EIGHT

Actually, I had only one errand to run the next morning, one I’d come to hate over the past year, but could put off no longer. A chore that would take three hours, no matter how much I wished it to be less. An hour to visit the man I was expected to love, two more to make me forget him again.

According to Jack Quigley, my father’s condition had gotten worse, but I had to see for myself, so at nine o’clock I headed out of my dome and across I-95 to Pinewood Manor in Chancellorsville. On the way I called Karen Kilbride and told her I wouldn’t be coming into the office until after lunch.

Twenty minutes later I walked down a nondescript hallway, through an open door into an equally austere bedroom, and stared at Pastor Jonathon Monk. Just the sight of him made my brain heavy, a sensation like someone stuffing my head with wet cardboard, mashing it tighter and tighter to stop me from thinking.

I crossed the distance between us, to the unadorned wooden chair by the window nook in which my father sat. An equally uninviting chair sat opposite the man. I pulled it away a few inches to put a little more distance between us, then settled into it. My head grew even more impenetrable as I forced myself to begin.

“How are you feeling, Dad?”

The question had two purposes, neither of which had anything to do with how Pastor Monk was feeling. The first was to get the conversation started with some semblance of normalcy. The second was to remind him who I was.

Jonathon Monk said nothing, began to blink over and over, faster and faster. Worse today, the blinking, even worse than last week. I would talk to the doctor about it afterward, although I wondered why. We could talk about it for days, but it wasn’t going to change anything. The old man was history. Nobody was getting out of this room alive, including me.

“I can’t see anyone today,” he said at last, his voice wispy as smoke. “I’m working on my sermon for tomorrow.” He raised a bony arm and pointed toward the door. “Come back tomorrow afternoon, after services.” Then he shook his narrow head, the dried-out skin of his face jiggling as though it were no longer firmly attached to the bones underneath. “No, not then, not tomorrow, either. Sundays my wife and I listen to the radio.”

I held my tongue. I’d read as much as I could stand about this cruelest of killers, the disease that wouldn’t let the old bastard go until it had returned him to infancy. I’d been living through it with him for almost two years now. This was where I should remind him that today was Tuesday, that his wife and my mother had killed herself a quarter of a century ago. This was where I wanted to remind him that she’d longed for death just to be rid of him, that I’d been ready to arrest him myself for the torture that had driven her mad.

That’s what I should be doing, but I was too tired for self-indulgence, and that brought up the question of who was really the sick one here. Was it my father, with his few remaining gray cells still rooted in the Church of the Faithful Brethren, the church his father had founded? Or was it me—allegedly still compos mentis—but less and less compos as I beheld the man who’d taken away both my childhood and my mother, and had now reentered my life to take whatever was left?

I knew better than to reduce the situation to such simple terms, but my gut didn’t. Wouldn’t it be nice, I found myself wondering more and more often these days, to have a real father to help figure it out? To ever have had a real father for that kind of help?

“I brought you a milkshake,” I told him. I pulled the big plastic cup out of a white Dairy Queen sack with red lettering. “Vanilla. The nurse says you keep asking for vanilla milkshakes.”

He grabbed the bag, but glanced over his shoulder toward the door. “Don’t tell my father. I’m not allowed to eat in my good clothes. He’ll beat me if he finds out.”

He tugged at the perfect knot in his necktie, and I shook my head. His mind was like an infected hard drive, filled with valid information, but so randomly accessed it had become useless. Pastor Jonathon Monk, son of Pastor Puller Monk and his wife, Sarah, could no longer keep track of the chronology of his life, but he kept his one good suit and shirt and tie immaculate, and wore them every moment they weren’t at the cleaners.

Now he tore at the Dairy Queen sack, threw it aside, and peeled away the paper enclosing the plastic straw. He tried to poke the straw through the plastic lid, but I had to do it for him. He smiled briefly before he lifted the milkshake toward his mouth and began to suck. I saw with relief that it had melted enough to make using the straw possible. Fast-food milkshakes could be a problem that way. Dairy Queen was about the only one that seemed to get it right.

