In This Rain (40 page)

“But he didn’t get it?”

“My father said Walter’s schemes were all too big and not well thought through. My parents argued about it. It must have been my mother who invited him that afternoon. I’d never liked Walter, and I could tell my father didn’t either, but he was a friend of my mother’s so he’d always been around. I was so stupid then, I didn’t even know what ‘friend of my mother’s’ meant.”

“That’s the wrong word,” Joe said. “ ‘Stupid.’ ”

She shrugged that off. “Anyway, he was there, and even I could see he was getting nowhere with the moneymen. I went to my room for something, I don’t remember what, and when I came out, there was Walter. He cornered me. He said I’d better be quiet or I’d embarrass my father. I tried to push him away but

He touched me, kissed me

whispered things I’d never even heard. His breath was so hot. I kept twisting around, completely trapped. The only thing I could have done was yell. But I didn’t. Because of the clients. Finally— it couldn’t have been very long but it seemed like hours— someone called his name. He turned, and let go just enough for me to knee him in the crotch. One of the older girls at school had told us about that, to do it if a man got ‘fresh.’ I didn’t know what ‘fresh’ meant and I didn’t know if what Walter was doing was it, but the knee thing seemed like it might work. It did. He was the one who shouted. I squirmed away and ran to my room. I’ve always wondered what he told them about the shout.” She paused again, but this time not for long. “I didn’t tell my father about the hallway. When I told him about Walter and my mother I had some dumb idea he’d make Walter stay away from her, and that would keep him away from me, too. But what he got furious about wasn’t the two of them so much— I think he must have known, somewhere, that that was going on— but that Walter had set me up to see it.”

“Set you up?”

“Suggesting I come for coffee. There was no coffee. Just Walter and my mother, half naked and rolling all over each other on a bear rug. Have you ever heard such a cliché? My mother

”

A crow squawked and flapped in a pine, startled by something. Joe searched the branches but couldn’t see it.

“He did it, Walter did it— he invited me, I mean— to get back at me. And because he knew I’d come. To show him I wasn’t scared. Any sensible fourteen-year-old would have avoided him like a disease, after that scene in the hallway. But he knew I’d take it as a dare. And I fell right into it.”

The deep shadows that covered the yard had settled into the trees now, too, though the sky was still light.

“He must have known I might tell my father,” she said, “and he didn’t care. More than didn’t care. He wanted that. So my father could see who won.”

Sutton Place

Unable to stay still any longer, Ann plunged down the steps, strode across the yard until she reached the peonies backed onto the rocks and could go no farther. She stopped, looking around at the areas Joe had cleared and at the ones he hadn’t gotten to, at the plants he’d brought here and the ones he’d uncovered and encouraged. Beside the peonies stood a patch of thin-leafed, knee-high stalks. Some kind of vine corkscrewed over them, weighing them down, but she could see more of them popping up here and there, even in the peonies. Go ahead, she could hear them say to the vines, try to smash us down: we still have tricks up our sleeves. Suddenly she wanted more than anything to be like Joe. She wanted to know what to do here, in this one place; to have a task she could accomplish and something cheering for her to succeed, even if it was only a patch of thin-leafed plants.

“Rudbeckia.”

She hadn’t heard Joe come up but she wasn’t surprised to find him there.

“In a month they’ll be almost as tall as you are,” he said. “With yellow flowers.”

“What do they need?”

“Just sun. They do everything else themselves.”

“What about that?” She pointed at the vine.

“Grapes. I’ll take it out but they won’t really care. If they have to they’ll grow right through it.”

“They’re coming up here, too, and over there.”

“They’re tough little bastards. They’d take over if you let them. Just the way the grapes would. In a way, they deserve each other. Except that it’s not up to them.”

“What do you mean?”

In the dusk she saw his old, slow smile. “It’s up to me. Tell me why you told me that story. Why you said ‘Now is the only time.’ ”

She wanted to keep talking about the flowers but she couldn’t think of anything to ask. “Walter was responsible for those accidents. And the murders of those gangbangers, and Jen, too. Maybe he didn’t kill anyone personally, I don’t know. But he’s responsible.”

