During one of the numerous stops before the surgery, Rebecca was asked to provide emergency contact numbers. Instinctively, she put down her home number and Julie’s cell number—then realized the issues with that.
“Should I put you down?” she had asked.
The right thing to do wasn’t the right thing at that moment.
“Leave it,” I said.
Her desire to believe was needed more than any kind of acceptance of the truth.
In the end, several irretrievable messages were left on an answering machine in an empty house and on a smashed cell phone in the bottom of a trash can somewhere near Union Station.
I knew that Rebecca was dead even before the doctor came out to deliver the official message. I had returned to the hospital a few hours after she had gone into surgery and as I approached the desk in the waiting area, there was something in the young nurse’s eyes that told me it was over. She scurried off and returned a few minutes later with the doctor in tow.
He spoke about cardiac arrest, resuscitation attempts, and other procedures I only half-understood and half-heard. It was informational but not too clinical. He gave me a few moments to realize I didn’t have any questions for him before offering his condolences and returning to work.
It was a pitch-perfect, well-practiced delivery of a message straight out of the handbook, penned in equal measure by grief counselors and legal advisors. And I resented him for so easily and so faithfully sticking to the script.
“We left messages at the contact numbers you gave us,” the nurse explained once the doctor had left. She apparently felt the need to address why I had to hear about Rebecca’s death like this. “I even went out to the lobby but I couldn’t find you. I’m sorry,” she said, her voice quavering slightly and her eyes just barely starting to well up before her survival instinct kicked in and she steeled herself to return to work.
That brief display of compassion was enough to give me hope that not everything is a choreographed process to manage expectations. She had fallen prey to an actual emotion and temporarily went off script. That alone gave me enough strength to absorb what was to follow.
I met with another layer of hospital administration that you see only when tragedy strikes. No next of kin—outside of a wife who was officially dead but in reality a missing person—presented a bit of a quandary for the team. Having probably encountered every scenario over the years, this one was particularly troubling. They couldn’t release the body to me because I wasn’t named on the admittance form and had no documentation to prove I had any legal authority. It took an entire week to sort it out before I was able to hire a service to deal with Rebecca’s remains. Badger’s effort to find even a distant third cousin came up empty and in the end, they were granted to no one.
Five days later there was another memorial, this time at my house. The Palos Verdes home had been an option since I had the key among Rebecca’s belongings, but I felt uncomfortable pursuing that. Besides, we wouldn’t have been able to fill the smallest room there.
No executives showed up, and without them, none of the pilot fish consultant gurus did either. The gathering was a random collection of people who sat on either end of an invoice—pool cleaners, gardeners, house cleaners, and the payroll folks from the various corporations Power of One had worked with.
One additional person was there, but he stayed out of sight just in case Julie got sentimental and decided to show up. I spotted the young detective from Palos Verdes Estates in his car, parked down the road from my house. I pulled up next to him on my way back from the pastry shop.
“Didn’t mean for you to come,” I told him. “Just wanted to let you know that Rebecca had passed.” I knew that wasn’t the reason for the visit. “Or are you waiting for someone?”
“Was in the neighborhood,” he said.
“She’s not going to show,” I told him.
“Who’s that?”
“The woman who killed Lois Hearns.”
“Julie St. Jean didn’t kill her,” he said.
“No? Who did?”
“We found traces of the deceased’s blood—” he started, but must have picked up my wincing at the excessive use of jargon and decided to speak to me in plain English. “James Fitch. Her blood was on his clothes.”
“Who killed Fitch then?”
“That’s for my friends in Sierra Madre to figure out. I’m only worried about my area of responsibility.”
“If that was true, you wouldn’t be here.”
Although his department had declared Julie dead, he still had his doubts. I might have underestimated him, but then again, he was dumb enough to drive all the way across town to sit in a car all day on the chance that Julie would actually show up to say goodbye to Rebecca.
“You going to come in?” I asked.
“Don’t want to intrude,” he said.
I didn’t have the heart to tell him that we could have used the extra body to help fill out the room.
“If you change your mind, we’re just up the road.”
Compelled to hold the service for my friend, I bore the disappointment that so few people had decided to show. I mercifully brought it to a close fairly quickly. The few folks who’d come filed out and then it was just me, Badger, and Detective Fortin.
Detective Fortin wasted no time verbalizing the question on all our minds.
“Now what?” he asked.
With Rebecca’s death, there was no longer the need to search for Julie. The police or Arturo or someone else would eventually track her down. Even the unspoken desire to punish her somehow dissipated with Rebecca’s passing. Julie’s life was ruined to a point from which even she, the master of reinvention, couldn’t recover.
The obvious choice was to walk down the the road and unload everything we’d learned about Julie to the doubting young detective. He had the basic pieces—the affair with Lois, the blackmail scheme, the connection to the murder in Sierra Madre—but he didn’t know anything about Julie’s past in Arizona, the missing money, or her double life.
But no one seemed very interested in doing that.
I studied the two men in the room with me. I had raised Detective Fortin’s hopes for a chance at redemption only to threaten to snatch it away. And Badger just looked like someone who wasn’t ready to end his morning “counting” ritual with Julie’s money.
“It’s the correct thing to do,” Badger said.
That got me to smile, because in this instance, Badger’s poor word choice was actually appropriate.
“But not the right thing,” I added. “Let’s go get Julie.”