I knew David Lancer. Sure, he was a state’s attorney, and his job wasn’t to find the truth. His job was to get a conviction. He would call it winning. He was law enforcement’s hero and had passable ethics.
But whether or not it was a just conviction, you can’t take on the world. Guilty or not, Creighton wasn’t one of the battles I was called to fight. Like that saying goes, Not my circus, not my monkeys. It’s a Momism—she was full of platitudes that sometimes flapped through my head.
Mom, I thought. First Mom and Dad, then Laura.
June starts hurricane season, and even in the air-conditioned Fort Lauderdale airport terminal I could sense the tropical dampness I took for granted until I moved to Arizona. Without even looking I felt the tiny lines in my face disappearing, the cracks around my mouth filling in, while my hair doubled its body. My hand felt slippery on the plastic handle of my roller bag, and I tried to remember the last time I had sweaty palms.
Inside the terminal was nothing compared to the outside, though. I dragged my carry-on out the automatic doors and into the real humidity, making me feel like I’d been hit in the face with a warm wet cotton ball. After the dryness of the high desert my lungs had to work a little harder sucking in all that water.
Florida. It’s a wet heat.
The feeling stayed with me as I made my way to the rental car terminal a short walk away, got directed to a self-effacing gray Accord, and drove north on I-95, not imagining how much time I’d be spending on this road in the coming days.
I grew up in this area. I left it to go to college and then Quantico and wherever that led, but had done some time working for the FBI in South Florida, too. Even with all the changes, I knew where I was. Every exit held a memory.
Sunrise Boulevard, where my family went to the beach. Every summer was greeted by the first sunburn, giving me and my brother and sister a back full of blisters the way crocuses announce the spring.
Oakland Park Boulevard, with the Wellman Building that showcased the largest selection of prostitutes in the state from its restaurant on the seventeenth floor. The two-story sex paraphernalia shop on the same block is a much later addition.
Commercial Boulevard, with the Denny’s that had been there for more than forty years. It had first been a Mother Butler’s that had more choices of pie than Howard Johnson had flavors of ice cream. I ordered the cherry pie there with a molesting scumbag just before I nailed him.
Also at that exit was St. Luke’s Hospital, where my mother had spent eighteen hours in excruciating labor giving birth to me. There had been blood everywhere. Once Mom suspected I knew where babies came from, she would recount the story every year on my birthday, during the cake, as part of the celebration. By the time I turned eighteen I sort of looked forward to hearing the story.
St. Luke’s was where Dad was now. That’s where I was headed.
And if I kept going north this way I’d finally get to Raiford Penitentiary, where Marcus Creighton was one of four hundred men on death row awaiting execution, many for more than twenty years. The system wants to be real careful that they don’t get it wrong.
Tourists see Disney World, Epcot, the Miami Dolphins football team, and Key West, but this is my Florida, the part where men kill their families.
Here ends the Quinn memories portion of our tour.
* * *
As I pulled in to the hospital parking lot, I have to admit, I wasn’t all that worried about Dad. Maybe when you don’t see a person face-to-face it’s hard to picture what they’ll look like sick. Instead, I was thinking about the big issues—Marcus Creighton, and whether Laura’s instincts were as good as they used to be. Now I’d have to switch gears to the quality of the hospital food and why I didn’t call more often.
Mom stood and walked toward me when I got to the door of Dad’s private room on the third floor. There was the usual repelling force as of same-pole magnets between us, but I fought it and hugged her anyway. She was a little shorter than I remembered, and felt thinner, too. After the age of ten or so I could never remember her willingly touching any of us. All my memories of her involved cooking, sewing, cleaning, driving, those things that are meant to indicate that parents care when their absence would only indicate neglect.
She turned back into the room and I followed her to where she stood at the foot of the hospital bed. The television mounted on the wall was on loud and when I glanced at it I could tell from Alex Trebek’s lapels that it was an old rerun of Jeopardy! Then I saw Dad lying with his back slightly raised, an IV attached to one hand and the television remote nestled under the other. Rather than shouting the answers as he usually did, he was listlessly hacking up his lungs.
At the full sight of him, my breath caught in the middle of an intake. Unpleasant little electric jolts ran down the surface of my skin from my sides to my legs. Physiologically, it was the same reaction I’d had the first time I walked in on the aftermath of a multiple homicide with an axe. But I’d never thought before now how perfect was the word “shock.”
My father lived in my head as a roosterish sort of fellow, always ready to boost me into the air for a dive into the pool, or to teach me how to break an attacker’s collarbone. People freeze in time that way. Now, bald head protruding from a body that didn’t raise the sheets as much as one would expect, he not only didn’t look like himself, he looked like something not quite human.
I felt bad that during the whole trip over here I’d been thinking about a case rather than him.
Mom ignored the coughing and shouted over the television, “Look, Fergus. Brigid is here.”
Note: Dad has excellent hearing. He just pretends to need us to shout when the TV is on. Mom doesn’t argue with this.