“All that evidence— ”

“Was discredited. I know. And we thought that meant we were reading it wrong. But that’s not what happened. We were reading it just the way we were meant to. It was all planted.” She took a breath and told him the worst part. “And it was planted under my nose. Because Walter knew I’d fall for it.” Now that she’d spoken it into reality she braced herself, expecting the weight of her stupidity, of the disgust and pity Joe would surely feel, to crush her into the ground.

Nothing happened. Joe didn’t speak, the earth didn’t open, and the sky stayed where it was.

Tentatively, as though stepping onto a log across a brook, she went on. “It was all so carefully planned. When everything was ready he had me called back from Siberia, gave me a stick to sniff, and turned me loose. And what a good little puppy I was! I dug it all out and brought it back just the way he knew I would. Just the way I found him with my mother, and told my father. Just the way he knew I would.”

She gazed into the flower bed, then leaned forward and seized a handful of vine. She tugged; the entangled stalks bent but the grapevine didn’t yield.

“Not that way,” Joe said. “Its roots are back by the rock. Pull it gently in the direction it’s growing from. It’ll let go.”

She waded into the rudbeckia, hesitantly at first, then with a rhythm, wrapping the vine around her hand as she tugged it loose. She followed it through the patch, to the boulder. “What do I do now?”

“If you can find where it comes out of the ground, pull it up. If it’s between the rocks and you can’t get at it, break it off.”

“Won’t it just come back if I do that?”

“It’s better than nothing.”

So she twisted and bent the vine until it broke, then plowed her way out of the rudbeckia, bearing her trophy.

“You think I’m crazy, don’t you?”

“No. I think I need to hear what happened in the last two days that brought you to this conclusion.”

“I told it all to Greg. He thinks I’m crazy.”

“When did you do that?”

“Yesterday.”

“Before you saw Walter at Jen’s memorial.”

“There was enough to tell.”

“Then tell it to me.”

*

Joe made scrambled eggs, toast, and bacon. “And Fig Newtons for dessert,” he said.

“Don’t you ever eat real food?”

“Canned beef stew?”

“I’ll take the scrambled eggs. Are you going to put anything in them?”

“Canned beef stew?” He grinned when she smiled.

While they ate she told him everything: O’Doul, the jeweler, Shamika, Blowfish and the Latin Kings.

“I was wondering about the thunderbolt,” Joe said.

She inspected her nails. “Only two got broken in the garage. I don’t know what she uses but I think I’ll go back to her. Joe? What am I going to do?”

“I don’t know.”

Those words might have brought despair but Ann felt a sudden wave of déjŕ vu. Not disorienting, as that sense usually was. Reassuring and familiar, instead. This was how they used to work, Chinese food containers or pizza boxes building a temporary landscape across his desk or hers. They’d lay out facts and look at them, talk about them, and decide what to do next. “I don’t know” didn’t mean Joe was at a loss. It just meant she’d asked too soon.

She cleared the table while Joe built a fire. He brought the box of Fig Newtons and sat beside her on the sofa.

“He’s made you into the boy who cried wolf,” Joe said. “If you’re right about Glybenhall being the one who sent the guy after you today— ”

“What do you mean ‘if’?”

“— then it makes sense that the guy was supposed to hurt you but not kill you. You’re still official, even if you’re on desk duty, so killing you would bring down weight. But an attack in your own garage could be written off to just another mugging. You’d get the message without much risk to him. But

”

“But what?”

“But something doesn’t feel right.”

She stared into the night. “You said that before.”

“I did?”

“When this started. You said it didn’t feel right, and I said it felt like Christmas. It felt like that because it was. Walter was giving me gifts.” A log crumbled in the fire. “Trojan horses. You were right.”

“I just feel like there’s something missing,” Joe said.

“Like what?”

“The connections aren’t clear. Even if Shapiro’s working with Glybenhall— ”

“For, not with. No one works with Walter.”

“And why kill Jen? Why?”

“Like I said, lovers kill each other. Maybe it had nothing to do with this. Or maybe it did. Maybe she knew something.”

“You think she helped set you up? Planted evidence, was a go-between?”

“God, no. No, not Jen. She’d do almost anything for a laugh but she wouldn’t have thought that was funny.”

“So it might be something she’d found out by accident?”

“Could be.”