The Pastor eyed me. “How’s school?” he demanded.

I pondered the question. This was the tricky part. The old man could be asking about anything connected to any kind of school. Kindergarten all the way to my new-agents class at Quantico.

“Mormons,” he said before I could answer. “Lots of Mormons.”

I nodded. We’d been down this road a number of times, and for the moment at least we could share the same page.

“Quite a few in the bureau,” I told him, “going back to the Hoover days.”

In the senility of his own last years, J. Edgar had formed the idea that Mormons were congenitally incapable of corruption. Luckily for him, he’d died before finding out otherwise.

“Good people,” Pastor Monk said. “Not Christian, of course, but …”

He seemed to lose his train of thought, and I had to smile despite the stuffy feeling between my ears. Alzheimer’s had given my father the unique freedom to come out with the god-damndest nonsense, and nobody could do anything about it. Suddenly his head slumped to his chest, stayed there for a few moments. When it came back up he was weeping, his eyes watery blue puddles, his withered cheeks running with tears.

“Couldn’t save them,” he said, his voice choked. “Only ones I couldn’t save.”

The Mormons—I expected he was talking about—and in a normal conversation there would have been no question. I reached for him despite myself, unable to stand the sight. I tried to pat his heaving shoulder, to make him stop, but a moment later he was perfectly composed, then quivering with anger.

“Blasphemers!” he raged. “False prophets! Deceivers!”

He bowed his head and I could see his thin lips moving. Praying, no doubt, for the lost tribe of Latter-Day Saints. That they be spared God’s righteous wrath for their heresy. I didn’t have to hear the words themselves to know what they were. I’d heard them all before, and a whole lot more, many of which had been aimed directly at me. I said a short and silent prayer myself, a prayer from my past, but one I’d been using more and more of late. An accusation—to be honest—more than a petition. Dear God, if you really exist, why didn’t you come down and rescue my mother and me when it still mattered?

The Pastor began to blink again, over and over and over. His head began to nod. The milkshake cup slipped out of his fingers and bounced against his leg on the way to the carpet. I reached across and picked it up. The plastic top had kept the shake from spilling. I stood and walked to the cheap veneer chest of drawers opposite where we sat, set the milkshake on it, in case the Pastor wanted it later. Then I turned and left the room.

Back in the reception area, a voice stopped me.

“Mr. Monk?”

Shit. Quigley. I turned to see him approaching.

“Look,” I said, trying to keep my voice level, “I told you the money’s coming. Now if you’ll excuse me.” I turned to leave, but he scurried around to block me.

“It’s not the money, Mr. Monk, although as I think about it, I guess that’s what it will turn out to be.”

“Just tell me what you need. I don’t have time to chat.”

“His condition is worse, I told you that on the phone the other day. You may have noticed the perseverative blinking, the increasing inability to maintain present-day reality.”

I felt my fingers clenching as I listened to him, disgusted at his choice of words. Not his blinking—my father’s—not his memory damage. I couldn’t remember ever loving the old bastard, but he wasn’t gone yet. The Pastor still deserved the simple respect of a pronoun.

“He’s going to need more watching,” Quigley continued. “Around the clock soon, at least that’s the way it normally goes.”

This time I nodded. “Just give me the bottom line.”

And some way to come up with it.

I didn’t need a psychiatrist to tell me why I did it, why every time I saw my father I had to go straight to a card room. And the new one in Arlington was just the ticket. I thought for an instant about the irresponsibility of playing poker when the Brenda Thompson case was spiraling into the toilet, but only for an instant before I pointed the Caprice toward Arlington and stepped on the gas.

It was a typical card room, I saw when I got there. A dozen or so round tables with green felt tops, about half of them filled with gamblers. Straightforward fluorescent lighting from the ceiling, too bright, but what the hell. Cashier’s cage against the far wall, lots of smokers in the room, a blue haze hanging like swamp gas above the players. Muted voices, not a lot of talking. Nobody here for the conversation.

