‘He knew Catherine Sheridan. She was connected to Darryl King . . .’
‘Here,’ Miller said, indicating the PD admin unit on the other side of the street. Roth slowed up, came to a stop.
Lester Jackson registered a moment of recognition followed by an expression of unwilling responsibility.
‘Mr Jackson,’ Miller said. ‘Good to see you again.’
Jackson smiled with effort. ‘And you, detective. How may I help you this time?’
‘Pensions Department.’
‘Pensions?’ Jackson said, and there was a tone of relief in his voice. ‘You need to go out of here, turn left, down half a block or so. It’s a different building. Like I said, out of here to the left and down half a block. You can’t miss it.’
‘Thank you very much, Mr Jackson.’
‘You’re very welcome, detective.’
Reaching the outer door once again Roth said, ‘Certainly happy to see the back of us,’ he said.
‘Lester Jackson we’ll speak to some other day,’ Miller replied.
Police Pensions Department was a narrow-fronted office block no more than a hundred and fifty yards from the admin unit. Receptionist directed Miller and Roth to a bank of chairs ahead of the front window, asked them to wait there until someone could see them. The someone, when she finally arrived, was a painfully thin woman by the name of Rosalind Harper. She directed them to an upstairs office that overlooked Sixth Street.
Seated behind her desk, a computer in front of her, she asked how she could assist them.
‘Forwarding address for a retired police officer,’ Miller told her.
‘Name?’
‘McCullough. Michael McCullough.’
‘Precinct?’
‘The Seventh.’
‘And do you know when he retired?’
‘March 2003,’ Miller said.
Rosalind tapped keys, scrolled, read, frowned, tapped more keys. She shook her head. ‘I have him here in the department from May of 1987 until March of 2003. That’s what? Fifteen years and ten months. Seems we didn’t make any pension payments to Mr McCullough.’
Miller leaned forward. ‘You what?’
Rosalind reached for the edge of the monitor and turned the screen. She pointed to the columns before them. ‘See here . . . this records the date he enlisted, here the date he retired. This column is the cumulative months of his employment, the salary he was paid at the time of his retirement . . . and this blank column here should be the continuing payments each month until he dies.’
‘But there are none,’ Roth said.
Rosalind nodded. ‘That’s what I told you. It appears we have made no pension payments to Mr McCullough.’
‘And his address?’ Miller asked.
Rosalind shook her head. ‘No payments, no address.’
‘Which means that you have no way of locating him?’ Roth said.
‘We don’t, no. Only way we would have an address is if we were sending something there.’
‘Like his pension.’
‘No, not his pension. Pension payments are made directly into the individual bank accounts. We send quarterly statements to the address we have on file, and then if they move we receive notification and the statements go to the new address . . .’ Rosalind paused, tilted her head to one side. ‘One thing,’ she said. She reached forward and turned the screen back towards herself. She typed more details, and then smiled. ‘You have a pen?’
Miller nodded, took out a pen and his notebook.
‘Have some bank details here . . . account registered as the receiving account for Michael McCullough’s pension back in April 2003. You ready?’
‘Sure.’
‘Washington American Trust Bank, Vermont Avenue. You know where that is?’
‘It’s about four blocks or so south of where I live,’ Miller said.
‘Nothing was paid over to the account like I say, but those were the details given at the time of pension registration.’
‘And that’s everything you have on this one?’ Roth asked.
‘That’s everything. Of course, if you’re planning on going down there and looking at his bank account you’re going to need a warrant.’
‘That’s not going to be a problem,’ Roth said.
‘Okay,’ Rosalind said. ‘We’re done then.’ She showed Miller and Roth back to the front of the building.
‘Thank you for your help,’ Miller said.
Rosalind Harper smiled. ‘Don’t mention it. Little bit of excitement around here is always a good thing.’
I
t is hard to believe that these things took place more than twenty-five years ago. Seems like we were children - though we did not think so at the time. We thought we were nothing less than the kings and queens of the world. We thought we could go somewhere and make a difference. People were dying. We believed the propaganda. We trusted Lawrence Matthews and Don Carvalho and Dennis Powers. And perhaps they were as blind as us. Perhaps, in turn, they also trusted those above them who said that this was the way of the world. We were the United States of America. We were the most important, the most powerful, the most responsible, the most effective. If anyone could handle this, we could. If anyone could walk out into the madness and bring calm and order and peace, then it would be us. There was no-one else.
And that was the thing we missed.
We didn’t see the real reason behind it all.
We were blind to the motive.
But that night - sitting in Catherine Sheridan’s apartment a handful of miles from Langley, Virginia - the sanctum sanctorum of the most important intelligence agency in the world - my heart in my hands and perhaps being truly honest for the very first time in my life, I imagined that everything I was, everything I wished to become, was somehow tied up with this girl. I could not tell her I loved her. I did not know what love was.
My father knew what love was, otherwise how could he have done what he did?
‘A carpenter?’ Catherine asked.
‘Yes, a carpenter. A cabinet-maker really.’
‘And your mother was sick.’
‘She got cancer. It was real bad. She couldn’t feed herself, couldn’t use the john, could hardly speak . . .’
‘She didn’t have medical care?’
‘My mother and father didn’t trust people a great deal. I don’t know whether it was a contagious distrust, or they were both like that from the start. Anyway, he figured the doctors would take all the money he had and not cure her anyway, so he read everything he could about it. I think he ended up knowing more than many of the experts he spoke to.’
‘But when it got so bad that she couldn’t speak . . . why didn’t he get help then?’
‘Far as I can work out I think they made an agreement. I think my mother didn’t want to end up in some hospital. I think she wanted to die at home with her husband and her son.’
‘And he killed her . . .’