The fire was mesmerizing, beautiful to watch, but Ann found it wasn’t warming her. “I need to go to sleep. But first I need to know what you’re thinking, Joe.”

“What I’m thinking is, if I were on the job, I’d want to do more digging before I set my trap.”

“If you can think of how or where I could dig— ”

“But you can’t. It’s not safe now. He’ll be waiting to see whether you took his warning. If you did he’ll leave you alone, but if he thinks you didn’t there won’t be a second one.”

“So you do think it was him.”

“It was somebody. Right now, he’s most likely.”

She smiled wryly. “You always were a belt-and-suspenders guy.”

She expected that to make him smile, too, to find, after all this time, her eagerness still straining against his caution. But he shook his head. “Not always,” he said, in a voice so soft she almost couldn’t hear him. “Not when it counted most.”

In the garden the moon cast a silvery glow and some flowers she hadn’t noticed in the daylight seemed to gleam in answer.

“Move over.” She settled against him and welcomed his warmth. She didn’t speak. What could she have told him?

“We need a confession.” He coiled his arm around her.

“I didn’t do it,” she said sleepily.

He looked down at her. “Not,” he said, “from you.”

“Oh. You want Walter to confess? Go ahead and call him, I have him on speed-dial. Though if this is your interrogation technique, I suggest you refine it.”

“If we can’t get a confession we need a smoking gun.”

“I had a gun. It was the wrong damn gun.”

“What about your friend Perez?”

“What about him?”

“Would he do some more digging?”

“He’s been ordered off this. Told to keep away from me. If we had a map to the treasure with a big X on it, Perez might dig. Otherwise, I don’t think so.”

“But if we baited a trap, and it got sprung, could we count on Perez to come collect the rat?”

She sat up to look at him. “You have a trap?”

“I don’t know. I’m thinking. But if no one’s there except you and me to see it catch anything, it won’t work.”

“Perez got burned pretty badly. At this point I’m not sure what would make him join up with me again. But there is someone we could count on.”

“Who?”

“Greg Lowry.”

“Lowry? I thought he was ready to lock you up.”

“He is. That’s why. Look how upset he got when I told him Mark Shapiro had to be involved.”

“You were dissing the honor of the agency. After me, that’s got to be a sore point with Lowry.” He smiled when he said that, but not with his eyes.

Ann kissed him and said, “I don’t think that’s it. Greg wanted the Commissioner’s job and he’s actually more qualified. It was political that Shapiro got it. Think of how frustrating it has to be for him to think that Shapiro’s involved in this but that I screwed it up so badly that none of it can ever be investigated again.”

“For that he’d have to believe you. You said he thinks you’re crazy.”

“I still could be right. The possibility must be driving him crazy.”

“So how does that help us?”

“If whatever trap you’ve thought up— ”

“I haven’t thought up anything.”

“But you will. And if it has the potential of handing him Shapiro if I’m right, and me if I’m wrong, I’ll bet I could sell it to him.”

“You? I’m not handing you to him.”

“When did it get to be your choice? The chance of that is what’ll close the deal. He has to see that he can’t lose. Walter— and Shapiro— for being as bad as I think they are, or me for stalking and harassing them, and Greg gets to save them. He’s a hero either way.”

“No.” Softly, Joe said, “It’s no joke, Ann. It’s nothing to be brave about. You don’t know what it’s like.”

“No, I don’t. And I’m not very brave about it. But if Walter takes whatever bait you’re thinking up, someone has to see it besides us, like you said. It’s a risk worth taking.”

“It’s not worth taking. We’ll think of someone else.”

“Who? There’s no one else, Joe. It has to be Greg. What’s the name of those plants, the ones that get as tall as I am?”

“Rudbeckia.”

“Think of me as them.”

“You’re much prettier.”

“And Walter’s the grapevine. Only this time, it’s not up to you. I’m going to pull him up by the roots.”

Joe stared, then burst out laughing.

She flushed. “That was a little grandiose, right?”

“Oh, maybe just around the edges.”

“But you know what I mean. Walter can’t do this to me twice. If there’s any chance of nailing him, the risk is worth taking.”

He gazed at her, his face shadowed. He pulled her to him and they didn’t talk about the future again until morning.