I twisted my gold pinky ring for luck, went to the cashier’s cage and traded three one-hundred dollar bills for a tray of chips, chose a table at the back of the room—always at the back, where I could see the whole room as well as the front door—and got the nod to join the three men already seated. We exchanged names all around. I pulled my chair up close and arranged my chips. The hand already in progress ended, and I threw in a five-dollar chip to ante up for the next one.

“Straight poker,” the man to my right said, a portly fellow with a shaved head who’d introduced himself as Jim. “Five card draw, no frills.”

We began to play. Four or five hands went by before I realized I’d made a mistake by coming, by thinking there’d be anything for me in a place like this.

Jim had described the game as no-frills, but that wasn’t the word for it. It was no anything at all, and certainly not what I needed after a visit with the Pastor. The problem wasn’t losing, it was just the opposite. I couldn’t possibly lose to these bozos. Talk about your tells, the three of them might as well have given me a printout of their hands.

“Man oh man,” Jim said after each and every deal, “man oh man oh man,” except when he drew the cards he needed, when he added yet another “oh man.”

To Jim’s right, Alan loosened his old-fashioned skinny necktie just before he bet, unless he was going to bluff, when he tightened it. Like cinching up your saddle, he must have thought, before heading out after the Indians.

But the third guy—Joey, he called himself—took the prize. Joey’d read once that a good poker player never changed expression, had obviously decided to go one better, to have no expression at all. None. His face was placid as new snow, but unfortunately for him only when he had the hand he wanted. The rest of the time he did exactly what the rest of us did. Grinned, grimaced, pouted, just like a real human being. What could you possibly be thinking? I wanted to ask him, as I raked in the pots he gave away when he wasn’t stone-faced.

I stood it as long as I could, until the hand that finally sent me packing.

Joey deals. I come up bupkes, a couple of fours, nothing with a face on it. I take three cards, no help. Alan takes one card. Examines his hand, lays his cards on the table face down, loosens his skinny tie, shrugs, takes it all the way off, stares at it as though he’d never before removed it completely. Four of a kind, I’m guessing … at least.

“Oh man oh man oh man of man oh man,” from Jim. Holy shit, five oh mans this time. Can he possibly have a royal flush?

I glance at Joey, wonder for a moment if he’d died. His face might as well be carved from granite. I can’t even tell if he’s breathing.

I check my own hand again. Maybe I missed something, but I haven’t. My fours are still slumped in solitude, surrounded by numbers that don’t add up to a nickel. What the fuck, I say to myself. You’re not having any fun anyway.

“To you,” Joey tells me, his voice impatient.

I throw in two black chips, the table limit. Two hundred dollars, just to see what they’ll do. I don’t have to wait long.

“Oh man,” Jim says, checking his cards again, shaking his head. He chucks his cards into the pot face down. “Man,” he says, not even the “oh” this time. Alan’s cards follow immediately, he grabs his tie, puts it back around his neck, doesn’t know whether to cinch it or leave it alone. I turn to Joey, his face distorting with pain as he adds his cards to the pile. I drop mine on top of the rest of them, face down, then reach to scoop in the pot. Jim’s hand starts toward my cards, but I look into his eyes and he backs away.

Outside in the Caprice I opened my briefcase and replaced my pinky ring, added four-hundred-eighty dollars to the secret stash.

I could almost hear Gerard Ziff’s voice in my ear.

“You what?” he was saying. “You quit winners? Jesus God, what’s the matter with you?”

But he’d know better even as he said it.

We were gamblers, the Frenchman and I, part of the brotherhood. He wouldn’t need me to explain to him why I’d quit … why I’d walked away without every cent of their money. It wasn’t about money, we both knew that. It wasn’t even about winning and losing. It was about playing the game. About the risk. Without the risk of loss, there’s no gambling. What I had going in the card room was little more than stealing.

I checked my watch. I had an hour to get over to Cheverly, to meet Lisa at Jabalah Abahd’s office. Despite my aches and pains, I was aware of my impatience to get there. The game was afoot, as Sherlock Holmes liked to say. I didn’t smoke a pipe or play the violin, and the only doctor I’d ever shared rooms with was Annie Fisher, but the detecting game itself was exactly the same, and suddenly I couldn’t wait to get started.