‘She was dying, Catherine. She was dying so fast at the end we didn’t know whether it would be today or tomorrow or the next day. It broke him to pieces. They’d spent more than twenty years living in each other’s pockets, finishing each other’s sentences. That was the way they wanted it. Sometimes I even thought that I might have been a mistake.’
‘How so?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe I just imagined it. Sometimes I got the idea that the time they had to spend with me was time they’d rather have spent just with one another. I remember when I went to college. Been there no more than six months, and he called for me, told me that he needed my help. He couldn’t cope on his own. I remember how scared I was of her. How she didn’t look like my mother anymore. She’d become someone I didn’t even recognize.’
‘This is when? The fall of ’79?’ Catherine asked.
I looked at her, in some way surprised. ‘God,’ I said. ‘It’s only eighteen months. It feels like so much longer than that.’ I said nothing for a while. I was somewhere else, considering how little
time had actually passed since their deaths. ‘I went back there in
the early part of August. Six weeks later she was dead.’
‘So what happened when you came back from school?’
I looked at Catherine for a moment, no more, but in that moment I recognized something so close to myself. Perhaps a vague reflection, a memory of her own that was similar.
‘Why do you want to know this stuff?’ I asked her.
‘I didn’t want to know this any more than I wanted to know
anything else. It’s the only thing you’ve never talked about.’ She
tried to smile. ‘Well, hell, I can’t say that it’s the only thing
you’ve never talked about, but it’s one thing that people normally talk about that you’ve never mentioned. Parents are one thing people converse about, along with where they’ve come from, the school they went to . . . but not you.’ She looked away, and for a
second she seemed hesitant. ‘So tell me what happened when you
got back from school.’
‘He had me help him in the basement . . . his wood shop.’
‘What did you do?’
‘I sanded and polished small fragments of wood.’
‘He—’
‘He had me sand and polish pieces of wood. Mahogany, teak,
black walnut. All of them different, and different shapes. Every day for a few hours we would sit down there and do this.’
‘What on earth for?’
‘You know anything about orchids?’
Catherine shook her head.
‘My mother loved orchids. She talked about building a green
house and growing orchids . . . and there was one she was fascinated by. I can’t even remember what it was called, but it looked like the face of a child. My father built a picture of this thing fragment by fragment and it became the centerpiece in the lid of her coffin.’
I looked up at Catherine.
Her smile died a quiet and lonely death. ‘He had you help him
build her coffin?’
‘He sure did. He was a carpenter, he wasn’t going to have
someone else do it, was he?’
‘And you didn’t know he was doing this?’
‘Not at first . . . at first I figured he was making a door for a
cupboard or something, but when the orchid was finished and he set it in the middle of this . . . Jesus, that isn’t the half of it, Catherine. He gave me instructions to follow, and while he was upstairs with my mom I worked down in the basement, and the thing that puzzled me was the size of it. It was just so fucking big, and I couldn’t figure out what he was doing at first . . .’ I felt that tight fist of tension in my chest. A crazy sense of panic had overtaken me and I needed to slow down, to stop for a moment, to gather my emotions and keep some semblance of objectivity about this thing.
‘He ... he was building a coffin for two,’ I said quietly.
‘What?’
‘For two . . . he was building a coffin for two people, and late at night, Thursday September 13th, he went to my mother’s room. He took a hypodermic needle and he filled it with morphine, and he injected it into her and then he lay beside her until she was dead. He dressed her in her wedding dress, and then carried her down to the basement and put her in the coffin. He sat there for a couple of hours, and then he put on his wedding suit and got in the coffin beside her. He took an overdose of morphine, pulled the lid of the coffin over himself until it dropped into place, and then he lay beside her and he died . . .’
Catherine - eyes wide, mouth open - looked at me for quite some time, and when she started to speak I knew exactly what she wanted to know.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I didn’t figure it out for about five or six hours. I thought he might have taken her somewhere . . . figured he’d finally conceded defeat and driven her to the hospital, but his pickup was outside, and his overcoat, his boots, all his regular clothes, they were right where he left them at night. And then I went down into the basement, and only after a while did I notice that the coffin lid was closed. I started to think about how I’d been working on this thing every day, and every time I’d asked questions he’d say nothing except that I had to help him . . . said that for my mom’s sake I had to help him . . .’ I closed my eyes and leaned back.
‘Jesus,’ Catherine Sheridan said, an exclamation. ‘That is the worst—No, God, I don’t mean worst . . . fuck, John, I don’t know what I mean . . .’
I stayed right where I was - head back, eyes closed - and for a long time I wondered whether I would ever be able to exorcise that image of my parents side by side, my father holding my mother’s hand, his head turned toward her, this strange, almost beatific smile on his lips; that, and the smell of camphor from his suit, the smell of wood and varnish, of stain and wax . . . I wondered whether I would ever be able to think of my parents and see anything other than the rigored smile they both wore, together at last - no distractions, no-one to invade their privacy, no-one to disturb them . . .
‘What did you do?’ Catherine asked.
Her voice startled me. I felt the dryness of my eyes where I had resisted the need to cry. I had not cried - not then, not since - and I did not want to now. I wanted to be matter-of-fact, consider it for what it was. A dying woman. A compassionate husband. A decision. That was all. I could only imagine what my father had gone through, but in hindsight I wondered if the decision he made had not been whether they would make the journey, but how soon they would leave. He kept my mother alive until everything was arranged. And I helped him. I had tried to remember it a different way. Not with grief or disbelief, but with gratitude. Through those weeks, working together in the basement, we had been closer than ever before, and I had come to know my father. I saw that he was a good man, a man of principles and ethics, of stubborn persistence against all odds. I wanted to think that I had inherited some of those qualities. I wanted a little of my father to be left behind.