popped up on Roy’s screen. He opened it. An image of a young guy’s face, a news story about a train accident. Pictures of his family, of the site around the accident. The name and birth date. Five-foot-three. “Gotta be at least five-nine, and not scrawny,” Roy replied after a few minutes of flipping through images. He took a sip of his vanilla Earl Grey.

  “How did you ever get into the Navy SEALs?” Roy asked Angel. “I mean, why? It doesn’t seem … I mean …”

  “I’m Latino, man.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means his mother,” Charlie offered, his chubby pink face illuminated by the screens.

  “It means that if my mother knew I was gay, it would have broken her Catholic heart.”

  Angel took a deep breath. “Maybe it would be different now. Things are different from twenty years ago. As soon as I came of age, I signed up for military service. From then on, I always took the hardest training, the hardest missions that sent me into the deepest, darkest holes this world has—”

  “And that’s not a figure of speech,” Charlie chimed in. “Maybe not even a metaphor.”

  “Shut up,” Angel said amiably. “I’m trying to tell my story. I saw some terrible stuff. Maybe I was hating on myself a little.”

  “Maybe?” Charlie said quietly. “But you won some of the highest military awards.”

  “The day my mother died, four years ago, I gave it all up in a heartbeat, but that don’t mean it wasn’t a powerful experience. I still have some of my closest brothers in there, and some others are having a hard time back in the world …” Angel’s voice trailed off. “I’ll never forget. So I’m happy. And the day I got out, the first man I met was Charlie. It was love at first sight. Haven’t looked back.”

  Charlie said, “And did he tell you we’re going to adopt? There’s a boy in Colombia. He lost his family. We’ve done all the papers.”

  “That’s really great, guys.”

  Roy had always wanted a family, but the possibility seemed further away than ever. When he’d married Penny, he thought that was what she wanted, too, but she refused—said she needed time.

  The adoption idea sprouted a memory in Roy. “Hey, Dr. Danesti said he was adopted. Could you look into that? Find out from where? Who his parents were? And you’re looking into his finances?”

  “You think we don’t have enough to do?” Angel said it smiling. “Sending over another one to you.”

  An email popped up on Roy’s screen, and he flipped through the images, not seeing anything that rang a bell.

  “I got that medical report, the one from Suffolk County,” Angel said. “Said just what that cop said it said.” He paused a beat. “And I met her. Your cop lady friend.”

  “Detective Devlin? You met her? Why?”

  “She had the file. Seemed like she wanted to meet you, if you ask me. Crazy cop. Really pretty. But it was like she could see into my mind. Spooky.”

  “She knows you’re working for me?”

  “I didn’t tell her anything. What I was trying to do was find the car from the accident, have a look at it. It’s not in the Suffolk pound.”

  “You should have just asked me. The car is back at our house. All fixed up.”

  “Fixed up? But it went off a cliff.”

  “Sam fixed it—or at least, he paid for it. Penny helped him.” Roy looked through another set of pictures. “Speaking of my wife, she’s having an affair. That’s what my mother told me.”

>   “Right now? Your wife is having an affair now?”

  “She was when I had the accident. It was why I was so upset at that party. I might have even driven off the cliff on purpose. My mother gave me that little tidbit. She said I screamed it out at the party, that my wife was sleeping with someone.”

  “Someone there was her boyfriend?”

  “I didn’t ask. Don’t even care.”

  “We better find out who.”

  “Maybe her lover is the one that tried to kill you,” Charlie mused. “And she tried to save you. That’s kind of romantic.” He grimaced after considering his own words. “Sorry. Actually, that’s not romantic.”

  “She did say something odd,” Roy said. “She said that Nicky said I would lose my mind. I never heard of a friend of hers called Nicky.”

  “Why not just ask her?”

  “That’s what I hired you for.”

  “And you talked to Sam? Your buddy?” Angel replied without rising to the bait.

  “He admitted he was the one who gave me the cocaine and ketamine at the party.”