Before I could, my cell phone rang.

“The ADIC wants you again, Puller,” Karen Kilbride told me when I answered. “Wants to see you. Now.”

I grimaced at the phone. Lieutenant Barra hadn’t wasted a whole lot of time going over my head to Kevin Finnerty.

“What should I tell his secretary?” Karen wanted to know.

“To quit bothering me, that I don’t have time for Finnerty’s nonsense today.” Silence from the other end, Karen’s shock so vivid I could almost feel it through the phone in my hand. “Or,” I continued, “that I’ll be there as fast as I can. Whichever you think is best.”

I took the time to call Lisa, tell her to stand by until she heard from me, and twenty minutes later I was sitting in Kevin Finnerty’s office. His big jaw was tight, his lips turned down at the corners, but that was pretty much how he always looked. I checked for his tell, but his normal stack of paperwork was off to one side. Maybe I’d been wrong to expect trouble from him. Maybe he was just checking on my progress in finding the missing roommate.

“Could it be, Mr. Monk,” he began, “that you’ve forgotten how our system works?”

I sat up straighter, began again to watch his paperwork as I played my first card, the classic dumb-ass agent card.

“I’m not sure I understand, Mr. Finnerty.”

“I got a call from the chief of police in Cheverly He was very upset. What happened out there?”

I told him. Told him what Lieutenant Barra wanted, that he wanted Brenda Thompson’s name, that he wanted to know specifically why I was at Jabalah Abahd’s house in Cheverly.

“Abahd?” Finnerty said. “Is that name supposed to mean anything to me?”

“The missing college roommate. She changed her name.”

“She was dead when you showed up to interview her?” He scowled. “And you let the killer get away?”

“Didn’t exactly let him, no. We fought, but he got by me and out the door.”

“Where was your sidearm?”

“In my briefcase. It’s a SPIN case. I had no reason to wear it.”

“How long has it been since you’ve read the manual of rules and regulations?”

The question was not meant to be answered.

“What about the A.F.O. case?” he continued. “You were assaulted, were you not? You are a federal officer, are you not?”

“He’s already a murderer. Seems a little silly to add kicking an FBI agent into the mix.”

“It’s not your decision to make. Your job is to present the facts to the United States Attorney’s office, let them decide.”

“Of course. When we arrest him. Adding a technical violation to the charges isn’t going to make catching him any easier.”

He sat back, his eyes closed for a moment, then swung forward again.

“I spoke to the legal division a few minutes before you got here. They agree we do not want to introduce Judge Thompson’s name into this. Legal will contact the chief of police in Cheverly, tell him to subpoena you if they must. We can challenge the subpoena until they give up and go away.” He stared at me, those gray eyes of his especially chilly this morning. “Unless, of course, you have something that might help them solve the homicide. We can’t be in a position of withholding evidence.”

“Nothing. Outside of a dead body and the presence of the man who’d murdered her, I couldn’t testify to anything else.”

What I did have—the diary thing—wasn’t anything except a highly theoretical motive, didn’t come close to the standard for evidence. Not yet anyway, and I wasn’t about to spread the theory around the Hoover Building until I had some facts to back it up.

“And the problem with the Thompson case,” Finnerty said. “What did the judge say when you went back to her?”

I told him her explanation—that she’d forgotten the missing three weeks, that she had not in fact told Lisa Sands the sick aunt had died, only that auntie had been expected to die but hadn’t.

“SA Sands insists the judge is wrong,” I told him. “Showed me her interview notes. The notes support her claim.”

“Agent Sands is a first office agent, a woman first office agent. She made a mistake. Add your own notes to the file, make it clear Judge Thompson cleared up the misunderstanding. With the roommate dead, your investigation is complete. I know the deadline is more than a week away, but you don’t need that much time anymore. I’d like to see the report before the weekend.”

He pulled a file from a stack to his left, opened the cover, then looked up at me.

“Is there something else, Mr. Monk?”

I thought about his question for a moment. Now was the time to object, but I couldn’t make myself do it. Not until I had something better to say.