Spent from the coughing, he hardly opened his eyes as he turned his head in my direction. I couldn’t even be sure he recognized me. “Hi ya, Toots,” he rasped generically, still trying to play the tough guy. Dad had retired from the Fort Lauderdale Police Department about thirty years before, but never stopped thinking of himself as a cop. We were all cops, of one kind or another. Except Mom.
Dad always let me get away with stuff that Mom couldn’t get away with. So once I got my lungs going again I moved to the side of the bed, took the remote out of his hand, and pressed the mute button because I don’t play that game. After that I didn’t know what to do.
“Have you seen Todd?” Mom asked. Which was to say, Todd hadn’t been to visit. Mom never said what she meant. It all had to be translated by the listener.
“Not yet. I just arrived and came straight here from the airport,” I said. “How are you feeling, Dad? Mom said you just had bronchitis. Next thing, here you are with pneumonia.”
In response he wrapped his arms around himself, holding his torso as tightly as he could, and had another coughing jag.
“That sounds terrible,” I said to Mom. “What does the doctor say about this?”
“He’s on an antibiotic,” Mom said, her eyes darting around the room, as if expecting to find there what she should be doing.
I started to get up to get him a glass of water, but he gasped for air, coughed again, got it up this time, swallowed. I got him a glass of water anyway, and he took a good belt, swishing it before swallowing again. Recovered, he seemed to summon more of his old self for my sake. “Don’t like water.” He took a breath and wheezed his old W. C. Fields line, “Fish fuck in it.”
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Mom flinch like she was counting the days he’d spend in purgatory for uttering that word. Dad started to hand me the glass, but lifting was hard and the glass settled on its own by his side and started to tip. I took it from him. “Could use bourbon,” he said, and turned his head to wipe the side of his face on the pillow. I realized where I got my own bravado from.
I glanced at Mom to see if she had any reaction to that one. Having recovered from the F-bomb, her face was again as bland as I’d always known it to be, and when she spoke she was participating in a different conversation.
“Todd doesn’t come to visit us much. He’s busy,” Mom said in more of her Mom Code. What that meant was We’re not as important as whatever else he’s doing.
“’Scuse me a sec,” I said. I went out into the hall and called Laura Coleman to cancel. But she wasn’t answering. I left a message for her to call me, and then went to the nurses’ station to find out what the hell was happening with my father. Finding no one there, I came back into the room.
Not wanting to be put in the same too-busy category as my brother, I didn’t mention the Creighton case, or that I was going to meet Laura Coleman when I left the hospital unless she called back to reschedule. Instead, Mom and I talked over the bed, over Dad, the way people do when patients are very ill. Uselessly, we talked about everything but Dad: Carlo and the weather in Arizona, life at Weeping Willow Retirement Home when Dad wasn’t sick, the possible whereabouts of Ariel, my sister, who we never heard from because she was in the CIA. I wondered aloud how we’d ever reach Ariel if something happened. Mom didn’t know.
A nurse came in, checked the fluids, took Dad’s temperature. I looked at the board on the wall where the names of the health care providers were listed. “Dettie?” I said.
“Short for Bernadette,” she said, and smiled warmly enough. I introduced myself and shook her hand. Asked for details to put her on notice that someone had Mr. Quinn’s back. With a glance at Mom, Dettie responded with what she knew, elevated temperature, chest x-ray showing bacterial pneumonia, nothing else. I managed to drag out of her that Dad was stable. She left, and I tried to seize on the comfort that she was acting like business as usual, wasn’t calling code blue. Wasn’t mentioning hospice.
To try to rouse Dad a bit, I did ask if he remembered anything about Marcus Creighton and the murder of his family. Usually keen to talk any kind of crime, Dad failed to be roused this time, only said he couldn’t remember it. This lack of interest in death, more than anything, told me how sick he really was.
“Have you eaten lately?” I asked Mom, thinking I’d take her somewhere, bring her something. In our family food is the answer to so many questions.
“Yes” was all she said.
Dad felt for the volume button on his remote and pressed it with no effect because the mute was still on. Pressing and pressing, he said, “Dinner was supposed to be here at four. The service is bad.”
Him speaking in complete sentences was a small thing, but I felt a sense of hope. I stood, feeling antsy and wanting to do something useful, anything. “Should I go hustle up someone for you, Dad?”
“He ate,” Mom said, and pointed at a tray on a sliding table against the wall on the other side of the room. I walked over and picked up the reddish brown lid, revealing some sort of chop suey thing, a plastic cup of fruit cocktail, and too much of it left over.
“Are you staying at our place?” Mom asked.
I tried not to sound like a guilty child. “Mom, all you’ve got is the couch, and the one time I slept on it I couldn’t move the next day because of my back. I got a room close. I’m, I’m really tired from the trip over, so I’m going to go check in now. But did you drive over? Do you need a ride home?”
“I have the car. I’ll be leaving in a while. Are you coming back?” Mom asked, struggling to keep the question light, the I don’t care if you come back tone at just the right pitch.
I leaned over the bed and over her chair so she wouldn’t have to stand up, and kissed both of them on the side of the face as I had been taught to do. My own pitch off a bit, with more of a bite in my own tone than I intended, I said, “Of course I’ll be back. That’s why I’m here. I’ll see you tomorrow.”