  “But if everyone heard you screaming about your wife having an affair, why didn’t your friend Sam tell you about it? I looked into him a bit, through my friend in the financial world, and he says Samuel Phipps had remortgaged that house, like, three times. Also found out he’s into the Matruzzi family for a few million in chits. Long Island mobsters are still mobsters, bro.”

  “He’s always doing stuff like that. He likes gambling. A bit disorganized, but his family left him billions.”

  “Heard that, too. Speaking of that, you told me Atticus said the trust had eight million left in it. I saw the trust documents—there was ten-point-four million in there when it was registered. So if it still has eight now after all those withdrawals, he did you a good job.”

  That was good to know. At least all the pieces were falling into place. It occurred to Roy that maybe he was barking up the wrong tree.

  His wife was cheating on him, his best friend was a degenerate gambler, and he had a stormy relationship with his mother. Maybe this was just part of the process: for him to find out everything going on around him, to start over, to find some peace of mind. But he still wanted to know who his donor was. The question ate away at him.

  “Isn’t Sam on your board of trustees?” Angel asked, still looking at his screen.

  “Yeah, but he never goes in there, not while Atticus is in charge. I doubt Sam even knows how to turn on a computer.”

  “Your dad and Atticus started LCT Capital, right?” Angel said. “I looked up their press releases—your dad invested in all kinds of stuff. He was into medical technology, early genetics start-ups, even joint ventures with Russian and Eastern European companies. That’s not nothing in the early nineties. He was a pioneer.”

  “I want you to find out about my dog,” Roy said. His mind could never quite stop from circling back to that.

  “Why didn’t you just ask Penny again?”

  “She never gives me a straight answer.”

  “I’m sending another one over to you,” Charlie announced in a singsong voice.

  Angel rubbed his eyes. “Did you ever consider one thing?”

  “What’s that?” Roy opened Charlie’s email.

  “That maybe you did this to yourself. Maybe you set this up somehow. Your memory has holes the size of Texas, and you had cirrhosis and who knows what else. You just said that maybe you drove that car off the cliff on—”

  “Quiet one second.” Roy held up one hand, palm out.

  There, on the screen. The little girl with the red hair. The girl from his dreams. She was in the arms of a thickly muscled young man with a beautiful redheaded woman beside him. The man had died a week before Roy’s surgery, about three months after the accident at the Chegwiddens’. He looked familiar, somehow. Roy had seen him before. He was sure of it. He read the news story. Suicide. Gunshot wound to the head.

  “Jake Hawkins.”

  29

  Rain drummed in waves of rising and falling sound off the hood of Roy’s old Chevy. The temperature held just above freezing, but this place was two degrees away from an ice storm.

  The house across the street looked tired, its white paint peeling from the wooden siding. The roof sagged. Lichens grew in expanding amoeba-like patches over the shingles near the chimney and at the edges of the single dormer window. A porch spanned the front of the house, the latticework beneath it broken into fragments, the mortar of the brick columns at each end cracked and crumbling.

  The grounds of the house were halfway to being reclaimed by the sparse forest of birches and fir trees leaning in around it. No one had mowed the lawn in the past season. The knee-deep yellowed grass of the yard grew chest-high around the concrete blocks supporting an old Pontiac Firebird. Someone had been in the process of sanding down the frame maybe a year ago, maybe two, but now it was a rusted shell.

  A stolen dream.

  When someone died, they didn’t lose just their lives; they also lost their family, their home, their kids, their everything.

  The house had a single front door with a window to either side. Maybe four rooms in a square on the ground floor, two bedrooms upstairs in the attic. One entrance in the back. Roy had checked, walking around through the woods in the night. The nearest neighbor was three hundred feet up the road. Straight across was a boneyard of discarded implements from the small farm to the south.

  A single streetlight stood near the front porch.

  Roy had driven up here twice in two days, stopping last night in a light snowfall to watch the lights click off inside the house.

