It’s been so long since I asked him to find out about Michael that I forgot he said there was more and that he managed to get past a security firewall and yada, yada, yada.
“What did you find out?”
“Well, it’s not really about him,” Clive says.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, it is and it isn’t.”
“Clive…”
“It’s about his dad.”
“He was a cop too.”
“Yes, but it gets complicated,” Clive says. “Come over after school and I’ll show you everything.”
Patience is not one of my strengths. Waiting and wondering and worrying churn up my insides. Not only that but also I’m now getting that quickening in my heart, the kind of amped-up feeling that says my body knows something ahead of my brain.
Only it’s twelve o’clock, and I have three more hours until I go to Clive’s.
“Gia,” Mrs. Collins says.
I look up at her, startled. I was spacing.
She asks the question again. Something about the significance of Ophelia to Hamlet? I haven’t thought about that.
I stare back at her like an idiot. “Sorry,” I answer apologetically.
She studies me briefly and shakes her head. “Please pay attention,” she says in a gentle, pitying sort of way. “You’re in outer space.”
At three o’clock, my new bodyguard, who has a body like a defensive lineman, drives me and Clive to Clive’s apartment.
“I’ll be fine from here on,” I say. Then add, “Thanks, Ann,” because I call him that, which makes him nuts.
He exhales. “How you gettin’ home?”
“Clive’s driver.”
He looks at me uncertainly.
“It’s fine, Ann, I’ll text you if anything changes.”
Clive and I get into the elevator, and as soon as we get to his floor and the door closes behind us, I turn to Clive. “Show me.”
He holds up his hands and goes to his room. He comes back with a manila folder. He opens it and looks at me questioningly. “You sure you want to hear it?”
“His dad is dead now, so it doesn’t matter much anyway. But whatever. What did you find?”
“First of all, his dad isn’t dead,” Clive says.
“What?”
“He’s living in Tennessee…in a small town there.”
“Maybe his parents are divorced and his dad left,” I say. “That’s not a big deal and Michael could be mad at him or think of him as dead…”
I think back to the time I asked him about his father. He talks so little that I’ve just about memorized his every word. We’d been talking about Thanksgiving. He was on the Henry Hudson, waiting for speeders.
“What about your dad?”
Silence.
“No dad,” he’d said finally.
“Did he…die?”
“Yeah…he’s dead.”
“Well,” Clive says. “Here’s the interesting part, Gia. His father was a cop—”
“I know that, you said—”
“And he was promoted to detective, but two years later there was an internal affairs investigation. I can’t get the actual report, I tried, so it was hushed up I guess because these people can usually get almost anything…but I got a summary from them—”
“Them?”
“My dad’s people, his sources,” he says, leaving it at that.
My heart is starting to pound in my chest. “What…what did he do?”
“He took payoffs, Gia…”
“From?”
“People in…your dad’s organization.”
“What? Clive are you sure?”
“It’s a summary of a report by internal affairs, Gia. They’re the ones who investigate these things.”
My dad and his associates sometimes got tipped off about things they weren’t supposed to know. I would hear bits of things, never whole conversations. They had connections everywhere, I knew, but I never imagined it would get close to me, not like this.
And then I remember the fight with Michael.
“The cops that they squeeze and then they own,” he said. “To me it’s personal.”
No wonder he hates people like my dad. He blames him, he blames us, but not only for how it ruined his brother, but what it did to his dad too. He couldn’t even forgive his own father.
The wall between us is even thicker than I imagined.