  Tonight, he was parked in the junkyard across the street, staring for hours as the rain hammered down in a driving wind. He fumbled with a pack of cigarettes, took one out with his left hand and put it into his mouth, then clicked the lighter on and off before crumpling the unlit cigarette into the ashtray. He had never smoked in his life, but the urge pulled at him now—some part of the same irresistible force that brought him back to this hauntingly beautiful little house.

  * * *

  Two nights before, he, Angel, and Charlie had checked and rechecked the images. Jake Hawkins was twenty-six years old, had been an up-and-coming mixed martial arts fighter with a six-win, two-loss record and four straight wins. He was five-ten—about Roy’s height. Excited stories described Jake as a contender for the middleweight MMA belt.

  The fighter was a southpaw. There were pictures of him in the octagon, blood spattered across his face, arms raised high after a win.

  Roy had taken his shirt off. Angel and Charlie had tried to match the pictures. Roy’s new body was built like a tank, just like Jake’s, although the muscles in the pictures were bigger and leaner. They had atrophied from the long time in bed, said Charlie.

  There were two moles on Roy’s back, in the same configuration they saw in the images of Jake. Jake’s chest had a tattoo of two horizontal lines, whereas Roy did not—but they thought they could see the shadow of the tat. Maybe someone had bleached the tattoos away.

  Roy’s stomach had cramped, screaming at him.

  Roy had read the stories of Jake’s shocking suicide. A gun death. The website connected it to other clips, suicides of boxers and football and hockey players whose deaths were linked to chronic traumatic encephalopathy. Was that what happened? Was Jake brain-damaged?

  Roy had studied the images deep into the night, long after Charlie and Angel turned in. They told him to be careful, not to contact Jake’s wife, to give it some time and think about it. That maybe Jake wasn’t their guy.

  Roy had obsessed over the pictures, stared deep into the fighter’s eyes. Is that you, Jake? he had asked. Is that you inside me? Are you talking to me?

  After midnight, he had fled Angel and Charlie’s apartment and gotten into his car, succumbing to the irresistible pull
that dragged him under the Midtown Tunnel and out along the expressway into the hinterlands of Long Island.

  * * *

  The front door of the house opened inward; then the screen door swung out. A little girl appeared.

  Elsa.

  Roy had learned this from his research. Five years old, with her red hair done up in pigtails, and a tiny yellow Minions backpack on. A woman came through the door behind her. Five-four, flowing red hair. She knelt and kissed her daughter.

  Hope Hawkins.

  Tears blurring Roy’s vision. Why did you do it, Jake? Why would you leave them?

  He had read the news story over and over.

  A single gunshot through the head. Self-inflicted.

  An orange school bus huffed to a stop, and Hope walked her little girl over to it. Both of them were hidden for a few seconds until the bus lurched forward. Roy waited for the woman to go back inside the house before starting his car.

  He pulled forward through the mud and potholes and onto the pavement, following the bus at a distance. He put another cigarette into his mouth and champed at the filter. The bus angled into the driveway of a single-story building—Calverton Elementary. Roy waited to see the little yellow backpack appear, the girl’s head down.

  Not talking to any of her classmates.

  He fought the urge to drive up and tell them he was her father.

  But then what?

  * * *

  “Just coffee?” the woman asked.

  Her red hair was pulled back. Pink lipstick matched her pale skin. Freckles were sprinkled over cheeks still ruddy from the chill outside. “No breakfast? We got a two-egg special.”

  “No, that’s it,” Roy said. “Thanks, Hope.”

  Her eyes narrowed, but her professional smile remained, her cheeks flushing a little. Maybe Roy stared a little too hard? It was difficult not to. He averted his eyes. Still, a gorgeous woman like that had to be used to men staring at her.

  She glanced down at her name tag and relaxed. Of course he would know her name.

  “A little early in the season for a scarf?” Hope asked as she poured Roy a cup.